This Is Our Undoing

by Lorraine Wilson

  Unless they wanted to bury that fact. Unless Xander succeeded. If Xander knew about this then his fear for his mother would only increase. If Silene knew it might explain her ... paranoia. - I’m in the field just now, but can you send through my dad’s message? Can I reply?

  - Only through the lawyer (and therefore us). I’ll send you their contact. Here’s the message. Speak soon.

  Isla’s chat window closed and another opened, three short paragraphs in it. Too short, Lina thought.

  Lina my love,

  I am well and safe, so please don’t worry. The Slovaks are being considerate and very humane compared to the alternative. I hear that Jericho is with you and, Lina, it makes me so happy to know that my two beautiful children are together and protected. I suspect that you have learned by now of another connection between myself and your friend and I don’t know what I can say about that except that I am glad I saw him, and that he still loved you, Lina. Although that came as no surprise to me, of course. The women of our family are not easily forgotten.

  He only wished to talk. and even with what has come after, I am glad that he came. I told you once that love was the only thing we had, but I have thought since that I was wrong, Lina love. It is the best thing, yes, but if anything is ever to change then we need our anger too. We need to forgive ourselves our anger.

  I am out of time, it seems. Keep your brother safe, and yourself, and I do not regret anything that has brought me to this place. I am so very, very proud of you and will be with you soon.

  All my love, your father.

  He used her name so often, Lina knew, because he feared forgetting it. She sat there as the blackcap sang and the first hoverflies rose sleepily from the grass, and thought that if she moved, all the pieces of her heart might fall out between her ribs like moths. But she must move, and she must think, and if she was to face Genni then she needed to cocoon her pain. She climbed back down into shade and moved though dew-damp vegetation to the first white-painted quadrat stake and began working a routine too familiar to occupy her mind.

  These were the things she could do nothing about, she thought: Her father’s freedom, Genni’s anger, Silene’s paranoia, London’s pursuit.

  These were the things that, with luck or creativity, she could do something about: Xander’s hunting for her secrets, Silene’s drugs, the locals and Devendra Kapoor, and perhaps, perhaps, her father’s safety.

  So. There were four birch saplings in this plot, all less than three metres tall. Would Silene be more or less likely to lash out if her drugs were switched to something less mind-altering? Lina was not actually sure, nor was she sure whether taking her off them could be deadly. She paused with a hand on a lovely arching Rosa gallica, dense with late flowers and early hips. Perhaps not that then.

  Xander. She saw no way in which she or Thiago could match his skill, so she had two options: find someone to erase her and Genni and their father’s footprints before they led Xander anywhere, or persuade him that she was not his enemy. She thought of Genni angling her body towards him on the sofa and folded the long leaf of a rose between her fingers until it snapped.

  Meadowsweet and foxglove, the old leaves of hellebores.

  Devendra Kapoor. Did she even want him to be found and brought to the station? It would calm Xander and his mother, but would that only be replacing two smaller threats with one powerful one? She could not forget the raptorine angle of his face in the first images they had found. She would go with Thiago to Govedartsi, she thought, or back to Baba Ruzha. If she could learn more about Devendra Kapoor then she could calibrate his threat.

  The next quadrat lay beneath trees, the understorey transitioning abruptly to pine needles, dwarf shrubs and resinous, confiding air.

  Oh god, Genni, Lina thought, stilling in the act of entering a measurement, heartbreak threatening to subsume her all over again. Keep your brother safe, and yourself and I do not regret anything that has brought me to this place.

  Her tablet rang a proximity notice, wild boar close by, so she spoke aloud. ‘He will be fine. I’ll speak to Vitaly, or someone, see if they can put someone to watch him.’

  Lina ran the waxy leaf of an arum through her fingers, counted nine within the quadrat. Thiago might know someone if Vitaly did not. But could she involve Thiago in this? She thought of his strained face, the anger, and the fact that he, too, had come here to escape, and thought, no. Not yet. If London were watching, or the PeaceKeepers, then she daren’t do anything that might make them take notice of Thiago too. ‘No,’ she said aloud.

  I am so very, very proud of you, her father had written. Which was one forgiveness, she thought, and he had also said that you needed your anger, which was another, although this one not just for her. Lina pressed a hand against an ache in her sternum, because perhaps she had never managed that forgiveness. Her life had been one delineated by love and by anger, and by her mother’s belief that the fight was worth abandoning her child.

  No. Lina stood up, brushing from her knees wormcasts and lichen fragments like tiny swords.

  No, she thought again, walking on to the next quadrat without really looking. Back into the burgeoning heat, cobwebs fluorescing and sun-hungry bees motile above the vegetation. She was not even sure what she was negating. The laying of blame on the wrong person, or the suggestion that she had not done the same.

  Love for strength, she thought, and anger for change. It would be good to remember that.

  The next quadrat stake was five metres away. Lina moved slowly, thorns snagging and a hoverfly making her flick her head instinctively.

  Talk to Xander, hint concern at Silene’s self-medication. Go to Govedartsi. Get Genni to write to their father. Contact Vitaly. Something had moved through here during the night, a badger perhaps, leaving a dewy trail in the vegetation. Four things to do; Lina almost smiled.

  She stepped into the badger’s trail. Into the bent-over grasses right next to the stake.

  A quiet, vast snick.

  Pain.

  And pain.

  Oh god, agony. Red and white and pain. Sweeping up from her ankle, and Lina was on the ground, rocks beneath her knee and pain and her hands cradling, scrabbling at ...

  The shock like ice. For a second, or two. Long enough for her to think with perfect precision:

  Leg-hold trap. And: Meant for me.

  But not just that. The pain. Teeth. Metal teeth, pain and steel and fury.

  Someone was whimpering great gasping sobs, half-blind, hands pulling at those teeth, but No! Retching, teetering on unconsciousness. Fingers quivering, cradling a ghastly, nightmare monstrous ankle. Think! But she couldn’t. Roaring in her ears and a scream in her throat, her locked teeth, nothing in her head but No, and Please, and Stop. Make it stop. Make it stop.

  And pull, and don’t move, and get it off get it OFF GET IT OFF.

  Then an image of a packet, a needle. The pain. Needle. Her bag. Blackness dragging and everything shrunk down to teeth in her skin eating muscles chewing bones.

  Needle. Her bag.

  Morphine.

  Fumbling the bag, every movement making her lungs spasm. Fingers searching, and not this, ohgodplease or this or ... first aid kit. Morphine.

  Pushing it through trousers into thigh and how could this tiny wound hurt, when that, when that was every neurone and neurotransmitter and breath and molecule of oxygen and there was nothing beyond pain. Black swimming shrieking fury, pain pain pain. Nothing but metal in flesh and terror and the world plunging and...

  ...and this breath...

  ...and this one.

  And this one ... was not a scream.

  She bent her head forward onto her left knee, the safe one. Breathing. Just breathing with the ebb and rise of agony, closed eyes and pain condensing heartbeat by heartbeat ununiversal, not apocalyptic. Just terrible, and frightening, and she was very, very alone.r />
  Chapter Twenty

  Lina touched the wet earth with one fingertip, saw pain stain her skin the colour of poppies, pure as birdsong. It had never occurred to her before that pain had its own music, but of course it did. Everything held song, she thought, watching her hands cradling air; red metal and chords trailing downward like the wound was singing to the earth.

  She moved, cried out, small and mewling underneath sonatas. Her water bottle rolled loose from her bag, hitting her tablet and she studied both, songless. Thirst, she thought. A monster in her throat, her lungs full of sand. How hadn’t she noticed? But she didn’t dare reach for it, watching blood blossom on the soil and the silent tablet. Please, she thought at it, not sure why, but desperately. Please.

  The pain sang and the world tilted beneath her and if she were not anchored by teeth and blood and metal she might have fallen off, slipped away. Please, she thought. Endlessly. Without end, outwith endings.

  Please. Red songs and blackness.

  Please. And blackness, and pain choral on her skin, her bones never ending, never ending, never ending...

  ...

  ‘Lina!’

  The song paused, minor keys sibilant. The world drifted, burned, echoed.

  ‘Lina.’ A crashing and voices and Thiago was there. Thiago beside her, his hands over hers so that they formed concentric layers over the metal and blood. A planet, an atom. Thiago was here and Lina began to cry. Because it would be okay now. It would be okay.

  He had one arm bracing her, speaking to her, his voice an anchor in the same way the pain was an anchor. She could hear her own breath and could not tell if she was still crying because Thiago was asking her questions and it was so hard to understand.

  ‘How much morphine,’ he said as if he’d said it already. ‘I can see one vial. Is that all you took, Lina?’

  Scrabbling in her bag, the needle, the short, separate pain like a piccolo in the dark. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, one.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m giving you another, okay? And I’m going to lie you down here.’ She didn’t think she would be able to move, but his hands on her were so solid and gentle that she went where they led her and then the ground held her along the length of her spine and she was so tired that the sky and the broken canopy above her looked like dreams.

  ‘Fuck, oh my god, fuck, she’s ... oh my god. What do we–’

  Xander? He was here? Lina closed her eyes and the voice cut off as if blindness was silence. The pain sang a constant contralto and someone touched her hair very gently.

  ‘Lina,’ Thiago said. The fingers on her hair lifted, then returned, stroking. ‘Lina, we’re going to get the trap off you. I need you to hold still. I’ve got you, but try to hold yourself still, okay?’

  ‘T,’ Lina whispered.

  ‘Jesus fuck, I can’t see. All the blood, I think I’m going to be–’ cutting off again.

  ‘The spring is broken,’ Thiago said, and Lina thought he was talking to that other voice because he sounded so different. ‘You will pull it apart by hand. I’ll do everything else.’ There was a strange, strangled noise, but it was moving away from her or perhaps she was moving away from it. The pain and her pulse in her ears were shaking her into pieces and she needed Thiago’s voice but he was further away too. ‘Save it, Xander. We don’t have time. You’ll do what I tell you. Now.’

  Xander, Lina thought. He was ... there was danger. She began to open her eyes, although it seemed surprisingly difficult, and the fingers moved from her hair to her eyelids, cool on her skin until she gave up the effort. A voice next to her ear whispered, ‘It’s okay, Lina. We’ll save you from the monster.’

  The monster, Lina thought. The roaring and the pain. ‘Kai?’ she whispered.

  ‘Hush,’ he said, his fingers stroking her hair again. And then she could hear him singing. Her heart and the pain and his thin bird’s voice, they were holding her like water, pulling her deeper and looser and far away she heard other voices, and the pain screamed and screamed again but the sea was carrying her away, a pale boy singing her under, and she sank.

  She drowned. She hung drifting.

  There were figures by her side sometimes, her half-surfacing, fog heavy between her and them like distance or the passage of time. She thought once they were a child, or two. They sang and she remembered her brother, but it wasn’t him because ... no, she had a sister, but hadn’t she lost them both? She remembered fearing that. She remembered powerlessness. And now it wasn’t a child, although how could she know? The skin of her arms knew, the air. Unless they had been there, but weren’t anymore, unless it was their ghost brushing her skin. Memories of love.

  ‘James?’ she whispered. Or thought she did. Everything was soughing like the sea after a storm, refracting sunlight and nausea with wrongness worming inward, a rank, dank fear that moved like fish in the shadows.

  A touch on her arm, stroking. A child saying ‘Lina,’ and she wondered who they were calling, their voice so full of tears. ‘Lina.’ As if they were talking to her, but that was not her name. Wrongness and fear.

  ‘James?’ she whispered again. The word like an echo in her skull, slipping between hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, murmuring to her cerebellum.

  A different voice answered. Male, calm. Safe.

  No, she thought. ‘James, be careful. Don’t...’ Don’t what? She tried to move but her body drifted away from her, her arms and her ribs distant archipelagos, the sea washing her further away.

  ‘Don’t tell them,’ she whispered. If she could tell him this maybe that would make it better, maybe then they could both come back. ‘My Mum, please don’t tell them.’

  Silence.

  ‘What shouldn’t I tell them?’ James said.

  Lina drifted anchorless. He must remember, she thought. He had held her through the nightmares and he was not holding her now, longing and the sea washed over her. Shadows.

  ‘Dad?’ She tried again. But Dad knew, and James knew and no-one else could ever know because they had been calling her Lina, which meant ... grief, but so familiar it was like coming home. She had lost half of herself. Her voice crackled like an old radio, like dead voices from dead times.

  Silence. The tide rose, her lungs filling with dreams.

  ‘Hush,’ the man said. ‘Hush, Lina. It will be okay.’

  Another moment. Light beyond her eyelids, and voices, and someone singing fingers on her closed eyes, company on the sea.

  ‘Why isn’t she awake yet?’ The song gone, tenderness filling Lina like a tide. ‘You said she’d wake up soon.’

  ‘She lost a lot of blood, and I had to keep her sedated while I removed a couple of bone fragments. She’s not in any danger.’ There was a warm hand on her calf, its weight like a gift, and she felt the tension of it as the man spoke. Thiago, she thought. Thiago’s here.

  ‘What if she gets infected? What if it’s drug resistant? She’ll die. I’m not stupid; everybody knows you die if it’s drug resistant.’

  Lina wanted to reach for that voice, touch it, hold it. Felt words rising in her lungs but they rose no further, dissolving like ink.

  ‘The wounds are clean. And we have the best possible antibiotics. She won’t die.’ The fingers on her calf tightening, relaxing.

  There were memories of a nut-brown boy turning his body into music, but that boy was a girl and no longer danced, and Lina hung in water the colour of the underside of a wave with forgotten music rising and falling in time with her heart.

  The room was dark when Lina woke, but this time, for the first time, she knew she was properly awake. Fully present at last. Even the parts that hurt were a comfort, because at least they were there; at least if they hurt, then she was there too.

  She needed the toilet. A drink, a wash, crusted with pain and sleep and drugs like detritus on her skin. Lying still, she thought about these th
ings, about how enormous it was to brace yourself against pain. Aware, distantly, that it was far easier to think about this hurt, this physical thing than about all the other things lingering blackly in the doorways of her mind.

  Then she hauled herself upright. Air whining between her teeth, machinery sending out alerts, her ankle mercifully bound up so that she couldn’t see what lay beneath. The alert sounded again. Remote medics asking how she was feeling, telling her she’d needed blood and sutures, that they’d removed minor bone fragments, that she had been asleep for two days. The screen was very bright in the unlit room, casting ugly, angular shadows.

  Two days. The advantage, she realised, of remote medical care, was that as long as she remembered to remove her I.V. line first, when they told her to stay in bed they had no way of actually making her.

  Thiago had left crutches against her bed, with a note saying, ‘NOT downstairs.’ She might have obeyed him. Dizziness, agony, a faint, lurching nausea, were nearly flooring her. But a heavy gibbous moon cast silvery light across the bathroom floor and an eagle owl was calling soft and sonorous, laden with shadows and starlight and the cool smell of pines at night. And she needed that.

  There was also this: she needed to be able to run.

  She could not entirely recall why, only that it might be terribly important. That if certain things happened then she would need to. ... her mind wavered, as if debating whether to let her remember. She would need to … go to her father, to save him. The top of the staircase yawed black before her. She remembered. If there came a moment when she had to choose between her father’s life and her own, then she would run to him the same way she had once run away.