More truths hung above her, but she ignored them because the stairs were wavering beneath her feet. She ought to go back to bed, painfully aware of the flimsy wall between her and where Thiago was sleeping and what he’d say if he woke. Hidden stitches were screaming, but she just wanted to stand in the darkness, her forest around her like a blanket. So she lurched vertiginous downstairs, doggedly on through the lab, and then out.
There were no lights in either of the houses, only one out of sight in the barn turning the courtyard into a soft-lit well, and the meadow beyond an etching that could have been of fog, or water, or nothing on earth. Lina filled her lungs with starlit air, her ankle wept and a swimming faintness clawed at her skull. If she wanted to stay out here, she realised, then she needed to sit. The tree stump only a short distance into the meadow seemed almost beyond reach and yet moving out from shadow into moonlight was like moving into a waterfall, becoming cleansed. Here was her forest. She took a long unsteady breath when she finally sat. The tideline of the trees, the voices of crickets like a second skin, the breath of the mountains against her cheek, something called distantly and Lina thought, Tengmalm’s owl, almost smiling.
And then voices. Every muscle in Lina’s body tensed, her ankle howled and her eyes strained wide against the pain and the dark. Because someone had set a trap in the grass where she would walk, and she had bled into the earth because someone had wanted her to bleed. And now someone had come to finish what the trap had begun.
...Her mind caught up. The voices were coming from the barn, where that lone, yellow light was shining, and she knew them both. She knew them. Although that did not make one of them any more innocent.
Xander was speaking with raw fury; perhaps he had been talking quietly before or perhaps he had slunk past with her still half-adrift on painkillers.
‘It was those fucking locals, you know it was, and I want to know what you’re gonna do about them?’
Thiago’s voice was too level and quiet for her to hear. Lina wanted to go to him, stand within his line of sight so that she felt safe.
‘It had to be them. Who the fuck else would it have been?’
Thiago said something very brief, and Xander’s voice rose to a shout. ‘Dev?’
Lina watched that occluded light as if she would be able to see through it to Thiago, map out his thoughts from the infinitesimals of his face.
‘Yeah well you’re totally fucking wrong, cos they weren’t even after your precious fucking Lina, were they? They were after my mum.’
‘What?’ Not louder so much as sharper.
‘Yeah she said she was going to go with her that morning. So who heard her say that, then? That cook and her niece? You? Cos that seems a bit more fucking likely than someone suddenly taking against Lina when they’ve been threatening us since we got here. And a shitload more likely than Dev hiding out in the woods to attack you guys. I mean, why the fuck?’
Silence. Lina closed her eyes and the owl called again.
‘I heard you talking to the cook, you know? Saying you were done with it, so I know you were totally in with it before. All those dolls and shit. Thought you could scare us away, right? Well, fuck, that kind of backfired didn’t it?’
The sound of metal hitting metal, Thiago talking again even softer than before and Lina was not even a little surprised at Xander’s changed tone.
‘I just... I ... look, if they were after my mum then I have a right, yeah? To know what you’re gonna do. That’s all I meant, okay?’ A pause. Lina held Xander’s angry young face in her mind and felt all those suspended memories slipping back into place. ‘She’s ... she’s not right. You can see that, right? She thinks... Doesn’t matter, just, if she’s not safe then you need to get us out of here. We can stay in Sofia or something.’
He sounded cowed and tired and a little bewildered and Lina thought, not for the first time, that Silene’s drug-addled, wilful neglect was more deadly to her sons than their father’s death had been. There were more words, but the heat had gone from Xander’s, and the cold from Thiago’s and this time Lina did see the teenager cross the courtyard, although he did not see her in her grey tunic against the silver sea of grass.
Rewoken worries wove drowsily through her mind and Lina spread her palms upturned to the moonlight as if she might gather it and then paint herself in it like armour. It did not surprise her that Thiago would cut himself off from the BB. But Xander knew he had supported them, and the mountain’s slow breeze plucked shivers from her skin. Not Thiago, she thought; the idea of him vulnerable made her want to cry and she remembered crying against him with the trap in her flesh, then for the first time remembered Kai too, singing and stroking his thin fingers through her hair. Why had Thiago let him come and see her like that, and had Genni been waiting here with only Silene to stop her from being entirely alone?
Silene. Lina tipped her palms, half-expecting moonlight to run molten from them, then pressed her fingertips against her knees, wanting to move her leg against the pain but staying still. Xander had said the trap was meant for Silene, whereas Lina had assumed it had been meant for her.
But Silene had been waiting for her in the greyed shadows before dawn, with only drugs and the darkness stopping her coming. So who had known about that strange, restless whim? Lina herself. Anais. Thiago had told Silene that Lina was going out, but he would not have done so if he had known she might want to tag along. Anais would have told Iva, if the information had mattered. Which would mean it could have been for Silene ... and yet Lina struggled to believe it ... Kolev saying ‘you’ when he meant ‘ESF’. Her saying to him, ‘How would you do that, Kolev? Show off your strength without making it a threat?’ Him replying furiously, ‘I do not know, but we will not do nothing, Doctor.’ Wanting to scare off the Wileys and hating ESF, the hammer in his hands and the old woman talking of angry gods in the forest.
Lina pushed herself to standing with a hiss of pain, the skyline rippling like a blown sheet, then settling again. Perhaps he had thought that hurting her was the answer. Frighten the Wileys into leaving without angering them enough for London to demand retribution. Perhaps he had thought that it could be passed off to ESF as a poaching accident. Lina paused between one awkward step and the next, her wounded foot hanging, humming pain. Perhaps Kolev had thought Thiago would pass it off to ESF as a poaching accident. Perhaps he had thought that because Thiago had said so.
She only stopped again once she was at the door to the lab, turned towards the barn and the light that meant Thiago was still there although she could hear no sound at all. She took one slow breath and then another, the lure of bed and painkillers like a weight, Thiago’s presence, Thiago’s reassurance the counterweight. Tomorrow, she thought. If Thiago had agreed to the trap then it had been for Silene.
If they had thought Thiago sufficiently loyal to them though, that he’d forgive them either target, then she could not handle that pain right now. It shouldn’t hurt because it could never be true; was ridiculous that it might feel even a little like betrayal. But it did, and she was dizzy and where the starlight had comforted her before, now the sleeping houses and that quiet light made her feel alone.
Tomorrow, she thought, and went quietly inside.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘You disconnected the medic.’
Lina’s dreams had been full of all the people she had lost and all the names, but now it was morning and Thiago was leaning against the doorframe, scowling at her with the dawn painting his black eyes fiery.
‘They kept on wanting to talk to me.’
He huffed a laugh and came closer, peeling the blanket back from her ankle without ceremony and narrowing his eyes at the red-black Rorschach patterns on the dressings. ‘Brace yourself.’ He began to peel the wrappings off.
Lina tried not to yelp at the pain, tendons shifting over knuckles as her hands tightened on the blanket.
�
�Sorry,’ he added, belatedly.
You could not do what Lina did and be squeamish. She was used to death, the intricate, intimate wonder that lay beneath fur and feathers and skin. But this was her skin, and her pain, and the vision overlaid on black-stitched bruises of metal teeth and ribbons of blood trailing down to the ground.
‘Yuck,’ she said very faintly and lay back childlike, holding her breath as he cleaned and re-covered each wound with his blunt fingers incredibly gentle. ‘Where’s Genni?’
‘The new house. With Xander.’
So Lina would go to her there. Show herself whole.
‘You’ll live, I expect,’ Thiago said once he’d finished, and Lina smiled at him with relief. He was quarter-turned away from her, tidying up, and his voice when he spoke again was very different. ‘You frightened me, Lina.’
She had always liked the way he pronounced her name. He made the word more hers than her father had ever managed however often he said it. Pushing herself upright and lifting her legs carefully over the edge of the bed, sitting close to Thiago but not touching. He still didn’t look up.
‘Me too,’ she said quietly. In the gilded light she could not fathom how someone else’s assumptions could hurt her or ever diminish this. ‘Thank you, T.’ For coming to get her, for coming so fast, for caring enough to fear for her.
‘Don’t. It shouldn’t have happened.’
She looked at him and her heart ached quietly. ‘It’s not your fault, T.’
He didn’t answer, casting her a sideways look that she could not entirely read. ‘You’re meant to stay in bed,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring you some food.’ He did not move though, as if he knew there were questions she wanted to ask.
‘T?’ she said softly. His eyes held hers unblinking, so she took a breath and said, ‘It was them, the locals, or the BB.’
Thiago tilted his head but then nodded slowly, not saying which. Perhaps it did not matter. He had accused Devendra Kapoor last night, to Xander, and Lina wanted to ask about that, but he did not know she had overheard, and she shied away from it.
‘For me or Silene?’ she asked instead.
He frowned directionlessly. ‘I wish I knew. Lina–’
‘T,’ she cut him off. ‘Did they think you’d cover it up for them?’
He stepped forward and sank into the chair, looking up at her with elbows on knees and his hands hanging loose. ‘They ought to have known better. I would never–’ he stopped, frowned, started again, ‘They crossed a line, Lina. Iva is furious as well.’
Lina smiled, but he did not.
‘I didn’t know about Silene,’ he added. ‘Doesn’t mean I’ll let it go though. I wouldn’t.’
‘I know,’ Lina said, her heart hurting all over again because she did know. ‘Anything could have stepped on it,’ she said, only now realising and the horror of it hitting her like ice. ‘It’s breeding season. They could have got anything, T.’
He was laughing, lifting a hand to rub over his face. ‘Which would have been worse than this?’ gesturing at her leg. ‘Christ, Lina.’
She had to laugh too, although the movement made her ankle spark pain, because yes it might be a little ridiculous to think like that, but she couldn’t help it. Thiago would probably have felt the same if it had been him, and he knew that.
She gathered the crutches and Thiago looked at her levelly. ‘You are meant to stay in bed,’ he repeated but made no other comment when she shooed him out of the room so that she could dress, nor as he went down the stairs beside her, not touching but ready to.
‘Something happened last night,’ Thiago said when she was two steps from the bottom, him below her looking up, his pupils contracting. Lina could see the strain of the last two days in his face, the way he was favouring his leg.
She stopped, foot suspended over the next drop. ‘W-what?’ she managed, thinking of the conversation overheard.
But it wasn’t that, and the words were so nonsensical that it took her a moment to make sense of them. Maybe she was not entirely coherent yet.
‘There was,’ she repeated him, ‘a dead fox nailed to the new house door.’ Thiago nodded. ‘And Genni found it this morning.’
They reached the lab. ‘Wow,’ she whispered. Then, more usefully. ‘Tag?’
‘No.’ Not all foxes were. Enough only for population monitoring.
‘How old?’ She meant how long dead, but Thiago understood.
He shrugged. ‘Soil type places it high up. I’d say three weeks, maybe four.’
This at least was familiar. She rested her crutches against the desk and reached for gloves. A soiled, crushed martenitsa lay within the fox’s decayed jaws, and touching it, she raised an eyebrow at Thiago.
‘Young male. No obvious cause,’ he said. The calling card didn’t really need discussing.
Lina nodded. Winters were hard on the juveniles, and spring was harder still on the young males, who could not yet compete with their elders. She ran her fingertip over the clean edges of his teeth, the perfect knife-tip canines. With an untagged fox she’d normally leave it at that. But – Lina half-turned to where Thiago was waiting without impatience – this was different. She found that she was stroking the pared skeleton of the fox’s front paw, soothing.
‘He was nailed to...’ trying to anchor this wrongness in amongst all the others. ‘Cameras?’
Thaigo gave a single upward nod. ‘On it,’ he said. There was a blankness in his face that held rage and Lina thought that the trap had flicked a switch in him which didn’t bode well.
‘Genetics,’ she said calmly, ‘and soil samples. I’ll try to get a location. We might get lucky.’ She reached for her tablet and was already setting up a new file when another thing occurred to her. ‘The cameras at the trap, did they–’
Thiago almost imperceptibly flinched and she wanted to say again, It’s not your fault, but he spoke first.
‘They were down.’
‘Oh.’ She ran a hand over the fox’s fur. ‘The shadow ... Then it really was the BB,’ meaning the trap, ‘and they really do have EM tech.’
Thiago touched the nail still in the fox’s skull, said after a long pause, ‘So it would seem.’
Oh god, she thought, he’s going to kill them all. She was about to say, How did they get something like that, and why would they go this far? They would know where it would end, why risk it? But he spoke first.
‘I’ve called a taskforce in.’
There it was.
‘No! The villagers–’ The expression on Thiago’s face cut her off.
It wasn’t for the martenitsas or the tag or even this macabre fox, but for the trap. She couldn’t hate the rebels for any of it though, she realised. She honestly couldn’t. ‘Not for me,’ she said softly.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I understand them,’ she said. ‘And I forgive them. And there must be another way.’
‘There isn’t.’
There’s compassion, she thought, and patience. But it wasn’t just about her; Genni was here, and where might this end if they did nothing to stop it?
Thiago was searching her face and she couldn’t answer. After a long moment, she saw him relax.
So the taskforce would come in then.
But what would that mean for Silene and Xander and Kai? Would they leave rather than see it, or would they not care, hardened to brutality the way Lina had so determinedly unhardened herself? They might see only retribution for an imagined sin. Her ankle pulsed when she moved, the stitches needle-points of fire. Not imagined then, but she remembered Kai whispering of monsters and the things she had read about Christopher Wiley, and would risk the trap again rather than see Iva’s people pay for any of this.
Kolev had said, If we do nothing then we are saying that yes, it is okay to do these things. And Lina had always known this, her father had
always known. So there must be a way, she thought, her fingers touching broken skin, bared bones. To not become a monster.
Thiago had asked Silene and Xander to come to the lounge and they came perhaps because they had the same dreadful sense of momentum that Lina had. Or they came hoping for deliverance.
Lina struggled up the stairs behind Thiago, irritably, determinedly mobile, not wanting anyone to see her any weaker than she already looked.
Iva and Anais were not there, and it looked like they might not have come in at all. Crumbs were scattered on the counter from yesterday’s bread, and both Xander and Genni were at the table with plates of toast half-eaten in front of them. Xander had been saying something but stopped as Lina appeared, Genni leaning towards him, her eyes on both their tablets with a small frown of concentration on her face. Lina sat carefully opposite them both, the mountains secreted behind morning mist, the meadow slipping into view and away again like the station were floating. It would burn off soon and by late morning it would become hard to imagine this moment here, cool and grey and water-spangled.
Thiago caught one of Lina’s crutches as it began to slide from the bench, touched her shoulder lightly and turned to the kitchen. Silene was curled into the corner of the sofa as if sleeping, and Lina caught Kai’s slantwise gaze on the balcony and smiled at him.
Genni had not looked up at her yet, but Lina thought she remembered her sister’s voice when she had been adrift. She reached across the scarred wood to touch her hand, her own gold-tanned skin and Genni’s rich brown. ‘Hey,’ she said quietly, and Genni looked up. Her fingers beneath Lina’s were fibrillating like a heart. ‘You okay?’
Genni nodded mutely, her eyes scanning Lina as if looking for signs of breakage. She was breathing quick and shallow.
‘You guys looked after me well, thank you.’
She nodded again. ‘Who did it?’ she said. Xander looked up from his tablet, slice of toast in one hand; Kai was floating silently towards them and Silene had opened her eyes.
This Is Our Undoing Page 17
