‘Lina.’ The thought vanished, Lina looked up. ‘You can’t go to your father. If they threaten him. You have to trust his protection.’
‘T,’ she said.
‘Promise me. It would be suicide.’
She sighed. ‘I can’t promise that, T. You know I can’t.’
He held her eyes for a long moment, then nodded shortly. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Options.’ And she softened with relief because he wasn’t going to push, and she didn’t have to refuse him again, and he was going to be cool and logical and steady about the wreck of their situation.
‘We’ve got three that I can think of.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘One: Do nothing, wait for them to give up, trusting our tracks are covered and your dad’s safe.’ Lina winced. ‘Two: Push Silene. She’s the weak link, she might reveal something incriminating enough to take the heat off us.’
‘Which is what Xander is scared of, and why he’s looking into me.’ Lina shook her head. ‘And he’s bloody good, T.’
Thiago only nodded, touched his third finger. ‘Three: Remove the threat.’
‘You can’t be serious.’ She stared at him, but his smile was full of knives and she remembered the man bleeding in the dust.
‘It would keep you safe.’
‘No, it wouldn’t. Don’t you think London would check it out ... if it wasn’t them? Or the Drowned State. Dev works for them, doesn’t he? And what about Xander, you can’t possibly–’
‘I said Xander won’t talk. And Dev’s independent.’ But Thiago curled his hand into a fist, knowing that he was still important enough to attract attention that they, and ESF of course, did not want. ‘We could make it look an accident, or blame the BB.’ A pause. ‘They deserve it.’
‘Jesus, Thiago.’ Besides, she had not said Xander’s name because he might talk, she had said it because Thiago was talking about making him an orphan. Make him one so that she could not be threatened with the same. Blood and empty doorways. ‘No,’ she said, bending forward abruptly and covering her face with her hands. ‘No. Never.’ She wouldn’t mourn Silene, nor even Dev. But leave a boy motherless? Do to him what was done to her?
‘I’d do it,’ Thiago said, utterly calm. Lina remembered Genni was upstairs and sat up so fast her vision blurred, looking at the empty stairwell.
‘I’d do it,’ Thiago repeated. ‘But it’s your call. You’ve more at risk.’
Oh god, if only he wasn’t right. If only ESF’s mouthpiece had not already suggested the same. Oh god, she thought blankly, oh dear god.
‘What do you think would happen to Genni if you went to your dad?’
The world slowed, the air in her lungs abruptly too heavy to breathe. She had not thought of that. Why had she never once thought of that? She stared at Thiago and saw him hurting because he had hurt her, but all she could think was that it was not a choice between her and her dad after all. It had never been as simple as that.
Even if she threw herself into the fire to save her father, he and Genni would not be saved.
She realised now how much she had been depending on having that last, terrible option.
‘I’m sorry, Lina.’
‘I know,’ she said, her voice foreign, the sound in the room muted by the closed door. Birdsong and grasshoppers and the distant murmuring trees all absent and the air somehow heavier for the lack. ‘But still, no,’ she said slowly. Not sure it was still true but having to believe.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
She packed sandwiches and hot chocolate for her and Genni, then drove down into the forest below the station. Xander had been alone in the lounge when Lina went up there, and when she asked, listening to her own level voice with surprise, he told her Dev had taken Silene out for a walk. Brave of him, she thought, to go back into the forest he had just been rescued from. Let it swallow them up though. Let it reveal its teeth and consume them. She remembered Kai opening the fox’s bone jaws and felt a flutter of guilt for not bringing him along this evening. But he had not been visible, and anyway she needed this time with her sister. Genni needed it too, she thought, she hoped. Besides, there was something about Kai that was scratching at her mind like claws and she wanted to escape that too.
Here, stepping out of the truck into the contented heat of the afternoon, she could pretend too that the things Thiago had said were not real. They didn’t feel real here, a wood warbler singing above her and Genni watching Queen of Spain fritillaries fan their exquisite wings on the teasels.
‘Come on then, love,’ she said quietly. Genni looked at the sunlit flowers edging the forest ride, the dusty mass of the truck, then along the deertrack that Lina was standing on.
‘In there?’ she said, her eyes reflecting the shadows beneath the trees.
Lina tried to picture how this place looked to Genni, who had perhaps never been in woodland before coming here. But her imagination faltered – how could birdsong and this green dappled cathedral be anything other than wondrous after the camps, the city, the State? ‘It’s not far,’ she said. ‘And very safe.’
Genni came forward slowly, not looking back, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. And it wasn’t far, just a few minutes through hornbeam and oak, a scramble up a bank and there was the den. Mounded earth smoothed by multitudinous paws. Lina took Genni’s hand and led her past it to a spot where they could settle themselves against the bole of an oak. ‘There, look,’ she said, point to a tree directly ahead of them. ‘See the camera? That’s what the videos I sent you are from.’
Genni looked, but her gaze was skipping around and her hand had stayed miraculously in Lina’s, faintly trembling. Without letting go of her, Lina pulled sandwiches out and handed one over. ‘Eat,’ she said. Food was such a weighted thing to a child who had gone without. Lina would never fully understand that, because her father had protected her so well, but she relaxed a little when Genni pulled her hand free of Lina to hold the sandwich.
They ate and did not talk much, although Lina pulled out her tablet to check her messages and showed Genni the screen so that she knew there was nothing from their father. Perhaps she should not have checked at all, or at least not waited until the sun was beginning to fall towards the hidden skyline, because Genni’s small frame tensed against her own.
‘It’s getting dark,’ Genni whispered, a long beam of sunlight turning scarlet against last year’s fallen leaves. ‘We should go. They aren’t coming out.’
‘They will,’ Lina whispered. ‘They’ll be awake already. It won’t be dark for a while yet.’
‘We won’t be able to see.’ Genni was still whispering but breathlessly. ‘No-one’s coming.’
‘They will,’ Lina repeated, taking Genni’s hand in hers again, stroking the brown fingers. ‘They will come, love. We’re safe, remember.’
‘But what if...’ Genni was looking at Lina’s stretched out leg, her wounded ankle. ‘What if we’re not safe. What if–’
‘Look,’ Lina whispered. ‘Look, here they are.’
And there they were. The mother fox standing in the entrance to her den, black nose tipped up as she scented the air. Lina had ensured they sat upwind of the den, so after a moment the vixen turned her head and, as if waiting for that signal, two small forms appeared, weaving between her legs investigating old bones and acorns.
‘Oh,’ Genni whispered and her breathing had calmed, her eyes wide enough to become white-haloed in the falling light.
Another cub emerged, and then a fourth, and as the mother sat patiently, they did what fox cubs did best, what Lina had most wanted Genni to see. They played and pounced and chased and growled, one coming within touching distance of where they sat silently, far too consumed by the game and the need to assault its siblings to notice them. Then the sun threw a last flare of bloody light across the forest and the night reared up from the shadows where it had been waiting. Genni flinched back
and gave a high whimper, brief and faint but enough for the vixen to turn her gold eyes on them and with a low bark send her cubs scurrying for their den.
‘Genni,’ Lina whispered. The mother fox stared at them, black tail moving slowly, then she turned and disappeared lithely into the trees. ‘Genni.’
But Genni did not seem to hear or notice that the foxes had gone. Her eyes were fixed on the slivers of pearly sunset between the branches and all of her muscles were tense. ‘It’s too dark,’ she said. ‘We have to–’ scrambling to a crouch. ‘We need to–’
‘Genni, love,’ Lina whispered, not moving because she thought if she did, Genni might startle away. ‘We’re safe, remember. We’re safe, and it’s still light. See? You can see me, can’t you? Here,’ she said, reaching into her bag. ‘Here’s a torch, would you like it?’
Genni grasped it but her eyes seemed blind. ‘What if we’re not safe,’ she said. ‘What if we’re not...’ Lina smoothed the hair from Genni’s face and Genni turned to stare at her. ‘Can you stop them? Can you stop them getting Dad and coming here. You have to stop them.’
‘Yes,’ Lina said without thinking. Remembering too late the choices Thiago had laid out so brutally, wanting to put her hands childishly over her ears and curl up here alone. But Genni was breathing fast again, her eyes focused on Lina’s but unseeing, turned nightmarishly inward. Lina did not need to guess what that nightmare might be, too many miles crossed and hunted. ‘Genni, you are safe here. You are.’
‘What about...’ a rasping breath, her eyes flickering shut but when Lina touched her she flinched. ‘What about Dad? What if they get him?’ another breath loud in the stirring forest, her voice rising. ‘What if they get him?’
‘They won’t–’
‘You don’t know,’ Genni gasped. ‘You don’t know!’ Her head shaking too frantically and Lina so wanted to fold her into her arms, but held still. ‘You have to save him, you have to save him, you have to–’ her fingers clawing at her arms, she choked on her own words, and this time Lina spoke louder.
‘Genni,’ she moved so they were facing, her ankle flaring heat and pain. ‘Genni, listen to me. It’s alright. It’s alright.’ But it was not alright, and anger rose up in Lina like a stranger because she had been spending so much time worrying and fearing that she had forgotten to rage. ‘Genni,’ speaking a slow cadence, ‘It will be alright. It will be alright. It will be alright. Breathe with me, love. Breathe with me. It will be alright.’
Darkness grew, the sky between leaves deepening to damson then an oceanic blue, the moon a narrow smile high above. Lina whispered, and Genni whimpered and breathed and whimpered, and slowly calmed. A roosting thrush called a last alarm and, almost too far away to hear, a nightingale’s song rose up the slope. ‘I can’t see,’ Genni whispered, more exhausted now than anything. Lina turned the torch on and as she had known it would, it made the night deeper around them, but that was not the point. It had never been about the darkness itself. Lina felt that anger again and realised that a small and brutally selfish part of it was at Genni. Or rather because Lina had to remain calm when she did not feel it, because she had two lives to protect instead of just one, and Thiago’s voice kept murmuring the answer to a riddle she wished undone.
She closed her eyes, listening to the nightingale and realising she could smell wildfires from the plains, bitter on the evening air. ‘Come on then,’ she said eventually, rising awkwardly to her feet, wounds pulling. Only when they were in the truck, the cab light a cocoon, did she realised Genni was crying. Silent and furious, hunched over herself, and Lina’s throat closed, but tears were better, she thought. Tears were healthier than gasping for breath on her knees. ‘Oh, love,’ she said softly, but Genni swiped at her face angrily and stared ahead. The light went out.
‘I want to go home.’
Lina did not dare ask whether Genni meant London or the station because she thought she knew the answer.
‘I want to go home.’
Lina started the engine and turned the truck, avoiding the tall teasels and hidden rocks more from memory than from the truck’s muddied lights. ‘I know, love,’ she said.
‘You don’t,’ Genni’s voice sounded distant and calm, which was worse somehow than when she was shouting. ‘You don’t know because you left. You ran away. That’s what you do. You leave people. You’ll leave Dad there.’
‘Jesus, Genni,’ Lina said, startling herself. She stopped the truck, her hands on the wheel. ‘I’m sorry, love, but you have no idea why I left, so you can’t possibly understand.’
Genni made a harsh sound of disbelief.
‘Genni. For god’s sake, I left to save Dad. I left so that he and you got to hold on to that home you want to go back to. That life.’ She stopped, dropped her hands into her lap where they curled in upon themselves. ‘I gave up my life to keep you safe before,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it again if I have to.’
She would. But it would still not be enough.
Genni’s head turned, her eyes a low gleam in the dark. Lina had no idea what more to say, anger and sorrow spiralling slowly within her.
‘Will you? How?’
Lina’s hands moved to flatten themselves on her stomach, still the ache and the roil. ‘However I need to,’ she said.
‘Xander said your friend killed his dad. Is that what you’ll do? Kill people?’
Oh god, Lina thought, just as she had done earlier, sitting in the lab faced with Thiago’s unassailable logic. ‘James didn’t kill him,’ she said, remembering Kai sly gesture, the post-mortem results. ‘State just want people to think so. Xander wants to think so.’
‘I thought you said State wanted to blame Silene.’
‘Silene thinks that. She thinks someone wants to pin this on her. Genni, I’ve no idea if that’s true.’
Genni was silent for a minute. ‘But it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s still because of you and James that we’re not safe.’
She was right. And wrong. Their father had never told Genni about Lina’s mother, against the unconscious indiscretion of a child, but also to spare Genni his own mourning. Lina could tell her now; it might excise her from guilt, her and James and all the things they had done. She turned the headlights onto full beam and drove the truck up the rough track that jostled them loosely, filling the silence with engine and rocks and gears.
When they pulled into the barn, Lina turned the headlights off, leaving only the light Thiago had kept on awaiting their return. Before Genni could move, she said levelly, ‘I can’t change the past, Genni. I can only fight this fight, here and now. So you can either carry on being angry with me for things I can’t change, or you can accept that I am doing everything I can to keep you safe now and not make that even harder for me.’
‘I’m not–’
‘You are, actually,’ Lina said. ‘By blaming me, by fighting me, by not trusting me. They make it...’ she cut off, her eyes becoming awash without warning. ‘Just be careful with Xander and trust me, Genni. Please. Hang out with Kai, he’d like that.’ She put her hand on the door. ‘Can you do that for me?’
Genni did not answer.
‘Genni?’
Genni sighed, shifted her weight. ‘Okay. Okay.’ Then swung herself out of the truck, Lina only catching up with her at the old house door. She pushed it open and Genni moved into the honeyed light as if reaching dry land. Lina began unloading her bag so she had her back turned when Genni spoke again.
‘Who’s Kai, anyway?’
Lina’s hands stilled, and she stared at the mud beneath her fingernails. She wondered where he was now, out in the meadow in the dark or hanging loosely over a balcony edge, fox skull in his pale hands. Oh Kai, she thought, and for a moment was too frightened to turn around and face Genni’s question.
‘The boy,’ she said finally. Genni was standing at the foot of the stairs, weight canted and a frown betwe
en her brows. ‘The boy who’s with ... who lives here. Blond hair, your age...’ she fell silent. No, she thought. No.
‘What?’ Genni’s frown deepened.
No, Lina thought again, desperately. It was impossible. He was real, and she was not losing her mind, and all the tiny oddities that had been building to an answer were wrong, wrong, wrong.
‘Perhaps you’ve missed him.’ But he had held his hand over her bowed head, he had sat beside her mimicking her movements, he had sung to Lina while she was drowning. Genni studied her face and Lina had no idea what she might be reading there, but eventually she simply shrugged and muttered, ‘Yeah maybe. Whatever,’ and turned towards the stairs, her footfalls quick and light.
A moth had followed them in out of the dark and was flying bewildered orbits around the light. Lina watched it with her pulse a slow murmur in her ears.
‘Kai,’ Lina whispered into the empty lab. And then, ‘Silene.’ Silene talked to him, saw him, hated and feared him, and Lina’s first surge of relief at the thought turned to ice when she realised what that meant. That the only other person who had ever noticed Kai was the delusional woman who had quite possibly murdered her husband.
Connections and stray words and the circling threat to her own friable sanity ravelled themselves in Lina’s mind as the moth fell and rose, fell and rose. Then she moved, turned to her tablet, sat as if she might shatter and pulled up the news articles she had already read a dozen times. Pulled up the photos.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Thiago found Lina just as the eastern horizon began to bleed from deep blue to cerulean. She was sitting on the tree stump in the meadow, both it and her chilled and dew-speckled, and she only moved when Thiago crouched at her side, touched the back of her hand.
‘What is it?’ he said quietly.
She looked at his familiar face and did not know what to say. That she could not forget his words yesterday, that she had come to care for a boy no-one else could see, that if she only had a finite number of days left then she wished she could have spent them here, alone, with him.
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