‘He’s doing well,’ Thiago said when she did not answer. ‘I got an update last night.’
She moved her head very slightly.
‘I spoke to Kapoor,’ Thiago continued, as if knowing that his voice might be what she needed to bring her back. The edge of the world became a line of fire, the vast arc of sky above them still alive with stars. ‘He’s ... interesting. I think he’s conflicted. He knows he owes us his freedom, but he’s suspicious. He isn’t the type to act until he’s certain though.’
‘So...’ It took an effort to speak; she had not slept and was far colder than she’d realised. ‘So what will he do?’ To become certain.
Thiago shook his head slowly, the bloody rising dawn painting his face, casting his eyes in shadow. ‘I did mention Xander’s hacking ESF. And I had another look at the reports around Wiley’s death. He was dying before he was stabbed. Drugs.’ He lifted a shoulder. ‘If we push her, she might do our work for us.’
Drugs and knives, threat and counterthreat. And anything Lina and Thiago did would hurt Xander, who was grieving one parent and carrying the other. She lifted her eyes from Thiago to scan the indigo meadow, but there was no-one there. She wanted to talk to him but also dreaded doing so more than she could say.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She’s worsening, so...’ So it would likely not be hard. ‘Not in front of Xander though.’
‘If possible.’
Lina shifted, her clothes moving damply against her skin. The air was incredibly still, mist laced against the trees like frost, the smell of water and the dying night. ‘T,’ she said, but then, faintly, the sound of alerts reached them through the open lab door, and they both turned.
‘I’ll go see,’ Thiago said, rising, then reached down to her. ‘Come in. You’re freezing.’ She put her hand in his, and knew he was right mostly because his skin was furnace hot against her own.
The alerts were for a super-storm. Not a storm, but a super-storm. She had not checked the weather for days, so had not seen this coming and it was rare for one to persist inland from the Atlantic coast. Lina read the words again and wanted to laugh. How utterly apt, she thought. But the humour faded almost before it formed. Perhaps the mountains would turn it aside, perhaps it would lose its fury as it barrelled across the continent.
‘Forty-eight hours,’ Thiago said. ‘We should start prep now.’
‘They might want to leave.’ She looked up from her tablet to Thiago, who was scowling at the windows as if calculating their strength. ‘They’d be safer in Sofia. Even Plovdiv.’
Thiago gave an abbreviated nod, still scanning the room. ‘Ask them?’
‘Gladly.’ She did not look at her tablet again. Minimised in the corner was a photograph she had enhanced last night then stared at for a very long time wishing it unseen but unable to look away. The sky was a thinning blue now, cloudless and foretelling heat. Neither of the Wileys would be up yet. Devendra might be, but Lina went to shower and check on her sleeping sister without rushing.
He was there, a pot of coffee steaming beside him on the dining table, tablet propped up and his bruises fading fast now, yellow and mauve. Silene was curled on the sofa with her own tablet, and there was no sign of Xander. Lina had not checked his web activity again, but she pictured him sleeping sprawled between gear and cables, his hunting bots tireless.
Dev looked up and smiled infuriatingly pleasantly. ‘Coffee?’ Gesturing at the pot. ‘It’s fresh. I hope you like it strong.’
This was surreal, she thought, fetching a mug and letting him fill it, the blue sky and the storm raging towards them beyond the horizon. She set her tablet on a coffee table and went to open the patio doors, half expecting, dreading, Kai there but the balcony was empty, swift fledglings murmuring restlessly in the eaves above her. A flicker of white movement caught her eye within the barn and, with a shiver, she turned back inside.
‘I’m not sure if you’ve checked the weather,’ she said to them both. ‘But there’s a super-storm coming. It’ll be here by the end of tomorrow probably.’
Silene looked up at her, frowning with the effort to understand. Dev canted his head expectantly and Lina said steadily. ‘It will be dangerous here, so HQ have asked that we evacuate you to Plovdiv. We can arrange travel to Sofia if you’d rather. You’ll need to leave this morning, I’m afraid.’
‘What...’ Silene looked to Dev, then back to Lina. ‘A super-storm? But ... no, that cannot be right. Dev...’
He had turned back to his tablet, likely confirming Lina’s news. Lina came to sit on the end of the sofa near Silene. ‘A full super-storm cell, yes. They are extremely rare here, but...’ she shrugged. ‘The station isn’t designed to withstand them, and the forest will be deadly. It really is vital you get to somewhere safer.’
‘And you?’ Devendra said softly. ‘I assume that means you will be leaving too?’
Lina met his gaze. ‘That depends. We have a lot of work to do preparing the station as much as possible. And it would be better if we were here to act if needed. We’ll be watching the forecast.’
‘You aren’t leaving?’ Silene said.
Lina looked at her dormant tablet, waiting in front of her and Silene. ‘We have a duty to this place.’
‘That’s a hell of a strong sense of loyalty,’ Dev said, smiling his sharp, devastating smile.
Trying to batten down a flare of anger, Lina said, ‘It’s our home, so yes, we will risk ourselves for it.’ She took a breath. ‘But we can’t let you do so. Thiago is arranging transport at the moment. We might be able to get you an airlift if the winds on the plain stabilise. If they can’t get clearance, we’ll truck you out to the ESF border where a security team will meet you and take you the rest of the way.’
‘We can’t go,’ Silene whispered. Her fingers were wrapped around her throat, their nails ragged, the polish chipped away. ‘Dev, tell her. We can’t go back.’
Lina glanced at Dev and then back to Silene. ‘You’ll be safe in Sofia,’ she said. ‘Won’t you? You could stay there afterwards if you don’t want to go home. Xander would prefer Sofia to here, I imagine.’
Silene shuddered and Dev leaned one elbow on the dining table, watching.
‘I can’t go back,’ Silene whispered, staring at nothing. No, not at nothing, Lina realised. At the meadow still hung halfway between shadow and sun. ‘You said they couldn’t make me go back. So they can’t, can they, even if they know? But the blood wasn’t–’ a tiny gasp that reminded Lina of Genni in the forest yesterday, fighting for breath. ‘He was there, Dev! It was him–’
‘Silene,’ Dev said impatiently. ‘No-one knows anything, more’s the pity. They only want to talk to you, and you aren’t going to talk to them. But perhaps we ought to listen to Lina and get out of here.’
‘No. You cannot make me, Dev darling. You simply cannot. I am staying here until it’s safe.’
‘It’s not safe here,’ Lina said.
More unnerving than the clutching hands and the glazed eyes, Silene laughed. ‘Not safe? Oh, I know that. With that thing here, and you, how could I be safe here? But...’ she turned jerkily to fix her gaze on Dev. He frowned at her. ‘But I don’t care about my safety, don’t you see? They can kill me.’ She laughed again. ‘Yes, they can. But I won’t let them get Xander. And if we leave here, they will take him away. You know they will.’
Dev looked at Lina and said musingly, ‘Do I? Perhaps I do.’ He scanned the room with the same analytical assessment as Thiago. ‘This place looks quite sturdy. And the forecast suggests the storm eye will track north of us.’ He gave Lina a wide, generous smile and she felt a weight press down on her lungs. ‘If we stay we could help Thiago with the prep as you are ... not fighting fit.’
Lina had abandoned her crutches and the pain had become such a background presence that she forgot he might still see her as broken. Unless it was more warning than taunt. S
he opened her mouth to argue with him, but then a high trill of laughter rose in amongst the song of a blackcap, and she came to a decision. Leaning forward, she shifted her tablet to sit square to both her and Silene, and woke the screen. Looking at that, she said, ‘The error margins are pretty wide at the moment, and even if it just brushes us here, we’d expect structural damage. ESF is not happy having guests here.’ She did not mention Genni. Silene had gone deathly still beside her, but Lina did not look. ‘They aren’t willing to risk one of you becoming injured, especially in light of recent events.’
Silene began to make a high, high keening sound, and even though Lina had chosen to do this, she did not want to turn. Because seeing the truth on Silene’s face might make it real, and the thing Lina had discovered in the night was something she desperately wanted to remain unreal.
‘Silene,’ Dev had risen to his feet, and Lina did look at the other woman’s face then. Told herself to show neither cold horror nor cruelty; anger and heartache looming.
‘Silene,’ Dev repeated, sitting on the table in front of her. ‘What is it? What’s...’ he followed her wide eyed gaze to the screen of Lina’s tablet and picked it up. ‘What’s this?’
Although Lina was unsure who he was addressing, she answered as steadily as possible. ‘It’s a news photograph. Do you recognise it?’ Seeing Silene flinch back, her face so colourless she looked deathly. Good, Lina thought savagely. This is exactly how you deserve to feel. And for the first time, found something in this new impossible knowledge that seemed just, and right.
‘From what?’ Dev said. His voice held danger now, which was what Lina had told herself to expect, but it was still chilling.
‘It wasn’t me, Dev,’ Silene whispered. ‘You have to understand it wasn’t me. I told him not to go. I said it would draw attention, but he wouldn’t listen. He never listened, Dev, you know that. And if he hadn’t gone then...’ she shuddered so violently that the sofa vibrated, her eyes finding the photograph on the screen, shying away, raised a shaking finger to point. ‘It followed me.’
Dev looked at the screen and Lina found that she could not breathe, the air around her thinned to the point of vacuum.
‘It was there too, Dev.’ Silene’s voice was dry and shriven. ‘No-one sees it, but it followed him home and then ... and then...’ She began to sob brokenly, her face haggard and twisted. She had been so poised and preened when she came, Lina thought numbly. Would anyone have guessed she would break so easily? Yes, perhaps.
Dev had not raised his head, still studying Lina’s tablet, and she did not want to look at the photograph, but had memorised every pixel anyway. Of the small body lying on the ground, its pale face twisted towards the camera, blood outlining his torso.
So much blood, she thought just as she had done last night. So much blood from such a small body. He must have been so cold at the end. He still was.
‘His name was Kai,’ she whispered, her throat full of tears and blind disbelief. ‘He was eight. He was murdered on Christopher Wiley’s orders. As he watched.’
Chapter Thirty
‘Silene thinks she can see him,’ Lina said. Silene shrank back into the sofa, clawing at her face as if to obliviate herself. Lina spoke without looking at Dev, but he was listening so intently she could feel the weight of it. ‘She says this boy, Kai, saw her with her husband just before he died.’
‘She’s told you this?’ Dev said.
This was what she had wanted. Silene’s innocence cast into doubt alongside her sanity so that Dev would have more reasons to take her quietly away than he had to hunt conspiracies. So why did it feel like it was her being unravelled, and her who was betraying that unutterably betrayed boy in the photograph.
‘Yes,’ she said very quietly, turning her face towards the balcony again, relieved to see that it was still empty. She could not have borne it if he had heard her claim not to see him.
‘Silene,’ Dev said, setting Lina’s tablet down and leaning forward to pull Silene’s hands away from her face. She yelped and resisted, but then surrendered and looked at him like a child expecting redemption. ‘Silene, you aren’t seeing any ... ghosts. They aren’t real.’ She was shaking her head mutely and he tightened his hold on her. ‘Ghosts aren’t real, Silene. This is just your grief. That’s all. We’ll get you to a doctor and all of this will get better.’ He looked at Lina, catching her by surprise. ‘What has she been taking? Have you supplied any of it?’
‘What?’ Lina frowned, her mind still full of his certain, soothing voice saying, Ghosts aren’t real. Hysteria welled within her. ‘We’ve given her nothing. I don’t know what she’s taking, but I...’ treading such a fine line. ‘I did mention my concerns that she has been overmedicating to Xander.’
‘Overmedicating,’ Dev repeated and Lina thought that he too had read the latest reports and was thinking of the unnamed sedatives in Christopher Wiley’s blood.
‘Hmm.’ He brushed Silene’s hair back from her face with a tenderness that Lina had not expected him to be capable of. He was too full of trickery and edges to be so gentle, or perhaps it was that he was so full of trickery that she did not want to think him also capable of gentleness. Monsters were easier to hate if they were only ever monsters. Her heart lurched a little at the word, and she thought that even if the impossible were true, even if she too was seeing a boy who had died hundreds of miles away, then that did not stop her wanting to protect him from harm now, here. She thought of James, and the fact that she could not bear him being accused of murder even though he too was beyond caring now, beyond being hurt.
Maybe that was why she was seeing Kai, she thought, her heart faltering, sharp and lonely. Maybe she was seeing an abandoned, innocent child and wanting to save him because she had abandoned James, and he was innocent, and no-one had saved him. Because she wished so much that she could have told him he was loved even after all this time, even though it had not been enough.
Maybe it takes a broken heart to see other broken things, she thought. In which case how could she wish to make herself blind?
‘I must go,’ she said abruptly, coming to her feet, cradling her tablet against her. Dev did not look up, murmuring to Silene just the way Lina had spoken Genni back from the darkness. At the top of the stairs, Lina remembered herself. ‘Thiago will tell you the evacuation plans. You should pack.’
Dev did lift his head now, his eyes on her dark as coffee and deceptive, but she left before he could either answer or read the agony on her face.
‘Kai,’ she whispered coming out into the meadow, raising butterflies and silencing grasshoppers as she passed. ‘Kai,’ she said. ‘Kai.’
But he did not come. Perhaps he couldn’t, now that she knew. Perhaps she had only ever dreamed him out of grief and fear and rage. She sat in the meadow, watching the mountains shimmer beneath the sun, waiting for the memory of a child, summoning the will to face a storm.
A swallowtail glided golden past her to dip and rise over the orlaya and Lina saw Thiago looking for her, so she rose. It hurt to walk without crutches, but the pain was a promise of healing. When she reached him, Thiago said:
‘Airlift at thirteen hundred. How’s the ankle?’
Lina smiled at him. ‘It’s fine. Is Genni up?’
Thiago lifted a shoulder. ‘Listening to music.’
They needed to talk again, her and Genni, move them both forward from last night.
‘She’s staying here?’
Thiago was leaning against the doorframe and Lina sat on the bench against the wall. She looked up at the high blue sky framed by roofs, then at the light lying over the meadow, wavering above the forest and the slopes, smelling that taint of smoke again from the plains. Two years ago a tornado had seeded fire through a small village and she had gone down to help. A handful of people survived, far more died, ash and burnt flesh in her lungs and the vultures overhead, corvids on the stumps of wa
lls.
They were so easily forgotten, the dead, and it shouldn’t be that way. She thought of James again and gingerly, still resisting, of Kai.
‘I can’t send her away,’ Lina said eventually. ‘She’s got to be safer here. Anyway, she’d be alone again, and I can’t do that.’
Thiago’s jaw tightened but he nodded. ‘Then we’ll keep her safe,’ he said.
Lina tipped her head back against the warm bricks. ‘One o’clock.’ Less than four hours and then perhaps it would be over, if what she had just shown Dev was enough. ‘What’s the weather like?’ Meaning on the firestrewn plains between here and Plovdiv, where small and deadly tornadoes could fill the air with smoke and collapsing wind patterns that no-one could predict, or fly in.
‘Borderline.’ Lina looked at him, but Thiago said nothing else and she had not really expected him to. Neither false reassurance nor unneeded explanations. ‘I’m starting with the barn. You do the shutters?’
Lina nodded. There was so much work to do before tomorrow evening, and her injury would slow them. ‘I’ll check on Genni first,’ she said, and Thiago pushed off from the doorframe, leaving her to drag herself out of the sun.
Far more readily than Lina had expected, Genni agreed to help unpack and check the storm shutters that would fit over the old house windows. Watching her intent face, Lina realised that Genni had gained a little weight since coming here and her lovely dark skin was two shades darker than it had been. Despite the anger, the hours hunched over her tablet, the lurking panic, she looked healthier now than she ever had before. Lina took a slow breath, brushed cobwebs from a shutter scattering spiders, and said, ‘You know the others are leaving later?’
This Is Our Undoing Page 24
