‘The storm it is coming quicker, you know?’ Iva said. ‘Tomorrow morning. You...’ she looked at the station then frowned at Lina, the lines around her eyes labyrinthine. ‘You stay in the old house, yes? The domovek can protect you. The forest is ... there will be bad things in the storm, I think. You stay in the old house, Lina. You will be safe there.’
Lina looked at the station too, the new house with its smooth walls and wide windows, the old with bricks of straw and mud, built and repaired and mutated over hundreds of years. ‘Yes,’ she said, although they wouldn’t. It was ESF protocol. ‘We will.’
‘So,’ Iva said, nodding and turning away. ‘Now, I will speak to Mr Ferdinando.’
Lina did not attempt to keep up this time, standing in the golding sunlight, worrying at the link Iva had drawn between the BB and the storm, the link Kai drew between the storm and his monsters.
‘Genni?’ The curled brown form on the top balcony did not move, headphones deafening her, and as Lina approached, she caught the smell of fires from the plains again. The rains would stop them, she thought, but that was no solace at all.
With Thiago and Iva in the lab, she borrowed Genni’s tablet to check the weather. Iva had been right. The storm forecast had updated to an eighteen hour warning for first contact, twenty-four till peak winds.
‘Damn,’ she murmured, Genni watching her, hands flexing on the chair’s armrests. Lina grimaced and then screwed up her nose, Genni’s fingers stilled. ‘I guess we better get our arses in gear,’ she said. ‘The storm is trying to race us.’
‘Okay,’ Genni said, leaning forward, eyes eclipsed moons in her tense face. She took two uneven breaths. ‘Okay, we have to hurry, right? Do we have time? We have time though, right?’
‘Yes,’ Lina said, reaching for her hand. ‘Come on then, let’s chase up some help.’
And yet she lacked the will to knock on either Silene or Xander’s bedroom doors. She remembered the memory stick lying in her pocket and wondered how the rockfall changed that, other than giving her more time. Genni looked at her and then away, then knocked on his door.
‘Xander,’ she shouted, then opened the door and Lina heard the rustle of bedcovers, a muttered curse. ‘You have to come help prepare for the storm.’
‘Like fuck,’ he said, a little loudly, speaking over hidden music.
‘Yeah. The storm is gonna be here in the morning, so everyone needs to help.’ Genni moved into the room and Lina belatedly realised something. Genni was capable of acting with Xander, and acting with Thiago; but she had never acted with Lina. Lina leaned against the corridor wall and closed her eyes, missing her father viciously, missing her mother more. Or missing the knowledge of a motherhood that did not end.
‘Not my job,’ Xander said. ‘Leave that to the traitors; it’s their job.’
‘Chicken,’ Genni said, and Lina opened her eyes.
‘What?’
‘You’re scared of the storm. And you’re scared of my sister.’
‘Like fuck,’ he repeated, but he was moving. Lina stepped into view and he faltered, looming.
‘We’ll be in the courtyard,’ she said unsmiling. ‘Come out as soon as you’re ready. Do you know where Dev is? His door’s open.’
He glowered at a point just beyond her shoulder and shrugged. ‘Why would I know?’
‘Okay,’ Lina said, and she and Genni went out into the sun. Iva was halfway down the track already, almost running, and Thiago was hitting something in the barn. Lina did not want to face him; they had never had to learn how to treat one another when they were fighting.
She checked her tablet, found, finally, a message from Vitaly, but not the one she had wanted. He was too far away, he had no connections beyond the one she already knew. He could ask, he said, but he doubted he could help.
The logical part of her had known this would be the case, but the hopeful part had not. And hope not strong enough for belief still hurt to lose.
So she must wait for Kolya then. And the lawyer.
Xander knew. The fact kept hitting her like a long fall ending. All the years of silence and lies and fragile safety ending. He knew, he knew, he knew.
They did the shutters first, then filled great bottles with water. Lina sent Xander to carry sacks of potatoes and rice up to the kitchen, seeing in his sweat and cursing a kind of vengeance. But also quixotically, unfathomably, still hoping that it was granting him at least a little peace. Thiago drained the truck’s tank and locked the fuel away, then he scowled up at the solar panels on the roof and Lina came silently to stand beside him.
‘You can’t do it,’ he said without turning. ‘Your ankle’s not up to it. I’ll ask Kapoor. Where is he anyway?’
And there he was, coming around the house carrying two of the car batteries that Lina had queued up for Xander. He looked from them to the roof and smiled. The bruises were gone, Lina thought, or at least so faded that his colour hid them. You would never know watching him now, how he had looked walking away from his captors. ‘Going up, are we?’ he said. ‘Not planning to throw me off, I trust?’
Lina left them there and took Genni around the lab storing equipment away, raising everything up off the ground. The milk in Iva’s bowl on the hearth was fresh, and for a second she had to hold still, softened by kindness.
‘Are you still leaving?’ Genni said when they were in the back office, Thiago’s office.
Lina set an invertebrate sampling net back down on the floor and looked across the room. ‘There isn’t time,’ she said. ‘It’s a long hike out. I wouldn’t make it.’ Not half-healed, although she might have done before, and not with the rockfall where the climb around it would be its most precipitous. Thiago had planned it too well.
Genni studied her shoes, scuffing one against the other, vainly trying to dislodge cobwebs and dirt. ‘So what about Dad? What if–’
Lowering herself gently into a chair, she tried to ease her ankle’s rising pain. ‘Nothing is going to happen until after the storm, either with Dad or here.’ Although between Iva and Kai and her own frustration, she was not so sure. The monster was coming, something building, everyone here teetering on the edge of some darkness and Lina could tell herself it was simply dread of the storm and the normalisation of her fear, but she was not sure. She was not sure.
‘What is it Xander knows?’
She had been expecting this question, was surprised Genni had not asked it earlier, but looking at her face now she realised how much courage it had taken to speak. Genni had already had one life stolen by the State, and then been forced to flee her second one. How much bravery it took to meet Lina’s eyes and ask if she would lose another. ‘Genni,’ Lina said and reached her arms out, wanting to weep when Genni moved hesitantly into her embrace. ‘Oh, love. I don’t know what to tell you.’ She brushed her fingers over her sister’s cheek, up over her hair. ‘It’s about my mum. She’d have been your mum too, only she died.’ Genni moved, but Lina placed a kiss on her temple. ‘She’d have loved you so much,’ she said.
‘So what happened?’ Genni whispered.
The door to the lab opened and closed, followed only by silence, so Lina spoke as steadily as she was able. ‘She died. She ... did something and State took her away and she died.’ I can’t, she thought desperately. Couldn’t say the words with her mind full of broken doorways and the television image of a concrete yard, the sound of her mother’s laughter, a palm against her cheek in the night. Please, she thought, I can’t. But Genni waited, and she spoke.
‘The State wanted us too, because of what she did. They would have taken us too, so we changed our names.’
‘They would have killed you because of what your mum did.’
Movement made Lina turn her head against Genni’s hair. Thiago was standing in the office doorway. She had forgotten how silently he could move.
‘Yes,’ she said, to
him and to her sister, stroking her sister’s back. ‘If they knew our old names, State would kill us.’
‘Even though it was years ago.’ Genni lifted her head, and Lina shifted her gaze from Thiago to her. She laid her palm on Genni’s cheek just the way she remembered her mother doing to her, a breath away from weeping. She wondered if her mother had wept the night she had left her child sleeping and gone out to try to change the world.
‘Yes, love,’ she said. ‘Even now.’
She could almost feel Thiago thinking, adding timelines to news events to Lina’s silences, but she smiled at Genni and added, ‘Our dad saved me. Just like he saved you. So we’ll save him, okay? We’ll keep this secret and bring him here, and we’ll be safe.’
Genni looked at her for a long time without speaking, her head resting very lightly against Lina’s palm. Then she straightened and wrapped her arms around herself and although her eyes were dry and steady, it had not been enough, Lina thought. She ought to have made up some safer lie, or turned the truth into sometime more certain.
‘We’ll never be safe. Not really. Not now Xander knows.’
‘He can’t prove it, not without admitting to hacking,’ Lina said, but surely that would not stop him. If she did not stop him. She felt, rather than saw, Thiago move away. Genni nodded, but again, it was not enough.
‘What did Iva say?’ Lina said to Thiago in a moment alone in the barn, cinching straps tight around the truck’s cab. She did not want to know what he had managed to calculate of her past, so she would instead insist on knowing this.
‘Nothing important.’
‘So not about the BB then?’
He looked up at her sharply and winced. ‘She said.’
‘Not much. Only that they aren’t finished with us ... this.’ She nodded her head at the new house.
Thiago narrowed his eyes. Beyond the courtyard the meadow was a field of gold, umbellifers turned incandescent and butterflies falling to earth like jewelled snow. It would be dark soon, and then the waiting night, and then the storm.
‘Do they still have the tech?’ she said, only now remembering it.
Thiago did not move, even when Lina took up the next strap. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘They’ll give it back.’
Smoothing the tarp beneath her hands, Lina watched him. ‘In exchange for what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘T.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to be blackmailed.’
‘What are they–’ Lina stopped, looking from his stubborn face to the new house. ‘Them. They want ... Dev back? No,’ Thiago met her gaze, frowning. ‘Xander or Silene. Because of Christopher Wiley. But what good… Oh god.’
‘A video. They could post it online. They’ve decided it’s payback for the deportations.’
‘Kill them.’ She pressed her hands down until the metal of the truck hurt her palms. ‘Why in god’s name are you all so obsessed with killing things?’
Thiago flinched and guilt swept over Lina. ‘Oh, T. I didn’t mean...’ he looked at her and she fell silent. She had meant him, even if she forgave him what she could not forgive in others. Which made so little sense that she could not begin to explain. ‘But you won’t,’ she said instead. Not asking, giving him at least that much.
‘Not out of fondness,’ he said. ‘I said I’d give them nothing. I meant it.’
Because of her then. And yet it felt so distant now, the pain, the trap, his guilt. So long ago and irrelevant. ‘Well,’ she said fiercely, ‘we aren’t leaving Xander an orphan, and we aren’t letting a child die. So we’ll get your tech back another way. After the storm.’
Thiago’s eyes blinkered, he moved to the next strap, pulling on it violently. ‘Yes,’ he said, then muttered something else in Spanish. There was a secret in his averted face, but she was too full of her own lies to fathom it. Too full of the coming storm and her father’s last words; a USB stick and futility. And then someone calling her name from the balcony of the new house, above and out of view.
She came to the barn entrance and looked up into Dev’s face, the last of the sun turning his lines and bones and darkness into a moment of Mughal art.
‘It’s Genni,’ he said, and she was running before he had finished.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Genni was crouched beside the sofa, her palms pressed against the floor and her head bent, keening a high, breathless note. Lina fell beside her, whispering her name, running a palm feather-light down the curve of her spine.
‘What did you say?’ she said, looking up. Stroking, stroking. Genni’s eyes were wide and blank. ‘What the fuck did you say to her?’
Xander stood three paces away, shoulders forward and chin up, ‘Nothing! She’s crazy!’
Lina glared, Genni’s ribs rose and fell beneath Lina’s hand. ‘What did you say?’
‘Oh my god, nothing!’
Dev turned to Xander and folded his arms silently.
‘It was just about camp kids. It was nothing. It’s not like she is one anymore.’
Disgust made Lina speechless. She lowered her head to Genni, whispering. ‘You’re safe, love. Gently now. You’re safe. You’re safe.’ Distantly aware of Dev speaking to Xander, Xander’s protest cut short and then his retreat; Dev sitting on the sofa, leaning back and staring up at the ceiling as Genni breathed and breathed and breathed. ‘You’re safe, love. I’m here. You’re safe.’
She took Genni up to bed when she was calmer, sitting with her in the shadows without speaking. And once she was asleep, dark against the pale sheets and the moonlight, Lina went outside into the meadow where mist was beginning to rise from the trees. There was still work to do. Thiago was somewhere, perhaps taking down the antennae from the back of the barn, but the sky above had cleared and she tipped her face up to the filigree stars, still hearing Genni’s birdlike breaths.
‘I’m sorry.’
She did not turn or move. Startled and yet unafraid. ‘What for?’
Dev came to stand beside her, the grasses whispering. ‘For Xander. He’s a good kid, he’s just–’
‘Grieving, yes, I know.’ Too tersely to be empathy. She felt Dev’s attention on her. ‘And also spoiled, blinkered and wilfully cruel.’
‘Not wilfully,’ Dev said, and she turned to him, his face a map of indigo shadows and the whites of his eyes. Starlight reflected.
‘No?’ she said softly. ‘And yet he knows his father killed those children. And yet he will destroy me and Genni and my father. Perhaps he is a ‘good kid’, Dev, but only in your world. Only by your reckoning.’ She meant it, and also did not mean it, because she could not believe any child culpable for the bigotry their parents trained them in. There was a point, she thought, where the child became responsible for their own blindness, and choices, but she had no idea where in Xander’s life that point lay. Whether he was beyond it or not.
‘He’s too young,’ Dev said, and she realised that her paler skin, upturned, must make her far easier to read than he was.
‘So were they,’ she said. ‘And yet it is Christopher Wiley who deserves vengeance? How can you live with that?’
He held her gaze for a long time before looking away, not to the house but to the mountains lying dense and black against the shining sky.
‘So you will take vengeance for those children? You have the training, after all.’
She didn’t. She did not have any training in vengeance, only in subterfuge and silence and secrets, in holding your breath behind a closed door, parameterising your expression as a guard read your papers, comforting a tired, crying child in the dark, lending a fighter courage knowing they might die.
‘You believe that of me?’ She wanted to hear him say it. To say, as a stranger, yes he thought her capable of killing, or no he did not. Perhaps it would help her to know.
‘I think you would do
anything to guarantee your father’s safety.’ He smiled, teeth flashing. ‘And I think Thiago would do anything to guarantee yours. Which creates a bit of an impasse, no?’
‘Who are you? What will you do?’ she said. She heard movement beyond the courtyard’s pool of light and although it was most likely Thiago, she pictured Kai out there, half-fox, half-dream, wholly lost.
Dev laughed quietly. ‘Good question,’ he said. ‘You don’t know anything about me, do you? No, don’t answer that.’ He shook his head and took a step away, still watching her. ‘More importantly though, Lina Stephenson, who are you? And what is it you need most in the world? Because I’m not sure you know, and I think you might need to choose.’
She did not answer and he took another step away, laughing again, softer this time and sadly. ‘Goodnight, Lina. Tomorrow the storm.’
Tomorrow the storm.
Lina slept badly. Woken once by Genni screaming, she sat for an hour in the dark as Genni clutched her fingers and whispered hoarsely about bones and pale faces, teeth in her skin, someone laughing. ‘Hush,’ Lina said, over and over, as Genni fell silent and drifted back towards sleep. But then Lina’s own dreams were haunted by the martenitsa dancing on the end of its rope in a terrible parody of joy. A silver-blue box and her father’s silence, the fractured wood of a broken door. Them all in endless variations and one single fear. Teeth and knives skittered through her dreams and a gold-eyed fox laughing, whispering, The monster is coming.
Her alarm was a relief. Even with the first tatter-banner storm clouds in the west driving smoke and the dawn ahead of them, she was glad to be up out of those dreams. Because the storm meant there would be no time to worry for her father or Genni, to turn Dev’s words over in her mind in endless configurations that led to her father’s safety, her own; orphaned children and revenge.
This Is Our Undoing Page 27
