But then two messages arrived on her tablet and Lina leaped for it. The first was Kolya. Hope and relief and the dying wildfires made Lina’s lungs resonate in her chest like bells.
Message undelivered. This account no longer exists.
She sank onto her bed and set the tablet down, closed her eyes, heard Thiago moving downstairs. So Kolya was gone then. It had seemed likely, Kolya had known it was likely, and both Kolya and Lina had known that it would be because he had guided Lina’s father and Genni through a crowded train station in the dawn.
So, she thought. When she left, she would have no help but Thiago’s friend. Not quite impossible but so much closer to being so than it had been yesterday.
There was a storm coming and work to be done, but she remembered the other message and opened that.
Dr Stephenson,
Your father attaches a message below. We are similarly likely to be offline from tonight or tomorrow, after which perhaps we should talk. Your father’s physical health is improving well, but his mental wellbeing is of some concern, I believe. I have been advised by ESF Investigators that they would be willing to intervene if, or when, the unofficial pursuit of you comes to an end. It is unclear what the source of this activity is, but their stance at the present is that it is most likely covert action by London State and thus places your father as a risk to you.
We can perhaps discuss more after we are both back online.
Yours etc.
And then, finally:
My beautiful children,
I like to picture you both in the room I saw so many times on my screen, with the mountains behind you and the forest like a sea. I like to think you are there now, reading this together, and that later perhaps you will go out to watch some foxes play as the sun sets. I have so many things to be grateful for, but the greatest of all is that I was able to be a father to you two. And that I can picture you safe, so far away from the corruption and the hatred and fear. I wish I could see your faces.
I am told that it is better for you that I remain here for now. So of course I do so happily. I am your father and will do everything in my power to keep you both safe. We’ll see. I am told I will hear more after the storm. After the storm; as if cataclysmic events can ever change those most fundamental of truths. Love and hate. Hate is changed by the small things, I think, not the large. And nothing at all can change love.
Look after yourselves through the storm, and always. Wherever you are, I am beside you.
Your father.
Lina went outside numbly, the low wind picking at the shutters waiting open against the wall. Shutting them slowly, blinkering the house into blindness, creating a small, still hollow to hide from the ruination of the world. A predawn thrush began to sing and Lina thought of those fragile lives singing oblivious, how little it took for them to die; how in their unknowing, they could sing until the storm came.
He would wait until the storm had passed. She reread his words and had to believe that. The storm would pass, the Wileys would leave and if Dev chose his old loyalties over his ambivalence then all it would take would be a name, then two, then three. Perhaps they would still use her father as a lure to bring her into their hold, or perhaps they would not bother with such finesse.
He had spoken of himself in the past tense.
She set the bar across the shutters, her fingers cold and stiff. Her reply to the lawyer had said only, Please check that he has no hidden medicine. No silver-blue tin.
We’ll see, he had said. We’ll see. And, Look after yourselves through the storm, and always.
Then Genni woke and they went up for a hurried breakfast of yesterday’s bread with the dawning sky starless beyond the windows. Lina watched Genni watching the mountains and decided that she could not show her the email. She thought of James, and how seldom you get to say goodbye, and how many times you missed that chance because you were too full of hope.
How could she possibly be placing her own morals above her father’s life? And yet she had watched her mother die when she was eight years old, so how could she do anything else? The storm that was coming would be terrible enough to kill them all...
‘We need to tape the windows,’ she said to Genni, and to Xander who had just slid silently into the room. ‘I’ll go get the tape.’
‘You seen my mum?’
Lina turned at the top of the stairs. Xander was staring at her with a belligerence that looked paper-thin. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Is she not asleep?’
‘No.’ His fists were flexing at his sides. ‘Dev’s with Thiago. She’s not in her room.’
Remembering Silene’s grey form in a dawn that felt years ago. ‘Perhaps she’s gone for a walk.’ Remembering Kai.
‘She wouldn’t, she was too...’ he hit his fists leadenly against the back of a chair. ‘She was too scared of something out there. She’s just ... she’s gone.’ A break in his voice that seemed to infuriate him. ‘What have you done?’ he said. ‘What have you done to her?’
Lina leaned back against the newel post and kept her face calm. ‘We’ll find her. I can send drones out before the storm comes. Thiago can check the cameras,’ she paused. ‘You can check the cameras, right?’
‘If you’ve–’
‘Let Dev know, Xander. Then check the cameras.’ She moved before he could choose between accusation or obedience. She would not comfort him. Nor contemplate his pain. She would set drones out and tell Thiago, and not think about Silene wandering into the forests after a silvery boy.
The coming storm would be terrible enough to kill.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Thiago was on the barn roof, grimly hammering storm frames over the centuries-old tiles when Lina went in search of him and her tag-seeking, heat-seeking drones. He climbed down and wiped the back of a hand across his brow, listened without expression when she told him about Silene.
‘Bloody idiot,’ he said when she had finished.
‘She’s not–’
‘I meant Kapoor.’
Well, yes. Dev had been playing her drugs like a game and he’d misjudged, perhaps catastrophically. Perhaps, for Lina, fortuitously. It was a terrible thought but she could not quite silence it.
‘Xander can check the cameras. I’ve got too much to do.’
Lina met his black gaze and realised that he too was weighing lives. Those of everyone here over that of one addled woman. It was an easier equation that Lina’s own. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the drones up then help you.’
‘We won’t have the net for long.’
So she would not hear from her father again. Not till after the storm. ‘I know.’
She watched the drones lift and tip into the uncertain wind. They would not survive the storm, of course, but might last longer than the net and the camera signals, and some would head for the plains because that after all was where the BB had taken Dev.
‘Kai,’ she called. The air smelled dense and dark, and the clouds tearing apart the sky were thickening. ‘Kai.’ Watching the track and the treeline but not expecting to see him. He had gone hunting monsters, and she turned back to the buildings because what else could she do? Go chasing shadows through a forest where night-time was blurring into the storm? Search for a boy who had already died? She shivered, looked up at the sky again, the horizon dark as mercury but the storm-front still hidden even though pressure changes were preceding it. The swifts had gone, climbed above the storm on their fragile sickle-wings. The birds were falling silent.
Up in the lounge again, she set Genni to taping the windows. Diagonals then crosswise, then quarter the squares; she knew how, of course, they all did. Lina did not lower the shutters yet because she wanted to watch the darkening world, and it also felt like abandonment to blind themselves to Silene.
‘The net’s gone,’ Xander said, looking up and gasping at the falling light.
<
br /> ‘Yes,’ Lina said. ‘I should get downloads from the drones for a while yet though.’ Although the storm was coming upon them faster than she had believed possible. Her drones would be falling broken into the cinders of the plains.
‘Lina,’ Genni said from the balcony doors.
The storm was raising its voice behind the glass, bandwidths built of wind and the coming rain, of groaning trees and resonation in small spaces, a gathering static. Setting her tablet down she went to stand beside her sister. And finally, enormous in the west was the storm-front, black and curvilinear, sweeping away to the north like the skin of some incomprehensible edifice, a starship, a city wall. Trees were beginning to heave in the forest, the noise climbing to a roar.
They were out of time. Lina opened the door, shouted to Thiago where he was re-checking the shutters on the old house, then closed and locked them, taking the tape from Genni.
‘Come help tape,’ she said to Xander, and surprisingly, he came. Frowning and taut as a drum, and staring out of the windows as if into the jaws of a monster. He picked up a roll and set to the job beside Genni as if they were nothing like enemies at all, turning the storm into pixels, caging it out. Something, broken branches perhaps, scraped along the wall below the windows, and was gone.
Below them the front door opened and slammed shut heavily enough to reverberate the air, and Lina breathed out, realising that she had been waiting, counting the seconds.
‘You’re locking the doors?’ Xander said, pulling his gaze from the windows.
The noise within the house was mounting and Lina did not notice Dev arrive until he spoke. ‘Can we connect directly to the house cameras?’
‘Yes,’ Lina said to both their questions. ‘The images won’t be great but we’ll be able to see if she comes back.’ And yet she did not think anyone was expecting that. Even if Silene had been rational enough to make her own way back, the storm would now prevent her. ‘Xander, can you do that?’ He abandoned the tape, retreating from the false-night outside with palpable relief. Strange how no-one cared that Lina had referred to Xander’s illegal skills and Xander had not even thought of denying them. It was as if the storm had suspended the outside world, reduced them to immediacy.
Dev took over taping the windows and Lina sat opposite Xander, checking her drone downloads. Despite their storm-forced truce, she would have preferred him shut away in his room or her in her lab. But instead she must sit close enough that she could lean forward to touch his knee, searching for a woman she would happily leave to the storm if it weren’t for the angle of Xander’s bent head.
‘Nothing from the drones,’ she said after a moment. ‘And they are down now.’
‘So what? We just sit here?’ Xander stared at her, anger tightening his eyes.
Such convenient masks, Lina thought. Anger, and blame. She looked out to the occluded balcony and wished she knew what was happening to Kai, aware of how ridiculous her worry was but unable to quash it.
‘Any luck with the cameras?’ she said.
Xander turned his tablet screen towards her and as Lina reached to steady a corner, she remembered the USB micro-stick in her pocket. Now. It would be easy. Silene had made it easy. The camera images were amorphous blues and greys, debris skittering along the ground, rain blurring the details.
‘Well done. We’ll see her if she comes back.’ She slipped a hand into her pocket, felt the slim edges of the USB stick. ‘There are more around the back, let me just...’
Dev came over, patting Xander easily on the shoulder, his face and limbs utterly relaxed but his eyes on Lina intent. ‘Any luck with the forest cameras? Or tracking her tag?’
Xander reached for his tablet. Lina held the USB stick in her palm, but the moment had gone.
Thiago reached the top of the stairs and scanned the taped windows.
‘Downstairs,’ he mouthed to Lina, then called to Genni where she had drifted back to the balcony doors, pressing her forehead against the glass, breath silver on the outer dark. Her face in the strange, underwater light was grey, her eyes wide so Lina rose, forgetting Silene and the USB stick and going to gather up more tape, reaching for her sister’s hand.
‘I can’t find her.’ Xander’s voice was raised, but Lina did not look to see if he was talking to her. Let Dev handle him, she thought, the way he had failed to handle Silene. ‘Dev, we have to find her. What if she’s–’
Dead, Lina finished for him. What if his mother was dead.
‘Come away downstairs,’ she said to Genni. ‘Let’s do the bedrooms.’ Distraction and occupation, for both of them.
‘Lina,’ Dev said over the wind, and she turned reluctantly. ‘What’s this?’ He held up an elegant hand, letting the little red wool figure fall from his fingers to hang jerkily from its noose.
Lina put a hand on the banister, saw Thiago below her raise his eyebrows in a faint question. Something struck a window downstairs and Genni flinched. ‘Go help Thiago, love,’ Lina said, then went back towards Dev. ‘Where did you find it?’
Xander looked up and recognised the martenitsa, his whole body stiffening.
‘Downstairs,’ Dev said.
Xander grabbed it from him, ‘What the fuck?’ Paling as he stared down at it. ‘Where?’
Reaching over, Lina opened Xander’s fingers and he let her more out of shock than willingness. She lifted the small thing and felt a stirring of idiotic pity for it; that something so symbolic of hope had become this. It was the one Kai had been holding yesterday, and she lifted her gaze from her hands to Dev, knowing what he was going to say and dreading it.
‘On Silene’s bed. What is it?’
‘Fucking–’ Xander stood so fast his tablet fell, landing screen side down. Lina touched her pocket again, then dropped her hand when Dev’s eyes followed the movement. ‘Fucking ... no. Oh god, no. Dev, they’ve got her.’ His hands were wide white fists, his whole body leaning forward as if he were outside, fighting against the wind.
‘This doesn’t mean anything,’ Lina said. ‘There was one lying around here somewhere, so she must have found it. Maybe that’s why she went out, but the BB haven’t–’
‘Of course you’d say that,’ Xander snarled at her, ‘Of course you’d fucking deny it. It was you. Jesus fucking Christ, it was you.’ Lurching towards her, Dev grabbed the scruff of his shirt, pulling him back before Lina had even begun to move.
Xander fought Dev’s grip, but he did not let go until Xander jerked the other way instead, away from both of them towards the windows.
‘We have to get her back,’ he said to Dev. ‘Make her help us. She–’ looking at Lina, ‘I will fucking destroy you.’ The storm yowled, something clattering against the window behind him making him duck reflexively, coming up angrier than ever.
Lina wondered whether the storm would be as bad when it spun over Slovakia. She wondered what her mother had thought of, at the very end. And James, and Kai, what had they been thinking? Autumn and Kolya and the helicopter pilots. She wanted to weep and scream and tear her nails down Xander’s face.
‘You already have,’ she said, the words a roar inside her and so it was either a miracle or a curse that they emerged so calm, almost gentle. ‘You have already destroyed my life many times over. And you have destroyed so many others as well, Xander Wiley. It is what you have been raised to do.’
Xander’s face contorted, bewildered.
‘Lina,’ Dev said almost too quietly to be heard. Lightning flickered, still far away but approaching. The mountains would nurture it. It was startling how alike Dev sounded to Thiago, saying her name. She did not look at him.
‘I have done nothing to your mother,’ she said. Xander stepped closer, pulled by her unraised voice. ‘Even though I have plenty of reasons, I have tried only to help. But that is never enough, is it? You will always want to destroy more. To tear anything down that is not yours. W
here does it end, Xander? My god,’ she broke off on a laugh that had no humour in it at all. ‘You didn’t blink an eye at your father murdering children. And now you will kill an innocent man, another child, me, to avenge a killer.’ She shrugged. ‘Will that be enough for you, Xander? How many deaths will make you happy?’
She was so cold. So terribly, painfully aware of every thread of noise from outside, the rain become hail, the low thunder distinct beneath the jet engine roar of the forest, the near-subliminal reverberation of the air as the whole house tested itself against the rising wind. It would not peak for hours yet, she thought. The brittle birds, the fox in her flooding den, the martens, the butterflies being drowned or torn asunder. She watched Xander but only because she could not move, too cold and too full heartbreak and the litany of deaths.
‘Lina,’ Dev said. Lina did not move, still watching Xander, his wide shoulders rising. ‘Lina,’ Dev said again and this time she turned, met eyes reflecting the lamplight darkly. ‘Go help the others.’
She rose stiffly, unable to tell now whether the chill in her blood was coming from the room or herself.
‘How dare you?’ Xander said. Then louder, ‘None of that’s my fault. How fucking dare you?’
Dev laid a hand on the small of her back, turning her away, and for a moment she let herself be pushed. But then, because the world she loved was being torn apart, she looked at Xander once more.
‘So you never knew any of the things your parents did? You never shrugged and told yourself that some lives are worth more than others?’ She tilted her head, ignoring Dev. ‘Who are you lying to, Xander? Me or yourself? What are you trying to prove with all this?’ Waving a hand at him, his fallen tablet, Dev. ‘Your parents’ worth or your own?’
This Is Our Undoing Page 28
