Dev gave a short laugh and pushed her again, less gently. ‘Alright. Much as anger becomes you, can you go now?’ She turned her gaze on him and his amusement faded. ‘I told you I am not your enemy,’ he said, too quietly for Xander to hear. ‘Let me deal with him.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
Thiago met her on the middle landing, Genni not in sight and the fury of the storm echoing up the stairwell. He put a hand on her arm and stepped close enough that they could hear each other without shouting. Lina wanted to check on Genni, touch her, watch her breathing. But Thiago’s expression halted her.
‘Xander connect to the cameras?’
‘He showed me the house cams,’ she said, then realised he meant the ones in the forest. ‘No,’ she amended.
Thiago pulled her into the bedroom beside them, lifted his tablet from the bed and showed her the screen. ‘Got these before the net went.’
They were frozen frames from videos, the first few greyscale in the predawn, then slipping with dawn and the storm into browns and purple-blues and greens that were nearly black. And in each of them, Silene. Lina studied her, silvery in the passing night and wavering in the dawn, her hand in one image reaching out in front as if beseeching.
Thiago reached around her to open another screen. A map of camera locations plotting the path Silene had followed, straight as a pointing finger and vanishing at the edge of a clearing that Lina knew. Wet meadow full of sedges and marsh orchids, a lightning-struck pine in the centre, sentinel and blackened. ‘The EM-tech?’ she asked. ‘Xander thinks it was the BB.’
The very lack of expression on Thiago’s face made her heart fall.
‘They didn’t lead her there. She’s alone until the meadow.’
No, Lina thought. They had not led Silene out there, but Lina knew who had. She remembered the old woman, Baba Ruzha, talking of ghosts and monsters and the waking forest; she had known about Kai and had been warning Lina long before Lina was able to recognise it.
‘Why would they take her though?’ Light blazed through the taped and shuttered balcony doors, vanished again, rendering Thiago a scorched silhouette. Thunder beat the walls, syncopated with the wind, the branches hitting the windows. If the BB had Silene, she thought, then at least she was not out in the forest. Xander had not though of that.
‘T? Why would they take her? They know we might call the taskforce again. They’ve got way too much to lose.’
Thiago shrugged. ‘No idea. Look, I want to check the shutters are holding in the old house.’ The rain hardened to something else, hail, stones. Lina looked at Thiago’s half-lit face and realised how frightened she was of the storm. The slim brick and glass that stood between them and unimaginable hell, the overwhelming awareness of power and fragility. It was different to other fears, no secrecy or hate, cunning or fierce belief; only a pure physical terror fibrillating her bones even as she studied Thiago’s face and frowned.
He moved as if about to leave and she reached out to hold his forearm. ‘Wait, T. Why would they risk this?’
Lighting burst over them, thunder followed. Thiago was watching the windows, his face taut and still. ‘The tech, I guess.’
‘No,’ Lina said, watching him. ‘It didn’t work before, so they’d not stake so much on it working this time. Something’s–’ His gaze shifted to her and away. No, she thought. ‘T,’ his muscles tightened beneath her hand and stayed tight. ‘T, you ... you called them in anyway.’ He blinked, met her eyes. ‘Oh god,’ she said. ‘You never called the taskforce off.’
Genni appeared in the doorway and Lina stared at her blankly, looking at her because she could not look at Thiago. ‘How could you?’ she said. Genni frowned, a roll of tape hanging loosely from her hand, pressed against the doorframe as though its solidity were a comfort. Lina lifted her gaze to Thiago’s, saw him wince. ‘We promised. How could you? Does Iva know? Of course, that’s why she came. They know, so they took Silene.’ She let go of his arm and stepped back. Hail screeched against the window and Genni pressed herself back. ‘They have nothing to lose, so they took her and now...’ she stopped, the relentless noise pressing against her lungs until she thought she might choke.
‘I said they would pay,’ Thiago said. Unrepentant.
‘Don’t make this about me,’ she realised she was whispering, fear of the storm and habit. ‘Don’t you dare make this about me. I won’t have that on my conscience, Thiago.’
‘Lina,’ Genni said.
Lina could not hear her, but the shape of her name on Genni’s lips made her open her arms, made her anger morph as her sister stepped into her embrace, press herself against Lina the way she had pressed herself against the bulwark of the house.
‘Of course it’s about you,’ Thiago said fiercely. ‘All of this is about you.’ Gesturing around them; Genni, Xander; the missing.
It was the accusation Genni had made too. It still lay there, even if Genni had begun to forgive it. Lina tightened her hold on her sister and found her voice. ‘All of it, T? It’s not about you giving them illegal tech, or about you keeping your own past hidden? Not about you needing to prove something to me, to yourself?’ He lifted a hand but she spoke before he could. ‘You’d kill people for that? You’d make children orphans for that, T? Because that’s not...’ her throat closing, her hands shaking and the storm raising its impossible roar again, again. How long could they bear this? she thought.
‘You wouldn’t?’ Thiago said. ‘You wouldn’t do those things to protect Genni, your dad?’
She took a step back, pulling Genni with her. Thiago raised his voice but she still read his words more than heard them.
‘You’re glad she’s gone, Lina. You’re wishing Xander had gone with her.’ He stepped closer, so close she could feel his heat and his breathing. ‘You’re the same as me, Lina. I just know myself better.’
She spun away from him, anger briefly overpowering the storm as she led Genni away. She would stop the taskforce once the storm was gone. She would get Silene back, even though they were enemies, because that was who she was. She saved people, she did not kill them. She found other ways to fight. She would find another way. Genni watched her sidelong as they climbed the stairs and Lina wanted to crawl into darkness, close the world and her sister’s wary gaze away.
As soon as she reached the lounge, Xander pushed past her and downwards, his headphones on and neither the music nor his heavy footsteps audible at all. Dev was sitting watching the windows speculatively, turning a cup of coffee within his hands, the colours the same. Lina came to sit opposite him, pulling Genni onto her lap although she was really too big for it, wondrous all over again when Genni did not resist, curling to tuck her head against Lina’s neck. Oh child, Lina thought, oh my poor child. Realised she was not thinking only of the one in her arms. Where was he? she wondered again. Where had he gone once he had wreaked his revenge and his twisted protection?
Dev pushed a mug into her free hand, amused that it surprised her. How much of the ironic humour was a mask though, and how much was real, and would he be as comfortable with murder as Thiago was? And had she ever truly understood what that meant until now?
‘Xander?’ she mouthed at him, not wasting herself on trying to be heard. The windows flexed and groaned. Dev had lowered the shutters, she realised belatedly; the tape and the surreal daytime dark had hidden them from view.
Dev shook his head. ‘He’ll keep,’ he mouthed back. ‘BB?’
So Xander had told him what the martenitsa meant. And she had denied it before. She grimaced, shrugged, seeing again Silene’s silvery figure passing beneath dark trees. Dev nodded and lifted his coffee, steam wavering in front of his eyes. ‘I owe Chris, you know,’ he said.
Lina frowned, not sure she had heard him correctly, and then not sure what he meant by it. Apology? So that was his decision then. ‘You owe us too,’ she said futilely.
Lightning an
d thunder shaking the house, turning his face briefly into blackened bones. He looked at the windows, frowned, said loud enough to hear. ‘The other house will be safer if the windows give.’
Lina remembered her promise to Iva, and realised that she agreed. Not because of the domovek, but because the old house had always felt more immutable than this one, more like home. The air in the room sucked away, her ears popping and Genni giving a small, sharp cry, then a bang and reverberation and the room again a false, cocooned stillness.
‘That’s Thiago,’ she said. ‘Gone to check if you’re right.’ She set Genni beside her to go to the balcony doors, pressing her hands to the shuddering glass and trying to piece the world together through the shutter’s gaps. But there was only the deep purple storm-light made black by movement and the rain, reflections of lamplight. She should have gone with him, however angry, however desperately she wanted him to be wrong.
Genni came to stand next to her, pressing her own palms on the windows. Looking from the partitioned storm to Lina. ‘Are we safe?’ she said, muted by the wind.
Lina was not sure. It was impossible to rationalise engineering and probabilities as the storm pushed against the house like some monstrous, malevolent sentience. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We might move to the old house to be sure. But yes.’ She removed a hand from the cold glass and brushed her knuckles over Genni’s cheek. ‘It will pass,’ she said. And then ... and then...
And then lightning. White chequerboarded blindingly, a shutter-image of the courtyard a whirlwind of debris, the forest and oceanic clouds. A face. Genni leaping backward and darkness again, her eyes burned blind, the rain driving through the shutters to paint the window in shadowy tears. She heard her own breathing, the window trembling, straining to see beyond the shutters to the balcony. Then movement and the lamplight behind her caught something pale against the metal screen, and Lina stared at it for a long minute before she realised what it was. A small, white hand flattened against the shutter.
Then lightning, and she was looking right at him as the world blazed, his eyes gold and black in his deathly pale face.
‘Kai,’ she whispered. Darkness and afterimages, the lamplight picking him out in fragments, fleeting. ‘Kai.’
He had been smiling.
Something hit the windows on the next wall and Lina turned reflexively. Dev was already up, running a palm over the glass and she knew what he had found before he looked at her. ‘Time to go,’ he mouthed, no amusement, but no fear either, and her own fear faded a little, seeing that. The wonder and horror and sorrow persisting like a low beat beneath her heart.
She reached for Genni’s hand. ‘Grab those two torches there, love. We’re going to head over the courtyard.’ And when she straightened again, Thiago was standing at the top of the stairs.
He crossed quickly to where his coat lay on a chair. Dev and Lina and Genni did the same, Lina making Genni struggle into three jumpers, a padded jacket and one of Lina’s thick coats. It was not about the rain, after all; it was about the branches, bits of tile, stones.
Something was wrong, she thought. Kai standing on the balcony smiling, her fight with Thiago, the ending of the world. Something else. The prospect of going outside made her legs leaden and shaking, but she fitted a bike helmet over Genni’s thick hair and somehow made Genni laugh as she did so. Thiago checked all the bedrooms on their way down, closing each one.
At the front door, Thiago paused, his hand where the bar had been before he removed it to go out. Dev was watching him, and Lina watched them both and gasped. ‘Xander,’ she said. Loud enough that everyone looked at her. Thiago frowned, Dev shifted his intent gaze from the door to Lina and Lina stared at Thiago’s hand where it held the empty bracket, his coat that he had only just put on. His dry skin. Dev leaned closer to be heard. ‘Let’s cross over first.’
They did, Thiago at the last minute swooping Genni up into his arms, Dev and Lina together having to wrestle the door closed, the wind trying to force it from their fingers, from its hinges. Then pressed against the walls, tracking blindly around the new house, the barn shadowy and creaking, lightning and between slitted eyes Lina saw it strike in the meadow, a geometric blaze behind her eyelids as rain made her vision swim. The wind shoved her but something solid held her up. Rain or leaves or hail struck her face and she might be bleeding but could not tell. Then the old house door came from nowhere, Thiago huddling Genni against it, his back to the courtyard and when he opened it the storm thrust them inside.
They shed clothes like skins, water and debris pooling at their feet, Thiago handed out towels and Lina wiped the rain from Genni’s face, checking her skin, her limbs until Genni pulled away impatiently. Lina’s ankle was singing and she remembered half-falling, Dev catching her, some of the wetness against her heel was warm so she left her shoes on rather than see what she had done.
‘Xander’s gone,’ she said finally.
Thiago was studying the shuttered windows and frowning, but at least they were smaller here. The storm pierced through gaps and air pockets in the thick walls, but they were at least marginally in the lee of the big house down here, the noise not quieter but different, more tonal. Iva’s bowl of milk caught the lamplight like the sallow face of the moon. Lina stared at Dev.
‘You let him go.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Dev dropped his towel onto her workbench and folded his arms. ‘Are there internal shutters for this place?’ he said.
Lina opened her mouth but the door vibrated beneath a surge of wind so she said only, ‘They’re in the office.’ It made a crazed, desperate sense that Xander had hurled himself out into the storm after his mother. Perhaps he had seen the images tracking her through the forest, or perhaps Dev had said something. Or Lina’s words had meant something.
She had not thought him brave enough, physically, to do this. But bravery did not matter; she knew that. It was only how much you stood to lose and how certain you were that you could not bear to do so. Throwing yourself into the path of another’s death was not so much about trading your own life for someone else’s as about not wanting to live without them.
She understood.
Dev stepped around her to lift a stack of shutters and she looked up at him. ‘Did you know?’ she said.
There was no lamp in here yet, so they were both in shadow, the storm pressing close, a chink in the mortar around the window singing piercingly. Lina remembered Kai singing to her as she drowned and wished she knew where he was, and that he did not frighten her so much. Both his existence and his potential. He had seen Silene with tablets, but he had not mentioned the knife.
‘No,’ Dev said eventually. ‘I told him it was madness.’
‘But you didn’t stop him.’
Thiago entered the room, making the small space crowded. He was out there now, she thought. Searching for his mother.
‘Tie him up? No.’ Dev studied the shutters in his hands. ‘Upstairs?’ he said, reading the label. He would not act, she realised, because he wanted to watch. Watch Xander and study his choices. Test the son the way he had not perhaps tested the father. He had been right; she did not know anything about him.
‘We’re going to get him,’ Lina said. Thiago raised his head.
‘No, Lina.’
Dev glanced at Thiago and smiled. ‘Finally we agree,’ he said as lightning burned shadows in the room, thunder ricocheted off the walls. Then, to Lina, hefting the shutters again, ‘You struck a nerve. This is him proving himself. Let him, he’s not a child. Plus he’s carrying a beacon.’ He smiled very gently and then moved towards the stairs before she could reply.
Thiago lifted a board up to the first window, clipping it carefully into place. Outside’s shutters, the old glass, and now these inside. A triple layer protecting them, and a boy who was still a child whatever Dev said, out there. You are always a child when you lose your mother, she thought
. And if her own words had driven him to this then...
She moved without really choosing to do so, Genni watching her from where she had curled up on the bottom step of the staircase. Thiago started on the next shutter, Lina opened a map and scanned for local signals, watched the progress icon loop and loop and loop.
‘Where is he?’ Genni said, and Lina jumped. The wind rendering her senseless unnerved her. ‘Where are they both?’
Lina watched the circling icon and shook her head. ‘I’m trying to find out. Idiot boy. God, what was he thinking?’
‘Are you going after him?’
Lina threw a quick glance over her shoulder, but Thiago would never hear them and his back was turned. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have to.’
Genni nodded slowly, then pressed her forehead against Lina’s arm, closing her eyes. The icon stopped spinning and a pulsing dot appeared on her map. He had seen the camera images then because he was following them, but slowly, barely a quarter of the way along. Lina reloaded the page agonisingly slowly and the dot did not move.
‘I have to,’ she repeated. ‘He might be hurt.’ She rose, pulled a mini tablet from a drawer and set that to loading the same data, ignoring a sharp pain flaring in her ankle. She gathered torches, a beacon, a knife. Thiago had gone into his office and Dev was still upstairs, so she moved fast, pulling on her sodden waterproofs, her attention on those and on Genni’s face fading to grey with fear. She paused, laid her palms on Genni’s cheeks and bent to kiss her forehead. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she whispered with her lips against her sister’s skin. ‘I know the forests, I’ll be fine. And Thiago and Dev are here to protect you, so you’ll be fine too. I promise.’
The wind threw itself against the house, forcing itself into the room, stirring Lina’s hair. Genni shuddered.
This Is Our Undoing Page 29
