by Ann Halam
Sultan curled his lip and made a low, menacing noise. I didn’t dare go any farther. A weapon, I thought. I need a weapon. I glanced around, without taking my eyes off the dog. The shed was big and shadowy, lit by a few white tubes strung across the faraway ceiling. There were packing cases stacked against the walls. I could read what it said on some of them. Dog Skins, Grade 1; Dog Skins, Grade 2 . . . In front of the cases on the left-hand wall—almost within my reach— stood a metal rack with furs stretched on it: not silky black fur, like the kind the calendar lady wore, but rough and murky brown, like the guards’ coats. They still had the shape of the animal that had borne them: four legs and a tail. Looking from the dog in front of me to those headless skins, I could easily see the connection. On the floor under the rack I could see a gleaming metal bar.
Sultan watched me, with an unwavering cold gaze. He’s fur stock, I told myself. He’s basically clothes, growing. He isn’t trained to kill. . . . This didn’t make much difference to my courage. To be killed by something that wasn’t even animal seemed a hideous kind of death, like being killed by a ghost. Or a giant roach.
What could I do? I talked to the Lindquists, and my voice soothed them. Was that magic? Had it passed from Mama to me? Would it work on this brute? I was desperate enough to try. “Sultan? You don’t owe these people any loyalty.” I made my voice gentle, crooning, kindly. “Look, those are dog skins. They send the fancy furs to the city, but they wear dog skins themselves. You know they do, you see them in their dog skins every day. I bet you think they only take the weaklings, but it’s going to happen to you. They’ll chop your head and paws off, your flesh will be fed to your brothers and sisters.” I didn’t think it mattered what I said, it was my voice that counted, but trying to scare him made me feel better. “You think the humans here care about you? They keep you locked up, they keep you in chains, all they see is a big factory animal, just a fur-bearer.”
The dog pricked its ears. I thought it was listening, it was fascinated by the crooning sound. I slid my foot sideways. I just needed to reach that rail of skins, and shove it hard. Once Sultan was down, entangled in the furs, I would grab that bar and club him over the head. “They’ll come for you one morning. They’ll probably give you a special meal, to fool you. Then they’ll pull your teeth, stretch you out on the rack, and skin you while you’re still alive, and the other dogs will gather round. The ones that hated you because you were Mr. Ismail’s favorite, they’ll be snapping for bits of your flesh.” Sultan seemed to be taking this horrific future in: I hoped it was making him sweat, because I had cold dews and sick shivers running down my spine. I slid my other foot, I leapt sideways. I grabbed: I shoved with all my strength.
Sultan was on the floor, buried in a mess of partly cured dog hides. I flung myself on the metal bar . . . but it wasn’t a loose bar! It was bolted into concrete blocks. It was one of the floor runners that the racks were meant to slide along.
If I could reach the packing cases before he was free, at least I could climb out of reach. But when I jumped up, my right leg, my bad leg, buckled. I barely managed to keep on my feet, holding a half-cured dog hide as a shield as I backed away.
“I’m telling you the truth!” I gasped. “They’re going to skin you!”
The dog no longer seemed impressed. It came on, its front legs braced and the thick ruff standing up behind its head. Trained or not, it looked murderous. But something was happening behind Sultan, something very bizarre. There was a fresh, lengthening hummock in the earth floor. It was moving fast. It had come in under the door, it was zooming along like a mobile, miniature earthquake.
The hummock exploded. Sultan yelped, and leapt into the air. There was something dangling from one of his back paws. It was Nosey, twice as big as she had been in Mr. Ismail’s office. Sultan snapped dementedly at his own foot. Nosey let go, but instantly fastened her teeth again, in the tendon of the dog’s heel. She had no fear! Sultan howled and danced in circles. I scrambled up the packing cases, and crawled along the top of them to the doorway. There was a gap between the wooden door and the frame, big enough for me to slip my hand through. I groped, and fumbled, and found the end of the bolt. I started to tug on it, but then I realized.
“Nosey!” I yelled.
She knew my voice. She came straight to me, clambering up the cases. Her naked paws had changed. They were broad and flat, like pink shovels with heavy, curving claws; her pelt was dark gray velvet. Sultan jumped and jumped, furious because he couldn’t reach us. “Nosey,” I gasped, “I think I can open the door, but then I’ll have to get down, and he’s going to come right after me, barking his head off. I have to find the kits. Can you help?”
I knew my mama’s magic would have an answer.
Nosey sniffed at me, her bleary eyes lost in the velvet fur. There was a drop of blood on her twitching nose: but I’m sure it was Sultan’s. She was now about the size of a man’s hand, but it was still a mystery where she’d put all those roaches. She must have eaten twenty times her own weight. But then the mystery was solved, right in front of my eyes. . . . The Lindquist sat back and grew. She grew: her fur stuck out and thickened into pointed barbs. I saw her eyes grow brighter, and cheekier. She almost seemed to be laughing silently. Then she rolled herself up, dropped from the packing cases, and landed on the floor, a solid mass of blackthorn spines, all pointing outward.
Sultan was beside himself, yelping and dancing around this strange object. He tried to bite it and leapt backward, pawing at his mouth. I tugged the bolt, and shoved the door. It came open, I dropped and ran for it.
I had to hope that Nosey could look out for herself.
It was morning now, a raw, gray, grizzly dawn, the kind of before-winter weather I hated. The snow was turning into slush. There were no fur-coated guards in sight. The dogs in the pen yelled and barked at me, but they’d been making a racket anyway: nobody came running. Mr. Ismail’s office door was open. The room was empty, my knapsack and my coat were gone.
Between the dog pen and the sheds where Mr. Ismail’s office stood, a narrow alley led to another yard. I guessed that must be the way to the fur farm itself. He thinks they’re fur-bearers, I thought: he’ll have taken them to the fur farm.
The other yard was bigger, surrounded by gray, blank buildings with rows of small windows high up. The foul smell was even stronger. I saw a pair of fur-coated guards with rifles on their backs walking briskly out from between two buildings, heads down, scanning the concrete in front of them. I dodged inside a pair of tall double doors that were standing ajar, found another door unlocked inside the lobby, and I was inside the fur-processing factory. There were some people in dark, close overalls with grubby white caps, tending the machines. But they were at the other end of the huge space: they didn’t notice me.
The windows were too high to give much light. White tubes on the walls gave out a faint heat. The pens, or cages, were in three rows, with aisles between them, and moving trays under them, that carried the slurry away. In the first row the pens were like tanks. Tiny things squirmed, over the white tubes along the insides. I had never seen live factory animals before, and I saw why Mr. Ismail had thought I was carrying fur-bearers. The tiny things were covered in thick, black fur. I stared at them, and had strange thoughts about my mama’s magic. But these kits had no heads or feet that I could see, and barely any bellies. They weren’t animals. They were sheets of moving, fur-covered skin: clothes, growing, with no purpose or feelings of their own. Oh, if my kits had been put in one of these tanks! If they had already been somehow changed into things like this! I looked in all the tanks, sick with dread, and saw no bright brown. Only black, and white; rust-red and blue-gray.
In the other two rows the fur-bearers started getting bigger. Still no sign of my Lindquists. I hurried on through. In a second huge room the air was icy cold, and here some of the furs were huge: almost ready to be killed. You could see how awful it would be, if one of these creatures were to breed, somehow, with a wild animal
like my Nivvy. Think of a sheet of mobile fur, big as a bedspread, armed with fierce teeth, brave and cunning and always hungry. Imagine an army of them, roaming the wilderness.
Beyond the cold room I was in the processing sector. Here there were long sinks, where it seemed as if the furs were scraped and washed in different treatments. But the machines were silent, and there were no workers about. Everything was cold, and dirty. Maybe the farm would have been stinking whatever anyone did, but nobody was even trying to keep things clean. Stacks of raw furs festered, waiting to be treated. Piles of stinking waste had just been shoved into the corners.
I didn’t see Mr. Ismail anywhere, but in a room labeled Specialist Hand Washing, on a shelf under a sink, as if they’d been hurriedly hidden, I found my knapsack, and Storm’s jacket. The knapsack was fastened up. The nutshell was inside, and so was the nail box, with the lab case. I’d hidden the map and the compass in the lining of Storm’s jacket before I jumped on the train: they were still there too. Finally I opened the nutshell, and my kits were there, scared but alive.
I felt like crying, I felt like praying. I’d hardly set out on the journey and already I’d broken nearly all Mama’s rules. But the magic had saved me.
Then I heard voices. There were people coming down the corridor.
I backed into the shadows, and hid myself as best I could, ducking down behind a stack of unwashed furs. They smelled worse than anything. The door opened and I saw the silhouette of two figures, looking in.
I heard Mr. Ismail’s voice. “Nothing to look at in there,’” he said. “See? Just a disused washing room.”
The other man—it must be the visitor who had called Mr. Ismail away when he was dealing with me—muttered a question. Mr. Ismail muttered back. I wondered if he was trying to explain why his workers and guards were all running around searching the factory floors, as if they’d lost something small and mobile.
The door closed and the footsteps retreated. I stayed where I was, crouched in the stinking gloom, hugging my treasure. I must be going crazy with fear, because I thought I had recognized that second voice! But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.
I waited to see if anything else would happen. But nothing did. Finally I put on Storm’s coat, shrugged the knapsack onto my shoulders, and started trying to find my way out. Farther into the neglected back rooms of the fur farm, I spotted a broken window, mended badly with cardboard and tape. I ripped out the cardboard, put Storm’s jacket over the shards of glass, and climbed out, onto open ground. There was a double fence not far away, both sides capped in rolls of barbed wire. But it looked as neglected as the rest of this place, and there weren’t any guards in sight. I crossed a bare field of slush, found a place where the base of the inner fence had come loose, and wriggled under it. The outer fence was more solid. I headed left, away from the railway line, down the corridor between two walls of wire. I set off at an awkward jog trot, my best pace: looking for a spot where I could climb. But the guard dogs were out, loose between the two fences: and something told me, even when I saw them in the distance, that I wasn’t going to deal with them the way Nosey and I had dealt with Sultan. These dogs were different, silent and efficient. I could see ahead of me a fence post that had come away, leaning at a crazy angle. I remembered when I had been able to run like the wind. . . .
I reached it. I fell against it with a vicious stitch in my side. The biggest of the dogs had caught up. It didn’t even growl. It lowered its massive head. I saw the saliva dripping from its jaws, as it gathered itself to spring—
—and something came barreling along, between the dogs’ feet. A creature stranger than any factory animal, a scurrying ball of barbs. Nosey had found me. The pack jumped and yelped. The lead dog forgot me, for a crucial half minute, as this extraordinary thing popped up in front of him. Maybe he’d been trained to feed on human flesh, but he still backed off, bewildered, from the sting of Nosey’s spines. I scrambled up the fence post. My Lindquist uncurled herself, and trotted cheerfully after me. I fell down in the slush on the other side, and lay there, trembling.
An hour or so later I had found a place to hide. It was an old packing case, hidden in a stand of bare willows, on the waste ground at the end of the railway platform: where heaps of fur farm junk, cardboard, torn skins, and other rubbish trailed off into the empty plain. I dragged some filthy sacking inside, and some rotten furs. I knew I couldn’t go any farther. I was dead tired, and my weak knee had suffered badly, in all the running and climbing. It wouldn’t carry me any farther. At least Nosey and I would be warm while we waited for the dogs to sniff us out.
But I couldn’t rest, not yet. At dusk I left my precious knapsack in the packing case with Nosey, slipped down to the railway spur, dropped onto the ballast, and crept along beside the track, back to the platform yard. There was something I had to know. When I’d been hiding in the hand-washing room, I had heard a voice and seen a silhouette I thought I’d recognized. It was crazy, but I had to make sure I was wrong.
A half-solid sleet was streaming down from the leaden sky. The dogs in the pen were quiet. Two armed guards in the dog-fur coats lurked in a shed doorway: I saw the tiny burning coals of smoking cigarettes in their cupped hands. There was no one else about. I crept into the narrow alley behind Mr. Ismail’s office. Light fell, dirty and yellow, from the window. I could just manage to see inside.
Mr. Ismail was sitting at the littered desk. He wasn’t alone, he was talking to someone. They had a bottle between them, and shot glasses. The farm manager’s words ran into each other. He was feeling sorry for himself, and probably he was drunk. But I was interested in the other man.
“I saw them with my own eyes, bright browns. You don’t know the fur business, or you’d know, that’s worth . . . And this girl in strange uniform. What’s it mean, eh? Where was she taking them? An’ what was that other thing?”
The other man filled Mr. Ismail’s glass again, and murmured.
“You’re right,” agreed Mr. Ismail, dolefully. “If I make a report of strange going son, it all comes back on me. I’m to blame. Muties, they’ll say. No, no, I’m keeping quiet, much obliged to you for your advice.”
The second man raised his glass, and tipped back his round, bristle-cut gray head. I saw his face. The groove between his eyes, the arched brows, that long nose, the expression of his mouth. I could not be mistaken.
It was Yagin.
I dropped to the ground, and crouched there, sleet in my face, hugging my knees, stunned. What could it mean? What was Yagin doing here?
Was he looking for me?
* 7 *
Lagomorpha
I Stayed in my packing case because I had no choice. When I crawled back in there after I’d seen Yagin, soaked and frozen and black with soot from the railway line, I really thought I would be dead before morning. I’d be chewed up by the dogs, the Lindquist kits would be in a tank in the fur-bearers shed, and Nosey might escape but she would be left all alone. . . . But nothing happened.
After two days, I had to believe that Yagin—if I had really seen him, if I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing—must have convinced Mr. Ismail to forget the mystery fur-bearers, and pretend he’d never seen the runaway girl in strange uniform. But why would Yagin do that? If he was chasing me, didn’t that mean he wanted to catch me? If he had tracked me down to the fur farm, didn’t that mean he knew about Mama’s treasure, and he wanted to take it from me, the same as the bandits who had burned our hut down? He knew I had the Lindquists, Mr. Ismail had told him. But how much did he know? Did he know more than I did? I lay in my stinking nest, listening for the dogs, putting together what I knew, and trying to make sense of it all.
The way they changed and grew was so strange I had to call it magic. But I thought I understood what the Lindquists were, now. I had remembered the names of the orders. I remembered how my mama had told me that Nivvy was a real wild animal. So . . . there were no wild animals left (or hardly any), but there were these kits, that could gr
ow into wild animals, the way fur-bearer kits grew into huge sheets of fur. But if that was what the Lindquists were, why were they a secret? Why shouldn’t I take them to the Fitness Police—who were supposed to kill muties, but look after the true wild creatures? I could say, You think my mama was a criminal, you think she did something terrible, but she’s not. Look! Here’s the marvel that she’s been keeping safely, after she was dumped in the wilderness; all these years.
I thought about it, and I thought about it. But I knew there was something wrong. It couldn’t be that simple. Mama had said, “When you have no one to turn to, look deep into your own heart.” So I looked, and I found that though I longed to trust someone, I did not trust Yagin. No matter what he’d done for me I didn’t trust him. I would keep faith with my mama. I would do what she had planned to do. Somehow, all by myself, I would get the kits across the frozen sea, to the city where the sun always shines, and until then I would tell nobody, nobody.
Nosey foraged for herself; there were plenty of bugs. The kits did not need anything. Luckily it wasn’t very cold, even at night, because I didn’t dare to light a candle. I ate the remains of the food Katerina had given me, and tried to rest. The worst thing was having hardly any water.
On the third day I began to get over my fear and exhaustion.
I used the railway track as a kind of open-air secret passage, to get deep inside the fur farm without meeting any dogs or fences. I found my way into food and housekeeping stores: I found an unlocked shed of winter equipment and stole a small sledge, and a bivvy tent. . . . The thieving was in ways harder than at New Dawn, because I wasn’t an insider; but in ways much easier. The fur farm guards and workers were pushovers compared to the New Dawn wardens. They didn’t lock things up, even though there were notices everywhere saying they were supposed to. They didn’t keep records. They didn’t know what they had, so they weren’t going to know the rations I took were missing. The plunder made me miss my school friends, even Rose: and it made me remember how Rain had died, which was miserable. But thinking of what to steal and how to steal it occupied my mind, leaving less room for depressing thoughts.
