by Paula Weston
She’s burning her.
Khan leans in, searches for signs of life. Angie’s chest is blackened and blistered, Jules’ fingerprints seared into her flesh.
‘You need to give more,’ Khan says. ‘Burns will heal.’
Oh God.
Jules has to find a way to do it again. The sirens are closer, but not close enough.
She shuts her eyes and pushes back the night, the horror of that bone jutting out of Angie’s leg and Waylon’s laboured breathing. Pushes back the reality of radwaste casks scattered around her. Ignores Khan’s urgency. She knows Angie’s energy and all of its moods. It’s been wrapped around her all her life, threaded through bone and sinew, pushing and pulling. Driving her. Jules flattens her palms against Angie’s chest and searches for a sense of it, that fire. She takes a slow, calming breath. Feels Ryan standing behind her.
There. An ember.
Jules angles her hands in that direction and releases the current. Angie’s shoulders leave the ground and the ember sparks a wave that rips through her mother. Jules feels the nerve endings catch fire—and Angie’s heart stutter back to life.
The Major catches Angie’s head before it hits the dirt. Khan leans in. ‘We’ve got a pulse.’
‘Sweet Jesus,’ Ryan says softly.
The Major puts his good ear to Angie’s lips, listens, and then he pinches her nose and resumes mouth-to-mouth.
Jules looks to Ryan, confused.
‘Your mum can’t breathe on her own yet,’ he says and draws her closer so she can rest against him.
Angie’s chest inflates with the Major’s breath, again and again. Her palms are upturned to the sky in supplication. Utterly helpless. The current hums, ready to go again, but there’s nothing Jules can do now but watch.
‘Ambos are here,’ French says at last.
Heavy-soled boots pound the dirt and a paramedic orders them to move back. They stabilise Angie with a respirator bag and splint her leg, firing questions at the Major. Khan sits with Jules on the ground. They watch as paramedics ease Angie onto a stretcher, the respirator bag replacing the Major. Waylon is still sucking on the green whistle when the second crew carries him off.
Jules follows the stretchers, letting Ryan guide her steps. Twice they have to pass Angie over the busted fence to get around the overturned freight wagons. A man with silver hair and a craggy face sits inside the first ambulance, dazed and bleeding from his forehead. He sees Angie and Waylon and squeezes his eyes shut. More vehicles are coming up the track. They’ll all be here soon: cops, the media, politicians.
The paramedics transfer Angie to a gurney and the Major props open the ambulance door while she’s loaded onboard. Khan stands with him, her face streaky from tears and dirt.
‘Bloody Paxtons,’ she says. It’s the first time Jules has ever heard her swear.
It seems appropriate to Jules to quote her mother in the moment: ‘Money and influence make people think they’re untouchable.’
The Major surveys the scene: Waylon waiting to be loaded into the ambulance, the radwaste casks scattered across the track, fire trucks racing for the scrub fire under the power lines.
‘It’s time they find out they’re not.’
67
‘Don’t scrub.’
‘I’m not.’ Ryan eases up with the sponge.
‘And don’t use conditioner on your hair. Soap only.’
Ryan sticks his head under the shower to rinse off. He heard the first time. The army medic is pacing in front of temporary decontamination showers in the Port Augusta Hospital car park, repeating instructions as if the Q18 crew is a bunch of six-year-olds. Clean fatigues are folded on a plastic chair inside the curtain and he has to minimise movement to avoid getting them wet. His own clothes have gone with everyone else’s for burning. Nobody’s admitting there was a radiation leak from the train, but the fact their clothes are in an incinerator and the Q18 weapons are on the way to disposal is not a good sign.
Cold air creeps under the curtain and grabs his ankles. He turns off the water and dries himself with a towel the size of a serviette. His skin is damp and he has to wrestle to get into the shirt.
Ryan hasn’t seen Jules since she left the crash site. Khan brought her into town and he assumes they’re both being decontaminated inside the hospital. It’s not that he wants her to be roughing it out here; he didn’t expect to be apart from her again so soon. The look in her eyes when she was driven away…
Ryan rubs his eyes with grazed fingers and thinks long and hard about staying in the cubicle. Keeping the world at arm’s length a while longer. He can hear it rushing by beyond the curtain: choppers, shouted commands, static-filled radios and steel-cap boots on concrete. The hospital grounds became a military facility as soon as troops arrived in Chinooks from the newly commissioned Whyalla base. The car park is crowded with staging lights to form a makeshift command centre complete with media scrum, and a triage tent for the steadily increasing number of locals worried about radiation exposure. It’s coordinated chaos out there.
‘You waiting for a blow wave, Walsh?’
He sighs and pulls back the curtain. One look at Frenchie and he knows her wind-up is barely half-arsed. She’s as wrung out and exhausted as he is. It’s been a shit of a day for all of them and he wishes he hadn’t been the one to give her that swollen jaw. And the day’s not over. As soon as Q18 is prepped, they’re off to help with roadblocks until the quarantine zone is lifted.
Frenchie’s buzz cut is already dry. ‘I don’t know, Walsh, you boys and your high-maintenance hairdos. You really should pull a comb through that mess—’
She cuts herself off because the Major is weaving his way towards them through patrol cars and flashing lights. Like them, he’s dressed in fatigues. He’s striding, not stomping, which could be a good sign.
‘Sir?’ Ryan says, moving to meet him.
‘She’s breathing on her own. They’re patching her up now.’
It’s like stepping into sunshine. The Major can’t hide his relief either.
‘And Waylo?’
‘Collarbone’s broken in two places and he’s got a couple of bruised ribs but everything else is intact. Ankle’s only sprained.’
‘Good.’ The tag on Ryan’s new shirt itches and he tries to shrug away from it. ‘Did you see Julianne?’ He’s got no standing to ask but he’s asking anyway.
‘She’s with Khan. She’s fine.’
He doubts that.
‘French,’ the Major says. ‘You and I are taking a trip to the airport. Go sign out a vehicle.’
She disappears towards the command centre. Ryan glances at the troop carriers.
‘Have I got time to check on Waylo?’
‘No.’
‘Sir—’
‘Not if you want to see your family.’
‘They’re here?’
‘Your old man’s threatening to punch a lieutenant if you don’t make an appearance.’ The Major nods in the direction of a marquee at the far edge of the car park. ‘You’ve got five minutes.’
Two steps from the Major and Ryan breaks into a jog.
The marquee is crowded with civilians watching a news update on a wall-sized flex screen. Ryan’s mum and dad hang towards the back. His dad’s arm is across his mum’s shoulder, hers around his waist. The sight of them leaning into each other brings a lump to his throat. Tommy chugs from bottled water as he scans the room and his face relaxes when he sees Ryan.
Ryan’s mum reaches him first.
‘Thank God.’ She squeezes Ryan like she used to when he was a kid, pinning his arms to his sides to stop him squirming away. He rests his cheek against her hair and breathes in cheap motel shampoo.
She lets go sooner than he expects and his old man is waiting. Jamie Walsh stands in front of his son, rough hands hanging at his sides as if he doesn’t know what to do with them. The spikiness between them is distant and blunted. His dad’s mouth quirks down and he grabs Ryan by the back of the neck and d
rags him into a hug. It’s awkward and unpractised but the contact loosens something deep in Ryan’s chest. He grabs fistfuls of his old man’s shirt and hangs on, unashamed. There’s no lingering eye contact when they pull apart, and it’s okay because Tommy swoops in for a hug and back thump.
‘You saw it happen?’ Tommy asks when they disentangle.
Ryan doesn’t know what they’ve heard but he nods. He touches his grazed elbow, his black eye. He feels every sore spot from the brawl at the oval and his run-in with the merc in the packing house.
Tommy’s tapping the half-empty water bottle against his leg. ‘Is Jules all right?’
Ryan pictures Angie crumpled in the dirt; Jules’ tear-streaked face as she shocked her mother back to life. ‘She will be if Angie pulls through.’
The screen in the marquee is showing an aerial shot of the train spotlit by a news chopper, followed by footage of protesters queuing up for potassium iodide tablets not far from where Ryan’s standing. The live coverage shifts to an ambulance turning into Hospital Road. Ryan can hear the siren now, getting closer.
‘Someone got shot trying to scale the nuclear plant fence during the blackout,’ Tommy says. ‘Dickhead.’
One of Xavier’s goons, no doubt. That mess continues to unravel.
His mum points at the words scrolling across the bottom of the news screen. ‘What’s ARPANSA?’
Ryan didn’t know himself until twenty minutes ago but he says it like he’s an expert: ‘Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency. They’re flying in to figure out if there’s any risk of exposure from the train.’
Tommy scoffs. ‘Pax Fed and Happy Growers are fucked if there is.’
‘Don’t use that language,’ Ryan’s mum says, out of habit. Nobody states the obvious: their land might be too, if the breeze is blowing the wrong way.
The Major appears in the marquee entry.
‘I gotta go. I’ll see you when I can.’
His mum gives him another hug and then he joins the Major outside before the urge to stay with his family overwhelms him. The Major nods in the direction of the Q18 soldiers gathering around the troop carrier.
‘Go,’ the Major says. ‘See if you can follow orders this time.’
‘What about you, sir? You coming?’ The world has gone sideways and he wants his hard-arsed commanding officer close by, running the show.
The Major surprises him with a grin—a shared moment that Ryan doesn’t fully understand.
‘I have someone to see first.’
68
‘I think she’s awake.’
Angie knows the croak in that voice. She opens sticky eyelids and her vision sharpens enough to see that she’s in a hospital. Everything hurts. A pale face hovers into her line of sight and Angie’s breath escapes in a choked rush.
Oh thank God.
Jules’ hair is caught up in a messy ponytail and her eyes are puffy—but she’s safe. ‘I was trying to get to you,’ Angie rasps. Her throat’s raw but she needs Jules to know.
Jules stifles a sob and Angie’s breath deserts her.
‘Waylon? Is he—’ She breaks into a hacking cough: a thousand tiny knives in a stabbing frenzy.
‘He’s okay, but you…Mum, you were dead.’
Those last moments with Xavier are fragmented and full of shadows, a blur of noise and pain. Angie remembers the gunshot shattering the back window, Waylon dragging her over shards of glass…the two of them jumping from the back of the ute and that awful moment, airborne, before the night filled with shrieking metal.
‘Your heart stopped.’ Khan steps into Angie’s field of vision. The kohl around her eyes is smudged, her shirt’s untucked and her sleeves pushed up past her elbows. Angie’s never seen her dishevelled. ‘Private Waylon landed on you and the impact caused a cardiac arrest. Commotio cordis, the doctor called it. You were gone there for a while.’ Khan nods at Jules. ‘She brought you back.’
‘I burned you,’ Jules whispers. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Angie lifts her free hand—there’s a monitor clipped to her finger and a drip in her arm—and finds bandaging on her chest with monitor leads sprouting out. Then she locates the pulse in her throat and feels the beat, slow and steady.
‘You started my heart.’
Jules nods. ‘I hurt you—’ She falters as Angie fumbles for her hand.
‘Thank you.’ She squeezes her daughter’s fingers. ‘Are you okay?’
Jules bites her lip. Nods, not quite certain.
‘Where’s Voss? I’m going to have his balls for taking you to that woman.’
‘You might want to thank him first,’ Khan says. ‘He kept you breathing until the paramedics arrived.’
Angie’s not sure what to do with that.
Jules wipes her nose with a tissue balled in her free hand and sighs. There’s something different about her daughter, but Angie can’t quite name it. Khan touches Angie’s good leg through the blanket.
‘I need to get showered but I’ll be back.’ She heads for the door. ‘I’ll send in your next visitor.’
The door doesn’t even click shut before it swings in again and Vee appears. Hesitates as she processes the sight of Angie so banged up. ‘Oh God, Ange.’
‘Settle down—’
‘You died.’
Angie pulls a face—not because Vee’s wrong, but because it’s easier than dealing with the truth. She tries to muster her anger at Vee but she can’t remember what it was about. Must be the drugs.
Vee drops her handbag on the chair and takes Angie’s free hand, careful not to dislodge the monitor on her finger. She reaches across the bed to touch Jules on the shoulder.
‘Vee, what are you doing here?’
‘I was coming to get you out of that protester camp, and now by sheer timing I’m the minister’s rep on the ground. I’ll need to get back out there in a few minutes for the ARPANSA briefing.’
‘How bad is it?’
‘We don’t know yet. There’s no visible damage to the radwaste casks. We could get lucky.’
Angie checks Jules over, spots the band-aid inside her elbow. ‘Your geneticist found Jules, then.’ It’s not a question.
Vee levels her gaze. ‘She’s in a decontamination tent as we speak. Without her data.’
‘Who has it?’
‘Nobody,’ Jules says. ‘I short-circuited the lab equipment and set fire to the samples.’
‘On purpose?’ Angie asks.
‘Yes.’
Vee checks her phone. ‘I’m trying to find out if Peta and Bradford got out before the roadblocks went up.’
‘Both of them were here?’
Vee catches Jules’ eye. ‘You haven’t told your mother?’ She raises her eyebrows.
Jules blows out her breath, hesitant. ‘I offloaded the current into Bradford.’
It’s in the way Jules says it—without shame or self-loathing or regret—that Angie understands what’s different about her daughter. Jules has finally come into a sense of her own power. And how to use it.
‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.’
‘Yes, I thought you’d be proud,’ Vee says, and Angie is, but not for the reasons Vee thinks. Angie lets Jules see that she understands.
Jules smiles and wipes her cheek on her shoulder, not willing to let go of Angie’s hand. ‘Khan says you heard about the trials in Afghanistan?’
‘Yeah.’ And there it is: the anger Angie’s been missing.
‘Peta says I’m all that’s left.’
Vee presses out a crease in Angie’s hospital blanket. ‘That may be true from Pax Fed’s perspective, but there’s a paper trail in my department. Granted, it’s under several layers of classification and it’s unlikely those files have the level of detail Peta Paxton could provide, but there is something in the system.’
‘It’s never going to be over, is it?’
‘Maybe not, but you have options now.’
‘Like what?’ Jules asks and Angie smiles to h
erself. Her daughter’s taking charge. At last.
‘Access to answers, for a start. Professor Mian knows about you, so why not have her run those tests in an environment we control?’
‘What if she says no?’
‘Then the problem goes away. She’s not going to risk her integrity and reputation talking about your DNA if she can’t support it with evidence. And if she runs the tests again it will be under an iron-clad confidentiality agreement with the department.’
Jules glances at Angie. ‘That’s one option. What are the others?’
Vee offers a calculating smile. ‘You go public. If the Afghanistan trials come to light, there’ll be compensation.’
Angie shakes her head. ‘Too risky for Jules, and you know the army’s not going to pay out on a class action.’
‘Pax Fed might. And it would be in the Paxtons’ best interests to provide compensation before it gets that far.’
‘Blackmail?’
Vee shrugs. ‘Up to you.’
Angie looks to Jules and feigns confusion. ‘Would that be hypocritical?’
Jules gives a surprised laugh and Angie realises how long it’s been since she’s heard that sound.
‘No, Mum. I think that’s what’s known as poetic justice.’
69
Peta Paxton sits under fluorescent lights in borrowed nurses scrubs with her hands clasped in her lap. Her platinum hair is slicked back and her make-up long gone. The Major rests his arm on the back of the chair between her and him, savouring the moment.
‘I’m a victim here too, Major.’
Across the desk, Khan offers a thin smile. The three of them are in a clinical office on the ground floor of the Port Augusta Hospital.
‘Define victim.’
‘I’m caught up in my brother’s machinations as much as everyone else here.’
‘So why did Major Voss intercept you at the airport attempting to leave?’
Peta wets her lower lip. ‘Because, Agent Khan, I was unaware you were in town and I didn’t think the local police were equipped to handle the situation.’
