by Claire Merle
Crying out with fright, Ana puled back. But the woman grasped her tightly. Instead of cheeks the woman had taut red patches. Her eyelashes and eyebrows had been burnt away. Rumples of skin gathered at the edges of her face.
Her eyes were the most frightening thing of al. In the 84
shadowy light from the tent’s fire torches, the irises looked black.
Ana pushed down her fear. ‘Let go.’
‘Such smooth skin,’ the woman said. ‘Hard to find these days.’
Ana tried to pul away again, but the woman was stronger.
‘There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’
‘I can’t,’ Ana said. ‘My friend’s waiting for me.’
‘I don’t see anybody.’
Ana peered up ahead. For a moment she couldn’t see Mickey either. But then a voice caled out to her from the darkness. ‘Hurry up!’
The women relaxed her grip. Ana tugged back her hand and hurried after her giant escort, bike wheels flicking up and hurried after her giant escort, bike wheels flicking up dirt. Mickey disappeared down an aley. Ana ran after him and came out at the edge of a canal.
Light from a moored barge rippled on the oily water.
Mickey jumped up on the boat’s curved roof and knocked on one of the portholes. Something wooden clattered and scraped along the deck. A flickering lantern appeared in the wheelhouse.
‘Mickey?’ a woman said. The giant loped along the centre of the barge and pressed his face up to the wheelhouse window.
‘Got a customer.’ He signaled to Ana. She laid down her bike and traversed the slippery gangplank.
‘Come here,’ the woman said. Ana stepped inside the wheelhouse. ‘You’re shivering. You’re not sick, are you?’
she asked.
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Ana shook her head.
‘What meds are you on?’
‘Nothing,’ Ana said.
‘Show me your eyes.’ The woman demonstrated what she meant, puling down the skin beneath her eye to show the white. Ana copied. The woman stood on tiptoe and raised her lantern for a better look.
‘Al right. Hurry up and pay Mickey so we can go
‘Al right. Hurry up and pay Mickey so we can go down.’
Ana dug inside her tote bag and retrieved the rol of notes.
She puled off the top one and passed it out to Mickey.
Mickey grinned at her and pocketed the money.
‘I’ve only got a hundred,’ she told the woman.
‘It’s enough.’
‘What should I do with her bike?’ Mickey asked.
‘Put it under the awning at the front with the others. I’l lock it up in a minute.’
Before Ana could thank him, he jumped off the boat.
The woman jostled her towards the trapdoor and down a vertical ladder.
Ana stepped into a paneled cabin infused with the smel of burning logs. A closed stone fireplace dimly iluminated the living area. Heat radiated from the aluminium chimney, which stretched up through the ceiling. Ana reached out her hands towards it.
‘Come on,’ the woman said, inclining her head towards the only door at the other end of the cabin. Ana folowed her through the smal living space, noting the cartography drawings on the wals, the rickety old-style television, and to her surprise, an upright piano tucked behind a sofa.
The area extended into a kitchen, the two spaces divided 86
by a couple of bookshelves. Beyond the kitchen lay a narrow corridor with a door off either side and a third straight ahead. Ana folowed the woman to the door on their right.
The woman passed her the lantern and produced a stick the size of a headless match. She lit the stick with the lantern flame and entered the cabin. A moment later, the berth brightened as a second square lantern on a night table began to glow. A low double bed took up most of the room.
Several wooden storage racks lined the wals.
Al the tension in Ana drained away. Her body sagged.
‘Thank you,’ she said, stuffing her rol of cash into the woman’s hands. The woman took off the elastic band and began to count the notes. In the soft lantern glimmer, Ana realised the woman was younger than she’d first thought, closer to twenty-five than thirty-five. She had neat, shoulder-length hair and wore dark lipstick. A shadow of hostility lay etched in her oval face.
The woman finished counting and gave Ana back a ten-pound note.
‘I’m in the berth across from you,’ she said. ‘Don’t touch anything. And lock your door.’ With that she turned and disappeared down the corridor.
Ana closed the cabin door and puled the metal latch across. She sank back on to the bed. Her thighs ached from al the cycling. Her fingers and toes were numb.
from al the cycling. Her fingers and toes were numb.
She kicked off her shoes, stripped away her jacket and jeans, and crawled under the covers. The cabin was cosy.
Her duvet smelt clean. Exhaustion swept through her.
She hadn’t realised how much the stresses of the day and last night’s broken sleep had taken out of her.
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She closed her eyes. Raindrops began to gently patter on the roof. She lay listening to them, thankful she wasn’t stil outside searching for a room. She would sleep now and get up at dawn. There were bound to be more people around to chat to then. Before returning home, she’d find Cole and convince him to talk. She had to.
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9
Lila
Light fel on Ana’s eyelids, forcing her to surface from a deep sleep. After a minute she roused. The low ceiling rippled with sunshine reflected up from the canal through the porthole. Water lapped against the hul. She felt sleepy and comfortable, until she tried to move. Her whole body resisted. She raised an aching arm and found her hair tangled up in her interface chain. As she twisted around to pick it undone, she caught sight of an alarm clock fixed to the wal.
06.48!
She bolted upright. Her forehead colided with part of the storage rack above the bed.
She yelped and clapped a hand over her mouth, at once aware of other man-made noises. The deck above her creaked with people moving around. Distant voices traveled through the porthole. She scrambled out of bed and checked the lock across her door. It was stil securely bolted. Hurriedly, she gathered her clothes and dressed.
She pinned up her hair as best she could and puled the hat down over it.
After she’d made the bed, she stood by the cabin door to listen. She couldn’t hear anyone in the corridor or the 89
kitchen beyond, so she put her tote bag over her shoulder and unbolted the door. The living area felt deserted. Last night’s fire had burnt out. Cold air blew down through the open hatch.
Ana grabbed the ladder rungs and climbed into the wheelhouse. A smel of coffee and bacon wafted across the water, along with the sound of chattering voices. She peered through the wheelhouse window. To her left, several metres up the bank a group of people mingled around a campfire, stomping feet and rubbing hands. A few of them sat on plastic crates, rugs drawn up to their noses. Nearby, two children messed about tying a piece of rope to a low tree branch.
‘Hey!’ A deep voice caled out. Mickey, the giant who’d brought her there last night, waved. Al eyes turned and looked at Ana. She lifted her hand in a smal, looked at Ana. She lifted her hand in a smal, embarrassed gesture of acknowledgement and puled her hat further down on her head.
‘Subtle,’ she mumbled. ‘Very subtle.’
Mickey bounded up the concrete path and reached out to help her jump the awkward step down from the gangplank.
‘The girl who throws away food,’ he grinned. ‘What about tea?’
‘I usualy prefer to drink it,’ Ana answered. Mickey barked with laughter. They walked along the footpath, past another barge, towards the campfire.
Soon Ana’s father would be rising and getting ready to go to work. At first, he’d wait for her to come downstairs.
He’d drink espresso in the kitc
hen and check his interface messages. In a few minutes, she’d send him one letting him 90
know she’d got up early and gone out for a walk. He’d be annoyed because he’d want to discuss her interview yesterday with the Board. But it would also work in her favour; he’d think she was avoiding him. She would aim to be back at the checkpoint at 9 a.m. when Neil’s shift started, just in case her father deemed their talk important enough to wait around for her, or the Board arrived for their folow-up interview. She could spend an hour and a half with these people. She hoped it was enough time to discover which one was Cole and find a way of getting him to talk about the Enlightenment Project.
Project.
Mickey scooted a girl along one of the crates so that Ana could sit down. Ana held her hands up to the fire.
Strips of bacon sizzled on the large gril. A pregnant woman sprinkled tea leaves into a pan of water. Ana tried to squeeze some life back into her fingers, while discreetly studying the men in the gathering. The eldest of them was busy hooking up a white sail to a tree where the children were playing. The sail cracked in a gust of wind and ripped from his fingers. The children laughed and jumped about, leaping to grab the snapping ropes.
Cole Winter was in his twenties, not his sixties.
That left Mickey and three others. A guy in a bobble hat and yelow ski jacket, who kept an eye on the bacon; a skinny man hunched on a crate; and a man with spiky hair who paced back and forth as he talked to the woman Ana had met the night before.
‘Your lips are blue,’ the girl beside Ana said. Shivering, Ana dropped her gaze to the smoky fire. She wondered if the girl had noticed her examining the men. The girl’s arm 91
opened like a wing. She wrapped her blanket around Ana’s back. When she took her hand away, they were left joined beneath the cover, shoulders touching. A strange nervousness crept through Ana. The intimacy of the girl’s gesture unsettled her.
‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’ the girl asked. Ana turned and was about to say ‘no’, when the girl spoke again.
‘It’s the eye make-up, see?’ She covered her face with
‘It’s the eye make-up, see?’ She covered her face with her fingers, spreading the middle two of each hand to peek out.
Cole’s sister.
‘You look pretty different without the mask,’ Ana said, trying not to let her surprise show. The wind-chime girl laughed with a snort.
‘Mask!’ she said. ‘Where are you from anyway?’
Ana hugged her arms tighter around her chest. ‘Around,’
she said.
The girl grinned as though Ana had said something funny again. ‘Not around here though,’ she said. ‘You don’t have an accent, but you talk weird.’
So much for blending in, Ana thought.
‘I’m Lila,’ the girl said.
‘Oh, right. Hi.’ Ana wriggled on the crate. The hard ridges dug into her thighs. Her stiff legs felt like they might freeze, bent at the knees. ‘So, did you talk to your brother about the wind chime?’ she asked. But before she’d finished getting the last word out, Lila jumped up.
‘Tea’s ready!’ she said. ‘You can’t do that, Si,’ she scolded the pregnant woman. ‘Put it down.’
‘Oh, stop your fussing, Lila,’ the woman said. But she 92
lowered the pan of boiling water back on to the gril and let Lila take over.
Ana suddenly noticed a slight boy of about four clinging to the pregnant woman’s long skirt and poncho, like a bulky fold in the fabric. The boy readjusted himself to his mother’s position. Just before he disappeared again, Ana glimpsed his face. He had odd eyes. Haunted. Deeply sad.
She felt a sudden, cutting jab to the heart. The boy was sick
– Active.
‘Here.’ Lila passed her a mug of tea.
‘Thanks.’ Ana cupped both hands around the mug for warmth and wondered how many others in their smal gathering were Active. It wasn’t always easy to spot.
Especialy if a person didn’t take any meds, because then they didn’t have the teltale side effects like spasms and hair loss.
She dipped her nose into the steam of her drink. The tea smelt strange – bitter herbs, mint and sugar. Blowing on the watery liquid, she peeped at the barges moored along the canal inlet. At the far end, a black-painted boat was moored directly beneath a warehouse façade, which rose four storeys sheer from the quay. It was the boat Ana had slept on. Enkidu.
She jolted. She’d actualy slept on Enkidu, the one clue to Jasper’s abduction. Was it Cole’s boat? And if so, who was the girl who’d shown her to the cabin last night?
Ana decided she would wait a few more minutes, then say she’d forgotten something below deck and return aboard to have a quick look around.
Lila sat down and snuggled in beside her, adjusting her rug so it lay across the two of them again.
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‘That’s my brother Nate’s wife,’ Lila said, gesturing to the pregnant woman she’d caled Si. ‘She’s due in three months.’
‘Do you al live together?’
‘Not my mum. Just me and my brothers, Nate’s wife, their son Rafferty, and Rachel.’
Rafferty had to be the little boy hiding in his mother’s skirts; Rachel, the woman who’d shown Ana to her sleeping quarters last night.
‘So is that one of your brothers?’ Ana nodded in the direction of the moody-looking guy with spiky hair. His discussions with Rachel looked like they were turning into an argument.
‘Yeah, that’s Nate,’ Lila said. ‘He and Rachel are always arguing. They practicaly grew up together.’
Electronic voices crackled on the air. Ana spun towards the sound. Above the footpath, the cut-up canvas sail now hung taut from the tree, like a cinema screen. The grey-bearded man sat in a chair two metres away. His interface projected on to the canvas, which had been strategicaly angled to avoid the morning sun. Either side of the man stood two cumbersome speakers.
‘Here he goes,’ Lila said. The gathering began to amble away from the fire, across the bank. ‘Come on.’ Lila away from the fire, across the bank. ‘Come on.’ Lila puled Ana up from their crate. ‘Gary gets upset if we don’t al join in.’
Ana forced her stiff knees straight.
‘It’s not very long,’ Lila said. ‘But he thinks it binds us together. Like praying or something.’
Ana trailed Cole’s sister up the concrete steps towards 94
the patch of grass. Away from the fire, her feet felt icy and the wind bit the bare skin at her throat. She peered at Nate from beneath her bel-shaped hat which now sat so low it cut across her eyes. His body jerked slightly as he walked.
He halted beside the pregnant woman, wrapped a hand around her waist and kissed her neck. But his smal eyes and mouth remained puckered with tension.
Only the yelow-ski-jacket guy who handed out crunchy bacon in foil wrappings, and the skinny man who’d moved his crate up the hil to the screen, were unaccounted for.
Neither bore a family resemblance to Nate or Lila, and they both seemed a bit old. Perhaps Cole wasn’t there this morning. She wondered if anyone else among their group had been involved with the Enlightenment Project.
She needed to find a way to broach the subject, without alerting them to the fact she’d run a search on Cole.
Stuffing her hands in the side pockets of her leather jacket, Ana stopped beside Lila. The gathering formed a hotchpotch semi-circle. Once they’d settled, Gary turned hotchpotch semi-circle. Once they’d settled, Gary turned up the volume on the speakers.
A BBC newscaster reported live from the old US
capital, Washington or something. It was a city razed in the twenties by Kuwait or Iraq – Ana couldn’t remember
– over the Middle East and US Petrol Wars. The Petrol Wars had finished ages ago now, but anarchy stil plagued the East Coast of North America. The UK was working with the Central United States on a Pure Separation Programme to help re-establish order in the worst-affected areas.
&n
bsp; Lila shook her head and sighed. Ana glanced at her, 95
noting how the sparkle vanished from her pretty eyes and a hardness set over her face.
Ana’s father watched BBC News. It was the only live broadcast to survive the internet after the 2018 Colapse and the Global Depression. Ana had never understood the attraction of watching live when you could select the programme you wanted, when you wanted, and forward fast or pause at your own leisure. Now she wondered if a large part of the appeal lay in the shared experience.
‘And now the home news,’ the reporter announced.
‘There has been a traumatic new turn in the abduction of Jasper Taurel, son of David Taurel, CEO of the giant pharmaceutics company, Novastra.’
Fear buzzed through Ana.
‘Oh, what now?’ Nate said scathingly. His pregnant wife, Simone, shushed him. Ana coughed nervously. A new turn in his abduction? Had the Wardens found him? Had a ransom been made?
a ransom been made?
The reporter’s eyes narrowed. He frowned into the camera.
‘The girl he was bound to, daughter of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Ashby Barber, has disappeared. The Wardens believe Ariana Barber was snatched from her home yesterday evening.’
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10
Drowning
At the sound of her own name, darkness crept across Ana’s vision. But she could stil see the photograph of herself on the screen, larger-than-life. And so could Cole’s brother and sister, and al the others in their gathering.
Afraid she would drop her mug, she gripped it tightly, overcompensating. Tea slopped down the sides, burning her skin, which was already raw with the cold. She swayed.
The earth pushed against her feet. She pressed into it in an effort to steady herself, as though they were two people back-to-back propping each other up.
‘At least they can’t blame Cole this time,’ Lila said. Ana stared at the mud seeping into her pumps. Her breath wheezed in and out of her chest. Any second now, the blatantly obvious truth would smack Cole’s sister in the face.
She raked her surroundings for an escape. She could head for the aley between the warehouses or jump a low barrier further up the canal to a car park ful of tents. She prepared to drop the mug and run.
