Regeneration

by Stephanie Saulter

  They had put it on her that morning. She sat still as a statue, refusing either to flinch or to speak as the ends were pressed together and the molecular locks activated, sealing into place and beginning at once to transmit her location and basic biodata. It would be many long years before she could hope to be free of it—long enough to be as good as forever for anyone else.

  In her case it was just possible she might outlive the limits of her sentence, but until then she would be tagged and tracked, and alarms would be raised and armed response dispatched if she ventured beyond whatever bounds were currently approved for her. The review board might have agreed to let her come home, but home was as far as she could go. Even to step outside her own front door would revoke the release and return her to prison. “You are prohibited from leaving for any reason,” they’d told her, “save an imminent threat to your own life.” The technician who’d been fitting the collar had smiled weakly as though to soften the pronouncement. “We don’t expect you to stay in the building if it’s on fire, for example.”

  “We also don’t expect you to set the building on fire so that you have an excuse to get out of it,” said the warden, one of those who would form her homecoming party. He appeared to have assigned himself the role of reminding her at every juncture that she was no less a criminal or a prisoner, and still subject to the sufferance of the state. “Or for any other reason.”

  The technician had ducked her head, tightened her lips, and looked uneasy. Zavcka had raised her eyes fractionally to rake the warden with a cool, contemptuous gaze. After a moment he’d felt compelled to add, in a tone he must have hoped she would find daunting, “It’s been tried.”

  Not by me, she’d wanted to retort. Not that she could foresee doing such a thing; she was equally ready to snap that she had owned the building for longer than either of them had been alive and valued its beauty and history in ways such tiny minds would fail to understand; moreover, that burning oneself out of one’s own home was both crude and conspicuous. Only an idiot would try something that obvious.

  She’d held her tongue as they’d checked the bond and calibrated the signal, recited the rules to her and made her acknowledge each one, then fidgeted impatiently while she’d silently read through the small print. She had finally scrawled her acceptance into a tablet, validated it with a finger ident and retinal scan, suffered through a brief farewell speech by the prison’s governor and equally insipid assurances from the staff psychologist. She’d had to be reminded to take the bioplastic bag with her pitiful collection of what Offender Management had termed “personal items.” It would not have been politic to refuse.

  Now, walking back into the bedroom, she caught sight of the clear bag, dumped unceremoniously on the floor and kicked halfway under a chair, and thought if there was anything here she wished to burn, it was that.

  There was a sound of quiet footsteps in the room beyond, a tap at the half-open door and Marcus’s voice saying, “Ma’am?”

  “Yes?”

  He stepped into view, just. “Sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but they’ve finished with us. They say they need to see you before they leave.”

  “Do they.” She sighed and strode to the door. As he stood back to let her pass, she said, “Thank you, Marcus. And, ah . . .”

  She must say something to this faithful servant, somehow reconfirm the essential dynamic of their relationship. She glanced back at him, for once in her life unsure how to proceed, and another strong wave of dislocation rocked her. She realized that she stood spotlighted in a puddle of sunshine. The plush and polish of her surroundings felt transient and unreal, like a stage on which she was now obliged to perform.

  She resisted the urge to put a hand to her throat. What came out felt like a tiny triumph, as disingenuous as it was truthful. “The place looks lovely. Well done.”

  Sometime later, she was interrupted by a hesitant throat-clearing as she sat, tablet in hand, on what had been her favorite sofa. She had chosen it deliberately, determined that its luxury would become familiar again, and her awareness of it had indeed begun to drift away as she read. Even with the redactions on her stream access so much more was available to her now than in prison, and the desire to catch up was an almost physical urge, a visceral need to become fully reoriented in the chatter and conflict and flow of events. She was immersed in an onstream argument about the new Thames Tidal Power facility and whether direct action was a legitimate form of protest when the noise made her look up. She was almost too surprised to be annoyed by the sight of the financial-services flunky she thought she had ignored out of existence an hour before.

  He had approached silently and stood just inside the sitting room, hands clasped behind his back, head inclined in a posture of deep respect, while his eyes scanned her face and form with an avidity that suggested something else as well, though quite what that something else was, she did not know. The intensity of his attention did not feel sexual, exactly, or threatening, or anything else she could easily put a name to. It wasn’t how he’d looked at her earlier, either, when others had been present. It felt unsettling, without being either dangerous or attractive.

  Zavcka rested the tablet on her lap and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  “I beg your pardon, Ms. Klist,” the man said. “I wanted to introduce myself. Properly.”

  “I think you already did,” she replied, puzzled. She reached for his name, struggling to recall it. Something nondescript, pedestrian. Thinking back through the conversation with his boss, she arrived at Patrick Crawford. It triggered a memory of him murmuring the name earlier, when he had been one of the strangers assembled in the hall to welcome her home.

  “Mr. Crawford, I believe?” she said, and his face lit up to an entirely unwarranted degree.

  “Yes, madam. I am very pleased to be at your service.”

  There was something strangely antiquated about his phrasing. Zavcka was known to prefer formal speech herself, and anyone assigned to her would be briefed accordingly, but this felt excessive, as though the requirement had been embraced with an unlikely degree of enthusiasm.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It may take me a day or two to settle in and examine the details of the portfolio.” She knew its details by heart, but one learned more about a subordinate’s capabilities by concealing the full extent of one’s own. “I expect I’ll be making some changes.”

  “Very good, Ms. Klist. I am at your disposal. You are no doubt aware that your current investments are performing exceptionally well, but I am ready to carry out any instructions you might have.”

  So he wasn’t here with a list of recommendations upon which he would make a tidy commission. But the quiet intensity of his voice and his gaze had not diminished.

  She was baffled, and beginning to be suspicious. “I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “But to be frank, Mr. Crawford, I’m surprised to find you so eager. I can hardly be a plum assignment.” She extended her arms along the back of the couch, displaying the collar and looking him full in the face. “Many would argue that I shouldn’t even be here, much less have someone like you available to me. Surely you’d prefer a client with a less . . . questionable reputation?”

  He glanced back toward the hall and the kitchen before he replied, “The only question I have is how they could have seen fit to imprison you in the first place.” He kept his voice low, speaking quickly. “I’m not alone in that, Ms. Klist. There are many of us who feel that your incarceration was entirely inappropriate.”

  He stepped forward, holding something out to her; it looked like a small piece of cloth. Curious, she leaned toward him and took it, then settled back into the sofa. He resumed his deferential pose. The something turned out to be a tiny pouch, made of a fabric so sumptuous that her fingertips tingled with pleasure. There was something inside: hard, round, no bigger than a memtab or a pre-Syndrome coin. She slipped it out of its silken case and held it up to the light.

  It was a flat disk made of a rich, deep gold that caugh
t the autumn sunlight and glowed in her hand. The “K” was dominant, the “Z” smaller, superimposed to share the upper diagonal. The letters were contained within a smooth circle like a wedding band. There was a tiny bulge at the bottom where the gold swelled into something that resembled a flower, or a mouth, as though the band were swallowing itself. It was a beautiful object, heavy and pure, and full of meaning. It was also, Zavcka realized distantly as she turned it in her fingers, the first gift she had received from anyone other than herself in more decades than she cared to count.

  “A small token,” Crawford said, “of our esteem.” His voice was thick with emotion.

  She found herself clearing her own throat. “I don’t think, Mr. Crawford, that the people who brought me here earlier would be happy about this.”

  “No, madam, I don’t imagine they would. But we’ve examined the rules very carefully and there’s nothing that says you can’t receive it.”

  “No,” she mused, still looking at the pretty thing in her hand. “But there are lots of rules about whom I’m allowed contact with.” She held the symbol up, glinting between thumb and forefinger. “This should disqualify you.”

  “I’m a senior consultant at an exclusive financial services firm in the City of London,” he said. “My qualifications in that respect are beyond reproach.”

  “So, just to be clear,” she said, wondering how on earth they had pulled this off, “you really do work for Dhahab Investments, you really are part of my account team and they really have assigned you to me.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “I presume they’re not aware of your other interests? Or is there a Klist Club in the premier-client division?”

  “No, madam.”

  “You must have done a lot of finagling, Mr. Crawford, to find yourself in precisely the right place at precisely the right time.”

  Crawford ducked his head as though accepting a compliment. “I’ve merely been diligent, madam. We knew you would be allowed home eventually. We wanted to be in a position to make contact.”

  “Now that you have, what do you expect is going to happen?”

  “That’s up to you, madam. There are things that belong to you that you must want back. I can and will, of course, undertake whatever business matters you wish to pursue, but we believe we have located the most precious asset of all: the child who was taken from you.”

  Zavcka’s breath caught, sharp as a knife in her chest.

  There was a tiny smile on Crawford’s face, almost a smirk, that told her he had seen. She recognized the look in his eyes now. It was longing, a longing that was worshipful in its avarice.

  “There are things we want as well, madam, that you have been wise enough to keep from the authorities. The secret of your longevity, the knowledge you have guarded for so long. We hope we can prove ourselves worthy of your confidence.”

  So for all the apparent reverence, there it was: an offer to horse-trade: the hidden child for the deepest secret.

  Except there is no secret, you moron. I’m a mutant. I didn’t disappear every couple of decades to turn back the clock with black-lab gene surgery, I went so no one would notice me not aging in the first place. If I’d known it would be you idiots who believed that story instead of the jury, I’d never have let the lawyer try it.

  Were it not for what the man had offered her, Zavcka would have said it out loud and damned the consequences. As it was, she felt the blood roaring in her ears, anticipation pounding down her veins and the symbol of devotion in her clenched fist, sharp against her palm. She made herself breathe deeply and slowly. This was going to be a far more immediate and delicate negotiation than she had anticipated.

  “Sit down, Mr. Crawford,” she said. Her voice was strong, full of authority. “I’m sure we can come to an understanding.”

  15

  The access road that had been a pristine white line on Fayole’s map was in reality a narrow, deeply rutted trammel of rich, dark mud. Its verges were thigh-high with nettles ragged with age and dirt, the recent passage of too many vehicles, and the ravages of autumn. The bright blue line of the drainage channel turned out to be a wash of turbid brown. Detective Superintendent Varsi stood close to where the road ended, in a stony apron wide and solid enough underfoot for a vehicle to turn, rubbing her feet through slippery grass to try and dislodge the worst of the mire from her shoes and thinking that her children would love the place.

  Detective Inspector Achebe trudged along the bank toward her, pants safely tucked into waterproof boots; the sludge line came up well past the ankle. Behind him, an EM engineer in a pair of waders was cautiously inching into the water along a crumbling slipway. Stakes had been driven into the earth at its head and the ooze at its foot, and a pair of ropes, one on either side, acted as makeshift handrails. The engineer was using the knots along their length to steady himself as he went. Sharon could see more suited figures in the water and on the opposite bank of the channel, and yet another pair further out where it would normally empty into the huge sweep of the Thames. They were manning a small vehicle with a lifting arm that listed dangerously toward the water. A flatbed truck bearing the EM logo, upon which the vehicle had presumably been brought in, was parked at the side, along with another EM van and a couple of police transports.

  “We’re certain this was it?” she asked as Achebe came up, and also started wiping his boots against the grass.

  He nodded. “The highest concentrations are—were—in the channel, and forensics indicates it’s where the algae slurry was released. The sterilization is complete now; they’re just testing to confirm no viable organisms. Then they’ll remove the barrier and let the water flow into the river again.”

  “So they’ve had to kill everything.”

  “In the channel? Pretty much. Apparently it’s going to stink to high heaven if they don’t get it moving soon. You can smell it already.” His nose wrinkled in distaste at the whiff of organic decay in the air. “But once they do, I’m told it should all come back into equilibrium fairly quickly.”

  “Right, well, EM looks like they’re on top of that part.” Sharon put away her mental image of Mish and Suri playing hide-and-seek out here; it was too cold now anyway, and the water was dead, and the reeds and rushes were starting to sag as the year wound down. Maybe next summer, if it was warm and bright and all was well again. “Walk me through what we think we know.”

  “They arrived shortly before dawn,” Achebe said, pointing to the muddy track. “It’s all churned up now, but when we got here a couple of days ago there were several distinct sets of tread marks. Given the strength of the storm, we know they had to’ve been laid down after the rain had stopped. The ones we’re most interested in were made by a heavy vehicle, probably about the same size as the EM truck over there. It was driven in, turned, and backed up to the slipway. We’ve got tracks going right onto the concrete. We think there was most likely a tank of some sort mounted on the back.”

  “So they would’ve run a hose into the water and opened the tap.”

  “That’s what it looks like, and when they were finished, they drove straight back out. The departing treads indicate that the vehicle was considerably lighter than when it arrived.”

  “And the other marks?”

  “Just cycle treads along the margins, created sometime over the next day or so. There’ve been a few cyclists and walkers along since we cordoned the lane off—regular users, but none of them recall anything unusual happening before we showed up. One of them said he’d already been out here since the storm and we matched his treads. We’ve got appeals out on the tanker.”

  “Anything promising from the road cams?”

  “Not really, and we’ve already eliminated everything that’s registered within the local area. That’s important because the weight and volume of a tank that could’ve been brought on a vehicle of that size down a road of this size aren’t enough to account for the amount of algae that went into the channel, not if it was being kept
in a healthy suspension.” He slapped at a late mosquito. “The EM microbiologists and our own people all agree that the only way the maximum volume we’ve calculated works is if it’s highly concentrated, and the algae wouldn’t have been able to live long under those conditions, so that means it can’t have been trucked in from any great distance. They think it would’ve been in the tank for no more than an hour.”

  “So, subtracting the time to load up, get underway, maneuver into position, and unload at this end . . . about a forty-five minute drive?”

  Achebe nodded. “Fifty, tops.”

  Sharon made a face. That was probably too long to be helpful. “What’s within fifty minutes of here?”

  “At least a thousand different farms, factories, industrial estates, and private properties with outbuildings and a good water supply for the growth tanks. Quite a lot of biomass agriculture.” He caught her look. “We’re prioritizing anyone who objected to Thames Tidal during the consultation stage, or signed that Estuary Preservation petition to try and block the power plant coming online, but unfortunately, that doesn’t narrow it down very much. At this point I have to assume we’ll be searching all of them.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “Slowly. Lots of indignant farmers and site managers who can’t imagine why we want to talk to them—or look around their premises.” He frowned, scratching at the mosquito bite. “They all maintain they know nothing about it, and so far we haven’t found any evidence to the contrary. But it’s conservative country out here, boss.” He gestured in the general direction of the lane, the surrounding suburbs, and the vast swathes of domesticated countryside beyond the bypass that defined the city’s limits. “No one’s come right out in support of the attack—they’re not stupid—but there isn’t the level of disapproval you’d expect, either. There’s a lot of ‘us and them’ language, along with a sort of . . . well, appreciation, really. A lot of remarks about how it shows gems aren’t the only clever folk around these days, all said very jovially, and when pressed they swear they don’t mean anything by it. That’s probably true, but it’s not the kind of thing you’d hear in east London, is it?”