Disharmony

by Leah Giarratano

  On the toilet, she’d pulled her tarot deck from her bag and wrapped the cord back around it, shoving the shiny box back inside before the deck made her cry again. It was the cards that had caused her all this trouble.

  Back in her booth, Samantha chewed her thumbnail. What if it doesn’t work? she asked herself for the millionth time.

  On a plastic seat just inside the glass doors of the airport, Seraphina had given her a few more items. The first was a wallet containing two boarding passes.

  Sam now studied the pass. Surely they would have called her flight by now? What if she’d missed it? She couldn’t imagine how that could be the case – she’d memorised the flight number so many times it was on constant replay in her head. BA887. British Airways, Business Class, to Heathrow airport, London. A ninety-minute trip that would take her countries away from all her friends and family. And Tamas.

  But it was the next part of the journey that really made her heart flutter. She’d been trying not to think about it. After a three-hour wait in London, she’d board a Qantas flight for Sydney, Australia. And she’d be in the sky for twenty-seven hours.

  That wasn’t just countries. That was a universe away.

  The only other thing in the wallet was a ticket of another type. Hours ago, she’d sat staring at it, her backside numb on the plastic seat just inside the airport doors.

  ‘Um, what’s this?’ she’d asked Sera, her voice thick. She hiccuped. She’d stopped crying half an hour or so before, but her body hadn’t seemed to have caught up with the fact.

  ‘That’s your passport,’ said Sera, matter-of-factly. ‘It’s also your visa, and any other travel document you’re asked to produce.’

  ‘Um, no, it’s not,’ said Samantha.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Sera.

  Samantha looked at her, and then back at the small piece of paper in her hand. She blinked. Hiccuped again.

  ‘It’s a ticket,’ she said finally, ‘to ride the dodgem cars at the Carnivale.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Sera.

  ‘It is,’ said Samantha.

  ‘Well, maybe you think so, pretty one,’ said Sera. ‘But to everyone else it will look exactly like your passport documents or your visa or anything else it needs to look like when asked.’

  Samantha had stared at the floor. She could not possibly be any more miserable and confused. Every brain cell screamed, ‘Not possible!’ But she’d been shown things tonight that made her believe that the ticket probably would do just as Sera said. It didn’t make her feel any better, though.

  ‘What if I lose it?’ she’d said.

  ‘I shouldn’t do that if I were you, honey,’ said Sera.

  Sera had then given her a story to tell in case anyone asked why she was travelling alone to Australia.

  ‘But you won’t need the story,’ Sera had said. ‘Whoever inspects your travel documents will merely feel that they’re having a particularly great day, and that you are a most bewitching fifteen-year-old – as indeed you are – and they will wave you on through. You just have to be cool and follow the signs.’

  ‘The signs at the airport?’ Samantha had said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sera. ‘Those too.’

  What Seraphina had told her about the Admit One ticket was true. A woman in a uniform in the queue for Departures had asked to check her paperwork, beamed at her, and ushered her through to another lane, cordoned off by red rope, with virtually no one in it. And it had been like that all the way through to the lounge. So she knew that some of what Sera had said was true. But she actually didn’t want to believe any of the other stuff Sera had told her.

  From the back seat of the car on the way to the airport, she hadn’t been able to see Birthday’s face as they both listened to what Sera told her. Sam would have loved to have seen whether his had registered the same shock and surprise as hers, but in some ways she was glad she hadn’t had the chance. Her heart couldn’t take any more shrapnel at the moment, and she feared that learning that Birthday had known all this stuff about her for years, without telling her, would be a betrayal too hard to bear.

  Her thoughts were startled back to the lounge when the PA piped up.

  ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We would like to advise that Flight BA887 is now ready for boarding at Gate number eight. Would all passengers departing for London on BA887 please make your way to Gate Eight for immediate departure.’

  The apple juice soured in Samantha’s stomach and she wished she had time for another trip to the toilet. She grabbed her bag and hurried towards Gate Eight. Towards London. Towards Sydney. Towards the twin brother she never knew she had but could now feel, just as she always had felt him without knowing what it was.

  Inside her chest, something clawed mercilessly at her heart, shredding it even further. She thought maybe she could taste blood at the back of her throat.

  Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, Australia

  July 1, 4.47 p.m.

  ‘Now what are you doing?’ said Zac. He pulled his desk chair close to Luke’s computer and watched, mesmerised, as Luke’s fingers blurred over the keyboard.

  ‘Hunting,’ said Luke.

  ‘For the empath or the genius?’ said Zac.

  ‘Yep and yep,’ said Luke. ‘But also anything else I can get on Morgan Moreau or any of these other names we just pulled. Now move over.’

  Zac slid his chair backwards and Luke rolled over to the next computer.

  ‘How are you going to find them?’

  ‘I’m hacking into a few databases,’ said Luke. ‘The Department of Community Services, the AFP and Interpol.’

  ‘This is how you got locked up, isn’t it?’ said Zac.

  ‘Well, it helped,’ said Luke. ‘But I figured out what I did wrong last time.’

  He skated his chair back to the other computer, typing furiously again. ‘It’s all about timing. I’ll dip in and out too fast for them to catch me.’

  ‘So I don’t need to prepare to get you out of here when the Feds come and bust in the door?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Luke, eyes glued to the screen. ‘I’ve never needed anyone to get me out of anything. Besides, this time I’m using two cloaking sites before launching simultaneous dictionary, brute force and pre-computation attacks on their networks.’

  ‘Have you ever heard anyone speaking Elvish?’ said Zac.

  Luke kept typing.

  ‘You’d probably understand about as much of it as I understood what you just said,’ Zac continued.

  ‘It’s simple,’ said Luke, sliding back to the other screen. ‘I’m hiding within a web of thousands of people across the world to prevent anyone learning of my physical location, and I’ve launched multiple-platform software weaponry that sniffs out and cracks the encrypted passwords I need.’

  ‘Yep, that sounds simple,’ said Zac.

  Luke grinned. ‘But I might not be able to chat for a while now,’ he said. ‘I’m going in.’

  ‘Going in?’ said Zac.

  ‘I’m just going to be concentrating for a while. I might not answer when you speak to me – I sort of zone out a bit.’

  Luke tuned out to the sounds around him and unfocused his eyes. Instinctively, his fingers continued to seek and find the keys he needed. The numbers on the screen became maps and pathways. The pathways transformed into three-dimensional streets and laneways. A pulsing light scudded down an alleyway ahead of him. He dived in and followed it.

  JULY 1, 8.14 P.M.

  Although he was starving, fully dressed – shoes and all – and not remotely tired, Luke couldn’t make himself leave the bed.

  Zac’s knocking and calling from outside the locked door made no difference.

  It wasn’t the plush pillows and the super-soft bedding that kept him there, even though he’d never experienced anything nearly so comfortable. And it wasn’t the mesmerising view of the boats through the rain-smudged windows.

  It was what buzzed about his head that kept him from getting up – information about who he
was, why he was, and who had planned for him to turn out like this.

  Morgan Moreau. Mother.

  Welfare had a lot to say about her. Nothing nice. They had a record of eight children she’d given birth to over a fifteen-year span. She’d raised none of them. And two hadn’t even made it out of nappies. The Feds had a detailed file – they’d begun it after baby number three had died under suspicious circumstances. They’d questioned her, even detained her following the drowning death of baby number four, but there was never any hard evidence that she’d actually physically harmed her children.

  Welfare didn’t care about the evidence. After finding her next two children malnourished and neglected, they’d made them state wards until the age of eighteen, finding her unfit to parent ever again.

  Luke noticed that the data trail on his mother had then been dormant for a couple of years until a pre-set alarm had been activated on a computer in a Sydney hospital, prompting the nurse on duty to call authorities. Morgan Moreau had been admitted to the maternity unit. And she’d just given birth to twins.

  Welfare sent the district supervisor and two case workers, accompanied by a police officer from the local area command.

  The Feds sent an agent, Fairlie Merryweather.

  There’d apparently been a complication during the birth and the obstetrician on-call had insisted that no one have access to the patients until he gave the all-clear. But by the time he’d done that, Morgan Moreau and her babies, a boy and a girl, were nowhere to be found.

  Luke had read Merryweather’s report. It had been particularly scathing of the hospital’s lack of cooperation with authorities. The obstetrician, and the nurse who’d called in the alarm, had both been transferred from the hospital. Given her reports to the AFP, Fairlie Merryweather had apparently searched the country for the trio, but the trail in Australia went cold.

  But Luke’s tracking software found it. Interpol had picked up the case. He learned that Interpol had logged the last known sighting of Morgan Moreau in Geneva, Switzerland. It was one year later, June 1997, and she’d been in the state’s largest hospital, giving birth.

  He found the birth certificate – Jake Grey Moreau.

  Next, he found the death certificate for his mother, Morgan Moreau, signed off by her midwife, Jamala Creole.

  He read Fairlie Merryweather’s Interpol report about his mother’s death. Merryweather had actually travelled from Australia to Switzerland and had interviewed nursing staff, the on-call doctors and Jamala Creole. Morgan Moreau is deceased, the agent had coldly concluded in her report. There was no mention of Jake, or the whereabouts of his twin.

  But Luke had the names of his three other siblings. They were in Australia. There were no fathers listed for any of them. Samantha White Moreau, his twin sister – the empath; Jake Grey Moreau, his younger brother – the supposed genius; and three older siblings, all born in Australia: Kyle Green Moreau, Daniel Brown Moreau and Liza Blue Moreau.

  What was with the ridiculous colour thing?

  He’d found the Welfare files on Daniel Brown and Liza Blue. After being removed as babies from his mother they’d both apparently been adopted into happy families. Their case files were minuscule, with brief yearly notations about their progress until they turned eighteen, and then their files had been closed. His own Welfare file, well, that was not so thin. He’d sent everything to his online storage files – maybe he’d go back to it one day, but the parts he’d seen were not exactly happy reading. Besides, he’d lived it, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to go over his memories so soon.

  Luke pulled the quilt up to his chin, freezing on the inside. He supposed he could track down Liza and Daniel, but they probably wouldn’t want anything to do with their old life, especially if they knew anything about their mother: the witch and child killer.

  And she dumped me like trash, he thought.

  He pulled the quilt up over his head, shivering.

  JULY 1, 9.03 P.M.

  ‘Get up, already! It’s night-time!’

  Luke peeled the covers back from his face. Although his eyes had been closed, he was wide awake and he was still freezing.

  Georgia stood in the doorway.

  ‘Why, do you want us out of here?’ said Luke.

  ‘No, dummy,’ said Georgia. ‘I want you to eat. I’ve been cooking since seven.’

  ‘What time is it?’ said Luke.

  ‘Nine,’ said Georgia. ‘At night.’

  ‘I’m starving,’ said Luke.

  ‘Well, of course you are,’ she said.

  ‘What have you been making that takes two hours to cook?’

  ‘Why don’t you come and find out, instead of just lying there interrogating me?’

  Georgia left the room and Luke climbed out of bed. The rain had really kicked in again, battering at the windows and causing the boats to bob and bounce about on the bay. He realised how lucky they’d been to find Georgia; it would have absolutely sucked to be sleeping outdoors tonight. He wondered where Zac was, but, more importantly, he wondered about the food. He really was ravenously hungry.

  After visiting the bathroom, he stepped into the hallway, and… yep, he should have known.

  ‘Why do you do that?’ he said to Zac, who was squatting by his door.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Zac. ‘Why don’t we get out of here now? We can go to my house. My brother, Anthony, wrote a thesis on the Telling for his post-doctoral degree. He could give us a lot more information.’

  Luke shook his head. He wanted to say: One, why didn’t you tell me this before? And two, are you for real: elves study prophecies that human beings have never heard about?

  Instead, he said, ‘I am so hungry.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Zac.

  They made their way downstairs, Luke’s face brightening with every step. He didn’t notice that Zac’s became more morose. All his senses were acutely focused on the kitchen. The smell was absolutely amazing.

  ‘Roast lamb,’ said Georgia as they rounded the entrance to the kitchen.

  Glowing flames spattered and sparkled merrily in a modern gas fireplace set into the wall closest to the ocean. The whole kitchen radiated warmth and comfort.

  ‘I didn’t see a fireplace there last night,’ said Luke, rushing over to it and warming his hands.

  ‘I forgot to turn it on,’ said Georgia.

  Zac frowned.

  ‘Roasted potatoes and pumpkin and buttered corn on the cob,’ said Georgia, pointing to the dishes that sprawled across the table. ‘I’ve made heaps too much gravy, that’s cheese bread and it’s freshly made, and I found a jar of a secret-family-recipe mint jelly. Oh, and I’ve made butterscotch pudding with banana custard for dessert.’

  Luke grinned. ‘You don’t really look domestic.’

  ‘Boarding school,’ she said. ‘Zac, could you bring the lamb over? It’s just resting there by the oven.’

  ‘No,’ said Zac.

  ‘Whoops,’ said Georgia, smiling, with a hand on her hip. ‘I forgot. You’re vegan. Oh well, you can still eat the vegetables.’

  ‘Not when they’re covered in butter,’ said Zac.

  ‘Well at least you can eat the bread. It’s still warm.’

  ‘Pass,’ said Zac. ‘It’s cheese bread. Vegans don’t eat any animal products.’

  Georgia laughed. ‘No wonder you’re so skinny,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing in the whole world you can eat.’

  ‘I’ll have a banana,’ said Zac.

  ‘Except that I used them all for the custard,’ said Georgia, grinning. ‘But it’s great custard.’

  ‘Made with milk,’ said Zac.

  ‘Of course! How else do you make custard?’

  Zac sighed. ‘Enjoy your murdered baby sheep,’ he said, stalking from the kitchen.

  ‘He’s a weird one,’ shrugged Georgia, scraping a chair out from the table.

  ‘You know, he really is,’ said Luke, carrying the roasting tray over, dodging the cats twirling and twisting about Georgi
a’s chair legs.

  He grabbed a plate and piled it super-high.

  Outside, the wind howled.

  Heathrow Airport, London, England

  July 1, 10.00 a.m.

  In Terminal Five of Heathrow Airport, Samantha White cleared the covered walkway for the British Airways flight, and froze, wild-eyed and panicked. A sea of people frothed and boiled around her. She stood stock-still in the middle of it, drowning. She had never seen so many people, so many signs, so many moving walkways in all directions. The worst thing was she had never felt so many emotions, all undercover in some hideously huge building. They darted, seeped, echoed and flung themselves at her from every direction. She thought she might vomit.

  A motorised cart driven by a man in a grey uniform whizzed past her and she spun, tracking it with her eyes. But now she’d turned herself around, and she didn’t even recognise where she’d come from.

  She read English well and spoke it clearly, as did all the gypsies in her camp. English-speaking tourists always had money to spend or to steal and it paid to be able to communicate well with them. And she’d rote-learned that she was supposed to make her way to Terminal Three and find the Qantas Club so that she could wait out the hours until her next flight. In Romania, that waiting time had seemed like it would take forever. But right now, she had palpitations – would she get to where she needed to be on time?

  There were supposed to be a few options to make her way there – a free shuttle bus, an underground train, or else a terribly long walk for the very bored. Problem was, she couldn’t see a sign for any of these selections; everything had blurred together into one horrible, colourful, nauseous mess. She knew she had three hours before she had to fly again, but she figured it was going to take her at least that long to move from this spot.

  I am so lost, she told herself.

  ‘If you don’t mind me saying, miss, you look very lost.’

  She spun around. A man wearing a grey uniform stood behind her. He had an Indian accent, dark eyes and a warm, comforting smile.