The government vehicle speeds through the streets, in the wake of a cop car clearing the way ahead, its lights and siren whirling. The driver looks nervous and does not speak to Milk. The moment he arrives at the incident scene he realises the set-up is inadequate, a last-minute job, and his stomach takes a nervous lurch. His technical crew is nowhere in sight. Instead he is met by a group of silent security guards who scan his ID, lead him through the swarm of cops and military personnel, and usher him towards the crane, up the ladder to the sky-pod.
His capsule wobbles when he shifts in his seat. If the tip-off was correct, he is directly above the confrontation zone where protesters and police are due to clash. At the back of his mind lurks a reprimand: he should not be here. He feels like a trespasser; no, suspended in this transparent capsule, he feels like a piece of bait dangling on a hook. Down below, the riot squad is lined up in neat rows behind the barricades, floodlights winking off their helmets. A group of soldiers dressed in khaki are guiding the squat body of the air cannon forward. It is an ugly thing, some obscene bug from a war zone, its barrel poking over the barricade like a proboscis. It swivels back and forth, shaking its head ‘no’, then falls still, facing the empty street.
When the wail of the siren first cuts the night air, he feels his throat close up. That sound signals a civil emergency; it means things are already going very wrong. He tries messaging control to shut it off, but there is no response: control has fallen silent. The last thing he heard was that the protesters were on their way, close to four hundred of them, armed with Molotovs and baseball bats. They’d already smashed shop windows and set a police car alight with the occupants inside.
Check the controls, he thinks. Stay calm. But he’s been checking and re-checking them for half an hour. The floodlights rule out any chance of softening the scene with visuals. He’s infused the squadron below with a scent that focuses concentration, but there isn’t much else he can do for now, and the cops are not the ones he has been told to tune. All he can do is wait. What his nerves are urging him to do is slip back down the ladder, edge through the police lines, and vanish into the backstreets. But there are AirDrones hovering at the edge of his vision, and his gut tells him the hatch at the bottom of the ladder is locked. He can see a line of security guards down there, facing outward, blocking access to the sky-pod. Or blocking his way out. Trapped like a bug.
Milk shuts his eyes and concentrates on breathing, tries to slow his heart. Tries to be there but not there, folding his awareness inward, seeking out a corner of himself; a place to withdraw to, where he cannot be found. It doesn’t last long: a minute at most, perhaps just a few seconds. Not long enough.
He hears the crowd before he sees it, the noise welling up over the howl of the siren: a ragged chant, an ugly call and response with an undertone that sounds more machine than human. The mob boils into view and dread shoots through him, the taste of metal in his mouth. A solid jam of bodies clad in black, anonymous, uncountable; a mass ruled by its own momentum, sprawling forward in waves that keep on coming.
Milk sits there frozen and watches disaster roll towards him. For a moment he cannot move, can barely breathe, just wants to disappear. But that isn’t an option: only a coward would sit there and do nothing. He hones in on the front line of the crowd and sends out a low pulse of soothing sound, a tranquillising ripple just below the threshold of awareness, but the chaos of the mob does not change. He dials it up a few decibels, praying for a shift in mood, but the herd keeps coming. He hits them with an olfactory sedative, Purple Haze, a heavy calming scent that has never failed him once, but this time it has no effect. There is a slight breeze too, and the aroma is drifting back into the squadron of cops and soldiers down below.
The siren, still blaring out its note of panic, rings through the mass of bodies like a command to charge. They keep surging forward. Those near the front are screaming abuse at the cops, who stand motionless in lines behind their riot shields. Milk’s breathing is shallow and quick with fright. There is no art in this situation. There is nothing he can do. His hands flap over the controls and land on the scent-box coordinates. Load up the one thing he hasn’t tried yet: the hope variant. He turns a dial and sends it flooding into the melee below.
The rioters have almost reached the barricade when someone hurls the first petrol bomb. It sails above the black-clad mass, over the barricade, and lands squarely on a cop, glancing off his plastic shield. The glass does not break but within seconds the riot squad has turned the air cannon on the crowd. Bodies are mown down like weeds, toppled by the blast of air from the swinging barrel. Bodies fall on bodies, a human pile-up, a mess of twisted torsos and feebly thrashing limbs. Milk can hear the screaming from up here.
The second Molotov is hurled from somewhere near the crowd’s far edge. It sails in a high arc, smashes down on the bitumen directly beneath Milk, and bursts neatly into flames. With a motion that is almost elegant, the cannon swings around and blasts out a throatful of air.
Like a flower unfurling on sped-up film, the fireball gathers and blooms into the night sky.
[South-west Commerce Zone/Interzone: TALLY | multiple unidentified citizens]
Tally had been in the department store far too long, she knew that, but it was like she’d fallen into some kind of trance. It was another world in here, a peaceful dimension where time hung suspended in a glaze of calm lighting and beautiful smells. This was her second stink-bomb job, but she almost didn’t want to smash the putrid capsule and wreck the whole thing, so she was putting it off. Slowly she wandered from floor to floor, gazing at the perfect piles of scented soap, the mirrored picture frames and silk dresses, the feathered hats and walls of pastel-hued cosmetics.
It was easier to be in here, she thought, than out in the streets facing up to her growing sense of hopelessness, or sitting back in their room staring at a blank page in her notebook. My room, she corrected herself, it’s just my room now, and felt her throat closing up like she was going to cry. She swallowed hard and stared at a display of sequinned handbags until the feeling passed. She must not be afraid: if she started to let herself be afraid now there was no telling where it would end. Catching her reflection in a mirror she gave herself a stern glare. She looked different, she noted again: taller, older, hair gone long and curly. Softer in the face but something hard about the eyes — she looked like some other girl, no longer a frightened kid. That’s how it looked from the outside, anyway.
On the way here, she’d walked past the electronics shop with all the TVs and paused to watch the screens for a moment: planes landing on tarmac, convoys of cars with dark windows, men shaking hands and flashbulbs popping, police lined up in rows. Some sort of politics thing, she guessed. The Chinese man behind the counter had glanced up at her once without interest, then went back to his paperwork. Not so dirty now, she thought, scowling at his profile.
She joined a group of women gathered around a display stand that was giving out free hand-cream samples. She’d wait a while before she dropped the stink bomb. It couldn’t hurt to stay in here a bit longer.
Tally had only just escaped the store when she heard the siren well up and fill the city. The blare of it gave her a fright — she’d suspected a security guard in the perfume section had been following her — but she fought the urge to run. Moz said running only raised suspicions: if you made it safely out of the shop, the guards weren’t allowed to grab you. Her stink bomb had caused a mass exodus anyway, propelling the late-night shoppers outside, faces screwed up in disgust. She’d made sure her own expression echoed theirs: it wasn’t hard, the stuff really stunk, like the smell of rotting meat.
But out here there were police everywhere. It made her jumpy, seeing their uniforms and yellow safety vests, the way they patrolled around in groups of four, their tank-like cars with the lights on top. Don’t freak out, she told herself. They’re not looking for you. It had just been a little stink bo
mb, no big deal: nothing to get paranoid about.
Then she saw the paddy wagon. Some cops were shoving a scruffy guy inside, his wrists cuffed tight behind his back. Beyond him, in the vehicle’s dim interior, she could see other shapes, an arm and a leg, someone crouched on the floor. They must be doing a sweep, picking up undocs. This was bad: she had to get out of the Commerce Zone. Keep your head down, Blue had always told her. Don’t make eye contact with cops, just keep walking. She stared at her feet then remembered: she was wearing a posh school uniform, complete with stupid hat. Surely they wouldn’t pick her up, not dressed like this.
The cop was on her before she’d even seen him. Tally held her breath as she looked into his face; he was saying something to her, waving his arms about like he was doing breaststroke. ‘Go back,’ he was shouting over the blare of the siren. ‘You can’t get through this way. There’s been a situation up there, the city’s cordoned off.’
She looked around. Everywhere cops were directing people away from the city centre, moving the crowds back towards the west. She turned and joined the stream of grumbling commuters with their shopping bags and expensive haircuts, half of them talking on their phones.
‘They’ve checkpointed the west tunnel,’ a woman said crossly, phone stuck to her ear. ‘It’ll take forever to get through.’
Tally jammed her school hat down tight and slunk along, trying to blend in with the crowd.
‘Let’s try the station,’ said an old man to his wife. ‘Surely they won’t stop the trains.’ They seemed annoyed rather than frightened, these people, but then they had no reason to be afraid. They were legit.
She let the crowd carry her along until they were slowed by a bottleneck. A huge queue stretched outside the train station: the cops were checking IDs. She stopped still, watching the obediently shuffling lines of people, the blinking lights of the scanners.
They were closing off all the exits from the city. Her disguise couldn’t help her now. The siren was still sending out its slow panicked wail, with smaller sirens swooping dizzily through it, and an acrid smell hung in the air; she couldn’t think straight. On the edges of the crowd, Tally spied uncertain figures drifting here and there: a young guy dressed in black, his eyes darting around; two kids in baseball caps, conferring with each other nervously; a young woman hugging one arm to her chest, like she was injured. Undocs, like her, no doubt wondering the same thing she was: how to get through to the Quarter without being caught by the cops.
There was only one option, Tally knew. She thought of that long dank blackness, like an echo chamber, a concrete trap that magnified the tiniest sound. She had never walked through there alone; it was dangerous down there, but now she didn’t have a choice. She turned away from the crowd and set off for the old tunnel.
But the cops were all over the Interzone too, patrolling in groups, stopping people to check IDs; another paddy wagon was parked at the kerb, and a kid about her age was being marched towards it, the cop’s hand clamped tight around his skinny arm. Tally began to run. The stench of smoke filled the night, and she ran past a burning rubbish bin, past a woman slumped at a bus stop holding her stomach, past a group of cops who had a guy pinned to the ground face down.
Tally was flying along now, weaving and swerving, zigzagging around the trouble spots, the two-hundred-metre sprint champion of at least four schools. She would not stop to help anyone; she didn’t care about other people anymore — they were not her problem. She would look after one person, and one person only. She ran past them all: an old woman struggling along, bent almost double with age; a scared-looking kid with fresh welts all down one side of his face; a dark-haired young woman in a torn green dress, limping along barefoot. None of them mattered to her: just look after number one.
And as she ran, over the squall of the sirens, over the clamour of the whole place going to pieces around her, Tally heard a voice — frightened but clear, a girl’s voice that brought a sweet, sharp stab of recognition — carry through the smoke.
‘Hey!’ it called out after her. ‘Hey, wait! Do you know how to get out of here?’
Acknowledgements
Writing a book can be a lonesome undertaking, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and this one made it onto the shelves with the help of many people. Thanks are due to Marion May Campbell for being a brilliant supervisor and inspiring author; to my editor Aviva Tuffield at Scribe for her early interest and superb manuscript-polishing skills; and to my agent Clare Forster at Curtis Brown for her faith, warmth and backing. Thanks also to the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne, for awarding the manuscript the 2007 D.J. (Dinny) O’Hearn Memorial Prize; to Scribe and the Copyright Agency Limited for shortlisting it for the 2010 CAL Scribe Fiction Prize; and to Cate Kennedy, Sophie Cunningham, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Tom Cho, Crusader Hillis, Mark Rubbo and Kerryn Goldsworthy for behind-the-scenes encouragement on these two fronts. I’d also like to thank Associate Professor Robyn Ferrell, and my fellow students at the University of Melbourne, for feedback on drafts; the very patient Marc Martin for the gorgeous cover; Ian ‘Eagle Eye’ See for his detailed and thoughtful proofreading; and Amanda Soogun for her fine photographic talents. I’m very grateful to James Bradley, Catherine O’Flynn and Chris Womersley for reading the manuscript and offering their kind and generous words of endorsement. And, finally, a big thank you to my fantastic family and friends for their ongoing encouragement, creativity and support; to my sweet cat Ollie for keeping me company at my desk all those years; and, last but not least, to Andi Pekarek, for finally arriving.
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