The Cut Out

by Jack Heath

  ‘We’re on the same side, you idiot!’ Sloth roared. Perhaps he was crazy after all.

  There couldn’t be more than thirty seconds left on the timer. If Fero didn’t find somewhere to hide soon, he wouldn’t be able to defuse the bomb. He and Sloth would be vaporised.

  Another pit was coming up. He could jump down. Sloth might not see him. But it could be a hundred metres deep. He might not survive the impact, let alone be able to defuse—

  A strategy emerged in his brain. He didn’t have time to think through all the potential ramifications. But it didn’t involve dying, or surrendering and allowing Sloth to take the bomb.

  Fero dropped the backpack into the pit.

  It vanished into the darkness, the echoes from the beeping timer whittling away into nothing.

  Fero turned around to warn Sloth about what he’d done—

  And saw him sprinting away down the tunnel.

  Fero started running in the opposite direction. Even without the canisters of deadly gas, even without an apartment block overhead, this was going to be a destructive blast. The pit would spew fire like a volcano, and if he was still nearby he would be turned to ashes.

  He fled through the blackness of the subway tunnel, wondering if he should try to bury himself in the ballast.

  A ladder. A way up to the surface.

  Fero grabbed the rungs and scrambled upwards, wondering how much more time he had. His head collided with a manhole cover. He pressed his palms against it. It seemed to weigh a tonne.

  Fero pushed harder, and the iron lid slid sideways. He was about to climb out into the night air—

  When something beneath him roared and the whole world was painted white.

  Somewhere below Fero, a few volts had zipped through the prongs of a detonator. The electric shock sank into 40 kilograms of hexogen, converting the hydrogen and carbon into heat, light and motion. The backpack blew apart instantly. Every fibre spun out into nothing, leaving the surrounding rocks to absorb the blast. Some were crushed to dust, others melted, and all of them pushed outwards and upwards, rocketing up the pit towards the train tracks at more than eight thousand metres per second.

  The heat didn’t shock Fero as much as the energy, the solid wall of air, flooding up the ladder behind him and shoving him into the sky. It sounded like rushing water, like an enormous wave bearing down on him, ready to punch him into the ocean floor.

  He tumbled higher and higher, limbs weightless, head spinning. As his eyes adjusted to the brilliant whiteness, he saw the ground collapsing far beneath him, the dirt and roots and trees and park benches of the Botanic Gardens all flooding into the subway tunnel as though planet Earth was starving and had begun to eat itself.

  His ascent slowed. Soon he would plummet back down to the ground and be pulverised—

  But he had saved Kamau, so perhaps his death was a small price to pay—

  Then he crashed into something above him.

  Fero flailed his limbs, only tangling them further. He blinked and shook his head and directed his dizzy gaze to the substance in his hands.

  Bird netting.

  He was tangled in the bird netting that covered the gardens.

  The explosion had faded, leaving only moonlight. The last of the thunderclaps bounced off distant buildings and came back as echoes. Fero clung to the tough nylon strands as the ground fell away in a series of landslides far below, covering the twisted train tracks. But the giant pylons that held up the bird netting still stood firm.

  The last bomb is gone, he thought. I did it. We did it – me and Cormanenko.

  Cormanenko, who gave her life to save a million others.

  The raging wind faded to a light breeze that ruffled his clothes as Fero stared out into the shadowed gardens, relieved to be safe at last. He sucked in a lungful of the cold night air.

  How am I going to get down? he wondered.

  MISSION SUSPENDED

  He had been waiting in the bird netting for more than twenty minutes when emergency services showed up. He saw the flashing lights on the horizon before he heard the sirens screaming through the city towards the site of the explosion. As the police sedans, the fire truck and the ambulance appeared outside the locked gates of the garden, he had never felt so relieved.

  Someone else was taking charge. The safety of Kamau wasn’t his responsibility anymore.

  The police used some kind of electric boltcutter to slice through the lock, then hauled the gates aside and the fire truck roared through.

  ‘Hey!’ Fero yelled. ‘I’m up here!’

  No one seemed to hear him. The police cars and the ambulance followed the fire truck until they reached the splintered end of the road. The fire truck screeched to a halt beside the crater. A rotating cannon blasted the smoking rubble with jets of water.

  The police got out of their cars. One of them made sweeping gestures at the crater, as if the others hadn’t noticed its size.

  Fero tried again. ‘Hey!’

  The police looked up. One pointed, another touched his radio. Someone yelled something that sounded like, ‘Get down from there!’

  ‘How?’ Fero demanded.

  The fire truck had braked on the dirt beneath him. A ladder unfolded itself on the roof and extended upwards. It seemed impossible that it could reach the bird netting, but soon the top rung was almost within Fero’s reach.

  A firefighter clambered up very quickly. She never hesitated between the rungs. Her hard hat gleamed in the moonlight as she stretched a gloved hand out to Fero.

  ‘Grab my wrist,’ she said, ‘and I’ll grab yours. Don’t let go of the net with your other hand. Okay?’

  Fero nodded, and clasped her glove. Her grip was very strong.

  ‘I’ve got you,’ she said. ‘Don’t look down. Close your eyes if it helps.’

  Fero didn’t. This morning he had jumped off the roof of a high-rise in Besmar. This was nothing.

  The firefighter let go of the ladder with her other hand and held Fero’s ribs.

  ‘When you’re ready,’ she said, ‘let go of the net.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Whenever you’re ready.’

  Fero let go. A whirlwind of dizziness took over him as the firefighter slung him over her shoulder and grabbed the ladder again.

  ‘We’re going down now,’ she said.

  The rungs clunked under her boots. Fero wondered what had happened to the ladder in the subway. Had it melted? Disintegrated? Were parts of it in nearby trees?

  He wanted to believe that quick thinking had kept him alive. But he suspected it was mostly luck.

  When they reached the roof of the truck, the firefighter put Fero down and he collapsed. He was shaky. Perhaps from the adrenaline, perhaps from the height, perhaps from the explosion.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘How the heck did you get up there?’

  Fero had no idea where to begin.

  ‘That’s tier-one classified,’ he said eventually.

  The firefighter stared at him.

  ‘I wish I was joking,’ he added.

  ‘He’s all yours,’ the firefighter told the police. She helped him down from the roof of the truck.

  One of the police – a thin-lipped man with a bent nose – caught his arm. ‘Are you going to tell us what happened?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Fero said. ‘But I can’t. It’s classified.’

  The cuffs snapped around his wrists before he’d even finished talking. By now, the sensation was so familiar as to be almost comforting.

  ‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of arson,’ the police officer said. ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

  Fero supposed that he should be bitter. He was being blamed by people whose lives he had probably saved.

  But he was just glad to be alive.

  The Towzhik Police Stati
on was not quite as Fero had remembered it. The walls and floor and ceiling were the same, but the air was filled with ringing phones, and instead of taking pictures, every single police officer was speaking rapidly into a handset.

  ‘You’ve called Towzhik Police Station,’ one of them was saying. ‘Are you calling about the explosion in the Botanic Gardens? . . . Thank you, sir, we’re investigating the issue. Have a nice evening. . . . You’ve called Towzhik Police Station. Are you calling about the explosion in the Botanic Gardens?’

  ‘It’s a madhouse in here,’ said the officer who had brought Fero in. ‘Next time maybe you could blow things up where no one will see it.’

  ‘Actually, that was my intention,’ Fero replied.

  They sat on a bench, waiting for the receptionist to put down the phone so Fero could be processed.

  ‘Cuff me to the bench,’ Fero suggested. ‘Then you could help out with the calls.’

  ‘Don’t tell me how to do my job,’ the cop said.

  Fero shrugged. He was too tired to care very much what the police or anyone else thought of him. Other than a quick nap in the back of a truck, he hadn’t slept since Tuesday night, and it was now – he checked the clock on the wall – very, very early Thursday morning.

  No, wait. Friday morning. He groaned.

  Another officer walked in, clutching a mobile phone. ‘I’ve got a woman on the line,’ he said, to no one in particular, ‘who says she saw a teenage boy—’

  ‘Sergeant Hilliev,’ Fero said.

  The sergeant whirled around. ‘You! What have you done now?’

  Fero smiled. ‘That’s classified.’

  A vein bulged on Hilliev’s temple. ‘Leave him with me, detective,’ he told the officer. ‘I know someone who’ll want to talk to him.’

  ‘Dead? I don’t believe it.’

  Fero stared numbly at the map on Noelein’s desk. ‘Doesn’t matter what you believe. It’s true.’

  He had just finished telling Noelein what had happened in Melzen and the subway.

  ‘I’ve got a forensic team pulling the hospital apart,’ she said. ‘They’ve found three dead terrorists and two live ones – but not Cormanenko.’

  ‘She was holding the grenade when it went off,’ Fero said. ‘There wouldn’t be anything left to find.’

  ‘You survived,’ Noelein pointed out.

  ‘I was way over by the train. Which, by the way, Sloth was driving. Aren’t you more curious about that?’

  ‘You’re not to tell anyone about his involvement,’ Noelein said. ‘Understood?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You already knew,’ Fero said.

  Noelein tilted her head. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘When he found out about me, Sloth must have tried to get a message to Vartaniev,’ Fero said. ‘But Vartaniev didn’t figure it out until he was questioning me. Which means someone intercepted that message.’

  Noelein smiled. ‘Smart boy.’

  ‘You knew he was working for Besmar, but you let him train me anyway? You let him choose my gadgets?’

  ‘Under close supervision. If we had segregated him, he would have known that we were onto him. He would have stopped providing us with useful intelligence.’

  ‘He didn’t seem very closely supervised on that train,’ Fero said.

  ‘I apologise for that,’ Noelein said. ‘We assumed he was planning to cross the border to Besmar before the attack. We didn’t realise he was intending to participate in the bombing itself until it was already too late.’

  ‘How did he get in?’

  ‘He must have been waiting in the train tunnel when they broke through the blockage. Anyway. Don’t worry about it – he won’t get far.’

  ‘So what happens now?’ Fero asked.

  ‘Now? You go home.’

  His shoulders sagged with relief. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it. One of the Cataloguers will drop you off. You’ll need to leave your phone and your shoes with me.’

  Fero stood up and started to take off his shoes.

  ‘Infiltration, exfiltration, intelligence-gathering, bomb-defusing,’ Noelein said. ‘You made quite a Librarian, Fero Dremovich. We’ll call you if we need anything else.’

  Fero looked up sharply. ‘I thought you said I was done.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean another mission,’ Noelein said. ‘I just meant if we have any questions based on this debrief.’

  Fero nodded, but he didn’t quite believe her. As he turned to leave, the framed photos of the children on the shelf caught his eye.

  ‘If those aren’t your kids,’ he said, ‘who are they?’

  Noelein folded her hands together. ‘Very few people will ever know about the things you’ve done over the last few days. Even fewer will know it was you who did them. Don’t expect to be thanked or otherwise acknowledged by anyone. But that’s no reason to forget.’

  Fero crossed his arms over his chest, trying to work out if she had answered his question.

  Noelein looked at the photos. ‘Those are people who would be dead,’ she said, ‘if it wasn’t for the work that I do.’

  Fero took a last look at the map, the desk, the hardback books. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘See you.’

  None of the Cataloguers looked up as he walked out. He watched the hundreds of eyes on the hundreds of screens. The thousands of fingers on tens of thousands of keys.

  All this, he thought, and I was still the best plan they had.

  He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

  OUT

  The Cataloguer said nothing as she drove Fero back to the Coralsk apartments. Fero didn’t say anything either. He watched face after face appear and disappear behind the glass, women and men and children and old people, some smiling, some staring into space, all oblivious to their near-death experience. The rising sun was pulling a new day over the world like a blanket.

  How often do these things happen? he wondered. How many times have I nearly died, and been saved, and never even known about it?

  The apartment blocks appeared, enormous and solid and still standing.

  ‘We’re here,’ the Cataloguer told him.

  Fero nodded. ‘Thanks for the ride.’

  She waited for him to get out of the car. Fero heaved himself up out of the seat. It seemed to take a lot of energy. If he made it to his bed, he would sleep for days.

  As he stepped out onto the footpath, a teenage boy zoomed past on a skateboard, nearly colliding with him.

  ‘Watch it!’ the boy yelled, as he vanished into the crowd.

  Fero shut the door, and the car pulled away from the kerb.

  He slipped his key into the front door and ambled into the foyer.

  ‘Had a nice night?’ the security guard asked.

  ‘It’s getting better,’ Fero said.

  He pushed the button to call the lift. The doors opened. He stepped inside and selected the twenty-sixth floor, trying to suppress a flashback to the gas that had nearly poisoned him at Melzen Hospital. He wondered if he would have nightmares for the rest of his life.

  But if nightmares were the worst of his scars, he’d been lucky.

  The lift arrived at his floor. Fero strolled up the corridor towards his parents’ apartment, and opened the door.

  ‘Mum?’ he called. ‘Dad?’

  Silence.

  He walked through into the kitchen. The dishes were still wet on the drying rack. There was a note on the bench in his father’s handwriting: FERO! Welcome home. Gone to get breakfast. Back soon. Love you.

  He would have liked to stay up and wait for them, but he was far too tired. He turned over the paper and wrote: Wake me when you’re back. Love you too.

  He left the kitchen and was about to put his foot on the first stair, when he heard a noise.

  A creaking floorboard, muffled by the carpet. Back near the front door.

  ‘Mum?’ he called out again. ‘Is that you?’

  No answer.

  ‘Da
d?’

  Another creak. Closer this time.

  He remembered it too late.

  The question. The one he should have asked Noelein during the debrief.

  Did you catch Troy Maschenov?

  Slowly, Fero edged back into the kitchen. He opened one of the drawers under the bench and drew out a knife sharpener – a long, heavy metal rod on a handle.

  The kitchen door eased open. Fero pressed his back against the wall behind it, heart pounding.

  ‘Sorry,’ someone said.

  Not Troy Maschenov. A woman.

  ‘I just had to make sure you were alone,’ she continued. And suddenly Fero recognised the voice.

  The woman stepped into view. Fero dropped the knife sharpener.

  ‘You deserve an explanation,’ Dessa Cormanenko said. Fero’s shoes squeaked on the kitchen tiles as he backed away from Cormanenko.

  ‘You can’t be here,’ he said. ‘You’re dead!’

  ‘I hear that a lot,’ Cormanenko said.

  ‘But . . .’

  Fero thought back to the grenade. The bright flash. The smoke. The gunshots.

  ‘You told Noelein I’m dead?’ Cormanenko said. ‘That you saw me die?’

  Fero nodded dumbly.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘That shouldn’t be your question.’ Cormanenko walked into the lounge room and sank onto the couch. ‘You should be asking why.’

  ‘I know why,’ Fero said, assembling the pieces in his brain. ‘As long as she thinks you’re dead, she won’t send anyone after you. You’re free. But I still want to know how.’

  ‘That wasn’t a real grenade,’ Cormanenko said. ‘And you weren’t the only one with a flammable passport.’

  Sloth’s voice echoed through Fero’s head.

  The paper has been soaked in a cocktail of magnesium and eucalyptus oil. It’ll burn bright and loud. You’ll also get a lot of smoke, but not much heat.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, feeling foolish. ‘But what about the terrorists?’

  ‘I dealt with them,’ Cormanenko said. ‘The survivors don’t know I’m alive.’

  ‘You faked your death so perfectly,’ Fero said. ‘Why risk getting found out? Why are you here?’