The Strange

by Masha du Toit

  “It might,” said Elke. “The clerk will show you where to start. Here, we’re taking these stairs.”

  “We’re going up to Zero level?” said Isabeau hopefully.

  “Higher,” Elke said, starting up the stair. “Gardens. Oh, Noor, I forgot to ask. When’s Crosshatch coming?”

  “Into the Eye?” Noor pressed herself against the rails to let a group of glim-clerks pass. “I don’t know. Why?”

  “He needs to make another statement for the trial.”

  Talking about the trial reminded Elke that she hadn’t warned them that Jinan Meer was no longer in custody. No time now; it would be better to tell them over lunch, when they could discuss things properly.

  It was slow going, pushing through the morning rush on Zero level, and the children were distracted by all the sights. Elke tried to steer a route that would keep them clear of the display cases. A group of smugglers had been executed recently, and she didn’t want the kids seeing the decapitated heads in the glass boxes.

  At the display, Isabeau dodged Noor’s restraining hand and craned to see, but luckily the crowd made it impossible for her to get more than a glimpse. Still, Isabeau was noticeably subdued as they went up the stairs to Gardens and didn’t speak again until Elke showed them the door to the archives.

  “Is Jayden’s head in there?” she asked Elke. “In one of those cases?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “But it was?” Isabeau’s mouth was tight, her eyes large.

  Reluctantly, Elke nodded. “It was, yes. They do that with everyone who gets executed.”

  “Come, Issy.” Noor put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. “Let’s go look at these archives.”

  Elke suddenly wondered whether it was such a good idea, leaving them by themselves. “You guys going to be okay, alone here?”

  “We’ll be fine,” Noor said firmly. “We’ll stay right here until lunchtime.”

  “I guess I could leave Meisje with you...”

  “She’s got work to do too, doesn’t she?” Noor smiled at Elke. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure Isabeau doesn’t wander off.”

  Elke noticed that the glim-clerk had come out of the archive room, presumably attracted by all the talking. The woman nodded a greeting at Elke, and held the door open, waving the children inside.

  “I better be going, then,” said Elke. “Good luck!”

  ¤¤¤

  It was mid-morning by the time Elke heard a tap on the office door.

  “Hey there,” said Kiran. “Can you chat?”

  “Uh—” Elke was showing Tomas how to copy notes into the record files, and the two of them were crowded together at the folding table she usually shared with Wozniak.

  Wozniak was at Dolly’s desk, reading a novel. “Want me to take over?” he said, putting down the book.

  “Actually, would you?” Elke pushed her chair back carefully, as most of the floor was taken up with snoozing gardags. “Wozniak’s much better at the paperwork than I am,” she told Tomas. “Get him to explain his system to you.”

  Wozniak grinned with slow pleasure. “I’ll show you how it works,” he said to Tomas. “Took me ages to figure it out, but it’s so much less work if you do it my way.”

  “The amazing efficiency of the truly lazy,” Elke murmured to Kiran as she left the office. “Did you have any luck?”

  “I did,” said Kiran. “Hey, Meisje.”

  Meisje pushed her nose into Kiran’s hand, and they paused a moment so Kiran could pet her properly.

  “The fugados tell you anything?” Elke watched as Kiran rubbed Meisje’s flanks while the gardag leaned against her legs.

  “I showed them that photo.” Kiran dusted white hair from her trouser legs. “They wouldn’t admit to much, but they recognised her, all right.”

  “They did?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  Elke gave a low whistle. “That’s the first solid thing we’ve found. I was starting to think she never came into the Eye at all.”

  “Yeah.” Kiran picked another white gardag hair off her sleeve, avoiding Elke’s gaze. “It’s— Well. You know how it is. Got to be subtle, not come at them with a bunch of direct questions, so all I know is that they saw her, nothing more than that.”

  Elke eyed Kiran for a moment. “Something’s worrying you.”

  “Ugh.” Kiran pulled an awkward face. “I’m just not used to...”

  “Talking to the cops?” Elke looked at her intently. “Being a snitch?”

  “Yes.” Kiran smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Exactly that. I should have thought about that part of it before volunteering to do this, right?”

  “Look.” Elke paused, picking her words carefully. “I’m not going hassle the fugados, if that’s what you’re worried about. I want to know about Thandeka, that’s all. If I thought the fugados had— I don’t know, harmed somebody, or were up to something, that would be different. But I don’t.”

  “Good. Because they’re not up to anything.” Kiran’s gaze challenged her. “And I don’t blame them for being cagey. They have good reason not to trust any of us, you know.”

  “I know.”

  Kiran looked at Elke searchingly then gave a little nod. “They’re terrified that they’ll be blamed for Kipper’s death,” she said. “That was all they wanted to talk about. Seems that there’s been a lot of stuff being pinned on them, and now this—” Kiran shrugged. “I can understand it.”

  “You mean the cafeteria thefts?”

  “Yes. And all those tools going missing on Works level. You know about that, right?”

  Elke nodded. There had been an uptick in the amount of petty thieving lately. “Are people blaming the fugados?”

  “Not yet,” said Kiran. “But the fugados are sure it’s just a matter of time before we start hounding them again. And here’s the thing they’re really freaked out about. They think Kipper was murdered, and that the real murderer will get away because they’ll be blamed. They say he’s hiding somewhere in the Eye, just waiting to strike again.”

  “Not really?”

  “Really.” Kiran’s expression had not a trace of humour. “Some of them are even saying it’s a ghost.” She shook her head to forestall Elke’s next question. “No, they’ve not actually seen anything. It’s all just suspicions. People hearing noises. A ghost moving about in the pipes at night.”

  “Ugh.” Elke grimaced. “That’s kind of creepy.”

  “Isn’t it? Kiran smiled grimly. “I’m not looking forward to working the night shift, I tell you that for free.”

  “Well then.” Elke made as if to move on, but Kiran touched her sleeve.

  “That’s not all. I poked about a bit. Asked whether people ever hide in Works, or in Long Storage. The group of fugados I spoke to didn’t want to commit to anything about Thandeka specifically, but I’m picking up that it’s not unusual for people to camp out down there for a while, if they want to stay out of sight. Might be worth looking around some of those older cans, see what you can find. Makes me think, too. You know those remains we found in the incinerator? You don’t think that maybe, that might have been—”

  But Elke was already shaking her head. “You think that might be Thandeka? I thought of that, of course, but I’m pretty sure not. They clean that incinerator out once a week. It would be a pretty big coincidence that Kipper would go missing, and then we find his badges in there with somebody else’s body.”

  “That’s true,” said Kiran. “I hope you’re right, and I hope none of the kids make that connection. But you don’t think it would be worth doing another search, see if you can find traces of somebody hiding down there?”

  “We’ve already done that.” Elke nodded at Meisje. “She’s pretty good at tracking down that kind of thing. We found some camp sites, an empty can in Long Storage, for example. But we don’t have Thandeka’s scent so we don’t know if it was her.”

  “Those kids don’t have anything that belongs to their mom? For th
e scent?”

  “More than a year after she left them?” Elke shook her head. “I asked them. They had some of her clothes, but they’ve been worn and washed too many times to have any scent left. Anyway, we’ve not found any fresh traces of a woman of her age anywhere. If she was hiding down there, she’s long gone by now.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said Kiran. “But not while the kids are listening. You don’t think she could have gotten mixed up with the Gute Fee?”

  Elke looked at her blankly.

  “You know.” Kiran looked deeply uncomfortable. “The slavers?”

  ¤¤¤

  When Elke said that she was taking them to the place where all the records in the Eye were stored, Isabeau had pictured an enormous hall, something like the old-time libraries she’d read about and seen in pictures.

  Of course, she realised now, there wouldn’t be space for something like that in the Eye.

  Instead, the archives were housed in a room as narrow as a corridor, its entire length lined with the drawer units that could be rotated up, down, left or right to bring yet more drawers into view. The place must house thousands upon thousands of records.

  At first Isabeau had been just as charmed by the cleverness of this system as Ndlela was. The glim-clerk had demonstrated how each record could be retrieved quickly and efficiently by shunting a drawer out of the way so that another could move into its place.

  They’d used the date of their mother had left home as a starting point, all three of them crowding around as Noor paged through the thin, semi-translucent record leaves. Each leaf had a photo in smudgy black ink, as well as a lot of text arranged in narrow columns of strangeside-script.

  They couldn’t read the script, but that didn’t matter—all they needed was to identify Thandeka’s photograph. But Isabeau’s heart sank as Noor worked her way through drawer after drawer with no result.

  For a while, Ndlela managed to divert Isabeau by explaining how to read the strangeside numbering system used for the file-numbers and dates. It wasn’t that difficult, once you memorised the spiky little signs and remembered that they went up and down, and not left to right.

  But Isabeau soon lost interest in that, too. She wandered the room, opening random drawers. At first the glim-clerk hovered anxiously but when she saw that Isabeau was not rearranging anything, she retreated to her desk again.

  The drawers made a satisfying clicking purr as Isabeau drew them out and slotted into place with a solid clunk. She practised her newly acquired knowledge of strangeside number by rifling through the record leaves, reading the file-numbers and dates. This was easy, because the records were filed strictly in order, one file-number following the next with soothing predictability.

  Down at the other end of the room Noor and Ndlela were still searching diligently, but Isabeau knew that they would not find anything.

  She opened another drawer and paged through the record leaves, her lips moving as she counted through the file-numbers and checked the dates. She stopped, and went back a few leaves, frowning at the spiky script.

  Was that a mistake? Her focus sharpened, she moved to the next drawer in the sequence. Again, she stopped, and frowned.

  “Hey,” she said. “That’s odd.”

  Neither Noor or Ndlela looked up from their work. Isabeau left the drawer open and went up to Ndlela.

  “Hey,” she said again. “Can I show you something?”

  Ndlela was only too glad to be distracted. “What?” He clasped his hands together and stretched them up above his head, groaning a little.

  “Come see.”

  She showed him the open drawer, and paged through the records, glancing back at him to see if he reacted.

  “What do you want me to see?” Ndlela blinked at the milky-white record leaves.

  “Look at the file numbers,” Isabeau said impatiently. “There’s one missing. See? And here as well.” She quickly went over to another drawer and slid it open. “Here. See?”

  Ndlela’s eyes widened. “Huh.” He went back to the first drawer again. “You’re right.”

  By now, their activity had drawn the attention of the glim-clerk. She edged out from behind her desk and came towards them, a tiny figure hardly bigger than Isabeau. “Is there a problem?” she said in her fluting voice.

  “Could there be records missing?” said Ndlela. “There are some numbers out of sequence.”

  The glim-clerk’s small face bunched, perplexed. “Only if booked out. And none from that section have been—” She peered into the drawer, flipping the records back and forth with expert fingers. “Hmm. Hm. Hmmmm.” Her mouth pursed and her face tightened even more. “Correct. You are correct. One missing here.”

  “This one as well,” Isabeau said, pulling out the other drawer. “Look.”

  The glim-clerk hummed with irritation as she studied the records. She stomped back to her desk and opened a ledger.

  By now, Noor had noticed that something was going on, and all three children converged on the glim-clerk’s desk.

  “Not booked out,” said the clerk, closing the ledger with a thump. She stared for a moment, eyes unfocused, frowning more than ever. “Hmm.”

  “What’s going on?” Noor said softly.

  “Looks like there are some records missing,” Ndlela explained.

  The glim-clerk focused on him. “There can be no missing!” she said sternly, and then with a touch of uncertainty, “Should be here. Should be.”

  She bustled back to the drawers and studied the records again, muttering to herself. When she’d checked and rechecked, she slid the drawer slowly closed.

  “Few people look at these ones,” she said. “This record here all for temporary worker.” She opened another drawer, rifling through the leaves. She reached the end, shoved the drawer shut, pulled another one open. That one also yielded no results, but halfway down the next one she straightened up with a “Hah!”

  “Another one?” Ndlela had moved up beside her.

  “Huh,” she grunted, working her narrow jaw as if chewing at something. “Hmm. Yes. This will I have to study.”

  ¤¤¤

  “Records missing?” Elke asked Noor. “You’re sure?”

  They were back in Zyta’s restaurant, which was not quite as chaotic as before. Most of the boxes and paint tins were gone, and the air was tinged with the sour scent of fresh paint. Elke, Kiran, Noor and Diesel were seated around one of the many small but graceful tables that now filled the space.

  Tomas and Danger were still at work in the office, and Mack Jack had taken Isabeau and Ndlela to look at the Strangeside viewport. This had been arranged by Diesel, when she realised what Elke and Kiran wanted to discuss.

  “Those records are definitely missing,” Noor said. “The clerk is working through them now. She says it might only be that they’ve been misfiled, but so far she hasn’t found any.”

  Elke and Kiran looked at one another.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Elke said. “If what you’re guessing is right, Kiran.”

  “You found something?” Noor asked Kiran. “You spoke to those people? The fugados? What did they say?”

  “I did,” said Kiran. “I showed them your mom’s picture. They recognised her.”

  Noor took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So, she did come to the Eye.”

  “We think so,” said Elke. “And we’re pretty sure she was hiding down in Works level for a while. But she’s not there now. The fugados say she isn’t, and I did another thorough sweep with Meisje and found nothing.”

  “But the fugados might be protecting her, mightn’t they?” Noor looked from face to face. “Hiding her? Maybe they’re just not telling you?”

  “I doubt it,” said Kiran. “It’s not that easy to keep somebody out of sight for that long.”

  “And,” Diesel interjected, “from what you’ve told me about your mother I doubt that she’d be just hiding out on Works level for more than a year when anyth
ing might be happening to you guys. She’d be trying to get back, wouldn’t she?”

  “That’s true.” Noor clenched and unclenched her hands. “But where is she, then?”

  “We have an idea about that.” Elke hesitated. “Noor, listen, we’re not sure about this. But with these missing records...” She looked at Kiran. “Maybe you better tell Noor what you told me.”

  “Sure.” Kiran looked steadily at Noor. “Have you heard about the Gute Fee?”

  Noor shook her head.

  “The collectionistas, maybe?”

  “The slavers?” Noor’s voice was sharp with surprise. “Sure. But what...” She frowned. “You think—No way. The collectionistas ship people to Rus and Cathay. That’s what I’ve heard. If they were snatching people in the Eye, how would they get them back out through the realside gate?”

  The three adults did not respond, and Noor’s eyes grew wide. “You don’t mean”—she stared from face to face—“ They might be— They send people through into the Strange?”

  “Inter-world slave-trade,” Elke said. “I have heard rumours. I thought it was just that. Rumours, based on nothing, but Kiran tells me that I’m wrong.”

  “You are, “Diesel said quietly. “The collectionistas are just one of the many branches of the Gute Fee”—she inclined her head towards Kiran—“ as Kiran calls them. A very old institution. You know, of course, that the Real is not the only world connected to the Strange, and that there isn’t just one Strange world?”

  Noor gave a tiny nod.

  “There are many worlds,” continued Diesel, “and we—Strangers, to use your term—have been interacting with these other worlds for a long time.” Diesel ran her fingers along the swirled pattern stamped into the table top. “There has always been a slave trade between the worlds. It’s a source of cheap labour. It’s also a convenient way to get rid of dissidents or refugees, shipping them off-world.

  “Of course, no sentient beings from the Real have been allowed into the Strange for decades now, not even as slaves. If this is happening, it’s deep under cover. The consequences for being caught transporting realworld sentients into the Strange are harsh. Death, not only for the people caught, but for anyone in charge of them as well.”