The Strange

by Masha du Toit

  “Shit. Yeah, sure. Let me just put some more wood in the fire. For light.”

  Once Elke had poked the fire up a bit, she took hold of Kiran’s jaw, and tilted it gently for a better view in the flickering firelight.

  “Anything?” Kiran’s voice was strained.

  Elke released Kiran’s face and sat back.

  “You better tell me.” Kiran looked at her searchingly. “They’re there, aren’t they. Those frondy things.”

  “They are. And, uh, in your gills, too.”

  “Shit.” Kiran screwed her face up into a scowl and expelled an angry breath. “Shit, shit, shit.” She took another breath and let it out through clenched teeth. “Okay. Sorry. Sorry. It’s just—” She gave an unhappy laugh.

  “I wish I could tell you different.”

  “Is it bad? Are there lots of them?”

  “No, just a little bit, really. A few strands. You only see them if you really look.”

  “Shit. Oh well.” Kiran slumped back. “I was so hoping that I’d found an answer, with the skritti. But if it’s spreading...”

  She seemed to shrink in upon herself, and Elke’s heart contracted with pity.

  “Hey.” Elke wanted to take Kiran’s hands in hers, but felt, all at once, too shy. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault.” Kiran reached for the bisc paper. “You had enough to eat? Some left in here.”

  “Let’s leave some for tomorrow morning. It was a bit rough doing the whole day on an empty stomach.”

  “Good idea.”

  Kiran took Elke’s hand, and drew her arm around herself, fitting her head into Elke’s shoulder. Elke was so surprised that she held her breath.

  “Tell me something.” Kiran’s lips tickled Elke’s neck.

  Elke cleared her throat. “Like uh— What?”

  “Oh...” Kiran’s voice was sleepy. “Anything. Tell me how you got to be a gardag trainer.”

  Bemused, Elke frowned into the dark. “Well. Okay.”

  When she stayed silent, Kiran butted her gently. “Go on.”

  Elke laughed a little. “What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. Did you have to go to a training school?”

  “You know I was in reform school, right?” Elke tried to see Kiran’s face, but the fire had died down too far. “After I stopped running with the Rent. Back in pre-history, when I was a teen...”

  The words came hesitantly at first, but Kiran made a good audience. She didn’t say much, just shook with laughter or made small sounds of sympathy in all the right places. Soon Elke was talking confidently.

  The noise from the courtyard below had died down, and the night sounds swelled to take their place. The roar of the sea, and closer too, the silk-soft pattering of the moths crowding around the sodium-lights.

  Elke talked until she ran out of words. Kiran was asleep, or seemed so, from the weight of her head and the gentle rhythm of her breath.

  Elke drowsed, and dreamed that Meisje was curled up against her, so that she was sandwiched between Kiran and the gardag. In the dream, Meisje was dreaming, too, whimpering and twitching. Elke put out a hand to soothe the gardag and found only emptiness beside her.

  She came fully awake.

  All the thoughts she’d been trying to suppress came flooding over her. The images of Meisje lost, or hurt, bewildered at being abandoned once again. What was happening to her? What would she make of Elke’s disappearance?

  A sound came drifting from the dark levels above—the lonely wail of a trombone, an uncanny echo of Elke’s mood.

  Kiran stirred. “It’s that record player again.” Her voice was sleepy.

  A steady drumbeat joined the trombone, and the walking tromp of an upright bass.

  Elke could sense Kiran’s smile even in the dark.

  “Hey.” Kiran laughed softly and drew away from Elke. “I think I know this one too.”

  She rocked gently in time to the beat. Softly at first, and then more confidently, she began to sing. Wordlessly, this time, an improvised counterpoint to the trombone.

  Kiran’s voice, rich and strong, rose into the night to join the recorded melody.

  When the music finally ended, Kiran waited a few beats, and then sang the last verse into the night.

  What did I do,

  What could I say.

  You changed,

  And then you went away.

  Kiran stood, as if waiting for the next song to start, but the silence stretched out all around. At last she sighed.

  “Well. Good night, then, Elke.”

  Elke could not make out Kiran’s expression in the dark.

  “Good night,” she said, as Kiran made her way across the roof of the can-stack to the hatch. “Good night.”

  Thandeka

  Noor stared at the ceiling, wishing she could sleep. Nothing made sense.

  She’d expected to die, or worse, and yet here she still was, dressed in a shift, shivering on a narrow cot in a tiny but exceptionally clean cell.

  They had been going to kill her.

  It hadn’t taken much to join the dots. All that talk of “sorting”, the way the overseers had separated them into groups, with mature, competent people like Elke and Kiran going in one direction, and the rest, too old, too young, or too inconvenient herded away to be inspected as if they were cattle.

  The medical-looking containers with icons showing various body parts.

  The casual way Jinan and Samuel had been murdered.

  Murdered. Killed. Executed.

  None of those words really fit. They’d just been...switched off. Stopped. Disposed of.

  Noor prodded the memory as if it were a bruise, but the expected pain did not well up. She felt numb.

  And, in the middle of all that bland horror, she’d found her mother.

  Thandeka.

  Inspecting the slaves who were about to be—what? Dismantled for parts?

  And then I must have fainted.

  Noor rolled onto her side. She’d regained consciousness in this white, clean, antiseptic little room. Her ankle felt odd—not numb, exactly, but not as painful as it usually was.

  When she drew aside the sheet to look at it, she found that there were lines drawn all the way from her knee and curving across her calf. Thin, silvery lines that wouldn’t come off when she rubbed them.

  A rattling in the corridor outside caught her attention. Something was approaching. Noor tried to sit up, but found she was too weak. A shadow fell across the bars of the gate.

  Her mother, pushing a trolley.

  Noor drew breath to say she knew not what, but Thandeka widened her eyes and put a finger to her lips.

  “Keep your voice down.” She unlocked the gate. “We can talk, but there are people next door.” She backed into the room, pulling the trolley after her, and locked the gate again.

  Noor’s surprise gave her strength. She sat up, the wall chilly against her back. “What happened to your hair?” It wasn’t what she’d meant to say, but she didn’t know what she’d meant to say.

  Thandeka touched her close-cropped head. “They shaved it for me.” She spoke with her usual dry humour. “Convenient, really. Makes my morning routine a whole lot more efficient.”

  “Mom!” Noor didn’t know whether to be shocked or to laugh, but all at once she was in her mother’s arms, and she was crying.

  “Oh, my girl. My girl.” Thandeka hugged her daughter fiercely, holding her so tight Noor had trouble breathing.

  She drew back to study Noor. “When I saw you there in the slaughter-queue, I thought I would die, Noor. How did you get here?”

  Noor studied her mother. She’s thinner. And she looks older.

  Thandeka had lived in her memory as a large woman, but in reality, she was shorter than Noor, and delicately built. Her beaded hair was gone, and Noor had never seen her in anything as plain as this green tunic, but otherwise she seemed unchanged. Her hands, as she stroked Noor’s hair away from her face, were
as strong and gentle as ever.

  “We came looking for you.” Noor struggled to breathe between the sobs that still shook her.

  Thandeka’s eyes widened. “We? You don’t mean— Ndlela— Issy?”

  “No!” Noor tried to wipe her face on a corner of the sheet that barely covered her. “Not them. Other people. Friends of mine.”

  “Here.” Thandeka pulled a handful of paper towels from the trolley. “Issy and Ndlela are safe, then? You’re sure?”

  “As far as I know.” Noor drew a shuddering breath. “They’re on the Babylon Eye.”

  Thandeka gave a grunt of surprise. “The Eye? How? And how did you know to come here? Actually— Why did you come here?”

  Noor mopped the worst of the tears off her face and blew her nose. “Oh, damn,” she said thickly. “I don’t know where to start. And”—she shot her mother a look—“ I could ask you the same thing. How did you end up here? And what the hell are these lines on my leg?”

  “I organised to get that ankle of yours fixed.” Thandeka was bent over the trolley, so Noor could not see her face. “Called in a few favours.”

  Noor was momentarily speechless. “They’ve—” She stared down at her ankle.

  “They haven’t done anything yet, beyond some muscle relaxants. Those lines are just from them doing measurements.” Thandeka pulled a drawer from the trolley, revealing a bowl, some cloths, and a row of bottles. “We have plenty of time. We can talk while I get you sorted out.”

  “Uh—” Noor became suddenly aware of something her body had been trying to tell her for quite some time. “Can I pee first? I need to in the worst way.”

  “Toilet is just here.” Thandeka indicated a sliding door next to the bed.

  Noor needed her mother’s help to get up. She was horribly dizzy and felt as weak as water.

  “You sure they just measured my leg?” she said as she grabbed Thandeka’s arm for balance. “Why do I feel this way?”

  “You fainted. And you’ve had a traumatic experience.” Thandeka opened the door to the toilet. “They gave you some shots to boost your immune system. Those might make you feel a little woozy, but it will wear off soon.”

  The toilet cubicle was spotless, but the toilet itself was just a hole in the tiled floor. When Noor was back in bed again Thandeka gave her a damp, warm cloth to wipe her face and hands.

  This nearly made Noor cry again. It had always been a ritual with Thandeka, if somebody was upset. It was surprising how comforting it was to bury your face in a steaming-hot, damp cloth, the rougher, the better.

  “So.” Thandeka pulled the sheet over Noor’s legs. “You first. Start with where Issy and Ndlela are. Are you sure they are safe?”

  “Well—” Noor tried to think how to explain. “Both of them are in the Eye. Ndlela got sick”—she spoke quickly as Thandeka stiffened with alarm—“ but he’s being cared for really well, and Issy, um, well, she’s got a gardag looking after her.”

  Thandeka’s eyebrows rose. “Maybe you better start at the beginning.” She took the cooling cloth from Noor and rinsed it out.

  The story came in fits and starts. Noor kept having to go back to explain who people were, or how the events led one to another.

  She told how she, Isabeau and Ndlela had survived on the Muara for the months after Thandeka and Jayden left. How they’d met Elke, and how Missy and her gangsters had turned their world upside down. She explained that Isabeau and Ndlela had discovered a cache of biologicals that the Stranger woman, Jinan Meer, had been planning to use to spread strangeside spores, seeds, and insects all over the Real. She told how Jayden had tried to smuggle samples of that cache, and how Elke had put an end to Jinan’s plans.

  As Noor talked, Thandeka opened another drawer on the trolley.

  “Eat,” she said, handing Noor a tray with a covered bowl. “And keep talking.”

  The food was bland, but Noor’s appetite revived as she ate.

  Noor told her mother about her new job, and how she, Isabeau and Ndlela had moved into a small, but much better house than the abandoned hotel they’d been living in till then.

  “And then Elke promised go through the records in the Eye to help us look for you.” Noor scooped the last bit of the soft green mush into her spoon and licked it up. “She got us to join her in the Eye, to see if we could find anything she missed. And we were getting somewhere, but then a disease broke out, and the Eye got quarantined.”

  Thandeka took the bowl and put it away. She opened another drawer, filled with rows of vials and bottles. Of these she chose a small vial of clear liquid and held it out to Noor.

  Noor looked at it doubtfully. “What’s that?”

  “It’ll help you recover faster. Don’t stop with the story. Wait, let me open it for you.” Thandeka snapped the top off the vial.

  Noor considered refusing to take the stuff, but her mother would never let her get away with that. She tipped the vial into her mouth and swallowed it down.

  “Ugh!”

  It was bitter enough to make her shudder.

  “What happened then?” Thandeka took the empty vial from Noor and disposed of it.

  “Oh.” Noor rubbed a hand over her face, trying to pull together all the pieces. “So much happened.”

  “Start with Ndlela. He got sick.”

  “Yes. He got a headache— Oh, Mom. I didn’t know what to do. They made me take him to this lazaretto place.” Noor looked unhappily at Thandeka. “I would have taken care of him myself—”

  “Under quarantine law?” Thandeka shook her head decisively. “You had no choice. Do they know what they were doing, in this lazaretto? They had medics?”

  “I spoke to one of the nurses.” Noor allowed herself to slump back in her bed. “He said that Ndlela was doing okay. Better than some of the older people.”

  All at once she wanted the story to be over.

  “Anyway, we figured out that there was a chance that you might have been taken by slavers. It’s— Complicated. There was this man who was supposed to know about the collectionistas. Elke and this other woman, Kiran, were going to go meet him. I kind of insisted on going along.”

  “Hmm.” Thandeka sat on the edge of the bed. “You insisted.”

  Noor shrugged unhappily. “Elke didn’t want me to go. She didn’t want to leave Issy all alone. But, well, I had to go. Elke left Meisje to look after Issy. Meisje’s the gardag I told you about. She’s saved Issy’s life more than once, on the Muara.”

  “And then?”

  Noor sighed. “We went to this club where the meeting was supposed to be. But it was a trap. We got jumped. Next thing we woke up in a train.”

  “Wearing biosuits,” Thandeka said, nodding. “Yes.”

  “And now I’m here. And that’s pretty much my whole story.”

  “Well. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.” Thandeka ran her fingers over her tight curls. “Ndlela sick with god knows what disease— Do you know what it is?”

  “Ink something. Pix, or something.”

  “Ink flu? That’s microsporidiosis.” Thandeka blinked, thinking. “That can be bad, it can be bad, but he’s young, he’s strong. Issy had no symptoms?”

  Noor shook her head.

  “I wish—” Thandeka bit back whatever she’d been going to say and sighed heavily. “I really don’t like thinking of the two of them all alone like that.” She spoke almost as if she’d forgotten Noor was there, but to Noor, it sounded like a reprimand.

  “I know! Don’t you think I know?” Thandeka frowned warningly and Noor tried to lower her voice. “I didn’t know I was going to get kidnapped by slavers! I didn’t plan to leave them at all. Anyway, we had to find you. What were we supposed to do?”

  Thandeka’s face remained neutral as she regarded her daughter. “It sounds as if you were getting on well enough, without me.”

  “We were not getting on okay at all.” Noor took a shaking breath. This was not how she’d pictured reuniting with her mother. She trie
d to regain control of her temper. “Didn’t you hear what I told you? Issy saw two men die. After they grabbed her, and nearly killed her. She’s not been the same since. She has nightmares— Ndlela hides it better, but I think he’s pretty traumatised, too. I try my best to help them, but they need you.”

  For a few seconds, Thandeka didn’t respond. A gate clanged, and voices echoed along the corridor.

  “But now you are here with me, in this place where people are slaughtered like animals.” Thandeka’s voice was gentle, and her eyes were steady on her daughter’s face.

  “And what are you doing, working for them?” The words were out before Noor could stop herself. “I saw you there, in that place...” Her voice faded as she saw her mother’s expression.

  “Is that what you think? That I help them? Work for them?”

  “What else?” Noor couldn’t look at Thandeka. She felt suddenly sick.

  “How do you think I ended up working as a medic, instead of being—” Thandeka looked away. “Well. Let’s not dwell on that. I left you because I thought I could find work in the Eye. Now that I’ve heard your story, I understand a bit more what was going on.”

  She sighed, and shook her head, remembering.

  “I didn’t know Jayden was trying to smuggle biologicals. He was always after the quick money. I should have...well. It’s too late for regrets.

  “We went in separately through that Ishtar gate, so there was nothing to link us together. By the time I heard that he’d been arrested, I was already in the Eye, and with no way of getting back.” Thandeka’s eyes were unfocused, as if she were watching her memories unfold. “I thought they would catch me, if I tried to go out the realside gate.”

  “That’s what Elke said.” Noor spoke softly. “She said that’s what probably happened.”

  “Well, she got that bit right. I hid for a while. Passed myself off as a cleaner. I was worried about you, of course I was, but I knew you’d be looking after Issy and Ndlela. I was surprised that you never returned my letters, though.”

  “Letters?” Noor frowned. “You sent us letters?”