‘Will you give me some privacy?’
‘You mean, get out of my own car in the rain?’
‘Yup. You can wait for me inside if you want.’
He stared at her, saw that she wasn’t joking, fiddling impatiently with the strap of her satchel, some spooking in mind that didn’t involve him. How had he let this dynamic emerge? Ah, well, he hadn’t brought her here for a fight – the opposite. He opened the door and got out, accidentally on purpose nudging his rear-view mirror as he reached back for his jacket. ‘O–kay, I’ll just be…’
He wandered to the far side of the next car and swivelled its side mirror so that it lined up with his rear-view. Craning, he could just about see a third of what Lucie Sterling was up to in his car.
Lucie had opened the satchel and drawn out an electronic tablet, a gleaming, sleek little device that was a couple of generations on from the ones Vidal had known before the Turn. It glowed like a window to the universe in her hand, uplighting her face as she powered it on and started tapping commands into it. Even though she’d ordered him out of the car, she was being hazardously indiscreet by doing this in front of him – a suspect in multiple murders, no less – but he could tell she didn’t care. She wasn’t doing this for admissible evidence. She was telling the truth on that front at least: this was personal, not an official investigation. For now, and from this quarter, at least, he and Sofie were safe.
Vidal observed through the mirrors as she worked the screen: this is how she’d monitored him and Sofie yesterday. He strained to see her pan across what might be a surveillance shot of the building, a heat map, by the look of it. It caused a hollow sink in Vidal’s chest to see his building so easily violated, but as far as he could see, she wasn’t accessing any internal camera feed that might have been set in the offices; there were no eyes on the rooms upstairs. The deflector panels and interference broadcasters were aimed at keeping Egus’s prying eyes out, but if they worked against the Stanton cops too, all the better. Lucie Sterling he could handle, but a whole snoop force with access to pictures from inside his business? That would have been another proposition.
Finally, Lucie killed the screen and shoved the tablet back into her bag. She peered up at the building’s blinded back windows for a long minute before stepping out of the car.
‘What were you looking for?’ he said.
No concern that he’d seen what she was up to. ‘Checking the building, of course. That you’re not leading me into a trap. I wouldn’t want to bump into an army of your goons.’
Vidal couldn’t help laughing. Goons. ‘And what does your device say?’
‘So far, so good. Nobody inside.’
For a heavy second, neither of them made a move. But she had wanted to know the truth; it was too late for doubt.
‘So let’s go,’ she said.
He didn’t say anything as he watched her step out of the car into the brackish sea-blown mist; he knew too much about conflicting interests.
He locked the car-lot gate behind them and she made him walk ahead of her around the corner onto Ocean Street. As he unlocked the office’s front door, he noticed Lucie glancing over her shoulder at the darkened windows opposite; he knew one of her patrol officers was looking back, maybe that stolid old woman who’d been keeping the late watch, no family to go home to, just an empty flat and a lonely retirement waiting for her. Vidal in a decade or two, if he didn’t manage to keep Sofie close to him.
He turned to deadbolt the door behind him, but she told him to leave it open. He led her through the reception lobby and the waiting room.
Now that they were here, he was hesitant. This could bring a lot of shit down on him. He went behind the reception desk and turned on the kettle, spooning instant coffee into his mug. On his message spike was a yellow notelet from Tertia: Police came asking Qs. I let them in. One interested in door. Tertia’s inimitable objective brevity. ‘Can I get you something? Coffee? A cookie?’
‘No,’ Lucie said. ‘You brought me here. Just show me what you want to show me. Whatever it is, I doubt it’s going to be enough to stop me bringing the cops in.’ But was it all empty bluster? Her voice had trailed away and her face had dropped fractionally as she’d spoken. Maybe nobody in Stanton apart from her was really interested in these kids. They may have sent a half-hearted officer out to check up on him, but that was the sum of it. If they had wanted to raid his office, they would have done that already. Or maybe he was being too complacent.
He waited for the water to boil, considering whether to turn around and throw her out right now, but as she paced behind him, he realised that just as she had her personal reasons for wanting to know the truth, so he had his reasons for wanting to share it. It was why they’d decided to leave the bodies out in the open, instead of burying them in some faraway woods or weighing them down in a lake. It was why Sofie had used his car – she’d wanted them found; they’d both wanted someone to care enough to ask who they were and how they died. He wasn’t a criminal – he was only trying to help. Someone was showing an interest in what was happening to these children at last; maybe somehow he could get her onto his side. It was a gamble, but he considered himself a good judge of character. Her primary interest was the safety of the children, otherwise she wouldn’t be here.
‘All right,’ he turned, grabbing his coffee mug. He stuffed a cookie into his mouth and proffered one to Lucie, who bared her teeth at him in response.
He led her to the stairwell door and unlocked it, flicking on the low-wattage timer light as he went. She picked her way up the stairs, trailing him cautiously, and Vidal unlocked the security gate – glad the kids had remembered to keep it locked – and let her through, leading her into the corridor which looked even dingier now that he was showing a guest around.
‘It doesn’t look like—’ she started, but stopped talking when she saw the small figure of Rainbow step out of her doorway and stand with her hands folded behind her, awaiting them like a polite host.
Vidal had bought the four-storey building lock, stock and barrel for next to nothing as part of an insolvent deceased estate. After spending all his money on renovating and converting the lower floor to an office suite, which was more than big enough for his practice, he’d left the upper three floors more or less as they were, promising himself that he’d do them up when his ship came in. The old transitory tenement of one-room flats with a shared bathroom, utility room and kitchen on each level had frozen where they’d died with old Robert Marx. The years had slipped by frighteningly fast before he’d had to come up here again, a thin layer of dust had settled on every stripped, knobbled and stained mattress and every creaking floorboard; lightbulbs had yellowed, window latches had seized with salt rust, and insects had started eating the walls from behind the wallpaper. He’d done his best to make the place habitable with his severely limited budget. Got a deep-cleaning company in – a client’s payment in lieu – bought in a batch of flatpack beds and cheap and cheerful bedding with prints of football pitches, hot-air balloons and dolphins. Even so, he’d had no money or time to repaint or make it more homely than that. Kids shouldn’t feel at home in a place like this, but Rainbow was; she seemed to glow softly in the dusky space, and gently, carefully, allowed the stagnant air to start circulating again.
Lucie stared at the girl: her clean black hair tied with glittery elastics into pigtails that hung over her new purple hoodie and neat-pressed jeans. The toenails on her bare feet were painted with a fresh coat of sparkling strawberry-pink polish. Behind her, the austere room – just a bed, office desk and chair – was washed by two bedside lamps in a warm yellow that spilled out into the subterranean gloom of the rest of the floor. Unlike the rest of them, Rainbow liked the light. Hers was the only window on this backside of the building that they’d blanked with curtains rather than a plywood board.
‘This is Rainbow,’ Vidal said. ‘She’s why we’re not giving up.’
‘Hello,’ said Rainbow, her eyes not settling on Lucie�
��s face.
‘How is she not showing up on the imager?’ she asked Vidal. ‘Are there other children in here?’
‘We need to take this one step at a time. Say hello to Rainbow first.’
He watched her fighting her urges and organising her impressions before speaking. ‘How old are you?’ was what Lucie chose. Of all the possible questions, it was also the first one that had come to Vidal’s mouth when they’d met. Judging by her height, Rainbow might have been nine or ten, but her voice and her bearing were unsettling – there was a self-possessed confidence in them, a clarity and directness. The impression had been even more uncanny when Vidal had first picked her up. Her skin had been dry and mottled like an old woman’s; gratifyingly, it had already regained much of its elasticity, and there was warmth and colour in her cheeks.
Rainbow glanced at Vidal, and he nodded. ‘It’s okay. Lucie’s a… friend. Tell her, sweetie. It’s okay.’
‘I’m fifteen.’
‘Oh,’ Lucie said.
‘Sofie told me I don’t look like fifteen, out here. Back there I… I guess I was any age I wanted to be.’
‘Do you miss it there? Do you want to go back?’
‘No,’ Rainbow said, darting an urgent look at Vidal; and before allowing Lucie to manipulate Rainbow any more, he interrupted.
‘So you’re ready to turn them on soon?’ he said. He walked into Rainbow’s room and squatted down to check the relay servers and router hub. The small lights flashed rhythmically between orange, red and green in that cheerful, chattering way of theirs.
‘Where did you get all this equipment?’ Lucie asked. ‘What are you doing with it?’
‘You’ll see in a few minutes. It will make more sense if we show you.’
Rainbow glanced back into her room, where an alarm clock with flipping digits sat on the side table. ‘We’ll turn them back on at two o’clock, yes?’ She flinched, as if worried she was getting something wrong.
‘Yes, that’s right, sweetie. All set.’ He watched Lucie staring at the rig, tracing the bundles of cable that ran along the skirting and up and out through the corners of the room. She still hadn’t worked it out; she thought they were talking about the routers. ‘You’re doing a great job.’
Rainbow’s eyes darted downward over her shy smile, then she went back to her breakfast – late-night snack, whatever it was; the girl was eating a lot to make up for lost years, and it was doing her good, but with her teeth and gums as messed up as they were, she still wasn’t managing anything solid.
‘We’ll leave you in peace,’ Vidal said to her.
As they turned to leave, Rainbow shucked off her hoodie and threw it onto the bed. Lucie stopped and asked, ‘Where did you get that T-shirt?’
Rainbow frowned. ‘My mother made it for me. She makes things.’
Vidal hadn’t really taken note of it before; he’d just assumed it was something Sofie had bought, a cool and arty sort of shirt any teen might wear. But now that he paid attention, it was more worn than the new supermarket sets, fraying a little around the neck, and it looked handcrafted. There was an oddly defiant-looking panda bear set on a bright cerise background, and the panda was made with a sheen of coin-sized polka dots, appliquéd tightly like fish scales or sequins.
‘Your mother’s an artist?’ Lucie said. ‘In Green Valley. She stays at the Edges?’
‘Yes,’ Rainbow said, her voice sounding very young. ‘Have you met her?’
‘I think so.’
There was a frozen moment as Vidal watched Lucie watch Rainbow staring into nowhere, and Vidal had to break it. ‘I’m just taking Lucie upstairs, then we’ll come back down and help you, okay?’
Rainbow retreated into her room and Vidal strode back towards the stairwell.
‘Stop, Vidal,’ Lucie said, and he waited for her in the thick gloom of the landing. ‘That girl, she came from Green Valley. Tell me: are there others here?’ There was a malicious focus in her face, and Vidal could tell she was ready to gut him if she scented a lie.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I’m taking you to them.’
Lucie shoved past him and hurried up the stairs. When she reached the heavy metal security gate locked across the top landing, she rattled at it. ‘Open this gate, right now.’
‘Wait,’ he said softly, coming up behind her with a slow gesture of his hands. ‘You need to stay calm. You cannot go barging and banging around them. I’m taking you in, that’s the plan, but you have to promise to be calm. Okay?’
Lucie took a deep breath in, and he could see her face blooming in the low light, the anxious twist of her body, but she was trying to contain herself, gripping her messenger bag to her front like a shield, or a weapon. ‘I scanned the building,’ she murmured. ‘There are no heat signatures, no sign of inhabitants up here.’ She paused. ‘Not even the girl downstairs.’
‘That’s because I’m protecting them.’ He unlocked the door and led Lucie down to the far end. He’d been up here so often that he’d become used to it, but as Lucie recoiled and choked as the soupy hone of the place got richer, he remembered that it wasn’t exactly the freshest. ‘Don’t blame us,’ he said, leading her along the corridor. ‘They don’t let us open the windows. They don’t like fresh air. You’ll see.’
‘Why’s it so dark?’ The pale orange glow of the safe lights was swallowed by the far heavier darkness.
‘They don’t like light, either.’ He turned on the small flashlight that hung on his keychain and continued to gabble. The truth was, these conditions gave him the fucking heebie-jeebies too. ‘Well, it’s not so much they don’t like it than they’re not used to it. It frightens them. We’re trying to acclimatise them to living normally: a bit of air, a bit of light, clean clothes, trying to get them to wash, but it’s slow. It’s hard. Harder than we imagined.’
Lucie started walking along the corridor, following the narrow trail his penlight was picking out of the gloom. ‘How many are there?’
‘There are thirteen left. We run a small local network of The I here for the kids. They’d die from withdrawal without it. It’s a slow process, so we’re starting by teaching them to sleep without the signal for short bursts. That’s why Rainbow’s watching the time carefully. She’s the only key we have to helping them.’
Lucie just shook her head. ‘Show me. I want to see all of them.’
There was, finally, nothing more to do or say. Vidal knew that however much he could explain, this was still a goddamn horror show. Nothing would prepare her, just as he could never prepare himself every time he looked in on the children. This was why it was so important that Lucie Sterling understood that he was saving these children, and why she must not get in his way. There must be no threat that they’d ever be hauled back to Green Valley.
He showed her into the rooms, one by one, two kids on single beds in each one, the windows blocked and boarded, the faint orange glow of the power-out strips from the corridors the only light they could bear. It made him look bad, the way they clung like abandoned puppies to some scrap of clothing they’d come out with, or a filthy toy. The new toys he’d bought them lay rejected on the floor. Lucie surprised him by going straight for the beds, squatting close down beside them and scrutinising their ruined faces as if looking to find something.
She spoke softly to them, but they just stared straight ahead with those terrifying, jammed-open eyes that never seemed to close. They never talked to him either, but sometimes, when they didn’t know he was outside, he’d hear them murmuring to each other, nothing he could recognise as language, but more like a song on a scratched record, drowned at the bottom of the ocean. A rhythmic hissing crackle from their throats that seemed to comfort them more even than the loose shrug of the rags they wore and refused to take off, or the catatonic rocking of their bodies. They were unplugged, that’s what they were: inoperable.
By the third room, the third pair, Lucie was crying and calling to someone, not to him. ‘Where are you?’ Then, when she noticed him tr
ailing her, she rounded on him. ‘They’re all dying.’ Vidal backed out of the room into the corridor as she advanced on him. ‘You don’t have any idea,’ she gritted out, speaking softly in deference for the sheer enormity of the wrongness in here, but her rage even sharper for her taut delivery. He’d bumped into the wall, but she still advanced, pushing him with the flat of her hand, as if wanting to shove him through the wall. ‘You have to send them back.’
‘No.’ It was a voice behind her, a girl’s voice, but firm, carrying a lifetime’s weight in that short syllable. Vidal looked over Lucie’s shoulder. It was the little one with the knotted hair, the one Sofie called Merida, though God knows what her real name was. This was the first time Vidal had ever heard her speak. She was awake, moving around, talking, all without being connected to the rig. That was good—
Lucie was turning towards the voice behind her, and it was only then that Vidal understood, seeing them in the same frame. This little girl and Lucie Sterling were flesh and blood.
But Lucie wasn’t listening. A sound was getting ripped out of her, not loud, not a shout, but a strangled moan.
At that moment it must have turned 2 a.m., because Vidal felt more than heard the thrum of electricity in the air as Rainbow powered the rig back up.
The little girl stiffened as she came online, the punch of overstimulation as she booted.
Lucie, tipping over, reached out for the girl, her knees buckling.
The girl gasped, her eyes opening too wide.
Lucie sprawled, her arms still reaching, not protecting herself from the floor as she fell, chest and chin and elbows crunching down into the splintered wood.
The girl rode the wave of the boot-up, breathing it out as she settled. She looked curiously at the woman writhing in pain on the floor, who was gibbering something, pointing towards the dark end of the corridor – ‘It’s here!’ – clarity emerging from the convulsive gasping – ‘Run, Kira. Run away!’ – still reaching for the little girl.
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