I glanced one more time at the locked stage door. All this time I’d been trying to get hold of David to tell him I’d found his daughter, but it finally struck me: where David was, he couldn’t hear or help me, and they were all right – Vidal, Rainbow and her mother – Kira should never come back here. Now I knew what had become of Green Valley, and now I needed to leave this poisonous place. Vidal would show me the way out.
Vidal had ended his brief call and turned towards me, almost smirking in my direction. As I hurried towards him, his face changed and he rushed to meet me, reaching out towards the neck of my body suit where the wires dangled from the broken switch.
‘What happened to this?’ He stepped back, looking me up and down, then his face bloomed in undisguised shock. ‘Holy shit. You’ve been in here… raw?’
All I could muster was a nod as the enormity of what I’d seen in Green Valley smashed into me and choked me.
‘For how long?’
‘A while. A long time. I’ve been looking for a way out.’
‘Who did this? Why?’
But I was already heading for the auditorium’s exit, trying not to glance again at the corpses in their formal array in the seats. Someone, offline, must have chosen this theatre as a mausoleum. And why not? It was a more peaceful resting place than many. Someone had tried, at least, to honour these people in their deaths. You can’t bury the dead in a concrete floor. ‘Just take me out of here, Vidal,’ I said.
Vidal caught up with me as I pushed out of the theatre doors and was hurrying back down the carpeted corridor towards the staircase. ‘Let me try and fix this.’ He reached his arms around me, to the back of my neck, and fiddled with the shards for a moment. Then he shook his head and frowned. ‘So you’ve been seeing… everything.’ Again that querying gaze into my eyes, over my body, as if he expected me to explode or shatter into pieces.
Vidal’s shock validated my reaction. Maybe it wasn’t so shameful that I’d spent the last however long screaming and gasping in snot-clogged revulsion and terror. ‘That’s what you brought me here to see, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but I was just planning to give you a glimpse. Just a controlled look. That would have been enough.’ And when I couldn’t bring myself to say anything in response he repeated, ‘Wouldn’t it? Are you okay, Lucie?’
‘Where were you?’ I didn’t want to wheedle; I didn’t want to shout, Why did you leave me? like some pathetic adolescent. We were standing at the tarnished railing overlooking the building’s entrance lobby, which was being randomly patrolled by three little automatic floor polishers, whining like trapped wasps as they worked. ‘You just disappeared.’ The robots clunked into walls and furniture and switched direction to another random course.
‘No.’ He shook his head vehemently. ‘We discussed it. I thought you were going to go to the town square, have a coffee, whatever.’ I tried to play back the moment in the park. I was sure I hadn’t made any plans with him. I’d been on my knees, vomiting into the shrubbery. ‘Like any normal person would,’ he continued. ‘I told you I had a meeting, that I’d come back.’ We were interrupted by a heavy thump, a crash in the corridor behind me that was too loud to be another cleaning machine.
When I startled and turned to look over my shoulder, Vidal said, ‘Can you hear that?’
‘Yes, of course.’ A shadow, large and slow, was stretching out of a doorway between us and the auditorium. ‘What is it?’
‘You shouldn’t have heard it. Not if you’re disconnected.’
‘What is it, Vidal?’ I pressed, but as the shadow emerged and I saw the first glimpse of black, matted fur that was casting it, a gnarled curl of horn, hinting at the golden slitted eye that would cut into me, my body was already in motion, running down the stairs. Halfway down the staircase, my foot lost purchase on the years’ layers of dust and dander and I stumbled, but it didn’t stop me, and I was out of the building and running down Zeroth’s driveway, into the darkness. Vidal was behind me, yammering on as if it was important: ‘But you’re not connected. You don’t come up on my scan. You shouldn’t be seeing it. You’re clear; I checked you when I fitted my interface. You’re completely offline.’
‘Shut up, Vidal!’ I called back. ‘Get us out of here.’
As we passed the gatehouse Vidal caught up with me. ‘Not that way,’ he gasped. ‘Here.’ We ducked into a stand of dead birches, the soft yellow glow from the emergency lights on the road strafing through them in disorienting stripes. The stripes were blocked out by the shadow, the stink of tallow and congealed blood from the ram’s pelt pursuing us as fast as we ran. I could hear its ragged teeth grinding, spittle foaming, the crack of sticks and the slurp of mud under its hooves.
We shoved our way through desiccated undergrowth and plunged out onto a roadway again, and I recognised where we were: the town square. The shops were slumped and dust-caked, signs peeling and windows shattered, gutters overfilled with debris and failed colonies of weeds.
As we belted across the long, dry grass on the square, I ignored the scurry of small creatures and the suck of putrid mud at my boots. Past the bandstand, roof caved in and railing flaked to stagnant drifts below, past a decrepit playground and seized merry-go-round. Something, someone, shrank back from us as we sprinted, but I didn’t look into her eyes, afraid that I’d draw the ram’s attention to her as it passed. Hide, I willed her. Hide until we come back for you.
Then we were through the square and jogging along one of the facsimile residential streets. Vidal slowed his pace.
‘Keep going,’ I yelled, glancing back. ‘Why’re you stopping?’
‘It’s gone,’ he said, slowing to a walk, checking behind him. I could see his gaze switching between The I’s overlay and what was real. ‘We lost it.’
The shadow was still looming behind us, keeping pace. ‘No, we haven’t,’ I said. ‘Come on!’
‘It’s gone, Lucie. It must be a flashback or something, that’s all.’
And with the word – flashback – as if all of this could just be explained away as a bad trip, my mind wanting so desperately to believe in comfortable explanations, the shadow stopped moving. ‘I saw it. It was chasing us. You saw it too.’
‘Yeah, through The I,’ he said, speaking softly, as if to a frightened child. ‘We’re close to the delivery bay. It’s just through there. You’ve had to take in more than you ever should have.’
‘Don’t patronise me,’ I hissed. ‘I know what I saw. But what I don’t know is how you can slip so comfortably in here and have meetings with the freaks who’ve done this, who’ve let all these people die.’ And that was all David was to me at that moment – a freak, a murderer. He’d worked with Egus to build all this. I rounded on Vidal, grabbing the front of his shirt, with a fistful of hair and skin, wanting to gouge into him, but he stood passively, patiently, hands out. ‘You’re doing business with the fucking Devil. For what? For money? You’re filthy.’ I shoved him away. But I was as filthy as him, I knew, snooping for a living, just like Zeroth. I was complicit.
I trailed him in silence along the curving suburban road, until he turned left down a narrow walkway between two houses. When the way narrowed, I remembered the constricted tunnel of foliage I’d been caught in earlier, and wondered if Vidal was leading me into a trap. But that had been online.
‘Could I have imagined it?’ I asked Vidal as he strode ahead, half to break the unsettling silence, and half to gauge how badly I’d damaged my relationship with this ally. ‘The ram?’
He took a few more steps in silence, playing my anxiety out, then relented. ‘No, not pure imagining. Flashbacks can be very convincing. But I’m certain that you’re clear of tracers, so there’s no way you would really have seen it.’
I was starting to believe him; the fear had dissipated like a bad dream. It was as if I’d been visiting a memorial to a place where something tragic and evil had happened a long time ago. There was a still, cold stink in the air, and old ghosts, but for the moment that
was all in the past. Intellectually, I could call up images of the dead triplets, all the other decay I’d witnessed that day, but my mind wouldn’t let me feel it any more – my glands were spent for the day and my brain was in charge; the native chemicals in my brain were managing my emotional reactions just as effectively as The I ever could.
‘How did this happen?’ I asked.
‘We let it happen,’ Vidal said. ‘All of us.’
‘You’re right about one thing, though,’ I said, because at that moment I truly believed it. ‘Those children are the only remnant of this place we can save.’
We trudged on for a minute more and I saw the end of the narrow pathway, and beyond it, the familiar concrete loading bay. The mountains of garbage to one side that had seemed so offensive to me when we’d first entered hours ago were a homely relief, like a link to the normal processes of civilisation. We were leaving Green Valley.
Vidal went through the gap first and turned right, disappearing. I followed, and walked straight into a hard, dark shadow.
VII
28 ‘This is why we don’t advise coming in on unauthorised devices,’ Gina Orban said, trying to place the flat of her hand against my back as she led me through the tunnel.
I squirmed away; I knew where to go. The tunnel led only one way: away from the loading bay in a gentle curve. In the skeleton strip-light, only one neon tube lit up every ten paces, I could see how the tunnel was moulded out of cement and lined with fat brackets of cabling just above head level. Where their coating of dust had been disturbed or clawed away over the years, the plastic sheaths of the cabling peeked through brightly – yellow, green, blue, red. Steel plumbing followed parallel with the bundles of wiring, some of the joints leaking, painting rusty smears down the light cement below and onto the floor. We were walking around the base of the wall, the functional shell that kept the illusion of Green Valley alive for those inside. The volumes of personal data churning around this electronic shell once would have outstripped the worst imaginings of the Luddites outside.
‘It’s a free world after all,’ Gina went on in her nonchalant lilt, as if she were the last person in the world who’d defend repressive regulations. ‘Visitors are entitled to come and go, but the interference needs to be managed properly, otherwise…’
She reached out again, and I knew in her way she was trying to make me feel better – she could see the state I was in – but I twisted away and faced her, planting my feet in a thin imitation of a warrior, the muscles under my ribs cramping and searing at the sudden movement. ‘Don’t. Don’t touch me.’ I was made of shards of lead, grinding against each other, the lactic acid or the spent adrenaline from my fright, or whatever poison it was, turned to sludge in my muscles. ‘Interference? Is that what you call it? There are corpses in piles in here, Gina.’
She shook her head, smiled patronisingly, but it was just a stock motion of her lips. She didn’t believe herself. ‘No, honey. It’s just code. Bad-natured code. It’s all an illusion.’
I’d walked straight into Gina just as Vidal and I were near the loading-bay door. She’d caught hold of me, feigning surprise to see me there, while Vidal slipped away like a rat into the darkness.
‘Bullshit,’ I spat, trying to goad her into giving something away, just a little wink that she knew what I’d seen and that she was in on it. ‘You know what I saw. I saw the truth. I wasn’t on any interface – authorised or not. You’ve seen it. That’s what your little act’s all about, isn’t it? Avoidance, denial, self-delusion. You can’t bear it, can you? That you’re the warden of that’ – I pointed at the inner wall of the tunnel, all that stood between the civilised world and Zeroth’s apocalypse – ‘that disease, that decay. That evil.’
She shook her head, her mask in place, turned and walked on. ‘Interference, that’s all,’ she said. Could it be that Gina had only ever skirted the periphery, along this tunnel? I couldn’t imagine any other way that she could stay so complacent. She was allergic to The I, so she would have to see what I had just seen every time she went into Green Valley. If she never had to look at those horrors, she could safely convince herself that they didn’t exist. The alternative – that she was aware of what lay inside, that she was knowingly hiding the truth from people outside – was too frightening to allow.
I scrutinised her face, traced her movements for any sign of complicity, but her body remained relaxed, guilt-free.
Some minutes later, by the time she unlocked a door in the inner wall and showed me through to the changing area I recognised from my first visit here, she’d learned not to reach for me. ‘At least let me help you get washed up, offer you some clean clothes,’ she said, turning to one of the lockers.
But I was onto her. I was coated in filth, head to toe, and I was convinced that some of the mess was blood, some of it putrefied flesh. Some of it could even be – I had to force myself to remember, and to think the words – the remains of David and Eloise’s children. ‘No. Let me out of here, now.’ I had to leave with the evidence intact.
I pushed my way out of the changing room, hurried across her office with the homely touches – the South American cloths and the Japanese ceramics, the battery-operated flamingo lights flickering in the lonely air – and shoved at the handle of the locked glass door to Stanton. I watched her coming towards me across the faded Zeroth carpet, trailing her hands almost ritually over the mohair throw on the back of her thrift-store sofa, a thoughtful look on her face. Something in her eyes as she approached, hard and dark, a yellow glint. Yes, a tallow stink in my nostrils, the funk of damp, dirty wool, and I could feel the ram reaching for me as Gina’s arm came towards me.
And past me, to unlock the door.
‘Free country,’ Gina repeated with a disappointed sigh as I walked out onto the frigid street, a plastic bag swirling up in the eddy of wind to greet me. Nobody pulling me back, no demonic ram stringing me up. Not this time. It was the fake strawberry of a protein shake on her breath that I was smelling, the essential oils she’d dripped on herself.
29 The cold late-afternoon sun slanted into the concrete wall, making it look warm. I’d been in there maybe ten hours, and the day outside had passed as normal while I’d lived that endless nightmare.
I walked right through the dead suburbs and halfway to the centre of Stanton before I found a taxi that would stop for me. It was hard enough out there at the best of times, but it didn’t help that my hair was crazily tufted and I was smeared in muck – not the sort of fare a cabbie with options would choose on a Saturday evening. Maybe this driver had fewer options than most, or fewer prejudices, but he still seemed relieved when he dropped me at the Stanton precinct and I actually paid him.
The weekend-shift guard at the door didn’t recognise me, and he glanced through me and wrinkled his nose as I went inside. Just another victim. I went through the charge office, the officers behind the desk not raising their eyes from their glacial affidavit dictation and the photocopier conversations, and up the stairs to the archive offices as if I was invisible.
In my office, I found the overalls I sometimes used when we went into the deep evidence store, and the jacket I’d left on the back of my chair so long that it seemed part of the upholstery; I changed and bagged up the clothes I’d worn in Green Valley.
Upstairs, there was only a scattering of skeleton staff on the detectives’ floor, and I was disappointed not to see Jordan jutting out of his chair, bent over case files, even though there was no reason for him to be in today. He was probably in a bar, watching a game, and the image of that cosy normality gave me an unexpected punch of breath-hitching nostalgia. A couple of the detectives looked towards me as I stopped in my tracks, steadying myself on a cubicle partition while I levelled my breathing again, but turned back to their work as soon as I moved on.
Bert Halstrom was sitting at his small table in the Sentinel lobby, filling in a crossword from the weekend paper.
‘Discard the mistaken nobleman in capital city,’
he said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Six letters. It’s after hours, Ms Sterling. Nobody’s in.’ His eyes shifted focus from the newspaper to where I was standing in front of him, taking in my getup of bare feet, blue overalls and corduroy jacket, the transparent plastic bag of stained clothes and the filthy boots I was holding in my fist.
‘Are you sure?’ I approached the inner door and made a show of pressing my ear to it. ‘I can hear voices inside, people typing.’
‘Office hours Monday to Friday, nine to five,’ he said. ‘Saturdays nine to one. As you should know, Ms Sterling. That’s official policy. We follow national regulations in this office, Ms Sterling.’
‘Knock it off, Bert, please. I need to see Barbra, urgently. She’ll be very interested in what I have here. Very interested.’
Bert shrugged. ‘I can leave her a message.’
I swore under my breath. ‘Don’t worry.’
I hurried back to Jordan’s desk and picked up his phone. The other detectives weren’t interested in what I was doing. I dialled Sentinel’s number. The answering service voice: ‘Welcome to Stanton Police, administrative department sixteen. Stanton PD’s administrative office hours are Monday to Friday, nine to five, and Saturdays nine to one. Please leave a message and contact details outside those hours.’
‘Barbra, it’s Lucie Sterling.’ I glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘It’s Saturday, half past five. I have something very important from… inside. Physical evidence. It’s bad, Barbra. Worse than any of us imagined.’ I hesitated before adding, ‘I think you’re in the office now, and I hope you’ll get this. I’ll wait a few minutes, but I need to leave soon.’
I left Jordan’s desk extension number, then picked up the phone on the desk opposite and dialled Fabian’s number. There was no answer. I pictured the two phones ringing in their lopsided harmony, vibrating the still air in the apartment. Where was Fabian? I dialled the messaging service; no messages.
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