I might have gone back down to my office to check the pneum box, but I remembered that the pneum in the apartment had been out of order, and I wanted to wait by Jordan’s phone in case Barbra called back. I’d give her until six; if she hadn’t called me in by then, she either wasn’t there or she wasn’t planning to humour me today.
So goddamn stupid, I started seething to myself, short-sighted. She’d want to know about the children, about the bodies littering Green Valley. Surely she would. Surely, despite the treaty and the official blindness, the scale of the devastation in Green Valley demanded a response from us outside.
Now I heard a clinking shuffle, and turned to see Bert approaching me. ‘Ms Reeve says to leave it with me,’ he said, pointing towards the bag of my clothes.
I reached for the bag, ready to hand it over, then stopped. His hand was frozen in a receiving gesture. How did I know Barbra had sent him? He could just as easily be working for someone upstairs – he might simply throw it in the incinerator. But if he was telling the truth, getting the evidence to Barbra was the only practical thing I could do, the only way to escalate the case; I couldn’t refuse her.
I reached over to the bag. ‘I’m just going to hang onto the boots, all right? I can’t go home in bare feet.’
I studied Bert’s face as he shrugged; either it made no difference to him, or he was a good actor.
But as I pulled the boots out of the bag, I got a closer look at their treads, caked with nuggets and mud and blood and ooze of Green Valley’s firmament. Barbra had to have this analysed too – she had to get everything I had collected, and she had to see it now.
I looked at Bert’s face, into his eyes, and decided to trust him. ‘Never mind, I’ll find some trainers in the gym.’
‘Okidoke.’ He grabbed the bag and the boots and sauntered back towards the stairwell.
‘Berlin,’ I said behind him.
He turned. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Your clue. Berlin.’
Now he smiled. ‘Of course! Berlin. Good one, Ms Sterling.’
* * *
I knew I should go home and tell Fabian where I’d been, but first, I needed to hold Kira, as if my belated care could ever heal her. The only thing that could keep me sane was the hope that for all those years she was plugged into The I, there was never a false moment or a glitch when she would have experienced raw reality. I ran through Claymarket, towards Vidal’s shelter.
The front door of Barrett & Sanders was locked when I got there, the blinds down. I rattled the doorknob, then glanced behind me, over the road. I couldn’t see Officer Danielewski or any other patrol officer watching the building – they’d probably called off the surveillance – but still, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself or the building, especially now that I knew what it was sheltering.
Instead, I went down the alley and around into the parking lot. Vidal’s car was still there, but that didn’t mean he was back yet. If he was here, it would mean he’d abandoned me to my fate in Green Valley and skulked to safety. I collected a handful of small stones and started pinging them into the middle-floor windows. It took nine stones and one crack for the curtain in Rainbow’s room to twitch. When Vidal pressed his face closer to the window to peer down at me, his expression was so relieved that it diluted my anger.
He held up his hand – wait there. A minute later, he’d joined me in the lot, giving my overalls a brief once-over.
‘Lucie, thank God. She didn’t put anything in you?’
‘You knew it was Gina?’
‘Yeah. She didn’t fit you with anything, did she?’ he repeated.
‘No. I didn’t let her touch me… except… she did press my shoulder here.’
‘But no pain, no stab, right?’
‘No. Would I have definitely felt it? Could she have put something in me just with her palm like this?’ I put the flat of my hand against Vidal’s back, like Gina had done when she’d guided me through Green Valley’s peripheral tunnel.
‘You’d have felt it. You’d have known if she’d inserted another tracer. Unless you were unconscious. Were you?’
‘No.’
‘At no stage?’
‘No.’
‘Okay, then you’re probably still clear. It looks like we got away with it last time. Bringing you downstairs, out of the perimeter, with the tracers still in you. They don’t seem to have picked you up. If Egus knew we were here, we’d be fighting a barrage of intrusions, but there’s no unusual traffic. We were very lucky. So if you’re clear now, we should be fine to let you in. Come. Quickly, quietly.’
Without speaking, I followed him around to the street and ducked inside, only letting my lungful of air go when we were up the stairs and locked in behind the hatch door.
‘How is she? How are the kids?’
‘They’re all fine. Still online. Rainbow will turn them off again tonight.’
I trailed him up to the next level and looked in on Kira, who was sitting slumped against her headboard in the exact same position Rainbow had set her the night before. But she was awake, in a virtual sense, her head slowly turning as she followed the view of whatever was being spooled into her ocular nerves, a smile playing over her lips, and then a frown. Then she began to talk, but no language I’d ever heard, that static-electricity crackle, the void-tuned radio hiss I’d heard them making in the night. These poor children had become machines, bypassing the middle step of fake translation and talking directly to the system in code.
In a better world, Kira’s mother would be sitting with her and watching over her in this trance, but I was not her mother and this was a fucked-up world and I couldn’t bear standing idly by, unable to make a difference.
‘What time is she coming off tonight?’
‘Midnight till two again. They’re calmer then.’
‘Will she be okay until then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you let me in when I come back, so I don’t have to wake the neighbourhood?’
He pursed his lips and nodded.
30 The lounge lights were still on when I came in. I imagined Fabian sitting up worried or in silent anger on the couch, so I angled straight for the bedroom, not glancing through the lounge door as I passed. I did owe him an explanation, but I couldn’t take this up with him soaked in sweat and Green Valley shit.
I shucked off my makeshift outfit, had a shower, and got dressed into my own clothes, feeling like a knight strapping on armour, all the while imagining long-suffering Fabian in the lounge, pretending to read, waiting for his prodigal to return, an absurdly biblical tableau, and it was only when I stepped out into the passageway and felt the prick and crumble of a small clod under my foot that I noticed them.
The impressions in the thick pile of the cream-coloured passageway carpet were unmistakable, but still I squatted down for a closer look.
Hoofprints.
I was no farmer, but I knew they were the hoofprints of a ram, interspersed by clumps of dirt scattered along the carpet where it had walked. Not farm-mud, but the cess of Green Valley dried and caked in the clefts of its feet, or fallen from the matted skeins of its gore-soaked hair, my consciousness admitting it at last.
‘Fabian?’ No more than a whisper. It might still be here.
Now I was up and hurrying quietly, following the dirty spoor, pushing through the doorway to the lounge. He wasn’t on the couch.
‘Fabe?’
A book on the floor, the novel Fabian had been reading; a drinking glass on its side on the rug, whiskey soaked in around it, the ice long melted.
‘Fabian?’ My voice was too loud. I tiptoed into the kitchen. Nothing out of place, everything as we generally left it: a few dishes in the sink, a couple of mugs on the counter; nothing pulled out of place, nothing smashed, nothing spilled. Had I just imagined it again?
No. I peered back through the door into the lounge. The heavy prints, the muddy leavings trailed over the rugs in the lounge, pressed out as clearly as stencils. Unle
ss this was a new, self-conscious form of hallucination The I was treating me to, I knew I wasn’t dreaming this up. I could follow the trail into the kitchen right to where I stood, imagining that sickening clicking of its bony nubs on the white tiles, Fabian’s home become that clinical slaughterhouse it had shown me.
I circled the counter on my way out and saw a smear of blood on the floor by the washing machine. My thoughts and my muscles focussed in icy precision, I went to the knife block. Someone had got here before me, and the largest butcher knife had been removed. I had to settle for the cleaver and a small parer.
Hurrying back up the passage, following the spoor into the study, I was almost gratified to find evidence of an invasion. Nothing much: just a few books flipped open on my desk, the handful of photos from my top drawer spread across the blotter, but enough to prove that someone – or something – real had been in here. As I turned, I noticed bare footprints on the carpet beside the desk – human footprints pressed out in faint smudges of blood and mud, a drag and a scuffle over the pile.
‘Fabian! Fabian, where are you?’
I retraced my steps, bargaining with the truth despite all the evidence: maybe it was just a common burglary; maybe the guy just had funny shoes; maybe the criminal had cut himself with a knife while he was forcing my desk drawer open. I could swear I’d left it locked. Maybe Fabian had been out when the intruder came in, I reasoned against the evidence. He’s got a life – he doesn’t just sit on hold, waiting for me when I’m away. He’d go to a show, for a drink, for a walk. Maybe this mud is from the park.
A knock now, a clink; a small shatter, and I was running to the source, the guest bathroom off the entrance hall, where Fabian was trying to pull himself up against the basin with his left arm while clasping his forehead with his right.
‘Ow! Motherfucker,’ he said. I almost laughed, both in relief that he was well enough to swear, and at the profanity that spat off his elegant lips. Blood was oozing around the palm clamped to his head.
‘Here, let me.’ I wet a facecloth under cold water and tried to pry his hand away from the wound. He was pressing tightly, as if his life depended on it, as if he’d lose all his blood, or his brain would fall out of the hole. When he eventually let go, the released pressure did send a dramatic well of blood out and over his brow and through his eyebrows, but it was only a surface wound. The skin around the gash was purple and puffy, but his hard skull seemed intact. I pressed the flannel against it, staunching the flow, and Fabian winced and leaned into my touch.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘It’s going to sound mad, but it was…’ I waited. I had to hear him say the words himself. Please tell me you saw a black ram in our apartment. It would prove to me that I wasn’t demented, that it wasn’t just flashback and residue, that Zeroth’s fuckery really extended beyond and outside my mind. If Fabian had seen what I’d been seeing, it would mean everything – it would mean that Zeroth was committing crimes in Stanton’s jurisdiction, and that nobody here could say it wasn’t their business.
But Fabian shook his head. ‘No. It was dark. I couldn’t see him properly.’
‘Go on, Fabe,’ I said, trying not to lead him but desperate to hear him say it. ‘What did you see?’
‘I could swear it was…’ He shook his head again, his own mental controls asserting themselves over his reality. ‘I was sitting in the lounge when someone came in. He just walked in. There wasn’t a noise or anything breaking. I thought it was you. I heard him moving around in your study, like you do sometimes before you come and say hello.’ I blushed with guilt; it felt shameful, how offhandedly he described my coldness, but he was absorbed in his story. ‘So I waited a little, but then I heard something falling, so I got up. I still thought it was you. I was so stupid. I thought you were going postal on the pneum or something.’ He snorted a rueful laugh. ‘So I just strolled up, and I saw him…’
‘What did you see? What did he look like?’
He looked me in the eyes, and for a moment I thought I understood his appeal – I’m not making this up; I’m not batshit; you’ve got to believe me. It was a giant fucken black sheep, standing on its back legs. Tall, like this. But it was a punch of disappointment when he finally said it: ‘It was David Coady, Lucie. I’ve only ever seen him in pictures, in publicity footage for Zeroth. He was bundled in a dark overcoat, a hood over his head, but I recognised him. I’m certain of it. He turned to face me when I came into the room. He looked like shit.’
‘David? Here?’ So I wasn’t being tracked by some super-soldier from cyberspace; it was only David. Deflated, I went back out into the passageway and looked again at the prints and the smudges on the carpet. I’d been so willing to believe. But here they were: just shoeprints after all, my mind resketching the hoof dents I’d so fervently imagined.
‘Did he speak to you? What did he want?’ I said as Fabian trailed me out, taking stock of the urbane little mess trailed through the apartment.
‘I don’t know. He didn’t talk to me. He didn’t even engage with me. He was sitting at your desk, just flipping through your things as if he belonged there, as if he were the one waiting for you to come home. When he saw me, he stood up and walked past me, almost through me, to the kitchen. That’s where I…’
‘Go on.’
‘I’d been tired and worried all day. I’d been waiting for you to come home, Luce, and I was in a foul mood. And this was David fucking Coady, Zeroth visionary… breaking into my home. It’s almost as if this intrusion gave me licence to… I’m so sorry.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I took a knife out of the block and threatened him. I don’t know which was worse, having our home invaded or being rendered invisible by this… ghost, but I was so angry. I shouted at him and waved the knife, like a complete goddamn fool, and he just ignored me. And the more he ignored me, the madder I got. So I went closer to him, and he hit me, kind of swatted at me without even looking. It wasn’t so hard, but I slipped and whacked my head against the kitchen cabinet. I crawled into the bathroom, and I must have passed out for a second.’
‘Oh, Fabe, I’m so sorry.’ I could almost laugh. If Fabian ever got involved in a fight, this is exactly how it would go. And I loved him for it. I loved that he was so unprimed for brutality that he couldn’t even get violence right. This was why I’d so readily succumbed to him those years ago: his was the gentleness I constantly searched for. I touched my fingers to the hand that was clamping his forehead. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said. The phone started ringing in the study.
‘Did you hear him leave?’ I asked Fabian. ‘Did he let himself out?’
‘I guess so. I didn’t hear. He’s not here now.’
I went to pick up the phone.
‘Hello?’
‘I’m too late, I know. He’s been and gone.’ The voice was granulated, swooping and eddying as if through a cosmic distance, denatured by the shift between there and here, but I knew Eloise was only a few miles away.
‘What does he want from me, Eloise?’
‘Same as you, I guess. I suppose he wants Kira back. He thought once you’d found her, you’d take her home with you.’
‘But they can’t go back there,’ I said. ‘It’s over, Eloise. Green Valley is dead. Long and badly dead. Calamitously dead, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I know that, but they don’t.’
‘They? Egus too?’
‘He believes the children are the future. There’s a song about that, isn’t there?’
‘And if the children leave Green Valley,’ I filled in, glancing at Fabian, who was tentatively prodding at his staunched brow as he listened to my side of the conversation with interest, ‘it condemns Egus to failure.’
‘Yeah. The end of his future, the end of his vision. The ultimate failure of Green Valley and the Zeroth dream. David thinks just like Egus,’ she continued. ‘He’s even worse than Egus. For him, always, the vision is mo
re important than the truth.’ Eloise had just summed up David in one line. ‘You need to protect Kira.’
‘But can he even… survive outside Green Valley?’ I thought of the children jolting through their fevered withdrawal.
Eloise snorted back a laugh. ‘Of course. We’re not like the kids. We’re grown-ups, no more addicted than anyone outside used to be. We’re all habituated.’ She spat out this last word like a curse.
‘Is it safe for you to tell me this?’
The static crackle grew into a howl again, and I thought I’d lost the connection, until Eloise’s voice emerged from the swirl. ‘Everything you saw in here is real. Don’t let them lie to you. Nobody should have to live like this against their will. We made the informed choice to live here, but none of the children did. Green Valley needs to come to an end with us. You’ve seen what it’s really like.’
‘Thank you, Eloise,’ I said.
‘Egus will have my mind for this. What’s left of it. It was nice knowing you, Lucie; you seem like a good person.’ Eloise’s bland words carried the weight of a profound benediction. And then her voice turned into a high-pitched grunt: ‘Eh, that’s all, folks,’ she said, before the line cut. I remembered that line from somewhere.
Then I had it. What the hell? Bugs Bunny?
31 This time, when I raced up the stairs to hammer on his door, Jordan was fully clothed. The air in his flat as he opened the door was even thicker with cigarette smoke than it had been the last time. He stood back without a word and let me in, sighing out a belt of a long, stale day. Evidently, he hadn’t been relaxing all weekend, but had been losing sleep as much as I had – the deep pits around his eyes were even more sunken than usual.
Jordan looked how I felt, and I was comfortable the moment I stepped into his home. Sometimes, I considered myself too dishevelled and smudgy and clueless to blend in among Fabian’s polished ornaments, but at Jordan’s place, my presence was absorbed. The thought felt disloyal as I sensed the pull from Fabian, sitting outside waiting in the car.
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