I hovered next to the lumpy brown sleeper couch in front of a low melamine coffee table that had once been a crisp white democratic flatpack, and was now stained in eggshell wafts by the tobacco fug and pocked with butt-burns and stained with brown rings. Pictures of dead children were scattered across its surface between a coffee mug, a third full with a cold-slicked and forgotten brew, a saucer piled with cigarette butts and a bowl with orange chip crumbs pasted to its inside. Jordan came around, collected the dishes and took them to the kitchenette counter, then returned and gathered the dossiers up, squaring the photos and documents into neat stacks, flipping the manila covers shut and laying his notebook and pen on top of the pile.
I was afraid that whatever I said next might burst the bubble of motivation that had led him to fish out the old files and stay here all day looking into those dead children’s eyes. If he sensed any pressure from me, he might snap closed, so I didn’t say anything for a while, waiting for him to ask, waiting for him to offer. But as the seconds passed, I anxiously imagined Egus breaking through Vidal’s security, somehow sending commands through the ether into Kira’s fitful sleep. It bubbled over then; I couldn’t keep it in.
‘I was wrong,’ I blurted, as if continuing a discussion we’d been having rather than avoiding each other’s gaze in silence for the last twenty seconds. ‘We can’t let them go back.’
‘I know,’ he said.
I hurried to his front door and he followed, grabbing his coat, gun and holster from the stand in the hallway.
* * *
I glanced at Fabian as he drove. These past few days, so much had happened. He’d discovered I had a living niece, he’d been attacked in his home because of me, he’d been worried to death about me, yet here he was, willingly driving me to where Kira and the other Green Valley kids were being kept in an electronic shelter whose very existence must fundamentally disgust him.
Squalls of icy rain slapped against the window in the gloomy dusk, shattering and blurring the lights prickling from windows over the grubby sidewalk. We passed the Eet Mor’s gap-toothed neon shining between the scuffed concrete columns on the sidewalk, and a blanket of warm yellow glowed from the back alley of Cubbington’s bakery. We’d passed the bodega and the pharmacy by the time Jordan told Fabian to pull over.
‘It’s still a half-mile further,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but from what you’ve told me, we’ll need to make proper plans.’ He took his junction set out of the back of the car and carried it to the junction-box in the alley.
* * *
What I remember most clearly about that night was Jordan’s face when he saw Kira. He stood quite still, his back to me. She was slumped, plugged in and zoned out on her mattress, against the peeling wall of that dingy room.
So still, for so long.
Fabian stood next to me, his silence sending claws into my spine. I had to shatter it.
‘Jordan?’ I said, reaching out to touch his shoulder.
My touch seemed to start him up again, and he took in a long sigh, filling his smoke-lined body from toes to tip, then he finally turned to face me, letting out the air. His eyes were red and his cheeks were blotched with rage, picking up the yellow glances of the low lights along the corridor. It was then, I think, seeing Kira through Jordan’s objective eyes, that the abomination finally sank into me as deeply as it could go.
‘She looks like you,’ he said.
‘No,’ I started deflecting. ‘She’s just like Odille…’ But I ran out of excuses as I looked in on her through Jordan’s eyes. He was right: that was my flesh and blood lying there, in critical need, and her father was not defending her. The duty was on me.
‘We’re going to make this right,’ he said. ‘Enough is enough.’ Then he trailed his way along the third-level corridor, back the way he had come, walking in careful, deliberate steps as if he didn’t trust the floor. Vidal saw him out, locking the landing gate behind him before going down and opening the turquoise door on the ground floor, checking on his hand-held signal meter as he went. I peered through the narrow gap in the boards in a vacant room on the street side of the building, and waited until I saw Jordan stumbling out into the mist-blown night like a man disenchanted from a trance. Across the road, the dark and vacant window of Verla’s coffee shop observed with no apparent judgement.
Vidal came back upstairs, pocketing his keys. ‘All locked up. Even if he is wandering about in Stanton, David’s not going to get in, so don’t worry.’
‘Do you need me to do anything?’ I asked. ‘Can we help in any way?’ Cautiously including Fabian.
‘We’ve got it all in hand. Sofe and Rainbow are a crack team. They’ve been doing this every night for weeks,’ he said with a defensive frown. He wished we weren’t there, but knew he had no option. ‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ he said, nodding towards Kira’s room down the mildewed and peeling hallway.
‘Are you sure Zeroth can’t hack your signals?’ I asked him. ‘Do something to the kids from a distance? Get into their minds?’
‘One hundred per cent.’ He lifted his signal meter and tapped its screen. ‘As long as the interference shield stays intact, we’re a sealed system. No signal on this range can get in from outside.’ Vidal’s electronic shields offered me far less comfort than the two barriers of solid metal between us and the street.
‘Keep an eye on that thing, will you?’ Fabian said.
‘Yup.’ Vidal turned and went down to the kitchen, and soon we heard him talking softly to Rainbow and Sofie.
I brought two hard-seated schoolroom stools from a vacant room, dusted them off with my hand, and placed them beside Kira’s mattress. ‘Come, Fabe.’
He sat next to me. ‘This feels like a vigil.’
‘I know,’ I said. The low brown light and the stagnant air reminded me of the house with the altar room in Green Valley. I shuddered the thought away before it took me too far down that broken house’s hallway. ‘She’s better off here.’
‘You’re going to tell me some day, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Exactly what you saw in there.’
I took a deep breath in, sighed it out. I said nothing.
‘Was she like this last time?’ he asked. ‘Has she been in a coma ever since she came out?’
‘It’s not a coma. She’s on The I, or a safe version of it. Watch her eyes.’
We both watched her eyelids jittering as her piped life played through her. For the first time since this had started, I felt a pause, as if I had time. Jordan’s outrage convinced me that at last someone else was on my side, that something official would be done, and that I could relax minutely, let down my guard for a moment. Fabian and I sat and watched Kira as if we were a contented couple watching their child sleep.
It was absurd.
‘I can’t do it, Fabe,’ I said.
He glanced at my face, waiting for me to carry on, shifting his knee an inch so that it touched me.
A tight burn clenched in my chest, a wet heat in my eyes. ‘I’m not enough for her. She needs a mother – she always has, all this time. Odille died and I let her down.’ Fuck it, I was going to allow myself to cry in front of him. ‘This sweet little girl. All she needs is someone to care for her, someone to love her, and I can’t do it.’ Fabian touched two fingertips to my leg, while my face crumbled and the dam broke, and all that ancient loss came flooding out. ‘Look at her. Isn’t she lovely? She doesn’t deserve what’s been done to her.’ I drew myself together and sat up straight. ‘Nobody does, none of these children do.’
‘No.’
‘Goddamn David. I trusted him. He was so good with her. He was spontaneous and patient and kind – I watched him with her. He laughed with her, tickled her toes, put his face to her skin and tried to breathe her in. When the three of them were together, they were an unbreakable unit. I was even jealous sometimes, I guess – Odille’s perfect new love excluded me.’
‘I’m sure it wasn’t perfect.
You know how things are different from the outside. It was probably difficult.’
I shrugged. ‘When he wanted to take her to Green Valley, I trusted him. I trusted Zeroth, that it would be a good place for my sister.’
‘Everybody believed in them – it’s what they do. They sell dreams – not just to naive people, but to everyone. Everyone fell for them.’
‘Now look at her little girl. How could I have let this happen?’
‘Jesus, it’s not your fault. Nobody knew that this was happening.’
‘Didn’t we? Didn’t we, Fabe? You did. He did!’ I said, poking a finger towards the door, towards wherever Vidal was scheming. ‘The rest of us just looked the other way because it was easier.’
‘But it looks like he’s trying to do something about it, right?’
‘But why now, why when it’s so late? You don’t know what it’s like in there, Fabe. And he’s known all this time. And it’s only now he’s started trying. He’s got some fucking angle; I know he has.’
Fabian sighed. ‘Perhaps. But at the moment, this is all that’s important.’ He gestured towards Kira splayed out before us, fighting her invisible demons. ‘She’s all that’s important tonight. Vidal said they’re weaning them from the technology, right? That they’ll turn them off for a while tonight?’
‘Yes.’
‘So let’s be here for her then.’
I took Fabian’s hand and knitted my fingers through his, squeezing a little too hard. It was seductive, the idea of ceding, of giving over, of giving up. How restful that would be.
Fabian seemed to read my mind, because he said, ‘We can’t change the world by ourselves, Luce. None of us.’
‘I didn’t think I’d ever hear you say that. You’re always so… on the case. With your Omega friends.’
His lips twitched into a smile. ‘Big changes take millions of small actions. It’s inaction that allows entropy to set in.’
‘And sitting here, doing nothing, is our action, right?’
Fabian nodded. ‘We’re not doing nothing. Right now, things are happening.’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone in power’s that concerned.’
‘They’re getting concerned. I’ve drawn people’s attention to it.’
‘Whose attention? I don’t think even you have that power.’ But I’d never really considered just how far his connections with Omega took him.
‘I have influence. I don’t abuse it, but I can use it when necessary. David made a mistake, breaking into our home,’ Fabian said softly, with an angry steel I’d never noticed in his voice. ‘There’s physical evidence of a crime committed in Stanton by someone from Green Valley. Egus has been skirting the edge of every one of the ill-advised agreements we made with Zeroth, and this time he’s overstepped. These children are proof of that. He’s culpable.’
I shouldn’t have been surprised. ‘So now you have what you wanted all along: an excuse to go into Green Valley and shut Zeroth down once and for all.’
Fabian read my face. ‘You feel sorry for Egus, don’t you? Despite all this?’ He waved his hand towards the doorways along the corridor that sheltered the addicted little shells lying on their small beds. ‘Despite what he’s done to your own niece?’ He shook his head and puffed out a sigh of dismay.
And it was true. Despite everything I’d seen, I pictured Jamie Egus as a mad, sad, defeated king holding on to the last vestiges of his glory, and he was finally going to be brought low. With the combined power of Omega’s corporate and social tsars and the government forces arrayed against him, he stood no chance of holding them off from his haunted, crumbling tower.
Fabian’s cheeks flushed when I didn’t contradict him. ‘You feel sorry for a man who invaded and collected and commodified the private lives of half the world’s population, sold them to the highest bidders, supralegal and untouchable. He wouldn’t have stopped until he owned everybody in the world.’
I scoffed. ‘Come on, Fabian. You’re smarter than that. It wasn’t just Egus.’
‘Egus was one of them, probably one of the most important.’
‘It was a system, incorporating us. The system changed. Is the new system any better?’
‘Yes,’ Fabian said, with a flash of the evangelical fervour he saved for his speeches, the same zealous fervour David pumped out in his product launches. ‘Yes, it is far, far better.’ What was it with the Sterling sisters and zealots?
I just shook my head. ‘I don’t know why I’m defending him. Of course I’m glad that someone’s taking this all seriously, protecting these children. But not everything’s as simple as you people make it out to be.’
‘Which people?’ Fabian said.
‘All of you.’
Vidal looked over at us from where he was arranging bowls on a narrow table in the corridor outside, and noticing his attention drawing my way, Fabian edged closer to me. I was too drained to push him away.
Fabian and I had run out of words to bat at each other, so I watched my addicted niece in her opiate dreams and allowed the silence and the stillness in the building to lull me.
My eyes grew heavy, but every time they dragged shut, I saw the ram, felt smothered by the bristly ropes of its gory hair. I drowsed and started, drowsed and started, and Fabian, wired and fully awake, cupped the side of my head and drew me towards him. I leaned my head on his shoulder and must have slept for only a bottomless minute, but I snapped awake when the air changed. I could feel it, the soundless, vibrating thrum of the wireless signals dropping out of the air as Rainbow turned the mirror I off.
On her bed, Kira stirred and pushed herself up from her slump, her eyes trying to find meaning in the peeling murk of the room and her middle-distance gaze. As reality oozed in from the edges – the starch stew Rainbow was slopping into the bowls in the hallway, the prod of the mattress and the scratch of the army surplus blanket, the cough and moan of the other children, soft crying from next door – she turned her head to Fabian and me, robotically, neutrally trying to parse us. I could see her trying to summon an I readout on us, and frowning deeply when she failed. And now she smiled, having learned somewhere that ingratiating sweetness might save her from harm. Every one of her facial expressions was stagey and overblown and it struck me that this was how she had learned to interface with The I, using her face to control her avatar. Her smile was like a pantomime grin developed and amplified for thousands, and it was mortifying in the low light of this small room with its intimate audience.
‘Hello, Kira. It’s okay,’ I said, softly and soothingly, as if to a scared animal. I reached my hand out slowly, watching her reaction.
She started to say something, only managing a weak hiss. She swallowed and tried again. ‘Where am I?’ she said, her dry, atrophied voice crackling around the words.
I glanced at Fabian, as if he might be able to help, as if he might be able to tell us where we’d all ended up, but he was staring at her with his mouth open, his forehead creased with undisguised revulsion.
Sofie came through the doorway, saving me. ‘Hi, sweetie,’ she said. ‘Here’s some food. Do you need help?’ Without waiting for a response, she knelt down on the mattress and started feeding Kira, and Kira ate passively, still looking with wide eyes around the room, as if it were a new level in a game, trying to figure out what it wanted.
‘She’s doing really well,’ Sofie said to us. ‘Waking up like this. She’s not resisting. You can hear the other kids, how they normally react.’ And from the other rooms along the corridor, I could hear gagging, crying, moaning, Rainbow and Vidal hurrying from room to room to soothe the worst hit.
Kira was docile as she finished her bowl of porridge, Sofie wiping her mouth with a flannel, their routine a grotesque, unfunny parody of a mother feeding a baby. All the while, Fabian was squeezing my knee and staring. His hand went tighter and tighter as he ground his jaw. I peeled my eyes away from Kira and looked at Fabian, the profound distaste he’d felt for Zeroth overspilling now i
nto visceral disgust. He pushed up and away from me. ‘We’re taking her home,’ he said, and when neither Sofie nor I responded, he stepped over to Kira and took her hand. ‘We’re taking you home.’
Now, seeing Fabian touching her, something I had barely managed myself, I was forced to respond. ‘What? Fabian, wait.’ I spoke softly, afraid Kira would shatter, being grabbed like that, and that Fabian’s raised voice would rattle her fragile mind. But she didn’t shatter; she stood and glanced between us with living eyes, almost like a real girl.
‘We’re taking you out of here, Kira,’ Fabian repeated, with a gentleness that shamed me. ‘We’re taking you to a proper home. You don’t belong in a place like this.’ He turned to me. ‘We can’t allow them to do this to her, Lucie. We can’t allow them to violate her like this.’
‘But we can’t move her,’ I said. ‘The children need The I. She’ll get sick if we take her away. She needs to stay here.’ Vidal stepped into the doorway, glancing between us and Sofie, who hadn’t moved. Both of them watched Kira like fascinated observers, as if she were a subject in an experiment. Had they observed the dead children suffering their withdrawal, watching to see how much they could take, waiting just to see what would happen? I thought of the little girl’s jutting hips on Maya’s shelf, of the strawberry-mint gum in her flour-coated pockets. ‘She has to stay here,’ I said again. Otherwise she could die. I couldn’t bring myself to voice it.
‘She’s disconnected now, isn’t she? She’s doing fine. She said so.’ Fabian pointed at Sofie.
‘Vidal,’ I pleaded. ‘Tell him what you told me.’
Vidal looked between us all, his unwanted guests and his daughter holding an empty bowl and a dirty spoon on a grubby mattress. There was a scream and a wracking sob from next door. ‘I don’t know what will happen, but I can’t stop you. I really haven’t got the resources. Sofe, we need to help the others.’
‘What do you want, Kira?’ Fabian said, still clutching her hand.
Green Valley Page 23