‘Stop it, please,’ I said. I could see that Kira was becoming afraid, her eyes widening and welling. She couldn’t understand what was happening to her; she’d been kidnapped from the only family she’d known and severed from her reality into the middle of this dark domestic battle.
‘Do you like it here?’ Fabian pressed.
Kira gathered her answer. ‘No.’ As she shook her head, a tear flicked off her eye and smeared down her cheek.
‘That settles it.’ He stood up and dragged Kira off the bed and down the corridor. ‘Let us out of here, Barrett.’
Vidal didn’t turn, just said over his shoulder, as Rainbow hurried into the screaming child’s room, ‘Let them out, Sofie. Make sure to lock up again, right?’ Then his conscience may have provoked him, because he turned and squatted down to look at Kira at her level. ‘I’m just glad for you that you’ve found someone to look after you.’ He reached out and smoothed her hair down. ‘You’ll be fine.’
We trailed Sofie down the darkened stairwell, Fabian still clutching Kira’s hand. She was looking around her groggily, still stuck in this murky dream. Sofie unlocked the gate to the landing, and we filed downstairs. We were going home, the three of us, and for a second that fake image of a neat little family was a feasible delusion.
As we approached the turquoise steel door, I softly put my hand to Kira’s back, hoping it was an encouraging gesture. She stiffened. At first, I thought it was a flinch, my own flesh and blood repelled by my touch, but then she began to jerk and spasm, pulled around like a marionette.
‘Something’s happening,’ I said. ‘There’s something wrong.’ Kira was still gripping Fabian’s hand, now painfully tight, and her eyes rolled back, small whimpers punching out of her as if shockwaves were shooting through her body.
I touched Kira and for the duration of a chemical flash, I knew what she was seeing. Less seeing than sensing the black hole it made in space. Semi-materialised, leaving a smudgy, half-drawn trail of soot as it went, reaching out for us, and beyond us, through the slats of the gate, its tendrils spreading around and past Fabian and me, through us, splitting up into a many-headed hair serpent as it trailed past us and towards the children’s rooms.
Then it disappeared, leaving only a negative burn in my imagination. Kira slumped down on the stairs and rubbed at her eyes, trying to erase the image. A phone started ringing upstairs.
Vidal answered, and after a moment called down, ‘Fabian, it’s for you.’ Fabian tore himself away from us and went back upstairs to the phone.
I put my arm around Kira’s narrow shoulders and drew her to me. She didn’t pull away. Her thin body quivered with fear, with life.
Then Fabian’s voice. ‘Hello? Yeah. Good.’
Fabian came back down, and stood behind us on the stairs.
‘We’ve got them,’ he said.
VIII
32 We got to the gantry early so that we could get a view right up against the railing. The past few days, the crowds had swelled so much that, by nine or ten in the morning, you’d need to queue up for the stairs and shove your way between bodies to see anything. By now, nine months after Egus and David were arrested, the dismantling of Green Valley was no longer our private moment, no longer even Stanton’s personal victory. Tourists had begun to throng here from all over the world. Stanton city council was instituting a ticketing system, hastily erecting two more paid gantries before the wall was gone, Green Valley razed, and there was nothing left to see.
The destruction of the wall hadn’t been planned as a public spectacle – in fact, those first few days after the arrests, even admitting the existence of the wall still seemed shameful, and the city had erected vast plywood barriers to screen the demolition. But people had kept prying and poking, peeping through the cracks on the off-chance of seeing something of the fallen invisible kingdom exposed behind the piles of grey rubble, of catching a glimpse of the dishevelled group of survivors being treated in the military tented camp planted on the office park’s lawns; and the barriers had kept slumping over and toppling.
But this morning, it was just Kira and me as the late-spring sun, red in the warm dust, strobed between the clearing clouds over the horizon. I pulled the brim of Kira’s hat further down over her brow, and made sure that her sunglasses were flush against her eyes.
‘It’s fine, Lucie,’ she moaned, wriggling away from me and aiming her face like a sunflower towards the light. I stopped fussing and watched her soak in the rays, still and contented and painless for a moment, and my chest swelled.
Tentatively, Kira tugged at the fingers of her gloves, glancing up at me to see if I’d try to stop her. I let it go, helping her pull them off and bundling them in my pocket. ‘Let’s get some lotion on, okay?’ Kira smiled and held her hands up, turning them, radiating them like toast in the red light. ‘Just a few minutes.’ Restricting, policing, monitoring: this, I’d soon discovered, was so much of what looking after a child entailed.
The machines started up with a roar and a clank, raising their hydraulic fists and hammering at the next section of concrete, beating at it until it shattered, slabs shearing down, rebar twisting and shrieking as it lost its purpose with a fight. Over the weeks we’d watched the hole in the roof grow wider, the wall decaying away, until Green Valley was more open to the sky and to the world than closed. This morning it was no longer an enclave, just a crumbled fortress.
People started to come onto the gantry, jostling and pressing, but still I was reluctant to move. Finally, the wind swirled, changing direction and funnelling a blast of peat from the site into our faces, and I took Kira’s hand and led her down towards Green Valley for the last time. At the perimeter fence today there were just two city patrol officers on the gate, unlike that first night, when an industrial collection of police and unmarked cars, a military detachment and the mobile operations centre had been clustered outside the Zeroth liaison office. The lights and the rush had reverberated off the concrete shell and died in the fog, falling muffled into the nothingness that had enveloped the enclave. This morning, the wind had found new channels between the demolished teeth of the shell.
I showed the patrol officer Kira’s special clearance letter and my guardianship certificate, and she let us in, scowling as her colleague pushed back a group of overeager young ruin-tourists who’d tried hopelessly to sneak past the public barricade and follow us in. A few weeks before, the Observer had published a photo of a hanged man outside the processing tents. The front-page suicide had ignited a flurry of theories about what was happening inside the tents. As survivors began to be processed out and reintegrated into Stanton life, the weight of testimony grew: about just how many people had died in Green Valley, how many had taken their own lives or been broken by withdrawal after it collapsed, ravaged by ancient diseases we thought were extinct, gone irretrievably mad. It was little surprise the remaining survivors were reticent as they stumbled out of their confinement into the sun, but gradually the truth had started to emerge with them.
‘Through there?’ I asked, indicating the liaison office door.
The patrol officer nodded, distracted by the shifting groups at the barricades.
The glass door, once the only public portal to Green Valley, slumped where the raiding team had smashed it in nine months ago, and now dust and leaves and litter lay in a clot on the threshold.
Kira’s grip on my hand tightened as we stepped into the poorly lit office. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. She pulled me further in.
A delta of rubbish and dust had swept through the doorway in a fan over the carpet, and rain had blown in, caking small pats of mud over the dust-coated floor. But deeper in, the room was much as I’d first seen it: the faded blue-and-green sofa, the patterned cloths and chintzy decorations, the catalogue reception desk and Gina’s old-fashioned computer screen all left where they had been. But the signs of police and forensics investigations were also clear; apart from the ravaged front door and a broken chair, the coloured dots st
uck on every item of evidence, numbered, photographed and classified, had been left to bond on the files and books and tea mugs, the paintings and wall hangings, on the spatters over the floor.
It had seemed a good idea to come back when we’d first been offered the chance. The police and forensics were finished with Green Valley and the enclave was about to be shut down finally, auctioned off, demolished, redeveloped, erased – whatever the intentions of the successful bidder. I’d discussed it with Fabian and Kira’s counsellor, and we’d agreed that maybe it would be good for her to visit one last time, help her create an ending for this chapter of her life.
Was it safe for a child, I’d wanted to know. There’s nothing unsafe, they assured me. Since the roof had been opened, the levels of airborne pathogens had dropped to acceptable; fungicides and pesticides had been pumped into the enclave before the second phase of the forensic work had begun; all human and animal remains had been appropriately disposed of. But what’s it like, I pressed. Would you bring your child there? The person on the phone skewered me with a long, judgemental silence. Then she said, ‘Other surviving residents would be grateful for the opportunity.’
But right now, I wasn’t so sure. Shouldn’t we all try to forget Green Valley like a bad dream, and move on? The rational part of me knew the area had been scoured and graded and that Kira would see none of the mortal decay that I’d seen, but still I couldn’t bring myself to move. Looking down, I saw that my indecisive feet were rooted on a brown stain in the carpet.
‘Lucie?’ Kira tugged at my sleeve. ‘There’s a big man here.’
My heart punched at my ribs and almost escaped before I had a moment to look up. But it was the man we’d come to meet.
‘Hi, Jordan,’ I said. ‘Thanks for this.’
He’d emerged from the locker room behind the office and was beckoning us to follow him there. ‘They collected all of the personal effects in the warehouse, and I’ve gathered some of the kids’ things here. The stuff in… better condition. I don’t know if she’ll find anything that was hers, or anything she likes, or whether she’ll…’ He stopped talking when he noticed Kira looking up at him frankly, following the conversation he was trying to have over her head. He spoke to her: ‘Do you wanna have a look through the toys?’
‘Yeah,’ she said with an excited trill, such a convincing facsimile of an undamaged, unafraid little girl. But when Jordan pointed the way into the locker room towards the plastic tubs of swabbed and sterilised toys, she hesitated and squeezed my hand. The room was sunken in the gloom of night lighting, and the switch at the door didn’t work.
‘Can we make it lighter in here?’ I asked Jordan.
‘Hang on.’ Jordan went into the reception area and squatted behind the desk. He found the main board and the strip lights came on, spearing clean, bright light into all the corners.
‘Better?’ I asked Kira, walking with her to the containers, the paltry physical remnants of so many children’s half-lives, her warm little hand in mine helping banish my fears too. She smiled and sat on the bench – the same bench where I’d allowed Gina Orban to invade my body – and leaned over the toys and started picking through them cautiously, as if something inside might still bite her. I ran my hand over her hair. ‘I’ll be just there by the door, okay? Talking to Jordan. Right here if you need me.’ She was already more engaged with a plush leopard than with me. I went back to join Jordan, leaning against the door frame opposite him, where we could talk and I could still keep Kira in my peripheral vision.
‘How’s she doing?’ Jordan asked.
‘Fine,’ I said. It was the short answer.
The last nine months had felt both like nine years and nine seconds. That night Fabian and I had gathered Kira up and driven her straight home.
Two blocks away from Vidal’s office, we knew we’d made a mistake. Kira started bucking and writhing with pain, gagging but too cramped up even to vomit, a thin trickle of foamy bile pushing out between her gritted teeth. It was as if The I was clawing her back to its embrace by her entrails. And then, as we passed the invisible limit of Green Valley’s radio signal, she slumped and relaxed, released finally, and we thought she’d be all right. We guided her into the lift – she managed to walk on her own legs, not needing to be carried, and we thought she’d be all right. We sat her in the tub, and she let us wipe some of the years of waste off her; we towelled her down, and we put her in our bed, warm and fragrant and at peace, and we thought she’d be all right.
But the dreams attacked her in the night, her mind rebelling, and she screamed as if she was being tortured. We took her back to Vidal’s building, to the grey-eyed children and their colourful bedspreads, so that Kira could survive.
It had taken her three more painful weeks to wean from The I. While Vidal and Sofie dropped in and out of the children’s world, Rainbow had always been there, nurturing and coddling and coaxing them as the children suffered through the withdrawal. We followed Rainbow’s timetable, disconnecting Kira from the mirror I for increasing periods, taking her out to the local streets for longer and longer walks to help her acclimatise to her new environment. We gradually transformed her diet, and her body fought every mouthful but eventually adjusted. During that period, three more children died. This time their bodies were not dumped, but sent through official channels to Maya, who gathered data at the pathology lab to try to help other Green Valley survivors, sharing it with the social workers, psychologists and doctors who had been assigned to the programme. Five of Vidal’s rescue kids weaned off safely, plus Kira, the healing process still a work in progress. The last three were still hooked up to the mirror I, the last I heard. Social services had matched some of the survivors with parents from inside, and more with family members from Stanton and beyond – I knew what these shattered families would be going through. I hoped that Maya was learning from the dead, and what social services were learning from Kira and the dozens of other children who’d been ejected from Green Valley would smooth out this mess in time.
‘Yes, she’s fine.’ I glanced at my niece, who was humming a very quiet tune as she made a rubber tomato dance a waltz with the leopard. ‘She’s really doing well.’
She felt my gaze at the back of her head and broke her game off to look at me. ‘I like this tiger,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t talk. But I can make her sing with my mind.’
‘She’s very pretty,’ I said. I was still learning not to contradict every misapprehension she’d picked up in there. I wanted urgently to fix what they’d done to her, to erase the junk code and replace it with the regular knowledge and the normal upbringing she should have had all along. I got it right just at this moment, but still my teeth gritted as I stifled my correction. I knew it was going to be a long and delicate process; my obsessive will to facts and what I’d learned to call truth – my tyrannical desire for re-education – would have to take a back seat. Kira’s happiness and confidence were all that mattered right now.
‘There’s still no trace of him,’ Jordan said. ‘The department’s engaged on the search like nothing before.’
Once Kira had been weaned from The I, and made it through a week in our apartment, I went back to Vidal’s office to check on the other kids and bring Rainbow and Sofie a gift to say thank you. I had no idea what they might like. The weight of their mortal responsibility had made them prematurely adult; they barely seemed to sleep, never mind take time out to relax and want childish things. I ended up choosing half a dozen books I thought they might enjoy – a wide range of topics so that something might appeal. It was a stupid gesture, and I was feeling self-conscious as I approached the office, as if I was the little child trying to gain attention from these busy grown-ups, trying to curry favour, trying to impress these brave and high-minded women. But before I even got to the door of Barrett & Sanders, I could feel the emptiness. No need for fake surveillance loops and subterfuge this time: they were gone.
The front door had been left unlocked, but that hadn’t stopped
someone from smashing his way through the plate window at the front. The shattered gash had been pasted over with brown paper, waxed against the fog, and it sucked and rattled as the wind blew. All the furniture had been taken, even the sticks in their decorative vase were gone. All that remained was the sign behind the desk, smeared where someone with greasy fingerprints and no tools had tried to pry it off: Vidal’s yellow rooster, consigned to the trash heap of his past. Was he still feeling a pull from his history, I wondered, or had he successfully abandoned it? Imagine being able to run far enough away to leave your past behind.
‘I bet you wish for some spooky tech now, don’t you?’ I teased Jordan.
To my surprise, Jordan sighed. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I really do.’ His resignation seemed like defeat, and it made me sad, but I said nothing about Misty Vale or Roger Basson. ‘After all this time, I don’t know if we’re ever going to find the other—’ He stopped talking as Kira shifted and dug for another toy.
Part of me assumed Sentinel knew about the farm. I’d been granted indefinite leave from the records department while I looked after Kira, and Sentinel had closed ranks behind their mysterious door again as quickly as they’d burst out, so I couldn’t know what they knew and what they didn’t. They’d find out about the farm before long, if they hadn’t already; I didn’t need to be the one to tell them. Because the bigger part of me wanted Vidal to escape. Those three children and Rainbow – given that they had no home to go back to, that none of their parents had survived, I could only imagine that all of them were better off with Vidal and Sofie than in the middle of a heavy-handed police operation mopped up by overstretched social workers and straitened state welfare. I thought back to Sofie playing with Basson’s dog in that dusty lot, and knew what I’d want for Kira: that if she needed a safe, happy place one day, she wouldn’t be betrayed by some officious stranger. What would I want for Kira? That was my only measure now.
Green Valley Page 24