This Is Our Undoing

by Lorraine Wilson

  Kneeling in the soft earth, she lifted the first trap, thinking: they would be on the move now. She wouldn’t hear from them until they were outside the city, perhaps not until they were with Jaco. Two indignant striped mice stared out at her from their cage, whiskers brushing the metal bars and pale paws wet with dew. The morning’s first butterfly wove sleepily past her and Lina slipped one mouse into the bucket and the other into the palm of her gloved hand. ‘Hello,’ she murmured to it, and the familiarity of data collection, the boneless sinuosity of the warm life within her palm, briefly stopped her counting the miles between here and home.

  The fifth trap contained a weasel, caught in pursuit of whichever rodent it was whose blood streaked the floor of the cage. Its tiny, galactic fury would normally have made her laugh but today did not. Something about the metal bars, the blood and the undaunted hate in the weasel’s eyes made her hands cold as she lifted the cage from the ground. Although normally she would weigh and measure this creature too, today she only released it, then sat back and pushed hair from her eyes with the heel of one hand. Over her left shoulder, sunlight was sparking fires from remnants of fog and lighting the treetops vermilion. A buzzard screamed. It would be okay, she thought. Perhaps the weasel was her and her father and Jericho. Perhaps even James. We are unbreakable.

  She rose and went to the next trap, then the next and the next.

  Later, moving uphill again towards the last transect, an alarm sounded on her tablet and she paused. It was one she’d coded thinking it was unnecessary but doing it anyway. She opened the map and tag data layers, and watched with something like anger as tags winked out and, after a pause, winked back on. It was not large, perhaps covering as little as thirty metres, but it was also directly upslope and drifting slowly west. Shoving her tablet into a pocket, she cut uphill away from the path.

  Thiago had said it was only an upload fault, but she went anyway. Checking her screen every few minutes, her progress against the shadow’s, then on again till she was panting, gathering scratches on her arms and shins. But she got there in time.

  The base-station was attached to a metal stake and Lina sank to the ground beside it, tablet on her knees, prepping data loggers, cutting access down to local passive only; then there was nothing to do but wait. She could have moved towards it, intercepted it, but that would muddy the data, so she stayed and tried not to let some stone-age instinct make her shiver.

  ‘Two hundred metres,’ she whispered. A wren shouted alarm, her tablet sounded another. Fifty metres away and all around her, silently, every single piece of tech failed.

  Then restarted. She stared through the trees and down at her rebooting tablet, and when the maps reloaded there was nothing there. Or everything. Because the shadow had stopped moving thirty metres away, then vanished. Unvanished. The tags all running without a flicker.

  ‘What the fuck,’ she whispered, already scrambling to her feet, but it wasn’t any use. At the point where the shadow had vanished there was only a small sub-storey birch tree, a patch of ferns. After a long moment, she turned back the way she had come and wove downslope to the trail she’d left.

  Thiago found her, or she found him, where an old bridge leaned doubtfully across a snowmelt ravine. He was sitting on a boulder and studying his tablet, but when she reached the centre of the bridge, he said without preliminaries, ‘You went looking for it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘for all the bloody good it did me.’

  ‘Nothing?’ he said, looking upslope the way she had come rather than at her.

  ‘No. It vanished.’

  ‘Damn,’ he grinned lopsidedly and pushed himself upright, stepping back down the rock, blade flexing and fitting to the slippery contours. ‘I’ll check the individual cameras for faults,’ he said. ‘Now?’

  She considered it, but with it moving she couldn’t believe there was an issue with individual tech, more the models or the uploading. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We’ll do the data checks at home.’

  He nodded and moved ahead of her along the track. ‘You done with the transects?’

  ‘One left.’

  They worked the traps together, one handling the animals, the other the weighing scales and tablet. One trap held a fire salamander, the very last had been prised apart and they took a few minutes repairing it, trying to identify the vandal.

  ‘Fox, then,’ Lina said when they had ruled out corvids and anything larger.

  ‘Likely.’ Thiago set the mended trap back against its stake and looked up at her with a strange expression on his face.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  He narrowed his eyes infinitesimally and straightened up. ‘You’re not going to like it.’

  ‘T?’

  ‘I had a call from Sofia earlier.’ He rested his hands on his bag, and she looked at them rather than him, the strength of them. ‘They want to send us some ... guests.’

  ‘What?’ ESF didn’t let guests come into their reserves. That was the entire point.

  ‘The family of that dead politico in London.’

  Lights danced in the corners of her vision. ‘What?’ she said again, faintly, staring at him. ‘No.’

  Thiago grimaced. ‘Mother and son, possibly some uncle. Bastard politicos. For a week or two, they said.’ He paused, began again. ‘I tried, Lina. But ESF must have some motive I can’t guess at. They wouldn’t listen.’

  Robbed of breath because this was a haven, her haven, defined by snow-painted peaks and the twin gods of science and ecosystem. ‘You said no.’ It was the haven she was bringing her father to, and Jericho who surely deserved safety. They would be nearing the walls by now, with luck, already on their way.

  Thiago’s eyes flickered and she looked away to the fractal cathedral of tree trunks behind his broad shoulder.

  ‘I tried,’ he said again. And she heard belatedly his anger. ‘I threatened to shoot them on sight.’

  She closed her eyes and gave a ghastly little laugh. ESF were brave to call his bluff on that. ‘Why?’ she said quietly so she did not shriek.

  ‘Apparently they’re at risk after the assassination. The wife persuaded someone in ESF and...’ He ran a hand over his scalp, pine needles falling from the folds in his jacket. ‘It’s fucked up, Lina. I’m sorry.’

  It took her a moment to realise the significance of the apology, saw him become aware of it too, of how much he’d revealed by saying that and how much she’d revealed by being unsurprised. Just as she suspected that he had fled from something, he had to guess she had done the same. Even with their pasts tacitly unspoken, she thought they recognised those parts of themselves in each other. It hardly mattered, only she had always been grateful they’d set their pasts firmly behind them. But his eyes reflected the vertical shadows of the noonday forest and he spoke as if nothing had happened.

  ‘The mother’s a state journo. Kid’s seventeen. Uncle, if he comes, some security consultant type.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, packing her bag and standing, then paused. ‘A journo?’ Seeing Thiago grimace again. ‘When are they getting here?’

  ‘Don’t know. Flying, so depends on the weather. Three days?’

  ‘Okay then.’ She’d contact Autumn as soon as they were home, set a different route. Jaco could take them to Stavanger instead of Gdansk. Or even just Calais, but god no, not France actually, not with the riots.

  She began to walk back along the transect line, Thiago ahead of her. ‘Watch,’ he said, pushing aside a branch for her to pass and she thanked him reflexively, saw him smile.

  ‘They won’t stay long. They won’t like it here.’

  She came alongside him as they reached the track and smiled. ‘Good.’

  But when she contacted Autumn again, there was no reply. When she tried to backtrack along the message app’s logs, it ended in dead addresses. It didn’t matter, she told herself. As long as she g
ot in touch with someone before Jaco put out to sea, there would be time to change the route. She would still meet them because even if they were couriered the whole way, she wanted to touch her father’s hand and hold Jericho’s restive body against her own. There was nowhere obvious she could think to take them yet, which was another reason for needing to be there. People were so easily lost when they did not belong, so she would be beside them until she knew they were safe. This place here had promised perfect safety, but now, with the dead politico’s family coming... No. Her father and Jericho would have to hole up somewhere until they left. Two weeks. Not in Gdansk; Vitaly drank too much to be good for anything beyond a flying handover. But Stavanger, perhaps. And there was an ESF office there.

  Her line manager sent a message even as Lina was thinking these things, running the cursor of her tablet over maps of the channel and the Baltic sea, the clock in the corner of her eye like a dwarf star.

  - Can’t talk today, I’m afraid. Tomorrow at 4.30 any good? Re: leave, you’re due plenty, but depends where to. No travel to Med coast, of course, or the flood regions in France, Belgium etc. We’ll need itinerary as you know, and our own security clearance. If you pull that together, I can take it to Group Head in our Monday meeting. Isla.

  ‘Jesus,’ Lina muttered, rereading the message as though the words might become less intractable. Tomorrow was Thursday and Monday was a whole five days away. She looked at the clock again. Four fifteen. Nearly twenty-four hours until she could speak to Isla, and Jericho and her father would be at the walls now, in a nondescript flat in an overcrowded tower block, with perhaps two more hours before they began the most dangerous part.

  She put the call through to Isla’s office, but it was answered instead by a neat, pretty, clever-looking man.

  ‘Dr MacKenzie’s office,’ he said, half an eye on her camera, his hands still typing.

  ‘Hi,’ Lina frowned. ‘I’m Dr Stephenson. Can I speak to her, please.’

  He looked at her properly, briefly. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Stephenson, she’s in meetings. Is it urgent and what does it concern?’ His hands busy, eyes flicking over the screen so it looked like he was reading her body. ‘Ah, you asked to file a travel permit request?’

  Of course he would be able to see that. ‘Yes. Can I–’

  ‘Is it urgent?’ he asked again, and his hands had stilled. Almost. One finger scrolling slowly.

  ‘No,’ she said. She had done nothing noteworthy, she reminded herself, and her voice was calm even though she was not. ‘Not urgent. I was just ... I am out all day tomorrow so I hoped to catch her now. Never mind. Thank you anyway.’

  He was watching her now, not with suspicion, because she was ESF too, and ESF looked after its own. But because no-one got to have secrets and he was cleverer than his position warranted. ‘Alright, Dr Stephenson,’ he said. ‘Have a good day.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said to a screen already gone blank. ‘Fuck.’

  Chapter Four

  They would be through the walls now. The thought rose as she fell from deep sleep to wakefulness. They would be in the second safe house, the dead farmland around them, and if her father was not sleeping then he would be sitting against a wall with Jericho’s head on his lap, running his fingers over Jericho’s cornrows the way he had once stroked Lina’s hair. Sometimes with her weeping, most often with her staring into the dark scarcely breathing in case in doing so she forgot her own name.

  There was no message from them, but that was okay. They might be sleeping now.

  Iva was still there when Lina returned from another morning of weighing small rodents and waiting for news. She was cooking both lunch and dinner at the same time, as she always did, so that she could return early to her home in the nearest village, Govedartsi. As Lina reached the kitchen Iva gave her a long, frowning look, pushed a chair away from the table and said, ‘Sit. I made only salad, but I will cook you eggs too.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Lina began. ‘You don’t–’

  ‘You slept badly? It is the news of these people coming, no?’ She made a hissing sound that drew deep lines around her mouth and slapped the palms of her hands together. ‘Mr Ferdinando, he told the village and we said keep them here,’ pointing at the floor, meaning the station. ‘Only here, it is best, yes?’

  Iva was speaking English because it pleased her to speak her fourth language and, Lina had always suspected, also because it was a small way of keeping her job here with ESF separate from her home in the village where her family had lived for all of history and ESF had granted them permission to stay.

  ‘I’d much rather not keep them anywhere,’ she said.

  Iva’s eyes were full of glittering understanding and not a little malice. ‘So. Perhaps the food here tastes so bad they will go?’

  Lina laughed. ‘Genius. Perhaps they will find snakes in their rooms too, or...’ struggling to imagine what a State person might find disgusting, ‘swarms of horseflies?’

  ‘That is better,’ Iva said, nodding and pouring tea into a waiting mug. ‘Here,’ handing it to Lina, ‘you have colour in your face now. That is better.’

  ‘Is Thiago here? I didn’t check.’

  Iva had her back to Lina again so Lina only saw her shoulders move. ‘I do not know. But is that the truck?’ It was, and unusual for Iva to hear it before her, as if she had been listening. ‘There. I must take the milk down to the old house. I will tell Mr Ferdinando that his lunch is waiting. Here, eggs. Eat.’

  She filled a shallow bowl with milk and carried it to the stairs balanced gently in both hands, her eyes on that and not on Lina. The milk was for the domovek, the folkloric guardian of the old house, but Iva seemed more urgent than her old ritual deserved. Or perhaps Lina was simply reading urgency into everything. She woke her tablet again.

  And at last there was a message. She was already smiling as she opened it.

  -Lina love, your friends never came. We’re still home safe. Talk later? Dad x

  They never came.

  Her dad and Jericho were still in London State.

  But Autumn had started their message with ‘Pole star’ - safe and uncoerced. She could picture them now, a soft-eyed agendered figure who she’d met in abandoned buildings and foul roadside cafes; they had always looked too kind to survive the work but they’d outlasted Lina and she trusted them as much as it was possible to.

  They never came.

  And Autumn had also said ‘use this contact only.’ She hadn’t thought about it at the time, but years ago she might have done. Perhaps they were compromised and all these messages were a betrayal. Pole star for safety, Orion for coercion. Paranoia could destroy you just as completely as fear.

  She realised she had not truly believed the need for such immediate flight, until now.

  Her father answered her call quickly, as if he had been waiting.

  ‘Dad, I don’t know what happened, but you need to get yourselves outside the walls. I can get you travel permits,’ unless she couldn’t trace Helda, but her dad needed certainty, ‘but first–’

  ‘Lina–’

  She only had a minute alone, her mind moving frantically. ‘Go to Stevie’s. Can you do that? Or somewhere else away from the house. Wait there till five, then go to the bakery on Old Cambourne Road. Tell them Andromeda sent you. They’ll help you. I’ll send through the permits. Okay, Dad? Okay?’

  His face showed doubts and nightmares, but he said simply, ‘Old Cambourne Road, bakery, Andromeda.’

  Smiling, touching a finger to the screen. ‘That’s it. Be careful. I have to go.’ Jericho appeared on the screen behind her father, his pupils wide and as reflective as a cat’s. Below her, Lina heard the front door open, close again. She said goodbye quickly and closed the window down. Thinking, oh Jericho. Dread and sorrow, and the fragility of a child.

  Thiago and Iva reached the top floor, but Lina did not look up, her tablet f
acing away from them.

  There was a possibility all of this was for nothing. If the Investigators thought Lina’s link to James was too old or was only romantic, then they might never bother looking for her, or for her family, and if so then there was no need at all to tear apart her father’s carefully constructed life or undo all the delicate healing that security had given to Jericho. She might be being too paranoid. But was it possible to be too careful when the consequences of being careless were so dreadful?

  And besides, the couriers had not come. And besides, her father would have refused to do this to Jericho unless he was frightened. Which meant he either knew more about her and James than she had ever told him, or he did not believe in the strength of their own fabricated identities.

  She sent a message to the new profile she’d been given. What happened? Orion? Then deleted all record of it.

  Thiago sat opposite her, Iva beside him. One of them slid a plate in front of her and Lina made herself look up, smile and reach for a fork rather than watch the reflection of mountains in her screen.

  No coded reply.

  The windows facing her showed the foothills and, beyond, the lowlands. There was a sooty pall towards the northeast, distant farmland burning again and if rains came to extinguish them, then they would come heavy enough to raise the floods. The world knew only extremes now, one death or another, one danger or another. To stay or to flee.

  When she was a child, after a frantic, hushed journey in the night, leaving everything they owned behind them, her dad had sat her down in their new house and called her by her old name for the last time.