This Is Our Undoing

by Lorraine Wilson

  ‘Lucia,’ he’d said, taking her hand in his. ‘Do you see this box?’ He’d held up a tin, silver and blue, unfamiliar. He opened it to show three small white capsules, each in their own plastic bubble.

  ‘If they find us, my love, we are going to take these tablets. They will keep us from harm.’

  ‘Are they magic?’ she had asked.

  He’d laughed a strange, ragged sort of laugh. ‘There is no magic, only truth and lies.’ A sigh. ‘No, they’re not magic, love. But they are very special. Only for if there is absolutely no other way. Let’s have a secret word, shall we?’

  It was like a game, to choose something you wouldn’t normally say, but would not forget. Frangipane, she thought, because she’d read it somewhere the day before. Elephant, because she wanted to see one. But they were not secret words, and there was really only one of those.

  ‘Maria,’ she said quietly, and her father did not move for a long time, the tin with its tablets in one hand, her fingers curled into the other.

  ‘Maria,’ he repeated eventually.

  Lina did not think of her very often. Memory meted out in small doses, and today was not a good day to be remembering. But thank god for it, she thought fervently, because she’d forgotten about the tablets. She had to-

  ‘Lina.’

  She flinched, cursed herself for doing so, and looked up into Thiago’s perceptive gaze. He said only, as if repeating, ‘Setting the third block of traps this afternoon?’

  While her father waited once more. While Lina waited to hear from ghosts from her past. Ghosts, she thought, and held herself still against another flinch because, aside from her father and mother, there was still James and she had no way of knowing how he was.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘How about you? Any news on that data shadow?’ She saw, without really registering, Iva’s face tighten, turn to Thiago’s and then quickly away.

  ‘It’s with IT in Sofia,’ he said, lifting a shoulder fractionally and spearing salad leaves, apparently oblivious to both Iva’s reaction and Lina’s sense of dislocation, semi-presence. But he would have seen both, she knew that. You did not live the way they did here and not become attuned. Which is why she felt as though both their pasts, so long insignificant, were scratching at the door.

  She took a breath. ‘Did Iva tell you we are going to give our guests food poisoning?’

  There was a hint of a smile in his eyes. ‘Chase them away, is it? Better not, regrettably.’

  But Iva was not smiling this time, ‘They’ll get in the way,’ she said.

  ‘They won’t,’ said Thiago, not looking at Iva but speaking to her. ‘It will be fine.’

  ‘They’ll create a lot more work for Iva,’ Lina said, only realising it now.

  ‘We’ll get help in. Your niece, Anais?’

  Iva pushed to her feet, gathering plates with unnecessary energy. ‘Anais will not want to. Neither will anyone else, I think.’

  ‘Oh Iva,’ Lina began, but then couldn’t think what more to say. Are they really so angry with us? Do they despise you a little and how do you bear it? Do they really think we here could stop the tagging? And defensiveness too, because yes, ESF were proposing to beacon tag its residents but it was to protect these last bastions of wilderness, to protect the forests that Iva’s people were so much a part of. Not like the States that were doing the same tagging for policing and control. Not like that. Better than that.

  As if Thiago had followed every one of Lina’s thoughts, he said quietly, ‘Reasons don’t matter, do they? Only freedom does.’

  Iva paused, her tight face softening as she looked down at Thiago. But when she didn’t speak, Lina heard herself say just as quietly as Thiago, ‘And protecting it.’

  It was too much of an admittance, both of herself and of what she knew about the locals. But just then, with these two people and their home about to be invaded, she didn’t care.

  In the end, Thiago went back to Govedartsi with Iva, hoping to talk them around, show them the data that ESF collected from Thiago and Lina’s own tags and how little of it ESF bothered to store. If he recognised faces from the camera network, he might hint at strategies to adapt to the tags. If anyone could think of a way to remain covert whilst being satellite tracked then it would be Thiago, and these mountains had been keeping secrets for millennia. A few more should not be so much to ask.

  Lina went north this time, walking through forest rides laden with pollen and a slow confetti of butterflies around teasel heads. A wood warbler’s song fell from a birch as Lina passed into the lush low hills below the mountains, the forest slipping from pine and hornbeam into oak, damsons, linden. A hare started from the track ahead and from here Lina could no longer see where forest ended and the climate ravaged plains began. With the sun on her skin warm with promise this should have been peaceful, but her mind was gone helplessly west.

  Still no word from Autumn, and she did not dare contact her father again, so she was left suspended, excised from events and yet too familiar with the dangers. Her dreams last night had been filled with her mother’s laugh, the touch of a palm cupping her cheek; the sight of overturned chairs and the front door standing open, splintered wood bright against the old paint.

  The chat request from her line manager came through when she was halfway through baiting and opening traps ready for the night. She took the tablet with her to sit in a small pool of sunlit track, brushing ladybirds from her legs, wanting to be warm without really understanding why.

  - Isla, she typed quickly, thank you for getting back to me, I was wanting to ask you something about those travel permits.

  -Were you? Well hold that thought. I’ve got serious news.

  The blood left her face, her skin going clammy and numb. This was why she had sought sunlight, because a part of her had been waiting for this since the beginning.

  -Your name has popped up on a couple of London State lists that we monitor.

  -Isla... she hesitated, her mind in freefall. Her manager carried on typing.

  -To do with the assassination of the London Minister. Had you seen that news? Don’t worry, it’s low level at the moment, and ESF look after our own, so we aren’t especially concerned. But we do ask for a report so we are prepared if they approach us.

  If they approach us? Oh James, Lina thought, wanting quietly to weep, because if he had talked, her name would not be on a low-level list, so he had not talked and oh that sweet, brave man. Did he know she didn’t expect him to keep her secrets, that she would forgive him anything he might be made to say, even the very worst of it, the secret that he had only learned by piecing together her nightmares?

  -Lina? I am sending through an internal personal security report form and I need you to send that back to me by the end of the day. Is that OK?

  -Yes, Lina typed nervelessly. I’ll do that. Isla, if they approach you what happens then? Still with a part of her weeping, and realising as well that the minutes until five o’clock had become more terrible and endless than ever.

  -They’ll either ask for interview access or file an extradition request. Standard practice is to refuse either. Full staff immunity, remember? Whatever it is, we’ll look after you, but we need full disclosure. You won’t be able to leave ESF land until this is over, of course.

  For a moment, Lina simply stared at the screen. She had promised her father she would stay here, with no intention of doing so. But Isla’s words lay in front of her and she wasn’t stupid; she knew why ESF would do this. No legal immunity or ESF papers could protect you from a knife on a crowded train, the car behind you on an empty road.

  She could leave anyway, but ESF would know because she already carried the tag that the villagers saw as a trap. There was irony in that, somewhere.

  A near-dry puddle by her feet held last night’s tracks of a deer where it had crossed the road in two effortless bounds. Lina beg
an to type,

  -Of course. I understand. But can I ask are there protocols for family? Can I apply for ESF travel permits for them, perhaps to bring them here? Even with the murdered man’s family coming, she wanted them here, safe from the knife or the empty road. Get them papers to come here, then if the Wileys left quickly they might never even meet.

  The wait for Isla’s response felt eternal.

  -It is possible, yes. It will depend on your report, I think. The level of urgency and risk. But I can get that application started for you if you like, expedite the process. Your father and brother, yes?

  -Please. Please, please, please. I’ll get the report to you tonight then. And thank you, Isla.

  -All being well, we can get permits issued in 24 hrs. Just FYI, when we get these reports, our Investigators run checks to ground-truth them.

  It was a trap then, in a way, or at least a test. Still mourning, still reeling, her thoughts were all shards of glass in her skull.

  -Understood. Thank you again.

  -It’s nothing. I’ll be in touch re your family.

  Chapter Five

  Lina wrote fast, the light fading from white to sepia and then silver as evening swelled around the station. It was gone five now, so they would be on the move, trusting her to keep them safe. Thiago was not here and through the open balcony doors of the lounge, the swifts screamed on long parabolas up into the eaves for the night, bending their sickle-bladed wings unfamiliarly, something fragile and fierce made helpless.

  She wrote about the years when she and James had been lovers and in love, when she had found in him a listener for her anger. First it had only been marches and protest banners, signing their names determinedly to banned petitions for the reinstatement of the old Bill of Human Rights, for victims of red water poisoning, against marine mining. Then one day someone had fallen into step with her in a march and murmured that there were other ways to fight, to help, if one were brave enough.

  She’d agreed there in the nervous crowd, then she’d persuaded James, and high on passion and the invulnerability of being twenty, they’d become couriers. Secreting refugees, wounded resistance fighters and orphans on their slow passages north to safety in places like Stornoway, Iceland, even Tromsø. Bringing others south to fight. Years of terror and ferocity and heartbreak, losing friends constantly, some in the Bradford Massacre, most simply vanishing overnight. Until one day her father found her weeping for another camp burned as a deterrent, and he placed his hand very, very gently over hers as if she were a bird he did not wish to startle. After a while, and when it was obvious she would not speak, he said, ‘I don’t know what you are into, Lina love, but please stop. You have to stop.’ She’d pulled her hand away and looked up, blazing, but he had not let her speak. ‘If they take you in for anything at all, they will find out, Lina. They will find out and we will both be killed.’

  She had always known it but to hear him say so, to have him lay his own life in her hands, there was no bracing herself against that.

  Then, like the sun setting, he said, ‘Find a way out, Lina. Find a safe place and then stay there. If you love me, get out of this.’

  The next day, he’d brought a hollow-eyed, malarial child home and held her gaze over their cowed, filthy head. ‘Love,’ he’d said, ‘it might be a drop in the ocean, but it is the greatest thing we can do.’

  She had left soon after, despite the endlessness of the task she abandoned, or perhaps because of it. She left because she loved him. But also because each life she saved, and each life she failed to save, had taken a part of her with it, and those parts had become heavier than what was left.

  She wrote this, parsing the ache in her chest into dates and facts, all the things she and her dad were not saying. Or most of it. James had not given her name as more than a lover, but if he did, that name would be scrutinised and it would only stand up to so much before it led to a different name, and another name, and an older, far worse crime than hers or James’.

  Her dreams last night had been full of an empty doorway, a silver-blue tin and a name made into a code for death. Lina stopped typing, looked up to where the evening star was wakening against a milky sky.

  She found Thiago in his workspace within the open barn that made the third side of the courtyard, bent over some unidentifiable mechanism. Glancing up as she entered, he used one foot to push a chair towards her then bent back to his work.

  She sat and despite the urgency did nothing, with Thiago’s hands busy and the smell of the barn filling her mind with somnolent cattle and slow, pollen-dense sunlight even while the night was gathering. But then finally, and without looking up, Thiago spoke.

  ‘Is it about the Wileys coming?’

  Lina shook herself. ‘No. Not really.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s about ESF policies on staff immunity.’

  Thiago levelled a long look at her. This was their unspoken pact, that what mattered was who they were here, to each other. But there was no way not to tell him now, and she so desperately needed to talk to him.

  ‘I wondered,’ she said slowly, ‘how far that really goes.’

  ‘ESF gives us full immunity. You know that. We sign over our citizenship, they protect us.’

  Yes, she knew that. Hence the reputation of ESF’s militia.

  ‘Yes, but out here...’ gesturing with one hand to the mountains and their lonely house that had never felt lonely at all.

  Thiago grimaced, but he would never soften truths for her. It was why she had asked. ‘I guess if a State were desperate enough, there’s always someone who’ll take the job.’ To find her, even if it meant their own death. ‘It would take something massive for a State to risk it though, against ESF.’ The way he said it, so simply, told her he thought this was the reassurance she had needed.

  Something massive, or something priceless and heartbreaking and old. It was all a matter of perspective.

  ‘How about internally,’ she said. ‘What do they do with you if you need that immunity?’

  Thiago studied her face. ‘Mostly, they like it. It gives them control over us.’ He paused. She could hear bats beneath the tiles, subliminal voices, the delicate rustling of straw. ‘At worst, they’d give a permanent travel ban.’

  Confinement here? It was no punishment at all, but that was not what mattered. ‘What about protecting families?’

  He showed no surprise, only curiosity. ‘Bringing them here?’

  Cautiously, ‘Yes. I think they’re in danger.’ From London State, or the PeaceKeepers who Thiago once served with. From a silver-blue tin that Lina saw again every time she closed her eyes.

  Thiago rubbed a hand over the stubble of his hair, smearing oil above his temple. ‘Because of you?’

  Lina recoiled. ‘No! Yes, I mean...’ she took a breath, ‘State arrested an old boyfriend. I’m listed as an associate.’ A partial truth. Sometimes known associates were arrested, sometimes they were exiled, sometimes they were ignored. Arbitrary justice.

  ‘That assassination?’ She could see him piecing together everything she had said and not said in the last few days. They knew each other so well. ‘Not much safer here then.’

  With the dead man’s family on their way? No, it wasn’t. She looked away to watch the emerging bats pass beyond the barn’s light. At the edge of the meadow, a tawny owl called.

  ‘Fuck, Lina,’ Thiago said very calmly and it made Lina laugh a little. ‘State never tell the family anything, and won’t bother passing this on to the PK,’ he added. ‘They won’t stay interested in an old relationship. Lying low should be enough.’

  Lina turned to face him.

  Looking at her, he said very slowly, ‘Not just an old relationship.’

  She couldn’t read the emotion that passed over his face; it was so slight anyone else wouldn’t have known there had been anything there at all. And she didn’t want to ask this next q
uestion.

  ‘What will they bother passing on to the PK, T? And what will the PK bother with?’

  He held her gaze without blinking, and god but she trusted him fathomlessly. ‘They will stay away if ESF are involved. I promise you that much.’ When she couldn’t speak, he leaned forward and touched the back of her hand, callouses on his fingertips, oil from the machines. ‘Lina. Get ESF permits for them. Tell Isla whatever it takes to do that.’

  It was what she had wanted to know. That ESF could save this, that it was safe to tell them. She smiled at Thiago, the owl called again and its mate answered further away. ‘I will,’ she said, rising. ‘I will.’

  As she reached the edge of the light, Thiago called and she turned.

  ‘I don’t...’ so unlike him to be hesitant, ‘If ESF think your family will endanger you, they might cut their losses.’

  She didn’t understand, wrapping her hands around her ribs. ‘What?’

  He shifted his leg and in the still evening, she could hear the tiny whirr of its motors. ‘Just that. But as long as the risk comes from you, then it’s not an issue.’

  Breathe, she thought. Breathe. The risk only comes from you so ESF will give them safety. This risk. Her and James.

  Once she was back at her tablet, with the windows now refracting darkness and the eerie echoes of her own face, she raised her fingers to end the story there. Her and James, their history and the fact that James had carried on after she left him. The older secret she left buried, which was a risk because if ESF knew already then she would have failed the test.

  If ESF think your family will endanger you, they might cut their losses.

  Her father had never done anything to endanger her; he had spent his every minute keeping her safe. It had only ever been the women he loved endangering him. And yet he had been so willing to leave.