This Is Our Undoing

by Lorraine Wilson

  No, Lina thought. She would finish the story there. It would surely be enough, and in a week perhaps, Lina would drive down to the checkpoint at the border of ESF land and she would watch a truck coming along the old road, dust and butterflies spinning in its wake. When it stopped she would shield her eyes against the light and her father would step down, he would turn to help Jericho out and Lina would gather them both up into her arms. Her father would lift her hand and press it to his cheek and she would know without him needing to say that at least some of the tears in his eyes were because she looked so much like her mother.

  But the dead man’s family would get there sooner. It was inevitable that State could get people here quicker than all of Lina’s machinations. And the next day, when she came back to the station beneath a dense white sun, Thiago came to lean in the lab doorway, watching her unload her bike and shake dust and seedheads from her boots.

  ‘You saw the message?’

  ‘This evening.’ It was such a relief now that he understood at least some. Enough.

  ‘Helicopter, of course. Fucking politicos.’

  ‘Not the uncle though?’

  Thiago stepped aside so she could pass him into the lab, moving to her workbench dazzled by the loss of sunlight. ‘No. He’s to follow. No timeline on that though.’

  ‘Marvellous.’

  Thiago laughed and crossed the room, opening a window to free a bee batting itself against the glass. ‘It’ll be okay,’ he said, and something about the certainty of the way he said it made her glance up at him, eyes narrowing. But when he said nothing else she let it go.

  ‘I’m going to put a camera on that bear’s new den,’ she said. It was not vital that she do it today, and Thiago knew that very well. ‘Just so I can get decent footage of how she’s moving now.’

  ‘They’re due half six. Weather permitting.’

  She had been so focused on how to avoid being here to watch them arrive, she had forgotten about the weather. ‘Will it?’ she said. ‘It’s windy up on the tops.’

  Iva appeared in the doorway with her domovek’s bowl of milk, placing it by the hearth and lifting the old one with its yellow skin like a setting moon. Lina smiled at her, but her mind was on the smell of the breeze coming through the open door, the floral mosaics and hot dust of the meadow and beneath that the cold stone and desiccation from the peaks. It would be dangerous up there today, the sun deceptive, the wind in the shadows deadly. She found herself hoping that no-one tried to cross the border tonight. And that the helicopter perhaps couldn’t land.

  ‘They will come,’ Iva said, staring down into the bowl she held as if looking there for someone to hold accountable.

  ‘Yes,’ Thiago said. ‘The foothills are fine.’

  Lina nodded and pressed her hands against her stomach, stilling the nausea there, thinking how quickly a life delineated by sunrises, by the bloom and fade of flowers and snow lines on the mountains, could become instead about hours and minutes and digital silence.

  As she was prepping the camera and checking the bear’s tag data to get a location on her den, Thiago went quietly out, talking to Iva in the courtyard too low to be understood. Then an app opened itself on her tablet and everything around her – the maps, Thiago’s voice, the white walls – fell away.

  - Jaco. Meridian. At stage 2. Papers hot & offline. Awaiting alternatives? Gemini feared down.

  Lina sat without moving, the light in the room shifted and then brightened again as a cloud passed across the sun. A pair of swifts tore a bell curve through the courtyard, screaming, and Lina realised she was counting her breaths to hold herself still. They were outside the walls. Past the dogs, the scanners, the checkpoints, through the worst of it because Lina knew too well how many journeys ended there on the line between city and country. Oh dear god, they were out. Her fingers came to press against her mouth, beneath them a smile, a tremor. Dad, she wanted to say, Jericho, you must have been so brave and I hope you are sleeping now. I hope you are holding one another because your bodies are so fragile and so precious. Dad, she wanted to say, I’ve got you. I’ve got you.

  But they were offline. Jaco or the courier must have destroyed all their IPs, and if they’d had more time they might have got new ones ready, but there had been no time. There never was. So she had only this:

  -Andromeda. Meridian. IDs and permits coming. Hold still. Thank you.

  Then a vidcall, and the too-clever man again, smiling his perfect smile.

  ‘Dr Stephenson, shall I put you through to Dr MacKenzie?’

  ‘Please,’ she said, faintly surprised. ‘If she’s free.’

  ‘She’s been expecting your call.’ He’d read her report, Lina thought, because the look he gave her was just that bit more speculative than before, a touch sceptical. Perhaps she did not look like his idea of the resistance, but surely that made her perfect for it. She smiled wider than she might have done, her spine straightening just a little, and his eyes skimmed sideways just as the image on her screen changed.

  ‘Lina,’ Isla was leaning back in her chair, a window behind her showing Zurich’s pale skyline, a clock tower and a sliver of mountain beyond, scaffolding from a bomb attack and the rain falling like a river.

  Lina pressed her fingers against the edge of the lab bench out of view and hard enough to feel the smoothed topography of the grain. ‘I was wondering about the visitors coming here...’

  Isla smiled. ‘Thiago forgiven us for that yet? Do you mean re: the lists? Don’t worry, they’re higher rated than the wife is.’

  Meaning confidentiality clearance. Good, that was good. She was still wrestling with whether her father and Jericho would be safer here with the Wileys or kept away. But if the Wileys knew nothing... ‘I see. That’s ... is there any news on the travel permits for my family?’

  Isla looked out briefly at the rain, then back again. ‘Protocol is to issue them only once our internal checks are complete,’ she said. ‘You understand that, Lina?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Isla leaned forward, her face pixelating and then sharpening as the camera adjusted. ‘But I’ve pulled some strings and we are issuing them early.’ Lina began to speak but Isla carried on over her. ‘Our Investigators gave me some news this morning which might actually have swung it in your favour. A couple of people on the same lists as you were picked up last night. Both died in custody, possibly self-inflicted.’

  Autumn. Lina’s eyes burned. Even if Isla had let her speak, she didn’t think she could have done. Autumn, and a small white tablet, just like the ones in her father’s silver-blue tin.

  ‘I managed to persuade the Group Head that if your family were not brought to you, then you would find a way to go to them. I think they felt that you being picked up by London State was more of a diplomatic hassle than simply issuing some travel permits.’ Isla laughed, pleased with herself.

  A breath as deep as the ocean, ‘Isla. I can’t thank you enough–’

  ‘Don’t thank me yet,’ Isla interrupted again. ‘We can offer no security en route, and their residence on ESF land will be provisional. But it’s a start, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ Lina whispered, more to herself than Isla. ‘It really is.’

  Chapter Six

  Lina stopped on the track to the station, eyeing the building with her shoulders tensing already. Unfamiliar voices fell from the open balcony doors on the top floor. Where the helicopter had landed, the meadow was swept flat, crushing the colony of butterfly orchids that had almost finished flowering. The air smelled wrong.

  Iva emerged from the house, pulling a coat on despite the day’s trailing warmth, and paused beside Lina with a small nod.

  ‘They are here then,’ Lina said, unease in the muscles of her stomach. It would be fine though, Thiago had said so.

  ‘I cooked them only fermented cabbage,’ Iva said. ‘That is all we
non-State eat, I think.’ And although she would never have done such a thing, Lina smiled.

  ‘What are they like?’

  Iva shrugged and, in a remarkably good imitation of Thiago, said, ‘Bastard politicos.’

  Lina laughed, and would have hugged her if Iva’s dignity had permitted it. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she said instead. ‘Will Anais come?’

  ‘Yes,’ Iva said, hoisting her bag back onto her shoulder and turning towards home. ‘Mr Ferdinando agreed it with her.’

  ‘Good,’ Lina said, but Iva only nodded again and walked away, her steps heavy and certain even as wood larks exploded from beneath her feet.

  It was as she was crossing the courtyard from lab to new house that Lina realised there was someone in the meadow. The wagtail gave it away, piping indignation at something Lina might have otherwise missed. Beneath a lone pine tree was a small tangle of hair so blonde it was almost white, everything attached to it hidden by grasses and a sprawl of vetch. Lina hesitated, then walked towards the tree, orlaya and the stiff stems of pinks brushing against her calves. The child was sitting with too-thin legs crossed, running a grass seedhead back and forth through his hands, and he didn’t look up although he must have noticed her coming.

  ‘Hello,’ Lina said, made quiet by some strange stillness.

  He looked up quickly, eyes the colour of backlit amber, unblinking. ‘Hello,’ he said. He was about the same age as Jericho, although with camp kids you often didn’t know, and this child had that familiar hollow, wise wariness. This child, Lina thought, did not dance.

  ‘I’m Lina,’ she said, kneeling down, all her primed hostility gone. ‘That’s a kind of oat,’ pointing at the grass in his hand, ‘like the ones we make porridge from.’

  He held it still, then touched a finger to one of the long filaments on the seedhead. ‘It’s like a really thin knife,’ he said. ‘A claw.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ Lina looked towards the house, where voices that reeked of London were just about audible, and she was beginning to understand. When the news and ESF had referred to ‘son’, it was because some children counted less than others.

  ‘Do you want to come in with me?’ she said. ‘It’s time to eat, I think.’

  The boy looked at her with those strange eyes and smiled almost kindly. ‘I am not hungry,’ he said. ‘I like it here.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lina rose, disturbing a small blue butterfly that skipped away like a part of the sky cut free. The true sky above was beginning to shift towards evening, and clouds that threatened a storm were gathering in the west. ‘It might rain in a while though,’ she said, then added, ‘What’s your name?’

  He was looking at the house now rather than at her. ‘Kai,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’ll mind getting wet.’

  She found the mother at the top of the stairs as if waiting, also blonde – it had probably been one of her adoption criteria – and perhaps mid-forties, dressed for a soirée, worrying at the pearls around her neck. Everything Lina had expected her to be.

  ‘Hello,’ the woman said, stretching out a hand and then letting it fall. People no longer shook hands since the bird flu epidemics became so regular, although in certain circles it was rumoured to persist, power-playing. ‘I’m Silene Wiley,’ she said, brushing her untouched hand against her dress. ‘You must be our resident scientist...’ Raising her eyebrows expectantly.

  ‘Lina. Annelina Stephenson.’ Be pleasant, she told herself, and uninteresting. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Likewise,’ Silene Wiley laughed lightly, all manners and delicacy, moving back to perch on the edge of a sofa. Lina realised her hands were clutching at her tablet too tightly and forced her fingers to relax. There was a teenager standing at the window, his broad back to the room, fingers tapping on the glass.

  ‘Xander, darling,’ Silene Wiley said, ‘say hello to Dr Stephenson. We can call you Lina, can we? Of course?’

  Xander moved his head fractionally and made a noise that might have been greeting. He was the one who had found his father’s body. ‘Hello, Xander,’ she said, but he ignored her.

  If only Iva had stayed, and where had Thiago absented himself to? ‘Have you met Mr Ferdinando?’ she said, cursing him mildly.

  The almost-grown boy did turn now. ‘He’s arranging net access for us, he said.’

  Of course, ESF would want non-disclosure agreements and devices scanned and registered before they opened up their net, and god forbid these poor souls be deprived of their access for a moment longer than necessary. Lina smiled noncommittally and moved to the kitchen area, checking the food Iva had prepared, sadly not cabbages, and putting the kettle on to boil.

  ‘Darling, you won’t...’ Silene’s voice had dropped as if Lina were not meant to hear. ‘Do anything, will you? You will wait for official access?’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Mum,’ the boy said, sounding younger and smaller than his seventeen years and too-heavy frame.

  ‘Well, darling, you need to be careful, don’t you?’ Still in that pseudo-whisper that made Lina wonder if she were meant to hear, and if so why. She breathed rice water and set glasses on the counter. Was Silene telling her that Xander had the ability to hack through ESF’s systems? And if so, why? To suggest that Xander might be able to access other networks – State lists, for example?

  No. She was being paranoid. But it was paranoia that kept you alive sometimes, and how were you supposed to tell when it was saving you and when it was crippling you. Jesus, Lina thought, why had they come?

  ‘Is this our meal?’ Silene Wiley said from behind her, and Lina felt her hands tighten on the saucepan, consciously relaxed them. ‘Gosh, how delightfully rustic.’

  Lina smiled. Compared to a guarded house on a gated street, this place must feel wildly isolated, unfathomably basic. What could possibly make them want to stay? It was a comforting thought. She stood in the fading sunlight and smiled at the strangers, ‘Dinner is ready.’

  Be careful, her dad had said back when this all began.

  With enviable timing, Thiago arrived at the exact moment that Lina began serving, touching her lightly on the shoulder as he swung himself into a chair, straightening out his blade with a sigh. He raised one hand to massage knuckles into his temple and said shortly, ‘Net access approved.’

  Xander Wiley was tapping on his tablet before Thiago had finished talking, angling his screen away from everyone. Secrecy, Lina thought, but that and his hostility were certainly grief or angst or a desire to be anywhere but here. They could not conceivably hold suspicion.

  Silene Wiley said something with a laugh and Thiago replied, and Lina made herself pay attention. On a normal day she’d still not have liked them. But now, god, they were London State, sitting right here when somewhere inside the city walls a person called Autumn had poisoned themself rather than talk and a man called James Hanslow was sitting in a cell, or being interrogated, or dying. She looked at Silene Wiley’s smile and saw James’ face the last time they’d met, when they were both trying so hard to stay whole.

  For the sake of seeming present, she asked at random, ‘Any news on your ... brother, is it? When he’s arriving? Is he coming from London too?’

  ‘Oh, he’s not my brother,’ Silene’s fingers fluttered thinly. She seemed made of porcelain and money, her eldest son of money and too much time indoors. He looked up and then back to his screen, almost a smile on his face. ‘He’s just a very, very dear friend, so we call him Uncle, don’t we, Xander darling? Are you from London, Lina?’

  ‘Long ago,’ she said shortly, and Thiago, without looking at her, repeated the question Silene had left unanswered.

  ‘So when’s he coming?’

  ‘He’s on his way,’ Xander said, the suddenness making him sound harsh. ‘He’s coming from the Drowned State, so the storms held him up.’ Shooting glances at Lina and Thiago, ‘He’ll be here soon.’ The
fact of this man’s arrival was wielded almost like a threat.

  Lina lifted her cup of tea, the heat passing into her palms like a touch. It was, she decided, because they were so used to being guarded, and this man, whoever he was, was coming to guard them. Such irony, such poor vulnerable people.

  ‘Who is he?’ she said. Thiago did look at her now, a slight narrowing of his eyes as if he thought she ought not have asked.

  ‘Devendra Kapoor.’ Silene said. ‘You will adore him, everyone does.’

  Kapoor. Lina ran the name through her memory and although it rang no bells, that meant little. She’d cut herself away too well. Although if he was from Paris, the State long-drowning but refusing to concede defeat, then she thought he must be little risk to her. It was this politico wife and her angry son who were the danger, not the amber-eyed boy in the meadow or the French ‘uncle’.

  The lights in the high ceiling flickered and died. Xander looked up frowning, and the room became strangely silent. Lina and Thiago glanced at one another but didn’t bother saying anything. The backup power would protect the essentials, and Lina was already rising, reaching for the lamps ready in a low cupboard.

  ‘You haven’t lost power?’ Silene was watching Lina light the lamps with sharp fascination. ‘The great ESF, I thought you were untouchable.’

  Lina kept her head bent, her hands busy setting one lamp and then another next to Thiago as he reached to hang them from waiting hooks. This was exactly how she imagined politicos to be, the constant baiting and facsimile manners.

  ‘It’s not power failure,’ Xander said, turning his screen to face the room, the frown on his face different now. Intelligent rather than mulish. The screen was black.

  Thiago tilted his head and the movement made Lina realise that no, in fact the generator had not yet kicked in. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, starting for the stairs. ‘Check the other tablets?’