This Is Our Undoing

by Lorraine Wilson

  When she came up for lunch, Silene sat gingerly beside Xander, her skin flushed and her eyes unfocused and Lina wondered what it was she was taking. She remembered the constant, quiet presence of her father when she had been young, and had to fight the curl of disgust from showing on her face. Kai was not here, and Silene did not look for him. Lina was about to ask, but then Anais murmured something to Thiago and Lina rose to help serve. Anais took the dish from her hands though, unsmilingly, leaving her redundant. So she turned instead to face the wide windows and the mountains beyond, aware of Thiago’s attention on her but watching the climbing flight of a lark against the treeline. There was a spruce in amongst the alders at the meadow’s edge, and although the alders were motionless, the spruce was shaking. It would take, Lina thought with excruciating slowness, force to shake a tree that size.

  Bear? Climbing just out of sight? Her fingers twitched for the tablet but it was still on the balcony. Bears did not often venture so close though, especially in daylight and with the smell of human in the grasses and the rising air.

  Too slowly, thinking too slowly. Human in the grasses. Kai. Bear. Kai.

  ‘T,’ she said, already running down the stairs, swinging around each turning on the pivot of her hand. The tree was still shaking when she reached the landing, it was still shaking when she flung the door open. It stopped the moment she stepped over the threshold.

  ‘Don’t,’ Thiago said behind her. ‘Lina.’ Almost pleading. But she moved into the meadow, aware of her own footfalls, the exact number of paces between her and the half-hidden boy, between the boy and the spruce tree. Three swallows wove flightpaths low over the grass and Kai looked up at Lina, his eyes wary.

  ‘Kai,’ she said softly. ‘Sweetie, could you go to your mum for me?’ He stood unquestioningly. ‘Slowly,’ she added. The tree still did not move, but that meant nothing and she said without turning, hearing footsteps, ‘You got your tablet?’ Kai began walking, petals falling from his hands.

  Thiago made a noise.

  ‘Bears?’ she asked.

  There was a pause, and then, ‘No.’

  Lina threw him a quick look. ‘Tags all online?’

  Silene was further back, and Lina saw without emotion that she was holding a knife out in front of herself. ‘Just there?’ Lina pointed to the tree.

  ‘Yes.’ Thiago began to add something else, but Lina was moving in a slow arc towards the tree that would bring her through a geum-decked miniature clearing. Thiago followed silently.

  There was nothing at the tree, and no claw marks of bears or territorial lynx, no torn bark from a velvet-shedding stag, not that it was the right season. Then the light shifted and something wedged into the trunk glistened like an eye.

  ‘Jesus!’ She hesitated, then warily pulled the thing free. Black clots slippery as jellyfish leaving trails across her palm, strands of muscle fibre and the glaucous gleam of fatty tissues. And her mind flooded with the red sucking flesh of a wound, her fingers slick and the bullet slick and James’ sweat as he tried not to move. His blood. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Lina. Lina!’ Thiago grabbed her shoulder and she stared at him. ‘Fur,’ he said. ‘Look, there’s fur.’

  She didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to look at anything, because she had dreamed of blood last night, fresh stains on concrete and silence. And James. And James. But fur, she looked and yes, there was fur. Short, grey-brown, clumped by blood and fragments of skin.

  ‘Deer.’ She glanced up at Thiago and he nodded once as if she had not reacted oddly at all. Then with one finger he moved the mass on her palm and it wasn’t a bullet at all, but a data tag.

  Lina did what she would have done with a tag retrieved normally from a predator’s leavings, the snowmelt, a village. She bagged it, photographed the site, took it into the lab and checked the cameras on the meadow edge. Iva brought her abandoned lunch but set it down and left before Lina could speak. None of the cameras had a view of the tree, and the tag itself had been damaged beyond salvaging so she couldn’t even track that. It had been a matter of seconds though, between her and them, so she sat trawling the cameras until Thiago appeared at her shoulder.

  ‘I can do that,’ he said quietly. ‘You run the tag.’

  She caught the strain in his face and said, ‘Did you see anyone?’

  Pulling another stool up beside her, he angled her screen towards him. ‘No.’ He was flicking between camera live feeds as if expecting something to be out there now, but there was only the sun-bleached track, forest floor, meadow, the back of the barn and the old cold store.

  ‘I’ll ask the others,’ she said. Kai; if anyone had seen anything it would be him. Without analysing why, she added, ‘Did Anais say anything to you?’

  Thiago shot her a narrow, unfathomable look then went back to tapping on pictures, zooming into patches of bare ground. ‘No.’ He leaned forward to study a stretch of old leaves and scuffed earth. ‘We’ll sort it, Lina.’

  Not ‘Don’t worry’ or ‘It’s nothing’ because either would be useless, but ‘We’ll sort it’, which was not. Lina smiled and rose to her feet.

  ‘I’m going to speak to Kai,’ she said and went out into the courtyard, the sunlight falling onto her like a waterfall.

  She found him sitting in the barn, on the floor beside Thiago’s workbench, arranging and rearranging a handful of nails into patterns in the dust.

  ‘Did you have some lunch?’ she said, lowering herself against the wall, the sun lying short-angled alongside her.

  He looked up with his fingers poised above a long, thin nail, rusted red. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly.

  She saw the hesitation on his thin face and said quietly, ‘You can get more whenever you want. There’s always food in the fridge, and bread and fruit out waiting. It’s okay; you don’t need to be hungry.’ She’d seen this in those short weeks she’d lived with Jericho. The assumption that food was not for him, that taking it might be dangerous. Jericho had hoarded it, bread going hard beneath his pillow, biscuits fallen to crumbs in his pockets; it had taken him months to stop and Lina hoped the journey would not bring it back.

  Kai smiled like an unfurling flower. ‘Lina.’

  ‘Yes?’

  He shifted the nails into some new configuration, the beginnings of a face. ‘What was it in the trees?’

  This was what she’d come for, but it still made her catch her breath. ‘Did you see something?’

  The face gained eyes that were crossed nails. ‘A monster.’

  The mouth was given two short nails as fangs. Lina wanted to reach out and scrub her hand across it all. One of the swallows was perched watchfully on a beam above them, its chicks murmuring. A wall lizard dashed beneath Thiago’s bench into a strip of sun, head tilted, also watchful. The boy noticed none of it, drawing his fingertip down each fang, rust marks on his skin.

  ‘A monster?’ Lina said eventually. ‘What did it look like?’

  ‘Fierce,’ Kai sounded thoughtful and not at all afraid. ‘Quiet.’

  ‘Was it a man? Did you see?’

  He frowned. ‘It was a shadow,’ he said.

  The lizard ran past the boy’s knee towards a line of ants, stopped again. The swallow cast itself out into the sky. Lina flexed her fingers carefully. The shadow? It had not been though. Not this time. The cameras had all worked, so it was only someone who had known where they were.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that it was a person who’s good at hiding, and wanted to ... play a joke on us.’

  Kai lifted the fang nails away, studied the face and put them back.

  ‘Can you stay out of the forest, Kai? When you are on your own?’ He looked up. ‘You can go further if you’re with your mum or Xander, or one of us, but stay in the meadow otherwise, won’t you?’

  ‘Why?’

  Lina hesitated. ‘Your mu
m might worry if we don’t know where you are.’

  He lifted the fangs away again, set them aside and turned the mouth into a smile. ‘She does worry,’ he said, removing one nail from each eye so that they became slits, or asleep. ‘But not about someone hurting me.’

  There had been the slightest emphasis in his voice. Someone hurting me. Lina replayed it again in her mind but couldn’t bring herself to ask, because however she looked at it, the words were too sad. ‘I think we’ll all worry if you get lost or hurt,’ she said. ‘The meadow is very safe, and the forest is too, most of the time. But still please stay close, is that okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, giving her that startling smile again. ‘I will stay close.’

  Lina nodded, said thank you and rose, dusting her shorts down and hearing the swallow chicks begging again although she had not noticed the adult arrive.

  ‘It’s not me the monster wants to hurt, anyway,’ Kai said as she was turning, and Lina looked down at his bent head. ‘Not this time.’

  ‘It won’t hurt any of us,’ she said firmly.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘I’ve asked HQ to postpone the tag programme.’ Thiago was sitting at his desk, one leg stretched out, one hand holding a mug of coffee half-drunk.

  Lina looked up from her screens full of data files. ‘Did you tell them about the deer tag?’ They had tried arguing against the tagging programme before and no-one had listened. This, presumably a villager’s stark protest, hardly seemed likely to convince them.

  ‘No.’ Thiago was frowning abstractedly.

  ‘Then you really think we can make the villagers come around?’

  ‘No.’

  Lina sighed and Thiago grinned at her.

  ‘Then why ask for the delay?’ She was not sure what she wanted to happen about this macabre statement of fury. Nothing perhaps, because she sympathised. But there was the shadow too and although she could see no connection between them, it was something unknown alongside something new, so she wasn’t sure.

  Thiago studied his coffee. The light in the room shifted and, as quietly as it had begun, the rain stopped. ‘It’s bad timing.’

  Because the Wileys were here? Or because anger from the locals was obviously so high. It was no answer, even by Thiago’s minimalist standards. ‘How, T?’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘The Wileys being here aren’t helping ESF look neutral. They aren’t happy.’

  They had been unhappy before, but it made a kind of sense that London State coming had made it worse. Another mark against them. And yet ... and yet there was something in Thiago’s face that Lina couldn’t interpret. ‘Will HQ agree?’

  ‘I think so.’ His blade was sliding back and forth along the floor, just a few millimetres, but she recognised the tension and thought perhaps she knew what it meant.

  ‘Can we help?’ Another unsaid being spoken. ‘The locals, I mean.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He’d been looking away from her, his eyes narrowed against the rising light, but he met her gaze now and his voice shifted. ‘But not now, Lina. You can’t do anything right now.’

  No. And yet another mark against the Wileys. Cowardice for survival, she thought again. But soon her father and Jericho would be here. Even if Xander or Silene did somehow connect the dots between James and her, this was ESF land, not London State, and that meant everything.

  ‘I’ll ask about the tag,’ Thiago said when she didn’t answer. ‘If you like.’

  She had run a DNA test overnight and managed to ID the deer it had come from, killed eleven days ago by wolves. Whoever these people were, they had scavenged the tag from the remains and brought it here with the old blood still slick. She might be able to track some of that on the cameras, but would it be better to find out from the villagers or go to them with proof, or just let the deed lie unchallenged? ‘It died above Beli Iskar,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Perhaps ask there.’ She thought of the young man who had challenged her, the woman who had let her go.

  ‘I’ll do that. Don’t bother doing the cameras till then.’

  Lina nodded. It would save her time if the villagers talked, but she thought of Kai building a monster’s face from iron and wanted to see for herself anyway.

  For now, though, she returned to her real work, fitting the data from her latest small mammal surveys into the databases, updating population models, forecasting the season. She had collected blood from a sub-sample because a study in Russia had isolated a genetic mutation causing mass die-offs from a flulike virus. Although the virus had not reached Bulgaria yet, Lina wanted to map the mutation anyway.

  She would still check her data for the shadow, and the cameras for the person who had left the tag. But she wanted, irrationally, to do both when Thiago was not there, because he’d told her that he would resolve it and she trusted him and yet would still look herself. Because she had only been annoyed by the shadow materialising on the slopes, harming nothing. But it had come to the station the day the Wileys arrived, and Kai had murmured ‘shadow’ in the dust of the barn, so it was more than an annoyance now. When Thiago went out to repair a treefall-damaged footbridge then, she looked. Although it did not help.

  No equipment failures, no weather or satellite correlates, no geographic correlates other than that the shadows were all close to paths. But the forests were full of old roads, old powerline ridings, tracks from people and deer. She frowned at the screen and almost wished the shadow back again to give her another sample.

  She was just beginning to trawl camera images from yesterday when Iva appeared in the doorway. She had her domovek’s shallow bowl of milk in her hands which she placed on the hearthstone, picking up the other. Lina smiled at her but Iva did not smile back.

  Straightening and studying the bowl, she said, ‘Mr Ferdinando is not back?’ And Lina was about to say no when they both heard the truck, so they waited silently. Lina shut her camera windows and let her mouse drift aimlessly over data files instead, her inbox. She was waiting for that too, of course, waiting and trying not to imagine the crowded trains, the stop-start of them through stable towns and dangerous ones.

  ‘Mr Ferdinando,’ Iva said so heavily that Lina shot Thiago an amused glance. He was brushing rock-dust off his trousers and pretended not to notice her look or Iva’s tone.

  ‘Iva?’

  ‘That ... that woman. She wants lunch outside!’

  Lina looked up. ‘But it’s going to rain again,’ she said redundantly. From her window, she could see the very edge of a deckchair that Silene had pulled out into the meadow, the tip of a broad sunhat.

  ‘Exactly it is!’ Iva declared. ‘It is going to rain, but she sits out there sunbathing and waved her hands like,’ Iva demonstrated one-handed, ‘and tells me it will be lovely. Lovely? I am not here to be servant to them. This is not what we agreed.’

  They were not exactly dangerous to Iva, but they were still State, and Lina remembered what Thiago had said earlier about that. He was watching Iva steadily.

  ‘She’s not, Thiago,’ Lina said when it looked like he might not speak, and Iva’s gaze jerked to hers as if startled. ‘They can’t boss her about like that.’

  Lifting his hands, Thiago said, ‘I know. Stick to what we agreed. You’re not on your own. We’ll manage.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘Iva,’ Thiago said levelly.

  Iva hesitated, then gave a small nod and stepped back. ‘But lunch…’

  Thiago stood. ‘I’ll help you, and it will be sheltered enough under the barn roof. Hopefully the swallows will crap in their food.’

  Iva snorted, a small, sharp smile pulling at her mouth, lines lace-working around her eyes. Lina ought to have offered to help too, but they were already gone and she delayed, setting another data import running on her tablet while a butterfly basked on the windowsill, gathering warmth.

  A chat app opened on her tablet; an
account and name she didn’t recognise but with a greeting that Autumn had taught her. Her lungs ached and she realised it was not just Autumn she had lost, but her link to James, to news of James and hope for James, and the time when they had loved each other entirely.

  - Andromeda, this is Volya. Bad news, they typed. With a codename like Volya, they must be Polish, might be the guide and her heart was already bruising itself against her ribs. We’re in KSL, father injured not serious but not mobile. The words deleting themselves automatically, self-devouring.

  - What happened? What about my brother? She couldn’t think where KSL was, needed a map, needed to focus.

  - Mugging. F wants b to continue on direct to you. Can arrange this with f to follow when recovered. Yes?

  She wanted to write ‘I’m on my way’, or ‘bring my dad anyway, whatever it takes’, or ‘no, no, it’s not safe, don’t come’ but instead typed, Yes. Bring him. Can I call f? How is he?

  - Not yet. Need new IPs. It’s not serious. Will update you once in R.

  Romania, she realised. Which meant the SL was Slovakia. Not the Ukraine, at least. Tallying trains and border crossings and thank god for the ESF permits making those crossings simple. Lina breathed in slowly, carefully.

  - Do you have news from LUK? They might, more at least than she did. There was a long pause and she thought for a moment that they had gone, but then, slowly,

  - Someone talked. People missing. It’s a good thing you got them out.

  She couldn’t imagine anyone not talking, there in the cells. And oh James, how much? How much had he said and if only...