Genni shook her head and sat on the bed, dust from her clothes settling on the cover like ashes.
‘Shower then food then sleep? Or just food then sleep?’
Thiago had taken the truck as soon as she got back, and although he hadn’t said, Lina thought he was going to try to intercept Devendra Kapoor. Not entirely out of kindness, but rather because neither of them liked the thought of someone so potentially hostile roaming their mountains unchecked.
‘I don’t know,’ Genni said. Lina wavered, aware once again of how little they knew each other, and how little reason Genni had to feel safe with her.
‘Tell you what; I’ll bring you some food, you lie down. Here’s a tablet you can use if you like. It’s safe.’ Genni took it as if it might explode, the dark screen reflecting her dark face like a hollow mirror. Lina paused at the doorway to look back at the child her father had entrusted to her. ‘Perhaps we could go and find some foxes in a day or two, when you’ve rested.’
Genni looked up, her exhausted face expressionless. ‘Foxes?’
‘Yes. There is a family nearby we could watch.’
‘Yeah,’ Genni said, and something in Lina unwound. ‘I guess.’
She was asleep by the time Lina returned with a plate of food, the tablet fallen and her legs curled up in a tangle of clothes and bedcovers. Lina eased her shoes off and pulled a sheet loosely up to her shoulders. She lay the food down on the bedside table then set something else down beside it. A framed photograph of the three of them, her, her father and Genni when she was still half-starved and just beginning to learn how to be held. She set it here now for the same reason she kept it beside her own bed – so that when Genni woke the first thing she would see was a reminder she was not alone.
Genni slept through lunch and into the afternoon, her brown skin ochred by the light and dust making pale freckles on her hands, her hair. Lina worked in the lab, or tried to, heartbreak in her chest like a held grenade. The need to mourn was held back only by the fear that she might never stop. When she went up again at five o’clock, Genni was awake, lying on her back watching the slow creep of sunlight up the wall. She startled when Lina appeared, but did not look away from the light.
‘Hey, love,’ Lina said. ‘Come and get some supper.’
If Genni had not been a camp kid, Lina suspected she might have denied being hungry. Something in her was holding itself withdrawn despite that first moment at the church when she had stepped mutely into Lina’s arms. But because Genni had known real hunger she rose and came to Lina’s side, ignoring the hand Lina held out, but following like a shadow.
Xander and Silene and Thiago were already in the top floor room, the meal prepared by Iva in the oven and Thiago’s frown leaving his face when he saw Genni. He was sitting at the far end of the table and did not rise, but pushed the chair next to his out with his foot, and said, ‘Glad to have you here, Genni.’ He poured a glass of water, set it in front of the chair, then looked back to his tablet. Genni hesitated, but Thiago’s attention was on his screen and, after a moment, she sat in the chair he had moved and wrapped her fingers around the glass, watching him. Lina had told him about her sibling’s new name, new self, and had said something of her worry that it was driven by fear, but he had echoed her conclusion in the truck. It did not really matter. Whatever its roots, if this was what Genni needed, then that was enough. Lina had nodded gratefully at that and gone upstairs to find her sister awake.
‘This is your brother?’ Silene was sitting on the balcony now, looking over her shoulder to study Genni. Her voice was sharp but her hand, holding a glass of wine, was shaking.
‘Sister,’ Lina said, directing her answer to both Silene and Xander. Despite the headphones, she thought he was listening. ‘Her name is Genni.’
Xander couldn’t see Genni from where he was slumped into his favourite corner but he only shifted fractionally and laid a tablet onto the sofa beside him. He had two, Lina realised. The one he had put aside was running something in a black html window, text scrolling up the page. Silene scraped her chair around, high spots of colour appearing on her cheeks.
‘But you said it was your brother coming. Xander, darling, wasn’t it–’
‘I did,’ Lina interrupted calmly. ‘And now she’s my sister. Same person.’
Genni was playing with her glass, turning it and tipping it as if fascinated.
‘But he’s, but she’s...’ Silene stopped and Lina realised it was not the gender that she was struggling with after all, it was the skin. Or perhaps what the skin implied. Kai was not here.
‘Adopted, yes,’ she said, a little less calmly. ‘As is obvious. And very, very much my sister.’
Behind her, Thiago opened the oven door and the hum was briefly louder than Lina’s heartbeat, the birdsong outside, her memories of James.
Silene came into the room. ‘From the camps?’ she said, her wine tremulous within her glass, her knuckles whitening. Lina did not bother to answer, taking plates down from the shelf and moving to the table.
‘Which one? No. Don’t. I don’t wish to know.’
Lina frowned sideways at her, and saw Thiago doing similar. Genni’s head was bent.
‘Mum,’ Xander said. ‘For fuck’s sake.’ Not cutting so much as weary, or worried.
‘Darling.’ She dropped down beside him.
‘Here,’ Lina said to her sister, handing her cutlery, ‘help me put these out will you?’ Genni did so slowly, carelessly, knives and forks canted at angles across the table.
Xander muttered something that made Silene flinch in a way his swearing at her had not. Above the sounds of metal on wood, the oven and the birdsong, Lina thought he had said, It’s over. Or perhaps, Get over it. And then something that held the word ‘Dad’ like a fist.
‘It was not about that,’ Silene said. The tinny pitch perfectly clear. ‘It was about... Actually, darling, it was something private between your father and I.’
Xander laughed bitterly and stood. ‘Fucking Paul Ellis, was it then? Dad had enough finally? Good thing he’s gone then, isn’t it?’
‘Alexander!’ Silene stared up at her son, one hand wrapped around her throat and her eyes wide and pale. Xander laughed again and turned his back. Surprisingly, he came to sit at the table, and it was his mother who said faintly, ‘I do apologise, but I’m really not that hungry.’ Then she fled downstairs.
Xander hunched over his tablet like a cloud before lightning and Lina wished, fervently, that he had gone too. ‘Alright, Genni,’ she said into the quiet, spooning food onto a plate, ‘Here’s yours. There’s plenty more though, if you can eat all that. T?’ She held her hand out for his plate as well. She realised belatedly that he had been watching her very closely for a while and averted her gaze, thinking, not now, T. Please. Not yet. ‘Xander?’ She thought he would ignore her, but he did not and, when she returned his plate, even thanked her.
After a while, once he had emptied his plate and refilled it, Xander looked at Thiago. ‘Did you go out looking for Dev?’
Thiago raised one eyebrow fractionally. ‘I did. No sign yet.’
Which was surprising, given both the tag and the probability of passing at least a handful of their cameras, and Thiago’s ability to track.
‘You really couldn’t find him?’ Xander’s disbelief might have been more insulting if there had not been an undertone of panic.
‘Sorry,’ Thiago said, only the slight tightening of his jaw revealing anything at all.
‘Fuck it then,’ Xander muttered, pushing his plate aside, second helpings forgotten. Genni had eaten more than Lina had hoped, and was tearing a thick slice of bread into bits, eating them slowly. Her attention switched from the food in her hand to the teen. His mother might have stopped him if she had been here, but Lina and Thiago only glanced at each other. If he had the skill, then better they know it. Perhaps this was why Thiago ha
d not asked ESF to track the man’s tag.
‘His tag’s here,’ Xander said after a few minutes of silence. Evening was half-fallen now, the windows uncertain mirrors. He turned his screen to face Lina and Thiago, showing a flashing red icon on his featureless map of the mountains. ‘It’s not moving.’
‘He gave you prior access to his tag?’ Lina said.
‘No. Why would he?’ He was watching Thiago, who was studying the coordinates expressionlessly. ‘I hacked in.’ He said it like that was not a criminal offence, when even possessing the skill was a crime regardless of the act. Either he was so assured of his own privilege he did not care, or he wanted them to know.
‘A military tag,’ Thiago murmured, impressed and unintimidated. ‘Send me the access and I’ll find him for you.’
‘Why’s he not moving?’
Lina looked out at the unblinkered view of mountain and sky, the last traces of sunset a shimmer of orange. ‘He’ll have stopped to camp,’ she said. ‘It’s not safe walking at night without a good map.’
Genni yawned and Lina smiled at her gently. ‘Tired, love?’ she said. Xander looked at the girl as if only now remembering she was there, and she saw an echo of his mother’s reaction pass over his face very quickly. Not Silene’s horror or disgust, but something related and quieter – refusal, denial.
‘I’ll fetch him at first light,’ Thiago said to Xander as Lina rose and Genni followed.
‘Shall I take some food down to Kai?’ Lina said. ‘Or your mother?’
Xander looked up from his screen to Lina, then Thiago, then Lina again, as if surprised she was speaking to him. ‘Mum’ll be asleep,’ he said and then glanced at Genni with that same strange blend of emotions flickering over his face.
‘Okay,’ Lina said, touching her hand to Genni’s shoulder to propel her towards the stairs. ‘Goodnight.’
Chapter Fourteen
Once Genni was in bed, drifting obediently anonymous through chat rooms and social media, Lina left her and went back outside into the meadow, scanning the silvery darkness for something paler than silver, frail as silk. ‘Kai,’ she said, inexplicably hushed. ‘Kai, are you here?’
Silene’s bedroom door had been closed earlier, but Lina doubted that Kai would be in there with her and sleeping. And she had not been able to forget, helping her sister prepare for sleep, the way Kai’s mother had held herself erect with revulsion, a borderline fear. Her saying, It was not about that, and Xander’s loathing.
Genni had asked to call their father and Lina had tried to explain why that was impossible, aching at the tight hurt on Genni’s face, the loneliness. No child should ever feel so alone, she thought, and she could have wept for that as well as everything else.
‘Kai?’ she called again, but the meadow’s crickets sang uninterrupted. Along the edge of the trees, a shadow floated butterfly-like above the grass, calling mournfully, and Lina watched the nightjar until it fell to the track, rose again and drifted beyond view.
‘Lina?’ His voice was coming from the station, and Lina thought she might have been mistaken, that he was after all curled inside with his mother or brother or alone. But as she came closer and he answered her again, she realised his voice was not coming from any of the open windows in either house. Even with her eyes unblinded by the dark, she only saw him when he materialised out of the barn’s black mouth.
‘There you are,’ she said.
‘Yes.’ His face was almost luminescent.
‘What are you doing out here?’
Kai tilted his head to look past her out at the moonlit meadow, the black forest. ‘Keeping watch.’
Lina could not help herself; she turned so that she too could look outwards, trying to see this great dark wilderness as Kai might see it. Something unimaginable, inhuman in a way that was more about being unknown than about cruelty. ‘We’re very safe here, sweetie. You should go to bed.’
Kai looked at her with wide eyes washed silver, seeming blind. ‘The monster is hunting.’
It was only this morning that Lina had gathered her sibling into her arms and known they, she, was safe from the people who had chased her across Europe. Only yesterday that she had seen her father’s face made thin by a knife between his ribs. The air was abruptly cold on her bare arms, heavy with the weight of the mountains above.
‘They aren’t going to come here. I promise.’
‘They always come,’ Kai said, utterly calm. ‘I’ve seen it.’
Lina shifted to lean against the dusty flank of the truck. The swallows in their nests chittered softly then fell silent again. ‘The people here, the ones who left the tag, they aren’t like...’ she hesitated but could think of nothing but the truth, ‘State, or the gangs, or–’
‘Christopher Wiley.’
Lina stared at Kai’s silver-outlined shadow. ‘Christopher ... your dad?’
He made a small noise, blinked his moon-blind eyes. ‘He was a monster too. You know that.’
Yes, she knew that. But even with Silene and Xander being so cruel, she had assumed that to Kai Christopher Wiley was a rescuer, the person who had saved him from a broken life. ‘How?’ she heard herself say and instantly wanted to take the question back.
‘He led the monsters, and told them to feed.’ Kai was watching the forest again. A roe deer barked in alarm twice, a third time, then was silent; if Lina had looked at her tablet, she might have discovered whether it was being hunted through the black trees. ‘I think,’ the child said, ‘if a monster catches you, you have to choose if you are going to fight, or be a monster too.’
‘Yes,’ Lina said, wanting to change the conversation but strangely powerless. ‘I think that’s true. Is that why you want to protect your family, so they don’t have to choose?’ So they would be kinder to him, love him, keep him. So they would not become the monster their husband and father was.
Far away, too far to be hunting the deer, a wolf howled, then another, a third, blurred by trees and echoes into one fluting, mournful note that made Kai cant his head, smiling, his teeth sharp and white. ‘Maybe.’
And because his smile and his quiet made her shiver, she said louder, defying the dark, ‘Did you see my sister, Genni? I’ll introduce you properly tomorrow.’
‘Maybe,’ Kai said again, stepping out into the moonlight. ‘Goodnight, Lina.’
‘Goodnight,’ she said, following him. ‘Get some sleep. You are safe, I promise.’
She turned when she reached the lab door and saw his narrow shadow slip past the new house out of sight. Above her Genni’s bedroom light came on, throwing amber angles down onto the stones as Lina went inside.
Genni found the martenitsa in the morning, hanging from the balcony of the top floor. A girl again, her red hair plaited with black cotton, sodden from the dew. Thiago was banging at something in the undercarriage of the truck and if Lina was avoiding him a little it was only because there were words she could not bear to speak aloud. Not yet. Iva or Anais must have put the martenitsa here, she thought, watching the red wool glow against Genni’s skin. She wondered if any of them, even Thiago, fully appreciated the line they were treading.
James murmured in her mind, a gap in her chest that kept catching her unawares and leaving her breathless. We are unbreakable. And yet he had broken. Or perhaps he hadn’t; perhaps he had won. There were a million ways of dying and not all of them were defeat. But he had left her just a little bit broken, and a small, selfish part of her was angry at him for the dominoes of his capture that led to her father wounded and Genni unbearably lost.
‘Why’s Dev’s tag gone offline?’ Xander had arrived without her hearing him, which said more about her distractedness than his stealth, and she had to fight memories of James back down into the safety of her heart. Anger and heartbreak and homesickness for nothing so tangible as geography. Before she could turn, he said, ‘Another one?’
&n
bsp; The martenitsa. ‘Mmm,’ she said. Genni offered it to him with her eyes flicking from his face to his tablet as if waiting for him to perform miracles.
‘Can you find who put it there?’ Genni said.
‘Genni,’ Lina said quickly, then softened. ‘It doesn’t matter really. It’s just a kind of gift.’
Xander was holding the doll up by its loop, the girl twirling slowly, dancerlike if not for the noose from which she hung. ‘Yeah, not really,’ he said.
Allow him to feel threatened, as she was meant to, or protect Genni from threat. It was no contest. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said firmly. ‘More a prank than anything, a ... like claiming a territory.’
Xander looked from her to Genni’s intent face, seeing what she was trying to do. ‘So not at all like a threat or anything then?’
He wrapped a fist around the doll’s body then released it and opened his palm. It was smeared with red two shades darker than the wool. Not much, but enough. Lina grabbed at his hand as if she could stop Genni seeing it, as if that would matter.
‘The girl, right?’ Xander said, trying to sound laconic, but she heard the waver. ‘Anais or whatever?’
Probably. Almost certainly. Jesus. The truck roared to guttural life in the barn.
‘Is that blood?’ Genni said. Lina cursed a long stream in her head.
‘Look,’ she said to Xander quickly, ‘why don’t you go with Thiago to pick up your ... Dev, and I’ll speak to Iva and Anais?’
He was torn, looking from his stained palm to the open doors and back again, then wiped his hand against his shorts. ‘They’re fucked,’ he said, spinning away. ‘You better tell them who they’re fucking dealing with.’
Lina went to the balcony and called Thiago, who heard her even over the engine. He cut the ignition, leaning out of the window. When Lina told him Xander was coming, he grimaced at her before pulling his head back in.
This Is Our Undoing Page 11