This Is Our Undoing

by Lorraine Wilson

  ‘Is that good?’ Lina remembered Anais in the barn over lunch.

  ‘It’s better than burning slums.’ Kai lifted his eyes to the landscape beyond the windows, dark forest climbing to grey rock to shreds of summer snow. Lina studied his half-averted face, trying to fathom being saved by the very man who had destroyed you.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ she said, and then added, ‘I imagine that makes him good at chasing monsters away, too. Don’t you think?’

  Kai turned his head, his eyes like low fires. ‘I think the monster has already caught him.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Neither Silene nor Xander returned to the main room for lunch. Thiago would probably not be back for hours, and Lina wished she had gone with him, if only because then she might be too busy to think.

  She would go to Beli Iskar with or without Thiago. Perhaps he was more suited to threatening, or bribing, but she was the one with a child to protect and they might bend to that more readily than anything else. And if she did that today then tomorrow, she thought like a promise, tomorrow she would go out early and do some work, and perhaps for a few hours pretend that her data and the morning were all there was. So Beli Iskar first, then she would deal with the warnings from both Isla and her unnamed assistant. The blood on the martenitsa was waiting down in the lab too, but it scarcely mattered. They knew who was leaving the dolls, and why. Lina said goodbye to Kai where he had returned to the balcony, turning the rib bone in his hand, running its narrow edge along his palm as if it were a knife and he was casting a spell.

  On the second floor she heard voices, and if the thin-faced man had not said anything, she would have carried on without trying to listen. Or perhaps not, but he had spoken, and she did stop.

  ‘You have to stop talking like that, Mum.’

  Bedcovers rustling restlessly. ‘But she knows, darling, I can tell. You have to stop her saying anything.’

  ‘Knows what, for fuck’s sake? It wasn’t you, and what else can possibly bloody matter?’

  ‘But darling ... you can’t see it–’

  ‘You fought, Mum. I know that. So fucking what?’ Footfalls crossing the room, and Lina jerked away but then they retreated again. Xander pacing. ‘Everyone has affairs, right? It’s not like Dad didn’t get around. Oh for fuck’s sake don’t bother, I’m not stupid.’

  ‘How...’

  ‘Because I looked.’ The footsteps stopped at the far side of the room. Curtain rings clattered and something thudded softly against the glass. ‘I’m a hacker, Mum, remember. That thing you said I’d get arrested for? It’s not hard to find stuff if you want to.’

  Lina closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall.

  ‘Oh Xander.’ Silene sounded forlorn, more now than when talking about her husband’s death. ‘We never meant to hurt you.’

  A croak of laughter. ‘The only thing that hurt me was your taste in men, Mum. I mean Paul Ellis, for fuck’s sake? But that’s not...’ Lina thought he might have sat down because his voice softened. ‘That doesn’t matter anymore. Mum. You need to stop talking shit. It makes you sound guilty. What ... what is it you’ve been taking?’

  ‘Alexander!’ But it was half-hearted. Almost ... drowsy, as if Xander’s question had come too late. ‘It helps me sleep, darling. I get these ... it’s like I’m dreaming awake and I see... Darling, I’m just tired, that’s all.’

  ‘Maybe you’re taking too much.’ Xander’s sigh was achingly sad and Lina feared him so much, but she bled for him too. ‘They said they’re rounding up the last few terrorists, that they’ll get some confessions and then... Mum, are you listening? Just a few more days, right? Then we can go home again. But we’re safe here till then, unless you make these people suspect you. ESF might kick us out, and we can’t go home until they’ve got those confessions, can we?’

  He had sounded so adult and soothing until those last two words, turning the whole thing into a fabrication for himself as much as her. They’ll get some confessions. Lina held her breath, touched her fingertips to the cool plaster of the wall, feeling grit subtle beneath her skin.

  ‘She’s one of them,’ Silene said, her voice lower, slower, slipping towards sleep. ‘She sees it, darling. You’ve got to stop her.’

  Silence, Lina’s lungs aching.

  ‘She’s... Look, yeah, she’s on some lists and shit but don’t ... just, I’ll find out what that’s about. But she doesn’t know anything, Mum, alright?’

  ‘We have to keep each other safe, don’t we, darling?’ Even quieter.

  Xander did not answer and Lina pushed herself away from the wall. What would he think if he opened the door and saw her there, listening? She stepped light as rain across the landing and down the stairs. The one second from the bottom creaked, so she skipped it and fled silently into the blaze of light, heat, the calls of willow tits like a low stuttering distress.

  You have the means at your disposal, I believe. There were other options though, and she would find them.

  She had not been down to Beli Iskar since that day retrieving the deer tag, before James’ arrest had unfolded her world. It was the same old woman she saw first though, standing on a stool to tie vine stems up into the overhead frame. The river’s voice was summer-hushed, and somewhere a radio played through an open window.

  ‘Dobro den,’ she said quietly, wanting to reach for the woman in case she fell. ‘May I help?’

  The woman looked at her with her arms still raised, lifted her gaze to study the empty road, then nodded slowly. ‘Molya,’ she murmured, taking Lina’s proffered hand to step back down.

  ‘I am Lina,’ Lina said, taking hold of a long vine full of tensile strength, weaving it carefully through the older branches.

  ‘I know this,’ the woman said, ‘and I am Baba Ruzha.’ Grandmother Rose; Lina could not tell whether the informality was a kindness or simple habit. Baba Ruzha passed her a length of twine and Lina took it, holding the vine in place one handed.

  ‘Baba Ruzha,’ she said, her face turned up to the leaf-layered sky, ‘I wonder if you could tell me who the woman was that I met when I was last here.’ She reached for another vine. Chickens muttered argumentatively somewhere nearby and the old lady held up another bit of twine, waiting for Lina to take it before speaking.

  ‘What is it you want with her?’

  Lina had been right then, about who had been in charge, and what of. ‘I mean no harm,’ she said, turning to look at Baba Ruzha. ‘Or trouble.’

  ‘No? And yet what else would bring you here?’

  ‘My sister has come to live with me,’ she said, shaking loosened vinebark from her face. ‘She is nine, and adopted.’

  Baba Ruzha nodded, folding her arms across the faded cotton of her dress. The chickens’ argument rose to a peak then subsided.

  ‘She has lived through ... a lot of danger to get here. Our father was wounded and she had to leave him behind. She is…’ Lina sighed, dropped her arms and turned to look at the other woman. ‘She is frightened, and I do not want her to be frightened anymore.’

  Baba Ruzha did not pretend to misunderstand her. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you do not perhaps agree with your friend in this thing.’

  Had Thiago really been so explicitly permissive? ‘Can I speak with her?’ she said instead of answering.

  Baba Ruzha studied the street again, looking both ancient and unshakeable. ‘Her name is Ognyana,’ she said eventually. ‘House seventeen, if she is at home.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lina said, but Baba Ruzha only waved Lina away. ‘Thank you,’ Lina repeated, turning away.

  ‘You know about the old ways, yes?’

  Lina looked back at the woman, the twisted trunks of vines rising behind her like an archway. ‘Some,’ she said, thinking of Iva’s carvings above the doors, her bowl of milk in the hearth.

  ‘Yes,’ Baba Ruzha said. ‘The
n you will understand perhaps there can be a great anger in the forests, if they are threatened. Anger that is not about,’ she turned a palm over in a slicing gesture, ‘politics, but is about belonging.’

  Lina frowned. ‘This is people choosing to act, not ... myths and monsters.’

  ‘Monsters?’ Baba Ruzha repeated, and Lina heard the word again in a very different voice. ‘Not monsters, no, but our people belong to these myths, so it is not possible to have one without the other. You do not understand this, I think. Although the lost boy does.’

  She could only mean Kai with his moonlit hair and translucent eyes, but how had she heard of him? ‘You are saying that the martenitsas and the blood,’ and the missing man, but Lina daren’t mention him, ‘are the work of an old god?’

  Baba Ruzha made a sound that was part laugh and part pure derision. ‘I am saying, Doctor, that the old gods are become angry, and my people are bound to those gods just as they are bound to this land.’

  There was nothing in the woman’s story beyond folklore and perhaps the need to feel protected by something more than ESF’s impersonal possessiveness. But Lina laid her palm on the warm slabs of the wall. ‘Why are they angry, your gods?’

  Nodding as if Lina had finally said something worthy, Baba Ruzha said, ‘Because you have brought monsters here, and if you do not banish them, then the forests will.’

  Lina could think of no answer to that; after a long moment, Baba Ruzha nodded again and turned back to her vines. Further into the village a donkey brayed harshly and Lina shivered, turning towards the noise and trying to push the word monster from her mind.

  She had gone back to the news sites last night, searching not for Christopher Wiley’s murder, but for his work. She wanted to say to Baba Ruzha that the monster was already dead, and if he was here then it was only as a ghost, manifested from the grief of his wife and sons.

  In the week before his death he had ordered and accompanied the State military to a south London slum and he had watched from an armoured car as armoured men went from door to door and speakers announced the clearance. They gave them half an hour to get out before the bulldozers came in, and what could not be flattened was instead set alight. It was not in itself unprecedented, or sensational, but the death toll made a brief flurry even in the State papers, someone somewhere seeking to benefit from Christopher Wiley giving the murder of children such visible ... patronage. It had been foolish of him to be there in person and Lina wondered whether Kai’s adoption had happened just before or just after, cause or effect.

  She had found no record of the adoption, but perhaps they had not bothered to formalise it, buying him instead like they might a new piece of art.

  So why, if the monster was already dead, were both Kai and this old woman still seeing them? And yet why not? The thing with seeing a monster killed was that it proved they existed. Lina inhaled slowly, smelling ripening pears and the sun-warmed road, realising that she had not been looking for house numbers painted in amongst the notices of the dead.

  Number seventeen was over the river and up a steep side path so that Lina could look down from here onto the ochre-red tiles of the houses below. She stood at the closed gate for a long moment before pushing it open, avoiding contact with those sheets of paper detailing the household’s lost, their black and white images staring half-averted out at her as if in warning, or despair.

  ‘Hello?’ she called, and a dog answered, running from behind the house barking in a deep and warning frenzy, but Lina was used to bears and wolves, and did not move, holding the dog’s gaze.

  ‘Teech!’ A man shouted, but the dog had already halted, his head up but teeth unbared. Kolev Asenov came out from a barn, a hammer in one hand, and stopped when he saw her. ‘Here,’ he said, and the dog came to him. Better trained than many, Lina thought, wondering what it had been trained for.

  ‘Dobro den,’ she repeated as he moved a few steps into the sunlight, the muscles of his forearms defined and brown. ‘Baba Ruzha said that Ognyana lived here.’

  His expression sharpened at the name. ‘What do you want with her?’

  ‘Is she here?’

  ‘No.’

  She believed him. ‘Can you pass a message to her?’

  He did not answer straight away, so she said what she had said to Baba Ruzha already, not moving from the gate even though the dog had retreated to sprawl against the barn wall. ‘I wanted to say that it is not needed, the things that have been done. And only risks the villages, yourselves.’ Arguments were gathering on his face so she carried on quickly. ‘I am asking that...’ she thought of Baba Ruzha’s words, ‘that my sister be allowed to feel safe here.’

  ‘As we are allowed to feel safe here?’ Kolev had not moved from the centre of his courtyard, but he, like Baba Ruzha had done, flicked his gaze past her to the street and then jerked his head for her to come in away from the gate. He sat in a sun-crackled plastic chair and she sat in another, mismatched. The hammer was still in his hands but he was turning it absently, as if forgotten. Lina had not forgotten though, the anger and the images of him carrying a bloody trophy through the forest to her door. She kept her feet balanced on the ground.

  ‘Thiago, Mr Ferdinando, is working on getting the tag decision reviewed,’ she said carefully. ‘What you have done, it has worked. But any more might begin to do harm.’ The hammer turned again, the head falling heavily earthward. ‘I am asking you to stop. Please.’

  ‘Please,’ he repeated quietly. He had kept his gaze on her the whole time she had been talking, eyes the colour of peat and full of an anger that seemed as timeless as Baba Ruzha had said. ‘And what about the rest? The others you have brought?’

  Lina laughed, surprising them both. ‘I brought? God, I don’t want them here.’ She took a breath. ‘We all want them gone, I think, yes?’

  Kolev curled a lip and she remembered the missing man again. Devendra Kapoor.

  ‘Unless we want ESF and London sending investigators in, or a taskforce, we need to let them leave quietly. Without trouble.’ Not that ESF would let London in, she thought, but Kolev might not know that.

  He leaned back with an outrush of breath, the sun catching a slim sheen of sweat along his hairline. ‘You are protecting them. You feel sorry for them maybe.’

  ‘No,’ Lina said, two thirds of a lie. ‘I don’t ... I don’t want them to start asking questions about you.’ Another partial lie because his were not the secrets she most feared them unearthing. ‘If you frighten them too much, or … hurt one of them,’ and if she had not been watching she might have missed the flicker in Kolev’s eyes, ‘then they will make sure you are hurt too.’

  ‘And if we only want to show them that we will protect our own, what then? If we show them that we can hurt them, if we choose, but will let them go?’

  Lina met his hard gaze for a long moment then shook her head and studied the hammer lying across his knees, his scarred fingers pale with wood dust. ‘How would you do that, Kolev?’ He moved slightly and she realised he had not expected her to know his name. ‘Show off your strength without making it a threat?’ She tried a smile and failed. ‘If it was that easy, then perhaps we would have fewer wars.’

  Kolev’s knuckles rose where he held the hammer, his wrists flexing. ‘I do not know,’ he said finally, and pushed to his feet. ‘I do not know, but we will not do nothing, Doctor. You want to take our privacy. You bring outsiders who drowned our people. If we do nothing then we are saying that yes, it is okay to do these things. Then next time you will take more, and more, and more until we have lost everything.’

  Lina rose as well, took a step away because Kolev would not. Although fearlessness might work with a dog, or a wolf, it would only aggravate a young man fighting for his own hope. ‘Kolev, please don’t make this worse than it is.’ But he would not hear her. She had thought when he had gestured her into the courtyard ... but no. ‘Will yo
u tell Ognyana what I have said?’

  He looked at the hammer in his hand, his face averted.

  ‘Please. Just tell her. Let her decide.’ Because she is your boss, Lina thought at him, and must also be your family.

  ‘Yes,’ Kolev said eventually, angrily. ‘Yes, I will. Now you should go.’

  She did, and her hands only began to shake when she had left the last house behind her, her shadow and the bike’s leading her home. Had it done any good at all, her coming down here? At least she had tried though, and made nothing worse. But she wished Kolev had not so frequently fused her and ESF into one enemy entity. He knew, or he should, that she did not agree with the tagging policy. Unless he simply did not care to make the distinction. It left her uneasy.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Thiago returned home in the early evening barely more than an hour after Lina. Glancing up, she thought she saw Kai jump down from the flatbed of the truck and vanish behind a stack of logs, but then Thiago walked past and the very calmness of his face made her forget Kai and forget the ESF access log for Xander’s tablet.

  ‘What is it?’ she said before he was fully into the lab, his shadow behind him. She thought she saw Kai again, his pale head slipping into view and then away. ‘T?’ She got up to close the door and Thiago raised an eyebrow because they rarely did so except in winter. He sat at his desk and stretched his false leg out, rubbing at the points where electronics met flesh. Sometimes he did this because he had pushed himself hard and the leg was aching, but sometimes, like now, Lina thought it was a reflex born of remembered pain.

  ‘Did you find anyone who knew anything? What did they say?’ If she had it in her to feel intimidated by him, the look on his face might have silenced her.

  ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘They say the BB have him.’