‘Would you like ESF to arrange travel home for you all?’
Another smile, this one a little edged. ‘Ah, well. I’m not sure we will be leaving right away, if that’s alright with you.’ Not asking.
‘Oh?’ Lina said, aware of her pulse and the rising tide of sunlight across her desk. ‘Is everything alright?’ He tilted his head and she realised she was being improbably naive. She wished she knew what Silene and Xander had told him. ‘Is it Silene’s ... health?’
He leaned forward to rest elbows on knees, sunlight reflected in his eyes. She was backlit, she thought. It gave her a sense of protection.
‘I wonder if you could tell me some things about my recent friends,’ he said, without answering. ‘You are familiar with them, I believe. Although perhaps not as much as your ... colleague.’
Also a question, which Lina likewise ignored. ‘Everyone in the Balkan States is familiar with the BB,’ she said. ‘And a considerable number are sympathetic to their motives.’
‘Your cook, is she sympathetic, Dr Stephenson? Are you?’
She wondered what he would do if she said yes. ‘They caught my leg in a trap a few days ago.’
‘Ah, yes. I heard. Ghastly.’ Dev did not look at her ankle though, and there was only curiosity on his face, not sympathy. ‘But you understand my position perhaps. That my captors spoke about certain links to this place, and I am not the sort of person who likes to leave puzzles unsolved.’
Lina’s spine ached quietly with the effort of holding so straight. ‘Mr Kapoor, Dev, while some of us may empathise with the BB’s situation, I assure you no-one attached to this station had any involvement with, or condoned, the attack on you. If you got that impression from the people holding you, then you are mistaken.’
‘Am I?’ Dev said softly, and Lina ought not give way to the bitterness rising in her throat. but of all the things to be accused of, this was the only one she was fully innocent of. If it had not infuriated her, she might have laughed.
‘Are you fluent in Bulgarian, Dev?’ she said in Bulgarian. ‘To be so sure of what they said?’
Dev started laughing, leaning back on the stool and appraising her anew. ‘They spoke a little German, two of them,’ he said eventually. ‘And I speak a little Russian. Some of the words are similar.’
Lina said nothing. The sunlight reached the edge of her desk, poised to spill into her lap. She turned her palms up, waiting.
‘Anyway,’ Dev said, scanning the equipment lining the walls, ‘I’d like to speak to Thiago, if he’s around?’
Reaching into the light to check her tablet, she said. ‘He’s due back for lunch.’ It was not like him to stick to such short trips, and he was only doing it for her. She touched her screen again, resisting the urge to check her emails.
‘Xander tells me your father has shared my recent fate.’
It took a few seconds for Lina to turn her head and meet Dev’s waiting gaze. ‘Yes,’ she said.
Dev nodded. ‘Shame. ESF can’t get him out?’
Like they had for him? No, Lina thought, they could but they wouldn’t because the incentive was not there. ‘We are trying,’ she said.
‘Hmm. It’s a difficult journey from London. A lot to go wrong.’
Dear god, Lina thought. ‘Yes.’ Then to pre-empt him, ‘I’m sure Xander has told you why my father and sister left London.’
A nuthatch landed on the window frame, hopped upwards, thrusting its slaty beak into crevices hunting spiders or long-ago stored seeds. Dev watched her. ‘He did indeed. Funny coincidence, isn’t it?’
She meted out a smile. ‘Funny is not the term I would use, no.’
‘It does cast a certain light over events, of course. You do see that, don’t you?’
It was worse than Silene’s accusations, Lina thought. Wild irrationality carried at least the possibility of being disbelieved. But this man. This man would be believed.
‘I don’t really,’ she said, pressing her fingertips into the sunshine, the heat burning against the ice in her blood. ‘My connection to ... one of the people arrested was a long time ago, and purely romantic. There is nothing linking me or my family to any recent events in London.’ It felt like she was betraying James, like he deserved her declaration of everything they had been to one another, deserved to hear her grief spoken aloud.
‘Of course,’ Dev said, smiling easily. ‘Of course.’ He looked around and said, ‘Do you have a cat?’
Lina could not fathom him at all.
‘The milk,’ he said, pointing at Iva’s bowl in the hearth, freshly filled this morning.
‘Oh. No. It’s a folk tradition, feeding the domovek who protects the house.’ Although what could a domovek do against the evils within the walls, she thought. She remembered Baba Ruzha talking of monsters, and Kai, and counted her breaths, willing Dev away.
‘Ah, I see. How fascinating. I’ll have to ask your cook. Iva, wasn’t it?’ He rose and turned away. ‘See you at lunch, I imagine. Hopefully Thiago will be back then.’
She saw him waver as he stepped into the sunlight, imagined the heat pressing against his bruised skull and felt a cruel pleasure at the thought of his pain. Then he was gone and her fingers curled in upon themselves, cold and shaking.
Thiago was not back in time for lunch and Lina took hers and Genni’s out into the shade of the barn. They sat there in near silence, the fledging swallow brood overspilling their nest to perch tattily on the high beams. She had still not been able to find Kai, although she thought she had heard his laughter.
‘Foxes later?’ she said to Genni.
Genni had piled more bread than she could possibly eat onto her plate, and was now rearranging it carefully. ‘How far away is it?’ Her dark eyes full of shadows and sunlight. ‘I don’t want ... I don’t want to go too far.’
‘Why is that, sweetie?’ Lina placed one of her tomatoes on Genni’s plate. ‘Is it because the forest seems scary or something else? I will be able to get messages while we’re out. Emails and things.’
Lifting the tomato, weighing it in her palm before laying it back down and reaching for the knife. ‘Are you worried about Dad? ’Cos you don’t seem it.’
Lina laid her hands palms down on the table. How was she meant to answer this? Their father would have known. ‘I am,’ she said slowly. Genni’s pupils contracted. ‘How could I not worry? Just the way I worried for you until you got here. The way I still worry for you now.’ She reached over to hook a finger around one of Genni’s, braced for rejection. ‘But I also believe he will be okay. I do believe that, love.’
‘But you said Xander might get people to hurt him.’
Had she said that? She did not think so, which meant Genni was assembling truths from half-truths. ‘I think Xander and his mum, and now Dev, have a great deal of power with London State. And if we give them reason to ... to hate us, I guess, then they could use that power to hurt us.’
‘Hurt Dad.’ She had not pulled her hand away, but her fingers were hot and stiff.
‘It’s a possibility, yes. But sweetie, I have friends protecting him, and ESF protecting him, and these people will leave soon. This will pass and we can start again, the three of us here, together.’
And Kai, she thought. Maybe Kai too.
‘You really believe that?’
‘Yes,’ Lina said, blinking away a rush of tears before they could show. What was belief anyway, she thought, other than hope so profound it could hold you up. What was a lie if it gave someone hope?
‘I don’t,’ Genni said, and now she did pull her hand away, wrapping her arms around herself, fingers gripping her upper arms. ‘I think Silene is mad and she’ll make Xander do something. And I think if they hurt Dad it will be because of things you did.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘They are talking about you.’
Li
na hadn’t been back at her desk long. Genni had gone up to her room, leaving Lina to fool herself she was working by staring blindly at data that had never seemed irrelevant until now. She had not heard Kai coming into the lab, and yet here he was beside her, his head canted fiercely.
‘Pardon?’ she said.
‘Xander and Dev. They’re talking about you.’
‘Oh,’ she said softly. ‘I see.’
‘Do you want to know what they’re saying?’
God no. Yes. No. ‘Do you know?’
‘Yes.’
Lina had not noticed the skull in his hands until he lifted it up. His index finger was stroking a slim canine and Lina studied it, disturbed. Then she checked the windowsill on the opposite side of the lab where an odd assortment of skulls and bones and feathers lay gathering dust and the corpses of flies. The fox skull there was not missing, so Lina looked back at Kai. ‘Where did you find that?’
‘I want to be a fox,’ he said. ‘Fierce and wild.’
Another camp child seeing something of the fox within themselves, she thought. How strange these tiny universals were. ‘I think you already are like a fox,’ and instead of asking again where he had found the skull, she said gently, ‘Is that how you heard them talking, by being like a fox?’
Kai smiled and the skull smiled, and with his pale bones and gold eyes, for a moment he really was something other than human. As if the tawny, bright spirit of the dead fox has passed somehow into this lost child and was looking out through his eyes. Lina reached out to touch the faint ridge along the fox’s cranium. Sagittal crest, she thought distantly.
‘Xander told Dev that you aren’t really Lina Stephenson.’ Kai held the skull up to look slantwise through the eye socket. ‘Is that true?’
Lina sat very still, her eyes on the skull’s sharp teeth, aware of the wagtail alarm calling just beyond the house, aware of the weight her own lungs held within her. ‘Who did he say I was then?’ she said eventually.
‘He said he’d find out.’
Sensation slipping back into her face, her fingers. It was not all lost then, not quite. But assuredly soon.
‘Are you real, Lina?’ Kai lifted the skull away from his face then returned it as if the fox’s eyes would see her lies and her truths more easily than his own.
‘I am real, sweetie,’ she said. ‘And I am really Lina Stephenson.’
‘But you weren’t before.’
‘What did Dev say?’ Thinking please don’t ask again. Please don’t ask, because this boy was perhaps even more fragile than Genni and she did not know what it might take to break him.
Kai studied her through the bones then lowered the skull. ‘He said that he suspected Thiago more than you and he wanted to know what else he had planned, and who was paying him.’ He frowned. ‘He said if London really wanted Silene harmed, they’d hire the ex-PK. But they didn’t know if London did want that.’
‘Okay,’ Lina said.
‘But Xander said if London wanted his mum killed secretly, they’d blackmail the ex-terrorist with a dad in prison for like, leverage or whatever. And anyway you two were probably fucking so it didn’t matter which way, did it?’ Mimicking Xander almost perfectly.
Lina nodded slowly. So then, she thought. So then. She had told Genni that she believed, and told herself that her hope was unassailable. But if either had been true two hours ago, they were not now. So easily undone. ‘Anything else?’ she said. ‘Did they say anything else?’
Kai opened the fox’s jaws wide, closed them again with a snap. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s when I came to tell you. Do you want me to go and listen again? They didn’t know I was there.’
‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘Where were you listening from?’ Because they might be deciding what to do about the ex-PK and the ex-terrorist whose father was become the pawn in a game of threat and revenge and injustice.
Kai laughed and patted her arm as if she were the child, his touch cool as the morning in the heavy afternoon heat. ‘They’d see you,’ he said, spinning away from her as lightly as a turning leaf then pausing half in sunlight, luminescent. ‘I won’t save your sister from the monster, Lina. She said she’d help him.’
Lina recoiled. ‘What with?’ she said faintly, but the doorway held only excised light. Was this the choice Genni had reached from her reconstructed truths? That if she helped Xander pin blame, then he would keep their father safe? And if it was Lina pinned then that was only justice for all of Lina’s own betrayals. It made a terrible kind of sense, bartering known brutalities, but for a long time Lina sat pressing her hands so hard against the desk that her wrists began to ache, holding herself still so that she did not go upstairs to her sister and shout, and plead, and rage.
When Thiago returned, he stood in the doorway watching her as she remembered to move, remembered that she was down here and reeling, not up there, letting all her pent-up anger fall on the wrong person.
‘Okay?’ he said quietly.
Lina took a breath, said, ‘Dev wanted to talk to you. He knows you were working with the BB, before.’
‘Not working with,’ Thiago said a shade too quickly. Lina turned slowly to meet his eyes. ‘Fuck,’ he added.
‘He’s...’ Lina paused, struggling to articulate how he had unnerved her. ‘Slippery. And he’s been talking to Xander.’
Should she tell Thiago about her mother? Before Xander found out and told? She had never had to put that story into words before though; never had to hear herself recount her mother’s death, and she did not want to do so now. When she was a child she believed that the last thing she heard her mother say had been her name. Now, understanding terror a little more, she doubted it. But even fabricated memories were a way to remember being loved.
Thiago cast a quick glance out into the courtyard then closed the door. ‘Tell me.’
She told him about London perhaps wanting Silene quietly killed, about Dev and Xander not knowing which of the two of them might be being paid to do so. She did not mention her old self.
‘Leverage,’ Thiago repeated. The one most terrifying word out of all of them, and Thiago understood. Lina pressed a hand over her heart.
‘They know you overheard?’
Lina shook her head. ‘Kai told me.’
Thiago frowned at her. ‘Kai?’
‘Yes,’ Lina scanned his face for answers. ‘What do we do, T?’
He carried on frowning but after a while laughed and scrubbed a hand roughly over his face. ‘Give him back to the BB? Throw her in for free?’
Lina laughed. ‘And Xander?’
‘He’s not a problem,’ Thiago said, so quickly that Lina realised he had spent time on this too.
‘Yes, he–’
‘How did he find out all this stuff, Lina? To get anyone to listen to a kid, he’d have to show them how he found out. Not a chance.’
That had not occurred to her. Perhaps because she had never considered him as an entity separate from his mother’s influence, and now Devendra Kapoor’s as well. But Thiago was right. It would be a prison sentence. Hadn’t that been one of Silene’s many half-mad statements? That she must protect him from that risk, and his father had endangered him by ... by doing something as controversial and visible as the clearance, by attracting enemies.
‘But they’d listen to Dev.’
Thiago did not answer; there was no need.
‘They won’t be able to link you to anything though,’ she said. All he had done was provide tacit consent for a few martenitsas hung on doorways and engineer Dev’s release. But he hesitated, glanced at her and then away, and something that should have been obvious for a long time became clear. ‘The EM tech,’ she said. ‘You gave it to them.’
He grimaced, rubbed at the conjoining of muscle and robotics.
Lina breathed in sharply. ‘Because of the tagging
programme. To help them hide. Oh, T.’ Something sad and proud pooling beneath her ribs. ‘Oh, T, why didn’t you say?’
‘Because,’ he said tiredly.
‘Because it’s illegal and you didn’t want me implicated. Because we’re both too used to keeping secrets.’ He looked up sharply at that, his fingers stilling on his leg, but did not speak so she added, ‘So if Dev or Xander discover that, they might see it as proof of sufficient guilt.’
‘It’s not as clean as blackmail, but it would still work.’ Meaning Lina would still be the most obvious even without her mother’s crimes coming to light. ‘And sounds like Kapoor won’t leave till he has one of us, or both.’
Why not, Lina nearly asked. Why not just leave if he really thought they were planning Silene’s murder? But she studied her reflection in her tablet screen, darkened and featureless, and knew the answer. Because if he could uncover a link, then he could trace it back to London, to whoever in State was trying to remove Silene, and by default Xander. If he left without knowing, then the danger in London would still be there waiting.
‘But we’re not!’ she said, curling her hands into fists then forcing them loose again. ‘Neither of us wants to kill her.’
Thiago smiled fleetingly. ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’
It hurt to laugh. ‘Fair point,’ she said. But then remembered Isla’s assistant’s advice and the room felt a little more full of shadows despite the angling sunlight. ‘I meant there probably isn’t any conspiracy in London at all. It’s just her fabricating it.’
‘Yeah. Why is that?’
Ignoring Kai, fearing for Xander, the affairs, opposing the slum clearance not for morals but for the attention it brought them. Children both living and dead. ‘Guilt?’ she said slowly. ‘Either she did actually kill her husband or ... paranoia?’ That the link between the clearance and his death had opened the door to rivalries and an opportunistic purge. Lina saw again the photos of the clearance, the bodies. Something tugged at her, something...
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