This Is Our Undoing

by Lorraine Wilson

  Genni nodded, eyeing the spiders dubiously.

  ‘The storm might get…’ Lina searched for a balance between truth and kindness. Thiago would not have bothered, and perhaps he was right, but she couldn’t help herself. ‘Pretty rough,’ she said eventually. ‘But we’ll get through it, okay?’

  Genni nodded again, but she threw a quick, dark glance out towards the forest. Lina touched her shoulder briefly, then scooped up one of the spiders and let it run across her palms. ‘She’s carrying her egg sac, look. Protecting it. She’ll tuck herself into a hole during the storm and be perfectly safe.’ Genni kept her gaze half-averted, so Lina set the spider down out of the way, wondering what she had been trying to achieve. ‘We should write Dad another message today,’ she said, and Genni’s eyes became immediately wide and strained. ‘We’ll turn off the electricity before the storm arrives, and will probably lose the net as well.’

  ‘He didn’t write back.’

  ‘No,’ Lina said. It worried her, that. The ESF lawyer had replied, confirming he’d passed the messages on, but had advised they give it time. The Slovaks will lose interest soon and let him go, he’d written. He’s being treated well. Don’t push. I’ll check in weekly.

  ‘But they don’t...’ Lina cut off. Genni still believed him to be simply resting in a safe house, recovering more slowly than he had hoped. ‘I think he’s struggling to get safe access to the net. But we know he got our messages.’

  ‘What will you say to him? About Xander?’

  Lina shrugged, smiled. ‘I’ll tell him they are leaving. That’s the important thing.’

  ‘And I’m staying with you?’ Genni was rubbing her dusty palms together, gathering spidersilk between her fingertips.

  ‘Yes,’ Lina said. But she could not tell from Genni’s face whether that was the answer she had sought, or simply a reminder of their father’s absence.

  Neither Xander nor Kai had shown themselves yet, and both absences worried at Lina’s mind as she stacked the shutters ready in the lab, as she got Genni to help her carry the sun lounger into the barn. But when Genni went inside in search of food, Lina turned from the barn to see Kai standing in the sunlight at the very edge of the courtyard. She studied him, her pulse pressing against her wrists and a voice in her head whispering, this is madness. It cannot be true, this is madness. His shadow lay at his feet and he watched her without blinking, eyes bleached almost yellow by the light and wariness.

  ‘Hello, Kai,’ she said, very aware of all the open windows around them, of the fact that she did not know quite where Thiago was. ‘How are you?’

  He did not move so she went to him, resting a hand against the old house as if that might lend her solidity. ‘Kai,’ she said again.

  ‘Lina,’ he replied. ‘Xander has found something out.’

  She stopped trying to measure the way the light hit his face, his mass compared to the air around him. ‘Pardon?’

  He moved his hands and their emptiness was a relief, ridiculously. ‘I don’t know what, but something.’

  ‘Is it…’ she glanced over her shoulder at the empty courtyard, the windows that reflected the sky blindly. ‘Sweetie, is it about you?’

  As he tilted his head the sun caught his eyes and some twist of gilding and shadow was exactly like the fox in yesterday’s dusk. Wariness and intensity and wildness. ‘Me?’

  Oh god, she thought. He looked like he might flee, vanishing foxlike too, only into light rather than darkness. Did he know? Did he even know? ‘Nothing,’ she said faintly. ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘He’s on the net, reading things.’

  ‘Lina?’ It was Genni, calling down from the upstairs window. ‘Can you come up? Are you on a call?’

  Xander had asked her the same question, Lina remembered. She had been talking to Kai on the balcony and Xander had asked that question, and she had somehow failed to comprehend the myriad hints and oddities until she zoomed in on a photograph and ceased to understand anything about the world.

  ‘What’s up?’ she said, seeing Kai take a step back from the wall to look upwards as well.

  ‘Can you come up?’ Genni repeated.

  ‘Yes,’ Lina said, turning back to Kai and abruptly unable to speak, Genni above looking down. Kai was watching Genni with a strange, twisted expression, and Lina remembered him running his fingers over the fox’s sharp teeth and shivered. She knew nothing about any of this, she thought desperately. About him or what he wanted or even what he was thinking, not really. If he could think. If he was not simply a ... a gathering of memory and anger and grief given weight.

  Realising she was watching him, he dropped his gaze to hers and said, ‘You should send her away before the monster comes. She still wouldn’t fight for you, you know?’ Then he slipped around the corner of the house, and Lina realised that nothing on earth could have made her step forward to see if he was still visible.

  ‘Chopper’s five minutes out. I’ll go round them up,’ Thiago said as she stepped into the blinding shade of the lab. ‘Looks messy though.’

  Lina would have happily absented herself from their leaving, but Genni had overheard and whatever she had called Lina for was forgotten beneath the need to watch the helicopter collect these people in a blaze of wealth and privilege that she had never seen before, not like this.

  They gathered outside, Silene slumped on a bench in a catatonia that perhaps she had been in ever since seeing Kai’s photograph. Xander was plugged in to his tablet but he was watching Lina, pale-faced but strung with something that might have been victory. Fear tainted her throat with acid as she kept her gaze on the foothills where clouds had gathered in a sullen, straggled line.

  ‘Fire twisters,’ Thiago muttered beside her and another fear stirred, a different, impersonal one.

  ‘It’s here,’ Lina said. A black shape lifting into sight in the east, skimming a line between the ravaged plain and the mountains, distorted by heat and the dirty air rising from the flatlands. Three kilometres away perhaps, then two and a half kilometres, the engine a low whump whump at the base of her spine, Genni’s hand creeping into hers and Lina gripping it in return, watching the slow swirl of the rising air, the dense distorted horizon. Another few seconds, then Xander noticed the helicopter and moved towards his mother. Dev had been watching it already, perhaps had seen it even before her. The air behind the helicopter shifted colour from a tarnished blue to something leaden and Thiago swore.

  A dust tornado rose behind them, but they looked clear.

  Dev straightened and resettled his feet, and beside her Thiago did the same. Faster, Lina thought. The twister veered into the helicopter’s wake, the sky above turned liquescent and then a thin tornado was leaping downward. Parallel to the machine, swinging precipitously, the helicopter’s black mass there and gone in a cloud of rock dust. Lina closing her eyes reflexively, too late. The helicopter bucking on the tornado’s cusp, rearing upwards then catching the edge of the fire twister, thrown sideways and downward and down. A fountain of rock and rotorblade and carapace fragments. Then black and oily smoke, half-concealed flames.

  Thiago swore again. Dev and Xander speaking and Genni gasping a shrill note beside her, and Lina could think only, A crew of two. Smoke and ashes, she thought. Two people and she did not know their names.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ‘Did you know that would happen?’ Xander said, spinning on Thiago. ‘Did you know they’d crash?’

  ‘Xander,’ Dev said quietly, but Xander’s hands were balled at his sides and a crimson wave was climbing his cheeks. He took three steps towards them, his mum twitching as he passed.

  ‘I fucking knew it,’ he said. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let us leave. So this was just like a stunt or whatever. That’s sick. It’s fucking sick. There were people on that thing,’ waving an arm towards the slow rising smoke.

  Lina wrapped her other arm aro
und Genni and bent to whisper that she should go inside, but Genni did not move. Thiago had not moved either. Dev went to stand beside Silene, his hand on her shoulder as if comforting her, although she seemed too far gone to need it.

  ‘Two people,’ Thiago said levelly. ‘Andrei Mikailovsky and Denise Larsden. They both have young children.’

  Genni flinched, Lina’s own fingers tightening, and although Thiago’s words made Xander shudder as well, they weren’t enough to stop him.

  ‘You couldn’t just tell us we’re prisoners here? Like, would it kill you?’ He spread his arms wide like a bear rearing. ‘Well, here we fucking are. Do your fucking worst, I dare you.’

  Thiago crossed his arms, lifted one eyebrow almost infinitesimally, and it was Dev who spoke from behind Xander. ‘Why on earth would they want us to stay so badly, Xander?’

  This was what Kai had warned her of, Lina realised. The blood in her veins slowed, the world slowed. She could not look away from Xander’s reddened, furious face.

  ‘Because she’s guilty as fucking sin. She wants to kill us like her fucking boyfriend killed Dad. Like her mother–’ He took another two steps forward and Thiago shifted his weight but all Xander did was lift a hand to point at Lina, his whole body shaking. ‘I know who you are and I’m going to tell the whole fucking world.’

  Spinning on his heel to leave, stumbling as Thiago caught his arm and yanked him back around and Dev had moved forward although Lina did not know which one he wanted to stop, and all she could think was, No. No, no, no. Everything asunder, terror and grief and horror and fury all unravelling. No, no, no. Too trapped within her own mind to hear anything other than the level, cold blankness of Thiago’s voice, feeling his fury only undo her more.

  ‘You are wrong,’ he said. ‘Whatever you think you know, you are wrong about the airlift and wrong about Lina. But you are right about this. If you endanger her, you will not leave this station.’ He released Xander’s arm dismissively and said to Dev, ‘Get him under control or I will.’

  No, Lina thought again, but at Thiago now as well as everything else. Genni moved against her and Lina’s body was suddenly her own again. ‘Come away,’ she whispered painfully. Thiago began to turn towards her, Xander fled past Dev, Dev pivoting slowly in his wake, and Lina pulled Genni with her. ‘Come away,’ she said. Thiago back at her side again as if he had never left, reaching to touch her.

  ‘Lina,’ he said. ‘Don’t–’

  But she did not slow because if she did she thought she might scream and once begun, never stop.

  ‘You have to–’ he tried again.

  ‘Not now,’ she said, and he stopped, letting her leave him behind as she took herself and Genni away, not into the lab because she thought walls might crush her now, and it was Thiago’s space as well as hers, and his rage might crush her too. So instead away around the back of the old house to drop into a crouch against the wall amidst old peony leaves and fallen cherries. Genni sat beside her and for a long time neither of them said anything. She needed to speak, Lina knew, but she could only sit there with her heart pressing against her ribs, seeing the helicopter flip sideways over and over and over. Seeing Xander’s pointed finger shaking.

  The truck pulling away fast made both of them look up. It would be Thiago going to check on the helicopter, Lina thought, and she should have gone with him but did not move.

  ‘What did he mean?’

  Lina turned her head to look at Genni. ‘He was just angry,’ but prevaricating was beyond her. ‘I’m going to have to go and get Dad.’ Putting into words what Thiago had known she was thinking. They knew each other far too well, she thought, still shaking. ‘Will you be okay staying with Thiago while I do that?’

  Genni’s arms were wrapped around her drawn-up knees and Lina watched her breathing, waiting for it to change.

  ‘I want to come.’

  ‘I know, but you’re safer here,’ adding quickly before Genni could protest, ‘And I’ll be faster and safer on my own.’ And if it came to it, she did not want Genni to know what she was doing until it was done. ‘And as long as you’re here, ESF will make sure Dad gets here too.’

  Genni thought about this, closing her eyes and resting her cheek against one knee. Lina expected more objections, so when Genni spoke it startled her. ‘Who’s Kai?’

  Not this too, she thought, exhausted almost to the point of hysteria. She watched the forest now, the multitudinous greens, the silver scattered lindens. ‘He’s a boy I see here sometimes,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Was that who you were talking to earlier? I thought I saw...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Genni lifted both shoulders enormously. ‘Sometimes I think this place doesn’t like me.’

  ‘No!’ Lina reached to touch her cheek with the backs of her fingers. ‘That’s not true at all.’ But Kai’s face as he had looked up at Genni, and his words, had held animosity. She tried to find something rational to say, something that did not include ghost children full of hurt and trauma. ‘It must all feel very strange to you here,’ she said slowly, ‘but the wonderful thing about this place is that the mountains and the forest, and even the animals, they don’t care about us at all. We just have to live respectfully and they carry on the way they’ve carried on for thousands of years. I’ve always liked that ... invisibility. It’s peaceful.’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  Her fingers were tense, but she was still breathing calmly so Lina looked back to the forest and sighed. ‘Yes,’ she said. Yes and yes and yes. ‘But never of the forest.’

  ‘Of going to get Dad.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said again. Not of the journey, but of what she might give up to save him, and what might still happen to them regardless. Thiago would look after them, she told herself. But ESF likely would not, so how much could he realistically do?

  ‘When will you go?’

  It must be about half past one now, she thought. How much the world had shifted in those thirty minutes. ‘Tonight,’ she said. ESF would be slower to notice her departure at night. And once she was clear, she thought they would rather speed her trip than force her back. She hoped.

  A low murmuring thunder rolled along the mountainsides although there were no storm clouds within view. She wished she knew what Dev was saying to Xander, and what Xander was saying to him. Although actually she did not want to know the latter, know how he would choose to tell the story.

  Slowly, painfully, she pushed to her feet. ‘I’d better speak to HQ. And check the weather.’ Twenty-four hours until the super-storm hit. She had almost forgotten, and ought to leave sooner. Perhaps ESF would not even realise she had left until the storm had passed. Genni rose beside her and when Lina reached out a hand, she only hesitated briefly before taking it. There was no way to know whether this new détente was because of the panic and the fight, or the knowledge that she was leaving, but Lina held onto the slim comfort of it as if it were the only spar remaining.

  Another message to Kolya first, and to Vitaly. Full of foreboding that neither had replied and wishing she had tried again sooner, set up a contingency plan sooner. Then to the lawyer asking again for news, telling him that they would soon be cut off. Then placing a call, and when Isla’s assistant picked up she said quickly. ‘Please don’t put me through. I wanted to speak to you.’

  He raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  ‘You’ve heard about the helicopter?’

  ‘Of course. Mr Ferdinando called it in.’ Although he would not have contacted Lina’s department, which confirmed her suspicions. ‘I believe trucks are being arranged as we speak.’

  Good, Lina thought. That was good. ‘Can I ask you something else? It’s about net activity, search histories, that sort of thing.’

  He glanced at another part of the screen then back to her. ‘This is about Alexander Wiley, I imagine.’

&
nbsp; Lina’s fingertips pressed against the edge of the desk. Genni had gone upstairs, so Lina wanted this done before she returned. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Is there a way to ... wipe his downloads, anything he might have accessed recently? He’s been using search bots I think. Can we destroy them?’

  The still-unnamed man tilted his head, studying her. ‘It is possible,’ he said slowly. ‘Why now? Any particular reason, beyond the obvious?’

  An alert popped up in the corner of Lina’s screen updating the storm warning, shifting it closer to the station. Her pulse sped up, she breathed out slowly. ‘He’s been hacking through ESF systems,’ she said. ‘If he starts making claims in public, it will lead back to our security.’

  The man laughed, light from an unseen window turning his eyes metallic. He had positioned his desk so that he faced both window and door, Lina realised, whereas Isla set the window behind her as backdrop. ‘Very good,’ the man said. ‘And yet I doubt that would hold up. If it were particularly important, however, the right person might be able to help.’

  Music fibrillating across the courtyard and into the lab. ‘I think I’m speaking to the right person now,’ Lina said steadily.

  ‘I assume we are disregarding the obvious solution to the issue?’

  He had suggested it before. As had Thiago, differently, and it still made nausea rise in Lina’s stomach. She could not answer but he must have read her face. ‘Well, you’ve run out of time on that anyway, I imagine. How about a transcript of his code. I’m sure I can pull enough together for some mutually assured destruction.’

  Which was what Thiago had reasoned as well, the two men suspiciously alike even if one was more subtle about it than the other. And yet Lina was not sure that Xander was thinking clearly enough to protect himself. Grief and the terrible pressure of caring for his mother had turned him inside out, she thought, so that he might be happy to immolate himself if it meant everyone else would burn.