Solo gave one last look at Fan. Her eyes lingered on the pink welts on his neck, before she left, crashing and banging as she went.
Jun tried to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ but the words choked in her throat. She felt the world slowly turn again, but not quickly enough; what had happened could never be undone. She turned to Kau, but his eyes wouldn’t meet hers. The UA had claimed another victory, and with it, another victim.
CHAPTER 16
7th May 2062
A minute or two had passed before Kau had realised his head was pulsating. He had to get out of there.
His father had sat like a collapsed marionette. His mother, who he’d always thought of as his conscience, had been slumped against the armchair, her face stunned, frozen in time. He couldn’t believe she’d been involved in something like this. She was better, more righteous and moral than he and his father were put together, wasn’t she? The story his father had told them suggested not. He didn’t know her at all.
He’d needed to leave his parents’ house, get some perspective, and he’d wanted to see Celeste. He’d called to check if she was at his place as they agreed. He’d imagined going home, walking in to find her standing in the doorway waiting for him like she’d always belonged there.
But she hadn’t been at his place after all. He scanned the Kultik cemetery, a ten-minute drive from his parents’ house. It was bigger than two football pitches put together but felt much smaller and cramped. Eroded headstone after eroded headstone impaled the graveyard. Stumped and grayscale, they slanted towards each other like crooked teeth. The mid-evening sun splintered burnt-orange across the horizon, casting shadows around the ramshackle mausoleum and newer crematoria.
Given what had happened at home, and the business with Anton and Kodi, a cemetery was the last place Kau wanted to be. He wasn’t one for omens, but a threat of death stalked him worse than Yanluo. The god of hell. He jumped out of his Intuimoto and tried to bury the sight of them bundling Kodi into Anton’s car, her legs bound together so she couldn’t kick one of the guards again. The anger – or was it fear? – had feralized her. She’d tried to bite them with fangs instead of teeth, scratching with talons in place of nails. He pushed out the thought that he should have insisted knowing the full story of the UA’s bounty on her before helping them out.
Kau walked up the old paved-stone path, bruised and beaten from the sun and rain, and saw the familiar outline of Celeste. Her usually deafening spirit had dimmed to a whisper. Regardless of whatever shit was going on with him, he’d do whatever it took to fix deflated, broken Celeste. He called her name, but she didn’t hear him.
‘Celeste!’ He tried again. This time she turned and gave him a weak smile. As he got nearer, he saw her eyes had been swallowed by puffy pockets of skin. What was she doing here?
He put his arms around her, and she buckled beneath him. His first instinct was to run. Take Celeste, get some things and leave. Forget his mother, forget Kodi; everything had spun out of control so quickly. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
She looked up to him, her lapis-blues were even more crystalline from the tears. ‘Where have you been?’ There was a hesitant tremble in her voice.
And what could he tell her? It was beyond restricted information, its consequence beyond breaking UA protocol.
‘Work,’ he said, and kept it at that. After all, it had been Celeste that reminded him about keeping restricted information just that. His eyes drew to a small headstone in front of her, marbled and pristine. Aurelia Crosbie. 5th September 2059. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said but had an idea of the answer.
Celeste’s eyes followed his to the name in front of them. This time when she spoke, there was no uncertainty in her voice. Like she’d said it so many times before that it was as solid as the headstone in front of them.
‘Aurelia didn’t make it to full term. My chips detected I was likely to miscarry. They advised us to abort, said it would be more containable.’
The ‘us’ echoed in his ear. He hated himself for fixating on it. The baby’s name on the headstone had Celeste’s surname. Who had been the ‘us’?
‘I’m sorry, Celeste. That’s…’
She started to shrug, but it faded into nothing. Perhaps she had been used to shrugging in response whenever anyone said something as lame as he had; maybe she teamed it with a wistful smile that said, ‘it’s funny how stuff turns out.’ Perhaps she realised she didn’t need to give him that bullshit shrug, or maybe it was all still too painful and raw.
He wanted to ask why she’d come here this evening, why had it been so important, but he didn’t. Instead, he pulled her tighter to him, and drank in her pain.
‘I don’t like to talk about it,’ she said, her voice muffled by the crook in his arm. ‘But I wanted you to know, needed you to know, because that’s why I acted funny at The Ends. Because when we were there…’
Kau sensed her reluctance – or was it resistance? – to say any more.
‘Something reminded me about that time, of her.’
Something, or someone? Whatever she had been trying to say, she couldn’t. The sun sloped down closer to the horizon, the splinters conjoining to one long orange blotch.
‘I wonder if I made a mistake. If we hadn’t have… if she would have been alright.’ Celeste’s muffles were all but drowned out by his arms.
There was that we again. ‘You can’t torture yourself for what happened in the past. And the chips are never wrong.’
Celeste pulled away and looked to the headstone. Her silence said she wasn’t done torturing herself.
‘Wherever she is, I hope she can forgive me,’ she said, and looked to Kau as though she was a child herself, pleading for reassurance. Her eyes were already full of more tears.
He was going to say ‘of course’ and something about how people can only make the best choices available to them at the time, but thoughts of his own mother bulldozed instead. Was it so difficult to put aside his expectations of her? Right decision, wrong decision, she was, after all, still his mother. That he had never felt such love from anyone but her.
‘You did what you thought was best and if your love for her is as pure as I think it is, then there’s nothing to forgive.’ He pulled her to him again, and felt her body ease into his in that way that told him they fit together. He felt taller, stronger, like he could take on anything or anyone, though the only person he needed to take on was his shadow.
He didn’t want to leave Celeste, but he had to go. There was someone else who needed to know that there was nothing to forgive.
CHAPTER 17
7th May 2062
An eerie stillness had settled since Kau had stolen out of the living room, only a few minutes after Solo. Jun was on the floor, dislocated against the armchair. Fan was sedate and pensive, his hands pressed together as if giving a sermon. The infinite minutes in silence echoed her decision.
Jun tried to take her mind back to what Fan had described, but it didn’t exist to her. She had given it away out of fear and cowardice. She remembered that Pav had died not long after Odgerel. It had seemed like a terrible accident at the time, that he’d drowned in the river not far from where he lived. A rod and tackle were close to where his body had been found, shadowing his death with shame, fishing being illegal and animal consumption a criminal offence. Jun shuddered. His death seemed repulsive now; an unnecessary defamation of a good guy. A chill scaled her body to what might have been; that she could have easily been ‘drowned’ or ‘hung’. Maybe they’d have messed with her car. If she hadn’t wiped her memory, then she wouldn’t be here, and neither would her son. She clung on to that thought tighter than she’d held Kau as a baby.
Solo had been right earlier in the Ghetto; Jun did have blood on her hands. She was reminded of Kodi, so young, but already understood the horrors of humanity. Kodi had run from the police, and there were the suspicious circumstances around her parents’ death. Jun had been too consumed with Solo to think about it at th
e time. What had she said? ‘This is my life, and I’m going to fight for it, whatever the consequences.’ There had been something about her that Jun couldn’t place. Her warrior-presence, though she was only a child, and she was smart; she hadn’t baulked at the talk about Odgerel, in fact, she’d been curious.
The awareness came so suddenly, Jun didn’t know how to digest it. Kodi had Pre-Emptive Perception, just like Odgerel. Jun didn’t know why she felt it so strongly, or how it could be possible, but she was sure that it was true. Kodi had been interested in Odgerel’s story, and there had been something in the way she’d asked about Odgerel’s death that intimated she knew it wasn’t suicide. Jun had no proof to why it should be true, but she instinctively knew that it was. That was why the AS task force had commandeered the lab; their spontaneous preparation was for Kodi.
‘Kau’s back,’ Fan murmured and pulled at Jun’s consciousness.
‘Good evening Mr Li Junior, Mr Li and Ms Xie are in the Living Room.’
Kau walked in with a few listless steps and lingered by the doorframe. His body stooped; his face unsure. She resisted the urge to wrap her arms around him, held herself back from blurting out how sorry she was, to ask that he didn’t think badly of her… to still love her. Instead, she pulled herself onto the chair, tightening the thread around her finger as she waited for him to say something.
When he didn’t, she mumbled, ‘where did you go?’
Fan edged himself forward on his seat and caught Jun’s eye. He seemed just as nervous.
Kau shook his head. ‘It’s mad. Totally mad. Is this what I’m getting into?’ he looked at them both.
‘This is the real world, Kau, and there are compromises you have to make,’ Fan’s voice rose. ‘I did what I needed to do for this family; your mother did what she needed to stay sane,’ he bellowed and stood up in the same breath. ‘You better get used to it.’
Kau seemed to let this rest with him for a while, before throwing himself down on the sofa. He sighed as he landed. He must have been turning something over in his mind because from nowhere, he said to her, ‘Can you encode the memories again?’
Jun wasn’t as exposed to the new developments in Neuroscience, but she broadly kept up to date with new innovations and concepts. ‘Abstractly yes, you can re-encode them. It wouldn’t be the actual memory, but you could create a false memory if you had the specific information.’
‘Do you still have it?’ Kau asked them both. Jun looked at Fan and prayed he’d kept her absolution.
Fan shook his head. ‘I got rid of it. I had to – it was the only way to protect you.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Jun said, more assertively than she’d planned.
‘I shouldn’t have what? Protected you? Like I have for all these years? I kept the secret you couldn’t bear to,’ he said, jabbing the air with his finger.
Jun flinched; he was right. Shame flushed her like a fever. Fan had known the secret and carried on working for the UA, even encouraging Kau to do the same. All the while, he had known what they’d done.
‘Let me relieve you of your duties,’ she said and jumped up. ‘I’m going back to the Ghetto to find Kodi.’
Fan thrust himself towards her. ‘No more getting involved in other people’s business! It’s for the best.’
How many times had he said that, manipulating circumstances to his advantage? It was a natural part of his lexicon, as breathing was to his survival. Flashes of Odgerel then Kodi came to her and her stomach clenched; she knew she had to get to the Ghetto.
Kau forced himself between them. ‘Kodi?’ he stumbled for a moment, his face screwing up like when he was small and didn’t understand something. ‘Kodi who? How do you… you can’t go to the Ghetto, it’s not safe.’
‘I love you,’ Jun cupped Kau’s face. ‘But I don’t care. That girl needs help, and I might not be able to, but I have to try.’ She’d had enough of the effects of when she ignored her instincts; she wasn’t prepared to let it happen again. She looked at Fan with a determination and an intensity she hadn’t recognised in herself for a long time. ‘I’m going.’
‘I’ll go with you, Mama. You can’t go by yourself.’
‘You can come if you want, but don’t try and stop me.’
‘It’s a waste of time,’ Fan said.
Jun pocketed Delphine’s datacarry. ‘I think I’ve wasted enough time, don’t you?’ Fan looked as though he was going to object but thought better of it.
Six words from the CaoDai came to her. She didn’t know why but felt relieved to say them.
We shall purify self and pray.
* * *
‘We need to find the Circolo Della Libertà, the Circle of Freedom. That’s where everyone gathers.’ Jun opened her Intuimoto door and stepped out to a gentle hum of people and a beguiling voice singing over tender music. That morning, all the sounds had jarred, and people were fearsome. Now, in place of disharmony, there was gentility, instead of savagery, soul.
She looked over to Kau, who was surveying the place, absorbing the unfamiliar. She nodded to the pathway which wound in between mobile homes; blue guang lights, fanned like peacock feathers, lit their way. Jun strode on. When she had been there earlier, the homes had seemed without order, all spontaneous vegetable patches and accidental radiavoltaics. Now she saw there were invisible plotlines, equidistant from one other, clustered instead of their CMCD grids.
‘This…Kodi, she made quite an impact on you,’ Kau said, careful of his footing.
‘It’s just a hunch – I could be wrong – but it feels right…’ Jun strode forward.
‘Did she say anything about her family?’ Kau’s face crumpled like he’d swallowed something unpleasant.
His empathy calmed her, like warm oil soothing her skin. ‘She hinted at it but told me no details. She likely learned not to trust everyone she met.’
Jun saw the mini-windmill, which signalled the slight ascent to the Circle. In the distance, the tawny sun melted into the buttery-burned sky. The soulful vocals that had welcomed were replaced with a melancholic, Gaelic cadence. As they got closer, she felt a heaviness drawing her in, an anchor falling into deep waters. Was that someone crying? An older, rounder man who might have been Polynesian stamped his foot, shook his head. A middle-aged woman, as slight as a sketch, knocked back a metal flask liberally, tears grazing her cheek.
Now they were intimately in the Circle, faces turned to look at them; voices went quiet, the melody diminuendoed to nothing at all. Seventy, maybe more, people were eying Jun and Kau. At the sight of Kau, some of the men murmured and straightened their backs, but none moved or spoke with conviction. Jun scanned their faces but couldn’t see Kodi amongst them.
‘Good evening everyone,’ Jun said, louder and grander than she had anticipated. ‘I was here earlier today and had the good fortune to be helped by a young girl. Her name is Kodi, is she here amongst you? I wanted to thank her properly.’
‘She was taken away,’ a male voice shouted, older and grainy, with shallow vowels that were clipped and brusque. ‘By the UA, the Police.’
She was too late. Another one she should have protected but let slip through her fingers. ‘Are you sure?’
‘They weren’t in ForceIntuimotos, but it was clear who they were. They were armed with Immobilisers and Voltarms. Most of us were left convulsing on the floor trying to stop them,’ said a woman directly in front of Jun. She had a calm, creamy voice juxtaposed by a large, red laceration on her face and matted hair like strewn feathers.
‘Did they hurt her?’ Jun’s voice trembled.
‘It wasn’t pretty,’ said the man from before.
‘Can anyone describe or identify them?’ Jun shouted.
Kau edged a few steps backwards, and looked behind them – had he spotted something? Some of the crowd muttered among themselves, and a singular voice pierced through the murmurings, drawing back her attention.
‘What are you going to do? Find out who did it and turn
your back again, like you did last time, Doctor?’
Jun recognised the voice. It was unexpected, but she was glad to hear it.
‘What are you doing here?’ The voice got louder and louder, Solo stalked through the crowd towards them, and a man followed not far behind. He had kind eyes, but they were apprehensive, even fearful. There was something about him that made Jun think he wasn’t a Ghettoite. His clothes were too immaculate; his face too fresh and un-weathered by the sun.
‘Were you hoping to make another Subject out of her?’ Solo hissed.
Jun walked towards her, dodging the huddled bodies on the ground. ‘Did you see them take Kodi?’
‘I arrived too late,’ Solo spat, her eyes bore into Jun’s.
Kau put a hand on Jun’s shoulder. ‘Whatever you think,’ he said unflinchingly at Solo, ‘whatever’s happened, my mother came to help.’
The man behind Solo took a step forward and eyed Kau. The last thing Jun wanted was a showdown.
‘No one can help her now.’ Solo hands rattled against her body.
‘That all depends,’ Jun said quietly, ‘on who took her. If it’s who I think, we may have a chance, but I need the Ghetto’s help.’
‘Why should we trust you? Why should I look at you, talk to you, when the thought of you makes me want to wrap my hands around your throat and squeeze till you’re no more?’
All the faces from the crowd were on her, and Jun replied to them as much as to Solo. ‘Because if it’s the same people responsible for your mother, then there’s a chance of getting her back,’ Jun said, hearing the weakness in her voice.
‘You better find a way to be sure. Those sonsofbitches have gotten away with murder once. I won’t let them again,’ Solo turned around and put a hand on the shoulders of the man-with-the-kind-eyes to steady herself. To the throng of faces, she yelled, ‘Lucas! Chandra! We need you!’ She turned back to Jun and Kau. ‘I wanna hear your grand plan, Doctor and so help you, it better be good.’
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