by JT Lawrence
“Are you insane?” says Keke. “Remove his eye?”
“It’s the only way.”
“It’s his eye, for Christ’s sake!”
“Think about Silver. Think of how scared she must be. Do you know how many kids these people have killed?”
“We don’t know that. We don’t know if it’s the same people.”
“Of course it’s the same fucking people! Marko was perfectly safe until he found out about the Genesis kids being murdered.”
“Don’t argue,” says the doctor in his deep, listless voice. He shows them his etched palms. “There’s no point in arguing. I won’t perform the surgery and nor will anybody else.” He prepares to leave.
“That’s not true,” says Kate. “There’s always somebody else.
“Keke, please,” says Kate, desperation pulling at her face. “Please. We need to know. We need to know!”
“You can’t put her in that position,” says Seth in a low voice. “It’s an impossible position. It’s not fair.”
“There is no position!” shouts Kate. “There is no fairness in this situation! These people have our daughter and we need to go and find her. That is all there is.”
“I can’t,” Keke says, shaking her head. “I can’t do that to Marko. I’m sorry.”
Kate’s body stiffens. Her hands are fists. “You don’t even know if he’s going to wake up.”
The words taste terrible in her mouth. Bitter and sharp. A burnt blade.
Kate realises her face is dripping. And she swipes the tears away. She doesn’t have time for emotion. Seth moves closer to her, pulls her into an embrace. She relaxes into him, and sobs into his shoulder, and asks the same question over and over again. “How can this be happening?”
Keke’s face is a long, dark veil of pain.
Kate’s Patch pings, snapping her mind back to the present moment. It’s an unknown number.
Unknown > We have your daughter.
Kate shows Seth her Helix screen with shaking hands.
“Ask them what they want from us,” says Seth.
“I already know what they want from us.”
KittyKate >> What do you want?
They stare at the screen in silence and dread.
Unknown > A meeting.
The Unknown contact sends a GPS marker for a location in Springs, forty kilometres east of Johannesburg. 5pm, it says. A sun emoti hologram rises and smiles rays of sunshine at them. It’s branded SOLAR CITY.
“Springs?” says Kate. “We can’t go there. It’s still red-bordered. It’s a fucking nuclear ghost town.”
Since the nuclear power plant accident razed the place, the land is no longer fit for human habitation. They can’t farm or mine. The government bought the whole tract and began to turn it into Africa’s largest solar farm.
“They’ve re-opened parts of it,” says Seth. “To workers.”
The journalists who were brave and/or stupid enough to break in to document the devastation during the first few years after the accident sent back images worthy of a sci-fi film: thousands of glinting solar panels in a deserted radiation wasteland.
“I’ve seen the pictures. Those guys work in hazmats and gas masks.”
Grocery stores, hotels and personal homes left exactly the way they were on the day of the disaster, like a museum of misfortune. Cereal aisles in perfect order apart from one box dropped on the floor and never picked up. A skew-sitting doily on an abandoned tea tray, only a black stain left in the milk jug. Not a living plant for miles. Everything covered with a thick layer of dust and devastation.
“The radiation is still very dangerous there,” says the nurse. “We sometimes have people trying to seek treatment here, but we have to turn them away. It’s too dangerous for the other patients. It’s the Zama-zamas. They think if they come to Jozi they can fence the merch. But the stuff’s old, and practically glowing with radiation.”
“Zama-zamas?”
“Chancers,” says Keke. “They go in to loot the empty shopping malls.”
“But they either die in there or come out poisoned, and we can’t treat them. No one can.”
“We can’t go there,” says Kate. “Can we?”
Seth rubs his eyes.”I don’t think we have a choice.”
Unknown > 5pm. No cops, no guards, no games.
“That’s in two hours’ time. It’ll take us almost an hour to get there. We’d better leave now.”
Unknown > Bring Mally.
“Of course,” says Kate. “Of course.”
“What?”
“They want us to bring Mally.”
The boy looks up from his snack. “What Mom? What?”
“Nothing, Sausage,” says Kate.
Seth speaks through gritted teeth: “We are not fucking taking Mally.”
“Silver is their bargaining chip.”
Of course they can’t, they won’t, take Mally. It would be like signing his death warrant.
Unknown > Bring Mally, or Silver dies.
Chapter 52
Shrieking Limpet
Mally’s screaming sends shards of mirror into Kate’s vision. He’s attached himself to her leg and refuses to let go. A shrieking limpet.
“Let go, Mally, for Christ’s sake,” says Seth, trying to wrench him off. His screams just get louder. Themba looks concerned at the noise, worried about her other patients. She waves another snack at Mally but his eyes are winched shut so tightly he can’t see her or her bag of treats.
“We’ll be back,” says Kate, combing his hair with her fingers. “We just need to go and see someone and then we’ll be right back and everything will be fine. You’ll see.”
Seth shoots her a look. So it is a lie, but what else can she say?
“I want to come with!” he squalls. “I hate it here!”
“Let go.”
More crying and gnashing of teeth.
“We need to leave right now,” says Seth, checking his SnapTile. There is a bump from Arronax: a copy of a signed waybill that confirms a delivery from Nautilus to his apartment.
“Excellent,” he says, but no one hears him above the din.
The nurse pops out of the room and is back a minute later with a small nebuliser. She turns it on and the candy-floss pink mask hisses. The aroma of artificial vanilla drifts in the air. She places the neb over Mally’s nose and mouth. At first he fights it but when he smells the sweet gas he lets go. Within ten seconds he’s out.
“What the hell is that?” asks Seth, lifting the boy’s limp body.
“A sedative. Creme Soda flavour. He’ll have a nice sleep, now.”
TranX Junior, thinks Seth. The chemgineer in him wants to inspect the product, see what the active ingredient is. The uncle in him wants to be in the car already, on the way to get Silver.
“You go. We’ll look after him,” says Keke.
Kate seems conflicted. She doesn’t want to let Mally out of her sight.
“We’ll take him with,” says Seth.
Kate stops what she’s doing and stares at Seth. She has an image flash in her mind: a picture of Mally, in the nuked shell of a Red Zone shopping mall, standing at the bottom of a long-abandoned escalator. Lost.
“I’ll explain to you when we’re in the car.” He looks down at Mally’s peaceful, sleeping face, then up at the nurse. “We’re going to need some things.”
Part 3
Chapter 53
Shark Fins and Lightning
Seth and Kate are outside their apartment building where they had to pick up supplies. They sling their backpax into the cab and climb in, panting. Seth bumps the GPS co-ordinates of Solar City, and the car beeps an error message.
“That is a restricted area,” says the car. “I cannot drive you to that location.”
“Just get us as close as you can.”
“I will need to file a report on your illegal request.”
“Fine,” says Seth. The dashboard chimes.
“Report filed. You may
receive a visit from the police force regarding your request.”
“Ja, right,” says Kate. As if they’ve got the time.
“I am only kidding,” says the cab.
Kate and Seth frown at each other. Since when does AI have a sense of humour?
They pull into the hooting city traffic and are immediately stuck behind an old bus – not a straddlebus – which they can’t drive under. The cab waits patiently, then they crawl a metre forward. Kate wonders if it’s a Turing: a beta listening cab. She taps her foot, runs her fingers through her hair. An ancient tuk-tuk that looks like it’s held together with sticky tape and string passes them, almost knocking off their side mirror.
“Come on,” she says. “We need to go faster. Is there a way we can go faster?”
“We are gridlocked,” says the cab. “Peak hour traffic.”
“Listen to me,” says Kate. “My daughter is in danger, and I need to get there as soon as I can. Do you understand?”
The car hesitates to respond.
“Do you understand?” she says again.
“That must be difficult for you?” ventures the car.
“Now can you drive faster?”
“Re-calculating route,” says the cab. The smart mirror animates with green lines and arrows. All of a sudden the car reverses, almost knocking over a cyclist who yells and hits the roof of the car, then it turns a sharp left into a side road and whizzes down an alley that is clearly marked ‘NO THOROUGHFARE’. It sends a rubbish bin flying and takes out a low-slung washing line. Windscreen wipers drag a shirt off the front glass.
“This isn’t a road,” says Seth, hanging on the side of the door’s interior. A pedestrian jumps out of their way, then shouts at them, shaking a fist in the air. Turing doesn’t respond. It makes a hard right into the next road and travels the wrong way up a one-way street. All the other self-driving cabs freeze when faced with such erratic driving from a fellow vehicle, and allow it to pass. They take a few more dangerous turns, and before they know it, they’re coasting on the highway, in the emergency shoulder, at 164km per hour.
“I like you, Turing,” says Seth. “Can I keep you?”
The car’s response system whirs. It doesn’t understand, and it doesn’t have an answer, but it sounds happy enough. They sit back into their seats for the first time since climbing in.
“Thank you,” says Kate, looking at Seth.
“For what?”
“You’re always there. Even when you’re not.”
“That doesn’t even makes sense.”
“I wouldn’t be able to do this on my own.”
“Yes, you would,” says Seth.
“No. You’re my better half.”
Seth looks out the window. Holoboards and oak tree canopies rush by.
“No,” he says. “You’ve always been the better half.”
They hug – an awkward gesture, with the small body in-between them – and Kate thinks, not for the first time, that Seth smells of bright rebellion. Zig-zags. Shark fins and lightning.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Kate says, adjusting Mally’s outfit.
Seth squeezes her hand. “What choice do we have?”
Chapter 54
The Perfect Place To Hide
The Red Zone, 2024
When they arrive at the red border they expect the cab to stop, but instead it takes the right fork and follows a dirt road along the barricade for a few kilometres. Sentries armed with automatic rifles and faces of stone watch them clip along. Massive billboards warn them to not enter: ‘Out of Bounds’, ‘No Entry’, ‘Hazardous Materials’. 4D icons of gas-masks and radiation hover above the angry-looking palisade fence.
“Cabbie?” she says, but it doesn’t respond. They slow down to avoid dead trees that have fallen in the way – long, brittle-barked skeletons. Martian dunes. Not a green leaf in sight. Once they’ve made it through the dead forest, the car races along the perimeter again until it gets to a spot marked at its base by an old water bottle: a secret sign that’s almost impossible to see from the road unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. The car brakes abruptly and the wheels lock, causing them to slide a few metres forward and spin ninety degrees before they come to a stop up against a soil bank. In the still car they listen to each other’s hard breathing. Once their seat belts decide it’s safe to disembark, the obligatory thirty seconds post-collision, they click open. They get out and inspect the red zone barrier for an entry point. Up close, they see that a portion – the size of a car – has been cut out and then put back again, on barely visible hinges, turning it into a swing gate. Their eyes meet to acknowledge their good fortune, but there is a hint of apple seed too (Sour Cyanide), because being handed a key to kill yourself is bittersweet, even if it’s a key you went looking for.
The cab kicks up the soft sand in getting through, and the steel swords of palisade trail along the exterior with a crowd of shrieking that sends voodoo pins into Kate’s eyeballs. The clockologram says it’s ten to five: if they survive the evening, which has never seemed very likely, they’ll have this cab to thank. They’re already wearing the hospital hazmats Themba gave them; all they need to do before they get out of the car is put their full headmasks on. They were able to fashion a child-sized hazardous material suit from an adult ‘small’ by using biostitches and medical tape. Kate expected the protective gear to be the colour of radiation, which in her mind is glow-in-the-dark orange, but instead they’re a fresh chewing-gum colour. Ice blue-green. Medical Mint.
The car sprays more sand as it guns for the exact location of the co-ordinates. They pass the outlying houses: shax and RDP housing, mansions and huts. Windows, front doors, and roofs broken or hanging at oblique angles. Gardens flattened. Cars corroded so badly they look melted into the ground. The shops here, so close to the border, are the ones hit hardest by the Zama-zamas: not a window remains in place. They drive on a tarred road now, wide and empty, and pass a playground with rusted primary colours. The motionless swings are eerie. Were there children here when the accident happened?
Five minutes to go.
“Are we close?”
Seth checks their co-ordinates against the clock. “Yes.”
The stunted suburbs morph into an industrial area. The buildings here are also stripped: the open mouths of stolen glazing gape at them as they pass by. The monochrome landscape is easy on Kate’s synaesthesia: muddy browns and charcoal hues soothe her manic thoughts. She pats the holster against her ribcage for the tenth time to reassure herself that she has her gun. It’s over her kevlarskin but beneath the hazmat material. A sandwich of borrowed outfits: one that will either save her life or robe her corpse.
They pull to a stop outside a water-processing plant. The adjacent dam is sludge. Mud mousse. The perfect place to hide bodies. They’re not planning on opening this area for the next three years, and when they do, it will be to government-contracted Chinese corps who will demolish anything standing to make space for the solar stalks. It’s what they did in the north of the red zone. So far the giant solar farm is an incredible success, and the Nancies’ PR firm won’t let the civilians forget it. They never mention the actual accident, unless you count the one day of the year they reluctantly lower the flag to commemorate the victims. Every other day is fair game for the spin doctors to celebrate Solar City and their resulting carbon deficit. Kate pictures hungry machines, like giant lawnmowers, sweeping over everything in sight, ploughing the empty structures and play-sets into the earth.
“Ready?” says Seth.
Kate nods and puts on her headgear. It’s claustrophobic and she has to stop herself from immediately wrenching it off. Once she’s a bit more used to it, the mask further dulls her senses. Her shapes feel far away.
“Ready.”
They climb out of the car. Seth carries the small, mint-coloured body in his arms.
Chapter 55
Crash Cart
Johannesburg, 2024
Kek
e jerks when she hears the shrieking. The machine against the wall, the one that monitors Marko’s synthetic heart, is screaming blue murder. She rushes up to Marko, as pale as ever, and puts her hands on him. Presses the emergency button and keeps pressing. The room is crowded with the din of the flatline. Keke refuses to believe they’ve lost the battle. She zips open his heartpack and looks inside, but knows – knew before she opened it – there’s nothing she can do.
The double doors are smashed open by a casualty team with a crash cart. Keke lets go of Marko and leaps out of the way. They shout at each other above the noise, nonsensical phrases like “jump the cardio” and “shake his coronaries” as if he is in some kind of cutting-edge fitness class, instead of what he is. Dead. For the second time in three days.
As the team works on Marko, Keke’s panic subsides. It’s out of her hands. It’s always been out of her hands. Her fright fades and it’s replaced by a flaring anger. Who did this to him? Who the fuck did this to him, to them, to Kitty and Silver? There’s nothing she can do to save Marko, but she can damn well do whatever she can to save Silver. There’s only one thing left to do. She taps a contact on her SnapTile.
“I told you, I’m not doing it,” says the Dark Doc as soon as he answers.
“Things have changed,” says Keke.
Chapter 56
Elegant Surrender
The Red Zone, 2024
The building itself is menacing. A tall, smog-eating silo etched with spiderwebs of cracks. Too much concrete, not enough windows, not enough air. Not that you can breathe this air, anyway. Not without getting really sick, not without turning your organs into radioactive lightbulbs.