by JT Lawrence
Chapter 77
A Different Kind of Family
Kate’s flying through the sky, away from the city and towards the South Coast, back in time, back to a memory that’s so dear it feels as if she’s climbing back into a warm bed. She’s ripping through the air, over towns and cities, and slows almost to a stop when she reaches Westville, KZN, where she was born.
From above, Kate recognises her hired electric car, idling by the river embroidered by weeping willows and rushes and reeds. She sees her mother, her real biological mother, walking towards the river, and all of a sudden she’s pulled out of the sky as if caught in a giant vacuum, sucked down with a force, and she finds herself shunted into her younger body that’s sitting in the car. The rearview mirror tells her she’s in her late twenties again, and when Kate looks down at her belly it’s stretched and round. She runs her hand over it. Silver.
Kate breathes and lets go; she allows herself to relax fully into the memory.
Westville, KZN, 2022
Kate sits in her hired car, parked a little way away from the river, under the glittering dappled shade of willow trees. She takes off her safety belt, adjusts her tender back in the chair. Her left arm is slightly paler and thinner than her right, still recovering from being in the exoskeletal cast she had to wear for months.
She breathes in the muddy green smell of the river (Wilted Waterlily): a smooth, undulating smell. Balmy Verdant. Rolling Hills.
God, Kate has missed driving, the freedom of the open road to the thrumming soundtrack of your choice. Stopping for a hydrogen refuel—not as pungent a memory as petrol—and greasy toasted cheese in a wax paper envelope. Flimsy paper serviette. Vanilla whipped Soy-Ice in a hard chocolate coating that you get to crack open with your teeth. Noticing, inside the store, that all the Fontus fridges are gone. Kate imagines them yawning in recycle tips, stripped of any valuable metal, or re-purposed as beds or dining-room tables in townships.
Kate winds down her window further, allowing more of the clear air into the car. After tossing out the air-freshener at the car rental agency (Retching Pink) she drove the first hour with all the windows open to try to flush out the fragrance. Artificial roses: the too-sweet scent painted thick vertical lines in her vision. Her sense of smell seems to be in overdrive lately, and the shapes more vivid than ever.
It’s a superb day: warm, the humidity mitigated by a cool breeze, and the sky brighter than she’s ever remembered seeing it. The branches of the weeping willows stroke the ground, whispering, as if to soothe it. She can smell a hundred different shades of green in the motion of leaves.
A woman pops up in the distance, walking towards the river. She has handsome silver hair, a thick mass of it, twisted up and fixed in place with a clip and a fresh flower. A stained wicker picnic basket in her hand. She is tall and moves in elegant strides: not rushing, nor dawdling, her sense of purpose clear. She doesn’t look around for a good spot; she knows exactly where the good spot is.
The woman sets down her basket, lays out a picnic blanket, smoothes it down in a practised movement. Once she’s removed her shoes, she sits with her legs out in front of her, crossed at the ankles, leaning back on her hands with her eyes closed and her face to the sky.
The woman takes out her clip and lets her hair tumble down like mercury. Kate unthinkingly touches her own short hair, rakes her fingers though the awkward length of re-growth. The woman relaxes like that for a while, then sits up and opens her basket, bringing out a plastic plate and knife, a packet of crackers, cheese triangles. A small yellow juicebox.
Kate snaps a photo of her with her LocketCam, then retrieves the cooler-box from the back seat that she packed that morning. She takes out a dripping bottle of iced tea, a packet of Blacksalt crisps, and a CaraCrunch chocolate bar. Watching the woman by the river, she opens the foil packet and starts to eat; then she remembers the bright green apple in her bag—Granny Smith—and eats that too.
So this is what her real mother looks like. Not just her non-abductor mother, more than just her biological mother, but her real mother. She can feel it. She sees Seth/Sam in her body language, her straight nose. But the hair and the eyes are hers.
She looks again at her reflection in the rear-view mirror, touches the new streak of grey at her temple (Silver Floss). Kate feels a welling up in her chest, an inflating of her ribcage, and breathes deeply to stay calm. Warm tears rush down her face; she is used to the feeling now, even welcomes the release. During the past few months she has made up for a lifetime of not crying.
The woman looks so peaceful, so at ease with the world, a trait Kate hasn’t been lucky enough to inherit, but she hasn’t always been like this; she has also had her dark days. They never moved house—they still live at 22 Hibiscus Road—as if they thought if they moved, they would lose all hope of the twins finding their way home.
Anne Chapman visits the river almost every day, the spot where she used to sit in the shade while the twins splashed around, and then later, their subsequent children: another son and daughter, born five years after Kate and Sam, spaced three years apart. The children, now grown, visit often, and the family looks like any normal, happy, loving family. It would be difficult, seeing them laughing and joking at family dinners, to guess at their sad, fragmented past.
Kate’s yearning crowds the car. How she would love to meet her mother, grasp her hand, taste her cooking, ask her about the years before the kidnapping, and after. But looking at her, seeing how content she is, how restful her spirit seems, she knows she can’t do it. It would be like smashing a shattered mirror that has taken decades to put together. Its hold is tenuous, gossamer, and she won’t be the one to re-splinter it.
No fresh heartbreak.
She has a new life, thinks Kate, like I do now. She thinks of Seth at home in Illovo with Baby Marmalade: how good he is with him, how gentle. Seth who wants to keep his Genesis name, instead of ‘Sam,’ says it doesn’t suit him, and he’s right.
He has a new life too, despite not changing his name. She pictures what she guesses they are doing now, sitting on the couch in front of the homescreen, Baby Marmalade asleep in his arms, Betty/Barbara the Beagle snoring in her usual spot, her snout on Seth’s lap. The wooden floor littered with nappies and wipes and teething rings and toys.
A different kind of family, James said.
An unusual family, but a family nonetheless: waiting for her to return home, and anticipating its new addition.
She thinks of her Black Hole, which is still there but has been sewn up to the size of her skin-warm silver locket. It’s the smallest she can ever remember it being, but it yawns when she thinks of James.
Kate watches her mother pack up, shake the blanket, fold it and put it away, then start walking back in the direction from which she came. Kate reaches for the door handle, then stops herself.
No. No. But when that feels too harsh, she allows herself a concession, thinks, at least: not today. Maybe tomorrow, but not today.
After a few steps, her mother turns and looks directly at the car in the distance. Kate can’t see her expression. A moment goes by, and Anne turns back and continues her walk home.
Kate takes a few breaths with her head back and her eyes closed, then snicks her safety belt in and starts the car, swinging it into reverse. Her back is aching again, her ankles puffy. She adjusts her position, rubs her swollen belly.
“Time to get you back home, little one.”
Born seven months apart, her babies will be almost like twins. A different kind of twin.
Kate begins to drive away and gets as far as the stop sign at the top of the road when she changes her mind. She turns the car around and races back to the parking lot at the river. Her mother is gone.
Chapter 78
Glass Mercury
Westville, KZN, 2022
Kate clambers out of the car, fighting with her safety belt with dumb fingers, almost tripping in her rush to catch her mother. She leaves the door open, not caring, and r
uns as fast as she can, hands on her pregnant stomach, down the peppermint slope and shouting, “Anne! Anne!”
A small, faraway thought occurs to her: that she must look completely crackers with her strange, short haircut, her mismatched arms hugging her round belly, running and shouting after a woman who she thinks might be her real mother—the mother she was taken from so long ago. She doesn’t care. She’s near the river now, can hear it gurgling, and looks frantically for the woman who was just here. Shields her eyes from the sunshine and squints up in the direction she was walking. There’s just an empty path.
Her desperation flashes monochrome. It cat-claws at her: needles in her skin.
“Anne!” she shouts as loudly as she can. “Anne Chapman!” but there’s not a soul in sight. Just the river and the green-flavoured breeze and the birds.
Kate stops running, and rests her hands on her knees. Her lungs are hard elastic. When she straightens up again, the woman has stepped out from behind the willows, a look of unabashed wonder on her face, still grasping her picnic things.
“Anne Chapman?” asks Kate, whispering now, also stung by the quiet hope in the moment. They’re only a few metres away from each other.
The woman blinks, drops the basket with a grassy thud. Her hands go up to her face and she touches her nose, her mouth, as if to test if the moment is real, or a dream.
“Sorry,” says Kate. “I know it’s a lot to take in. I wasn’t going to—” She stumbles over her words. “I was going to wait and—”
“It can’t be,” the woman says, hope now like flames in her cheeks. “Can it?”
Kate’s heart is sprinting; she puts her palm over her chest as if to tell it to slow down.
Calm. Calm. Stress is not good for the baby.
They stand marvelling at each other. Silver floss for hair, and eyes the colour of the sound of the sea. It’s like looking into a time-travelling mirror (Glass Mercury). Then Anne reaches out through the mirror and touches Kate’s chin, and it’s so tender that Kate just wants to melt under her touch and the poignancy of the moment. The sense of her immense loss—thirty years of tender, unconditional love she missed out on—almost bowls her over. A life stolen. The overwhelming feeling of her own personal tragedy splashes her world purple.
The abducted two-year-old in Kate wants to yell Mom! and fling her arms around her mother, but the moment is strange and disjointed and not the Hallmark scene she imagined it could be. Yes, they’re bound by warm flesh and blood—always would be—but their relationship is eternally eroded by deprivation. The heart-bending truth is that they are virtual strangers, and this realisation, coupled with the rolling feeling of squandered time she feels, punches Kate in the stomach, and it hurts so much she winces, and holds on to her belly.
“Oh!” says Anne, stepping towards her, taking her by a shoulder, “Are you okay?”
There’s another jab, and Kate exclaims with a sharp intake of breath. Anne lays the blanket out and, holding her good arm, helps Kate to sit down.
“I think,” says Kate, recovering, “I think the baby just kicked.”
Immediately the pane of cold glass that’s between them shatters and falls away, and they both start weeping. They hug and hold hands and cry and cry. Their salty cheeks touch, their tears run together. Sniffing, they both search for tissues but come up empty-handed. Kate uses her sleeve to wipe her face.
“Kate. My darling Kate. After all this time. Is it really you?” but Kate doesn’t need to answer.
Chapter 79
Brain on Fire
The Lipworth Foundation
Johannesburg, 2036
As the memory comes to its end, Kate is pulled back into the operating room. The back of her head is still sizzling with pain, but it’s not the overbearing, black-hammer kind that knocks you into oblivion.
The DarkDoc smoothes a thin platelet plaster over the wound. “Done.”
“Kate?” says Zack. “Are you with us?”
Kate lets out a low groan. “Fu-u-u-uck. That was—” But she doesn’t have a word to describe it.
“It’ll take you a while to adjust to the mesh,” says the doctor.
“I don’t have time.”
They unwrap her limbs so she can move freely again. Morgan shines a pen-light into her eyes. “How do you feel?”
Woozy, she’s going to say. Brain on fire. But there’s something else. She looks around the room, looks at the people’s faces. It’s like there’s an extra dimension.
“Intense,” is all she manages to say. The pain is fading.
There’s the ordinary world, real life, which is how regular creeps experience reality—Kate calls it ‘monochrome’—without the extra shapes and sounds and colours that she sees, then on top of that is her synaesthesia. But now, now there’s an additional layer, and it’s rich and beautiful. Enhanced. Like you’ve only ever seen black-and-white films but then you turn on a switch and all of a sudden it’s 4DHD hypercolour with textures that come right out at you, as if you can feel them with your eyes.
“Kate?” says Zack, moving into her field of vision.
My god he’s beautiful. He is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. She wants to touch him.
“It feels like,” says Kate, “it feels like my eyeballs are drunk.”
“It’s not your eyeballs,” says the DarkDoc, coming into view.
He’s a magnificent man too. So strong, so gruff and handsome. Is he really her lover? It suddenly seems unlikely.
“It’s your brain.” The doctor emanates deep red energy. It’s as if his chakras are glowing in short bursts. Kate thinks she can see his heart beating, as if she has some kind of new real-time X-ray heat-sensing ability. She wants to touch him, too. She was wrong to say it felt as if her eyeballs are drunk. It’s more accurate to say that every neuron and nerve ending in her whole body is tripping on some kind of futuristic neat-tech rainbow crack version of LSD.
“I understand now,” Kate says. “I understand why Silver wanted to get this.”
“This is just the beginning,” says Zack.
“How much time do we have left?”
Kate has forgotten about the warden. She looks at her, takes in her stocky frame, her firm muscles. How strong she is, like an Amazon warrior! But more royal than that, with her silver baton. A military queen.
“Forty-eight minutes,” says Zack, bringing Kate to attention. “That’s if they shut off the power at fourteen hundred exactly.”
“It’s not enough time,” says Morgan.
“It’s all we have.”
Kate stares over at Silver inside the dome of the transparent tent. It looks like a bubble to her now, as if they are all underwater and the sleeping Silver is protected by her own special pocket of air. It’s like a fairytale.
“Tell me what I need to do.”
Chapter 80
BrightCandy Canal
“All right,” says Zack. “Doctor Morgan’s and my theory is that Silver got stuck in between reality and her RPG immersion.”
Kate splutters. “Theory? That’s all you have?”
“That’s all we have.”
Jesus Christ on a cracker.
Kate’s mind is racing, and her thoughts feel as if they leave heat trails in their path. Words tumble out of her mouth. “RPG? How do you get stuck? I’ve never heard of that before. Is it because it was a backstreet mesh? It wasn’t done properly … it didn’t work well enough?”
“We think it’s because it worked too well,” says Morgan. “That particular lace is so advanced … and Silver so adept at immersion that we think she went too deep, too quickly, and …yes, she got stuck.”
“Usually when you have trouble immersing, you just come out and restart. But for some reason Silver’s not doing that. We know she’s not in Eden 7.0, and we know she’s not here with us, so our theory is that she’s somewhere in between.”
“Eden 7.0?”
“It’s the updated version of the role-playing game she’s always
in. It’s so advanced now that you can only play if you’re meshed.”
“How do you know she’s not in the game?”
“Doctor Morgan has patients at the Atrium. They haven’t seen Silver since she left the building yesterday. Not in the game or in real life.”
Kate remembers her earlier trip to the Atrium, but now in her memory it has a glow to it, a promise, irresistible potential.
“They were on high alert there, when I called,” says Morgan. “Rushing to fetch everyone out before the grid goes down. Do you understand the implications, Kate, if you’re immersed when the power is cut?”
“Yes,” says Kate. “No power, no Net. No Net, no way out.”
Morgan nods at her, slow and sad.
“Forty-six minutes,” says Bernard.
“All right,” says Zack, “You’ve gotta go.”
Kate’s blood rushes through her veins; there’s a lightness in her head. “But I don’t know what I’m doing!”
“I’m going to dial you in.” Morgan clicks something on his mandible and talks softly to it. “Going through.”
Kate grabs Zack’s hand.
“You’ve got the greatest chance of finding her. She came from you.”
“But I don’t even know how to—”
And just like that, Kate’s body goes limp. Her consciousness is sucked out of her flesh and bone and transported through a rushing-light fibre-optic tunnel (BrightCandy Canal) and the ether goes cold and dark around her.
Chapter 81
Mezzanine Puzzle
Kate’s consciousness is rushing and rushing as if she is being teleported through space and time and her heart is going mad in her chest—even though, looking down, she doesn’t have a chest (or a heart, for that matter)—until she reaches some kind of plateau where it feels as if she’s standing on top of a skyscraper, and then she tumbles—her soul tumbles—back down and into her body. It’s a soft landing, and it smells of rosemary blooms and bright moss.