They reach the village and walk through every street. Tom and Mark knock on doors while Kate scrutinizes the road debris for tracks, and in the end they shout, yelling at the silence, searching for anyone to ask. Their voices echo off rotten walls. The place is empty. Ghostly. There aren’t even any bones. She falls behind. Pain courses so deeply into her thigh that it overwhelms her vision. She drops down to stop the nausea that consumes her and cries into her sleeve. With her eyes closed, the silence is such she could be anywhere—a farm, a valley, anywhere remote. But not a village. Not a place with houses and roads, where people should be, where—
“Kate.”
She tries to stand but doesn’t have the strength.
“Are you okay?”
Her head stays down but she raises a hand. She grits her teeth as Tom pulls her up, turns her face so he cannot see her cry. There’s no time for her to slow them down. No time for weakness. Every minute, every second, something slips further away. She tries to hide her limp.
Some of the shops are shattered, others intact, their insides embalmed in darkness. Walking with her eyes closed, stumbling, some long-buried memory slips in: her final moments with the Feed. A bank of shops. A looter. A helicopter. Scintillating shards of glass. This little wormhole takes her back through another, knocked open by her fever dream, to when she’d first had it. She had woken and been convinced someone had been in her head. She’d had to know who. Tom had taken a lot of persuading but that morning she made him access the homeHub in his father’s study. He’d riffled through her BackUps, her uploaded SaveYou states; he’d looked inside her mind. Recent, earlier versions of her, unfolding before his eyes. What she’d thought, how she’d felt, unfiltered; she was totally naked before him. It was the strangest and most wonderfully warming thing to see, knowing that he was inside her thoughts, sifting through her mind, and that she felt safe with him there. But when he came out, his eyes looked sunken.
“Yes,” he had said. “He was in there. While you slept. My father came inside your Feed.”
In the office at the tower’s tip, they had been in the highest place in the city. Horror peopled the world below. Every day, more atrocities, paranoia; more people being taken or saying that their friend or parent, lover or child, had been and that was why they’d killed them. “The demon eyes,” they said, “I saw them.” Their own eyes staring, twitching, looking around for the next threat, the next attack to resist. People they knew, people they didn’t. People who may or may not have been taken. Who knew where truth ended and blended into fiction now? People killed. That was the only truth. They killed because they didn’t want to die. But what Tom had just told her was more disturbing. His father had hacked inside her Feed? It was illegal and disgusting.
“But why?”
From his face, Tom evidently knew but was struggling to process the information. He had swallowed, then met her eyes. “He was analyzing the baby.”
She takes Tom’s hand tightly now as they pass a community hall with shuttered windows. Her other hand protects her stomach, the ghost of the shape it had been. The silence is so loud in this street, it’s buzzing in her ears. A grotesque lurch hits her as Tom pushes open the hall’s heavy door and a cloud of flies launches, battering off her face, borne on a stench that rolls thickly out. The buzzing is not the silence at all: it is from thousands of flies seething over countless human mounds. They crawl across the infection-smeared walls like moving paper. The stench invades her nose and blocks up her forehead. Her vision loosens and fades.
She comes to, minutes or hours or no time later, as Tom throws water in her face. She has been pulled away from the hall.
“You’re all right. It’s okay, Kate.”
“Who’s Sylene?”
Tom scowls. “Who?”
Kate buries her face in his chest, unsure with her head only half in the world whether the wetness is water or tears or sweat. “It’s the fever dream,” she gasps.
“Drink this.”
“Tom, I’m worried.”
“We’ll find her.”
“The cream’s not working.”
Leaning on the pavement, grasses growing up between the cracks around her, she rolls up the leg of her trousers and shows him the wound. Tom’s face blanches.
“Kate. Why didn’t you—”
“Margaret gave me this cream but it’s not working. I feel very sick.” Kate gives him the tube and puts a hand to her mouth, holding her breath. Tom grips it tightly, glancing blankly at the quickcode. Then he stares at her leg and the darkness spreading into her skin.
“Everything will be fine,” he tells her, though his eyes say something else. “I promise, Kate. I promise.”
“You’re no use to Bea dead, Kate. You need to get to a Pharmacist!” Mark shouts at her again.
She is sweat-clammy. She has just been sick. Her trousers are rolled up in an attempt to dry her wound as they sit in the dewy morning just outside the village while Tom scavenges for food.
Mark stokes the fire vigorously. “That cream might buy you time but it won’t stop the infection. Look at it, Kate, it’s horrific! Why on earth didn’t you say something? You have to find a Pharmacist!”
“They’re a myth.”
Mark shakes his head. “They’re real.”
“You would say that.”
“I met one.”
“You’d say that too,” she mutters, and turns to look for Tom. “We can’t delay finding Bea.”
“I met him not too far from here.” Mark makes a show of shivering. “But he has drugs and knowledge and you need his help. You don’t want to delay finding Bea? Well, how would dying slow things down?”
“We have to find this van!”
Satisfied that the fire has taken, Mark settles on a log. “Kate. For fuck’s sake, listen. The world is too big. Are we even on the right track? The nature of stories has changed: you can’t willfully hope for a happy ending anymore. Look at me and John . . .” He pauses. Thinks. Decides something. “It’s possible the Pharmacist would know about her. He’s one of them, one of the taken. Or that’s what he says, anyway.”
They sit as the birds fly overhead and the clouds come in. Eventually a figure tops the hill.
“Here he is,” Mark says, and Tom, in the distance, raises his hands. Mark rests a frying pan in the flames as Tom, his trouser legs wet with dew, drops mushrooms onto the ground.
“They’re sneaky little buggers today. Must’ve heard me coming.”
Mark looks up from the fire. “She needs a Pharmacist, Tom.”
“It’ll be fine. We don’t have time to—”
“Be quiet a moment, Tom,” Kate says. She stares into the fire. She imagines Bea. Maybe she’s alive, maybe she’s dead. The truth is she can’t bear it either way. Because if Bea’s alive, she’s who-knows-where with awful things happening that Kate can see only too clearly. But if she’s dead, then Kate is dead too, numbed to anything that matters. She inhabits these two possibilities constantly. She’s living a double life. It drains her hope. She needs certainty. She needs relief. And if this Pharmacist might know . . .
“We’re going to find the Pharmacist, Tom,” she says through gritted teeth.
As the days pass, her leg hurts more deeply. The waves of pain warp what she sees. The veins darken and she cannot walk far. But she follows Mark, who seems to know the way. They doze during the day so they can walk in the coolness of night to manage her fever. Days, just days now, from this Pharmacist. One morning she wakes unwatched as sunshine touches her face and small drips of dew drop off the tarpaulin. Birds warble in the mulchy air, and she hears voices, and then they are gone. The voices again, indistinct but angry, are carried on the breeze and she limps between trees toward them. Through the trunks she glimpses Tom and Mark, their gestures fast. This fever has made time go strange, and sounds wash through her ears like water. Tom strides away and Mark follows, grabbing at his arm. “It’s not the first time!”
“I was gone for a moment!”<
br />
Mark’s voice lowers as he approaches Tom fiercely. “Why won’t you watch us, Tom?”
“I don’t like—”
“No one likes it!” he growls, pushing Tom back. “I’ve been watching you and I don’t like what I see. So give me an excuse that makes sense!”
At that moment Mark sees her. He freezes as he mutters something to Tom, who turns.
“What’s going on?” Her voice rings oddly in her own ears.
“Are you going to tell her?” Mark demands. After the silence, when Tom refuses to speak, Mark strides away. “I’d rather travel alone!”
Kate stands, breathing hard. She has so little strength. It’s all she can do to continue.
“I only came to piss. I would’ve been gone for two minutes.”
“What is wrong with you, Tom?”
“I was barely gone.”
“Tom . . .”
“Fine.” And he stalks deeper into the woods.
“Our daughter’s called Bea, by the way, and my name is Kate,” she says quietly, to his diminishing back, to the damp air, to no one.
By the time she returns, Tom and Mark have packed the camp away. They pick their way through the forest until they hit a road. Then they walk for miles in silence until, halfway through the day, Mark tells them he is leaving.
“I’ve no desire to see this Pharmacist again. Once was enough.” He points up the road and tells her, “There’s a camp twenty miles from here. You’ll hit a city first. Don’t go in, but skirt the orbital. Take the third road you cross and the camp has signs. Ask for Claire. She’ll direct you to the Pharmacist.” He will not look at Tom. Rather: “Watch him, because he doesn’t watch you,” he whispers as he hugs Kate, but he smiles warmly when he pulls away as if he hasn’t spoken at all. “And if I find your daughter, I’ll look after her. I’ll try to find you, but . . .” He gestures at the world, the desolate road, the emptiness around them. “I promise I’ll look after her.”
Kate feels heat rising in her eyes. “And if we find John . . .”
“You won’t,” Mark says, nodding. “There are few happy endings these days. The world is too big and we’re too small. We have to change our expectations.”
“But there’s still hope.”
Although the wobble in Kate’s voice betrays her, Mark pretends he didn’t hear it. Instead, he salutes and jumps from the road, then simply strolls away across the expanse of grass. Tom turns immediately, and for a while, Kate follows. When she looks back, Mark is approaching a roadside shack where intertangled cars are rusted into a lump on the forecourt. He is clapping his hands and looking for movement, but she can no longer hear his sound.
They walk through the night; they walk so they don’t have to talk, and the following day it’s the same. Even though her leg hurts chronically and her temperature soars, she keeps it all clamped in. The world is hallucinatory. The past and present mingle. She won’t speak. Flashes of different futures. With Bea. Without. All she needs Tom for is to help her find Bea, and she’s not sure she needs him for that. There is such a distance between them. Galaxies of space, where before there had been closeness. A distance inserted between them.
The next morning they crest a hill crowned with thick, thorny cords that they push back and stamp to the ground. In the bowl below them a city is revealed: a scuff of soot, a granulated smudge under a clouded sky. A motorway snakes down the hill and she follows its course with dried-out, burning eyes. Tiny cars are frozen there. More scatter the roads that split away in complex knots of elevated tracks. Between where they stand and the city, two giant skids score the plain. Crumpled knots of sky debris scatter the land.
“You know,” Tom says, and then coughs. His voice is rough from disuse. “I know you didn’t want to go to this Pharmacist, but if he is one of the taken, like Mark said, then maybe he does know things. Maybe he will know who took Bea. What do you think?”
Tom’s hope again, starting to burn through. Give it time, that’s all it takes. Even though he’s merely repeating what she had said previously, it starts to work like a balm, salving something inside her more effectively than Margaret’s cream. Hope sparks again. What else can she do? Within an hour this has become their refrain, his heartfelt belief and her hopeful pretense while she cries in silence inside: That the Pharmacist will know. That he will have information. That he will help them find their daughter.
They find the third road at dusk and track it across the countryside. They continue through the night until, with a deep gasping sound, the sky behind them is lit with fire as something in the city explodes. Nothing huge, not like the things they had seen before in the hellish chaos as they had journeyed to the farmhouse, but it’s big enough to shrink them. A tanker? A fuel station? Does it matter anymore? They keep walking, Kate even slower than before. Stumbling, stumbling, she needs regular rest. She bleeds sweat. She slows.
The next day, Tom finds pignuts for her and then, when they come across a copse on a hill, they decide to rest. Kate bathes in a small pond at the foot of the hill while Tom sets traps for food. They secure the canvas beneath the trees and look out over the countryside as the sun lowers and the clouds steal its colors to glow above the earth. Sitting together, her shoulders shaking with the fever, she remembers a time long ago, sitting beside each other, jolted on a train. They were speeding past the darkened stations toward the tower. Tom’s father had summoned them, so they were going. Her parents were missing; Southampton had gone down; maybe he had news. Tom had made her do anagrams, trying to calm her down, to anchor her to the real. But who didn’t want to hide from that? Chaos was grasping the city. Of the children in Kate’s class, only two had been on that morning. Even JasonStark27’s Feed was not on anymore, and while there had been so many times she could have throttled him, she now desperately hoped the little shit was all right. She had held her stomach as the train moved on, had tried to send her baby—Bea, though she didn’t know it yet—messages through the soothing motion of her palms. She had wished she could message her directly, but she didn’t have an implant; they hadn’t wanted her enabled in ute. So she had tried to breathe more slowly, to send her daughter the message that she could calm down too, she could stop her writhing around. Kate had been trawling every pool for news of her parents; that was why she’d been so buzzed. So maybe these anagrams were a good idea. Maybe it was better to be distracted . . .
“You’ll like this one,” Tom had said, his voice a veneer of calm. He’d stroked her face. “It’s topical.”
“Go on then.”
“Dariancharles,” he had said, and clapped his hands on his thighs.
Dariancharles. Or dari ancharles. Or darian charles, or dari an’ charles, or something different because the vid had been so unclear. As President Taylor had died and Sergeant Vaughn, the assassin, had been wrestled to the ground, there had been something he’d shouted, or so it was being claimed in billions of pools, something he’d screamed before he was shot that sounded like dariancharles. Or dari an’ charles. Or . . .
“The world is trying to work out what that means and you think it’s an anagram?”
“I don’t know.” Tom had mimicked her voice. “But no one else knows either. It must be code. Some sort of message to his collaborators. He knew that vid would be seen by everyone.”
He had pulled bits of paper and ancient pencils from his pocket and given her some. She had scribbled the letters D-A-R-I-A-N-C-H-A-R-L-E-S in a cloud to try to focus. She couldn’t. Tom’s pencil had raced across the page while her brain couldn’t even move . . .
“Done!” he had exclaimed. “Five. You?”
She had lied. Said she’d gotten one. Told him to go first, which he did: “Who killed the president? Well, how about this as a clue: Iran Ash Cradle.” He had looked at her meaningfully. “What we did to Iran—so they go boom in return. Car Sandal Hire? Iran Crash Deal? Scar Heal Nadir! That’s four to me. And here it is: Arid Ranch Sale! These terrorists are from one of the dry zones. The AfricaBl
oc or AsiaSouth. Their land is useless now. These attacks are revenge for the Water Wars.” He had snort-laughed before winking at her and tapping his head. Somehow his eyes were still vibrant despite how worn he looked. It had kindled something in her. “Well, at least we’re keeping the wetware working. What have you got?”
She had shielded her empty paper. It had struck her suddenly that there must be conversations deciding geopolitics that sounded like her polls. What region would you sacrifice . . . to protect your lifestyle? Africa, Asia, or Iran . . . It had chilled her. Who would vote for them? Tom was waiting. She had gone on. A fraction of a second—3.5millisecs—and he hadn’t noticed, and she had 21,593options, anagrams that made some kind of sense, and there was one she had known he’d like.
“China Lads Rear.”
Tom had leaned back as the train sped on and mimed shooting at the sky. “That’s good, Kate,” he had said, and sighed as the train pulled into the station under the tower, nearly a mile directly beneath the homeHub, where Ben was waiting. “So you think it’s the Chinese?”
She had gotten up painfully and told him she was going back on, that she had to find her parents. Tom had reassured her that Ben had promised he’d have news, had told her not to get too buzzed. Gently squeezed her hand. She’d be buzzed in an instant, she had known it, but in a disintegrating world it had been a comfort, even if it hadn’t existed in the real, to feel the safety of the Feed.
“Do you miss the camp?” Tom asks her now, and she’s pulled back, startled, into the sun-setting light with the birds around them, whipping about for insects, feeding in the evening sky. That dark underground afternoon echoes in her memory from years before.
“I . . . I miss Bea,” she stutters, blinking the past away.
“Of course. I mean, when we find her, shall we keep doing this? Moving around. Finding places like this, like here. We don’t need anyone else. Let’s just be us. I’m sorry we didn’t do it before, when you said we should. You were right. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
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