“How big was the camp?”
“Oh, small. It’s actually quite near here.” Tom glances toward the facility, now hidden behind some trees, and works out directions in his head. “It was the best. The house had been Kate’s aunt’s, but the others had already found it. It was a real community. We built a dam in a stream so we had a washing area, and we’d just worked out how to filter the water through soil so we were no longer getting sick. The farming was really coming on. It was great, Sylene, you would have loved it.” He can’t stop talking. He wants her to like it, he realizes. He wants to defend its memory. “Nothing huge, like Claire’s camp—now that was something else. But ours was something to be proud of too.”
“It sounds lovely.”
“It was precarious. We didn’t know how a harvest would go. All the machines were breaking. We had no idea how to fix them. But we were working out new ways of surviving all the time. Sean had nearly perfected cheese before the animals died.”
Sylene smiles. “I know what it is, but I’ve never had it. No . . .” She doesn’t have the word. She hunches her back and plods her arms along, puffs out her cheeks and, with her fingers above her head, heaves out a moo.
“Cows!” he croaks when he finally stops laughing. He gives it a go too: an impression of her imitation of a cow, romping along the earth. It makes him laugh even more. “Well . . . we’ll find you some cheese someday. When we’ve found Bea, let’s make that our next mission.”
“And where did you and Kate meet?”
“At my brother’s wedding. It was very over-the-top. You were . . . Kate was there to swell the numbers. She’d only known Ben briefly, at college, but there were so many people invited by my father, businesspeople from around the world. Ben wanted to fill it out.”
“Describe it to me.”
“Really?” He exhales fully. “Well, my father wanted it to happen at the tower, to close the mall and hold the event there. He wanted to have augmented content through the Feed depending on what your perception of a perfect wedding was. And to be honest, my brother wanted something no less extravagant, no less over-the-top: he just wanted it to be real. A ridiculous house with grounds and a lake and all sorts of lights in the trees. Fireworks and a banquet and helicopters and musicians and massive screens. The company made the largest flexiscreen ever for the day. They floated it on the lake. After the dinner, during the fireworks, they streamed all these vids so it looked like someone pulled a plug and the water had drained away. Then it looked like someone filled the lake up with champagne, and then there were all these lights and effects, and grabs of Ben and Miyu zooming around, and lasers.”
“It sounds amazing.”
“It was pure distraction, the way we lived.”
“But where you met Kate, so not all bad.”
“We met over dinner. Sorry, the banquet. I’d gone for a drink, and by the time I got back I was stuck at the back of the room. I could barely see the head table, where my father was giving a speech. And next to me was you. Kate. You know what I mean. You looked up at me and, brazen as you like, rolled your eyes. Then you mouthed along to what my father was saying, like you were imitating him. And then—and this was the moment, I think—you did this . . .” Tom draws his hand in front of his neck and mouths, Go off, go off the Feed. “And I did. I went off. My father’s voice disappeared. The room was suddenly silent. Kate revealed it all for what it was: nothing. There was nothing there. It wasn’t real. It really didn’t count for anything. And I felt . . . liberated. We talked for real, slow, at the back of the room, while everyone else was buzzed. It was the most amazingly private thing I’d ever done. My father would have been furious.” He spreads his hands as he walks. “Of course, when she realized who my dad was, it was embarrassing for a moment, but I didn’t care, she didn’t care, we both felt like we were somewhere we didn’t belong, so off we went.”
“Just like that? You knew?”
He flushes slightly and loses the confidence of his speech. “Well, no, that’s not quite what I meant. I mean we went upstairs. We kept our Feeds switched off and left everyone else to it. You remember the lake I told you about? The lake with the screen?”
“Of course.”
“Well, we saw that from upstairs. While everyone else was outside. We were upstairs in one of the bedrooms.”
That night as they lie in the tent, Sylene’s breathing slows and it sounds like she’s asleep. Tom is also dipping into dreams. They’d stopped watching each other long ago. It had happened in a moment’s understanding between them, a pause in a look: How could either of them kill the other? And why would they? Knowing what he knows now, Tom can easily see a way to forgive the killings, or understand them at least, and such understanding encourages acceptance. If he were to be taken . . . at least his death would not be in vain. There would be a continuation of sorts, he thinks as he nearly sleeps. Words meld and mean different things. The world changes in his mind. He is aware of the cold earth under the tent but feels like he’s flying above a desert at the same time. Fragments of buildings point up, collecting sand. Office blocks, clock towers, churches. Sand collects in drifts against their sides but the scale of things is impossible: How large are those future ruins beneath him?
“Tell me another story,” she says, and Kate’s voice sucks him back. She rolls to face him. She doesn’t touch him, but he can feel how close she is. “About the past, Tom. Where did we live?”
Her voice is sleep-smothered and he’s not quite sure he heard her right.
“We . . . we lived in a house . . . it was in the old part of the city, not one of the new domiciles. You hated all those new-builds . . .”
He listens to her breathing. He can remember their home without trying. Their kitchen in the basement, their bedroom upstairs. They’d prepared the baby’s room with new LCD wallpaper and carpet; every time he went in, he set the colors to blue, and whenever he returned she’d changed them to yellow again. All the other things in boxes that they’d bought: the clothes, the toys. Essentials, they told each other, all. All that potential there, a different future, boxed and gathering dust in their house. Their home. If it’s still even there, in the ruins of the city, where they are going back to. He’d fled it before to save Bea; now he’s returning there for her.
Sylene prods him in the eye.
“Okay, I’ll tell you a story . . . This was a few years ago. We were at the camp, in the study in the farmhouse, watching Bea. We had the fire burning, but apart from that it was nearly silent: just the sound of her piling blocks on the rug. She never got the tower very high; two blocks, maybe three, and then it would fall, and she would start again. She always had this smile, like she was the most patient person in the world. I was aware that things had gone quiet, that her little grunts of concentration had stopped. I opened my eyes, and just as I did so, I saw her reach up to place the sixth or seventh block on the tower, and she caught my eye and the thing collapsed. She stopped and looked at the blocks, and she said, ‘Fuggit.’ That was her first word. Fuggit. And the expression on your face as you looked at her and looked at me, and we both said at the same time: ‘Well, I didn’t teach her that!’”
Sylene sighs and seems to sink lower.
“Is that enough?” Tom whispers. “Are you asleep?”
“Thank you. It’s almost like I can remember it.”
They come at the camp from a different angle from when he had returned with Graham and Danny, their desperate journey back from the facility. They approach down a narrow lane with balding hedgerows lining its sides and birds warbling from the branches. Their boots clump past wrecked vehicles on the soil-covered track. And the air, something about the trees, smells familiar.
“We’re nearly there,” he says.
“We’re going to your camp?”
He nods curtly. “It’s on the way. And you asked about home, so . . .”
They walk on, arms swinging, boots banging, birds singing.
“Also,” Tom says, having
thought some more, “we can stock up on supplies. We can take some food with us.”
Sylene glances at him.
“What?” he asks.
“If the camp was attacked once, it may have been attacked again.”
Tom frowns. He hadn’t thought of that. A bird speeds into a bush and hops from stick to stick. The sky is already losing its light. Their breath steams.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“I’m just saying, Tom,” Sylene maintains, “that we should be careful.”
They carry on walking.
“But when we get there,” Tom says, “you know you’ll have to pretend.” He scans the horizon, looks up into the trees. “Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
They leave the lane and enter a field; the gate is crumpled and the hedgerows haven’t yet quite overgrown the gap. Nearby rabbits scatter. He sees at least fifty more, farther away, unconcerned.
“Well, at least we don’t have to go far for dinner.”
“Tom.” Sylene has stopped. She has her hands clasped and her face is furrowed.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she says, “I’m fine, I . . .”
“What?”
“It’s the baby.”
He nearly reaches for her but doesn’t. “Are you okay?”
“You do know it’s still Kate’s? That just because I’m . . . just because of me, it’s not . . . The baby is still genetically Kate’s and yours.”
The sun has sunk and the light catches the sides of their faces. The hedgerows cast thin-fingered shadows and the group of rabbits is dissolving, scampering swiftly away.
“Yes,” he says. “I know.”
They leave the field and drop into another lane. They are close to the camp, he knows it, but he can’t find the track. The evening is already sketched out in darkening gray, and this stretch of road, with its overturned cars and jackknifed trucks, looks familiar, but he curses. He’s lost. He’s sure the turnoff was here. He glances at her. Strands of hair fall from under her hat, whose woolen rim halos her head. Her cheeks are pink and her nose bright white. She catches him looking and smiles.
“We should just camp, Tom, if we can’t find it soon.”
He looks away. When he turns back, he sees, just for a moment, melancholy on her face. She, seeing his glance, smiles at him again. He takes her hand and pats it. Her fingers squeeze his—did they?—before she lets him go.
Tom watches her from the corner of his eye. Her near-familiar gait, the way her arms swing like they always have, the fullness of her belly between the curtains of her coat. It’s just like it used to be, the first time they came looking for this place, having battled from the city, having clung to life, surpassed their stunted thoughts, communicating somehow with malformed words, a degenerate language of grunts. And at last, with the sun’s last light dropped below the earth and bouncing only dimly off the clouds, he finally finds the track.
“It’s been hidden,” he murmurs as he climbs into the pile of wet branches.
She starts to climb too. Bits of bush and strands of ivy have been curled around and interspersed to hide what it is. What it is is a barricade. She nears its top and rolls over.
“Careful!”
She looks back from the other side and smiles. “Precious cargo,” she says, patting her stomach. “I know.”
Tom looks back along the road. Nothing. Still. Apart from the wrecked van and the motorbike, it’s empty. He was here with Danny and Graham not too long ago. How times change the world. He peers back into the murk of the forest and scales the barricade. At its top is gloom: dark earth and black trees beyond. A dizzying lack of light.
“Kate?” he calls, and checks himself. “Sylene?”
The rustle of trees in the darkness; these trees; the sound that returns in his troubled dreams, and with it the fear rises within him. He can’t see anyone. Running through the woods again, searching and desperate. To stay with Kate or search for Bea—what choice was that? He scrabbles and falls down the other side.
“Sylene?”
A hand grips his arm, and—“Roagh!”—she collapses into him, laughing at his face, shaking his shoulders and roaring at him, getting high on his quaking fear. Tom raises a shaking finger. “Don’t . . .” he starts, and the quiver in his voice makes her face fall. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not here.” He smiles without meaning it, puts a hand on Sylene’s shoulder and moves her down the track. The gentle incline feels so familiar to him and also from another world. The wizened trees reach over them, spindle-thin, and click like insects in the breeze. “This is where she was taken. I must have been so close.”
“Oh,” Sylene murmurs. “I’m sorry.”
He examines the bushes as they pass. They are nearly leafless; it would be impossible to hide here now. But then they had been full. And smoke had burned the air. And his heart had jolted with panic; he’d had no idea what to do. Then. Not now. He’s looped back around to find her now. He’ll save her. She’ll be fine.
By the time the track levels out, Tom notices that he and Sylene are holding hands. They break out of the trees and the air is instantly cooler. He doesn’t let her go. There is nothing between them and the stars. The long grasses whisper. He squints, looking for shapes, looking for lights. Looking for anything at all.
“Should we wait until morning, so we can see things more clearly?” Sylene’s voice is quietly earnest. She shivers. He sees that she is scared.
“No. Let’s get a bit closer.” He squeezes her hand.
“But maybe they’ve left.” She withdraws it.
Tom points into the night. “Look, there it is.” He directs her sight at a darker patch and they take high steps over the grass.
With his gaze locked on the house, the first hut, Danny’s, surprises him, out of the gloom. Its windows black, its wood wet-dark and glinting, it has a heavy presence in the night. It is burned, chunks of it charred away like a cindered skull carved out.
“I’m beginning to think,” Tom whispers deeply, “that we shouldn’t have come back.”
“We can still leave.”
Yet he sets his jaw and continues. The house gradually appears, a stroke of gray in the darkness. The skeletons of trellises have collapsed. A smear of soot is shadowed around the kitchen door and Tom walks to the window, where jagged glass is still in the frame, a board now fixed in behind it.
“It’s deserted.”
“Then why are you still whispering?”
Tom coughs. “There’s no one here. They must have abandoned the camp after we left.” His voice echoes in the darkness.
“So. Shall we go?”
“Let’s go in.”
“I don’t like it here!” She pulls him back, digging her feet into the ground.
“There’s no one here!” he explains, and is surprised by the harshness in his voice. Something more than impatience, more than hope snuffed out. “Come on, Sylene.”
He drags her forward with him. The scorched kitchen door is rough like hide as he wraps his fingers around the handle. His thumb sits snugly on the latch as if he’d never left, as if they’re creeping back to bed from a midnight walk. The door sticks in the frame. He heaves once, twice, and with the third, harder shove it falls open and he lurches into the kitchen as a clatter of cascading metal beats the silence apart. It resounds throughout the valley around them. Sylene pushes her way into the doorway as Tom looks back out, into the darkness, gaping at the shadows of the huts, looking for movement, looking for light, for—
“Who’s there?”
Tom freezes. He shrinks into the doorway and forces Sylene back into the cold kitchen behind him.
“I have a gun!” the voice shouts again, and a sharp crack echoes around the hills.
The silence draws out.
“Who are you?” comes the voice once more—a man’s voice, tremulous with age.
“Graham?” Tom calls quie
tly. “Is that you?”
The windows are boarded and an armchair has been moved next to the sofa, but apart from that, the study is the same: the desk, the cupboard, the pictures on the walls, even the worn-out rug. A fire burns in the grate.
“I only use the back door now,” Graham chatters, “and this room and the kitchen. I don’t want anyone noticing me. I really don’t need that much space. It’s quiet sometimes but I’m quite, quite comfortable.”
“You sleep in your hut?”
Graham nods.
“Wouldn’t you be safer here?”
“It was all theory until tonight, Tom. You’re the first people to have disturbed my peace.” He gets slowly to his feet and takes the pot from the flames. The skin under his eyes has a translucency to it that it hadn’t had before, and his hands shake as he pours. Somehow he looks less substantial. “More, Kate?”
“Thank you, Graham,” says Sylene.
He hoops the pot back over the fire and settles onto the sofa. His movements are effortful. For a while before he speaks he looks around the room, as if admiring people who aren’t actually there. Then he turns to them abruptly, as if no time had passed. “I thought people would be drawn to the house and not come looking in the huts. I thought: The prominent door of the house, that’s where they’ll go, so I can keep the back one for me!” He tilts his cup at them. Smiles over the rim with glee. “Cheers, Kate. Cheers, Tom. Welcome home!” He drinks. And then, “So . . . tell me . . . did you find any—”
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