by E. J. Swift
In the lobby, old Eduardo greets her like a woman risen from the dead, which she supposes she is, and certainly feels like, seeing his face. The reaction wrong-foots her. Eduardo tells her the government are in session.
‘In session? Why?’
‘It’s a crisis meeting.’ Eduardo is visibly teetering between the importance of the situation – whatever it is – and intense curiosity about where Ramona has been and why and how she has come back. But Ramona has no inclination for mind games.
‘Dammit, Ed, this is urgent. I need to see them now. Is Lygia here?’
Ramona’s boss appears almost as shocked as Eduardo to find her errant pilot standing in the lobby. Once again Ramona explains the urgency of the situation. Seeing Eduardo’s expectant face she drags Lygia into the canteen, which is mercifully empty of customers. The clang of pots and pans filters through the kitchen shutters. She tells Lygia about the compound in the desert. About her mother. About the diaries. Lygia listens. When Ramona describes the experiments in their glass cubicles Lygia lifts a hand as though to push away the image, then drops it again. When Ramona has finished, Lygia sits in silence.
‘Machines,’ she says at last. She looks about the canteen, seeking concurrence from an audience who are not present. ‘They’re machines.’
‘You see why I need to get in there?’
Lygia shakes her head slowly. Ramona can see her weighing things up as she struggles to make sense of this awful truth. She even looks empathetic. Ramona’s hopes raise, only to crash again in the next moment.
‘You can’t interrupt them now, Ramona. They’re in a crisis meeting. I don’t suppose you’ve heard but the shit’s hit the fan. The lost city?’ Lygia drops her voice, then looks annoyed at herself for pandering to such absurd conventions. ‘Osiris,’ she says firmly. ‘Osiris is out there. Talk about a revelation, eh? First the Boreals invaded, now the Antarcticans.’ Lygia shakes her head. ‘It’s a clusterfuck.’
‘Lygia, are you listening to me at all? I’m telling you the Boreals are kidnapping, experimenting on Patagonians and you’re keeping me standing here? I need to tell people what’s going on! They’ve got to do something!’
‘Ramona, I hear you, and by the arse of the fucking whale it’s horrendous, but there’s a war breaking out in our back yard and we’ve got one side camped on our doorstep. This is an emergency! Whatever shit the Boreals are up to will have to wait. Come back in a few hours, they might be done by then. But until this crisis is over, we can’t take any steps.’
‘I can’t believe this—’
Ramona’s boss lifts a warning finger.
‘And don’t think you’re getting away without an explanation. You’ve been missing for months. I want a full report.’
‘Lygia please! Listen to me!’
Lygia stands. She is walking away as she makes her parting shot.
‘A full report, Callejas!’
As she storms through the lobby, Ramona is aware of Eduardo goggling, his ears practically walking away from his head in his desperation to eavesdrop. Now her row with Lygia will be all over the archipelago within the hour.
Outside, she vents her rage upon the plant-choked walls of the Facility, kicking against the stonework until her sore, swollen feet shout with pain. On the walls beneath the foliage are the markings of the sea city. She feels like the place has been dogging her for months, riding on her back, that every time she turns her head it has ducked out of sight, unwilling to be seen. And now she can see clearly, and it’s shitting all over Patagonia.
How can Lygia have heard what she has just said and tell her to wait? How could anyone?
She’ll go back to Arturo’s. She’s in dire need of a finger of rum – or four. Striding back down the road, she lifts her head and howls her frustration to the wind.
‘Fuck this! Fuck this!’
From the top of the hill she can see the Antarctican ships dominating the strait. She starts to count them and gives up. Looking at the ships she remembers Taeo, the Antarctican who broke her aeroplane. She should have sought him out while she was in the Facility and given him a piece of her mind. Later, she thinks. It will do her good to shout at someone.
As the coastal track levels out, weaving into the buildings of the town, houses and storefronts and drinking houses, all quieter than usual, she passes other residents of the island, and she cannot suppress the images of those stricken people in their glass cubicles – their coffins – in Tamaruq. They are still in there. She couldn’t save them. She couldn’t even give them a dignified death. She’ll see them every day for the rest of her life. Each woman, man or child she passes in Fuego is a person at risk, a person who might be stolen away in the night. Davida Akycha Kvest is dead, but the raiders who took Inés and the others are still out there. Even now they might be targeting a village in the highlands.
Heading in the opposite direction towards her is a small, slight figure. There’s something vaguely familiar about the walk, but not enough to make Ramona stop. She’s not in the mood for pleasantries or remonstrations.
The pilot marches right past without even acknowledging him. Mig spins on his heel and runs after her.
‘Hey! Hey, señora, remember me?’
She ignores him, striding along with her chin held high, deftly sidestepping anyone in her way. Mig hurries to keep up.
‘Hey! I was in Cataveiro. Remember?’
He catches her wrist.
‘I helped you with the salt woman.’
The pilot turns and snatches her arm away. Nothing about her face is approachable.
‘What do you want?’
‘I helped you with the salt woman,’ Mig repeats. ‘In Cataveiro.’
She looks at him properly then. Her face moves from anger to confusion to a dawning recognition. She looks different from what he remembers. Her hair. It’s shorter. Ragged. Her face is tired.
‘Cataveiro,’ she says, approaching the word cautiously.
‘Cataveiro,’ says Mig.
‘What do you want?’ she says again.
‘My employer has a proposition for you.’
The pilot keeps walking. Mig jogs along beside her.
‘Who’s your employer?’
‘The Alaskan.’
‘Why would I want to talk to her?’ says the pilot. But she slows her pace.
‘You’ll want to,’ Mig assures her. The pilot finally stops. She faces him. People carry on around them: a woman carrying a crate of fish, a man with headphones and a personal radio, adjusting the station, perhaps tuning into the same long-range channels that Mig and the Alaskan have been monitoring. Mig senses the pilot weighing up her options. It seems to take her a long time.
‘All right,’ she says at last. ‘But this better be good.’
Ramona struggles to recall what she knows about the Alaskan. She has heard the name before, in Cataveiro, and outside of the city too, but never in any concrete way. The Alaskan’s reputation is more spirit than human, someone that can slip through the noon of day without leaving a witness. She doesn’t even know if the Alaskan is from Alaska, or if she’s truly a Boreal – after all, a name is just a front, a door which can sometimes be opened and sometimes not, and many Patagonians whose work is of a dubious nature take names for themselves in this way, subsuming their identities until their real names are forgotten altogether. If Ramona knows one thing, she knows the Alaskan’s work is dubious.
Mig takes her to a house close to the harbour front. She can hear the gulls screeching as they fight over scraps in the air, and she can smell the brine. There’s a freshness to the sea air of the archipelago which is different to the hot haze of Panama or any other coast that Ramona has seen. Mig has a key. He lets them in, checking behind them, she notices, and instinctively she does too, although she sees nothing out of place.
The Alaskan is a frail woman in a wheelchair who appears to be listening to a dozen radio stations simultaneously. A woman who, in that first initial glance, reminds Ramona of h
er mother. The semblance dissipates in the next few seconds, when the Alaskan raises her head, redirecting all of her focus to Ramona, and Ramona undergoes the curious experience of being openly, unashamedly evaluated. This is a shrewd individual, used to control. The Alaskan’s irises are so dark they are almost black. A memory – something that was said, though she cannot think where or when – flickers at the back of Ramona’s mind, but she can’t retrieve it.
Having finished her assessment, the Alaskan begins the deliberate process of switching off the radios, one by one.
‘So you did come,’ she says.
‘Mig here says you have a proposition for me,’ says Ramona. She glances about the sparse, functional room. Few furnishings; no belongings that she can see, except the radios. This is a transitory setup. ‘I don’t know what it is but I don’t have much time.’
‘You may want to make time,’ says the Alaskan, silencing the final radio with a push of her index finger. Her other wrist, Ramona notes, has been recently broken, and doesn’t appear to have had much attention since.
The Alaskan turns herself to face Ramona.
‘Ramona Callejas, am I correct?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re the pilot.’
She thinks of Colibrí, abandoned, broken in the desert.
‘I was.’
‘Mig saw you return to the island.’
‘So what, you want a ride?’
The Alaskan looks at her steadily.
‘I’d make it very worth your while.’
Ramona feels an irrational sense of disappointment. No matter how exulted the customer, it always comes down to this. She’s just a carrier.
‘I have more important things to worry about than ferrying passengers.’
‘You haven’t asked where I want to go.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I won’t be going anywhere any time soon.’
‘And why is that?’ asks the Alaskan coyly.
‘Why would I tell you?’
‘Why not? You’re clearly preoccupied with something. You can’t even keep still, or look at me while you’re speaking. Sit down, share the load. Have a nougat.’
‘A nougat?’
The Alaskan shrugs.
‘I have other sweets.’
Ramona takes a perch on the edge of a chair. She’s aware of the boy at the back of the room, fidgeting. He did help her. With Xiomara, when she believed Xiomara had medicine.
‘What happened to your wrist?’ she asks the Alaskan. A look passes between the woman and the boy, a look that Ramona does not understand.
‘I had an accident.’
‘Are you from Alaska?’
‘I’ve been in Patagonia for over fifty years.’
‘But you are from Alaska?’
‘I was born there.’ The Alaskan laughs. The sound sits deep in her throat, resulting in a spasm of coughing. ‘Honestly, Callejas, do you think I’d be living in this country through choice? Think of me as whatever you want, but believe me when I say I have little left in common with a nation you so clearly despise.’
‘They broke her spine,’ says Mig.
‘Enough!’ The Alaskan cuts through sharply. ‘Enough.’
Again, the lost memory flickers, but refuses to crystallize. Ramona considers the two of them; the boy and the old woman, bound by some strange and indefinable relationship which she cannot work out. A great weariness overcomes her. Why not tell these two? At least they are listening.
‘I found out something,’ she says. ‘Something the Boreals are doing. Something… despicable.’
The Alaskan waits quietly. Mig has stopped fidgeting, and is listening intently. Ramona is unable to restrain herself any longer.
‘They’re kidnapping southerners. The Boreals. They’re kidnapping them from their homes and taking them north of the belt and – and experimenting on them. With redfleur.’ She spits the word.
A shudder runs through the young boy.
‘It wasn’t only redfleur either.’ The words pour out of her; she knows she should hold back, should spare the boy, but having begun she can’t stop. ‘Before that, they were doing other experiments. Engineering people. Trying to change them. And not only up there. They had centres all over the place, in Sino-Siberia, and down here in the lost city—’
She stops abruptly, remembering the strange rumour told to her by Félix, back in Panama, a rumour that seemed too bizarre to be real, but has proved to be real, and then what Lygia said—
The Alaskan is staring at her, completely absorbed.
‘The lost city, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re behind the times,’ says the Alaskan. ‘The lost city – Osiris – has been invaded by the Boreals.’
‘Lygia told me.’ She slumps. ‘So the government won’t see me. They’re in a crisis meeting. Apparently it’s more important than this.’
‘Well,’ says the Alaskan. ‘I hate to break it to you, but it’s war. War has a tendency to redefine priorities.’
‘Not like this,’ whispers Ramona. ‘Not like this.’
The Alaskan’s mind is racing. Neurones surging towards one another, each pulse generating another connection of the greater, the overlying web. The lost city. The missing link. Of course.
The fact that the Boreals are experimenting on southerners is a revelation, but if she thinks far enough back… When the Alaskan was ascending the giddy heights of power, there were rumours of such centres. They were never spoken of. Only hints. Allusions. Conversations not quite concluded. Gaps in reports. No one asked, and so no one knew, and no one could reveal. That was before the emergence of redfleur, but it makes sense that the purpose of these centres would be diverted to such a wide-scale threat.
She looks at the pilot’s tired, haunted face. It doesn’t make sense to the pilot. There’s a woman who’s seen some things she won’t forget. Such is this world. Not everyone can witness it and survive unchanged, or survive at all. Something about her – the impulsiveness, perhaps – reminds the Alaskan of the Scandinavian girl.
‘The man Vikram Bai,’ she says. ‘He has immunity.’
The Alaskan is thinking aloud. The pilot looks confused.
‘I don’t know him.’
‘He is Osirian. He was shipwrecked here, some months ago now. He is largely responsible for the rediscovery of Osiris. But he is of interest for other reasons. He has immunity to redfleur.’
‘Immunity?’ The pilot looks dazed at the idea. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘Maybe not,’ says the Alaskan. ‘Think. Think what you have just this moment told me. The lost city was once an experimentation site. That is what you said.’
‘Yes, an ancillary centre, that’s what Kvest’s diaries—’
‘We know that the man who survived redfleur – the only known survivor – is from the lost city.’
The Alaskan waits, impatiently, for the moment of clarity to register. When it comes, elevating the pilot’s features into an entirely different plane of cognizance, the Alaskan feels for a few blissful seconds nothing but the thrill, the volt of pleasure that comes of a covert knowledge shared.
The pilot takes a little more time to catch up in full.
‘You think because of that he might – he might provide a cure?’
‘It’s possible,’ the Alaskan muses. ‘It is one possible explanation, anyway. And certainly the most tantalizing one, don’t you think? But in any case, we can’t ask him about his parentage because he’s no longer here. No, Vikram Bai has gone to a war zone.’
The pilot jumps up from her seat and begins to stalk the tiny room.
‘Then we need to get him back!’
‘A ridiculous idea. The city is trapped between the Boreals and the Antarcticans. The long-range signals indicate a ceasefire, but that will never last. Neither side will concede.’
‘Then we need to tell them. We need to get inside the city – find this Osirian – tell them what I know!’
Th
e Alaskan casts a despairing glance in Mig’s direction.
‘Mig, you know what’s happening here. Help me talk some sense into this madwoman.’
Mig regards her steadily. That secretive, cat-like expression that marks a door to the boy’s other life.
‘She’s right,’ he says. ‘We have to find Vikram.’
‘Mig—’
‘We have to find him! You said he could provide a cure. That’s what they all thought, at the camp. That’s why they all came.’ Mig swallows. ‘That’s why I went with him, after Cataveiro.’
‘I said he might. Nothing is certain. How should I know, I’m not a scientist. I’m an old woman. What do I know?’
‘He can end the experiments in the north,’ says Ramona. She seizes Mig’s hands. ‘We’ll find him.’
The Alaskan pops a nougat into her mouth and sucks it slowly. She observes the two of them, boy and woman, so suddenly alike in their evangelical fervour. She despairs of the human race. How can people be so imbecilic?
‘Where did you find the site of the experiments, Callejas?’
‘In the desert, north of the belt. A place called Tamaruq. Why does it matter where? When you hear what they were doing…’ The pilot’s eyes slide to Mig. She doesn’t continue her sentence.
The Alaskan adjusts her weight in her chair and loads her next words with all the gravitas she can muster.
‘In the desert. North of the belt. Deep into the uninhabitable zone. And how many other secret places do you think the Boreals might have in this world, for this, for other, as you would call them, atrocities? You may expose these crimes, but believe me, by the time that site has closed, another will have sprung up in its place. If not redfleur, something else. The world is too vast, Callejas. You cannot find out all of its criminals.’