by Karen Healey
Hanad focused on me again. “Come, Abdi.”
“Come where?” I said cautiously.
“We have a boat moored off the coast.”
Tegan’s eyes narrowed.
“I can’t…. It’s not just me. There are six of us.” I tried to say it firmly, but knew I’d misstepped when Hanad frowned.
“I was hired to retrieve you. Not these Australians.”
“We don’t have to take them all the way,” I said. “Just to another boat they can use, one strong enough to get them to New Zealand.”
“No. Too risky. Come.”
My brief burst of satisfaction at being the person in demand had faded. It seemed that the position gave you fewer choices, not more. I was trying to decide how much resistance might be met with violence, how much I could endanger the others in my quest to help them, when Bethari made an alarmed noise.
“Actually,” she said, “I think the risk would come in heading out to sea.” She flipped her computer over to show them, as Thulani’s beeped an alarm.
“Three fliers on the coast,” he reported. “One of them heading this way.”
Hanad said something nasty in Somali about fish-eating Australians, and then nodded at me. “All right. We go inland, to a safe house there.”
“You don’t know the territory,” Zaneisha said.
“You do,” Hanad said. “I’ll hire you as guide. Two hundred thousand Australian.”
“My fee is that all the members of our party go with us.”
“Ridiculous!”
“One of them is the girl who made the pills for the medicine smugglers,” I said quickly.
Hanad looked interested. “Joph Montgomery?” He spread his hands. “All right. I can see you Australians are as stubborn as your flies. We go together. But I am not taking this many strangers to our Melbourne safe house. We’ll use one of yours.”
“Ours are jeopardized,” Zaneisha said, and didn’t mention that it was because we’d split away from the rest of the movement.
Hanad’s eyes narrowed. There was going to be a limit to how far we could push him, and I suspected we were coming very near it.
We needed someplace that would be safe, private, preferably invisible to fliers, which meant underground, and—wait.
“Underground,” I said. “Tegan, that urban exploration you used to do. Would any of those tunnels be suitable?”
Tegan’s eyes gleamed. “Yes! The old drains wouldn’t have changed.”
“To Melbourne, then,” Hanad conceded. “Very well, let’s go.”
“One second,” Bethari said, and went behind the counter, into the employee break room again. There was a brief silence, a strangled shriek, and the strident clatter of metal being banged about. Zaneisha vaulted the counter, Tegan right behind her, but they both stopped dead when Bethari came back in, negligently carrying the twisted remnants of the EMP control unit.
“Now we can go,” she said, and sauntered out the front door.
Tegan obviously wanted to ask Marie about the other successful revivals—but we weren’t going to do so in front of Hanad and Ashenafi, much less Zaneisha, who Marie was still treating with suspicion. The men traveled with us, wide shoulders crushing me between them, while Zaneisha drove. Bethari and Joph had transferred to the men’s car, to go with Eduardo and Thulani. Both groups were hostages to the other’s good behavior, depending on everybody to keep faith.
It was a neat compromise, and I was pleased that I’d arranged it so quickly. But I wished we could talk to Marie.
Instead, when I could, I snuck glances at her in the rearview mirror. She was stretched out on the backseat, taking short breaths through her tight mouth. Joph’s red medical bag was sitting on her stomach, but Marie hadn’t taken anything, preferring to keep pain and sharp wits, rather than exchange them for more comforting woolly-headedness.
Actually, as far as I could remember, she’d chosen either total oblivion or no real pain relief ever since she’d been rescued. No in-between relaxed state where she might be tongue-loosened and vulnerable to inquiries about what research she’d done in captivity; she’d repulsed Hurfest’s questions with a prickly vehemence I’d attributed to personal dislike. In retrospect, it was very interesting.
Ashenafi seemed to be content with silence, occupying himself with his computer. Hanad, however, asked questions. Zaneisha answered and countered with her own. It was hard to tell who was getting the most out of the competition for information, but a competition it certainly was.
“So you have no reliable contacts left in the city,” Hanad said at last, and sat back, looking disgruntled but not surprised. “And you, Abdi?”
“Me?”
“Who are your contacts?”
“I don’t have any,” I said, confused. “I only knew one man in the smuggling ring, Digger Jones. But that wasn’t his real name, and I don’t know where he is.” I hoped he was either lying low or out of Australia; the medicine smuggling had been beneath SADU’s notice, but the ordinary police might have been able to make something out of even the fuzzy and inaccurate details I’d given Tegan permission to talk about in her ’cast.
“Your ordinary contacts. Your mother said you had a host father.”
“Him? He’s useless.” Reese Chang was clueless, not malicious, but no great addition to the species. Oddly, it was he who’d introduced me to Tegan. I’d been doing an assignment in my room when he’d knocked on my door. “Would you like to see history made?” he asked in the special voice that meant he was pleased that he could give the thirdie boy a treat.
I’d seen history made many times before, watching my mother usher in new law in the National Assembly. She’d been one of the driving speakers in favor of cutting our ties with the French military. But that was Djibouti history, thirdie history, and of no interest to Reese. I had to humor him, so I let him order the house computer to show me the video of a terrified girl, shying away from the crowding press. She was bald, dressed in a flimsy medical tunic, and bleeding from scrapes on her arm and bare feet. She looked small and delicate and weak. But her dark eyes were huge and observant in her bare white face, and even as her body flinched from the bumblecams, her gaze was direct.
For a moment, it seemed as if she were looking directly at me.
A camera trick, of course. Everyone watching that ’cast—and there were millions of them at the time, and billions later—saw the same thing. But it caught my attention. I thought, That girl is beautiful.
In the car, from the front seat, Tegan caught my eye in the mirror. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, what about the local Somalis?” Hanad persisted.
I shifted uncomfortably. It wasn’t an unreasonable question; Melbourne had a sizable Somali population. Thanks to the No Migrant policy, they were all at least a generation removed from Mogadishu or Toulouse or Minneapolis or any of the other places they might have come from. But they were my people. We shared some of our long history, some mutual understanding of our food and language and heritage.
I’d avoided them deliberately.
“I didn’t want to risk them finding out about the smuggling. In case I was caught.” Or in case they’d given me away.
Hanad looked at me for a long time. “You should learn how to trust,” he said at last.
This struck me as particularly ridiculous advice from an acknowledged mercenary and kidnapper, but I kept my peace. I wouldn’t be trusting Hanad. But I could trust my mother, who’d sent him.
The atmosphere grew less tense as we got closer to the city, and the traffic became more dense. Even with Australia’s rigid and extortionate taxes on car ownership, not everyone was willing or able to take public transport, and it was easier to lose ourselves in ten thousand vehicles than in a few hundred. In fact, the danger was that we’d lose the other car in our convoy, but Thulani was a good driver and tailed us with ease.
It was nearly full dark by the time we arrived. The suburb Tegan directed us to h
ad once been a town that had sprawled until the city and the town met. Along that uneasy border was a quiet, weed-strewn wasteland, where old factories that hadn’t been upgraded to the most recent air-pollution standards had been abandoned. There was a one-time estuary that had dried out and, overlooking it, several government apartment blocks in the traditional gray. The inhabitants had made an effort with bright curtains and hardy, drought-resistant flowers on the balconies, but it was hard to disguise the grim air of that institutional architecture, especially in the harsh lighting that limned the buildings at night.
We parked by the head of the estuary, where a huge concrete grill was set into the hillside. “Those buildings weren’t there before,” Tegan said, eyeing the apartments with suspicion.
“Are you sure the tunnels will be?” Hanad asked. Again, a reasonable question. I had the feeling that Hanad prided himself on his reason.
Unfortunately, so did I. I didn’t want there to be so many similarities between this man and me. It made me doubt myself, and doubt was dangerous.
“They were built to last a couple of centuries. Melbourne doesn’t really get earthquakes, and definitely no volcanic activity.”
“Superstorm erosion?” Zaneisha suggested.
“Maybe. Which reminds me. The first bit of the way is vulnerable to flash flooding. Alex and I didn’t go into tunnels in the rain, because we weren’t freaking stupid, but a couple of guys she knew did, and one of them nearly drowned just a few meters from the exit. If a storm starts, we have to stay put. The central chamber’s huge, with a lot of high ground. Our feet might get wet there, but trying to get out would be much worse.” She looked sternly at the men, making sure that they were taking in all of my Somali translation. Thulani’s English was just conversational, and Eduardo barely spoke any—about as much as I did Portuguese. They all looked appropriately impressed.
I was, too. It was one thing to know urban exploration had been something Tegan had done in the old days and quite another to see her put those skills into action.
We grabbed necessary supplies without a lot of discussion, and while the cars were driven away, to be parked inconspicuously, Hanad and Zaneisha rolled out a field stretcher for Marie. She watched, silent and bright-eyed.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything?” Joph asked, picking up her medicine bag. “You’re going to get jolted around a lot.”
“I’m fine,” Marie said tensely. “Let’s save the pills for when we need them.”
Joph’s bag was packed with pills and breathers and pain-relieving gels. There was no need to hoard them. I exchanged a significant look with Tegan, and she adjusted her computer in the band about her wrist. “Lights on,” she told it, and slipped between the massive concrete slats, leading us into the earth.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Con sordino
The journey back to Melbourne had been mildly uncomfortable. The tunnels were much worse.
They were made of curbed slabs of white-gray concrete, powdery with age, but still stolidly strong. They weren’t smoothed off prettily—the walls had never been intended for public viewing—and I stumbled more than once on irregularities in the flooring. I’d expected damp. Instead, it was dusty dry, but the air smelled musty, and patches of lichen and moss grew in the cracks of the rough concrete. We were doubtless breathing in countless spores; I was glad I was still on the immunoboosters given to me after the implant had been removed.
Tegan and Bethari could walk upright for the entire route, but the rest of us had to stoop most of the way, with Zaneisha and Hanad nearly bent double in some of the lower stretches. The worst moment was when they had take to Marie off her stretcher for a tight bend, so they could collapse it. While she was dangling from Zaneisha’s arms, one of Marie’s bandaged feet brushed the concrete. I was standing right behind her in the bottleneck, crouching so that I could straighten my aching neck, and in the wash of my computer’s light, I distinctly saw in her face the agonized moment that her foot made contact. Her eyes showed whites all round the iris, her mouth opening on a silent scream before she bit it down, glancing at Zaneisha with well-concealed fear.
I recognized that pain, and the immediate fear that followed.
My anger, which had been absent in the presence of so many interesting new problems, roared back to life, and my paranoia with it. Maybe Marie could be forgiven for not telling us about the apparent success of the revival program. If she feared Zaneisha as a potential traitor in our midst, I’d do well to pay attention. What evidence did we have for Zaneisha’s apparent change of heart, from one of Lat’s loyal lieutenants to our stalwart defender? An interest in Tegan’s well-being, a willingness to go into danger—these were circumstantial proofs at best.
True, Zaneisha had been the one to suggest warning the president, so that innocents wouldn’t be hurt if Lat tried to attack even without the EMP. But one of us would have thought of it eventually; I should have thought of it sooner. Perhaps she’d taken my slowness as an opportunity to put herself beyond suspicion.
I reached behind me, for Joph’s cold hand. “How are you?” I whispered.
“Kooshy-keen,” she whispered back cheerily. Joph hadn’t scorned the aid of painkillers. She wasn’t in the obliviating state of a full dose, but she walked easily, only wincing as we covered a couple of the rougher patches.
We piled together at another bottleneck, and I felt restlessness stir about us. Eleven people, lined up like ants marching back to the hive. But unlike ants, people weren’t suited to pushing through tunnels. For the first time, I felt the weight of the rock and soil above me, vast and suffocating.
“Almost there,” Tegan’s voice said, clear and confident. I felt obscurely better. The rock was still there, but Tegan’s matter-of-fact competence made it lighter.
She was right. It was only a few minutes before we came to the central chamber.
It was huge, a vast space hewn out of the rock like one of the mountaintop churches I’d seen in Eritrea. As I swept my computer’s light over the walls, I could see that some of them had the rough grain of natural stone. The hollowing out of this place had been only partially at human hands; the rest of the cave had been here well before. As Tegan had promised, the floor was uneven, with plenty of spots raised over the high-water marks that stained the walls. A few metal ladders bolted to the rock even led to smaller tunnels.
Hanad put his hands on his hips and surveyed the area with vast satisfaction. “Good,” he proclaimed, as if he’d discovered the spot himself. “Set up camp.”
I rolled my eyes and went to help Zaneisha get Marie more comfortable.
My hopes of getting a quiet moment to talk with Marie were swiftly foiled. Zaneisha and Eduardo, who apparently performed any medical duties for Hanad’s men, changed the dressing on her feet. I caught a glimpse of raw, red tissue heaping into scar formation, and turned away, feeling ill. It was one thing to know that Marie’s torture had involved more permanent physical effects than those meted out to Tegan and me, and quite another to see the results written on her body.
Tegan didn’t even try to insert herself into the process. She had a hushed conversation with Joph and Bethari—probably warning them not to bring up Marie’s revelation about the two new revivals in front of the men—then followed Hanad’s directions in laying out memory-fabric bedrolls.
I went over to assist.
“These are weird,” she said abruptly, shaking out a bedroll. The fabric snapped into its prescribed position, automatically filling with air. I tested the flex on one and was satisfied with the firmness.
“It’s just a flexible carbon polymer….” I began.
“I know. I looked it up.” She sighed. “Sometimes I think I’m getting along okay in the future, and sometimes I just need a second to process it. Computers you can scrunch up or stretch wide, tattoos that blink patterns of light….” She held out her arms. “Surgery that can bring dead girls to life.”
“Self-heating food containers?” I offered,
unpacking a pile of them.
“Those, we had.”
History was a subject I’d thought I excelled at. Meeting Tegan Oglietti had made it clear how many gaps there were in my knowledge.
“Speaking of food,” said the living historical monument beside me. “Who’s in charge of dinner?”
“You are,” I said firmly.
She grinned at me. “Trick question. You’ve got to learn to cook.”
“Teach me, wise one.”
Tegan gave me a small package “Place your fingers on one side of the tab, and your thumb on the other,” she said solemnly. “Now, in one swift movement, tear.”
I performed the motion with equal seriousness. Tegan poured in half a cup of water and made me stir it with the wooden spoon attached to the side.
“Wait five minutes, then consume,” she told me. “Ta-da! You are a master chef!”
I laughed and held the package cupped in my hands, giving the chemical pouch at the bottom time to warm the soup through.
“This is pretty good,” Bethari said, between mouthfuls. “What’s in it?”
The Arabic lettering on the ingredients label mentioned chicken stock. Bethari had eaten most of her portion already. It would only make her sick and sad if I told her. “Lentils,” I said. “Various spices.”
Tegan, whose chef-raised taste buds doubtless recognized the flavor, shot me a grateful smile that warmed me far more than the soup did.
Marie, who was laboriously eating her own portion of soup, noticed the exchange, and I received a glare that should have stripped my skin off. I frowned back. What the heck was her problem? Other than the fact I existed, and liked her foster daughter, and wanted to take her to another country on the far side of two oceans—okay. Marie had some incentive to glare.
But I wished she’d just come out with it. There were a number of plays I could make in this situation, but all of them required her to make the first move.
Guiltily, I realized that thought was probably yet another instance of what Tegan called “acting like a robot.” I had to get a grip and stop manipulating people close to me.