Unsheltered

by Clare Moleta

  Right. Silence again. A harder, assessing silence. And what is it you think I can do?

  Fuck him, what did he think she thought he could do? She took a shaky breath, couldn’t afford to alienate him. Agency took the unaccompanied minors north, she said. I heard there’s another holding up there, somewhere along the XB. A place they keep kids.

  Okay.

  So, you’re in Fengdu, right? You have a phone. If I give you her status number, can you make some calls, find out where that would be?

  Why don’t you make the calls?

  It was possible that he didn’t know. She said, I can’t call into those places. They’ll just put me in a queue till my credit runs out. She heard footsteps, turned. Adam was striding down the factory floor towards her.

  Look, Li, Chris said. I’m sorry, but you’ve got the wrong idea about how things work inside. I don’t have any special access to the Population Distribution Agency or anything else.

  Bullshit, she thought. Said, You have sheltered status. They’ll tell you things they won’t tell me.

  I don’t know what you’ve heard, he said, but the Agency doesn’t have two sets of rules.

  Maybe his calls were monitored. She’d heard that happened inside. Adam was in front of her now, lit with indignation, holding out his hand for the phone. She knocked his arm aside. Chris was telling her to log a missing-minor claim.

  I don’t have a number they can call me on.

  That doesn’t matter. He sounded impatient now, done with it. The Agency doesn’t call. You need to follow the Source procedure and they’ll contact you that way when they have news. Okay? I have to get back to work.

  Let me give you her status, she said. In case you change your mind.

  I can’t help you, Li. He started to say something else, something placating. She hung up.

  One call. Adam’s voice went high. The trade was for one call.

  I needed two.

  You think you’re the only one trying to find someone? You didn’t even put in for the credit.

  He stepped towards her and then froze when she raised the phone above her head and drew her arm back, ready to throw.

  You think you can put it back together? They stayed like that for a few seconds and then she thought that this was a waste of time. Dropped it into his hands.

  You’re welcome, she said, and walked away from him.

  They’d crossed the Gulf in the dark. The man sitting next to them in the press of bodies on deck was crossing for the second time. He warned her to keep Matti’s clothes dry, unfastened his life jacket and pulled his T-shirt up to show her the scars of chemical burns from fuel mixed with saltwater. The first boat had capsized just outside the port. He made it to land and walked to the makecamp, but two weeks later it got shut down and he was sent back across the Gulf.

  There’s a new makecamp now, he told Li, closer to Port Howell. From there you can try to buy a sponsor inside Sumud, or maybe jump a truck. He said most people off the boats ended up in the makecamp, unless they’d made an arrangement.

  She knew about the new makecamp from Teresa and Navid. Teresa had told her she and Matti might have a better chance of getting their change-of-status claim processed now, without Frank. And then she went out of the room and they listened to her crying.

  The man looked Li in the eye. You have to be careful in a place like that, he said. A woman and child alone.

  Matti slept and slept across the Gulf. She slept like she’d been awake for years. She cried in her sleep and Li couldn’t reach her, could only sit holding her, in her own sickness and fear. The moon came out and showed the black horizon all around them. She thought how fragile their continent was, with the sacrifice zones encroaching from the north and the oceans rising around the edges, taking back its low places. Matti had never seen the sea before they came to Valiant. Navid took her down to the port one day when Frank’s shift was finishing.

  She wanted to know why the water was just lying there, Frank told Li afterwards. Why no one was using it. So I showed her the desal plant, explained how it works.

  You took her in there?

  Not inside. Jesus. Anyway, she wanted to know once we use up the sea, what else will people drink? Navid told her beer. But then he starts explaining how the Gulf’s just one little bit of all the water and I showed her a couple of freighters on their way to the precincts. She’s nodding, like it’s all making sense. And then she says, So can we walk out to those boats?

  The nausea passed and there was only the rocking that went on and on. Her head so heavy on her neck. Frank, she thought, it’s your turn. But she felt the weight of Matti, the bulk of her life jacket, felt her breathing, still breathing. Darkness everywhere, the deck slippery with vomit, Valiant behind them, West behind them. Frank. Waves lifted the boat and the man beside her started praying. She looked east, she thought it was east, searched for the lights of Port Howell.

  The nearest Source Centre was about an hour’s walk from the factory, on the western edge of the industrial zone. Closer in, most of buildings had their lights on and their windows intact. There were vehicles moving in the loading bays, shiftworkers stacking and unloading and yelling to each other, security guards smoking in doorways. Early afternoon, a cold grey rain.

  At the edge of the zone she saw the port. Gulls circled the freighters coming in from the Gulf and there were tankers queuing up outside the desal plant. Something bottomless opened inside her. The desire to fall was so strong that she had to step back. Closed her eyes to steady herself, and when she started walking again she only looked at what was right in front of her.

  The Source Centre was crammed into a single shopfront between the hammam and the Dollarzone. It was the closest one to makecamp, so Li and Matti had come here once a week to check on their claim. Almost a forty-k round trip. They got up in the dark and came home in the dark. The walk was too much for Matti so they got a taxi back but the camp price was double local price and it could go higher depending on the driver’s mood and how desperate the passengers looked.

  Back in Valiant, Frank had queued every weekend for two months to get them pre-registered under the skilled worker and food security categories. Now Li was waiting to be contacted about registration. Once you were registered, you waited for clearance, pending sponsorship. Then, if an XB precinct opened a quota, you looked for a sponsor inside that precinct and got your sponsor approved. Then you could apply for change of status under quota.

  The queue was shorter than usual this time – it looked like clearing makecamp had been bad for business. There were wharfies and factory and plant workers, and a handful of other evictees like Li, trying to blend in with the legitimate unsheltered, the ones with a home and a job in a hometown that still existed. She used to bring the plastic sheet and the sleeping bag so Matti could rest while they queued. Sometimes they got onto a machine before closing and sometimes the signal didn’t drop out before Li finished punching in all the numbers. There was never any progress on their registration but she couldn’t know that for sure unless they queued.

  She stood in this queue for two and a half hours. Every time she shuffled forward she reached down to drag Matti with her and Matti wasn’t there. She rocked on her heels, chewed her lip, tested the flex of her fingers, anything to stay in motion. Hours already since she talked to Arsalan. Almost four days since they’d cleared the camp. Maybe Matti was safe for now but Li couldn’t keep her safe. That depended on Agency and Agency had cracks you could drive a truck into. So easy to lose one skinny girl who couldn’t tell the time yet.

  Acid rose in her stomach and her burns throbbed, in spite of the painkillers Rich had topped up before she left the factory. People looked away from her too fast. She kept her eyes down, read the graffiti on the pawnbroker’s wall, the words she knew or could translate. Refuse the Ballot. You saw that in every language, in West too. The Whole Game’s Rigged. And scrawled over but still visible, We Decide. Terrorists Go Home. That was an old one, like a history lesson
about missing the point. Matti had struggled over terrorists. What if they can’t go home? she’d asked.

  Li’s face felt raw where her eyebrows had been. She tried to remember the burning tent, the heat of it. What she remembered was Matti at the fence, her fingers curled in the wire. Mum, look!

  She got to the front of the queue. The shopfront window had Single Source of Truth stencilled on the glass in the official yellow and a government-approved price list underneath. An armed security guard out the front was checking everyone’s status. Inside there were six machines under strip lighting, with access to printing for an extra fee. A Cnekt slot for phone-credit top ups. There were newspapers available for reading on a table along the back wall, but only one chair, for the second security guard.

  Li found a free terminal, swiped her card and logged on. Barely enough credit. She scanned the Source newsfeed first. More photos of the camp demolition, XB Force in riot gear, medics carrying a burns victim on a stretcher. Statements from health and security officials in Port Howell. It all looked familiar but not because she remembered it. She’d seen it all back in West, in newspaper coverage of other makecamps, other demolitions.

  There was nothing about unaccompanied minors.

  She checked Matti’s status for an Agency update – maybe even a note about her being taken. But there was nothing. Just the pre-registration claim, still stranded at Stage Two Request, dependent minor.

  The child who stared out at Li from the screen was a few years younger, hadn’t fully grown into her eyes yet. This status-record Matti felt immensely far away, as if Li had lost the years since the photo was taken, too. And then she realised this was it, now, this was all there was. The photos had been in their tent.

  Lodging a missing-minor claim took her right up to closing time. She punched numbers and watched the clock, her stomach tightening every time the page froze. There was no save function. When she was halfway through the form, the signal dropped out and she had to start again. She had to enter her status at every new section and every time she typed unsheltered, half the fields disappeared. She hesitated over Employment or means of support. The olives, the hardware store in Nerredin had been legitimate. In Valiant they’d put the garage and the salvage depot and the desal plant down on their pre-registration, plus agricultural skills. Leaving it blank wasn’t an option. She didn’t know how patching was regulated in East but it was all she had now.

  A pop-up warned her she had three minutes. If she didn’t submit the claim before the terminal shut down she’d lose it all, lose another day tomorrow starting from scratch. The last field was a contact number. Probably Chris was right, they wouldn’t call, but she couldn’t take that chance. It might be days before she found another Source centre further north; what if some Agency employee checked Matti’s status in the meantime and saw there was a claim? Teresa and Navid had a phone for the repair shop but what could they do, all the way back across the Gulf? And unsheltered. She knew what it had cost them to get her and Matti on that boat.

  One minute.

  She put Chris down. Hovered over relationship and then typed relative. Whatever he said, she didn’t believe he was powerless, not compared to her. And she had to believe he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he got the call and did nothing. Because he owed her, really he owed her his life.

  * * *

  Walking back to the factory, she thought about the last time she went into the No Go. Less than two weeks since the first reports of fever and makecamp was a sprawl of contagion behind her. She moved as fast as she could, watching for patrols, listening for movement. Smoke was rising north of the camp. That made sense. Port Howell authorities wouldn’t want to burn the bodies too close to town.

  Four days since she’d been through the fence. Matti would be back in the tent by now, hopefully sleeping. Li could do what she needed to and be back before she woke.

  The first snare was on open ground about five hundred metres from the fence. It held a rabbit, partly eaten and starting to stink. She cut it loose, threw the carcass away into the scrub so the smell wouldn’t drive away new kill, and then reset the snare. Kept moving. Two days without sleep, waiting to see if her child would live. The next two snares were empty and she was grateful to conserve the time and effort.

  A few hours south, dusk and temperature falling, she saw the highway in the distance, cutting inland across the flat of the No Go until it got lost again in the hills. Nothing moving, and she’d be hard to see in this light, so she kept heading towards it, carefully, on a diagonal. There was an ache at the base of her skull that she was trying to ignore. Two more snares to check.

  Just before full dark she heard engines and flattened herself in the scrub while the tankers roared past, headlights boiling. Water runners. They travelled in convoy now, belting through the No Go in daylight if possible. This one must have got delayed. It wasn’t the jumpers they were worried about, it was Trade. Trucks had been ambushed in the No Go, food and medicine lifted, water siphoned off. That was why all the drivers were armed now and most convoys carried security. She hadn’t run into any Trade out here yet but she’d heard stories in makecamp about things that happened further north – trucks and tankers hijacked, disappeared up into the sacrifice zone.

  Her head was thumping now and the ache was spreading slowly through her bones. Resetting the last snare in the dark, her hands were unsteady on the wire and there was a spinning lightness behind her eyes. She made it to a patch of stringybark with the idea of digging a windbreak, but she was sweating, off-balance, a tide surging in her ears. She managed to get her pack off and pull out the water bottle but not to open the lid.

  * * *

  Fever held her down in the hole. There was somewhere she needed to be but whenever she tried to climb out, Frank started talking again, explaining the rules. You know your problem, Li? Every time you throw, you’re betting on a five. See, Matti, she figures things can go any way – sooner or later she’s gunna roll a six. That’s why she wins. A fluorescent light buzzed on in the swirling black and there was a clock ticking and someone breathing behind her, but not Frank.

  * * *

  She woke clear but weak and in terrible thirst. She was shaking and too cold to function. It was light. The sand under her was wet and her clothes were soaked with sweat or dew. In a few minutes she steadied enough to get the lid off her water bottle.

  Matti had been alone all night. She would think Li had been hurt or killed, that she wasn’t coming back. Would she do what Li had told her and wait at the Kids’ Tent, or would she come into the No Go looking for her? Li stood shakily and lifted her pack. She would just check the two snares that were directly on her way back. Go into makecamp with fresh trade if she was lucky.

  * * *

  Get up. Slowly.

  She was so focused on the gun that it took a few seconds to register he wasn’t XB Force. No uniform. And it was just him. He’d found her by accident; he looked surprised, anyway. She stood up and stepped away from the cover of the mallee, from the snare she’d just reset and the fresh kill.

  Where are you from?

  Port Howell.

  Liar.

  A couple of metres between them. She kept her hands at her sides.

  You’re makecamp, he said. Why are you across?

  Looking for food.

  His eyes moved past her to the shrubs, but the pistol stayed steady. In the No Go? That’s not how it works.

  People like him brought the food. People like her paid for it. That was how it worked. She said, I don’t have enough trade.

  He was dressed like her, shabby, colours of sand and scrub. But the pistol looked army issue – the kind you could get if you had backup. That meant he might have bullets too.

  Catch anything?

  Not yet.

  Harder than it sounds, huh? he said. You shouldn’t be out here alone.

  You’re out here alone.

  He grinned at her. No I’m not.

  She didn’t le
t herself look behind him, didn’t take her eyes off him.

  You should get back inside before you get yourself shot. He looked down her body and up again. Think of something else to trade.

  He took a step towards her. She brought her hands up and he stopped. Said, You’re bleeding.

  No.

  Let me see.

  I’m not bleeding.

  Two more steps and he jammed the gun into the soft place under her jaw, dragged her arm up, rigid, in front of her face. Then what’s this? Huh? What’s this? He slapped her with her own hand. Forced her hand into her face and rubbed it back and forward, smearing the gore. He pushed her away onto the ground. Raised the gun.

  Show me what you’ve got.

  She started to get up.

  No, stay down. Crawl.

  Her body shook, disobedient. She crawled and breathed, felt his eyes, the stones and brittle grasses under her hands. Towards the mallee, with him behind her. But Mum, if you die first, where will you wait for me? She crawled in an arc, a little to the left of the shrubs. A little more to the left.

  You lying bitch. He moved past her eagerly towards the kill, but a little to the left. Where she had led him. Her disobedient body, the rock under her hand.

  The snare took him clean by the ankle and flung him forward. He shouted before he hit the ground and the pistol went clear without discharging and she sprang onto his back and brought the rock down on his head, hard, twice. Left him face down and picked up the kill without turning her back on him. He didn’t move. She couldn’t afford to lose the snare but her hands were shaking too hard and her body would not approach him. There was no time anyway. If he hadn’t lied the others would have heard him shout, they’d be coming now. She picked up the gun. It wasn’t loaded but that didn’t make it useless.

  Walking back, she kept telling herself to run but her body wouldn’t do it. She was so tired from the work of fever. Her bones were rubber, she was dried out inside and the steady thumping in her head was back. She needed to see Matti, know she was okay. Take the kill to the ready shop. Safia would keep it cool for a cut on her trade. Then drink and sleep. Not dream. She would never bring Matti back out here. The pistol was tucked into her waistband, against the small of her back, and she wondered what bullets were worth.