by JT Lawrence
‘I hate doctors,’ says Seth.
‘So do I. Ironically.’
Seth pockets the pills. Kirsten lets him.
‘How long have you known this guy?’
‘James?’ She laughs. ‘Forever.’
‘How long?’
‘Thirteen years longer than I’ve known you.’
Betty/Barbara said to not trust even the people you love. And James hid the letter from her. She doesn’t know what it means, and she wishes Marmalade is with them, but there was a little tapping, a little whirring in her brain, warning her to be careful.
They arrive at The Office and take the stairs to stay out of view. Kirsten leads Seth to Keke’s regular office.
‘Keke!’ she shouts, glancing around. The room doesn’t look right: it’s in its normal mess but it doesn’t have the right colour. It feels like cold water is rushing over her body.
‘Has someone been here?’ Seth frowns at the open drawers and floor white with paper.
‘It’s difficult to say. It is usually—messy—but something doesn’t taste right.’
‘Excuse me?’
Kirsten checks the safe; it’s empty. Keke’s Tile is gone.
‘Maybe something spooked her and she ran for it,’ says Kirsten, more to reassure herself than anything else. ‘Maybe she’s hiding out, waiting for to hear from us.’
She dials Keke’s number, and they both jump when a disembodied voice starts singing from underneath the desk. Elvis Presley: A Little Less Conversation. Kirsten scrabbles around on the floor, and she finds Keke’s phone.
‘Fuck,’ she says again. Keke would leave a lot of things behind in a hurry, but never her phone. ‘They’ve taken her.’
All her contacts. More importantly: her SugarApp.
Seth scrunches up his face. ‘Elvis? Really?’
While she is on the floor she spots the Beckoning Cat flash drive. Thank God. They don’t know it is a drive. She holds it up to Seth, pushes its belly to reveal the tail. ‘They left her flash drive.’
He takes it from her, plugs it into his Tile.
Kirsten uses her pocketknife to unlock the fridge. As soon as she opens the door, she sees Keke’s insulin kit and there is another wave of cold water. She shuts her eyelids against the glow of the refrigerator, wishing the insulin away, but it’s there again when she opens them. She puts it on the desk in front of Seth.
‘We’ve got seven hours to find her.’
‘Hey?’
‘Seven hours to go,’ she says, ‘before Keke... gets really sick without her insulin.’ She says ‘really sick’ but what she means is: ‘die’—she just can’t say it out loud.
‘She’s diabetic?’ he asks.
Kirsten doesn’t answer. She sits back down on the floor and closes her eyes for a while. After a few minutes Seth is kneeling in front of her. He touches her gently on the shoulder.
‘Kirsten?’ I think we’ve got something.’
Chapter 25
The Seven That Were Taken
Johannesburg, 2021
There are two folders on Keke’s Maneki Neko flash drive. The first one is called ‘The Seven That Were Taken’ and has seven old, scanned and archived newspaper articles, dated from 1991. The second folder—‘RIP’—contains four recent PDFs from Echo.news.
They start with the folder called RIP. Kirsten recognises the first article immediately. She read it a week or so before, at her shoot at the aquarium, about Betty/Barbara being found dead in her flat.
‘This is—was—her,’ says Kirsten. ‘The crazy woman who gave me the key.’
‘The key?’ asks Seth.
‘The key that opened the safety deposit box at the seed bank that had the list in it. Look at the date of her birth, the colours are backwards.’
Seth frowns at her. ‘You are truly odd.’
‘Look,’ she says, and shows him that Betty/Barbara’s date of birth is backwards in the third line of numbers on the list.
‘So the one date is our birth date,’ he says. ‘What is the other?’
They open the next article. It’s about a well-known composer, found dead in his bathtub, by his lover. Seth frowns.
‘I remember this story from a couple of days ago.’
Drowned, it says, apparent suicide, or accident, although the lover wouldn’t accept it, said they had everything to live for. They were about to be garried: a trip to Paris planned for spring, after an intimate wedding in Paternoster. On finding the blue body, the lover smashed up the apartment, destroying any evidence that may have existed. He swore foul play: Blanco’s most prized possession is missing: an antique ivory piano key from a Roger Williams piano. It was his proposal gift. The lover required sedation, and was not being treated as a suspect. The musician is dead, their future washed away in a few inches of waxy grey liquid (Cold Dishwater).
‘It could have been suicide,’ says Seth.
‘He was first on the list.’
Seth hesitates then opens the next document. A picture of a blond woman laughing into the camera comes up on screen. Top executive dies in front of toddler son. The story is about a high-flier corporate who accidentally ingested peanut matter—the source unknown—and went into anaphylactic shock and died in the kids’ park down the road from her office. The people at the park had tried to resuscitate her but her airways were swollen closed and CPR wasn’t successful. The white-haired child was first taken in by the paramedics, then the policewoman on the case, and eventually collected by the husband who had unplugged on the golf course and had heard about his wife’s death on the radio on the way home from the pub. The fourth article was Soraya’s organ failure. He had felt a connection to Soraya. Coincidence?
They move on to the second folder; there is a picture of an awkward little boy, a toddler, dressed in a brown suit, sitting on a piano stool in front of a baby grand. Baby Beethoven kidnapped, reads the headline.
‘The drowned composer,’ says Kirsten.
Seth opens the other archived articles: they are all stories of abduction. Toddler missing, about a too-blond two-year-old who can speak four different languages. The executive.
Has anyone seen Betty Schoeman? A mug shot of a not-pretty baby dressed in old-fashioned clothes, frowning at the camera. Betty/Barbara.
Child abducted from nursery school, reads another, about Jeremy Bond, a two-year-old snatched from a crèche playground just minutes before his parents arrive to collect him.
Seth reads the fifth one:
Saturday Star, July 1991
Toddler kidnapped while father shops
Tragedy struck in the friendly city today in the unlikeliest of places. Young Ben Jacobz (14 months old) escaped his pram in a department store at Green Acres Mall, Port Elizabeth. ‘He was always so fast,’ his mother told us, unable to keep from crying. ‘He started crawling at eight months, was walking by ten. He would just tear around the place like the Duracell bunny.’
Baby Ben managed to toddle out of the store while his father was standing in the queue to pay for some clothes for him. ‘It happened all the time,’ says Mrs Jacobz, ‘his uncle used to call him Now-You. Now you see him, now you don’t.’
‘We even tried one of those terrible things,’ said Mr Jacobz. ‘Those toddler leashes, but he would […] throw a tantrum. He hated it.’
As soon as the boy’s father spotted the empty pram he left the queue and started looking for him. ‘I wasn’t too worried yet,’ he said, ‘Ben did it all the time and we always found him.’ But then he saw a strange woman outside the entrance of the store pick the baby up. ‘I started shouting at her, and at Ben, but she didn’t look at me and hurried off […] and disappeared into the crowd. I started running after them, and that’s when the guards tackled me.’ Mr Jacobz was unknowingly still holding store merchandise when he ran out of the door, setting the alarm off. The security guards, not aware of the kidnapping, saw him ‘make a run for it’ and apprehended him. When he could finally explain the situation the baby was gone.
The police have launched an extensive search. They ask that the public keep a look out for anything suspicious.
‘We’re sure they’ll find him and bring him home,’ said Mrs Jacobz. It was then Mr Jacobz broke down weeping.
That must be William Soraya. Ben/Bill. They open the last PDF.
The Observer, 21 May 1991
Snatched
Twin tragedy hits small Durban suburb
After a gruelling 48-hour search in uncharacteristically cold weather for the missing Chapman toddlers of Westville, KZN, the South African Police called off the operation as of 2 AM.. Brown-eyed twins Samuel and Kate (3) were last seen in the front garden of their parents’ home before Mrs Anne Chapman moved inside to answer a telemarketing phone call on the landline. Less than a minute later the children had, according to their mother, ‘vanished’.
The search party combed the area, as well as a nearby river where Mrs Chapman purportedly used to take the children to swim and picnic. Anne Chapman, having a record of PPD or post-partum depression, is being questioned despite the divers not finding anything incriminating. Mr Patrick Chapman is standing by his wife, stating they are both ‘extremely anxious’ to find the twins. In a strained voice, on camera, he urged anyone with information to come forward. The SAP, faced with a dearth of any kind of evidence and an already-cold trail, promised they would keep looking, but don’t seem to hold out much hope of finding the children, dead or alive.
Kirsten and Seth stand pale under the fluorescent light in the office, looking at each other, speaking aloud as they process the jolt of information.
‘Holy fuck,’ they say at the same time.
‘Samuel and Kate,’ says Kirsten. ‘The mad woman—Betty/Barbara—called me Kate.’
‘Samuel and Kate, abducted at three, become Seth and Kirsten.’
‘Moved to a different province, and split up.’
Kirsten shakes her head. It doesn’t make any sense.
‘Wait, it says ‘brown-eyed.’ She looks into Seth’s blue-green eyes that mirror hers (Sound of the Sea).
‘They must have had our irises lasered. Strōma’d the brown out. It’s easy enough to do.’
She thinks of her biological parents, the Chapmans, and feels overwhelmed. What they must have gone through. What she and Seth must have gone through. There is an extreme feeling of loss for the life she should have had, the life that was taken from her, and here he is now, standing in front of her: the missing piece of her puzzle.
‘The Black Hole,’ she says. ‘It finally makes sense.’
He blinks at her. She has the feeling he understands; maybe he feels The Black Hole too but has filled it with other things.
‘I was always—disconnected—with my father,’ he says. ‘Never met my mother. Never felt he really wanted me around, didn’t understand why they had me in the first place.’
‘Exactly,’ says Kirsten. ‘But why abduct a child you don’t want? Surely a creep so desperate for a baby would, I don’t know, love the child more?’
Seth is silent.
‘It doesn’t add up,’ says Kirsten. ‘It’s too much to take in. I don’t have the mental bandwidth to cope with this.’ She moves to run her hands through her hair but feels her prickly scalp instead, the plaster on the back of her head. Realises she’s been holding the knife all along and puts it on the desk. He glances at it and narrows his eyes.
‘Whose knife is that?’ he asks.
‘This?’ she says, ‘It was my father’s—well, whoever he was—the man who pretended to be my father for twenty-eight years. Why? What’s wrong? Why are you freaking out?’
‘Who was your father? What did he do?’
‘Who was my father? I don’t know. He was a research guy, a lab guy, a grindaholic who ignored his wife and daughter to read a lot of scientific literature. I still don’t actually know what he did. Will you please tell me why you are getting so freaked out by the knife?’
‘You’re not quite Nancy Drew, huh?’
‘What?’
‘Did you even think to look up that insignia?’
‘No. Why would I? And who the fuck is Nancy Drew? I’m a fucking photographer, not a member of the Hawks. All this—’ She motions around her. ‘—this fuck-circus, is new to me, okay?’
He stares at her, then scans the insignia of the pocketknife and does an image-match search. Nothing comes up.
‘You recognise it, the logo, I can see.’
‘Yes, I recognise it,’ says Seth. ‘But... it’s impossible. An urban legend, a myth. It’s not supposed to exist.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Seth points at the diamond-shaped insignia. He traces an angular ‘G’ in the left of the diamond and a ‘P’ in the right.
‘The guys at Alba are going to flip out when I show this to them.’
Kirsten looks at the knife, looks at him. She sees him smile for the first time.
‘GP,’ he says. ‘It’s the fucking Genesis Project.’
Chapter 26
Non-Lizards
Johannesburg, 2021
‘Okay,’ says Kirsten, ‘there’s no easy way to say this, so, well, here goes: I need to cut a microchip out of the back of your head.’
‘Wow,’ says Seth, ‘just as I was beginning to think we were getting on.’
‘The crazy lady—’
‘Now you’re speaking about yourself in the third person.’
‘The other crazy lady, Betty/Barbara, said she knew they were tracking her because she could feel the microchip in her head. And the killer—killers—whoever is trying to kill us, knows where we live. Knew that lady who took her toddler to that park.’
‘Look,’ says Seth, shaking his head, ‘that just can’t be true. Technology for trackers didn’t even exist when we were kids. Wait, is that why the back of your head was bleeding? You tried to look for a fucking microchip?’
‘Not tried, I found it!’
‘Show me,’ he says.
‘I planted it in a taxi. It could be anywhere.’
He looks around the office, rolling glassy eyes. She’s known all along he won’t believe her.
‘Next you’ll be telling me to wear a tinfoil hat.’
‘Actually, that’s probably not a bad idea.’
‘Ha,’ he says.
‘I’m not fucking with you.’
‘Okay, but you’re not cutting it out with that thing. I know someone.’
‘We don’t have time to fuck around!’ shouts Kirsten.
‘Look,’ he says, ‘I need to go to Alba. That is not negotiable. They’ll be able to remove the chip. Analyse it. Then we need to get bullets, and get you a weapon.’
‘What the hell is Alba? What about Keke?’
‘We can only find your friend when we have more information. The chip is the only thing we have at the moment.’
A thought strikes Kirsten.
‘Hackerboy Genius,’ she says. ‘Keke’s contact. His number will be on her phone. He can get into anything: it’s how we found you.’
‘You think he’ll know something?’
‘He’ll know more than what’s on this drive,’ says Kirsten. ‘She asked him to dig.’
Seth shoves his Tile into his backpack.
‘We’ll call him on the way.’
‘What is the Genesis Project?’ asks Kirsten as they head down the fire escape stairs, towards the basement.
Seth shakes his head. ‘There’s not a lot to tell. I mean, there have been rumours for years, but I don’t think anyone actually believed them.’
Kirsten thinks of her father: heavy, steel-framed glasses, dulled by time. Big hands, badly tailored trousers, egg-yolk stains on his ties. She finds it difficult to imagine that he was involved in any kind of covert movement. Unless he was good, unless he was very, very good.
‘It’s a bit like The Singularity – never gonna happen, but still as scary as shit.’ He shoots a glance at Kirsten, as if to size her up, as if to see if he can tr
ust her. ‘When I started at Alba—’
‘You still haven’t told me what that is.’
He stops on the sixth landing. The caged light next to his head flickers, a loose connection.
‘Alba is a bit like Fight Club. The first rule of Alba is: never talk about Alba.’
‘Fight Club?’
‘Have you ever read a book? Do you know that inquisitive mice grow more neurons?’
The only book she has ever read cover to cover is the collector’s edition of Hansel & Gretel that James gave her. The cruel coincidence is not lost on her.
‘Besides, we’re probably going to die tonight,’ says Kirsten, ‘I’m thinking all rules are off.’
‘Well, ja, that’s the second rule.’
‘Ha.’
‘Seriously,’ he says, holding her arm, ‘no one is allowed to know, do you understand?’
They start moving again.
‘Alba is a crowdfunded underground organisation: a rogue group of engineers, scientists, biologists, geneticists... We experiment with biotechnology, but mostly we investigate others that do the same thing.’
‘You’re a biopunk?’
‘Technically I’m a chemgineer, but, yes, biohacker, biopunk, hacktivist... basically we’re high-tech Truthers.’
‘You uncover stuff.’
Seth nods. ‘We’re a technoprogressive movement that advocates open access to genetic information. We play around with DNA—only in a clean way—but our aim, the reason we exist, is to infiltrate and expose what we call black clinics—megacorps who use biotech in an uncool way.’
‘Like?’
‘We look for anything dodgy: any way the company might be ethically dubious, illegally practising, or trying to exercise any kind of social control.’
‘That plastic surgery place—in Saxonwold. Tabula Rasa.’
‘They were buying discarded embryos from fertility clinics, injecting the stem cells into people’s faces.’
‘You exposed them?’