“I was on my way,” Wei replied.
“Can I offer you a seat? A drink?”
“Thank you.” And so for a moment he was content merely to sit and sip from the cool glass in his hand.
“My son,” Yang Po said after a period of silence. “You’ve done well.”
“But I’m so tired,” Wei replied. “I can’t seem to think straight.”
“Hush. Look at me, son. What can you see?”
Wei looked. At first, his brain could not interpret what his eyes were seeing. He struggled toward comprehension. It was not Yang Po in the seat before him. Another man sat there instead. The man was probably in his forties and greying at the temples.
“You don’t recognise your own father, Jiang Wei.”
“But you’re dead! Aren’t you?”
The man laughed. “It’s I who’s alive and you who are dead.” His hair had turned white now, his face heavily creased.
“What’s happening to you?” The man – his father – was ageing rapidly. Now his hair was shrivelling away and the flesh melted from his body, leaving him bald and frail. Here the progression halted.
“Such is the nature of transformation,” the old man said in a thin, rasping voice.
“But you died long ago,” Wei insisted.
“All I had to look forward to was this.” He raised his trembling arms. “I’m going now. Good luck.”
Before Wei had a chance to say his final goodbyes, the old man began to crinkle up into a knot of yellowed limbs. Decomposition was almost instantaneous, and soon all that was left was a leering skeleton. But even this was not the end, for now the skeleton crumpled inward. Some invisible force ground the bones into dust until there was nothing of his father left.
“You are unwell, Jiang Wei,” Yang Po said. He was sitting in the same seat that his father had recently occupied, still ruddy, calm and expectant.
“What just happened? I thought…”
“You’re disorientated. Take that helmet off.”
Wei lifted the Controlled Waking State helmet from his bruised neck and placed it on the ground next to his chair. His hair was soaked with sweat. “Sir, I’m losing my mind,” he said.
“It is to be expected. That you can still talk is a miracle in itself.”
“Then please – let me out. Let me return to the homeland.”
For a moment, Yang Po said nothing.
“Sir?”
Yang Po was looking at Wei, but their eyes did not seem to be meeting. In fact, the older man was not looking directly at him but slightly to one side.
“Sir?”
Yang Po appeared not to listen, or at least paid no heed whatsoever. He was still looking in Wei’s direction but he saw through him, as though Wei himself were a ghost. This filled him with dread more completely than anything that had gone before. Wei was glimpsing a time after his own death, when his consciousness was no more. Yang Po seemed unconcerned.
“This is what awaits you,” Yang Po finally said, though not exactly to him.
“Sir?”
But the interlude was over and Yang Po’s behaviour returned to normal. Wei heard himself repeat an earlier statement:
“Then please – let me out. Let me return to the homeland.”
“Impossible,” Yang Po said immediately in reply. “We have just received new orders. A terrorist organisation is plotting to attack the reactor complex. We are being placed on high alert. It will be necessary for you and several of your colleagues to be drafted into the local security forces as a temporary measure, until the saboteurs are brought to justice. We are all enormously proud of the work you are doing. Indeed, we are proud of the work you have already done.”
“But I can’t stand it,” Wei pleaded. “I’m seeing things that no one was meant to see.”
“It has been duly noted, and a record of your concerns has been placed on your file,” Yang Po said. “You are experiencing certain difficulties in moving from the Controlled to unControlled environments. Such difficulties are to be expected given the nature of our work here, but it does give us cause for concern.”
“Regarding my well-being? As I said, Sir, I…”
Yang Po held up his hand. “You misunderstand. Your well-being is of little interest to me, except in that I must explain your failings to my superiors in the homeland. I must not allow you to tarnish my reputation. I wonder if now might be the time for you to play an entirely different role. Yours will be a heroic sacrifice, Jiang Wei.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, you do not. Yours is not to understand. Not to question, nor to enquire. You must give thanks. If I choose to destroy you, then you must go gladly to your destruction.”
“I see. Sir, may I ask – what day is it now?”
“It’s Saturday, June 1,” Yang Po said. “Shortly before 10am.”
But it made little difference to Jiang Wei what time and date it was now; he’d come unhooked from his place in chronology and he didn’t know the way home. There was still a part of him that wanted to live, but how did he know that he was right to seek life and shun death? How did he know that he wasn’t still in CWS? How did he know that he wasn’t already dead?
He was dismissed. He could hear sirens.
32. Prompt Critical
“It’s too late now,” David said, his form shimmering slightly.
“You can’t stop it?” Sylvia asked.
“Not even if I wanted to. We’re almost at prompt critical.”
“Are we safe here?” ‘Here’ was the safehouse, five kilometres from the reactor complex in the Amber Zone. It was just after ten in the morning on Saturday the 1st of June.
“Don’t go outside,” David warned. “Not yet.”
“David,” she pleaded, wanting to rip him away from the madness that enveloped him. “Where are you?”
“I’m outside the perimeter, like I said. They removed my implants, so they can’t track me. But I’ve got someone on the inside.”
“Can you get away?”
He barked out a short laugh. “I wouldn’t have thought so, Sylvia. They’ll close the border for sure.”
“How long? What’s happening?”
“Less than a minute. They’re trying to shut it down. Monkeys, the lot of them.”
“Can they do it?”
“In the next forty seconds? No. I love you, Sylvia. Now listen to me very carefully. Don’t go outside for at least twenty minutes. There’ll be chaos out there, understand? You’ll have one chance to get out before the military lock the whole place down, so get the fuck out! Okay, that’s it. It’s happening n… ”
David vanished as the call terminated. The power went off, leaving them in darkness.
“It’s all right,” Peters said, turning on a torch and shining it around the room.
But they heard nothing. Not a sound except for their own breathing.
“Do you think it worked?” she asked.
“Certainly.”
For a time after that there were no words passed between them. There was nothing left to say. The time for bargaining was over. Sylvia became aware of how tired she was from talking. It had been useless. And that was her husband: utterly intractable. No wonder their marriage hadn’t worked the way it should have.
“Has it been twenty minutes?” she said at long last.
“I still can’t hear anything, can you?”
“Let’s get out of here.”
Sylvia half expected to witness a scene of devastation on the streets of the Amber Zone, but there was no such thing. The power was out and people were wandering aimlessly, not yet having caught wind of the unfolding calamity. It was cool and grey and there was a strong westerly breeze blowing. They walked along Porter Street and turned left onto the Grand Parade. The buses on the vast concourse were all at a standstill, and there was a throng of human traffic flowing south, away from the Red Zone.
“We’ll be able to see the reactor complex from the end of Temporal Avenue,”
Peters said. “Come on.” They crossed a footbridge to the far side of the Grand Parade. There was as yet no panic. People did not know what to do, but they had no inkling of the cause of the power cut. In fact, a number of cafe customers remained sipping their cappuccinos on the strip, wait staff lingering uncertainly. Temporal Avenue was emptying, and the shops were closing, but Sylvia could see a knot of people at the end of the street. The crowd was looking across the waterway in the direction of the Red Zone. Sylvia and Peters took their places on the foreshore like children at a fireworks display.
The whole sky over the Red Zone seemed to flow with smoke and fire, and a terrible heat washed over the onlookers. As she stood, Sylvia imagined that this scene would be burned onto her retinas permanently, that she would never now not see this hellish visage. Through the slowly dissipating haze of black dust, they could see the reactor stacks dwarfed by the smoke cloud above. The left-most reactor was lit up with an eerie, raspberry-coloured glow. The light seemed to come from within. Small particles of some gritty black substance were beginning to waft down onto them, and with every passing second, this fallout intensified. There was an acrid taste in her mouth, something indescribable. Now a light rain was beginning to fall and people were taking cover. The drops running down their faces and pooling at their feet were black. Peters tugged at her arm and they turned away. Most of the people were attempting to flee from the black rain, but Sylvia and Peters knew better than to get caught in the stampede. Instead, they sat down at an abandoned cafe on Temporal Avenue. Though it was dim inside, it was bright enough for Sylvia to see her shaking hands by. She sat down and looked at them shaking, not knowing how to make them stop.
“I’ll take a reading,” Peters said. He got out a slim device and began fiddling with it. “It’s not fatal, but it’s bad,” he eventually concluded. “Probably less than two hundred millisieverts. But we’d better get rid of these clothes. Sylvia, your face is black.”
She looked up. “So is yours.”
“Go wash your face in the kitchen,” he said. “And throw out those clothes. You should be able to find something.”
At least the water was still running. Sylvia scrubbed her face and arms with soap and a hard, bristly brush. She found some clothes belonging to the wait staff in a side room, so she stripped off her grimy clothes and threw them in a bin. Without a shower, she couldn’t get the black dust out of her hair. She put the clothes on, not noticing or caring whether they were too large or small. Then she went back into the cafe and sat down.
“Did you find any clothes for me?” Peters asked.
“I didn’t look. Sorry,” Sylvia replied.
When Peters had washed and dressed in a red jumper several sizes too large for him, they were ready to move again. The rain had abated.
“I forgot to get my bag from the safehouse,” she said as they made their way along the Grand Parade.
He stopped and turned toward her. “Didn’t you see what just happened? If you get away with your life, you’ll be doing well.”
She followed him.
33. Up in Smoke
Rion was just about to leave Sylvia’s empty apartment when the power went out. Not wanting to be trapped, he hurriedly swiped the pass card on the door reader. For a fraction of a second, his mind surveyed possible escape routes, should the door not respond. Force open a window? Jump down from the second floor? But then the lights turned green and the door swung open with a click. All right. A power cut. He had lived almost his whole life without electricity, so he could manage without it for a few minutes.
Out on the street, the buses were at a halt. People were trapped inside and slowly coming to the conclusion that they might, like him, need to find a means of escape. Rion stood on the Barons’ second storey balcony for a few moments, surveying the scene. The street below looked like a disturbed beehive, its inhabitants springing angrily to life. Soon the street was swarming, as people got down from the buses and began moving in every direction. Rion had an inkling that the power might not be coming back on anytime soon, that something more serious than a simple outage had occurred.
It was only then that he turned his gaze westward and saw the column of smoke pluming out over the Red Zone. He physically recoiled, not so much in shock, but in the knowledge that his ambitions had just literally gone up in smoke. David fucking Baron. And here he was, on the culprit’s balcony. Ought he to avert his eyes? He noticed that the smoke was, bizarrely, light blue in colour. From this distance he could not see whether the reactors themselves were ablaze. As he watched, for what seemed like several minutes, the cloud grew impossibly massive, and the blue smoke was drowned out by black. Then he saw the flames.
People were running around down at street level, but Rion felt no desire to do the same. He couldn’t go back to the Amber Zone and his new masters – that much was certain – but nor could he easily flee Yellowcake Springs on foot. It was many kilometres to the gate and he knew the empty wasteland beyond all too intimately. He would need to blend in. Hell, he had been implanted now! Might they mistake him for a citizen, especially if the relevant records were destroyed?
Rion would be a citizen yet, but of what? An irradiated town? There was some kind of coordinated activity going on down there now. Official vehicles were policing the streets, commanding those on the walkways to return to their homes. But the police vehicles were too few in number, their message too faint, to turn back the crowd. People were spilling out of doorways and onto the street faster than the police could herd them up and send them back. Possessed of a newly-formed hive mind, the crowd pushed east along the boulevard beneath Rion’s balcony. Ought he to join them now, to take his place in the throng? He wavered, crippled by indecision. The sound of breaking glass persuaded him to wait until the bulk of the crowd had passed.
A minute or two later, something approaching order had returned to the street below. Police officers were posted on street corners and the first blockades were being erected. If Rion was going to get out of this precinct, it’d better be now.
On the street, Rion found himself heading north in the direction of the nearby Amber Zone gate. In doing so, he was very much at odds with the general sentiment of the time. He felt an obscure desire to return to the place of his incarceration. Was it because there he had felt safe for the first time in his life? His feet did the thinking in the absence of any firm resolution from his mind. Asking himself why he was going this way, he had to admit to himself that he was looking for Sylvia too, that he was scanning the crowds for her face.
At the gate, a steady stream of evacuees was pouring out of the Amber Zone. A light rain was beginning to fall, intermixed with some foul black substance. There was no avoiding it, no shelter here. The faces of those fleeing the Amber Zone were blackened. The black rain continued to fall lightly, but the sky above them was beginning to clear. Then Rion was caught up in the movement away from the gate, and he had no choice but to fall in. They were all equals now, all similarly bedraggled. A little further along, a cluster of army vehicles, similar to the ones he had seen on the road from East Hills, had gathered. Rion managed to secure a seat on one before it was declared full.
The carrier chugged to life and slowly made its way out of the town. People who were related or known to each other huddled together for comfort, but Rion had no one. Someone was talking about radiation, and someone else about family members left behind. Rion knew he would be distraught later, but for now there was nothing inside of him except for a bitter taste in his mouth. The convoy stopped in a barren area just beyond the outskirts of town, where a field hospital was in the process of being constructed. They were ushered out and told to join a queue at a particular tent. There were countless thousands here, seemingly the entire population of Yellowcake Springs, but Rion knew it could not be so as more carriers were arriving all the time.
“What are we lining up for?” someone behind him in the queue asked.
Rion turned around. It was a young boy, maybe twelve year
s old. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice like gravel. “Medicine?”
“That’s right,” a man in front of him said. “They’re giving us tablets for the radiation. Potassium iodide.”
Rion knew nothing of this, so he kept quiet. The line moved rapidly and he was soon at the front. He was given two small white tablets and a plastic cup of water. He swallowed the tablets with the water and put the cup in the bins nearby.
“It’s to prevent thyroid cancer,” the man who had spoken before said. He was a big man with a soft, gentle face. Dressed in beige overalls, which were stretched taut across his ample frame, he had the appearance of a monk.
“Thyroid cancer?” Rion asked, not wanting to admit he had no idea what a thyroid was.
“That’s right. Radioactive iodine gets into your thyroid and gives you cancer. Only has a half-life of eight days. These tablets flood the thyroid with non-radioactive iodine, so you can’t absorb the radioactive iodine.”
“So we’re safe from the radiation, then?”
The man shook his head. “Ever heard of strontium, caesium and plutonium?”
“No,” Rion admitted.
“You will now. Strontium and caesium have a half life of around thirty years. They haven’t got a tablet for that, either.”
“And plutonium?”
“Twenty-four thousand years. I’m Ben, by the way.”
“Rion.”
The man smiled, apparently cheered by this, and walked on. Rion followed him and joined a second queue.
34. Garbage
The house was a mess; the kids had been here all day and had left a trail of food packets, toys and crumbs behind. The sink was full of dirty dishes, the kitchen floor needed sweeping, and there was a basket of clean washing to hang out on the line. Wei set to the task at once, undaunted but resigned. Lui Ping had never been one for keeping a tidy house, and the children were still small, so this job often fell to him. He preferred to think of it as a hundred small jobs rather than one large one, and he liked to complete the task in stages.
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