The Strange

by Masha du Toit

  She turned started back, embarrassed at her own awkwardness, and trying to sort out how she felt about this news of Jinan Meer’s absence. Relief, she supposed.

  It was then that she noticed that Meisje had disobeyed her order and had followed her to Alexander’s table.

  “Why didn’t you listen to me?” Meisje just looked at her blandly and settled down next to Danger again.

  Where to next? Isabeau didn’t want to wait here in the cafeteria till it emptied out again. Back to the cubby. It was the only thing she could think of.

  At the cubby, she curled up on her bed, and even managed to sleep for a bit, although the noise from outside kept startling her awake. At last she sat up.

  “Let’s go see Dolly,” she told the gardags, and felt better even as she said it. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Elke’s boss would know where she was, and if she didn’t, would know what to do.

  Isabeau took the stairs up to Short Storage and hurried between the rows of cans, already rehearsing what she would say to Dolly, but then she stopped short, staring at the man who stood in the office door, talking to Dolly.

  That man. What was he doing here? He was the guy who was helping Jinan Meer.

  Argent.

  Isabeau shrank back into a gap between two cans. The gardags, she was glad to see, had followed her example and found shadowy corners further up the corridor.

  If only she could get close enough to hear what Argent was saying. She edged as far forward as she dared, straining to hear, but it was no good.

  The minutes passed, and she didn’t dare going any closer, but couldn’t tear herself away either. At last, Argent nodded a greeting. Isabeau held her breath and closed her eyes, expecting to be discovered, but his swift footsteps swept past her hiding place.

  She waited till Dolly disappeared back into her office, then slipped out of her hiding place and made her way as quickly as she could back down the corridor. Seeing Argent had shaken her confidence, and she wanted to be back in familiar surroundings.

  The day was starting to draw towards its end. Workers were putting away their tools, calling out to one another, sharing ritual end-of-shift jokes.

  Isabeau hovered near the cubbies she’d shared with Noor and Ndlela, checking once again whether anything had changed.

  I should have left one of the gardags here to keep an eye. But she was far from sure they’d follow her orders.

  Once again, she wished she had the diadem.

  For the first time she let herself think what would happen to her if Noor, Kiran and Elke never came back. The thought made her mouth go dry, and she forced herself to take deep, calming breaths.

  First things first. I can’t stay here in the cubby tonight. That seemed self-evident. If something had happened to Noor and the rest, if somebody had attacked them, then those same people would surely come after her too, and she couldn’t afford to be where they expected her to be.

  She’d been a fool to stay at the cubby as long as she had.

  Isabeau thought of the hiding places she already knew—Works level, with its hollow walls and access hatches. But that wasn’t safe, either. Missy Cloete was down there, somewhere, hiding in the shell-cavity or in the ducts, disguising her scent with disinfectant.

  Another idea crept up on her, sending icy rivulets down her spine. Missy Cloete. Did she have something to do with Noor and the rest of them disappearing?

  Isabeau stood for long moments, eyes screwed shut as her thoughts skittered from fear to fear.

  Something cold pressed on her arm, and she looked down to find Meisje, nose shoved against her arm, gazing up at her with concern. Danger was there too, sitting tall, ears cocked, eyes bright with interest.

  She was not alone. The gardags did not look cowed, or afraid, or even nervous. They were relying on her, waiting for her to decide what to do.

  “Right.” She swallowed. “Meisje. You know the Eye, right? Can you show me a safe place to stay, tonight? Somewhere we can all be out of sight, and also, where Missy Cloete hasn’t been.”

  At Missy’s name, Meisje’s ears came up and she gave a sharp bark.

  “You know she’s in the Eye,” said Isabeau. “And you heard what Elke said, that she’s been using disinfectant to mask her scent. We need a place far from where she might be hiding.”

  Meisje barked again. Then she set off down the corridor, glancing behind her to see whether Isabeau was following.

  “Come on, Danger.” Isabeau took one last look at the cubby and followed Meisje.

  Drugged

  Elke surfaced. She tried, and failed, to open her eyes.

  The world moved in a familiar rhythm, swaying and bumping. Her head was one continuous roar of pain, and her body oddly contorted, legs drawn up, arms twisted behind her.

  Somebody leaned against her, a warm weight on her thigh.

  Everything rocked back and forth.

  A train. She was in a train.

  She slid into darkness again.

  ¤¤¤

  Elke woke, and sank, and woke again.

  The pain stayed constant, a dull ache behind her eyes, a pounding in her skull. Reality came at her in waves of scent, pain, glaring light.

  Her neck, back, legs and arms, all were pinioned. The motion that had rocked her for—hours? —had stopped. In clearer moments she knew she was blindfolded and that the pressure on her face was a breathing mask. Her body was wrapped in something stiff and slippery that creaked a little when she moved. The only sound was a low, booming rumble like a vast, subterranean heartbeat.

  Time passed.

  Her thoughts squirrelled round and round, not finding traction.

  Time passed.

  The floor vibrated. She was being pulled by the feet, slid along like a bag. Sound returned as something was knocked from her head and ears.

  The swish of plastic over plastic, the scuff of a foot, the puff-puff-puff of a steam locomotive. She must have been wearing ear-protectors. That meant that they’d been through a portal, and that her captors cared enough to shield her from the sound of the carillon that opened the gates between the worlds.

  Somebody bent over her. A grunt of effort, then her hands were released from their bonds, and a moment later, her ankles. Before she could react, she was hauled to her feet. She groaned with the pain of her stiffened limbs and stumbled, trying to keep her balance.

  The blindfold was pulled roughly from her head.

  It was dark, but not too dark to see. She was wearing some kind of biosuit, the kind with a built-in mask and goggles. Other people huddled close beside her. Many others.

  Nausea coiled in her belly and pushed up in her throat. She fought it down, taking desperate gulps of air that made her mask hiss, dimly aware that she was leaning against something, somebody, a yielding body dressed, like she was, in a biosuit.

  Voices spoke softly, close at hand, and then she was walking, pushed along by the bodies around her.

  The brain-fog returned.

  She walked, stopped, sat for a while, stood again, walked again.

  Light came and went. The mask hissed as she breathed, a valve popping at every exhalation.

  Hiss, and pop. Hiss, and pop.

  Corridors.

  A long walkway, crowded with biosuited figures. Uniformed guards watching them pass by.

  Kiran was just ahead of her. Elke knew it was Kiran, despite the concealing biosuit. Something about the way she walked, the way she held herself.

  Time passed.

  She was sitting again. A woman’s voice droned nearby, but Elke could not make out the words. She opened her eyes. Somebody—Kiran? —sat next to her, and next to her the woman, still speaking, leaning forward earnestly, as if trying to persuade Kiran of something.

  A guard strode past, and the woman touched his leg, calling out with the confident authority of one used to obedience. The guard lifted the woman to her feet and kneed her in the stomach. Then a fist to the ribs, a twist of the arm, the beating administer
ed with a workman-like efficiency that was more chilling than rage.

  Professional. Elke closed her eyes, no longer willing to watch. Maximum pain, minimum damage.

  Time passed.

  Voices, and Elke found that she was standing again, this time in a brightly lit hallway surrounded by other biosuited figures. Two guards flanked their group. They were as big as can-worker glims and had the dead-faced look of hired muscle. Something puzzled her about their uniforms.

  Elke’s slow brain gradually pieced it together. They weren’t wearing biosuits. Only prisoners got biosuits.

  A man came hurrying down the corridor, slowing when he saw them. He spoke to the guards in a clicking, slurring strangeside dialect, impatient and angry. The guards answered with the minimum of words, their voices stolid and unemotional.

  Elke didn’t have to understand the language to know what that tone meant.

  “Don’t ask me. Just following orders.”

  Another room, this one with a bench where they were made to sit. Elke managed to get a better look at her companions. Kiran was on the far side of the room, grasping her own forearm, staring intently at the sleeve of the biosuit where it bunched between her fingers. Noor sat next to her, and next to Noor was the woman who’d been beaten by the guard.

  Something was familiar about that stocky figure.

  Jinan Meer.

  Elke tried to figure out what she felt about this, but nothing came. She lay back against the wall and let the brain-fog claim her once more.

  People walked across the room, talking.

  Somebody mopped up a pool of dark fluid. He—she? —was dressed in grubby robes, a scarlet scarf concealing all but the eyes. Elke’s numbed mind fumbled for the significance and found it—Fugado. So, there were fugados here too, wherever this was. Cleaning, and watching, as they ever did.

  Where was Meisje? The panic of the thought made her surface momentarily until she remembered Meisje was still missing. Hiding somewhere in the Eye… No. That was not right.

  Somebody bent over her and tugged at her wrist, exposing a valve that nestled in the biosuit sleeve. They snugged a stubby tube into the valve. A stab of pain, and her arm itched all the way up to the shoulder, a warm and lively itch that faded as it spread across her torso. Her head lolled, and she stared at her own arm, fascinated by the semi-translucent folds of the biosuit’s ancient, yellowing plastic.

  Kiran had loosed the grip on her sleeve and Elke saw why she’d been holding it. The plastic of the sleeve was torn in a ragged slit all the way up her arm. That was bad, but Elke could not remember why.

  Time passed.

  She had to pee. The pressure in her bladder invaded her dreams, brought her momentarily to the surface.

  Standing again. A guard, a female guard, tugged at the hood of Elke’s biosuit, pulling the mask off her face, impatient at her inability to stand upright. The biosuit was pulled away.

  Elke stepped from its folds, grateful for the guard’s steadying hand. Her body, released from the confining plastic suit, stank of sweat and fear, and she felt absurdly embarrassed.

  All of them were out of their suits now, bodies and faces visible for the first time. A bewildering variety of people, all adults, all with shuttered faces, not one meeting her gaze. Elke searched among the faces for her friends, her stomach clenching at the thought that she might have lost them already.

  But no, there was Kiran, her face grey-tinged with fatigue, hair sticking up in sweaty tufts. Noor, near the door, unfastening her ankle-brace under the stern gaze of a guard.

  Elke felt nearly sick with relief. They were still together. They were still alive.

  Jinan was there too, arguing again, until a guard shoved her in the chest. Jinan staggered back, collided with the wall, and sat abruptly on a bench.

  The drugs that dulled Elke’s mind allowed only a mild resentment at the sight. Why can’t she just shut up? She’ll bring down trouble on the rest of us.

  Events slid past her without seeming to touch her. More rooms, more corridors, people being taken out in groups. A row of things that turned out to be toilets, and the blessed relief of peeing.

  Another room. Somebody shining a light into her eyes, making her breathe into a bottle, looking into her mouth, looking at her body.

  Blood—her own blood—drawn into a vial.

  A medic adjusted a light to shine directly into Elke’s eyes. He read out a phrase, and another, and another. Most of the words were in languages foreign to her but every now and then a word would crystallise into meaning.

  Time passed.

  Somebody held her firmly by the chin. A sharp pain lanced across her skin, accompanied by a familiar clockwork buzz. Elke knew that sound.

  A man leaned over her, reaching to dip a tattoo needle into a vial of ink. He lowered the needle to her face again. The pain continued where it had left off, dragging down from her lip to the tip of her chin, and back up again. Over and over again.

  He was using a clockwork tattoo needle. Must be. Can’t be electric because electricity doesn’t work in the Strange.

  Elke blinked at the thought. Electricity... What about my implant?

  She must have been more dazed than she’d realised not to have tried to activate it before. She tried now, and as she’d expected, it didn’t respond. No heads-up display appeared, no overlay of silver-white letters that would tell her where and when she was.

  The pain stopped and the man withdrew his hand, leaned back, considering his work. He rubbed at her chin with a dry tissue that pulled at her skin, hurting more than the needle had.

  He rapped out a command at somebody behind her, and Elke felt hands pulling at her again. She was guided from the chair, and somebody else took her place.

  Got to wake up. Elke blinked hard and shook her head, trying to force herself to focus, but the motion just brought back the nausea, a dizzying wave that threatened to engulf her.

  Somebody tugged her arm and pushed her through a door with a shove that nearly sent her staggering.

  I could get tired of this.

  She tried to get angry, tried to work up a rage that might lend her strength and clear her mind.

  Just got to get through this.

  Just got to survive.

  The Gremium

  “But what did you think you were doing!”

  Jinan’s voice was too loud. Elke glanced at the guards, but they weren’t paying attention. She rolled her shoulders and wished she could get up and stretch properly. The long hours sleeping on the hard, cold floor had left her stiff and aching, but least she’d woken with a clear mind. Whatever drug they’d used to subdue her had worn off at last.

  Mental clarity came with a cost. The horror of what had happened kept hammering through her. The moments before they’d been captured replayed in her memory over and over again. Regret seared her as she identified every chance she’d had to turn back, to change her mind, to avoid this disaster. And when the storm receded and her mind drifted to Meisje, or some small thing she’d been planning to tell Dolly, or Diesel, or Mack Jack, and reality jerked the floor from under her again.

  She would never see them again.

  Even if she could escape, and help her friends to escape, she had no idea where they were, or how they’d ever get back to the Eye—or if it was possible to get back. It was like being dead without the oblivion of death, as if some giant, disinterested force had simply wiped away her life.

  She forced herself to focus on her surroundings.

  Their group was much reduced, and all of them, as far as Elke could see, were from the Real. All of them except for Kiran and Jinan, who were still arguing.

  “Why is that any of your business?” Kiran shot Jinan an irritated look.

  “My business?” Jinan gestured at the room they were in. “Here I am, a prisoner, because you fools stumbled into—”

  “You’re here because you stuck your nose in,” said Kiran.

  Elke wished she knew what time it was, or eve
n whether it was day or night. So far, she’d not seen a single window or anything that hinted at the world outside. The fresh tattoo on her chin stung, and she kept having to stop herself from touching it. She looked around the almost featureless room.

  Not exactly how I imagined the Strange. Might as well be anywhere. The only hint that she was not realside was the subtle, fluttering, candle-like glow from the ceiling-mounted panels. No electric light ever looked like that.

  During the long, empty hours she’d got to know some of the other prisoners. The two women who were sleeping in the corner were Betina and Mell, political activists from Albion. They’d been betrayed by government spies who had infiltrated their organisation. Selling them to the collectionistas saved their government the cost of keeping them in prison and avoided the political fallout of an execution.

  An older man called Samuel, who came from Niger, couldn’t explain how he’d ended up with the slavers. He was weeping softly to himself, his face turned towards the wall.

  The youngest there, apart from Noor, was a young man called Javiero, who’d been taken from a Spanish prison.

  “They imprisoned me for murder,” he’d told Elke in a rather boastful tone. “I’m innocent, of course, but that makes no difference if you can’t pay the bribes. And now they sold me to the collectionistas just to save themselves the cost of hanging me.”

  All the prisoners wore the clothes in which they’d been captured. The only restraints were ankle bracelets that bound their feet together with tough, stretchy cords. Walking was possible, at a steady pace, and running was out of the question.

  Now that the drug-induced mind-fog had receded Elke noticed things she’d missed before. The floor of their room was not concrete, it was stone, polished with the passage of many feet. The walls were stone too, immense blocks expertly fitted together with no visible mortar. The light panels in the ceiling weren’t the flimsy plastic she’d assumed, but slabs of glass that appeared to be filled with a glowing fluid that twitched and crawled as though it was made up of a thousand tiny insects. The doors were metal, black with age, worn in places to a gloss that spoke of many lifetimes of use.