The silence had continued as Thien carried me back to the command room. He placed me in a chair and we watched as Benjamin’s vitals lit up the screens. A glimpse of her shot across one of our cameras.
“She’s going to live, you fucker!” I said to the silent Grimley.
That’s when Thien spoke. “Ellie, I don’t think you understand.”
“I understand perfectly well. This prick has wanted to close us down for years. All he cares about is coastal grasses, quantifiable results, popularity levels and promotions.”
“Honestly, for a genius, you wander around as if you’ve got a hood over your head,” said Thien. “Why do you think I came back to work with you these last few months? Grimley sent me. He’s the one who kept the power on for us. He’s the one who let you use your money against my wishes. He’s the one who kept us going, just to give Benjamin a chance.”
Thoughts caught inside me, tripped over themselves. I couldn’t think straight.
Then he said, “Who do you think I’ve been fucking all this time? I met Grimley before you did on the rooftop bar that night. I tried to convince him to shut us down completely.”
Silence once more as I thought of the cocktail glasses drained on the table. Of Grimley’s sadness when he had said we’d have to shut down. Of his kind eyes and his comforting hand at the bar.
Thien continued. “It couldn’t go on any longer. Grimley-bear was the one who was resisting me. He wanted to talk to you himself.”
Something snapped in me. Things weren’t as bad as I’d imagined and I found myself grinning in the midst of the shock. “Grimley-bear?”
Grimley shrugged. There was an insouciant smile on his face.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were helping?” I said.
“It had to be a secret. We didn’t want it to go public among the bureaucrats. It needed to look like an oversight,” said Grimley. “Mistakes can be overlooked. Poor decisions not so much.”
What about your promotion?” I asked.
“Oh well, I guess that’s dead in the water. You know, quantifiable results, high profile publications, public ratings and all that.”
Then the embarrassment hit me. I buried my head in my hands. My mind was still trying to catch up. How wrong I had been about everything.
A hand touched my shoulder lightly. It was Grimley’s. “Shall we see how she’s doing?”
The readouts showed that she was still in the woods. Her vitals were fine. She was okay, for the moment.
“She won’t make it,” I said.
“We have to hold onto hope, though, don’t we?” said Grimley.
“Oh, now you’re sounding like the Russians.”
“Apparently they’re doing well with the mammoth. They’ve got it onto the vodka. Soon it’ll be singing the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen.’”
“Now that’s the kind of mammoth I want to meet,” I said, and smiled.
We stayed there for some time, watching Benjamin’s vitals. She was slinking through the forest, discovering her new home. “So, I suppose you’re going to take me back now? Coastal grasses are waiting for me.”
“Maybe not coastal grasses. But let’s stay here for a couple of days,” Grimley said. “Let’s see how she goes. She might make it, right?”
“She might live for a little while,” I said. “But that’s all any of us have, in the end. Just a little while before we die.”
“Let’s make the most of it, then,” said Grimley. “She wouldn’t have any chance if it weren’t for you.”
“Well, she is my true love.” I laughed.
When we closed the centre down for the final time, two days later, Benjamin was still out there hunting in the forest. A perfect little thylacine in the wilderness. The copter carried us away from the centre one last time, back to Hobart with its buildings and its quiet streets and its bureaucrats and the habitat that I found so strange. Maybe I could live there too, after all.
It was padding softly along a crest in the open, between the dark forests south of Lake Gordon, when my partner noticed a long hanging pouch beneath its belly, beneath its striped rear. That pouch looked full. Seeing us, she yawned and the great jaws were so wide we joked she could have turned inside out. Then she slipped away with a low-hung gait, back into the forest, as if we’d never been there at all.
About the Author
Rjurik Davidson, a young Australian author who won the Aurealis Award for Best Newcomer some years ago, has been writing about the city of Caeli-Amur for nearly a decade. His debut novel, Unwrapped Sky is set in this city-state where magic and technology are interchangeable; where minotaurs and sirens are real; where philosopher-assassins and seditionists are not the most dangerous elements in a city alive with threat. During the day, the ordinary citizens do what they must to get along. But at night, the spirit of the ancient city comes alive, to haunt the old places…. You can sign up for email updates here.
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