“Not too much time.”
“There’s Chen, I know.”
We were going past the tree again. “When, then?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll tape a statement for the police, have it all ready to hand over. We’ll get them alclass="underline" Katerine, Greta, Meisener, Crablegs. All the others.” I was shaking. “They have no right! Years they’ve been playing with people, as though we were just chess pieces. I don’t even think Greta knows that other people apart from her really exist. Thousands of people have suffered. Tens of thousands.” And she had suffered because of Katerine. As I nearly had. As I had.
I wanted to see Katerine alone on a chair in a windowless room. I wanted her to weep. I wanted her eyes to turn red and sore. I wanted her to beg, to plead for some water, her contact lens case. “I want to see the color of her eyes.”
“Who?”
“My mother. I want to see her suffer.” No, it was more than that. “I want her to see me. I want her to look up at me and see me. I want to be able to look into her eyes and see myself reflected there. I want her to see that I see the world through my own eyes, and not hers. I want her to acknowledge me. See that I’m real, I exist. I’m grown, my own person. That I’m finally free to become who I might be.” I linked my arm through Magyar’s, pulled her to a halt. “Tomorrow. I promise. This time tomorrow.”
“Tonight. Right now would be better.”
“But tomorrow I’ll be ready. I’ll-”
“Lore, if you wait for the right moment, you’ll wait forever. There is no perfect time. You just have to do it anyway. Things won’t be any better tomorrow.”
“But what’s the hurry?” I had waited three years. “If it’s Lucas Chen you’re worried-”
She made an impatient, chopping motion. “I’m sorry for what he’s going through, but it’s you I care about. Tell me honestly—will it be any easier to talk to your father tomorrow than today?”
Me and Oster. I took a deep breath, let it out again. “No.”
“Tonight, then.”
I nodded reluctantly. “Tonight. But I’ll make the tape first. And after tonight’s shift… What?”
“You’re doing it again. Not facing things. Tell me, why wait until after the shift?”
“It’s my job…” But, of course, she was right. I would never work there again. There was no more Sal Bird, aged twenty-five. Done with, all done with. Tonight, during winter dark in this part of the world, I would call Ratnapida. A blaze of light, clear water. Limpid reflections. No more obscuring the truth. No more shadows and lies. Tonight.
“Do you want me to come home with you?”
“No. Tonight will be soon enough. I need some sleep. And I need to tape that statement. I’ll call you at the plant when… when… I’ll call you.”
I held her again, for a long time. I could feel the shape of her through her coat and mine, the hard bone, pliant muscles. I wanted her with a hard, deep ache. Tonight.
Chapter 26
The next day in the tent passes slowly. Lore gets her breakfast, but long after her internal clock tells her it is early afternoon, there is still no lunch. She begins to worry. Why haven’t they fed her?
Why feed someone you are going to kill?
Thirty million. It isn’t much. She has no idea what the family’s total holdings are but she knows it adds up to tens of billions. Thirty million. She had requisitioned more than that herself for the Kirghizi project.
It must be Oster. He must have found out that she and Tok know about Stella, know what he has done to her. Maybe he has already killed Tok, somehow. Maybe he is deliberately stalling negotiations so that her kidnappers will kill her, then no one will know what he has done. But how is he stopping Katerine from paying? Her mother is smarter than Oster.
Lore shakes her head. She has to understand, has to work it out, find a way to make them pay.
The afternoon ticks on. She does stomach crunches, leg lifts, push-ups, and stretches. She is hungry. For the first time in nearly two weeks she finds herself longing for one of the pills she has hidden under the tent. She takes out her nail, holds it, puts it back in the sleeping bag, takes it out again.
The afternoon turns to evening. No supper.
When her body tells her it is time to sleep, she isn’t tired, but she lies down in her sleeping bag because it makes her feel less naked. She holds the nail tightly and breathes slowly, evenly, trying to relax her muscles one by one, from the feet up.
Bright light floods the tent from outside as someone rips open the flap. “Up. Now.” It is Fishface, but Lore hardly recognizes him, his voice is so harsh. “I said now.” He steps menacingly toward the sleeping bag and Lore wriggles out hastily, nail tucked in her left fist, out of sight. He grabs her arm. “We’re leaving.”
“Did they pay?”
He does not answer.
Lore looks around her as they head across the old floor-boards she has only been able to feel with her fingertips. It is a barn, very old. Hundreds of years old, probably.
Outside the night is cool and clear. The smell abruptly changes, and she knows she is in a northern European country—England, perhaps, or Ireland—and that the scents of garlic and sun permeating the inside of the barn are a trick. So much planning…
She shivers as Fishface marches her across a cobbled yard toward a pair of headlights. Some sort of vehicle. Lore moves slowly, docilely: she is supposed to be drugged, and she needs to think.
They are now only forty yards from the vehicle. It is an off-track van, the kind with doors that open at the back. The doors are open. She does not want to climb in.
They are going to kill her, She is sure of it. Old farm equipment lines the stone walls of the yard. She can smell the rusting metal.
They are almost at the van now. She can see someone inside, programming directions into the instrument panel. Crablegs. The floor of the van is covered in plasthene. To catch the blood? She maneuvers the nail into position in her fist.
They are at the van. Crablegs is standing at the lip, holding out his arms to her. Fishface is behind her. He moves his hands from her arms to her waist, not gripping now, just getting into position to boost her up and inside.
Lore pretends to stumble. As she knows he would, Fishface reaches to catch her. She turns fast, nail in fist.
His eyes are brown. The look that flares behind them is part shock at her speed, part fear, part a strange kind of acceptance: she will kill him. That nearly undoes her. But her fist is already swinging in its short arc. He doesn’t move. The nail rips into his neck and blood fountains. They tumble into metal. Something sharp. Bright pain. Blood splashes on her face, her arms, her throat, in her hair. She is screaming. Crablegs is screaming. Fishface is silent.
Shock makes all the rest hazy, unreal, underwater slow-motion: the van, the shouting, then silence as the van rumbles through the night. The long sigh, the hissing nasal spray creeping across the air between her and Crablegs molecule by molecule, deadly.
And breathing it in, sucking it down, tumbling backward out of, the van while it’s still moving is a rite of passage. She could have died. She should have died. She moves from one life, from Frances Lorien van de Oest, to another, arriving—as all newborns do—naked and covered in blood.
Chapter 27
I set the Hammex 20 up on its tripod and sat opposite, in the chair beneath the window. The camera lens was like a cold fish eye, unblinking. I stared at it, forgetting what I was supposed to say. The reflection of a bird flying past my window flashed in the glass eye and made me jump.