‘Perhaps you excel at storytelling because your memories are stories you tell yourselves. The truth recedes into the past and becomes a different truth. You select some facts and discard others. You exaggerate certain things, make up other things out of whole cloth, and from this patchwork create glorious fabrications.’
‘Are we really so interesting to you?’ Chloe said.
Ada Morange said, ‘They are interested in certain people, most definitely. We have had many discussions about history, he and I.’
‘The concept of hero is very interesting to us,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘We are composites. No one component is worth more than any other. Your minds are in some ways similar. Your so-called “self” is a composite superimposed on the activity of many competing subpersonalities or agents. What you perceive as your consciousness is a string of temporary heroes rising above those they have defeated. And so you seek out heroes in the common story of your race.’
‘Heroes are mostly fiction,’ Daniel Rosenblaum said. ‘The idea that certain men or women have a disproportionate effect on history has been largely discredited.’
He’d been subdued all through the evening, greeting Chloe with an unsettling formality and showing no interest in her adventures, most of his attention on the alien in their midst.
‘Yet Dr Morange thinks herself one such,’ Unlikely Worlds said.
‘Is that not why you are here?’ Ada Morange said. She appeared to be amused.
‘Interesting things happen around you,’ Unlikely Worlds said. ‘You attract stories. I wonder, Chloe, if Ada is using you, or if you are using her. Who is the hero, and who the shield-carrier? I cannot say. Not yet. It is all so delightfully entangled.’
‘Perhaps the bead in Rana’s bracelet is the hero,’ Chloe said.
Later, she had a brief reconciliation with Daniel.
‘I was angry with you,’ he said. He was a little drunk, sipping a glass of brandy and smoking a cigar. She’d never seen him smoke before. ‘I’m still angry, just a little. You blundered into something you didn’t understand, and I was caught in the blowback. Everyone was. First everyone was arrested. And then the office was firebombed. And now, I’ve just been told, Ada Morange is going to shut down Disruption Theory.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Daniel shrugged.
‘How are Jen and the others?’
‘As if you really care.’
‘Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Daniel.’
‘I have a lot to feel sorry about,’ he said, but relented a little. ‘Actually, I want to give you a bit of advice, if you’ll let me. Ada has rebuilt her company to a certain point, but now she needs to find something game-changing that will take her to the next level. That’s why she bought into Disruption Theory, and I took her shilling with the full knowledge that she would exploit anything we found. And now, well, she hopes that this thing of yours, this Ugly Chicken, is the game-changer. And if it is, she’ll do everything in her power to keep hold of it. So what I’m trying to say, Chloe, is be careful. Don’t get caught in any crossfire.’
‘I can’t let this go,’ Chloe said.
‘That’s my girl. That’s what makes you such a good scout.’
‘What about you? What will you do now?’
‘Ada has offered positions elsewhere to everyone who works — who used to work — for Disruption Theory. She offered me a position, too. Here, as a matter of fact. That’s partly why I came. Mostly.’
‘This place is definitely full of spooks and weirdness.’
‘I turned her down. I’m thinking,’ Daniel said, ‘of writing another book. I need to get Ada’s permission, confidentiality clause and all that, but I think she’ll like the idea.’
He paused, no doubt expecting Chloe to ask the obvious question. When she didn’t, he added, ‘You’ll be in it of course. We all will.’
Chloe said, ‘Good luck with it. But I already have someone covering that beat.’
Departure day dawned grey and cool, the sky sheeted edge to edge with cloud. One of the discreet, infallibly polite staff had laid out coveralls for Chloe. Thanks but no thanks: she pulled on zebra-striped leggings and a plain white oversized T-shirt and went out to find breakfast.
And discovered that Ada Morange, Unlikely Worlds and Daniel Rosenblaum had left in the night.
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Henry said.
‘Dr Morange has a hundred different affairs to attend to,’ Michel Charpentier said. He was wearing a blue shirt and had a pale yellow sweater draped over his shoulders in the way that only the French can pull off. ‘That she spent an entire evening with us last night is an enormous sign of her confidence.’
Fahad wouldn’t be reassured. He was growing jittery, wondering aloud if he was doing the right thing, fretting about Rana.
‘I wish I could trust that woman,’ he said, nodding towards Rimsha Bhatti, who sat at the far end of the table with several of the scientists.
‘If you want to do right by your father this is the right thing to do,’ Chloe said, and immediately realised she was being a bit harsh. She was on edge, humming with the unsettling mix of anticipation and mild dread that she remembered from childhood holidays. She said, ‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think we were doing the right thing.’
She tried her best to eat a bowl of granola while Henry ploughed through his usual Full English breakfast, Michel sipped from a bowl of coffee, and Fahad nibbled at a slice of toast and fed Rana with fruit and yogurt, making helicopter noises as he aimed each spoonful at her mouth. The bead gleamed greenly on his wrist. At last, Rana tired of the game and grabbed the spoon and said that she knew how to eat, thank you very much, and Fahad gave her a look that just about broke Chloe’s heart.
Rana told Chloe that she’d had a dream about Ugly Chicken.
‘What was he doing?’
‘He took me into the sky,’ Rana said. There was a dab of yogurt on her nose. Her glossy black hair was gathered into two short pigtails that stuck out from the back of her head.
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Fahad said. ‘She has dreams like that all the time.’
‘We flew past stars and planets and all kinds of things,’ Rana said.
‘And then what happened?’
Rana shrugged. ‘And then I woke up.’
She seemed to be unaffected by Fahad’s nervous impatience and the fuss of preparing for departure, listened with placid acceptance as Fahad explained that he’d soon be back. But when Chloe and Fahad and Henry were about to climb into the people carrier, she broke away from Rimsha Batti and ran towards her brother.
‘Take me, take me, take me!’
Fahad gathered up his sister and hugged her, then carried her back to their aunt and set her down and told her to be brave, said that she should be happy because their friend was going home. But Rana blubbered with inconsolable distress, and Chloe noticed Henry and the driver of the people carrier watching with narrow attention, as if, like her, they were half-expecting Ugly Chicken to show itself. When Fahad walked back to the people carrier he avoided everyone’s gaze because he was crying too.
Michel shook hands with them and said that he would see them on the other side, and they drove off, joined a thin but constant stream of traffic on the autoroute towards the port. The shuttle leaned into the sky, huge as a mountain. Fahad pressed against the passenger window, looking up at it and turning Rana’s bracelet around and around on his wrist. Chloe felt a flutter in her stomach. This was this. No turning back.
The people carrier left the autoroute at a slip road and drove past warehouses and an industrial estate and pulled up in a lay-by behind an articulated truck with a blue shipping container on its trailer. Chloe and the others got out and the driver of the truck swung down from his cab. It was the wiry ex-Foreign Legion guy. He climbed onto the trailer and cracked open the doors of the container, revealing a wall of cardboard cartons, said that as soon as they were inside he’d repack the cartons and they’d be on their way.