Instead, he wandered off to a patch of sunlight in the middle of the road and stood there until she told him they were going for a walk.
They walked a long way, slowly spiralling away from the road. There were factory ruins here, as in most parts of the forest. Stretches of broken wall. Chains of cubes heaved up and broken, half-buried, overgrown by the arched roots of spine trees, and thatches of copperberry and bubbleweed, but the man seemed no more interested in them than in the wreckage of the road train.
“You were gone two years. What happened to you?”
He shrugged.
At last, they walked back to the road. The sun stood at the horizon, as always, throwing shadows over the road. The man walked towards the patch of sunlight where he’d stood before, and kept walking.
Ziyi and the two dogs followed. Through a thin screen of trees to the edge of a sheer drop. Water far below, lapping at rocks. No, not rocks. Factory ruins.
The man stared down at patches of waterweed rising and falling on waves that broke around broken walls.
Ziyi picked up a stone and threw it out beyond the cliff edge. “Was that what happened? You were running from the bandits, it was dark, you ran straight out over the edge…”
The man made a humming sound. He was looking at Sauron’s fat orange disc now, and after a moment he closed his eyes and stretched out his arms.
Ziyi walked along the cliff edge, looking for and failing to find a path. The black rock plunged straight down, a sheer drop cut by vertical crevices that only an experienced climber might use to pick a route down. She tried to picture it. The roadtrain stopping because fallen trees had blocked the road. Bandits appearing when the crew stepped down, shooting them, ordering the passengers out, stripping them of their clothes and belongings, shooting them one by one. Bandits didn’t like to leave witnesses. One man breaking free, running into the darkness. Running through the trees, running blindly, wounded perhaps, definitely scared, panicked. Running straight out over the cliff edge. If the fall hadn’t killed him, he would have drowned. And his body had washed into some active part of the factory, and it had fixed him. No, she thought. It had duplicated him. Had it taken two years? Or had he been living in some part of the factory, out at sea, until the storm had washed him away and he’d been cast up on the beach …
The man had taken off his clothes and stood with his arms out and his eyes closed, bathing in level orange light. She shook him until he opened his eyes and smiled at her, and she told him it was time to go.
Ziyi tried and failed to teach the man to talk. “You understand me. So why can’t you tell me what happened to you?”
The man humming, smiling, shrugging.
Trying to get him to write or draw was equally pointless.
Days on the beach, picking up flotsam; nights watching movies. She had to suppose he was happy. Her constant companion. Her mystery. She had long ago given up the idea of selling him.
Once, Ziyi’s neighbour, Besnik Shkelyim, came out of the forest while the man was searching the strandline. Ziyi told Besnik he was the son of an old friend in the capital, come to visit for a few weeks. Besnik seemed to accept the lie. They chatted about the weather and sasquatch sightings and the latest finds. Besnik did most of the talking. Ziyi was anxious and distracted, trying not to look towards the man, praying that he wouldn’t wander over. At last, Besnik said that he could see that she was busy, he really should get back to his own work.
“Bring your friend to visit, some time. I show him where real treasure is found.”
Ziyi said that she would, of course she would, watched Besnik walk away into the darkness under the trees, then ran to the man, giddy and foolish with relief, and told him how well he’d done, keeping away from the stranger.
He hummed. He shrugged.
“People are bad,” Ziyi said. “Always remember that.”
A few days later she went into town. She needed more food and fuel, and took with her a few of the treasures the man had found. Sergey Polzin was at the recycling plant, and fingered through the stuff she’d brought. Superconductor slivers. A variety of tinkertoys, hard little nuggets that changed shape when manipulated. A hand-sized sheet of the variety of plastic in which faint images came and went … It was not one tenth of what the man had found for her—she’d buried the rest out in the forest—but she knew that she had made a mistake, knew she’d been greedy and foolish.
She tried her best to seem unconcerned as Sergey counted the silvers of superconducting plastic three times. “You’ve been having much luck, recently,” he said, at last.
“The storm must have broken open a cache, somewhere out to sea,” she said.
“Odd that no one else has been finding so much stuff.”
“If we knew everything about the factory, Sergey Polzin, we would all be rich.”
Sergey’s smile was full of gold. “I hear you have some help. A guest worker.”
Besnik had talked about her visitor. Of course he had.
Ziyi trotted out her lie.
“Bring him into town next time,” Sergey said. “I’ll show him around.”
A few days later, Ziyi saw someone watching the compound from the edge of the forest. A flash of sunlight on a lens, a shadowy figure that faded into the shadows under the trees when she walked towards him. Ziyi ran, heard an engine start, saw a red pickup bucket out of the trees and speed off down the track.
She’d only had a glimpse of the intruder, but she was certain that it was the manager of the recycling plant.
She walked back to the compound. The man was facing the sun, naked, arms outstretched. Ziyi managed to get him to put on his clothes, but it was impossible to make him understand that he had to leave. Drive him into the forest, let him go? Yes, and sasquatch or wargs would eat him, or he’d find his way to some prospector’s cabin and knock on the door …
She walked him down to the beach, but he followed her back to the cabin. In the end, she locked him in the shed.
Early in the afternoon, Sergey Polzin’s yellow Humvee came bumping down the track, followed by a UN Range Rover. Ziyi tried to be polite and cheerful, but Sergey walked straight past her, walked into the cabin, walked back out.
“Where is he?”
“My friend’s son? He went back to the capital. What’s wrong?” Ziyi said to the UN policewoman.
“It’s a routine check,” the policewoman, Aavert Enger, said.
“Do you have a warrant?”
“You’re hiding dangerous technology,” Sergey said. “We don’t need a warrant.”
“I am hiding nothing.”
“There has been a report,” Aavert Enger said.
Ziyi told her it was a misunderstanding, said that she’d had a visitor, yes, but he had left.
“I would know if someone came visiting from the capital,” Sergey said. He was puffed up with self-righteousness. “I also know he was here today. I have a photograph that proves it. And I looked him up on the net, just like you did. You should have erased your cache, by the way. Tony Daniels, missing for two years. Believed killed by bandits. And now he’s living here.”
“If I could talk to him I am sure we can clear this up,” Aavert Enger said.
“He isn’t here.”
But it was no good. Soon enough, Sergey found the shed was locked and ordered Ziyi to hand over the keys. She refused. Sergey said he’d shoot off the padlock; the policewoman told him that there was no need for melodrama, and used a master key.
Jung and Cheung started to bark as Sergey led the man out. “Tony Daniels,” he said to the policewoman. “The dead man Tony Daniels.”