The soil is still good here; even I can see that. Soft, crumbly, not dark brown but black, as black as asphalt. Privately I pocket a bagful of it, and some of Victor’s weird seeds, as we walk. Maybe I will grow them in my little apartment when I get back home next week.
At the candidate park I think I see some evidence of cultivation, not just the ground broken but furrows still remaining, but it’s so muddled from the decades of weeds and neglect and saplings pushing up that it’s hard to tell. Instead of asking Darian to look at the data, I ask Victor. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Since Darian is surely up to something, I feel like I can trust Victor a little more. Even though he too thinks I’m a romance writer with my head in the clouds.
The ‘soft’ sciences, my ass. I’m corroborating the actual history of this city and that’s what they’d call me.
I don’t know, maybe they’re right.
October 1
I am curious about K., but there is also the fear of insulting a dangerous man by impugning his identity in some way, which every woman perceives with a sense keener than any other. V. also has this sense, I feel certain, though I can’t imagine why. Where did I get that idea? Maybe I am simply incapable of seeing him clearly.
But K., I see clearly. He’s educated, affable, a little older than me; he’s clearly losing weight now that he’s joined our neighbourhood, I mean, so fast it’s almost visible; even his thick hairline recedes as swiftly as a grassfire chomping great swathes out of a meadow. By joining with us, he has left behind some secret manner of feeding himself, and now he eats like we do. He could leave, I think ferociously, watching him and V. as we cross the city, as agile as rats. He could leave us.
But he won’t.
Now, why is that?
It used to not be a relevant question; people just sort of clustered up, huddled together. Babes in a storm. But now, with the entire city at our disposal, you can go anywhere, and people do; you can survive alone, and people do. He’s obviously been doing well. So why leave them, and come to us?
The sinister sparkle of that golden beard, like candyfloss!
He joins us now, me and V. and occasionally the taciturn P., as we search for the missing. I would not have asked him, but we have so few people, and we are looking for people who are so few. Whole blocks, whole neighbourhoods, have no human life within them whatsoever, only the statues of our conquerors, their faces grossly smug, as if they are proud of having driven everyone out of the area. We get nothing good, nothing useful, from these people. In movies, I think angrily sometimes as we plod up and down the streets, we would have found an informant by now. But maybe (I think, and I think V. does too) we are carrying one with us.
We’ve moved flats, quietly and without comment. Now we are in some airy, Art Deco monstrosity, room after room of soothing curves, no angles, plush rugs, and (importantly) intact doors. We boarded up the windows that first afternoon. Remember a world where we liked to have large panes of glass at ground level? Shudder to remember. We are far, far from our old neighbourhood, and even though I returned and gave everyone our new address, I fret about my lost neighbours, my lost people. I feel very far away from them, not a half-hour walk. (If only we could use bicycles! But that was a useful lesson to learn, too.)
At night, we climb to the roof and survey the darkened city with binoculars. V. often bores of this and turns his on the sky, which of course is terrible with binoculars and makes him motion sick.
Look, he said last night, startled, scrambling to his feet, and I rushed to his side, but saw nothing where he pointed.
You’re not being pulled again, are you, I complained.
No! I just… I think I saw the ISS pass, he said, and his face crumpled in the moonlight, all exaggerated pain in silver and black. I took his flashlight from him quickly before he collapsed to the roof and sat motionless, head in hands.
Oh my God, I said. Oh, God.
Silence fell as we stared up at the sky again, in vain; clouds had begun to gather, softly covering the stars, a chunk of bright moon, till everything was snowed under its diffuse powdery light.
I never thought of that, I never looked up. But the astronauts up there, had they gotten a visit from Them as well? Was the whole space station dead, mad, vomiting strange languages? A slow starvation, or a swift death by thirst?
I’m so sorry, I wanted to tell them, that no one will come get you. I’m so sorry. We do remember you.
Far below us, snorting and pacing, the statues prowled the streets. Their feet were like nails on chalkboard. Come up here and say that, I wanted to yell.
I wish we had proper siege equipment for this siege, V. muttered. Pour a big cauldron of boiling oil on them.
Drop a rock on them, K. said.
Yes, I said. Like in the books.
HOW WOULD I catch Darian in the act?
I’m not even going to talk to the others. Winnie would try to talk me out of it (and succeed). Victor would stay neutral. But I am adamant, quietly, that the story that Eva is telling is worth sharing with the world, and its veracity can only be questioned by reasonable persons. That’s all. That’s all I want to say. That’s all I want to prove. And Darian, I am sure, just as adamantly, does not want me to prove that.
What a ridiculous thought. We’re all focusing on our own research here.
Victor says the deer appear quite normal. “Even their droppings,” he says.
“I’m not helping you collect deer shit, Victor.”
And now I find I’m missing files. What the hell? I’ve talked to the other three and they say nothing’s out of the ordinary at their stations. “Mice,” Victor said uncertainly. “Check the back for droppings. Or ants.”
I tried to meet Darian’s eye, but he held his gaze steadily till I dropped mine. “You probably just mis-filed them,” he said brusquely. “It happens.”
I don’t want him to talk down to me, I want him to admit that he’s been tampering with my research. There isn’t much missing—just photos and a scan of the one badge that I found in the dirt by the hospital, and the inscription on the back, because it occurred to me that most of the badges I’ve read about don’t have an inscription. It’s not in any of the Cyrillic languages; I have the scanner trying to parse what it says. So there’s still some files. But not the high-quality original. I’m ticked off.
What I want, really, is to catch him in the act. But what act? He’s rarely even near the pod during the day, and at night we’re all there.
Maybe I’m just being paranoid.
After all, he’d say, you don’t have any evidence. And if he looked (gulp) he’d find, probably, traces that I’ve been in his files, too. But he wouldn’t give them to me if I asked. And I didn’t delete anything.
I would not want to tell V. or Eva, by the way, that the ISS crashed about five years after the end of the Setback. No survivors, of course, but no way of determining whether there were remains on board either. Only scraps were recovered from the ocean. Maybe they were spared, there. Maybe they weren’t.
October 3
The bloody agents go around stealing guns, emptying the city. Cleansing the city of ammunition till we are toothless. Oh, how I hate Them for that, hate Them. We are reduced to cavemen, to fighting with fists and nails and teeth and clubs, as if we had not even invented the spear. What are They so afraid of? And They are cracking down even more on gatherings; the number grows smaller and smaller, till we can meet and speak only in our handfuls. Any speck of light, any wisp of smoke, any betrayal of habitation is enough for Them to rush in and search.