Four days after she returned to the camp, Gabby phoned Dad. I was making us pasta when the call came through. A tension came over him, hunched there, a reed too brittle to bend. I thought at first it must be the police.
But no. The farce I had made of everything just rolled on and on, a wave too powerful to check.
‘Sara never even turned up at the camp.’ He came forward and embraced me. I put my arms round him. I felt him shake. I held him, keeping him together. This again. This again, and always – keeping Dad whole against the wrack thrown up by Mum.
The river ran slow and deep along sunken cuttings. The banks were sand, and the river had cut itself a deep bed, but nowhere did it run particularly fast. There were bathing pools, or what would have made bathing pools, but they were very deep. The banks had the consistency of damp sugar, and the water ran milky brown, always.
Something the size and shape of a human corpse could not have floated far downstream. This whole stretch of river was one complex muddy snare. There was too much growth. There were too many pools, and too many reed beds, too many soft, estuarine places, almost-channels, forks. There were too many trees. She must have fetched up somewhere, bloated and bleached, with the plastic bag still wrapped round her head. Once she was found (someone was going to have to find her, eventually) it was going to be obvious to everyone that Mum’s was no simple suicide. Suicides do not asphyxiate themselves then leap into millraces. She had had assistance. She had had company. She had had someone get rid of her body. When they found her – and someone was bound to find her – their first thought was not going to be suicide. It was going to be murder.
I had to get the bag off. I had to find her and take the bag from off her head.
The nights were drawing in. When I got home from school, the conservatory was so cold I could see my own breath in the light of the porch lamp. I stepped inside and reached for the wall switch—
No. I drew my hand back, breathing clouds of light into the dark.
I passed through our rooms and out among the halls and landings of the hotel. The empty rooms nagged at me. The place was virtually mothballed now. Wounded servicemen were no longer being billeted with us, and Dad, with all his worries, had neither the time nor the will to spirit up yet another clientele.
Mum’s presence had held together, by the weight of its demands, a home that made very little sense now that she was gone. Relieved of the pressure she exerted, the place was flying apart – drawing room and dining room and bar and check-in desk. Our own apartments, too, were getting bigger and colder.
No one vanishes like that. A splash and gone. Not there. Not without help.
Help, then. Since she was not found. Not then. Not later. Helped to die. A fear bred in the dark. Who really has the nerve to tape a bag around their own throat? Who really pulls a boot lid down on themselves. More to the point, how?
I answered the last question myself, while Dad was out. The boot lid was double-hulled. There was a cut-out in the plastic, strong enough to haul the lid down, if you lay inside. I lay there in the boot, fingering the hole, horrified at the strength of the temptation that gripped me then, to pull the lid down over me, as she had done.
As for the rest, I had no answers. At night I lay awake, haunted by scraps of memory. A haloed figure. Hair as white as mist. His zipper coming down. Insane. Absurd. But in this season of mists and shadows I could not help remembering that I had left her on the platform with him. His erection white and hard and as long as a dagger. His loamy hands.
Dad kept records of our guests on the laptop behind the check-in desk. The photographs all seemed to have been taken in the same room, against the same wall – as though the country’s entire military had climbed one by one out of the same tank, and left by the same magnolia-painted corridor into the bleak, wet light of the same car park.
Everyone sported the same regulation haircut. There were a handful of blonds but none of the ones with the lightest hair – hair that might just be albino-white if they grew it out – looked like the soldier I remembered. Perhaps his hair had turned white after the photograph was taken, bleached by a nameless terror as in a second-rate ghost story.
Face folded into face until I could no longer call to mind what my quarry looked like. So much for that.
FOURTEEN
Dogmen have me surrounded. They yip and slaver, waving crude knock-off AKs, their bandoliers glittering in the Middle’s glass reflections of a red and bloated sun. The streets are swimming in their oil-black blood but still they mass, overcoming the city’s defences.
‘Up here!’ A rookie firewoman grabs my hand; a fizzing sensation courses up my arm. ‘Come on!’ She moves up the stairwell ahead of me with an athletic, pneumatic grace. I struggle to keep up with her. Sweat runs into my eyes. Behind me comes a sick and frantic skittering – engineered claws on polished tile. They’re after us.
‘In here!’ She’s found a portal. She pauses, chest heaving, waiting for me to plunge my fist into the fizzing blue-green wall. The amulet on my arm glows dazzling white and the portal shreds itself clear and we find ourselves newly arrived at the municipal command centre, nerve ganglion of the dying city.
The armies of the Augmented are already massing at the gates. The best we can do now is set the place to self-destruct, robbing them of their prize. If they seize control of the city and its weaponry, then there can be no hope for the human diaspora pouring from the gates.
The command centre is built on many levels, balconies and mezzanines. Droids, faceless and beneficent, tend and mend its little fires and short-outs. We move among them as they carry equipment from one place to another.
(The shopping mall, so secure and so surveilled, provided us with countless camera points. Layering real-time AR over its surfaces, tenants and clientele has been a joy. The trouble is the mall itself – it’s far too well-designed. People move round this place so calmly, we have had to cast them as faceless ‘bots’. Even so, their lack of urgency kicks a sizeable hole in a game that is, after all, about action. We should have gone for our first idea and cast the shoppers as zombies. But we had neither the time nor the resources to engineer how the undead might react to a player’s presence. Bared bloody fangs, and flailing arms (barely attached: one falls off and crawls away – a neat sight gag), and the judicious application of projectile vomit – we had all these ideas storyboarded, and abandoned them with reluctance. According to our game bible, the bots – their heads as blank as eggs, their limbs a liquid chrome – are attempting a hopeless repair of the city’s failing systems. Frankly they look like what they are: shoppers, laden with bags and pushing prams, all hidden and homogenised under the most cursory AR skinning.)
A scream is cut off mid-flow by a blinding light and glass shatters. The firewoman hesitates, reels, and turns. A shard of blue glass as big as a meat cleaver has pierced her chest. Blood flecks her mouth as she tries to speak. ‘Kill the . . . the city.’ (Christ, how did this stunt get through QA?) ‘Save . . . the . . .’
She falls into me, already rotting and crumbling as nano-engineered bacteria pronounce her clinically dead and therefore ripe for scavenging. Her breadcrumb corpse collides with me – a shivering rain and a little breeze. And on the breeze, a word – ‘w-o-r-l-d’ – and she is gone. My only helpmate on this level. Dead. Kill the city. Save the world. I am alone.
Scritch scratch.
A dogman has emerged from the portal. Grenades hang from leather belts criss-crossed over its heaving silver chest. Round its middle finger, raised in obscene insult to the human world, the pin, on its little wire ring, still dangles. He shakes it free of its claw and it lands on the floor with a bright sound. The dogman pulls its lips back in a grin and howls. How on earth did this monster get through the portal? The portal’s supposed to be locked to everyone but—