Graft (37 page)

But there's something else. Something had roused her. A bleeping that's slowing. Slowing.

And she knows the sound.

Yasmin skitters across the tent, shakes Sol. He snaps awake, terrified. Close to his face, she jabs fingers in her ears, seals her third hand over her mouth.

“What?” he asks, bleary. “What is it?”

Yasmin scolds him without saying a word.

Sol's eyes widen.

“They know we're here?”

Yasmin shakes her head.

Panicked, a woolly mouth: “No?”

Yasmin tenses in frustration. She moves away from Sol and signals for him to watch her. Then she sweeps a flat hand across the matting.

Sol coughs. “Drones?”

Yasmin repeats the action with a sucking noise.

“A sweep?”

Yasmin clicks and hops towards the door. Sol massages his ankles under the tongues of his boots and unzips his peacoat. He's surprised to not see steam.

“Is… is it getting closer?” he asks, rubbing his eyes. Dried blood comes off his skin like dandruff. “Yasmin…”

The bleeping stops.

Yasmin reapplies her weight to the tent's door. Carefully, Sol joins her, convinced for a moment that there's a Luger pistol in her hand. He closes his eyes; listens to feet and equipment moving around the tent. A group fanning out to encircle them.

“Hold,” he hears.

Now they're banging on the walls. Sol sinks into the floor. Across the tent, the window darkens.

Enclosed.

Any second. Any moment now…

Finally someone speaks. Muted. The scraping feet of someone waiting impatiently. “Here,” they say. A man's voice: deep, discordant: bit-crushed by its relay.

“And here,” somebody else says. A woman, and no less unsettling.

They've tracked our prints
.

“Let us in, let us in,” the man says. “Or we'll blow your house down.”

Yasmin reaches for Sol's hand, holds it steadfast in two of her own. With her third she digs the Luger tightly into her side, and he can't stop looking at it.

“Grab the charges,” the man outside says.

The shadow on the rear window withdraws as a monumental figure bends down to peer inside. Their face is obscured, but Yasmin recognizes trolley team garb. To Sol they look future-military – tactical in extremis. Whoever it is standing on powered stilts.

The operative slides off their cowl, and Yasmin gasps.

Fi.

The woman recoils simultaneously, apparently overloaded with information. A young woman she recognizes beside a middle-aged man she doesn't. The young woman with a vintage sidearm. Each of them exhibiting the body language of prey.

Sensing her fluster, Fi's suit flashes proximity lasers, parses escape vectors. She thinks:
This is a serious fucking breach.
Then, against all protocol, she yells into her mic: “Don't blow it! Don't blow the door! It's empty. It's
empty
!”

Sol squeezes Yasmin. But she's all in –

“Then who locked it?” the team leader shouts back. “Are you
positive,
Fiona?”

“It's clear,” Fi shouts.

“I told them this box needed a service,” the man mutters. “Pinging concrete for shits and giggles.”

“What's going on?” Sol hisses. “Who's that…”

But Yasmin is riveted to Fi, as if blinking might expose the operative as an apparition.

Fi tilts her head.
Come here
. Yasmin glides over and places her hands on the glass. Fi leans closer.

“You've lost your hat,” Fi says. A melancholy in her voice. Then, more distantly, “You can't be here.”

Sol blunders across the matting. Headrush. Dark blotches. “You know her?” he asks. It sounds so trite, so useless.

The operative's breath frosts on the glass. She ignores him. Such an odd face she's pulling.

Sol is cut out; left to observe. He fingers the crusting scabs of his cuts, the plates of dead skin round his mouth.

“Please don't stay here,” Fi says. “Whatever you're doing, they'll–”

A device cheeps on Fi's body. She swats at her chest plate, a practised response. Angled into the sun, her buckles flash. “Yes, I'm coming,” she says. A harmonic in the “yes” glides across the glass. She frowns.

Yasmin pulls her hands away from the window, leaving three oily prints.

Fi holds up a fingerless glove. “Now we're even,” she says. “Now we're square.”

I
t's
Yasmin's turn to sleep. On waking they'll leave – motions agreed through their personal semaphore; Sol filled with an irrepressible dread at the idea of what might be ahead.

He holds out Roy's Luger as if aiming for a distant target, then lies it flat on his palm. It's missing its magazine, he believes, hardly the protection Yasmin envisaged. Yet to him it's a talisman nonetheless. Where had she found it?

Aim again. Sweep the tent. The structure's three conjoined walls are aerated like sea sponge, and remind Sol of the pegwall panelling back in the workshop – the system they, or he, imposed for racking tools. The workshop feels a long way away now, but like his job, the pegboard meant something: a shrine to control in a society collapsing. A distraction from a relationship failing at home. It was reassuring, actually, that even here, even at such extremes, he could seek and find order. It calms him. It rallies him. This might be the ideal place to rehang his photo collage, create a new vista – a triptych. Because, he realizes, a certain kind of security comes with imposing yourself on an alien space.

Roy, though. Roy's end. Sol reflects on all the ways Roy was free, and feels a kind of envy. Sol's spaces were the workshop and the rooms between four walls of a pokey flat. The cars that ran him between. Cells, in hindsight. Roy, though – Roy lived rootless, free on the road.

Aim it. Aim it again.

If they wait here, will the squad return? Almost definitely. He still can't work out why the woman outside had spared them. Something mutual – some contact, some connection; God knows Yasmin has a presence, a certain way of unpicking you. Is it weird to assume the woman was involved in Yasmin's trafficking? He thinks about the logistics of it, the chances of that, and ends up spiralling. Yasmin knew the camp was at the top of the mountain they climbed. She understands this terrain. And this is the other conundrum: she also told him she exited through the tower. How had they skipped it?
Where
is the tower, if not at the bottom of the mountain?

What had the workers shouted back in Sellafield? It's half-remembered now, a gauze applied. There'd been such strain in the workers' voices that something wasn't right. That the crates were empties.

Sol thinks:
Heads or harps
.

There had to be two sides to each coin. So where was the other side of Sellafield?

That isn't Plastic! You'll have trolley teams tripping on wreckage for weeks…

Did they really move people up and down this cruel slope? And if they don't make it, what will the future make of their remains? Sol and Yasmin, their rags disintegrated around them; the leather of his boots, the heavy cotton of his peacoat. This concrete tent a tomb, their burial chamber, or mistaken for a staging pod, used for unknown travel by unknown means. Or then again part of some ancient lift system, like a cable car station, whose other workings – pulleys and cables and joists – were lost.

Now Sol sees their spooning figures as pressed flowers under the Slope. Archaeologists dusting down Yasmin's biomods with soft brushes before excavating and reassembling her for a museum case. Would Sol sink further than her, being heavier? That seems fitting enough – seems fair. She would be so fascinating. A marvel of science…

And yet reducing her to raw mechanics isn't fair at all. There'd be nothing left of her personality. Her doggedness. Her funny sort of humour, come to that. And Sol would be better off as nothing – leaving brittle bones yet no trace of pride or selfishness – no clues about his amateur artistry, his past, his time with Mel and his life without her…

The wind picks up. Sol looks at the door. Nervy movements. Steady your hands.
Aim again.

Not wind, in fact, but a sudden, distant rumble.

Yasmin sleeps on as dust bobbles up in the floor's gaps, as an engine vibrates the walls. It sounds like a half-track. The sound of riots –

Sol wipes his nose, sips more water. His body in ribbons. He weighs his back against the door and wills her awake. Yet the ponderous vehicle passes without disturbing her. Just as she was in standby, she's almost unnaturally still – a
skilful
sleeper.

“You kip on,” he says out loud, then shakes his head. His father's voice:
You're losing it, boy.
His stomach's watery, and he puts a hand to it. “OK,” he says. “No.” Then to Yasmin, unable to tell if he's really kneeling down to her on one knee or having a premonition.

“Sleepyhead,” he says. “Wake up.”

Yasmin's pupils pop with green-optic flash. “Hi, bright eyes.” She's up in one balletic movement, fists raised in defence. “It's me,” Sol tells her. “Only me.”

Yasmin pulls a parody of a smile.

“Still know the way?”

The tent darkens. Through the rear window, a single cloud, edged in purple, has moved over the sun.

F
rom the concrete
tent they run arm-in-arm over fractured terrain, powder squeaking under their boots.

Ahead, the vehicle that passed churns its way up the hill, and the two of them follow between its tracks. Yasmin seems almost content to move this way, despite Sol's nerviness, their obvious silhouettes against the white background. Frankly she's past caring – enjoying the kind of confidence that generally manifests in hubris. But hubris is only really hubris if you choose to feel ashamed. While her makers had obviously tried to install that sense in her – make shame her default setting, even – it hasn't worked. And now comes her reckoning.

“Security,” Sol says, meaning the half-track. “Must be a patrol.”

Yasmin doesn't let on. The trail leads upwards in switchbacks towards the ridge, topping out by the main camp.

“Do we keep following it?” Sol asks. “Does it take us where you want to go?”

Yasmin ignores him again. She's willing the house to come into view; eager for it to appear, to invigorate her. And anyway: the vehicle looks exactly like the half-track that brought her from the mansion to the camp. She's angry that Sol can't understand this – that naturally they should follow it.

Then the half-track halts. A snap, a dropped gear. Something grinding. The engine cuts out, and Sol's guts drop. “Over there,” he urges, grabbing Yasmin by her doubled shoulder and hurrying to the steep escarpment that falls away from the trail to open Slope. They leap over the bank and press themselves into rubble on the other side.

“Did they clock us?”

Yasmin crawls up to the edge to canvas. She hisses and points to an area next to the vehicle.
No
. Sol joins her, squinting; follows her finger to an outhouse just off to its right. Then a hatch in the half-track opens, and two operatives climb out.

“What are they doing?”

Moments later, the operatives start pulling blank boxes and crates from the outhouse door and loading them on to the half-track.

“Supplies,” Sol whispers. “A store. Must be for the camp.”

Yasmin nods.

“We could take them,” he adds, and his nonchalance shocks him. It illustrates a kind of alteration; things he's willing to do that only a week ago he'd baulk at. Is it Roy's gun? Or did the changes in him gestate, enter mitosis, when Irish jumped across that Lexus bonnet?

“The house you told me about,” Sol says. “You said you woke alone in a house.”

Yasmin nods.

“That's where we're going, isn't it? That's where he is.”

Yasmin points up the ridge.

Sol nods. “When these two have gone, let's see what's in that store.”

T
hey could be in a crater
. They could be lost in a gas giant's sweep.

Sol hitches the sports bag up his shoulder as they reach the store. Another unsophisticated structure, flat-roofed, whose uncoated cinderblock walls teem with conveyor entrances and service hatches. Yasmin tugs at Sol's sleeve and gestures to the ridge. There's an armed patrol moving around the perimeter.

“Don't worry,” Sol says. “They can't see us.”

Sol and Yasmin pop the door. Striplights, a suspended ceiling. Mezzanine storage. A cursory check: no humans, no surveillance. The supply boxes are unnervingly neat – stacked, tagged, palleted – and their heads track across the space, lingering on the far corner. IN crates. Yasmin crackles. A staging post on the road to transfiguration –

The storeroom's hard walls give Sol a false sense of security. He starts leafing through a supply crate. Below foam packing material he finds dry foods, powder sachets, drip bags. Nothing especially strange. The glyphs, however – the sister-world's language – seem more prevalent than they had in Sellafield's storage area. He thinks:
For internal use only
, and inspects a packing slip – a little piece of plastic-coated fabric covered in iconography. On it, a vertical string of icons marks out what he presumes are stops on the route. He can't read the words, but they correspond in part to his theory about the base of the mountain – the place the Sellafield workers called Plastic. The bottom-most icon is a cooling tower, while the middle icon – crossed out – is a tepee. The topmost icon shows a house with a tick next to it.

Tower. Camp. House.

Sol opens more crates, analyzes more packing slips.

Finds more ticks.

“This stuff's going up to your house,” he tells her. “Christ. All of it.” Eerie light falls through ventilation slats in the gable end, casting barred patterns on the crates. “See for yourself. It's all going that way.”