Ironheart (2 page)

‘I said stay where you are.’

She kicked her legs and spluttered muddy water but the hand kept her firmly pinned down. She was scared now too, scared and angry with herself. Because she’d done the one thing that only
dumb people did: she’d got caught by southsiders.

India struggled against the heavy grip to no effect. The more she kicked and thrashed, the more firmly she was held in place.

‘Calculus, stop it, leave her alone!’ The woman’s voice sounded close by and India was immediately released. She wriggled away across the mud. But when she turned and caught
sight of her attacker she cried out in alarm.

The creature was taller than anyone in her village, with a face that was hidden behind a long helmet. The body was slim and smooth, wrapped in a flexible metal skin that suggested a ripple of
muscle and fibre beneath. The powerful legs were tensed and the midsection was pulled into a tight spring-steel abdomen. This was not a man at all but something else altogether, something
she’d only read about in musty, waterlogged books, something she knew to be dangerous.

She scrabbled in her pocket for a small metal tube and felt its familiar weight in her hand. When she flicked the button on the side it crackled to life and the tip glowed with a blue light.
‘Get away from me,’ she growled. ‘This shock stick’s got a full charge. It’ll take your head right off.’

The creature looked at her curiously.

‘Stand down, Calculus.’ The woman scrambled down the bank towards them. She was lean and muscular, with a strong face and brown skin that suggested she had spent a lot of time out of
doors. She frowned at India. ‘Why were you spying on us?’

India could tell she was American because her dad had often imitated the voices of the Americans he worked with. He called them ‘Yanks’. This was the first time India had ever heard
one for real. ‘Why did you steal my water?’ she shot back, sounding braver than she felt. She threw the broken lock on the ground. The woman held up a small water bottle.

‘We only took what we needed,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to be afraid, we’re not southsiders.’

‘I’m not afraid,’ said India. She noticed that the woman wore a pistol on her belt.

The woman fumbled in her satchel and then lit a small cigar. ‘I have business with Mrs Roshanne Bentley,’ she said, exhaling blue smoke. ‘I was told she lives on the North
Shores. Do you know where we can find her?’

‘Who wants to know?’

‘Verity Brown.’ The woman held out a small card. ‘I work for the Trans-Siberian Mining Company. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?’

India had certainly heard of it. She darted forward and snatched the card from the woman’s fingers. It was white, with the words ‘Trans-Siberian’ in blue, circling a map of the
northern globe. The same picture she remembered seeing on the front of her father’s overalls. Underneath, the card read:
Verity Brown (Mrs) – Salvage Agent.
The woman folded
her arms and waited for an answer while the machine creature stood patiently at her side.

‘That’s a robot, isn’t it?’ said India.

‘He’s not a robot, he’s an android, the only one of his kind left. He’s my bodyguard.’ A tiny smile appeared at the corner of Verity Brown’s mouth.
‘Doesn’t hurt to have protection. You never know who’s going to come after you with a deadly weapon, do you?’

India lowered the shock stick slowly and put it back in her pocket. She wasn’t quite ready to trust these people yet but she was pretty sure they weren’t southsiders. She stood up
and wiped the worst of the mud off her canvas trousers, taking a closer look at the android as she did so. She could see he was old, really old, from a time before the Great Rains when they’d
known how to make things like that. He had a large dent in his skull and the surface of his body was scored and pitted. There was a crack across his visor and a panel in his chest had been replaced
by a piece of rusty sheet steel held in place with rivets. He was the most incredible creature she had ever seen.

‘Can it talk?’ she asked.

‘Of course I can talk,’ said the android. His voice sounded richly amplified from somewhere within his body.

India thought she might have insulted it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve never met anything, I mean anyone, like you before.’ She wondered what was the proper
way to address an android. ‘He’s pretty cool,’ she said to Verity. ‘Does he kill people for you?’

‘Perhaps you could just tell us where to find Mrs Bentley’s house,’ said Verity, avoiding the question. ‘I need to talk to her about her husband.’

‘What d’you want to know about my dad?’ said India, then she quickly bit her lip.

‘Ah!’ said Verity. ‘So you must be one of the daughters.’ She looked at the piece of paper in her hand. ‘Bella, maybe or . . .’

‘India.’ She cursed for having given herself away. ‘We live down there.’

Verity Brown looked along the shoreline where India pointed and stamped out her cigar. ‘We need to visit your mother, India. I need her help with an important matter.’

‘She’s not my mother,’ said India quickly. ‘My dad remarried after Mum died.’

Verity nodded thoughtfully. ‘OK, well we need to see your stepmother then, but we need to do it quietly. The village guards won’t be happy if they see us.’

India looked from Verity to the android and back again. ‘You’ll never get as far as our house,’ she said. ‘The guards have got dogs and guns.’

‘Don’t worry, Calculus will get us past them.’ She flashed a smile. ‘But I need to know that I can trust you, India. It’s important you don’t give us away
before we speak to Mrs Bentley Can you do that?’

India looked at the strange couple again. ‘Maybe.’

‘I guess that’ll have to do,’ said Verity. ‘Let’s shake on it.’ She extended a hand, which India shook awkwardly. ‘We’ll wait out here until it
gets a bit darker. Tell your stepmother we’ll be along to the house later. Will anyone else be there?’

India thought about Roshanne’s perfectly arranged dinner party for Mr Clench and smiled. ‘Oh, no!’ she said. ‘We’ve got nothing planned for this evening at
all.’

She watched the two strangers disappear back into the surrounding gloom and then made her way back to the village, her head dancing after the strange encounter. Verity Brown was so completely
different to anyone she had ever met and as for the android, well, if you had a bodyguard like that, she reckoned you could do just about anything you wanted. She smiled as she thought what she
could do to Mehmet if she had her own android.

She was so busy with her thoughts that she didn’t notice she had arrived at the village gates, a pair of heavy iron and oak doors, set into the fortified earthworks surrounding the
village.

‘Who goes there?’ The voice snarled at her from behind the closed gates.

‘It’s me, India,’ she said in a small voice.

The door groaned open a crack and three burning torches emerged, wielded by three burly men. Mehmet stood in the middle, holding a black dog that grunted and whimpered on the leash; the other
two held shotguns.

‘India! What’re you doing out?’ growled Mehmet, glaring at her. ‘It’s an hour past curfew You’ll get yourself shot and I won’t be held
responsible.’

‘Didn’t Cromerty tell you?’ she said. ‘I got held up. I had a bit of trouble at the well.’

‘Trouble?’ The word carried electricity. The men bristled and stroked their guns. ‘What sort of trouble? Did you see anyone out there, India?’

She gulped. Looking at Mehmet’s red eyes and the grim looks on the faces of his men, she felt suddenly afraid for Verity Brown. ‘No, nothing like that. The lid got stuck, that was
all. It just took me awhile to get it free.’

But Mehmet wasn’t listening. He pushed past her and peered into the gloom. ‘Southsiders was up at Holloway yesterday,’ he said. ‘They took some goats and shot Gab Watling
in the leg.’ He stared into the distance and growled. ‘They’re out there again tonight, I can smell ’em.’ He turned to his men. ‘Go and get the rest of the dogs
and fan out along the shoreline. We’ll flush them troublemakers out and string them up in the trees.’

‘No!’ said India, too quickly. ‘I mean there’s no one there. I’d have seen them if there was, you can see all around here from the well.’ She was further into
the lie than she wanted to be but she couldn’t back out now.

Mehmet studied her for long seconds. ‘All right,’ he said, dismissing her with a jerk of his head. ‘Get home then.’

Relieved, but still worried for Verity Brown, she pushed her way through the ugly group.

‘I hear your mum’s got Mr Clench coming over,
again
,’ Mehmet shouted after her. The way he paused before he said ‘again’ said everything about what he was
thinking. The other men sniggered.

‘Roshanne’s not my mum,’ India shouted back over her shoulder.

She walked quickly down a rutted lane, past the tangled heaps of salvaged steel waiting to be fed into the flaming jaws of the village smelter. The stink of burning rubber made her hold her
breath.

Their cottage was a damp, stone building that stood apart from the others near the edge of the water. Her heart sank as she walked up the path and saw her stepmother standing by the kitchen
door, radiating impatience.

‘What sort of time do you call this? I’ve been waiting all afternoon for those fish. This dinner won’t cook itself, you know.’ Roshanne Bentley’s untidy smear of
red lipstick was coming off on her cigarette. She wore a pair of satin slippers and her best lounging robe. Once richly embroidered, it was now threadbare and faded to a ghost of its former colour.
The hem was damp and muddy from the house puddles.

India pushed past her stepmother and dropped the wet sacking on to the kitchen table. ‘That’s all I could get. The rest were boneheads.’

Roshanne looked distastefully at the crushed and broken fish inside the damp parcel. ‘Is that
it?
How am I supposed to feed our guest with that? Where the hell have you been all
afternoon?’

‘I just went to check on the well,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

‘What,
again
? Sometimes I think that wretched well is just an excuse for you to sit around on the hillside while I slave away after you and your sister.’

India snorted at the thought that her stepmother might slave after anyone. Roshanne never emerged from her bedroom before midday and certainly never bothered with anything as mundane as
housework.

‘Why don’t you just put chemicals in the water like everyone else?’ said Roshanne. ‘Then you might have time to give me a bit more help around here.’

‘The chemicals kill off the fish,’ said India wearily.

Roshanne picked a stray bonehead from the sacking and dropped it outside the back door with a shudder. ‘A good thing too,’ she said. ‘Personally I couldn’t give a stuff
about the fish and I’m sure your hole in the ground would still be there if you left it alone for one night. I have to say I’m heartily sick to death of working my fingers to the bone
in this ghost town of a village. It’s no way to live for someone with my background.’

India sighed. Roshanne was not entirely wrong about the emptiness of the village. As the southsider attacks had got worse, so more and more of her friends’ families had moved away. It
didn’t help that the few people who were left tended to avoid their house because of Roshanne’s snobbery. India had got used to spending a lot of time on her own.

‘It’s tough for everyone,’ she said in a weary voice.

‘Not everyone, India.’ Roshanne parked the cigarette in the corner of her mouth and began to sever the heads from the little fish and pull out their insides. ‘Fortunately there
are still some people who understand the importance of good breeding.’ A clump of ash fell on the chopping board. ‘At least Mr Clench knows how to live with style.’

The previous year, Thaddeus Clench had bought the largest house on the north shores and instantly became the subject of great discussion in the village. Some said he’d been a slave farmer
in the West Country, while others said he’d made a fortune as a pirate rigger – or that he was a gold prospector who’d once killed a man in cold blood. He had first appeared in
their house at her father’s memorial service, when he’d stayed behind after the other guests had left, to ‘comfort the grieving widow’. Then he had put his arm around India,
urging her in a beery voice to ‘call me Uncle Thaddeus’. After that he had started to come to dinner regularly in spite of Roshanne’s truly disgusting cooking.

India dug her hands deep in her trouser pockets and curled her lip. ‘I’m not that hungry tonight. I thought I might just stay in my room.’

‘Oh no, young lady!’ Roshanne wagged the knife at her. ‘Mr Clench will arrive in one hour and I need you here.’

India’s suspicions were aroused. ‘Why do I have to be here?’

Roshanne rolled her eyes and let out one of her ‘give-me-strength sighs. ‘You might not think it’s important to have influential friends, India, but one day you’ll learn
the value of being well connected. When Mr Clench arrives I want you to be well presented so please make an effort. Why don’t you wear a dress for a change?’ Her voice took on an oily
tone. ‘You’d look nice in a dress.’