Tamaruq (44 page)

The passengers hug one another, hug Ramona. For a while they are unable to let one another go. They are all weeping openly, and Ramona makes no attempt now to contain her own tears.

The Alaskan is dreaming. In the dream she is rattling along the rough track of a barren landscape on an old solar-cycle. There is no end to the track. It goes on, perhaps forever. There is a purpose to the journey but the Alaskan has forgotten what it is, only that she must keep going at all costs. The sky is red and apocalyptic and from time to time Jurassic birds flap across it in great flocks, and their calls sear the air like the calls of the last residents on earth. As she rounds an outcrop of rocks the Alaskan is confronted with a field of enormous solar panels, stretching away in front of her for as far as she can see. And she sees that the track stops where the solar panels begin. The only way across is to ride over the solar panels, which will result in burning, in the complete excoriation of her skin, in certain death. And while she is contemplating her next action, the Alaskan is dimly aware that she has been to this place before, that the solar fields of the Corporation are not unknown to her, and one by one the panels begin to turn towards her, swivelling on their stands with measured, robotic intelligence. When they all face in her direction the Alaskan knows what will happen next. They will collect the sunlight into a great lance and it will blind her.

Mig bursts into the Alaskan’s room, upsetting one of the radios as he enters. The boy fumbles to pick it up but drops it again almost immediately in his excitement.

The Alaskan rubs at her eyes. The shadows of giant birds continue to march slowly across the backs of her eyelids. She feels groggy. Disorientated. This is what comes of wallowing in the past.

‘Try and have a little care, won’t you? What is it?’

Mig sets the radio straight. He is panting with exertion.

‘The pilot. She’s back.’

The Alaskan struggles upright in her chair.

‘Good work, Mig. Very good work. You need to find her, right away.’

She thinks but doesn’t add:
before Xiomara hears the news.

When the boy is gone she looks around the sparse rented room. At the radios. The information. It’s done its purpose. Perhaps soon she’ll be bidding farewell to this sequestered country after all.

Ramona accompanies her mother and the crew of survivors as far as Arturo’s Place in the harbour town and leaves them there to decompress. They’ll talk of course, but she isn’t worried about that; it won’t do any harm for them to tell the world their story – the faster and more widely it’s broadcast, the more chance they have of action against the Boreals. She looks longingly at the interior of the bar, with its worn, comfortable seating, and offerings of wine and rum. A number of leisurely card games are in progress and Ramona is struck by the slowness of everything, the little hubbub that their entrance has generated. Nazca keep us but she could do with a drink herself.

Leaving Inés, she hesitates.

‘You’ll be all right here, Ma? I’ll be as quick as I can.’

Inés gives her a look of what can only be described as outrage. Reassured, Ramona continues on her way.

Heading up through the harbour town to the Facility she notes the hurried, distracted appearance of those out on the streets. There are more soldiers visible than usual. Residents are staggering home under the weight of their purchases, or have children in tow, carrying extra bundles. Stockpiling, she thinks. Something’s happening here. Or something’s about to happen. But despite the tension in the air, everything looks disconcertingly as it was. The old road up the hill is quiet. Here are the soldiers’ billets, here are the gates to the Facility, the checkpoint, and the face of the young soldier waving her through is familiar, unchanged. Here is the approach to the building that was once a centre for the architects of the forsaken sea city, Osiris, a pathway she has walked a thousand times. Could Osiris really be out there, as Félix suggested in Panama? She thinks again about those Antarctican ships and her misgivings double.

In the lobby, old Eduardo greets her like a woman risen from the dead, which she supposes she is, and certainly feels like, seeing his face. The reaction wrong-foots her. Eduardo tells her the government are in session.

‘In session? Why?’

‘It’s a crisis meeting.’ Eduardo is visibly teetering between the importance of the situation – whatever it is – and intense curiosity about where Ramona has been and why and how she has come back. But Ramona has no inclination for mind games.

‘Dammit, Ed, this is urgent. I need to see them now. Is Lygia here?’

Ramona’s boss appears almost as shocked as Eduardo to find her errant pilot standing in the lobby. Once again Ramona explains the urgency of the situation. Seeing Eduardo’s expectant face she drags Lygia into the canteen, which is mercifully empty of customers. The clang of pots and pans filters through the kitchen shutters. She tells Lygia about the compound in the desert. About her mother. About the diaries. Lygia listens. When Ramona describes the experiments in their glass cubicles Lygia lifts a hand as though to push away the image, then drops it again. When Ramona has finished, Lygia sits in silence.

‘Machines,’ she says at last. She looks about the canteen, seeking concurrence from an audience who are not present. ‘They’re machines.’

‘You see why I need to get in there?’

Lygia shakes her head slowly. Ramona can see her weighing things up as she struggles to make sense of this awful truth. She even looks empathetic. Ramona’s hopes raise, only to crash again in the next moment.

‘You can’t interrupt them now, Ramona. They’re in a crisis meeting. I don’t suppose you’ve heard but the shit’s hit the fan. The lost city?’ Lygia drops her voice, then looks annoyed at herself for pandering to such absurd conventions. ‘Osiris,’ she says firmly. ‘Osiris is out there. Talk about a revelation, eh? First the Boreals invaded, now the Antarcticans.’ Lygia shakes her head. ‘It’s a clusterfuck.’

‘Lygia, are you listening to me at all? I’m telling you the Boreals are kidnapping,
experimenting
on Patagonians and you’re keeping me standing here? I need to tell people what’s going on! They’ve got to do something!’

‘Ramona, I hear you, and by the arse of the fucking whale it’s horrendous, but there’s a war breaking out in our back yard and we’ve got one side camped on our doorstep. This is an emergency! Whatever shit the Boreals are up to will have to wait. Come back in a few hours, they might be done by then. But until this crisis is over, we can’t take any steps.’

‘I can’t believe this—’

Ramona’s boss lifts a warning finger.

‘And don’t think you’re getting away without an explanation. You’ve been missing for months. I want a full report.’

‘Lygia please! Listen to me!’

Lygia stands. She is walking away as she makes her parting shot.

‘A full report, Callejas!’

As she storms through the lobby, Ramona is aware of Eduardo goggling, his ears practically walking away from his head in his desperation to eavesdrop. Now her row with Lygia will be all over the archipelago within the hour.

Outside, she vents her rage upon the plant-choked walls of the Facility, kicking against the stonework until her sore, swollen feet shout with pain. On the walls beneath the foliage are the markings of the sea city. She feels like the place has been dogging her for months, riding on her back, that every time she turns her head it has ducked out of sight, unwilling to be seen. And now she can see clearly, and it’s shitting all over Patagonia.

How can Lygia have heard what she has just said and tell her to wait? How could anyone?

She’ll go back to Arturo’s. She’s in dire need of a finger of rum – or four. Striding back down the road, she lifts her head and howls her frustration to the wind.

‘Fuck this!
Fuck this!
’

From the top of the hill she can see the Antarctican ships dominating the strait. She starts to count them and gives up. Looking at the ships she remembers Taeo, the Antarctican who broke her aeroplane. She should have sought him out while she was in the Facility and given him a piece of her mind. Later, she thinks. It will do her good to shout at someone.

As the coastal track levels out, weaving into the buildings of the town, houses and storefronts and drinking houses, all quieter than usual, she passes other residents of the island, and she cannot suppress the images of those stricken people in their glass cubicles – their coffins – in Tamaruq. They are still in there. She couldn’t save them. She couldn’t even give them a dignified death. She’ll see them every day for the rest of her life. Each woman, man or child she passes in Fuego is a person at risk, a person who might be stolen away in the night. Davida Akycha Kvest is dead, but the raiders who took Inés and the others are still out there. Even now they might be targeting a village in the highlands.

Heading in the opposite direction towards her is a small, slight figure. There’s something vaguely familiar about the walk, but not enough to make Ramona stop. She’s not in the mood for pleasantries or remonstrations.

The pilot marches right past without even acknowledging him. Mig spins on his heel and runs after her.

‘Hey! Hey, señora, remember me?’

She ignores him, striding along with her chin held high, deftly sidestepping anyone in her way. Mig hurries to keep up.

‘Hey! I was in Cataveiro. Remember?’

He catches her wrist.

‘I helped you with the salt woman.’

The pilot turns and snatches her arm away. Nothing about her face is approachable.

‘What do you want?’

‘I helped you with the salt woman,’ Mig repeats. ‘In Cataveiro.’

She looks at him properly then. Her face moves from anger to confusion to a dawning recognition. She looks different from what he remembers. Her hair. It’s shorter. Ragged. Her face is tired.

‘Cataveiro,’ she says, approaching the word cautiously.

‘Cataveiro,’ says Mig.

‘What do you want?’ she says again.

‘My employer has a proposition for you.’

The pilot keeps walking. Mig jogs along beside her.

‘Who’s your employer?’

‘The Alaskan.’

‘Why would I want to talk to her?’ says the pilot. But she slows her pace.

‘You’ll want to,’ Mig assures her. The pilot finally stops. She faces him. People carry on around them: a woman carrying a crate of fish, a man with headphones and a personal radio, adjusting the station, perhaps tuning into the same long-range channels that Mig and the Alaskan have been monitoring. Mig senses the pilot weighing up her options. It seems to take her a long time.

‘All right,’ she says at last. ‘But this better be good.’

Ramona struggles to recall what she knows about the Alaskan. She has heard the name before, in Cataveiro, and outside of the city too, but never in any concrete way. The Alaskan’s reputation is more spirit than human, someone that can slip through the noon of day without leaving a witness. She doesn’t even know if the Alaskan is from Alaska, or if she’s truly a Boreal – after all, a name is just a front, a door which can sometimes be opened and sometimes not, and many Patagonians whose work is of a dubious nature take names for themselves in this way, subsuming their identities until their real names are forgotten altogether. If Ramona knows one thing, she knows the Alaskan’s work is dubious.

Mig takes her to a house close to the harbour front. She can hear the gulls screeching as they fight over scraps in the air, and she can smell the brine. There’s a freshness to the sea air of the archipelago which is different to the hot haze of Panama or any other coast that Ramona has seen. Mig has a key. He lets them in, checking behind them, she notices, and instinctively she does too, although she sees nothing out of place.

The Alaskan is a frail woman in a wheelchair who appears to be listening to a dozen radio stations simultaneously. A woman who, in that first initial glance, reminds Ramona of her mother. The semblance dissipates in the next few seconds, when the Alaskan raises her head, redirecting all of her focus to Ramona, and Ramona undergoes the curious experience of being openly, unashamedly evaluated. This is a shrewd individual, used to control. The Alaskan’s irises are so dark they are almost black. A memory – something that was said, though she cannot think where or when – flickers at the back of Ramona’s mind, but she can’t retrieve it.

Having finished her assessment, the Alaskan begins the deliberate process of switching off the radios, one by one.

‘So you did come,’ she says.

‘Mig here says you have a proposition for me,’ says Ramona. She glances about the sparse, functional room. Few furnishings; no belongings that she can see, except the radios. This is a transitory setup. ‘I don’t know what it is but I don’t have much time.’

‘You may want to make time,’ says the Alaskan, silencing the final radio with a push of her index finger. Her other wrist, Ramona notes, has been recently broken, and doesn’t appear to have had much attention since.

The Alaskan turns herself to face Ramona.

‘Ramona Callejas, am I correct?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re the pilot.’

She thinks of
Colibrí
, abandoned, broken in the desert.

‘I was.’

‘Mig saw you return to the island.’

‘So what, you want a ride?’

The Alaskan looks at her steadily.

‘I’d make it
very
worth your while.’

Ramona feels an irrational sense of disappointment. No matter how exulted the customer, it always comes down to this. She’s just a carrier.

‘I have more important things to worry about than ferrying passengers.’

‘You haven’t asked where I want to go.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I won’t be going anywhere any time soon.’

‘And why is that?’ asks the Alaskan coyly.

‘Why would I tell you?’

‘Why not? You’re clearly preoccupied with something. You can’t even keep still, or look at me while you’re speaking. Sit down, share the load. Have a nougat.’

‘A nougat?’

The Alaskan shrugs.