Disharmony (28 page)

She did another sweep of her surroundings. She’d never seen a place so plush, so expensive, so airless. So completely alien to her life at home. She had to keep forcing herself to unwrinkle her nose. Everything smelled terrible! A disinfected, chemical fog that set her already tear-swollen eyes to watering again. She had an awful headache. Right now she felt that one gulp of camp air – the mountain breeze, Nuri’s black coffee, horse – would blow the pain right away. She sighed and drew her knees closer. When would she get to smell those things again?

Over the past few hours, especially since sunrise, she’d noticed a change in the type of passengers strolling past the wall of glossy magazines she’d parked herself behind. At first she’d seen tired couples with silver hair and sensible shoes, and young families bundling along with impeccably dressed, heavy-eyed children. But since six a.m., men and women marched in as singles, wearing suits and towing behind them black bags.

She wondered whether they could be some kind of army. They all smelled the same, dressed the same and constantly watched their watches. She focused on them – a little paranoid after everything Sera had told her – and wondered if perhaps they were some sort of secret service, here to monitor her. At first she figured that some of them were quite mad as they murmured quietly into thin air, until she noticed little earpieces. Her anxiety increased. She’d seen movies with spies wearing those.

She found only one difference between them – attached to most of their identical, expensive-looking wheelie bags was
a little charm: a yellow ribbon wrapped around a handle, a glittering star clipped to another, a plastic green frog lolling about on a zipper. She figured these must be amulets that had been blessed for luck.

Her stomach grumbled; whether it was with grief or hunger, she was beyond caring. Although Seraphina had told her repeatedly that she could eat anything she wanted in the lounge – for free! – she’d had nothing but juice. Mostly because the juice bar was just to the right of the magazine wall and she’d watched several people pour glasses for themselves. She figured she could do that without breaking something, bursting into tears, or setting off an alarm.

She had passed the food bar on her beeline to the corner booth. Her senses already completely dazzled by the lights of the airport shops, she’d stolen just a quick glance at the food laid out in cabinets of stainless steel and glass. Other than fruit and bread rolls, she hadn’t recognised anything there, and nothing smelled real. Not even the apples.

Once she’d sat down, she’d moved again only three times. Twice for juice and once for the toilet.

The toilet experience had threatened to bring the tears back.

Everything was so clean it almost stung. She’d tiptoed into the shiny, empty room, shocked by all the reflections of herself. She turned away from the wall of vanities but met herself again, sneakers to curls, in a full-length mirror.

And for a second – in the most opulent toilet she could imagine – she saw herself as the Gaje must. She wore her favourite sneakers – pink faux-Converse. She noticed holes that she’d never before cared about, and one of the laces had freed itself from the plastic tip on the end that had held
it together. It was fuzzed up like a stringy afro, and had apparently gone about gathering up burrs and grass seeds for extra adornment.

The waistband of her black faded jeans didn’t quite meet the hem of her aqua T-shirt, and she tugged it downwards to try to cover her flat, brown stomach. It snapped back, settling just above her hips, and for a moment she saw the now-clean T-shirt as it had been before Sera had hovered her hands over it in the Funhouse: covered in Tamas’s blood.

She pressed her fingers into her eyes to try to blur the sudden vision. It wasn’t until she’d been in the rental car that she’d realised her shirt was spotless and the stiffness of Tamas’s dried blood on her jeans had vanished.

Hating the sight of the shirt, she zipped up the black jacket Sera had given her. It smelled like leather, so she assumed it was, and right then she was glad she had it. The air in the airport seemed to be skin-temperature, but she felt she’d break out in shivers at any moment.

She studied her face in the mirror. There was no sign of the bruising from the skirmishes in Pantelimon – another apparent ‘gift’ from Sera – but her green eyes accused her from behind tear-swollen, red lids. Why are you doing this to me? they asked. She shrugged. She had no answers. She’d untied the golden cord from around her forehead. Her curls flopped into her eyes, but she thought she now looked maybe a smidge more like some of the other travellers she’d seen so far.

On the toilet, she’d pulled her tarot deck from her bag and wrapped the cord back around it, shoving the shiny box back inside before the deck made her cry again. It was the cards that had caused her all this trouble.

Back in her booth, Samantha chewed her thumbnail. What if it doesn’t work? she asked herself for the millionth time.

On a plastic seat just inside the glass doors of the airport, Seraphina had given her a few more items. The first was a wallet containing two boarding passes.

Sam now studied the pass. Surely they would have called her flight by now? What if she’d missed it? She couldn’t imagine how that could be the case – she’d memorised the flight number so many times it was on constant replay in her head. BA887. British Airways, Business Class, to Heathrow airport, London. A ninety-minute trip that would take her countries away from all her friends and family. And Tamas.

But it was the next part of the journey that really made her heart flutter. She’d been trying not to think about it. After a three-hour wait in London, she’d board a Qantas flight for Sydney, Australia. And she’d be in the sky for twenty-seven hours.

That wasn’t just countries. That was a
universe
away.

The only other thing in the wallet was a ticket of another type. Hours ago, she’d sat staring at it, her backside numb on the plastic seat just inside the airport doors.

‘Um, what’s this?’ she’d asked Sera, her voice thick. She hiccuped. She’d stopped crying half an hour or so before, but her body hadn’t seemed to have caught up with the fact.

‘That’s your passport,’ said Sera, matter-of-factly. ‘It’s also your visa, and any other travel document you’re asked to produce.’

‘Um, no, it’s not,’ said Samantha.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Sera.

Samantha looked at her, and then back at the small piece
of paper in her hand. She blinked. Hiccuped again.

‘It’s a ticket,’ she said finally, ‘to ride the
dodgem cars
at the Carnivale.’

‘Is it?’ said Sera.

‘It is,’ said Samantha.

‘Well, maybe you think so, pretty one,’ said Sera. ‘But to everyone else it will look exactly like your passport documents or your visa or anything else it needs to look like when asked.’

Samantha had stared at the floor. She could not possibly be any more miserable and confused. Every brain cell screamed, ‘Not possible!’ But she’d been shown things tonight that made her believe that the ticket probably would do just as Sera said. It didn’t make her feel any better, though.

‘What if I lose it?’ she’d said.

‘I shouldn’t do that if I were you, honey,’ said Sera.

Sera had then given her a story to tell in case anyone asked why she was travelling alone to Australia.

‘But you won’t need the story,’ Sera had said. ‘Whoever inspects your travel documents will merely feel that they’re having a particularly great day, and that you are a most bewitching fifteen-year-old – as indeed you are – and they will wave you on through. You just have to be cool and follow the signs.’

‘The signs at the airport?’ Samantha had said.

‘Yeah,’ said Sera. ‘Those too.’

What Seraphina had told her about the Admit One ticket was true. A woman in a uniform in the queue for Departures had asked to check her paperwork, beamed at her, and ushered her through to another lane, cordoned off by red rope, with virtually no one in it. And it had been like that all the way through to the lounge. So she knew that some of what
Sera had said was true. But she actually didn’t want to believe any of the other stuff Sera had told her.

From the back seat of the car on the way to the airport, she hadn’t been able to see Birthday’s face as they both listened to what Sera told her. Sam would have loved to have seen whether his had registered the same shock and surprise as hers, but in some ways she was glad she hadn’t had the chance. Her heart couldn’t take any more shrapnel at the moment, and she feared that learning that Birthday had known all this stuff about her for years, without telling her, would be a betrayal too hard to bear.

Her thoughts were startled back to the lounge when the PA piped up.

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We would like to advise that Flight BA887 is now ready for boarding at Gate number eight. Would all passengers departing for London on BA887 please make your way to Gate Eight for immediate departure.’

The apple juice soured in Samantha’s stomach and she wished she had time for another trip to the toilet. She grabbed her bag and hurried towards Gate Eight. Towards London. Towards Sydney. Towards the twin brother she never knew she had but could now feel, just as she always had felt him without knowing what it was.

Inside her chest, something clawed mercilessly at her heart, shredding it even further. She thought maybe she could taste blood at the back of her throat.

‘Now what are you doing?’ said Zac. He pulled his desk chair close to Luke’s computer and watched, mesmerised, as Luke’s fingers blurred over the keyboard.

‘Hunting,’ said Luke.

‘For the empath or the genius?’ said Zac.

‘Yep and yep,’ said Luke. ‘But also anything else I can get on Morgan Moreau or any of these other names we just pulled. Now move over.’

Zac slid his chair backwards and Luke rolled over to the next computer.

‘How are you going to find them?’

‘I’m hacking into a few databases,’ said Luke. ‘The Department of Community Services, the AFP and Interpol.’

‘This is how you got locked up, isn’t it?’ said Zac.

‘Well, it helped,’ said Luke. ‘But I figured out what I did wrong last time.’

He skated his chair back to the other computer, typing furiously again. ‘It’s all about timing. I’ll dip in and out too fast for them to catch me.’

‘So I don’t need to prepare to get you out of here when
the Feds come and bust in the door?’

‘Nope,’ said Luke, eyes glued to the screen. ‘I’ve never needed anyone to get me out of anything. Besides, this time I’m using two cloaking sites before launching simultaneous dictionary, brute force and pre-computation attacks on their networks.’

‘Have you ever heard anyone speaking Elvish?’ said Zac.

Luke kept typing.

‘You’d probably understand about as much of it as I understood what you just said,’ Zac continued.

‘It’s simple,’ said Luke, sliding back to the other screen. ‘I’m hiding within a web of thousands of people across the world to prevent anyone learning of my physical location, and I’ve launched multiple-platform software weaponry that sniffs out and cracks the encrypted passwords I need.’

‘Yep, that sounds simple,’ said Zac.

Luke grinned. ‘But I might not be able to chat for a while now,’ he said. ‘I’m going in.’

‘Going in?’ said Zac.

‘I’m just going to be concentrating for a while. I might not answer when you speak to me – I sort of zone out a bit.’

Luke tuned out to the sounds around him and unfocused his eyes. Instinctively, his fingers continued to seek and find the keys he needed. The numbers on the screen became maps and pathways. The pathways transformed into three-dimensional streets and laneways. A pulsing light scudded down an alleyway ahead of him. He dived in and followed it.

Although he was starving, fully dressed – shoes and all – and not remotely tired, Luke couldn’t make himself leave the bed.

Zac’s knocking and calling from outside the locked door made no difference.

It wasn’t the plush pillows and the super-soft bedding that kept him there, even though he’d never experienced anything nearly so comfortable. And it wasn’t the mesmerising view of the boats through the rain-smudged windows.

It was what buzzed about his head that kept him from getting up – information about who he was,
why
he was, and who had planned for him to turn out like this.

Morgan Moreau. Mother.

Welfare had a lot to say about her. Nothing nice. They had a record of eight children she’d given birth to over a fifteen-year span. She’d raised none of them. And two hadn’t even made it out of nappies. The Feds had a detailed file – they’d begun it after baby number three had died under suspicious circumstances. They’d questioned her, even detained her following the drowning death of baby number four, but there was never any hard evidence that she’d actually physically harmed her children.

Welfare didn’t care about the evidence. After finding her next two children malnourished and neglected, they’d made them state wards until the age of eighteen, finding her unfit to parent ever again.

Luke noticed that the data trail on his mother had then been dormant for a couple of years until a pre-set alarm had been activated on a computer in a Sydney hospital, prompting the nurse on duty to call authorities. Morgan Moreau had been admitted to the maternity unit. And she’d just given birth to twins.

Welfare sent the district supervisor and two case workers, accompanied by a police officer from the local area command.

The Feds sent an agent, Fairlie Merryweather.

There’d apparently been a complication during the birth and the obstetrician on-call had insisted that no one have access to the patients until he gave the all-clear. But by the time he’d done that, Morgan Moreau and her babies, a boy and a girl, were nowhere to be found.

Luke had read Merryweather’s report. It had been particularly scathing of the hospital’s lack of cooperation with authorities. The obstetrician, and the nurse who’d called in the alarm, had both been transferred from the hospital. Given her reports to the AFP, Fairlie Merryweather had apparently searched the country for the trio, but the trail in Australia went cold.