Fierce September (21 page)

‘But that’s wicked,’ Pel gasped. ‘Nobody would want to do that if it meant destroying the planet.’

‘But somebody does,’ Fortun said. ‘Face the facts, Pel. We know the virus is nothing to do with us, but we’re the only ones who do know that for sure. So we wear the blame while whoever it is gets on with the master plan.’

James gave his hair a rest, stopped striding and sank onto the sofa. ‘Don’t be so dramatic.’ He glanced at me. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Fortun.’

‘Okay, Fortun, all of you – I know you had nothing to do with it. Willem knows and so do the others who helped rescue you. I’ve been keeping an eye on the web, and all of the rescuers except Willem have put up stuff saying it’s rubbish to blame you.’ He wagged a finger. ‘So get over the moaning and start thinking.’

‘Well! You’ve changed your tune,’ I said.

He snapped back, ‘I’ve been engaging the brain. Why else would I lose five hands in a row?’

Shallym asked, ‘What do you think then? What do you reckon the master plan is?’

My friends were all looking more alert now. I could almost see the hope swirling around them. But I still felt as if I was trudging through mud. Nothing was clear, except that menace lurked outside the door.

Wilfred woke with a cry. Seizing the distraction, I jumped up to fetch him. I changed him, then gave him to Vima.

‘Oh, he’s grown,’ Brex said. ‘He’s so cute. Jovan …’ She stopped, her face flushing.

Vima smiled at her. ‘It’s okay, Brex. I’d like to hear what you were going to say.’

Brex took a deep breath. ‘Jovan’s got long fingers, just like Wilfred has. He’s cute too, but different cute.’

Nobody said anything for a few seconds, but James’s eyebrows climbed high up his forehead. At last Vima said, ‘These babies, the little ones in the Centre … we have to find a way of stopping this wickedness for their sake. They’re not going to have any life at all if we don’t.’

No, they’d be marked as the children of the bringers of destruction.

James clapped his hands, demanding our attention. ‘Concentrate. This is what I think. Juno keeps asking if I’d like to go back to how life was before all hell broke loose.’

I glared at him. He made me sound like a nag.

He didn’t even glance at me. ‘The only reason I can come up with for releasing a virus, for blaming you lot, is that you’re being used as a cover for some group that wants to go back to the consumer society.’

We couldn’t understand how or why that could work. James sighed, impatient at having to explain the obvious. ‘The government’s come under a lot of pressure to loosen the environmental regulations. There are people lobbying for controls to be eased so they can build factories to churn out stuff we don’t need. Then they’ll find ways of making us think we do. Next thing you know, the whole pollution saga will be alive and running riot in Aotearoa.’

‘Why?’ Marba asked. ‘Excuse me saying so, James, but that just isn’t logical.’

James stuck his face nearer the mini-comp. ‘It is if you add in the fact that the business owners get rich. They’re powerful. They get to have the whole extravagant lifestyle, buy all the fancy appliances and lord it over the rest of us who’ll get poorer and poorer.’

We thought about that. None of it seemed logical.

‘Okay,’ Vima said, ‘if we accept what you say, where do we go from here? And do we proceed with the theory that there
is
a master plan?’

James flopped back and flung his hands in the air. ‘How the hell do I know?’

Great. Thanks a bundle.

But Silvern said, ‘That’s all very well, but where does Willem come into all this?’

‘Don’t be crass,’ James snarled. ‘He doesn’t, and if you knew even half of what he went through to get you rescued you’d bow your head in shame for even suggesting it.’

‘Calm down and stop jumping to the wrong conclusion,’ Marba ordered. ‘Juno, you explain.’

Thanks again.
As if James was going to believe Hera’s warning that Willem was in danger.

He didn’t. He snorted and rolled his eyes when I told him what she’d said. So we told him the other stuff – about Hera’s saying the ship was coming, that her words had saved us from being blown up when the ship docked. Vima finished by saying Hera was the one who’d revealed the secret of her pregnancy.

‘Why was it a secret?’ James asked, then shook his head. ‘No, it doesn’t matter. None of my business.’ He frowned and we waited while he thought about what we’d told him. ‘Okay, I guess we’d better factor Willem in. Until proved wrong anyway.’

‘Use your famous brain!’ I snapped. ‘Somebody wants to harm him. He’s not part of the whole virus circus.’

He rubbed his hands over his head, and his hair shot out in wild tendrils. I had a sudden vision of him on Taris, having his head shaved every week the way ours had been for so many years.

‘Yes, of course,’ he muttered. ‘Sorry – information overload. Hard to process in a short time.’

‘Willem runs a school,’ Fortun said. ‘We can’t figure out why somebody would want to harm a schoolteacher.’

But James couldn’t either. ‘He’s got a fairly high profile nationally, but even those who disagree with him recognise that he’s a good man. What does he say about this latest hate campaign?’

Paz shrugged. ‘We won’t see him till tomorrow. He comes in every morning.’

James attacked his hair again. ‘You realise that if all this is right, we’re looking at a pretty sophisticated operation?’ He ticked off the points on his fingers. ‘One: take Willem out with the virus so that he’s not around to keep up the pressure on the government to resist those who want the environment laws relaxed. Two: pin the blame on you lot so that nobody looks elsewhere for a villain. Three: whoever is responsible probably expected the pandemic to last a hell of a lot longer, and that would have weakened the government too.’

‘There’s the hate campaign, don’t forget,’ Biddo said. ‘It looks like somebody’s feeding stuff into it to keep it raging.’

James held up a fourth finger.

We tossed around a few more ideas, asked some more questions, but we were stuck.

‘This is useless,’ James said. ‘Bugger off, you lot. Jump on the web. See if you can discover anything that looks even vaguely relevant. We’ll talk again in the morning. Eight o’clock sharp and then again after Willem’s been.’

Their faces disappeared from the screen and we were back to looking at each other, with nothing to do but play cards.

Vima picked up the deck and shook her head. ‘I can’t believe I’m wishing I could go back to work, but I am. Quarantine could have us climbing the walls fairly soon.’

‘We could look for stuff on the net,’ I said. ‘Dunno what though.’

James took the cards from Vima and dealt them out. ‘We’re going to play a mindless game of chance called strip jack naked. That way we’ll be occupied but our minds will be free to think.’ He slapped a card down in front of me. ‘Pretty useless looking for random stuff on the net. We need a lead or a direction, so play and think.’

It was a good idea, a daft game – but we came up with no useful ideas.

Mother called in the early evening. She’d heard about the new hate campaign. ‘Are you all right, Juno? Tell me truly, please. It’s difficult enough being here with our friends around us, but you and Vima are so alone.’

I choked back a glib reassurance and spoke the truth. ‘It’s hard, but we don’t feel so isolated thanks to the minicomp. And then there’s James, who worked with Vima. He’s helping us to try to work things out.’

Mother rubbed her eyes. ‘That’s good. I’m glad you have company.’ She smiled at me. ‘I can’t wait to have you back again though.’

A wave of homesickness hit me. ‘I miss you, Mother.’

We talked for a while longer and neither of us mentioned Dad or my grandparents. Hera sang me a good-night song. It was a lament and it made me shiver.

The eight o’clock meeting in the morning brought no fresh news and no more ideas about what we could do. James arrived for breakfast. He bathed Wilfred and played with him till he fell asleep.

Later in the morning, Marba called and asked me to read out the names of the train passengers Biddo had found listed on the net. ‘Willem says we’re barking up the wrong tree.’ We’d not heard that expression before. ‘He says the people who object to his school are a group of doddery old dears who wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘But did he tell you who they were anyway?’ I reckoned Willem’s judgement about his own safety mightn’t be too reliable.

‘We want to know if they’re on the list of train passengers that Biddo found,’ Marba said, then he recited the names Willem had given him: Mae Calverley, Georgina Prince, Khan Regan, Soraya Billings.

‘Just four of them?’ Vima asked.

‘He says there were three more but they died of the virus last week. There are others who come along and shout outside his school every saints day, but he doesn’t know their names.’

James had to explain what a saints day was. I asked him to read out the computer lists of passengers’ names. He quickly became bored, and made Vima and me take turns with him. It was useless. How would we remember any of them, even if we could find a way of linking them to either of the groups?

Marba wouldn’t give up. ‘These lists still could be useful. We’ll divide them up and each of us will be responsible for making sure we can recognise any name from our section if we come across it somewhere else. Okay?’

We agreed, though it was plain all of us thought it a waste of time.

I didn’t sleep very well that night, disturbed by dreams of dark menace. Wilfred’s crying woke me around four o’clock. I picked him up, chatting to him as I changed him, then gave him to Vima to feed. It was while I was in the kitchen, making us hot drinks, that I saw the talk icon flash on the mini-comp. Who could be calling in the middle of the night? This wasn’t going to be good.

It was Sina. ‘Juno – Hera and Sheen have disappeared. We’ve searched the building, all of us, and they’re not here.’ She scrubbed away tears. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak beyond a strangled cry.

Vima ran in from the bedroom. ‘Sina,’ she said, going straight to the mini-comp, ‘has anyone gone outside to look for them?’

Sina made a huge effort to stop crying. ‘Juno’s stratum are going. They’re getting ready now.’

Silvern appeared on the screen. She was dressed in her warmest clothes. ‘Juno, we’ll keep looking till we find them. We’ll find them long before you’re out of quarantine.’

That loosened my tongue. ‘I’m coming too.’

She smiled briefly. ‘Yeah, we thought you would. Be outside your building in five. We should be there by then.’ She ran from the room.

Vima was still in front of the mini-comp. ‘Sina, could you tell me when you know anything? Please?’

‘Of course I will.’ She managed to smile at Vima. ‘I want to go too, just like you do.’

‘Yes. It’s harder to stay behind and wait.’ Vima’s voice was as strained as Sina’s. ‘Thank you.’

It was the first time they’d spoken since Vima’s pregnancy had become known.

I hurried to the bedroom. I was dressed and shoving a change of clothes into my bag when Vima came in, her hands full of food. ‘Take this. It’s all stuff you don’t have to cook.’ She tucked it deep into the bag.

My mind skittered around, unable to accept that Mother and Hera had vanished. Had they gone of their own free will, or had somebody taken them?

Vima towed me out to the lounge. ‘Stop imagining the worst.’ She held my shoulders and made me look at her. ‘Listen, Juno – you’ve got to keep your mind clear. If anyone can find them, it’ll be you.’

But I’d not caught any of Hera’s thoughts – nor she mine, as far as I knew. I simply had no idea where to start looking, or what had become of them. I hugged Vima goodbye and took the lift to wait outside in the dark.

S
IX OF MY STRATUM ARRIVED just as I rushed out the door onto the street. None of us spoke as I joined them, but I assumed the others were searching a different area. That was good. We ran towards the sea, then turned left into Courtenay Place. I followed, trusting they had a plan, that they knew what they were doing. Trusting that we’d find my mother and sister alive and unharmed.

‘Listen!’ Paz skidded to a stop.

We halted too, trying to quiet our breathing. But the unearthly howl that shrieked through the night would have cut through the loudest gasping.

We took off, running harder than before. Was this the right direction though? Sound bounced off buildings in the city, skittered along alleyways. I shut my mind to doubt and kept running. Paz, Fortun, Jidda and Silvern were the fastest runners. They sprinted over Taranaki Street, swerved left into Cuba.

Pel, Dreeda and I, bringing up the rear, forgot about keeping quiet as we belted after them. The sound of footsteps everywhere. Up ahead, Marba hurtled around a corner, followed closely by the others. Then there was only the sound of our footsteps blocking out all other noise and all thought as we rushed towards the figures lying in the middle of the street. Mother and Hera. A man circled them, howling. He had a stick or a weapon. He swept it in demented circles. The wind of its passing ruffled their hair.