'Then a simu?'
'I'm not sure . . . maybe . . .' He closed his eyes for a few seconds and appeared to be listening. The cold had rouged his cheeks like an old woman's clownish makeup, highlighting rather than disguising the chalkiness of his skin. '. . . maybe not a true cognoscens. Dad explained it to me, it's a quantum thing. That's why distance doesn't matter. But I ought to be able to hear better. I can't even tell if it's a man or a woman. They've done something scary to him, to his mind. Or hers.'
'What's this got to do with Zach?'
He wiped his nose on his sleeve. 'I told you, it's not very clear, but I think she's trying to warn me. They want me, or someone like me.'
'And Zach?' When tears filled his eyes, she finally realised what Max was too scared to say. 'They're going to make Zach tell them about you.'
She rummaged in her pocket for a tissue, then stamped her feet and clapped her hands together, which were beginning to numb. When she tried flexing her fingers, her glove chafed Jasmine's scratches. Underfoot there was no snow or ice; she stepped outside the shelter and scrutinised the well-lit carpark to give Max a chance to wipe away his tears. For the first time she took in, really took in, how immaculate the tarmac was. Where were the mounds of dirty snow, the patches of ice, the grit for traction? This place: it was creepy the way you numbly accepted Fulgur's latest surreal fantasia, as though toilets that played Oh Come, All Ye Faithful when you sat down, and Do You Hear What I Hear? when you flushed, were perfectly ordinary-rather quaint, actually, in comparison to the red-and-green-striped toilet paper embossed with metallic gold stars. But Zach, she reminded herself, wasn't colour-blind. No one led Zach, with or without a blindfold. Not unless he chose to be led.
'How make him?' she asked, wheeling round. 'What are they going to do to him?'
'I don't know.'
'Then use that braintapping trick of yours.'
'I'm not stupid! I've already tried that, but I can't pick up anything. Zach has no information, none of the simus do. Maybe only a few people know, and they're not good senders, or maybe they've figured out a way to keep anyone like me from hearing.' He took a raw breath. 'Laura, how can Dad work for them? For people like that?'
For people like Fabio, she thought, people who elicit foolish revelations with the ease of a hypnotist. People with slick talk and slick offices and even slicker gadgets; with silk shirts and slick, silken kisses. 'Was Zach . . . I mean, the things he said, was he thinking them?' She sped past Max's silence. 'You know what I mean, don't you? That he doesn't want to-' He was shaking his head, but she couldn't brake now. 'Max, you've got to tell me.'
'I can't do that to Zach,' he whispered, tearing his eyes from hers. 'Please don't make me.'
* * *
While Laura was debating with herself, mustering all the reasons, and their cousins and great-aunts, why Max ought to cooperate, and coming up with a very bare family tree, so moving on to how to tap her brother for syrup-just where to drill the right hole-and while Max himself had walked behind a parked car to pee-no tree trunks in sight-the sirens began. Laura was all for rushing back into the main building to search for Zach, but Max did his listening for a moment, then demurred. 'He's OK, he's left.'
But Max was wrong, an hour later reminding her-almost apologetically-that he couldn't tell much about location unless a person happened to be thinking about it. The party-goers were herded outside to a safe distance, most of them half drunk, and not a few high as noctilucent clouds over the poles, and glowing nearly as much in the dark. Some of the children were frightened, but others seemed to find it a good lark. On the way to search for their parents, Laura overheard one eight- or nine-year-old boy announcing loftily to the others, 'It's a game. Watch, there'll be a Fulgur helicopter landing soon, with Father Christmas and a sack full of presents for us. My dad works in PR, he told me.' Max rolled his eyes at Laura, then exclaimed and pointed to the left, hunching his shoulders again. Their mum's face was incandescent with rage, grotesque under the circumstances.
Grotesque under any circumstances: a bomb could only rearrange her features to advantage, I'll do it myself if she says one word, one fucking word about Zach.
Laura's mum grabbed her arm and dug her fingers into the layers of fabric hard enough to leave a bruise needing cover-up for a week. 'Where have you been, you stupid idiot.' Hissed directly into Laura's ear, her spite as obscene as some bloke's slurping tongue. 'Snogging that auger?'
Laura wrenched her arm free, her hand throbbing. Shoved her face into her mother's. Raised her voice, raised it good and loud, then raised it even louder. 'Go on. Wallop me if you must. Pull my hair. Pinch me. But don't you ever call him that-not ever again, do you hear. He's worth a hundred of you, you bitch.'
Her mum went white and raised a hand to strike, then caught the stares of those standing within earshot and fell back a step, hurriedly smoothing her hair with the raised hand. She smiled a shellacked smile which fooled no one, least of all herself. 'Poor girl, she's overwrought, it's been too much for her,' directed at a woman her own age who dropped her eyes and looked away.
And her dad?
Molly, that's enough now.
scuttled away, that spider, but still shuddery behind the toilet smelly like wet knickers please mummy i'm sorry please
hauls her out by her hair, shakes her
screams
shut up, don't you dare cry, SHUT UP SHUT UP!
Molly, please, the child's terrified.
I'll show her terrified. Disgusting filthy girl.
Her dad dropped his eyes, watery from the cold, and looked away. The wind lifted his thinning hair. They'd been herded outside without a chance to collect their coats.
'I've still got them,' Laura said.
'What are you talking about?' her mum asked. 'Got what?'
'The pink knickers with the butterflies.'
Clearly at a loss, her mum shook her head. After an interval just long enough to raise Laura's hopes, old sugar-coated hopes, her dad cracked a rigid smile. His memory for figures was phenomenal, and he could still recite whole swatches of school poetry. As a little girl she'd loved to listen to him reciting My Cat Jeoffrey, he always acted out the licking and claw sharpening and cameling his back, the cork catching and spraggling upon waggling. 'You're my kitten,' he'd said, 'just like Jeoffrey': 'For he can tread to all the measures upon the music. For he can swim for life.'
A doorframe splintered for a pair of knickers: no special feat of memory for her dad.
'We were worried about you,' her dad said, putting his arm round Molly's shoulders.
* * *
There were in fact three helicopters, but the Fulgur dragon didn't land until the bomb was disarmed and removed and the infiltrator, in shirt sleeves but fired by his slogans, whisked away. With the children clustering round Father Christmas, the cold and fear forgotten in their excitement, the guests were given the go-ahead by the police to return to the party. Those without the prospect of a gold-wrapped parcel embossed with the Fulgur logo made their way into the lobby with alacrity, rizzy nerves and speculation no longer heat enough, and most were scurrying, they hoped discreetly, to reach the bar ahead of the others. A TV crew had arrived, with reporters tapping the crowd for a pint or two of gossip. Laura hung back, snagging Max's arm, and they were about to slip away to ring for a taxi when a second TV van pulled up, followed by several press cars in convoy which disgorged journalists. Max stared at them with a look she was coming to recognise, then began to move towards the building.
'Where are you going?' she asked.
'Don't you want to hear what he's going to say?'
'Who?' Laura asked.
'Zach.'
* * *
And all at once, Zach was everywhere. He spoke at public meetings, was interviewed on TV, gazed at Laura from websites and newspapers, began his own blog. Laura had difficulty understanding how a popular movement could combust almost overnight from the seemingly dry rags and odd scraps of society, but Fabio had made it clear enough that there was nothing spontaneous about his plans. And Zach was turning out to be a very charismatic public speaker, damn him. 'Simus are not your enemy. Your enemies are pollution, and dwindling resources, and hunger, and disease. And fear-mostly fear. Don't be afraid of us: we want what you want, a good life lived peacefully. Together we can work towards solving our devastating problems. Together we can remake our lives, and our planet. Together we can move out into new frontiers. I too have dreams . . .'
The Janu numbers were still small, but already raising alarm in some quarters. When Laura convinced Owen to attend an open debate at the university right after Christmas break, she was surprised to find that the lecture hall, while not overcrowded, was only half filled with students; there were young couples, several with pouched babies, there were pensioners and burly labourers and women with signature silk scarves, there were suits; oddly, however, there were no simus except the lad winging Zach, whom he introduced as a medical student. Zach's other companion-chaperon?-was a thirty-something Fulgur psychologist from Ghana, slender and soft-spoken, adversary of the Big Mama school of therapy, and genuinely funny; she had the audience laughing and whistling and clapping when she told a story about a rooster, a prostitute, and a panel van full of stolen computers. Fabio was nowhere in sight.
Laura did her best, but Owen couldn't reveal what he didn't know, and it was tricky to get any information from her dad. Fabio's too old for you, he'd said when she tried the gorgeous-hunk gambit. Fabio, it was obvious, wasn't a corporate drone like her dad, and he seemed to have a conscience. But you could never tell with fanatics. Had he made use of what she'd told him? If the stuff she'd turned up on the net was accurate, his dead brother had been a simu. Everyone knew about Latinos and family. She'd expected Fabio to be here tonight. He ought to have been here tonight.
So far there was no sign that Max's secret had become Fulgur property, or was about to. But how could she be sure? 'Dad will kill me if he finds out I've told Zach,' Max had said. 'Don't you dare let on.' In public it would be impossible to talk to Zach, but maybe she could gauge whether anything remained of the old Zach; whether, beneath the glossy Corvus plumage, was parrot or hawk.
There were some critical questions from the audience though none of the rowdiness which had erupted at a few of the meetings. Nor were there any Purist hecklers with their soft fruit and hard curses; security was tight, but the guards had been instructed to let all weapons-cleared parties through. Zach's own directive, it was widely reported: 'We've got nothing to hide. Let anyone who has something to say, say it to our faces. We're not afraid, and we won't be driven off by gutter tactics.' It appeared that his policy was working.
'He's certainly come a long way since quitting school,' Owen whispered. 'But I don't trust him. Remember how he went mad at the factory?'
Laura never argued with Owen any longer about Zach, nor with any of her mates. It just made her look as if she still fancied him. It had been tricky enough getting Owen to accompany her tonight; he wasn't precisely jealous, he maintained stubbornly. 'Aren't you curious?' she'd asked. But her trump had been to imply that Owen was resentful of a former schoolmate's success.
'For godsake, he's just the latest flavour of the month. It's not even a proper political party, wait and see, the whole thing will peter out in a few weeks.'
'Even with Fulgur backing?'
'Dad says it's miniscule, the amount of money they're putting in. It's just a look-good PR move because of the simu programme. Anyway, Fulgur's got a strict policy of non-partisan political support. They contribute across the board to every party except the Purists. Not to the illegal ones, naturally. So even this new movement would have been bound to get some donations eventually.' He nodded earnestly, a loyal dragonling-in-training. 'There aren't even any tax breaks. It's all strictly regulated, all publicly declared, all impartial, all transparent.'
Yeah, and I'm the reincarnation of Helen of Troy.
At school the kids were a bit weird about Zach. On the one hand they acted as though he was the latest pop star, the girls especially bragging about the time he . . . On the other, feelings about the simus were heated, with a lot of mistrust and scepticism. And Tim and Derek and their mates were becoming vitriolic (another Zach word)-and daily more upfront about it. This week there'd been two incidents where a teacher was forced to intervene, the second involving detention. If I.S. knew who was responsible for the club bombing, they weren't letting on, though several people, including two or three Fulgur employees, had been 'helping the police with their enquiries' since the day after the blast. Disgruntled finance types, her dad claimed, one a risk-management intern with Purist connections: 'Whatever your sentiments on overpaid peacocks, Fabio, admittedly, is beginning to earn those gaudy silk shirts of his, that petrol-guzzling silver Masserati he drives' (the first Laura had heard of it). So, altogether, it was best that Zach hadn't moved back into his flat yet. That's exactly what she'd said to Josh: 'It's best.'
Laura bit her lip and leaned forward on the edge of her seat to catch Zach's latest reply. He was speaking into a mike, but a few rows ahead of her two men were conversing in a choppy undertone, and throughout the room there were other little pools and jets of whispering. Surreptitiously she rubbed her abdomen to ease the heaviness in her gut, that dull ache which usually denoted the onset of her period in a day or two, three at most. Though it wasn't like her to get a headache, it must be the heat or Owen's latest swank, pricey, practically carnivorous cologne. Worse than girls, the way lads deluded themselves. At least she could look forward to a period of respite, he wasn't the sort to get off on a touch of blood. And he charted her 'tides' better than she herself-talk about euphemisms! Zach would never flinch from straight talk.
