The Fail Safe Read online

  Fero heard a window roll down. Muffled words were exchanged. He imagined a cop comparing the driver’s face to a photo of Fero. He imagined the torch beam sweeping over the back seat.

  Then the car started moving again. Fero could almost feel it as he crossed the invisible line. He was outside the police search radius. He was free.

  This was better than the alternative, but it raised questions – the kind Fero wasn’t good at answering. What now? Was he going to spend the rest of his life on the run? If he was no longer a loyal Teller, what was he? Troy Maschenov had been very capable in crises. He reacted to threats before other recruits even noticed they were in harm’s way. But when there was no immediate danger and no one giving orders, he often found himself feeling overwhelmed. It was like being alone in a lifeboat, with no sign of land on the horizon. He could paddle if he chose, but in which direction? And why?

  He was in a stranger’s car, travelling to an unknown destination. He no longer had a side in this endless war. He wasn’t even sure who he was anymore. He felt sick, and it wasn’t just the motion of the car or the increasingly stale air.

  After a little more than an hour of driving, the car slowed down, turned twice and stopped. The driver’s door opened and closed again.

  Fero waited for the boot to open. It didn’t. Footsteps crunched away across gravel.

  Fero listened to the not-quite-silence for a while – insects buzzing, the hum of distant traffic – and then fumbled for the emergency boot-release button.

  There. The boot popped slightly open. Fero peered through the gap. The car was parked in a driveway on a quiet suburban street. The lights were out in the houses opposite. The sun was setting, and the car cast a long shadow.

  Fero was well outside the search radius, but that could change if anyone saw him climb out of the boot. So he waited. He was good at waiting. Troy Maschenov had spent his first mission watching a suspected Librarian, recording everything she did, everywhere she went and everyone she met. After weeks of surveillance, he had concluded that she was guilty and called in a more senior Teller to . . .

  Fero derailed that train of thought. He couldn’t face another death on his conscience.

  He watched the street until the sun went down. Then he slipped out of the boot, closed it behind him as gently as he could and crept away, avoiding the streetlamps. A dog barked at him from behind a fence. He broke into a run. If anyone saw him he hoped they would assume he was a jogger. It was too dark for anyone to see his clothes, or for satellites to spot him.

  He needed a change of clothes, food, and somewhere to plan his next move. A homeless shelter would be ideal, but his chances of finding one were slim. He wasn’t even sure what town this was. If he saw a rubbish bin that looked likely to contain clothing or edible food, he would rummage through it.

  He reached a T-intersection. He almost didn’t look at the street sign – what were the odds that he would recognise this part of whatever suburb he was in? – but when he did, he saw a familiar name. Caesesk Avenue. It had been on his bus route when he was a child. He was in Premiovaya, not far from his old school.

  Not far from his childhood home.

  He ran faster now, fuelled by a desperation he had barely known was waiting under the surface. The streets flew past. The wind froze the wetness on his face and he thought it had started to rain until he realised that he was crying.

  His family had known him before the Bank turned him into a weapon. They would take him in. They would know what to do. He didn’t have to be alone anymore.

  Seeing his old neighborhood made him feel as though he was in a dream. There was the power pole he had chained his bike to, right next to the park where – where what? Something had happened, he was sure of it. On a summer day, with – with whom?

  Half an hour later he was there, right outside the house he had grown up in. The trim around the windows had been repainted, blue instead of pink. The roof tiles seemed darker than he remembered, stained and mossy. But the dented letterbox was the same, and Fero thought he even recognised individual scratches in the wooden beams holding up the porch.

  It wasn’t until after he had rapped his knuckles on the wide, dark door that he wondered if his family still lived here. He had only Noelein’s word that they did. Perhaps some stranger was about to find a ragged teenage boy puffing on their doorstep.

  A light clicked on inside. Footsteps approached the door. Fero wondered whether to duck into the bushes.

  Too late. The door swung open, revealing a middle-aged woman in a purple dressing-gown. Her gaze started to travel down from Fero’s face to his clothes, but then it abruptly darted back up to his eyes. Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Troy!’ she gasped.

  ‘Mum,’ Fero tried to say, but it came out as a sob.

  Jeel Maschenova hesitated for a moment, and then she bundled him up into a hug. He could feel her heartbeat through her gown.

  ‘How?’ she asked.

  Fero barely heard the question. Held in her arms, he was overwhelmed by her faint perfume, the same one he remembered from when he was a little boy. Even in the freezing air he felt warm, like a marsupial in a pouch. He had felt nothing like this when Zuri hugged him, or Wilt. How had he ever believed that they were his parents? There had been no sense of safety with them. This kind of feeling only came from being with someone he had known since before he could talk.

  ‘Come inside,’ Jeel said. ‘Quickly.’

  Fero followed her in.

  Everything he looked at seemed to dredge up a new memory. The bookcase that had fallen over when he tried to climb it as a little boy. Those mugs his mother loved so much she never used them. The upright piano on which she used to play quiet tunes when it was snowing.

  Not everything was the same. The TV was bigger, its picture brighter. The carpet had been removed from the living area. His mother had been a merciless vaccuumer, but now the floorboards were crusty, cat hair protruding from the cracks.

  Jeel herself had changed too. Her black hair was greying at the roots, and the skin under her pointed chin was loose. And was she smaller, or was it just that Fero had grown? Certainly she had lost weight.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I just can’t believe it.’

  Fero laughed. The whole situation was crazy.

  Jeel picked up the remote and turned off the TV, silencing the newsreader mid-sentence. An electric kettle crescendoed towards boiling point in the kitchen.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ Fero said, suddenly shy.

  Jeel patted his head – she had to reach up to do it. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea. Sit down. Make yourself at home.’

  The expression struck Fero as strange. He was home, wasn’t he? But he sank down into the fabric of the couch, which groaned and exhaled a cloud of dust into the air. Jeel disappeared into the kitchen.

  ‘How have you been?’ Fero called. The question felt horribly inadequate. It was something to say to a friend who’d been away, not to the mother he hadn’t seen in four years.

  ‘Oh, you know.’ The clinking of mugs and spoons almost drowned out Jeel’s voice. ‘I got my job back at the museum. They said they’d hold a place for me, after . . . So that’s three days each week. And it’s good. The work matters.’

  ‘What about the rest of the time?’

  ‘The rest of the time I’m here, getting old.’ She chuckled without mirth. ‘I need pills for everything. I take something to sleep, something else to keep my blood pressure down. My doctor says I should carry tongs so I don’t have to bend over when I pick things up. Tongs!’

  A throb of guilt in Fero’s chest. He knew how much he had changed, physically and emotionally, but it hadn’t occurred to him that Jeel might have changed too. He had always pictured her snap frozen exactly the way she had been when Troy left.

  Jeel came back with two mugs – not the good ones – filled with steaming brown water. She handed Fero the one with the spoon in it. ‘How have you been?’ she asked. ‘Where have yo
u been? How did you get back? Tell me everything.’

  Fero sipped his tea. It was the same bitter brew she had always made him as a child when he was sick. The taste made him a little boy again.

  Troy dug through the toy chest with less and less urgency. A blue rabbit with button eyes, a piggy bank filled with plastic coins, a drum with a scratched skin. The more he looked, the less sure he became of what he was looking for. The mere knowledge that this might be the last time he saw these things had compelled him to search.

  It was so strange that his big sister’s toys were so fluffy and soft. He was ten years old – all these little-kid things were too young for him. As he picked through them he found himself getting distracted by images of her playing with this toy car or that xylophone.

  ‘Troy.’ His mother’s voice, sharp, right behind him. She had always been light-footed and often didn’t speak until she had been in the room for several minutes, watching.

  Troy snatched his hand out of the toy chest. It fell shut with a sound like a magistrate’s hammer. She didn’t ask the obvious question: what are you doing in here? She simply waited for him to explain himself, her eyes cold.

  ‘I was just looking,’ Troy said. ‘For something to remember her by.’

  ‘You can’t take anything with you,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

  He hadn’t planned to take anything. He had just wanted to touch and smell. To put a memory of his sister’s things where his memory of her face should be. But he couldn’t articulate that, not while his mother was staring at him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘The car is here,’ Jeel replied.

  He waited for her to tell him that he didn’t have to go. That getting himself killed in the Besmari army wouldn’t bring his sister or father back. But she merely stepped aside and waited for him to leave his sister’s room. His big sister, who was younger than him now, who would never be too old for these soft, fluffy toys.

  The car out front was a nondescript black sedan. Troy had expected a tank, or at least an armoured car. Something Kamauan bullets couldn’t penetrate. He knew the army was dangerous, but they would try their best to protect him . . . right?

  He was ten – too young to enlist without permission from his legal guardian. It hadn’t been until Jeel was signing the forms that Troy realised he didn’t really want to join. In fact, he wanted her to stop him from volunteering. To say that while she was impressed by his bravery, now that his father and sister were gone, Troy was the only person who mattered to her and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. But instead she had looked happier than he had seen her since that day when the police turned up with their hats in their hands. It was as though she was glad to be rid of him – no, that wasn’t right. There was anger in her eyes too. It was as if rage was the only thing she had the energy for.

  She had signed the forms with a flourish and said, ‘Don’t come back until you’ve made them pay.’

  Troy had thought about tearing up the forms later, out of her sight. But she would either discover his cowardice or think that he had failed the extremely basic entry tests and been rejected. It would prove what she apparently already thought – that he was worth little, maybe nothing. At least this way he could keep his pride.

  Now he stood in the doorway, looking at the dark sedan and the silhouette of the man behind the wheel. Somehow, even though he had known the date and time of his departure, he hadn’t really believed it would happen.

  ‘Go on,’ Jeel said, a glimmer of sympathy in her eyes. ‘It’ll be okay. I promise.’

  Troy was old enough to know she couldn’t possibly promise that. But it was a small kindness, and it muted the pounding of his heart.

  ‘I love you, Mum,’ he said, and walked out to the car.

  CHEMICAL WARFARE

  Fero blinked and rubbed his eyes. If Jeel noticed that he had reacted strangely to the tea, she didn’t say so.

  My sister is dead, he thought.

  She had been dead for years – killed alongside his father when a Kamauan terrorist boarded their bus and opened fire on the passengers. But then the Library had made him forget her death, and now it was like losing her all over again. It was as though an organ had been ripped out – one whose function he didn’t understand, like a pancreas or a spleen.

  He couldn’t remember her name.

  Until now he hadn’t truly understood what the Library had done to him. It wasn’t just that they had taken his family – his father’s and sister’s lives, his mother’s happiness. They had made him forget that his family ever existed.

  The world swirled around him. Every object summoned a memory. The curtains he had closed each night. The wrinkled book he had accidentally dropped in the bath and afterwards blasted with a hair dryer. The lamp he had unplugged during storms because it made a fizzing sound. Troy Maschenov was coming back, as though summoned by his mother’s voice.

  ‘What happened to your clothes?’ Jeel was asking.

  Fero looked down at his blackened jeans and charred coat. ‘These aren’t my clothes,’ he said, suddenly exhausted.

  Jeel put her mug down a little too hard on the table. ‘Your room is just how you left it. You can get some of your old clothes from in there.’

  ‘I was ten,’ Fero said. ‘They won’t fit me anymore.’

  His mother paused for a long time. Then she said, ‘Some of your father’s clothes might fit.’

  Fero looked down into his now-empty teacup. She still had his father’s clothes? This shouldn’t have surprised him. She had left Troy’s and his sister’s rooms untouched. This house was a time capsule. It was as though she expected her family to come back – and yet she seemed astonished when he actually did.

  Jeel waited.

  ‘Okay,’ Fero said.

  Jeel stood up and disappeared into her bedroom. Fero heard cupboard doors opening, clothes rustling. He realised that she was muttering to herself, as though she resented having to donate her late husband’s clothes to this blow-in. This beggar. But she had seemed so happy to see him a minute ago.

  Fero was dizzy. He stood up and immediately overbalanced, falling back onto the couch. His eyes took a long time to adjust after every blink. The world was a bright blur.

  He stood up again and stumbled towards the bathroom. His guts clenched. He was going to throw up. This forced up yet another memory – shivering, feverish, yelling, ‘Daddy, it hurts! Make it stop, Daddy!’ as his father held a bucket in front of his face and stroked his hair. He couldn’t remember how old he had been, or what had been wrong. The flu? Food poisoning?

  Fero pushed open the bathroom door and staggered over to the toilet. He hugged the bowl like a long-lost friend and emptied his stomach into the porcelain.

  The bathroom shared a wall with his mother’s bedroom. In the silence after Fero stopped retching he could hear her voice, still muttering. This time, though, he could make out the words: ‘How long before they get here?’

  Fero realised two things at the same time.

  One: his own mother was turning him in.

  Two: she had drugged his tea.

  I need pills for everything. I take something to sleep.

  Fero grabbed the towel rack to haul himself to his feet. His eyes wouldn’t stay open. His limbs weighed thousands of kilos. He should never have come here.

  He lurched out of the bathroom towards the front door, fighting to stay awake. When he got there he heard squeaking brakes outside. Footsteps hurrying up the drive. Voices.

  The Bank was already here.

  He spun around and stumbled towards the back door. His mother emerged from her bedroom behind him. ‘How dare you!’ she screamed. ‘Working for the Kamauans? After what they did to your father? To your sister?’

  So she had seen the news. Fero wondered what the police had said about him, what he was supposed to have done. Shutting out her voice, he reached the back door, pulled it open and staggered out into the yard.

  Tiny stala
ctites of ice hung from the corners of the clothes line, glittering in the light from the house. The cracked concrete path led to what had once been a chicken run before the gate came off its hinges. A barren vegetable patch was sealed under a layer of frost.

  He ran to the two-metre high steel fence that separated the backyard from the alley behind the house. Usually he would have no trouble scaling it – jump, grab the rail at the top and pull himself over. But tonight it might as well have been the rampart that surrounded Kamau.

  Shakily, he crawled up onto the compost bin for extra height. A quick look over the back fence didn’t reveal any Bank vehicles. Just a delivery truck taking a shortcut up the alley.

  Through a fog he heard someone crash through the back door. Any second now the Tellers would see him. But if he got over the fence first, he might be able to open the back of the truck and climb in before he blacked out.

  Fero swung one leg over the fence, steadying his body with one clumsy hand on the rail—

  ‘Freeze!’ someone bellowed.

  Fero turned his head to see two Tellers kitted up in body armour and camouflage fatigues. Both had guns pointed at his head, their fingers on the triggers.

  He could try to throw himself over the fence before they opened fire. If they did shoot, they might both miss. He might withstand the impact with the ground on the other side and stay conscious long enough to climb into the truck, which was just about to drive past.

  Or he might get shot to bits and die. Maybe he should surrender instead.

  Out of nowhere, a strange thought struck him: what would Cormanenko do?

  She wasn’t a friend. Other than eighteen intense hours a month ago and running into her yesterday – and the time she had shot him – he didn’t know her at all. But somehow she seemed like the only sane person in this world of terrorists, child soldiers, spies and revolutionaries. The only one who saw things clearly.