He sprints down the winding, precarious road. Within seconds he is drenched. He can hear the roar of the sea, pounding against the flood barriers. Past the low concrete outhouses and army barracks; past the soldiers on duty huddled under their waterproofs who barely glance up as he runs by. Trees on the mountainside bend in submission to the wind. A blast catches him and he skids perilously close to the sheer drop at the edge of the road and he does not care, a strangely triumphant part of him almost wishing he would slip the final centimetres that will send him over, thinking that would show them. As he runs he screams, and the fresh cold water batters his face and fills his mouth. Does it taste different, the rain here? Everything is different. Everything is wrong. He runs on. He trips and falls and curses and pulls himself up again and runs.
‘You call this a storm?’ he yells. ‘You call this a storm?’
There is no one to hear. He is shivering now. The truth is, it is a storm, a powerful one, but he can see the sparse lights of the harbour town shimmering ahead through the scything rain. Arturo’s, he will make it to Arturo’s Place. He passes the first few houses. The streets of the town are like rivers, but the route is familiar, even in the half darkness. When he reaches the bar the windows are shuttered and only a faint glow comes from between the slats, but he knows there are people inside. There are always people inside this place. He pounds on the door and keeps pounding until Arturo himself opens it.
He senses that up to the moment he steps inside, the atmosphere has been jovial, buoyant. A group of four local men are sat together around a cards table at one end of the bar, while others overlook the game. All are fishermen judging by their attire and the lingering smell of brine. Most of the locals in this small port are fishermen or stevedores. They look at Taeo with distaste. There are mutters. Taeo ignores them. He goes to a table on the other – empty – side of the bar and asks for a double rum.
The storm sounds louder from inside. Rain drumming on the roof almost drowns out the fuzzy music emitted by the radio. Patagonians, always chattering on the fucking airwaves. Considering their hysterical technophobia, they’re happy enough to broadcast their life stories and those of everyone they know over a wavelength. It’s irrational.
One or two of the fishermen continue to cast suspicious glances in Taeo’s direction. The majority simply pretend he is not there. He drinks the first double and orders another, hunched over his table, feeling the water from his clothes seep into the chair and through his shoes to the floor. He wants opium but he is trying to stop. When the pilot knocked on his door he had the pipe in one hand, the little wire in the other. She saved him, momentarily. She has the kind of face once seen it is difficult to forget, though he would be pushed now to say why, exactly. Dark, enquiring eyes, strong eyebrows, her chin jutted forwards, as if pre-empting trouble. He has the impression she could have told him a lot, if she’d cared to. She refused to go for a drink with him, though. Just like the rest of them.
Fuck. He’d kill for a smoke right now. Why did he come out?
He thinks of Shri and imagines what she would say if she could see him now. He pushes away the thought because it is too awful to bear.
There is a place right here in the harbour town; that’s where he discovered it first. A nice place – a salon, the proprietor calls it – with soft chairs and pillows where there is tea if you want it and the radio plays only music, all tunes with a soothing, yet melancholy air, that the other clients nod along to, and sometimes hum. Pipes and syringes are offered to your preference (all completely hygienic, the proprietor reassured him, and there was further reassurance in his smart, clean attire and business-like manner). Taeo prefers the pipe. It’s the tradition of it, after the old Asian style, and this way the stuff is purer, botanical. At first he took regular trips to the salon, but now he prefers to buy in bulk, and smoke it in the solace of his own room, out of sight.
Maybe he should have stayed there tonight. But the energy’s gone and that man, Eduardo, goes out of his way to be unhelpful. After fixing the plane (that gorgeous machine – where the hell did she get that? The Patagonians scrapped every Neon aircraft they had) it just feels wrong.
His glass is empty again. Wordlessly he raises it, trying to catch the bartender’s eye. He orders wine. Marisa, that is her name. Marisa takes her time coming over with a bottle, also silently, without meeting his eyes. Is he imagining it, or does she deliberately arch away from the table as she reaches to pour the wine, keeping as much distance between herself and him as possible?
He thanks her. He says the bottle is a favourite, but he couldn’t care less what it is – doesn’t even bother to look at the label.
Her lashes flicker. There is no acknowledgement; she could be serving a ghost. As she moves away he sees her shoulders relax, her walk taking on a leisurely sway. She pauses by the card players.
‘More beer, boys?’
‘Yes, Señorita Marisa, more beer. And how about some of your pretty friends to join us too, eh?’
‘You’d have my friends out in this weather? Shame on you.’
‘Eh, they can’t be as pretty as Marisa.’
Marisa’s laugh is round and encouraging and her dark curls bounce when she throws back her head. Taeo would have liked to talk to her. He would like to talk to anyone. He takes a heavy swig of the red. The aftertaste of the wine here is sour and harsh, nothing like the sharp, clear heat of the sake back home. He watches the bartender and the fishermen flirting.
Since the day he stepped foot on Patagonian soil, an invisible circle has been drawn around him. If he squints, he can almost see its borders. Now and then he observes covert glances in his direction or catches the edge of a whisper. A part of him wishes he could hear what they are saying about him, and the other part is grateful for his ignorance. He drinks deeply from the glass, welcoming the haze of alcohol that is settling about him.
Shri jumps into his head again, and this time it is impossible to dismiss her. He thinks of the winters that are full of dark and Shri, and the summers that are full of light and Shri. He thinks of the beaches where they walk and the strange, luminous creatures that wash up from the ocean depths. He thinks of Shri’s voice through mist too dense for the lights of Vosti Settlement to reveal a face, and her fingers locked through his, and the walk home with nothing but touch and voice, and he remembers her lips against his, when no one can see.
Not every moment was like this, it is true. The six months prior to his departure were not like this, but those moments are harder to reach, and anyhow, he does not want to think about those dreadful months, only the good times. The times that were golden.
By the time Ivra comes the rain has dropped to merely forceful and the bar’s clientele has doubled. Taeo has swaddled himself in memories. His bodyguard is angry. Taeo holds up a hand as though this might ward off the inevitable berating. He wonders if the salon is open and thinks about how long it would take to get there. About ten minutes. The pull on the pipe, slow, fills his mind, and how the smoke would taste.
Ivra sits heavily in the empty chair opposite, water cascading from his hood when he pushes it back from his face. He speaks in their home patois.
‘How many times do I have to tell you not to wander about without me?’
‘More than once, I suppose.’
Ivra’s voice drops to a furious whisper. Taeo avoids looking at him. Perhaps if he looks away for long enough, Ivra’s anger will wash up and over him, like a passing wave.
‘More than once? Do you think this is a joke? You know, I feel like I’m dealing with a child, not a senior Antarctican engineer.’
Taeo gives a humourless laugh. One of the fishermen glances up. When Taeo notices, the man swiftly averts his eyes.
‘Maybe it is a joke. Maybe that’s exactly the joke.’
‘You’re drunk again.’
‘Is there anything else to do in this fucking place?’ Despite the haze around his thoughts, he knows better than to mention the opium. He’s managed to keep that much a secret from Ivra.
‘How about keeping your head down and having some respect for your own skin, not to mention mine? You know the archipelago is crawling with pirates.’
Taeo picks up his glass. It is empty. Again. He raises it, but Ivra clamps a hand over the rim, forcing Taeo’s arm back down.
‘Enough.’
On the other side of the room, the bartender is hovering by the cards table, its places claimed by a new set of players. One slender hand leans on the back of a customer’s chair, the other rests jauntily on her hip. The game is growing raucous.
‘They won’t even look at us,’ says Taeo. ‘The Patagonians. They despise us.’
‘Not all of us.’
Taeo studies his bodyguard. The years abroad have made their marks. Warmer summers have darkened his complexion. Ivra is Brazilian-Antarctican like Taeo, but he has dropped his Portuguese entirely. His Spanish sounds like a native now. With the locals he adopts a convivial, disarming manner.
Ivra does not walk around with an invisible circle attached to him. But he has been stationed in Fuego for a decade. Taeo is not prepared to wait that long.
‘Have some wine,’ he insists. ‘It’s on me.’
‘We’re leaving.’
‘Even you refuse to drink with me?’
‘You know, you’re paranoid about people not speaking to you but you refuse to take the possibility of a kidnapping seriously. I fucking despair.’
Taeo says nothing. He has no desire for an argument, even through the immunity of alcohol. He pictures Shri, focuses on her warm, broad smile. But he can’t hold on to it. Shri’s brow knits, and she lets loose a tirade of anger. Instead, he thinks of the salon.
‘I have to get out of here, Ivra.’
‘We can both hope for that.’
‘This place is what theists would call actual hell.’
‘You’ve been here all of four months.’
‘It’s all been a big mistake. I’m not a…’ Even now he has trouble speaking it aloud. ‘…a dissident, Ivra. I shouldn’t be here.’
Ivra folds his arms across his chest. He is a big man and the posture makes him look more imposing. They never speak of it, but Taeo knows his bodyguard is a link in the Antarctican information network. The same network for which Taeo is now some kind of minion: a message-boy.
‘Perhaps you should have thought of that before you transmitted an open holoma to the Republic,’ says Ivra steadily.
‘Have you seen my transmission, Ivra?’
‘Yes, I’ve seen it. I’m not surprised they sent you here.’
‘It was a mistake. I wasn’t myself. It was stupid.’
‘I’m not surprised by that either.’
‘They must realize that. I can’t stay here.’
Not without Shri.
He speaks her name silently, over and over, as though there might be some essence of her in the air that would communicate if she were here. Surely she will forgive him now. He’s done his penance. Missing her is too much to bear. How many times he said he loved her, meaning it, but not thinking about it, and now her absence is an open wound. He misses the children, their hugs, their funny direct questions, and the way they all giggle over things secret to themselves, the three children together, a perfect trio.
The door to the bar opens. A man runs inside, neglecting to close it behind him. The newcomer pushes back his sodden hood and starts gabbling in deep Fueguin dialect. Some of it evades Taeo but Ivra’s posture shifts. Taeo can see he is listening intently. The newcomer is gesticulating. The telling grows wilder and more dramatic as he goes on, until a chorus of exclamations drowns him out, and Taeo can’t catch a word.
‘What’s he saying?’ Taeo asks. Ivra motions: quiet. Taeo hears the word shipwreck, repeated over and over. There has been an accident, somewhere down the coast, earlier tonight, a ship on the rocks. The man’s story is drawing to a climax. He speaks faster and faster and suddenly he stops mid-sentence, as though the words have been snatched from his throat. He looks solemn now. The listeners have gone quiet and very still. When Taeo looks at their faces he sees a collective fear dawning.
Someone says, ‘Not possible!’
There is a long silence and then the newcomer whispers, ‘Yes, Osiris.’
Taeo stares at Ivra.
The door bangs shut and bounces open again. No one goes to close it.
‘No, no,’ says a voice, perhaps the one who spoke before, perhaps someone else. The newcomer insists, ‘Yes,’ and then everyone begins talking at once.
Ivra pushes back his chair and jerks his head towards the door. Bewildered, Taeo follows him outside. The rain is still falling heavily, spattering his face with cold droplets. The warm fogginess of the bar seeps away.
‘That man said there was a shipwreck,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘A ship from…’ He can barely say the name; his head feels light and dizzy. He finds himself whispering, as the Patagonian did, as though he too had always believed the city to be destroyed, ‘…Osiris?’
The name hangs. Taeo hears very precisely the sound of rain drumming on rooftops.
‘That’s what he said. But he only heard it from his cousin. There was a call placed from down the coast.’
‘That can’t be possible.’ He looks at Ivra, trying to read the other man. ‘Can it? Do you know something I don’t? I mean – why now?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t—’ Ivra’s expression falters; suddenly he looks shaken. ‘Anything’s possible.’
‘If it is an Osirian ship…’
‘The Boreal States will react,’ says Ivra.
They stand in the deserted street. Most of the town’s inhabitants are still inside, sleeping, unaware of the drama that is unfolding at Arturo’s. The rain falls. The puddles simmer about Taeo’s feet. Osiris. The sea city. Patagonians call it the lost city. That is what the world believes, and even in the Republic, where they know the truth, the lost city is rarely spoken of by name. Let ice lie quiet, they would say. It is an old motto and a backwards one, the underlying message being that ice does not lie quiet. It cracks and breaks and shatters glaciers and swells the sea. Ice is a kinetic substance, which brings upheaval after upheaval – as is the course of history.
He thinks, almost wonderingly, this is it. This is the start of the war.
The very thing he spoke out against – and whatever he said in there to Ivra, he meant every word of that transmission – this is where it starts.
In unspoken agreement, the two men head out of the town, back up towards the Facility.
‘I’ll record a holoma tonight,’ says Ivra. ‘Someone should be due to make a collection soon.’
Taeo nods. He does not understand the complicated relay system of messages operated by the Antarctican network, but Ivra does.
‘What about our agents in the north? Shouldn’t we alert them too?’
Ivra frowns. ‘We should wait and see how the situation develops. We don’t yet know if the boat really is from—’
That’s not right, thinks Taeo. They can’t wait on this – they have to act. If what the Patagonian said is true, there is a huge political issue at stake for the Republic: a containment issue. The agents in the north need to be primed. They need to be on the watch for a Boreal response.
‘It’s probably a hoax,’ he says. ‘Or pirates. Didn’t you say the archipelago is crawling with pirates?’
Ivra frowns. ‘It could be a hoax. What if it’s a ploy by the Pan-African Solar Corporation? What if they’re trying to draw the Boreal States south and start a war?’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘If the Republic and the Boreal States cancel each other out, the Solar Corporation gets the pick of resources north and south. They’d love to see us at war with the Boreals.’
‘You’re forgetting one thing, Ivra. You’re forgetting what the Republic knows.’ He pauses to let this sink in. ‘We know the sea city was not destroyed. We know that it could only ever have been a matter of time before someone got out.’
There is a pause, and Ivra says, ‘If it’s real, you know the Republic is going to be calling you back.’
‘I wish they would, but I think you’re hopeful. My punishment isn’t over yet.’
‘I mean they’ll call you back to your work.’
‘I won’t go,’ says Taeo, but uneasily. He has felt the weight of Antarctican law and it is not a light one. ‘Not on their terms.’
‘You say that now. They told me you were working on something. A new fuel. Could be revolutionary, they said. How are you going to feel when the Boreal States send their submarines south?’
Taeo is angered by this. ‘The submarines aren’t ready. They won’t be for years. And they’ve got my damn research.’
‘You can’t trust intelligence,’ says Ivra. ‘Nobody really knows what the northerners are up to. All we know is that they want our continent, and when the time comes they’ll be happy to destroy anything that stands between them and it. This place –’ he waves a hand back towards the coast ‘– this place won’t even register.’
Taeo cuts off the retort that springs to his lips, reminding himself just in time that Ivra has lived here for ten years now. He has clearly formed an attachment for the country, despite its endless inconveniences and hostile people.
‘Anyway,’ he says. ‘It’s all speculation until we find out more.’
Ivra grunts assent.
An idea is forming in Taeo’s head.
He’ll send his own holoma to the north.
At the Facility gate, the young soldier on duty shines a light directly in Taeo’s face before checking his papers. The kid’s cheeks are pitted with smallpox scars.
‘You’re clear,’ says the kid.
‘We’ll catch up tomorrow,’ says Ivra. He heads back down the hill. He has lodgings in the town.
Taeo watches him go, peering through the rain. An Antarctican settlement would have guiding night lights, but in this place you feel your way through the darkness, the way you feel your way through conversations. For a moment he imagines he sees the lights of a ship, outlined like a constellation of stars. A big ship, an Antarctican ship. The lights are mesmerizing. Taeo wants to run down there, throw himself off the sea walls and swim until he reaches the hull. He imagines hands reaching down to pull him out of the water. His rescue, his redemption. He can actually feel the warm fingers wrapped around his own.
There is no ship. There are no lights – only his own yearning.
* * * *
Room 5.27. No name on the door. He is nameless now. He sheds his sodden clothes and dries off, shivering. He craves hot water but you can only get it in a narrow time window in the morning. At first he had tried to make his spartan room more homely. It is not the austerity he minds so much as the lack of personality about the space. But his efforts, the things he brought with him, seem a parody of themselves. Like the Antarctican lamp which is not compatible with the backward Patagonian wiring – it sits on the table, useless to everyone.
Out of habit rather than any expectation, he checks the room’s energy gauge and is surprised to see the needle has wavered the tiniest fraction over zero. He drags his chest to the middle of the room and unlocks it, carefully retrieving three holomas. The first one, which is completely dead, he puts on charge. The second two have not been used. He places one on the lid of the chest. Each holoma is a smooth black elliptic device, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.
Taeo thinks about what he wants to say. His mind is racing and it is difficult to separate the strands: what he should say, what he shouldn’t say, what he must say. This is his opportunity. He needs to sound professional. In control.
Not so long ago, those things were easy. He could walk into a room and people would fall quiet, waiting to hear what he had to say.
He puts his palm to the holoma and feels it warm in response.
‘Begin recording.’
His first message is for the Republic. He tells them what he has overheard. He tells them he will investigate the shipwreck, and that if there are survivors, he will secure them until he receives further instructions. He stresses that there were a number of Patagonians present when the news was announced. If it really is an Osirian boat, it will be almost impossible to contain the news, and even if it is not, he reminds them, the mere suggestion that Osiris might still be out there will cause a stir in the Boreal States. He does not mention Ivra, who will doubtless record his own holoma. He says he will report back with the outcomes of his investigation.
This holoma he will place at the agreed drop-point at the harbour, from where someone Taeo has never seen will collect the message and ensure that it makes its way back to the homeland.
Now for the agents north of the belt. He needs to circumvent the tediously slow web of drops and pickups and codes, and get a message straight to the Panama Exchange Point.
Holomas work like magnets. When in proximity, both devices will activate, and the holoma bearer will know another holoma is nearby. So all he needs to do is to find a fast carrier.
He notices the power gauge is flickering; the charging holoma has squeezed out the last drop of energy. He puts the other two aside and turns off the overhead light. When he presses his palm to this one, a cluster of white lights glow on its surface. He taps each, watches their images materialize one by one, though he knows each word by heart, has watched them over and over. It is a month since the holoma arrived.
There are several holum from Shri, one each from Kadi and Sasha, and a minute of Nisha making incomprehensible noises. Shri’s eyes look directly at him and she keeps smiling but he can tell the smile is forced, uncomfortable. The children are doing as well as can be expected in the new school, she says. Sasha has started his Siberian and Swahili classes and there has been a lot of playing spy (Shri’s eyebrow lifts pointedly). Where has that come from, does Taeo suppose? He imagines a note of accusation in her voice, but perhaps she is trying to play down the situation, or perhaps she means nothing by it at all. The image of her is at once clear and fuzzy, present and not. He wants to reach out and touch her hair, her face, but she is nothing but a manipulation of light rays.
He remembers her face at First Light. Carnival night in Vosti Settlement, which everyone admits throws the greatest celebration of the holiday. People come from settlements all around the peninsula for Vosti’s carnival, riding the hover-rail or the snow-mobile through the winter dark, putting the final touches to their headdresses while they sip from flasks of piping-hot sake.
Shri shouldn’t have been there, as he found out later. She had promised to attend a family engagement, but she had wanted to see the Vosti carnival with her friend (whose name Taeo has forgotten – she and Shri lost touch – and yet he always recalls her with a kind of abstract fondness, thinking of the two women travelling together in the pod of the hover-train). Shri had been persuasive – she has always been very persuasive. Taeo has often imagined the conversation that brought her to Vosti, the ruses she would have used.
Tell me about the carnival, Shri would have said, fixing the friend with her most captivating gaze.
And the friend would have said: Shri, by ice, how can I describe this to you. There’s the costumes for a start. She would have told Shri about the faces masked and bejewelled, and the dancers who flung the nine flags of the Republic like matadors. She would have described the pageant: the crossing of the Southern Ocean, the great swathes of material, all blue, to represent the water, and a woman dressed entirely white, for Antarctica. And after the pageant, which finishes in the minutes that the sky begins to lighten, all the street lights go out. You stand in the dark, hearing the breathing, the low, excited murmurs of those around you, watching the sky, waiting.
And then the edge of the sun stirs above the horizon.
For a few moments, the entire settlement stands united in awe, in a kind of disbelief. The sun has returned, it has not abandoned us. There will be an end to the winter after all.
The drums begin. Joyous rollicking beats, samba invigorating the street, and everyone begins to dance.
Taeo danced in those days. It didn’t matter that he was no good at it. The streets were so densely packed that you couldn’t help but be carried along, and in those earliest minutes of nascent orange light you felt a weight fall from you which made your feet free, and your heart full. The sake turned your head giddy; everywhere you looked people were turning to one another and hugging and crying a little.
Happy First Light! Happy First Light!
In the crush Taeo found himself hugging Shri. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders, her body pressed close to his. On her breath were traces of sake and spices. She stood back and looked at him, beaming. Her mask was pushed up from her face, as his was, and strands of her hair had got caught in it, and her face was revealed, intricate swirls of gold and silver painted on clear brown skin. She said in Portuguese, ‘I love your carnival!’
Taeo felt, at that moment, a sense of pride and belonging as strong as any he had ever experienced. His carnival – yes, it was his carnival, his people, his settlement. And this beautiful woman said she loved it, not in patois but in his language of the home.
The sun was lifting higher, tendrils of light winding into the sky, an explosion of colour after the dark. He could not help but think that something magnificent was beginning.
Say something. He had to say something.
‘Don’t you celebrate First Light?’
Such a stupid thing to say! Of course she celebrated First Light.
But she said, ‘Yes. But not like this. This – this is magical.’
* * * *
It was simple, and it was not simple. It was simple because, for reasons Taeo never understood, Shri had decided right there in the street that they should be together. They would be together. Why? Because she knew it was meant to be. It was simple like a fairy tale, like the sun-journey stories told to children in midwinter, stories they have told to Kadi and Sasha and now to Nisha:
The sun has gone to gather sunbeams from the stars, because every year, the sun gives out a million sunbeams to Antarctica, and now it must go and find more. It takes a long time before the sun can come back, and give us light again.
If their tale was told, it would be told like this:
Taeo and Shri met in the carnival on First Light, and they fell in love, and that is how it was and is and will be.
But it was not simple. She was Indian-Antarctican, he was Brazilian-Antarctican, and despite being free to do as they liked, still the communities were tight. They teased one another. Call yourself a Brazilian? You’ve got the worst sense of rhythm I’ve ever seen. When they went dancing, Taeo moved gracelessly and Shri laughed at him and told him she loved him. She came to live with him in Vosti.
Like all Antarcticans they were good with languages. They spoke partly in patois, more and more in Portuguese. When Shri was intent upon some task which required exacting concentration, she would mutter to herself in her own language of the home. He picked up words and phrases of Hindi, liking the way the new sounds moved in his throat, hoping that one day this learning might become a mediating force, a peace gesture in the thing they never spoke of. Neither of them cared for traditions, the past; they were interested in the future.
Shri claimed she didn’t miss her home. Friends came to visit, but since moving to Vosti she had not been back. Perhaps it was the shunning of the family engagement on First Light. Perhaps it was something larger; she rarely mentioned her family, and when she did an ominous mood would settle upon her, and so upon Taeo, filling him with an unease that threatened the tranquillity of their home. Only once did they take the hover-rail to Tolstyi Settlement, a journey five hours long and expensive too. The door to Shri’s family house remained shut, even when Shri shouted and banged on the door and was angry in ways he had not seen until that moment. Shri did not cry. Her face took on the taut, determined expression which would become her only expression after the transmission and would always fill him with grief. She said nothing on the journey back, not one word, until they were at home and he had cooked supper and she sat at the table watching him but not watching him, her eyes elsewhere. When he put the plate in front of her and said, ‘You must eat something,’ she said, ‘It’s not Tolstyi, you know. There’s nothing wrong with Tolstyi.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I like Tolstyi.’
‘It’s just them.’
Two weeks later they discovered she was pregnant. They had not planned to have a child so soon. Shri went to Central Market and paid too much money for a mobile to hang over the crib which was made of some newly mined Antarctican alloy. Taeo recognized the metal; he had tested it in the lab and could have told her each of its properties. When the sun fell on it, the mobile held all the colours of the southern lights. Shri said it would be as if the baby had her own piece of sky, an Australis all her own to guard and watch over her. If there was a word for that property in any of their languages, he did not know it. She touched her stomach and said: I want to call her Kadi, and he put his arms around her still-slender waist and said: Yes.
* * * *
The power is almost gone. Taeo replays Shri’s last message. He lies on the uncomfortable bed, watching the flickering image of his partner, paused, her lips just parted on the brink of a word, a strand of hair falling across her face that in two seconds’ time she will brush away. And in five seconds’ time she will shake her head, because the hair has fallen back again. She glows, translucent. Present and not. She flickers. The holoma dims.
‘Don’t go,’ he says. Then the last bit of electricity squeezes from the cell. Shri goes out. She is gone.
There is no noise but the wind and the rain. He wants opium badly. He knows he shouldn’t but he takes it out and lights the potent resin bead, watching it bubble under the flame. He smears it carefully around the hole of the pipe. Brings it to the flame. A pull, then another. Inhale. Exhale. There – there it is. This is what he needs. This is all. The darkness moves, shapes emerging out of it and melting back, as if he lies in a living pool of wax. And the world is warm, and the hurt is less.
Something is happening. Something big. This is my chance to get home.
It is then that he thinks of the pilot.