Friday Brown (25 page)

And something else, a quickening, white-hot in my veins.

‘We can’t let on that we’ve found him.’ My voice was flat, dead. ‘Not until we’re away from here. I’ll get us all out somehow, but she can’t know. Darcy?’

She nodded, her chin tucked into her chest. ‘I still don’t believe she could do this.’ Her fingers plucked at a matted strand of her hair. ‘She loves Silence.’

‘Loved,’ said Bree. ‘She loved him.’ She took AiAi’s
hand and put a finger against his lips. ‘You’ve gotta keep a secret, mate.’

Carrie said. ‘It’s six against two. We’ve got to take the car and go.’

‘How do we do that?’ Joe asked. ‘None of us is a match for either of them.’

Darcy’s face was set in a combination of despair and disbelief. She was torn, and AiAi didn’t count. If Arden told him to do something, he would. His devotion ran that deep. It was four against four—the bases were evenly loaded.

I climbed down the ladder.

‘How did you know?’ I asked Joe. I’d been looking in all the wrong places. I should have sensed something—
I
should have known where to look.

Joe pointed at the tank. ‘The other side,’ he said. He hugged his knees and buried his face in the crook of his arms.

I followed his footprints in the dust and looked up. On the outside wall of the tank, Silence’s name was etched in the rust and the dirt. Seven high, chalky-white letters. He’d written big, just like I told him to.

A few kilometres away, at the edge of the desert, a plume of dust rose and settled behind the troop carrier.

I watched them come.

There was nothing else to do but seal him up again, a pale comma curled on a bed of rotting leaves. Some things aren’t meant for this world. They’re too fragile, and life breaks them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Fresh grief feels like this:

Your mind is a maze and every pathway leads to a bricked-up wall, the one where you can see the real world just on the other side, but you can’t reach it. It’s a feeling like someone’s scooped out your insides with a spoon and all that’s left is a shell that walks like you and talks like you, but your body and soul have parted ways for a time. Your senses don’t fire and you can’t connect with another human being because to string all that grief together like a strand of paper dolls would create something as powerful as an atom bomb—you’d implode. So you’re all alone. And, for a short while, at least until it sinks in, you can fake anything.

I watched the others go about their business. They didn’t look at each other. Their movements were jerky.
They all seemed to have found something interesting at ground level. I knew from experience that this was normal: to divide and separate like oil droplets on water. It was instinctive, animal self-preservation.

Start packing,
I told them.
The sooner we get out of here the sooner we can get help for Silence.

That was stupid, of course. He was so far from saving. I meant justice. That’s what I meant.

The troop carrier pulled up. Arden and Malik had returned too soon—a round trip took three hours and they had been gone for less than one. Which meant something had made them turn the car around.

I went into the church. I erased all signs that I’d been there. I put on my boots. They were heavy and uncomfortable. I rolled my swag as tightly as I could, using my body weight to squeeze all the spaces out. I pressed so hard that the rough canvas chafed the skin off my knuckles. While I was looking around for anything I’d missed, Arden stepped through the entrance.

We took each other in.

Her: tall, imposing in her combat boots, impossibly clean.

Me: small, barefoot, filthy and scared.

My knees were knocking, my nose was blocked, my eyes ached from dust and tears—but I had hate. In that moment it was huge and whole, filling up the empty space that losing Silence and Vivienne had left inside.

‘You’re back early,’ I said. My tone was blasé. Exactly how I wanted to sound.

‘The road is flooded about twenty kilometres out,’ she said. She fingered the stump of her dreadlock. ‘We’ll have to try another way.’ She frowned at me. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?’

She touched her fingertip to the raw skin under my eyes. ‘You look like you’ve been crying.’

‘It’s the dust.’ I backed away.

Arden turned and stood with her back to me. She hit her forehead with the flat of her palm. ‘Think, Arden, think!’ she hissed.

My dread rose another notch.

‘We need to head for higher ground,’ I offered. Even to me, my voice sounded paper-thin.

Arden shook her head. ‘We just wasted half a tank of fuel. You don’t get it, do you? I’m responsible for
lives.
They
depend
on me.’

‘We’re not as isolated as you think. We’ll just get as far as we can. Someone will come…’

Play it out. Make her calm down. Keep her focused. We need to leave, or at least try to, before her wheels fall off altogether.

Arden grabbed my hand. She squeezed it twice, let it drop and touched her hair again.

I felt her fear and indecision and, for a split-second, I pitied her.

She got me good with her sucker punch.

‘You found him, didn’t you?’ She looked so sad.

I watched her finger that frayed end and I knew. It was my fault. I was the reason they’d turned back.
I’d blown everything. Now we were all witnesses she needed to erase.

I coughed to kickstart my heart. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I whispered.

For an instant she looked confused. But she must have seen something in my eyes, my expression. I’d given myself away.

‘It was an accident,’ she said. ‘He must have had an asthma attack. He just stopped breathing.’ Her breath caught and her eyes glazed over. ‘I didn’t want you all to be upset. It was easier to let you think…’

‘He’s been keeping his inhaler in his pocket since we’ve been here,’ I said carefully. ‘Because of the dust.’

‘Look at you,’ she said and stared down at my feet. ‘You’re filthy.’

There were muddy marks, halfway up my calf, from where my feet had sunk into the wet leaves inside the tank.

Arden shook her head again, touched the stump. ‘And this…’ she sighed. ‘I suppose the others know, too?’

‘Just me. I found him. Only me…’ I lied.

Arden started to cry. ‘Why would he get in there? I told him to hide, not commit
suicide
.’

‘Did you check?’

‘Did I what?’ She looked away.

‘Did you get in there and check? Did you touch him? Before you screwed down the…’

‘He was dead.’ She still wouldn’t look at me.

‘He was still
alive
last night. You heard him. You
knew
!’ I screamed. I flew at her with my fists but she batted me away.

Malik came. He stood in the doorway, saying nothing, as always. Just there.

I sat down hard on the floor. ‘You knew and you let him die,’ I cried. ‘You could have done something.’

‘Shut up,’ she hissed and put her hands over her ears.
‘Shutupshutupshutup.’

For a full minute there was nothing but the sound of our breathing. The dust I’d kicked up hovered in the air. Arden rocked herself. Malik put his hand on her shoulder and she jerked away.

She gave a tiny smile. ‘He was my first,’ she mused. ‘I found him in the station, sitting there. He’d been waiting for days, waiting for Amy to come back. He’d still be there if I hadn’t saved him.’

‘Where did you take him that night? Before you burned down the squat?’ I asked her. I needed to know why Silence had been different after that, even more lost.

‘He wanted to leave. With you.’ She gave me a look loaded with disdain. ‘So I took him to places we used to go. You know, we hung out. I reminded him of all the good things. I thought they meant something to him.’ She sneered. ‘And he said he was still leaving.’

‘What did you do?’ I had to know. Even if it was only her version of the truth.

She winked at me. ‘Plan B. I reminded him of the bad things.’

‘He was just a
kid
,’ I sobbed.
How bad could they be?

Arden seemed faraway. She was smiling to herself. ‘He held up a service station. When he was fourteen. Got away with it, too,’ she said. ‘I just took him back to remind him, get a slushie, you know…I didn’t think the same guy would be working there.’ She snorted. ‘Fucking
priceless.
Silence walks in, realises it’s the same guy, and the guy recognises him. Then this guy launches over the counter and comes at us with a fucking
machete,
screaming that he was going to chop him off at the knees…’

I gasped and she remembered I was there.

‘He’s okay, I mean, obviously he didn’t catch us, otherwise…’ she ended on a sigh. ‘He was okay.’

So that was it. Silence had decided he wanted to be somebody else, somebody
good.
He’d wanted to start over. He’d tried to ask her to let him go and Arden had rubbed his nose in his past. She’d destroyed what little hope he had left.

‘Did you really think I’d let you take him?’

‘What? I wasn’t
taking…
’

‘See it from my side. You wanted Silence. You tried it on with my brother, and with Malik.’ Her eyes were deadly slits. ‘I made you part of my family and you tried to take everyone away from me.’

Thoughts were grappling, but nothing made sense.
Her brother? Wish was her brother?
Shock started in my centre and spread. The skin on my arms broke out in blotchy welts as if I’d been smacked. Right then, I hated Wish, too. I couldn’t separate them—any feelings I had
for him became entwined with my hate for
her
—it felt like someone was burning holes in my brain.

‘I took your money.’ Arden smirked. ‘I know you think it was Darce, but I took it.’

I hadn’t asked, but she’d told me anyway.

‘It was getting boring. I needed to change the dynamic—you were going to leave.’ Her voice got low. ‘I wish I had just let you.’

It was something we both agreed on. If I had left back then, would Silence be dead? Was it some kind of random butterfly effect, or Arden’s orchestration? I thought of Vivienne’s belief in magic, omens, luck, whatever. There was no magic. No cosmic balance of right and wrong. No signs. There was only death and ego and madness.

The insolence of Arden in confession mode left me feeling sick. I staggered upright and wrapped my arms around my waist.

‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘You can’t own people. You can’t make people love you.’ I spat it out like a poisoned dart but she didn’t flinch. ‘You can’t force them to respect you.’

‘You sound like a fortune cookie,’ Arden said, then as an afterthought, ‘Wish came for you, you know.’

‘What?’

‘He came that afternoon.’

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I said.

‘It does matter. He didn’t come to see me, he came to get
you
.’ She gave a catty smile. ‘I told him you’d already
gone. But
I
came back for you, didn’t I?’ She made it sound like a threat.

I had to have the last word, whatever happened next.

‘You killed him,’ I said and a fat tear rolled down to my chin. ‘In a hundred different ways, you killed him, starting from the moment you took him from that train station. And you still think you saved him.’

Arden made a gagging noise.

Right then, Bree peered from behind Malik. ‘We have to go now. The trailer’s packed, and the car.’ Her eyes were wide and fearful. ‘The road’s going under.’ She looked at me, back at Arden. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Tell everyone to get in the car, Bree.’ Arden drilled Malik with a stare that was loaded with meaning.

Malik took a sidestep in my direction.

They were going to leave me behind.

Malik wrapped an arm around my waist and lifted me as if I weighed nothing. I kicked out at Arden with my boots as he dragged me past her, but she dodged, an expression of distaste on her face.

A quick flash of Bree, running after us. Carrie shouted something I couldn’t understand. Malik’s hand covered my mouth and nose. I sucked air through his fingers but I couldn’t get enough.

My body hit the stairs that led beneath the church; pain registered in my head, my back, my elbows and knees. Everything blurred. And the weird thing was, even with my fear of enclosed spaces, it seemed like the safest place to be.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Darkness. Darkness for an eternity.

Pain all over, liquid pain that had no centre. It was everywhere. Even my hair hurt. How long? Minutes. Hours. I opened and closed my eyes but nothing changed. I was stuck in an underworld, a cold, damp ever after.

I shifted one leg and it shuddered like an unoiled hinge. I tested each finger as if playing a scale on a piano. Unbroken, just stiff. My clothes were wet. The ground should have been hard, but it was doughy. Sludge. Sensation hit slowly.

One.

Thing.

At.

A.

Time.

Think.

I am Liliane Brown.
There. The cortex for other thoughts.
I am alive. Under the church. I’m alive under the church.

It was quiet, except for my own breathing and a musical tinkle like a wind-chime in a breeze. But there was no breeze. Dead air, the air inside a tomb. Four walls of darkness, pressing down.

I felt my face: straight nose, puffy lips, eyes that had cried. One tender cheekbone. Stickiness in the hair behind my left ear.

There were things at the edges of my mind, waiting to get in.

I twisted onto my back. Straightened my arms and legs. Stretched and flexed.
Vitruvian Man,
star jumps, snow angels in the dirt. I tried to remember things I’d seen, things I’d done. My memory was in small, scattered pieces.

I am Liliane Brown. I am alive.

Is that all there was? Was it enough? Shouldn’t there have been more?

I reached out my hand and locked it onto something cold, cylindrical. Vertical. The leg of a chair. I squeezed tight, pulled, levered my body upright. The chair gave, objects toppled and fell. I rolled sideways and butted against the bottom of the steps. Crashes, thuds. The chairs settled and there was silence.