Allie’s spoken to Darrell on videochat; he looks terrible. ‘Just about holding it together,’ he says. They’ve scoured the countryside for her. ‘If they came for her, they could come for me,’ he says. ‘We’ll keep looking for her. Even if what we find is a body. We have to know what’s happened.’
They have to know. Allie has had wild and terrible thoughts. Tatiana’s convinced with a sudden upsurge of paranoia that Roxy has betrayed her to North Moldova and interprets every new turn in the hostilities as a sign that Roxy’s sold her out, even given the Glitter to her enemies. Tatiana is becoming unpredictable. At times she seems to trust Mother Eve more than anyone; she has even signed into law a measure making Mother Eve the de facto leader of the country if she, Tatiana, is incapacitated. But she’s having violent fits of rage, striking and hurting her staff, accusing everyone around her of working against her. She’s giving contradictory and bizarre instructions to her generals and officers. There has been fighting. Some of the revenge bands have set fire to villages harbouring gender-traitor women and men who’ve done wrong. Some of the villages have fought back. There is a war slowly spreading in the country, not declared on a single day between well-defined enemies but spreading like measles: first one spot, then two, then three. A war of all against all.
Allie misses Roxy. She had not known before that Roxy had found a chink in her heart. It makes her afraid. She hadn’t ever thought of having a friend. It is not an item she’d particularly felt the need for, or the lack of, until it was gone. She worries. She has dreams in which she sends out first a raven and then a white dove, looking for good news, but no news returns on the wind.
She would send out scouting parties to comb the woods if she knew where to look within a hundred miles.
She prays to the Holy Mother: Please, bring her safely home. Please.
The voice says: I can’t make any promises.
Allie says in her heart: Roxy had a lot of enemies. People like that, they have a lot of enemies.
The voice says: You think you don’t have a lot of enemies, too?
Allie says: What help are you?
The voice says: I’m always here for you. But I did say this would be tricky.
Allie says: You also said that the only way is to own the place.
The voice says: Then you know what you have to do.
She says to herself: Stop it now. Just stop it. She is just a person like all of the other people. Everything will disappear and you will survive. Cut off this part of yourself.
Shut off this compartment in your heart, fill it with scalding water and kill it. You do not need her. You will live.
She is afraid.
She is not safe.
She knows what she has to do.
The only way to be safe is to own the place.
There’s a night when Tatiana calls for her very late, past 3 a.m. Tatiana’s been having trouble sleeping. She wakes in the night with bad dreams of vengeance, spies in the palace, someone coming for her with a knife. At these times she calls for Mother Eve, her spiritual advisor, and Mother Eve comes and sits on the end of her bed and speaks soothing words until she falls asleep again.
The bedroom is decorated with a mixture of burgundy brocade and tiger skins. Tatiana sleeps alone, no matter who might have been in the bed earlier in the evening.
She says, ‘They’re going to take everything from me.’
Allie takes her hand, feels her way along the jangled nerve-endings to the griping and disquieted brain. She says, ‘God is with you, and you will prevail.’
As she says it, she presses in a careful and measured way on this part of Tatiana’s mind and that one. Nothing you could feel. Only a few neurons fire differently. It’s just a tiny suppression, a minute elevation.
‘Yes,’ says Tatiana. ‘I’m sure that’s right.’
Good girl, says the voice.
‘Good girl,’ says Allie, and Tatiana nods like an obedient child.
Eventually, Allie figures, more people will learn how to do this. Perhaps even now, in some far-off place, a young woman is learning how to soothe and control her father or brother. Eventually, other people will figure out that the ability to hurt is only the beginning. The gateway drug, Roxy would say.
‘Now listen,’ says Allie. ‘I think you’d like to sign these papers now, wouldn’t you?’
Tatiana nods sleepily.
‘You’ve thought it over, and the Church really should have the ability to try its own cases and enforce its own statutes in the border regions, shouldn’t we?’
Tatiana picks up the pen from her bedside table and signs her name jerkily. Her eyes are closing as she writes. She is falling back on to the pillow.
The voice says: How long are you planning to drag this out?
Allie says in her heart: If I move too quickly, the Americans will get suspicious. I’d meant this for Roxy. It’ll be harder to convince people when I do it for me.
The voice says: She’s getting harder to control every day. You know she is.
Allie says: It’s because of what we’re doing. Something’s going wrong, inside her head with the chemicals. But it won’t go on for ever. I’ll take the country. And then I’ll be safe.
Darrell
The shipments are fucked up because of the fucking UN.
Darrell’s looking at the truck that’s come back to him. It dumped its bags in the woods, and that’s three million quid of Glitter bleeding out into the forest floor when it rains, which would be bad enough by itself. Except that’s not the only thing. They got chased from the border, they came rough through the woods to get away from the soldiers. But they gave them a trajectory, didn’t they? If you’re running from the border and you’re heading in this direction, narrows down the options of where you might be, doesn’t it?
‘Fuck!’ says Darrell, and kicks the wheel of the truck. His scar pulls taut, his skein hums angrily. It hurts. He shouts ‘Fuck!’ again, louder than he’d meant to.
They’re in the warehouse. A few of the women glance over. A couple start wandering towards the van to see what’s happened.
One of the drivers, the deputy, shifts her weight from one foot to the other and says, ‘When we had to drop a load before, Roxy always –’
‘I don’t give a fuck what Roxy always,’ says Darrell, a little too quickly. A look passes between the women. He pulls it back. ‘I mean, I don’t think she wants us to do what we’ve done before, all right?’
Another look between them.
Darrell tries to talk more slowly, in a calm, authoritative voice. He finds himself getting nervous around all these women now that Roxy’s not around to keep them in line. Once they know that he’s got a skein himself, it’ll be better, but this isn’t the right time for any more surprises, and his dad’s said he’s got to keep it secret until it’s healed, anyway, until he comes back to London.
‘Listen,’ he says. ‘We’ll lie low for a week. No more shipments, no more border crossings, just let it all go quiet.’
They nod.