Corvus L. Lee Lowe Copyright © L. Lee Lowe 2009 Cover photograph courtesy of Thomas Larsen http://natursyn.dk 1 Bracing himself against the wind, Zach gets to his feet without a thought for direction or destination. In the white forever of this place, there is no lantern to light the dark and bitter woods of memory. Even the croak- ers would find little use for such knotted timber. Do you hear me? he shouts full volume in his mind. Nothing worth felling. Nothing worth nothing He angles into the blowing snow. The cold has as much substance as the snow, thick and clean and impenetrable, almost lush, and it reminds Zach of a dense text encountered for the first time, against which you pit yourself, into which you tunnel for sustenance, at school his first Mandarin characters had been like that, you have to wrest sense from the meaty snow- flakes before they melt on your tongue. He opens his mouth and catches one, then another. Tears gather at the corners of his eyes, and he wipes them away quickly—angrily—with gloved fingers lest they freeze his eyes shut—his damned traitorous eyes. His booted feet are soon clogged with snow, and heavy. With each step they amass another layer, and then another, and though he tries to shake them free, the stuff clings like down, soft and fluffy yet as tena- cious as the barbs that filled his roughquilted child- hood—auger, transfuck, mulac, devi, freak. He bends his head and plods on, breathing painstakingly around the icy knife in his chest. Somewhere there would be shelter. Somewhere there would be food. They wouldn’t want to kill him just yet, would they? The cry slices through the silence. Zach stumbles and falls, the ground flying up to meet him like the breast of a great albatross. Black-vaned against the unending white, its wings beat and beat about his head. He raises his arms to shield himself, the birdcall surrounding him like manic laughter. Where is she, you buzzards? ‘All right,’ the technician in charge says. ‘Safe zone.’ ‘He’s in?’ ‘Slick as a lube job.’ ‘Mind your language.’ Charles Litchfield runs a hand through his thinning sandy hair and glances round. Senior neuros are cut a good deal of slack, but you can never be too careful. ‘The amount you worry, I’m surprised you haven’t got ulcers yet.’ Andy’s fingers dance like spiders across the console before he raps off a series of instructions to the computer. ‘Anyway, I thought that after the funeral you withdrew your application for transfer.’ Despite occasional lapses into irreverence, Andy is top-notch at his work, and Litchfield always requests— and gets—the younger man in his unit. Laura said he played a wicked bass, too—a weekend hobby that 2 wouldn’t be tolerated in a lesser tech. ‘That doesn’t mean I flout the rules.’ Andy’s eyes never leave the monitors. ‘You blame him, don’t you?’ ‘‘Don’t be daft. He’s been completely exonerated. If anyone is to blame, it’s myself. I should have checked for any long-term sequelae—complications—of the virus.’ Andy says nothing though his eyebrows arch slightly. ‘We all know he’s a risk-taker,’ Litchfield says hur- riedly. ‘That’s what makes him so good.’ For a few minutes Andy works on in silence while Litchfield studies the stream of raw data passing across the neural link monitor. A few jagged spikes in alpha2, and the feedforward channel seems sluggish though still well within tolerances. ‘Maybe you should’ve sent Gina or Phil,’ Andy says when he’s finished his adjustments. He stretches, then cracks his knuckles. Litchfield’s eyes go to the tech’s fingers. There have been rumours. ‘You know perfectly well it had to be Zach.’ He raises his voice for the benefit of any watch- dogs. ‘He’s the best we’ve got for this kind of job.’ ‘What if he breaks? It’s hit him very hard.’ ‘He’ll do. Remember who he is.’ ‘Looking for someone?’ Laura whirled at the sound of Zach’s voice. He stepped out of the shadows under the massive beeches, tempering his mockery with a half-smile. Quarter- smile, actually, and still her pulse responded. She wondered if he’d notice. She knew what they said about him, about his sort—everyone did. A trickle of appre- hension slid between her shoulder blades, and she glanced quickly in all directions, but there was no one 3 in sight. Zach’s eyes darkened, and he took a step backward. ‘Right,’ he said. He turned on his heel, his hair swinging like a sluice of black rain across his face, and strode away through the coppery leaves, which crackled underfoot. It had been a dry season. After a second’s hesitation Laura followed, catching up with him near the gunnera mani- cata—in summer a spectacular display like a giant’s rhubarb patch, which had so impressed her that she’d once netted it. An exotic foreigner needing lots of space, and protection from their harsh climate. ‘Wait, Zach. Please. I don’t care what they say.’ He stopped under a ginkgo tree and looked down at her. She was unusually tall, but he was even taller. All of them were, though he more than most. ‘And your dad?’ he asked. ‘He’s not going to find out.’ ‘Suppose he does? Not reporting it could cost him his job. And if you’re planning to get a place at univer- sity—’ She shrugged. He stared at her for a moment longer before pluck- ing a single, butterfly-shaped leaf from the branch overhead and offering it to her, a reminder of his pre- posterous, infuriating, magnificent unpredictability. ‘Come on, then.’ He jerked his head towards the petting zoo, often crowded at the weekend, and the brackish canal district that lay beyond. ‘I know a place where they do a decent burger and chips.’ But they both knew he meant where they’d be served. It was a small, cheerful takeaway with a single table and a couple of hard wooden chairs squeezed into the rear, almost hidden by a rack of magazines and the 4 drinks cooler. The dark-skinned woman working be- hind the counter nodded at Zach without speaking and without pausing in her chopping. Onions, Laura thought, and a heady spice which she couldn’t pin down. Nor had she ever seen such upper arms, whose skin from armpit to elbow swayed like flaccid udders as the woman worked. The square of cardboard folded under the leg of their table didn’t quite do its job, so that every time Laura leaned forward, her coke wobbled. A bit like her feel- ings, which lurched from elation that Zach, who threaded a motorbike through the clusters of kids in the carpark with the same utter indifference with which he tacked in and out of the classroom whenever he could be bothered, that a flesh-and-blood Zach, about whom she’d spent most of her waking hours, and not an inconsiderable number of her sleeping ones, day- dreaming and dreaming, that Zach was actually sitting right here across from her, eating . to stupefaction and a disbelieving admiration of her own daring . to dread that she’d be found out. That word would get back to her parents, and worse, to the Insects. She was a good liar, but nobody could lie their way out of this. Zach picked up a chip with a graceful movement of his fingers, then caught her studying him. ‘What?’ he asked. She coloured and couldn’t think of a crack response, nor even a suitable one. ‘Think we don’t eat?’ Her colour intensified, and she stared down at her own plate. She’d been hungry when they’d taken their seats and ordered. She prodded a chip with her fork, the way you’d nudge a quiescent bug with a stick or a shoe or a pencil—whatever came to hand—to see if the horrid thing would spring at you, or at least scuttle away. 5 ‘Nice deep yellow, aren’t they?’ Zach asked. ‘Stella uses ground cockroach meal, says it does wonders for the flavour too, better than malt vinegar.’ Laura speared four or five chips rapidhit on the tines of her fork and thrust them into her mouth. She chewed ostentatiously, smacking her lips. ‘Delicious,’ she said, with a flash in her eyes. ‘Re- mind me to ask Stella where I can buy some of that meal for my mum.’ This time the complaints began before pudding. ‘Have you talked with him?’ her mum asked. ‘No opportunity.’ Her dad scraped up the last of his mash, pushed his plate aside, and stood, anxious to fetch the serving bowl from the dresser. ‘Anyone else ready for dessert?’ Max shovelled in his peas with a grimace. At thir- teen he was always hungry, and there would be no sweet unless he cleaned his plate. Laura knew how he felt. Nobody else’s parents expected them to finish everything. Absolutely archaic. Obsolete. Superannu- ated . She grinned to herself. Though Zach hardly ever pitched up at school, his vocabulary was legendary. The stuff he read . she’d have to work hard to convince him she had a brain too. ‘What are you waiting for now? I do everything else around here as it is, do you expect me to go to your boss as well? ’ her mum asked, her mouth puckering as if she’d bitten into a lemon.