The Other Tree (35 page)

He put on his helmet.

“You’re going in, with or without your helmet,” he said.

The rage in Chris faded into an agonising ache. She could almost smell the antiseptic on her mother’s coat, and the thought of her mother’s last moments filled her with an indescribable pain as well as a crazy kind of relief. Her mother had defied SinaCorp, had lived a life full of good and bad decisions, but had followed a heart full of hope and love. Wherever that might have led.

Chris felt a firm shove in the middle of her back, and a searing wind suddenly whipped at her hair. She quickly pulled on her helmet as she stumbled into the room of whirling fire.

* * *

Emir sat perfectly still, eyes closed, listening as the distant sound of voices was drowned by the noise of lashing flames. His eyes suddenly snapped open and he rolled onto his back, folding his limbs and twisting his joints like a break-dancer on fast forward before leaping to his feet, the ropes falling to the floor.

“Neat party trick,” said Luke. “Hey!”

Emir was already halfway down the hall before he skidded to a stop, turning to Luke in a moment of genuine contemplation. Darting back, he twisted the ropes from Luke’s wrists before racing towards the far archway again.

Luke sprinted after him, and saw Emir peeling off his jacket as he approached the doors.

“What are you doing?” hissed Luke.

“I’m going in,” said Emir grimly.

“Then, why are you taking off your jacket?”

Emir paused.

“Right,” said Emir, shrugging his jacket back on. “Habit, I guess.”

Emir moved towards the archway and Luke stood in front of him, hands raised.

“Are you crazy?” said Luke. “Firstly, Docker will kill you. Secondly, Docker will kill Chris. And thirdly, Docker will probably kill me. And that’s all presuming you don’t get roasted first.”

“It may be crazy, but so is Chris. I just know she’s going to do something like try to fight Docker with her bare hands or a half-potato.”

He rolled his eyes at the memory.

“Okaaay,” said Luke. “Crazy, I get it. I had no idea it was transmissible, but everybody getting killed isn’t going to help.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Well, is there anything useful in the—”

There was a deafening crack, and then an agonising scream tore through the flames. As Luke and Emir looked at each other in alarm, a dark shape moved towards the archway.

17

Chris could feel the shapes of the pebbles through her boots, and she was certain this was not a good thing. She could sense Docker’s presence close behind her as she forged through the sheets of flame, which was also not particularly comforting.

Her mother had been murdered. In a sense, Chris had always felt that way, but Docker’s words painted such a different picture from the one she had grown up believing. Instead of a portrait of corporate negligence and apathy, it was exposed as an enormous mural of deliberate violence, persecution, and control.

SinaCorp believed you could buy anything: silence, secrets, even eternal life. But there were things that couldn’t be swayed by wealth, no matter what the marketing departments said. Respect, pride, love, empathy, remorse— you could buy the semblance of them, you could even buy people to tell you that they were real, but they would always be pale imitations of the powerful human connections that people formed of their own free will.

Chris couldn’t help feeling that her mother hadn’t been the only casualty in the desert all those years ago. In some ways, Docker had been destroyed that night, as well.

She tried to wipe the sweat from her eyes, but she only managed to smudge soot onto her faceplate. For a disoriented moment, she wasn’t sure if she was even still headed in the right direction, and felt a brief surge of panic that perhaps the room had changed configuration.

There was the sudden crack of an explosion, and an inhuman scream ripped through the flames. Images of banshees and fire demons flashed through Chris’s mind as she tried to make out shapes through the whirling fire. Several beats passed before she realised the noise was coming from Docker.

Smoke rose from his hip, and through the heat shimmer it looked as though he were melting. There was another shattering bang as the gun strapped to his calf exploded, and Chris felt a spray of shrapnel sting through her suit. Docker started to collapse, engulfed in flames.

Less than five steps brought her to his side.

It was another long nineteen, through pulsing jets of fire, before Chris dragged Docker’s screaming body back into the cool of the cavern.

Luke and Emir stared in horror as Chris hauled Docker over the threshold, away from the blazing archway, both of them smoking. Chris laid Docker on the dirt floor, her stomach clenching at the sight. Docker’s heat suit had melted onto his skin, bubbling and fusing with his burned body. There was a charred hole in flesh and fabric where his gun had exploded into shrapnel at his hip, and again on his calf. Chris gently removed his helmet, and he gasped at the cool air, eyes clenched in agony.

Chris tried to staunch the blood with her hands, but there was too much of it, everywhere. She was getting molten flesh on her suit.

Just scrape it off
, thought Chris.
Don’t stop
.

“Water,” said Chris. “We need water—”

Luke and Emir looked at one another. Luke ran down the hall and pulled several bottles of water from one of the SinaCorp packs. Chris followed, reaching into another pack and grabbing a heavy armful. Emir crouched quickly beside Docker. There was a brief moment of hesitation, then Emir flicked his wrist, and a glass dropper appeared between his fingers. He squeezed the clear liquid onto Docker’s lips, then quickly stepped back as Chris charged over.

Kneeling beside Docker, Chris carefully poured water over the smoking flesh and fabric. Docker choked on every breath, as though his lungs were full of fluid. His lips moved, staining with blood.

“Should have…left you with a gun,” gasped Docker, his eyes opening a slit at Emir.

“Don’t try to talk,” said Emir.

Docker’s gaze flicked to Chris as she knelt beside him, trying to wash away the blood and ash, cooling the burned flesh.

“Irrational optimist…” he choked out. “Just like…your mother… Didn’t end well…for her either…”

“You’re missing the point,” said Chris, her voice tight, her eyes watering from the acrid smoke.

As Docker’s eyes focused on a distant point, he seemed almost to relax, as though a lifetime of careful calculations and unintuitive rationalisations was lifting from him. His breathing grew shallow and intermittent.

“Finish the mission,” whispered Docker, his eyes closing. “Go home…”

The last of the water trickled from the bottle, spattering onto Docker’s chest. There was a long silence, then Chris quietly screwed the lid back on the empty bottle. She started to unzip her fire hazard gear, unclipping buckles and straps before stepping out of the suit. Emir moved over to Chris, his heart aching and pounding from too many things that should have been said a long time ago.

“Chris, are you okay?” asked Emir.

“Here’s your suit back,” said Chris woodenly, handing Emir the bundle of stiff fabric, still remarkably intact aside from a few shrapnel scratches. “Sorry about the blood.”

Emir wasn’t sure he wanted to wear the suit again, but he wordlessly slipped it on, fastening clips and re-attaching his discarded gear.

“I guess it’s lucky you got the good suit,” said Luke, his gaze briefly drawn to the misshapen figure on the ground.

“Actually, I had mine custom-made in Italy,” said Emir, snapping a heavy wrist guard over his forearm. He glanced at Chris with a hint of guilt. “After we spoke in the plaza, I guess I…had my doubts.”

That explains the flattering tailoring
, thought Luke.

Emir walked over to Chris, who was picking up her satchel from where it lay beside a pillar.

“I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you,” said Emir. “I should have done something a lot sooner.”

Chris reached into her pocket and pulled out a curl of leather cord, strung with a piece of amber.

“Bale wanted me to give this back to you,” said Chris, holding it out in her palm. “He made it out, by the way.”

Emir stared at the honey-coloured stone as it caught the fluttering firelight. It seemed like a lifetime ago, someone else’s, that Chris had stood there with the smooth piece of amber in her palm, her cupped hand filling with rain. The trees had loomed around them like pillars in some fantastic green palace, while rain drummed on the leaves.

Emir had failed three of his first-semester subjects, and things with his family were strained, to put it generously. It was clear he wasn’t an academic, and it came as a deep disappointment to his parents. They had said it would be a waste if he didn’t go to uni. What they had meant was that he was a waste of all their sacrifices.

Emir had been too young to remember much of the civil war. He had been four when his family had finally settled in a new country and built a new life in the suburbs. What little he remembered of his life before wasn’t the patter of gunshots through the night, or the boom of mortars landing on the street outside, or the screams that ended with sickening abruptness. What he remembered was the silence.

He remembered the family huddled in the darkness, not daring to move, not daring to breathe, not daring even to think, lest the marching feet outside sensed your presence. He became very good at that—the silence, the stillness, the calm despite the pounding heart, the readiness to run.

He didn’t remember the march through deserted towns, the trek over the border, or the long, overcrowded boat ride across rough seas—his sisters described those to him years later. However, he remembered the silence when they had arrived—a different kind of silence, so suffocating and muted that he found it difficult to sleep for weeks afterwards. He would wake in the darkness at the sound of footsteps, ready to scramble out the window and bolt into the night.

Emir’s eldest sister had become a heart surgeon, and his other sister was a lawyer in policy reform. Emir had only gone to uni at his parents’ insistence, and things had not looked promising. Earlier that week, he had tried to explain the grim academic outlook to his parents. Some harsh words had been exchanged. Mostly in one direction.

He was not a fan of tough love. Nor did he approve of guilt and unconstructive criticism as parenting tools, but they were effective, and Emir couldn’t help feeling that he was, indeed, in many ways useless.

He had been surprised by Chris’s invitation to the national park. He’d seen it as a chance to get out of the city, where he felt penned in by walls and rivers of traffic lights, and he sensed that Chris felt something similar. It had been the fourth anniversary of her mother’s death, and Emir had suspected she wanted to be far away from familiar reminders, but not quite alone.

The day had been a glorious revelation. They had spent most of it sprinting through the rain and mud, vaulting logs, and being chased by dogs, bugs, and at one stage, a man with a stuffed duck on his hat. They’d scrambled over fallen trees, leapt ditches brimming with pillbugs, and he’d had to drag Chris from a rushing brook which had broken its banks. He’d never felt so alive and so at peace.

He had watched Chris, who had lost both her sister and her mother, as she fossicked through the damp leaf litter. Despite losing the people she loved under such tragic circumstances, and being alone in the world aside from her frail father, she still found such joy in scraps of moss and wilted seedlings. The way she would light up at every small find, as though the world still held such infinite wonder and pleasure for her, amazed him.

She had turned to him with her arm extended, a muddy rock in her hand as though it were something marvellous. And she had looked at him as though he were something wonderful, something worthwhile, someone she wanted to share this fascinating rock with. He had taken the pebble in his hand, and as the rain pattered down, washing away the mud, he’d seen the amber emerge. It had been like holding a piece of sunlight in his hand.

Emir held the piece of worn amber in his hand, while Chris gazed up at him.

Luke cleared his throat.

“Is it just me, or is that rumbling getting louder?” said Luke.

“I thought maybe it was for atmospheric effect,” said Chris. “Like the soundtrack loop in a carnival horror house.”

She paused, feeling the rumbling through her now very-thin soles.

“Now that you mention it, it does feel a little like seismic instability,” she said.

“Two buttons and a door, right?” said Luke. “Sounds like we could do it with three people.”

“And one heat-resistant suit?” said Emir.

Chris rummaged around her satchel and pulled out a jar of dark goop.

“I have fireproof gel,” said Chris brightly.

“So we can die with great hair?” said Luke.

Chris gave Luke a sour look.

“It’s a fire retardant based on pine resin,” she told him. “You put it on your skin and clothes. They use something similar for stunts involving people running around on fire, mostly in comedies. It’s good for up to five minutes.”

“Why do you have fire-retardant gel?” asked Luke.

“I also made an airborne sedative and poison darts—”

“How the hell did you get through customs?”

“Language, please,” said Chris archly. “I label them as condiments.”

“I don’t know,” said Emir, looking at the archway. “There’s fire and then there’s
fire
”

“My coat’s made of wool,” sighed Luke. “So that should count for something.”

“Are you serious?” said Emir, looking from Chris to Luke. “You’re really going to try running through an incinerator covered in pine resin? I can’t believe you guys made it this far.”

Chris picked up Docker’s helmet, weighing it thoughtfully in her hands.

“Fancy equipment didn’t do you guys much good,” said Chris quietly.

Emir looked away, trying not to think of Roman’s fingers digging into his arms.

Luke unscrewed the lid from a jar labelled “Blackberry Jam” and gave a tentative sniff. It smelled vaguely like the blackberry jam a neighbour used to make. Then again, she had been arrested shortly afterwards and the police had wheeled away the contents of her pantry amidst a tangle of biohazard tape.