The Other Tree (39 page)

“People like you always need someone to blame. For your grief, for your loss, for your unfinished business. For your childish quests, your own inadequacies, and the reckless damage you do to the people around you. Will you blame me for your father dying alone in his kitchen, as easily as you blame me for your mother’s death?”

Bile rose in Chris’s throat, her limbs trembling with violent urges.

“Docker told me how my mother really died. What you did. What you still do.”

Marrick’s expression remained unchanged.

“I told Docker it was a mistake to approach you. He wanted to give you a chance to redeem your mother, to make up for the mistakes she made. Docker was always too sentimental. You’re not nearly the woman your mother was.”

“But I’ll finish what she started,” said Chris.

“Do you really think so?” said Marrick, sighting casually down the barrel of the gun.

Chris looked steadily at Marrick, an expression of grim, defiant hope in her eyes. It was the same kind of hope that had haunted Docker until the very end, the kind Marrick recognised as dangerous. Mad, illogical, inexorable unless quickly extinguished. To Marrick, hope was wanting something you hadn’t earned, and probably didn’t deserve.

Chris looked down at Luke’s ashen face, his breathing so faint that she was afraid she wouldn’t notice if it stopped altogether. Blood seeped through the bandages, and she kept her hands pressed firmly against the covered wound.

After Liada, she had never wanted to witness death again. Although Chris had been devastated by her mother’s death, some small, guilty part of her had been grateful that her mother’s passing had been quick and far away. Though she had desperately wanted a chance to say goodbye, and wished her mother had been surrounded by loved ones in her final days, there was a part of Chris that didn’t think she could bear to watch as someone she loved slowly deteriorated and slipped away.

Chris closed her eyes, feeling Luke’s heart fluttering weakly beneath her hands, like a suffocating moth. She had never had the chance to help him, to find out what it was that seeped through him like a slow-acting venom. She had been too busy to build that bridge, and now it was too little, too late.

At the sound of running footsteps, Chris and Marrick looked up to see Emir striding smoothly across the bridge. The ropes swayed and shuddered as his feet pounded over the planks, and the cavern rumbled again with the sound of geological indigestion. As Emir reached the cavern, both Chris and Marrick looked at Emir’s hands, almost expecting him to be brandishing a shiny crimson apple. He was empty-handed.

Marrick’s gun stayed locked on Chris.

“Report,” said Marrick.

Emir looked uncertain and faintly embarrassed as he approached.

“I couldn’t find any fruit,” said Emir. “And all the trees looked kind of the same.”

He paused.

“Did we come in the wrong season?” suggested Emir.

Marrick’s eyes narrowed, quickly judging Emir’s sincerity. Well, he
had
been hired as muscle.

“Ms. Arlin, on your feet,” said Marrick.

Chris glared at Marrick and reluctantly stood, the gun still tightly trained on her.

“We’re all crossing the bridge,” said Marrick.

Chris kept her eyes on Marrick as Emir stepped towards Luke.

“Leave him,” said Marrick sharply.

Chris’s eyes flared with anger. Everything in her wanted to refuse and make a stand. She had a dozen passionate declarations lined up that would have made William Wallace proud, but they all ended with Marrick shooting Luke in the head and saying “How about now?” Chris swallowed what felt like a rhinoceros stuck in her throat.

“Let me say goodbye,” said Chris. “Give me that.”

Without waiting for a response, Chris knelt beside Luke, almost surprised when no shot rang out. She gently wrapped her hands around Luke’s cold fingers, wishing he could know how deeply sorry she was, how much she wished she’d done things differently. She imagined rewriting the last few weeks, starting from the moment she had stood outside his office for the first time, looking at Luke as he sat behind his grey laminate desk. It seemed like so long ago. She should have just taken the damned card and never looked back.

She squeezed his hand, pressing it to her cheek.

“I’m so sorry,” Chris whispered.

She felt his fingers press weakly against hers, and his eyes opened a crack.

“It’s okay,” Luke mouthed. “Not surprised…”

Chris leaned in close, her breath warm against his cheek.

I’m coming back for you
.

It was so soft that Luke wasn’t sure if he imagined the words.

Luke felt hot tears running down his fingers, and he felt Chris squeeze his hand again before pulling away. He saw Emir’s shadow following Chris as they walked away, and finally he saw Marrick striding past in eel-skin boots, not even glancing at him before she vanished from sight. Their footsteps faded across the grit, and the cavern floor vibrated beneath him like a waterbed with a massage setting.

This was not how Luke had imagined he would die. He had to admit it was rather more interesting than what he
had
imagined, and also a fair bit sooner, but there was no point in having regrets now. Prayers and wishes meant as little now as they always had.

Luke understood the reality of how the world operated. It didn’t function according to rules of fairness, or logic, or morality. People weren’t rewarded or punished for their actions. Things just happened. People just did things. Consequences were unpredictable, inconsistent, and often cruel. He had spent the better part of his life chasing comforting lies about good and evil, truth and justice, about inescapable judgement that would catch everybody one day.

He had wanted to believe it, but as he lay dying, shot by a woman whose sins were outnumbered only by her awards for philanthropy, who would undoubtedly get away with his murder, and would probably shortly become immortal, he decided that the inherent injustice of the world was irrefutable.

One of Luke’s earliest memories was that of sitting in the backyard, beside the body of his dog. He had been waiting for it to wake up, half-knowing that it wasn’t going to. When his parents found him several hours later, flies had already started to settle. Solo had always been an excitable dog, yapping at the fence as schoolchildren walked past, poking their sticks at him through wooden slats. The vet said Solo had been poisoned and suggested that pesticides accidentally left in the yard were a common cause. This would have been plausible if it hadn’t been for the poisoned dog treats scattered around the yard, tossed in from the street.

Children recover from such things, even if they don’t understand why they happened, or why no one is ever brought to justice. However, there are things people don’t recover from, and to Luke it seemed fitting that his world now ended in the same way it had twelve years ago.

He had been fourteen at the time of the accident. In the months, possibly years, leading up to it, the house had become a subdued battleground of bitterness and disappointment. The relationship between Luke’s parents had steadily deteriorated for all the usual reasons, and arguments flared out of the smallest of mundane things. His skin grew thick from the daggers thrown daily across the room, steeped in the personal pain and quiet despair of the people he loved.

The out-of-town convention had come at a time of possible reconciliation, and his parents had decided to take the opportunity to spend some time alone. Luke’s last memory of his parents was the two of them walking out the door—his father in his Wookie costume, his mother in her stormtrooper outfit. It was supposed to be a new beginning.

Those hopes had ended on the side of Highway 47, when a speeding pickup truck sideswiped his parents’ sedan, sending it rolling across three lanes and into a concrete retaining wall.

The autopsy report said they died within hours.

Their bodies lay in the wreckage for two days before anyone reported the accident.

Later, witnesses said they didn’t stop to assist because they thought it was an advertising promotion. And they were running late for work.

They’d never found the driver of the pickup.

It had sunk through Luke like a homogenous, toxic molasses, filling him first with an indescribable rage, then an agonising grief, then just a sort of resigned hollowness. He had emancipated himself from foster care as soon as he was able, and once his schooling was finished, he had set off, never looking back. He wasn’t sure what he had been looking for—maybe peace, maybe meaning, maybe escape from the emptiness that filled his days and nights.

He thought he had found it in Vardeci, amongst the dark firs, the soothing prayers, and in the pity of an old dog. There were books full of truths he wanted to believe, full of grand statements about a judgement day which couldn’t be escaped, about a final weighing of the soul, from which petty excuses and hidden lies couldn’t protect you. He had wanted to believe, but that was different to believing. Father Andreas knew that, and Luke had blamed him for it.

However, clarity was with him now, as the blood slowly drained from him. Faith was believing in things you wished were true. There was no place for faith anymore.

Then, like the gentle falling of a curtain at the end of a play, everything went dark.

18

Chris wiped away her tears as she walked unsteadily onto the bridge, grabbing the rope handrail. The cracked wooden planks wobbled beneath her feet, her misshapen soles catching on the knotholes. The bridge bounced and swayed like an amusement park ride, and she had no idea how Emir had managed to run across when she could hardly walk. She glanced quickly over her shoulder, hoping that Marrick would lose her balance and tumble away. Unfortunately, Marrick seemed to be having less trouble staying on her feet than Chris.

“Do you need help?” asked Emir, walking close behind Chris.

“Keep your distance,” barked Marrick, staying a good five metres behind Emir, her gun still trained on them.

Grudgingly, Emir fell back a few paces, still trying to remain within lunging distance in case Chris lost her balance. It occurred to him that safety harnesses might not be such a bad idea, and if he ever worked for a large corporation again he would definitely pay more attention to their occupational health and safety policies.

Chris concentrated on maintaining her balance, keeping her eyes on the island looming ahead. The thin bridge hung across the darkness like a spider’s thread, leading towards the wide, rocky island. As she neared, she could see the spire of rock rising from the abyss like a spear, blooming into the island like a botanical nuclear cloud. The sides of the rock were rough with stalactites and jagged cleavage, as though parts had fallen away over countless years.

As she drew closer, she could make out more detail in the collage of foliage. Enormous trees loomed like reverse bonsai, and oversized grasses tangled through runaway scrub. The island sprawled with unfamiliar greenery, filled to capacity with plants she’d never seen. Everything around her seemed slightly unreal as she approached the end of the bridge. Eden rose before her, like a dream grown wild, left unwatched for too long.

A deep boom echoed from far below, rising through the rock, and the island shuddered. The bridge suddenly swayed violently, and Chris’s feet slipped from the boards. She managed to grab a rail as she fell, her feet swinging over the chasm. Marrick grabbed the ropes on either side of her as the bridge bucked and swung. Emir glanced at Chris, her fingers already slipping from the coarse rope, then at Marrick, her gun aiming away as she steadied herself. At the same time, Marrick and Emir realised that, on the swinging bridge, he could make it to Marrick before she could aim her gun.

Chris gasped as her fingers slipped from the rope, and Emir lunged, catching her arms just in time. The bridge shuddered again, and Emir decided that the odds of the bridge still being here in the next thirty seconds were a fairly even bet. Emir lifted Chris into his arms and sprinted the remaining distance to the island.

As Emir’s feet hit solid ground, Chris saw the gun rise.

“Emir!” yelled Chris.

Before his next step landed, there was a muted shot and the sound of flesh tearing, and Emir gave a surprised cry as his leg collapsed beneath him. He crashed to the ground and Chris spilled from his arms, rolling across the dirt. She looked up to see Marrick stepping onto the island, her smoking gun aimed at Emir’s doubled-over figure.

Emir’s hand was clamped over a rip in the calf of his suit, bright red liquid flowing over his fingers. He gritted his teeth, glaring up at Marrick. Of course, she would have a gun that could penetrate Kevlar.

“So talented,” said Marrick. “Unfortunately, that just became a liability.”

Chris rose to her feet, fists clenched. Marrick tightened her finger on the trigger, careful to maintain a safe distance from Emir. The first time she had seen him had been on surveillance footage taken at a SinaCorp facility in Pasadena, where he had apparently “recovered” several artefacts despite significant security measures. She remembered the slightly frightened silence in the room as the footage was replayed to her, and she had no doubts that, even wounded, Emir remained the dominant threat.

“On your knees,” said Marrick, staring down the barrel at Emir.

Emir looked at the gun through hooded eyes, pain radiating through him in screaming waves. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself onto his knees, keeping one hand clamped on his bleeding calf.

“Hands behind your head,” said Marrick.

Sweat dripped down Emir’s face as he lifted shaking hands behind his head, baleful eyes still locked on the gun. He cringed at the sensation of blood pulsing freely from his leg.

Marrick turned to Chris with calculating eyes.

“So, cryptobotanist,” said Marrick. “How long do you think he’ll live without medical attention? And how long do you think it’ll take for you to find the Tree of Life?”

Chris looked at Emir, growing paler by the second, the pool of blood by his feet staining wider. She wanted to shake her fist at Marrick and cry “You’ll pay for this!,” but there was no time. The island groaned, and in the darkness around them, rocks heaved and shook.