The Radical (Unity Vol.1) (22 page)

M
ara stood outside the cockpit door staring at us. ‘May I introduce you to my son, Lucius? Lucius, this is Seraph and Ryken, as you may have gathered. We’re at 48,000 feet now and should reach New York in around one hour, fifty minutes’ time.’

She spoke in an educated tone with a voice that reminded me of someone else
’s. She had an air of propriety that was edged with mischief, her eyes lit as though she never doubted for a second she would get us out of the situation we had found ourselves in back on the ground. While Ryken walked forward to greet her in a professional manner, I observed the scene and listened to the way she talked. You know how they say mothers and daughters sound the same… I felt sick. I knew the truth instantly.

I thought back to the little girl
’s bedroom in that house back in Stratford. The drawings on the walls were of exotic plants and gardens, animals and birds. The images inside a budding scientist’s mind.

Lucius was a gentlemanly young man
with dark features similar to his mother’s. He saluted Ryken and me, quite the trained soldier, before going up front to the cockpit.

I remained stock-
still, unable to move. Mara and Ryken shared anecdotes regarding the Hellion, which she revealed was a favorite mode of transport too. I stared at the woman and guessed she was around 45 or 50, just the right age. She was wearing pink leather sandals and an ornately embroidered purple caftan over white linen trousers. She had long hair, black in color, brown eyes, a tall athletic physique and a slight patch of freckles across her nose and cheeks. She stood confidently, with her hands clasped around each of her elbows. Then, as she smiled at my observations of her, I saw it. Eve’s smile.

I stood up out of my seat
and began to shake. It felt as though my stomach had been left behind on the ground. It was as if I were looking at a ghost. Silence filled the cabin and I held one hand over my mouth while Ryken remained in the background, wondering what the heck was going on.

‘Why do they call you
the
Apprentice
?’

Mara smiled confidently. ‘I think you know. Camille taught me everything she kno
ws. In my line of work, I learned long ago that the only person I could rely on for protection was myself.’

Ryken took a step back from Mara, knowing something was up.

I paced around her, surveying her as if she were a waxwork model. I walked over to my seat to rummage in my bag and retrieve the wedding photo. Mara continued smiling even when I held the photo up to compare the faces, before handing the image over.

‘Didn’t Mum look lovely?’
she gushed.

At first, I didn’t know whether to hit her or scream, or just collapse and drown in my own disbelief. This was intolerable. All these secrets and lies I could never have imagined.

I stepped backwards until my legs hit a chair and I fell into it with a thud. I dragged my knees up to my chest and hid my face.

‘So much pain,’ I managed to say.

Neither Ryken nor Mara dared move forward. I was no longer the creature I was before. I was retreating and they didn’t know how to deal with me.

I thought of Eve having to live apart from her husband and daughter, of the little girl’
s bedroom with no wall covering except the handmade collage in pencil and crayon. I thought about Eve having Mara for a daughter and living with that knowledge too, that her virologist offspring could be dead any minute.

I vaguely heard Mara whisper to Ryken,
‘It’s shock. It will pass.’

His concerned response echoed around the room and his voice was like a foreign language. I fought to gather sense.

‘You’re the mirror image of your father but I saw her in you straight away too.’

‘I know,’
Mara replied, emotion finally entering her own voice. Mention of Tom meant she was definitely Daddy’s girl. ‘I always wanted red hair like Mum, but you seem to have been gifted with the recessive gene in our family.’

Again
with the trivialities. I needed answers.

‘Why, why did we never meet before? Why did Eve never tell me about you? About your father?’

I looked out of the window but all I saw was nothingness. Meaninglessness. A world that had never given me anything but disappointment – that was all I could hope to expect. These latest revelations made me feel hollow.

Mara
crept across the floor and sat beside me, gently taking my right hand from my knee to hold it. I continued looking the other way.

‘
There is so much to talk about,’ her voice resounded clearly.

‘W
hat was all that on the runway then? A trick? How did we get out of there so easily?’ Ryken cut in, demanding he have a part in the conversation.

‘Oh that,’ Mara said, ‘
just something we’ve been working on for a few years… we coated the jet in a microscopic, nano-resin. Essentially, the plane’s computer draws in the general image from its surroundings and projects it back, like one large blank canvas
.
Listen Ryken, Seraph and I have a lot to discuss. Perhaps you might give us some time to speak alone?’

‘He’s okay Mara, he can stay,
I trust him. I told him about the
Operator
and he is still here.’

‘You will hav
e to bring me up to speed, however, I am still catching up with all these revelations, too,’ he mocked lightly.

I got the sense he was trying desperately to hide some nervousness about something. He was
n’t in charge when it came to Maddon women, he knew that well enough already.

I turned to look at him to gauge his expression but instead, I caught Mara nodding frantically in his direction, as if they shared something else secret that was also tantamount to the fight we faced.
One thing at a time
, I decided,
I can only handle one thing at a time
, though clearly I was on the periphery of some knowledge they shared.

Mara gestured for Ryken to sit opposite us and I took a deep breath when she began,
‘Seraph, my father was known as Stephan Dulwich, but his real name was Tom Bradbury. In 2023, my mother signed his death certificate, but the body was not my father’s. It was his colleague’s Stephan’s. In the ensuing chaos of the flu, Mum and Dad used the confusion so that he could assume a new identity. I was nine years old at the time and have some vivid recollections of what happened. The devastation is imprinted on my mind. Unless you went through it, you might never really understand. The looting, panic buying… gang wars. Bodies lining the streets, doctors struggling to treat hundreds of thousands of patients, hospitals crammed full of victims, a country and a world weeping and wailing over a seemingly unexplainable tragedy. But there are a select few of us who know what really happened. The best person to explain is my father.’

Astonished
looks passed between Ryken and I. Then Mara pulled a memory stick out of her pocket and held it up.

‘Listen to what he has to say very carefully.’

Mara took the old-fashioned USB and plugged it into an adaptor on her xGen, a large, pink leather-bound device with a sizeable screen. The contraption’s chunkiness suggested the amount of RAM it possessed was enormous. Once she loaded up the viewer, she passed it over to me and Ryken moved over my way to peer over my shoulder.

‘Yeah, thanks, it’s record
ing. Hi there… I’m Tom Bradbury, professor of zoology at Cambridge University. Today is Saturday, November the 10th, 2012. We just arrived in New Guinea on an expedition to seek out some more of the previously undocumented species here. We arrived in Jayapura yesterday before helicoptering out to camp a few miles from the Mamberamo river basin. It’s 6pm but the temperature is still at least 40 degrees Celsius. Even continually drinking water doesn’t seem to match the amount we’re sweating out constantly. The giant bugs around here are having a field day with my flesh. You can probably hear them trying to bash their way through the tent. I’ve had to throw at least four nets around the thing to protect myself. We have to remain vigilant in case the conditions take a turn for the worse. Unpredictable tropical storms have been known to cause extreme devastation. It will be a treacherous hike up into the rainforest but my colleagues Simpson and Harley are expert mountaineers and assure me that we will be okay. We’re waiting for a day when we can guarantee no rain for us to be able to get safely up into a lower-lying part of the Foja Mountains and see what we can find. We are going to erect a few canopies and try to smoke out whatever we can find. Two native ecologists have agreed to accompany us.

‘I find it hard to see how anything could survive here. It’s an impossible environment for crops and livestock to thrive in. It’s not only thick with vegetation, but the weather is unruly and the conditions in the mountains are quite often freezing. The flora and fauna have had to adapt to their environment over the millennia and seem to be highly evolved, having been left to their own devices for so long. Hopefully we will be able to venture into the wilderness tomorrow to see what we can find. I’m expected to hold a seminar on Wednesday so I’m due to fly back home on Monday night. If nothing turns up by then, that’s it. I’ll hopefully have some findings soon, so until then…’

*

‘This is my second video diary
,’ he managed to say while coughing and spluttering, before regaining himself. ‘I’m laid up in my camp bed and I’ve no idea what day it is, only I know I should have been back in the UK a long time ago. We ventured up into the mountains the day after my last entry. The weather was quite fine, if a little cool the further up into Foja we got,’ he caught his breath, continuing, ‘I think it must have been around 5:30am when we set off and we reached our destination around noon.’

He rolled about to get comfortable and frowned with the effort it took to speak.
‘All five of us reached a plateau and surveyed the scene below us… the lush green forest and active, diverse wildlife were a sight to see. It did seem as though we had reached a lost world. The knowing nature of the environs suggested an evolutionary strength beyond anything of any other land. We didn’t find anything new, but one of my colleagues overheard one of the guides panicking when they realized we were in the vicinity of what they referred to as the “Devil’s Fowl”. However, we were so inquisitive, we insisted they show us the way to this mysterious creature’s habitat. I don’t know if it was the thin air, but I could have wept when we discovered it was a bird of unparalleled beauty. The size of a chicken, but much slimmer, its feathers were as white and fluffy as a chick’s, tinged grey-black at the ends. It had an elegant long neck with a black patch of velvet fluff on its crown. Its pink feet and claws were small in comparison, while its wings were built for the purpose of short flight. It crowed a sensational rhythmic cry almost resembling birdsong but exhibited vicious tendencies as soon as we went anywhere near.’

He struggled with more coughing and spluttering
. ‘We took some samples of feathers and excrement but the creature wouldn’t let us get close and we didn’t want to risk infringing on its environment any more than we had to, such was its apparent rarity. We came back down the mountain that evening, and arrived back at camp at around 6:30pm, sound as a pound.

‘However, the next morning…
’ he spluttered, wiping his face with a cloth, ‘…where was I? Oh yes, the next day my colleagues and I woke up feeling as if we’d each been hit by a truck. While I exhibited symptoms of a chest infection, Ed Harley had a terrible stomach upset… possibly gastroenteritis, I think… and Hal Simpson had something akin to glandular fever. I think I remember us saying to each other that we’d suffered similar ailments as youngsters, but for us all to experience them again, all at the same time, it was too strange. We thought we would be able to shake off our maladies but we were soon all bedridden. Our guides fled and left us to it, not wanting to catch whatever it was we’d caught.

‘
We’ve all spent the past few days hanging by a thread, delirious and barely able to function. We ran out of water and had to use the satellite phone to call for emergency aid. It only came after three more calls for help, but someone merely dumped a medical kit along with a few barrels of water, plus tins of rice and beans. They left them a few meters away from our tents and somehow, I slithered along the ground to retrieve the supplies. I slept for about four hours afterwards, such was the energy I’d had to exert to get myself there and back. I injected myself with a penicillin shot but honestly felt worse off for having had it. Harley also felt worse off for it, while poor Simpson’s allergy to the stuff meant he couldn’t have anything anyway.’