‘So it’s invisible, whatever’s coming from the south?’ Priya asked after Semilion had told her of Camberwell’s broadcast and the subsequent patrols that had surveyed the area.
‘Invisible, or there’s a message in the transcript that I’m just not seeing.’
‘And the boys you sent out saw nothing on their patrols?’
He told her of the advancing plumes of purple smoke, the fires that raged through the fields, the Blackeye activity over Exmoor and the lights pulsing on the wall.
‘The lights might have just been a test.’ Priya said. ‘I’ve seen it before when I was in Bahrain. They test them every now and again to make sure they’re still working. The Blackeye activity? I heard someone say they use Exmoor during Blackeye trials… that’s right, isn’t it? And the purple smoke in the south… where did you say it was? Exmouth?’ She sighed and thought of the damage the purple agent had done over the years. ‘That’s Crenatin Four. Its use is illegal, though I’m sure that doesn’t matter this side of the border.’
‘So once you eliminate all those as being threats, what are we left with?’
‘A big fucking mystery, that’s what.’ Priya ran her fingers through her hair, perplexed.
‘Very poetic.’
‘And true. What does the council say?’
Semilion rubbed the back of his neck and moved over to the radio transceiver.
‘And that coy reaction means you haven’t told them?’ She snorted. ‘What did you tell me? That you don’t receive any privileges in your little dictatorship? What would happen if Betty didn’t bother mentioning she’d seen something whilst on sentry?’
‘It’s not the…’
‘You’d berate her, wouldn’t you? And you’d make a show of it so everyone saw and learnt a lesson from it. Just take what you did to Eryn for taking a boat out for a few hours. You punished her for a month!’ She looked at him angrily before swallowing her ire. ‘There’s some kind of threat here,’ she swept her hand over the pile of books on the table, ‘and you haven’t told anyone. Why not?’
‘Sarah knows…’ he said. He wanted to tell her about Red, for her to understand why it wasn’t as easy as she supposed.
‘Oh, as long as your wife knows I suppose it’s ok.’
The solar lamp on the table flickered, and Semilion retrieved a fully charged one, placing it beside the old. The books upon the table glowed brightly in the clear white glare.
‘I didn’t bring you down here to scold me like a child, Priya. You said you knew something about codes. That’s all.’
She stared at him for a moment and then shook her head in despair. She hated his little republic, his community princedom where he ruled and others followed. She learnt every day of some new standard that seemed unjust, immoral, or medieval, and all done for the ‘sake of the community’, their freedom’s shackled to ease the governor’s neuroticism. She sat down before the table and looked at the notes Semilion had made, resigned to the fact that a puzzle might occupy her mind whilst working in the crèche. Maybe she would crack it and he would give her a job solving more… If there were more to solve.
The page was awash with scrawls and scribbles, notes to check book pages and as-of-yet unread volumes waiting on shelves. The original transcript was nearly indecipherable.
‘First of all, I need you to write down the broadcast as you heard it, minus all this… nonsense. I can’t work on it if I have to contend with your interpretation as well. If I come up with the same answers then all well and good but I don’t want your translation colouring mine.’
He took the page from her, produced a clean one, and began filling it with a small neat script.
‘Who taught you to write?’ She asked casually.
‘My teacher, of course. Jocelyn Sayer’s father, Dalton.’ he replied after a moment, before continuing with his duplicate. ‘He was killed in an accident a long time ago...’ He said a few moments later, hesitating in his writing as he remembered the carnage.
Priya watched him attentively. For a moment she imagined an amalgamation of circumstances that had coalesced to form the apprehensive man before her, though it was fleeting. As he started writing again she returned to considering him an unfit, poorly qualified dictator.
Twenty minutes later he was finished, and he handed the page back to her.
‘That’s everything? As it was recorded?’
‘That’s everything.’
‘Ok, you can leave me now.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t concentrate with you standing over me waiting for answers.’ Her fingers scooted him away as though he was an irritating dog. ‘Get some sleep or something, go and make Eryn’s life miserable, do whatever it is you do, but do it somewhere other than here.’
‘It’s the middle of the night…’
‘I’ll let myself out when I start to doze off.’
She turned to the table and opened the first book of ciphers, tapping her pen on her teeth as she studied the text.
Semilion watched her for a few moments, anxious to be leaving the job for someone else, and yet content to have fresh eyes working on it. He had been drudging through it for weeks and had made almost no progress. If she proved to be of any use he might take her out of the crèche and offer her a more strategic purpose.
He took the first step slowly, before asking if she needed a drink, but she was already lost in the books, and didn’t hear him when he repeated himself. Already she was making deft notes and flipping through pages as though she would have the task completed before he reached the top of the stairs.