“Grab something firm,” he said, as he gunned the motor.
Her shrieks of fury were lost in the roar of the engine.
He spun the card around, tearing yet more tread marks into the once perfect grass. Ahead he saw his aim, the rent gates. The jeep had come in that way, and he thought there was a certain pleasing symmetry in taking it out again. It wasn’t as simple as that, however. There were guards ahead.
Lots of guards.
Worse yet, he realised something was missing.
“Don’t stop now,” the girl said.
He ignored her. “Squiz! Where are you, Squiz?”
“Have you gone insane? This is no time to babble at your invisible friend.”
He heard the patter of tiny feet on the back seat, and then the little fellow vaulted into his lap, where he blinked up at him with wide, orange brown eyes, and gave him a cryptic smile.
“What the malking scrag is that?”
He let the question go unanswered. It would take all of his concentration to get out of there. The guards, in spite of whatever personality defects they had, were professionals. As soon as they’d seen the jeep jerk into life, they’d fanned out, and dumped the batons for something a little more muscular. He saw the glint of metal in several hands. At least two of them had shotguns.
“We’ve left it too late,” the girl said. “They’ve got us. We’re trapped. I blame you!”
He narrowed his eyes, and changed his grip on the steering wheel. “Save your blame. You might need it later.”
He saw her point. The guards’ uniforms were blackened with smoke, and their heads must have been in agony from the fire alarm. The girl had wrecked their gates, and now the intruders had left one of their number on the ground, unconscious, perhaps dead. They couldn’t know he was sleeping off a tap to the jaw. They couldn’t know that their intruders were more interested in photos than mayhem. They were harassed, hurting, their pride was injured, and one of their buddies was down.
They would shoot.
He crushed the accelerator underfoot, and the jeep lurched into motion.
“Are you mad?” she said.
He swung the car around in a tight arc, until they were heading back the way they’d come.
“You are mad,” she said. “There’s no other exit. We can’t get out that way.”
He grinned.
“I know.”
“What’s going on in that box of broken junk you’re using for a brain?”
He eyed her sidelong, and noticed that gleam of gold at her ears again. He looked closer.
She yowled. “Keep your eyes on the ro- Grass.”
“Books,” he said.
“What?”
“Black books with golden leaves. They’re beautiful.”
“...oh.” She blinked. Then she shook her heard. “Don’t distract me!”
“You need all your attention for screaming?”
Her jaws clenched, and she dug her nails into the sides of her seat.
The cherry tree shone up ahead. It flashed towards them.
“This old machine can go quite fast,” he said.
“In the wrong direction.”
“Whatever can you mean?”
“The tree. You’re going to ram the tree!”
“I certainly hope they think so.”
She gaped at him, and for a moment the halogen lamps lit more than the grove; they lit up her face, and he noticed how her eyes sparkled green on blue, opalescent, like emeralds on the ocean.
She found her voice, although she had to shout over the engine to make herself heard. “I pray to himself almighty that you know what you’re doing. ‘cos if you don’t…”
Her words trailed off.
She gripped the sides of her seat so hard he saw her knuckles turn white. Squizzle yelped and slid down between his feet, squeezing his ankles in fear. Even Soro caught himself crushing the wheel in a death grip.
The tree rushed towards them.
Either the men behind had fallen for his bluff, or they hadn’t. He was gambling they would have standing orders to protect the fruit of New Verity’s labours. He was chancing everything on the hope, the slender, almost groundless hope, that given a choice between waiting to trap a couple of interlopers, and running to prevent damage to their employer’s prize creation, they would choose the latter.
He was praying.
“Take a look over your shoulder, would you,” he said. “This creaking jalopy doesn’t have much in the way of reflective surfaces.”
“Oh God! They’re coming after us.”
“Perfect.”
The tree loomed over them, and its beauty had acquired a fearsome aspect, the way a battle ship could be both a work of grand art, and an open threat. It rushed down on them, as if it had been hurled by a giant. The beautiful purples and pinks of the blossom shivered in the night breeze, revealing glimpses here and there of twigs, branches, and the bark of the trunk, dark, hard, and able to smash their bones and turn their bodies to sacks of blood soaked pulp. He tried not to see that image; he tried to push it out of his mind, but it was one case where his visionary talent worked against him. He couldn’t stop himself from picturing that scene, in which the old jeep, survivor of many wars, finally found its end as a twisted hunk of broken metal, its grey green frame painted red with the wash of blood that had rushed out of the tangled, mashed bodies of the two people.
And Squiz, he thought. And poor little Squiz.
Not while I’m alive.
Not tonight.
“Grab on!” he shouted over the engine noise.
He waited until the last possible moment, and then he twisted the wheel with savage strength born of both fear and hope.
The girl didn’t even scream. She bit her lip hard enough to draw a bead of blood, and one hand came up to squeeze his shoulder.
Squizzle, down by his ankles, couldn’t see what was going on, but the creature could sense it, and he, too, grabbed onto Soro, and clung to him, chattering in terror, big eyes squeezed shut.
The jeep had no roof and no windows, so the wind that howled into his face lost several degrees, and felt like a chilling gale. Then, as he turned, jinking the jeep so it skimmed past the cherry tree, the air turned livid pink. He’d cut it too fine, he saw, and instead of shooting past the tree, he’d brought them in through the foliage.
“Heads down!”
The girl obeyed, and Soro shrank down in his seat, just in time to duck under the massive branch that whipped through the space where his face had been.
His hands and face turned white, and his heart tried to tear out of his chest.
Pink gave way to black. They were through.
He raised himself up in his seat, and swung the motor around. “Let’s see if that was worth the cost of all those fliers and handbills,” he said.
The girl didn’t reply.
He turned to look at her, and started to laugh, but he choked it when he saw the light in her eyes. Blue green like the sea, he thought. Stand on the beach and look at it, you’ll feel an odd longing, but it can pull you down and drown you in a second. The sea is full of salt, but it’ll never shed a tear.
The odd mood passed, as he angled the car for their second swing at escape. “Looks like congratulations are in order,” he said.
She unfolded herself, slow, tense, and regarded him with bright, dangerous eyes.
“Squizzle can be our best man,” he said. “Best monkey, I guess. ‘fraid he ate the ring.”
“I’m in Hell,” she said, with no expression. “No,” she paused to correct herself. “Marrying you would be Hell. Listening to you spout insanity while you try to give me a heart attack is like a trailer, a sneak preview, and I want to get out of the movie theatre, and I can’t.”
He turned the car further around, giving the guards time to close in before they broke out of the grove. “Don’t take everything so seriously,” he said. “Maybe it wasn’t our wedding. Maybe we crashed some other poor schmoe’s
party. It’s just… Look at yourself.”
The girl frowned at him. She turned her head away, but her eyes lingered on him, as if she were afraid to let him out of her sight. When at last she looked down at herself, she gasped.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” he said.
They had raced through the boughs of the cherry tree, its branches laden with flowering buds of pretty pink blossom. They had driven with all the speed the aged jeep could give, and their passage must have made a terrific wash of air currents. Like playful zephyrs, those invisible currents had reached up through the branches, and plucked hundreds of pink petals. Soro, the girl, they entire jeep, all were sprinkled with blossom.
“In some countries,” he said, as he aimed the car at a gap between two trees, “this means we’re married.”
The jeep shot through the trees, and her reply was lost in the roar of the engine and the singing of trees.
Once again he saw the squat yellowish labs, wreathed in choking black smoke that spread thick tendrils across the grassy gap between the labs on the right and the chain link fence on his left. He’d forgotten about the fire alarm. Somehow it had faded in to a background murmur during their trip through the grove, and that trip, though it had felt like a week’s vacation in Paris, had taken scant moments. Now he would see if his gamble had been wisdom or folly.
He leaned forwards, jaw working, hands tight on the wheel. The guards had broken their half-circle, and formed a ragged band, running at their employer’s prize creation. He drew a deep, shuddering breath, and sagged in his seat.
“You son of a mutant pig,” said the girl in a breathless whisper. She leaned across, and kissed his cheek.
He burned past the startled guards, and shot out through the torn front gates.
***
He turned left at the corner of a textile warehouse, and shot down a road lined with maple trees, their fresh green leaves waving in a gentle breeze.
He drove to the end of the road, and turned left onto a dingy lane.
“Do you know where you're going?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“Well that's just splendorific,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “Here and I thought I was being rescued, and instead I've been kidnapped by captain clueless.”
“They had a parking lot back there.”
“And trees and buildings and a pretty path.”
He eyed her sideways. “They could be following us in those cars.”
It was her turn to shrug. “If they are, they've got cars with cloaking devices. God!”
He looked startled. “You feeling all right?”
He knew, as the words passed his lips, he'd made a mistake.
“Feeling all right? Feeling all right? My uncle's car's a wreck, I'm being chauffeured down the winding road to Hell, I was chained up by a gang of steroid junkies with shotguns, who are maybe hunting me right now, and just to make sure I get the absolute day of my dreams, I couldn't even get the photo I risked everything for!”
She slumped back in her seat, her chest heaving.
Soro tried to think of something he could say. “Umm... If it makes you feel any better... You can have mine.”
She winced, and flared her nostrils. “I can have yours.”
He flashed her a smile. “If you want it.”
She looked at him with narrow, suspicious eyes. “Just why in sweet Hades were you there at all?”
“It's what I do,” he said.
“What you do,” she echoed.
“Always have,” he said. He held out his hand. “My name's Soro.”
She flinched, then her lips pressed together, and she slapped his hand aside.
“Hey now,” he said.
She punched his shoulder.
“W-”
“Soro!” she said.
“Every day of my life,” he said, his eyebrows fighting to raise and lower at the same time.
“I thought it couldn't get any worse.”
He turned left on a much larger road, surrounded on both sides by abandoned waste ground. The tarmac was rough and pitted, and he saw a heap of junked cars sitting in an open space on his right. He saw no signs, no fences, no reason they should be there. The wrecked cars, dumped on the wasted earth, made him feel an odd sense of loss and loneliness.
“You're not cuffed to the wheel of a dead car,” he said. “That's not so bad, I guess.”
“No, I'm not, I'm stuck in my car, sitting next to the sell-out of the century.”
“That's harsh.”
“Of the millennium!”
He chewed his lip. Maybe if he turned around, he could give her back...
“I've seen your pictures, Mr Soro the Sell Out.”
He perked up “Oh good!”
“I loathe them.”
His shoulders slumped, and he rubbed the back of his neck.
“You've got a gift, a genuine gift. Oh, people yammer about talent and promise, but you've got the it.”
“I've got the it?”
“You've got the it! That's a real gift, an ability no one can match. But what do you do? You take your pictures, and then you sell them to anyone with a wad of bucks.”
“You're not being fair,” he said. “I always try to make it even. Take the shoot for Kujyll Co.”
“Where you took publicity shots for a campaign to promote animal testing.”
“I guess, but I also gave my pictures to the Animal Freedom Front, for their campaign to oppose Kujyll Co.” He grinned at her. “So it balances out, see.”
If possible, she looked even more aggrieved. “That's worse! You've got a gift, a real, true gift from God or the anima mundi, or the holy spirit of evolution, and you don't care what effect it has on other people.”
“I care-”
“Right, yes, of course! You care so much that you make sure you don't change anything. You balance your efforts so that no one wins. Whatever impact, whatever benefit you might have had on the world, you take pains to negate. You don't need enemies, Mr Sell-Out Soro. You've made them redundant.”
They came to the next intersection, but he was so taken aback he drove straight on.
After a time, when he thought she had calmed down, he shot her a mournful look. “If I'm so hateful,” he said. “Why did I bother to save you?”
She laughed. “I think we can put that down to a momentary lapse. And besides, if you keep turning left at every corner, you'll be able to deliver me back into their paws any minute now.”
He gave a dejected mutter. “Turn left 'cos most people turn right. s'posed to keep us safe.”
She turned in her seat, and glared at him. Then her expression softened, and her eyes became clear, like a pair of placid pools. “Tell me this. If I wanted your picture to use it to campaign against GM agriculture, would you give it to me?”
He nodded. “Sure. I've done that lots of times.”
“But what if it wasn't me? What if we never met, and instead, New Verity sent a guy in a swish suit and tie, and offered to buy your picture, your stolen photo, for a promotional poster, would you bite?”
He opened his mouth, closed it, and then he turned his eyes onto the road.
She sat back and sighed. “I thought so.”
“...I-”
“Drive,” she said. “Drive wherever you want, then get out.”
**
The morning sun touched the panelled glass side of the UN building, and lit it up like a burning torch. Belle Stakker looked out of her window on the twenty third floor, and stared at the city. Most personnel with a permanent posting to the headquarters of the UN favoured a window with a view across the harbour, and out to sea, but Belle would not have traded her office for any other. She loved to look down on the city. She loved to see the people made small, to watch them scurry about their affairs oblivious to her watching gaze.
Some days she would stand there for hours, watching the city exchange electric for natural light, watch the people of the dark hours give way before the pe
ople of the day. All of it under her beneficent, monitoring eyes.
But not today.
She rubbed her fingers and thumbs together, and stumped across to one of the filing cabinets beside her antique mahogany desk. Unlike most UN personnel, her desk did not have a modern, powerful computer. It did not have a slow, creaky antique computer. It did not have a computer at all. Whereas most of her fellows would have sat down in their comfy leather swivel chairs, and pulled up the data they needed on their screens, Belle had no choice but pull open a squealing metal file cabinet, and leaf through a wodge of yellowing paper files. Her stubby fingers pored over the files. By then she'd gone through this procedure so many times that she'd didn't need to turn on the fluorescent strip lights to find what she sought. Her fingers could identify individual files by the crinkles and creases in the paper.
She found what she wanted, and took the files with her to the desk, but she didn't sit down. She wanted to. Her stout little legs protested at standing through the long dawn vigil, but she couldn't sit down. She knew that if she did, her educated hands would find their way to the bottom drawer of her desk. She knew they would pull the drawer open, reach inside, and once again betray her to her secret shame.
She brushed her fingers and thumbs together, and patted at her tailored pin stripe suit, as if flicking away lint.
She resisted temptation as best she could, though she knew she would submit later on. If not at dawn, then around eleven a.m., when the pangs started, or during the afternoon slump.
But not yet.
She fingered the files. She didn't need to read them. She had already memorised their contents.
***
Light in New York meant darkest night in Astana, but the Kazakh capital was as active and lit as any great city. The air hummed with an almost palpable tension that night, centred on the national arena.
Oleg Tsiolkovsky ducked a shattering right hook, and struck back with a left jab that rocked Zamran Turki's head, and loosed a spray of blood across the ring.
It was fight night in Astana.
When the country had at last thrown off the shackles of the Soviet empire, her people had faced a tremendous struggle to assert their independence, to restore their pride, to be the free nation they had dreamed of all through the long communist night. They laboured to create new institutions, and learned the hard truth that political freedom does not mean instant success and happiness. But they had a strong fighting spirit, and the drive to prove to the world that they could be a modern country, and one to envy.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the world of sports. Kazakh athletes proved time and again that they could compete on the world stage, and their greatest achievements took place in the boxing ring.