Li’s face felt raw where her eyebrows had been. She tried to remember the burning tent, the heat of it. What she remembered was Matti at the fence, her fingers curled in the wire. Mum, look!
She got to the front of the queue. The shopfront window had Single Source of Truth stencilled on the glass in the official yellow and a government-approved price list underneath. An armed security guard out the front was checking everyone’s status. Inside there were six machines under strip lighting, with access to printing for an extra fee. A Cnekt slot for phone-credit top ups. There were newspapers available for reading on a table along the back wall, but only one chair, for the second security guard.
Li found a free terminal, swiped her card and logged on. Barely enough credit. She scanned the Source newsfeed first. More photos of the camp demolition, XB Force in riot gear, medics carrying a burns victim on a stretcher. Statements from health and security officials in Port Howell. It all looked familiar but not because she remembered it. She’d seen it all back in West, in newspaper coverage of other makecamps, other demolitions.
There was nothing about unaccompanied minors.
She checked Matti’s status for an Agency update – maybe even a note about her being taken. But there was nothing. Just the pre-registration claim, still stranded at Stage Two Request, dependent minor.
The child who stared out at Li from the screen was a few years younger, hadn’t fully grown into her eyes yet. This status-record Matti felt immensely far away, as if Li had lost the years since the photo was taken, too. And then she realised this was it, now, this was all there was. The photos had been in their tent.
Lodging a missing-minor claim took her right up to closing time. She punched numbers and watched the clock, her stomach tightening every time the page froze. There was no save function. When she was halfway through the form, the signal dropped out and she had to start again. She had to enter her status at every new section and every time she typed unsheltered, half the fields disappeared. She hesitated over Employment or means of support. The olives, the hardware store in Nerredin had been legitimate. In Valiant they’d put the garage and the salvage depot and the desal plant down on their pre-registration, plus agricultural skills. Leaving it blank wasn’t an option. She didn’t know how patching was regulated in East but it was all she had now.
A pop-up warned her she had three minutes. If she didn’t submit the claim before the terminal shut down she’d lose it all, lose another day tomorrow starting from scratch. The last field was a contact number. Probably Chris was right, they wouldn’t call, but she couldn’t take that chance. It might be days before she found another Source centre further north; what if some Agency employee checked Matti’s status in the meantime and saw there was a claim? Teresa and Navid had a phone for the repair shop but what could they do, all the way back across the Gulf? And unsheltered. She knew what it had cost them to get her and Matti on that boat.
One minute.
She put Chris down. Hovered over relationship and then typed relative. Whatever he said, she didn’t believe he was powerless, not compared to her. And she had to believe he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he got the call and did nothing. Because he owed her, really he owed her his life.
Walking back to the factory, she thought about the last time she went into the No Go. Less than two weeks since the first reports of fever and makecamp was a sprawl of contagion behind her. She moved as fast as she could, watching for patrols, listening for movement. Smoke was rising north of the camp. That made sense. Port Howell authorities wouldn’t want to burn the bodies too close to town.
Four days since she’d been through the fence. Matti would be back in the tent by now, hopefully sleeping. Li could do what she needed to and be back before she woke.
The first snare was on open ground about five hundred metres from the fence. It held a rabbit, partly eaten and starting to stink. She cut it loose, threw the carcass away into the scrub so the smell wouldn’t drive away new kill, and then reset the snare. Kept moving. Two days without sleep, waiting to see if her child would live. The next two snares were empty and she was grateful to conserve the time and effort.
A few hours south, dusk and temperature falling, she saw the highway in the distance, cutting inland across the flat of the No Go until it got lost again in the hills. Nothing moving, and she’d be hard to see in this light, so she kept heading towards it, carefully, on a diagonal. There was an ache at the base of her skull that she was trying to ignore. Two more snares to check.
Just before full dark she heard engines and flattened herself in the scrub while the tankers roared past, headlights boiling. Water runners. They travelled in convoy now, belting through the No Go in daylight if possible. This one must have got delayed. It wasn’t the jumpers they were worried about, it was Trade. Trucks had been ambushed in the No Go, food and medicine lifted, water siphoned off.
