The foot traffic wasn’t thick but it kept coming. Everyone was caked in dust. People carried their lives on their backs, their mouths and noses covered with masks or rags. They wore goggles or sunglasses or welding visors, scarves or veils, hats with gauze hanging down. Some of them were accompanied by underfed dogs, watchful and dust-coloured. There were people on bicycles and occasionally horses, cloth-muzzled, dust streaming back from their shoulders like red wings. Once, a camel loomed out of a red cloud, a man swaying on top, holding a crossbow, everything he still owned stacked behind him.
There had been no bores yet along this stretch of highway but sometimes there was Trade set up out of the back of vans at the roadside, selling water by the litre or by the scoop, and readies, masks, sunglasses. Their mark-ups were huge but they were still getting customers.
Li moved as fast as she could. She’d managed twenty-five, sometimes thirty k each day since leaving the lake, resting a few minutes every hour or so with her foot up on her pack and her eyes shut against the dust. She’d given up on the fantasy of a lift almost as soon as she got back on the highway. A bicycle was her preoccupation now. She was on the lookout for someone desperate enough to trade one away, even though she wasn’t sure she’d be able to pedal. There was another town coming up on her map, about two more days’ walking, bigger than Lawrence – maybe there’d be something there. What could she trade, though, that would be worth a bicycle? Every single thing she had left that was keeping her alive? It wasn’t much more realistic than a ride in a truck, but it kept her mind off the dust.
Her ankle hurt but it was holding. She’d been afraid the stick would mark her out as easy prey but plenty of people had them, because of injury or age or just to pace themselves.
She asked everyone. People had heard about the children walking but no one could say for sure that they’d seen them. The stories were elastic and contradictory, delivered with the conviction of retelling. There were ten kids or fifty, more; there were babies among them, they were barely minors; they were hungry and ragged and well-provisioned.
No one could tell her where they might be going. A few people talked about a Company camp somewhere between Sumud and New Flinders. All they knew was that it wasn’t a place you would take children to, and it wasn’t a camp that would get you inside. The only other place after that was Permacamp. She’d heard about it back in makecamp. Permacamp was an official Agency camp outside Fengdu, had been there for years, but it was all the way east, across the Range.
Some of the stories sounded more like paranoia than rumour. One woman had heard that trucks had stopped for the children, the drivers offloading food and water out of pity. Someone else described an organised child-begging operation with adult ringleaders, leeching off other unsheltered.
It didn’t make sense. They were all on the same highway, people gravitated to each other in the roadcamps at night. Why was it so hard to pin down an actual sighting? A bunch of kids on their own, walking or camped, wasn’t something you would miss. Why was their existence so provisional? The children in these stories emerged out of some collective dust and faded back into it again, untouched and untouchable.
Li unbuttoned her pocket and closed her hand around the horse, fit her thumb into one bent foreleg.
The road swung towards to the fence or away, the No Go came in and out of view through the dust. She hadn’t seen a patrol in there since before the lake. What there was, now, was dogs. Feral and hungry, they lay low in the scrub or slunk across open ground; they fought and fucked. Sometimes a pack converged on the fence-line, all dust and matted hair and drool, snapping and snarling at anyone who strayed too close, working themselves into a frenzy. Maybe they were an accident or maybe they were a part of XB Force’s defence system. Cheaper than landmines, cheaper than vehicles and guns and uniforms. The weaker ones would die of thirst or starve but there would always be more.
There were the dogs and the unsheltered. The road. The trucks. The dust above them, enclosing them all. Li wondered if there was anything still up there watching, still capable of recording all these small pulses of radiant heat that moved distantly parallel with the wall, moved and stopped and moved again. It might register the thermal energy of the wall itself as a long continuous flickering that the small pulses could never breach. It might be high up enough to see the wall for what it really was, to see the dust on both sides.
Late in the afternoon she met a man who said he’d seen them. He was walking alone, pulling a dusty tartan shopping trolley. A parrot hunched, hooded, on his shoulder. Hundreds of kids, he told her, camped roadside north-east of here the morning before last.
She didn’t trust his willingness, but she couldn’t resist hearing him out. Did you talk to them?
He pulled down the rag that covered his nose and mouth and spat red into the dust. Flung his arm out at the trolley, an all-encompassing gesture. I offered them everything I had. They wouldn’t take it. Girl says to me, scrap of a thing, not more than thirteen, says God gives them what they need. The bird clicked its beak under the hood and shuffled irritably. I said, Girlie, from the look of you lot, he isn’t up to the job. You know what she says?
The road shook under a truck and they pulled to the side and hunkered down. The
