She says, God looks after us because we’re walking for God. I said, How’s that? And she says, People made Weather but only God can take it back. She says they’re walking to show God they’re sorry. He waved an arm at the road. For everything. All the war, waste, stuffing up the climate, these goddam walls. It wasn’t their fault but they’re sorry anyway.
The truck passed and they stood up, facing each other. His eyes were wide and locked on hers. He was mad, she realised. It was all in his head.
She says, this is exactly what she says, God’ll save us when God’s ready. Until then God keeps us safe. He nodded at Li, eyes wide. So I said.
Li shouldered past him and kept walking.
I’m telling you, he called after her. They wouldn’t take food, nothing. I tried.
She wouldn’t ask anyone else. It was all bullshit. Fearmongers and rumour-mongers. Madmen invoking God to feed their own fantasies. What did these kids represent – what threat, what need – that nobody asked where they’d come from and who might be looking for them, or where they thought they were going? Matti walked through the lizard brains of the unsheltered like an aberration, like a talisman of a world gone to hell. Li found she was crying and smudged the tears angrily into her dust mask. There had never been hundreds. She should have spat in his face.
Then that feeling passed. People would make the children into whatever they needed, it didn’t change anything. This was between her and Matti. They had made a deal that Matti would stay put and wait. But then she remembered that Matti never agreed to the deal. When had she ever done what Li told her? Matti hadn’t wanted to stay in Valiant or makecamp and she wouldn’t want to stay here, choking on the dust at the side of the highway. She wanted to get to the Best Place.
All those rumours had started from something. Something further along this road, where everyone else had come from. If the kids had left the lake a day or two before she got there, and they’d been walking ever since, they might be a week ahead of her, but they couldn’t be covering more ground in a day than she was now. If she could get a bike she would close the distance faster. If she couldn’t, then she just had to keep walking.
The dusters eased off at sunset. Li cracked the mask and breathed deep. She rinsed her eyes and her scabbed cheek with a capful of water, dug a toilet hole behind some bushes. After another hour’s walking she came to the fringes of a road camp that stretched most of the way back to the fence. She didn’t avoid them now. Joining meant she could search the camp at first light. And with this many people in the dark, it was safer to stay in close than take her chances being followed away from the crowd.
She set up her bed a little way back in the scrub but near enough to catch the talk. People were sharing water and readies, contributing roadkill to be cooked over the fire. The camps were about more than safety in numbers, they fed some need for community that people put away in daylight. It reminded her, painfully, of the road from Nerredin but if she pushed back past that, it took her back to Val, to the feeling of childhood.
Listening in, sifting through languages, she heard that Sumud might have to open a skill quota soon, or drop the buy-in price, because of some kind of epidemic. Someone’s cousin had called from inside New Flinders to say he’d made it through the gate under a truck. But trucks didn’t slow down along flat road like this – they just fanged through. Your only chance was a roadhouse. More urgently than getting inside, people talked about water. Who had it, how much they’d paid or traded, where the next bore was supposed to be.
The kids fell asleep in swags or tents or on their parents’ laps. Li looked at every one of them, would walk the camp at first light, but she knew Matti wasn’t here, safe by the fire.
Someone asked about the children walking and Li listened harder but it was just the same stories she’d already heard. Ghost stories.
Then a woman said, But where are they walking to?
And a man barked a laugh. Where are any of us walking to? To where someone might let us in.
A rush of talk, people translating to each other. Li lost the thread. Then the first woman spoke again. But why east? New Flinders hasn’t opened quota – all that’s up there is Transit.
Li thought, Transit must be the Company camp. The one people had said to stay clear of.
There’s Permacamp. Eventually.
But the woman dismissed this. No one’s walking across the range in the cold season, let alone kids. All the talk now is Sumud, right? I mean, that’s where we’re all heading. Right?
A new voice. Maybe they’re not trying to get in. Maybe they’re trying to get somewhere else.
Silence while this was considered.
Like where?
Maybe one of the Deep Islands.
Li opened her eyes.
All those islands went under.
Bullshit. That was just a couple of them.
You can grow stuff there, I heard. Weather’s not so bad, plenty of water. And they don’t have the ballot.
Who says they don’t? Ballot’s everywhere – even inside the XB.
Think about it. Would it be worth the time and money for government to ship people over from there?
It was so strange to hear other people talk about the best place like it wasn’t just a private game. Li couldn’t get her bearings. Around the fire the talk went on and she didn’t know anymore if it was real or if she was just
