The Wandering (The Lux Guardians, #2) (14 page)

It
becomes increasingly clear that this place is inhabited. Food
cartons and cans clatter across the pavement, picked up by the
wind. Clothes have been suspended from a wire over our heads and
hung out to dry. The buildings look cared for and
lived in
. This place is
something else, something more than the safe towns we deposited
civilians in. Those places were lifeless—lacking—but driving on
regardless, an undead creature unwilling to lie down. But this town
is distinctly alive. The streets are empty but something is
thriving and thrumming, hidden just beneath them.

Marie falls into step
beside me. I automatically wait for Priya’s light footfalls on my
left—they never come.

“That wasn’t very
charming of you, my Lord,” Marie drawls with obvious disapproval.
She throws a glance over her shoulder to where Priya and Honour
walk side by side a way off, making clear she’s referring to the
way I spoke to him. “Actually,” she says, “it was downright nasty.
Honour’s an alright guy. You could do a lot worse in a friend. At
least he’s not likely to stab you in the back like half of the
people around here.” She bumps her shoulder into mine until I make
eye contact. “You’re not exactly well liked. The Guardians don’t
like mysteries or the unknown, and you’re both. You won’t get any
of us trying to be your friend.”

I stare ahead,
focusing on the backs of people’s heads, the seam of a canvas
backpack, the tread a Guardian’s boot leaves in the dirt. I’m sure
when this apathy fades, I’ll be ashamed I ever spoke to Honour in
such a way. He’s my friend, that’s indisputable. And though I’ve
only known him a couple of weeks, circumstance and disaster have
forged a friendship I might admit I was dependent upon if I were in
a better mind state.

I scratch the back of
my neck until my skin is raw.

“I’ll apologise to
him.” The shame has hit me sooner than I thought it would.

“Later.”

The tension in Marie’s
voice makes me raise my eyes. There is a group of men and women,
all ages, sizes, and colours, several metres in front of us. The
strangers’ eyes are intent on us as we follow the Guardian leaders,
nearer and nearer with every step. In the washed out light their
stares look hostile.

***

Bennet

14:33. 21.10.2040.
Bharat, Delhi.

I used to think
everyone who lived on this continent looked the same—dark skin,
brown eyes, hair the colour of coal—but I was naïve and
narrow-minded to think so. There are so many startling differences
between each person in this Guardian building, as many variances as
there are between one man and the next in London. It makes me
wonder why I thought every Bharatian appeared the same, makes me
wonder where I ever got that impression from, when it is quite
obviously a lie. My father? My mother? My whole country? Can an
entire country of people really be so wrong about the people of
India? Could that be possible?

No. I don’t think it
could. Someone knows the truth, that the people I share my new home
with aren’t as uncivilised or set apart from us as we’ve been led
to believe. But why aren’t they telling everyone else? Why doesn’t
every man and every woman back home know the wonder, and yet the
banality, that is this land and its people?

There is no important
difference between Garima and me, other than I am light skinned and
she is dark. But would people have me see her as too different to
associate with? Too different to be friends with?

I’m questioning many
things lately.

I’m
especially questioning
myself
. Even now—I’m questioning the
answers I give to myself, because there is a marked difference
between Garima and I, a difference that sets us as far apart as
worlds in the dark expanse of the sky.

Garima would know what
to do with this contraption, whereas I am pressing every button and
switch I can get my fingers on.

“How
in the world do you work?” I hiss at the infernal machine. It
doesn’t reply, inanimate as it is, but seems to stare at me through
its narrowed eyes. Disapproving, judging.
It’s not my fault I don’t know how you
function
, I argue.
I’m from eighteen seventy eight!

“Here.” Vast steps
around me to push down a lever I had overlooked. It slides down the
side of the metal thing, taking the bread with it, and begins to
hum.

“I’m hopeless,” I say,
despairing. “I can’t even make food.”

“You’ll get used to
it. Don’t worry.” His voice is without inflection. Besides the
bright show of emotion when I brought him the supposed Miracle,
I’ve never seen him anything but cool headed and even tempered. I
suppose being the Guardians’ leader means he has to keep his
emotions hidden and allow logic and sense to rule him in the place
of feeling and passion. But I still find it odd that he’s
constantly robotic.

I could never be like
that. I feel far too much.

“I’m glad I found
you,” he says, smoothing black hair away from his face. “Garima
insists you should be present.”

“Present for what?” My
irritation at technology is swallowed by curiosity. Does this have
something to do with the vial I smuggled across the town? I’ve been
wondering what they planned to do with it. I was told it was a
basis for a cure, which I assume means there is work to be done
with it, but I know next to nothing. Garima is part of the team
tasked with the secret project but for all my bothering her she’s
kept her knowledge to herself.

Maybe now the mystery
will be uncovered. I press my palms together, excited.

Vast says, “A
demonstration,” and I am officially overjoyed. Answers are one
thing but to be shown instead of told how things are … I’m starting
to really appreciate the way things are run around here.

“After you,” I say,
with a single backward glance of longing at my toast as it pops
up.

I follow Vast out of
the communal lounge and along white washed brick hallways that
slope ever downward until we reach a stairwell.

Biting my lip to
dampen a grin that would betray my thrill, I reach for my skirts to
give my feet the freedom to swiftly descend the spiral staircase
only to remember I no longer wear skirts. My legs are covered by
trousers in a light, airy fabric that sways with my every step. I
don’t need to lift them to walk; they narrow at my ankles and leave
my slippered feet free.

The
fashion is something I don’t miss from home. The layers,
especially. Although they were necessary to insulate me against the
winter chills and ices, there’s a part of me that suspects a
different reason. Modesty—but what does that mean and who decides
what is modest? If women in Bharat can wander the streets in two,
perhaps even one layer of clothing and remain modest, who decided
that we had to wear so many more? It strikes me that we suffered so
much pain from over-tight corsets and enforced ‘proper’ posture on
ourselves for … what reason? Appearance? Because some faceless
person decided it was fashionable? Or
right
?

With every day that
passes, with every difference I notice between the old me and the
Bennet I have become, I love my home a little less. Maybe, when
I’ve completed my task, fulfilled my destiny, and found my brother
… maybe I won’t go home.

Maybe I’ll stay.

“You are not here with
us,” Vast remarks as we reach the bottom of the dusty stairwell.
Under the yellow glare of the flickering light his neutral
expression might shift toward compassion. Understanding, maybe,
though I fail to see how he understands. He’s hardly a teenage girl
from the era of Victoria’s reign who fell into a future world that
demanded her fix it.

“No.” I raise my head,
prepared to be attentive. “But I am now.”

Vast appraises me.
Satisfied, he swings open the silver door that, while he has been
pretending to stall me with obvious statements, has been reading
the impression of his thumb against the strip of glass set in its
handle. One night I mused that I’d slip down here without anyone’s
notice and pay my friend Garima a visit, bring her a drink or some
cakes perhaps, but I surmised there would be some measure put in
place to keep the laboratories secure. I was right. Without Vast’s
fingerprint, I’d have no access.

“Bennet!” Garima
bounces over as soon as the door opens on the light-flooded
laboratory, her hair hidden by a white hijab. Her eyes are wide,
her excitement visible in the jittery way she bounces on her heels.
Garima, my first friend, is never still and never silent. It’s why
I like her, why I chose her, besides her intelligence. She
motivates me to keep moving too, to not dwell on things loved and
lost.

“You have to see this!
The liquid reacts with anything in its immediate surroundings.
Water, oxygen, orange juice—all with different reactions. And the
colours! I’ve never seen so many in one second. It’s like nothing
else. You’ll love it.”

“I’m sure I will.” I
pat her arm with a smile.

Vast has gone to the
far end of the room, past a glass partition, where a team of
Guardians in white saris and salwar kameez bustle around giant,
black tables laden with vials and jars and bottles of all sorts of
things. On one table a blue flame trapped inside a glass box
flickers unwatched, experiments abandoned for the minute. My heart
gives a painful tug. In a flare of fantasy I see my brother here,
running around the tables, words of utter, childish joy at the
Guardians equipment pouring out of him as fast as torrential rain.
His eyes have that wide, glossy look they get when he’s happy,
brown hair flopping into his eyes as he spins and spins, not able
to decide what to inspect first.

And then the image
fades like the ghost it is. My brother isn’t here. My Branwell is
gone.

I fix my attention
firmly on the scientists. Their hands are gloved, their eyes
covered by mirrored glasses that turn flashes of light around the
room. “They’re all women,” I notice aloud. My mouth gapes open.
“Garima, why are they all women?”

“Vast says men aren’t
trustworthy. Women are more efficient. And we’re motivated by
compassion and ambition and loyalty, not greed and personal gain
and …” She sighs, her hand fluttering through the air. “And I
forget the rest. Basically, we’re better than them.”

“At what?”

“At everything. Of
course. Also the last man to be let loose in these labs stole
something we were working on and sold it to States. It’s now
killing people in the Forgotten Lands. We learned our lesson. Men
are pigs.”

I laugh. It’s hard to
hold in my glee when Garima presents me with such bold and
unapologetic ways of thinking. She reminds me of someone I won’t
allow myself to remember. Such womanly fierceness!

Garima interlocks her
elbow with mine and, without a moment’s warning, darts across the
lab, heaving me with her. I tuck my arms in so I don’t knock
anything off the tables we fly past. “Could we maybe go a little
slower?”

“Slower? Why would we
need to go slower? Seconds are ticking, Bennet! We don’t want to
lose them.”

She finally stops when
we reach the glass wall that separates us from Vast and the science
team. The room is three times as wide as the biggest room I’ve ever
been in—a ballroom in Carolina and Jeremy’s summer mansion—and
twice as high. The room goes on for days and I already feel as
though I’ve crossed the Pacific ocean with Garima. I stuff the
wayward strands of my hair into my head scarf and straighten my
tunic as I catch my breath, face as warm as these Bharatian
days.

“So,” I say, inhaling
the antiseptic smell of cleanliness as we enter the main
laboratory. “Wasn’t there supposed to be a demonstration of some
kind?”

Garima races to what I
assume is her work station, ever quick. She pointedly ignores a tut
from her colleague. I follow my eccentric friend, allowing myself a
smirk.

“Finally.” Vast
manages to project disapproval without changing an inch of his face
or a note of his voice. How does he do that? “I thought you were
going to gossip all day.” He switches to Hindi to speak with the
other scientists—orders I assume from the way the scientists become
a flurry of movement. Beakers and phials are collected and
deposited on the table in front of us, and the
gold-green-silver-blue ‘cure’ is produced from a locked box.

“You’re familiar with
the Miracle,” Vast speaks to me in English, gesturing to a test
tube held by a round-faced girl in her twenties with a sea-green
hijab. “This is its antithesis. Devika, begin the process now.” The
girl, Devika, disappears through a hidden door in the wall to
‘begin the process’. Whatever in the world that means.

I’m
irritated by the first part of what Vast said—I am in
no
way familiar with the
Miracle, since nobody will tell me a thing about it—that it takes
me a moment to realise what else he said. What is the antithesis of
a cure?

A weapon.

I’m flung back to the
fear I left in eighteen seventy eight, with my brother on his
grief-fuelled manhunt for an organisation that refused to be found.
It’s trying to recover the Lux and the Weapon all over again, to
stop the destruction that will surely come to pass with them in the
wrong hands. Except this time I’m unsure. Are these the wrong hands
for a weapon to be in? Or are these the right hands? Weapons, as
well as being tools of ills and evil, can be used for good, for
much needed change, for an end to a dark era … can’t they?

I don’t know.

I raise my eyes to the
Guardians’ leader with grim reluctance. “Show me what it does.”