Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (27 page)

“At the end of the corridor, facing the elevators. Number Thirty-Three or Thirty-Four I think.”

There were various doors facing the elevators, and none of them had a number. They were deciding which door to knock on when one of them opened and a woman of seventy or so appeared. She was slender and agile but very wrinkled, naturally wrinkled. It was obvious she’d never had plastic surgery. The creases in her skin were impressive. Her white hair fell in limp strands over her face. The woman jumped when she saw them.

“Mai Burún?” Bruna asked hurriedly before she could close her door again.

The human stood there looking at them. “That’s me,” she said hesitantly.

“Can we come in?”

“No.”

“Mai, we’re here on behalf of Frank Nuyts.”

“I don’t know who he is.”

“He’s the partner of Carlos Yárnoz. You do know Carlos, don’t you? And maybe Alejandro Gand. They’re all dead. But they gave us a map. They told us to ask for you.”

Mai frowned at them, wary.

“You’re not speaking in the appropriate manner. I don’t recognize you.”

“Mai, we’ve come a long way. You have to trust us.”

“You’re not speaking in the appropriate manner. I can’t trust you. I’m going to shut the door.”

Unexpectedly, Bruna’s mind opened up like an overcast sky suddenly allowing a ray of sunshine through.

“Tranquillity. The password is
tranquillity
.”

The woman sighed and relaxed. “That’s it. Come in.”

They walked into a wide candlelit living room with mattresses on the floor and windows covered with wooden panels. About thirty children between the ages of five and fourteen were sitting on the mattresses or on chairs and armchairs watching movies on their mobiles, reading, or chatting. They were making very little noise given how many of them there were—and how young—and the place was as spotless and tidy as a military barracks.

“Come with me.”

They followed her to a tiny empty bedroom. The woman lit two thick candles and sat down on the end of the bed. There was nowhere else to sit, so the others remained standing.

“You’ve come for the Onkalo decoder, haven’t you?”

Bruna hesitated momentarily and then decided to trust her intuition and tell the truth. “We don’t know what we’ve come to find. We’re private detectives. We’re from Madrid, in the Hispanic region. We’re investigating the murders of Carlos Yárnoz, Alejandro Gand, and Frank Nuyts, Yárnoz’s partner. It was Nuyts who gave us the map that has brought us to you. He gave it to us before they killed him. We know we have to go to Onkalo, but that’s all we know. We don’t even know what’s in that place. They say it’s cursed. It’s not on any maps. Except for the one from Nuyts of course.”

“I don’t know,” said the woman, looking at them in amazement. “This isn’t what I was expecting. Yárnoz told me that he’d return or that someone else would come. His partner—yes, that’s what he said. I think he said Frank. And that he’d say the password. And you’ve said the password, but you don’t know anything. You might even be the murderers. But no, I don’t think so. You’d be pretty stupid murderers. Anyway, I’m sick of looking after that thing. I live in constant fear. I’ll give it to you.”

She stood up, walked to the bedside table, picked up a jar of facial cream, stuck her fingers inside, and pulled out something small covered in cream. She cleaned it painstakingly, first with her hands, applying the cream to her face, and then with the edge of her dark-blue T-shirt. When she deemed it presentable, she gave it to Bruna.

“It’s yours.”

It was a rectangle of hard black rubber, about three centimeters long by two wide and half a centimeter thick. It had a small screen that was visible through the rubber and four embedded blank buttons. A decoder, and pretty sophisticated, too, reckoned Bruna. Watertight, impenetrable.

Mai had sat down again and was completely absorbed in massaging the cream into her face.

“Onkalo. Onkalo. Where to begin? Okay. You know that the problem with nuclear energy is the waste. It’s lethal—very dangerous and very destructive. You can’t see radiation or feel it or smell it. But it’s capable of ending life on the planet. When Becquerel and the Curies discovered radiation at the beginning of the twentieth century, they didn’t know they were opening the door on a monster infinitely bigger than us. The danger associated with nuclear waste can last many hundreds of thousands of years. Do you understand what I’m saying? We, the human race, have barely lived that amount of time on Earth. The first rock paintings are only about fifty thousand years old, and the toxicity of some nuclear waste lasts more than three times that long. A species so weak, so ignorant, and so young created this devil of inconceivable longevity. Worse still, the devil was getting bigger every day; each day we were filling more of the world with this horrible and unmanageable danger. When the Atom Protocol prohibited nuclear energy in 2059, there were close to eight hundred metric tons of nuclear waste. It’s a huge and lethal beast, and it’s still here with us today. We live with it. With our creature.”

Mai stopped talking for a moment and glanced inquisitively at each member of her audience, perhaps to see if they were following her, if they were being sufficiently attentive. They were of course.

“Historically, nuclear waste was stored in temporary warehouses, in huge tanks submerged in pools of water, because water provides good protection against radiation. But of course, bearing in mind that the toxic waste remains lethal for so many years, storage tanks aren’t a solution. They require a lot of maintenance. They can be attacked and destroyed in a war or by an earthquake or tsunami. And apart from that, how are we to know if someone will be around in seventy thousand years to keep filling those tanks with water? So the Finns, who at that stage were an independent nation—I’m talking about the end of the twentieth century—had the grandiose idea of creating the first permanent toxic waste dump in the world. A place that wouldn’t require maintenance, that would ensure of its own accord that the beast was kept isolated and contained. It was in reality a very generous initiative. They were the only society that tried to assume almost eternal responsibility for the toxic waste they were producing. That’s how Onkalo was born, a word that originally meant ‘cavern’ in Finnish but for which they have now invented the meaning ‘danger of death.’”

“So Onkalo is a nuclear waste dump?” said Bruna.

“Correction: Onkalo is
the
nuclear waste dump for Earth. There is no other. It’s the ogre’s tomb. Or rather, his subterranean prison, because he’s still down there and very much alive. Initially, the idea was to have a dump just for the waste from Finnish nuclear plants. A small island, Olkiluoto, was chosen because it has very old, very stable bedrock, with no risk of earthquakes or eruptions. It is in fact such stable terrain that on the same island five kilometers away there already once was a nuclear power plant. The dump consists of a spiraling ramp four kilometers long that goes down to a depth of five hundred and thirty meters. The dump is down there: hundreds and hundreds of cylindrical cavities drilled into the rock. In each cavity there is radioactive material, spent fuel rods, sealed inside a copper cylinder, placed inside a boric steel tank, and then wrapped in bentonite clay. Layer upon defensive layer to imprison the devil. Anyway, they started construction of Onkalo in 2004, and in 2020 they buried the first copper cylinders. In the initial plan it was anticipated that Onkalo would continue to store cylinders from Finnish nuclear plants until the year 2120, eleven years from now. At that stage the entrance to the dump would be sealed with concrete, and the road and the access points would disappear.”

“Disappear? Why?” asked Clara.

“The architects of Onkalo spent a long time thinking about how best to warn future generations about the danger of Onkalo. First they thought about putting up signs. But what sort of signs? In what language? How do you know what type of humans exist fifty thousand years from now for instance? The biggest threat to Onkalo is the curiosity and the greed of our descendants. If thousands of years from now they find such a well-sealed construction, you can be certain they’ll want to open it at any cost; they’ll want to go inside to see what’s in there. It would be like opening Pandora’s box. Evil and death would take control of the world. So after considerable reflection the developers of the dump came to the conclusion that the most secure thing to do was to try and remove all trace of it, try and have the world forget Onkalo and even create a legend about it as a sacred or cursed place. Myths last millennia.”

“But you said that the sealing of Onkalo was due to take place eleven years from now,” said Bruna, “and yet they’ve already erased the data. They’ve already tried to create that legend of an inaccessible zone.”

“Yes,” Mai Burún said, and sighed. “Humans make plans, but then reality takes charge of thwarting them. It was a combination of circumstances: the fact that nuclear power was banned in 2059, and then the horror and violence of the twenty-first century. The Plagues. The Robot Wars. I don’t know if you recall, but during the Robot Wars there was an attack on a provisional nuclear waste storage facility in the former United States of America—one of those places with the water storage tanks. It created a radiation catastrophe in the area, minimized only because the waste storage facility was in the Nevada desert. But on top of that the stolen material was used to make several nuclear bombs, which terrorists subsequently detonated in India, China, and Italy. Those were terrible years. But of course you didn’t live through them. You two technos didn’t exist, and you, young man, must have been very young.”

“I was born in 2079, the same year the Robot Wars began,” said Deuil. “You’re right, I don’t remember much.”

“I, however, remember it all very well. I’m a nuclear engineer. I worked in Onkalo from 2085 to 2098. After the attack on the waste storage facility in the Nevada desert, the nuclear powers understood that they had to do something urgent about the waste. Although some of the powers had been on opposing sides during the Robot Wars, the risk was too great for everybody, and they decided to put in place a secret agreement, the Keops Treaty. The only location at hand that was both feasible and secure for storing waste was Onkalo. By then, with the closure of nuclear power plants in 2059, Onkalo had already begun to accept waste from other parts of the world, receiving huge benefits from it of course. But with the Keops Treaty they aspired to a definitive solution: the burial of all the world’s radioactive waste. So they decided to extend the storage space at Onkalo as speedily as possible, transfer the waste of the entire planet there, and seal the dump as soon as they could. I took part in that frantic, megalomaniacal race. It was exhausting but moving. In the end, after Unification, when ultranationalist terrorism began to emerge in this zone, it was decided to advance the timing of closure even more, and that was a disaster. Onkalo was sealed in 2098. Tons and tons of concrete plugged the entrance to the tunnel. They smashed and removed the asphalt from the road, turned over the soil, flattened the ground, and transplanted trees. At the same time Onkalo was erased from the Central Archive, from public memory, from encyclopedias, and from maps. The legend of it being cursed was created, and journalists and writers were charged with its dissemination.”

“Obviously, something didn’t work,” said Bruna, thinking about all the radioactive material that seemed to be out there in the world.

“It didn’t work for the usual reasons: human weaknesses—desperation and greed. The closure was being carried out so prematurely, so hastily, so sloppily that various nuclear engineers, I included, felt that the last deposits had not been properly protected and that they could end up contaminating the entire zone. After a heated debate, a decision worthy of Solomon was reached: Onkalo would be sealed, as had been anticipated, but a small means of access to the final storage area would be left—a narrow vertical tunnel with a lift and a staircase. So that’s what happened. I didn’t see it finished, but I know the entrance is there. It’s an almost invisible entrance from the outside, and it was to be kept open for several decades in order that checks could be undertaken to see if the radiation from the waste was increasing. Then this entry would also be sealed.”

Mai fell silent and buried her face in her hands. She stayed like that for over a minute without moving. Bruna, Clara, and Deuil looked at each other anxiously, not knowing what to do. Finally, Burún looked up and continued.

“I’m not part of the small team that goes down periodically to do the measurements. I stopped working in Onkalo in 2098, when they sealed it. But unlike most of my colleagues I stayed in Pori for various unrelated reasons. Eight years ago Gand came looking for me. He wanted me to show him where the entrance to the small verification tunnel was. He offered me a lot of money, and I accepted. I’m ashamed to admit this, but I needed the money for the children. So I took him there. I didn’t have to do anything more: he had the decoder and knew how to get in. After that I didn’t hear from him again until a few months ago. He turned up here with Carlos Yárnoz. They asked me to keep the decoder. They said they’d come and fetch it. They paid me very well again. And that’s everything I know, and I prefer not to know any more. I’ll worry a lot less when you take that damned thing out of my house.”

39

I
t took them twenty minutes to get back down to Level 21, and they didn’t say a single word during the descent. Knowing that the beast, the offspring of humans—eight hundred metric tons of invisible death—was buried a scant thirty kilometers away had left its mark on them. Onkalo was indeed the door to hell.

They didn’t say much during the meal either. The restaurant turned out to be a colorful and noisy place, a cabaret full of a rowdy crowd with an erotic show involving men and women, including a few reps and several mutants, no doubt to promote its kinkiness. The meal was the usual jellyfish substitute and not a very tasty dish, but there was plenty of it, and the reps ate it down to the last crumb, knowing that they needed to store up energy for what awaited them the next day. Deuil on the other hand barely touched his meal. He was in a dark mood, tense, isolated. He was acting so strangely that he even drank wine, something Bruna had never seen him do before.

Chatting with Chirousse, the owner of the restaurant, they had pried out of him that the territory in which Onkalo was to be found was indeed an abandoned and unhealthy zone where nobody wanted to go. The only way of getting there was on foot, so they decided to head off at 7:00 in the morning. They bought water and food at the store and went to bed early, in the extravagance of their three rooms. As if they were on holiday.

Boom, boom, boom. The bombardment was intensifying. After closing her door, Bruna rested her back against it and felt the vibrations from the explosions. The room was narrow and long. It was lit by a small neon tube that was connected to a hand-cranked battery, providing feeble light. There was a big lumpy bed at one end. At its base, and perpendicular to it, was a small bunk bed. A pair of battered chairs—one metal, the other wooden—doubled as small tables. The window was covered with a thick slab of duroplast. There was a picture hanging on one of the dirty, peeling walls. It was one of those cheap hologram prints available in markets: a herd of horses with their manes flying in the wind. If you moved your head, they galloped. It was a horrible picture and in one of the most depressing rooms that Bruna had ever seen. The rep mentally cursed her memorist for having provided her with the poisoned chalice of a knowledge of beauty. Clara was no doubt delighted with her equally ugly room. Delighted and perhaps in the arms of Deuil. This morning, despite Bruna being careful, the hair-ring Gabi had placed on Bruna’s finger had broken. She took it as a bad omen.

Two thuds sounded, and Bruna thought they were shell blasts, but then she realized someone was knocking on her door. She peeled herself away from it and opened up. It was Deuil. He came inside without saying a word, and the room seemed to darken. He was carrying a bottle of white wine and two glasses, and he was burdened with something else—rage or fear, hate or love—an intense emotion that was overwhelming everything. He looked at the rep and showed her the glasses.

“We’re going to celebrate getting to know each other,” he said in a hoarse voice.

“I thought you didn’t drink alcohol. Your body being a temple and all that.”

“I’ve betrayed many of my principles with you,” said the tactile, filling the glasses.

They toasted and drank. Then with his free hand Deuil grabbed the rep by her waist and pushed her until she was crushed against the door, their faces almost touching, their breaths intermingling.

“I want to remove your clothes. I want to open those warrior legs and enter you,” he whispered, drunk, and not just on alcohol.

When she heard him, a fire ripped through Bruna’s body. They separated, as anxious as castaways on the point of drowning, abandoned their wineglasses, and tore off their clothes. Naked, they stood upright, and the tactile threw himself at the rep again. He embraced her, and they fell onto the bed. One of the wineglasses fell over and soaked the mattress and Bruna’s body.

“Ah! The wine of celebration and of sacrifice,” said Deuil, sitting astride the rep’s thighs and licking the wine off her breasts.

“This may be the last time we make love,” he whispered before delicately running his tongue along the edge of the rep’s armpit.

“Why?”

“We may die tomorrow.”

Bruna grabbed Deuil’s face between her hands and forced him away from her so she could look at him and say, “What’s the matter with you, Daniel?”

The tactile’s eyes were chasms. As if there were no one on the other side. But the tattooed eyes on his chest seemed to burn and contemplate her. Suddenly, he placed his arms between the rep’s and opened them with a swift movement, removing Bruna’s hands from his face; then he skillfully followed up with a judo hold, leaving Bruna immobilized, with the tactile’s legs coiled around hers and his hands holding her wrists down on the bed above her head.

“I can overpower you,” panted Deuil.

Bruna sensed an unanticipated strength in his grip, his expert use of the weight of his own body to pin her down. Even so she could have freed herself without too much difficulty. But she didn’t want to.

“I don’t think so,” Bruna replied.

“I can overpower you because you love me and that weakens you,” he whispered.

“I don’t think so.”

Boom, boom, boom. The blasts sounded more distant, throbbing in the night, carried by the wind. Bruna gazed at Deuil’s face as if it were the first time she was seeing it. His beautiful, prominent Asian cheekbones. His eyes, as if slashed by two cuts of a knife. His small ears, his shaved temples. The translucent teeth. And those fine, well-delineated lips, those powerful lips she knew so well. He’d never seemed so handsome.

“You drive me mad, Bruna,” he whispered, loosening his hold.

He gazed at her with a look of desolation and defeat. But then his face changed and lit up with fury. He pulled out the elastic holding his topknot with one hand, and his long, straight black hair fell on them like thick rain. The rep had never seen him with his hair down. He held Bruna’s wrists against the bed again and, parting her legs with his own, sank into the depths of her flesh with one push.

“Tell me you love me,” he ordered as he took her.

Bruna squeezed her lips tightly.

“Tell me you love me!”

His hair was enveloping them like a cave; it was a cascade of silky darkness that caressed the rep’s shoulders with every thrust. Bruna had never told anyone that she loved them; Bruna hadn’t even said that to Merlín. The skin of the two lovers was slippery. Their bodies danced, their bodies fused. Deuil was entering deeper and deeper into her and was on the verge of reaching her heart.

“Tell me you love me,” he repeated with ferocious anxiety and a desperation bordering on violence.

Boom, boom, boom. The grenades exploded inside the rep’s veins. Storms of tears, swirls of blood. The horses galloped on the wall. The world was ending, and a pleasure so sharp it felt like pain rose through Bruna’s chest, cutting through her throat until it reached her mouth.

“I love you!” she shouted.

And it was true.

And it was a lie.