‘A few days later, after the funerals, people shot at our house. So my father decided that it was no longer safe for us, in our country. He used his connections to send my mother and me to England. The university had been closed down by then, but he had a consultancy with a pharmaceutical company, and he stayed on so that he could send us money. You need a lot of money to come to England and live here. Six months later, my father was denounced by one of his former students and thrown in prison. Along with many of his colleagues.
‘He was in prison for eight years. Meanwhile, my mother brought me up. We lived in Oxford. She worked in the university, as a secretary. And then there was an amnesty, and my father was released. He went to Germany, as a political refugee, and then he came here. You can imagine how it was for me. This man, this stranger, claiming to be my father. Coming between me and my mother, who collaborated in the charade. But my father worked hard to win my affections, and he got a job with GlaxoSmithKline and we moved to Uxbridge. We had a nice house. My mother made a lovely garden, and Rana came along. I remember that we were very happy.
‘My mother went back to work after Rana was born, with an insurance company in Wembley. One night she stayed late because a colleague was leaving and there was a party. She was driving home, it was raining, and a lorry ploughed into her car and killed her. My father took it badly. He believed that my mother’s death was a judgement. There was a payment from my mother’s life insurance. My father called it blood money. By then, he had begun to drink heavily. He fell in with some bad people and started to gamble. Cards, high stakes. He lost all of the insurance money, and then he lost everything else. He owed a lot of money to the wrong people, and to cover the debt he started to steal from his job. He was found out, and fired. And his gambling debt was bought by the McBride family, and he was told he would cook drugs for them, to pay it off. He refused, and Rana and I were kidnapped. Held as hostages until my father gave in.
‘So we moved to a little town in East Anglia, on the Flood. You saw what it was like. My father cooked shine. He was so good at it he was sent to Mangala, to cook meq. Rana and I stayed behind. We were hostages again. We weren’t treated badly, but the man and woman who looked after us were crooks. Thieves. My father got into the Elder Culture artefact business. He wanted to make enough money to buy a ticket to Earth. He sent things back to us, too. Things we could sell to make a little money. The people looking after us stole most of the stuff, but they let us keep a few things, including a little bead. And perhaps,’ Fahad said, ‘that was also fate. And perhaps it wasn’t.’
‘This was Ugly Chicken’s bead,’ Chloe said.
‘Who can say if it found its way to us by choice or by accident? You might say that it doesn’t matter, because by whichever path it arrived the destination was the same. But I think that it matters a great deal whether our lives are shaped by the choices we make, or whether they are shaped by the choices of something that stands outside of our ordinary experience.’
‘You’ve thought about this a lot.’
‘Wouldn’t you, if you were in my situation? Our guardians thought that the bead had no value, and gave it to Rana. I believe that the thought wasn’t their own. And I don’t think it was my father’s decision to send it to us, either. I began to draw my pictures. Rana began to talk to her new imaginary friend. And a few weeks later I found out that my father had been killed.
‘I saw how he died,’ Fahad said, his gaze dark and steady. ‘Rana and I escaped. That was the first time Ugly Chicken showed itself to other people. I stole some money, but it wasn’t enough. I was still wondering how I could buy a ticket to Mangala when you found us. Do you see now how it all works out? You saw my pictures and wanted to know what they mean. And they led you to me, and maybe you will help me get what I want.’
Chloe said, ‘If you want Ada Morange to help you find the people who killed your father, to bring them to justice, you’ll have to ask her yourself.’
‘I don’t want them “brought to justice”,’ Fahad said. ‘I don’t want them handed over to the police. I was brought up to believe that we should forgive those who trespass against us. But you and I know that it isn’t enough, don’t we?’
He was right about one thing, Chloe thought. She had been like him once upon a time, back when she had helped to set up the LFM wiki, when she had been looking for the truth about what had happened to her mother. When she had been looking for someone to blame. When she had been trying to make sense of the horror show that had knocked her life completely off course. Yes, Fahad was very like she had been, back then. Scared and angry, boastful and defiant. She understood his bitterness and his hurt, and wished that she could tell him that it would heal, in time. That you live all your life in the presence of your parents, and they’re suddenly gone, and it’s like a raw wound in the heart of your being. You can’t imagine going forward without them, but you do. And, gradually, the wound heals. A poem she had once found spoke of a tree falling in a wood, and the gap it leaves. And into the gap falls sunlight and new life. But she knew that Fahad wouldn’t care to hear that. He was still too raw, too angry. He wanted justice. An eye for an eye, and all that Biblical shit.
She said, ‘If Ada Morange agrees to help you, you’ll have to give something in return. That’s how it usually works. You’ll have to tell us about the pictures, where they are, what they show. You’ll have to tell us what Ugly Chicken really is, and what it can do.’
Fahad turned the pad so that the spire was, for her, the right way round.
‘This is on Mangala,’ he said. ‘It was made by the people who made Ugly Chicken. He was asleep a long time. And now he is awake, and wants to go home. He wants to show us where he belongs and what he can do. But if you want to know more than that, you’ll have to take me to Dr Morange.’
Early the next morning a courier delivered Chloe’s passport, taken from her flat, and brand-new passports for Fahad and Rana. They were driven to a private airfield and boarded a little prop plane that hopped across the Channel to Normandy and landed on a strip mown into a meadow of a farm owned by Karyotech Pharma. Ada Morange and Henry Harris were waiting with a stout middle-aged woman: Rimsha Batti, one of Fahad and Rana’s aunts. She had been found by Ada Morange’s people in Pakistan, and they’d brought her to France to chaperone her niece and nephew.
Rana was shy with this strange woman; Fahad suspected some kind of trick, glancing indifferently at the pictures of his mother and her many relatives that Rimsha displayed on her phone, which she also used as a translator because she had very little English. She said that she had come of her own free will to help her nephew and niece; she had left behind her husband and her own children, her work as a librarian. ‘Dr Morange paid for my air fare, nothing else.’
Chloe was suspicious too. Not of Rimsha, who seemed like a sensible independent woman, but of the way this little family reunion had been arranged. Henry said it was mostly a legal precaution. Fahad was Rana’s brother, but as far as the authorities in Britain were concerned he wasn’t her guardian. Rimsha was prepared to intercede on their behalf, if it came to a battle in the courts.
Henry had evaded the police during the confusion created by Ugly Chicken, and had made his way to France after supervising a little distraction — dispatching lookalikes on a private jet to Shanghai and leaking to a friendly media outlet blurry CCTV of them boarding the plane.
‘It won’t fool Nevers for long, but it might give us a bit of breathing space,’ he told Chloe. ‘Time for you to decide what you want to do next.’
But Chloe already knew what was coming. She’d known ever since she’d seen, as the plane had come in to land, the Mangala shuttle balanced at the horizon.