"Sergey might know, I guess. What are you going to do with all that cash, Ziyi?"
"Maybe I buy this place one day. I’m getting old. Can’t spend all my life trawling for junk on the beach."
Ziyi visited the hardware store, exchanged scraps of gossip with the store owner and a couple of women who were mining the ruins out in the forest. None of them had heard anything about a bandit attack, or an accident on the coast road. In the internet cafe, she bought a mug of green tea and an hour on one of the computers.
Searched the local news for a bandit attack, some prospector caught in the storm, a plane crash, found nothing. No recent reports of anyone missing or vehicles found abandoned.
She sat back, thinking. So much for her theory that the man was some kind of Jackaroo spy who’d been travelling incognito and had got into trouble when the storm hit. She widened her search. Here was a child who had wandered into the forest. Here was a family, their farm discovered deserted, doors smashed down, probably by sasquatch. Here was the road train that had been attacked by bandits, two years ago. Here was a photograph of the man.
Ziyi felt cold, then hot. Looked around at the cafe’s crowded tables. Clicked on the photo to enlarge it.
It was him. It was the man.
His name was Tony Michaels. Twenty-eight years old, a petrochemist. One of three people missing, presumed taken by the bandits after they killed everyone else. Leaving behind a wife and two children, in the capital.
A family. He’d been human, once upon a time.
Someone in the cafe laughed; Ziyi heard voices, the chink of cutlery, the hiss of the coffee urn, felt suddenly that everyone was watching her. She sent the photo of Tony Michaels to the printer, shut down the browser, snatched up the printout and left.
She was unlocking her jeep when Sergey Polzin called out to her. The man stepping towards her across the slick mud, dressed in his usual combat gear, his pistol at his hip. He owned the recycling plant, the internet cafe, and the town’s only satellite dish, and acted as if he was the town’s unelected mayor. Greeting visitors and showing off the place as if it was something more than a squalid street of shacks squatting amongst factory ruins. Pointing out where the water treatment plant would be, talking about plans for concreting the airstrip, building a hospital, a school, that would never come to anything.
Saying to Ziyi, "Heard you hit a big find."
"The storm washed up a few things," Ziyi said, trying to show nothing while Sergey studied her. Trying not to think about the printout folded into the inside pocket of her parka, over her heart.
He said, "I also heard you wanted to report trouble."
"I was wondering how everyone was, after the storm."
He gazed at her for a few moments, then said, "Any trouble, anything unusual, you come straight to me. Understand?"
"Completely."
When Ziyi got back to the cabin she sat the man down and showed him the printout, then fetched her mirror from the wall and held it in front of him, angling it this way and that, pointing to it, pointing to the paper.
"You," she said. "Tony Michaels. You."
He looked at the paper and the mirror, looked at the paper again and ran his fingertips over his smooth face. He didn’t need to shave, and his hair was exactly as long as it was in the photo.
"You," she said.
That was who he had been. But what was he now?
The next day she coaxed him into the jeep with the two dogs, and drove west along the coast road, forest on one side and the sea stretching out to the horizon on the other, until she spotted the burnt-out shells of the road train, overgrown with great red drapes of bubbleweed. The dogs jumped off and nosed around; the man slowly climbed out, looked about him, taking no especial notice of the old wreckage.
She had pictured it in her head. His slow recognition. Leading her to the place where he’d hidden or crawled away to die from grievous wounds. The place that had turned him or copied him or whatever it was the factory had done.
Instead, he wandered off to a patch of sunlight in the middle of the road and stood there until she told him they were going for a walk.
They walked a long way, slowly spiralling away from the road. There were factory ruins here, as in most parts of the forest. Stretches of broken wall. Chains of cubes heaved up and broken, half-buried, overgrown by the arched roots of spine trees, and thatches of copperberry and bubbleweed, but the man seemed no more interested in them than in the wreckage of the road train.
"You were gone two years. What happened to you?"
He shrugged.
At last, they walked back to the road. The sun stood at the horizon, as always, throwing shadows over the road. The man walked towards the patch of sunlight where he’d stood before, and kept walking.
Ziyi and the two dogs followed. Through a thin screen of trees to the edge of a sheer drop. Water far below, lapping at rocks. No, not rocks. Factory ruins.
The man stared down at patches of waterweed rising and falling on waves that broke around broken walls.
Ziyi picked up a stone and threw it out beyond the cliff edge. "Was that what happened? You were running from the bandits, it was dark, you ran straight out over the edge…"
The man made a humming sound. He was looking at Sauron’s fat orange disc now, and after a moment he closed his eyes and stretched out his arms.
Ziyi walked along the cliff edge, looking for and failing to find a path. The black rock plunged straight down, a sheer drop cut by vertical crevices that only an experienced climber might use to pick a route down. She tried to picture it. The road train stopping because fallen trees had blocked the road. Bandits appearing when the crew stepped down, shooting them, ordering the passengers out, stripping them of their clothes and belongings, shooting them one by one. Bandits didn’t like to leave witnesses. One man breaking free, running into the darkness. Running through the trees, running blindly, wounded perhaps, definitely scared, panicked. Running straight out over the cliff edge. If the fall hadn’t killed him, he would have drowned. And his body had washed into some active part of the factory, and it had fixed him. No, she thought. It had duplicated him. Had it taken two years? Or had he been living in some part of the factory, out at sea, until the storm had washed him away and he’d been cast up on the beach…
The man had taken off his clothes and stood with his arms out and his eyes closed, bathing in level orange light. She shook him until he opened his eyes and smiled at her, and she told him it was time to go.
Ziyi tried and failed to teach the man to talk. "You understand me. So why can’t you tell me what happened to you?"
The man humming, smiling, shrugging.
Trying to get him to write or draw was equally pointless.
Days on the beach, picking up flotsam; nights watching movies. She had to suppose he was happy. Her constant companion. Her mystery. She had long ago given up the idea of selling him.
Once, Ziyi’s neighbour, Besnik Shkelyim, came out of the forest while the man was searching the strandline. Ziyi told Besnik he was the son of an old friend in the capital, come to visit for a few weeks. Besnik seemed to accept the lie. They chatted about the weather and sasquatch sightings and the latest finds. Besnik did most of the talking. Ziyi was anxious and distracted, trying not to look towards the man, praying that he wouldn’t wander over. At last, Besnik said that he could see that she was busy, he really should get back to his own work.
"Bring your friend to visit, sometime. I show him where real treasure is found." Ziyi said that she would, of course she would, watched Besnik walk away into the darkness under the trees, then ran to the man, giddy and foolish with relief and told him how well he’d done, keeping away from the stranger.