Cutting the Cord

  First published in 2020 by Impact Press

  an imprint of Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

  www.venturapress.com.au

  Copyright © Natasha Molt 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-920727-93-2 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-920727-88-8 (ebook)

  Cover design by Working Type

  Internal design by Brugel Creative

  For my mother, Susanne

  PICTURES

  Y our boyish face is white, like the wet snow we press with our small hands. You toss your blue gloves up high and they fall through the air, feather-light – a piece of sky undone. The Woman. Her face is blurry at the edges. Somehow I think and feel she is my mama. She picks up your gloves, pats them against her legs, releasing flecks of snow. I help her guide the gloves back over your dimpled fingers. You shove marshmallows into your mouth and sticky goo dribbles down your chin. You are laughing, and I am, too. The Woman bites off pieces of carrot for the snowman’s eyes and nose.

  Three bottoms wedged on the sled: the Woman is at the back (her face no clearer here), I’m in the middle and you’re in front of me. I hold you tight, my arms stretched over your snowsuit, and Mama squeezes us both into her as we race down the hill. You squeal with delight.

  ‘Looking!’ you shout. ‘Looking!’

  We ride the ski lift, going higher and higher towards the bright sky and the warming glow of the sun. Your blue eyes gaze down at the white glaring snow and you cry.

  I kiss your sodden cheek. Salty.

  Mama holds you. Shh. Shh.

  1

  NEAR ESSEN, GERMANY

  4 MAY

  THREE MONTHS AFTER PHASE ONE: RESISTANCE INITIATION

  She parks the black hatchback behind a thicket of evergreen bushes. Her blue eyes, set in hollow sockets, gaze back at her in the rear-view mirror. Her hair is pulled back into a braid. Twenty-two years old.

  ‘What am I going to look like when I’m fifty? I won’t make it to fifty.’

  She pulls down the black balaclava, positioning the holes for her eyes, mouth and nose. Leather gloves are snug on her hands. She tucks the sleeves of her black jacket over the rims of the gloves. The Glock pistol is secure in an ankle holster.

  Ready.

  She climbs out of the car and crosses the narrow road. The sunlight is white and hard, the sky a perfect blue. A cool morning breeze passes under her nose and the oxygen swells in her lungs and head and the pounding throughout her body begins.

  She checks her watch: almost 7.30 am. From her surveillance over the past week she knows that Jonas should be in his greenhouse.

  She wades through the tall grass that flickers in the wind and raps against her long black pants. The earth is soft from last night’s spring rain. Mud squelches on her boots. She crosses the ditch, locates the rock near the security fence and pushes it aside, revealing the hole she’d dug yesterday. She grits her teeth and ducks down. Her hands land on the moist dirt and she slithers like a lizard to the other side of the fence. Mud clings to her clothes. She rises and runs steadily.

  Shards of sunlight spike through the towering, trembling pines. Beyond the pines are rolling green meadows and beyond the meadows are three barns, a tennis court and a pool, and on top of a hill sits a rambling house with a thatched roof. And security cameras.

  She runs to the first of the barns for cover and observes the greenhouse at the rear of the house.

  She takes out her gun, screws on the silencer and steps away from the barn.

  Four minutes.

  On camera.

  The balaclava presses in on her, its wool soaking up the film of sweat coating her face. Through the glass of the greenhouse she can see Jonas watering orchids with a hose. Alone.

  He appears an old man, still large, but hunched. A few strides and she opens the rear greenhouse door and stands behind him.

  Her grip tightens around the Glock.

  His pants are tucked into gumboots and a striped short-sleeved shirt hangs off his shoulders and the bump on his back. He hums a tune she does not recognise. His gaze is fixed on his orchids. Then, as if he senses someone else is near, he speaks:

  ‘Britta?’

  He turns and looks up; his eyes are red and watery. His eyebrows gather and one side of his upper lip and nostril rise warily.

  Do it quickly.

  His lips part and, before words come, she presses the trigger: Pft! Pft! Pft!

  He pauses, drops the hose, which falls to the ground and twists like a panicked snake. He holds her eyes for a moment, long enough for her to see an emptiness fill him, before he collapses with a thud.

  She draws out a segment of the Manifesto from her jacket and tosses it on a wooden bench.

  Authenticity, ring in this dead man’s heart and in mine.

  Job done. Get out.

  But her feet are heavy and the only movement they make is towards Jonas Baumann.

  The pistol in her hand doesn’t feel cold. It never does through the gloves. It feels warm in her fingers and the polymer frame makes it light. Her eyes drift down to her scuffed black boot and across to Jonas’s frozen expression. Water from the hose thins his leaking blood. His face will grow familiar – the others have – rising out of cups of coffee first thing in the morning to surprise her. Or when she puts her face underwater, reminding her how they no longer breathe.

  She turns to his flowers. Orchids are everywhere, on wooden benches, rows and rows of them: inflorescences of delicate and bright colours. Her nostrils are overwhelmed by the smell of the greenhouse: vanilla, fish, cinnamon, burnt sulphur from the gunpowder – and blood, still warm.

  A creaking sound.

  Her eyes dart out of the greenhouse towards the thatch-roofed home.

  A girl’s voice, sweet and high, calls through the side door.

  ‘Opa? Opa?’

  The child nears. With each step the shadow of the house leaves her and her silhouette becomes more vivid. Young Britta. Jonas’s granddaughter.

  She’d seen the young girl with Jonas at the weekend market eating bratwurst on a roll with mustard. She is ten, no older, with fair hair encasing a pale face.

  The orchids shield the assassin from Britta’s view.

  She has to get out of here.

  She bolts out of the greenhouse through the rear door. As she runs towards the barn, time pushes down on her like a vice squeezing wood. Near a barn wall she crouches down; there’s a drumming in her body. She hears screams, the wail of the child, innocence trying to scare off death. She looks back.

  The red cedar sliding vents at the base of the greenhouse block her view of Jonas. But she sees the child – her contorted face, the curl of her mouth.

  Within seconds, she cries: ‘Hilfe! Hilfe!’

  A woman, wearing an apron dusted with white flour, comes running from the house. She grabs the child and yells: ‘Jens! Jens! Hilfe!’

  Out comes a man, a woman, more children. They enter the greenhouse and topple down, like falling dominoes, to the ground where Jonas lies.

  The assassin blinks.

  And runs.

  Past the barn. Over the meadows. Through the forest. Grass turns to a carpet of brown brambles. With each step she pushes them into the soft earth. Before her, wherever she turns, looms the image of Britta’s face. The veins within her temples pound, threatening to explode..

  Sirens blare. Loudly at first, almost deafening. The wolves are after her now.

  She slithers un
der the electrical fence where she’d dug the hole and then pushes the rock back into place.

  On the country road, her boots clap against the tar. A hundred metres down is the black hatchback.

  Her breath is even.

  At the car she doesn’t brush the dirt off but gets in and starts driving. As she stares through the windshield, everything appears larger than normal, frighteningly clearer, sharper around the edges.

  Off with the mask. The pistol under the driver’s seat for now. She does not drive fast. After a few minutes she puts her seatbelt on. Then the radio:

  The riots in Athens against the Greek government’s latest austerity package are yet another result of unchecked globalisation of financial markets.

  All there is in the air and between her ears is little Britta’s wail: Hilfe! Hilfe!

  2

  SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

  6 MAY

  Amira Knox, First Warrior Sister, hates flying long distances. Travelling under the name Anika Vollmer doesn’t change that: a fake passport doesn’t change who she is. She despises the reheated meals with mushy vegetables and rubbery strips of meat, the lack of legroom, the proximity of fellow passengers, and the stuffy air. Most of all she hates being trapped with her thoughts for hours at a time with no exercise and no opportunity to paint. Looking about her, she imagines painting the plane lit up by a fire of bright yellows and murky oranges, the beige and brown of tormented faces. She pulls at her navy hoodie, then tugs at the dark, almost black, hair that falls down in layers over her shoulders.

  Having not been home to Kangaroo Valley for a little under a year, she is undertaking the journey now because there is no other choice: she has been summoned. There were no reasons given, just the order. After two eliminations in Europe, one in Paris and another in Germany, she should be pleased to be returning, if only because she would get to see her mother and her Third Warrior Brother, Kolya, but as the hours on the plane to Sydney pass she can’t help wondering, and worrying over, why she has been recalled – why they all have been.

  It had been late on Tuesday evening, when she was recovering from Baumann in her apartment and putting on a load of washing, that the telephone rang.

  ‘Anika, is that you?’ asked a familiar voice. This was her Messenger, Wilhelm.

  Amira took the laundry powder from the cupboard. She was irritated because he was calling her so late, especially since he knew that she had just completed her assignment. He always wanted to debrief and discuss things in painful, excruciating detail, but now wasn’t the time to make an appointment for a meeting.

  ‘Yes, I’m just about to go to bed. What is it?’

  ‘You must return home. He wants you all for Thursday evening.’

  Her hand had slipped, overfilling the cup with laundry powder; white had dusted the tiled floor. Mother must be gravely ill, or there was some other trouble.

  ‘Why? What’s going on? Is something wrong?’

  ‘I don’t have the slightest idea. I was simply told to relay the message and organise your flight. I have left you tickets in your PO Box and sent you an email with the details. You’ll have an early morning train to catch. You’d better pack.’

  ‘It’s so sudden, and I’m very tired. Are you sure …?’

  ‘Yes. The instruction was unequivocal. I’ll see you when you get back.’

  On her laptop Wilhelm’s email had waited in the inbox. There were only the details of her train to Frankfurt and flight to Sydney. Nothing else. She could take a chance and call Mother. But phone calls home were strictly forbidden. Amira had packed a small suitcase and her backpack, and next morning rose early, collected her tickets, and was on her way.

  This flight is worse than others she has undertaken, and she has been on many in the last two years. Beginning with a world trip with Kolya to Mexico, Africa, India, China, Japan, Europe and America, where, as part of their training, they saw how the inAuthenticity disease had spread, how it had affected the poor. The reason this trip is weighing so heavily on her – she admits to herself – has nothing to do with the woman beside her coughing and grunting every now and then, nor even her curiosity over why she has been summoned. It is, rather, because Britta’s scream is echoing randomly, and she is finding that, as the journey draws on, the girl’s voice is becoming all that she can hear, lodging in her ears, like grommets. Creepy and unsettling. She has freed Jonas and saved the girl from infection. So why should she be so shaken by what has happened?

  Now she sits by the window and dabs her pale honey-coloured face with the warm refresher wipe the flight attendant has handed out, her blue eyes gazing down at the backpack at her feet. She double-checks its contents: a paperback, a basic make-up kit (necessary for a sudden change of appearance), a notepad and several biros (which she can use in more ways than one). Then she flicks through the complimentary airline magazine without reading the articles.

  She often wonders in moments like this, with time stretched before her, who her birth parents are, what they are like, whether they are still alive – why they gave her away. She is adopted, like all the Warrior children. In her mind, her birth parents are always gentle, kind and loving, and were forced to put her up for adoption by circumstances beyond their control. Most of her childhood, in her private moments, she would imagine how they might smell, the colour of their eyes, whether she had any siblings. In these recurrent imaginings she would see herself being reunited with them, their presence finally filling her deep inner void. Some day she must find them.

  Now, late in the second leg of the flight, the darkness beyond the glass catches the light, a setting sun on the horizon, a deep red that matches the Australian desert below. Her stomach rolls as brown fields appear beneath the plane, then hills covered with eucalyptus trees, reminding her of home, where the screaming had first begun.

  She was Britta’s age. The goat’s tongue was warm on her palm, lapping up grain. First Warrior Brother, Randy, cajoled his lamb to eat the chicken poop. He thought it was funny, and Second, Third and Fourth Warrior Brothers – Laith, Kolya and Oscar – laughed too. Stupid boys. Amira looked out beyond the barn at the dry grassland. He appeared in the entranceway, a dark figure against the white glare of day. All around him was light and, as he stepped closer, the light shone out of his eyes, through his tortoiseshell spectacles. His thin lips, nestled in a bushy beard and moustache, curved upwards in a smile. Over his shoulder was a khaki knapsack. He was Father. The One.

  As Amira watched, he strode into the barn, knelt down, gingerly laid the sack on the ground and unzipped it. Inside were pipe bombs, the ones they’d made the day before. The boys huddled over them.

  Amira watched the chickens peck food from the ground. They had such tiny feet; amazingly they didn’t topple over with their weight. A scraggly one had half its raw skin showing. The others had pecked out its feathers. Why? Amira lifted the poor bird up and placed it in the pen with the lambs; it would be safer away from its own kind. If she had a canvas, she’d like to paint it nestled in the soft wool of a lamb.

  Father handed out the explosives. ‘For your animals.’ His eyes gleamed.

  Amira couldn’t move. Why did they need to blow up their animals? Wasn’t there some other way of testing their bombs?

  Father’s eyes rested on her face. ‘Amira? Are you okay?’

  Her brothers glanced at her. First Warrior Brother heaved a sigh of irritation.

  The muscles in Amira’s jaw tightened. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Good. Let’s get started then, shall we?’

  Father and her four brothers carried some of the animals to the pickup truck.

  ‘Come on, Mira; you have to help, too,’ said Laith.

  But she didn’t; her feet felt like they were plastered to the ground.

  As she looked on, the others continued to lift the animals onto the ute. The lambs bleated and the chickens squawked. Father jumped into the driver’s seat. Her brothers climbed onto the back of the vehicle with the animals; their spirits we
re high, all but Kolya’s.

  ‘Are you coming?’ he asked her.

  Father was watching Amira through the side mirror.

  She bit her lip, lowered her gaze and shook her head.

  Father started the ignition and they drove away from the barn. She cupped her eyes against the plume of dust kicked up by the pickup’s tyres. After about two hundred metres, the vehicle halted. Randy hopped off the back. He was first. Father helped him set his cage down in the grassland. They carried a lamb, two chickens and a goat, one at a time to the cage. Once everything was in place they drove a safe distance away and Randy, a serious expression of concentration on his face, pressed his trigger. His animals were blown into the sky and bloody bits of flesh, fur and feather rained down on the earth, splattering the truck.

  Amira ran into the barn and stared at the chicken without some of its feathers. The lambs pressed against stalls, noses hanging over planks of wood, eyes large, dark and watery, eager for more food. She struggled against impending tears, but in vain. Father must not see her like this. He would be angry. He would tell First Mother and she would be sad.

  She found a corner in the shed and covered herself with hay. She heard more explosions and the creatures in the barn bleated and squawked. Help us. After some time, the ute returned. The sun sat low in the sky and Father appeared in the entranceway. The light was gone from him and he cast a long shadow on the hay. Kolya was by his side, his eyes wide open. Father’s heavy boots crunched on straw and he called out her name.

  ‘Amira? Amira?’

  She remained silent, hidden. If she was quiet enough, they wouldn’t see her.

  ‘Find your sister,’ Father commanded Kolya. His voice was taut, like a string on a guitar, how it sometimes got before he went at First Mother.

  Her brother found her within seconds. ‘Mira, what’s the matter?’ he asked quietly.

  She gazed into his face; his blue eyes were filled with fear. Father padded over and examined her. She was in trouble now; she dared not breathe.