The Alpha Threw Me To The Hyenas

Chapter Ten: Two Hundred Miles

He did not open the door for me.

He watched me try to do it with a taped forearm and a hand that would not close, and he let it go on for about four seconds, and then he reached over and pulled the handle and went back to leaning on the roof.

"Front or back," Ilyas said.

I had not expected a choice.

"Front."

"Right."

I got in. He came round and got in the other side and the car sat there with the engine running while the two hundred people in that courtyard stood and looked at it, and he did not put it into gear for nearly a minute.

"What are we waiting for?"

"For them to get bored," he said.

They did not get bored. He put it into gear anyway.

The gate came up and went past. Then the long drive, then the road, then the roundabout at the bottom where the city properly starts, and I sat with my hands turned up on my knees and watched the whole of the only place I had ever been go by the window in the dark.

I had never been outside it. Not once. Twenty-two years and the furthest I had gone was the market on the north side with a list and a woman from the kitchens, and the market was still inside.

We went through the middle of it. Past the tram stop with the broken shelter, past the row of restaurants where the house had an account, past the bridge, and out through the eastern suburbs where the lights got further apart and the buildings got lower, and then there was a stretch with nothing on either side except fencing, and then there was nothing at all.

Nobody spoke for about forty minutes.

He drove the way he had put me down on the floor in the hall, which is to say without any waste in it. One hand mostly. He did not check the mirror more than he needed to, and he did not tap anything, and he did not put the radio on.

I tried to read him.

I want to be clear about why I mention it. I could read anybody. That is not a boast, it was the only skill I had and I had it because I had spent my entire life being furniture in rooms where important people forgot to be careful. I could tell you which of two men at a table was frightened of the other. I could tell you a week in advance when somebody was going to be dismissed.

I sat eighteen inches from Ilyas for forty minutes and got nothing.

Not a hostile nothing. Not the flat closed-off nothing you get off somebody who has decided not to give you anything. It was more like looking at water. He was entirely there and entirely visible and there was no purchase on him anywhere, and by the time we passed the last streetlight I had gone through everything I knew and come up empty for the first time since I was nine years old.

"You are staring at me," he said.

"Yes."

"Any particular reason?"

"I am trying to work out what you are."

"I am a man driving a car," Ilyas said.

"That is not what I meant."

"I know what you meant." He changed down for a bend. "Everybody in that house does it. You lot stand about reading each other like it is a job. Somebody comes in a room and eleven people start working out what they want. It is exhausting to watch."

"It is how you survive in there."

"It is how you survive in there," he agreed. "It is not how you survive anywhere else, which you are about to find out."

There was a coat on the back seat. He reached round for it at some point without looking and dropped it across my lap.

"Put that on."

"I am not cold."

"You are shaking hard enough to move the seat," he said, "and you are no use to me frozen before we get there. Put it on."

It took me a while with the arms. He did not offer to help and he did not watch me struggle either. He kept his eyes on the road and let me get on with it, and that was somehow the least humiliating thing anybody had done to me in nine days.

"Where is Mira," I said.

"I do not know."

"You do know."

"I know she is inside the house," he said. "I know that on Saturday she was moved off the kitchens by an instruction that did not come through me, which is unusual, because instructions about staff come through me. That is what I know and I have told you all of it, and if you ask me again in ten minutes I will still not have any more."

"What do you think it means?"

"I think," he said, "that you should stop asking me questions I cannot answer and start asking me the ones I can."

So I did.

"What is out there."

"Salt."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the whole answer." He nodded ahead at the windscreen. "About seventy miles from here the ground goes white and the maps stop being any use, because there is nothing on them worth marking. It is two hundred miles across at the widest and nobody has ever built anything on it, and nothing grows, and there is no water except what you carry."

"People go out there."

"People go out to the line," he said. "There are men who take equipment to the edge of it and come back the same day and get paid extremely well for a day's driving, and I have never once met one who would tell me what the money was for."

"And past the line?"

He did not answer immediately.

"There is a story," he said, "that they tell children in the eastern villages, about the laughing. You do not hear it in the city. Out there every single house has it and every single one of them tells it differently, and I have asked about forty people over eleven years and the only thing all forty agreed on is that you can hear it at night and it is not animals."

"Do you believe it?"

"I have never been past the line."

"That is not what I asked."

Ilyas glanced across at me for the first time since the roundabout.

"No," he said. "It is not."

The road went on. The last of the fencing gave out and after that there was just the tarmac and the headlights and a long low shape of country on either side with no lights in it anywhere.

"They gave you an order," I said.

"They did."

"At the line."

"Yes."

"Are you going to tell me what it is?"

"No," he said.

I looked at my hands. I could hear the tyres changing note as the surface got worse, and I understood that I was three or four hours from the end of everything and sitting next to the man who had been given the details of it.

"Then tell me this," I said. "How far are you taking me."

He drove for a while without answering.

"The line is about seventy miles," he said. "That is where the ground turns. That is where they hand people over to a patrol and get a signature and drive home and are back in their own bed by four."

"Yes."

"I am not stopping at seventy," Ilyas said. "I am taking you past it."