Unsheltered by Clare Moleta (spiritual books to read TXT) 📕

annihilating. Her leg gave way and she fell down screaming. Answering shots in their direction and Jasmine stood over her and stomped on her ankle again.

Li retched, tried to twist away out of range but she was tethered to fifty litres of water. Jasmine grabbed the rope and dragged her back. Li gouged up a handful of dirt and threw it in her face – she yelped and dropped the rope. Steel caps hammered into Li’s shins, sides, belly, jaw. There was no room for these smaller pains through the agony of her ankle but when she tried to take Jasmine’s legs out and bring her down where she could fight, her body wouldn’t do the work. Knife, she thought. A word like mountain. Like fly. Jasmine got on top of her, pinning her arms, banging her head back on the ground and unleashing the tube in her face. She was choking, drowning. The skin flayed back from her bones, couldn’t get her head up. Somewhere outside the water there were hands wrenching at her waist. Then she could breathe and Jasmine’s weight was off her and she rolled over and vomited liquid.

When she sat up, the siphon tube was whipping around near her head and her toolkit was gone. Was that what this had been for? All of it? Li wanted to kill her with her hands. She started crawling after her but there were bodies everywhere in the headlights. Where the fuck had they all come from? They ran towards her and past her, carrying bottles and cups and bags and tins.

She thought she saw a figure hauling a container, right at the edge of the light. Tried to get up but something in her ankle ripped and give way. For a few seconds she hung on the edge of blacking out and when she opened her eyes the figure was gone. Looked back and saw that people had reached the tankers. Two were wrestling over the siphon tube. It came free and water arced up thinly from the hole, catching in the headlights. The crowd made a gutteral sound. A guard fired into their backs and kept firing. Li started crawling away again, just trying to get to the road now, get out of range, but it hurt so much to move. All around her people were running and shooting and shouting and falling.

And then it hit her that Matti could be here, trapped somewhere in this mob. Li turned back, looking for smaller shapes, yelling Matti’s name. In front of the nearest tanker, a man got the gun off the guard and smashed the butt into the side of her head, then he stepped back and fired straight at the tanker. Panic, chaos, bodies falling. But they were just in the way. And now the tanker sprang new leaks and people held up their containers or their cupped hands until they were pushed aside. The smell of blood and water.

That was when she heard helicopter blades, saw the lights in the sky and knew she should have got away sooner.

Transit

Li started work in Serkel’s salvage facility two weeks after they brought her in. Any sooner would have been unproductive. She had broken bones in her ankle, torn ligaments and tendon damage. The medic had put her lower leg in a cast but assessed her as otherwise fit. She gave her a bunch of shots and some crutches, and then confined her to Charlie compound for fourteen days. Her status number was printed on a band around her wrist.

The first day, she walked around the fence on her crutches. There was a thick, sweet stink in the air and she saw that Matti was truly out of reach now.

When she was done looking, a couple of Essos had to carry her back to the sleepbox. She lay on a cot, breathing sweat and mould and old blood, and looked at the metal grid on the metal ceiling, at the damp and rust. Someone coughed persistently in a corner. The woman in the next cot lay looking at her out of dark, exhausted eyes. This part is hard, she said. You won’t feel it as much when you’re working.

Her name was Camila. She’d been in Transit for a month. Li turned away and gripped the Saint Anthony medallion. They’d missed it somehow when they processed and tagged her. It was flat and warm, it held her warmth. She traced the ceiling grid with her eyes, working inwards until she got to the smallest box and then starting from the outside again.

Charlie compound was a concrete toilet and shower block, two twelve-metre shipping containers for sleeping in, and a patch of dirt out the front where the women queued for the shift vans. It was surrounded by other fenced compounds, each one separated by concrete paths and linked by two gates. There was a central compound with a cracked runway down the middle and a concrete hangar where they got fed. Cameras on the fences. Essos, always in pairs. The whole lot enclosed by a rigid mesh outer fence, at least five metres high, angled in and topped with razor wire. Unclimbable.

This was Transit. And Transit was in the No Go. Now it was the highway that was out of bounds – she couldn’t see it from Charlie compound, couldn’t see the perimeter fence either, couldn’t even see the industrial complex north of Transit, where Camila said Li would be working soon. All she could see was fences and all she could hear outside them was dogs.

The horse was gone, fallen out of her pocket somewhere in the chaos at the roadhouse.

By the time the medic said she was work-ready she’d figured it out. She couldn’t break out of Transit. Every link gate had an individual lockcode. There was nothing in here she could cut the fence with and even if she could