‘Uncle!’
The group didn’t pause.
Peter tried again. ‘Oi! Griff!’
His uncle stopped so abruptly that the guy behind him nearly bumped into him. Griff scowled at Peter and beckoned him over.
‘Nice day for it?’ Peter said cheerily as he caught up with his uncle.
‘How is everything, Peter?’ Griff’s voice was low, but Peter had the feeling nobody was listening anyway. The group was tense. A couple of people were peeling through stacks of notes. In another place, he supposed, the bulging folders would have been replaced with tablets and laptops.
‘Oh, you know,’ said Peter, stalling for time. They were nearing the checkpoint for the Restricted Area. One of the two guards at the gate handed the old guy at the front a plastic card and motioned him to remove his glasses. The old guy took them off, and the guard waved a wand encased in black polymer across his eyes and then across the card. They had to do it a couple of times because the old guy kept blinking. The man behind him was getting exasperated – his stack of papers was slipping. He exchanged a few terse words with the guard, who shrugged.
‘No, I don’t know, Peter,’ his uncle said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘Right, yeah. Of course.’
The whole security thing was way over the top, Peter decided. It wasn’t as if they had Beyoncé back there. But it wasn’t as if Peter hadn’t sneaked backstage before either.
The other guard on the gate, a pretty woman with long mahogany hair, was making a headcount of the group and carefully counting out a number of plastic passes from her pocket.
‘There hasn’t been anything much so far,’ Peter said. He caught the woman’s eye and gave her a chin wave. She smiled. ‘Nobody knows anything about the …’ he mouthed the word mining.
His uncle’s face was blank. ‘The what?’
Peter winked. ‘Okay, then.’
Griff moved to join the others. ‘We’ll talk later,’ he said over his shoulder.
Peter dropped to tie up his bootlace. When everyone had been waved through the gate and was hurrying off, he sauntered forward with a smooth apology on his lips and stared unblinking as the black wand moved in front of his eyes. He accepted the final pass with a wink at the woman and walked into the Restricted Zone. Confidence, that’s all you needed. Easy as.
Once inside, he took stock of his surroundings, his heart thumping with adrenaline. Griff and his paper-toting mates were disappearing inside a big tent on the right. Directly ahead of him was a line of bush intersected by a muddy track. A flimsy sign with a skull and crossbones drawn on it with heavy black marker had been jammed into the earth beside the track. Peter raised an eyebrow. Dramatic, much?
To his left was another tent with a four-wheeled horse-drawn wagon at the rear. The wagon was like all the rest, streamlined in gunmetal grey, narrow and high sided with a canvas roof, and rubber tyres for negotiating the unstable ground.
A man appeared through the tent flaps. He unhooked a white face mask from his ears, slipped it into his pocket and hurried over to what looked like the latrines.
Curious, Peter took a hasty glance around and then walked as confidently towards the tent as his twitchy nerves would allow. As he drew near, his nose wrinkled in distaste at the sweet stench of rot in the air, and he wished he had a mask to put on as well.
He held his breath and stuck his head into the tent. Long, wrapped bundles were stacked behind a sheet of translucent plastic in one corner. A mechanical fan in front of an insulated container of ice was doing its best to keep things cool, but it was doing nothing to prevent the smell permeating the air and everything it touched. The dirty, naked body of a girl lay on a bench, her long brown hair streaming over the edge. A man was carefully poking around in her torn flesh with a long pair of tweezers and dropping black pellets into a bucket on the floor.
It was only a glance, and then Peter was heading back to the gate as fast as he could, ignoring the smile from the woman with the mahogany hair in his haste to get through to the other side.
It looked as if Seddon had already found the Kōtuku High students.
So how come they hadn’t told anyone?
