About The Scarlett Kite
Hi! I'm Scarlett Kiteway, I'm 20 years old, a journalism student in Perplex City and this is my blog all about the excitement over the search for the Cube. I'll be keeping track of what the media over there is saying about it, and maybe a little bit about my life as well!
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Friday, March 10, 2006
Claire tells her story
Category: story, 05:54 PM
Claire Castille is a small woman. It was that I noticed, when we were sitting in her small tent by the excavation site, our hands wrapped around tin cups of tea. She looks thinner than she did in Major Castille's photographs, her hands almost bony but with strength in the sinews of her arms. She has a fierce determination to her, too. And she couldn't stop looking at Allain. I noticed that - as she made the tea, as we talked, as we walked from her temporary tent back to her more permanent base - she just kept looking at him and smiling. He was smiling, too, the widest smiles I've seen him give since I've known him, I think.
There was so much to ask her to explain, but I thought that could wait. The first evening, I left Allain and Claire sitting looking through the photos on his key - of him at college, him with his grandfather, him rowing in the college crew - and her asking for explanations of every normal, ordinary everyday thing he'd done. I walked outside the large tent and sat a little way away, climbing up a collapsed marble awning to get a view across the empty city. I looked up at the stars and wondered who the last person before us was to stare at the stars above this place. The night was very still. In the distance some animal was calling in long, loud whoops and another of the same kind returned the call. I pulled my knees up to my chin. I sat there like that for a long time.
And the next day, Claire Castille told us her story. Allain was worried at first - we'd been moving for so long that I think he felt afraid to stay still. But Claire said she'd been here for months, that she's been scanning the area regularly for signs of life and she's been the only human being here the whole time. I think she was a bit concerned about how easily we'd found her, though - she and Allain have been talking about putting up proximity alarms around the whole city.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I ought to let you hear Claire's story as she told it to us herself.
"I'm a software expert," she said. "But I expect you know that." She smiled at Allain. It was morning. We were sitting on a ridge overlooking the city sipping our morning tea. She ran her hand across her forehead. "I suppose you also know that I've been involved in a few things I might have done better to stay out of. That doesn't matter right now. But I'm good at what I do. Very good, in fact." She looked down at her hands and smiled. "I have been called a genius, but it wouldn't be for me to say.
"In any case, a bit more than a year ago, I was offered a job. It was a fascinating position, working for the military at the place you know as Viendenbourg. Among other things, they wanted me to work on developing and maintaining an innovative kind of security system they have there - I think you've come into contact with it. When I accepted, all they told me was that I would be working to protect the development of classified technology. I didn't need to know anything else, it wasn't my area.
"But," she smiled, "that wasn't enough to stop me wanting to find out what was really going on. You've been to Viendenbourg, you've seen the facility there, you've seen how they operate. I did my job very well, maybe too well - the external security system seemed unbreakable, and so people became a little bit more lax about internal security. I was able to track communications inside the base from time to time, and so found out about what was going on, about what they were doing in that long building with the sound of drilling coming from it. And what I found out horrified me."
She paused, took a sip of tea, and looked out across the ruin where there was once a city. When she continued to talk, she didn't look at us, but carried on staring at that empty place.
"I don't know everything. I never got inside that building. But I know something. They're digging something up there. I don't know what it is. But they're trying to put together something that's buried there, or recreate something that was made a long time ago. And after I learned that, I knew I couldn't stay there. Allain knows why - it's because of what our family did at Viendenbourg."