Debatable Space

Lena

Harry and Jamie challenge me to a poker game. I spurn them initially, but then begin to weaken. I am getting bored of my state of captivity.

“But no card counting,” Jamie warns me. “We know you have that remote computer in your head. But that’s against the rules. We play the old-fashioned way.”

I smile and accept the challenge.

I don’t need a computer. I am, innately, a brilliant card counter. Ha! This new generation, they’re used to having surgically implanted computer chips to help them with their calculations. But I grew up in an era where we learned mental arithmetic in school. I was taught my times tables! And I have a naturally retentive mind.

So even now, after all this time, despite a few lapses, I can control my memory like a fluid supple living thing. I can choose to forget whole swathes of past, keeping only the record of them in my computer data chips. But when I want to recall a fact, it will appear immediately, without hesitation. It is a skill that has allowed me to retain clarity through all these hundreds of years.

And I am bound to win this game, of course, because these two are so easy to read. Jamie is a man in the body of a child, but he has nonetheless the soul of a child. He is over a hundred years old, but chose to have his puberty retarded in order to retain that precious, special clarity which only young children have. As a result, Jamie thinks more intensely than others, he feels more intensely. But he is frozen at the cusp of manhood, able to dream and desire, unable to deliver. It makes him edgy, dangerous, and desperate.

With Harry it’s different of course. If I were naked and raging, with unwaxed hairy legs, and with my arse sticking up in the air, then maybe, just maybe, he might regard me as a female of the species. But in my present beautiful, perfumed, civilised state – no chance. Harry is a Loper through and through. He was banished from the community of Lopers for eating his own father (an act of barbarity that is so typical of these lower types.) But though he is forced to belong to the world of humans, Harry is more wolf than man; more pack animal than team player. His humanity is just a facade he assumes.

Flanagan is oblivious to all this. But I can smell it on Harry. I know that he would long to devour his Captain, to eat him limb by limb and bite up his eyes, and to savour with his last bite the desperate death rattle in Flanagan’s quivering larynx.

So I have no sexual power over Harry, but I can smell his every emotion, almost his every thought.

“Raise you five, see you five.”

“I’ll see you five and raise you another ten.”

I win, and win again. At the end of the game, both Jamie and Harry are looking sheepish. Then I get a sudden whiff of something from Harry. An emotion I haven’t felt from him before. I glance at Jamie – and catch the same emotion in his eyes.

Pity.

“We’re surrendering you to the custody of the flame beasts,” Harry explains. “They will guarantee your safety. When the ransom is paid, you will return safely to civilisation.”

He’s lying. I can’t smell it now, but I just know it. Why else would he be looking at me so kindly? Why else…?

With a sudden surge of horror, I realise the ghastly truth. They let me win. I could have told you that, if you’d only asked.

“Shut the fuck up!” I scream at the voice in my head. Then I realise I have spoken it aloud. Jamie and Harry look at me kindly. The boy and the beast.

They have been humouring me. Because they know I’m doomed. These two sad, pathetic specimens are being nice to me, because they feel sorry for me.

I stifle a sob.