Flashback

Chapter Twenty-One

Jem looked at herself in the mirror. She reached out, hand to hand, and pressed the surface. It clicked and swung open to reveal a cavity. She dropped to her knees and cried out. Saskia’s eyes were filled with blood. The lids were swollen and ripped. Her jaw had dislocated and a safety pin had been pushed through her cheek. Her left arm was broken and its hand missing. A rust-coloured bandage had been wrapped about the stump. Toes—wearing the nail polish that Jem had applied—poked out from a blanket of sacking.

Air moved through the shell of a ballpoint pen in her throat: sssssssssssssssssssssss.

‘Oh, Saskia.’

Jem took the folded jeans from the foot of the cot. She pressed away her tears on their empty pockets, folded them, and put them back. On a stool was Saskia’s neoprene wallet, some chewing gum, house keys, a handkerchief, receipts, tampons, and a folded wedge of pink paper.

Jem put her hand on the paper.

Unfolded it.

Remembered the disappointment in Danny’s expression.

On the table, her phone rang. Jem backed out of the anteroom without looking away from Saskia. She picked up the mobile.

‘Hello?’ she said. Her voice was quiet.

‘Bitte rufen Sie die Polizei! Eine Person ist in Lebensgefahr und–’

‘Saskia, is that you?’

‘Please contact the police. A woman is in danger and needs your immediate help. You will be rewarded.’

The caller identity information was missing. Yet Saskia’s voice was clear in the earpiece. Jem leaned towards the cot. Saskia had not moved. She was clearly unconscious.

‘What… how do you feel?’

‘It’s dark.’

Jem looked at the closed, blackened eyes.

‘Sweetheart.’

‘Did you die too?’ asked the voice. ‘Are we ghosts?’

Ego: ‘When you reached out for her, it was the device that took your hand.’

‘No.’

‘Saskia’s hand itches. She wants to scratch it herself, but she can’t.’

‘Which hand?’

‘Her left.’

Jem looked at the bandaged stump, but did not move to scratch it. ‘How’s that now?’

The voice sighed. ‘Better.’

‘Saskia, I want you to listen to me. I don’t know how much you remember. My name is Jem and I’m your friend. Once, you helped me. Now,’ she said, a tear running onto her lip, ‘I am going to help you. Do you understand?’

‘The woodsman helped too.’

Jem drew Saskia’s fringe through her fingers, as though weighing it for a snip. ‘Am I talking to a computer? Are you like Ego? What can I do?’

‘Find help. But be careful.’

‘That’s why Saskia’s still here, isn’t it? She’s hiding.’

‘I’m sorry. It may be too late already. We’re dying.’

Jem looked at Saskia’s chest. It was still. Had it been moving at all?

‘No!’

Cory put on his jacket and approached the hut from the higher ground at its back. He looked at the woodsman, who had died face down after a crawl of two or three yards. Cory moved over him and located the smouldering hole in the man’s coat. He held the gun above it. There was a brief tent of fabric, then the coat tore and the bloody pellet rejoined the heel of the weapon. Mass restored: Cory watched it melt into the stock.

Cory crouched and considered the puzzle of the man’s outstretched hand, which had gripped the edge of a blue tarpaulin. He lifted the sheet and looked into the hollow beneath the hut. His ichor processed the darkness. As it brightened, he saw five pairs of beer bottles. They had been wrapped in foil and placed on a metal tray. Behind them was a stack of newspapers. Cory took a pen from his fluorescent jacket and dipped it into one of the bottles. He touched the pen to his tongue. Salt water. A cable, secured with duct tape, led to an upright tube. Behind that was a battery. The apparatus was a homemade capacitor, probably for a television. But why had the woodsman crawled here? Cory moved further inside. His zero-light modifications chewed the dark until it was an overexposed blaze, and still he could not discern a weapon.

Cory was still thinking when a radio signal stormed through him. It was a high-strength burst from a mobile phone trying to contact a tower and it came from inside the hut. He sighed as he rose. The old wounds in his chest leaked. He pressed a hand to them and walked to the front of the hut.

‘Saskia,’ he said, entering. He noted the chair, the bread on the table, and the stove. He enjoyed its flames with the intensity of an aesthete. Its light dimmed as he stepped closer. The reservoirs of power inside him—stings drawn out by the cold—recovered their extents. The room cooled and Cory healed a little.

He licked his dry lips and stopped at the mirror.

By his own clock, the man who looked back was two years from his ninth decade. This man pitied the youth who had told the Provisional Army recruitment sergeant back in Atlanta that he wanted to enlist to honour his state. In truth, Cory’s reasons were threefold: breakfast, lunch, and supper. Make that fourfold: to put many miles between him and the choleric water that killed four of his six brothers, between him and the Transitional Authority camps, between him and his blind father.

Even now he remembered how gently his mother had read the newspapers aloud to that man, sometimes closing her eyes in sympathy, the better to propagandise hope.

Cory had decades-brewed hate—for himself, his father, this face in the mirror—and he lashed out. The heel of the gun made a star. By his second strike, fractures radiated to the frame and black-backed pieces fell upon the floor.

Where the shards used to be, Cory’s ichor overlaid the heat signatures of two people: one crouched, one lying. He paused: the desperate boy who had signed up for the army was still part of him, was a component that could be resolved with the correct function.

Walk away, soldier. Your superiors aren’t here. You can’t kill Jem now any easier than you could kill her at the safe house. Admit it. She’s too much like…

Cory dug his fingernails into the crack of the false door and tore it off. He was not prepared for the absolute dark inside. A ghost erupted.

Catherine?

The blade stopped before it touched his neck. He had caught her wrist. He paused. He let the moment pay out.

‘Jem.’

‘Get fucked.’

The muscles in his jaw bulged. He felt her wrist bones shift. Grimacing, Jem supported the wrist with her left hand, but his strength was beyond her. She screamed through locked teeth. Cory shook her and the knife fell. He kicked it towards the stove and looked back at her. With one strike, she was unconscious, dropping. He caught her awkwardly and laid her down. He put his gun over her forehead. This woman had hindered him from the start. He noted the syrupy blood that bubbled from her nostrils. He huffed and lowered the gun. Later, he thought. Her immediate death would only distract him. His attention moved to the body in the dark anteroom.

It took only a moment to see that Saskia was dead. Not, perhaps, beyond resuscitation, but her breathing had ceased and her lips and earlobes were darkening to the cyanotic shade that he had seen countless times. Saskia was drifting away from him. He could feel the distance increase with each second, and his anger grew in equal measure. It was not conceivable to come so far and risk so much for the information she surely held about the Cullinan Zero. But, despite her death, there was time. He had to be quick.

‘I’m impressed, Saskia,’ Cory said. And he was.

He closed his eyes and strained to feel the smallest hint of a…

Yes, it was there. The device in her head—a crude prototype of his ichor—was functioning enough to permit narrowband communication. The device would not last much longer, however. Cory felt it was too closely bound to the flesh; the cyanotic, failing flesh.