far less concerned about the potential repercussions of her outburst. Behind her, her parents sat up to try to see what was happening. Her father, weakened by age, fear, and malnutrition, simply lay back again when he couldn’t see anything, too tired to care. Her mother, once an intelligent, demure, and gentle woman, balanced on the end of the bed half naked, screaming like a banshee.
“There’s enough of them in here already. We don’t want more. You take them and find somewhere else for them to go. You can’t…”
Kate ran back to silence her, leaving Mark at the door to placate the soldier.
“Gurmit Singh,” the trooper announced as he shoved an elderly Asian man into the room. Singh protested with a high-volume, high-speed torrent of Punjabi, which was neither understood nor acknowledged by anyone. A battered leather carryall was thrown into the room after him, containing the sum total of his worldly possessions. He tripped over the bag, almost losing his light-orange-colored turban in the process, then turned around and continued his vociferous tirade. When the soldier pulled the door shut in his face, he simply turned again without pausing for breath and continued unloading at Mark, who shook his head.
“Don’t understand,” he said, desperate to shut the man up. “Speak English.”
“No English,” he snapped back, then continued his rant in Punjabi.
“He can’t stay here,” Kate’s mother screamed from the bed. “We can’t have his type here…”
Singh pointed at her, or was it at the bed? He rubbed the small of his back, then thumped his hand on the mattress and raised his voice to an ever louder, even more uncomfortable volume. Mark tried reasoning with him, desperate for him to be quiet. Singh ignored him, then picked up his bag and angrily sat down in the armchair in the corner of the room, still yelling furiously and pointing at the bed.
Kate stood by the hotel room door, her hands over her ears, desperately trying to block out the endless, directionless noises coming from both her mother and Gurmit Singh. Mark tried to hold her, but she pulled away from him, almost recoiling from his touch.
“I can’t stand this,” she sobbed. “Either they go or I go.”
“None of us can go anywhere. For Christ’s sake, Katie, that’s the problem, there’s nowhere else to go.”
“I don’t care. Kick them out. Throw them out on the street if you have to.”
“Who are you talking about now?”
“You know exactly who I mean. It’s too dangerous. We’ve got to think about ourselves and the baby and just screw the rest of them-”
“I can’t. You know I can’t-”
“Then I will. I mean it, Mark, if you don’t get rid of them, I’ll leave.”
“Katie, there’s nowhere for them to go. Please, sweetheart, just calm down and-”
“Don’t patronize me. Don’t tell me to calm down. How can I calm down when-”
“Shh,” he begged, putting his hand up to her mouth. “Please don’t shout, Katie, they’ll hear us. Don’t do anything that’ll give them any reason to come back in here. You know what’ll happen if they do.”
“Maybe I should,” she said, pushing him away. “Maybe that’s exactly what I should do. Maybe if they knew what was going on here they’d help. They’d come up here and get rid of-”
“Shut up!” he hissed angrily, covering her mouth again.
Gurmit Singh, who had just started to quiet down, suddenly exploded into life again, startled by the appearance of Lizzie, who emerged from the bathroom.
“Who the hell’s this?”
“Mr. Singh,” Mark answered. “He’s just been delivered.”
“But we don’t have any space-”
“We can’t have his kind here,” Kate’s mother yelled, reaching out and grabbing hold of Lizzie’s arm and pulling her closer. Lizzie shrugged her off.
“Too many here,” Singh yelled back, suddenly switching to English. “Back bad. Need bed.”
“Oh, you can do the language when it suits you, then,” Kate sneered at him.
“What’s going on, Mark?” Lizzie asked.
“Nothing we can do about it,” he began. “We don’t have any say-”
“We can’t go on like this,” Kate interrupted, desperate tears welling up in her eyes.
“We have to-” Mark started to say.
“Tell me what I’m supposed to do, then, Kate,” Lizzie snapped angrily. “I heard what you were saying. I know what you want-”
“Then do something about it!”
“Where else am I supposed to go? What do you want me to do?”
Another outburst from Singh interrupted the argument. He got up from his seat and pushed between them, still gesturing toward the bed. Furious, Lizzie shoved him back down again.
“Back off!” she spat before turning to face Kate again. “Put yourself in my shoes, Katie. What would you do?”
“She can’t stay here. It’s not safe. You’re putting all of us at risk.”
“Look around, we’re already at risk. Everyone who’s left alive is at risk, for Christ’s sake.”
“Calm down, both of you,” Mark whispered, trying unsuccessfully to separate the two women, worried that their noise would bring the soldiers back.
“I’m not going to calm down,” Kate yelled, throwing open the bathroom door and pointing inside. “That thing in there is evil.”
“That thing in there is my daughter.”
“She killed your sons!”
“I know, but she’s still my daughter.”
Lizzie knelt down in the doorway. Curled up on the floor in front of her, chained to the sink pedestal, gagged and bound and heavily sedated, lay Ellis. Lizzie stroked her hair and ran her hand gently down the side of her tranquilized face.
“She could kill you, Lizzie. She could kill all of us.”
“I know, but I can’t let her go. Try to understand…”
“There’s nothing to understand.”
“Yes there is. What if your baby turns out to be like this? Will things be different then? Could you imagine giving your baby up?”
“No, I-”
“She’s my daughter, Katie, and no matter what she is, what she’s done or what she might still do, she’s my responsibility. I’ll protect her and fight for her until the bitter end.”
“If we go on like this,” Kate warned, “that will be sooner than you think.”
26
THE MORNING I THOUGHT would never come is finally here. I lay on the bed for hours, but I couldn’t sleep. It reminded me of being back in the apartment with Ellis, when we shut ourselves off from the others and slept on Edward’s top bunk. I kept thinking about her wide, innocent eyes. Oblivious to all that was happening around her, she curled up alongside me, full of love and complete, unspoken trust.
Barefoot and cold, I’ve spent most of the last few hours looking out of the small window, watching the darkness turn to gray as the sun rose over the roof of this bizarre prison.
I’ve stood here for hours trying to work out who this Sahota might be and what he wants from me. I’ve taken some reassurance from the fact that I’m sure Joseph Mallon’s naive trusting of me is genuine-he put his life on the line several times yesterday, and all that any of the Unchanged have left now is their lives. He’s either supremely confident and brave, stupidly optimistic, or, and this seems most likely, he genuinely believes all the crap he’s been peddling. So will Sahota be the same? I’ve been trying to work out my tactics, deciding how I should play my showdown with Boss Man. But how can I prepare for a meeting in a place I don’t know with a person I’ve never met?
It’s all irrelevant.
