Curtis shrugged, looking not just uncaring but actively bored. I wondered how many times he'd witnessed this little scene before. Just variations on a theme to him by now, I guessed, the same words coming out of different mouths. 'Yeah, we'll take some technology back with us,' he said. 'But the only thing we really want is you.'
'Then take us all! You're separating husbands and wives. Families. You might as well kill the people you are leaving behind – you know they have no chance on their own.' Jules voice was soft and persuasive, but I could tell he already knew that Curtis was deaf to any plea or persuasion. His face hardened.
'Fine. Take us. Point a gun to our heads and take us – but do not expect us to work with you. Do not imagine that every second of every day we won't be searching for a way to pay you back for what you have done.'
And that was the one thing I still didn't understand. Queen M could take them, but how could she control them? How do you keep a whole slave kingdom docile? I'd seen the scientists working on her flagship, the people in the fields – unguarded.
It was Soren who put the final little piece into the puzzle, the picture springing out clear and clever, and ugly as hell. He drew something from his belt that I'd taken for yet another gun. But I saw now that the barrel was too thin to spit out conventional bullets. It was meant for something else.
He approached Jules first, and the man flinched away. But when Soren dropped to his knees in front of him, he looked briefly taken aback, not quite sure where this could be heading. Before he'd even begun to guess, Soren grabbed his leg, pressed the barrel of the strange silver gun against his thigh, and pressed.
Jules let out a scream of profound agony, dropping helplessly to his knees as Soren moved on to the next woman, shooting whatever it was into her too. He turned back to me before the third victim, waiting for this one, struggling and screaming, to be restrained by our soldiers. 'They'll need dressings for that,' he said.
There was no point refusing. The wound on Jules' leg where the gun had fired was small but weeping a blackish fluid, as if something had penetrated to the deepest parts of him. It would get infected if I didn't cover it soon. I tried to figure out what had happened as I worked on him and the rest. The only thing I knew for sure was that the hole wasn't empty – something was lodged inside.
The process didn't stop with those who'd been chosen. The discards, too, were shot. Only with the baby did Soren hesitate, before a short, angry jerk of Curtis' head urged him on and – face turned away – he pressed the gun against his tiny leg too. The child's agonised wail went on and on, overlaying everything that followed.
'You've all been fitted with tracking devices,' Curtis said flatly. 'Long range, ten years of battery life. And that,' he said to Jules now, seeming to take a sort of pleasure in it, 'is why you'll be doing every fucking thing that we tell you. Because not only will we know where you are at any time, we'll know where they are.' He pointed at the small, frightened group of those to be left behind. 'And if you do something we don't like, they'll be the ones to suffer.'
I realised suddenly that Kelis was hovering at my shoulder, watching my face rather than the bloody little drama playing out in front of us. She touched my shoulder lightly. 'We're taking them to a better life, you know. We're rebuilding society – the only people who are.'
'And that makes this all right, does it?' I asked bitterly. 'That's how you live with yourself?'
She shrugged one elegant shoulder. 'I live with myself because I haven't got any more choice than they do.' She rolled up the rough green cotton of her combats, and I saw a small white scar on her outer thigh, right where her own implant had gone in.
It only took me a second to understand it all. My fingers shook as I rolled up my own trouser leg. And even though I was expecting it, the sight of the puckered little scar on my right thigh still sent a wave of nausea through me, the bile rising in my throat.
'I don't have a choice,' Kelis said. 'And neither do you.'
The plane was fixed by the time we returned, but there wasn't much of an air of celebration as we climbed onboard. The newcomers were silent, shell-shocked. I caught the eyes of the little seven-year-old girl as we taxied and took off, and read a dawning knowledge in them that someone that young wasn't meant to have.
I'd been sleeping, fitfully, when I felt the plane begin to descend. A glance at my watch told me we'd only been airborne a few hours, and I looked out of the window and saw the green-grey land beneath us. No way was that St Lucia or anywhere else in the tropics.
Ireland, I realised as the plane landed, more cleanly this time, a strip of concrete that might have been a road once. Curtis didn't take everyone this time, just Jules and me and four of the others – no explanation, just a brusque order to follow him.
The people he was looking for were nearly a mile's walk away, over the hills and the long wet grass. There was a fresh smell to the air, cleansing after the decay of Paris, but I didn't find it refreshing.
When they saw us they raised their hands to their heads, three little matchstick figures in the distance. They must have known we were trouble but they didn't try to run. Perhaps they'd realised there wasn't any point.
Curtis was watching them through military grade binoculars, still and silent for two minutes. Whatever he saw must have satisfied him because he made a sharp gesture and we all walked forward. They stayed stock still, waiting.
'There were six of them when we came,' Curtis said. 'We took two. The rest were too old or two weak. They had the trackers put in, same as you. But I guess they just didn't believe us.'
Close up, and they'd gone from stick-men to stick-thin real people. I guess subsistence farming isn't so easy when you have a climate like Ireland's and no wind generators. I thought they were probably younger than they looked, but fear and hunger had hollowed out their faces. They could have been in their sixties, three women and a man, stooped over the hoes with which they'd been tilling the fields.
A fine drizzle had started as we walked, plastering everyone's hair to their heads, dripping from the tips of their noses. The same nose on each of them, with a little up-tilt at the end that must have looked cute back when they were children. All the same family, I guessed. The separation must have hit them hard.
'They ran away,' Curtis suddenly said, to us and to the four forlorn figures in front of us. 'Your sisters or wives or, who the fuck knows, maybe both. Just so as you know who to blame for what's about to happen.'
Then he pulled out his gun and shot all four of them – two in the back as they'd finally realised that they needed to run away. Even the blood looked grey in the watery sunlight. I wanted to look away, but I didn't. Everyone ought to have someone watch, and care, while they die.
And then we went back to the plane. Lesson over. Of course, there was no way of knowing if what he'd told us was true, if they really were the relatives of runaway slaves. For all I knew, they could have been some random strangers he'd seen from the air.
But in a way, that was the point. Because now we knew exactly how ruthless he was. We knew he didn't make empty threats.
I saw in the hopeless droop of Jules' shoulders that the knowledge had broken him. He'd do whatever Queen M wanted him to. And, in time, maybe he'd even come to enjoy his new life. Now that he knew he had no choice, he could forgive himself for his desertion – I knew how people's psychologies worked. Self-justification. Cognitive dissonance. We need to believe that what we're doing is the right thing, always. If our beliefs say it isn't, we're more likely to change our beliefs than our actions. I guess human beings are lazy that way.
In his own brutal way, Curtis had given Queen M's newest recruits a sort of freedom – to embrace their new life without guilt.
But not me, I'd learnt a different lesson. If I wanted to escape I'd have to be very clever, and very, very careful.
CHAPTER TWO
It felt almost unreal to be back under the clean sunlight of the Caribbean. As soon as we landed I was given a list of patients and put right back into the routine I'd had before the flight to Paris, as if nothing at all had changed. The slowly healing bullet wound in my leg was the only concrete reminder of what had happened. Everywhere I went, Soren and Kelis came too. For the first two days I refused to speak to either of them. Soren took the snub with his usual stoic restraint, or possibly indifference. Kelis didn't say anything, but there were tight little lines around her eyes, deepening every hour I ignored her. For some reason, my opinion seemed to matter to her.
