Good. I could use that.
On the third day, we were eating breakfast in our customary silence when Kelis suddenly said, 'You can keep this up forever, I can tell. You're stubborn as hell. But really, what's the point? You've made the same decision we have – to accept what's been done to us and to live rather than die.'
My mouth tightened. 'Yeah. But my decision involves curing people and yours involves killing them. Excuse me if I don't see the equivalence.'
Soren grinned, his blond hair blowing in the sea breeze scraping the deck of the flagship. 'You cure them so that we can kill them later,' he said. 'Excuse me if I don't think that makes you any better.'
'Soren,' Kelis said, frowning at him. 'You know that isn't -'
But I interrupted her. 'No. He's right. Where do I get off thinking I'm any better than you?'
And yeah, it was a calculated move. First the punishment, then the forgiveness. But at the same time, it was true. I wasn't any better. And if they'd found him, my husband, then left him behind somewhere with a tracker in his thigh and a death threat hanging over him, would I even be thinking about escaping?
Of course, he'd have found a way to remove the tracker – probably amputating his own leg – and have tracked me down by now, taking out Queen M's entire army in the process, but that was another story. I've always remembered an interview I once saw with a survivor of one of the Nazi death camps, someone whose job it had been to drag the corpses from the gas chambers to the ovens.
'Until you find yourself there,' he'd said. 'You don't know the things you'll do for just one more minute of life.'
I guess something of that acceptance must have registered in my face, because the third week after we returned I finally woke to find that Kelis and Soren weren't outside my door. 'Recruiting mission,' someone told me at breakfast on the big communal tables out on the deck, but they didn't explain. No one else had anything very much to say to me either, and I wondered what Queen M had told her people about me. I realised I was lonely without my two constant shadows.
I spent the morning running a small surgery on the ship, giving the once over to people suffering everything from colds to colitis but mostly VD. I didn't have to hear the noise from some of the cabins at night to know how most of Queen M's crew killed the idle hours. Nothing like living through the apocalypse to reawaken your lust for life. If they kept going at this rate, we'd be developing antibiotic resistant strains of syphilis which were just going to be a whole bundle of laughs.
After lunch a call came through that there'd been an injury on one of the plantations on St Kitts. A machete wound, deep by the sound of it. I was required to treat it and get the man back in working shape. And if I couldn't… I could already imagine the cold little cost-benefit analysis going on in Queen M's head. I'd seen her only once since my return from Paris, and then we hadn't spoken. She'd just looked into my furious eyes and smiled, patronisingly – as if I were small child throwing a temper tantrum that would be indulged at first and then, if necessary, punished. I don't think, up till that point in my life, I'd ever hated anyone so much.
But when I got the order to go to St Kitts, I went, just like she knew I would. What was I going to do, leave the man to die of his injuries?
The small schooner which took us bounced on the waves like an over-eager puppy. I was eager to get to the island too – my first unescorted trip away from the ship. The shoreline was rocky, rising quickly to a forested, hilly interior with terraces that had been cut into the hills. Fruit trees and sugar cane plantations were slowly eating up most of the fertile land.
We made landfall at a small jetty on the sort of beach that would once have been heaving with fish-belly white British tourists. Just two people were waiting for us there that day, a tiny Chinese woman who looked as delicate as a doll, and a big North African man whose face was deeply marked with tribal scars.
I hopped off the boat onto the sand. My sandals sank in, grains seeping in over the side to cascade grittily over my toes.
'The doctor?' the Chinese woman asked.
I nodded, and to my surprise, turned to see that the schooner was leaving, none of its crew of four staying to baby-sit me. 'We'll be back at sunset,' the captain told me. 'When you're finished with the patient you can relax, take a tour of the island if you want. Queen M said you'd earned a holiday.' He grinned at me like he expected me to be grateful, and I managed a thin smile back.
They brought the injured man down to the beach, transporting him on the back of a rickety donkey trap. They'd given him a leather cord to chew on, but muffled little whimpers of pain were escaping round the sides. The edges of the wound were already blackened, starting to rot in the humid tropical air. His eyes stared into mine, pleading. I guess he knew what the price of my failure might be. It all depended on the state of his ligaments, but I didn't tell him that. I just shot him up with enough morphine that he wouldn't be worrying about anything very much for a while.
After that I injected local anaesthetic around the wound and got to work. It was jagged and deep enough to have nicked the bone. At the edge of the nick I saw a small piece of metal and after a second I realised that I was seeing a tracking device. Finally – a piece of luck. Except not really, because now I knew that it was embedded right in the bone. No way to remove it without breaking the bone around it.
Nothing about this was going to be simple.
I sighed and carried on with the job I'd been brought to do. There was dirt in the cut too, and I could see the beginning of sepsis. As I irrigated the wound and cut out the tissue that was already past saving I found myself drifting back into that trance-like state I'd first learned when I was a junior house officer putting in 60 hour weeks at the Royal London. You couldn't see the person you were working on as a person. It had to be a job, a little bit of technical expertise you were displaying. Saving a life was only secondary. You focussed in on the skin and subcutaneous fat and bone until it was just another material you were sculpting.
I was so caught up in it that it wasn't until I'd nearly finished, delicately sewing the edges of the wound together with the smallest stitches possible – as if he was going to care about the ugliness of his scar – that I noticed someone watching me as I worked. Not just watching. Drawing. I caught a brief blur a pale face and dark hair, the scritch-scritch of a pencil against paper.
When the bandage was in place, I took a moment to look closer. A Japanese guy, younger than me probably. The flat planes of his cheeks and downward tilt of his eyes gave him a slightly rakish air. His hair was gelled into sharp little spikes and his clothes looked like he'd spent too long thinking about them.
Without asking for permission, I took the sketch pad from him. I blinked, twice, and then I let out a small, helpless laugh. I'd expected something lifelike, a medical journal illustration or a verite style of war reporting maybe. But he'd turned us into a comic: soft, round curves and big doe eyes which made me look like a ten-year-old mutant. The guy I'd been working on was drawn screaming in pain. There were Japanese characters coming out of his mouth in a speech balloon which I guessed loosely translated as 'holy shit that hurts'.
I looked up from the drawing to the artist. 'OK – who the hell are you?'
He smiled. He had shockingly white teeth, so straight you could use them as a spirit level – but there was a wide gap between the two front ones. It turned his rakish look to something slightly goofy and I instantly found myself liking him more. 'I'm Haru. And you, I think, are Jasmine. I'm very pleased to meet you.' His voice was strident, accent a little Japanese, a little American.
'Yeah. You've clearly heard of me but strangely no one's said anything to me about you.'
He looked a little offended. 'Really? Well, I'm the court artist.' I laughed, which pissed him off still further. 'No, I'm serious. Queen M knows that a society isn't just about the physical things, the food and the power. Without art and culture we may as well return to the stone age.'
'Funny,' I said flatly, 'she didn't seem too bothered about the artistic qualifications of the people we left behind when I went recruiting.'
He winced. 'Yes, well – I guess culture's a luxury still. You can only afford so much of it.' His eyes skittered around, trying to avoid mine, and after a moment I looked back down at his work, flicking through the drawings.
They were good. They were all in the same style as the first, some of them divided into actual panels, super-heroic figures leaping across the page in tight-fitting, brightly coloured costumes. I was pretty sure the beefy guy in the blue spandex rescuing a little child from a fire was supposed to be Soren. I wondered if that was something which had actually happened. 'So I'm guessing you were a Manga artist in a previous life,' I said, looking back at him.
