'Listen friend,' Soren said. 'We're not the West. We're us. But please yourself – I'll probably survive the disappointment if you don't feel like sharing.'
'There is no story,' Ingo said. 'There is nothing as neat as a story to tell about my country. First the Belgians robbed us and sometimes they murdered us, and when they finally left we put our own men in charge – and they robbed and killed us too. Our neighbours abused us and the refugees of Rwanda came and made everything worse, bringing the terrible ghosts of their past with them. There was war, and where there was not war there was disease, and everywhere there was hatred and greed. The women were raped and then they were driven from their villages because they had been raped – because of the shame. Mothers killed their own sons and daughters for witchcraft. But why did we need witches when we already had men? The warlords fought over blood and diamonds. The West held concerts for the starving of Ethiopia but they turned away from us, and do you know why?'
'I know why,' Haru said quietly. We looked at him and he twisted his mouth into an expression that was somewhere between amusement and shame. 'Video games.'
For the first time since I'd known him, Ingo really smiled. It wasn't a good sight. 'Yes,' he said, 'coltan from our mines made the games machines of the West. Our children died in slavery so yours could have just one more toy. I have seen you, Jasmine, looking at my fingers and I think you assume this happened when Queen M found me. No. They were broken long ago, when I was seven and a man stood on my hand when I reached for a knife to stop his friends from violating my sister. You ask how it was when the Cull came? I will tell you – it was exactly the same as it had always been. My land was drenched in blood, and nobody cared.'
There was a silence after that, deep and uncomfortable. Finally, it was Ingo who turned to Kelis. 'You still have a story to tell.'
'Anyone want to hear it now?' Kelis asked self-mockingly, but I nodded and so did Haru.
'We showed you ours…' he said.
She paused a moment, then nodded and leaned back so that she was looking up at the pale blue sky rather than at us. 'New York. Who'd have thought that one day a real rain really would come and wash the streets clean? Only it wasn't the dirt that was washed away – sometimes it seems like the filth was the only thing left. But mierda never stays smooth. It clumps and congeals and that's what it did in the city. First just little groups, the old street gangs, and then new ones came. It was quite funny really, to see Manhattan lawyers walking the mean streets with guns. Funny until they started shooting at you.
'After a while it got more formal. The gangs turned into Klans and you were either in one or you were left to beg for scraps – no middle ground. That's what the Cull took away – the safe centre. And all my life I'd been begging for scraps, working as a secretary in some crappy little law firm that made your average ambulance chaser look classy, getting spat at and worse, guarding prisoners who thought they were something because they ran crack on their little corner. So I decided – enough, you know? Why shouldn't I start over? Why shouldn't I be better than I was?
'I joined the Midtown Men and I found that I was good at it. My daddy, he'd taught me to shoot before he… yeah, back before the Cull. So I could handle a gun and I found that I could handle myself too. I made myself useful and I was completely loyal; pretty soon I was one of the elite. People were eating my scraps – and it felt good.
'But it doesn't matter how high you climb, there's always someone above you. And if you're looking out for number one you can be damn fucking sure that everyone else around you is doing the same. We had a lot of things in New York, but we didn't have high-tech. And the gangs, they had an arms race going on – doesn't take much to get one of those started. You get handguns, I get semi-automatics, you get rocket launchers, and I get myself an Apache helicopter. Leave it long enough and they'll go nuclear, I'm not kidding.
'So when Queen M came and offered the kind of tech we were never going to find for ourselves… we were racing to say yes before anyone else could. The only thing she wanted in return was a few soldiers. New York, soldiers are easy to find – ten waiting to fill the place of each fallen man. We said yes. I said yes, when we voted in council. Didn't think for a minute they were gonna pick me.'
She looked over at me and smiled. 'I guess right about now you're thinking that I got pretty much what I deserved. But I was only trying to survive. I remember learning about Darwin back in school, when it was still OK to teach evolution. He said we're all the children of survivors. Every ancestor we've got won some kind of fight. I don't think it's any surprise we're killers – the surprise is how we sometimes manage not to.'
She was still looking at me, her expression more uncertain than her words, and I realised that she was looking for some kind of forgiveness, or at least for acceptance. I smiled back, awkwardly. 'I'm not going to judge you. Hell, I'm long past judging anyone.'
'Yeah?' Her expression lightened. 'Shame my girlfriend didn't feel the same. When I told her I was gonna have to leave her behind… well, let's just say I don't think she's keeping my bed warm back in Washington Square.'
Her girlfriend? Oh. Oh. I saw the way she was looking at me, as if she wanted me to understand something without having to explain it. And I saw the way that Soren was looking at her, then the darkening of his face as he followed her eyes to mine. I knew immediately that I'd been right – there was no way this was going to end well.
'What is your deal?' Haru said, turning to me. 'You were a scientist, you said, trying to find a cure for the Cull. What happened?'
'Well,' Soren said dryly, an edge of hostility in his voice that hadn't been there before. 'I'm only taking a guess, but I'd say she failed.'
'Not entirely,' I said and only as I said the words did I realise that I was finally going to have to tell them the truth. Because they'd opened up to me? Not really. More because lying is tiring and I was using all my energy trying to keep the Voice inside me down to a murmur. I didn't have energy left over for anything else. And maybe because I'd done so many wrong things over the last few weeks, I wanted to finally do something right.
'Not entirely,' I said again. 'We did find a cure, but we found it too late.'
'I never heard that,' Kelis said with wonder. 'That's… I don't know, that makes everything so much worse, somehow. To know that someone got so close to stopping it all.'
I shook my head. 'No, not really, you see…' I laughed harshly, because this was harder to do than I'd imagined. 'You see, I haven't been entirely honest with you.'
At that I felt four different people stiffen around me and I remembered suddenly that all of them had guns. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, but I could see their faces, closed and untrusting, and I knew that it was too late to back down now.
'The Infected, on Cuba – I knew exactly what was wrong with them. I knew it because I recognised it. Jesus, I helped to design it.'
'They'd been given the Cure?' Kelis said slowly.
I nodded. 'Yeah. A version of it. The Cure stopped the Cull, you see, but it didn't leave the people we gave it to unchanged. It caused auditory hallucinations, delusions, the whole schizophrenic works.'
'You were cured,' Haru said in amazement, and one by one I saw the others realise that he must be right.
I smiled with unexpected relief. It felt great not to have to hide myself any longer. 'Yes. We tested it on ourselves, me and Ash, and on a few of the others.'
'That's why you need those drugs,' Kelis said. 'The ones we went hunting for in Havana.'
'Yes,' I said again.
'And what exactly happens,' Haru asked, 'if you stop taking them?'
Like Kelis earlier I leaned back, looking up at the sky rather than across at my companions. 'Bad things. Worse things than even I imagined. You see Ash – he was another scientist, a bio-weapons expert – he took the Cure too. We were both sick for a long time, days of pain when we didn't think we'd survive. When we finally woke up, there was… the Voice.' I could hear it now, on the edge of my consciousness, hissing at me to keep quiet, to go on keeping its secret. But I found that with these not-quite-friends around me it was possible to ignore it.
'It spoke to me, inside my head. It still does. It's not my voice – it's not the voice of anyone I know. And it's not – I don't know how to describe this, to someone who hasn't felt it. The Voice doesn't make me obey it. There's no compulsion about it. It's just that when it speaks, everything it says seems to make such perfect sense that there's really no question of not listening to it.'
'Yeah?' Haru said uneasily. 'And what kind of thing does this Voice say? Are we talking along the lines of 'kill
