'We want to trade,' he told Jules. 'Groups like yours and ours need to connect, share technology. Rebuild society from the bottom up.'
Jules nodded, a reflex gesture rather than an indication of agreement. 'Trade requires the possession of something that another desires. And we have everything we need.'
'When was the last time you ate a pineapple?' Curtis asked.
Jules smiled. 'That wasn't tinned?'
'Coconut, too. Peaches, lemons, oranges. Fresh fish, fresh meat. And that's just the basics.' It was the most animated I'd seen Curtis. His face was filled with an almost evangelical fervour and for the first time I considered that Queen M's kingdom might be something her people believed in. 'We have higher technologies too. Some manufacturing. We have access to oil fields.'
Jules looked suddenly wary. 'You have all this, and yet you would cross an ocean to trade with us. What is it we have that you want?'
Curtis's expression shifted, just a little, and I knew that whatever answer he was about to give, it wouldn't be the truth. But for the moment the conversation moved on, and soon they were bartering, figuring out exchange rates in a world without currency. They talked about technologies, the possibility of getting generators running again without enough people to staff them. There was drinking and eating too and after a while some chatting and bonding. It felt strangely ordinary. Just one group of people visiting another and chewing the fat. A little boy came to sit in my lap, his curly brown hair brushing against my chest as his head turned backwards and forwards, following a conversation he couldn't understand.
Some time after midnight, it all began to wind down. Jules hesitated, then told us that we could sleep in the safety of the Louvre with them. I was the only one watching Curtis' face as he said it, and I knew instantly that he'd made a terrible mistake in his invitation.
The attack came at precisely four in the morning. At the first sound my eyes snapped open, then snapped to the clock on the far wall – an instinct I'd picked up years ago when he and I had been living together, and there was no telling when he might get called away or where to. Four o'clock is the deepest part of the night – the time when most people who die in their sleep pass away.
But there weren't many deaths that night. Not as many as there would have been if our crew had struck during the day. I guess that was the point. By the time my eyes were open and I was fully awake there were already three bodies on the ground by the door. I could hear the sounds of fighting further out and Curtis was holding a big black Beretta against Jules' head. The awareness of it spread like a ripple through our hosts and, one by one, the weapons they'd picked up were dropped to their sides.
Somewhere at the back of the room a baby was crying. I could hear the harsh, desperate whispers of its mother as she tried to quiet it down. She was probably afraid that our people would kill it, if she couldn't get it to stop. I wasn't sure they wouldn't.
For a moment, Jules' eyes glared into mine through the gloom and I read a bitter accusation there. I wanted to tell him that I hadn't known this was going to happen – except that would be a lie.
Soren had a gun in his hand and he looked happy, or at least satisfied. He herded our hosts out of the gallery, pushing them towards the grand marble stairs that led to the ante-chamber below the glass pyramid, then up into the big, empty square. The sky was dark and starless above us.
Kelis carried one of the women who had been wounded in the brief crossfire, blood oozing from her side onto Kelis' t-shirt. She avoided my eye as she walked past and I wanted to believe that it was because she was ashamed – because I'd thought I might be starting to like her.
There was more sobbing now, not just from the baby. They thought we were going to kill them all; a death squad come to end their little social experiment. But that wasn't it at all.
They divided them up: men, women, old, young. The four oldest were pushed into a far corner, away from everyone else – discarded. Historical memories washed up, of other times when one group of humans had sorted another in this way, but I let them ebb. We weren't a death squad. I was sure of that, at least.
'Check them over,' Curtis said to me.
I folded my arms, not wanting him to see them shaking. 'Check them over for what?'
He frowned. 'Disease. Injuries – you know, doctor stuff.'
'Treat them like animals, you mean.'
I saw his hand tighten on the trigger of his gun, the barrel twitching reflexively towards me.
'I'll treat the wounded,' I said, and there was no disguising the shake in my voice. 'That's the only 'doctor stuff' I'm prepared to do.'
'Listed, lady. We've been doing this for a long time before you joined the show. And we can carry on just fine without you.'
'So why do you need me at all?' I asked.
His lips curled in a sneer, but Soren stepped forward before he could speak. 'Check them all out,' he said, 'and you can treat that lady. She'll die if you don't look at her. You can see that.'
I could. The bleeding from her side hadn't slowed, and her face was the ivory pale of someone a few pints short of a full load. 'Promise me no one will die,' I said.
'No one will die,' Curtis said, so quickly that I knew there had to be some kind of catch. 'You've got my word on that. If everyone plays nicely, no one gets hurt,' he added, and I could see that he wasn't lying.
The woman's injuries took half an hour to patch up: a pressure bandage, some stitches and antibiotics. I wanted to give her some painkillers too, but Curtis' hand clamped around my arm as I reached back into my medicine bag. 'She'll live without that, won't she?'
I nodded reluctantly.
'Then it's time to do your job.'
I approached Jules first. His face was numb with shock. I stood awkwardly in front of him for a moment, wondering what exactly I was supposed to be doing. Taking his temperature? His pulse? Holding his balls and telling him to cough? In the end I settled for the first two and rolled back his eyelids to check for anaemia. Curtis was still looking at me impassively, so I took his blood pressure too – sky high, but that was hardly surprising – and then I examined his tongue. After that I turned to Curtis and shrugged. What the hell else was I supposed to do?
'Strip,' Curtis said, and for one moment I thought he meant me. Then he turned to include all our captives in the instruction. 'Strip – all of you.'
Now the visual really was like something from the darkest pages of history. I saw the women look at each other, look at the men – look at their children. But when there are fifty odd guns pointing in your direction, there isn't much time for modesty. And they'd heard Curtis' promise that no one would get hurt. I was clinging on to that hope too. Quietly, trying not to look anyone in the eye, I gave each of them a more thorough exam, peering at bellies sagging from childbirth or the bitter scars of acne on a teenage face. After each one I gave Curtis a report, a run down of past ailments, possible present conditions. A young woman's eyes stared at me, wide and uncomprehending, when I told her she was in the late phases of breast cancer, almost certainly fatal.
After me it was Kelis, questioning each of them about their background, their qualifications, their skills. They were kept shivering and naked as they answered in the chill Paris air, dank with a mist which smelled as if it had come straight from the sewers.
And then, finally, Curtis began pointing. There were seventeen empty seats on the plane and fifty-six people to choose from. I could do the math. The true scarce resource these days are people, Queen M had told me. And I guess however many plantations and wind farms you build, you can still only pump out new people at the same old slow rate.
Unless you go and steal them from somewhere else, of course.
A lot of jet fuel for seventeen new subjects, but you're looking at a lifetime of work. Especially if you pick the young and the healthy, and you leave behind the old and the barren. The seven year-old child – bright-eyed and full of energy – had been sorted into the wheat; worth the investment of a few more years training. But the baby, the child's sister, got left behind – a chesty cough that might just be a cold, might be something more serious.
I saw the awful realisation of what was about to happen in the mother's eyes a second before she started screaming. Curtis didn't say anything, just backhanded her across the mouth. She fell to the ground, the scream boiling down to a desperate whimper.
'Whatever you're doing,' Jules said, 'don't do it. Please. We're happy here. We're… we'll trade with you. We'll give you what you need. We'll… anything.'
