been found wanting and couldn’t face their glare. I heard her start to cry. I turned back to look at her. Her face crumpled as she let out a dry sob. I sat up as she crawled over to me. I held her so tightly it must have hurt her. I felt her shake with each sob. She bit me, dug her nails into me.
‘I promised myself I would be strong,’ she finally said, angry with herself. ‘It’s not me. It’s Ambassador. He’s so lonely. So far from his people.’
She was carrying the pain for two.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She looked up at me. ‘You bastard!’ she spat, so angry again. ‘I hate you and I think you’re the only thing I have really got out here. You know what I did back in Trace’s office…’
‘You saved us, then again with the mech,’ I said.
She hit me. She put power into it but it was at an awkward angle; I was still holding her.
‘You put me into a corpse, back in the Freetown, that mech driver you made me jack into, you fucker. You put me into a corpse after I’d killed for the first time. I killed and then you made me feel the consequences in a dead man’s head.’
I stared at her, appalled. I felt like all the blood was draining from my body, leaving a bag of skin filled with metal and plastic. I’d had no idea.
‘And you’d already made it so I couldn’t talk to you about it.’
She’d killed on the Atlantis Spoke as well, when she’d hacked their systems and used automated weapons to take out a Walker, but it hadn’t been so immediate. She didn’t watch the consequences in front of her eyes. She didn’t end up wearing their blood, and as a result I don’t think she’d faced up to it, and I wasn’t going to bring it up.
‘This is very fucking touching, but some of us are trying to have sex!’ Mudge shouted from his compartment.
Morag’s head whipped round at the voice. She looked so angry, searching for someone to blame. I don’t know why Mudge and Merle had turned off the white-noise generator but I knew why Mudge had shouted. He wanted us to know that everyone not tranced in would hear us. It was a warning. Moments later Morag understood.
‘C’mon,’ she said and took my hand. Hers felt tiny surrounded by the composite material of my prosthetics. The tactile sensors offered my nervous system the facsimile of touch as she dragged me towards her compartment.
Inside was dark. Various things were scattered around on the floor, and I’m sure I stood on some of them as she dragged me down to sit on the smartfoam mattress. I switched to lowlight and illuminated her in green as she came towards me with a jack, reaching behind my neck for one of my plugs. I caught her wrist in my hand.
‘Are you going to kill me?’
She shook her head but didn’t get angry.
‘Let go of me now.’ I did. ‘You don’t know me at all, do you? Now we do what I want to do.’
I felt the jack click into my plug. I watched Morag disappear.
I knew this place. It was a jazz club in New York from about a hundred years before the FHC, before the city was flooded. It was called the Cotton Club and at the time booze had been illegal. So of course it flourished. All the greats had played here: Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.
The place was subtly lit, filled with smoke. Tables were set around a dance floor in front of the raised stage. More intimate booths were set into the wall. There was a fully stocked bar against the back wall. The place was empty. Like the tea room, even the smell was right. Or at least how I imagined it would have smelled – wood with alcohol soaked into it, tobacco smoke.
‘I made this for you. I played down some of the more racist parts of the decor,’ Morag said.
I turned at her voice. She was dressed like a flapper. She wore a tasselled dress that came down to just above her knees, some sort of fabric skullcap/hat thing and a string of pearls.
I looked down at myself. I was wearing spats and a linen suit of the era. I even had a hat. Morag would tell me the hat was called a panama.
‘When?’ I asked.
She looked away from me. In here she – we – could cry.
‘After I found out.’
‘Why?’
She smiled as she wiped away the tears. ‘So you could practise without the others killing you.’
I smiled. ‘Can I hold you?’
She did nothing, said nothing for what seemed a very long time, and then she nodded. I moved to her and wrapped my arms around her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to her. ‘I’ve no reason, no excuse; all I’ve got is that I love you and I won’t hurt you again.’
She looked up at me. ‘Why are you sorry?’ she asked. I opened my mouth to say for cheating and then closed it again.
‘I’m sorry I abandoned you,’ I told her.
I should have trusted in her, been in this from the start. She nodded and pushed me away.
‘People – men – have hurt me before, I mean physically. I’m used to it. Is this what you want? Because we can do it in here. It’s okay in here. It’s not real.’
I looked at her in horror. She held her arms out away from her body and suddenly she was drenched in blood. I stumbled away from her, horrified. I bumped into a chair and fell back onto the floor. I wanted to vomit.
‘No, Morag, please!’
I wanted the image gone. It felt like a horrible warning from the future, the sum result of Morag’s association with me. Her bloodied visage walked towards me and I recoiled from her. I didn’t think she was really offering this. I wanted to think it was a lesson, but maybe it was revenge. My back hit the wall and I curled up and closed my eyes.
‘It’s all right.’
I felt hands caress my face but it really wasn’t okay. I opened my eyes and she was kneeling over me unbloodied. I was weeping. The tears felt wet and real on my skin. They were a release, a relief.
‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I said.
I watched her face harden as anger swept across it like a storm.
‘Are you going to leave me again?’ Through gritted teeth.
‘No, never. It’s just that I can’t take you into these places, see you hurt, get you killed. I’ll get everyone killed worrying about you. I don’t care. I don’t care if they win, if we live in some dictatorship; I just want you to be safe,’ I told her, still weeping.
Her face softened. ‘You know how selfish that is, don’t you?’
I nodded through the tears. ‘What are we going to do?’ The desperation in my voice shocked me.
She sat down cross-legged next to me. She didn’t hold me. I felt like a child. She stroked my hair.
‘I think the Cabal knew that Operation Spiral wasn’t going to work,’ she said. I stared at her incredulously. She wanted to talk about this now? She ignored my look. ‘I think they knew it was going to kill or drive mad everyone involved, but they needed some research data so they made a human sacrifice for the knowledge they wanted. Maybe the information was spiralling around Vicar’s or some of the others’ heads.’ I started to say something but fingers brushed against my lips to silence me. ‘It was in the files in Limbo. Somehow they hadn’t made the connection. Elspeth McGrath. She either died then in Their minds or she was unfortunate enough to spend time in an ongoing psychotic episode, trying to destroy herself while they opened up her mind as a sense simulation so they could better look for the information they needed. I was the lucky one. I was pretty.’ I looked at her, horrified. She looked back at me, straight in the eyes. ‘I wonder what you were doing when I found that out?’
I couldn’t speak for a while. Despite the artifice all the moisture had gone from my mouth.
‘Revenge?’ I finally croaked.
Another smile devoid of humour.
‘No, I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t care. We just have to do what we can to make things better.’ The steely resolve that I’d first noticed back in Dundee was there.
‘Why? You don’t owe the world a fucking thing.’
