proved me wrong.
‘Do you understand now?’ he asked.
I nodded, neither understanding nor caring. It just seemed easier. Morag was a foetal ball on the stone floor, dry sobs racking her frame. Rolleston showed me that I could still feel. He shot Morag twice in the head.
I screamed. I screamed ‘No!’ over and over again. I screamed until my throat bled. I’m still screaming.
They left me in the room with her cooling corpse. It had been a large-calibre gun, though oddly quiet, suppressed. Her skull looked like a broken egg. I couldn’t take my eyes from it. I could see where technology had violated her flesh. I had the obscene urge to try and put her head back together.
I don’t think that leaving me in there with the corpse was planned sadism; I just think they had other things to do. They wanted to get on running their psychotic totalitarian regime. Eventually they came and took her away. They tidied up her remains like the sum result of her eighteen years of life was to make a mess.
When she was gone I stared at where she’d been. They’d reduced her to a stain. All I could do was stare. I hoped someone would come and kill me soon. Even brainwash me, make me someone, something else. At least I’d be on the winning side. You can’t fight something like this. There was no thought of revenge. There was nobody left to take revenge. There was just a shell staring at a stain on the ground wishing he could be switched off like the machine he was.
It’s amazing how long you can think of nothing when the alternative is watching a replay of your lover being double-tapped in the skull. Any attempt to try and think of her in better times just ended with the same two whispered shots. My lover reduced to a spray of matter on the wall. Except sometimes I managed to think about all the shitty things I’d said and done to her in the brief time we’d been together. Even then it still always ended with those two gunshots.
It felt like days. I had a clock and calendar on my IVD but I didn’t understand them any more. I occasionally drifted off into fitful sleep. I dreamt of fire and plains of black glass haunted by black-cloaked figures.
It took a while for me to realise there was someone else in the cell with me, she was so quiet and unobtrusive.
‘How did you know it was us?’ I asked. My voice was a rasping croak torn out of a damaged throat. ‘The traitors?’
I couldn’t even bring myself to feel anger towards whoever had betrayed us.
‘They didn’t say who you were, but I recognised you when I saw you. I know how you move.’
It was funny how the Grey Lady wasn’t frightening any more. She was just a force of nature, something you couldn’t fight against. She was one of the bad things that happened to you when you tried to fight the likes of Rolleston. She moved into view. Now she was looking at me. Her eyes must have been implants but they looked real. They were grey.
‘How’d you get her?’ I asked.
What fucking difference did it make? I closed my eyes, watched the replay again and opened them to find the Grey Lady looking at me, her head cocked to one side almost quizzically.
‘I deployed with two other enhanced members of the Black Squadrons, both ex-special forces. They engaged the others. One of them was killed. The other was badly wounded but captured Miss McGrath. It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re asking.’ For some reason that seemed important to her.
We said nothing for a while. In other circumstances it would have been awkward.
‘Why do you do it?’ I asked, more out of something to say to break the silence than any real interest in anything. ‘Work for him, I mean.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Are you fucking him?’
She said nothing but there was the slight flicker of something there. Like I’d hurt her. I was good at hurting women, but this was the Grey Lady.
‘Do you just want to become some biotech god?’ She shook her head. ‘Then why? Why do this to people?’
‘You do terrible things to people who you disagree with,’ she said.
‘It always feels like they started it.’
‘You turned on him,’ she said.
‘Because he was trying to get me to do something terrible.’
I couldn’t even find the strength to be angry.
‘Only in relative terms. It depends on your foresight.’
‘You people like your justifications, don’t you. Like to feel good about what you do.’ Again I delivered this with a completely flat voice. I didn’t really care.
‘I do it because I’m good at it.’
‘You don’t fancy doing it for someone… nicer?’ Even in my hollowed-out state it sounded weak.
‘You’re not standing where I’m standing.’
‘So you are fucking him?’
Again there was just a flicker of something. Sadness? Anger? Go on, piss off the Grey Lady. Actually that wasn’t a bad idea. Maybe she’d kill me. I’d been thinking a lot about the afterlives all the signalmen I’d ever worked with had told me about. But they were just hopeful fantasies, dreams of seeing Morag again.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she told me.
I sighed. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Because you smell.’ It was delivered with monotone honesty but the childishness of the statement from the Grey Lady’s lips made me laugh. It was a bitter laugh. It sounded like somebody choking. I was sure she was right. It felt like I’d been lying here for days. The only concession to hygiene was some kind of suction/cleaning device strapped uncomfortably over my groin and arse.
‘So?’
Even through the numbness and pain, the Grey Lady carefully and thoroughly giving me a sponge bath rated as deeply surreal. She was thorough. She even shaved me and put some kind of small machine in my mouth that brushed my teeth, then washed and deodorised my mouth.
‘You’re healing quickly,’ she said, examining my many wounds.
That’s the Themtech, I thought. That’s what makes Rolleston and me so close. I’d not been paying any attention to my wounds but there was a lot less red on my IVD and the pain was subsiding. I think I would have preferred being able to concentrate on physical pain.
When she was finished I asked, ‘Why did you do that?’
She didn’t answer. She leaned forward and kissed me. I snapped my mouth shut like a trap. She straightened up. Again there was a flicker of something there. Hurt?
‘What the fuck!’ I shouted.
I was feeling again. I’ll give them credit, these people liked to push the boundaries. She undressed. Her naked body was wiry, hard but surprisingly petite for a frame that contained so much power. She stood in front of me, somehow vulnerable.
‘Don’t you understand?’ I asked. Desperate.
Steely fingers calloused from years of martial arts practice touched me. She knew how and where to touch me.
‘Don’t…’ I begged.
My body was already starting to betray me. A single dry sob painfully racked my frame. She gracefully swung a leg over the couch I was strapped to and straddled me.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she said, sounding vulnerable as she looked down on me. It was the one thing she could have said. She leaned forward to kiss me. This time I let her. This time I reciprocated. She was real. It was something. It was more than the constant feeling of numbness.
When she left I wept. Now part of the cell seemed haunted. I couldn’t make my eyes go there. I had betrayed everything else, why not her? And still nobody would kill me. Was leaving me here wretched like this part of Rolleston’s punishment? I knew exactly what I was. Rolleston was wrong: I wasn’t an animal. That was too noble. I was scum. When sleep came it was fitful. I wanted my dreams to punish me.
It was a plain of black glass over fire. In the distance the jagged knife points of mountains. Protruding from the plains were obelisks like the stone cairns of the Highlands writ large and made of the same black glass. Alien-
