his hip. Besides, he would’ve been calling her name. Sofia put her eye to the spy-hole. Her heart stopped beating. It actually stopped, dead in her chest, she was sure.
Two uniformed police officers were standing in the hallway outside her apartment.
Her first thought was for her father.
11
FORMER URUGUAYAN-ARGENTINIAN BORDER REGION, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION
Ramon Luperico was much weakened by his ordeal. The former administrator of the small French detention centre in Guadeloupe, a state-run facility that appeared nowhere in the public records of the French state, he did his best to match the pace of his liberator as they hurried through the thick forest. He was desperately glad to be free, of course, but not at all comfortable about being dragged through the primordial wilds by this woman. His lungs burned and muscles quivered, and he’d been stung more times than he could count by fiendish insects of all sorts. Ants, flies, mosquitoes, even a wasp on one occasion, he was sure. The woman had sprayed some sort of aerosol in his face when he complained, but otherwise she seemed entirely unsympathetic. At least the spray had kept the insects at bay.
He had thought her French when she’d spoken back at Facility 183, but now he was not so sure. She hadn’t talked much at all since pushing him out the door of the old police station, past the bodies of his former jailers, but when she did speak he was sure he detected a slightly guttural North American tone in her accent. Canadian perhaps - a Quebecois?
But he doubted it. The Canadians had always been a civilised people. And even now, with the world turned inside out and savagery the first refuge of scoundrels and good men alike, it seemed improbable that any government in Vancouver would’ve dispatched somebody like this she-devil into the wilds of the South American Federation purely for his benefit. Indeed, it seemed unlikely to Luperico that she had been dispatched for his benefit at all.
His armed escort prodded him deeper into the brush, sparing no thought for the injuries he had sustained under torture, or for the fact that he hadn’t eaten properly in days; ignoring his protests to stop, just for a moment, to let him gather what little strength he had left. The further into the forest they penetrated, the more conflicted he felt. It was good to put some distance between themselves and the prison, to get as far away as possible from any chance of him being recaptured. And yet his anxiety continued to grow. The trees seemed enormous, like vast and ancient cathedral pillars, soaring far overhead. The vines and thorny creepers through which they fought seemed utterly impenetrable to him, but the woman hacked and slashed a way through using her long, black-bladed machete. Occasionally he would catch a glint of dappled sunlight on its sharpened edge and worry about what might become of him while in this killer’s company. Nobody but she knew he was here now. Nobody even knew he was alive.
Whenever it seemed as though he might flag, she urged him forward with monosyllabic orders and once with the toe of a boot applied with some force to his posterior. A posterior that had been whipped with electrical cords just two days ago. Not to extract information from him, it should be noted. What could he possibly have told those militia brutes that they would’ve found interesting? No, they had whipped him and humiliated him purely for the fun of it.
As a man who had supervised the hostile debriefing of any number of the French Republic’s enemies himself, Luperico found the oafish, horribly unprofessional behaviour of his former captors almost as upsetting as the torture itself. He realised that this might have seemed like a ridiculous point of distinction. After all, nobody
There were times in his cell when Luperico lost all hope, because he had no idea what those animals were after, beyond the momentary pleasure of causing him pain and inestimable grief. He felt not a shred of sympathy for them, regardless of the way in which they’d lost their lives. He would have spat on the corpse of the deputy commander had he been able to raise sufficient moisture in his mouth to do so.
*
‘
She forced him along the rudimentary trail she had cut earlier, but it was not an easy passage. The undergrowth grabbed at his already tattered clothing. He stumbled and tripped every few metres on tree roots and sharp rocks, crying out as they lacerated his bare feet, while the canopy grew so thick overhead that it seemed twilight was upon them. At times Luperico had trouble discerning where she wanted him to go. He would stop and turn on her with a wounded look, seeking direction, flinching from an expected rebuke.
‘I do speak English, you know,’ he told her now. ‘Your facade is not necessary.’
‘Save your breath. You’ll need it.’
She pushed him on relentlessly, allowing him to stop and rest only while she checked for any sign of pursuit. Once at the edge of a small clearing, covered in a bright, startling blanket of red flowers. Another time, in a deep V-shaped hollow formed by the roots of some monster tree. He was never unobserved during these brief interludes. But caution and field craft demanded Caitlin take a few moments to direct her attention back along the trail they’d just covered. Luperico gave no impression of planning an escape or assault. He was an administrator, not a killer. Not like her.
The worst heat of the day was upon them, ramified into a terrible crushing humidity under the tree canopy. They avoided the occasional open areas covered with nothing but grass, skirting around them whenever they reached a clearing. All the while sweat poured out of her companion in great torrents, and she made sure that he was keeping well hydrated. He sipped from a spare canteen she passed to him, containing not water but a flavoured nutrient drink. It tasted both salty and a little sweet at the same time. Probably better, though, than the food bar she’d made him sit down and eat, about half an hour after they’d set out. That motherfucker looked like chocolate but tasted of cardboard. He wolfed it down, nevertheless, ravenous and pathetically grateful.
Presently they reached another small clearing, or in this case, more a crude hollowing out of the undergrowth where she had earlier cut away at thick vines and dense masses of ferns with her machete
Caitlin gestured for him to sit on a small log and he lowered himself gratefully and carefully to the ground. The day was passing and she noted a change in the clamour and tenor of bird and animals noises around them. The world was quieter now, as those creatures that hunted and fed during the day repaired to their burrows and nests to take refuge from the night stalkers. The long, pencil-thin shafts of light that penetrated the canopy had shifted from bright white to a softer, golden hue.
After close to three hours of rigorous trekking through the forest, Luperico was exhausted and close to emotional collapse. She could tell that the idea he might actually escape the nightmare of the Federation’s wretched sinkhole was finally becoming real to him. He might live. He might escape, get far away from here, and survive to such an age that the terrors of the last few years, and especially the last six months, receded into the dark numbness of the long ago.
As long as he could give this woman what she wanted.
She could read all of this in his face because she had seen that stupid, futile hope in the face of so many other men that she had lost count.
He silently watched her interrogate the data pad strapped to her forearm. She busied herself with that for a minute, fixing their location, while he sipped again from the canteen. His limbs were shaking, whether from extreme fatigue or shock she could not say and didn’t much care. But he tried not to let his weakness seem so obvious. His eyes told her he was already turning his thoughts to what she might ask of him next.
What possible interest could she have had in him?
Caitlin was content to let him stew.
She knew the years of
