boy who found it amusing to douse his pet mice with petrol and set them alight just to see what would happen — he’s failed to notice armed police officers erecting plastic construction barriers across the front of the coffee shop, redirecting traffic. Ranald didn’t see fit to draw the blinds when he decided to pull his own hostage crisis in the middle of the city, and now a crowd is beginning to build, because it’s human nature to want to stare at the car crash, count the injured and the dead. Ambulance personnel are moving into place on one section of the street, and there are news crews gathering.
‘I know they are,’ Ranald replies tonelessly. ‘I told them to come.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Franklin blusters from across the room, but I don’t hear Ranald’s reply because one face in the crowd has drawn my gaze: ashen and familiar, eyes shadowed from a long-haul flight during which he probably did not sleep. Someone who’s six foot five and built like a line-backing angel.
Ryan.
My hands fly up to my mouth, all the fear I feel for him in my eyes. Why didn’t he stay inside that bar? What if Ranald sees him?
When Ryan’s eyes meet mine over the heads of the people in front of him, something flares in them and he pushes his way forward immediately until he is standing right up against one of the plastic crash barriers. The width of the footpath away.
I shake my head at him, mouth at him to go, go away, but he stands his ground stubbornly.
‘What’s happening?’ he shouts at me through the glass.
I shake my head again, my face telling him that it’s too hard to explain, my eyes telling him to run.
The harsh midday sunlight is reflecting a little off the surface of the windows; he probably can’t see Ranald standing just behind me with a gun in hand, levelled at my back.
I see Ryan turn and collar a policewoman who’s standing nearby. He points in my direction. She turns and squints at me through the glass, shakes her head.
‘You can’t goin there, sir,’ she says. I hear her clearly, though she’s standing outside.
‘That’s my girlfriend,’ Ryan yells. ‘My girlfriend in there. I need to get inside.’
And without thinking, I walk away from Ranald, the psychopath holding the gun, towards the front window. I touch my hand up against the pane, my heart so full I almost can’t contain it.
Ryan smiles at me but there’s a terrible fear in his eyes, which grow wider, more fearful, as Ranald approaches quickly and wraps one arm around my neck from behind, the other hand still holding Franklin’s gun, his breath foul with coffee, sleeplessness, adrenaline.
I’m rarely afraid. And I have no sixth sense, no ability to foretell the future. But everything about this bright morning — this morning in which everything seemed more beautiful than it was possible to be — is going badly wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be this way when Ryan and I found each other again. It was only meant to be the first step.Today was supposed to be all about the silver lining, not the cloud.
‘Give yourself up, sir!’ a policeman shouts at Ranald through a loudspeaker. ‘All the entries and exits are blocked off. There’s nowhere to go. Give yourself up quietly or we’re coming in.’
I wonder how someone who looks like Ranald does on the outside — composed, professional, pleasant — can hold so much vitriol, store so much rage and affront and envy inside. How he could blame Lela Neill for tipping him over the edge when all his life he’s been poised to fall; poised to explode like a catherine wheel, raining fire down on everyone.
‘You’ve done what you came to do,’ I say. ‘Sent out your hydra made of code and malice, your virus strong enough to bring down entire companies. Let everyone here go. Let me go. You may not wish to live your life, but I do. I’ve travelled so far to get to this point. A long time ago, I was standing in the place you now occupy and I was not destroyed. I chose life, or had it chosen for me, and I have stuck with it. It may not be the life I would have wanted for myself, and yet I embrace my future. And it is out there.’
I point at Ryan through the flystruck window, feel the surge of that sea I carry inside me. I meet his gaze; his heart in his eyes, too.
‘Let me go,’ I repeat softly. ‘Please.’
Ranald clutches me more tightly to him, sticks the point of the gun into the hollow between Lela’s collarbones, for effect; to see the devastation it wreaks on Ryan’s face. On mine.
‘You were never going to go out with me tonight, were you?’ he says calmly.
I shake my head, and the cold muzzle follows my every movement as if it has become one with me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘but we would never have worked, not in any life.’
When he continues to hold me, saying nothing, I can’t stop myself remarking peevishly, ‘ou’ll never get out of here alive, you know.’
‘I know,’ he whispers, placing a kiss on the top of Lela’s head of red-brown, choppy hair.
I see Ryan blanch; feel Lela do the same.
Ranald pulls me in closer, pushes the muzzle harder into the base of Lela’s throat. ‘And neither will you.’
Then he shoots me. Us.
The crowd outside shrieks with one voice. No doubt leans forward, all the better to see.
I feel myself fall backwards to the floor, numb with shock. Fall upon his body, already dead. His soul already departed; Azraeil not here to reap it.
Blood, like a fine rain, a gentle mist, seems to fall upon us, and I hear Ryan screaming through the glass, ‘No! Mercy, no!’
Chapter 20
Ranald shot Lela through the base of the neck, a shot that exited her body through his heart. He did that deliberately. He wanted her to see him die, then die in terror herself, air and blood mingling in the cavity he’d made in her chest. He wanted her to be entirely conscious as her life ebbed away.
Except that I, not Lela, am the one bearing witness. I can feel her inside, locked away tightly, like a kernel, a hard knot, within her own body, her soul twisted, turned in on itself, like a Mobius strip. It’s highly likely she feels nothing, sees nothing, doesn’t even realise that she’s dying. And that, itself, is a mercy.
The pain I’m feeling from the gunshot wound is visceral and immediate but tolerable. Easily subsumed by someone with my strange . . . abilities. But Lela’s spinal cord has been severed, her lifeblood is leaching out and mingling with Ranald’s on the floor. Even as I try to coalesce inside her, push all of myself into those ruptured, crushed and cauterised areas of skin, bone, nerve and muscle in order to knit them together, in order to staunch the bleeding, purge the wounds of cordite and infection, make her rise, make her walk again, make her whole, I know that she is failing. That I have failed. That I cannot heal Lela, as I could not heal her mother. For a moment, I imagine that Ryan is here beside me, holding my hand. But it must be an illusion thrown up by Lela’s dying mind, for I hear Ryan outside screaming, ‘Christ, please! Let me go to her, please!’
There are footsteps all around me, but the world is growing dark and I am more entombed, more earthbound, than I have ever been, for the body I am shackled to is growing cold.
My inner demon, always one beat ahead of my waking self, says: This one is meant to die. This one cannot be saved. There is nothing more to be done.
And I recognise that for the truth, want to tell them all — Mr Dymovsky, Cecilia, Sulaiman, Justine, Franklin — that there is no point separating Lela from her murdeer, no point throwing open the front door, screaming for help. The stretcher, the defibrillating machine, the tourniquet, all the medical marvels of the age, are wasted on Lela now. But I cannot make my voice work. For her body is dying, and her senses are fading, and I am mired in them.
I should have seen it coming; it had already been foretold by Azraeil himself. He had touched the side of Lela’s face, marked her as his own. I’d misread everything — had thought Azraeil was to take Mrs Neill and some stranger. The two to be reaped at the same instant. Not a stranger, I realise now. Lela. Mother and daughter.
And I’d dismissed Ranald all along when I should have seen . . . Because I did see, but did not understand.
