Around dusk, or the institute’s artificially-created version of it, Taka took him down into the lower levels. Moonlight was slanting down through the foliage and the jungle hissed and thrummed with the noises of a thousand nocturnal creatures.
“So what did you want to tell me?” Addison said, excited.
“We need to stop this,” Taka whispered back.
“Stop what?”
“This, what we’re doing,” he continued, grasping Addison’s hand. “It’s gone on enough. I can’t keep leading these people to their death. I just can’t do it.”
Addison saw the earnest look. Taka wasn’t joking.
“We’ve been through this, Tak,” Addison sighed, brushing aside a fern. “We can’t. And we’re doing so well! People are actually responding, coming to terms.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It has to be.”
There was a pause, then Taka looked him dead in the eye.
“The levellers are lying.”
Addison blinked.
“Lying? About what?”
“Something. Everything.”
“It feels real to me.”
“You must have noticed it,” Taka pressed, growing more animated. “None of this adds up. This place is huge, so why only five of them? And why do they need something as basic as dialysis if they’re so-called masters of genetics? And that drone. It isn’t right, it doesn’t fit. Does its design even remotely match anything else here?”
Addison’s mind flashed to the five plinths in the levellers’ chambers. Red, black, jerry-rigged. Very out of place with the misty-grey aesthetic of the institute.
“It looks evil,” he replied. “Designed to scare us. That’s literally the point.”
“And another thing,” Taka continued, on a roll now. “When you revived me you said we had weeks, possibly only days, before the place collapsed. Yet here we are, still here!”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“It’s just another thing in a long line of bullshit we’ve been fed. They’re lying Addison, I feel it in my bones.”
“It doesn’t matter, Tak,” he replied, scared of where this was headed. “They may have secrets, but it doesn’t change the facts. Between the drone, this thing in my neck and Four, there’s nothing we can do.”
Taka paused, gazing at a hummingbird hovering overhead.
“I think Four’s pistol is broken,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“When you surprised her this morning, her hand went to the pistol. Then she stopped and signalled the drone instead. I think its dead and she’s bluffing.”
“No, Tak,” Addison replied, finally seeing what he wanted. “And even if it is, they still have the drone.”
“Not always,” Taka said. “After an execution, it powers down. And it’s been powering down for longer recently.”
“So?”
“What if there’s a way we can take it out?”
“Tak, no...”
“No listen,” Taka said, eyes shining. “I’ve thought this through. We wait until after an execution, when the drone’s powered down, then we take on the levellers. They won’t be expecting it. Four would be the hardest, but without her pistol she’s vulnerable. Plus we’d have the element of surprise. When it’s done we can throw the drone off the upper levels, or dunk it in vat fluid. It’s just nuts and bolts and bad attitude, I doubt it’s waterproof. Come on, we can do this!”
Addison let out a long breath. The implications of what Taka was saying were huge. He wanted to encourage his lover’s spirit, indulge the possibility of escape, but deep down he knew it was hopeless. The levellers would have thought of this. They thought of everything. And when they caught them there would be pain beyond all imagining.
“It’s too risky, Tak,” he said. “Four might have other weapons, they all might have other weapons.”
“For god’s sake!” Taka shouted. “You’re so goddamn institutionalised! Can’t you see? They’ve just got you believing in their power, but it’s a sham, a lie, one great big performance. Come on, we have to try.”
“Trying gets you killed.”
“You surely can’t believe that?”
“In this place, you learn the hard way.”
Taka’s face turned cold. He moved away, and when he spoke again it was in a small voice.
“I know I’m not the first,” he said.
“The first what?”
“The first of me to be brought back.”
Addison reeled, feeling like he’d been punched.
“How…?”
“I had my suspicions,” Taka said, face glinting in the fake moonlight. “Things you’ve said. Things I’ve said that you react to like you’ve heard before. So I found a tablet, went back into the logs.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because it doesn’t matter!” Taka cried. “I don’t care! Whoever that was, it wasn’t me. The past doesn’t matter, only the present and what we do with it. And taking on the levellers is the right thing to do.”
“It won’t work, Tak. I’m sorry it just––”
But Taka had had enough. He shoved past Addison and marched into the treeline. At the edge of the clearing he paused.
“There’s going to come a moment, Addison,” he called back, voice cracking. “A window of opportunity in which to act. And if you miss it… Well, if these trials haven’t taught you what a missed opportunity is, you haven’t been paying attention.”
“Taka, please––”
But he had vanished into the jungle.
Taka stayed in his own cellsuite that night, leaving Addison to toss and turn alone. For the first time in weeks he was plagued by nightmares: crashing waves and screaming faces. The pounding in the walls was louder too, a constant thudding, so when Addison dragged himself up the next morning he felt worse than when he’d turned in.
He went to find Taka, but he wasn’t in his cellsuite, nor anywhere on the upper levels. He searched as long as he could, but was eventually summoned to court. Taka didn’t turn up there either. Technically he didn’t need to, his duties were pastoral not legal, but he’d come every day so far. Without him, the ten executions Addison was forced to endure seemed ten times as horrifying.
Just as Addison was beginning to panic, he finally found Taka in the levelling room, waiting to be briefed on the day’s returnees. Addison marched over to confront him,
