The microphone crackles. ‘How much longer, Malachi? We’re going to miss lunch.’
I incline my head towards the last two cages in the row. Can’t he see our timetable has been thrown out by the death of a giant? I lock the rapist’s cage, move on to Lolie.
She gives me her fingers, sighs like a depressed teenager.
‘The judge, he is lucky.’ Her English is limited, but her words hold a deep envy. ‘So lucky . . .’
Her hands suddenly look too young for someone who has notched fifty kills since she was ten. My fingers itch to grab my cell phone and ask her how old she is, but Tamba sits watching like a schoolchild who has been ordered to stay in the classroom.
It suddenly feels so unfair that Lolie should spend the rest of her life in prison. She deserves to have some teenage fun, style her hair even, drop people with only her deadly beauty. Her eyelashes, for instance, look at them. They have the power to snap people’s hearts open and closed, however many times she decides to blink them.
Maybe Lolie and the solo sailor could meet up after this, laugh about the time they were both locked up on the rig.
There is still time to laugh, Lolie. There is time to paint your nails. I trim her toes, will her to live while she wishes herself as stone dead as Judge James.
* * *
When I reach Shikorina, she is cradling one of her children again. I can almost see its soft, shining forehead. I stare at the empty space where I thought I caught a glimpse of baby skin. Is it a boy or a girl, I wonder?
Shikorina is a remarkable mime artist. She stops her long strokes, tickles the imaginary child at the nape of its neck.
‘The way he did it.’ She shakes her head sadly. ‘It was terrible.’
I nod imperceptibly. Ask me, I know how it feels for electricity to suck the ions from your blood vessels, crush them.
‘I was careful, Malachi.’ She leans towards me, whispers as if to prevent the child on her lap from hearing. ‘I didn’t let the others see.’ She rubs her child’s spine from its neck to its baby coccyx.
I press Shikorina’s towel deeper into the disinfectant, wipe her toes curled up with love for the little ones she drowned so carefully.
High above, Tamba stands up and shuffles some things on his DJ desk, his browbeaten eyes still on me. I lock Shikorina’s cage, walk away as if I am not more than tempted to love this crazy mother. The giant’s empty space tries to suck me in, but I force myself past his three drops of blood. I feel a flush of heat as I pass Vicki’s charming freckles, her seductive smiling mouth. The brace slips from my fingers. I stoop to pick it up. Continue to the trolley, lay down my falcon-taming paraphernalia. A craving tugs at the muscles deep in my belly. I walk to the door with a sullen teenage reluctance. I want to stay.
I want to stay and kiss Vicki.
* * *
Meirong and Janeé have shining lips from something mysterious submerged in gravy. I sit down, strike mine with a spoon, find a hard sunken object. I dredge it to the top. It is a bone with jelly meat clinging to it. I scrape the bottom of my bowl, find another. And another.
‘What’s wrong, Malachi?’ Meirong asks sharply.
I take a noisy sip of the gravy. Delicious. Really. I nibble on a bone. Wonderful. Truly. Not vertebrae, but maybe a tail.
I think of Vicki’s pretty coccyx, the place where her tail would have been twenty million years ago, a triangular plate above the soft swelling of her buttocks. Her engineer added two small dimples for sheer sexiness.
I catch a piece of marrow floating with the carrots, gobble it. Delicious. I smile at Janeé.
‘Nice, hey, Malachi? I boiled it for three hours.’ Janeé grabs the pot, tramps around to my side. ‘Have more.’
I lean back to make way for my new mother and her pot of broken bones.
Tamba’s sense of humour cracks through his despondency. ‘Janeé, you hit the jackpot. Malachi is going to get nice and fat.’
Janeé smiles happily. ‘Fat like me.’
Tamba snorts through his stew. Even Meirong’s eyes almost smile above the u-shaped bone she is sucking on.
Olivia hurries in. ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.’
‘Well, you got ox,’ Tamba says.
Janeé scoops three spoons of the ox’s tail for Olivia.
‘Any news?’ Olivia asks.
Meirong places a bone on the edge of her plate. Her voice is shaky. ‘Three hover-cruisers and a helicraft from –’ She stops, refuses to give our location away.
We all wipe our mouths as if Meirong ordered us to. Even Janeé puts down the pot.
‘Yes?’ Olivia nearly whispers.
‘They are heading straight for us.’
Olivia drops her spoon in her food.
‘We’ll know by tonight. Just, all of you . . .’ Meirong glares at each one of us. ‘No trouble. Please.’ She gives up on her oxtail. ‘Olivia, Doctor says to add a sedative to their evening feed. We can’t take any chances right now.’ She drops a bunch of keys on the table, makes me jump. ‘The girl. Give her lunch then hang the keys on the engine.’ She slings a pink lanyard around my neck, anoints me. ‘Now, please.’
Meirong passes me a bowl from the trolley. It looks like we will all be eating waggy tails today.
‘She’s very weak,’ Meirong says grimly. ‘You might have to feed her.’
The silence in the canteen simmers with guilt. Meirong claps her hands as if to make the shame of five people fly up and away. ‘Come, come. Back to your stations, everyone.’
* * *
I hurry on to my horrible afternoon task.
Up, up I climb towards the sun, balancing bits of skeleton. By the time I reach the last flight of stairs, my chest is burning. Surely I could not have lost my fitness this quickly. No, the
