‘End it, you murderer!’ he screamed. ‘End it! I’ve had enough!’
And then something moved, quick in the night, and there was a terrible, dull crunch. Cordwain’s eyes rolled up into his head and he crumpled, folding onto himself and falling to the ground.
Standing behind him, a rock from the drystone wall in her hand, was Jez.
Crake just stared.
Jez tossed the rock aside and took the keys from the Shacklemore man. She walked over to Crake, turned him around, and undid his handcuffs. By the time they’d fallen free, he’d found words again.
‘I thought you were dead.’
‘So did he,’ she replied.
‘But he . . . but you were dead.’
‘Apparently not. Give me a hand.’
She began to tug Cordwain towards the trees. After a moment, Crake joined her. As they manhandled him over the drystone wall, his head lolled back, and Crake caught a glimpse of his eyes. They were open, and the whites were dark with blood.
Crake turned away and vomited. Jez waited for him to finish, then said, ‘Take his legs.’
He wasn’t used to this merciless tone from her. He did as he was told, and together they carried him out of sight of the path and left him there.
They returned to the clearing, where Jez replaced the rock in the wall and threw Cordwain’s gun into the undergrowth. She dusted her dress off as best she could.
‘Jez, I—’ he began.
‘I didn’t do it for you, I did it for me,’ she interrupted. ‘I’m not being taken in by any damn Shacklemore. Not when half the world still wants us dead.’ There was a weary disgust in her voice. ‘Besides, you still haven’t told me what you learned in there. The Cap’n will want to hear that, no doubt.’
She wasn’t the same Jez who had accompanied him to this party. The change was sudden, and wrenching. Everything that had happened before, every shared joke and kind word, meant nothing in the face of the crime he’d committed. Crake wished there was something to say, some way he could explain, but he knew that she wouldn’t listen. Not now.
‘It’s better that we don’t speak about what happened here today,’ she said, still brushing herself down. She stopped and gave him a pointed look. ‘Ever.’
Crake nodded.
‘Right, then,’ she said, having arranged herself as best she could. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
She walked down the path towards the landing pad. Crake cast one last glance into the trees, where Cordwain’s body lay, and then followed her.
Twenty-One
‘You want to take on the Delirium Trigger?’ shrieked Harkins. Pinn choked on his food, spraying stew across the table and all over Crake’s face. Malvery gleefully pounded Pinn on the back, much harder than was necessary, until his coughing fit subsided.
‘Thanks,’ he snarled at the grinning doctor.
