CLAIRVOYANCE: Part 20
“I do not think you know what you ask,” said Mahmoud, frowning. His eyebrows were like black caterpillars in the dim light of the galley. “Things are not the same here as in your Federation. Odessa may be a big city, but the entertainment taxes keep such things in the houses of rich men and foreigners, so that we of the working class are not distracted from honest labour by your decadent Western ways.” He couldn’t quite keep the sarcasm out of his voice, but he was serious. The ship’s timbers creaked gently as if to agree with him. “Poor men do not use virtual reality equipment.”
Gina listened calmly, then shook her head. “There’s got to be some way of getting access. You have people who use VR for their jobs, right?”
“Rich men and foreigners,” Mahmoud repeated. “The mere act of seeking access to a VR terminal could be enough to arouse suspicion from all kinds of directions. Whoever is after you could track you down with ease.”
She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it suddenly with a click of teeth. Instead she hissed, “I never said there was anyone after me.”
“Then you should make it less obvious,” he replied, staring deep into her eyes. “Be wise, my girl. I knew it when I first dredged you up, when you were muttering in your sleep from fever. Even so, I would have figured it out by now. For a Federation woman you are a remarkably poor liar.”
“And you’re too damned clever to be a fisherman!” she snapped back at him. She was so angry, furious, about how wrong everything had gone. She wouldn’t even be here if they’d listened to her, instead of smack in the fucking third world with no way out. She could’ve worked something out and been with someone who cared about her.
Gina hadn’t meant for the conversation to turn this way, but now all her frustrations had found a target. She continued, “Why did you rescue me, huh? Why did you bring me here? Why are you so bloody kind for no reason?! I can’t tell if you’re really real or if this is all some giant mind-fuck!” She pounded a fist against the bulkhead, suppressing the urge to slap Mahmoud around the head, but her anger faded instantly as the strength went out of her. Her knees buckled. She sagged back against the wall while Mahmoud rushed forward to catch her.
“Easy,” he said, steadying her back to her feet. “You forget your own body.”
“I don’t care. I’m through following everyone around, letting people decide my life for me.” She looked up at Mahmoud with steel-blue eyes, fighting loose of his grip, and brought her legs back under control. “Either you help me get into VR or I’ll do it by myself.”
Mahmoud broke eye contact, scowling as if in pain. “You don’t know what you ask.” She opened her mouth to speak again, but he cut her off. “You don’t. You’ll find out why. But if this is truly what you want,” he sighed, “I’ll do what I can.”
“Thank you,” Gina said sincerely. Now the main emotion burning in her chest was guilt. Mahmoud was right, she didn’t know what she was asking for, but it was something she had to do.
She reached out to touch his arm, half in comfort, half apology, but he avoided her hands. His face had turned hard and deeply-lined, almost the opposite of his usual relaxation. “It will take a day or two to arrange. The timescale is not up for negotiation.”
Gina didn’t know what to say. Lamely, the only thing that came to her mind was, “I’ll link up with my Chinese bank account, I can pay you back.”
The old smile returned to his lips as suddenly as it had gone, as if she’d said something terribly funny. “I never assumed you wouldn’t,” he said.
She gave a wry chuckle, then stepped closer and threw her arms around Mahmoud’s neck. “I’m Gina,” she whispered into his shoulder. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Mahmoud Kerensky,” he replied and awkwardly returned the hug. “The pleasure is mine. Now, please let go before my wife sees and guts me like a fish.”
Snorting a laugh, Gina did as he asked. “Really, thank you. I wish . . . I wish I could pay you back properly, for everything. You don’t know how important this is.”
“Do not worry. Just lie down, rest, you’re still in no shape to go running around everywhere on your own.”
“I’m tired of resting,” she countered. “I want to do something. Anything before I go stir-crazy.”
After a moment’s thought, Mahmoud asked, “Have you ever been fishing?”
She shook her head, and started to get worried as she caught the massive grin spreading across his face.
Mahmoud had taken the boat out to sea and hung some lines over the side, baited to attract butterfish, which he claimed was the only fish you could still catch in the Black Sea nowadays. During the quiet moments he spouted lots of sailor’s talk at Gina, barked orders at the skeleton crew who’d joined the pleasure cruise, or conversed quietly with his wife in a queer mixture of Arabic, old Russian, English and Conglom. Gina couldn’t decipher a word of it. Not that she’d ever stoop to eavesdropping, oh no. She just liked to know what people were saying.
The boat pitched and yawed across the choppy waters, cutting into the cool autumn wind. The afternoon sun’s orange and gold bled through the clouds, the air tasted salty and fresh, and everything smelled like history. Like things that had stayed the same for hundreds of years. Gina breathed deep as sea spray lashed at her face, and a smile curled her lips. For a second she couldn’t think of any reason to ever leave this boat or these people, though she barely knew them.
An alarm started to beep on one of the rods, and a crewman rushed over to reel it in. Gina stood to one side and watched. It was very exciting, seeing someone struggle with an old-fashioned fishing line, dragging his quarry closer and closer to the surface. She clapped her hands when the fat fish lifted free of the water, but put some distance between her and the catch as the triumphant fisherman hauled it aboard. He was just bringing it over the railing when the hook lost hold, and the fish flopped onto the deck at her feet as several kilos of teeth and muscle, flapping like mad. She gave a girlish shriek and jumped backwards into a bulkhead. Those who saw her barked with laughter, and she grinned sheepishly while the fish was picked up and tossed into a bucket. Her cheeks blushed bright red.
“I’ve never seen a live fish before,” she said in her own defence.
“Then it’s good you are here,” chuckled Mahmoud, appearing from the control room doorway. “The day is full of opportunities.”
He took one of the rods and thrust it at Gina, then showed her how to use it. She didn’t take to it straight away, but she grasped the general idea after a few casts. It was only a little longer before her first bite.
She jerked the rod the way Mahmoud had taught her, then started reeling in the line. Slowly but surely she pulled her catch to the surface. Out of the waves rose a small transparent jellyfish, hanging limply off Gina’s hook. The crew offered condolences while Mahmoud stepped in, ripped the jelly off the hook and threw it back into the water without a care.
He said, “Rats of the sea. It’s what we catch most of. Just give it another try.” He took the rod and cast the line for her.
“Thanks,” she said, but as she took the rod back, the whole world began to spin around her. It was like a whirlwind swept her up. She vaguely felt herself hit the deck, but it didn’t make a big impression.
She tumbled through white nothingness, buffeted about by contrary winds that howled all around her. She tried to plug her ears but found she had no hands, no arms, no body, nothing to stop the wailing wind. Even her sickening nausea refused to go away. She kept wanting to throw up but didn’t have the muscles to do it.
Lost in the chaos, Gina’s mind flailed desperately for something to hang on to. There was something solid not so far away; she could feel it through appendages that didn’t exist, and she lunged for it with the enthusiasm of a drowning man to a lifesaver. She fell back into the world — but it wasn’t the world she’d left.
Satin bedsheets rubbing against her, smell of sweat and skin. She exploded into orgasm, digging her nails into her lover’s back, then relaxed as he rolled away panting heavily. She glanced to her side and, with a distant sense of horror, took in Jock’s gaunt, bespectacled face. In the real world she hadn’t seen him in weeks, never really liked him in the first place, but now she gazed adoringly at features as familiar as if they’d been together for years.
“Does this ever feel weird and wrong to you?” she asked him with the voice of a teenage girl. Rat’s voice, Gina realised somewhere in the background. She was inside the girl’s head, experiencing everything through Rat’s senses and perceptions. She caught a reflection of herself in the massive TV screen above the bed, a thin olive-coloured body, and marvelled at the strange little twists and turns of life.
Jock snorted derision and said, “What? Like, do I ever have second thoughts about ploughing a girl ten years younger than me, whom until recently I’d always thought was a boy?” He turned his head to smirk at her. “Yeah, all the fuckin’ time.”
“You’re a bastard,” she laughed, smacking his chest with the heel of her hand. “So when’s my next lesson? I know your rig by now, I wanna learn the advanced stuff. You promised you’d make me a cowboy, remember?” He opened his mouth to speak, but she wagged her finger at him. “And no cowgirl puns.”
“Hey, what am I, a CommSci teacher? I’ve shown you everything you need to know. The rest is just technique.”
She rolled over until half her body was draped over him, rubbing her bare thigh against him. “Don’t bullshit me, Jock. You’re number twelve on the rankings out of how many thousands? I want to know what you know, do what you do.”
“You just want to use it to find them,” he countered accusingly. His expression turned sour. “I know you were friendly with Gina, but I keep telling you you need to let them go. We’re home free, no more dogs on our trail, nobody knows we were even involved with them. Just take what you’ve got and run with it.”
Anger welled up inside her like a stream of molten lava, boiling out into her bloodstream. She raised herself up onto her elbows to look down at him and snapped, “She saved my life, Jock! Twice!”
“She was the thing that got you into danger in the first place! My space, my rig, my job, all bombed to slag, remember that? I fucking well do.”
She stared at him with her brow locked into a withering scowl, momentarily lost for words. Finally she spat, “Everything ain’t always about you, boy,” and started pulling her clothes back on. He called her back, mumbling feeble and insincere apologies, but she ignored him. Just crossed the empty floor to the black mass of the VR rig ensconced in the corner, strapped in.
Jock appeared at her shoulder a few minutes later, stripped of his usual arrogance and bluster. He gently lifted the VR crown off her head and held her by the shoulders. When he spoke he was hesitant, his voice almost kind.
“We’ve been looking for weeks,” he whispered. “Not a peep out of either of them. Not even traces. When anyone’s ghosting for as long as that, there’s only one explanation, and I know you don’t want to accept it, but it’s the truth.”
There was a long silence. At length, Rat let out a dry sob. “She was in my head once. Gina, I mean. When we were in Hong Kong, in the Fed building, I was halfway up this really high ladder and I got so frightened I couldn’t move. She came back for me. Crawled into my head and made me let go, practically carried me up the rest of the way. I thought she was a freak, nobody’s supposed to do that. It’s not supposed to happen. But I’d be dead now if she hadn’t.”
“Look, it’s–“
“What if she needs our help?” she said fiercely, fat tears inching down her cheeks. “What if she’s still alive out there somewhere and we missed it? I should’ve gone with her!”
Jock hushed her and buried her face in his shoulder. He awkwardly held her shuddering body while she sobbed her heart out. “It’s not your fault, babe. There’s nothing you could’ve done.”
The tears gradually stopped flowing. The last thing she said, hanging limp in the VR straps, was, “She’s really gone . . .” She didn’t look up again until Jock placed the VR crown back on her head, then grabbed a second crown for himself.
“C’mon,” he teased, forcing a lighter tone with limited success, and jumped them into the colourful chaos of the GlobeNet VR network. “I’ll show you a few tricks. Get your mind off it for a while.”
His outline became faint, and Gina started awake.
It was like coming out of a bad dream. Gina’s stomach churned and her skin was slick with sweat. An unfamiliar feeling hung in her belly like a stone, something hard and cold and empty, as if she’d left something behind on the way back to her own body.
“You were talking in your sleep,” said Maryam, sitting on an old wooden chair beside Gina’s hammock. It took Gina a few seconds to translate the thickly-accented English into words she could understand. Maryam’s face worked as if she wasn’t sure how to go on, then finally settled into a strange expression halfway between mothering and frightened. “You’re not quite normal, are you?”
“I’m fine,” Gina rasped, her throat dry and painful. The woman held a cup to Gina’s cracked lips, and she drank deeply.
Maryam shook her head. “I know ‘fine’, hen, and you’re not it. My dear husband might think you’re just weak from the fever, but he’s daft. I’m not so easy to fool.”
She crossed her arms and looked at Gina, daring her to lie again, though unsure whether or not she wanted to hear the answer. When Gina didn’t reply, Maryam sighed, “Is it some kind of sickness? Drugs? We can try to get hold of things if you need them . . .”
“It’s not drugs,” Gina said, although that wasn’t entirely true. Her body was starting to feel the long absence of Spice, a strange itch at the back of her skull that she couldn’t quite scratch. The drug wasn’t physically addictive, but the psychological effects were . . . unpredictable, especially after a few weeks without any.
“Look,” she continued, “I really appreciate you guys helping me and everything, but I can take care of myself. I am alright, I am normal.”
Pull the other one, echoed a voice in her head, painful and distorted as if pumped through a microphone on too high a gain. She gritted her teeth, thinking that something was wrong with her hearing, but when she opened her eyes again she realised that Maryam hadn’t spoken.
The older woman smiled and patted Gina’s hand. “Just . . . trust me. Anything you say won’t leave the room. Nobody here but us girls, see?” She raised her arms to indicate the empty room around them. “You’re carrying so much on your shoulders, you can’t keep it all bottled up inside or it’ll eat you in the end.”
Gina snorted in resignation. “What is it with you two?” she asked. “You keep trying to get me to talk, are you Fed informers or what?”
Maryam gave a wry laugh. “Would it help if we were?”
Rubbing her eyes to buy time, Gina tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound lame or stupid. It seemed like she’d run out of everything but the truth. “I . . . I really don’t want to involve you, Maryam. The last time I dragged friends into this mess, they ended up dead. Two women who were like sisters to me. I’ve watched a trail of bodies behind me getting longer and longer, and I would happily go down a hole and hide for the rest of my life if I thought it would do any good. Do you understand?”
“I think it’s you who doesn’t understand, hen,” said Maryam. “I know what it’s like. I remember when the Federation took over in England, I saw a lot of things I’d like to forget. Friends. Family.” She paused. Then, “I worked and I paid to get smuggled out of Hull on some old freighter, packed into a leaky cargo hold with a thousand other people. No food, no water except what we carried with us. About half were dead or dying by the time we got to Odessa. There were people dying of cholera in the western world. The survivors had to work day and night throwing the bodies overboard, just pick them clean of their things and toss them into the sea like rubbish.”
The soft-spoken words made Gina’s skin crawl with horror. She whispered feebly, “Maryam, I–“
“Doesn’t matter,” Maryam went on with firm conviction. “Long time ago, over and done with. But Moud and me, we know what the world’s like at its best and at its worst. And it’s fair obvious you need help.”
For a long time Gina couldn’t speak. The words refused to come, or made no sense to her own ears, too confused and conflicted with warring emotions. Finally, in halting sentences, she started to tell her story. And for the very first time she left nothing out.
“So you slept with him,” Maryam murmured, trying to wrap her head around that part of the tale. Gina sat with her hands buried in her flame-red hair, feeling the untidy length of it touching her shoulders. It had grown halfway back since her haircut in Hong Kong and badly needed a brush.
“Yes,” she groaned, “with Gabriel.”
Maryam smiled indulgently. “Just one of those things?”
“Yeah. You could say that. I don’t know what I was thinking. There’s just something about him, you know?”
“Do you love him?”
“No! Well, maybe, I mean . . . It’s complicated.” Gina sighed. “He’s crazy. I like him, I really like him, but right now there’s no chance.”
“But you’ve also got this other boy you like, who’s just as bad in his own way.” Maryam tapped her chin and gave a sigh of feigned sympathy. “What’s a girl to do?”
Blushing, Gina fixed Maryam with a hard look. “I think maybe that’s enough about my sex life.”
The older woman’s eyes twinkled. “I’m sorry. It’s just nice to have another girl around to talk to.”
Gina couldn’t help but smile. She looked down at her bare legs, dangling over the side of the hammock, and ran her fingers along the smooth skin. She’d had them treated years ago; no hair would grow there now. “It’s not important who I end up with. I have to stop things before they get any worse. Maybe I can talk Gabriel around, calm Bomber a little, and resolve the whole mess without anyone else getting killed. I don’t know how, but I’ve got to try.”
“All anyone can ever do, dear,” said Maryam, “is try to do the right thing.” She glanced up at the old clock dangling from a nail in the wall. “I should go, dear, I’m running late.”
Smiling, Gina nodded and leaned in to embrace her. “Thanks. All your help, it’s . . .” She lowered her eyes, a little bit ashamed. “Seems like I’m always thanking you two, and I don’t even understand why you keep doing all this for me.”
“Because it’s the right thing to do,” Maryam answered. “And I think you remind him of Safi.” The name seemed to quiet her, and she stood up to leave a little bit too quickly. Gina caught her arm just before she reached the door.
“Who’s Safi?” Gina asked flatly.
“Our daughter,” Maryam said with a sad smile, and disappeared down the hallway.
CLAIRVOYANCE: Part 19
Gina had worn more than a few names in her lifetime. It was out of necessity more than anything; she used them up one by one and discarded the empty husks behind her. She went through several identities before settling on ‘Gina’, and it took more than a year of trial and error to find a last name that stuck. Hart. Gina Hart. It sounded right together, like a film star.
She wondered what her parents would think of it. Director and Mrs. Vaughan would probably be aghast, their darling girl going around by an appellation fit only for some manner of prostitute. But their naive little daughter died a long time ago, or so Gina liked to think. The girl had had to give way for the woman she became.
Her hammock rolled again, and she remembered she was on a ship. She’d almost drowned. Some people dragged her out of the water, gave her food and a place to sleep. Gina wondered where they were now. She decided to go look for them.
She tried to sit up but found her muscles wouldn’t respond. The next moment there was a big woman by her hammock murmuring soothing words that Gina couldn’t understand, piling cold cloths on her forehead. A dark-skinned man with a huge beard stood beside her looking worried. Gina couldn’t understand him either. Their voices sounded tinny and distant, like her head was wrapped tight with clingfilm.
What was happening? How did she get here? Nothing made sense. She couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a second at a time.
They’re the people who rescued you, said a voice inside her, the voice that remembered things. She didn’t hear it much anymore. It continued, You have a fever. You were in the cold water a long time.
The memories came back to her in waves, imperfect and full of holes. Too intense, too weird. So many things had happened to her, she could no longer tell which were real and which were just a fever dream.
She still remembered her life before she started running. She’d been a telepath, freelance, selling her mind for money. She took drugs that let her feel other people’s thoughts and emotions. Then a man came to her and offered her a job she should never have taken. They met more people, but foremost among them was another man, someone dangerous. She looked inside his head and found only horror.
The terrible images repeated themselves in front of her eyes, made more powerful than ever by the fever burning in her brain. Half-melted skeletons of steel and bone sagged and swayed through the sky. Rows of trees were stripped of their leaves and branches, dead or dying in the poisoned ground. Misshapen statues of ash and carbon stood locked in the moment of their death, staring sightlessly as the red sky bled evil down onto the world. Deserted streets echoed to the soft keening of the wind. It was the sound of a thousand voices screaming in the distance.
Her confused thoughts circled back to the time before she became a telepath, before she took to the Street of Eyes, and clawed through the fuzzy shreds of memory. Those days had gone by so fast. She had a boyfriend then who helped her run away from home. For a while they lived together in a couple of condemned flats with a group of his squatter friends, happy, not needing much. Then his addiction to pixie dust started to spiral out of control. He spent more and more time away with the faeries. She wasn’t into it, but she stuck by him because that’s what she did. In the end she found him on the bathroom floor, dead from dehydration with a blissful smile on his face.
That, at least, was real. She clung to those memories with desperate strength. Memories were all she had left.
She saw the dangerous man again, glowing with inner light, something more than human. Gabriel, she remembered. The name was something clear and powerful in the thick sludge of her thoughts. She feared him, hated him, pitied him and loved him all at the same time. And he loved her. Maybe. Some things had happened, and she wasn’t sure . . .
Slipping back into the darkness, she rested for a while, but the unfocussed dreams spinning through her head were almost the same as her waking delirium. Occasionally she tasted food or water passing her lips but couldn’t be sure whether it was real or imaginary.
Then, one morning, she awoke with a cold sliver of clarity between her eyes. She saw the little cabin around her, smelled honest salt and wood, felt fresh air pouring over her face from the open door — this time without seeing dancing kidney beans and purple elephants. She tried to look around, but the slightest movement seemed to ignite a fireworks display of pain behind her eyes. She moaned, and within moments the big woman appeared to layer more damp cloths on Gina’s forehead. She wore a faded apron stained with a lifetime’s worth of coffee, flour and gravy.
“Some painkillers would be better,” Gina suggested through her dry throat, and the woman jerked back. Then she broke into giggles and ran off cackling about gods and the praising thereof. Gina grunted and tried not to move. Everything hurt.
The woman marched back into the room with the bearded man from before. Gina tried to remember his name, flogging her fuzzy brain until it uncovered the right one like a shining jewel. He was called Mahmoud, and the woman was his wife, Maryam. She hoped she could get her tongue around those.
“It’s good to see you awake,” said Mahmoud, smiling under the black mass of hair that covered most of his face. “You had Maryam worried sick, you know. She kept saying, ‘She will die of fever, she will die, poor girl,’ and I told her over and over, ‘No, she is young and strong, she will survive.’ You took your time proving me right!”
“I’ll try and do better next time.” Gina forced a smile, then barked a dry cough. “How long was I out of it?”
Mahmoud signalled his wife to get some food and drink, and she shot off like a bullet. Once she was gone, he pulled up a chair and sat down next to Gina’s hammock. “It’s been two weeks since we picked you up. You remember? You were adrift in a lifeboat, we found you and fished you out the water. You came down with fever the next day.”
She nodded, then immediately regretted it. “I remember,” she grunted. “Not my best day ever.”
“No,” said Mahmoud, “you were lucky, very lucky. You could easily have died in the water, and again here in bed.”
“I’m grateful.”
He broke into a grin. “Be grateful to God, my girl. We had little to do with it, we merely followed the paths set out for us.”
“Okay,” Gina murmured politely. Her head wasn’t in any shape to deal with religion at the moment. “Two weeks . . . Christ, how could I have a fever for that long? Didn’t you give me antibiotics?”
“How would we give you what we do not have?” he asked, a little hurt. “This is not a pleasure yacht, though I’m sure it’s an easy mistake to make. For all our riches we are humble people with humble means.”
The idea of not having antibiotics threw Gina for a loop. She couldn’t imagine anyone in the Federation so poor that they didn’t have access to basic medicines. Regardless, she didn’t want to offend Mahmoud’s feelings, so she worked up an apologetic smile.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to come off like that.”
He nodded acceptance and stood up again, shoving the chair back into its corner. “Try to rest. We’ll be coming into port in a few hours, home with our catch. Then you can leave if you wish and make your own way to wherever you are going.”
“Thank you.” A moment of silence passed between them. Gina’s gratitude was plain to see, requiring no further explanation. “You never even asked my name.”
“I’m sure you will share it when you are ready.” He dipped his head in a brief bow, then headed for the door. She called out to him just before he made his exit.
“There was a man travelling with me,” she said softly. “A friend. Not on the lifeboat, before that, before we launched. Have you seen any sign of him?”
“None,” he admitted, “but I will keep my eye out. Really, try to rest. I must go pilot this thing into port, but Maryam will be back soon, she’ll get you anything you need.”
Gina thanked him again and leaned back into her pillows. Food and rest sounded pretty good right around now, so she settled in to wait, feeling truly safe for the first time in years.
Gina struggled up the stairs despite her body’s protests. Her muscles were stiff and weak from days of lying in bed, but she needed to get out, needed to see the sky again. It always reminded her she was still alive.
The ever-present smell of salt became even stronger as she poked her head up through the hatch. Sea spray spattered across her face, and she pulled her borrowed jacket tight around her against the cold wind. She climbed the rest of the way, undaunted by the pitch and yaw of the waves, and emerged onto the slippery timbers of the foredeck. Bobbing green waters stretched out before her, and she looked out over them like a newly-minted queen surveying her country.
The sky was grey but it didn’t choke her like the City’s usual blanket of smog. Dark, rocky shore stretched out on either side of her, showing miles of choppy surf in each direction. A massive concrete pier connected the shores behind her, an ancient relic from the previous century, discoloured with hundreds of patches where its crumbling concrete had been repaired and reinforced against the beating of the waves.
Wooden jetties sprouted haphazardly from the pier. The boat was tied up at one of these, drifting next to the rusted hulk of a freighter that obviously hadn’t moved in years. Up on the pier, oily yardsmen battled with nets and dredging equipment, unloading each ship as it came in.
And above the pier she could see a massive stairway leading up the hills to the city above, the longest, tallest set of steps she’d ever seen. To the right of it stood the remnants of a small cable car line, now in disrepair, replaced by an elevated tram track. To the left was a container elevator going up the hill to a large complex of warehouses. Beyond the warehouses she could see nothing but roofs going off into the distance. The stairs were the only significant space in view that wasn’t covered by buildings.
Gina had to step back and think before the sights absorbed her completely. This town might not rival the continent-spanning vastness of the City, but it looked big. It gave a feeling of . . . oldness. Properly old, in a way that neon lights and mirrored glass could never really achieve no matter how many years they lasted.
“Where the hell are we?” she asked herself.
“Home,” Mahmoud said from behind, startling her, but Gina quickly regained her composure when he joined her at the railing. He positively beamed with happiness. “My sea, my town. The best place in the world to come back to with a good catch! The Federation has paid our haul, we have money to spend and time to enjoy the land!” He thumped his fist against the wooden railing, a fierce grin on his lips. Then he fixed Gina with a look and added, “You will join us for the celebration tonight?” It was more a statement of fact than a question.
Gina shrugged. “Sure. Wouldn’t want to miss a party.”
There were a couple of things she ought to be doing, but she welcomed the chance to forget about everything for a while. Her life hadn’t been the greatest since she got involved with Bomber and his crew. Instead she closed her eyes and listened to the rustling of the waves. She hadn’t felt so relaxed in months.
At last she opened her eyes again and said, “What is this place? It’s not like any city I’ve ever seen.”
She’d been building up to that question ever since she woke up. She had to find out sooner or later, even if it meant looking at her place in the world again and trying to figure out what to do next. At the moment she was out of sight, adrift, without anyone trying to kill her or protect her. It made a nice change. Anything was better than–
“Odessa,” Mahmoud answered suddenly, “in the True Marxist State of Ukraine.” He didn’t seem to notice Gina stiffen where she stood, her knuckles white where they gripped the railing. He continued, “It is the place of my birth, and the birth of my father, and of his father, all the way back to the Cossacks of ancient times.”
She stammered, “I’m . . . in the Recommunista?”
Mahmoud flinched. “People here aren’t fond of that term. It’s hardly fair to equate us to–“
“The last thing I need right now is a political lecture!” she burst out. Suddenly it all made sense. The primitive conditions, the antiquated architecture, the complete absence of holographics. One of her worst nightmares had come true. “Mahmoud, I’m a Federation citizen! Do you have any idea what they do to people like me here? And the gangs . . .”
His dark eyes looked at her with such gravity that much of her anger and panic melted away. He said in a dead serious voice, “Things have become less drastic over the years. We have lived at peace with the Federation for some time now. Enough for them to make contracts with local fishermen like me, at least.”
“That’s . . .” She sighed. “Okay, Mahmoud. Thanks.”
Faint signs of a smile around the corners of his mouth. “You do not trust me.”
“It’s– it’s complicated.” She was at a loss about how to explain the threat of getting ‘disappeared’ into some Russian slave pit, getting tapped by the mafia, or — even worse — being extradited to the Federal Police. She was wanted for any number of felonies, depending on how much the Feds disliked her after raiding their Hong Kong base to free Bomber. Being a foreigner here certainly wouldn’t get her any favours from the local law.
Just about the only thing that could be said in the Federation’s favour was that it was slightly less of a stinking, corrupt hellhole than the glorious Marxist States.
Mahmoud turned around to look up at his city, its buildings ancient and majestic under the endless grey sky. “Your Federation may be a safer place,” he admitted, “but this is a free place, where men can still live without the bootprint of police and government all over them. You cannot have both.”
Gina nodded dubiously. She wasn’t sure she believed Mahmoud or agreed with him, but if a man like him was happy here then she supposed it couldn’t be all bad. Mahmoud gestured to the rickety jetty leading toward the shore and proffered his hand, an invitation to come along and explore.
“Alright,” she said, working up a smile despite herself, and took his arm. “Show me the good bits.”
Their tour of Odessa lasted until dusk fell. Gina and Mahmoud rode a rundown blue tram through the tight streets of the city centre, visiting pubs and palaces, huge streets and tiny back alleys. They all looked equally ancient and intriguing. The Vorontsov Palace — itself just a solid mass of neoclassical concrete, seemingly made up of nothing but columns and facades — offered an intense view of the harbour below, all the way out to the great green plain of the Black Sea.
She’d enjoyed the pubs too, and had downed four pints of pitch-black Russian ale by the time they made it back to the dockside. Her head was warm and buzzy but not quite drunk yet.
Mahmoud guided her towards a stretch of pebble beach in the lee of the pier. People were dancing around a large bonfire made of driftwood and old clothes. A few amateur musicians stood to one side playing their instruments, fiddles and guitars and an accordion. An untalented but enthusiastic singer belted out some bawdy Russian folk song, and earned a massive cheer for his effort.
Gina’s stomach rumbled when she spotted the island of collapsible tables shoved up against the wall of the pier, piled high with platters of food. The revellers didn’t seem to bother with the usual garden-party affair of paper plates and disposable cutlery, they just grabbed what they wanted and ate when they liked.
The crowd parted to let Maryam through. She stormed up to Mahmoud for a hug and a kiss, then crushed Gina to her chest. “There’s m’girl!” she said in her thick English accent. “Glad y’re ‘ere, it’ll be fun an’ dancin’ all even’n!”
Gina just smiled and nodded. They supposedly spoke the same language, but only in theory. Maryam’s strong hands dragged her along to the food, where Gina nibbled politely at a handful of things she didn’t recognise. She’d decided she wasn’t hungry.
“You look uncomfortable,” Mahmoud observed from beside her.
“I’ve never been to . . .” She was lost for words to describe the scene around her, so she spread her arms to try and encompass it all in a gesture. “Anything like this.”
He smiled as if he believed she was having him on, willing to indulge her little story. “Do you not have parties in the Federation?”
“Nothing that comes close. Stiff little affairs with white tablecloths and caterers. Bars and night clubs. I’ve even been to church once. This . . .” She shook her head.
“You must have been wealthy,” he said.
“My parents were. I was their little princess until I hit puberty, and they bought me anything I wanted. Sometimes I–” She suddenly realised what she was saying, how much she’d opened up to somebody she didn’t even know, and clamped a hand over her mouth. The alcohol buzz had loosened her up too much, and Mahmoud was a terrific listener. Which made him all the more dangerous.
Worst of all, he seemed to guess her exact thoughts and put a fatherly hand on her shoulder. “I have said before, anything you wish to share, you may do so of your own free will. As much or as little as you like. I ask no questions.”
“Thanks,” she said huskily, then cleared her throat and sent him a playful smile. “What about you, great fisherman and rescuer of strange women? What’s your story?”
He gave a slight snort. “Are you sure you have that long? I wouldn’t want to ruin your evening.” He stepped closer to the fire as if to warm himself, but then took off his thick jacket and threw it on the pile of coats and shoes for safekeeping. Gina followed his example and shrugged out of her borrowed jacket, exposing her borrowed t-shirt and borrowed jeans. The desperate need to go shopping overcame her, just to get into some of her own clothes again.
In the meantime she murmured, “I’d like to hear it if you want to share it. As much or as little as you like.”
She couldn’t suppress a grin at his sour expression. Using his own lines on him was clearly considered cheating, but Gina Hart wasn’t about to let anyone get away with that.
“All right, my girl, you win,” he sighed. “It’s a good night for a story. But perhaps not a story about me.” He clapped his hands three times, and the musicians stopped playing. He spoke to the crowd in Conglom. “I should like for you all to sit around the fire and listen to a tale of my ancestors, who are of the blood of the ancient Cossacks, and you will listen politely and enjoy it because I am the man who pays your wages. Understood?” He scanned the crowd for any signs of dissent, and found only a few glum — but silent — faces. Then he added with appropriate magnanimity, “However, I would not be a ship’s captain if I were without mercy. You may still drink.”
The crowd cheered and applauded, and they all settled on the sand around the fire to listen. Someone shoved a bottle of vodka into Gina’s hand as she made herself comfortable. She figured a sip or two wouldn’t do any harm. She could barely taste anything as she swallowed the oily liquid, but it burned sweetly all the way down her throat.
Mahmoud’s deep, rolling voice picked up over the fading murmur of the crowd, and Gina allowed herself to be swept up in his words as the story began.
“When I was just a boy,” Mahmoud boomed, “my father used to tell me tales of the great men in my family line. He told me of their heroism, their patriotism, their sense of duty or honour. They were flawed men, as all men have flaws, but my father told me to appreciate their memory for the good they did, not the bad. As we should appreciate all men for the good they do.
“My father told me a lot of shit while I was growing up,” he continued, and grinned as a laugh rippled through the crowd. “It was not his fault, truly. The stories were important to him, told to him by his father, who heard them from his father, and so on. Like family heirlooms passed down the generations. They gave him a link to the past, to a simpler life where our people were free as birds and did as they pleased wherever they pleased. He once asked me if I wanted him to write down his stories, but I said no. It was the telling that made them special. So now I give you a story of my own father, Djalil Omar Kerensky.
“You will not find this name in any history book or epic poem. My father was one of those men whose lives are never written down, but who make you know how much less the world would be if they had not existed. He too had brushes with heroism in the days when the Recommunist revolution came to the Ukraine. But let me begin at the beginning.”
“Djalil was born in the middle of a thunderstorm on the Black Sea, aboard a fishing boat called Son of the Wind. His father was the ship’s steersman, my grandfather. My grandmother, though big with child, had insisted on joining her husband for the journey so that they might be together when the child was born. Even the captain could not dissuade her. So Djalil Omar entered the world amidst crashing lightning and ten-metre waves, a healthy baby boy named in the tradition of my grandmother’s family.
“He grew up aboard Son of the Wind, learning the ways of the sea from all the people aboard. When Djalil was fifteen years old, the ship’s captain died of pneumonia. Leaving no sons of his own, he passed his ship to my grandfather. That was when things began to change.
“Word of the Recommunist movement reached Odessa when my father was eighteen. At first he heard stories of non-violent protests against the Russian government, against their inability to lift the poverty gripping the country, even though their politicians lived fat and easy off the proletariat’s taxes. However, the revolution was far away and my father could do little but wish them well.
“The marches slowly spread throughout Russia, ever larger and more numerous. Even people in independent Ukraine started to grumble. The Russian government attempted to stop the marches by deploying armed police, which would finally give Djalil the impulse he needed, when those same police gunned down a column of unarmed protesters in Saint Petersburg. To my father, whose ancestors lived through the October revolution, it was as if the Tsars had returned. He called the fishermen of Odessa and started to march. Many people did the same, rising up in the hundreds of thousands all across Russia and Ukraine and Belarus.
“He was soon recruited into one of the Russian Recommunist groups, spreading the word about the government’s crimes on both sides of the border. The police arrested him several times for speaking at marches, letting him rot for weeks in a Russian jail, but each time he was released without charge.
“They still held out hope for a political victory. Opposition parties everywhere were set to take both countries by storm. Then the joint governments of Russia and Ukraine suspended elections. Again my father was in the thick of it, speaking for the revolution, until even the army began to turn against the government. The Recommunists looked like the better option, promising leadership and prosperity through cooperation and hard work. The government tried harder and harder to suppress things, but more and more soldiers deserted as things grew more violent. In the end, Djalil knew they couldn’t wait any longer.
“With his help the Recommunists made a plan to infiltrate the Kremlin, aided by the army guards, aiming to depose the government without firing a shot.”
Mahmoud observed the crowd again, which was getting noisy and restless, and he sensed that their patience wouldn’t last much longer unless he got to the point. He nodded to himself.
“Djalil Omar was part of the group that went into the Kremlin. Army guards turned a blind eye to him, some even helped to surround and block the exits of the palace buildings. When Djalil gave the signal, they marched in on the government in session. The Prime Minister, President, everyone of importance was there and there was no escape.
“Due to his gift for speech, Djalil made a statement to the assembled officials, and placed the Deputy Prime Minister under citizen’s arrest. Then it fell to him and his compatriots to pick up the rule of two great nations. They set out to implement their reforms as they had promised, and my father was part of the initial debates, always pushing for the rights of the poor.
“However, homesickness took its toll, and he soon became frustrated with politics and his own lack of education compared to some of the other leaders. After only a few days my father left Moscow again to return here. To his ship and his family, to honest work and honest people, to the sea and the bounty it brings us. To a simpler, better life.”
“A toast!” someone shouted from the crowd. “To a simpler, better life!” The crowd boomed their approval and drank, then gave Mahmoud a roar of applause.
Gina found herself clapping as well, without even realising it. The story had drawn her in so much that she’d lost all track of time. It seemed like Mahmoud had inherited his family’s speaking skills — or maybe it was just because of all the vodka boiling in her stomach. Her head started to spin, and she steadied herself against the sand.
When the quiet returned, Mahmoud said, “My father never spoke about the revolution afterwards. This story was told to me by one of my uncles, and I am satisfied that it is true. That is why Djalil Omar Kerensky is worthy of a place among my honoured ancestors, and why he is my father.”
Mahmoud finished in a solemn tone and lowered his head. A respectful silence fell while Mahmoud raised his glass. They all drank quietly, even Gina — and then the toast was over. People sprang up to continue the party as lustily as ever. The musicians resumed playing and Mahmoud headed over to the tables to get something to eat.
Once, he glanced over to where she sat, smiling in his peculiar way. She caught the look, raised her bottle to him in salute and drank with the best of them.
The mother of all headaches pounded in Gina’s skull, like somebody hammering on a big drum inside her brain. She moaned, but even the act of moaning hurt. So did moving, breathing, thinking, and pretty much everything else under the sun. She tried to keep as much blanket as possible between her eyes and the painful daylight peeking through the porthole. It was white and bright and horrible and she wanted it to go away.
What on Earth was I drinking last night? she asked herself despite the pain, but the whole evening had become a blur. Definitely something strong. She’d drunk herself silly plenty of times in the past, but never in her life had she experienced a morning as bad as this.
She thought she heard someone speak outside her cabin, and grunted at them to shut up. She was in a foul mood. Didn’t want to do anything except lie around in perfect peace and quiet until the hangover went away. This demanded absolute silence from everyone else on board.
She tried to get back to sleep, but her brain wouldn’t shut off. The recent past kept preying on her mind. It felt like an eternity since she took the job that landed her in all this trouble. She’d been running for her life ever since, with Bomber as her constant friend and companion. For certain values of ‘friend’. He was the strong, silent, emotionally distant type, which fit neatly into his cold-blooded attitude, but every now and again he showed a glimmer of humanity that really caught her attention. She wondered where he could be now. Whether he was still alive. She missed him a lot . . .
She only hoped that Jock and Rat might be able to give her some answers, if she could get back in touch with them somehow. They were Bomber’s acquaintances, although Gina and Rat had come to be friends.
God, sighed Gina, it’d be good to see those faces again.
A spark of loneliness tugged at her heart. She was completely cut off from the rest of the world. She’d kept her eyes out during her tour of the city, and found there was no such thing as a public GlobeNet terminal in Odessa. Some linkups had to exist somewhere, but they might as well be a million miles away.
More people started speaking, and louder. Again she called out for them to shut up. Her brain throbbed as if trying to violently burst out of her skull. It reminded her of taking one Spice tab too many, in that your thoughts turned to mush and all you really wanted was to stop your senses from bombarding you with more information.
“What’s the point?” someone asked. The voice was clearly in the same room, but muffled and distorted as if coming through a bad speaker. Gina opened her eyes to look, but found no one.
“Who’s there?” she asked. No response. Her head felt increasingly light, as if it were detaching and floating away from her body. Moaning, she replaced her face on the pillow and tried again to block everything out, but even with her ears covered she could hear voices warbling at her. Go away! she shouted mentally.
“You’re wasting your time,” said someone unfamiliar. Suddenly the voices stopped.
For a long time she heard no sound at all, and she bit her lip, worrying. What was going on with her? Was she finally starting to break down?
Somewhere in this mad adventure, being in contact with Gabriel and his impossible telepathic abilities, Gina had started to develop weird talents of her own. They came and went, but at times she could read people’s minds without taking any Spice at all. Feel their thoughts, see through their eyes, even make them do things against their will. It was scary and wrong and shouldn’t be possible, but it was happening. A tiny part of her had held out hope that the fever might have killed it off. She should be so lucky.
She recalled the short time she’d spent on Gabriel’s airship. Sleeping with Gabriel probably hadn’t been her best idea ever, but it had seemed inevitable, like destiny. But she’d also kissed Bomber, and she’d be lying if she said there hadn’t been something behind it. The same Bomber she’d last glimpsed through the door of a falling lifeboat, lunging at Gabriel in a misguided attempt to protect her. Knowing full well Gabriel could kill him with a thought.
Gina sighed and kicked herself. No matter what, her mind always turned back to Bomber, as futile as that train of thought was. It wasn’t fair. She didn’t deserve to be alone again.
“There is no such person,” came that voice again, Dopplering strangely. “Besides, you’re hardly in any shape to–“
Suddenly it was cut off by another, deeper than the first, and her heart leapt into her throat when she recognised the rolling Mississippi accent. Her eyes saw two different rooms at the same time, her ship’s cabin superimposed over a small square room, pastel walls and spartan furniture, a blurry but familiar face staring at itself through a mirror with a thick coat of stubble growing on its chin.
It snapped, “Enough! I’m sick and tired of listenin’ to you. I don’t give a damn how much time it takes, how much money it’s gonna cost, or who’ll be standing in my way. I’m gonna find her.“
The voices continued but Gina couldn’t make anything out after that. Her trembling hands were covering her face, wet with tears, and her whole body shook against the pillows.
He was alive. Nothing could’ve made her happier, but . . . Things weren’t finished. She’d have to get involved again and let the storm swallow her up a second time. She’d have to find a way to stop Bomber and Gabriel from tearing each other apart, even while facing down the apocalyptic visions that had haunted her day and night. They’d drive her stark raving mad sooner or later. She still held out hope for a cure, though she didn’t even know where to begin.
Even thinking about the blasted city made her head hurt. She still didn’t know where it came from, or how Gabriel could’ve picked up that kind of trauma, or why he passed it to her. Maybe it was some memory from his time in post-apocalyptic New Orleans. Maybe a plan for something yet to come. She still didn’t know, thanks to Bomber screwing everything up.
And then there were the Hephaestus Project nanobots. Nobody had a clue how or where they fit into the Gabriel Lowell mystery. She still burned to know the answer.
It had to be done, she told herself. The peace she’d found in Odessa would only ever be the eye of the hurricane.
Gina swallowed the rest of her tears and swung her legs out of the hammock. Forcing some clarity into her muddled brain, she pulled on some clothes and went off in search of Mahmoud.
EMPATHY: Part 18
Gina clenched her jaw as she tumbled wildly down a bottomless black pit. Lightning flashed and boomed somewhere in the distance, some kind of discharge, a dreamworld representation of their battle of wills. Her arms were locked around Gabriel’s legs. He tried to kick her off, claw his way up out of the dream, but she held on. How much longer she could keep it up, she didn’t know. Every time he battered at the walls of their temporary prison it was like taking a baseball bat to her head, and there was no escape.
“Let go,” Gabriel called back. “He’s dangerous to you and to me, it’s got to be done!”
“I won’t let you kill him!” she roared with her mind as much as her mouth, and Gabriel faltered for a moment against the power of her resolve. He looked down at her face, his eyes wide. She screamed, “Do you understand?! I won’t let you, ever!“
Gabriel bared his teeth and stopped in mid-air. Gina suddenly felt a hard floor under her feet and rolled away from him, while Gabriel touched down on the invisible plane with cold precision. He towered over her, his expression both angry and confused.
“I don’t understand you, Gina,” he said. Gina felt frustration in him, urgency, annoyance at her for her stubbornness. There was no evil in his decision to kill Bomber, no more than a vague touch of jealousy — to Gabriel it was a purely practical choice.
He continued, “You were ready to help erase his every memory of you, and now here you are, trying so hard to stop me from simply removing him. It doesn’t make any sense.”
She climbed to her feet and returned his stare, her vision blurring in time with the pounding in her head. “You’d understand if you were a human fucking being,” she forced through her hoarse throat. “I don’t care if it’s convenient, or if you think it’s justified. You’re not killing him.”
“What difference would it make to you?”
“Do you even remember what you said, Gabriel?” she asked him. “Nobody was supposed to die on this ship. Nobody, not even Bomber.”
“Plans change, Gina. You have no idea how much bad news this guy really is.”
“That’s not the point!” she went on angrily. “He’s not just a body, none of them are! I’ve killed people, really killed them, blood and guts and . . .” She quickly shook off the nightmares building behind her eyes. Her knees started to buckle, but she made herself stand and whispered, “They’re people. They’re more than objects, more than just flesh and bone, you’re fucking living proof of that! And when you forget that, when you forget what makes them unique and irreplaceable, all you see is another bleeding body on the floor in front of you.”
“So it’s not him you care about, huh?” he replied in a clinical tone. “You just don’t want anyone getting hurt.”
“Stop it. It’s not gonna work, you can’t manipulate me, not this time.”
“I haven’t tried,” he pointed out.
“No. No, you haven’t.” She took a deep breath to steady herself and rally her thoughts. “So did you think there was something special between us? That I care about you just ’cause of a lay?”
“That’s not why I think it, I’d know if you were just trying to use me. Please, Gina, stop this now and we can still–“
“You’re not killing him,” she repeated thickly, her eyes focused on the spot where she thought he was standing. She could no longer see through the red haze. “You’ll have to go through me first.”
“Are you that hell-bent on committing suicide?” he asked. “I am trying to save your life! If you don’t end up killing yourself here, then he’ll do the job for you! I don’t care what you think, you’re important to me. Just stop this and we can forget the whole thing ever happened.”
She shifted her weight to keep from falling over, head spinning. There was music playing somewhere, the same annoying tune over and over and getting louder and louder every second, and no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t seem to make it go away. She choked out, “Make a decision, Gabriel.”
“I– I can’t–” He hesitated, bit his tongue. Gina felt the emotions boiling inside him. He was conflicted and unsure, more vulnerable she had ever seen him, yet at the same time she could feel the immense grip of his mental power starting to squeeze her from all sides. He still wanted her to surrender, didn’t know how far he’d go if she forced him . . .
“Just fucking do it,” she spat. The pressure around her built up, slowly crushing her insides together, making it difficult to breathe. It was like being caught in a hydraulic press. Something had to give way soon.
“Stop it!” he shouted, his heart racing close to panic. “I don’t want to do this!”
Gina bared her teeth into a tortured smile. Breathlessly she kept on pushing him, goading him. “Come on. Show me that cold-hearted killer that’s in there. Show me how you do it.”
The intense pressure on her chest increased, forcing a grunt of pain out of her lungs with the last of her air. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, could barely feel her bones starting to crack. But she could sense his eyes staring at her, wide and full of madness, like a cornered animal. For an endless moment she knew with absolute certainty that he was going to kill her. Her consciousness slowly went black.
All of a sudden the weight dropped away from her. She collapsed to the ground gasping for air, and Gabriel fell to his knees beside her, wanting to touch — to see if she was alright — but unable to lift an arm towards her.
“I knew it,” she said between gasps. “Knew you couldn’t.”
He hung his head. “I didn’t.” After a long pause, he tried to look up but couldn’t meet her eyes. He simply said, “Take your friend and go. Do whatever you need to do. Just come back.”
Haltingly, she pushed her arm across the floor to take his hand. “Okay.”
The dreamworld faded away in front of her eyes.
“Step away from him!” yelled a woman’s voice, at first unfamiliar, then slowly matched to memories sparking in Gina’s disoriented brain. The woman. Jezebel. She stood at the end of the hallway in a shooting stance, pistol held in front with both hands, aimed at Bomber — who stood over Gabriel’s prone body with finger on the trigger. For a moment Gina wondered where he’d gotten hold of a new gun, but it didn’t come as much of a surprise. It was an essential part of him. Wherever he went he would either already be carrying a firearm, or he would liberate one at the first opportunity.
“Put it down, Jez,” he replied coldly. “You shoot me, he’ll be dead before you’re finished pullin’ the trigger.”
Jezebel took a careful step forward, never lowering her eyes or her weapon. “It wasn’t a request, Simon. I got boosts a lot like yours, so don’t push your luck. Step away.”
“Don’t try to bluff me.”
A slow grin spread across her face at that. “I was a Marine field lieutenant, Simon. You really wanna find out what my implants are like?”
“Stop,” croaked Gina. Her mouth was dry as bone, and she worked to get some saliva into it. “Don’t.”
“Gina?” Bomber asked without turning his head. It was a hundred questions and meanings compressed into two syllables.
“I’m okay,” she coughed, “just put your guns down. It’s all right.”
He ignored her, white-knuckled fingers squeezing cold steel. “All right?” he barked. “‘All right’ ain’t the term I’d use.”
Gina never knew someone could feel so betrayed. It was a tight ball of darkness in his heart, layers of twisted emotion curled around a gallery of distorted faces, many of which she recognised. There was Colonel Obrin and Captain Caine, the old copter-pilot girlfriend. Jock and the Emperor. East, and an unfamiliar man in a Fed uniform. Gabriel and Jezebel featured prominently, with a whole furnace of rage dedicated solely to them. But even that paled before the coldness at his core, the resentment he felt for Gina.
She could feel his emotions as if they were her own. Jezebel’s as well, her thoughts as clear and determined as her expression, a stark contrast to Bomber’s calculating fury.
“I’m not putting anything down until he steps away,” Jezebel said icily.
Gabriel swallowed hard and shook his head, pushing himself an inch up off the floor, then grumbled over his shoulder, “Jez, do it.” Flame-coloured eyes turned to look at Gina, and he added, “We’ve . . . reached an agreement.”
“You– What did you do to her?” hissed Bomber. He grabbed Gabriel by his hair and shoved the gun up under his chin. He roared, “What did you do?!” When he got no answer, he pulled back the hammer of his pistol with a menacing little click. Jezebel’s fingers twitched in shock, and she just barely managed to stop herself from pulling the trigger. Bomber, however, was past caring about her, all his attention focused on Gabriel. “I’m done playin’ around with you, madboy. You’re gonna give me some answers. And don’t you even think of tryin’ anything on me. Bashing you with a pipe might not take, but I’m pretty sure this will.”
Struggling to her knees, Gina cried, “He didn’t do anything! They’re letting us go!”
“We are?” blurted Jezebel. The very idea seemed offensive to her. As little as she or anyone knew for sure about Bomber, the thought of letting him run free sent all kinds of alarm bells ringing in her head.
Bomber glanced from Gabriel to Jezebel and back, not sure what to think. His blood thrummed with adrenaline. Every heartbeat sent a supercharged burst of pain through his head. He snarled, “Bullshit. I’m not fallin’ for any more mind control crap! Now get back!” He kneed Gabriel in the stomach, knocking all the air out of his body. In the same instant his weapon arm flashed up to train on Jezebel.
For Jezebel there was only one possible reaction. She squeezed. A rip of automatic gunfire burst out from her pistol, bullets whizzing through the air where Bomber had been. He had planned for her move and was already out of the way, only mildly distracted by a single bullet grazing his arm. Before Jezebel even realised her error, Bomber had calmly put one round through her heart and another through her head. Calculated down to the millisecond and executed with absolute ruthlessness, like a chess match to the death.
Silence descended like a shroud. The moment hung in the air, shock too real for the human mind to accept. They might not all have known Jezebel very well, but she had been real. She was a person, something more than the sum of her physical parts. All the things that made her what she was poured out of her with the torrent of blood . . .
. . . And then reality flooded back in. Gina caught sight of Gabriel slowly rising to his feet. The expression on his face turned her blood to ice in her veins. She closed her eyes and willed Bomber to stop, to turn and run like hell. He hesitated only a heartbeat before moving, almost leaping the distance towards Gina.
Gabriel didn’t move to stop them, only looked. Watched Bomber grab her and drag her down into the hatch. His voice, however, reverberated in their heads like bouncing pebbles, undiminished by distance. “You were right, Simon,” he said in the tones of Death itself. “We are done playing.”
“This isn’t how it was supposed to happen,” said Gina, helping to rip open the lifeboat door. Gabriel landed heavily on the metal grating behind them, but Bomber slammed the door in a hurry and locked it shut. Gina strapped herself into one of the six empty seats, still in shock, not sure whether she was doing the right thing. “It’s wrong, it’s all wrong!”
“Too late for that now,” Bomber replied. He reached for the lifeboat release switch, and froze as he saw Gabriel’s face right outside the porthole. To his horror, the door lock — only operable from the inside — started to undo itself without being touched.
“I let your friend talk me out of killing you,” Gabriel murmured. “That was my mistake. It won’t happen again.”
Gina leaned forward, pleading, “Please!” She wasn’t quite sure what she was begging for, but it was the only thing she could think to say. Gabriel’s eyes flicked to her for an instant. That’s when Bomber saw his chance.
“Hold on!” he barked as the door flung open, and flipped the switch that sent the lifeboat tumbling into freefall, thousands of metres above the ocean. Before Gabriel could react, Bomber leaped out of the falling pod and tackled him. That was the last glimpse Gina caught of Bomber, strapped in and hurtling away from the airship at terrifying speed, the lifeboat door left flapping and banging on its hinges.
All the breath was ripped out of her lungs by the thin atmosphere at this height, but she screamed anyway, a soundless cry of pure anguish, fear, frustration and helplessness. The lifeboat tumbled wildly, bone-crushing G forces pressing down on Gina’s chest. Her lungs felt like they were going to burst. Then, somewhere in the deep recesses of the capsule, an oxygen sensor realised that there was nothing to breathe inside and automatically slapped an oxygen mask over Gina’s face.
She passed out just as the first molecules of breathable air enter her nostrils.
The shock of the lifeboat hitting the water jolted her halfway into consciousness. Freezing cold water running around her ankles did the rest. She squealed and gasped in surprise, trying to get her feet out of the murky Atlantic sludge while her clumsy hands fumbled with the seatbelt. She was already shivering from the cold. No lifejacket on, no waterproof clothes, nothing. And the lifeboat was sinking fast.
Finally she managed to get the seatbelt undone and sloshed through the mounting water to reach the main control panel. She found a large button labelled ‘INFLATE’ and bashed it with the heel of her hand. A large orange airbag deployed out the side near the hatch and inflated itself. Another, symmetrical airbag sputtered out the other side but refused to inflate. Gina cursed her luck.
Her boots filling with water, she tore at the equipment locker until it came open, then grabbed whatever looked handy. Flotation jacket, flare gun, water filter, a bag of protein bars and a battery-powered heat strap that would keep her torso from going hypothermic. She tried the emergency mobile phone but the provider had long gone out of business, leaving it without a signal. She chucked it over her shoulder and started up the ladder, leaving the first aid kit as too big and clumsy to carry up with her.
Every part of her dripped as she sat down. Her jeans were drenched through, as was her jacket, but she had no other clothes to wear. She looked around at the lightening sky and felt a sudden stab of homesickness. She was terrified and alone, and there was no one to help her. The world was empty.
The feeling rattled her to her core. Never in her life had she been more than a few metres away from another human being, probably more than willing to help if she needed anything, just based on her looks. Even in New Orleans she’d had Bomber, the driver, even the gunmen. Now she could look from horizon to horizon without seeing a solitary sign of life. Even the airship had disappeared, either long gone or rendered invisible against the clouds.
“Shit,” she said, looking at what her world had shrunk to. A half-sunken lifeboat, bobbing up and down in the ocean, still taking on water. The icy Atlantic wind whipped past her on all sides, and she started to shiver. Numb fingers undid her jacket, jeans, shirt and bra, all of them cold and limp with seawater. She drew the line at panties, though — soaked as they might be, she wasn’t about to sit completely naked on a life raft at sea for any amount of time.
Her teeth started to chatter while she fumbled with the heat strap. The old Velcro fastenings didn’t want to stick together very well anymore. Once secured she hit the button, and warm relief poured into her muscles, instant heat like an electric blanket all around her. But that wouldn’t protect her from the wind or the sea. Reading the instructions on the strap, she put her wet shirt back on over it, and watched it slowly start to dry with dull curiosity.
She didn’t know how long she sat there, dressed in nothing but a shirt and a pair of panties. The hours dragged on and on. She still had the mobile phone Rat had given her, tucked into a pocket of her jeans, but whenever she tried to make a call it informed her that her number had been blocked. Probably Gabriel’s doing.
Once she searched for the little spark of him inside her head, but she couldn’t find it anymore.
Night fell all too quickly. The sickly grey sky turned yellow, then indigo, then black. There were no stars. No light except a stubborn little LED inside the lifeboat that refused to die, sending its faint glow up through the murky waters to hold back the darkness. For her. In this tiny ocean world, it was her only friend.
She tried to rub the sitting cramps from her legs, but didn’t dare move too much for fear of sinking. The waves remained calm and flaccid, but she didn’t know what she’d do if the wind really picked up. She never considered drowning an option, but it was starting to look inevitable.
At some point she fell asleep. When or how she didn’t know, but it could only have been out of pure exhaustion. She awoke at sunup, just as tired as before, and watched the lighter shadow move up along the thick grey clouds. Sunrises and sets had always fascinated her. What wonders lay hidden behind the sky’s blanket. She’d never known what it really looked like until Bomber took her to Austin.
There were a lot of things she’d never have known if it weren’t for Bomber. What it felt like to kill someone. Or betray someone, even for their own good. Why girls would pretend to be boys, what happened to you in a Fed prison, what it was like to have someone force their way into your mind and take out everything they wanted to know. And being made to enjoy it.
She understood why Jezebel did what she did. Jez knew she was being manipulated, recognised it for what it was, and didn’t care. It didn’t matter to her, didn’t change the way she felt.
Gina had come to love Gabriel in her own way, despite knowing, feeling. Despite the way he frightened her. She could talk to him, though, maybe even bring him around to a less fucked-up way of thinking. He wasn’t beyond help. Maybe she was all he needed. That annoying spark of hope left her unable to dismiss her feelings for him.
And maybe he was just using her like he used everyone else, and it all fitted into his grand plan somehow. She still had no idea what any of it meant. The burnt city still flashed across her eyelids from time to time, although the artifact was receding. His little workplace in Radiation Alley, the nanobots, the AI doing his bidding. So many questions she never got to ask.
Another night crept up on her. The sea had been rowdy during the day, but it became far more agitated as the inky blackness swallowed up the world. Gina threw up the bits of protein she’d managed to choke down, and held on for dear life against the pitching and rolling of her little raft. Her arms and legs started to ache from the effort. Her jeans and jacket, which she’d used as a makeshift blanket, washed away as a wall of water rolled over her. She spat out salt water, praying for the raft to hold together, and it didn’t break apart just yet.
Brushing the drenched hair out of her eyes, something in the distance caught her eye. A light. Somewhere out there, a light was burning, and that meant a ship or some type of land. She held on as best she could and dug her flare gun out of the large pouch at the front of the heat strap. Holding it up at the sky, she pulled the trigger and quietly promised lots of things to any deity who cared to get involved.
A single red flare arced into the sky. It burned brightly for a few seconds, then fizzled out again on its way back down. Gina pulled the trigger again just to be safe. A second flare shot out. If they missed the first one, then this one at least should get through.
She clung to her raft and wished the tiny little lights to get closer as another wave broke over her.
The ship had to have seen her. The lights grew slowly in the distance, only a few miles away now, often hidden from sight for terrifying seconds by the rising and falling of the waves. Another wave battered against Gina’s body, trying to knock loose the cramped, frozen fingers which clung so desperately to the plastic airbag. Just a few minutes more, she told them. Just a few minutes and she’d be saved.
Then the skies opened up. A torrential downpour of freezing rain hid the lights from her eyes, and she scrambled desperately to get another flare up into the sky. It launched, but sputtered and fizzled out before it even reached the top of its arc. Gina shook the gun and tried to fire again. It did nothing.
She banged it against the metal shell of the lifeboat, trying to get it to do something, but in her desperation she took her eye off the sea. Suddenly she gasped and looked up. Out of nowhere there was the biggest wave she had ever seen in her life. It loomed over her, an even deeper darkness against the night sky, and swallowed her up with all its force. Her fingers slipped. She was floating, knocked out of her senses by the wave, and tried to call out for help.
The lights were so close now, she could almost reach out and touch them. Her hoarse throat soon stopped making any noise at all, and she couldn’t even lift her arm to wave as the lights passed her. What a shame to fail when her salvation was so close at hand . . . Something dragged her under, and she didn’t resist. She had no fight left in her.
Suddenly the water dropped away. It sloshed off her in drips and streams, and she landed on something hard, rough ropes and wood grating against her skin. Careful hands cut off the remains of her wet clothes and wrapped her up in a blanket. She knew what the worried eyes behind the hands were thinking. Had they arrived too late?
Somebody put a cup to her lips and poured hot coffee down her throat. Nothing had ever tasted so good. Her arms spasmed in pain as circulation returned, and everything went black.
It was light again when she opened her puffy eyes. She hung in a hammock aboard some kind of ship, wrapped up in a wet but warm blanket, and she saw her clothes hung over a small electric heater in the corner. A shirt and a pair of panties. This was all she owned in the entire world.
She struggled out of the hammock and landed heavily on the real wooden floor. She looked at it with a certain degree of suspicion. Nobody had used wood to build boats for decades. Passing on the still-dripping clothes, she staggered out of the room wearing only her blanket. She didn’t know why that seemed like a good idea.
The opposite door on the corridor was open, leading to some kind of galley. A woman wearing a red head cloth stood behind the kitchen counter, apparently cooking something. Gina stared at her. She was wide as a rugby player and her belly jiggled as she walked, but she seemed to be having fun. She sang a tune in some unfamiliar language.
She caught sight of Gina when she turned back to put something on the counter. She cried out in shock and dropped her wooden spoon, rushing over to try and push her back into bed, but Gina had no time for that. She wanted to know where she was. So she dodged the large woman and headed back up the corridor, up the stairs to the light.
A bright yellow sun greeted her, caressed her face and started to dry her still-wet hair. A cool breeze played aimlessly in every direction, and the waves were calm. Further on deck, three men in thick brown coats were hauling in a net of ultra-fine nanomesh by way of frayed hemp rope and a squeaky set of pulleys. The net was filled with evil-looking brown sludge, which they deposited in a tank at the front of the ship.
“The fuck is this?” Gina wondered aloud.
“Ah, you’re up,” said a deep voice from behind her. She turned to look, and her eyes found a brown-skinned man larger than the galley cook, as broad as he was tall, his massive belly restrained by a thick leather belt. He wore a waterproof blue anorak, a pair of brown jeans and a baseball cap, as well as a luxurious black beard of a size and softness that other men could only envy.
He continued, “We picked you up alone in the water last night. Hypothermic, going into shock, very bad. Maryam was worried you might not live to see the morning, she tended to you all night. And here you are!”
She nodded. Was that how it had gone? She thought so, but her memory seemed fuzzy, like looking at it through the wrong pair of spectacles. Her head ached as if a rock band had just moved in and were testing out the drums. She pulled the blanket tighter around her against the wind. “Who are you? Is this your ship?”
“This is indeed my boat. My name is Mahmoud, but you may call me Captain if you like. You have already met my wife Maryam.” He gestured down the steps at the large woman in her nightgown and red head cloth, who gave him the evil eye before trudging off to mind the pots. “Forgive her, she worries.”
Gina asked, “So where are we, Mahmoud? And what are you doing here?”
“Why, we are fishermen, miss,” he proclaimed enthusiastically, “and this around you is what we call ‘the sea.'”
She snorted with humour at Mahmoud’s delivery. “Fishermen. What the hell’s there left to fish out here?”
“The Red Tide,” he murmured. “You would call it ‘harmful algal blooms’. The Federation pays us to dredge the algae when it gets thick, keep it from poisoning the water too badly. Wouldn’t want one of the rich children to get sick swimming. Some days we even get some fish caught in the filter. Good eating!”
Strange coldness crept up Gina’s spine, and she started to shiver. Within moments the woman, Maryam, returned with big bowls of stew piled in her arms, one for every member of the crew — and a particularly full bowl for their unexpected guest. Strangely enough it didn’t smell of moulded protein, and a quick taste confirmed that fact. Real beef. She nearly threw up from the sheer richness of it, but she choked down bite after bite anyway, too good and far too expensive to waste.
“Thank you,” she told Maryam as the woman returned to her husband. Gina wasn’t sure Maryam understood until she broke into a big smile and started belting out words in a thick English accent.
“Thass aight, hen!” she blathered at a volume that seemed to embarrass Mahmoud. “Jus’ glad we got you all safe and dry and owt!” After a moment’s thought she added, “D’you know when you’ll be wantin’ off? We only put into port when we go ‘ome, really, but we c’n make an esseption!”
“No, that’s okay, thank you. I got nowhere else to go at the moment and I don’t want to hold you up any more than I already have.” She still clutched the blanket to her clammy skin with weak, trembling fingers. “I’m lost,” she said.
The big woman smiled again. “Don’t worry, dear. Life will always find you.”
Gina didn’t know if she wanted that to be true or not.
