Sinister Sentiments (12 page)

“Oh, my darling!” he cried, his voice a strained, dry squawk. “However did you do it?”

Maybelline fell into his arms, kissing his half-hollow cheeks.

Henry beamed at her. “However did you break the curse?” he asked.

Maybelline stepped back, tears flowing from her cheeks once more. “I didn’t,” she replied.

Perhaps I should have known that the rescue had been too easy. Henry wasn’t even wearing shackles. It occurred to me rather slowly that Maybelline shouldn’t have needed my aid to pull an old man out of a tent full of books. I glanced back at the books, a recent memory stirring in my mind. A lot of writing stared back at me, its brown ink blotted on endless pages, as though it had been written with an unsteady hand.

The whistle of the wind caught my ears. Sandstorms didn’t usually just appear, they had to build up and travel over huge distances to be the size and bulk of the one before me. I had no idea where it had come from, only that the tornado-like blast was suddenly brewing at my feet. I stumbled away from the phenomenon, trying to shield my eyes from wayward grains as I watched a fierce, dark shape emerge at its centre. The first thing that became clear to me were two pinhole eyes boring down on my small frame.

“Who dares to free my slave?” an echoing voice boomed overhead.

“He did!” Maybelline pointed her bony, tanned hand at me, finger shaking as she squealed the damning words. “He freed him!”

“Oh, Maybelline,” Henry said sadly, shaking his withered head from side to side.

“It was written in the future!” Maybelline cried back over the din of the winds. “Henry, it had to be him! I couldn’t change things!”

“Ha!” cried the voice in the swirling sands. “You choose to believe in the tool of the creature that fooled you once already?” he asked with vengeful glee.

The Foresight was the genie’s tool. I remembered Maybelline saying as much. She had looked into my future and seen writing and books. She had seen me take Henry’s place in that tent.

“You were supposed to break the curse!” Henry chided her, clutching his chest with the strain of raising his voice. He was so terribly unhealthy. Had the genie done that to him too? Was I next for the same treatment?

“It was easier to just find someone to take your place,” Maybelline told him, not daring to glance in my direction.

“It was, wasn’t it?” The genie’s voice boomed with a chuckle. “And what a replacement! He even has experience of servitude already.”

I looked up into the deep, black eyes watching me from the shadow in the sandstorm. Slowly, my head began to shake in defiance, my fists clenching so hard that my nails broke the skin of my palms.
Servitude.
I would not accept another master, not again.

I ran. I broke into a wild sprint, heading for the Fleahopper with the full intention of leaving the Crenshaws behind. It was lucky that we had parked so close, for I was mounted on the contraption’s bough in seconds. I began to activate the locomotion, my feet flying wildly to rotate the pedals. The craft’s angel-wing sails expanded, suddenly catching the draft from the sandstorm and hefting me into air. One brief gasp of elation escaped my lips before I looked down at the ground once more.

Maybelline may have tricked me, but Henry was a good man. Whilst his wife was screaming at me to return the Fleahopper and take my place as the genie’s slave, the old withered man simply waved at me with a gesture of good luck. I paused in my pedalling, hovering in the updraft as guilt settled in my stomach for perhaps only a second or two.

That was as long as it took for the genie to strike.

The sandstorm caught the Fleahopper and upended it, tipping me down into the centre of the cycle of wind. I was caught up in the genie’s shadow-body as I watched the craft shatter into pieces above my head, Maybelline still screeching somewhere nearby. Then, with an almighty thump, I was thrown out of the storm. I landed head-first in a pile of musty books, and I knew from that moment that my goose was cooked at last. When I turned to try and flee the little tent, there was no exit by which to escape. The walls were solid as a pyramid’s tomb-stones from my side of the canvas.

The genie was gone. I was sure of it by the lack of whistling wind. The only sound outside the tent was that of Maybelline and Henry fruitlessly arguing over their hapless fate.

“How could you have been so foolish?” The old man chided his wife. “We can’t escape now, without the Fleahopper, we’ll die walking the desert!”

“No, no,” Maybelline assured him. “It’s all right, my love. I’ve seen it all. We make it back safely, I promise.”

I heard her footsteps thumping away in the sand, and a moment later she was back and panting. The familiar slide and click caught my ear as I sat and listened to the Foresight being extended. A thoughtful pause followed.

“No,” Maybelline stammered, “it’s not possible. I saw us, Henry, back at home in Kensington. But now I can’t find the vision. It’s gone.”

“Weren’t you listening to the genie, my dearest?” Henry asked her.

“What do you mean?” she replied. “Henry, why is the vision gone?”

“It appears that the future has changed,” he concluded.

They had two options. The first was to die, wandering to seek freedom in the desert. The second was to enter the tent. Henry had been there before, and he already knew there was no way out unless someone else opened the thing and pulled you from it. I didn’t bother trying to convince him to pull me free when he brought Maybelline inside. I had very little chance of surviving any longer in the desert than the old pair. I had never tried to escape from Kader’s little city for the same reason.

What we really need
, I thought with an empty chuckle,
is a curious thief like me who might fancy raiding the place
.
One who would have brought transport and supplies for his mischief-making.

I resigned myself to the thought that it wasn’t to be. Not many people out there were as greedy and curious as Maybelline and I. Henry settled, almost comfortably, back into his pile of books, lifting a few volumes and passing them into my hands. His crying wife sat between us, her face pressed against her palms.

“Come now, darling,” Henry said. “At least we’re together now.”

It sounded a tad empty, but Maybelline nodded at the notion.

I turned over the books in my hands. “What are these for?” I asked Henry. “What are we supposed to do for this genie creature?”

“I’m afraid he’s rather a vain old thing,” the withered man answered. “It’s up to us to transcribe his many stories of conquest over mortals. You’ll find the stories in the books and they need to be translated with the dictionaries in that corner. Paper and quills just ahead of you there.”

I retrieved the necessary tools from the places he had pointed out. At least I could console myself that it wasn’t back-breaking labour. I was free from the desert’s burning sun, and I even had people to talk to. If I was always destined to be a slave, then this was probably the best thing I could have hoped for. I began to look up a few words for the title of the first story, lifting a feathered quill and hovering it over the page.

“Wait,” I said with a pause, “where’s the ink?”

Henry passed a quill to Maybelline, exchanging a grave look with her. “It’s already loaded,” he replied weakly.

I didn’t see how it could be, but I put it to the page all the same. Red ink spurted at the nib from an unseen well, trickling and blotting the page before I could really get control of it to commence writing. It was dark, thick stuff, not at all like the inks that I had seen before.

“Where’s this stuff coming from?” I asked Henry.

Maybelline had a hand over her mouth as she watched me work.

“Just keep going,” the old man replied.

I completed the title, the first translation of the many I would do for the rest of my days.

The Bleeding of the Thief

I looked at the crimson trickle of liquid as it dried pale brown on the page. A tingle coursed through the veins in my arm, prickling with the beginnings of needle-sharp pain. Henry suddenly gave a wince as he too put pen to paper, and Maybelline held onto him, as though his very life was seeping out through the nib of the quill.

Delila
h’
s Birth

It’s funny what goes through your mind when you realise that you’re about to die. It was January when I lay on the battlefield, long after the fight had moved uphill. The cold nip of the winter wind blew at the gaping gash on the side of my head, freezing the blood even as it poured down my neck to pool at my shattered collarbone. The breeze whistled so loudly against my half-ripped ear that I had no chance of listening out for anyone coming to my aid. Not that I felt they would; winning the battle was far more important than losing a few good women along the way.

January was the month when I first met Malcolm, twenty-seven years prior to the date that I died. He was already military back then, working for the intelligence division in the Twenty-One-Hundred program. He smiled with bright white teeth and told me that the army was going to do great things at the turn of the twenty-second century. I applied for a job in his department, not because of his great dream, but because of his smile. It took him a few months to realise that I was interested in him, but during that time I bought into the TOH ideal. I too believed that the army was going to transform our struggling nation.

To build, one must first demolish.

It became their motto on New Year’s Day, when the city of London was erased from living history. It was the first of many great settlements to fall nationwide, its gilded skywalks and shining skyscrapers collapsed in a matter of hours by government war machines. Malcolm and I were supposed to be the intelligence department, but we were even more blind than the rest of the team that we worked for back then. Our sweat and toil and ingenuity had brought about the end of days.

Malcolm and I were in London the day it fell. I could remember us trying out the new double-sync cameras he’d bought for me; broadcasting our stupid young love to the world even as the supertanks were setting their course for the Thames’s south bank. Sometimes, Malcolm told me that he’d been planning to ask me to marry him that day in London. The breakout of war against the military machines had rather put a spanner in those works. Even after, when the System had taken over as the new form of supreme government, we never seemed to manage to get around to the white dress and the big wide aisle. It just wasn’t important anymore.

I wish we had now, as I lie on the cold ground watching the blackness creep into the corners of my vision. If we’d managed to get around to getting married, then my empty grave would read ‘Beloved Wife’ on the tombstone. Now what will it say? ‘Here lies Delilah Stewart, who faced the System and lost’. It is an uninspiring thought to know that a simple flamecannon mowed me down in the end. Its flames burned a hole straight through the left side of me, nicking the edges of vital organs and ripping away most of that side of my face. It wasn’t instant, it wasn’t elegant, and it wasn’t as though I couldn’t have avoided it, if I hadn’t been so stupid as to look around for Malcolm when I should have been gunning the enemy down.

I don’t know where he is, but all I can hope is that he’s safe. Malcolm was always the better soldier of the two of us; the taste for war is in his blood. I expect he’s back at the base already, probably wondering what happened to me and when I’m going to call in my report. When no report comes, I can’t imagine what he’ll do. I can’t bear my last thoughts to be of guilt over Malcolm’s grief.

All I can do is think of January as the cold air whips against my burns, and of the year we spent together before the wartime came. We’ve spent twenty-six years in battle together since then, but no moment has ever come close to being so sweet as the one before London was no more. That was the day when Malcolm really loved me; that was the day when nothing in the world mattered more than our being together. That was…

*

I should have died then, with those thoughts. Everything went black, the way the movies tell you that it’s supposed to, but in some distant, echoing corner of my mind, I could hear the buzzing coming in the distance. It was like a fly in my ear, though I couldn’t move to swat it, and it stayed with me for a long time, lingering like a dream whilst the rest of me seemed to cease to exist. Perhaps I was dead for a while, somewhere amid the droning sound, but it can’t have been for long.

I wake in a room lit with low, green lights. Green is not as vibrant a filter as you might think when you shine a light-bulb through it; all it seems to do is intensify the shadows of everything that you can see. Like the shadows behind the liquid that’s pumping through the tubes around me. Dark liquid of indeterminate colour that seems to be flowing into a drip at my side. I shiver at the thought of my side, the pain-memory of the flamecannon sending me reeling with aftershock. I shouldn’t have a side for the liquid to be pumped into.

I look down to my left, my neck pulling with a strange, new tightness as I move. A metal rig holds my naked frame in place amid the tubes, lying at a forty-five degree angle on a hard, flat surface. Some of the flesh on my stomach remains, its caramel hue looking all the darker in the green light. The skin ends about three inches from where it ought to, to be replaced by a thin, flexible metal. It moves like chainmail when I try to wriggle, but it doesn’t hurt where the needle with the liquid drip is jabbed into it. It completes my shape, a mirror-image of my other side, as though someone took the time to sculpt it to my body with precision.

Someone has fixed me.

I suppose this must be a hospital of some sort, though it feels like a cross between a butcher’s and a mortuary. I am hung like a shank of flesh for safekeeping; there is even a label printed over my bare stomach. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust to the grim lighting, before I can strain them to decipher the upside-down stamp. It proclaims me
UNSUITABLE
. Well, that’s just charming. Unsuitable for what, I’m left to wonder.

The military protocol in a prisoner of war situation is to demand an audience with one’s captors. I scream until my face hurts, hollering my demands until the tiled room is filled with echoes of my own desperate cries. One side of my face doesn’t move the same way as the other anymore, and it’s now that I remember how the flames tore away at the left of me. I wish that I could free my hands to touch my cheek, to see if the chainmail skin has been grafted there too, but the metal bonds on my wrists are far too tight to allow it.

The eerie solitude gives me time to assess the rest of my body. The collarbone that was broken is now painless and flexible, feeling stronger and heavier than the one on my right side. My stomach doesn’t ache with hunger, which probably has something to do with the tube in my side, and the precision with which I can hear that tube’s liquid bubbling suggests that my ripped-off ear has been successfully reattached. Good news so far, but the label on my stomach is still a worry. If I am so unsuitable, then why has someone gone to all this trouble to save my life?

A clattering noise sounds overhead, and I crane my neck as far as it will go to try and follow it. The bare white ceiling tells me that the sound is coming from somewhere close, but above it, outside the room. I listen, wondering whether I should cry out once more, but a sudden sound stops me just as I open my mouth. Hissing, like that of a snake, circulates my little chamber, and moments later I see the reason why. A faint purple gas is permeating the room between the cracks in the tiles. It would be futile to hold my breath in the sealed room, so I try to keep my breathing level as the fear makes my heart thump harder in my chest.

I was right. They didn’t want to keep me alive after all. They have let me wake in the room in which I’ll die. This isn’t a butcher’s. It’s an abattoir.

*

Not dead, again, which is less of a relief than it was the first time. The purple gas must have knocked me out for quite some time, for all the furniture in the dim greenish cell has been rearranged. There’s a chair this time, for starters. I’m sitting upright in the cup-shaped structure, which is made of hard, shiny metal, and my wrists are clamped to its curving arms. My long, black hair is loose and it hangs limply at either side of my face. It’s greasy, like it hasn’t been washed for a long time, and I’m sure that it’s a little longer than it was before. A woman notices these things, even in such bizarre circumstances.

There are three things of interest to occupy my solitary mind. The first is that the tube in my side is gone, and my body is now covered by a thin, white smock. The second is that my room has a door, which I must have been facing away from before, and the door has a slide-away slot where someone outside could peer in. Then, there is perhaps the most interesting new fact of the three. Next to my chair is another chair. An empty chair, suggesting that someone may arrive to occupy it soon.

A woman could go mad in a place like this. It must be hours before my first visitor comes, yet I do not feel hungry, or tired, or indeed anything at all. All that stirs within me is the sting of vengeful hatred when the man in the brown suit opens my door. On the pocket above his heart, there is a logo of a bronze arrow splitting a lightning bolt in half. I know the symbol well from my days at the TOH Project. When I worked there, I used to think that the arrow was a symbol of progress: the industrial fortitude of man overcoming nature’s dangers: famines, droughts and diseases.

Now, I know the truth. The downward arrow is the unseen strike of the System, sent to destroy the spark of life that is humanity. Its fearful weight is keeping the whole nation under its control. But not me. I am one of the rebels, and I’m sure that the man in the suit knows it.

He approaches the chair by my side, settling down with crossed legs, as though my bitter cell is some kind of fine drawing room. He wears polished spectacles with a light grey tint, which obscure any chance I might have had to read the expression in his eyes. His long, tanned fingers are plaited together, resting on one knee as he watches me in silent contemplation. I think of the soldier’s protocol again, clamping my lips tight-shut to show him that I won’t give away my fellow rebels’ secrets. The suited man doesn’t seem to notice my behaviour.

“Mr Stacey,” he says, suddenly snapping his fingers.

The man whom he beckons is younger and shorter than the brown-suited one, and he wears a white coat that matches his pale, nervous face.

“Yes Doctor Reuben, Sir?” Stacey asks in a pitchy mumble.

“How many courses has this subject had?”

Stacey doesn’t seem to want to enter my room. He’s hovering at the door, crouching a little to look into my face. I must be a horrible sight, because when I let my deadpan stare meet his eyes, the young man retreats a few paces. He stands in the shadow of the corridor ahead of me, pulling at his collar.

“Um… Eight, Doctor Reuben, Sir,” he stammers. “Eight courses of treatment.”

The one called Reuben waves his hand across my eyes, so I play along and stare vacantly past his sleeve. When he puts his square-jawed face right into my view, it’s hard not to focus on him directly. I find myself looking at my own reflection in his dark glasses. From such close proximity, I can only see my narrow, dark eyes looking straight back, but the skin around them seems ashen and worn down. It’s almost silver in the dark shine of his lenses. Reuben abandons his brief examination, rising and dusting off his knees.

“Well, I need this cell back,” he decides. “The Reavers are bringing in new meat today. We’ll give her one more go with a conscious treatment, then chuck her out with the rejected stock if there’s no joy.”

I think of the stamp on my stomach again. Whatever they’ve been trying to do to me whilst I was out cold, it hasn’t worked in their favour. I don’t like the sound of being chucked out much; it doesn’t strike me as a process I’m expected to be alive for. The two men exit my cell, leaving the door wide open, but I can hear them clattering and bickering somewhere nearby. I have to resist pushing at the bands on my wrists, with the cell door open before me. So far, this Reuben character is treating me like I’m braindead. It would be a shame for him to find out that I’m not, until the moment is to my advantage.

“Stop being such an idiot, Stacey,” Reuben suddenly shouts. “Get in there and hook her up to the machine.”

The sound of squeaky wheels is followed by begrudging footsteps as Stacey re-enters the room. He is pushing a unit with a large, black box that looks like it came from a hospital, and atop that box there is a screen which is currently displaying some jumpy static. With quivering hands, Stacey sets the screen before my eyes and fishes a series of cables out from the back of the black box. I watch him in my peripheral vision as he clips some of the cables to my fingers and toes. When he has placed a tight, wired-up band around my forehead, he retreats sharply and breathes a sigh of relief.

It interests me that he thinks I’m so dangerous. Surely, I’m just a woman in a chair. What does he have to be afraid of?

“Thank you, Stacey,” Reuben says coolly. “Now, wait at the door in case you’re needed.”

I watch Reuben roll up the sleeves of his brown suit. He sits down in the chair beside me once more, reaching out to tap the fuzzy screen. The device flickers sharply to life, and a huge button shimmers with the words
COMMENCE REBIRTH PROCESS
. Reuben taps it, and at once I feel a faint tingle in my toes and fingertips under the clips. It is a subtle vibration, but one that tells me that the screen and I are now connected. I watch the numbers counting down before me, waiting for the process to begin.