Could she be developing osteophytes? Bone spurs were usually a symptom of osteoarthritis, and he had never heard of it occurring in symmetric formations, or with associated muscle changes. These were identical on both sides. He went deeper but found the inner musculature and rib structures to be normal.
With a flick of his fingers he restored the image to show the osteophytes, then sat back and stared.
He froze with the sudden realisation of what this meant. It was strange. He spent his life working with muscles and bones while every day he, like everyone else, was bombarded with information about the freaks and S.I.D infections. He glanced up at the poster on his wall with the smiling face of Mercedes Smith.
He had met her once, briefly, at a dinner given for medical practitioners in Manchester. His equipment was part-sponsored by Utopia Genetics.
Chloe was infected. He could feel his extremities going cold with fear—not for himself but for her. He had seen DI Mitchell’s latest kill and the shots of the freak he had destroyed. Ali thought about that happening to Chloe.
If he reported her now the Purity would pick her up and she would be disappeared, her family would be put into quarantine—and so would he. He would be signing her death warrant, but no, that had already been signed. She would die one way or another. He would be signing her execution order.
He got up and paced. If he didn’t report her the pain would get worse and she, being a good citizen, would go to the doctor and he would report her. Ali liked that option better. All he needed to do was destroy the evidence. He sat again quickly and brought up the details of the scan that he had sent.
Occasionally there were bad images and he would delete them; this was no different. He found the file and issued the delete command. The file was removed.
Ali sat back and felt better. Now it was nothing to do with him.
17
Chloe
The Metro train pulled up in St. George’s Square. Although her parents were less than half a mile away in the centre of the shopping district, Chloe wasn’t going to try to meet with them.
She pressed the button and the doors opened. There were still a few people on the tram heading further in but there was no point joining the queues this late in the evening. There’d be nothing left to buy.
Her destination was just across the way. The huge Victorian monolith that was the Central Reference Library. Her ears were still humming from what had happened in the scanning booth. She made a point of checking in all directions before crossing the tracks; she was not sure whether her hearing was actually working properly at all. First there had been the weird extended hearing in school and then—whatever that had been.
But that wasn’t why she was here.
The Central Ref was circular with mock Roman columns at the main entrance with a portico that covered the wide steps that led up to the revolving doors. She pushed through from the cold and damp into the cool and dry. There was something solid and reassuring about the place. The walls were so thick and everything about the construction was massive.
She walked through the riffy scanner. She needed some proper network-connected machines. The one at home had a highly restricted subset of BritNet but as a student she could do more research in here.
The problem was that she felt so helpless. Her best friend had disappeared and the police were clueless—they must be because they hadn’t found the other girls and they had been missing for weeks.
She headed upstairs along winding steps that were a yard at their widest and took two paces each. On the next floor she pushed through the fire doors into a corridor that ran around the outside of the building. The windows showed St George’s Square and its multiple tram lines.
There was a small area with wooden seating just outside the main terminal suite. She fetched a plastic cup of water from the machine and entered the quiet room.
The fifty seats each had their own terminal and screen. Almost all were empty apart from a few university students scattered about. Chloe had never intended to try for university; the debt level was not worth it. That was another reason to try for the Purity. She had never had any doubt she would be able to get in but now she was beginning to wonder whether it was her best choice.
While history was not a big subject in the curriculum, the most significant events of the previous century were covered. While the militaristic attitudes of the Germans were always decried there was special dispensation given to their desire for a pure bloodline. It was suggested that if they had succeeded in their aims the world would never have suffered from the S.I.D plague.
The purity of the human genome was what it was all about in the end. And S.I.D was the one thing that destroyed it. Nothing was more important, and Chloe could hardly disagree with that—but methods mattered.
She chose a seat out of sight from the other people in the room. Not because she was embarrassed—well, okay, perhaps it was because she was embarrassed. They were older than her and even if it was only by a couple of years she felt naive in their presence. Like a child.
The machine recognised her and the screen came alive. These were not the basic terminals like the ones at home or school; these had full graphics capabilities, another reason to use them.
She watched the graphical display that eventually settled into the search engine for BritNet.
‘List of missing schoolgirls in Manchester, unsolved.’ she typed.
There was a moment’s delay and then ‘Authorised. Chloe Dark. 7639572. Title?’
‘School Project.’ Well, it was almost the truth.
A window popped up with School Project in the title and listing names and dates starting with the most recent: Melinda Vogler and the date two days ago. There were eight names in the list. Chloe frowned. ‘Eight?’ she said under her breath.
At the bottom was another message: ‘Related searches: Missing schoolboys; Missing Men; Missing women.’
Chloe clicked the missing boys link and the window expanded to accommodate another twelve names. The dates of disappearance went back ten years and nothing recent. She knew that there may have been disappearances before that but after the systems collapsed it was a while before records became available again.
She had a sudden thought. ‘Refine search to abductions.’
The list reduced to a total of seven: four girls and three boys. Somehow that felt better, although it meant that thirteen other children had simply disappeared. Although perhaps people didn’t know they were abductions.
‘Graph factors.’
A new window popped up containing a graph showing the disappearances over time. There were a couple of older ones but five had occurred in the last year. She wondered why they were only looking for the recent girls, although those were all clustered in the last month, so perhaps it wasn’t strange.
Other text tabs were available graphing by gender, date of birth, and other strange things like physical height and weight.
The gender graph showed what she already knew, but the date of birth graph was interesting. Every one of them had been sixteen or seventeen years old when they disappeared. Just like her.
She sat back and stared at the screen. It seemed to mean something, but what? Someone was abducting children of a specific age? Why would they do that? The police must have noticed that too; there was no information that she could find that they did not have and they would have looked at it from every possible angle. Probably angles she could not imagine.
What did she possibly hope to have achieved? There was nothing she could do.
She stood up, picked up the cup of water, and left the room.
18
Mercedes
The nightclub smelled of sweat and the sharpness of spirit-based cocktails. If there was a melody to the throbbing music, Mercedes did not hear it, only the drums and the bass. Other people pressed against her. Out in the real world she would have been offended, but not here. This is why she was here. To feel.
She was in her club gear that expose
d most of her body. It wasn’t the most expensive, just something that anyone who could afford to club might wear. A black filigree masquerade mask hid her features while the reflective purple lipstick made her lips bigger than normal and distracted the eye. Her face was on almost every corporate image; it was likely someone would recognise her and masks were not uncommon.
The club was a rebellion, not just for her but everyone else here. The plague taught everyone to stay clear of everyone else. Simply touching someone could kill you in the most obscene and grotesque way. In this private club everyone touched. Minimum clothing, packed tight, anonymous.
Complete nudity was not permitted—that would just be gross—but people came very close without breaking the rule. The sexual thrill of being crammed against so many other semi-naked bodies was the other part of the appeal.
As she moved to the music she rubbed against the others, arms, legs, hips, backs, chests and breasts, and others touched her. It made her feel more alive than any other time. What she did in the real world was only to make space for this.
The rhythm of the track, if it was a distinct song, gave way to another with a slightly different pattern of beats. It was faster. The lights flashed faster. The air smelled of sweat and sex. There was no gap between bodies to see but she knew there would be many people in the crowd engaged in sexual acts. Standing because there was no room to lie down.
She had drunk a combination of caffeine and alcohol before coming onto the floor, where no drinks were allowed. She briefly wondered what it was like at the beginning of the night when the first people arrived. Did they huddle together in the middle of the dance floor while others arrived and added themselves to the outer edges? Or did they dance apart from one another and the incomers filled in the gaps?
A voice whispered. ‘Mercedes.’
She whipped her head round looking for the person who had spoken her name. In the flashing lights the faces of those around her were looking up, or down, or staring blankly ahead. No one was looking at her.
‘Mercedes.’
Xec. Her feeling of abandon dissipated like mist. She stopped moving. The dancing crowd was suddenly an irritant.
‘Wait,’ she said loudly. No one around her gave any indication they had heard, nor was it likely they had as the throbbing track grew in volume infinitesimally and she could feel the bass notes shaking her lungs.
She glanced around and located the entrance a hundred bodies away. She bounced to the music and pressed her way through the flailing limbs.
When she was one with the crowd she moved with it. They were like one raging animal. But now she was separate from it and every movement was an effort as she pushed for the exit. The bodies parted but it was like molasses and now she hated it as hands touched her, trying to hold her back. The animal was selfish and did not like to lose a part of itself to the outside world.
Bodies filled the short passage to the antechamber. The music volume dropped, leaving only a numb ringing in her ears, and she stumbled free. Someone caught her arm but Mercedes shook it free and glared at the woman who had tried to prevent her from falling. Mercedes straightened herself and stalked towards the changing rooms.
The riffy scanner identified her bag to the attendant who passed it over. Mercedes entered one of the booths and shut the door. The door itself was sufficient to maintain someone’s modesty while changing but the booths were open top and bottom. There was a stone basin in each with a stream of water running from the lip and down to the plughole.
She was soaked with sweat, mostly not her own, and her hair hung lank about her shoulders. She stripped off the clothes and splashed water from the basin over herself to rinse off the smells. A small tin cup was provided to allow her to drink. She grabbed one of the supplied towels to rub herself down. She detached the mask and put it next to her bag.
‘What’s the time?’ she said. Xec was under strict instructions not to interrupt her when she was clubbing. That meant this was important, but did not mean she had to be pleased about it.
‘A little before eight.’
She sighed. She knew she had not been at the club long. She remembered in the old days when clubs did not even get started until well past eleven. Things changed.
‘What is it?’
‘When will you have access to a screen?’
‘When I get back to the car.’ She poured water across her back. It ran off into the little ridges in the floor and drained away. There was a red mark on her foot. Someone had trodden on it. She could not remember when that had happened. It was always the same. The driving rhythms and volume drove the adrenaline to the point you didn’t feel anything bad. Just the heightened pleasures.
She used the provided towel to rub herself down. A couple of women went past outside. They were laughing. One of them glanced in at her. Mercedes met her eye for a fraction of a second. There was a change in the woman’s face: one that said that, even if she had not specifically recognised Mercedes, she knew she was someone famous. Mercedes turned to face away from the door.
‘You could just tell me,’ said Mercedes as she pulled on her panties. The dress slipped into place neatly and she zipped it up. The sensible shoes went on. She rinsed her club clothes in the basin, used the towel to dry them and put them in the air-tight bag she brought for the purpose. There were a couple of other sets of clubbing outfits as well. One set was never enough for a full night, or even a full evening.
Watch, expensive but not ostentatious, followed by wedding ring though she was not, and never had been, married. It was a defence. Simple necklace which matched the watch, and earrings that matched the necklace.
She gathered up her things, gave the booth a quick glance to ensure she had forgotten nothing, and headed out of the club.
The car drove up to the entrance as she exited. It was raining and cold but it was only a few steps across the cobbles of the back alley to the warmth of the interior.
She pulled the door shut behind her and dropped back into the luxurious leather of the vehicle.
‘Drink?’ asked Xec. Not that he could have got her one. Mercedes opened the cooler and pulled out a bottle of water. The car pulled away smoothly. Xec was driving since she did not trust any ordinary employee with her dirty little secret. Even the car was not registered to the company, or her, but one out on long term hire from a company in London who asked no questions as long as they got paid.
The screen flickered into life. It showed an ultrasound scan.
‘You found another one?’
‘I imagine you have not the slightest inkling of the files I have to look through to find these?’
‘I’m sure you don’t check every file yourself.’
‘That would be wasteful.’
‘I can’t see anything strange about this, are you sure it’s another?’
‘You think I would waste your time otherwise?’
‘Name?’
‘Chloe Dark,’ said Xec and the image zoomed in on the bony protrusions in her back.
‘What am I looking at?’ said Mercedes. Her medical training was far in her past and she hadn’t practised since the plague.
‘Ordinarily I would describe them as osteophytes.’
‘But?’
‘They are normally associated with arthritis and there is no evidence of that here, plus their development is perfectly symmetric.’
‘It could still be a standard S.I.D infection.’
‘Playing devil’s advocate, Mercedes?’ Xec’s tone was amused but with an underlying sense of annoyance. ‘She’s the right age and she’s in the right place, the development is atypical to an S.I.D infection. Besides,’ he said, ‘you haven’t checked the name?’
‘There were so many.’
‘Dark is not a common name.’
‘Parents?’
‘Amanda and Michael—Mike.’
Mercedes thought hard. It was possible. Theoretically they had been double blind tests—though even the parents had not known anything w
as happening. All the records had been lost and all they had left was half-remembered names. She had not been party to the details of the tests, just a very junior medically trained administrator.
‘Could be,’ she said. ‘No harm in picking her up.’
‘The Purity investigator will be arriving tomorrow.’
‘Better get it done tonight then. Where is she?’
‘And the therapist that did the scan may be a problem. He clearly realised there was an issue because he deleted the file after he had sent it. I have ordered a clean-up of the spillage.’
‘Did I need to know that?’
‘I needed approval from your executive level.’
‘But you’d already ordered it.’
Xec said nothing.
Mercedes sighed. ‘You did the right thing, of course.’ She settled back into the seat and took another sip of water.
‘Do you want to go back to the club?’
Do I? She wondered. ‘No, I’ve lost the mood.’ She paused and looked out at the streets crying in the rain. ‘Take me home. And no more calls tonight.’
‘As you wish.’
19
Ali Najjar
He leaned back in his padded chair and stared at the blank screen—it had long since switched to sleep mode. He was not happy.
He glanced at the picture he kept on his desk of his wife, son and daughter. The current image was three years old, taken shortly after Zalika had been born. She was a crazy three-year-old now, running around and getting herself into everything. She would become very serious about her toys, explaining to her father how they had a bad back and he had to fix them. Which he would, of course.
What would he do if Zalika contracted S.I.D? How would he feel? What would he want the person who discovered it to do?
The idea of some horror distorting his beautiful daughter’s features made his hands convulse into fists. It was not something he could imagine easily.
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