Melancholy: Book Two of The Cure (Omnibus Edition)

by Charlotte McConaghy

  The three musketeers and I all raise our hands. On the stage Luke, Shadow and Raven raise their hands. Dodge does too and, surprisingly, my red-haired failed conquest, Eric. Luke’s parents raise their hands, much to the disgust of several people around them. All up, it’s only about thirty people out of more than two-hundred.

  I can’t believe Ranya hasn’t raised her hand and, by the look of it, neither can Luke. It occurs to me that this could be a clue, and I start looking around the room at all the people who vote to bury the body. I commit their faces to memory; they’ve just become suspects. But the problem remains: it’s still basically everybody.

  *

  I go with Luke to the lab to take a final look at Batch before he’s put in the ground. Meredith is toiling away, so focused on whatever she’s doing that she doesn’t even look up at our arrival.

  “Can you take one of your mental picture thingies for me?” Luke sighs.

  “Yeah, but I can only see so much, and I can’t remember things I don’t know.”

  He sighs again.

  “Those are some awfully big sighs,” I murmur, rubbing his back without thinking. It comes to me belatedly that this is probably too intimate a gesture, and I remove my hand quickly. Do friends rub each other’s backs?

  “It’s idiocy,” Luke says.

  “It’s crowd mentality, superstition and grief.”

  “Don’t they want to know the truth?” he snaps, frustrated.

  I shrug. “Don’t take it on. We got what we could from the body and now we have to look elsewhere.”

  Luke looks at my face. “I get more emotional and you get more rational.”

  “It’s a strange world,” I agree.

  “Meredith, you got any other little gems of information you want to share with us before it’s too late?” Luke asks the scientist.

  She looks up, distracted by her work. “I could have gone over him for DNA evidence if I’d had another day or two. Skin particles under the fingernails or in the wounds, hair follicles, blood or sperm residue …”

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me that yesterday?”

  “You didn’t ask yesterday.”

  He looks about ready to hit her. “Is there anything you could do before the morning?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll see to it that you’re punished,” he threatens.

  I take his wrist and pull him away. “Let’s go punch a bag for a few hours,” I suggest.

  “Josi – ”

  “This isn’t a detention center,” I tell him. “We don’t ‘punish’ people for enacting their own human rights.”

  He tugs his wrist out of my hand and stalks away furiously. I watch him go, thinking him a very different man to the one I lived with.

  After a few moments I turn back to Meredith. “You’ve done some really bad stuff,” I say softly. “If it weighs on your conscience at all, feel free to lighten it a tad by helping us out. We’d appreciate it.”

  “I’m already helping you,” she points out calmly. “I’m working on the Zetemaphine blocker to keep that brute alive. I can’t do two things at once.”

  “Well could you please pause that job for the night and try to find us any clue at all to who killed this man?”

  She considers me. Something seems to gentle in her eyes slightly and she nods.

  “Thank you.”

  *

  Luke

  Blood fills my fingernails and pours from my gums, my ears, my nose, my eyes. My hands are around a neck, squeezing squeezing squeezing. All of my strength goes into stealing the breath of the body before me. My hands slip, though; there is too much blood. My feet slip next, and I land heavily on my hip, splashing the thick crimson liquid all over my face –

  I jerk awake, sharp pain slicing through my side.

  It takes me long seconds to orient myself. My bedroom in The Inferno. Dry, bloodless, just like my fingernails and gums are. I have fallen out of bed and landed on my hip.

  Alone, I peer through the dark to the window, beyond which I can see a glowing silver moon. It is almost full.

  Or, no. It was full a couple of nights ago. When Batch was murdered.

  My skin crawls and even though I know there is no blood, I can taste it in my mouth.

  Something under my bed catches my eye, a glint of metal, and I look more closely. Reaching curiously, I feel the cool sharpness of a blade. My blade, I see, as I pull it out.

  Except that the knife is covered in dried blood. And I don’t remember putting it under my bed.

  *

  February 16th, 2066

  Josephine

  Batch is buried at dawn as the sun rises over The Inferno. We are on the very north side of the compound, and the funeral might be beautiful if not for the dreadful sounds of the Furies beyond the wall, still trying to get in.

  Lace’s daughter cries during the whole service, though Lace remains stony-faced. Eric, who it turns out was Batch’s best friend, says a few words, eyes streaming with tears.

  I spend the funeral watching the faces of the people around me, trying to work it out. Various forms of grief are patent here on this clear morning. Some look uncomfortable, some look weary. Most look sad, a few angry.

  It is a puzzle indeed, and Luke isn’t the only one who wants to put the pieces together.

  *

  Luke

  “Oh god.”

  “What’s wrong?” Dad plonks himself down on the couch next to me.

  “I think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.” I hand him the tablet and let him scan the instruction book I’ve been perusing. It’s the only file I kept from the tablet I stole from John Smith and then gave to Josi.

  It’s the end of a very long day. I’ve been speaking to just about everyone I can, getting statements about their whereabouts during the hours unaccounted for, during which Batch was murdered. There’s no way to prove any of it, of course, so it’s all a bit pointless. But it still has to be done. I haven’t told anyone about the knife under my bed, which was undoubtedly the weapon used to cut off Batch’s head, because frankly it looks bad enough to implicate me. I need to work out who put it there before I tell anyone.

  Dad’s thick eyebrows furrow as he reads, scrolling through the pages. “Aren’t you supposed to be working on the case? This is a big project.”

  “I’m working the case,” I promise him, then gesture to the instructions. “But this is important. I’ll work on it through the night if I need to, just do little bits at a time.”

  Eventually Dad looks up. “You want some help with it?”

  I breathe out in relief. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  *

  Dad and I head to the toolshed and have a look around. There’s always someone here, no matter the time of day – a guy called Blue is currently repairing one of the dining tables from the Den. He hates me for some reason I don’t know, so gives me a few hard looks before pushing off and leaving us to potter.

  It’s a blessing that this toolshed is impeccably well stocked. Living in a completely self-sufficient community means people have been building and maintaining everything for the last twenty years, so they’ve stolen a whole heap of building material and tools from the city. I find two big pieces of wood that have obviously come from one of the trees beyond the wall. Dad grabs a few tools and starts piling them together on the bench. We go back to the instructions to make sure we have most of the stuff we need, and have to put our heads together to come up with ways to improvise the rest.

  “We don’t have delicate enough tools for the bridge,” I point out, scratching my cheek.

  “We can hand-carve that bit,” Dad says.

  “Maybe you can, but I can’t.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  I start measuring the wood and making the pencil markings where it’ll need to be cut. “You and Mom going alright?”

  Dad’s gathering a straightedge, a plane and a jig in order to start the fingerbo
ard. He starts looking around for the right bit of wood. “Sure.”

  “Do you … wish you were still at home?”

  “No, son,” he says. “It’s just an adjustment. Your mom and I have lived in that house for thirty years. And all our things …”

  Christ. The house will be reclaimed by the bank and all their things will be discarded. Including all my stuff from childhood, everything they own, and everything that once belonged to Dave.

  My hands stop and I am utterly horrified. “I didn’t think – ”

  “It’s alright,” he tells me gently. “They’re just things. It matters, to be here with you.”

  “But Dave – ”

  “Wouldn’t have cared about all that stuff.”

  “But we do. We care about it.” There’s a wooziness in my heart. I can’t believe I brought them here without thinking about what they’d be losing.

  “No, Luke,” Dad says firmly. “Possessions don’t connect us with Dave. Love does. Longing does.”

  I swallow, barely holding it together. I nod. “Sorry, Dad. For leaving you guys when it happened. I shouldn’t have … I was a coward.”

  “I’m sorry too.”

  “What are you sorry about?”

  “For not being me anymore.”

  I look up, struck by the words. He’s concentrating on his measuring, tongue poking out the side of his moustached mouth. “You are you.”

  “No, mate,” Dad murmurs. “I don’t think I am.”

  We work quietly for the rest of the afternoon because I don’t know what to say to such words. The longing he spoke of is palpable in the air between us – longing for his dead son and longing for the man he used to be. But what I’m not sure he realizes is that the longing itself is new for him, since the cure. And to me, the longing seems like life itself.

  *

  February 20th, 2066

  Josephine

  Hal’s been ordered to teach someone to keep the train running. There’s always meant to be a couple of people at the one time who know how to maintain it, but at the moment there’s just him. He asked a bunch of people who said no, and since there were no volunteers, I decided to put myself forward. Truth is, the books Luke got me are great, but they’re all fiction, and my brain feels like it’s shriveling to the size of a pea without anything new to learn. It’s an awful feeling, worse than physical starvation. It makes me dream of being trapped, the cage around me shrinking so that I must shrink with it or be crushed.

  I don’t, however, look forward to spending extra time with Hal, even though he’s become one of my best friends. Pace has spent the last several nights crying. She would gut me if I admitted to having heard her, and she’d hate for me to act any differently around Hal, but still. I feel awkward being in the middle of whatever it is.

  I follow him down into the train tunnel. It’s instantly cooler than the hot air above. “This train was built in the 2020s so she’s getting on a bit,” Hal tells me fondly. “We took control of her back when we started The Inferno – it’s easily the biggest victory we’ve ever had.”

  “Where is it now?” I ask, peering into the pitch black.

  “On a circuit. Currently she’ll be about sixty-seven miles away. Today’s operational speed is two-hundred-and-ninety-eight miles per hour, which means she’ll arrive in approximately thirteen and a half minutes.”

  “Oh. Approximately.”

  “She runs on a magnetic levitation line, which was first used in Shanghai in 2004, at lower speeds than this, of course. The technology’s pretty geriatric at this point, but she still runs beautifully.”

  “How does it know where to stop?”

  “She doesn’t stop – she’s in perpetual motion and has been since the day she was built. The algorithm makes her run at different speeds each day, so her exact location can’t be predicted by the Bloods.”

  “But they could just put constant surveillance on the city stations.”

  “She runs on a line that hasn’t been operational in the city for over thirty years. The Bloods didn’t have a clue how we were moving in and out of the city without detection. Until they did know. But Luke destroyed their intel before he came out here the first time.”

  “Yeah but if Jean whatshername knew the information, then she still knows it, regardless of what’s on her computer.” I know her name. I know it very well: Jean Gueye. She’s a woman I think about a lot. Because she’s the person who ordered my death.

  “Yeah,” Hal agrees.

  “So … what?”

  “So we have to be really careful.”

  “But what if the Bloods just jumped on the train? It would lead them straight to us.”

  “They’re not allowed to leave the walls.”

  “One of them did.” The one I shot.

  Hal shrugs. “How would they find us? The line is so long and covers such an expansive area that they’d never know where to get off.”

  I shake my head. Someone will figure it out, one day. Or they’ll set up a permanent watch of the stations and wait for us to come to them. Especially after our latest attack on the Collingsworth lab. They’re going to want Meredith back. And then we’re screwed.

  “She’s the only transportation we have,” he says. “And we’re lucky to have her. We can’t move above ground because of the Furies and they don’t have access to the tunnels. The risk of the train is one of the reasons we don’t make too many attacks and turn ourselves into too much of a priority target – we can’t afford to lose her.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I sigh. “It just seems, like, outrageously risky.”

  “I thought you liked taking risks.” He smiles.

  “What gave you that impression?”

  Hal shrugs, blushing a little. “Your boyfriend was a Blood.”

  I freeze.

  “He used to talk about you all the time, Josephine.”

  “Don’t call me Josephine. Raven and Quinn still have no idea who I am.”

  He spreads his hands quickly. “Okay. Sorry.”

  “Mouthing off like that can get people hurt.”

  Hal stares at me, looking mortified. “Is this … Are you angry because … Did Pace say something … ?”

  “Not a word.”

  “I hardly remember what happened!” he tries helplessly. “I was so drunk – ”

  “Oh please. Just grow a pair and talk to her, Hal.”

  The rest of the lesson is awkward after that. When we’re done I hesitate, asking, “Do I have to start referring to the train as a female now?”

  It breaks the tension and Hal grins. “It’s a requirement.”

  I head gratefully back up into the settlement for my next lot of training.

  Luke is waiting for me on the mats. There are other people sparring, but he concentrates on me, pushing me harder than anyone else and not giving me any breaks. He’s in a foul mood, snapping at me constantly and pacing around in annoyance.

  I decide to keep my mouth shut, not wanting to get into a shouting match with him in front of the other trainees. They all thought I was lucky to have personal training with him, but after his last roar of disgust at my inept kicking, I think they have now reconsidered.

  When we’re finished I storm out. He jogs after me. “What are you doing?” I hiss. “Don’t follow me.”

  “Why?”

  “That was humiliating!”

  “Fine.” He changes direction.

  After dinner I find a note on my bed. It is written on the torn-out page of a book, as paper is scarce. It’s sacrilegious to ruin a book, in my opinion, and I can’t believe he’s done it.

  I can’t go to your house, but we need to talk. Meet me at our spot.

  Our spot? I definitely was not under the impression that we have a spot.

  When I find him in the dark I can’t help but laugh. “You’ve got a good sense of humor, Luke Townsend. I’ll give you that much.”

  His smile flashes in the moonlight. We’re at the edge of the settlement under
the only copse of trees, in the spot where we had our ‘break-up’ and said we hated each other.

  “I’m nothing if not sentimental,” he agrees.

  “Why aren’t you allowed to come to my house?”

  “I’m allowed to, I just don’t think I should at night unless we want Raven and Quinn to think there’s something going on between us.”

  “What’s up?” I sigh.

  “Sorry about today.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Although I’m not really that sorry.”

  “Good apology.”

  “You need serious training,” he insists. “I can’t be going easy on you, and I’m surprised you would want me to.”

  “I don’t want you to!”

  “Okay,” he laughs. “So we’re agreed.” Luke hesitates. “I’m still sorry. I wasn’t myself.”

  “You were angry.”

  “I’m always angry.” He meets my eyes. “It’s getting worse.”

  “Luke,” I murmur. “Don’t … do anything rash. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “It’s dangerous, me being like this.”

  “Your change won’t happen until the blood moon. Meredith has months to work it out.”

  “You were normal every other day of the year,” he points out. “But I feel … I’m not normal.”

  Ben said he had no idea how the virus would react in an adult subject. Which means that Luke could have completely different symptoms to me, having been injected as an adult instead of a child. Looking at him now, he looks a lot like he did the night he injected himself. Aggressive, restless … His mood swings have been pretty wild over the last few days.

  “You have all of your cognitive functions,” I insist. “You’re aware of your actions. You’re still you.”

  “For how long? I have to tell them.”

  “Tell who? Quinn and Raven?”

  He nods.

  “No. No way.”

  “Josi – ”

  “If they know you have a virus that makes you aggressive and violent, they’re going to think you murdered Batch.”

  “Better me than you.”

  “Better they just find the actual killer,” I say.