by JT Lawrence
“The doctor was certain,” says the nurse. “He said there was no chance – zero chance – of a recovery.”
“Unless he gets a new heart,” says Keke.
“Yes.”
“But there are no new hearts.”
“No.”
She lets out a long, wobbling sigh. “So then, it’s time?”
Themba shrugs. “If you need more time…”
“It’ll be going against his wishes, waiting any longer. Already I’m seeing his body atrophy. He’s grey, can you see that? He’s been grey since the attack.” She’s holding on to Marko. “This isn’t what he looks like. What he used to look like.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Keke doesn’t want sympathy. It wrecks the barrier between acting strong and outright weeping.
“Your family should be here with you. Your friends.”
A sharp thought pierces her grief: fear for Kate and Seth, and the kids. Will she ever see them again?
Her eyes rest on Marko. His medical eyepatch, his personalised hospital gown. He’s the thinnest he’s ever been. This isn’t how she wants to remember him.
Keke’s eyes are streaming now. “This whole time. It never felt real. I never expected him to not wake up.”
“Of course,” says Themba. “That’s normal. It’s normal to expect things to get better.”
She stifles the sobs that are rising in her throat, and moves towards the life support equipment. She tells herself to be brave. To not be selfish.
“Do I just,” she says, tears running down her face, “do I just turn this switch?” The counsellor had shown her how to do it, but surely it wasn’t as simple as that?
Is it really that easy to end someone’s life? To end Marko’s life?
She can’t believe this is happening. It just seems too prosaic. When you think of death, it’s so huge, so final, it’s such a mind-boggling concept, but here she stands within arm’s reach of her pharmacy-bought deodorant and a mug of tea that’s getting cold. Tea. How could she even consider drinking tea, now or ever again?
“I can do it for you,” Themba steps forward.
“No. Marko would want me to do it.”
It’s such an intimate act, after all.
“This switch?” Her voice is gravel.
Themba removes her patient’s oxygen supply and nods at her. She has tears in her eyes too. Keke takes a deep, stuttering breath and switches off Marko’s life support.
Chapter 72
Paraffin & Garbage
Arronax gets off the private plane and sniffs the night sky; scrunches up her nose. She hates the way Joburg smells. Pollution and smoke. Paraffin and garbage. She much prefers her lab. What’s not to love? Brisk white walls, purified sea air, perfect climate control. Her family call her a control freak, but she knows better than that. She just likes to have a handle on things that can be controlled, because God knows that most things in the universe are completely, absolutely, undeniably out of our control. Besides, she’s a scientist. She wouldn’t be any good at her job if she didn’t like playing with variables.
A man in an airport uniform greets her on the strip. He blinks too much. Maybe it’s the sight of her mermaid hair. She knows that when she’s not in her lab coat she doesn’t look like much of a technologist.
He wants to carry something for her. “You didn’t bring any luggage?”
“Just this,” she says, patting the small transit box she has under one arm. And of course, a sonic toothbrush and a clean pair of panties, which are in her handbag, in case of emergency. She’ll fly back home as soon as she’s delivered the merchandise, unless Seth asks her to stay the night. The man in uniform leads her off the strip and around the west corner of the private airport, where there is a cab waiting, engine already purring in that soft, dry way hydrocars do. Arronax loves the efficiency of Nautilus, the way that every detail is thoughtfully arranged and on time. In London she would take it for granted, but South Africa is, altogether, a different kettle of fish. She slides into the back seat and waves goodbye to her chaperone before the tinted window glides shut, and the cab skates away.
The car doesn’t ask her where she wants to go. Even that detail has been attended to. She relaxes back into the seat then has the image in her head of a hundred other people doing the same thing before her, and sits up straight again. All those bodies. All those heads, all the hair. She sees them like ghosts in the car with her. It’s the reason she can’t sleep in hotels. The bed linen can be straight off the washing line, smelling of fabric softener and sunshine and a hot iron, but still they bring with them all the people who have lain in them before. Sweating, sleeping, making love. It sets her teeth on edge. A 4DHD microscan of a dust mite is not something you can ever un-see.
“ChinaCity/Sandton,” says the cab. “The Gordhan. Estimated arrival time is 23:12.”
Arronax looks at her SnapTile, dials the surgeon who’s waiting for her to arrive with the product.
“Doctor Gazongo. We’ll be there in seventeen minutes.”
“Sure,” says the surgeon, voice dull with exhaustion. “We’ll be ready. The galleria’s all set up. The nurses will prep him now and bring him down.”
“Excellent. Sorry if I woke you up.” She’s not really, but it seems like the polite thing to say.
“I’m looking forward to it. It’s not every day you get to debut this kind of surgery.”
The crispness of her British accent is offset by his softness. “You sound tired.”
“I’m drinking a double coffeeberry shot as we speak.”
“I hope it’s half-caff. I don’t want your fingers shaking.”
“My fingers don’t shake.”
The car zooms through the dark. Algaetrees flash on and off as they pass underneath. She tries for the sixth time to call the next of kin of the patient – Kekeletso – but she never answers. Maybe Seth sent through the wrong number. He did seem very distracted in his message to her, but it’s possible she wasn’t reading it correctly. Difficult, sometimes, to correctly decipher the tone of a bump. She assumes this is the ‘Keke’ he often thinks about.
They’ll need the woman’s signature to proceed with the surgery, of course. She’d have to find her at the hospital and get her to double-sig the waiver. Despite her initial hesitation in meeting Seth’s first condition in order for him to remotely complete the job, she soon realised that he had done her a significant favour in finding their first human trial subject. Usually it takes months to fight through all the red tape involved in in vivo pilots, but he has managed to find the perfect patient. Getting Seth Denicker on board is the very best thing that has happened to this project. She must think of a fitting reward.
Chapter 73
A Wisp of Hope
Marko’s flatline trills through the room. Kekeletso turns away from the screen; she doesn’t want to see that fatal green line. Themba mutes the cardio monitor. Keke feels as if she’s sinking; at the same time wishes she is a ghost so that she can float up and away with Marko’s spirit.
There is a commotion outside. The double doors burst open and all of a sudden there are ten nurses and a crash cart in the room.
“Wait, wait!” says Themba with her hands in the air. “It’s okay. Leave him. It’s a DNR.”
“No,” says a man in blue scrubs, handing her a Tile. “Not anymore.”
A wisp of hope. They re-connect his oxygen and unclamp the brakes on the bed.
Themba frowns at the device and flicks through a few pages while the staff wheel Marko away.
“What’s happening?” whispers Keke, suddenly back to earth. “What’s going on? Where are you taking him?”
Themba looks at her, utterly bewildered. “Ever heard of Nautilus?”
Chapter 74
Dark Dream
“I knew you’d be fully prepared to give your life for the boy,” says Maistre Lumin, “so we had to think of some other way to get you to co-operate.”
Kate continues to try to wo
rk her hands out of the plastic loop behind her back. It doesn’t feel as if she’s making any progress and they are throbbing with pooled purple blood (Violent Violet). Seth’s face is as white as a dinner plate.
“When you refused to bring him to us in exchange for your daughter we knew we had to … shall we say … dig deep.”
Bongi adopts her steady pose again. Is this really happening? It’s so stupidly surreal that for a second Kate wonders if she’s in the middle of one of her nightmares, but the pain in her wrists asserts a deadly reality. This is no dark dream.
“We’ve done our homework. We know what happened to you, what the Genesis Project did to you. We know everything that’s on public record about you, but we also know more. In fact, I’m confident that we know … Well, perhaps we know even more than you know, about yourself.”
Keke was right about her Helix being bugged. Kate shoots a withering look at Bongi, who doesn’t even have the grace to look ashamed.
“The VXR sessions you had with Dr. Voges were most revealing.”
“Fuck you.” Kate says it with such ferocity that some spit lands on her chin. She wipes it away with her good shoulder. Silver is still in a trance.
Maistre Lumin taps his foot. Checks the car’s clockologram. Their deadline is rushing to meet them.
“None of it matters, now. We’re running out of time. I need to know where Mally is.”
“We don’t know where he is,” says Kate. “He ran off.”
Lumin looks at her for a long time. Drills into her, until she has to look away.
“I’ve brought something with, you see. A tool, to help the truth out of you.”
Kate’s stomach burns.
“Sebongile,” he says, palm outstretched. Bongi takes her eyes off them for a second to pass something to Lumin. It’s a zip-up charcoal-coloured clamshell, for which he thanks her and opens, carefully, on his lap. He sits like that for a moment, appearing satisfied with the contents. Kate wants to know what’s inside, but at the same time she doesn’t. Crimson Cringe: it’s a strange sense of rubbernecking when it’s your own torture on the table.
Lumin finally lifts the thing out of the box. It’s his pair of golden-handled secateurs. Polished to a high shine, the blades catch the interior light as he shows them off. Even though the pruning tool is a metre away, Kate feels the cold, sharp steel on her skin, feels it puncturing her flesh.
“You sick motherfucker,” says Seth. “You’re not going near Kate with those things.”
“Oh,” says Lumin, in mock-surprise. “These aren’t for Kate.” He takes off the safety catch and scissors them in the air between them, making a rasping sound. “These are to use on Silver.”
Chapter 75
Golden Secateurs
The terror zings all the way through Kate’s body; her nerves fizz with fright.
“No!” she shouts past the bright effervescence. She tries harder to squeeze her hands through the cable-tie bracelet but they’re numb, so when she forces it, the cable slices into her heel, spilling the lilac blood. The pain cuts through the numbness.
“No,” she growls at Lumin. Her fear and anger is a beast inside her that is ready to take Lumin by the throat, but she can’t get at him. He takes a step forward, secateurs in hand, and Kate screams and lashes out at him with her feet, tries to kick him, tries to defend her daughter. He gets closer to the girl and Kate can’t stand it and then all of a sudden she’s free – the blood from her wound lubricated her escape – and she launches herself at Lumin. She comes at him so hard and so quickly he falls under her weight. Kate doesn’t have a weapon. She’s not strong enough to strangle him, but she thinks if she can scratch through his throat to his carotid –
But before she can do anything a shadow swarms over her like a cloud of locusts, and as she tries to jam her nail into Lumin’s pulsing neck the floor falls away from her as she’s lifted off him by the scruff of her jacket and thrown out of the vehicle. She tumbles and rolls away and sees flashes of stars in the night sky. The bruised grass smells green. She ignores the pain – a blue bolt from shoulder to palm – and scrambles to get back inside the vehicle but when she looks up it’s straight into the barrel of the Resurrector’s automatic weapon.
Bongi is helping Lumin up, dusting him off and adjusting his cloak. He has a smear of Kate’s blood on his throat.
“Get her back in here! And tie her up properly this time.” His cheeks are blotches of pink. Anger, or embarrassment, or both. He uses a tissue to wipe the blood away.
The guard, despite being twice the size and strength of Lumin, flinches at the scolding. He hauls Kate up into the van and ties her bleeding hands in front of her this time, ties her feet together, and then connects the two loops with another tie so that she can’t move. So that she’s trussed like a rabid dog on the floor; a lamb to the slaughter. Seth is watching her, but his eyes don’t register hers. She can tell by the look on his face that he is in his head, trying to figure out a solution. Whereas her first reaction is to move, his is to think. His eyes skitter to the secateurs that were knocked out of Lumin’s hands, and he watches as Bongi picks them up and hands them back to him.
“You’ve wasted enough of my time,” Lumin says, smoothing down his wisp of white hair. She has humiliated him in front of his entourage. His eyes say: You’ll pay for that. I’m telling you, you’ll pay for that.
Kate growls at him. The danger has made her wild.
“Tell me right now where Mally is or your daughter will suffer the consequences.”
“You wouldn’t,” says Kate.
“You’re wrong,” he says.
His eyes look so deeply into hers it feels as if he is mining them. He speaks slowly, “You see, I know what your nightmares look like.”
He holds the secateurs aloft to make his meaning clear.
“No,” says Kate. “Please.”
“You are giving me no option!”
“Bongi!” says Kate, “Please. It’s Silver. Silver! You can’t let him hurt her.”
Bongi remains fire-eyed for Lumin. “You’re the one who’s hurting her. Do what he says and she’ll be safe.”
Lumin sits next to the toddler carseat and casts a detached glance at Silver. Uses the hand that he’s holding the secateurs in to move a strand of hair out of her eyes. Her swollen face doesn’t flinch. She’s gone somewhere far inside herself, as if Bongi’s unexpected slap had turned off a switch in her brain.
Kate knows what that’s like.
Lumin takes the girl’s hand in his. An affectionate uncle. Kate’s insides liquefy into neon juice.
“I know what haunts you. What do you think your late lover would say, if he was here?” He wiggles the fingers on his other hand, then hides his thumb so that it looks like it’s missing.
“Lumin, please. Please. I beg you.”
“Tell me where the boy is.”
“I don’t know here he is! He ran away from the hospital! He’s on the streets, somewhere.”
His nostrils flare. “You have an idea. The colours.”
He raises the secateurs to Silver’s hand, puts her little finger in between the blades. The girl stares ahead, oblivious. Kate yelps and struggles with the ties.
“You spoke in code, on the phone. Tell me what it means.”
“Tell him,” says Seth.
“They’ll kill Mally!”
“Mally isn’t here.”
What he means is, Mally isn’t here with a pair of shiny pruning shears being held to his hand. He could be anywhere. There might be time to save him.
Lumin adjusts the angle of the blades so that Silver’s little finger is in the perfect position to be severed at the large knuckle.
“Tell him,” says Seth again.
She struggles with the restraints. “How can I?”
Bongi looks at the time, 23:00, and says: “Sixty minutes to midnight.”
There is so much tension in the cabin, it’s like they are all set in electric jelly.
�
��This is your last chance,” says Lumin, his eyes arresting Kate’s. “I’m going to count to three.”
This is too much for Kate to handle. She can’t stand the vulnerability. She can’t stand it. It’s like her heart is outside her body, raw and beating.
“One,” Lumin says, like a parent losing his patience. “Two.”
He looks down and is about to apply pressure when Kate shouts “Okay! Okay. I’ll tell you.”
He looks up at her, moves the secateurs away from Silver’s hand. Waits for her to talk.
“Pink, khaki, dot, purple, brown, purple, dark green, ’S’.”
Seth translates. “25.8084° S.”
“GPS co-ordinates,” says Bongi. She taps the numbers into her Tile.
“Pink, purple, dot, grey, brown, purple, cyan, ‘E’.”
“28.7081° E” says Seth.
Bongi taps the last digits then frowns. Lumin looks at her, a question mark for a face.
“They’re playing with us,” she says, showing him the screen. Lumin’s cheeks begin to colour again.
“We’re not,” says Kate. “Those were the exact colours.”
“You expect us to believe,” he says, grabbing the Tile from Bongi and tilting it in their direction, “that Mally is on his way to the Luminary?”
The realisation stings Kate and Seth at the same time.
Lumin’s cross face melts into a pleased one. “Oh, you truly didn’t know, but how perfect,” he says, smiling at Bongi, who types the co-ordinates into the van’s holodash. “We thought we’d have to chase him, but there he is, running towards us.”
Kate grunts, wrestles with her binding.
Lumin beams at everyone. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you to trust in Celestia.”
“Praise the Light,” says Bongi.
The vehicle’s engine starts, and they move forward.