‘And you are?’
Sapphire felt the anger beginning to boil within her. She suppressed it as best she could. ‘I’m from her school,’ she said. ‘I’m the Purity officer.’
It was with a certain amount of satisfaction she watched the sunny demeanour of the receptionist dissolve. The woman glanced at the riffy monitor in front of her. The device registered Kepple and her credentials. With her Purity registration, and being a teacher, she was better than next-of-kin.
‘Room 313.’ The woman was almost trembling. Sapphire gave her a nod and headed for the elevators. She had been here before. There was a lot of security to get through on the third floor but it wouldn’t be a problem for her.
Chloe
‘I’m fine, Mum.’
‘You’re not fine,’ said Mrs Dark. ‘You’re in an isolation tent behind sealed doors. You’ve been attacked. You’re injured.’ Her mother looked on the verge of tears again. Chloe knew the real reason: She had been attacked by a freak; the possibilities were terrifying. But you didn’t talk about that, so instead her mother talked about the more obvious of Chloe’s injuries: her arm in a sling, with the wrist swathed in bandages. ‘And never mind your arm; have you seen your face?’
Chloe had seen her face. Against the orders of the doctor and the nurse, and apparently anyone else who just happened to be passing, she had climbed out of bed, though it made her head throb. There was some space between the bed and the inside of the plastic tent, on one side was a medical monitoring device set into the wall with its instrument panel behind a sheet of glass. Chloe’s battered face was mirrored in it.
Outside the tent were a couple of chairs that looked very uncomfortable even though they were padded. Her mother was sitting in one, forced to lean back by the shape. There were no windows. The top of the tent had a noisy fan that sucked air out constantly so the walls bowed inwards. Chloe understood why and could imagine the air from hers, and every other, room being cooked to kill off anything alive that came from her.
In that time alone, before her mother had arrived, complete with a large badge hung around her neck, she had examined herself in more detail. The arm that was not in a sling was bruised up and down its length where she had parried her attackers’ blows. One eye was turning purple and she had a cut across her left cheek which had been stuck together with tape. Her right shoulder ached incessantly, as did all the muscles in that arm and, where the freak had gripped her, it stung. Inside she felt detached although she wasn’t sure if that was due to the drugs, or the experience.
Her mother said she had arrived about four in the morning but had not been allowed to see Chloe. So the staff had found her a place to bed down and she had fallen asleep but they hadn’t woken her up. Her mother’s eyes were red from the crying, and probably the lack of proper sleep. It was now past lunchtime
‘We were up all night when you didn’t come home, our trace couldn’t find you,’ said her mother. ‘I was going mad. We called the police, but they couldn’t find you either. I thought you were gone like Melinda.’ Mother started to cry again. ‘I was going out of my mind.’
Chloe decided it was best not to say she almost had been gone like Melinda. ‘I’m okay, mum. I’m here, aren’t I?’
Her mother looked about to burst out crying again. Chloe wondered for a minute whether it might have been better if she had been caught because then she could have found out what had happened to her friend, and maybe they could have escaped together.
There was a knock on the door and, without a moment’s delay, in strutted her teacher. ‘Chloe, I’m so glad you’re all right.’
Miss Kepple approached the wall of the isolation tent and put her delicate hand against it, almost as if she would rather be touching Chloe. ‘How are you feeling?’
Chloe shrugged. And then winced at the pain. ‘I’m okay.’ She wasn’t quite sure how to behave with her teacher here; it was strange seeing her out of school.
Miss Kepple turned to Chloe’s mother. ‘Mrs Dark, you must have been so worried.’
‘Oh,’ said her mother, ‘yes, we both were. My husband. When she didn’t come home.’
Miss Kepple acted like Chloe’s mother hadn’t even spoken. ‘Don’t worry Chloe,’ she said. ‘This doesn’t change anything.’
Chloe frowned. ‘Anything?’
‘You can still be in charge of the D-N-Cadr-A. What happened to you doesn’t make any difference.’
‘Oh,’ said Chloe. ‘I am ... thank you.’ In truth Chloe had hoped it might make a difference; she had decided being part of an organisation that stopped her from seeing her friends was not what she wanted. Even if it meant the displeasure of her teacher.
‘I thought I’d leave something for you,’ said Miss Kepple. She reached into her handbag and pulled out something metal that glinted under the lights. ‘I’ll just leave it over here.’ She placed it on the personal cabinet that was outside the isolation wall.
‘What is it?’
‘A badge. It’s a badge for your new position.’
The door to the room opened again. A woman in a white coat, a doctor’s coat, came in. In her hands she held a portable terminal. She glanced up and took in the two people in the room, nodded to Chloe’s mother, and then looked at her teacher.
‘And you are?’ Her tone was not friendly.
‘I am Chloe’s Purity teacher, Sapphire Kepple. I came to see how she is, and to tell her how everyone at the school is thinking about her.’
‘Well, I am Chloe’s physician, Dr Majeed. Chloe has had a traumatic experience and at this moment, what she needs is peace and quiet. I do not believe you need to remain any longer.’ The doctor moved back to the door and opened it. ‘You can go back to the school and you can tell them that Chloe thanks you for your regards but, for the foreseeable future, any visits are restricted to immediate family and officials only.’
Chloe had never heard anyone speak to Miss Kepple that way. In school everybody, even the Principal, was terrified of her and what she represented. Chloe wasn’t sure but she could see Miss Kepple’s left hand was clenched so tight the drawn skin was going white. Then she relaxed and the hand dropped open.
‘Of course Dr... Majeed,’ said Miss Kepple. ‘And thank you, I will pass on the information.’ She turned to Chloe, and once again raised her right hand to touch the plastic of the isolation wall tent. ‘Bye now Chloe, get well soon, and we’ll see you back in school.’
Dr Majeed closed the door on the teacher as her heels clicked out and down the corridor. She turned and smiled at Chloe. ‘Well, my dear, you are lucky,’ she said and Chloe wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the attack, or Miss Kepple’s departure.
‘Is she going to be all right?’ said her mother, escaping the grip of the chair and standing.
‘We are still waiting for some results to come back,’ said the doctor. Chloe did not need to have that interpreted and, from the look of despair on her mother’s face, neither did she. ‘However, all the other injuries are superficial. Just bruising, cuts and some stretched ligaments. The worst of those will take no longer than a couple of weeks to heal fully.’
There was an unspoken ‘but’ hanging at the end of her sentence. Neither Chloe nor her mother said anything.
‘However there are a couple of things we should go over.’
‘What’s wrong?’ said Chloe’s mother, her fears erupting to the surface again.
The doctor turned a calming smile on her. ‘Nothing to be concerned about, Mrs Dark. Just some things I need to ask your daughter and if there’s anything you can add I would be interested to know it.’
Chloe’s mother sat back down. She gave the impression of trying to relax, but the way she gripped the armrest of the chair was telling. The doctor turned back to Chloe.
‘As I said, most of your wounds are superficial, my dear,’ she said, ‘the blow to the back of your head could easily have been worse than it appears to be, for which we can be grateful, however the reason it’s not
bad is curious.’ She paused.
‘What?’ said Chloe.
‘Yes, what?’ said her mother.
‘Do you have any problems eating?’
Her mother gave a short sharp laugh. ‘The problem is stopping her.’
‘Mum!’
‘Really?’ The doctor looked suspicious. ‘You seem like a sensible well-balanced girl, Chloe.’
Chloe hesitated. It was a strange thing to say. ‘Thanks?’
The doctor pulled up the hard-backed chair and perched on the edge. ‘You know, before the plague, it was not unknown for young women to become convinced they were overweight, even when they weren’t, and stop eating.’
‘I eat.’
‘She does.’
‘Yes,’ said Dr Majeed. ‘But sometimes they would hide it by eating and then forcing themselves to regurgitate. In some cases it was so bad they died.’
‘They did that?’ said Chloe. The doctor merely nodded, and waited as if she was expecting more of an answer. ‘This is about my weight?’ Another nod. Chloe thought hard. ‘I exercise a lot.’
‘Your weight is equivalent to a girl half your age. Exercise is unlikely to account for that. Muscle tissue is denser than fat.’
Chloe just looked at the doctor, not knowing what else she could say.
‘But look at her, doctor,’ said her mother coming to the rescue. ‘Does she look underweight? We’ve all seen the pictures of people starving, children and adults, does Chloe look like that?’
For a moment Dr Majeed looked as if she were on the back foot. She looked hard at Chloe, waist to chest to face, and finally shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Your machine must be broken, then.’
Chapter 5
Mercedes
‘Let us in, Mercedes!’ The voice of Alistair McCormack growled through the intercom system. His face looked abnormally large through the fish-eye lens that focused on him and Margaret Jenner, outside the door to Mercedes’ penthouse.
Mercedes Smith ran her hand through her hair—it needed a good wash. She had not had a good night. Xec had woken her at three in the morning to report the failure to snatch Chloe Dark. The following hours had been tedious and filled with stress.
Xec had done his best to cover up and delay the investigation. The rain would have washed away most trace evidence and he had managed to keep Chloe’s location uncertain for a while. When she had asked how he managed that, the reply had been an enigmatic: ‘I called in a favour.’
After that she couldn’t get back to sleep. Possible scenarios kept running through her mind, and none of them had a happy ending. She had expected representatives of the board to turn up a lot earlier. Maybe Xec had kept the information from them as well.
The buzzer on the door rang again. ‘Mercedes, we need to talk about this right now.’
‘Well?’ asked Xec.
She turned away from the screen and looked out on the dismal day. The panoramic windows of her penthouse apartment in Utopia Genetics revealed only the freezing grey mist of a Manchester autumn morning. At least it had stopped raining. ‘Yes, all right, let them in. I’m going to get changed.’ She turned and headed towards her bedroom suite, unconsciously avoiding the stainless steel glass and leather furniture. She slammed the door behind her.
When she opened it again she had a smile plastered on her face. Her hair was clean and her clothes transmitted a confidence she was not feeling inside. Alistair McCormack and Margaret Jenner were seated opposite one another in the leather sofas with cups of coffee in their hands. Mercedes was awash with the stuff; it had been the only thing that kept her going through the night. The smell of it just reminded her that her stomach was empty.
‘Lunch, Xec.’
‘Way past that, Miss Smith.’
‘Late lunch.’
‘Scrambled egg, ham and toast in the kitchen,’ said Xec in his most efficient voice.
Mercedes walked past her unwanted guests without acknowledging them. She went around the corner to the breakfast bar where her breakfast waited. She ate quickly, crunching through the buttered toast and washing it down with orange juice. There was also a pill on the plate. She didn’t ask Xec what it was but added it to her meal.
When she returned to the lounge she was feeling vaguely human again.
McCormack placed the espresso cup on the glass table where the porcelain clinked as he put it down. The cup looked especially small in his huge hands.
‘We’re screwed,’ he said as his opening gambit.
‘No, we’re not,’ said Mercedes. ‘We’re a very long way from being screwed.’
Jenner slammed her cup and saucer on to the table so hard Mercedes thought it would crack. ‘This is a complete disaster,’ she said. ‘When this gets out, it’ll be all our lives on the line.’
Mercedes settled back into the armchair and crossed her legs comfortably. ‘Nobody is going to find out.’
‘Don’t try that on us,’ said Jenner. She was gripping the edge of the leather sofa, digging in her fingernails. ‘We have just killed the chiropractor of the girl who failed to be disappeared.’
‘It’s just a coincidence,’ said Mercedes. ‘There is nothing to connect the two events.’
‘Except,’ said McCormack. ‘Except he’s only her bloody physical therapist.’
‘Kindly do not come into my home and threaten me.’ Then she smiled. ‘The situation is not ideal, I’ll give you that. But it is not as bad as it seems. Xec woke me with the news last night, and I have been up for hours. We have been analysing the situation and dealing with the evidence trail.’
Mercedes uncrossed her legs and smoothly climbed to her feet. She turned her back on them and walked over to the window. She stared out into the gloom. ‘Xec, what is the state of the evidence of Chloe Dark’s abnormality?’
‘The records of Chloe’s visit to his surgery have been doctored to show no abnormalities. The man’s attempt to delete the records has also been obliterated since we control all aspects of the medical data.’
‘But he went to speak to her parents,’ said McCormack. ‘How are you going to deal with that?’
Mercedes turned. ‘We don’t have to,’ she said. ‘Since there is nothing in the medical records to suggest there was a problem, anything he said will be the ravings of a deranged mind. In fact, when the police put samples of his tissue through their analysers, they may actually find he was suffering from some sort of infection.’
That stopped them, thought Mercedes, let them try to make this my fault now.
‘Coincidences do happen in this world,’ said Mercedes.
‘This is one hell of a coincidence, Mercedes,’ said Jenner. ‘And don’t forget we have a Purity officer looking into the whole thing right now. Do you really think you can pull the wool over his eyes?’
‘I don’t have to; there is no evidence that connects them. The only conclusion is that this was an unfortunate pair of circumstances.’
The two of them were quiet for a short time, so Mercedes went on the attack. ‘But you, Alistair.’
His head jerked up.
‘Your men failed to pick her up. Can you explain that?’
‘How the hell were we supposed to know she was that good? She’s just a kid, like the rest,’ he growled. ‘We won’t be making that mistake again.’
This time Jenner stared at him in horror. ‘You’re going to try again?’
‘What choice have we got?’ he said. ‘If we leave it too long it’ll become obvious. The Purity will get her and then we’ll really be in trouble because it will look as if our devices failed to detect her.’
Jenner turned to Mercedes. ‘Surely you can’t agree to this?’
Mercedes shrugged. ‘There’s nothing else we can do. Alistair is right; if we don’t pick her up she will start to show, and if the Purity get hold of one of our assets, they’ll easily make the link with the others and it won’t be long before they’re here in force.’
‘But your goons put her in the ho
spital and one of them was a freak,’ said Jenner, ‘they’ll test her thoroughly.’
‘No,’ said Mercedes, ‘their tests will find nothing wrong with her DNA. And then they will release her and we will be able to pick her up. This time we won’t make any mistakes, will we?’ She looked pointedly at McCormack.
‘We’ll be a lot more careful,’ he said. ‘We won’t make the same mistake again.’
But Jenner would not be stopped. She stood up. ‘But they will be keeping track of her. They will assume whoever tried to pick her up will do it again. It will be both the police and the Purity. How are you going to do that?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said McCormack. ‘We’ll have to see how it goes.’
‘This really is a disaster,’ said Jenner. She picked up her coffee cup, noticed it was empty, and put it back down. ‘I need more coffee.’
‘Fresh coffee is available in the kitchen area,’ said Xec in his precise manner.
Chapter 6
Mitchell
It was around three-thirty, the sky continued grey and overcast but it was too cold to rain. The auto-drive police car wound its way through the Manchester traffic. Although they kept moving, the traffic lights were not always green in their favour, and their progress was much slower than DI Mitchell expected. It seemed Lament was not hurrying them through the late rush hour. The crime scene had been a wash-out.
‘How much further to the hospital?’ asked Graham. The two of them were sitting in the back. The vehicle was not a limousine so they were side by side. Mitchell could smell Graham’s aftershave, not a cheap brand but he hadn’t overdone it. Mitchell half-shook his head again as if trying to clear it. This man was not someone to be trifled with, and they would have to be careful.
The car crawled down Oxford Road but, once past the railway station, progress was faster.
‘Ten minutes at most,’ said Mitchell, ‘more likely five.’
The car drove past the old university buildings; there were still a few students but the halls of residence were all empty now. Nobody travelled to go to university anymore. And there were precious few classes of any sort. The government had woken up to the fact that key skills were being lost as people died of old age. Specialised skills were important, but not as much as knowing how to make clothes, or grow food. Or manufacture new riffies for the new population as demanded by the Purity.
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