That subject was not reported in any detail but advanced chip manufacture was something that drained the resources of the country, and forced them to trade with countries that had the raw materials they needed. But no country had been immune to the plague.
Mitchell was glad he wasn’t a politician.
A minute later they were passing the iron railings of the hospital. They turned in through the main entrance and drove through the older buildings and round to the newer ones. Although ‘new’ still meant sixty years old.
The car came to a halt and the locks popped. Graham didn’t wait for the door to be opened for him; he climbed out and hurried to the entrance. Mitchell, older and slower, and probably more willing to tolerate the damp cold, followed. Once he was under cover the car moved away. The two went through into the main reception area. Graham did nothing but walk up to the desk. Something on a screen caught the attention of the receptionist, who then stared at him with barely hidden fear.
Mitchell’s riffy identification showed up too, and when she saw it she seemed to relax a little.
‘We’re looking for the girl brought in this morning,’ said Mitchell. The Purity agent had stepped away from the desk and was studying the posters on the wall. ‘Name of Chloe Dark, can you tell me where she is?’
She didn’t even look it up. ‘Yes. Third-floor genetic isolation,’ she said, ‘room 313...’ She pointed along the corridor. ‘The lift is that way.’
Mitchell thanked her and turned to where Graham had been, but he was already heading down the corridor. Mitchell refused to run but he did stretch his stride to catch up. The elevator doors were opening just as he arrived.
When they opened on the third floor it became clear that whoever had decorated it had decided that the biohazard symbol was the way to go. The entire length of the passageway, floor and walls, was plastered with the symbol, as well as warnings about S.I.D. He half expected to see it on the ceiling too but it seemed they had managed to restrain themselves.
The first door sealing off the isolation area slid back as Graham approached it. The authority given to him by his riffy was certainly higher than Mitchell’s since the door slid back and barred him entrance immediately. Realising that Mitchell wasn’t with him, Graham turned and hesitated for a moment as if trying to decide what he should do next. Speaking loudly enough for his voice to penetrate the door, he said. ‘You’ve spoken to this girl before?’
Mitchell didn’t bother raising his voice. He simply nodded.
‘All right.’ There was a manned station a further twenty paces down the corridor. Mitchell watched as Graham headed towards the guard sitting there. He couldn’t hear the conversation but after a few moments the guard adjusted some detail on his terminal and the door slid open to Mitchell.
‘I’ve given you temporary access,’ said Graham, once Mitchell had caught up. ‘As long as you’re with me.’
‘All right.’
The final door did not open on their approach. Graham touched the button on the wall then turned back to look at the guard. He checked them both over a second time and then let them through.
‘Decent security,’ said Graham. There was a turn in the corridor and from that point the rooms were numbered from 301 going up on the left-hand side and down from 321 on the right. Room 313 was near the end on the right-hand side.
The Purity agent walked straight in.
Mitchell stepped in after him and took in the scene that was only too familiar to him. The bed, the isolation tent, and the worried relative sitting off to one side. It wasn’t only that he had seen this a hundred times before, it was the fact that, once upon a time, he had been the one in the seat.
Mitchell saw the look of recognition on Mrs Dark’s face as her eyes flicked from Agent Graham to himself. He nodded at her. ‘Good morning, Mrs Dark.’
Chloe was sitting up in bed with her legs over the side. She too recognised him but looked with considerable unease at the man she didn’t know. She was wearing a dressing gown which she pulled close around her. Mitchell wondered whether the Purity agent deliberately scared people, or whether he genuinely had no idea of the effect he caused on others.
‘Hello, Chloe,’ he said. ‘This is Special Agent Graham of the Purity. He’d like to talk to you about what happened last night.’
His identification of Graham did not have a calming effect. The worried expression on Mrs Dark’s face deepened further. Graham glanced around, his gaze falling on a hardback chair behind the door. He grabbed it and placed it just outside the plastic of the isolation tent. He leaned back and crossed one leg by bringing his ankle up and placing it on the opposite knee. If it had been 40 years ago Mitchell would have expected him to light a cigarette.
‘Chloe,’ said Graham. ‘You don’t mind me calling you Chloe, do you?’
She shook her head. If Mitchell was any judge, she would rather the agent were gone completely. She didn’t care what he called her.
‘If you’re feeling up to it, Chloe, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling us exactly what happened last night.’
‘I was in the Central Library—’ she began.
The agent interrupted. ‘We know where you were, Chloe, up until the time the trouble started.’
Mitchell was not impressed with Graham’s interview technique. He cleared his throat pointedly.
Graham glanced round at him. ‘Interviewing victims is not necessarily my forte,’ he said. ‘Perhaps DI Mitchell would prefer to do this?’
Despite the fact he had been given the opportunity to do what he wanted, Mitchell felt that somehow he had been pushed down into a very small category, that of police interviewer. Nothing so exalted as a Special Agent of the Purity.
‘When did you first think there was something wrong?’ he asked.
‘On the tram,’ she said, ‘it was when the freak got on, although I couldn’t see him properly. But there was a man who’d got on earlier, and I could see him looking at me.’
‘You were facing him?’
‘No, I could see his reflection in the glass. He was looking at me. Staring.’
Mitchell nodded encouragingly.
‘Then everybody else got off and he moved forward closer behind me,’ she said. Mrs Dark made a tiny noise. Chloe glanced across at her then back at Mitchell. She didn’t look at Graham at all. ‘We got to Didsbury and that’s when they attacked. I was just getting off.’
‘And then you fought them, and you beat them off,’ said Special Agent Graham, the tone of his voice indicated how unlikely that sounded.
‘My dad wanted me to train in martial arts; he thinks the world is a dangerous place.’
Graham just grunted as if he didn’t care what her father thought. He got up from the chair and wandered over to the cabinet by the wall. Mitchell had already noted that there was something small and metallic lying on top. Graham picked it up and examined it. He looked sidelong at Chloe. ‘Where did you get this?’
Chloe hesitated as if she didn’t want to say. ‘My teacher gave it to me, my Purity teacher.’
‘Sapphire Kepple.’ Graham put the badge back down onto the cabinet. ‘I’m done here for now,’ he said to Mitchell and, without offering a goodbye, he left the room.
‘Thank you for your help, Chloe,’ he said, ‘and you Mrs Dark.’
Mrs Dark got to her feet. ‘Do you know what’s going to happen to Chloe?’
Mitchell shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, that’s for the medics and the Purity to decide.’
Chapter 7
Melinda
She woke in the dark and her head ached.
She did not know what time it was but without even opening her eyes she could see the electrical wires just as she had before. She guessed from their relative positions she was back in her room, in her prison. If it was still the same day she had now been there two days, but the gas they had given her might have knocked her out for longer.
Yes. She now remembered: the gas.
Today—she might as
well think of it as the same day—had started just like yesterday. Breakfast offered by somebody impatient, followed by people in rubber suits who forced her to stay as far away from them as possible. They unchained her again and took her for the tests.
She adjusted her position a little and she realised something was different.
Her left arm was still chained to the bed but when she moved it there was no clink of metal on metal. And something was missing from her electrical sense. She had not noticed before but, just as she could see the electricity in the wires, she had known that her chain was metal even in the dark. She reached with her right hand to feel the new binding. It was some sort of plastic cable but tied just as firmly to her wrist.
She was very thirsty and found she had no need to use the facilities regardless of how long she’d been asleep. Were they trying to dehydrate her? They might be. The experiments they were performing on her were varied.
Yesterday it had been mainly samples they were after. She had ended up with her arms like pincushions, and then there were the deeper samples. It seemed they did not care if she were anaesthetised or not. Those had hurt, a lot.
In a room that was as white as every room and corridor here, but resembled a torture chamber as much as a medical facility, they had clamped her to a frame. It provided support but was not solid so they could get at her back. There were straps around each part of her arms and legs as well as across her chest and hips. Her head too was clamped in position. The place was equipped with drills that would have put a dentist to shame. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they had started drilling into her head, but yesterday it was just samples.
As they had gone about their tasks, she had closed her eyes and tried not to think about what they were doing to her. Instead she explored the room with her new sense. She saw the power cables. One particularly thick one coming through a wall glowing like a neon bulb and others snaking away like tributaries on a river. And there were machines including computers of different sorts.
So yesterday she had watched the lights glowing, fading, and moving while they had prodded, pulled, poked and sampled her as if she were nothing more than a frog on a dissecting table. She pushed that thought from her mind as soon as it appeared.
And today had started the same way. She had resigned herself to being treated as nothing more than an object. But instead of the dissecting room, she was taken to what looked, for all the world, like a gym. There were all sorts of exercise devices: things like bicycles, machines for weightlifting, and several she didn’t recognise at all.
They kept her on the leash, but moved her from machine to machine. The man she had come to think of as her jailer, even though he wasn’t the only one, kept hold of the chain while he pointed to a machine and indicated how she was supposed to use it. They did not offer her any better clothing than the hospital smock but she was a long way past embarrassment now.
They did not exercise her very hard but they did attach various measuring devices for her heart rate and blood pressure, and on a couple of occasions she had to breathe into a tube. All of which she found much more exhausting than perhaps it should have been. She wondered whether she was still under the effects of the sedatives she had been given in the first place.
She was allowed a break and some lunch which again was mostly fruit and water. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could go on without some solid protein. But it seemed that the morning of exercise was only half of the day—for the rest she went back to the dissecting room. She was strapped in firmly once more and left for a long time.
Since all of the people in the prison apart from her were wearing rubber suits it was hard to tell them apart, but the long wait was broken when a particularly tall person walked through. From his long and confident stride she guessed he must be a man. The others stopped what they were doing and watched him from the moment he entered.
He came over to where Melinda lay in the frame. He gestured with his hand, making a circular motion. An attendant leapt to the frame and turned it until she was hanging by the straps and staring at the ground with her back exposed.
Although she could not move her head she could see his feet as he moved closer. There was the clink of metal on metal, and a scrape as something was picked up from a metal tray.
As she lay there in her cell, recalling the final events before she blacked out—before they gassed her—she tried to focus. The memory was fuzzy and she had to concentrate. She remembered the metal sounds. She recalled his shoes as they shuffled that little bit closer. And then there was the intense pain as something sliced into her skin, along her spine.
She lay in the bed, the sheets becoming damp with her sweat. In the days she had been here, not one of them had spoken to her. The only real flesh she had seen was her jailer’s hand. Nor had she spoken to them.
But then, in that moment, as the man cut directly into her skin, all the pent-up fear and anger condensed into a single scream: ‘No!’
Her sensitive electrical sense was blinded with white. She did not know exactly what happened next because she could see nothing. People screamed, or cried out in pain. Then everything went quiet, even the constant background hum of the machines was silenced.
The acrid burning smell of plastic filtered through the air to her. A scalpel blade, red with blood, clattered to the floor beside her and the man crumpled to the ground.
It was moments later she smelled the first of the unpleasantness in the air. She tried to hold her breath but, since there was no escape, she had to breathe eventually and that’s when she lost consciousness.
Now that she remembered the details she could feel the cut in her back, it stung and stretched when she moved. He could not have been very deep but the mere idea of someone cutting into her back while she was still alive...
No wonder she had responded. Then it came to her—she had responded. Though she had been completely tied she had done something, though she had no idea what it was. The idea was outrageous. And yet, it explained everything.
She lifted her hand above her face as she lay there on the bed, the electricity flashing between her nerves and muscles made a rhythmic pattern glowing dimly beneath her skin. Then she focused her mind. She remembered her own panic as the man had cut her open.
And from elbow to fingertip the light in her arm glowed.
Chapter 8
Mitchell
Special Agent Graham was seated at the desk of the hospital office he had commandeered. All he had to do was express the desire for an office to be put at his disposal, and it became so. Mitchell was not impressed. He knew the difference between power given willingly and that extracted by fear. You might say the Purity put the fear of God into everyone, but that wasn’t the case: It put the fear of S.I.D into people, even though that was precisely what they were supposed to be against.
‘You want a drink?’ asked Mitchell into the silence that filled the room. Graham was working on a portable tablet; he appeared to be reviewing files. Mitchell, even though a Detective Inspector in a prestigious force like the Manchester Police, did not rate that level of technology. Instead he had just been waiting, looking out the window at the greyness.
‘You think they have any coffee?’ said Graham.
‘Nothing decent.’
‘Just some water.’
Mitchell left the room and closed the door after him. He didn’t hurry; he wasn’t even sure what they were waiting for. Although it was probably one of the tests to see whether Chloe had been infected with S.I.D.
Mitchell headed along the corridor. He knew that after this short amount of time the S.I.D test would almost certainly come back negative. But that was for the best, for Chloe at least; he had no desire for her to be locked up. But if she was infected it would certainly be a risk letting her go free. Normally she would be sent to Purity quarantine.
He pushed through the swing doors at the far end of the corridor which led to an atrium where he stood at the top balcony looking down. He could take
the elevator but there really wasn’t any hurry so he headed for the stairs. And then stopped suddenly.
There was a woman pacing backwards and forwards near the reception area. He squinted, wishing that his eyes were not ageing at the same rate as the rest of his body. The woman was dressed immaculately, certainly not like a teacher, but he recognised her: Sapphire Kepple.
She kept walking towards the exit, then stopping and retracing her steps in a slightly uncertain way as if she knew she ought to leave but didn’t want to. Certainly curious behaviour. He wondered at the significance of the badge, and the level of interest that one Purity teacher might have in one relatively ordinary girl.
He made up his mind and headed for the stairs. As he descended he became visible to the atrium, and it was when he reached the first level she noticed him. The effect was dramatic. She had just been on her return journey, when she reversed direction headed for the exit and was gone. Mitchell thought that was probably for the best as well. He wasn’t sure what Graham might have done if he found her loitering in the hospital.
He found the drinks machine. It did have coffee but there was no question that it would be of the lowest possible strength that could still legally be called ‘coffee’. He pressed the button to make the machine recognise his riffy, ordered two bottles of water and scooped them out of the basket at the bottom when they were delivered. Two glass bottles, plastic ones were rare and expensive nowadays. People reused the old ones since they never deteriorated, although they did split eventually and could be crushed. Glass was easier to make, mould, and recycle.
Mitchell took himself and the bottles up in the elevator, seeing no reason to climb all those stairs. When he reached the door of the office he heard raised voices. Then he corrected himself—there was only one raised voice and it wasn’t Graham.
Putting one of the bottles under his arm, he opened the door and went in without knocking. The doctor’s diatribe stopped mid-sentence as he broke her flow.
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