"Mary mother of God," Kelis gasped. "I know it needed to look convincing, but did you have to shoot me in the fucking gut?"
I turned to face her. My gun was still in my hands and I saw them raise it until it was pointing straight at her. I'd fired four bullets since we'd entered the building - more than enough left. She wasn't looking at me as I said, "No - I meant to put it through your heart. I guess my aim was off."
She chuckled weakly, the sound turning into a gurgle of pain. But when she lifted her head to look at me the laughter died. "Jasmine..?"
"I told you, Jasmine's gone." Somewhere inside me, something was protesting that, but the Voice was quite sure. It had lost Ash - there was no way it was letting me go too.
Face twisted in agony, Kelis pushed herself upwards, first to her elbows then slowly, painfully, to her knees. "No," she said, her voice just a thread. "You're still you."
I took a step towards her, stumbling over my own feet. "That's not true. I've killed hundreds of people. I've shot pregnant women. Jasmine would never do that. It must be the madness."
A thin trickle of blood leaked from her lips. Her breath gasped in and out of her as she struggled to form the words. "We'd all like an excuse for what we've done - but that's just cowardice, and you're not a coward. You killed all those people. You, Jasmine. Accept it and move on."
I took another step closer. My finger was tight around the trigger of the Magnum. Another millimetre, another milligram of pressure, and Kelis would stop saying those terrible words. "I don't know myself any more," I gasped.
Amazingly, she managed a smile. Her lips were crimson with her own blood. "That's OK, I know you. And you're not so bad." Her eyes wouldn't let mine go, no matter how much I wanted them to.
I could kill her. I wanted to kill her. I could surrender to the Voice and let it take all the decisions. Let it shoulder the responsibility. Or I could live with all the things I'd done. I could go on making all the awful, impossible choices that this world forced you to make. The only sane response was to go crazy. Let go. Just let go.
And yet.
Kelis' eyes. The lips that I'd kissed, only a few days ago. I had to take the responsibility for that. I couldn't kill her and let that death be nobody's fault.
I didn't know I'd thrown the gun away until I heard it clatter against the far wall.
EPILOGUE
I bandaged Kelis' injuries as best I could. The bullet had done less damage than it might - a through-and-through which had missed the organs she'd need the most. The exit wound was the worst, muscle beyond repair, ragged scraps of skin. In front it was just a small hole, black and burned round the edges. The bandage stopped the blood loss but I didn't give her five hours if we didn't get her some more serious care. And even then...
She was unconscious by the time I finished with her. My body felt drained, my mind almost a blank. And the Voice was still there, pushed down but not defeated. Another sort of addiction, a temptation that would always be there.
It was easy enough to figure out Ash's broadcast system. The message I sent was short, but I thought it would do the job. Then I sat down beside Kelis on the floor, rested her head in my lap, and waited.
It only took half an hour for Queen M to find us. She looked at us both, long and cold, then at Ash, the blood pooled around his head. "Well," she said. "It seems my confidence in you wasn't misplaced."
"Glad to be of service," I said, and in a way I was. The pirate queen's ambitions seemed almost charmingly small-scale compared to Ash's. And who knows, maybe the world needed her in it. When I'd chosen not to kill Kelis I'd had to accept that Queen M was right. The best of us are capable of terrible things.
"So," she said, but I held up my hand.
"I know what you're thinking," I told her. "You're thinking your little plan worked just fine, and I helped you neutralise the threat from Cuba along with a far worse threat you hadn't even known about. Kelis wasn't part of the plan, but it all turned out for the best. So I guess you'll just shoot me, because I'm not the safest person to have around now Ash is gone. But I think there's something you ought to know before you do all that."
She was smiling as I spoke. I couldn't tell what it meant. Probably nothing good - her smiles never did. "Well, you've pretty much got it covered. Although you've left out the part where I bring Kelis back to my flagship and then shoot her too, just so everyone can see what happens to people who betray me."
Kelis' head was still in my lap. I ran my fingers gently through her hair and I felt her stir a little. She didn't wake though, and I thought that was probably for the best.
"You don't want to do that," I told Queen M, "because I'm going to need her, and you're going to need me."
"Really? Seems to me you've passed your sell-by date."
"If Ash was the only person left who'd taken the Cure, you'd be right."
Her whole face stiffened. I knew that Haru must have told her everything I'd told him about the Cure and what it did. "OK. Where are they?"
"I don't know. But wherever they are, they're a danger to you. Fuck, they're a danger to the whole world."
"And you'll hunt them down for me," she said, an edge of mockery in her voice.
I smiled, because this wasn't a job I wanted, but I knew I had to take it. "I'm the only one who can. I'm the one who understands them."
She looked at me for a very long time. Then she nodded once, sharply. She was smart, that had always been the problem.
It took two weeks for Kelis to recuperate. Queen M and her people were long gone by then, taking their new recruits with them. Ash's eunuchs had deserted the city when their leader fell. They'd never found Ingo and I hoped that, somewhere, he was still alive.
It was just me and Kelis in the sterile white hospital with its echoing, empty maternity wards. There were stocks of anti-psychotics there, more than enough to last me. I took them and forced the Voice back down into the depths of my mind, and tried to forget the things I'd learned about myself when I'd listened to it.
On the eleventh day we took the jeep that had been left for us, food and ammo and spare fuel piled in the back. Kelis was still weak, stumbling as she walked until I let her sling her arm over my shoulder. I took the wheel as we headed into the desert. The wind was hot and dry in our hair and I saw Kelis smile for the first time since the night Ash died.
The smiled slipped and her eyes closed, and I thought that maybe she'd drifted off into sleep. But after a moment, she said. "You didn't tell Queen M about the children."
"No."
"You didn't think maybe you ought to warn her?"
"No."
She turned towards me, opening her eyes again. "That's all you're going to say? Because if we are going to be spending the next god-knows-how-long together, I'd appreciate a bit more in the way of conversation."
I shrugged. "She would have killed them. And Ash could be wrong. He was crazy, after all - there's no reason to think the Cure will be transmitted into the second generation the same way it manifests in us. Who knows what those children will grow up to be?"
"I guess we'll find out in about ten years."
The silence stretched out between us, easy and comfortable, as the jeep ate up the miles on the long road. "You're married," she said finally, fifty miles down the road.
It hurt, but not as much as it used to. "Yeah. Or maybe. I'm going to go on believing that he's alive."
"And you don't want to go and look for him? Back home in England? That could be the first place we go."
"No," I said softly, then more firmly, "No. I'm damaged goods. I don't want him to see me like this. Let him remember me the way I was before."
She didn't look at me as she said: "Maybe he wouldn't care. Maybe he'd just be glad to have you back."
I watched the tarmac unspooling in front of us, the sun blazing down on it all. "Maybe one day," I told her eventually. "There's something else we need to do first."
"Yeah," she said. "OK. And where do we start?"
> "It's a big world," I told her. "We could start anywhere."
THE END
REBECCA LEVENE has been a writer and editor for fifteen years. In that time she has storylined Emmerdale, written a children's book about Captain Cook, several science fiction and horror novels, a novelisation and making-of book for Rebellion's Rogue Trooper video game, and a Beginner's Guide to Poker. She has also edited a range of media tie-in books. She was associate producer on the ITV1 drama Wild at Heart, story consultant on the Chinese soap opera Joy Luck Street, script writer on Family Affairs and Is Harry on the Boat? and is part of the writing team for Channel 5's Swinging. She has had two sit-coms optioned, one by the BBC and one by Talkback, and currently has a detective drama in development with Granada Television.
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