by Joe Ducie
He guessed that Irene and Tristan were feeling the same, unvoiced frustration, as they began to spend more time at night simply hanging out, broaching the topic of escape only occasionally, in the control room hideaway. Having managed to scavenge a few more torches and a handful of pillows, the hideaway looked a touch more homely – if you could ignore the semi-automatic rifle leaning against the far wall. Tristan had used some of his stock of credits to purchase a whole bunch of treats from the vending machines, and they were currently using Smarties as betting chips in games of blackjack.
‘Twenty-one. Blackjack!’ Drake said, and collected a dozen chocolate pieces. He was the dealer, Irene and Tristan his players, and he was cleaning up.
‘Well, I’m broke,’ Irene said glumly. ‘Lend me a few chips, Michael?’
Tristan shook his head. ‘Sorry, ma’am. I’m just not that kind.’
Irene swiped a few of his Smarties and ate them before he could protest.
‘I think this game’s about done anyway,’ Drake said. The night was still young, having barely crept past midnight. ‘What do you want to do now?’
The thrill of sneaking out without trackers was wearing a bit thin, Drake thought, as it became clearer that the real prison was the hundreds of miles of cold ocean trapping them to the Rig. But one night soon I’ll have my chance …
‘Let’s talk,’ Irene said. She folded her legs up under herself and rested her hands in her lap. ‘We know what Drake’s going to do when he gets out of here, back home to London, but what about you, Mike? Going to run all the way back to Australia?’
Tristan shrugged. ‘I’ve thought about it, but I honestly don’t know. I mean, we don’t really talk about it much, but we’d be living a life on the run, wouldn’t we? Could we ever go home?’
Irene swatted his knee. ‘Oh, stop that. Let’s pretend for a minute you could go anywhere, flying first class. Where would you go?’
‘Nearest Burger King,’ Tristan said without hesitation. ‘Triple cheeseburger, thank you very much.’
‘I think I’d go with you,’ Irene said and rolled her eyes.
‘What’s your grand plan, then?’ Tristan asked her.
‘Moraine Lake in Alberta. It’s in Banff National Park up in the mountains. The water is so, so blue and surrounded by these huge trees and snowy peaks. I want to swim in that lake.’
‘You’ve been before?’ Drake asked.
Irene shook her head. ‘No, never. I grew up in the next province over, in British Columbia near Vancouver. But I’ve seen pictures.’ She glanced at Tristan. ‘We could get cheeseburgers on the way, I guess.’
‘It’s a date,’ he said, then considered what he’d just said, and blushed.
Irene swatted his knee again and smiled.
‘I think I’d just go back to school,’ Drake said, surprising even himself. ‘Heh, how about that? I think I’d just want to go back to a normal life, before any of this happened.’
‘Boy, I can understand that,’ Tristan muttered. ‘If I ever do get home, I’d probably work outside, seeing as how I’m not allowed to use computers, somewhere out in the sun with trees. Somewhere in the country, down south from Perth maybe, where I don’t have to see, hear, or smell the ocean. Lot of vineyards down that way, I could get a job picking grapes, or something.’
‘I always wanted to be a blackberry farmer, growing up,’ Drake said.
Irene snorted. ‘Oh bless, that’s so cute. Why blackberries?’
‘Why not?’ Drake chuckled and shook his head. ‘When I was younger, before my mum got too sick to really travel, we used to go out into the country and pick blackberries right off the plant. They grow wild all over the UK, you know? She’d make these fantastic pies with about a million kilos of sugar in the crust, stuffed with blackberries. And the jam, oh sweet gravy, the jam.’
‘That does sound nice.’ Tristan cleaned his glasses on his sleeve. ‘But you’d probably get sick of blackberries after a while.’
‘I’m not sure I understood what you just said.’
Tristan chuckled. ‘So I’m working in a vineyard, Will’s farming blackberries – although I’m not sure that’s a thing, given that they grow everywhere – what about you, Irene? After you’ve swam in that lake, what then?’
Irene sighed. ‘Find a handsome man with a yacht and loads of cash and sail through the Mediterranean.’
‘Oh, sure,’ Tristan laughed. ‘That sounds great.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ she said.
Tristan waved her protests away. ‘Knowing you, you’d be bored inside the first hour. Sailing on yachts and eating fancy food, that’s not you, Miss Finlay.’
For a moment Drake thought Irene would snap at him. Her face flickered through a range of different emotions, and seemed to settle on mildly confused. Irene stared at Tristan as if seeing him anew. The tiny smile on her face looked like a secret waiting to be shared.
The conversation drifted across midnight and into the early hours of the next day. Drake felt that the events of the last few weeks had forged a useful sort of friendship between the three of them. Oh, so you’re thinking of them as friends now? They knew each other better in two short weeks than most people, in the outside world, knew each other after years. A small, nagging worry in the back of Drake’s head wondered what would happen to these two if – when – he escaped on his own.
‘What about first kisses?’ Irene asked, and giggled. ‘Tell me yours, Will.’
‘Oh, blimey. Mary. My first was Mary Mallory behind the bike shed at school,’ Drake said, thinking back a few years. ‘We were thirteen. She was pretty.’ He chuckled. ‘I wonder if she still goes there. I’ve no idea what goes on at home any more. How about you?’
‘Brian Salmon,’ Irene said, and made little kissing sounds with her lips. ‘We were at Stanley Park on a school trip in downtown Vancouver. He picked me a flower.’
‘Did she say Salmon?’ Drake asked, nudging Tristan. ‘She said Salmon, right?’
‘Oh shut it. He was cute and,’ she almost blushed, ‘he could grow a moustache.’
Drake laughed until his sides hurt.
‘How about you, Michael?’ Irene asked. ‘When was your first kiss?’
Tristan shrugged and looked away, embarrassed. ‘I’ve never actually … I was always busy at school and never, well, never really had any friends or anything.’
‘Really?’ Irene blinked. ‘You’re seventeen, aren’t you? Well, that just won’t do.’
She stepped forwards and grasped Tristan’s head, a hand on each cheek, and pulled him close. Irene gave Tristan his first kiss – and she made it count. She pressed her mouth against his and Tristan gasped. His knees tried to buckle but he caught himself. Unsure what to do with his hands, Tristan waved them back and forth either side, no doubt signalling for help.
Drake burst out laughing again at the sight of him flailing.
‘There now,’ Irene said, satisfied. She pinched his cheek and let him go.
Tristan fell back against the wall, stunned and confused. He let what had just happened sink in. Slowly but surely a dazed, beaming smile spread across his face. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘I … wow, Irene. Please do that again.’
Irene giggled and looked between Tristan and Drake. ‘Boys,’ she said fondly, shaking her head.
Back on the western platform in his bed the next night, Tristan snoring happily below and dawn just a few short hours away, Drake thought back to that kiss with just a twinge of jealousy, and saw the exact moment the tiny, bespectacled boy in the bottom bunk had fallen in love with Irene Finlay.
20
Fractures
Two days before the last rigball game of the season, and a few days before the first day of April, Drake sat up in the common room, flicking through the Alliance Systems newspaper, The Crystal Globe, thinking that Lucien Whitmore really loved the word ‘crystal’, when he saw the Titan return yet again, sailing in over the western horizon towards the Rig’s southern platform.
He gripped the paper hard enough to tear it in half. A bubble of excitement rose up from his stomach and into his throat. All that’s left is to … try.
The excitement soured at that thought, and felt a lot more like falling into a tank of mutant sharks. Still, Drake knew his time was close at hand.
Later that night, he told Irene and Tristan he wanted to get a better look at how they transported the crates and containers from below the eastern platform to the top of the southern platform for loading. So from their hideaway they moved up through the vents, level by level, until they reached the highest point of the eastern platform.
Exposed to the night air, the three of them huddled together for warmth, high above the sea. The sky was scattered with an impossible number of stars, and the moon, heading towards full, cast a pale light on the otherwise dark ocean. Below them was the open-aired bridge from the eastern to the southern platform that Drake had never used.
This was the way Brand had brought the Crystal-X crates the time Drake had cast them back into the sea.
Concealed between vents and Tubes, Drake and his friends spoke quietly, watching the Rig in the dark. At just after midnight, about ten thousand sparks of blue light began to swim under the water, between the pillars of the Rig’s platforms, swaying back and forth in unison.
‘I’ve seen that before,’ Drake whispered. ‘On my first night here. It’s sea creatures, like a school of fish, or something, affected by the blue mineral.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Irene said, and Tristan agreed. ‘Like the stars have fallen into the sea.’ She sighed and put one of her arms around Drake’s shoulders, and the other across Tristan’s. ‘Funny what’s brought us together, isn’t it?’
Drake nodded slowly. ‘Something on your mind?’
‘You both showed me yours …’ she whispered. ‘Do you want to know why I’m here on the Rig?’
Tristan looked between Irene and Drake. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Irene, you don’t have to –’
‘I killed my father,’ she said.
Drake whistled low between his teeth.
‘Well …’ she whispered. ‘My stepfather.’
Daddy’s little girl, Drake thought. That’s what Anderson called her that night. He was being cruel.
‘Irene, I …’ Tristan frowned.
‘He wasn’t a very nice person, my stepfather,’ she said. Her eyes took on a shiny glaze, all the better to reflect the swirling blue light in the water below. One of the tears cut a silent track down her cheek. ‘He hurt me and, you know, more than hurt me. For years.’
Drake felt a quiet, lethal anger stirring in his gut. Tristan’s mouth was set in a fierce, thin line.
‘Anyway,’ Irene said, taking a deep breath. ‘One day I came home from school, and he was in the driveway working under his car. It was propped up with one of those automatic carjacks, you know. My mum was there, handing him tools, and she had a shiny new black eye and a split lip and just this, this miserable look on her face.’ Irene shook her head. ‘And I just snapped.’
Irene took her arms from around Drake’s and Tristan’s shoulders and clapped her hands together. She looked between them both, naked fear and a harsh pride warring on her face. After a long moment, Drake took her arm and put it back around his shoulders. Tristan did the same.
‘You know,’ Drake said, ‘the Alliance, all the police and lawyers, judges and juries … They always talk about how we chose to do what we did. How we made bad choices and have to live with them.’ Drake shook his head. ‘But … sometimes, you know, there isn’t a choice. The path doesn’t lead to right or wrong. I was always going to steal that medicine for my mother. It wasn’t a choice I even worried over. It was just the path I was on, because I … I love her.’
Tristan listened to his words solemnly and Irene pulled them both in a touch closer – sharing warmth against the cold night.
‘Ah, I don’t know what I’m trying to say …’ Drake muttered. ‘Just, we have to live on the path that had to be taken. And that … that doesn’t make us bad people.’
For a time after that, Drake, Irene and Tristan sat in comfortable silence, simply watching the fallen blue stars far below darting back and forth under the surface of the ocean.
So enthralled by the light show, Drake almost missed the first shipment being transported across to the waiting crane of the Titan. Two small containers, about three metres high and five metres across – mini shipping containers – were being wheeled across to the southern platform.
Masked guards escorted the trolleys, pushed this time by crew from the Titan in orange overalls and hardhats. Brand directed the movement, of course, carrying a long baton of a flashlight to guide the way. The southern platform was abuzz with activity. Drake noted the Seahawk was missing, perhaps back on the mainland picking up more poor inmates the Alliance deemed worthy of the Rig.
For the next few hours, the crew and the guards brought up crates and containers – always two trolleys at a time – from down below the eastern platform. The Titan’s crane picked up the cargo and Drake watched it disappear into the hold of the ship, gears spinning in his head. If we could get onboard, then we …
‘We,’ he said aloud, surprised. When had he started thinking in terms of ‘we’?
‘Eh?’ Tristan whispered.
‘Nothing, mate, nothing.’ His rough escape plan had a greater chance of success if he went alone. Drake knew that, he knew it, but a part of him, and not a small part, didn’t like that idea any more.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, releasing a warm mist into the cool night air.
The sound of whirring motors cut through the quiet. The fleet of tiny speedboats emerged from the Titan and began doing laps of the cargo ship. He shook his head, having seen enough.
It had to be at least three or four in the morning by the time the guards stopped bringing cargo up through the eastern platform. Unwilling to risk the descent down to the hideaway when the platform was crawling with eyes, Drake, Irene and Tristan had to wait them out. After a few hours, just when Drake was beginning to think they’d have to chance it if they wanted to get back to their own platforms before dawn, the Titan’s crane swung back over the ship and the crew reboarded. All the crates had been loaded for the night.
Just how much did they load? Drake wondered. If it was all Crystal-X, and Drake had no clue what else it could be, then the mining down below had been stepped up significantly from those first few shipments he’d seen. Tonnes and tonnes of the damn stuff … What did the Alliance need with so much?
Back down in the hideaway half an hour later, Tristan yawned. ‘Did we learn anything useful tonight?’
Drake shook his head. Irene was staring at him strangely, biting her lip. ‘What?’ he asked her.
‘I think you’ve got some sort of plan,’ she said in a sudden rush. ‘An escape plan, and you don’t want us to know! I see how you go quiet when we talk about it, Will. Tristan thinks the same, don’t you?’ Tristan opened and closed his mouth a few times like a goldfish, then settled on a nod. ‘See? Tell us, Will!’
‘I …’ Drake sighed. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You think I’d still be here if I had a way off?’
‘That’s just it,’ Irene said. ‘I don’t think you would be. I think you’d leave us behind in a heartbeat if you could get away.’
Drake’s temper flared. ‘And you wouldn’t?’
‘I wouldn’t leave my friends –’
‘That’s crap,’ Drake snapped. ‘Sorry, but it is. Do you think the same then?’ He turned on Tristan.
A few weeks ago, Tristan wo
uld have cowered under Drake’s glare. Now he held his ground and nodded. ‘I think you’d feel bad about it, Will, but I do think if you had the chance … you’d take it without us.’
Drake looked from Irene to Tristan and back again. ‘You two have been talking about me, then?’
‘Do you have a plan?’ Tristan asked.
‘Just bits of one,’ Drake admitted. ‘It all depends on if I’ve read Storm right, and what would happen if we got caught …’ He shook his head. ‘Just bits of one.’
Irene shivered. ‘I don’t know what kind of life I’ll have away from the Rig – on the run from Alliance Systems, but we can’t stay here, you must see that? The Rig will get us killed.’ She placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and squeezed softly. ‘Please, help me escape.’
Drake stared at her for a long moment and then shrugged her hand away. He thought of the fire at Cedarwood, of Aaron, who had trusted him and died for that trust. ‘Someone asked me to help them escape before, about a year ago … And I got him killed, Irene.’ He stepped back with a snarl. ‘No! I won’t. It’s all just so … so … Look, we can plan, we could have the best plan in the world, but reality isn’t so kind to my plans. Everything could fall apart, and you, or Tristan, could be hurt – or worse. I never want to deal with that again.’
Irene sniffed. ‘Even if it means being alone? On the run and alone? And leaving us here?’
‘You can’t rely on others,’ Drake said bitterly. He thought of what Alliance Medicare had promised his mother, and what they had delivered. A slow death wrapped in a blaze of painkillers when the medicine was there to treat her, sitting in large, cold warehouses. The nations of the world relied on the Alliance for so much, but they gave so little. Look at what they’re doing here! Experimenting on the inmates, on forgotten kids, and changing them into something else. The ones that didn’t go insane became killers to be recruited into the Alliance’s own private military.
‘So that’s it, is it?’ Irene asked, crossing her arms and scowling. ‘Will Drake’s on his own? Just fine by himself. Tell me, how’s that worked out for you so far?’