Touch

by Claire North

  “Just one, and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you, and when this is done you can find a nice body with a terminal disease, and I’ll go.”

  He waited, broken flesh and breathing silence.

  I closed my eyes, trying to shape the words. “I’ve been thinking about Frankfurt. Your organisation was running a trial, a vaccination programme – vaccinating against me, my kind. Four researchers were killed, and you blamed Josephine – blamed me. I studied Josephine’s life. She was no killer, but when I became Alice, I had a look on her computer, and there it was. CCTV footage from Frankfurt, the night of Müller’s death, and Josephine smiled at the camera. She smiled and it wasn’t her, we both know it. Not Josephine, not my Josephine. I made her a deal and she had no idea what I was, she didn’t know what it meant to be worn. But your CCTV footage predates the time when I met her, so if she had been worn, she cannot have been aware of it. Grabbed in the night perhaps by the man she’d slept with. A few hours vanish, a few minutes. She closes her eyes in a stranger’s hotel room, and when she blinks, she is there still, though her hands feel cleaner than they were, and two maybe three hours have passed her by. Is that the time, she asks, and a stranger says, yes, yes it is, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? And she walks away, not knowing that in the bathroom by the door the tap is still washing away someone else’s blood, scrubbed from her fingertips.”

  Eugene ran a finger along a line of scarring across his belly – habit, fascinated by his own flesh, eyes focused on nothing, body moving on automatic. “You haven’t asked a question yet.”

  “I want you to understand it, before I ask. You told Coyle that Josephine killed those people under my orders but that it was her choice. You blamed me for another’s crimes without evidence. You sent Coyle – a man with a history – to kill me, and through all of this I think about Galileo. Where Galileo fits into all of this. Because Josephine killed no one. I studied her life, it wasn’t her. But a few hours here, a few hours there, perhaps – just perhaps – her body killed someone. And the manner in which it was done is all Galileo. Every step of the way. So, either you’re a fool, giving orders that do not conform to your stated intentions, or you’re nothing more than a pawn. My question, therefore, is this: have you been losing time?”

  Silence.

  He paces.

  He turns.

  He stops.

  He paces again.

  Is he considering the question or simply his answer?

  He paces again.

  Stops.

  Says, “No.”

  That is all.

  “All right then,” I replied. “You’re just another foot soldier.”

  His eyes flickered up to mine, then away again. “Where is Coyle?”

  Fingers running over scars.

  “Rathaus Steglitz,” I said.

  “An address.”

  I gave him one.

  Chapter 50

  Waiting in a prison.

  Boring, waiting for the excitement to begin.

  I remember:

  (Do you like what you see?)

  (I love it! Love it love it love it!)

  Kuanyin.

  I remember her as decent, if aloof.

  I remember her as a her, beautiful in a Congolese woman, her hair pinned back, the scar marks just visible on her wrists from where the blades had slashed, as she proclaimed, “She said she would try again.”

  And what did you do?

  “Why, I took her away from there.”

  And what will you do when she wakes? Kuanyin, goddess of mercy, what will you do when the woman you are wearing opens her eyes and the grief that you walked away from is still fresh in her heart?

  “I will open her eyes in a safe place, with no knives nearby,” she replied. “She chooses death because it seems simpler than life. I will make that decision hard.”

  I heard Kuanyin speak, and I was impressed.

  “Do you like what you see?”

  “You’re very beautiful,” I replied. “Very kind.”

  Only later did it occur to me that I never asked when she intended to give the body back.

  And then, as far from the austere coldness of Kuanyin, there was Janus, who stood in front of a mirror in an apartment in Brooklyn and said, “I love it!”

  It was 1974, and though the Cold War raged and Nixon still clung on by his ragged fingernails, there was a sense in the air that these were the times that would change all times.

  Her brief had been nothing remarkable. Her ambitions bordered on the banal – a house, a family, a life to call her own. A clean body with no past, no baggage. I just needed to get her started.

  I had found the skin at freshers’ week.

  “I love it! Love it love it love it!”

  Michael Peter Morgan, twenty-three years old, about to start an economics doctorate. His first degree was from Harvard, his parents, both dead, had left him a sizeable inheritance. An awkward youth with almost impossibly black hair, thick eyebrows and shoulders that curved forward before the gaze of other men, at first I had dismissed him as a candidate. However, look again and somewhere beneath the hooded eyes and clenched fists, a handsome man was struggling to break free.

  The second Janus slipped into his body like a hot dressing gown after a cold shower, my suspicions were confirmed. His shoulders rolled back, his head rose, his knees unlocked, and as Janus stripped before the mirror, he, who was an instant before a she, puffed his chest out and exclaimed, “Wow, do I go to the gym?”

  “You did tae kwon do at Harvard.”

  “Oh I can see!” he shrilled, turning his naked body this way and that. He raised his arms and squeezed the muscles tight, squeaking with satisfaction. “How long do I take to grow a beard? Do you think I need a beard?”

  “Morgan shaves every three or four days, not very well.”

  “I think I’d suit grizzled. Adds masculinity. How much do I have in the bank?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars.”

  “And what do I do?”

  “You’re about to begin a doctorate.”

  “So I’m qualified?”

  “Highly.”

  “Is my doctorate in something exciting?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I suspect… for these purposes, no.”

  “It’s fine, I can do without the doctorate. Now – I can’t quite see – my arse, would you call it tight?”

  I considered his arse.

  “It seems very nice.”

  He slapped it with a loud crack of palm on buttock, feeling around the flesh on his bum, his thighs, his belly. “Jesus,” he said. “Tae kwon do is the shit, isn’t it?”

  “You haven’t practised for a while. I thought you would be pleased by how well you retain the benefits.”

  “Hell yes! Though I always find it’s easier to stay at a level when I’m a guy.” His gaze, wandering round Morgan’s room, settled on the wardrobe. Throwing the doors wide, Janus’ face dropped. “So yeah,” he grunted. “Shopping trip tomorrow.”

  I tried not to drum my fingers on my knees. “Do you think you’re going to take it?”

  An overdramatic sucking in of air followed this enquiry, before Janus’ face split into a delighted grin. “Just one question – do you think I can get away with wearing yellow?”

  Janus was Michael Peter Morgan for thirty years.

  He married.

  Had children.

  Lived well and, from what I can tell, never once jumped away. Such a life is a luxury that only an estate agent can provide. It is the luxury of wooing a wife over many a rocky year, the empowerment of worrying about a mortgage, the privilege of going to the doctor for an ingrown toenail. It is the joy of friends who love you for the words you speak and the thoughts you think, the honour of being honoured for the deeds you yourself have achieved. It is a name, an identity, which becomes through years of labour entirely yours. A thing that is almost real.

  I do not know what the original Morgan would have done with his life, h
ad he lived it.

  Questions of “what if” are not an estate agent’s occupation.

  Do you like what you see?

  Chapter 51

  I don’t know how long it took them to get to Rathaus Steglitz.

  To find that Nathan Coyle was not, in fact, there.

  Eugene, restored to full hazmat glory, entered the room, then the room within the room, my transparent cage, without a word. He marched forward, drew his right hand up to his left shoulder, and on the backstroke hit me as hard as he could across the face.

  It was a slap more than a punch, but the shock of it reverberated down to my very toes.

  “Where’s Nathan?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  He hit me again.

  “Where’s Nathan?”

  And again.

  “Where’s Nathan?”

  On the fourth stroke his hand became a fist, and his fist sent my chair over sideways, and my head bounced against the floor, and a tooth rattled in my mouth, and I thought, that’ll cost someone some day, losing a tooth like that, and the chair that I was secured to creaked under the strain.

  Bored with hitting me, he tried kicking, and the third time he kicked my kidneys, something inside went pop. A feeling like a blister bursting, the warm glow of fluids seeping into places within my body where such fluids should not seep.

  Had he stopped hitting me, I could probably have found some reason to answer his question. As it was, he didn’t, so I couldn’t, and when he stamped down on my little finger hard enough to crack it, it occurred to me that Eugene’s personal problems were getting in the way of his professional integrity. Then he stamped again, and I largely stopped thinking.

  “Where’s Nathan?”

  I gasped, “Steglitz. He’s in Steglitz.”

  Eugene kicked again.

  “Steglitz!”

  He grabbed a fistful of hair, his gloved hand digging into my scalp, pulled my face close. “You’re going to die in this place, Kepler.”

  Ghosts have one defensive move.

  We move.

  A tale was told of one of my kin who, pursued for her life, hid in the body of a mother. She was eight months pregnant, and as the captain of the killers demanded her name – which the ghost did not know – she hid in the only place left to hide, in the body of the near-born child within its mother’s womb.

  Of the consequences of this – life, death – the story is more vague, but the lesson survives: when cornered, a ghost will always run rather than fight.

  Now seemed as good a time as any to buck the trend.

  I slammed my head, as hard as I could, into Eugene’s visor. Hair tore from my scalp, Eugene staggered back, a thin plastic crack in the sheet across his face. I rolled on to my knees, then dropped back as hard as I could on to the chair.

  Plastic snapped beneath me. I tried to move my hands and found that one was free, the leg that had held it broken wood. My other hand was still cuffed to the seat of the chair, which was either a terrible dragging weight or a weapon. I looked up into Eugene’s startled features and swung the chair into his face. The crack spread through his visor like a spider’s web, and he fell to the side as the weight of my makeshift club slammed into the side of his head. Others were moving, one reaching for a Taser, Alice for a gun. I tried to charge them, but my feet were still cuffed and I fell forward. I saw the man with the Taser bring it up to fire, and raised the chair in front of me. The electrodes hissed and spat as they struck, a buzz through my palms and the pop-pop of the gun. An arm went around my neck from behind, squeezing tight enough to send a pulse of blood through my ears, fog across my eyes, and as Eugene stuck his knee into my back and his fist into my jugular vein, I twisted round, tangling my chained feet against his knees, drew my head back and, biting down a hysterical laugh, slammed my forehead into the crack in his visor as hard as I could.

  Plastic shattered, biting into my face, my skin, my eyes; a shriek came out of someone’s lungs – mine? – and as a gun fired and a bullet shattered my shoulder blade in a primrose roar, my forehead brushed Eugene’s cheek and

  another gunshot. The body beneath me jerked, cried out in pain, and I held on, sweat running down my back, panting for breath, but I held on, my arm across the throat of the security guard beneath me, blood running down his back from where the bullet had broken his shoulder, popped one of his lungs like a can of Coke. He stared up at me, confused, trying to breathe and finding his lung expanding with blood not air.

  A dead man in my arms.

  His tongue flopped in his bloody mouth, his eyes bulged, and he didn’t understand, and he died.

  I scrambled back, bits of broken visor slipping down the inside of my suit.

  Looked up.

  Alice was staring at me. She held a gun with both hands, and it was pointed at me.

  “Leontes!” she barked, and I stared back, empty-eyed, empty-brained. “Leontes! Your suit is breached, Leontes!”

  I remembered that my feet were not chained, tried to get up, felt scar tissue tight across every muscle. Constriction in my chest, aching in my ribs, tasted blood on my mouth, heard a whining in my right ear and wondered if Eugene could remember a time when he had felt human, before this constancy of physical distress became all that he knew.

  “Leontes! Sir!” Alice’s voice was shaking, but the gun was not.

  A picture of Coyle’s phone – Aeolus, Circe.

  Call and response.

  Alice called Leontes, and Eugene responded…

  … God knew what.

  I took a step towards her, and as her finger pulled back the safety to fire, I stumbled, fell, landing breathless on my hands and knees, my palm slipping in the growing pool of blood spreading out from…

  … whoever he’d been.

  Whatever man it was who’d died, eyes cold at my side.

  I looked up and met Alice’s eye, and she knew I was not Eugene, and would not permit herself to believe it. I made no sound but launched myself from the floor towards her face, hands outstretched to tear at the mask that covered her head. I heard the gunshot, felt the shock of something below my lungs. She’d aimed low and wide, deliberately, and it wasn’t enough to slow me down as I slammed into her, throwing her back through the open door of the cage and on to the floor beyond. I knelt on her chest, dragging at her suit as the blood ran down my trouser leg and someone jumped on my back and tried to pull me off, and I drove my elbow into their stomach as hard as I could and heard a whomph of air, managed to get my fingers under Alice’s helmet, a bare inch, as she pushed her hands against my neck and chest, trying to drive me away. I could see a corner of her bare skin and, as the man I’d just thrown off tried again, hurling himself on to my back, I bent beneath him and pressed my lips into the side of her neck and jumped.

  Alice Mair.

  Good to be someone you know.

  Above me, Eugene sagged under the weight of the man wrapped across his back. I drew my fist back and drove it as hard as I could into his face, felt his nose snap beneath my fingers. His body went limp. I kicked him off me, and as he rolled, so his attacker rolled with him, still clinging to Eugene with all his might. I pulled my hazmat helmet back down over my suit, and as the final man in the room untangled himself from Eugene, I crawled to my feet and gasped, “Help him! For God’s sake help him!”

  The man looked at me, looked at Eugene, fallen to the floor.

  His eyes roamed over my suit, stained with Eugene’s blood, but he saw no tear.

  “It’s in him!” I shrieked, overestimating how high my voice could climb. “Help him!”

  If he looked close, too close, he’d see the tiny gap between suit and helmet where I’d wormed my fingers in to touch Alice’s skin. Or perhaps he wouldn’t. Perhaps there was too much blood to see.

  Then he got to his feet, ran to the door, stuck his head outside and roared, “Help us! Somebody help us!”

  This “us” included me.

  Chapter 52

  East
Berlin.

  There are many ways to tell when you’ve crossed that now unsung line from West to East Berlin. Trees shorter, roads straighter, new buildings that much newer. All these things are the external indicators; for internal, I find nothing gives the game away quite so much as discovering yourself in a windowless concrete industrial workshop on whose walls are written the immortal words: CONFIDENT IN OUR STRENGTH.

  Capitalism’s self-confidence is infinite, but never quite so vividly pronounced as that of its socialist rivals.

  Running feet, running people, raised voices. Duck and cover.

  A medical team, fully dressed in hazmat suits, kneeling over Eugene. The inside of my colleague’s helmet was steaming up. I cowered against the wall, dreading the moment someone asked me my half of a call sign or something as simple as my true name.

  I needed to get out of this suit. I needed skin.

  Vomiting wouldn’t hurt either.

  I bent over double, hands around my belly, and gave the preliminary shudders of a woman about to puke. The sight of nausea is often enough to induce nausea in those who see it. People cleared out of my path as I staggered, head down, into the corridor.

  They believed that I was Eugene.

  Let them believe it. If I was lucky, Eugene wouldn’t wake any time soon. If I was unlucky, some bright spark would watch CCTV footage of the last thirty seconds and spot the moment when my fingers brushed against Alice’s neck, and that would be that. Either way, time was a factor.

  I headed away from the cage, away from the commotion, into the bowels of the building.

  It had perhaps once been a factory; heavy metal doors led off to concrete caverns where the empty pipes of extractor fans hung down like jungle vines. Most was still empty space, but some computers had been wheeled in, server racks and cooling fans in a maze of unadorned copper and silicon. Around these worked the men and women of this institution, whatever it may be, some in suits, some in ties, some in loafers. None carried guns, though one door guarded a collection of padlocked cases whose contents, I guessed, were rather more explosive than a set of disco lights. I avoided people, kept my head down, hands to my belly, a woman running for the toilet. I was having a bad day, speak to me at your peril. I’d counted seventeen strangers by the time I found the unlabelled grey door to the women’s toilet, eighteen by the time the woman in the solitary stained cubicle emerged, saw me, smiled and said, “You all right, hun?”