Leopard Dreaming (46 page)

Her invisible bed jolted as he jumped nearer, jarring her arm and making her cringe.

‘I know your secrets!’ he screamed in her ear. ‘I warned you, didn’t I? You should have stayed home at Serenity, where you belong. With me!’

Invisible soldiers made a rush at him, while Mira slid under the bed as best she could manage with her wrist still hanging loosely from the cold metal rail. Outside in the hall, she could hear past the ruckus to footsteps and a conversation as it grew louder.

Mira wondered if this was the conversation he’d fore-heard that set him off again.

Straining to hear it, she could catch only snippets.

‘… ball is rolling,’ Lina complained. ‘We’re partners now … You have to let me go, so I …’

‘… shall,’ Kitching replied. ‘… another guest coming … somewhat cranky. Excuse me, trouble in the infirmary … meet you … next corner on your left, please.’

Mira heard him burst through into the room, banging open the invisible door, while Freddie continued to leap about screaming the same nonsensical phrases over and over again, and the four invisible guards shouted at him in various languages.

‘Somewhat cranky? Only
somewhat
cranky?’

‘Get down from there right now!’ Kitching ordered.

Freddie laughed maniacally, and Mira couldn’t decide whose neck she wanted to get her hands on first — until Freddie obeyed by leaping down and lowering his voice to the merest of whispers. His resonance changed as well, as if aging from Freddie the Larrikin to the much shyer Fredarick the Sage, whose vocabulary filled out despite the clumsier tongue that befitted him so much better as a deaf man.

‘Beware his temper, little brother. He’ll bite like a wounded animal. He’s been ambushed before and didn’t take to it quietly.’

‘I can handle Bennet Chiron.’

Ben?
Mira brightened at the sound of his name. She’d assumed they were speaking of Lockman, yet she hated to think of either one of them getting hurt again because of her.

‘You’d better,’ Freddie warned him. ‘I gave you all three ways that you’d need to hijack their
Limo
, so before your third team gets back from that final stage with the beached whale, I’ll get my hour alone with Mira Chambers. Then you’ll get your Issues to meet your plans for the future, and we can all part company within the year. No further contact required.’

‘One hour, as agreed. You hold to your side and I’ll hold to mine, old man.’

‘Yes, yes. And verification of what happened to that loathsome lieutenant?’

‘Tied to a tree, as planned.’

‘Just as well too, or he’d be more than you could handle, little brother. His heart and past are both darker than you know. The last time he assaulted an enclave this size, he had to change his name to bury his true identity.’

Mira shook her head, unable to believe it. He couldn’t mean Lockman. He wasn’t that kind of killer.

A small voice deep inside her reminded her that she’d been wrong about him before. She’d been wrong about Ben too, and a lot of other things, including the reason why Kitching did what he did. And she had no idea what they meant by issues.

Shaking her head, she refused to believe Lockman would turn against her. If he was coming, let Kitching be the one to worry. She rolled Lockman’s name around in her mind, savouring it. Jayson; her loyal lieutenant. She touched her lips and recalled the delicious taste of him. Like Ben, he’d never been anything short of a gentleman. She’d only betrayed him in the forest to save him.

Doubts kept creeping in with her guilt and fears anyway. An old habit, too hard to shake. She hadn’t meant for him to fall so hard. Hadn’t meant for him to be hurt again as they’d taken her away from him. Perhaps she hadn’t been clear enough about how she really felt about him either, and she wished now
that she’d cared enough about his past to ask more questions.

‘He’ll kill Mira before he lets anyone else have her,’ Freddie said.

‘Lies, lies,’ she repeated to herself. She tried to stay focused on her first and most reliable impressions of him. It didn’t matter to her if he’d closed the door on a former identity or two. She had two former lives herself, between childhood and her decade locked away. She also knew to the core of her heart that he would never betray her. And yet, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t silence the nagging doubts they’d planted. She’d spent too many years never being able to trust anyone. How could she trust her own heart if she’d never been tested?

Clenching her eyes tighter, she flooded her thoughts with every sweet, gentle thing he’d ever done for her. Every touch and every kiss, but as she caressed her lips again, reconsidering each tender moment under the darker light of their implications, she began to rock back and forth with her knees hugged up to her chest.

It
was
still possible that he’d only been using her. In the harshest, cruellest world, it could be possible.

‘Now look what you’ve done!’ Kitching shouted. ‘Did you mean to upset her? You must have known that’s how she’d react to your little tantrum.’

‘Yes, yes, yes! But it’s immaterial. This isn’t the right ward of the infirmary. You know which room I need when I take my private time with her.’

Kitching growled and paced back and forth for a moment. ‘If that’s the way it must be, then so be it. But my men get to escort you all the way without any further protests from you, and they’ll count every second you’re alone with her from the hallway.’

Freddie clapped excitedly. ‘And the matron? She must stay with me the whole time too. Unconscious or not. No exceptions.’

‘Denied! She’s been through enough. I’ve broken a dozen men with half as much. And let’s not forget it was ruining one young woman that drove us apart in the first place. A second is only expendable because of the high potential for her Issues to aid me in repairing the future — and only if you leave her with no permanent damage. To take a third for no reason other than carnal pleasure, I’d kill you myself.’

Dimly, she heard movement, as if Freddie had wrapped an arm around his brother’s shoulders to confide in him.

‘You misunderstand me, brother. My love for Madonna is spiritual. I’d never touch her precious flesh that way. She’s my angel.’

Mira promised herself he’d never touch her ‘that way’ either. She’d kill him first.

‘You can’t lie to me,’ Kitching argued. ‘I’m still disgusted by what I caught you doing sixty years ago with that daughter of the drifter you found squatting here. Frankly, it’s harder to believe you’re still capable, let alone eager to reproduce yourself. So if I must supply the circumstances in order to achieve a mating between the pair of you, I’m hardly going to put another female in there to distract you. You’ll get one shot at producing an Issue, and one only. Then it’s back to reverse engineering.’

Mira shrank in terror. They wanted a child from her!

The thought of that old man on top of her made every filthy thing she’d ever seen pale and dissolve into nothingness.

‘Oh, but the Issues shall be twins, brother. One fresh life for each destroyed, and the fates shall return to balance. Is that also worth something to you?’

‘You’re not getting two women alone in the same room with you!’

‘Aaiiieeeeeeeeee!’ Freddie wailed in frustration. ‘You must heed
all
my warnings the instant they come
to me! Time is as straight as the world is flat, but while travelling, the terrain often changes.’

‘Make sense, man!’

‘Simpleton! Listen slowly to these echoes as I make them. Every action has a reaction. Sometimes they’re unforehearable. So wherever I go, my angel must accompany, or the future you’ve planned shall begin unravelling.’

‘And what’s that got to do with all that
world is flat
crap?’

‘Pah! It should be obvious. You may think you know where you’re going, but like the ancient sailors, if you stray too far, you’ll come full circle.’

‘We’ve already done that in coming here, where our lives first diverted, but I can’t help feeling there’s still something you’re not telling me.’

Fredarick wailed a second long cry of exasperation. ‘Your men tried to sedate me! I’m an old man, brother. I need all my thrusters firing if I’m to do what I must with Mira Chambers. How many sedatives are here? They can’t be wasted on me, when she’s the one who needs taming for an hour.’

‘We have “breath mints” too,’ Kitching argued.

‘Think, brother! I can’t keep you informed of the future if I’m off my face when the future veers in a new direction. And I cannot tell you the biggest secret when she’s sitting right there, pretending to remain so innocent!’

‘Ow, ow, ow!’ he added, as heavy footsteps dragged him out into the hall and slammed the door behind them. ‘Not the ears!’

‘You were saying?’ Kitching said, clearly ignorant of how well Mira’s hearing had developed to compensate for her loss of vision. Freddie should have known, but failed to mention it.

‘Trust me,’ Freddie pleaded. ‘I’ll bring no harm to
either woman, save for that which has already been done, and that which we’ve already agreed upon.’

‘You mentioned a secret,’ Kitching demanded. ‘Spill it, or I’ll be forced to learn how much pain it takes to wake a woman from the green sleep of a Chinese floater.’

‘Okay, okay! Lean closer though. It must be whispered. You may not have noticed, brother …’ His voice dropped even lower. ‘But that girl, Mira? She
is
crazy.’

Mira heard a loud slap of skin against skin and a heavy thud, as if his body had been thrust against the thinnest metal wall out there.

‘Get him out of my sight,’ Kitching ordered. A set of boots rushed out in that direction. ‘Before it’s contagious.’

‘You underestimate your own wickedness!’ Freddie shouted as he struggled, ‘if you think taking her cherry is more evil than taking her irises! You can’t reverse engineer a computer screen without the wiring and software to go with it.’

‘Which is why we’re trying it
your
way.’

‘No, no! Wait!’ Freddie cried as rough handling succeeded only in dragging him back inside the infirmary. ‘What did you do, you fool? All the echoes, the future! It’s all changing again!’

Maddy Sanchez struggled to open her eyes. She could hear voices arguing in the hall, and Freddie wailing.

Leave him alone!
she cried, but only in her mind, since her lips barely parted. Her head thrummed with a sedative she’d never experienced. Made her mind and body separate. Aware of the worst things around her, she felt light-headed, with leaden legs as if her body was drowning in a numbing fog that grew denser from chest to feet.

‘No, no! Wait!’ Freddie cried as two Asian men dragged him in from the hallway. ‘What did you do,
you fool? All the pages in your other hand. They shouldn’t be there!’

‘All I did was send my aide to fetch them, old man. Silently, so it wouldn’t distress you. Now calm down, and watch me.’ Kitching entered with the Braille manuscript and took it to a metal sink beside a medical bay where Mira Chambers cowered, handcuffed to the side rail of a gurney.

‘You wrote this scene,’ Kitching said. ‘And up until now I’ve let you enact it. But it’s obvious to me now that you wanted Miss Chambers to hear all of it, and fear it, or you’d have been speaking to me all this time in silent sign language.’

‘Don’t mess with it! Noooo!’ Freddie wailed.

Too late,
Kitching grinned, and signed to him.
If you can hear the new future, then you know what I’m going to say before I say it. And that my first words to you will be the last you foretold in this Braille monstrosity. So the transition from your version of the future to mine is — and always was — seamless
.

‘Please, no, no, no, noooo!’ Freddie pleaded, dropping to his knees and clasping his hands tightly as if praying. ‘My perfect tragedy! Stop!’ he cried. ‘You’re destroying the ending!’

‘Behave,’ Kitching said, loudly and clearly. ‘Or I’ll send for a taser glove.’

‘Aaiiieeeeeeeeee!’ Freddie wailed as if he’d been stung anyway. ‘That line was meant to comfort me! The perfect ending with us all safe at home at Serenity!’

‘Honestly, old man, I can’t be rid of you soon enough.’
But,
he added with his skeletal hands,
we’ll do it my way; with all your dreams turned to ash.

Raising the manuscript over the steel sink, Kitching clicked his fingers to summon a cigarette lighter from one of his men and used it to set the pages ablaze.

Maddy blinked as he dropped the flaming play into the sink.

Freddie’s scream also came delayed, as if he’d needed to see it to believe it.

‘Tragedy!’ he wailed. ‘Don’t you understand? There are still so many things that can go wrong tonight. It hardly matters who comes to fight for sovereignty over Mira Chambers — whether it’s you or me or Ben, Lockman or Garland — there
will
be a struggle. I’ve heard it happening every possible way between now and forever, and in every permutation of the future!’

‘I disagree. You haven’t heard my version.’

Please,
he added with his hands.
Her death can be avoided! Yet she keeps dying, over and over, no matter what I do, trying to stop it! Now I know the reason. It’s your tampering!

‘I have no intention of killing her.’ Kitching paced the floor, sounding equally frustrated. ‘Listen to me, Fred old boy. Try to grasp one pure moment of clarity. Your sweet young matron can’t leap in front of any bullets if we keep her groggy. Forewarned is forearmed, as she would say. Am I right, brother?’

‘But it
has
happened.
Will
happen. Has-will-have
going
to happen, because it already did. And is. And will in the future. Because it’s still playing out that way again!’

Despite burning the manuscript?

Freddie nodded, his hands knotting feverishly. ‘My angel must stay safely within arm’s reach of me.’

‘And that’s all it would take to keep you quiet and cooperative until the end?’

Freddie’s nods turned to trembling as he pointed to Mira, still cowering under the gurney. ‘Get a sedative, or she’ll fight like a wildcat!’