Light Errant (27 page)

o0o

Until a voice said, “
Ben...?
”

The voice was female, young, bewildered and exultant both; faintly accented and surely familiar, but I didn't have time to grope for any understanding before she'd run those seven paces in three strides and grabbed me, the momentum of her pushing me back one extra lethal step so that my head did crack against the cave's roof and my skull sang once more with a dance of light.

“Oh, God. I'm sorry...” Her hand rubbed my head, but she was laughing against my neck as she did it; and then she said, “What the hell are you two doing here, anyway?”

“Being rescued, I think,” Jamie said quietly beside me. It was his hands that drew us apart, his eyes and mind that were seeing clear enough to name her. “Janice, what's happened?”

“Uh. We, we found a way out, and we were trying to get away only there were these, these blokes, they would have seen us and they had guns, so...”

Her turn to slip into silence, as a heavy metal bar slipped from her hand and clattered to the ground, barking my ankle
en passant
. I looked down at it, she looked down at it, I don't know what she saw but I saw how the end of it was darkly wet, staining the rock.

I didn't ask what had happened to the blokes, I thought I knew. Thought I knew how she was feeling, also. This time it was me who reached to hold her, she who didn't resist. Jamie was twitching, skittering behind her shoulder, only one thing on his mind but afraid to ask for it, just in case. He was my bro; I did it for him.

“Janice, Jan—where's Laura?”

“Outside,” she said, and her eyes gestured towards the door. It was easier to look that way now, our eyes were adjusting and besides there was a small crowd of people clustered there, cutting down the shine. I could still see more shadow than skin, but they were all women, that I was sure of, and all kin also. Even at this distance, even with women in indirect daylight, there were enough of them close enough together to raise a bit of a buzz.

No Laura there: but not my job to enquire further, certainly not my job to go and find her. Jamie was gone already, pushing, almost elbowing through the press of pale family that stood between him and his beloved.

Also between me and mine, of course. I stood there noble and self-sacrificial in my own mind at least, watching him go, letting him go, trying to let them both go; and I held on to Janice for comfort, for a substitute, for the most ignoble reasons I could imagine. If she knew, if she understood or guessed, if she saw where my eyes had gone and figured my mind was gone with them, she didn't seem to mind.

And she was doing pretty well, actually, at the substitution business. My attention wasn't long gone, my imagination was only briefly focused on Jamie and Laura before she called it back to the here and now, to her. She leaned into me, a long slim body of contrasts: whippy and hard but soft and yielding also, so many textures contained under not very much acreage of skin; trembling where I touched her but her own hands gripping tight and strong, both bringing and seeking reassurance,
it's okay now, tell me it's okay...
She smelled sour and her skin was greasy, a long day and a night of fear not washed away; but also she smelled as she had the night before, warmly female, smoky, all the scents of promise and welcome.

And then she lifted her head a little, only a little, nice I thought that she didn't have to stretch to kiss me; and I could tell how long it was since she'd had a cigarette, the tobacco-taste was stale and fading, and I thought,
Bastards, they didn't have to take her baccy...

And giggled into the kiss, almost choking on it, weariness and relief combining to bring me to that bubble-touch of hysteria again. She pulled away, staring at me, “What?”

“Nothing, nothing.” I drew her back, just to hold this time because it felt good just to hold, when I'd thought never again to hold anyone but Jamie, and him not for long at all. “So tell us, then, how come you busted in here? You weren't looking for us.”

“No. We didn't know they'd got you. How did they get you?”

“Later.”
We gave ourselves up because they'd got you
—romantic, perhaps, but not heroic. The girls were the heroes here. “You first.”

“They were scared,” she said slowly, picking up the story just after the bit she didn't want to think about, “and I was curious. They said there might be more men, they wanted to get out of sight, so they crowded into the big room outside. I thought that was stupid, we either got away or gave ourselves up again, but I did want to know how come they'd left us unwatched but they still had two men guarding this place. With rifles. So I left them jabbering in a corner,” and she was trying to control it for my sake but oh, she was undisguisably contemptuous of my relatives, and would never know how sweet that was to hear, “and I bust open the door to see what was inside. That's all. I think I was hoping for more guns or something, though God knows why. We couldn't really have a shoot-out, not with this crew.”

“No.” Laura would chance it, and I thought probably one of my cousins also; but the others not, they'd be useless.

“Your turn now,” she said, but I shook my head.

“Not yet. They left you unguarded, you said, but you must've been locked in,” and stripped of anything useful as I had been, keys and penknives, purses, credit cards. “You found a way out, you said, but how?”

“Oh.” She smiled slightly, a touch of happy memory, what I'd been working for. Pleased with herself, she was; very pleased she would be later, when the rest had a little faded and this shone out. “They had us in the cells to start with, yeah? I just asked the wrong guy the wrong question, I suppose. I never thought the police might be involved... They locked us up with the others, me and Laura. But then they took us out of there in a hurry, brought us here and just shoved us into this arcade, it must have been the first place they could think of. They barred the doors on us and there weren't any windows, of course, those places, it was like being locked into a safe. But all the lights were on and the machines were running, there were dumpers in the ashtrays, they'd only just cleared the people out before we came, it was that sudden. All I really wanted to do was smoke those dumpers right down to the filter, I was desperate for a fag; but no one had a light, they'd taken everything off us. So I was going round almost on my hands and knees, looking for a live match someone might have dropped; and the other thing I did, every slot machine I came to, I dipped my hand into the tray. I do that, it's just instinct. And I found a quid, you almost always do. Stuck it in my jeans and forgot it, and went on looking for a light.

“But when they moved us, after the Island had closed up for the night, they put us in some kind of breezeblock office over the way. And it had windows, little ones with these big metal bars over them,” glancing down at her big metal bar with its speaking stain, “but the bars were on the inside, our side, and they were bolted into the walls, and the bolts had these great big screw heads on them, and the pound fitted the slot? So me and one of the others, Serena, we took turns all night and half the morning, and we got two bars off in the end. And then we broke the window, and nobody came; so I slithered out and had a look, and there weren't any guards, so I jemmied the door open and let the others out. And then...”

And then she faltered, but I knew the rest. A couple of guards, a couple of girls with iron bars and desperation on their side.

“Show me,” I said; and she thought I meant the quid, she dug it out and showed me a buckled, scarred piece of shrapnel the Queen would not have recognised as coin of her realm. But I took her hands and turned them, and saw the damage to her nails and fingertips and knuckles; and just as I was wincing in sympathy with that, I couldn't help it, I remembered
break a finger
and a girl's scream. Janice's fingers weren't in prime condition, but none of them was broken. And she hadn't mentioned Laura in her list of martyr-heroines, and Laura wasn't the girl to sit idly by and let others work her rescue for her...

Janice gasped, and I realised just how tightly I was squeezing her poor hurt hands.

“Shit, sorry,” I muttered, blushing for other reasons entirely. “Come on, can we get out of here now?”

“Mm,” she said, eyeing me thoughtfully and then leading me by the hand, not allowing me to let go. “You'll want to see Laura, see how she is.”

How Laura was, was busy. Focused.

And distressed, and in pain, and anxious, and infinitely relieved; and dealing with all of those by stepping aside from them, leaving them lie for later. Focusing hard.

Not quite hard enough, I thought. Jamie was beside her and just a little behind—where I thought he'd been told to stand:
don't get in my light
, I thought she'd said, or something like it—and she couldn't forget, couldn't ignore him, couldn't focus him out. Kept turning her head to check before she turned back, focused in.

What she was focusing on, of course—this was after all Laura, medic Laura, wannabe doc and mother-to-be Laura, little-friend-of-all-the-world Laura who disapproved of any pain on principle, except perhaps my own—what she was kneeling over was the fallen body of our foe. One of our foes. Not the man who made puns in tunnels, just a heavy: who looked particularly heavy now, sprawled face-down in the dust and sand and garbage that covered the road. Who looked dead indeed, his flesh slumping flaccidly on its cage of bone and his head seeming bent out of true at the back, a mess of hair and blood and I thought broken bone.

Give it up, Laura
, I wanted to tell her,
let his ghost go.

She was groping awkwardly one-handed, left-handed—she who was so determinedly dextrous—for any pulse she could find at his wrist or at his neck, and then and not for the first time feeling with already-blooded fingers at the soft giving spot on his skull which shouldn't have given so much even when he was a baby.

At last she did give it up. She twisted her head aside and tried to stand, pushing at the ground with her one hand while she kept the other cradled against her stomach; and couldn't do it, and reached instead up and behind, for Jamie's instant aid. He helped her to her feet, turned her gently towards him, wrapped his arms around her and kissed her mucky hair. Not enough, I thought, he couldn't kiss away her failure; but then Janice at my side made a sound, a soft and guilty choke in her throat, and it was my turn to focus, to hold and hug and try to give an impossible comfort.

I thought vaguely that there was an irony here, I who had wanted no more killing seeking to succour someone who had just killed for the first and worst time, even though she'd had better reason for it than ever I'd had; but she didn't give me time or space to pursue the thought, burrowing her face into my neck, demanding the attention of more than my body. Her shoulders shook under my hands, I felt her tears trickle down under the collar of my shirt. I did what little I could, working my fingers into tense muscles pressing my cheek against her hair and murmuring platitudes, “It's all right, Jan, it's okay, you did what you had to, it was just self-defence,” and really, really didn't want to lift my head even for a moment, to spy on my coz where he was doing much the same thing for his beloved, my beloved Laura.

o0o

There were questions and more than questions, there were urgencies clamouring at the fringes of my mind, beating dark wings at my windows; but they had no more impact than a butterfly's wings. If they were stirring up a storm it would come later, I could deal with it later. Right now it was easy just to turn right in on Jan, engulf her the best I could, be her shell against the world for a while.

And so I was, till she chose to open us up: and that came only after she'd sniffed, snorted, knocked her forehead meaningfully against my ear for whatever meaning I could extract from that, shuffled a few inches over to rub her face dry against my other shoulder and then glanced up and taken another kiss from me, that I was by no means loth to give her.

“You know, it's a funny thing,” she said, eye to eye with me, nose to nose, other eye to other eye and holding my head tipped down at the requisite angle with both hands dug well into my hair, “I've been shut up with four of your relatives for the best part of a day and a night, and that just made me feel queasy and ill; and now here I am with you, and whatever it is it's much stronger with you, you're absolutely crackling, and it makes me feel better. How is that?”

The question startled me, more ways than one. Macallan women didn't usually upset anyone very much, even
en masse
. Maybe Janice was hypersensitive to whatever it was, the aura, the disturbance in the ether that hung about us like a curse, like a blessing, actually only another fact of life to be endured or enjoyed in whatever measures came along.
Maybe she's been hypersensitised
, a dry thought whispered in the back of my head. Maybe too-close exposure could do that to a girl, maybe the friction of mucous membranes could leave her with more than one legacy to remember a Macallan man by. I'd have to ask my mother. Or Laura, of course. I could ask Laura, she should know...

But Janice wanted me answering her question, not sliding off into a private and tedious morbidity. She gave my head a wee shake, to remind me; and, “Patterns of interference,” I said, traditionally. “Pack a lot of us together and everyone's out of synch, everything clashes. Like an orchestra where no one's in tune with any of their neighbours, yes? Get one of us solo, especially a bloke, and it's just a buzz on a single frequency. Like a TENS machine, some people kind of like it. Gets louder in the light, too. Like now,” for me, I could feel myself crackling as she'd said; and I was pleased that it helped her, because it made me feel wonderful.