Stray (10 page)

“And if you can Harvest, I imagine you can Transfer?”

“No touch.”

Tesla frowns.

“She Harvests and Transfers remotely,” Miriam explains.

His eyebrows rise.

Let it be enough. Let them be satisfied
.

“Interim Watcher status would have been granted to your aunt,” Tesla says. “But she is in breach and will likely be taken in for debriefing in the next few days. I will be your Watcher until you have been handed over for Orientation at the completion of our Early Detection Study. I will make contact if we detect any disturbance in your reading. You must keep your phone with you at all times.”

So much for the conditions of my grounding. “Disturbance?”

“Your tracker is a basic locator. It is programmed to recognise keywords relating to the Affinity Project that are considered illegal terminology. This is to discourage careless speech that might threaten the secrecy of the organisation. If you accrue too many demerits, you will hear from me. I suggest you avoid doing so, but the tracker also relays your vitals, blood pressure, core temperature and your brainwave activity. Contact with other Assets, Sparking, sexual intercourse and physical violence will cause fluctuations in your reading. If we detect anything extreme, I will contact you. Your welfare is the chief concern of the Affinity Project and we always protect our Assets.”

He stands up. “Now, you will need to lie down to be Neutralised. You will likely pass out. Is there anything you would like to ask us or tell us before we leave?”

The mud in my brain has slowed all traffic, fear the only remaining vehicle with traction. “What am I supposed to do between now and Orientation?”

“Live.” He turns to Benjamin. “Mr Nelson.”

Benjamin licks his lips. “If she’s pregnant, then someone else will have to perform the procedure.”

Davis rolls his eyes. “What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference to me,” Benjamin says.

“I’m
not
.”

Davis snorts.

Tesla takes his phone, flicks through the screens and taps an icon. There is a moment as the page loads. A graph appears and he holds the phone up for Benjamin to read. “Her blood work,” he says. Benjamin leans in and uses his finger and thumb to broaden the image, examining the graph. If my synapses could actually fire, I would blush, but I sit in the same numb fear that gripped me from the beginning.

“All right,” Benjamin says, turning to me. “Can you stand? Your aunt should be present.”

When I first heard them from the bathroom, the sense of doom had been immediate. The end. It rang through me then and it rings through me again. The end. Miriam helps me up, Jamie and Felicity rise too. Now everyone is on their feet, looking at me. I pat Miriam’s hand and pull away. “I’ve got it.” A show of courage. I make my way to the hall, shuffling and slow, and look back. Jamie, as pale as I have ever seen him, blinks desolate eyes.

It’s a long slow walk from the kitchen to my bedroom, some kind of ceremonial procession up wooden stairs before dark rites and the descent into shadows. I pause at my bedroom door and turn to Miriam. “Can you at least wait in the hall?”

She glowers beside Benjamin whose expression appears grimly set. “Protocol requires a female chaperone.”

“She’ll be right outside the door.”

“Evie,” Miriam says.

“Please.” I sigh. “Don’t I get any dignity?”

She folds her arms, her jaw working, then she steps aside. “Fine.”

Benjamin looks uncertain, but we leave her on the landing and I lead him into my room. I close the door, aware of thresholds being crossed and the letting of foreign things into private places. My Lara Croft costume lies in a heap at the foot of the bed like dead skin from a previous life. Benjamin frowns at the grenades and handguns beneath my boots but I don’t bother to explain. He places the equipment on my desk and gestures at the bed. “Remove your pants. Leave your underwear on and lie down.”

Underwear on. Thank God.

I take my time, afraid of losing my balance, of falling, of Miriam pushing into the room, of an audience for my humiliation, my fingers bloodless and fumbling at the button of my jeans. I picture Tesla and Felicity downstairs, Davis and Jamie.
Jamie
. Benjamin waits. I fight denim from my ankles and almost tumble on the bed, the quilt cool on the back of my bare legs. Hips, thighs, skin. I lie prone, the lump at the base of my skull hard as a golf ball. Jamie’s scent rises from the pillow and I have to close my eyes but tears slip beneath my lashes anyway. A drowning girl’s flailing reach into the bandwidth and I find him immediately, waiting for me. I wrap myself in Jamie’s signal like it’s a life-preserver.

“Jamie is my friend,” Benjamin says, stepping towards the bed, his size and significance eclipsing the room. “So is Helena.”

I release Jamie’s signal and lie empty.

“This Synergist Coding,” he says, flexing his fingers as though recalling what he felt when he touched me in the hall, “it is trouble and they will find out.”

“Can we get on with it?” I say, without malice.

He turns to my desk, again the sound of latex gloves, the whiff of alcohol. He comes back to the bed and folds up the edge of my T-shirt. I clench fistfuls of quilt against the instinct to cover myself.

“And these, down a little, please.” His brow and lips pinch in, a no-nonsense frown. He waves a knuckle at my panties, unwilling to adjust them himself, which I appreciate, though lifting my hands to shunt the fabric puts pressure on my neck and makes me grimace. “That will do.” He sweeps the cotton swab over my skin, making my flesh pucker with goosebumps.

I picture my ovaries, pink and round and unaware. Before this, before Sparking, my imagined future wasn’t much more than formless mist, easily blown into and out of shapes that whim or fancy inspired. I might have been a photographer. I might have gone to Paris. I might have lived by the water, taken up painting and fallen in love.
I am in love
. But in the before version of my life that might have meant children, maybe, sometime, down the line. I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about it. Now, I understand that DNA has blown the mist away and the future is a concrete path between concrete walls, heading in one direction. I bite the inside of my cheek and ignore the slow slip of my tears. “Do they always run?”

He flicks his black eyes at me and then turns away to the desk. “I did.” He returns with the silver revolver thing.

I stare at his remarkable face, his high cheekbones and strong jaw. I try to visualise him with Jamie, sitting, laughing, watching television, playing sport, anything vaguely normal, anything other than what he’s doing right now, alone with me. I wonder how old he is. Older than Jamie, maybe twenty-five, twenty-six? I wonder what his life looked like before extracting terrified young men and women from hiding, drugging them, marking them, stuffing them into the backs of vans, became his job. “If I were pregnant,” I say, “this would …”

“Terminate the pregnancy.”

“Why do you care?”

His mouth compresses. “The Holy Mother sits in your hall. Shouldn’t you care?”

“It belonged to my grandmother.”

He shrugs.

“You would have let someone else do it,” I say. Am I trying to bait him?

He taps something on the handle, the barrel splits in two. He presses the long top of the T-bar to my abdomen and I flinch against the cold.

“I would have,” he says.

It beeps once and he moves it slowly down, searching for the right spot.

“Not much of a stand.”

“That’s what Helena says.” He moves the instrument until it beeps a long continuous note. Something clicks and the note stops. A faint rushing sound follows.

I draw a shuddering breath. “What’s she like?”

“Helena?” He watches the silver instrument. “Smart, clever, kind.”

“Beautiful.”

“She is one of us. Hold still.”

I close my eyes, again with tears. “They could be happy together.”

“They could have been.”

I look at him.

“His chance is gone and so is hers,” he says.

I struggle up on my elbows. “What are you talking about?”

“Lie still.” He pushes me back. “You know this. You have been with him. When Synergists bond their signals bind also. It cannot be undone.”

“But–” I knew there were binding words, a ceremony and such, but Miriam never said … Jamie never said … “When you say, been with–”

“I will release the gauge, you will be paralysed for a moment. It will hurt then you will be unconscious and you will feel nothing.”

A colossal crash wakes me, then raised voices, Miriam’s angry exclamation as she hurries out of my bedroom and down the stairs. I lurch up. Bad idea. My head throbs, my pelvis aches, the back of my neck burns; I can’t have been out long. Hostile voices echo from the hall below. I swing my feet off the bed and fumble for my jeans. By the time I get my pants on – a stiff, stinging exercise bending over tender skin – the voices have cooled. Silent, hunched, I tiptoe out onto the landing.

“Perhaps we could make an effort not to damage the Assets.” Tesla.

Davis pants and spits, his voice muffled. “He broke my nose, sir.”

“You provoked him.”

“Gallagher’s out of his mind,” Davis says.

Tesla sighs. “Mr Nelson, check Jamie’s tracker. Make sure it has not dislodged.”

The sound of movement.

“I’ll pack the van.” Davis. Heavy shuffling steps.

“Ridiculous.” Felicity clicks her tongue.

“The incision’s closed,” Benjamin says. “The tracker’s still in place.”

“Thank you. You can help Davis.”

“Sir, I’m not sure anyone can help Davis.”

Benjamin’s long even stride, Felicity’s short steps behind him. Movement in the kitchen. The back door opens and closes.

Silence.

Carefully, I lower myself to the floor. It’s too painful to lie on my stomach so I shift onto my side, jamming my head up against the skirting for a glimpse of what’s going on. Through a triangle of space between the ceiling and stairs I see the bookcase in the hall has lost a shelf and all of Miriam’s books, collectibles and junk mail are scattered across the floor. The Virgin teeters on the edge of her porcelain robes in the little alcove. Tesla crouches on the floor picking things up. Jamie’s legs poke out into the hall from the living room. Miriam squats down beside him. He’s not moving.

“Leave it,” Miriam says, over her shoulder. “I’ll clean up later. What was this about?”

Tesla rises slowly to his feet. “I had Benjamin upgrade Jamie’s tracker. The reading was high. I commented that he has lost a lot of ground from when he was following the Deactivation Program. Davis remarked that we could all guess why. Jamie punched him.”

I can only see the back of Miriam’s head, but I can picture her look of disgust. My insides tie in double-knots. He knows. Of course he knows. They all do.

“This is a long way from the table,” Miriam says.

“Davis responded with his baton. Set to maximum.”

She shakes her head.

“It will wear off shortly.” There’s a long pause then he says, “They have to end it.”

She doesn’t respond.

“Without a sanction they cannot be together. He made a commitment to the program. To Helena.”

“He loves Evangeline.” Miriam looks up at him.

For one moment I squeeze my eyes tight shut. My heart, a drowning thing.

Finally he says, “Then he will do what is right.”

Her jaw hardens and she rises to her feet. “They’re Synergists.”

He flinches, his lips parting, his frown bearing down. “Have they …?”

“She says they haven’t.”

I clench my fists.

Exhaling, he grips his temples between thumb and forefinger, as though the whole idea gives him a headache. “When she comes in for Orientation, there will be no way to hide this from the Proxy.”

Proxy
.

The word sends an icy chill up my spine. I picture the little girl in the tank and the room with black glass. What the hell
is
a Proxy? The child? The tank of goo? Some kind of telepathic A-bomb? And why does the Synergist issue need to be a secret? Is it more than disapproval of unsanctioned relationships?

“
I know
,” Miriam says. “But you can do
something
. Felicity could–”

“Felicity does not control the Proxy.”

“I’m just saying–” Her voice breaks. “You’re in a position to help her.”

Tesla doesn’t reply.

Miriam swipes the back of her wrist across her eyes; that deep mournful note thrums in the bandwidth.

Jamie groans, shifts his legs.

In the driveway, the van starts up.

Tesla hesitates as though about to speak. His hands ball into fists then release. He swivels on his heel and strides out of sight through the kitchen and out the back door.

My mind in total disorder, I rise as quickly and quietly as I can, press my hands to my eyes, steady myself and make my way downstairs, stepping over the mess in the hallway. Through the window I catch a glimpse of the van pulling out onto the road. Black. Tinted windows. Not remotely subtle.

Jamie has hauled himself up to sit with his back against the couch. Miriam pokes at a cut on his eyebrow, making him wince. He reaches to feel for the lump in the back of his neck.

“You should be resting,” Miriam says, not looking at me.

“I’m fine.” I’m disintegrating.

Jamie squints up at me. I lower myself onto the couch beside him, nudging his shoulder with my leg, working to keep my face even. “Defending my honour?”

He frowns. Miriam’s head snaps up.

“I heard Tesla.”

“You did?” she says. “Then you heard what he said about you two.”

“Miriam,” Jamie begins.

“It’s over. I’m sorry, but you knew from the start it would have to be like this. You both have trackers now. There’s no getting round it. Say your goodbyes and go.” She stands, her sombre gaze on me. “I’ll be downstairs when you’re done.”

We both stare at her back as she crosses the hall to her studio, and watch through the glass door when she closes it behind her. She disappears around the corner to the darkroom, making her way to the hidden training room below. Neither of us speaks. I’m not sure that I can; my mind feels ransacked. All my contained fear of the impossible, inevitable end, tipped over and spilling through me.