Rise Page 16

  Groff frowned and Harris gestured to his colleagues. “So that we might examine the specimen under natural light.” The doctor pointed to the dark cell. “I’m afraid subject three may mind the light since her eyes are still healing, but the sensitivity cannot be helped. In fact, it is a crucial tell sign in the subject’s development.”

  Any other time, Groff wouldn’t have thought twice about obeying the order. With the concentrate tucked into his waistband, he swung between feelings of rebellion and secrecy. “She is in a very delicate state, Doctor Harris. The light will cause her considerable distress.” Groff licked his lips. The three Bleek doctors stared at him with dispassion.

  Harris cleared his throat. “Fetch subject three from her cell, Groff. After all, you were the one who raised the subject of festering stitches. As much as I am sure you will nurse the subject to the best of your ability, there is the possibility that further surgery may be required.”

  Groff felt the motivation to keep fighting ebb.

  Harris squeezed up his eyes. “Are you unwell, Groff?”

  “I am fine, Doctor Harris.” It was only a half-lie; organ failure and worn joints were everyday ailments in camp.

  “You look like a man harbouring the will to do harm. Is that right, Groff?”

  Groff thought about the calcium fluoride compound he had stolen. He imagined the compound activating, its colourless gas rising to the heavens and eradicating all life on the way up.

  “I have a toothache.”

  “That, at least, is treatable. Be grateful your pain isn’t more acute. And now, subject three if you please.”

  Such a polite request! Harris was also skilled at keeping his own brand of poison hidden.

  The doctor entered the key pass into the handheld alongside Shola’s cell. The door slid aside.

  It pained Groff to step inside that cell. There were folk tales about girls who endured the sleep of the dead in glass coffins and princes who touched enchanted objects to the dead girls’ brows and awoke them. He was no prince, though, and the girl was far too young and visceral to seduce him. A swirl of flesh on the bed, she reeked of pheromones and animal musk.

  “Come on now, Shola Ricks. The white coats would see you.” He slid a hand around the back of her neck and was repulsed by the feel of bristles.

  “Do they kill me now?” she asked with a trace of longing.

  “Soon, Shola Ricks. Soon.”

  Together, they emerged into the light. The gravity of Shola’s surgeries had left her limp and weak. Groff had to half-carry her into the consultation room, where he laid her down on a riser stretcher and activated the hoover kick.

  He stepped aside as Harris and his doctors entered the room. Trays of instruments were recovered from white cabinets sunk into the walls. As Groff had feared, there was no dream gas to soothe the girl to sleep this time, only the brute application of sharps and blunts to already raw flesh. Groff edged towards the door, but Harris instructed him to stay. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought he saw a spark of amusement in the doctor’s expression.

  The scanners reminded Kali of her father’s personal gel frame, from which he accessed the load-codes and access passes for the entire data farm housed at Capital Hall. She thought about the day she had threaded her own manifesto between the warp and weft of the government’s newsfeed. Dust motes had twinkled in the soft haze through the window and the heat of the sun had been welcome. Not like the savage blaze out in the desert. There had been a water clock ticking, she remembered that much, and in the space between, a sense of time stretching. It took less than a minute to upload the document, but in those moments of waiting she experienced a heightened appreciation of life and its dangers. ‘I am the fox’, she had told herself. ‘I am the fox creeping in amongst the plump chuck birds.’

  Months later and Kali felt like that fox once more stealing into the hen pen. Despite her objections, she had more than enough training to install the scanners. But she needed an excuse to give her and Mohab eyes on the bridge.

  “I do not like the way these hinge.” She banged the top of the scanners and pursed her lips.

  “You get it right, bitch,” said the guard who had eavesdropped on her and Mohab earlier.

  “If you want it done right, we will need to anchor the scanners at the apex of the service trunk. It can be assessed from the bridge.” She put her hands on her hips and stared down her nose at the guard. One of the men visibly flinched and she braced herself against the baton.

  For once though, the guards appeared to be in agreement with her suggestion.

  “You seen a gunner’s bridge before?” said one to the comrade nearest.

  “Only photostat.”

  “Do we have clearance for the upper deck?” The mouthiest guard eyed Kali. He was right to suspect her of an ulterior motive for visiting the bridge. Luckily, he wasn’t able to fully process what that motivation could be.

  “Hurry it up, then. We’ll take the internal riser rig to the bridge. And Klein, Gilbert…” He fixed on his fellow guard. “You don’t take your eyes off these two, not even for an instant. After all, it doesn’t take much for that rebel bitch to whip up a shit storm!”

  The three guards elbowed one another and laughed at her expense while, standing by her shoulder, Mohab stared dead ahead.

  “Lead the way then, Lieutenant Kali,” said the mouthy guard, waving her on. “After all, this gunner belongs to Titian’s army. It’s only right daddy’s girl should head up this parade.”

  With her fluffy eyelids pinned open and her newly scarred irises being prodded, Shola Ricks was proving how she had learnt to howl. Back in the cells, the razingstock boy scuffed the floor with his bone hooves and produced his version of their low drawl. The lizard girl was equally excited. Groff recognised the dry rasp of her working neck folds and the tight keen which was her attempt to communicate. No animal liked the sound of another suffering. Except Harris and his fellow white coats.

  Groff endured the child’s distress. But Shola Ricks had sunk her hooks into him, and he folded his arms and dug his hands into his armpits. It was the closest he could come to a barrier between himself and what was going on in the room. Pipettes hovered over Shola’s eyes; she screeched at the stinging drops, working up froth at the corners of her mouth.

  “I’ll wait in the corridor,” said Groff, and he started for the door.

  “Stay.” Harris was drawing blood from the girl’s arm with a suck syringe. Groff half-expected the doctor to the drink from the plunger.

  He did as he was told, even as the cries of the hybrid children mingled with those of Shola Ricks. ‘His name was Ju. A nightclub singer, born and raised in Nilreb...’ In his mind, Groff recounted memories from another lifetime, telling himself the story as he had Lieutenant Kali. Memories from that first night soothed him – the lights in the trees, the crisp white tablecloths, the bite of schnapps…

  “Lo-lany-lo, lo-lany, lo-lany. Mama, sing with me. Oh, Mama, wait a while. That’s hurting…” Shola’s nonsense talk turned to sobbing.

  Groff grabbed at his hair and twisted the handful. He longed to retrieve the bottle of concentrate he had stolen and burst it under the noses of the brutes in that sterile room! It would be sweet relief to watch the Bleek bastards have their lungs and eyes blister, to watch them burn from the inside. Except, there was Shola Ricks lying prone on the examination table between them, and while he longed to end her suffering, he couldn’t face the idea of watching her die like that. And so he stayed still, still as stone, and tried to convince himself that he wasn’t really in that room. He was back at the nightclub with Ju, listening to his pretty songs.

  It took him by surprise to realise that Shola Ricks had quietened down and was being carried back to her cell in the arms of one of the doctors. Harris patted the stretcher.

  “Hop on then, Groff. Let’s see about that tooth.”

  Tooth? It took Groff a moment to shake off the remnants of his daydream and remember his claim to have too
thache. Whether that was true or not was difficult to tell when he lived with perpetual hunger and the pains of a body breaking down.

  Either way, there was no getting away from the lie. And in part, he felt he needed punishment. Hadn’t he stolen the concentrate in full view of Shola Ricks? Hadn’t he been reduced to this phantasmal villain, this stealer of potions and tellers of lies?

  He sat on the edge of the riser stretcher, feeling it give a little under his weight then settle.

  Doctor Harris selected a set of pliers. “Yes, you may like to watch the extraction,” he told the others, and all three doctors peered down as he lay back on the bed.

  “Open wide, Groff, and show me which tooth is causing you bother. Prod it with your tongue. Yes, yes I see.”

  Harris leaned over and used the closed pliers to ease out one of Groff’s cheeks and then the other. He glanced up at his fellow surgeons. “The decay is prevalent throughout the teeth. It is a Vary weakness. The elongation of the incisors and breadth of the molars means there is a differential between a healthy Bleek mouth and the oversized version you see here. It is a subtle demarcation, I grant you, but acutely marked by those who study Vary physiognomy.”

  One of the doctors cleared his throat. “If the malformation is inherent, why bother removing one tooth?”

  Groff saw the man staring down into his mouth with abject fascination.

  “Because this is Groff, and Groff has a way with children, don’t you, Groff?” Harris poked at the nurse’s forehead, right over the branded P. “Now brace yourself, Groff. A few firm tugs and we’ll have you relieved of another of those troublesome teeth you’re so prone to losing.”

  The pliers widened before Groff’s eyes and descended. He felt them clamp down and the sweat of anticipated agony broke over him. The false accusations wore away at him like acid. With Shola Ricks’ suffering still ringing in his ears, he thought about the smuggled concentrate in his pyjama waistband and the dream of flying free in a gunner.

  Twenty-Three

  Mohab thought it must be strange for Lieutenant Kali Titian to stand on the bridge of an imperial gunner ship wearing a pair of nicks and prison pyjamas. It was just as strange for him to be at the heart of one of High Judge Titian’s colossal war machines; it drove home quite how futile it was for the Vary to dream of freedom. Even if he and a handful of others made it inside the gunner and made good on their promise to destroy the camp, there would be other camps like Abbandon waiting for them all over Bleekland. If Titian had his way and struck out against his neighbouring states, there was the risk that camps like Abbandon would soon litter the Earth. And then what, when the last vestiges of freedom had been drained and Vary were on the brink of extinction?

  He shrugged off the thought and concentrated on absorbing his surroundings. The bridge was a cube of black glass-sheet. Banks of datastacks and gel screens locked in and over one another. Riser stools sat flush with the floor, ripe for activation. The great living shaft of the engine’s stem dominated the bridge.

  Mohab imagined the gunner in flight, the docile hum of its kinetic engine. Did the stem oscillate or simply vibrate? He felt like an innocent inside a Tree of Knowledge.

  Kali pointed to the racks of scanners and a row of spare hook-ups. “Over there.” She spoke up for the benefit of the guards. “The hook-ups look secure.” Dropping her voice, she whispered, “Dalma plates are part of the data system; they control the display systems, weapons, navigation, etc. You see those charger bays?”

  Mohab followed Kali’s eyes as they flicked sideways. The charger bays looked the same size and shape as the weird stone tablets he had dug up in the quarry.

  He didn’t dare make his interest any more apparent. Instead, he concentrated on logging out items from the tool roll as Kali worked to link up the scanners to one of the spare hook-ups. Behind them, the guards were curious in their own right. They poked about in the nooks and crannies of the bridge, no doubt imagining themselves sent to war in the romanticised setting of the gunner and not stationed amongst the slime and pestilence of a prison camp.

  Mohab couldn’t help it. Curiosity got the better of him. “The keycode brings the engine into play. The dalma plates...?”

  “Hold a full interstellar schematic for trade routes, satellite rings, meteorological differentials and debris imagining. We have no way of knowing if there is any juice in the stones you excavated, but nothing in my study of the gunners or what I thought was Titian tech led me to believe they could expire.” Kali looked past Mohab and her face went blank. She held out a hand. “Pass me a couple of jack pins and a bore gauge.”

  They were being watched. Mohab logged out the tools and passed them over. Assisting as required, he watched Kali work to fix the scanners in place, all the while aware of the guards at their back and the vast swell of the gunner all around them. He just hoped Kali Titian knew what she was talking about. The lives of every Vary in camp depended on her.

  “There was once a raggedy old man who travelled far and wide on a broken riser stretcher pulled by a lame red racer. The man had gone in search of the Purpled Cathedral – a sacred place and his spiritual home. Ever since he was a child, the man had heard tell of the Purpled Cathedral, and he had longed to rest there. But the man, he had wolves at his back and at his door, and so he was forced to take to his broken rig and lash the lame red racer to it, and go on his quest through a land full of wolves. There had been terrible encounters – burly four-legged beasts which snapped at his heels and tore his clothes. The lame red racer was whittled down by their attempts until the creature was even more pitiful and the raggedy old man longed to put it out of its misery.

  “All around him, the man saw his people beaten and tormented and slaughtered by wolves. There were days when he could barely find the will to breathe, and there were nights when his heart hurt like it was being carved out from his body. But he kept the vision of the Purpled Cathedral in his mind and journeyed on.

  “For many years and over many miles, the raggedy old man travelled through the land until finally, just as the wolves had almost caught up with him and were baying for his blood, he saw the ancient towers at the horizon. The Purpled Cathedral glittered under sunlight, deflecting the cries of his attackers. Banked on either side by the snarling wolves, the old man drove the lame red racer through the crystalline gates. At his back, wolves impaled themselves on the spikes at the cathedral entrance, or curtailed their pursuit and wove around in figures of eight, whining for their lost prey and fearful of that grand Cathedral of righteousness…”

  It had been clumsy in its way, this story of flight and pursuit. There wasn’t enough detail about the why and the wherefore, and he pitied the red racer being forced to soldier on. But it had been the best Mohab could muster with so much riding on the events of the next day.

  The nurse, Groff, sensed as much.

  “Sometimes it must be difficult to find the words,” he said later, taking a seat on the low cot alongside Mohab and handing over a small glass cylinder. “There’s one more vial to go. I can get it tomorrow. I’ll just need to find an excuse to bring it to the holding bay.”

  What Groff really meant was ‘I need this last vial as leverage so you don’t take off without me.’ Mohab understood. And he owed the nurse in a way. Groff had done his best to put him back together again.

  “We will need you to attend to any who get wounded,” he said by way of reassurance and hid the vial in a secret pocket of his pyjama jacket alongside the other three which Groff had already acquired.

  “We will have a very small window of time in which to board the gunner. The keycode changes every hour.”

  “And do you trust Titian’s daughter to do her part?” Groff stared at Mohab in earnest. “Can she be relied on to deliver the code?”

  Mohab blew out his lips. He’d asked himself the same question over and over since putting the request to the lieutenant. After all, betraying the Vary seemed the surest way to secure herself a pardon and acceptance b
ack into Titian’s fold.

  Somehow, though, he didn’t think she would go against him and the others depending on her. Was it because of a sense of morality? A need to atone for her manifold sins? Or a desire to outwit the Bleek bastards who’d brought her down? It might have been none or all those reasons. All he knew was when he looked Lieutenant Kali Titian in the eye, he saw the same cold resolve as he saw in the twenty-five Vary recruited for the escape plan.

  “We must trust the child of our enemy. It’s a ridiculous circumstance but nothing about our current existence is reasonable.” Peering out into the half-light of the barracks, he said quietly, “Kali has chosen her side. She won’t let us down.”

  “Hey – you two! Go the fuck to sleep or the next shit I take, you lick my arse clean!” It was the block chief, arrived at the doorway and flanked by his men.

  While Mohab lay down flat on his father’s old cot, Groff sloped off in the direction of the bunks at the back of the cabin. Holding his breath, Mohab waited to see if the blockers would shut him up in their own way. But then the block chief stepped away from the door and his men followed, leaving Mohab to breathe again and pray for the oblivion of sleep.

  Twenty-Four

  People make assumptions about me, Grizmare noted to herself. How comfortable I must be with a life spent among grandiosity and palaces and political power! Except, hadn’t it only been yesterday that she swept dust from her cave home and watched a young boy build towers using alphabet bricks? And – Oh, the memory made her smile! – hadn’t she liked to kick those bricks down, revelling in the pouting rage on her son’s usually stoic face?

  Now, though, standing in the foyer of High Judge Titian’s grand Capital Hall, she couldn’t help feeling small next to the robust statues and soaring walls. The exterior of Capital Hall was tremendously imposing – part fortress, part palace. The tallest building in Nilreb, it was wholly characteristic of her son’s love of utilitarian grandeur, consisting of twelve graduating tiers and being capped with five shards of dark grey bedrock surrounding one vast central dome. Internally, the ostentation continued. Grizmare stared up at the blank-faced statues towering over the foyer and she supposed she was meant to be admiring facets of her own son. Arranged in facing pairs, there was the gladiatorial aspect of her son, lunging forward while triumphantly holding up the globe of the Earth. The next pair showed his propensity for architecture, being seated, gel frame in one hand, a ‘miniature’ version of Capital Hall resting on the palm of the other. The third pair represented her son’s steely ambition; much like the tiger dog, he had always struck Grizmare as gritting his razor teeth and powering forward. Each statue braced against an imagined wind while cradling a model imperial gunner craft against their chest. Lastly, and carved either side of a glamorous reception desk, were the most honest pair of figures. These emotionless giants each held up a piglet while taking a blade to its throat. Captured in the stone was the creature’s ecstatic anguish – the only emotion in the entire series.