There is a blonde woman behind the wheel with a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. There’s a crest on it that says ‘JetLife’.
She smiles. Her English is thickly accented. She says, ‘Roxy Monke sent me. Will be there before morning.’
She opens the back of the car. It is a sedan, roomy enough, though he’ll have to keep his knees curled against his chest. Eight hours.
She helps him climb into the trunk of the car. She is careful with him, gives him a rolled-up sweater to make a buffer between the back of his head and the metal housing. The trunk is clean, at least. As his nose meets the curled fibres of the interior carpet he smells only the floral chemical scent of shampoo. She gives him a large bottle of water.
‘When finished, can piss in bottle.’
He smiles up at her. He wants her to like him, to feel that he is a person not a cargo.
He says, ‘Travelling coach, huh? These seats get smaller every year.’
But he can’t tell if she’s understood his joke.
She pats his thigh as he settles in.
‘Trust me,’ she says as she slams the trunk closed.
From here, on the gravel path between nowhere and nothing, just around the corner of a screen of trees, Jocelyn can see a low-slung building with windows only on the upper storey. Just the corner of it. She hoists herself on to a rock and takes some pictures. It’s inconclusive. She should probably get closer. Although, that’s a stupid idea. Be sensible, Jos. Report what you’ve found and bring a unit back tomorrow. There’s definitely something there that someone’s gone to quite a lot of trouble to hide from the road. Although, what if it’s nothing; what if this ends with everyone in the base laughing at her? She takes another few pictures.
She’s intent on it.
She doesn’t notice the man until he’s almost standing next to her.
‘What the fuck do you want?’ he says in English.
She has her duty weapon by her side. She shifts position, allowing it to bang against her hip and move forward.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she says. ‘I’ve gotten turned around. I’m looking for the main highway.’
She keeps her voice very level and calm, turns her American accent up a bit without really intending to. Suzy Creamcheese. Bumbling tourist. It’s the wrong tack to take. She’s in army fatigues. Pretending at innocence just makes her look more guilty.
Darrell feels the skein pumping in his chest. It does it more when he’s afraid, twitches and fizzes.
‘What the fuck are you here for, on my land?’ he says. ‘Who sent you?’
Behind his back, he knows the women in the factory are observing the encounter with cold, dark eyes. There’ll be no doubting him after this, there’ll be no asking what he is; they’ll know what he is when they see what he can do. He’s not a man in women’s clothing. He’s one of them, as strong as them, as capable.
She tries a smile. ‘No one sent me, sir. I’m off duty. Just doing a little sightseeing. I’ll be on my way.’
She sees his eyes flick to the maps in her hand. If he sees those, he’ll know she was looking for this place and no other.
‘All right,’ says Darrell. ‘All right, let me get you back on your way.’
He doesn’t want to help her; he’s coming too close, she should call this in. Her hand twitches towards her radio.
He reaches out three fingers of his right hand and, with a single swift jolt, he kills the radio dead. She blinks. Sees him for a moment as himself: monstrous.
She tries to swing her rifle round but he has it by the butt, catches her in the chin with it, leaving her staggering, hauls the strap over her head. He considers the rifle, then tosses it into the undergrowth. He comes for her, palms crackling.
She could run. There’s her dad’s voice in her head, saying, Take care of yourself, sweetie. And there’s her mom’s voice in her head, saying, You’re a hero, act like it. This is one guy with a factory in the middle of nowhere – how hard can it be? And the girls from the base. You of all people should know how to deal with one dude with a skein. Don’t you, Jocelyn? Isn’t this your special subject, Jocelyn? She has something to prove. And he has something to prove. They are ready to begin.
They square off to each other, circling, looking for a weakness.
Darrell’s done little tests before; he gave minor burns and hurts and damage to a couple of the surgeons who worked with him, just to see if it’d work. And he’s practised alone. But he’s never used it before in a fight, not like this. It’s exciting.
He has a sense, he finds, of how much he’s got left in the tank. It’s loads. More than loads. He lunges for her, and misses, and lets an excited jolt earth through his feet, and he’s still got loads. No wonder blooming Roxy always looked so pleased with herself. She was carrying this round inside her. He’d’ve felt pleased with himself, too. He does.
Jocelyn’s skein is twitching; it’s just because she’s excited. It’s working now better than it ever has, it’s been so good since Mother Eve cured her, and now she knows why that happened, why God made that miracle for her. It was for this. To save her from this bad man, trying to kill her.
She tightens her stomach and runs for him, feinting to the left, pretending to go for his knee, and at the last moment, as he’s stooping to defend against her, she twists right, reaches up, grabs his ear and gives him a jolt to the temple. It’s smooth and easy, sweetly humming. He gets her on the thigh and it hurts like fuck, like a rusty blade scraped along the bone; the big muscles just keep bunching and releasing and the leg wants to collapse. She hauls herself upright with the right leg, dragging the left behind her. He’s got a lot of power; she can feel it crackling on his skin. The kinds of jolts he gives are muscular and iron-hard, not like Ryan’s. Not like anyone she’s fought with.
She remembers her training for fighting an opponent who is simply stronger, simply has more to work with. She’s going to have to let him play himself out on her, presenting to him the bits of the body where he can do least damage. He’s got more juice in the tank than she does, but if she can trick him into spending some into the earth, if she can be faster and more nimble than him, she’ll have this.
She backs away, dragging the leg a little more than she needs to. She makes herself stumble a little. She clutches at the hip. She watches him watching her. She holds out a warding hand. She lets the leg collapse under her. She falls to the ground. He’s on her like the wolf on the lamb, but she’s faster than him now, rolling to the side so that he discharges his killing blow into the gravel. He roars, and she kicks him hard in the side of the head with her good leg.
She reaches up to grab the back of his knee. She has it planned, like they taught her. Bring him to the ground, go for the knees and ankles. She has enough. One solid blow here where the ligaments join and he’ll tumble.
She grabs at his trousers and makes contact, her palm firm against his calf to jolt him. And there’s nothing. It’s gone. Like a motor revved to a standstill. Like a pool of water drained into the earth. It’s not there.
It must be there.
Mother Eve gave it back to her. It must be there.
She tries again, concentrates, thinks of the stream of running water, like they taught her in her classes, thinks of how it flows naturally from place to place, if she only allows it. She could find it again if she had just a moment.
Darrell kicks her hard in the jaw with his heel. He’d also been waiting for the blow that didn’t come. But he’s not one to waste his chance. She’s kneeling now on all fours, gasping, and he kicks her in the side once, twice, three times.
He can smell bitter oranges, suddenly, and a scent like burned hair.
He pushes her head down with the heel of his hand, delivering a charge to the base of her skull. It becomes impossible to fight with the jolt there – he knows: it was done to him once long ago in a park at night. The mind becomes confused, the body goes limp, there is nothing to be done. He holds the charge steady. The soldier si
nks to the floor, her face in the gravel. He waits until she’s stopped twitching. He’s breathing heavily. He has enough juice left to do the same thing twice over. It feels good. She’s gone.
Darrell looks up, smiling, as if the trees should applaud his victory.
In the distance, he hears the women pick up a song, a melody he’s heard them sing before but which none of them will explain to him.
He sees the dark eyes of the women watching him from the factory. He knows something then. A simple fact that should have been obvious from the first, had he not been pushing the knowledge from him. The women are not glad to see what he has done, or that he could do it. The fucking bitches are just staring at him: their mouths as closed as the earth, their eyes as blank as the sea. They walk down the stairs inside the factory in orderly file and march towards him as one. Darrell lets out a sound, a hunted cry, and he runs. And the women are after him.
He is heading for the road; it’s only a few miles away. On the road, he’ll flag down a car, he’ll get away from these crazy bitches. Even in this godforsaken country, someone will help him. He runs pell-mell across an open plain between two great bodies of trees, feet pushing off from the ground as if he could become a bird now, a stream now, a tree now. He’s in open country and he knows they can see him, and they are making no sound, and he lets himself think – maybe they’ve turned back, maybe they’re gone. He looks behind him. There are a hundred women and the sound of their muttering is like the sea, and they are gaining on him, and his ankle turns and twists and he falls.
He knows them all by name. There’s Irina and clever Magda, Veronyka and blonde Yevgennia and dark Yevgennia; there’s cautious Nastya and cheery Marinela and young Jestina. All of them are there, the women he’s worked alongside these months and years, the women he’s given employment to and treated fairly, in the circumstances, and there’s a look on their faces that he cannot read.
‘Come on now,’ he calls to them. ‘I got rid of that soldier for you. Come on. Yevgennia, did you see me? I took her down with one zap! Did you all see that?’
He’s pushing himself away with his one good foot, as if he could scoot on bum and hip for the shelter of the trees or the mountain.
He knows they know what he’s done.
They are calling to each other. He cannot hear precisely what it is they’re saying. It sounds like a collection of vowels, a cry from the throat: eoi, yeoui, euoi.
‘Ladies,’ he says as they run nearer and nearer yet, ‘I don’t know what you think you saw, but I just hit her on the back of the neck. Fair and square. I just hit her.’
He knows he is speaking, but he cannot see any recognition in their faces.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Darrell. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.’
They are humming the ancient song softly.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Please don’t.’
And they’re on him. Their hands find bare flesh, their grasping, pulling fingers on his stomach and his back, the sides of him, his thighs and armpits. He tries to jolt them, tries to grab at them with hands and teeth. They let him discharge himself into their bodies, and still they come. Magda and Marinela, Veronyka and Irina, grabbing hold of his limbs and setting the power across the surface of his skin, scarring him and marking him, and digging into his flesh, softening his joints and twisting them.
Nastya places her fingertips at his throat and makes him speak. They’re not his words. His mouth is moving and his voice is humming but it’s not him speaking, it’s not.
His lying throat says, ‘Thank you.’
Irina plants her foot in his armpit and hauls on his right arm, shocking and burning it. The flesh at the joint crisps and turns. She has the ball out of the socket. Magda pulls with her, and they have the arm off. The others are at his legs, and his neck, and the other arm, and the place across his collarbone where his ambition sat. Like the wind stripping the leaves from a tree, so inexorable and so violent. They pull the skein, lithe and wriggling, from his living chest, just before they get his head off, and at last he is quiet, their fingers dark with his blood.
When she makes the call for Tunde, it has to be the start. Roxy Monke is coming back.
‘My brother,’ she says on the phone. ‘My fucking brother betrayed me and tried to have me killed.’
The voice on the phone is excited.
‘I knew he was lying. The little shit. I knew he was lying. The women in the factory said he told them he was getting orders from you, and I fucking knew he was lying.’
‘I’ve been gathering my strength,’ says Roxy, ‘and making my plans, and now I will take back from him what he took from me.’
So she has to make it true.
She gathers a small force. No one’s answering the phone at the factory, so some fucking thing has happened. She figures he might have people with him, even if he thinks she’s dead; he’d have to be a fucking idiot to think no one would try to take the factory from him.
She’s expecting to have to mount an assault, but the gates of the factory are open.
Her workers are all sitting on the lawns. They greet her with wild whoops, a sound that echoes across the lake, caught up and passed between the crowd of them.
How did she ever think that she would not be welcomed back here, cripple as she is? How could she have imagined she couldn’t allow herself to return?
Her coming home is a festival. They say, ‘We knew you were coming back, we saw it. We knew that you were the one we were waiting for.’
They crowd around her, they touch her hand, they ask where she’s been and if she’s found a new place for the factory, the war coming so close and the soldiers so intent on finding them.
The soldiers? ‘United Nations soldiers,’ they say. ‘We’ve had to put them off the scent more than once now.’
‘Yeah?’ says Roxy. ‘You did that without Darrell, did you?’
A look passes between the women, hooded and mysterious. Irina puts her arm around Roxy’s shoulder. Roxy thinks she can smell something on her; a smell like sweat but more soupy, a rotten tang to it like period blood. They’ve been tweaking the drug here; Roxy knows it and never stopped it. They’ve been taking off-label product. They go into the woods and do it on the weekends; it makes their sweat smell like mould. There’s blue paint under their fingernails.
Irina squeezes Roxy tightly. She thinks the woman’s going to pick her up. Magda takes her hand. They walk with her towards the cold-storage fridge where they keep the volatile chemicals. They open the door. Inside, on the cold table, is a collection of lumps of meat, raw and bloody. She cannot, for a moment, imagine why they are showing her this. And then she knows.
‘What have you done?’ she says. ‘What the fuck have you done?’
Roxy finds it there in amongst the blood and mush. Her own self, her beating heart, the part of her that powered all the rest. A thin and rotting piece of gristle. The muscle striated, purple and red.
There was a day, three days after Darrell took it from her, that she realized she wasn’t going to die. The spasms across her chest had ceased. The red and yellow flashes had disappeared from her eyes. She had bandaged herself up and walked to a hut she knew in the woods and waited there for death, but on the third day she knew death was not going to take her.
She thought then, It’s because my heart is still alive. Outside my body, in his body, but still alive. She thought, I would know if it were dead.
But she hadn’t known.
She holds her palm to her collarbone.
She waits to feel something.
Mother Eve comes to meet Roxanne Monke off the midnight army transport into the train station in Basarabeasca, a city a little to the south. She could have waited for Roxy in the palace, but she wanted to see her face. Roxy Monke is thinner, she looks pained and worn. Mother Eve holds her in a tight embrace, forgetting, for a moment, to probe or question with her special sense. There’s the smell of her friend, just the same, pine needles and sweet almonds. T
here’s the feeling of her.
Roxy pulls away awkwardly. Something’s wrong. She’s almost silent as they drive through the empty streets to the palace.
‘You’re President now, then?’
Allie smiles. ‘It couldn’t wait.’ She pats the back of Roxy’s hand, and Roxy moves the hand away.
‘Now you’re back, we should talk about the future.’
Roxy smiles a tight, thin-lipped smile.
In Mother Eve’s apartments in the palace, when the last door is closed and the last person is gone, Allie looks at her friend, wonderingly.
‘I thought you were dead,’ she says.
‘I almost was,’ says Roxy.
‘But you came back to life. The one the voice told me was coming. You are a sign,’ says Allie. ‘You are my sign, just as you always were. God’s favour is with me.’
Roxy says, ‘Don’t know about that.’
She undoes the top three buttons of her T-shirt, to show what’s there to be seen.
And Allie sees it.
And she understands that this sign which she hoped would point in one direction is pointing entirely in another.
There was a symbol that God placed in the sky after the last time She destroyed the world. She licked Her thumb and drew an arc across the Heavens, spreading the multitude of colour and sealing her promise that She would never again flood the face of the earth.
Allie looks at the crooked, upside-down bow of the curved scar across Roxy’s chest. She draws her fingertips along it gently, and though Roxy looks away she lets her friend touch her wound. The rainbow, inverted.
‘You were the strongest one I ever knew,’ she says, ‘and even you have been brought low.’
Roxy says, ‘I wanted you to know the truth.’
‘You were right,’ says Allie. ‘I know what this means.’
Never again: the promise written across the clouds. This thing cannot be allowed to happen again.