“If anyone asks where we are, the ops won’t tell them we’re here.”
“Don’t prophesy doom.”
Carla sat huddled in a corner and said nothing.
“This is doom,” Sarah said. “I don’t need to prophesy when we’re already at their mercy.”
When I look into Carla’s records, everything stops.
As the days pass, she sits quietly in the cells. Albin and Sarah chat, and she puts in a word now and then; when Ellaway raises his voice she asks him to stop; when Albin paces his cell in an attempt to get some exercise she leans against the bars and watches him; she kneels in her corner, heaping up the straw in an effort to make a comfortable pallet, her head ducked over the task; she avoids people’s eyes when they bring down food.
This is what I find on her. She grew up in the country and came to the city to study medicine. Since then, she’s been working at St. Veronica’s hospital in pediatrics. Her name is down on a contract as Sarah’s tenant; they’ve been living together for four years. She was arrested once, three years ago, luning in Five Wounds, and it was believed to be an accident.
And two years ago, she was brought before the medical council. They handed down a six-month suspension, but didn’t strike her off. Everyone wrote in references about what an excellent doctor she is.
A bottle of Oromorph went missing from the store cupboards. Everyone was surprised when they traced it back to her.
TWENTY-FIVE
“Y
our sister called,” Paul says.
I stop in the doorway, pull off my gloves. “My sister?”
“Yeah, Becca.” He’s leaning against the opposite wall, his hands pressed flat against it. “She called about an hour ago.”
“You’ve been home that long?” I hang up my coat, go over to give him a kiss. “How come she had your number, anyway?”
“I guess she looked me up. I’m in the phone book. She knew my name, anyway. She wanted to know how you were.”
“Well, I guess you told her.” I sit down on the sofa, take off my shoes and try to squeeze some warmth into my feet. My head is full of bottles of Oromorph, and I don’t want to talk about my family.
“Yeah, I said you were fine. She’s nice, your sister. You should introduce us.”
“You forget,” I say, “I’m not allowed anywhere near her as long as there’s a target on my head.”
“Did you get home okay?” He sits beside me and takes my cold feet in his hands.
I stop. I walked all the way to the bus stop without looking around me; I sat on the bus and didn’t make a head count of the passengers. No, I sat on a seat and looked without seeing out of the window at the rain and thought about the four people we have down in the cells who mauled Johnny and who steal Oromorph, the three people who attacked Marty when they were luning, the people who shot Johnny and Nate with silver bullets. The ones we have, and the ones still out there. I thought about our free-rangers down in the cages, about what would happen to them tonight, and I knew I wouldn’t stop any of it.
And all the time there were others of them out there, and I didn’t look around me. I shiver, and the back of my head, still unbroken by a bullet, tingles.
“I—I did. Jesus.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t even thinking about it. I just came home and didn’t look anywhere.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Paul pulls off one of my socks and interlaces his fingers with my toes.
“No.”
“You think someone’s still after you?”
“Yes,” I say, “I think someone’s still after me.”
He sighs. “Hasn’t anyone caught anyone yet?”
I shrug. He doesn’t get to hear of bruised citizens sleeping on straw in the dark at the bottom of my building. He doesn’t get to look into my dark places. “Haven’t you cleared the city of child abuse yet?”
“No,” he sighs. “God.” I lie down, rest my feet against his chest. He covers them with his hands. “Anyway, I had a nice chat with Becca.”
I look up at him with suspicion. “What did you talk about?”
“She told…” Paul stops as the telephone rings, and looks over his shoulder, his hands still on my feet.
“Shall I get it?”
“No.” He glances back at me, gives me a mock frown. “You’re supposed to be in hiding.”
He crosses the room to answer it, and I sit back up on the sofa, pulling off my jacket for something to do. When I think of my own apartment, it gives me a nostalgic wrench that I can’t handle, so I try not to think of it. And staying here is good. As Paul leaves the sofa, there’s a sense of loss, and I realize how close together we’ve been living. Having him on the other side of the room feels like a long way away.
“Hello?” He looks up at me, sitting lonely on the sofa, and holds the receiver a little way from his mouth. “Hang on a minute, Lola, I’ll be back in a moment.”
I lean back, watch him.
“Yes,” he says. “Yeah. No, I haven’t.” There’s a pause, during which I smooth the fabric on one of his cushions. “Well look, we can go over it tomorrow. Okay, bye.”
“Who was that?”
“Work.” He rubs his head. “But I’m not going back in. They can just wait till tomorrow.”
“Are you too busy to work tonight?” I say as he rejoins me.
“Might be.” He grins. “Anyway, I’ve had enough work for one day. Where were we?”
“You were going to tell me what my sister’s been saying about me.”
“She hasn’t been saying anything about you!” Paul gives me an amused look. “Why, is there something to tell?”
I shrug. “No. Just that last time we spoke she forbade me to come to her house.”
“Well, she was worried about her kid, you can’t blame her for that.”
“I’ll do what I want,” I mutter, trying to sound only half serious. Little children grow so fast, and Leo will have changed so much since I’ve seen him.
“She said you’d been a big help with him, by the way.”
“With Leo?” I look up.
“Yeah. She said you’d been taking him for walks every day, playing with him…I didn’t know you’d been around him that much.”
I sigh. “I’m not going broody, if that’s what you’re wondering, so don’t start dropping tactful hints.”
“Now that’s unfair, I’ve never dropped tactful hints,” Paul says, folding his arms. “It’s bad manners, accusing your lover of things your previous lovers have done.”
“Fair enough.” It’s a reasonable point.
“No, she said you and him get along great.”
I brush my hair off my face. “It’s easy to get along with someone portable.”
He laughs.
“No,” I say. “I just—Leo’s my friend. He doesn’t criticize me. And he’s a great little boy, I mean, he’ll be a nice kid when he grows up. I mean, the poor little guy, the world’s so big for him. He needs someone on his side.”
“Do you miss him?”
I look down. “Yeah.”
“Well, Becca could visit us here, you know.”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know if she wants to see me.”
“Oh, come on, you tell a woman with a tiny baby that some sniper may be after you, of course she’s going to be worried about you coming to her place. You can’t take that personally.”
“This relationship must be going very well if you’re starting to criticize how I get on with my family,” I say. “Mind you, if you start trying to make me call my mother, you really are in trouble.”
“I was only inviting your sister over,” he says. “Or are you too worried about people after you?”
“Whoever’s shooting my friends, I don’t think it’s Becca.” I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to keep the comedy image of Becca firing a gun blotting out the phrase “shooting my friends.”
Paul sits in silence for a moment. “Don’t they have any information at all?” he says in the end.
I look at him. “Are you tired of me being here?”
“No…” he says, and the telephone cuts him off in mid-syllable. He sighs, stands up. “That’s not it at all. I’m concerned for your life rather than trying to get you out of my apartment—Hello?” He frowns. “Can I help you?” There’s a pause, and then he looks up. “It’s for you.”
I stand, cross the room to the phone on my half-shod feet. Paul puts an arm around my waist as I take the receiver, and I lean against him. “Lola Galley.”
“Lola, hi, it’s me.” It’s Ally.
I stiffen a little in Paul’s arms. “What is it?”
“Who was that? Is that the guy you’re seeing?”
“That’s top secret for my own security, remember? Mind your own business.”
“Who is it?” Paul says quietly, and I shake my head, rest against him.
“Why are you calling?” It comes out a little abrupt, but Ally’s voice sounds wrong inside Paul’s apartment; I shouldn’t be hearing it.
“Got something I thought you should know.”
“Can’t it wait till tomorrow?”
“I thought you might like to know in advance, that’s all.” I can hear the rattle of his fingers tapping against the phone. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the building half an hour ago.”
“What?” I stand up, disentangle my hand from Paul’s and push my hair out of my face.
“Yeah. Didn’t catch anyone; it was late and you know no one walks in front of our building if they can help it.”
“What, you mean the office building?” Paul touches my shoulder as I say this.
“Well, yeah, what did you think?”
“What happened?”
“Well, it didn’t catch. And it didn’t go through a window, either, I mean, that’s why we’ve got all that chicken wire. But the front of the building is pretty well scorched. I didn’t think you’d like to come in tomorrow morning and see it without a warning, that’s all.” He says the last part rapidly, as if defending himself.
“What floor?”
“I don’t know, Lola, throwing height. What did you think?”
“Not the cell level, then.”
“No, higher.”
“And what’s the reaction down there?”
“Well, they haven’t told us anything yet.” He says this without passion, and I don’t ask anything else.
“Well look,” I say, “thanks for telling me.”
“That’s okay. I just thought you’d like to know.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“At least you won’t get a shock tomorrow, that’s the main thing. And there’s no real damage done. Not to us, anyway. But I guess there’s going to be some clamping down done soon.”
“Okay. Look, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay. Burned building and all. Hey, at least it’s covered some of the graffiti.”
“Okay, bye, Ally.” I hang up and lean back against Paul.
“Who was that?” he says.
“Ally.” I pull him back toward the sofa, drape my legs across his lap.
“Who’s Ally, your other lover? Your boss? Your ex?”
“Well, kind of,” I say.
“What, your ex?”
“Not really. We were very young at the time.” I tuck my head into the hollow of his neck and hope he’ll leave the subject there.
“Why do I get the feeling,” says Paul, “that if I ask you anything else about this guy I’ll get an ‘I don’t want to talk about it’?”
“Because you’re very very perceptive?”
“Hmp. You’re not still seeing him?” He says this more as a statement than a question.
“No. We just work together.”
“Do you like me better?”
“Much.”
“Okay,” he says. “Oh, and how did he get this number?”
“I had to give my boss a contact number. Just the number, not the address. Tomorrow I’ll tell him not to give it out.”
“Right, well, that’ll do.”
Paul kisses my nape, and I stretch my neck out. He brushes my hair aside, and I see it tumble around my face in a dark curtain. When I sigh, he tilts my face toward him and I uncurl my legs and shift across the sofa to sit over him. His scalp is warm against my fingertips as we kiss, and when his arms come around me I close my eyes and press nearer to him, needing this, needing a moment outside time.
The telephone rings again. “I don’t believe this,” Paul mutters, and I take some comfort from the fact that he’s as upset at the interruption as I am.
“We could just ignore it,” I suggest, but he’s already stood up.
“Hello? I’m sorry? No, I’ve told you before.” He gives me a look of wide-eyed despair. “No, I’m sorry, but I’m not…”
Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the DORLA building. A half-f bottle, a crash of glass, a spreading ball of flame. Liquid goes so far, a spilled cup covers the floor, a single teardrop spreads as wide as a penny. Half a liter of alcohol is enough to burn a lot of people.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Paul says, hanging up. “We’re going out for a walk.”
“Who was that?”
He shrugs. “Double glazing. Come on, get your coat. It’s stopped raining, and if the phone rings one more time, I’m gonna have to pull it out of the wall, and then I won’t be able to use it when I calm down.”
“Someone’s after me,” I say. “And, and…” I almost tell him about the Molotov cocktail. Almost.
Paul sits down. “You’ll be safe,” he says. “No one’s going to get you. You’ll be with me.”
“Not that I don’t appreciate it,” I say, “but if someone fires a bullet at me, I don’t know how much help your escort will be.”
“No one’s going to shoot at you when there’s a witness,” he says.
“Not unless they feel like shooting the witness, too.”
Paul takes me under the arms and sets me on my feet. “You can’t hide in here forever, you’ll wind up a crazy old woman throwing knives at cracks in the floorboards. We’re going for a walk, and no one is going to shoot you, and you’ll see how much better you feel about everything.”
It seems so easy to agree with him; one walk doesn’t feel like a fatal idea. But isn’t that the kind of thinking that makes you careless and gets you killed? I don’t even know. I’ve never been in a siege before.
“Come on. Half an hour of fresh air. We’ll go to the park, it’s lovely at night.”
“The park’s lovely at night?” Paul lives north of Sanctus. Woods all over it, clumps and patches of trees. Marty’s blood soaking into the ground.
“Have you never been? When the lights are lit, it’s pretty. Come on. Nothing’s going to happen. We’ll be safe, really.”
He thinks he can look after me, and he may even be right, but in secret, I take my gun anyway.
It isn’t nighttime yet, not really. It’s only the winter that makes everything so dark. As we reach Spiritus Sanctus, the gates are wide open, and the path that stretches in front of us is lined on either side with lamps, tall, ornate pillars decorated with ironwork around their bases and bowed, glowing heads. There are people walking down it, their shadows long and vertiginous, some holding hands, some walking with their hands in their pockets, even joggers.
A patter of claws sounds behind me, and I drop Paul’s hand and whirl around, my hand going for my pocket. For a moment there’s nothing, I can’t see anything, and then I realize I’m looking too high. Lune height, and this is not a moon night—people are just out for a walk and the sheepdog running along the path is not my responsibility to catch. It goes by me in a rush, and after years of training I still can stop myself flinching as it passes.
“What’s the matter?” Paul asks.
I shrug. “Oh, I just—don’t like dogs.”
“You don’t like dogs?” He sounds as if this was a puzzling thing to say.
“No, I don’t like dogs. I really hate dogs. They’re stupid animals.”
He puts an arm around my shoulders. “Some of them are clever, you know.”
“I—I mean it’s stupid that they exist. They’ve…Dogs are all pedigrees nowadays, or mongrels that are cross-breeds from different pedigrees, no one knows what a real dog would have looked like before we started breeding them this way and that. They’re—freakish, they’re, I don’t know, wild animals boiled down into pets that are too stupid to do anything except love whoever happens to be their owner more than they deserve. It’s…They’re like dancing bears, like someone had bred a chimp to walk on its hind legs because it’d be cuter that way.”