by JT Lawrence
Johannesburg, 2024
Themba finishes with her checking up on Marko, with her adjusting of tubes and wires, her emptying of his entero-purse and catheter bladder, and snaps off her purple latex gloves. Keke looks up at her, for an opinion on how he’s doing, but the nurse tightens her lips and leaves the room. She’s not talking to Keke anymore, not since she brought the dodgy techdoctor in from the black clinic in Fourways. Not since she gave the instruction for the man to remove Marko’s eyeborg.
Marko lies dormant, as before, but he now has a white patch and bandage over his left eye.
His left eye-socket, she corrects herself. Eye-socket. Because the eye is gone.
The nurse shouldn’t be so damn self-righteous. She doesn’t know what the stakes are. It had been an impossible decision to make, but in the end she couldn’t ignore the fact that Marko, her beloved, her lover, is already one and a half feet in the grave, and dearest Silver, her fairy god-daughter, has her whole life ahead of her.
If she’s still alive, Keke thinks, looking over at the sweet-sleeping Mally, curled up on the lazy chair under a blanket. If she’s still alive.
Keke’s Patch buzzes, making her sit up.
DarkDoc > Have uploaded the footage we found. Use this link. Password is x0PeNx. I think you’ll find it extremely interesting.
Keke hits the darkweb link on her SnapTile and taps in the password. While she waits for it to authenticate she sees she has a bump from Zack.
ZikZak > How is / patient?
Kex >> Same. Worse.
ZikZak > Sorry.
Kex >> He’ll die if / doesn’t get / new heart.
ZikZak > Not many of those around, nowadays.
Kex >> No. I’ve been searching for one on / Net. Strange thing 2 look for.
ZikZak > …
Kex >> Found some bizarre things on Marxet. BIZARRE.
ZikZak > Can imagine.
Kex >> Only bacon hearts available.
ZikZak > ??
Kex >> Cardiologist says he’s not strong enough. If we suppress his immune system he’ll die. If we don’t suppress it his body will reject it.
ZikZak > Anything I can do?
Kex >> …
Keke is tempted to tell him about the man in the grey suit who came to see her earlier. The one with the emergency medevac ambudrone invoice and the hospital bills. The ones she couldn’t pay. Marko’s private medical aid will pay for half of it, but that’s still twenty-one million rand she doesn’t have in the bank. The man said that if she’s unable to raise the cash they’ll have to move Marko to another hospital – an NHP centre – and that will surely be a death sentence. Keke’s been in far too many of those institutions for her job and the stories are always bleak. Not enough doctors, not enough nurses. Black bloodstains on the corridor floors, because there’s no cleaner, no mop, no fucking bleach. Women giving birth in waiting rooms and public toilets and standing up because no beds are available and the floor’s too dirty. People complain they don’t like the smell of hospitals: privileged people who sniff at the antiseptic air and wrinkle their noses, but they don’t have a clue. She’s been there and experienced the opposite, and she’ll take the smell of disinfectant over disease any day.
Something’s happened to Marko’s bank balance too. Some kind of blip in the bitcoin system. All six of his Blox accounts are showing a negative balance. Unless someone has managed to hack his personal –
ZikZak > U name it.
She can’t ask him for bank. Or can she? Marko lies, unmoving. She’ll find a way to pay him back.
Kex >> I’m FUBAR.
ZikZak > I’ll come over.
She should say no. She should say she’s fine, or lie that she needs to be on her own. But the truth is that with Marko in this terrible way, and her best friends in danger, she’s never felt this lonely. She touches the skin on her arm, on her stomach, it’s some kind of tactile reminder that she is alive and warm in this hard, dangerous place the world has become.
The footage becomes available to view. There are hundreds of separate files, and she scrolls past all of them till she gets to the very last one. Her stomach is a knot as she taps the ‘play’ button. The hologram spins open in front of her.
It’s dark, and difficult to see what’s going on. The red recording button glows. Keke realises Marko is under the desk. Hiding? Legs walk by. She gasps, even though she knows Marko was attacked, and should not be surprised by the sight of an intruder in their home. She gasps again, and realises it’s not a gasp of surprise but that she’s crying. Her chest is one big ache; she feels Marko’s pain; that he had to go through this terror. She wipes away the tears, tries to clear her eyes so she can watch the clip. A vibrating icon comes up, 911. With one click he had used his panic button, called emergency services, and given them his co-ordinates. But not soon enough.
Give me something. Give me something to make this risk worthwhile.
The intruder stops right next to Marko. He looks at the stationary boots. There is a period of complete dark – he must have closed his eyes to the horror – and then they open again when the attacker kicks over the table, exposing him completely. The eyeborg auto-focuses on the sword-bearer’s face, and automatically adjusts the dim light so Keke can take in her pale cheeks and vulgar smirk.
The face shocks her; she almost drops the tile. This is it. This is it. She scrubs backwards to see the attacker’s face again and takes a screenshot.
Got you.
Keke sends the pic to her FusiformG app and it starts cycling it through its recognition system. While she waits for the results, she resists watching the very end of the eyeborg clip, can’t stand the idea of Marko being so scared, especially when he’s lying here on this hospital bed, right next to her, unable to even breathe on his own. With five seconds left of the video she’s about to click off when a yellow sticky note appears on the screen. It forces her to keep watching. Four seconds, three seconds. Is it a note for her? It remains blank. Two seconds. Then a second away from the end – when Marko loses consciousness – a single letter appears on the note, and then there’s nothing.
Chapter 63
Mistress Catfish
There’s a knock at the door of the private ward. It must be the man in the grey suit again, here to throw them out of the hospital, but a friendly face pops around the door. Keke’s eyes sting with tears of exhaustion and gratitude.
“Look at you.” Zack has a beribboned white card box in his hands, which he puts down on the side table so he can give her a tender hug.
“Not looking my best?” she jokes, pulling away, even though she doesn’t want to.
“Quite the opposite,” he says. “You look positively angelic, sitting there, surrounded by hospital white. Like some kind of angel. Or saint.”
“Believe me, I’m neither of those things.”
“They say that a saint is just a sinner who keeps trying.”
“Ja, well…I’m not even trying.”
“I know,” he says. “That’s why I like you.”
They stand apart, looking at each other. Keke tries to sniff away her tears.
“Besides,” she says, “Saints don’t come in my colour.”
“And they are all the poorer for it.”
She imagines herself as a cocoa-skinned saint, then thinks of what she has done to Marko, and her ring of light buzzes out like a bulb in a brownout. The vision reminds her that she hasn’t slept in days, hasn’t eaten properly. She’s so hungry it feels as if her stomach is eating itself. No wonder she is hallucinating.
“For you,” says Zack, handing her the white box.
She puts down the tile she’s been clutching for the past hour and takes the box, pulls the ribbon off and opens the lid. Her sleep-deprived mind pictures different scenarios of the contents of the box, before she looks inside. First, a flock of finches bursts out and scatters throughout the room, leaving small multi-coloured feathers floating in the air. Next, a foil balloon with a nonsensical congratu
latory message: “It’s a BOY!”, and after that, a bomb that explodes as soon as the lid is opened half-way. The explosion ignites the room, the corridor, the whole wing, and the entire hospital building falls in a atom-bomb cloud of fire and dust.
“Go on,” says Zack. “It won’t bite.”
She opens the box properly. Choxolate brownies, crowded with pecans.
“Now who’s the saint?” she says. If her stomach could leap out of her body and into the box, it would.
He holds up his other hand, in which he’s holding a brown bag. “I brought real food too.”
They sit on the other side of the room from a curled-up Mally, so as to not wake him with their words. Over facon, rocket pesto and cashew-cream wraps, and in a low voice, Keke fills Zack in. If he thinks badly of her for choosing to retrieve the footage then he doesn’t show it. When she’s finished, he sighs and rubs his face in empathy for her.
“You’ve really been through the mill,” he says, eating his ricepaper plate. “I want to help. What can I do?”
Keke fixes her bright biolenses on him.
“Who are you?”
He laughs. “You know who I am.”
“You’re too good to be true,” she says. “And in my experience, that’s bad news.”
“I’m not going to try to convince you that we’re on the same side. It sounds like we don’t have time to waste. Either I stay, and try to help you however I can, or I leave. It’s up to you.”
“Why are you helping me?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“No.”
“Because I can. And because it’s the right thing to do.”
“That isn’t what I thought you were going to say.”
He winks. “There are other reasons too.”
“Tell me how we know each other. From before, I mean.”
“I will. When the time is right.”
“Tell me now.”
“We have more important things to do. That little girl – ”
“Silver.”
“Silver. We need to figure this out. Find her while she’s still – ”
They stare at each other over the plastic table.
“While she’s still alive.”
“If she’s still alive. We need to do what we can to find her.”
Keke bumps the eyeborg footage to Zack, along with the picture of the attacker and the face-mapping results.
“L?” says Zack. “Some kind of code between you two?”
Keke shakes her head.
“L?” he says again.
Keke’s eyes are sandpaper. She fishes for her eyedrops in her bag.
“What about this assassin? What do you know about her?” asks Zack.
Keke hands him a steaming cup of the awful instant coffee they keep at the nurses’ station. It’s the kind of stuff her parents used to drink in the 1970s, made of soluble granules of a chicory mix. It has hardly any caffeine in it, which doesn’t make any sense for a nurses’ station.
“Absolutely nothing. That’s the problem. It’s like she came out of nowhere.”
They have a sip each, and their faces simultaneously reflect their distaste. Keke takes back his mug and pours the contents of both down the drain of the small hand-washing basin next to the hospital bed, then offers him a tray of caffeine gum instead. He shakes his head.
“Take me through the FusiformG results.”
Keke snaps the last two out of the foil backing and pops them into her mouth. Without caffeine she would have melted into the floor by now.
“There were fifty-three different matches.”
Leaf after leaf shows the same woman with different names, and different wigs, shades and scarves, but the same painted pouty lips. Mistress Catfish.
“Face-mapping is one thing, but what we really need is her DNA profile code,” says Keke. “I bet you she has a hundred fake identities. We’ll need her dynap code to isolate her real dossier.”
“Not much chance of that.”
Keke agrees.
“Unless she left some kind of bio evidence at your place. Did the detectives check?”
“I’d be surprised if they did. You know what they’re like. Besides, I don’t think this woman is in the habit of leaving evidence around.”
“It only has to be one hair, you know. It’s possible.”
Keke thinks of Marko’s man cave and pulls a face. She can count the number of times he’s cleaned it on one hand. In fact, she can count the humber of times he’s cleaned it on one finger. There’s probably enough DNA in there to identify hordes of his RPG friends, none of whom would appreciate being flagged.
“It’ll take too long,” says Keke. “We need it now. There are only a few hours left until – ”
She looks over at Mally and hopes the effects of that gas will keep him asleep till the morning. It will be easier to cope with the results – whatever they may be – when the danger has passed and the sun is up.
Zack stands up. “Let me see what I can do with that pic. I’ll try everything I can to fetch her file. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
Chapter 64
Calamine Ice
“Kitty,” says Keke. “Thank The Net. You’re alive.”
“Am I?” says the blipping Helix hologram. “God, it’s been a dream. A fucking bad dream.”
“What happened?”
“I’ll fill you in later. Suffice to say I’ve got enough nightmare fuel for the rest of my life.”
“God. Sorry. But you’re okay.”
“I’m alive, anyway.”
“And Silver?”
Kate’s voice catches. “We don’t have her.”
“What?” Keke’s whole body goes cold. What does she mean, they don’t have her? Where is she?
“They didn’t bring her.”
“Those motherfuckers.”
Keke pictures the little girl all alone. Scared.
“Oh, Kate – ”
“Tell me that Mally’s still safe, with you?”
“Of course. He’s right here. Still sleeping. Snoring, actually, with his mouth open.” When Kate doesn’t reply, she adds, “I need to get myself some of that gas. Ha.”
Kate starts crying.
“Sorry. It’s not funny. None of this is funny. I’m totally tripping on sleep-dep.”
“I’m just so relieved, that’s all. At least one of them – ”
Keke knows what she means. At least one of them is safe. It’s not enough, but it’s something.
“And Seth?”
“He’s recovering.”
“From what?”
Kate hesitates. Too emotional.
“I’ll tell you everything when I see you.”
She turns away from Mally and lowers her voice. “Where’re you now?”
“We need to find Silver, but I’m all out. I don’t know where to go.”
They’re both quiet for a moment. Urgent thoughts jostle to be spilled.
“I think – ” says Keke, but Kate interrupts.
“I killed someone.”
“I would have done the same thing.”
“Would you have?”
“Hell, yes. I’d kill them right now for you, if I had the chance. Kill every last one of them.”
She’s looking at Marko, and it’s as if Kate reads her mind.
“How’s Marko?”
“The machines are doing all the work. It doesn’t look like he’s going to – ”
The words hang in the air.
“Oh, Kex, I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. I’m so – ”
“So I figured, if he’s gone already – because he is, really – then we may as well retrieve the footage.”
“Retrieve the – ”
“Kate, I watched it. I watched the attack. And I think I’ve got something for you.”
A pause as it sinks in.
“I’m sorry. That must have been so hard.”
“I processed her face,” says Keke. “The woman who atta
cked Marko.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“A hundred per cent. I think she’s our biggest lead. And I think I know where you’ll find Silver.”
“Instruct your car to head north east.”
Kate drags her gaze away from the projection and instructs the cab.
“Of course,” says Turing. “Redirecting.”
“Now here are the co-ordinates. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Pink, khaki, dot, purple, brown, purple, dark green, ‘S’.”
Kate is about to ask why Keke is talking colours then realises the phone call is most likely being monitored. She needs to watch what she says. She taps the numbers manually into the cab’s dashboard. 25.8084° S.
“Pink, purple, dot, grey, brown, purple, cyan, ‘E’.”
28.7081° E.
Kate’s desperate to ask where she’s sending them but of course she can’t. Not if the enemy is listening.
“You got this from Marko’s eye? ”
“We got a picture of the person who attacked Marko from his eyeborg, yes. Then a friend helped me to ID her. And this is where she’s most likely to be.”
“And we’ll find Silver there?”
“It’s our best bet. Do you want the long version or shall I cut to the chase?”
Turing chimes in: “We will reach our destination in thirty-four minutes.”
“Then I’ll take the long version. Information is ammunition, right? Besides, Seth’s still out cold and I need some company for the ride or my brain will implode.”
Kate sits back. It’s a welcome tide of relief as they allow themselves to lapse into the comforts of their friendship, even if it’s only for a short while.
“I found out that you and Marko’s attacker have something in common.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“You were both taken away from your parents when you were kids.”
“She was a…was she a Genesis abductee? She can’t have been.”
“Nothing like that. Welfare nabbed her.”
