I gasped and fell back, panting in pain.
Beep. Beep. Beep. The nurse checked on Bane and departed in a wave of efficient unconcern. All was well. I could... I could take it a little more slowly.
“Margo?” Kyle knelt beside me. “You okay?”
“It’s just... it’s just my chest.”
“Chests are kind of important, we breathe with them. Do you want Doctor Frederick to take a look?”
“I really don’t think he can do anything,” I panted.
“Well, he can check nothing’s actually broken.”
“I don’t think he can do anything, even if something is. Could you just... help me up?”
“Okay. Slowly does it...”
He pried me gently from the floor and eased me gradually upright. Everything had stiffened up unbelievably. A mistake getting off the bed in the night. He steered me around to the armchair on the other side of the bed and settled me there.
Stirring, Jon opened his eyes and listened for moment. “That sounds better.”
“You think so?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“No reason why you shouldn’t get some sleep. The monitor’s connected to an alarm in the little room where the nurses sleep.”
“It is?”
“Yes, Doctor Frederick said, yesterday.”
“Oh.”
Kyle gave me a breakfast of toast and a cup of coffee. And fetched me water when I realised how thirsty I was.
“Oh, Happy Christmas.” He gave me a hug and a kiss. “We’ll defer present giving until Bane can join in, shall we?”
Oh yes, please Lord, let Bane be able to join in...
Doctor Frederick arrived and pronounced himself cautiously optimistic. A lot of caution and just a hint of optimism. Better than the opposite.
Pope Cornelius next – must’ve just been told what’d happened. I managed to return his sober ‘Happy Christmas’. He’d brought Holy Water, and he sprinkled Bane and laid his hands on him and prayed for him, doing as close to the Anointing of the Sick as was possible for a nonBeliever. When he’d finished he laid a hand on my head for a moment and murmured a blessing.
“Bane,” I said. “Bane needs it...”
“It’s an infinite supply, my dear, the blessings won’t run out.”
When he’d gone, Kyle helped me move the second armchair around to the tube-free side of the bed. Then it was just me and Jon.
“Did you hear what Doctor Frederick said about the morphine?” asked Jon.
“What morphine?”
“I’ll take that as a no. There’s a little button thing there by the bed apparently, can you see it?”
My eyes sorted among the tubes.
“Ah. Yes.”
“Well, if we think Bane’s coming round, we should press that to give him an extra dose of morphine – unless he’s had one too recently, the machine will know. Pain puts the body under great strain, apparently, and he mustn’t be strained. And considering the damage... well, it’s gotta hurt.”
“What is the damage? Is his spine okay?”
“Did you hear anything Doctor Frederick said last night?”
“Not really.”
“Well, he was basically lucky, or rather – it could have been worse, that was the verdict. You know it’s just a Hollywood myth bullets travel in straight lines inside the body?”
“Uh, yeah, I grew up with Bane as a best friend too, y’know.”
Jon mustered a smile at that.
“Yeah. Well, the bullet went into his back at the side just under the ribs but missed the kidneys. Veered off to the left at an angle and lodged against the spine, but didn’t penetrate far enough to threaten the spinal cord. Didn’t actually do much damage to the spine at all, most of its force was spent by then.
“If he can pull through the shock and trauma, he should heal okay. It missed the main artery down the centre of the body, most importantly of all. Or you wouldn’t have got him here, he’d have been dead in minutes.”
“There seemed to be such a lot of blood as it was.”
“Yeah, but it could have been a lot worse. A little blood goes a long way visually, Doctor Frederick says. But it didn’t damage anything major.”
I swallowed. The thought of the bullet tearing through Bane’s insides...
“Did they keep the nasty thing? Bane’ll want it.”
Jon snorted.
“Yeah, they kept it. I’ll still be one ahead, though.”
My hands flew to my mouth.
“Oh Lord, please don’t even...”
His hand found my arm and squeezed.
“Sorry. Just a joke. I hope he never has another.”
“Yeah...” I stared over my hands at Bane. He hadn’t survived this one yet.
“He was my only friend for so long,” said Jon after a while.
“The only one?”
“Yeah. My sister was so much older than me and no one wants to be friends with a preKnown.”
“Other preKnowns?”
“My mum tried. But I was too little to understand they were my only potential friends. Just knew I bored them, they bored me. So I was on my own until I was seven.”
“That’s when you first met Bane?”
“Yeah. His mum brought him to work with her one day in the school holidays. Wasn’t long after the thing with the car at the high adventure course, you know about that?”
“Oh my, yes. His parents were going to take him and Eliot on the high adventure course for Eliot’s birthday – but there was a row, as usual, so they decided to take Eliot and a friend and leave Bane in the car.”
“Yep, so his dad locks him in the car with no lunch, Bane swearing he’ll get out, but his dad doesn’t listen, off they go to have fun. Some hours later there’s an announcement asking Mr and Mrs Marsden to go to the car park so along they go, and there’s Bane sat in a police car, getting to play with the lights and the siren and eating a real burger the nice police lady’s bought him.”
“At which Eliot and his friend turn bright green with envy and their day is completely ruined,” I grinned. “And Bane’s parents endure a twenty minute grilling from the policewoman as to how their seven-year-old son came to be walking down the main road to Salperton, all the time wondering how much Bane had said.”
“Off to visit you, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, he hadn’t quite grasped how far it was. Of course, he hadn’t actually said very much. He did figure out quite early on that being taken into care wasn’t quite as good a thing as it looked at first glance.”
“Umm,” agreed Jon. “So the police lady is finally satisfied and off she goes. At which point his parents discover what he’s done to the car.”
“Ripped out most of the interior panels, trying to figure out how to get the doors open.”
“Yep, but of course, car doors being electric, he couldn’t work it out, so finally he got so hot and hungry and frustrated he kicked out the driver’s side window and simply climbed through.”
“Yeah, his dad was furious. Stopped on the way home and dragged him into the forest and gave him a hiding he’s never forgotten – or forgiven.”
“Umm,” sighed Jon. “Anyway, your parents couldn’t have him that day when I was seven, for some reason. That’s what they did with him for most of the school holidays, right?”
“Yep. So his mum was prepared to risk the car again?”
“Rather than the house, yes. They’d had a row and he’d threatened to burn it down if she left him locked in there. She parked in shade and she’d actually made him lunch to reduce his motivation to escape. But my mum saw Bane in the car as she drove past our cottage and assumed Mrs Marsden was doing an incredibly nice thing, bringing her son to play with dead meat.” Jon used the derogatory term for a preKnown and I grabbed his arm.
“Don’t call yourself that!”
He just smiled faintly.
“Okay. A preKnown, then. So by the time Bane
’s mum’s parked, my mum’s called that there’s someone here to play with me and she’s in the car park greeting Mrs Marsden and saying how kind it is of her and Bane’s out of the car like a shot and Mrs Marsden’s caught in a terrible dilemma – doesn’t want to admit she was going to leave Bane in the car all day but she’s terrified her horrible son will beat up her employer’s poor little blind boy.”
I snorted.
“I bet she was in a sweat.”
“Yep. So I come along then, dizzy with excitement, I admit – literally years since I’d had anyone to play – and Bane says ‘hi,’ sizing me up, and I say ‘hi’ ever so firmly back, wondering if he’s going to punch me, ‘cause he sounded like he was thinking about it. But he thinks I don’t seem so bad and anything’s better than a day in the car, so he says to me in a friendlier tone, ‘D’you have any good dens in all this forest?’ And off we scarper before his mum can decide what to do.
“And my mum’s going on about what a nice kind little boy Bane is and Bane’s mum is quaking in her shoes and doesn’t dare say anything and has probably one of the worst days of her entire life. But Bane didn’t hit me – well, not the first visit – we got into fights later, of course! So after that Bane’s mum brought him whenever he couldn’t go to you.”
Jon was quiet for a moment. “He didn’t have to keep coming when he was older. He knew he was going to be hurt if he kept caring about me.”
“Well, Bane’s nothing if not loyal.”
“Yeah. Didn’t he tell you all this?”
“Yeah... vaguely familiar. He talked about you a lot when we were little. Used to want me to meet you. When we were... I don’t know... ten? Eleven? He just stopped mentioning you so much.”
“That’s when he decided he was going to marry you,” said Jon dryly.
“Really? I’ve been going to marry him since I was eight. Well, they do say boys catch on slower than girls.”
“Also when he found out I was in the Underground too.” Even drier.
“You told him?”
“No, he asked me. If he ever claims to be thick, don’t believe him. I thought I’d been careful as anything.”
“Too well up on all things Underground. He was half raised in our house and my parents never tried to keep it from him – would’ve been impossible. They just treated him the same as me and Kyle and it paid off. Eliot was a different matter, but Kyle generally went around to their house to play with him.”
Jon snorted slightly.
“Poor Kyle drew the short straw there.”
“Well, they didn’t have much to do with one another when they were little, but once Kyle understood why our parents went to so much trouble to get on with the Marsdens, he wanted to do his bit. Didn’t do Eliot any harm. He actually cried at Kyle’s funeral, y’know.”
Jon was looking all thoughtful again.
“You’re Bane’s family, y’know. Have been for years. It’d kill him if he lost you. Kill his spirit, anyway.” He stared through his comatose friend for a few more moments. “Come on, mate, hang in there...”
My attention turned back to Bane, but... Jon was right. I’d taken the place of Bane’s real family a long time ago. And if Jon hadn’t been part of Bane’s tiny family before our trek across Europe, he was now.
Was that why Jon had never made any effort to steal me away from Bane? Not that I’d ever given him the slightest encouragement, surely? Without that, he was too loyal a friend to try. Perhaps even with.
Doctor Frederick came back with the nurses after a while and chased us out while they changed the dressings. When he let us back in he expressed satisfaction at Bane’s progress, following it up with strenuous cautions against getting our hopes up. I cross-examined him at some length, probably forcing him to repeat much of what he’d said the day before – the wound in itself wasn’t too serious, apparently, but the delay in Bane getting treatment and the corresponding draining of his strength (and blood) was.
“But you’ve replaced all his blood, haven’t you?” I demanded. “If you need more, I’m O positive too, he can have mine...”
“Calm down, calm down,” said Doctor Frederick. “We had enough blood, he’s simply exhausted. His body used up every last reserve to stay alive until he got proper help. We’ve got him on fluids and salts, and if he can hang on long enough he should rally. But he may have gone too far. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”
“But...” I couldn’t think of anything to suggest.
“But since you’ve clearly come back to life, I should take a look at your chest. Doesn’t actually make much difference if they’re bruised or cracked or outright broken, same treatment applies, but your brother is nagging me. I should take a look at that hole, anyway.”
“That’s really nothing.” But since he didn’t try to get me out of the room again, I didn’t put up a fight. Apparently he considered Bane unlikely to wake up in the middle of his examination, worse luck.
Cracked and bruised was his verdict, and the bullet hole was clean and no cause for concern. He was able to tell Kyle so as he was leaving, when Kyle appeared with sandwiches. And Sister Krayj.
“I’m letting a substitute go tonight, Margo,” Kyle told me, when I’d finished my plateful. “I wanted to stick around.”
I looked at him blankly.
“Go where?”
Surprise covered his face.
“On the raid, Margo.”
They were carrying on. Of course they were. The world hadn’t stopped. Hadn’t actually shrunk to this one little room. Not for everyone else.
“Of course. For the Boxing Day raids. Are you in charge, then?” I asked Sister Krayj.
“Yes. We’ve tweaked the plan a little but I need you to tell me exactly what happened, or we won’t be going anywhere tomorrow. And we’d rather not waste the little bit of time before New Year.”
“Umm. No, of course not.” I swallowed. “Okay, well...” I tried to sort my thoughts, straighten out my memories of that disastrous night. “It all started exactly as normal, but Father Mark – in his own words, the back of his neck was prickling...” I told her of Bane’s precautions, filling in what she already knew, then how Father Mark got up to scout around, and alerted the guard, and the terrible consequences.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said when I’d finished, my voice a little shaky. “I don’t think the guard was supposed to show himself at all. I mean, the guards don’t usually carry Lethal pistols. Only the Commandant. But the Commandant’s got a few extras locked away he can issue if necessary.”
“Usually to officers, according to the book,” remarked Sister Krayj, also sober-faced.
“Yeah. But I’m guessing they thought rifles would be too unwieldy up a tree. Especially for someone who just needed a weapon for protection as a last resort. I think the guy was supposed to hear us coming and get on his wristcell to the tower, tell them where we were going to be, and when we actually got there, switch on the floodlight. At which point the machine guns would mince us up.
“But the wet – and Bane always insisting we crawl all the way from the trucks – meant he didn’t even know we were there. So when Father Mark materialised completely out of nowhere, heading for the guy’s tree, he just panicked, and once he’d got him, he couldn’t think what else to do but to try and take him in – those guards aren’t the sort of hardened killers who’d just shoot a man dead at close range. I expect they would’ve been quite pleased with him for catching one of us, but I doubt it was the plan.”
“And the towers didn’t open fire at first because they weren’t sure what was happening,” said Sister Krayj. “Makes sense. No major surprises in what you’ve told me. The amended plan should be fine.”
She was silent for a moment, her face drawn. “There’s, uh, there’s going to be a Requiem Mass for Father Mark, of course. But the time’s not been set. Bane would want to be there, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes, he would. I’m glad they’re waiting. The other teams we
re all okay? Eduardo said they were...”
“Yes, they were fine. But the next raid’s going to be a cautious one. We’ve worked a lot of extra checks into the plan, so even if we have to pull out without any reAssignees, the danger to our guys should be minimal. And they won’t be expecting it so soon after the Christmas Eve raids, which is the only reason we’re rushing out again like this. But your brother’s staying here for this one, all the same.”
Kyle took my hand and gave it a squeeze and I squeezed back. Felt bad a capable person was off the team on my account, but... couldn't stand anyone else dying right now, not with Bane lying there on a knife edge.
The light was fading again when something – a slight change in the rhythm of the monitor? – focused all my attention on the precious figure in the bed.
“Bane? Bane?” I brushed gently at the hair around his face, though it was all out of the way already.
“Is he waking up?” asked Jon.
“Maybe. Does it sound different?”
“Yes. I’ll get Doctor Frederick.”
He left the room so fast his stick hardly tapped the ground at all. I pressed the morphine button, then shifted to sit on the bed itself, staring at Bane. Was his chest moving more quickly?
“Bane?”
Lord? Please?
His eyelids twitched.
“Bane? ”
***+***
14
THE IMPATIENT GARDENER
More twitching, then Bane’s eyelids crept up as though each weighed several tons. Beautiful brown eyes stared up at me, frighteningly dim.
“Bane? Can you hear me?”
“Margo?” His lips moved but I could barely hear him. Never seen such exhaustion in his eyes. Like nothing would be better than to just close them and let go of everything...
“Bane, don’t try and talk, okay? You were hurt in the raid, I don’t know if you remember. But you’ll be okay if you fight, but you’ve got to fight, do you understand? Don’t you DARE let go...”
Liberation (I Am Margaret Book 3) Page 16
