Zero Bomb

by M. T Hill

  A thought struck me, actually. Remi insists that his attempt to ‘save’ his family was to protect them from the future we ourselves are resisting. The parallels between him and Kip have been there all along. I maintain that he was always preparing himself for our war.

  #28

  Laurel, I cannot stand what you have had done to him. To his face. I simply cannot forgive it. I wish I had never told you what he said to me about your book. These means are beyond cruel – like something they would do to a dog in my lab. You told him we were cleaning him? He was learning the way! What choice have you given him now? He flinches at every little thing I do! His cheeks haven’t stopped bleeding!

  Is it because he didn’t get your book like some of us do? Is that it? Is this about your ego? Or did you have those wicked machines mutilate Remi’s face to test me as well?

  #29

  Remi will not speak except to relay your threats against Martha, should he stray. You honestly did this? He has vanished, you can tell. It is all unravelling. I told him we would be liberating her – what does he believe now? What does he think when he looks in the mirror at these awful new scars of his, at this stranger’s face you’ve had carved into him?

  This is not why I came with you. I do not accept that different recruits demand such radically different stimuli. I believe in this cause. I believe in a better way. Respectfully, however, blackmail is not the answer. Nor should it be a foundation of the zeroing.

  #30

  Pietro is worried about things. About your plan. About Remi going rogue, telling someone. Pietro said he was going away to think about it. It is all so big. Honestly, I do not understand my part either. How many more of us are ready? You say you have raised an army, but how can we know? You never let us communicate with each other. You control who we talk to. You control everything.

  #31

  Remi came out of the infirmary. He came directly to my flat, which he knows is forbidden. He is not the same man. You have broken him. I cannot read his eyes any more. I cannot see inside him. And yet he swears loyalty; he tells me he is in, says he wants Martha to know. Know what? I want to ask him. What Laurel Brace promised she will do to your daughter if you fail her?

  Respond to me, at least this time. You owe me that.

  #32

  You bitch. Is this how you wanted me to feel? Is this the game? I have given YEARS to you. I give my blood. The least I deserve is a fucking reply.

  #33

  One week. Accept this message as my final word. Remi is partnered with the old man Benjamin for their trip to Greenley’s allotments. They will take my car, which I have rigged with a backup unit. I have supplied a pistol in case things get hectic. The plan is for them to drop me in Birmingham and continue on in the second wave. They tested their shorter on a residential substation in Greenwich – it blew every last fuse in a forty-seven-storey tower block. When the men get to the allotments, there will be no danger of failure. Pietro is missing, so I cannot get the full measure of Benjamin, but he seems involved. Remi has rallied somewhat: he tells me he wants to wear a Birmingham City shirt because he has read about hiding in plain sight.

  Why am I even writing to you?

  #34

  Remi, Benjamin and I leave for Birmingham this evening. You will not hear from me again. Let this be known: the workers are bigger than you. I would spit in your face if you were here. I renounce you. You fucking bitch! I am going up there in spite of you. I am doing this for Miranda and Remi’s daughter and all our children. They deserve a better future, and they deserve better than you.

  Hope I don’t find you in the after. None of us will need you by then.

  [Collection note: correspondence ends. Tap here to read again.]

  PART IV

  MARTHA

  1

  It’s Martha’s turn to deliver a bag of limbs. She leaves the allotments early for Manchester, collecting the rucksack from the shed above Greenley’s lab. The rucksack weighs a lot, so when Martha boards the train she’s glad to get it into the luggage rack, relieve her back. Gladder still that no fingers or toes, with their silky synthetic skin, are poking out of the rucksack’s broken zipper.

  Despite the train’s aircon, Martha’s hair sticks to her forehead. She undoes her military blouson and flaps her top to get air on her skin. Early summer in Dillock means muggy days under dark cloud, so even when it’s not raining you’re dreading it. The hills don’t help, this being a market town in shadow, seated beneath vast moorland whose burned-back and nude-peat plains absorb the rare light.

  The train leaves Dillock late, chuntering out of the station with a cheery peep. It shouldn’t matter, given the time and money owed to the allotments; just last week Greenley was moaning that their creditors were ‘starting to take the effing biscuit’, leaving Martha to cringe at his neutered swearing, unsure how to react. Greenley’s partner Sharon still chided him for it, like Martha wasn’t seventeen, see, or a functioning adult.

  Well, today she’ll remind them what she can do. She sits there listening to a salvaged Minidisc player, a ‘Best of the alt-noughties’ compilation made by the foster brother from whom she’d stolen her first kiss. As the train hums along, the music places her again in the foster home, all jam sandwiches and sugar soap and blue paper towels, and she remembers the outline of this boy’s face, his gawky arms and slender calves, his too-big hands, his jaw and eyes in isolation. She smiles thinly: they’d flit between each other’s bunks come the early hours, sure they’d never alert anybody to the smell of her black-market cigarettes if they only leaned far enough out of the window. He was a kind of love, that boy, taken from Martha and placed into digital rehab, then erased forever when she was moved to the next home. She always feels she didn’t steal enough of him. She closes her eyes, lest she stare into the same hole she burrowed into in the months following her mum’s death. Minor key, swelling strings. Seventeen now (going on thirty, according to Greenley), but only eleven then, which made it six years in care. A long six years, they’ve been – puberty navigated alone while she was shunted between state facilities and volunteer carers filling holes in the social net, some with better intentions than others. All those meetings with pro bono counsellors, therapists who’d travel over from Yorkshire, down from Cumbria, from all over the north, to spend time with her. Those rare treasures who listened, who sometimes took Martha’s hand and squeezed it, told her it was fine to cry, even though she never really could. People who taught her to accept that friendship could be transient; that some friends will go willingly into the dark, and that others could need saving from themselves. People who explained the hidden costs of loss, a harsh lesson for Martha to learn so early. And people with whom she shared her mother’s absence. Most importantly, they were real, unlike her father, who was dead to her a long time before. (‘I don’t remember him,’ she told one counsellor. ‘I never had a father.’) Because the bastard had been a no-mark, a waster, a fuck-up, best she can tell. When she was seven he’d had a breakdown and vanished. Her mother insulated her from the worst of him, and the gap was easily filled. Change the tune and snap, the waters close over.

  Now Martha’s journey gets interesting: dense trees around a derelict industrial site, currently a squat for a group of textile artists. ‘Another co-op is not competition,’ Greenley told the allotments crew. Beyond the railings and wire, colourful patchwork flags hang from a rotting roof – a taunt to the drones, the sky-eyes network overseeing the country. Here the train moves to full pace, and the last of spring reveals itself in cool greens and strong-growing weeds, vast empty fields, automated dog walkers at perfectly spaced intervals along the brook. She flicks the playlist on – classic nineties to early-twenties ragepop, rough beats, some bloke yelling, ‘Impotence! Impeachment!’ over and over.

  Then the sight Martha loves most of all. As the train starts across the Fiddlehead viaduct, the trees thin and the land tapers quickly away. Look down and follow the steep slope into the elbow of the valley, the dashed li
nes of mixed electric and petro-traffic. Turn to the opposite side, where the allotments – their allotments, Martha’s home – slide into view. Proud as punch, Martha is, with all of it there to see: the vegetable patches, her self-painted shed – tiny but cosy and hers alone – and the various machines, growing canes, the goats and woodpiles and tool sheds. There’s Rolly, working on his vintage motorcycle. Here’s Sharon on her rounds, a handful of pulled weeds by her side, cigarette smoke rising from beneath her hood. All around Sharon is the uncanny green grass of the allotments, luminous on the slope. And there, stitched into this slope, are row upon row of limb-trees – the allotments’ core produce and source of income. Next to the limb-trees, trenched into the fields, run the tracks for the co-op’s fleet of ‘hands’ – a set of two-part robotic units, designed and engineered by Greenley, and whose nickname really ought to be arms. The hands move up and down the field, tending their crops. Martha’s hand, the one she maintains, is farthest to the right. It’s currently at the end of its trench, where it rotates, extends and arches in a fast, fluid motion. Elegant things, the hands, and uncannily precise. The hand’s manipulator case hangs above a limb-tree. Suddenly the manipulator flowers into an array of surgical steel, and it plucks away the tarp. Martha conjures its noises, acutely sharp and sonorous. Beneath the tarp lies a set of untreated, unsheathed limbs whose surfaces carry a lambent glow. A bush of pale fingers, and two male feet, soles up, held aloft on two partially developed legs, unlikely flagpoles standing there absurdly. Martha grins to herself as the hand sprays them with growth hormones, and then the allotments are gone. Fiddlehead viaduct recedes, and the train enters a run of red-brick tunnels. Martha sits alone with her rucksack of limbs, and her music, and the taste of that first kiss in a foster home proving elusive, one too many memories away.

  At Manchester Piccadilly, Martha ambles along the slippery platform, cutting an awkward figure with a rucksack almost the height of her. Despite a sort of fragile peace, rigidly enforced by the panopticon, plainclothes police still perform random searches and explosives swabs on the main concourse, so Martha doesn’t hang around trying to find the platform of her connecting train to Crewe. It’s late in, so Martha decides to lug the rucksack up to the mezzanine level. People-watch, take some photos. Get proof she did this alone, again, despite the others secretly doubting her, and also to record the time in case there are issues with Greenley’s service level agreement. Take photos because city life distracts her, and viewing the place through a screen is one way to filter the noise.

  ‘Nerves do us good,’ Greenley told her that morning. ‘It’s okay to push yourself. And we trust you. We do trust you.’

  His insistence had made Martha’s palms clammy, too. Frankly, she thinks she’s already proved herself. She wonders what it’ll take.

  The train Martha needs, due from Birmingham, doesn’t show at all, so she hops aboard the ultrafast London service, messaging the client with news that he should meet her at Macclesfield instead, and that she doesn’t know what’s going on. She’s one of the first on the train, easily finding an empty pair of seats, and places the rucksack by the window. It isn’t far to Macclesfield, which means she can still make the drop and scoot back to Dillock in good time. She updates Sharon and crosses her arms, no distractions.

  Just before the train leaves, a woman asks to sit down next to her. Martha hutches up reluctantly, propping the rucksack on her knees. The woman is flushed, as though she ran to catch the train, and her hair is wet. She draws a bottle of water from her bag, along with a pen, a well-worn paperback and a pillbox. The woman asks to use the armrest. Both of them looking out the window as the train slides along. Moments later, the woman starts counting out tablets and arranging them neatly on the seatback’s fold-down table. She leaves them rattling, all different colours and shapes, different markings. Martha glances into the woman’s open novel, and is taken aback to see a smaller booklet hidden inside. The word CHEMO stands out immediately.

  ‘You okay minding my things?’ the woman asks, sensing Martha’s interest. ‘I’m absolutely busting.’

  ‘Course,’ Martha replies, embarrassed. The woman’s face opens out as she smiles. Martha smiles back, follows her passage to the toilet, and looks down at the bottle. She thought she’d seen something: the words LOVE and APPRECIATION are written around its sides. She turns away, guilty. The train is passing a scrapyard full of nearly-new diesel cars. Then the woman is back, and Martha pretends not to notice as she takes her tablets one by one. Tap, swallow. Tap, swallow.

  When the train reaches Stockport, the woman gathers her things. She smiles at Martha again, but Martha can’t reciprocate. She knows now where the woman is going – knows better than most. Because in this woman Martha has found an abstraction of her mum, who also came to Stockport and the Christie for chemotherapy. The same mum who lay on her side with bedsores and dry lips, legs lost in wires, with the smell of death blooming in the most innocuous things – the cups of tea and chocolate boxes, the single white orchid, fake, on the windowsill. Cuddling her mum in the hospital bed until a nurse came in to say, ‘Sorry, the beds are for patients only,’ only to backtrack on seeing how Martha had moulded so perfectly to her mum’s shape.

  Martha wishes the woman good luck. She hopes it means something.

  ‘Ta, poppet,’ the woman says, and leaves.

  Martha returns the rucksack of limbs to the empty seat beside her.

  Love and appreciation.

  2

  Macclesfield railway station, and outside to a nondescript electro-converted car. A quick flash of headlights. A man, small and portly, slipping out.

  ‘Doctor Abbas,’ he says, hand out.

  ‘Hiya,’ Martha says, keeping her hands in her blouson pockets.

  The doctor scratches the back of his head. ‘You’re, uh, young.’

  Martha turns her boot heel in the gravel. ‘And?’

  He glances over her shoulder. The body language of a decent man running on desperation. Dr Abbas, previously of Manchester Royal Infirmary: a fleshboy, skellyman, or one of the other less kindly names Martha knows from the town. In its last days the NHS ran entirely on the goodwill of its staff. Now, its volunteers rely on smuggling for even the basics.

  Martha sniggers. ‘You made decent time, anyway,’ she tells him. ‘Cheers for tweaking your plans.’

  Abbas smiles weakly at her. She wonders if she appears feral to him, hair tangled and smelling strongly of woodsmoke, her skin heavily freckled. Loose clothing so at odds with fashion – the nice things she used to wear. In truth, she may well be feral: she hasn’t looked in a mirror for a long time, and whenever she catches herself in reflections – train windows, glass facades – she’s leaner, more defined. Sometimes it’s her mum staring back at her.

  ‘Who these for?’ Martha asks him, lifting the rucksack down from her shoulders. She settles it on her boot caps, so the canvas won’t touch the wet gravel.

  ‘You know I won’t tell you,’ Abbas says, opening the car boot. He rolls back the parcel shelf, wheezing slightly. He’s wearing a hearing aid, old style. ‘Patient confidentiality still means something,’ he continues. ‘It’s not like you have a right to—’

  ‘Go on,’ Martha interrupts. One hand on her hip, a decent impression of caring less. ‘I counted the lengths – you’ve got a kid’s set in here. Poor bastard know what’s coming? They gonna make it, or what?’

  Abbas shakes his head. ‘I’m not doing this. Sorry.’

  Martha smirks. She slips the invoice from her money belt and hands it over. ‘Greenley wants it paid sooner than last time.’ She shrugs. ‘I don’t mind, to be fair. We should do them on the house for kids. He gets hung up on paperwork; be easier if we went in for crypto. Get a drone running deliveries and all…’

  Abbas, still confused by Martha’s approach, nods coolly. ‘We’re trying,’ he says.

  Trying to mend things that can’t be fixed any other way, that is.

  Then a hesitation, the unsai
d things held back. Martha stares at Abbas and tries to imagine how well he would’ve been paid as a doctor before he went underground. Tries to imagine how many more doctors and nurses volunteer to keep the torches alight.

  Martha unloads the rucksack into the boot cavity, where Abbas has opened a hidden compartment in the subfloor. The prostheses fit snugly when she lines them up. There’s nothing grim about it, though it might look macabre to a passer-by.

  ‘They’re smart,’ Abbas says. ‘You changed your polymers?’

  Martha shakes her head. Staring at the kid’s prostheses. One is an over-knee replacement, right up to the thigh; the other a foot and partial shin. ‘Maybe it’s the light,’ she tells him.

  ‘And they’re warrantied like usual?’

  ‘Course. Four years. Greenley’s looking at mobile servicing, but he says you can’t get the staff.’

  ‘No,’ Abbas says, arching his brows. ‘I only mention it because the last lot came on the back of a motorcycle, and we had to really scrub them down.’

  Martha grins. Rolly, that must have been. For him, running deliveries is an excuse to hoon about on B-roads.

  ‘You want a lift anywhere?’ Abbas asks, quickly replacing the floor cover. ‘I mean, back into Manchester? I’m due for a home call near Ancoats. Car’s empty, except for these, so it’s no hassle.’

  Martha reties the rucksack and stuffs her pockets. ‘Go on then,’ she says. ‘So long as you don’t try feeling me up on the way.’

  Abbas’s expression locks up in horror.

  ‘Only messing,’ Martha adds, chuckling. ‘If you tried, I’d cut your balls off and feed them to our goats.’

  Then she waves to open the car door and lowers herself into the seat, leaving the doctor standing there, face a picture.