Feeling isn’t really in their job descriptions
Whatever fresh hell this is, I don’t have time for it.
I move on.
The next window contains a bed with a motionless figure in it, seemingly asleep despite the harsh fluorescent light. It’s a tall, thin man with wispy, colourless hair and hollow cheeks. He’s wearing a red T-shirt, with a white band around his wrist.
Is he the new Riley? The new expendable? Will his name tag read RILEY as well? Was our Riley really Riley?
I continue down the corridor. Fluorescent lights twitch erratically above me, occasionally plunging me into cold green darkness.
The next door leads to Cato Bell’s office, and I feel a surge of triumph and adrenaline to have found her, before she found me. She’s sitting with her back to me, in front of a series of screens, each one showing a feed from the rooms in the barracks.
I can see Edwin huddled on his bed. Pax pacing up and down. Nia’s room is empty, but I can see light coming from under her bathroom door, so she’s probably in there. My room is dark, but I can make out a bed with a lump under the covers. Cato thinks I’m there, asleep. Good.
Other screens are spattered with green code on black – indecipherable secrets and plans. Bell has her back to me, watching the screens intently. The room appears to be an old communications centre, with banks of controls and glass monitors, dull and dusty. The walls are lined with shelves and filing cabinets. Crumbling stacks of paper and cracked vinyl binders are tumbled together. Some look like they’ve been shredded by rodents. An ancient, threadbare desk chair is overturned in one corner, tarnished wheels in the air. A thick rope of new cables stretches up to a hook on the ceiling and is draped down the wall where it disappears into a conduit.
Just inside the door I can see a fire extinguisher leaning against a filing cabinet. It would only take a second to grab it. She wouldn’t have time to cry out for help. One swift blow to the head, and all my problems would be solved.
For a moment I wish I was the kind of person who could kill in cold blood. But I continue on, down the corridor to the next room.
It’s her bedroom, and I was right. It is much nicer than mine. She has gone to some effort to make it comfortable, with fresh paint on the crumbling walls, and a soft Turkish rug underfoot. I slip inside and run my hands over the low futon with its linen bedsheets. I switch on her bedside lamp, which casts a golden glow over the interior of the room. I open a trunk containing neatly folded clothes, all black and expensive-looking. I open a drawer and see fancy looking serums, a silver-backed hairbrush, perfume in a petite crystal vial. I pull out an ornate golden bullet that turns out to be lipstick, with the words Saint-Emillon Noir engraved down one side. The colour is a bruised dark purple – almost black.
I turn to the mirror and carefully press it to my own lips. It glides on smooth and rich, and it doesn’t surprise me to learn that I am very good at applying lipstick. I purse my lips together and lean forward to leave a kiss on the mirror.
Is it wise to let Cato Bell know I was here? Probably not. But I want her to feel some of the uneasiness that has plagued me since I woke up on the bus. I want her to know that she isn’t always in control.
There’s a torch on her bedside table, and I swipe it and head back outside. I have more exploring to do.
…
I get to the fenced perimeter of Camp Eleos, and stop, glancing down at the wristband. I don’t want to alert Cato Bell to the fact I’m wandering around out of bed.
I find a pair of jeeps parked beside a bank of solar panels. I walk over to one of them and open the door, swinging myself up into the driver’s seat. The keys are in the ignition. If it weren’t for the wristband, I could start the engine right now and zoom off, assuming I know how to drive.
I open the glove box in case there’s something useful, and find a foldable hunting knife, which I take, then keep exploring.
Beyond the solar panels I can see a tall communications tower, bits of it rusted and buckling, but other parts still standing straight. Newer electronic boxes and cables seem to have been attached recently, blinking with blue and red LEDs, and a smooth white satellite dish embraces the sky. I keep going. The floodlights don’t reach this far, so I switch on the torch and cast it around.
There is a long line of chainlink fenced enclosures, roofed with rusting corrugated iron. They look like animal pens, each one with a chainlink gate furnished with a rusted, salt-worn padlock. I wonder what kind of animals they kept here, until I see a pair of weathered handcuffs and realise that these pens weren’t for holding animals – they were for holding prisoners.
The ground starts to rise and becomes rocky and unstable. I don’t know why I’m so drawn to the weird crouching building on the crag, but I need to see inside. I scramble up the slope, dislodging rocks and skidding back down a few steps. It’s hard going, and after a few metres I’m out of breath and can taste the stew from earlier in the back of my throat. I wish I’d thought to bring the bottle of water.
I hear the clattering of tiny rocks behind me and freeze. But it must only be something I dislodged, because I don’t hear anything else, and my torch doesn’t pick anything out of the darkness. I hope I’m still inside the perimeter of Camp Eleos.
I keep climbing.
The crag is eroded, the footings of the observation station exposed. It contributes to the animal feeling of the building, its thick concrete foundations like splayed feet.
I reach the building and stop outside. The concrete has eroded too, revealing the wire mesh that holds it all together. There are no doors or windows, only gaping holes of darkness that swallow up my torchlight. I turn again. The compound seems a long way away, the floodlights illuminating the tiny cluster of buildings in the surrounding nothingness. The observation chamber is on the other side of the building, facing out to sea, and not visible from the compound. I take a deep breath and go inside.
I don’t know what I was expecting to find. In the first room, there are a few splintering wooden stools, tumbled chunks of the sandy orange rock, discarded beer cans so old the labels have faded to silver. I cast the beam of my torch down to my feet and see thick dust on the concrete floor. My footprints leave blurred outlines patterned with the spots and wavy lines from my sneaker treads. To my left there is another room, and to my right a flight of concrete steps lead up to the observation chamber. I pause, then head left.
The second room is much the same as the first. A small window frames the compound below, like a toy village. I cast the torch around the wall and see a narrow metal cot, salt-worn into a skeleton, the mattress foam covered with only a few shreds of tattered fabric. On the walls I can see names scratched into the crumbling concrete.
BILLY MAC 35
FLIPPER CLARKE
TUG PRUITT
31 KNOT EVANS
GREY WOLF
FLASH BULLARD
TITCH GUERERRO
SWAMPY HAIG
VINEGAR JOE
KILROY WAS HERE
There are carved pictures of flowers, crucifixes, faces, other names, dates. Above them all, in large, block letters, I read the words
NO MERCY HERE
I hesitate, then pull the hunting knife from my pocket and put the tip to the wall. I etch letters, the concrete crumbling away as easily as ricotta. I sit down on the cot and admire my work. Then I switch off my torch and sit there for a while, in the darkness.
It’s the first time I’ve really felt alone, and I don’t know what to think about it. Do I like being alone? Or do I thrive in a crowd? I can’t tell. I feel sort of empty and sad and scared, as though I’m standing on the edge of a deep black precipice, trying to decide whether to jump, or wait to get pushed. Either way I’ll fall.
Sandra is gone. She made a deal and she left. Whether or not Cato Bell will honour the deal is irrelevant, because either way, Sandra got off the island.
I wonder what kind of a deal I’d have to make. What could I possibly give Cato
Bell? She doesn’t need money, and I don’t have any kind of influence. Although maybe my parents do. If I went to a posh school like Westbridge, my parents must be rich, or important, or both. Then again, if my parents were powerful, surely they never would have let me go to jail for something as trivial as withholding evidence. A teenage girl, in the wrong place at the wrong time, scared for her life. An upstanding citizen in all other respects. No jury would convict. No judge would pass a sentence so harsh.
Unless I did something else.
Eventually, my thighs go numb against the rusted metal cot base, and I switch my torch back on and return to the central room. I can see where my footprints lead into the other room and back out again.
But there are other prints, too. Fresh ones, leading to the steps that ascend to the main observation chamber. They look identical to mine, same size, same tread, and for a moment I feel totally turned around. Did I already go up there and forget? Is this another memory glitch?
I follow the footprints up the steps into the observation chamber. The opening in the concrete wall is a long slit that runs from one side to the other, curving around the snout of the building, open to the elements from chest to head height. A concrete plinth holds a rusting iron bracket that would have once held a telescope or something.
There is a figure leaning against the opening, looking out into the darkness beyond. I stop in the doorway.
‘You took your time,’ Nia says conversationally over her shoulder.
Did I summon her here? Is she a real fairy and I made a wish? ‘I was enjoying the scenery,’ I say, because apparently we’re playing it cool. I join her and look out at the black night. Stars glitter overhead in the thick rope of the Milky Way. We’re turned away from Camp Eleos, so there is no light below, only blackness where I know the jungle and ocean to be. It’s as though we’re suspended in space.
‘Pretty,’ I say.
‘Why, thank you.’ Nia flashes me a grin, and all of a sudden I’m overwhelmingly glad to see her.
‘What’s with the lipstick?’ she asks, and I remember I’ve got a faceful of Saint-Emillon Noir.
‘Trying out a new look.’
Nia frowns critically at me. ‘I’m not sure it’s your colour.’
A gust of wind lifts my hair from my shoulders, and I lean out into the night, resting my elbows on the concrete wall and breathing deeply.
‘Sandra’s gone,’ I tell Nia. ‘She made a deal with Cato Bell. Threw Paxton under the bus for a chance to claw her career back.’
‘Ugh.’
I shrug. ‘I dunno. She doesn’t have any memory of Paxton, so it’s not like there’s a familial bond there.’
Although when we first woke up, he said he recognised her. How is that possible? She should have been erased with the rest of his episodic memory.
‘He’s still her son. Even intellectually, that should mean something.’
‘You don’t think you’d choose yourself, if you could?’
Nia gazes at me for a long moment. ‘I don’t know.’
I don’t know either.
‘How did you get out?’ she asks.
I tell her about the paperclip, and she nods. ‘She brought me a file like that as well.’ She pauses and clears her throat. ‘Did you read yours?’
‘Nope. Didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. Why, was there anything interesting in it?’
Nia waits for a moment before replying. ‘A few things.’
I want to ask more, but she leans on her elbows next to me, close enough that I can smell deodorant and soap, feel the heat radiating from her skin.
‘What about you? How did you get out?’
‘I ran the shower as hot as it would go so that the camera in the bathroom fogged up. Then I smashed a window.’
‘Simple, yet effective.’
‘I needed somewhere private to look at Riley’s wristband.’
‘Any luck?’
‘Take a look,’ she says, tilting her head to the rusting iron plinth.
I shine my torch over and see the white band, or what’s left of it. She’s used her paperclip to prise it open. There are bits of wire and circuitry all over the place, and I’m kind of amazed that the slim band around my wrist contains so much.
‘Beautiful design,’ she says. ‘Really high-level stuff.’
‘Obviously,’ I reply. ‘They were built by a reclusive morally ambiguous genius. But can you do anything with it?’
She purses her lips. ‘There was a tocsin embedded in the motherboard.’
‘A what?’
‘A tocsin. It’s a little mechanical device that is supposed to destroy the wristband if it’s tampered with. A self-destruct mechanism. To stop people from doing exactly what you want to do.’
‘Oh.’
‘But I removed it, because I am amazing.’
I grin at her. ‘You are amazing. But … isn’t self-destructing exactly what we want the bands to do? Can’t we make them all self-destruct?’
Nia shakes her head. ‘As well as killing the motherboard, the tocsin emits one last tone – like the one that immobilises us outside the bus. It knocks the wearer out, and sends a GPS location to the server so someone can be dispatched to recover it. And you.’
‘Right. Well that’s no help. But you removed the little guy, so now you can hack into the band, right?’
‘Not without a computer.’
I tell her about the banks of screens in Cato’s office. ‘Could we steal one?’
‘Too risky. And they’d have a level of security that I can’t break without more equipment.’
‘What kind of equipment? Maybe we can find it here …’
Nia closes her eyes. ‘What’s the point?’ she says. ‘What exactly are we trying to achieve?’
‘Escape.’ I say it like it’s obvious, because it is.
‘We’re on an island.’ More obviousness.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘But we’ll find a way. We’re smart. You’re the goddamned Blue Fairy, you can figure anything out. We can take Bell hostage and make her evacuate us. We can use her equipment to contact the outside world and get someone to come and help. Hell, we’ll get Edwin to set the whole fucking island on fire and wait up here until someone comes to put it out. But we’re not going to get to do any of that if she resets us tomorrow morning. I can’t go back. I feel like … I feel like I’ve just started to figure out who I am, and it makes me feel strong. I am strong. I don’t want to go back to cowering in the dark, not knowing anything.’
Nia’s lips part and I can see a flash of teeth as she inhales. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘You’re right. I don’t want to go back there either.’
I know there’s something she isn’t telling me.
She stares at me for a long moment, and there’s something behind her expression that frightens me. Whatever it is that she knows, it’s big. And it’s about me. About her and me.
The space between us could be closed by the smallest of movements.
I want to feel her skin on mine. I remember the moment on the bus when it felt like she was going to kiss me, and I realise that in this moment, I want to kiss her. A lot.
Nia is sitting on my bed, knees drawn up to her chest, her finger absently stroking the golden crack on her prosthesis. Her brows are drawn together, her face a mask of concern as she looks up at me.
What was this girl to me, before?
What is she now?
I wish Cecily Cartwright was dead.
Is that what was in the file? The truth about what Nia did in response to Paxton’s wish?
The gap between us is suddenly a chasm. There are too many options. Too many possibilities. No matter how I’m feeling in the moment, up here with the stars all around us and my hair moving gently with the breeze, I can’t give in to temptation. I have to keep my head clear.
‘What would you do, if you did have a computer?’ I ask.
It only takes a moment for Nia to switch gears. I see curtains descend on whatever
it was in her eyes, and she bites her bottom lip as she considers the practicalities of my question.
‘I’m pretty sure I can use my little wifi bug to break into the wristbands.’
‘And then what?’
‘The bands operate on an automated IFTTT chain,’ she muses. ‘With optional overrides.’
I nod as if I know what she’s talking about. ‘Sure, sure.’
She chuckles. ‘IFTTT stands for if this, then that. It’s a chain of really simple commands where there are triggers and actions. So one of the triggers is getting off the bus when you’re not supposed to. The action is making the wristband heat up. Another trigger is standing on the relevant marker, and the action is playing a tone that causes temporary paralysis.’
‘And the memory loss, is that a trigger too?’
She nods. ‘Another tone. It’s a really cool technology.’
I raise my eyebrows. ‘Is it, though?’ I ask. ‘Really cool? Is it really cool to be turned into a powerless zombie?’
I think back to the security guards sitting in the bare room, staring at the wall, their faces blank, and shudder.
‘Anyway,’ Nia continues, ignoring me completely, ‘there are also manual overrides. So if Cato Bell decides she wants to change the rules, she can control the wristbands manually and zap us for fun.’
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘So if you had a computer, could you change these actions?’
Nia shrugs. ‘Change them, probably. Or maybe disable them entirely. Or override the IFTTT with some other command. I also think I could make them broadcast a distress call, in the hope that someone nearby could come and rescue us.’
‘That sounds promising.’
‘But I need a terminal. A computer to punch the commands into.’
‘What about the displays on the bus?’
Nia’s eyes light up, but then she shakes her head. ‘How could I do it without her noticing?’
‘She must have done it. When she was pretending to be Catherine. Under our noses the whole time.’
‘Yeah, I guess so.’
‘So, we wait until we’re back on the bus, and you do your wizardry and take over the wristbands, so we don’t have our memory wiped and can escape into the jungle!’
The Erasure Initiative Page 18
