by Gary Gibson
‘So,’ she said, nodding around the room with a flick of her head. ‘How are you settling into the new place?’
‘It’s okay. Still need to do a little more redecorating.’
‘Previous owner’s taste in home decor an issue?’
‘Fake tigerskin rugs. Miniature Grecian statues on plinths. I hid it all in the back of a shed where I couldn’t see it.’ I stepped towards her. ‘Rozalia . . .’
‘Sit down,’ she ordered, pushing the plunger on the cafetière all the way down. Her voice sounded raw and strained. ‘You want eggs?’
I stared at her, unsure what to say or do.
‘I said,’ she repeated, anger edging into her voice, ‘Do. You. Want. Eggs?’
I reached for a glass of water already sitting on the countertop and drained it. ‘Sure,’ I said, wiping my mouth before refilling the glass.
Rozalia nodded and pulled a pan from a hook, slamming it onto the hob with undue force before switching on the gas bottle beneath the hob. She broke six eggs against the side of the pan with the air of an executioner dispatching victims, then swirled them around the pan, staring at them as they sizzled. I got hold of a mug and filled it with coffee, shivering and coughing at the first sip as I took a seat. Clearly she liked it a lot stronger than I did.
Two minutes later, Rozalia dumped a plate of eggs in front of me. I was impressed. She’d managed to both undercook and burn them.
‘You know,’ I said, choosing my words as carefully as possible, ‘I remember exactly what it’s like to go through something like this. I mean, lose someone.’
Rozalia nodded. ‘Your wife, Alice. I know what you’re trying to do, Jerry. Don’t. That’s not why I’m here.’
‘I know words don’t help much, but—’
‘I do not want your fucking sympathy!’ she yelled.
I put both hands up in surrender.
The wild look faded from her eyes and she shovelled the remaining half-crisped, half-liquid eggs onto a second plate and sat down across from me, scooping the gooey mess into her mouth. I tried eating mine and quickly came to the conclusion I’d be better off sticking with the coffee. At least it was helping to burn away a little of the previous night’s excess.
She finished her eggs, then pushed away the plate, and stared over at me. ‘I don’t think what happened last night was an accident.’
I tried to process the words, unsure if I’d heard her correctly. ‘I got the impression there was some kind of equipment failure. Maybe—’
Her knuckles whitened where she gripped the edge of the counter top. I could see how hard she was fighting to hold herself together. ‘No,’ she said tightly. ‘There are things you don’t know, Jerry. Things no one else knows.’
‘Maybe you didn’t hear about it, but Oskar told me a few things about myself you’d all been keeping from me. If that’s what you’re—’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Not that. Nadia had . . . suspicions.’
‘About what?’
Her shoulders rose and fell and her eyes met mine for the first time. ‘About some of the circumstances around your predecessor’s death.’
I put down my mug. ‘You’re talking about the other Jerry, right?’ I realized my hands were trembling slightly, and not just because of the hangover. ‘The one who was here before me.’
‘It’s important that everything I say stays between us.’
‘Go on.’
She leaned forward, her expression intent. ‘I want you to swear, Jerry. On your life.’
‘Fine. I swear. Nothing goes beyond this kitchen.’
She nodded, apparently satisfied. ‘That other you had been looking into something, just before he died. It’s true that there have been accidents, equipment failures and software problems of all kinds, since before they brought you here. A few of them were nearly as bad as what happened to you last night, but rarely fatal.’
‘What exactly do you mean, “looking into something”?’
‘He had an idea that maybe some of those accidents weren’t really accidents.’
I fought for understanding through the haze of hangover pain. ‘Go on.’
‘He had reasons,’ she said carefully, ‘to believe certain missions may have been deliberately sabotaged.’
‘How could you know this? And what possible reason could anyone have to do something like that?’
‘Good question. Anyway, a while back, he came to talk to Nadia about a specific incident that nearly got a lot of people killed.’
I licked my lips. ‘What happened, exactly?’
‘At the time, it had been arranged that Mort Bramnik was going to join some of us on an expedition to a recently opened alternate. Bramnik was intending to show some people from the Authority’s own alternate around, and we were expected to talk to them as if we were nothing more than inter-dimensional fucking tourist guides. I don’t know who these people were, but from the way Bramnik was acting towards them, not to mention the fact that they were getting the grand tour, it wasn’t hard to guess they were important.’
She leaned back, turning her coffee mug in her hands. ‘Something went wrong not long after we crossed over into the alternate, along with all the Authority tourists. We ran into something big and nasty that’d make you shit your pants in a second flat. Mort Bramnik himself nearly got killed as a result. Until that moment, we’d had every reason to believe we would be entirely safe, but the whole thing turned into a fuck-up of truly epic proportions.’ She looked up at me. ‘And until last night, that was the worst incident of all – even including the whole debacle in those vaults you saved me from. The only reason nobody got killed on that outing with the tourists was because Casey just about single-handedly saved our collective asses.’
‘So what happened after that?’ I asked.
‘The Patriot agents started showing up, snooping around the island and generally getting in everyone’s face. I think Bramnik’s been under a lot of pressure because of that first bad incident. Over the past year, he’s been away from the island with such frequency we started wondering if he’d ever come back, or who his replacement might be.’
‘If he’s screwing up so badly, maybe a replacement for him isn’t such a bad idea,’ I ventured.
‘Except that Agent Greenbrooke would most likely be his replacement, the way things have been going around here. And if Greenbrooke wound up running things, there isn’t one of us who’d be able to so much as take a shit without half a dozen Patriot agents taking photographs and writing extensive reports on the subversive nature of our bowel movements. Believe me, nobody wants Greenbrooke in charge.’
Having met the man, I could only agree. ‘So Nadia had suspicions about my predecessor’s death.’ It still felt strange, saying the words.
She nodded. ‘He had some reason for believing the mission with Bramnik might have been sabotaged, but he wanted to find proof before he started throwing accusations around. Except he went and got killed himself, not long after. Nadia figured that, in itself, was also more than a little suspicious, so she decided to see what else she could find out on her own.’ She shrugged, her expression bleak. ‘And now she’s gone, too.’
I put my hands up in a stalling motion. ‘Wait a minute. Why are you even telling me all of this?’
She frowned. ‘Jerry – I mean the first Jerry – was a good friend of ours.’ She looked down, and I saw she was trying hard to suppress tears. ‘You were. Seeing you alive like that, when you and Nadia both turned up in that EV, when I thought me and the others were goners for sure . . .’ She hugged the coffee close to her. ‘It was a shock, I’ll tell you that, even though I already knew they’d retrieved you from your alternate, and that I’d have to meet you eventually.’ Her eyes met mine. ‘I’m also telling you all this because you saved my life, and you deserve to have someone tell you the truth for once.’
I thought for a moment. ‘So did everyone else know Nadia was asking questions?’
Rozalia shook her hea
d. ‘She didn’t announce it publicly, if that’s what you mean. She just made a few careful, casual enquiries so as not to arouse suspicion.’
‘But not careful enough, you think?’
Rozalia gave me a hopeless shrug. ‘She also visited the alternate where the other Jerry died, I know that much. To be honest, I’m not clear on exactly who she might or might not have talked to.’
I got up and scraped my uneaten eggs into the bin before dropping both our dishes in the sink, just to give myself time to mull over everything I had just been told.
‘I’m sorry about your loss,’ I said, turning back to her, ‘truly sorry. I liked Nadia a great deal. I’m not in the least surprised she and my predecessor were good friends, because you’re clearly both good people. She made a real effort to make me feel welcome, even though it must have been like seeing a ghost. If there’s any reason to think foul play was involved then, believe me, I’ll be the first to want to know who’s responsible.’
I drained the last of my coffee and dropped the mug in the sink along with the dishes before continuing. ‘But none of this means anything unless you can prove there really was foul play involved. Just for a start, what possible motive could anyone have for wanting to sabotage any of the missions in the first place?’
‘Well,’ said Rozalia, a touch defensively, ‘that’s the reason your predecessor went looking to see if he could find any evidence.’
‘Did he talk to you or Nadia? Is that how you know all this?’
Rozalia nodded. ‘He spoke to Nadia, but not me. Unfortunately, she refused to share the full details of their conversation with me.’
‘Why?’
‘She was trying to protect me,’ she replied, with undisguised bitterness.
‘What from?’
‘Everything,’ she said. ‘I loved that woman to bits, but at times she was like a damn mother hen.’ She reached into a pocket and pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes. ‘You mind?’
I shook my head – I wasn’t a smoker, but the kitchen window was open next to where she sat. I waited as she lit up with a battered lighter, her breath faltering slightly as she let out the first rush of smoke.
‘Like there was this one time I got sick,’ she continued, waving away some of the smoke. ‘This is before we were retrieved by the Authority, mind.’
‘You survived together, the two of you, didn’t you?’
Rozalia nodded. ‘Nadia spent a lot of time and energy looking after me and keeping me alive back before our retrieval. Sometimes, if things got really bad, she’d keep it from me. She’d just . . . clam up rather than say anything. Maybe it’s because I’m more than ten years younger than her; I don’t know. But any time we had bad arguments then or since, it’s because she’d kept something back from me. I didn’t even know she’d spoken to Jerry until I came home and found them sitting there in our living room.’ She laughed. ‘I actually got worried they were having an affair or something, the way they were acting so secretively. But I made her tell me the truth in the end, and that’s when I knew she was doing it again . . . protecting me, when I didn’t need protecting.’
I reached up to touch a pendant that was no longer there, imagining what it might have been like if Alice had survived to stay by my side through the post-extinction years. Had she fallen ill, or been in danger of any kind, I might easily have been guilty of the same well-intentioned but overbearing care.
Rozalia got up and held the smoked butt of her cigarette under the tap before dropping it in the trash.
‘You’ve been here for years,’ I said, ‘and I’ve barely arrived. You don’t have any idea why either of them were so intent on keeping their concerns under their hats?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe they were afraid of the Patriots finding out. Everyone’s scared to death of them, even the other Authority types. If they ever found out what your predecessor was up to, things might get worse for us.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ I asked her.
‘Greenbrooke hates us,’ she said, her voice low and venomous. ‘He tortured Wallace. He’s the reason all our missions have been getting longer, and also a lot more dangerous.’ She met my eyes. ‘And he especially hates me and Nadia. If I walked into Government House and tried to talk to Bramnik, I don’t know what might happen. For all I know, the Patriots might be put in charge of an investigation, and then we’d really be fucked.’
‘All right, so what now?’ I said. ‘I mean, I’m grateful you told me all this, but you’re acting as if you think I’m going to pick up where the first Jerry left off.’
Her nostrils flared. ‘Would that be so bad?’
I shook my head and chuckled. My comment hadn’t been serious, but clearly she didn’t see it that way. ‘Rozalia . . . I think you’re forgetting just how new here I am. I only just had my first real mission, and it was a complete disaster. And now . . . all this,’ I said, waving my hand. ‘I’m supposed to do what, exactly? Because I really don’t have any idea.’
There was a wild look in her eyes. ‘So you don’t want to know. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘It’s not that. It’s just . . .’ I sighed, collecting my thoughts. ‘I’m not a detective. I honestly don’t know what you expect me to actually do.’
Rozalia stood. ‘You need,’ she said, ‘to talk to Chloe Wicks. She knows more about the other Jerry than anyone else on this island.’
‘Chloe Wicks?’ I repeated. ‘I’ve barely even spoken to her, except the one time. How . . . ?’
Then I remembered the way she had kissed me so unexpectedly outside the entrance of the Hotel du Mauna Loa. Given what I now knew, the incident took on an entirely new and unexpected perspective.
‘You were together for some time,’ said Rozalia. ‘Nadia told me she saw what happened between you and her when Casey was putting on his show.’
‘It didn’t make any sense,’ I said. ‘I guess it does now.’
I followed Rozalia to the front door, where she stood on the threshold. ‘Does Chloe know anything about all this stuff you just told me?’ I asked.
‘Probably. Yes. I think so. Certainly Nadia spoke to her,’ she said, ‘after the first Jerry died. So? Are you going to talk to her?’
‘I guess. But maybe you should come with me,’ I said. ‘It might be better if you were—’
Rozalia shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘But don’t wait too long.’ Her hand brushed my arm as she turned away, and then she was gone, walking out through the gate and down the empty street.
I closed the door and leaned my forehead against it, feeling like the fragile foundations of my new life were about to slip out from under me.
TWELVE
Four hours later, after I had drunk enough coffee and water to take the edge off the lingering hangover, I was standing outside Chloe Wicks’ home. It was a two-storey affair on the northern edge of town, its front yard filled with rusting chicken cages and overgrown grass and clearly untouched since the day its original owners vanished.
I knocked on the door several times, but got no response. I called out her name and waited, but nothing. Hell, for all I knew, she wasn’t even on the island – away, perhaps, on some expedition to another alternate.
I tried the front door and found it was unlocked. I pushed it open slightly and called her name again, but still got no reply. I stepped inside anyway, finding myself within a small, cramped vestibule, a narrow staircase to one side leading to the upper floor. Through a door on my right I saw a kitchen, and the remains of vegetables on a chopping board, suggesting that perhaps she wasn’t too far away. On my left I saw a living room, one wall lined with shelf after shelf of mouldering paperbacks. A framed photograph on a shelf drew my eye and when I stepped closer, I saw it was a picture of myself with my arm around Chloe.
The other Jerry, I corrected myself. Not me. I felt suddenly disoriented, and pressed my back against a wall until I could steady my breathing.
In truth,
I had been expecting to find something like this, after what Rozalia had told me. Even so, the sight of this picture – it looked to have been taken in the bar of the Hotel du Mauna Loa – sent a thrill of shock through my nerves. The two of them were laughing in the photograph, and now I looked closer, I could see other faces in the background – Casey, Nadia and Oskar.
Then I turned my attention to the books on the shelves, where I saw a dozen thick-bound notebooks placed close to the floor. I sank down onto a dusty couch, feeling all the strength go out of me. I clutched at my belly, feeling suddenly nauseous.
My diaries.
In my first years of solitude, when my primary concern had been survival, the idea of keeping a diary had seemed a deeply foolish one. And yet that simple act of writing entries as if I were describing events to Alice had somehow kept me sane – or relatively sane, at any rate. The routine of putting the words down, of describing the daily struggle to survive, kept me from cutting my own wrists. Later, when I wandered my alternate in a hopeless search for other survivors, I had managed to fill two thick books with crabbed writing and sketches. They had become so precious to me that I had, at times, risked my life in order to protect them.
And now I found myself staring at a dozen notebooks identical in appearance in every way to the ones that now sat in my own house, on the other side of town.
I reached down and pulled out the last of the notebooks on the right, assuming they were arranged, as my own were, in chronological order. I expected to find mostly blank pages, since this was the last notebook in which I had written immediately prior to my own retrieval.
At that time, my entries had grown increasingly sporadic as the Alice in my thoughts took on a kind of reality of her own. Each day was becoming too much like every other, and the less I wrote, the more I struggled to find reasons to keep on living.
I had thought that I might start writing again, about the new life the Authority had gifted me with. But, in a way, a spell had been broken. I had barely written anything since a few short days after emerging from quarantine.
I opened my other self’s last diary, but instead of finding the blank pages I had expected, I found them to be filled with tight, cramped handwriting identical to my own.
