With that, she pulled her brown shoulder bag round, unclipped its buckle. Albert stiffened. It had been part of the ritual since he was very young, too small to see over the desk. When the talking finished, Dr. Calloway would reach to her bag, put in her hand, bring out her selection. Then get up and walk to him. The goad, the flail, the strap…many things had been brought out of that bag, and none of them did him any good.
She put her hand inside, withdrew it, held it out to him. A metal band, slim, golden, open at the clip. A mind restraint. “Take it,” she said, “and put it on.”
His heart wavered. He clenched his teeth together. He thought of the muscle that twitched in Scarlett’s cheek whenever she was mad.
“No, Dr. Calloway. I’m not going to put it on.”
An eyebrow lifted, a perfect crescent of disdain. “Are you being defiant, Albert Browne? Put it on and come with me.”
“Come where? Back to Stonemoor? To be killed?”
It was the perfect reproduction of the smile she’d given him that last time in the testing room: clear and dazzling and cold. “Oh, Albert. You know that’s for me to decide.”
He did know. He looked at the band of metal, at her slim fingers that held it, at the blue veins in the back of her hand. It would be easy enough to do. Stop worrying. Stop fighting. Just take it, slip it on, fix the clasp. There wouldn’t even be any pain….
That would come later.
“No,” he said.
“No?” The black eyes blinked slowly at him.
“I don’t need the restraint. Not anymore.”
The smile was gone. “Think hard, Albert. Think of the terrible acts you have committed. The bus! The wharf! The raft! Think what happens when you disobey me and go out into the world! I have always warned you of it! Without the band, the violence rises inside you and inevitably bursts out.”
“That’s not true. Scarlett said—”
“That girl was nothing. She was a nobody. An outlaw and a thief.”
Albert looked out toward the window and the open sea. “Yes, I suppose she was. But everything was different with her.”
“Well,” Dr. Calloway said, “perhaps she gave you comfort. But she did not change your nature in any way. And now she is in the lagoon, being pulled apart by fish.” She held out her hand again. “Forget her, Albert. Put the restraint on.”
Albert gazed at her. He raised his fingers in a gesture he had seen Scarlett use. “Not a bloody chance.”
“If you don’t—”
“You’ll kill me. Go ahead.”
“No, if you don’t,” Dr. Calloway said, “I’ll instruct my men to shoot one of these idiots beside you. And I’ll keep repeating that order, islander by islander, one by one, until you do as I say.”
A silence.
Then the noise in the hall erupted. Physically, the tumult was loud, but the psychic buffeting that Albert received, as the citizens of the Free Isle gave vent to their terror and consternation, was almost overwhelming. It was like being on the bus again. It was like being set about with cudgels. He grimaced, raised his arms about his head.
The woman nodded. “Painful, is it? Is it rattling in your skull? We can end that in a moment. Put it on.”
He bared his teeth at her. Anger fizzed in his temples. If he only had his power now…
“No?” She signaled the Faith House operative standing to her right. “Well, then we’re going to have to shoot the first person, I’m afraid. Not the leader. He’s too obvious. And standing too far away. One of the quieter ones.”
Albert gave a groan. He held out his hand. “All right! All right! I’ll do it.”
“Take the restraint, then. Come over here and get it.” Dr. Calloway glanced aside at the man, who nodded and raised his gun. “On the count of three.”
“No!” Albert cried. “I’ll do it! Give me a moment—”
“No time to waste, Albert. One…”
He stumbled forward, reaching.
“Two…”
He snatched at the metal band.
A shot rang out.
The noise in his head flared, stopped, started again.
Albert stared in horror at the woman. “But I was doing it. I was doing it….”
Her face was blank. “I didn’t give the order. We didn’t shoot.”
The man to her right dropped his weapon. He fell to his knees, collapsed onto the floor. A harpoon shaft was sticking through his chest.
Albert stared at him. “Well, someone clearly did.”
A cough from the side. The figure crouched on the window ledge across the hall was silhouetted against the brightness of the ocean and her face was hidden, but the light shone through her tangled mess of auburn hair.
“Yeah,” Scarlett McCain said, and spat out a piece of gum. “I guess that’d be me.”
Just for a moment, there was equilibrium. On the one side, three heavily armed men and an astonished pale-haired woman. On the other, a girl with a harpoon gun and the element of surprise. No sound, no movement. All the people in the room in perfect balance, frozen and poised.
Like all perfect things, it couldn’t last. Scarlett reckoned she had maybe ten seconds before the balance tilted and everything went to hell.
She hopped off the sill, walked forward, keeping the remaining barb of the harpoon gun fixed directly at Dr. Calloway’s chest. The black eyes bored into hers; Scarlett heard a faint noise in her head, almost a ringing, like the air pressure had changed slightly. Then the woman’s lips parted with a sigh of understanding.
“The bank robber. I’d hoped I’d meet you.”
“And I hoped I’d meet you. But don’t move anything other than that pointy jaw of yours, Doc, or I’ll put a hole right through you. The same goes for your friends. Albert, you might want to pick up the gun that the dead guy’s dropped. He won’t be needing it again.”
She was pleased to see him totter over and scoop up the weapon. No dumb questions, no breezy chitchat. He was learning. She could see he was shocked at her arrival, his face blanched, his eyes showing white and wide. Otherwise he seemed in one piece. He backed away toward her. “Watch her hands,” he said.
“I got it. Time to go, Albert. Unless you want to talk some more.”
He was staring at the gun, holding it awkwardly, cradling it like it was a newborn child. “No,” he said. “The talking’s done.”
“Then make for the stairs.”
They backed toward the main doors at the far end of the hall, passing between the men and women of the isle. The heads of the Faith House agents swiveled, following their progress. Dr. Calloway hadn’t stirred. Scarlett kept the harpoon gun leveled at her. With each step, this was tougher to do—there were so many people there. They were close enough that she could feel their clothes brushing against her jacket, sense their hostility brushing against her too. Out of the tail of her eye, she saw Albert similarly weaving his way, giving odd little jerks and flinches as though he was being struck. But no one moved.
The only sound was the shuffling of Albert’s trainers. A greater silence stretched like elastic across the room—its tension hummed in her ear.
Twenty seconds since she’d fired the shot. And still the equilibrium.
They were almost at the door. Albert glanced over his shoulder to check where Scarlett was. She was drawing ahead of him.
She nodded reassurance.
And the elastic snapped.
With a sudden jerk, a big man with a blondish beard stretched out a hand and grabbed at Albert’s shoulder. Albert gasped, struck out sideways with the gun. Scarlett turned her head a fraction. On the far side of the room, the pale-haired woman gave a command. A shot rang out; a bullet scalded the air close to Scarlett’s neck. She flinched aside, fired the harpoon the length of the hall. It tore through the side of the woman’s coat, pul
ling her off her feet, pinning her to the wall behind. The inhabitants of the isle scattered. The Faith House operatives came alive, began firing indiscriminately.
Everything went to hell.
Scarlett tossed the harpoon gun away. Twenty-three seconds—thirteen better than expected. You couldn’t really complain. She shoved aside a big woman who was trying to get to the stairs and yanked at Albert’s arm, pulling him clear of the bearded man’s grip. She grappled him to her, ducked him down low. Bullets struck the concrete just above, scattering confetti splinters in their hair.
Out through the doors. Down steps, along a corridor, running through a random maze of rooms and passages—Scarlett pulling Albert by the hand.
They paused for breath at last, stood panting. It was a room where the weavers of the colony worked. There was no one there. Wooden looms, angular as giant crawling bats, stood hunched beneath the striplights. The one nearby was strung with lank green fibers, which Scarlett suspected had something to do with kelp. She let go of Albert’s hand.
He was smiling at her. It was his old grin and something more: the joy in it lit up the room.
“Hey, Albert,” she said.
“Hello, Scarlett.”
“You all right?”
“Yes. I’m so very glad to see you. I thought—”
“I know. Me too. Give me the gun.”
It was lighter in her hands than she’d expected, and the mechanism was different from her revolver’s, but it took the same bullets. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, hefted it briefly, sussing the locks and cylinders, and all the while listening for the approach of the pursuit. The screams of the islanders diffused outward through the tower. With all the echoes and the caterwauling, it was hard to tell if anybody was coming along behind.
Well, someone would be soon. She positioned herself in the doorway, the gun held ready, looking back down the corridor by which they’d entered. “I’m afraid this Free Isles business is a bust,” she said. “You can’t stay here.”
“I know. That’s all right. The people all hate me anyway.”
“Already? Even for you, that’s working fast. And there’s Calloway too. By the way—nice gesture you gave her there at the end.”
“Thanks. I was pleased with it.”
“You maybe don’t need to use three fingers. Two or one is usually sufficient. But the feeling was spot on. So: Do you know the quickest way down? There’ll be boats below.”
“We need to cross the Great Fissure by a bridge, find the main stairs…. But, Scarlett, I’m so happy that you got here safely. And…I’m sorry about what happened—”
“Forget it. Not now.”
“But you were put to so much trouble.”
He was looking intently at her, his eyes bright in the half-dark, doing his thing. The corners of Scarlett’s mouth tightened, but she didn’t complain. In the circumstances, it sure saved time. “Yeah,” she said. “The basket ride I could have done without. And the near drowning. The only good bit was the reception committee waiting when I got out at the top.”
She didn’t say anything more. If the six officious, smiling islanders had expected a drowned corpse in the basket, they had swiftly recovered from their surprise. Rushing forward, each one had vied with his fellows to whisk her off to await the attentions of Johnny Fingers. The resulting discussion had been quick, decisive, and extremely one-sided, and it had released a lot of Scarlett’s built-up tension. It had also got her a nice harpoon gun.
Albert had sieved the gist of it. He winced. “Was the part with the crank handle strictly necessary?”
“Rest assured, everybody I thumped deserved it. And they did me another favor. They told me you were alive.”
“Yes, and the great news is that Joe and Ettie are here too! They—”
“Shh!” She raised a hand, listened. Yeah, noises in the corridor—boots on concrete, light and cautious, coming nearer. She frowned; it had taken her the best part of an hour to find her way to the hall from the winch room high above. She had seen the Fissure but had no knowledge of the lower reaches, which meant she had to rely on Albert now. “We’ve got to go,” she said. “Get us to the stairs.”
They ran past the looms and out through a squared opening. Beyond was a dim-lit corridor, doors to storerooms, other empty chambers…A crack in one wall let in a shaft of daylight, and they could hear seabirds crying outside. There was a smell of rust and sea salt, a tang of desolation. A dusty set of steps led upward out of view.
Scarlett wrinkled her nose. She spun round, trotted backward, watching the door behind. “This doesn’t feel like the way to the main stairs.”
Albert rubbed his chin. “We should have got to the Great Fissure by now. Maybe we went wrong at the start. Maybe we should have turned left when we came out of the hall….”
“Brilliant. Well, we can’t go back.”
“Can’t we?”
A volley of gunshots tore the side of the doorway to shreds. Chunks of concrete dropped from the ceiling.
“No.”
Scarlett returned fire. In the confined space, the sound was deafening. She stepped back, worrying at her numbed ear with the tip of a finger. Smoke filled the room. Albert was a phantom at the foot of the steps, hands on hips, staring up into the dark. “We could try these stairs….”
“Useless. We need to go down, not up.”
Something came rolling along the floor of the corridor. It was a fizzing stick of gelignite. Scarlett abandoned her reservations. A step, a jump; she was next to Albert. They bundled up the staircase side by side.
Again, in the narrow confines of the concrete stairwell, the sound of the blast was magnified. It felt like they were in the middle of the explosion instead of ten steps up. Heat funneled past them, tugging at their clothes. Scarlett’s hair gusted up and over her forehead, mimicking the flames. They reached a landing, made a full turn, continued upward, heads ringing, eyes stinging with the heat. On the next landing, the walls were decorated with half-finished murals of pretty colored shells. The doors off the landing were concreted up; the only option was to continue on.
Scarlett cursed. “This is no good. What’s above us? Come on, Albert, you’re the expert on this place.”
He was wheezing, hands on knees. His hair hung down about his face. “Me? I’ve only been here five minutes. I found out where the toilets were, and that was about it.”
A sound drifted upward with the smoke from the level below. The voice of the pale-haired woman, raised in sharp command. Boots drummed on the stairs.
They hurried on. “How many men do you think she’s got?” Scarlett asked.
“Three. You killed the other one.”
“Yeah. I just hope there aren’t any more. What about Calloway? She armed?”
“She doesn’t use a gun.”
Up the staircase to the next floor and the next. Some doors were barred against them; others gave onto dead ends. The boots drew steadily nearer; the men were a turn behind. Albert began to flag; he stumbled at a landing, fell to his knees. Scarlett pulled him bodily round the corner. Bullets raked the wall; fragments of shell splintered against their backs. They were on a landing. The stairs continued, but two doors led off, both slightly ajar, with rooms beyond. The door to the left had a key sticking out of the lock.
“I don’t want to keep going up,” Scarlett said. “Left or right?”
“I’ll say left. I’ve got a good feeling about it.”
Scarlett kicked the door open, motioned him through. She pressed against the wall, the revolver trained on the stairs.
“How’s it looking, Albert? Talk to me.”
“Well—”
The tip of a bowler hat showed round the stairwell. Scarlett fired a single shot; the hat went spinning. She ducked back through the door, wrenching out the key. She slammed it, locked it, st
epped away. Gunfire struck like hailstones against the other side of the wood.
Albert was standing in the middle of the room. Scarlett put the gun in her belt and went to join him.
She nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “Nice choice.”
As a route of escape, the room had two main problems. The first was that there were no other doors out. The side walls were piled high with neat rows of baskets. Some baskets were empty, others filled with dried samphire and sea cabbage, bottles of fish, and pickled clams. All were fitted with links of chain.
The second problem was the wall at the end. It wasn’t there. The room opened out directly onto the vast gulf of the central fissure. Hazy light angled across the empty space from the hole in the roof above, showing the dim outline of rooms and alcoves on the opposite side.
Scarlett walked to the edge. There were three tall frames bolted to the concrete, each fitted with wheels and crank handles, each with a rope dropping out into the void. She prodded at the largest.
“Bloody baskets again,” she said.
The firing beyond the door had become ragged and now stopped altogether. In the silence, you could hear the underlying noises of the tower: the creaks, booms, and reverberations that marked its centuries-long death throes, as it succumbed to the impact of the waves.
“Looking at it positively,” Albert said, “we could hold out here for a while. We’ve got plenty of supplies. See, there’s pickled clams and everything.”
“Nice idea, but they’re probably fetching gelignite to blow apart the door.”
Scarlett craned her head out over the edge. Far below them, the bridge they’d been aiming for was a thin and grainy strip across a well of darkness. A faint draft of air rose from the darkness, cooling her flushed cheeks. The tips of her hair, caught by a breeze, fluttered around her face. The ropes disappeared in a variety of directions. The central one was the steepest and went the farthest down.
She straightened, looked at Albert. There was a touch of that old serenity about him, the calmness he exuded despite it all.
The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne Page 29
