Sinister Sentiments Page 11

  Morning dragged the fears of night away, illuminating a brand new world of prosperity. I ate breakfast in the shade of the Fleahopper’s wings, dreaming of the new life that awaited me in Texas upon my return. I wouldn’t settle again in my hometown where the mark of thievery still branded me, but find a new place farther south where I could start again. I wasn’t entirely sure what sort of business I could do. A thought occurred to me as I sat there, starting to smile.

  “Can I have the Foresight for a moment?” I asked Maybelline suddenly.

  The old woman whirled, eyes widening in apparent panic.

  “Why?” she demanded, “We have to get Henry in a moment. What do you want it for?” She clutched the instrument over her heart, a grip so hard her fingers were turning blue.

  The sudden snap in her questioning tone startled me. “I, uh,” I stumbled, “I just wondered if you could tell me what comes next for me? You know, what’s my path after this moment?”

  “It’s no good, you looking,” Maybelline stammered. “You can’t calibrate.” She looked up at the sun, then over to Henry’s tent. “I suppose I have a brief moment to look on your behalf.”

  I gave her an eager smile, which she barely looked at.

  Maybelline put the Foresight’s lens to her eye, staring deep into the scope as she gently touched the dials and buttons. Her lip trembled as she watched, and her other eye twitched, even though it was tightly shut. After a moment, she set down the instrument and retracted it. She sat for a second or two, head bowed as she considered the Foresight resting in her palms.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked her.

  “Curiosity,” she replied. “Knowing your path doesn’t make things any easier, you know.”

  “Oh come on,” I griped. “You can tell me something, can’t you?”

  “There were books,” Maybelline said quietly. “You seemed to be doing a lot of writing.”

  It surprised me, but it didn’t sound all that unpleasant. I got to my feet, stepping out of the shade to offer the old woman my hand. She took it and rose, leaving the Foresight to roll around on the blanket as we both stepped towards the lonely tent. I walked just as I had in the future vision, Maybelline slowing to keep a safe distance behind me. I saw my own arm, clad in the turquoise robes, reaching out for the tent flaps just as I had before.

  “Mr Crenshaw?” I asked. “Henry? Are you in there?”

  The old man with the withered, fatherly smile gave a gasp in reply.

  I gingerly stepped into the tent to reach for him, dislodging his weak little frame from within a large pile of books and papers. He stumbled forward, leaning on me as I pulled him from the tent, and he wrapped his arms around me in a grateful embrace. I let him lean awhile longer to regain his strength, until I realised that he had spotted Maybelline over my shoulder.

  “Oh, my darling!” he cried, his voice a strained, dry squawk. “However did you do it?”

  Maybelline fell into his arms, kissing his half-hollow cheeks.

  Henry beamed at her. “However did you break the curse?” he asked.

  Maybelline stepped back, tears flowing from her cheeks once more. “I didn’t,” she replied.

  Perhaps I should have known that the rescue had been too easy. Henry wasn’t even wearing shackles. It occurred to me rather slowly that Maybelline shouldn’t have needed my aid to pull an old man out of a tent full of books. I glanced back at the books, a recent memory stirring in my mind. A lot of writing stared back at me, its brown ink blotted on endless pages, as though it had been written with an unsteady hand.

  The whistle of the wind caught my ears. Sandstorms didn’t usually just appear, they had to build up and travel over huge distances to be the size and bulk of the one before me. I had no idea where it had come from, only that the tornado-like blast was suddenly brewing at my feet. I stumbled away from the phenomenon, trying to shield my eyes from wayward grains as I watched a fierce, dark shape emerge at its centre. The first thing that became clear to me were two pinhole eyes boring down on my small frame.

  “Who dares to free my slave?” an echoing voice boomed overhead.

  “He did!” Maybelline pointed her bony, tanned hand at me, finger shaking as she squealed the damning words. “He freed him!”

  “Oh, Maybelline,” Henry said sadly, shaking his withered head from side to side.

  “It was written in the future!” Maybelline cried back over the din of the winds. “Henry, it had to be him! I couldn’t change things!”

  “Ha!” cried the voice in the swirling sands. “You choose to believe in the tool of the creature that fooled you once already?” he asked with vengeful glee.

  The Foresight was the genie’s tool. I remembered Maybelline saying as much. She had looked into my future and seen writing and books. She had seen me take Henry’s place in that tent.

  “You were supposed to break the curse!” Henry chided her, clutching his chest with the strain of raising his voice. He was so terribly unhealthy. Had the genie done that to him too? Was I next for the same treatment?

  “It was easier to just find someone to take your place,” Maybelline told him, not daring to glance in my direction.

  “It was, wasn’t it?” The genie’s voice boomed with a chuckle. “And what a replacement! He even has experience of servitude already.”

  I looked up into the deep, black eyes watching me from the shadow in the sandstorm. Slowly, my head began to shake in defiance, my fists clenching so hard that my nails broke the skin of my palms. Servitude. I would not accept another master, not again.

  I ran. I broke into a wild sprint, heading for the Fleahopper with the full intention of leaving the Crenshaws behind. It was lucky that we had parked so close, for I was mounted on the contraption’s bough in seconds. I began to activate the locomotion, my feet flying wildly to rotate the pedals. The craft’s angel-wing sails expanded, suddenly catching the draft from the sandstorm and hefting me into air. One brief gasp of elation escaped my lips before I looked down at the ground once more.

  Maybelline may have tricked me, but Henry was a good man. Whilst his wife was screaming at me to return the Fleahopper and take my place as the genie’s slave, the old withered man simply waved at me with a gesture of good luck. I paused in my pedalling, hovering in the updraft as guilt settled in my stomach for perhaps only a second or two.

  That was as long as it took for the genie to strike.

  The sandstorm caught the Fleahopper and upended it, tipping me down into the centre of the cycle of wind. I was caught up in the genie’s shadow-body as I watched the craft shatter into pieces above my head, Maybelline still screeching somewhere nearby. Then, with an almighty thump, I was thrown out of the storm. I landed head-first in a pile of musty books, and I knew from that moment that my goose was cooked at last. When I turned to try and flee the little tent, there was no exit by which to escape. The walls were solid as a pyramid’s tomb-stones from my side of the canvas.

  The genie was gone. I was sure of it by the lack of whistling wind. The only sound outside the tent was that of Maybelline and Henry fruitlessly arguing over their hapless fate.

  “How could you have been so foolish?” The old man chided his wife. “We can’t escape now, without the Fleahopper, we’ll die walking the desert!”

  “No, no,” Maybelline assured him. “It’s all right, my love. I’ve seen it all. We make it back safely, I promise.”

  I heard her footsteps thumping away in the sand, and a moment later she was back and panting. The familiar slide and click caught my ear as I sat and listened to the Foresight being extended. A thoughtful pause followed.

  “No,” Maybelline stammered, “it’s not possible. I saw us, Henry, back at home in Kensington. But now I can’t find the vision. It’s gone.”

  “Weren’t you listening to the genie, my dearest?” Henry asked her.

  “What do you mean?” she replied. “Henry, why is the vision gone?”

  “It appears that the future has ch
anged,” he concluded.

  They had two options. The first was to die, wandering to seek freedom in the desert. The second was to enter the tent. Henry had been there before, and he already knew there was no way out unless someone else opened the thing and pulled you from it. I didn’t bother trying to convince him to pull me free when he brought Maybelline inside. I had very little chance of surviving any longer in the desert than the old pair. I had never tried to escape from Kader’s little city for the same reason.

  What we really need, I thought with an empty chuckle, is a curious thief like me who might fancy raiding the place. One who would have brought transport and supplies for his mischief-making.

  I resigned myself to the thought that it wasn’t to be. Not many people out there were as greedy and curious as Maybelline and I. Henry settled, almost comfortably, back into his pile of books, lifting a few volumes and passing them into my hands. His crying wife sat between us, her face pressed against her palms.

  “Come now, darling,” Henry said. “At least we’re together now.”

  It sounded a tad empty, but Maybelline nodded at the notion.

  I turned over the books in my hands. “What are these for?” I asked Henry. “What are we supposed to do for this genie creature?”

  “I’m afraid he’s rather a vain old thing,” the withered man answered. “It’s up to us to transcribe his many stories of conquest over mortals. You’ll find the stories in the books and they need to be translated with the dictionaries in that corner. Paper and quills just ahead of you there.”

  I retrieved the necessary tools from the places he had pointed out. At least I could console myself that it wasn’t back-breaking labour. I was free from the desert’s burning sun, and I even had people to talk to. If I was always destined to be a slave, then this was probably the best thing I could have hoped for. I began to look up a few words for the title of the first story, lifting a feathered quill and hovering it over the page.

  “Wait,” I said with a pause, “where’s the ink?”

  Henry passed a quill to Maybelline, exchanging a grave look with her. “It’s already loaded,” he replied weakly.

  I didn’t see how it could be, but I put it to the page all the same. Red ink spurted at the nib from an unseen well, trickling and blotting the page before I could really get control of it to commence writing. It was dark, thick stuff, not at all like the inks that I had seen before.

  “Where’s this stuff coming from?” I asked Henry.

  Maybelline had a hand over her mouth as she watched me work.

  “Just keep going,” the old man replied.

  I completed the title, the first translation of the many I would do for the rest of my days.

  The Bleeding of the Thief

  I looked at the crimson trickle of liquid as it dried pale brown on the page. A tingle coursed through the veins in my arm, prickling with the beginnings of needle-sharp pain. Henry suddenly gave a wince as he too put pen to paper, and Maybelline held onto him, as though his very life was seeping out through the nib of the quill.

  Delilah’s Birth

  It’s funny what goes through your mind when you realise that you’re about to die. It was January when I lay on the battlefield, long after the fight had moved uphill. The cold nip of the winter wind blew at the gaping gash on the side of my head, freezing the blood even as it poured down my neck to pool at my shattered collarbone. The breeze whistled so loudly against my half-ripped ear that I had no chance of listening out for anyone coming to my aid. Not that I felt they would; winning the battle was far more important than losing a few good women along the way.

  January was the month when I first met Malcolm, twenty-seven years prior to the date that I died. He was already military back then, working for the intelligence division in the Twenty-One-Hundred program. He smiled with bright white teeth and told me that the army was going to do great things at the turn of the twenty-second century. I applied for a job in his department, not because of his great dream, but because of his smile. It took him a few months to realise that I was interested in him, but during that time I bought into the TOH ideal. I too believed that the army was going to transform our struggling nation.

  To build, one must first demolish.

  It became their motto on New Year’s Day, when the city of London was erased from living history. It was the first of many great settlements to fall nationwide, its gilded skywalks and shining skyscrapers collapsed in a matter of hours by government war machines. Malcolm and I were supposed to be the intelligence department, but we were even more blind than the rest of the team that we worked for back then. Our sweat and toil and ingenuity had brought about the end of days.

  Malcolm and I were in London the day it fell. I could remember us trying out the new double-sync cameras he’d bought for me; broadcasting our stupid young love to the world even as the supertanks were setting their course for the Thames’s south bank. Sometimes, Malcolm told me that he’d been planning to ask me to marry him that day in London. The breakout of war against the military machines had rather put a spanner in those works. Even after, when the System had taken over as the new form of supreme government, we never seemed to manage to get around to the white dress and the big wide aisle. It just wasn’t important anymore.

  I wish we had now, as I lie on the cold ground watching the blackness creep into the corners of my vision. If we’d managed to get around to getting married, then my empty grave would read ‘Beloved Wife’ on the tombstone. Now what will it say? ‘Here lies Delilah Stewart, who faced the System and lost’. It is an uninspiring thought to know that a simple flamecannon mowed me down in the end. Its flames burned a hole straight through the left side of me, nicking the edges of vital organs and ripping away most of that side of my face. It wasn’t instant, it wasn’t elegant, and it wasn’t as though I couldn’t have avoided it, if I hadn’t been so stupid as to look around for Malcolm when I should have been gunning the enemy down.

  I don’t know where he is, but all I can hope is that he’s safe. Malcolm was always the better soldier of the two of us; the taste for war is in his blood. I expect he’s back at the base already, probably wondering what happened to me and when I’m going to call in my report. When no report comes, I can’t imagine what he’ll do. I can’t bear my last thoughts to be of guilt over Malcolm’s grief.

  All I can do is think of January as the cold air whips against my burns, and of the year we spent together before the wartime came. We’ve spent twenty-six years in battle together since then, but no moment has ever come close to being so sweet as the one before London was no more. That was the day when Malcolm really loved me; that was the day when nothing in the world mattered more than our being together. That was…

  *

  I should have died then, with those thoughts. Everything went black, the way the movies tell you that it’s supposed to, but in some distant, echoing corner of my mind, I could hear the buzzing coming in the distance. It was like a fly in my ear, though I couldn’t move to swat it, and it stayed with me for a long time, lingering like a dream whilst the rest of me seemed to cease to exist. Perhaps I was dead for a while, somewhere amid the droning sound, but it can’t have been for long.

  I wake in a room lit with low, green lights. Green is not as vibrant a filter as you might think when you shine a light-bulb through it; all it seems to do is intensify the shadows of everything that you can see. Like the shadows behind the liquid that’s pumping through the tubes around me. Dark liquid of indeterminate colour that seems to be flowing into a drip at my side. I shiver at the thought of my side, the pain-memory of the flamecannon sending me reeling with aftershock. I shouldn’t have a side for the liquid to be pumped into.

  I look down to my left, my neck pulling with a strange, new tightness as I move. A metal rig holds my naked frame in place amid the tubes, lying at a forty-five degree angle on a hard, flat surface. Some of the flesh on my stomach remains, its caramel hue looking all the darker in the green light.
The skin ends about three inches from where it ought to, to be replaced by a thin, flexible metal. It moves like chainmail when I try to wriggle, but it doesn’t hurt where the needle with the liquid drip is jabbed into it. It completes my shape, a mirror-image of my other side, as though someone took the time to sculpt it to my body with precision.

  Someone has fixed me.

  I suppose this must be a hospital of some sort, though it feels like a cross between a butcher’s and a mortuary. I am hung like a shank of flesh for safekeeping; there is even a label printed over my bare stomach. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust to the grim lighting, before I can strain them to decipher the upside-down stamp. It proclaims me UNSUITABLE. Well, that’s just charming. Unsuitable for what, I’m left to wonder.

  The military protocol in a prisoner of war situation is to demand an audience with one’s captors. I scream until my face hurts, hollering my demands until the tiled room is filled with echoes of my own desperate cries. One side of my face doesn’t move the same way as the other anymore, and it’s now that I remember how the flames tore away at the left of me. I wish that I could free my hands to touch my cheek, to see if the chainmail skin has been grafted there too, but the metal bonds on my wrists are far too tight to allow it.

  The eerie solitude gives me time to assess the rest of my body. The collarbone that was broken is now painless and flexible, feeling stronger and heavier than the one on my right side. My stomach doesn’t ache with hunger, which probably has something to do with the tube in my side, and the precision with which I can hear that tube’s liquid bubbling suggests that my ripped-off ear has been successfully reattached. Good news so far, but the label on my stomach is still a worry. If I am so unsuitable, then why has someone gone to all this trouble to save my life?