Diamond Eyes (56 page)

‘Agreed,’ Sanchez said. ‘What chance has it of working anyway? Much better to be patient and try some more music and smelling salts.’

Mira clenched her fists into Ben’s shirt, wishing she could simply shake him awake. ‘How patient will you be?’ she asked. ‘Ten years — like for me? You can’t leave him like this. He’s better off dead!’

‘Careful, Mira!’ Sanchez scolded. ‘This is the last time you’ll be able to see Ben. Don’t make me take you back early!’

‘What?
You mean I can’t visit him? I’ll earn my day passes, I promise!’

‘After the record you two have together? Every day has ended in disaster.’

‘No! But I …!’ She tapped her forehead with her fist, knowing all too well where that argument would lead. ‘Sorry, I … I guess my head isn’t in the right place.’

Closing her eyes, she could feel the last seconds of freedom ticking inside her ears in time with her pulse; with Ben’s pulse too, as if the two had become one. The thought of separating from him again threatened to pull her apart from the inside out.

‘I think I feel sick again,’ she said.

‘The ensuite’s behind you,’ Pete suggested. ‘You could splash water over your face.’

Zhou rolled the wheelchair closer, but she blocked it as politely as she could manage: ‘I’m not crippled.’

She stepped around the chair, closing her eyes to avoid the fear of stepping into empty air. On the way, she deliberately stumbled into Neville and grabbed at him, her hand sliding swiftly in and out of his cardigan pocket; not so difficult to pick as he’d imagined.

‘Sorry,’ she said, and it was true: she was disappointed by them all.

She headed for the ensuite with her eyes closed and pulled the door closed behind her. Once inside the snug room, she fumbled around to find the invisible toilet, sink and paper towel dispenser — everything she needed to trade her last moments of freedom to wake Ben. She couldn’t leave him condemned to darkness, as she had once been.

She unravelled the roll of toilet paper into the basin, then fumbled with Neville’s matches, burning her fingers twice until she managed to set a flame to the paper. Smoke billowed thick enough to make her cough, but she listened until she heard a healthy flame crackle, then added a dampened layer of paper towelsto douse the flames. The smoke alarm howled above her and she burst into Ben’s room, sweeping the smoke along with her, triggering a second alarm that caused panic and an uproar.

Someone grabbed her arm and shouted for help. More invisibles thundered in from the hall; two, four or ten, she didn’t bother counting. Through it all, she kept her eyes closed, turning all of her other senses towards Ben.

‘This is for you,’ she whispered, knowing that on some level, some time in the future, he might remember. ‘You taught me to live, but of the two of us, it’s you who deserves it.’

Bodies jostled her away from him; an invisible sea of arms. She imagined them floating his bed to safety like a life-raft, away from the fire. Away from her.

‘Goodbye, Ben.’

Swept away on a different current, she struggled to keep her head above the crowd. Unforgiving arms pulled her down, pinned her arms, and she went limp, expecting the cold jab of a needle, no longer caring. But then, somewhere beyond the din of the fire-evacuation process, beyond time, fear and longing, she heard him cough.

‘Ben?’

She heard him cough again, then shouts from his mother and other nursing staff about seeing his arm move.

‘Let me go!’ she cried.

Life exploded back into her limbs and she kicked herself free of the faceless invisibles who had grabbed her. She scrambled against the tide of surrounding bodies — patients shouting for directions, staff trying to soothe them. Hands clawed at her clothes, but the hall was now too swollen with the crush and rush of invisible bodies.

By the time she reached the thickest part of the crowd, she could hear Ben’s mother shouting for other nurses to be more careful with his tubes and pillows.

‘Extubate now!’ Mellow ordered, and Mira was jostled backwards a little, with the other onlookers.

‘No!’ she complained. ‘Let me see him!’

Ben coughed again and Mira shoved with all her might towards him, but was snared by four strong male arms that had finally caught up to her.

‘Mira?’ Ben coughed. ‘Mira …’

‘Here, Ben! I’m here!’ She stamped her feet, still struggling to get free.

‘He’s groggy,’ Mellow argued. ‘He can’t be fit for talking yet. Get her out of here, and get those other patients back into their rooms.’

Mira felt herself being dragged backwards through floppy plastic doors; she grabbed one for leverage and, with a savage twist of her hips, escaped. She scrambled across the floorless sky, fearlessly as never before, to clutch at Ben’s hand. She could smell him, hear him, feel his pulse again, and that was all she cared for or needed.

He wheezed as he clasped her hand weakly, ‘You promised … you’d never do that.’

‘Do what?’ chimed Mellow and Mira together.

‘Scare me … again.’

Mira smiled and clenched her eyes shut against a flood of tears. She rubbed his hand against her cheek and hoped he could feel inside of her the same kind of warm glow that she’d grown to long for in him. ‘So sue me,’ she whispered. ‘I lied.’

Freddie lounged in his dungeon in blissful silence. Sixteen hours; all too brief, like the upswing of a pendulum that hangs too long between tock and tick.

Was that Fredarick’s thought, or his own? He wasn’t sure anymore, but he did know that every sweet second of silence needed to be savoured. He could feel the end coming — as inevitable as the pounce of a predator. His prey was drawing near again, only this time, he was empty; purged of all but the final echoes in this quiet place. Now he was hungry, almost starving to put an end to it.

Sanchez crept up on him, as if her dainty feet were considerate of making no echoes, while her miming shoes had been delayed by her detour to the mainland — and by her need to skim back through his testimonies before she could discover how to find him in the most quiet place on the island; entombed between secret walls in the beach-rock dungeon.

He had listened to the echoes of those near-silent footsteps for so long, he knew exactly when to rise in time for her flashlight to find him. Guarding his eyes in time too, he was pleased to see that she’d brought Fredarick’s Braille testimonies. Yet she looked at him so sadly for a long moment, as if by writing it, he was also guilty of plotting it, when the best he’d ever been able to manage was a few nudges to the outcome — and never without repercussions.

He reached into his back pocket to reassure himself he still had the box of matches that he’d lifted from Neville’s cardigan on the day of that incident with Mira, when Neville had tried to peel Fredarick away from her just as he’d finished the last stitches. Neville had blamed Mira for picking his pocket, yet all the while it had been him — shape-shifting his leopard’s spots so swiftly that no one had noticed. He’d needed them to light the flames for the Sage and his blasphemous Braille manuscript, but having stolen the Epilogue, he could be sure that the coming moments would mark the end of it all.

His spike-haired angel studied him a little longer before her lips began to quiver. However, she was considerate in speaking only with her hands in his sacred place:
So this is how you get into my office?

He nodded, but as he shielded himself from the stark halo of her searching light, he knew that she wouldn’t be able to recognise him yet as the most zealous facet of himself. Nor did he want her to, so he kept his mouth shut, and turned to hug the wall. His fingers found the secret cellar door and he knocked upon it, knowing that as he stepped back into the shadows of his mind, the sage would be the one who opened up the cellar and bid her welcome.

Motion detectors in the cellar switched on a long row of fluorescent lights as they entered. Upstairs in her office, a small red light would be blinking. Above them, a surveillance camera also followed their progress — all for safety, Sanchez had decided. As an unsupervised area of Serenity, if Fredarick needed urgent medical attention down here, there’d be no other way of knowing.

She caught his arm as they approached the first row of shelves, now empty after her staff had cleaned up for him, and turned him enough to ensure she had his attention.

I’m sorry about the workmen,
she signed.
And all the noise they made. And I’m sorry they took your typewriter when they cleaned away everything else, but I’ll replace it with a better one, I promise!

He shrugged and looked at her, as if waiting.

You must still be guarding a secret,
she signed,
or else why are you still down here?

He nodded. ‘You have questions first.’ Reaching for her hand, he stopped short at the last moment as if touching her might somehow make her evaporate likethe whispers of her voice.
You are welcome to speak in here,
he signed shyly.
Even when you’re angry at me.

Angry?
she thought, wondering why she’d ever be angry at him.
I thought this place was sacred to you,
she signed.
Last time —

Last time the racket of workmen competed against you, and your words are too precious to waste.
‘Please speak to me,’ he said. ‘I’ll die happy if your voice is the last echo I ever hear.’

Touched by his compliment, she clasped his hand, her head buzzing so loudly with questions she wondered if he could hear it. ‘I fear my echoes will only sound like an interrogation.’

He smiled and sat upon an empty wine barrel, signalling that he was ready.

‘How did you know I was smiling when I cracked the whip that Neville gave me?’

His grin widened and he winked. ‘You just told me. The echoes travel back to me. I pick them up all over Serenity and piece them together like a puzzle.’

‘But you’ve also described things that happened on the mainland; not just dialogue, but thoughts and actions! Surely you can’t hear anything that far away?’

‘Mercifully, no. Most of those echoes come from a conversation that will take place soon enough in your office with Ben and Mira. Even now, those whispers are growing ever softer.’

‘And the rest?’

‘Like Ben and his guesses at the names of the people who framed him, my subconscious has been generous in filling in blanks.’

‘Oh?’ She grinned. ‘Which subconscious?’

He smiled in reply. ‘We should discuss my alter-egos in another place. For now it hardly matters if I was completely accurate. You needed only enough to believe the message at the core of our story.’

She gaped at him, frustrated at herself for still suffering a residual difficulty in believing it. ‘You really can hear the future?’

‘You
can hear through time too, Matron. Every book in every library turns readers into time travellers. How else could they transcend years or centuries to meld with the minds of those authors or biographical characters?’

‘That’s not what I meant and you know it.’

‘But it’s why I smiled at the suggestion of writing a play. No staff had heeded the warnings of an old man before that. They’d accused Freddie of ranting; with a play, we could meld your thoughts with ours directly. That’s why Freddie has stayed his hand from sabotaging my use of Braille — that and his one condition, but don’t ask me. I’m forbidden to speak of it yet.’ He rubbed his temple as if inside, a battle was waging.

‘I still don’t understand why you waited so long to show me, why you needed to write so much, and why you gave it to me too late to prevent Ben from getting hurt. You must have known I wouldn’t get time to read it until much later that evening?’

‘The brink is always difficult to judge for timing. Tipping them to safety too soon would have left my brother free to hurt more innocent people. He would have followed Mira here. The great wall is not a boundary he respects! And who would have been first to stand up to him?’ A tear formed in his eye and then fell. ‘He would have killed you.’

Sanchez brought her hand to her mouth, unable to speak.

‘Forgive me?’ he asked. ‘Your echoes are too precious to stand by and let him end them.’

‘But you risked Ben for me — no, you sacrificed him! Not to mention the danger and near miss for Mira!’

He hung his head and buried his face in his hands. ‘You cannot deal more guilt than I already feel.’

‘Their echoes are precious too!’ she argued. She did pity him deeply, but he wasn’t the only one now who felt guilty. Her choices in the matter had all been short-circuited. So had Ben’s and Mira’s. ‘If we’d only known sooner! Forewarned is forearmed, Fredarick. Those problems would have been hell, but they were ours to conquer!’

‘You can’t have it both ways,’ he cried. ‘You must give back the pages.’ From his pocket, he withdrew a box of matches.

‘No, these are important! I have to have them translated and filed for future study.’

He shook his head violently. ‘Too dangerous!’

‘Oh, Fredarick! This is a gift that makes you very special. Can’t you see? You should be proud of it and learn to embrace it — just as Mira is.’

‘I don’t need to see. I can hear all the repercussions. And I know what will happen if we ever leave — if anyone on the mainland ever discovers our curses.’

‘Curses? No.’ Sanchez frowned, thinking of all the things that might have been better if she had access to his gift, not only for the sake of Ben and Mira, but also for Carlo, Freddie’s brother and the soldier he’d murdered.

‘Welcome to my world of self-loathing,’ Fredarick said, clapping his ears like drums. ‘Having entered, it’s no longer safe for you. I must help you escape.’

‘Escape?’ she gasped. ‘No, no; I need to stay in close contact so I can help you be happier!’

He shook his head and signed his reply:
Noise spent on impossible dreams only adds to the racket.

‘But there’s still so much we could try! Don’t you want to visit your brother in jail; make things sweet with him finally?’

Again he shook his head.
That lemon has always been bitter. He chose his own actions. He wasn’t blackmailed. He fabricated those threats for an alibi — just as he used to side with neighbourhood bullies when we were children. He’s the reason I’m here, did you know? It was him who stripped me naked, him who stole the eggs and him who knocked me unconscious in the neighbour’s coop to take the blame for him.