Diamond Eyes (6 page)

‘Only a quarter of people can smell them.’

‘Do you mean only blind people, or only a quarter of blind people?’

‘Did I say blind people? No. I said
people,
as in a quarter of all people. It has to do with genetics, not how well noses can compensate for vision loss. I’m not as stupid as you think.’

‘I never suggested you were stupid. A little touchy maybe. How did you know the flowers were brown, though?’

‘Don’t ask stupid questions.’ She tapped her nose. ‘I wasn’t always blind.’

‘Argh!’ He braked the wheelchair to a halt in a place where the sound of a tin roof intercepted the light rain. ‘I almost forgot.’

Mira heard pages flipping, then felt him fossicking through a pocket at the rear of the wheelchair.

‘Damn, I knew it.’

She chewed on her lip, realising that he must be onto her escape plan, as fledgling as it was.

‘I forgot to collect an extract from my staff file this morning,’ he said. ‘We’ll need it for my half of our session with the VIPs. Unfortunately, you’re categorised as a red-tag client, which means I can’t take you into the admin building unless. well, unless you’re sufficiently sedated or restrained.’

She sighed, knowing his only other option was to take her back to her cell first.

‘Sorry, Mira. It’s a safety precaution for you too. Scissors and other sharp desk items can be dangerous if you make a grab for them. Even flower vases in the hall. Unless...?’

‘I know; unless you lock me back in my cell.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep referring to your room like that. It’s painted such bright colours now. And yes, I know that’s no use to you, and no, that’s not what I meant anyway. Actually, I was hoping you wouldn’t lodge a complaint against me if I left you out here alone.’

‘Out here?
Is that a trick?’

‘Not completely alone. There’s a guard at the big gate to your right.’

‘You can’t leave me out here. It’s not allowed; stop teasing!’

‘I’m not teasing. Look, you’ll be fine. The file I need should only be two rooms down the hall on the ground floor. I’ll be five minutes tops. Okay?’

He manoeuvred her wheelchair again until herknees bumped into a low woody shrub. The familiar scent of lemons shook loose from the flowers to greet her.

‘There are no thorns in these so you can safely pick a whole bunch... if you’d like?’

Stunned, she couldn’t think of anything to say. Surely he had to recognise this as the same plant that grew outside the main gate? If he’d parked her under the awning that guarded the front steps to the main building, as she suspected he had, then it should have been even more obvious, since the same hedge led all the way from captivity to freedom; or it had on the day she’d arrived.

‘Are you okay with this?’ he asked.

She nodded, still dumbfounded.

‘Have fun then.’ He patted her shoulder, making her jump.

She heard his shoes jog away: up three hollow timber steps, across a squeaky floor, soon followed by the creak of a heavy door hinge.

It’s a trick,
she thought.
It has to be!

Didn’t matter. She explored the plant with her hand to double-check it was part of a hedge and not just a single bush, then swivelled the chair until she was parallel to the hedge, facing away from the steps.

He must be watching me from a window!

If he was, she’d soon learn for sure. She gripped onto the wheels, extended one naked foot as a guide to help follow the flowers towards the gate, then accelerated with all of her strength.

Sergeant Hawthorn escorted Matron Sanchez to the hot seat in the centre of the U-shaped table arrangement. The client she’d brought with her was a bent old woman with twigs in her hair and mud in her teeth, but she seemed quite content to sit in the corner

until they needed her, humming to the music the docs had provided through an expensive headset.

Turning with the intention of joining Lockman in the hall, Hawthorn noticed a set of five data drives sitting in the top of Zhou’s open briefcase. They were labelled as
Stage Four Case Studies,
but he could only read the codes on the top three. All had been compiled overseas during the last leg of their trip and included surveys on
death row prisoners at San Quentin, trainee astronauts at Cape Kennedy
and, on behalf of MI5,
espionage suspects
at
Guantánamo Bay.

Perfect,
he thought as he slipped the
Guantánamo Bay
drive into his pocket. The Brits must have thought they were clever using an American prison to bypass their own laws for interrogating political prisoners. They’d soon regret that.

He headed out the door and nodded to Lockman, who now stood guard in the hall.

‘Stay alert,’ he warned. ‘I’ll check the halls and exits.’

S
till accelerating, Mira followed the curve of the hedge around the circular driveway towards the gate. Her wheels stayed on the path, clacking occasionally over cracks and grooves. A branch slapped her face; she swept it over her shoulder.

Horse-racing announcements from a TV or radio crackled almost constantly with static near the gate. Again someone turned the page of a large, clumsy-to-handle newspaper. Mira hoped it would keep their attention for a few minutes longer.

She decelerated enough to pass by almost silently, ducking her head in the hope of slipping below the level of the window that she remembered touching on her day of arrival. Then, accelerating downhill, she kept alongside the hedge that led to the tram stop.

Free!
she thought with the wind in her hair, a little rain too... and the distant sound of Ben, already calling her name.
Impossible!
The wind was still in her face, the wrong direction from him.

Her wheelchair sent a glass bottle skittering until it smashed — just as the slope levelled out, a little sooner than expected, and she panicked, gripping the wheel guides so firmly that friction burned her hands. Shestretched out with her bare feet and heels to help slow her pace. Another branch slapped her face, then another as she passed through the veil of another tree. Fearing the trunk, she crashed into something else. Something hard that she landed over — in. Something that scratched her hand and bumped her cheek.

She pushed herself off it — out of it — unable to recognise it immediately by its shape, but in pushing herself up, she also found the rough bark of a tree trunk on the other side and realised that the strange obstacle had probably saved her from a much harsher accident. Like a small roofless sports car, her saviour smelled of leather and fuel, but was cupped, with only one wheel on the nearest side and a higher padded section on the other. She couldn’t be sure. The whole contraption was covered by a loose plastic blanket.

She fumbled along it to find her toppled wheelchair, then shifted it to the other side of the contraption and tree, fearing that it could be seen from the top of the driveway.

In the distance, she heard construction noises and trucks — one struggling over rough ground and another accelerating. Neither was as close, nor intermingled with as much traffic, as she remembered from the day of her transfer. She’d been semi-sedated then, though, and manhandled by four hairy arms that made it difficult to keep her bearings. Was that three weeks ago? Or three months?

Her naked feet found the edge of the concrete path. With the lemony scent of brown boronias now behind her, she stepped cautiously off the path onto stony dirt. Her tender feet cringed.

She bumped into something hard — a thick grid against her chest and stomach. A gate maybe?

Exploring its shape urgently, she found it to be the bull bar and nose of a large vehicle. She sighed in relief, wishing she knew how to drive and wondering if she should try anyway.

Her second thought was even scarier: a vehicle so close to Serenity suggested visitors who wanted to be there.

‘Hello?’ she called nervously, and was glad when nobody answered.

Something touched her ear. She slapped it, imagining it to be Ben’s hand, but the thing rebounded and she realised it was just a leaf; a leaf attached to a branch that persisted in teasing her. She stepped away and found herself in a thicker cage of branches, soft like the veil she’d plunged through on the other side. She pushed through it, and bare dirt turned to soft grass under her feet.

A fine drizzle of rain kissed her face; Mother Nature kissing her wounds through the bandage.

Bandage!

‘Stupid! Stupid!’

Mira stumbled back through the veil into semi-hiding, knowing that she’d have to remove her blindfold now; the one thing that would make her stand out, even in a crowd from a distance. Her heart raced, but she clutched one hand to her chest for comfort, clenched her eyes shut and tore it off.

Panic seized her for an instant, but there was no white pain shooting from her eyes to the back of her skull this time. Slowly, she relaxed her eyelids a little and discovered she was still blind; still blissfully blind. No hint of light or darkness through her stitched eyelids, and no pain. Not even a dull ache.

She sighed again with relief.
It must only be strong light that hurts!
She prayed she was right, and tousled her fringe, hoping the wilder strands would help to mask her damaged eyelids as she stepped out from the shadows.

Still no pain. She stashed the blindfold inside the waistband of her tracksuit pants and headed closer to the kerb, stepping even more carefully now, feeling her way with her feet in the hope she could avoid more hazards without looking too obviously like a blind escapee from Serenity.

Five steps, she remembered foggily. That was all it had taken her to walk from the kerb to the tram-stop shelter upon arrival. They’d been unable to drive her uphill to the entrance because of repairs to the driveway. Five more steps from the tram stop to the tree with its concrete path that led up the hill. Smaller steps now that she didn’t have the constant badgering of hairy-armed case workers.

She guessed her five steps then translated to about ten foot lengths now, and she counted them silently to herself.

Her big toe stubbed the base of a thick timber pole. The light pole, she guessed. She hugged it to be sure of its shape and stifled another smile. The shelter had been to the left of the light pole, which, retracing her steps from the opposite direction, now put the shelter on her right. She groped for it and found it.

Inside, she found a long timber bench seat, where she tucked up her feet and waited.

The road sounded lonely, not at all the same as she remembered from that first day, when there’d been many cars parked at the bottom of the driveway.

A bird chirped a short distance away; a hint, perhaps, that she should sprout wings and fly away. Straining her ears for a promising sound, she wondered how long she’d need to wait until the next tram; or maybe she should swim to the mainland? But how could she be sure she wasn’t heading out to sea? She clutched her temples trying to think.

‘Need a ticket?’ Ben asked. His warm breath brushed her cheek.

Mira screamed, nearly falling off the seat. A dozen questions boiled in her head while another three tangled on her tongue. How had he crept up on her with his noisy shoes? How long had he been watching? And why could she smell blood?

Her hand flew to her eyes, but the stitches were fine.

‘Get away!’ She swatted at his voice, her hands striking empty air. ‘I’m not going back there!’

‘I didn’t say you had to. Mind if I sit beside you, though?’

‘No, and stop treating me as if I’m stupid. I know why you’re here!’

Ben laughed. ‘Stupid? You’ve got to be kidding. You just broke the land-speed record for escaping and scared me half to death in the process. Nice job conning me about the need for your blindfold, by the way.’

‘I wasn’t conning you! I don’t lie! I never lie!’

‘So why don’t you need it now?’

‘I do need it.
did
need it, and maybe I still do need it... sometimes in bright... Ooo!’ She punched her fist into her thigh in frustration. ‘You wouldn’t understand!’

‘Not unless you explain it. How could I?’ His voice drew closer and lower, as if he was leaning down to inspect her stitches.

‘You told me not to go on about hallucinations. Did you forget that?’

‘So sue me; I take it back.’

‘Lied more like it!’

‘Well, I don’t know about lying. I really would like to sit, though; may I?’

Mira cringed away from him, her head hugging into the corner of the shelter, wondering what kind of trickhe was trying to pull. Nowhere for her to run to now, though, if he wanted to tackle her. ‘As if I could stop you,’ she snapped.

He chuckled, a soft and kind-sounding laugh that still managed to mock her.

‘No means no in any language,’ he replied. ‘Especially when it comes from a woman. So if you don’t want me to sit, Mira, just say so.’

‘How did you find me so fast? Did you see me? Follow me? Or were you always watching?’

‘May I sit?’ he persisted with his ever-patient voice.

‘Sit, go on. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

‘I’ll take that as a no then.’

‘I didn’t say
no,
I said
sit.
Are you deaf, or twisting my words now?’

‘You’re the one who’s twisting your words. I heard you say sit, but your tone and body language are both telling me
no.
So if I sat beside you now, you could rightfully accuse me of imposing my will on you.’

‘Would not!.
Could
not,’ she corrected. She sat up and folded her arms. ‘Go on. Sit or don’t sit. See if I care.’

‘You’re still doing it. If you really wanted me to sit, you’d ask nicely and unfold your arms. That body language is still blocking me.’

‘Ugh! I don’t want you to sit. That’s not the same as not caring. You might as well be another passenger. except, you took off your shoes to sneak up on me, didn’t you?’

‘Obviously.’ He groaned and shifted his feet. ‘I think I’ll stay standing.’

‘Now my company isn’t good enough for you?’