And in a world of darkness, of infinite loneliness, she was a lost little girl who had no choice.
Pippa swayed; she danced without moving, floated without floating, cried without tears... then laughed as she glanced at the scanner’s image and the representation of reality scattered across a pale plasma screen. The nurse moved the hand-held scanner across her abdomen, wriggling the machine across thick glistening jelly. Sonic images transferred from womb to screen before Pippa’s wide hopeful eyes. Her heart leapt. Joy swept her. Love filled her from a bottomless pit and tears invaded her eyes because there, there! She could see the foetus. She could make out the representation of the baby, could distinguish the child, her child, curled neatly within a wonderful protective life-giving sack, and an incredible uplifting surge of indescribable life filled her with a love, and violence for love she could never have believed possible. It was the most awesome feeling she had experienced, rushing like drugs through her veins: greater than love or hate, more intense than anything she had ever felt, and rendering all past life experiences as pale imitation. This moment, this instant diluted the past world in which Pippa had lived. It gave her intensity, energy, and a need to go on.
A single silver tear ran down her cheek. A beaming smile hijacked her face by force of arms.
This was her child, her baby, her little boy... an amalgamation of love, of joining, of everything her life had ever meant: the whole point of a human organism’s existence, a concentration of her totality.
And...
She glanced up into the midwife’s face, an innocent and almost subliminal movement, a mere arching of her neck a tilt of her head, and... a slab of stone slammed her face, iron pliers crushed her heart, a cold wind blew mourning through her soul, desecrating the grave of her memories and pissing on her joy.
A terrible darkness embraced her world and existence, and crushed it with a gauntleted fist of spiked steel, scattered with black rose petals, smeared in her blood.
Something was wrong.
Something was terribly, terribly wrong.
She stared at the midwife, face ashen. She suddenly understood, she understood perfectly, but a fist slammed the centre of her brain as she fought with the unexpected implications, the reality
.
“What’s wrong?” she managed to say through parched lips. Her eyes lifted, glanced up and met the strong, courageous gaze of the midwife, who took a deep breath through a haze of her own tears.
“I’m sorry, the baby stopped growing weeks ago.”
“I don’t understand.” But she quite obviously did
.
She just didn’t want to admit it. She needed it pointing out to her, the hard way, the painful way, the mocking way, in an infinite, endless torture, a perpetuation of piercing pain.
“The shadow you can see, it’s the sack. The sack has continued to grow, but the baby is far too small; there is no foetal heartbeat, Pippa. I’m very, very sorry.”
The world swayed. The room tipped and she was falling, falling into a dark grave, a stone tomb world of unexpected endless sorrow. She could not understand, it had been perfect, it had been right, it had been good
,
and now...
Now it was fucking bad
.
Pippa was allowed to clean up with dry paper towels, then led from the room into another anonymous suite where she had to wait to see the specialist. The waiting room outside the scan room was filled with expectant mothers, happy fathers: joyful parents. Her gaze swept across them like the after-effects of a nuclear winter, and she touched the Makarov in her belt. Her hatred welled in her breast with an unquenchable fire, and she suddenly urgently wanted, neededto kill and kill, and kill, and kill... and then she stumbled across the gaze of a middle-aged woman, holding the hand of a little girl. The girl’s eyes were wide and bright; she was staring up at Pippa from beneath a mane of dark curls. She smiled. There was love in the girl’s eyes, and in that smile, an unconditional love that burned Pippa’s hatred into a stump and cauterised it with drifting echoes of a long lost emptiness.
Pippa closed her eyes, felt the world crush her, felt Nature smash her to the earth to lie in broken glass pieces, shattered, pulped and fucked by the very same God-fist which had wantonly and without mercy or undue forethought Given.
The door opened. A woman entered; Pippa was unsure of her status, but she wanted to kill, to take life, to punish. God could, would and had punished her without justification, indiscriminately, so why the fuck couldn’t she? But even as her unreasonable anger smashed through her spinning mind, so she severed the brittle thought, snapped the thread of spun insanity.
“Mrs. Tasker will be with you shortly,” the woman said. There was pity in her eyes, and in her voice. Tears pooled her gaze, nestling like streams of un-spilled mercury.
Then, all Pippa felt was—nothing.
Emptiness: a vast, rolling bleakness spreading into desert...
Desolation.
Pippa swayed; she danced without moving, floated without floating, cried without tears... then screamed without pain... The whole universeswayed with her: the mint-green walls; the bed on which she perched, scuffed boots resting lightly against polished sterile tiles; the cheap reproduction artwork hanging limp against wires. She turned. A white china sink squatted against the wall, chrome taps glinting under strip-lighting. An old PC stuttered in the corner, incarcerated by the ball and chain of an ancient red-screen monitor.
Once again, she was alone.
Pippa swallowed. A bitter taste invaded her mouth.
The taste of...
Death.
She turned, stared at the sink and felt sick, terribly, terribly sick.
Once again, the door opened as the world swayed like a staggering drunk.
The Consultant entered.
If she says a wrong word I will kill her, thought Pippa bitterly. The Makarov dug in her back, a threatening friend, a dark comrade, a Sister in Death and Despair: Widow Maker, Soul Taker, Life Fucker. Pippa smiled and it was a fucking nasty smile.
In contrast, Mrs. Tasker smiled in kindness, her eyes understood. Her sympathy was real, not contrived and plastic, but genuine: a gorgeously scented rose blossom in a desolation of black cloying weeds. Her assistant gave Pippa a simple sterile leaflet, and she glanced at the square-stencilled lettering:
Understanding Miscarriage
. Pippa shivered; it was as if the black letters on the neat white sheet made it all real, made it official: your dead baby, stamped with a genuine one hundred percent guaranteed seal of approval; and scrawled with the omniscient authority signature of an evil and unforgiving God.
The following conversation was a dream—a hazy, half-realised dream—an unreality through which Pippa gyrated. Pippa spoke without breathing, understood without truly understanding, and made the final decision. She would have to take a tablet, which would force the foetus to detach and pass naturally from her body. Pippa did not want to go to theatre, to endure the slice of the knife
;
but there could still be a chance the tablet would not work and she would have to endure a D&C.
Eventually, after a billion years of torment, she left the hospital, stepped out into the cold miserable world, and stood dumbstruck on the pavement for long minutes, unable to focus on direction.
Pippa was crying, and she wiped her eyes on the back of her neat black leather gloves. The wind howled from the west, smashing across the hospital shuttle park, and Pippa stared into the middle distance and spat poison into the wind.
How cruel the world could be. How fucking cruel, how fucking uncompassionate, how fucking bleak.
She floated like a restless spirit across the dark concrete and climbed into her shuttle. Jets glowed, and she roared into the sky and headed for home.
It was not real. It could not be real. How could something so terrible be real? Pippa wanted to inflict hurt; once again, she wanted to maim and kill and punish. But there was nobody to punish. There was nobody to blame. For once in her life, there was no external enemy. Frustration, instead, was her Mistress.
The baby had ceased to grow; one pregnancy in three suffered a miscarriage sang the stoic song of statistics. Didn’t make it any easier, though; didn’t sweeten this bitterest of bitter acid pills.
As she lay in the darkness, remembering the joy of pregnancy—the wonder at carrying another life within her—just to have it cruelly snuffed from existence—tears rolled down her cheeks and soaked like crystal honey into her pillows.
And she knew, deep down, she knew she would never be the same again.
Invasion of body, and spirit, and mind.
Pippa fought the intrusion, and looked up suddenly into glowing emerald eyes. There was a pair of shining, silver scissors in her hands. “Get the fuck out of here,” she snarled, lifting the scissors.
“What happened next?” soothed Emerald.
“You are not entitled to know!” screamed Pippa, swirling, dazed in the depths of mental slurry. She lifted the scissors to her eyes and saw her face reflected there.
She remembered the hospital; wanted to vomit.
“Let me back,” said Emerald.
“Get out!” she screamed. “Get the fuck out of my head.”
Pippa woke with a start, breaking contact with Emerald.
“Do not be afraid,” said Emerald.
Pippa glared at her. “Don’t ever go inside my head again. You hear me? Or I will fucking kill you.”
“Why are you so frightened? Is it the scissors? What do they represent? Is it something to do with your father?”
“None of your fuckingbusiness, bitch.”
Pippa grabbed a bottle and drank deeply, then poured water across her face. She rubbed at her eyes, then her temples, and sank deep into her seat. She scowled around at the other members of Combat K.
Franco, wide-eyed, stared at a fixed point between Keenan and Pippa. He said nothing. Pippa’s reaction had been... unexpected. He gazed at Keenan, a sideways glance, and Keenan knew what he was thinking; that glance meant “and you went to bed with that psychopathic woman?”
Pippa continued to breathe deeply, and her fury gradually abated. Her head swivelled, fixed on Keenan, and she gave a single nod. “OK, your turn, Keenan. Let’s see how you like being mind-fucked.”
“Was it that bad?”
“Bad memories,” she grunted, then grinned a savage grin. “I hope you enjoy the ride. You’ve got stuff locked away in there as well, bad stuff. The bad gigs that
I
know all about, anyway.”
Keenan glanced over at Emerald, at those elegant, tapered fingers, which only a few short hours ago had tried to smash his face to a pulp. He grinned.
How bad can it be?
“
Do it,” said Keenan.
Emerald stretched forward languorously and took his hands. He gazed into the perfection of her face; then he remembered the changed thing she had become. He shivered as a feeling of cold swept him, and then he was falling backwards, falling downwards into a well of memories, and he remembered all too clearly the Bad Old Days
.
Keenan sat on the hillside, his back to a sprawling gnarled oak, and looked down over the city of Burylesh-Ka. The city squatted, a smash of concrete and high-rise buildings filling the horizon like some crazed aerial photograph. Above the chaos, clouds of rusted iron hung in a sky the shade of lead. Raw tracers of dying fading sunlight tried valiantly to break through. Keenan watched their hazy fingers spotlighting areas of the city, but gradually the clouds bunched together into one huge centralised mass of foreboding. They pushed away the sunlight, pushed away the warmth and happiness and brightness.
Fitting, thought the young Keenan.
How fucking apt.
Keenan stood, groaned, and stretched his back. He had been sitting a long time and his bones ached with cold. His uniform—policeuniform—was crumpled and stained; it had been a long evening shift sifting the streets for killers, pimps, whores, skinners and shells. They had been successful, Keenan and Volt. They didn’t pull their punches; they used the old rough justice and took no shit. Still, it had got to Keenan, tonight: bitten him. Injected his veins like the shite skinners used; filled his arteries with toxic slurry; drained him of emotions and feeling, and warmth and love, and understanding.
So the clouds wanted to drown the city?
He laughed bitterly.
Fuck it. Let them, he thought. Let them all drown.
He took a few steps forward, emerging from under a looming ridgeline of trees. Below him lay Lakanek Prison, a massive spread of concrete, Worm Wire and Lazy Towers. Keenan watched it carefully, aware of their internal slack ways, under-staffing, rule by idiot bureaucracy. Maggots, he thought, just another poisoned wheel in the whole degraded machine.
Was it always like this? Always so bad?
No. He shook his head. Three years ago—Gods, only three years?—he had signed up, fresh-faced and twenty-two years old. The Helix War, decelerating from atrocity, seemed like distant news: an old man’s war fought by bitter old soldiers. Here, now, Keenan could make a difference. He would cleanse the streets of Burylesh-Ka, make them safe for good honest people, make them a haven free of filth and corruption. He laughed, mocked his innocence, his naivety. How had he been so stupid? So blind? So downright fucking green?