She raises her hand, slowly, as if she’s in a class and not sure whether she really knows the answer or not. Waves to him.
‘I want to talk to her,’ he says to the uncle.
‘I’m afraid you can’t, Carl.’
‘I want to.’
The uncle straightens up off the fence, frowning. The chainlink rebounds with another metallic shiver. ‘You already know not to talk like that. Your wishes are very small things in this world, Carl. You are valuable because of what you can do, not because of what you want.’
‘Where are you taking her?’
‘She’s going away.’ The uncle stands over him. ‘They all are. She’s done her job now, so she’s going home.’
It’s what he already knew, somehow, but still the words are like the slap of the wind in his face, buffeting, robbing him of breath. He feels the strength in his legs drain out, his stance shift fractionally on the worn concrete beneath his feet. He wants to fall down, or at least sit down somewhere, but knows better than to show it. He stares out across the huddled structures of the Osprey Eighteen settlement, the cottages in tidy rows, the school house and refectory, lights just starting to come on here and there as the afternoon tips towards evening. The bleak undulations of coastal moorland under a darkening pewter sky, the distant rise of mountains worn smooth and low with age. The cold Atlantic behind it all to the north.
‘This is her home,’ he tries to convince himself.
‘Not any more.’
Carl looks suddenly up into the man’s face. At eleven, he’s already tall for his age, the uncle barely tops him by a half a head.
‘If you take her, I’m going to kill you,’ he says, this time with conviction as deep as all his sudden knowledge about Marisol.
The uncle punches him flat.
It’s a short, swift blow, into the face – later he’ll find it’s split the skin across his cheekbone – and the surprise alone puts him on the ground. But when he bounces to his feet, the way he’s been taught, comes back with his rage fully unleashed, the uncle blocks him and hits him again, right fist deep in under the base of his ribs so he can’t breathe. He staggers back and the uncle follows, chops left-handed into the side of his neck with a callused palm edge and puts him down a second time.
He hits the ground, whooping for air he can’t find. He’s fallen facing away from the helicopter apron and Marisol. His body hinges convulsively on the asphalt, trying to turn over, trying to breathe. But the uncle knows his pressure points and has found them with effortless accuracy. Carl can barely twitch, let alone move. Behind him, he thinks Marisol must be rushing towards him, but there’s the razorwire, the chainlink, the other aunts and uncles…
The uncle crouches down in his field of vision and scrutinises the damage he’s done. He seems satisfied.
‘You don’t talk to any of us like that, ever again,’ he says calmly. ‘First of all because everything you have ever had, including the woman you think is your mother, was provided by us. You just remember that, Carl, and you show a little gratitude, a little respect. Everything you are, everything you’ve become and everything you will become, you owe to us. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that if you ever do speak to one of us like that again, I personally will see to it that you get a punishment beating that’ll make what we had to do to Rod Gordon look like a game of knuckles. Do you understand that?’
Carl just glares back at him through brimming eyes. The uncle sees it, sighs and gets back to his feet.
‘In time,’ he says from what seems like a great height, ‘you will understand. ’
And in the distance, the waxing, hurrying chunter of the helicopter transport, coming in across the autumn sky like a harvester scything down summer’s crop.
He drifted awake in a bed he didn’t know, among sheets that emanated the scent of a woman. A faint grin touched his mouth, something to offset the bitter aftertaste of the Osprey memories.
‘Bad dream?’ Rovayo asked him, from across the room.
She sat a couple of metres off in a deep sofa under the window, curled up and naked apart from a pair of white briefs, reading from a projected display headset. Streetlight from outside lifting a soft sheen from the ebony curves of her body, the line of one raised thigh, the dome of a knee. Recollection slammed into him like a truck – the same body twined around him as he knelt upright on the bed and held her buttocks in his hands like fruit and she lifted herself up and down on his erection and made, again and again, a long, deep noise in her throat, like someone tasting food cooked to perfection.
He sat up. Blinked and stared at the darkness outside the window. Sense of dislocation – it felt wrong.
‘How long was I out?’
‘Not long. An hour, maybe.’ She tipped off the headset, laid it aside on the back of the sofa, still powered up. Tiny panels of blue light glowed in the eye frames, like the sober gaze of a robot chaperone. She shook back her hair and grinned at him. ‘I figured you earned the downtime.’
‘Fucking jet-lag.’ He remembered vaguely, the last thing, long after her hands and mouth could no longer get him to rise to the occasion, lying with his head pillowed on her thigh, breathing in the odour of her cunt as if it were the sea. ‘My time sense is shot to pieces. So, looked like I was having a bad dream, huh?’
‘Looked like you were wrestling Haystack Harrison for the California title, if you really want to know. You were thrashing about all over the place.’ She yawned, stretched and stood up. ‘Would have woken you up myself, but they say it’s better to let something like that play out, let the trigger images discharge fully or something. You don’t remember what you were dreaming?’
He shook his head and lied. ‘Not this time.’
‘Well then maybe you were dreaming about me.’ She put her hands on her hips. Another grin. ‘Going a fifth round, you know.’
He matched the grin. ‘Don’t know, I think I’m pretty fully beaten into submission right now.’
‘Yeah, I guess you are,’ she said reflectively. ‘You certainly seemed like a guy knew what he wanted.’
He couldn’t argue with that – self-ejected from the screening room, tight with anger at Ertekin, he’d stood in the centre of the operations space and when he spotted Rovayo propped on the edge of her desk and watching him, he drifted towards her like a needle tugging north.
‘Problems?’ she asked neutrally.
‘You could say that.’
She nodded. Leaned back across her desk space to the data-system and punched in a quit code. Looked back at him, dark eyes querying.
‘Want to get a drink?’
‘That’s exactly what I want,’ he said grimly.
They left, rode an elevator stack up through the levels of the Alcatraz station until they could see sky and water through the windows. It felt like pressure easing. On the upper balconies, Rovayo led him to a franchise outfit called Lima Alpha that had chairs and tables with views across the bay. She got heavily loaded Pisco sours for them both, handed him his and sank into the chair opposite with a fixed, speculative gaze. He sipped the cocktail, had to admit it was pretty good. His anger started to ebb. They talked about nothing much, drank, soaked in the late afternoon sunlight. Slipped at some point from Amanglic into Spanish. Their postures eased, sank lower in their chairs. Neither of them made an obvious move.