I didn’t like this at all. Rolleston turned to Kring and nodded. Kring looked to Cronin. Cronin looked uncomfortable but finally nodded as well. Kring turned and left the room.
Moments later I could hear the sounds of a struggle. I watched Kring carry a gagged, bound, badly wounded but very angry Morag into the cell. He put her down and forced her to kneel. She stopped struggling when she saw me. Fear was written all over her face. I turned back to Rolleston.
‘Come on, not like this. Fucking brainwash me, torture me, but leave her out of this. We don’t deserve this. At the very least we’ve been worthy opponents.’ I was babbling nonsense — anything to delay the inevitable.
‘You are less than an insect to me. This is about understanding your place. This is about the fortune of your presence here before me. This is so you can understand something better. This is so you can admit your hypocrisy. You fight and struggle so hard to pull down what those above you have sought so hard to build, but you will betray it all for your own selfish wants and desires. Do you understand how pointless everything you have ever tried to do is?’ He turned to Kring. ‘Take her gag off.’
‘Go and fuck yourself, you cunts!’ Her anger made her Dundonian accent so broad it was almost impossible to understand. Fuck knows what the English and the Americans in the room thought she’d said.
‘I will have her gang-raped in front of your eyes. My understanding is that she is used to it.’
‘Don’t fucking listen to him, Jakob.’ I heard the resolve in her voice. I knew that she would be harder to break than me.
‘Please…’ I was begging now.
‘I will put you both into a sense machine and you will watch her being tortured for decades — do you understand me? You know me; you know I’ll do this.’
‘Fuck him! Jakob, listen to me. He can’t touch me. Don’t tell him anything.’
I couldn’t look at her. I was weeping. I knew Rolleston would do these things.
‘Not immediate enough for you?’ Rolleston asked. He drew his sidearm and held it at her head.
‘Fuck you!’ Morag screamed at him. I’m not sure I’d ever seen anyone so angry before. ‘Don’t you do it! Don’t you do it, Jakob!’
‘No… please… stop…’ I was sobbing as I begged. I wasn’t sure who I was begging to stop. Rolleston was starting to pull the trigger.
‘Jakob! Look at me! At least fucking look at me, you bastard!’ Morag screamed. I had to force my head round. She was scared now, but resigned, stronger than I could ever be as I tried to meet her fierce and earnest look. ‘Listen to me. It’s okay. If it was the other way around I would watch you die.’ I believed her. I broke.
If they were still alive, then I betrayed Mudge, Pagan, Cat, Merle, the whanau, all of the resistance and my entire fucking planet and everyone I’d ever known alive or dead. All the while Morag was crying, begging me to stop, not to say any more. It took me hours to sell out everything I knew. Rolleston listened to it all. I was numb with disgust at myself by the time I’d finished. I thought I was just a shell, that I couldn’t feel any more. Rolleston proved me wrong.
‘Do you understand now?’ he asked.
I nodded, neither understanding nor caring. It just seemed easier. Morag was a foetal ball on the stone floor, dry sobs racking her frame. Rolleston showed me that I could still feel. He shot Morag twice in the head.
I screamed. I screamed ‘No!’ over and over again. I screamed until my throat bled. I’m still screaming.
They left me in the room with her cooling corpse. It had been a large-calibre gun, though oddly quiet, suppressed. Her skull looked like a broken egg. I couldn’t take my eyes from it. I could see where technology had violated her flesh. I had the obscene urge to try and put her head back together.
I don’t think that leaving me in there with the corpse was planned sadism; I just think they had other things to do. They wanted to get on running their psychotic totalitarian regime. Eventually they came and took her away. They tidied up her remains like the sum result of her eighteen years of life was to make a mess.
When she was gone I stared at where she’d been. They’d reduced her to a stain. All I could do was stare. I hoped someone would come and kill me soon. Even brainwash me, make me someone, something else. At least I’d be on the winning side. You can’t fight something like this. There was no thought of revenge. There was nobody left to take revenge. There was just a shell staring at a stain on the ground wishing he could be switched off like the machine he was.
It’s amazing how long you can think of nothing when the alternative is watching a replay of your lover being double-tapped in the skull. Any attempt to try and think of her in better times just ended with the same two whispered shots. My lover reduced to a spray of matter on the wall. Except sometimes I managed to think about all the shitty things I’d said and done to her in the brief time we’d been together. Even then it still always ended with those two gunshots.
It felt like days. I had a clock and calendar on my IVD but I didn’t understand them any more. I occasionally drifted off into fitful sleep. I dreamt of fire and plains of black glass haunted by black-cloaked figures.
It took a while for me to realise there was someone else in the cell with me, she was so quiet and unobtrusive.
‘How did you know it was us?’ I asked. My voice was a rasping croak torn out of a damaged throat. ‘The traitors?’
I couldn’t even bring myself to feel anger towards whoever had betrayed us.
‘They didn’t say who you were, but I recognised you when I saw you. I know how you move.’
It was funny how the Grey Lady wasn’t frightening any more. She was just a force of nature, something you couldn’t fight against. She was one of the bad things that happened to you when you tried to fight the likes of Rolleston. She moved into view. Now she was looking at me. Her eyes must have been implants but they looked real. They were grey.
‘How’d you get her?’ I asked.
What fucking difference did it make? I closed my eyes, watched the replay again and opened them to find the Grey Lady looking at me, her head cocked to one side almost quizzically.
‘I deployed with two other enhanced members of the Black Squadrons, both ex-special forces. They engaged the others. One of them was killed. The other was badly wounded but captured Miss McGrath. It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re asking.’ For some reason that seemed important to her.
We said nothing for a while. In other circumstances it would have been awkward.
‘Why do you do it?’ I asked, more out of something to say to break the silence than any real interest in anything. ‘Work for him, I mean.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Are you fucking him?’
She said nothing but there was the slight flicker of something there. Like I’d hurt her. I was good at hurting women, but this was the Grey Lady.
‘Do you just want to become some biotech god?’ She shook her head. ‘Then why? Why do this to people?’
‘You do terrible things to people who you disagree with,’ she said.
‘It always feels like they started it.’
‘You turned on him,’ she said.
‘Because he was trying to get me to do something terrible.’
I couldn’t even find the strength to be angry.
‘Only in relative terms. It depends on your foresight.’
‘You people like your justifications, don’t you. Like to feel good about what you do.’ Again I delivered this with a completely flat voice. I didn’t really care.
‘I do it because I’m good at it.’
‘You don’t fancy doing it for someone… nicer?’ Even in my hollowed-out state it sounded weak.
‘You’re not standing where I’m standing.’