Diamond Eyes (32 page)

The delusion used to terrify her — so much so, that after everything else she’d been through it had been enough to drive her to beg Fredarick to cut out her eyes. Instead, he’d pitied her enough to stitch them closed, convinced that one day soon, she’d change her mind. And now here she was.

Playing with the glasses intrigued her. Each time she lowered the invisible glasses over her eyes, the claustrophobic blue potatoes disappeared.

Better still, and heaven of all heavens, she could feel almost everything she could see in her room. It reminded her of being at home, where she’d been able to see without glasses all the rooms and furniture built by her great-grandfather. Anything built, shifted or repaired differently since then had dissolved into invisibility, just as her own body had done during early puberty.

Even so, she could make no sense of it. Had her great-grandfather lived here at one stage too and woven a similar magic?

As she danced around the room again, she remembered the visions of horse riders and giant ghostly beasts that she’d seen through different-coloured glasses in Ben’s car.
Shades of yester-year.
The phrase echoed in her head, like an ache fading. Her mother had often hummed that phrase before she flew away —
died,
Mira reminded herself.

The ache in her belly swelled to consume her with grief — until her ghostly door burst open and the brown spectre of Neville hurried in. His shoes and the door remained silent as he manoeuvred around the table with a wheelchair holding a ghostly girl bound securely by her wrists and ankles.

Mira leaned closer to the girl, unable to see her down-turned face, but sensing the familiarity of someone who’d disappeared gradually between her ninth and twelfth birthdays. All grown-up now and sedated but — she soon noticed — only pretending to be completely out of it.

A ghostly female assistant brought in a trolley full of hot meals and laid one on the table, while Neville’s ghost untied one of the girl’s hands and wheeled her closer to the meal.

The assistant left and the wheelchair-bound girl sprang drunkenly into action, grabbing hold of her dinner plate and smashing it into Neville’s groin, collapsing him into a silent, screaming heap with food scattered all around him.

Mira laughed, but only briefly — her expression mirroring that of the ghost girl as they both realised what would happen next.

The girl swiftly untied her other hand and legs, but shrieked soundlessly as the man grabbed her ankle. She grappled for her fork and glass from the table and attacked him with both, then scrambled over him to the door, fumbling blindly for his electronic key along the way.

The door opened just as the girl reached the key slot and two more burly ghosts burst in to wrestle her roughly into submission on the ground. Crushed under the weight of their bodies, she remembered that their clothes had smelled strongly of lemon antiseptic. But she couldn’t smell it now. Then she saw the needle.

Mira stroked the girl’s ghostly arm while her handlers inspected the needle and bumped an air bubble out of the tip. Her hand passed through the girl’s skin and Mira winced, remembering her pain.

Was it only a week ago?
It seemed like an eternity, but she could remember just three days with Ben and two, maybe three, days in the middle without him. Oh, how slow and hopeless her pitiful existence had seemed before she met him!

‘You’ll sleep now,’ Mira whispered as the needle pierced the girl’s ethereal skin. ‘And when you wake up tomorrow, you’ll meet Ben.’

The girl struggled, defiant to the last ebb of her strength.

‘Shhhh,’ Mira crooned, and began to sing her mother’s favourite verses from the poet trees, just as she and her papa had done on many restless nights for her mama.

Grief burst up in a wellspring, tears welling to sting her eyes. She poked at them behind her sunglasses … too late. The sleeping girl blurred, then dissolved, as did the chest of drawers in the corner of her room. White pain stung her eyes, and she glimpsed a wall, like a lace threshold, and then saw through it to the rest of the ghostly furniture in her room, which became solid, each piece with their own mix of colours.

Real colours?

Mira wondered if she could see again through her tears and the magic of the mirrored sunglasses. Or was it wishful thinking for Monday?

She gasped in doubt and astonishment, enduring the pain, and during that brief moment of clarity she glimpsed her own body. She saw that her tracksuit had the words
Serenity Centre
printed into the cloth of the chest pocket so smoothly that she could never have detected it simply by touching it. Underneath it was a warning:
VIP: Visually Impaired Person. If found, please call police or Serenity Centre.
Underneath that, in larger print, were two phone numbers.

So escape had never been a possibility for as long as she’d been wearing that logo, she realised, and she tore off the jacket, her tears thickening and blurring her sight even further.

White pain stung her eyes, piercing deeply into her brain, and she saw through another threshold. The clarity vanished, replaced by a pale golden light that grew so bright, it blinded her. She blinked, and when she opened her agonised eyes again, the table had disappeared, along with her body and everything else in the room. The walls swiftly followed and within seconds she was standing ankle deep in rich golden grass, with a tropical forest behind her and a broad sweeping view of the golden bay ahead. No sign of any buildings. On the water, she could see foamy lighter trails from strange hovering watercraft and golden ghosts on fat skis that required no boats to pull them.

In the distance, a storm brewed at sea, while the early effects of its mischievous breezes teased the palm fronds above and around her. The golden grass bowed reverently under its touch, but she couldn’t feel any of its playfulness upon her invisible skin.

Mira glanced behind her to the edge of the rainforest and saw the overgrown ruins of the Serenity Centre’s administration building, now clasped deeply in the gnarled fingers of thick vines and palm forest. Mesmerised, she dared not blink, wipe her tears or lift her sunglasses in case the vision disappeared.

She walked towards the ruins with her arms outstretched — and bumped heavily into the cold reality of her invisible cell wall.

A fraudulent intent,
however carefully concealed at the outset,
will generally, in the end, betray itself

Titus Livius

T
he cat in the alley behind the Drift Inn crouched over the ceramic bowls of milk and fish scraps that kitchen staff had put out for her and regarded the shadow-lurker with her golden-moon eyes.

He smelled of breath mints — the same as her favourite kitchen hand — and although smoke rose from his cigarette like the curl of an arrogant cat’s tail, not once did he raise the little fire stick to his lips. Instead, he held the smouldering tip low, like a signal fire, allowing the ash to fall into a small peaked mound beside his army boot.

Twice he spoke to her. Her eyes squinted in acknowledgement each time and he nodded politely in return; just two predators in the same alley, one with a full belly and the other still hunting.

Light spilled from the fire exit at the nearest end of the hotel and a head leaned out to survey the darkness between them. The cat smelled a rat: the two-legged variety. She dashed away from the newcomer, taking cover behind the large rubbish bin nearby. Motionless, the human predator remained in the shadows, waiting for his prey to come to him.

‘Sergeant Hawthorn?’ called the rat.

‘Here!’ The shadow-lurker raised his cigarette to reveal his location, then stubbed it out in the ash with the toe of his boot.

‘Your mission?’

‘Easy as breathing, sir. I was beginning to worry about you, though.’

The rat grew braver and crossed the moonlit alley to join the other man in the shadows. ‘I could say the same thing, Sergeant. I needed the merchandise this afternoon. Where were you?’

‘Likiba Isle. An unexpected detour, sir. Sorry I couldn’t warn you in advance.’ He reached into his trouser pocket and withdrew a small silver cylinder, about twice the size of a bell for a cat’s collar. ‘Schematics, interrogation notes, output data — you name it, you got it. I even copied the transcripts of all the test cases — except for the last-minute case this afternoon, of course.’

The silver toy flipped into the air and the rat caught it one-handed, his other hand buried deep in the pocket of his dinner jacket.

‘What “last-minute case"? I thought the docs finished the final testing phase a few days ago?’

‘So did they, but an opportunity presented itself for one more and Dr Zhou indulged himself.’

‘Did he now?’

‘It’s of no consequence, sir, just a crazy blind girl.’

‘Any chance you were seen?’ asked the rat.

‘No, sir.’

‘What about Lockman?’

The hunter shook his head. ‘He’s pretty sharp for a kid, but he’s straight out of boot camp. If he suspects anything at all about my regular breaks, it’s that I’ve got a weak bladder. Nothing more.’

‘What about coming here? Does anyone know?’

The hunter shook his head again. ‘You didn’t recruit me for my good looks and charm, sir.’

‘Don’t be a smart ass, Hawthorn. I get enough of that crap from Mitch Van Danik.’

‘Sorry, sir. I only meant that I appreciate the risk you’re taking in assigning such an important mission to me, and I’m not about to let you down now that I’m sorting my life out again.’

‘Well, that’s good to know,’ the rat replied. ‘But how long until your absence is noticed?’

‘Five minutes. I’m on a break. There is one thing I need to ask you.’

‘Oh?’

The hunter drew his sidearm as swiftly as a panther baring its claws. ‘Why did you assign an old has-been like me to this mission, and then ask me to steal something that you’re already supervising? The docs are going to hand over everything to you, just as soon as they’re finished, anyway … Unless you plan on framing me for selling military secrets on your behalf?’

In reply, the rat tilted his hand inside his pocket and a silenced pellet dissected the hunter’s neck. He fell gasping, unable to scream as his life drained swiftly onto the dirty bitumen.

‘That information is classified,’ said the rat.

He removed the unfired weapon along with the watch and fake ID wallet from the body, then scurried swiftly back to the fire exit door. Along the way, he withdrew a sealed plastic bag from his pocket that already contained the murder weapon, a small amount of black powder and the empty bullet casing. Careful not to let the powder or the casing fall through the blast hole, he stretched his gloved hand into the gap behind the rubbish bin and stashed the bag there. The cat, which was hiding there, spat at him and scratched his wrist just above the glove, leaving three parallel blood trails.

*     *     *

Ben made it home to the beachhouse a little after 6:10 pm, annoyed with himself and the thoughts that now consumed him about Mira.

She had her first decent chance to see again, or at least to remove the crystalline growths that tormented her daily with pain, but the main question that plagued him was how it would affect him when she didn’t need him anymore. Would she still want to see him? Or even talk to him once she could truly see him for who he was?

As a toughened ex-con, he couldn’t help but mask most of his body language, yet she would read him like a book. And since any form of deception was no better than a lie as far as Mira was concerned, the more she could see about him, the less she was likely to trust him — especially if she ever glimpsed any of the hand-signal conversations he’d had with other staff right in front of her. To Mira, that would be worse than talking about her behind her back, since he hadn’t just taken advantage of her blindness. He’d blatantly abused her trust, manipulated her escape to the bus shelter and lied about the extent of his wounds outside the gate. He wouldn’t blame her if she never wanted to hear, see or smell him again. He kicked the base of his surfboard-shaped letterbox, hurting his big toe through his shoe. Muttering a curse, he let himself in through the front door, his frustration escalating at the sound of hurried shuffling upstairs, as if his mother was attempting to hide something — or someone — again.

‘Hi, Ma, I’m home,’ he called, trying to hide his feelings. ‘Are you cleaning again? Or still?’

‘The house won’t clean itself, Ben-Ben.’ She scurried out to the railing at the top of the stairs, wearing her nurse’s uniform, but with the top three buttons undone.

The floor creaked in the bedroom behind her.

‘Is someone else up there?’

She laughed awkwardly, raking her long fingers through her hair. ‘Do you need to come up to your room just yet?’

‘For a shower, yes.’ He headed for the bottom step.