Leopard Dreaming (4 page)

What’s to process? Sound waves and light waves aren’t so different, Lieutenant. The crystalline abnormalities in my eyes are akin to his, in the basilar membranes inside his ears. Distortions are similar too. Mine are blurry. His are echoes. Mine hurt. His drive him crazy.

But in your case, working with you for a while and noticing little things gave me time to warm up to the idea.
Since then, he’d been forced to reassess virtually everything he’d ever known about time, fate and perceptions of reality, but some surprises were simply too big to have thrown at him, even if it was only the same coin with a flip side. Light waves, sound waves.

So you understand what we’re up against?

Yeah,
he said, but shook his head in disbelief even though she couldn’t see him.
I could nuke every listening device from here to Judgment Day, and he’s still heard every word we’ll ever say.

Not everywhere. Just in the places he’s been able to beat us to. I don’t know if listening devices can record the sound waves he needs to hear the future, but it only takes one moment in time where we say something to attract his attention, and then he can track us practically anywhere.

Good thing he’s locked up, then.

Yeah, is he? Kitching had his brother committed decades ago because he thought he was crazy from hearing voices, even though he’s supposed to be deaf. Now he knows I can see things, even though I’m supposed to be blind. So it’s easy maths. If I were Kitching, Matron Maddy wouldn’t be my only subtraction from the equation at Serenity.

I thought those brothers hated each other? Freddie wanted no part of anything to do with the military for the short time I saw him. Far worse than you. Nearly screamed the halls down complaining we’d all be doomed if we did.

And yet all seven of his personalities love Matron Maddy more than life itself. If Kitching took her he won’t need me. Why bother with the past when he could own the future?

If that’s his plan, then why warn you? Why leave a toy behind and not a list of his demands?

To scare me. Throw me off my game, and mission accomplished. I can’t beat him, Lieutenant! Kitching maybe, but never Freddie. It only takes one slip. One person gossiping to another, retelling the tale, or even part of it a decade or more from now. And when I think of everything we’ve said already …
She shivered, which started a chain reaction of trembling that spread all over, and as she turned away to hug herself, he realised how much she’d been fighting to hold herself together.

He pressed her closer to the wall, wanting to hear his name on her lips instead of his rank. Needing to hold her and tell her everything would be okay. ‘Give up,’ he had to say instead, and lowered his rough hands as gently as he could manage onto the smooth flesh of her shoulders.
We’ll beat him
, he promised, typing directly onto her soft skin.
We’ll beat them both.
‘Time to go our separate ways.’

Mira bristled and rounded on him, shaking a finger that looked genuinely angry. ‘You’ll leave when you’re dismissed, soldier! You don’t get to keep the truck until after you get the job done, and Kitching went that way, by the way.’

She pointed out towards the estuary, and headed out first, with a signal to follow her.

Maddy woke in utter darkness again with the oxygen mask strapped tightly around her face. Without it, she couldn’t breathe inside the gutted torpedo; an SS-N-16 Stallion anti-ship missile with the 200 kiloton charge removed and replaced by her as the payload. Motionless now, but she’d overheard crew placing bets on a top speed between Mach 1 and 3.

Heat made her sweat and panic again. Ropes bound her legs and arms, preventing her from thrashing around and wasting her pocket of precious air.

A week without her anti-inflammatories meant she’d begun to pay, yet again, for the single glass of dirty water her mother had swallowed while backpacking through South America thirty-five years ago, while pregnant with her. One glass. Two lives destroyed. Born with polio into a world where the disease was supposed to have been wiped out through vaccinations, Maddy had beaten the disease itself but not the lingering effects, the most painful of which was arthritis. So her small body ached, even on the best days.

She felt the weight of a small air tank on her chest; about twice the size of a coffee thermos, and froze in fear of it rolling off her. She felt safer when they laid it beside her. Less likely to dislodge the two lifelines, which not only supplied her mask with sweet oxygen, but also functioned to scrub most of the carbon dioxide from her expended breath and maximise her time in purgatory.

Judging by her thrumming headache, the metallic taste on her tongue and the sick feeling in her stomach, they’d left her well overdue for replacement.

Their only kindness had been a small torchlight, but each time they locked her down, in exchange for the light and air, she had to thank them. A package deal. She couldn’t take one without the other. Her life depended on conceding compliance in that one small thing. It was the thin end of a wedge into her psyche,
but knowing it didn’t help as much as she’d hoped any more. She crossed her fingers every time they made it impossible to do anything other than thank them for torturing her. A childish rebellion, and yet it seemed to be the only one they hadn’t noticed so far. For the same reason, she couldn’t ask them for anti-inflammatories or painkillers: they’d make her beg.

To spare the batteries, she kept the torch off when she tried to sleep, but she never let go of it. Infant polio had left her with an underdeveloped arm and leg, but as a survivor, her muscles had decades of training at obeying her will through sheer determination, even while the ropes prevented her from feeling most of her hands and feet. Yet as skills went, it paled in comparison to Mira’s ability to coordinate arms and legs that were always invisible to her.

Still keeping the torch off, Maddy used the butt of it to scratch a little more of the rubber insulation away from the shell. Straining her smaller arm against the ropes and concentrating on balancing the tank between her breasts, she finally heard the reward of a dull chink of plastic against metal.

Frantically, she tapped out an SOS in Morse code, praying her captors really did mean to keep her alive down here in the bowels of their submarine. Dead, she’d be useless to them for coercing Mira into cooperating with the next stage of their plan, so perhaps they’d been distracted by the need to escape and evade all the naval vessels that were out hunting them.

No!
She clamped her eyes shut and banged her head up and down twice to knock some sense back into herself. She shouldn’t be making excuses for them. As a trained psychologist she knew all the tactics for inducing Stockholm Syndrome in a hostage, and they’d wasted no time in ticking all the boxes. They’d denied her food, water, light, air and all sense of time passing, and they’d whipped the bare soles of her feet, palms of
her hands and buttocks with a bamboo cane to make every moment of rest miserable, each time stretching her past her limits, so when they finally broke her she’d be desperate enough to do anything they wanted, so long as they gave her some moments of peace, finally.

She knew the theories and strategies in defying and fighting their tactics too. Singing songs, pacing her power naps, and replaying regular chores in her mind to help keep track of time and stay focused on all the things she needed to do in order to resume a normal life. Escape being top of her list. And yet she’d replayed almost a full week in her mind already and now her body and brain were beginning to rebel against each other.

Distantly, she heard children laughing. A baby cry. Her life playing backwards, perhaps, in fractured memories, and seconds stretching to minutes, hours and a lifetime.

Her lungs burned for air. Primal needs drove her hands to tap faster, pleading and begging to be let out again, even as logic and training screamed for her to slow down and have faith that they needed her alive.

A man’s laugh outside chilled her instantly.

Colonel Kitching.

Sounds of a scuffle broke out somewhere nearby and she heard Freddie sobbing.

‘Last chance to play nice again today,’ Kitching said. ‘You will keep me informed of where Mira Chambers will be, truthfully. What she’ll do and what she’ll say. Or this time I’ll leave your precious matron to die in there.’

Freddie wailed as if they’d stung him with electricity. ‘Let her out!’ he screamed and pleaded repeatedly.

Maddy held her breath, fearing the consequences, but her mind and body coalesced into a unified ball of fury. She’d lived her whole life trying to help others less fortunate and now she was being used to hurt two
people she’d come to think of as family, even if Mira and Freddie still hated and feared each other.

‘Set her free and I’ll agree to anything!’

‘Freddie, no!’ she cried. And using the last of her air, she threw the torch out of reach, defying them and preferring them to kill her. Accepting death as inevitable, all fear for her own safety evaporated in the foul air. Unexpectedly, her fists curled, tightening around her punished skin, and she tensed, ready to fight them more fiercely than ever.

‘Open it,’ Kitching chuckled. ‘Make sure her mood has improved. Then bring her to me.’

Mira jogged around the second bend in the alley with Lockman close on her heels.

Ahead through the fog emerged a placid view of the estuary, and she saw seven piers splayed like fingers around the mouth of the creek. All stretched out towards the darker waters of Moreton Bay.

Yesterday’s masts held up the sky, ghostly in the stirring mist with their booms and armatures muscled by sails. Smaller vessels bobbed at their moorings further out. All obscenely serene, considering the evil that lurked regularly beneath them.

Beyond them all on the warming horizon, the widening rays of yester-morning crept up to bleed fresh pain into the day.

‘Wait,’ Lockman called, but she ignored him.

He grabbed her by the arm before she could escape too far from the filthy alley.

She wrenched free, reflex mostly, but he also let her go and she knew it. Asylum staff had only been half his strength and still managed to pin her more securely. So, biting her tongue, she refrained from snapping at him.

‘At least keep to the shadows,’ he warned her. ‘Give me a chance to check if it’s still safe out here.’

‘Don’t touch me without warning me first.’ She crossed her arms, angry at herself for not drawing that line with him sooner — his fault too, she decided, but only because it seemed too hard to stay mad at him. He never touched her enough to antagonise her ordinarily — a backwards logic that only succeeded in making her feel childish.

‘Stay here,’ he said, backing off from her anyway.

She didn’t need to see him to know how far he’d moved. She felt the air turn cool between them and knew she’d over-reacted. Her old foe, impatience, nipped up at her from the shadows. She needed to make up for lost time in finding Maddy, but to achieve it, she also needed to keep him onside with her — while making it sound like she couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. Made her head hurt more just thinking about it.

‘If you’d scouted the area properly in the first place!’

‘Hey, a lot can change in twenty minutes. How long do you think you were messing about near that old chalk line? That kid’s death had nothing to do with us.’

‘Messing?’ She bit her lip, wishing she had half his self-control, but so far she couldn’t pretend to be angry with him without actually getting angry at him, and that frustrated the hell out of her too.

She took a step for the nearest pier, but Lockman blocked her way again.

‘Mira,
please
.’ He ushered her backwards against the ghostly wall. ‘Must you be so obstinate?’

Dew made the crumbling stonework feel dirty and stick to her bare shoulders, and as he leaned nearer, she became intensely more aware of him. The delicious musk of his skin. The warmth of his hands, and that soft caress of his breath on her ear again.

‘Not all snipers are land-based.’

‘I know that!’

He clasped her shoulders with light fluttering fingers, using finger Braille again to get through to her.
If you didn’t like my plan, at least tell me yours. Five more steps that way and you’re exposed to the bay, and to anyone out there with a scope.

She splayed her fingers against his chest, as if pushing him away.
No more than you! Nobody would believe you’d ever leave me hanging like bait anyway. That was your General’s favourite trick, and I dare say the real reason you requested a discharge in the first place.
‘Ever heard of irreconcilable differences?’

‘Sounds vaguely familiar.’
Fine, you nailed me. I’d have stayed closer than your own shadow.

‘Then save your tactics for Kitching.’
I can hardly send you away and then need you five minutes later to drive a car or a boat.

Why not? It’s been SOP for my last three girlfriends.

What’s SOP?

Standard operating … never mind.
‘Just cut me a break, okay? Whatever our differences, we still want the same thing.’

‘You’re touching me again.’ She ducked under his arm, wishing her body didn’t react with its own wretched mind all the time. Made her blush all over whenever he drew nearer. He shouldn’t remind her so much of Ben, and yet he did. His gentle hands and quiet manner. Less pushy than Ben, and less demanding. Most of the time, she felt more at ease with Lockman. But that liquid lava tone he used whenever he called her name or spoke softly … that really had a way of sucking her breath away. Made her feel hot in a way she’d never felt before. Not even with Ben.

She clutched her chest where she kept his note of goodbye. Crumpled close to her heart, it served as a bitter reminder of what happened to people who grew too close to her. It seemed much safer for Lockman if she could be bitchy enough to drive him away for real, and sooner rather than later, or else that boy scout morality of his would be the death of him.