Leopard Dreaming (50 page)

You must,
he signed, hanging his head in shame.
Or shall I be forced to make you look back through time to the fateful day your grandmother begged me to leave her alone?

You don’t have to do that,
she argued.
Leave it to the silence of the past. I won’t look, I won’t tell. I promise.
It seemed too surreal to be discussing such things with him anyway — and to be signing for a deaf man in a real-time two-way conversation for a change.

He crouched and reached for her hand. ‘Don’t you wish to know how you came to be?’

Mira edged away along the wall, shaking her head.

‘Wrong answer. When you know how it began, you will beg to end it.’ He smiled a toothy grin, as if that somehow made him more believable.

‘I’ve seen how depraved the world can be,’ she assured him. ‘My parents loved each other, and that’s enough for me.’

‘Wrong answer. You are the daughter of my daughter, made right here, in this laboratory.’

Mira clamped her palms against her ears, curling her fists. ‘I don’t want to hear it!’

‘Not in a test tube, or a beaker.’

‘Shut up! Shut up!’
Leave me alone!
‘Oh, no.’ He froze in slow forming horror, clutching at his throat, gagging, and staring at her hands as if she’d stolen all sounds from the world by repeating those three simple words:
leave me alone
.

‘No, no, nooo!’ He clawed at his throat and his ears, seemingly to force the sounds from one to the other. ‘How did you do that?’ Recoiling from her, his eyes flooded with tears. ‘You’ve changed everything again!’

He collapsed in a heap, screaming and writhing in all the many ways of his seven personalities, each complaining of all the new futures bombarding him while so many others became impossible. He spun about in circles, clawing at his ears, as if she’d thrown acid all over him — and he lunged at the door, just as two guards tried to burst in.

‘Out, out!’ he wailed. ‘Time is short enough when I have so much to fix!’ He roared like a beast, blood streaming from his ears onto his blue teddy bear pyjamas.

Mira glanced at her hands, dumbfounded. She wondered if he’d misunderstood.

She’d only said three silent words.

Three words that she wished she’d shouted at him from the very beginning.

Leave me alone,
she signed again, and he screamed.

Lockman reached the end of the first long tunnel, where a T-intersection offered two more extensive corridors. One headed deeper west, the other east towards the shoreline. He could smell a briny musk down that way too, as if sea water had seeped in and dried once or twice over the years; and he could feel a silent hum in the air. Touching the wall, he could feel a constant vibration too, but without any sense of distance or direction.

Cycling through the modes on his Night Owls revealed no further clues about which way to go either, so he released one of the scorpions and stayed motionless beside it, waiting.

The arachnid’s ten eyes turned in his direction, then it scuttled to the western wall, as if recognising him as the most immediate threat. He stayed motionless a moment longer, watching it, until the eight-legged predator scuttled back towards him. It ran past his boot, putting as much distance between it and the western corridor as it could manage within the confines of the tunnel. Territorial. Passing several niches, it kept scuttling off into darkness, retracing his steps and heading back to the furthest end of the bunker, where he’d found it. One chance in three of taking that particular direction.

He set a second scorpion free at the mouth of the intersection, this time facing east. Like the first, it hesitated only briefly, then turned about and dashed past him.

Watching their pale green fluorescent bodies fade out of range of his ultraviolet field of vision, he noticed them lock pincers only once, fighting for first place as they raced off into the shadows.

He pocketed the makeshift tube with the other scorpions, drew his weapon and turned west to find out what they didn’t like down there.

Freddie spun to an abrupt halt, crouching and cornering Mira in the windowless infirmary.

No air conditioning in the underground facility, made him sweat more than usual.

Echoes from the future settled into a quieter pattern, made easier by the coming decades of silence — after soldiers would install a lock, permitting admittance to no other but Mira.

Her voice became the only one he could hear, many months and years in the future, coming back time and
again to apologise — for what, he couldn’t be sure — and to ask him the strangest of questions.

The same thing had happened before, in the forgotten dungeons below Serenity.

Who killed Maybelline,
would be the first she’d ask in this new place.
Gabby or Declan?
She’d return a few days later with the answer to feed back to him through time — and also chastise him for omitting a key detail that had sent her down the wrong trail. A phone would interrupt her with the ringtone of a Christmas carol. Too bizarre that she’d carry or answer a phone in the first place. Or that she’d come and go with impunity from such a high-security military base.

Smacking his head, he tried to shake out all the echoes of the other dozen crimes she would ask for help with over time — and wondered why, if he was to become a prisoner in this subterranean vault, his own voice and all other sounds would soon fall into ominous silence.

He eyed her warily, while she studied him suspiciously. Distorted mirror images of each other. He crouched with his arms crossed and hands balled up to his chin, listening to the future echoes, while she squatted with her back to the wall with curled fists, preparing to launch and defend herself.

Seconds stretched to minutes, while his expression only darkened.

Did the echoes really change?
she asked — as if she could ever be that innocent.

He nodded, almost imperceptibly, and raised a finger to his lips.
Your path forks here,
he explained with his hands,
and takes mine with it. If you leave this room, I believe you will become the death of me, but perhaps not Matron Maddy.

I’m not here to kill you,
she assured him.
Help me, and come with us.

He could hear her voice, also echoing softer from an alternative future. The difference between what
would
be
and what
might be
seemed too hard for him to judge without the benefit of music to help neutralise those other less likely wave frequencies.

You face a choice,
he explained, still in silence to help protect the delicate balance.
If you take your own life, your friends will be saved, but many others will die — many thousands in five nations. Or a new alternative; if you survive this day, you will lose two of those nearest to you, and save all those many thousands of strangers.

‘Who will I lose?’
She glared at him.
‘Tell me.’

I cannot say yet, aside from Maddy. Time is as straight as the world is flat. It’s only by moving forward we can see or dream of the whole shape of it.

I’ve got a better idea.
She spoke silently with her hands, surprising him yet again.
Why don’t we join forces against your brother? We can all walk out safely with Maddy. Together.

Gabby cut the engine to her jet ski and ran it ashore, deftly skidding over mud to the high tide mark. Darkin’s hands gripped tighter around her waist as they jolted over a thick tuft of dune grass, came to an abrupt halt, and leapt off together into a pad of fallen mangrove leaves.

‘Stay out of the mud,’ she warned him. ‘Rotten egg gas under the mulch will stink if any of the muck gets on your boots. They may smell us coming.’

Sei’s ski slid ashore right beside them. ‘Why didn’t we land over there, at the old pier?’ she asked. ‘It’s closer and cleaner.’

‘Do you want to control the distraction, or become it?’ Gabby kept her voice low as she secured their anchor lines to a palm tree. ‘That pier will be watched, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from hunting poachers, it’s never attack directly, and always leave one exit open for them.’

‘That’s two things,’ Darkin said.

‘Don’t interrupt. If we make them feel like trapped animals, they’ll fight as if death is an acceptable risk. And a feral foe is something we never need.’

‘Where’s your boat?’ asked Darkin. ‘Shouldn’t Lockman be here already?’

‘He went further north.’ Sei pointed up the coast, where the mud flat disappeared into a marshy peninsula of mangroves.

Mosquitoes buzzed around them, some bigger than others.

‘Did you hear that?’ Darkin spun about, scanning the starry sky out over the bay. ‘Sounded like a chopper.’

‘Keep your voice down.’ Sei grabbed his shoulder, pulling his attention back to her. ‘Sound travels further at night.’

‘Especially over water,’ Gabby added. ‘Follow me. Best place to set up an ambush is this way.’

‘Ambush?’ Sei argued. ‘Oh, no. We only came to cause a distraction.’

‘Yeah, whatever opportunity presents itself. I suggest we take captives if possible. Less opposition for Adam can only improve his chances.’

‘Agreed,’ Darkin said and crept up with Gabby. ‘Right behind you, lady ranger.’

Sei nodded too, and Gabby led them up through the thinning forest, using only their natural night vision and light from the rising moon; more than enough to cast shadows amongst the trees.

As they passed around the edge of a clearing, where a bulldozer had pushed fallen branches into a pyre, Darkin grabbed Gabby by the elbow and tugged her to a halt. ‘Can you smell that?’

She sniffed the air cautiously, surprised that she hadn’t noticed it first.

‘Petrol fumes?’ he asked.

‘Diesel.’ Gabby laid her hand flat against the nearest tree and felt the slightest hint of rumbling rising up through the roots. ‘If I was a betting girl, I’d say there’s a generator running below us.’

‘So there must be a vent around here somewhere.’ Darkin glanced about without success. ‘If we can find it and block it, we may be able to smoke them out.’

‘Or kill them with carbon monoxide,’ Sei argued. ‘Not while there’s any chance our people are down there. Keep moving.’

‘Main entrance is this way.’ Gabby turned uphill towards the old church. ‘If Kitching is any kind of criminal, he’ll have the front door under surveillance. So I’ll make a sling shot so we can knock from a distance.’

‘Let me.’ Darkin drew both his Eagles, side by side. ‘Knock knock,’ he said as he took aim — until Gabby shielded his eyes, stopping him.

‘No, let me.’ She tugged the band out of her hair, releasing her ponytail and already eyeing the nearby bushes for a green branch that would offer the desired fork-shape and elasticity. She spotted one and broke it free, assembling the two pieces into a sling shot.

Behind her, she heard another twig snap.

‘Uh-oh,’ Sei said, as Darkin whipped both Eagles about.

‘Down!’ he cried, but Gabby spun and threw the twig at the man who burst out at her from a patch of scrubby saplings. Darkin fired, answered by a burst of rapid fire aimed skywards as warning shots, while a swift fist dropped his body to the ground beside her.

‘We surrender!’ Sei shouted, throwing down her weapon just as Gabby drew hers and unlocked the safety. ‘Hold fire, hold fire!’

Eight shadows emerged around them and Gabby froze, dropped it and raised her hands slowly. She saw one of them use a radio to make a call in a language
she’d never heard before, and within minutes she heard a chopper swooping in low and fast towards them. It hovered overhead to land, making an awful racket. Shielding her ears, Gabby clenched her eyes shut as the sand and dirt whipped up under the rotors.

Beside her, a scuffle broke out.

Blinded, she felt Sei fall against her, and squinting briefly, she saw Tarin lying on her side with blood forming at her temple. In reflex, Gabby bent to check her pulse at her throat, but someone struck her from behind too, and as she fell, the night consumed her.

Mira pictured Kitching on his knees, alongside General Garland, both begging for her mercy. A nice idea, if only a passing fancy.

‘Yes, yes!’ Freddie clapped, quietly but excitedly as the larrikin emerged briefly. ‘Now you finally understand me. We must take him out, and along with him, all the seeds he’s spawned elsewhere.’

‘Whoa, there! I won’t hurt children.’ The moment she said it, she realised she had something very strongly in common with Kitching.

‘You won’t have to. When we delete him from the equation, his network shall fail, and the native populations of the disputed islands will be wiped out in a territorial war.’

‘A war? You mean a real one with bullets and explosions? Or a cold one, where the power switches off and trade agreements squeeze out the life, metaphorically?’ She’d read Braille histories of both.

‘World war. Zot, zot zot, go the missiles. Pah,’ he huffed and waved his hand dismissively. ‘Inevitable anyway, so no matter.’

‘Hang on. Those are the other lives you mentioned? The many thousands?’

‘Closer to a million, but all strangers, so no matter. Maddy will be safe at Serenity, and you’ll be free to
come and go here, keeping me prisoner in splendid silence forever, where your voice shall become the only one ever to haunt me.’

‘Oh, but, I have
no
intention of keeping you as a —’

‘Pah!’ He waved her off again. ‘It’s the new future. I’ve heard it. It’s here — in three hundred of five hundred permutations. Acceptable expense, since my angel will no longer die here.’

He crouched to gather the rest of the old surgical instruments, and Mira thought about attacking him and attempting to save Maddy on her own.

The old man turned one suspicious eye to her, as if he’d already fore-heard that possible future.

In her current state, she’d be no match for him, let alone any guards from the hall. Her mind still operated at barely half speed, while her body remained predominantly asleep.