Necropath (39 page)

PAIN AND CONFUSION

Sukara caught the New Mumbai Express north from Chandi Road. She sat beside the window and stared out at the passing streets and buildings, her fist clutched around the folded hundred-baht note that Vaughan had given her. She thought back over the meeting. Vaughan had done everything he could to make her feel at ease, and within minutes of meeting him she had received the impression that he was a good person. It was no wonder that Pakara had taken to him, and at the thought of her sister and her special friend, Sukara felt a strange, swift stab of jealousy. Right now, she would have given anything to have Vaughan as a friend—nothing more than that: she wasn’t asking for love, or commitment, but just someone who would listen to her with sympathy. What she needed right now, she thought, was a friend.

When she had summoned the courage to ask him if he would see her again, she had been unable to interpret the look that had come into, his eyes. It was as if she had struck him a blow. He had seemed pained, and at the same time almost pathetically grateful that she, Sukara, had wanted to see
him.
And yet his reply, an unsure, reluctant
maybe,
gave the impression that he would rather not get involved.

He was not the type of person she had first imagined when Dr. Rao had told her that Pakara had had a special friend. Sukara had expected someone older and richer, someone more outgoing and at ease with the world. Vaughan had seemed...
haunted
was the first word that came to mind, haunted and beaten and on the verge of giving up. She wondered if he had suffered mental problems—there had been that strange look of frightened anguish in his eyes, contained there by mental effort and not allowed to infect his behaviour. And yet his manner had been far from manic or obsessive: he was gentle and soft-spoken, almost, at times, seemingly on the verge of tears himself. She wondered if it had been Pakara’s death that had affected him so badly.

She wished she had asked Vaughan more about himself, where he was from and why he was on the Station; what he worked as and where he lived. But perhaps, looking back on it, it was just as well that she hadn’t been that inquisitive. He struck her as a lonely person, unused to talking about himself: she guessed that he would not have liked her questioning him. Maybe next time, maybe she would be able to ask him about himself when they met again.

As the train carried her away from Himachal sector and Vaughan, it was reassuring to know that someone who had known Pakara and grieved at her death was here for her to contact in the future.

Sukara looked ahead to her return to the hotel. She would pack her belongings and then tell Osborne that she was leaving. It would be hard to face him and tell him that she had seen him with the woman earlier, but it was something she had to do. She could pack and walk out without a word of explanation, avoid the emotional confrontation. But he had wronged her, he had taken her trust and betrayed her; he had taken from her mind what he had wanted and given nothing personal of himself in return. He had lied to her, and that had hurt. She could not let him get away without telling him what she thought of his betrayal.

At New Mumbai Station Sukara left the train in a press of commuters and crossed the street to the gates of the Hotel Ashoka. The uncrowded, peaceful grounds seemed like paradise after the chaotic hurly-burly of the streets. She walked down the gravel drive, her heart thumping like a drum, passed through reception and rode the elevator to the tenth floor. As she walked along the corridor, she rehearsed the words she would use to tell Osborne that he was a liar and that she was leaving for good. She repeated her best lines over and over, but knew in her heart that when the time came for her to use them, her mind would go blank and she would shout and cry like a child.

She unlocked the door and entered the room. She looked around, called his name, and then checked the bathroom. He was still out, then. A small part of her felt relieved, even though she knew she must wait until he returned and confront him.

She found her backpack and began stuffing her clothes into it. The new clothes, the dresses Osborne had bought her, she left on the bed. They had made her look silly, anyway. She packed her T-shirts and skirts and underwear. She fastened the backpack and sat on it in the middle of the room, so that he would see her as soon as he entered, and know that something was wrong; know, she hoped, that she had seen him with the girl. She hoped that he would not be wearing his pin when he entered the room, so that she would have time to tell him what she thought of him and get away—before he had the chance to read her and see that, alongside the hate she felt towards him, she felt love also, and the need to be loved in return.

She sat there, defiant, for ten minutes, twenty. She got up, wandered around the suite. She stopped in the middle of the lounge, considering. Soon she would be on her own in a strange place, with only her savings, the dollars Osborne had given her, and Vaughan’s gift of a hundred baht to keep her going. On the drinks cabinet, beside the bottle of bourbon he had brought with him, was a pile of Station currency, baht and rupees, along with over a hundred American dollars. She scooped the notes from the cabinet and stuffed them into the pockets of her shorts. She would be out of here before he noticed it was gone. And, anyway, he was rich and would not miss the money.

She moved to the window and peered out. She would wait another five minutes, and if he had not returned by then she would just walk out. She returned to her backpack, sat down, and counted off the minutes on her watch.

At exactly five minutes she stood and returned to the window, looking down at the extensive grounds. She was about to move off, shoulder her pack and leave, when she saw him. Her stomach lurched sickeningly. He was striding through the grounds towards the entrance. She hurried over to her pack, hauled it onto her shoulder, and stood facing the door, waiting for what seemed like hours.

At last she heard the handle turn, watched the door swing open. Osborne stepped inside. He stopped when he saw her, displaying his easy smile.

At the sight of him, she knew that she could not leave. The feel of his arms about her, his lips hot on the top of her head, returned to her; she recalled his promises, that they would be together forever, and she began to weep.

She let her pack slip from her shoulder and stared at him through her tears. “You lie!” she wailed. “You betray me! I saw you today, I saw you with woman! You go to hotel!”

For a second Osborne was speechless, then, “Su... Su—she was no one. She doesn’t matter to me. Su, you’re the only—”

“You fuck girl, not me. You think I’m ugly. You lie! You betray me.” She was sobbing now, her words hardly coherent. She gestured to her pack. “So I come back, pack up. I leave you.”

Osborne looked stricken: his eyes widened in panic and he rushed towards her, took her in his arms, and hugged her to him. She tried to resist his embrace, tried not to find solace in the strength of his arms. “No! Christ, please, no— you don’t understand. The other girls... they don’t matter, only you.”

She slumped against him and sobbed. “I no understand! I want to leave, I want to stay—I want to understand!”

He fumbled in the pocket of his suit, and she knew he was looking for his pin. He found the case, opened it clumsily, and drove the pin into the back of his head.

She knew with a sudden, burning shame that all her thoughts, her very identity, was now open to him. She hated his knowing how vulnerable and afraid she was.

He just stared at her, an expression of amazement crossing his face. His reaction to scanning her anger, pain, and sense of betrayal, shocked her. He laughed in disbelief at something he had found in her head.

Then he grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Where is he now?” he yelled. It was as if, upon using his augmentation-pin, he had become someone else.

“Where is who—?” She stared at this suddenly transformed Osborne.

“The man you call Vaughan! Where?” And he slapped her across the face, backhanded, knocking her to the floor. He knelt beside her, grabbed her chin, and turned her face to his.

She gagged, shocked and sickened.

He stared into her eyes, into her mind, found what he wanted, and pushed her away. He rushed into the connecting bedroom. From her position on the floor, Sukara saw him pull a case from beneath the bed, open it, and take things out, slip them into his jacket. Then he closed the case and returned it beneath the bed and came back into the lounge.

He knelt beside her again, and she flinched at the expectation of further blows. Instead, he reached out and thumbed the tears from her cheeks. “Su... I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I’ll explain, okay? I’ll come back and explain, and then we’ll be together, just the two of us, no more chasing about, no more...” He stopped himself, stood, and hurried from the room.

Sukara lay on the floor, weeping with pain and confusion. She pushed herself to her feet and stood unsteadily, ran into the bedroom, and knelt on the floor beside the bed. She reached underneath and fumbled for the case. She pulled it out, tried the catches. The case was locked. In anger and rage she grabbed the case by its handle and swung it again and again at the wall. On the sixth blow, the catches broke. She collapsed onto the floor and opened the lid.

Three hollow, gun-shaped recessions, one small pistol still in place... Then she saw, in a pocket in the lid of the case, the graphic. It showed Vaughan, but a younger Vaughan, standing beside a younger version of Osborne. Sukara stared at the image of Vaughan, smart and handsome, and tried to reconcile this vision with the man she had seen at Nazruddin’s.

She reached for the case, pulled the pistol out, fumbled with the chamber until it snapped open. The gun was loaded with a dozen bullets. She was about to close the case when she saw something else: a golden pendant, identical to the one that Osborne was never without—a spare mind-shield?

Quickly she looped it around her neck. If she were to follow him, then she would have to be shielded. The thought of what she was about to do filled her with terror.

Sobbing, she pushed herself to her feet and ran through into the lounge. She grabbed a jacket, struggled into it, and concealed the pistol in the pocket.

She ran to the window and stared out. Osborne was a tiny shape, striding through the grounds of the hotel towards the taxi-flier rank.

Sukara ran from the room and down the corridor to the elevator, barging into people and walls in panic and desperation.

She reached the flier rank just as the vehicle carrying Osborne screamed off along the street, climbing. She hauled open the door of the next flier in line and commanded the pilot to follow the flier in front.

Clutching the pistol in her jacket pocket, Sukara wept quietly to herself.

* * * *

THE VAITH

Vaughan left Nazruddin’s as the sun was setting and the lights were coming on down Chandi Road. From a hardware store opposite the restaurant he bought a hammer-gun and slipped it into his backpack beside the grenades. He left the store and turned right, towards the train station, then right again along the road leading to the spaceport. When he came to the back alley, he slipped from the crowd and hurried past skips overflowing with rubbish and restaurant scraps, his progress through the twilight scattering rats ahead of him.

He came to a door in a windowless polycarbon building, familiar from Commander Sinton’s memory. He tried the handle; not surprisingly, it was locked. He removed the hammer-gun from the case and applied it to the lock. When a flier roared overhead, covering any sound he might make, he pulled the trigger. The gun beat at the door with a quick, percussive blast. He kicked it open and stepped inside. He hurried down a long corridor, his way illuminated by a skylight high overhead. When he came to the first door on the-left, he opened it and passed into a cavernous, empty warehouse; the photon tubes from the street outside washed the chamber in splashes of garish red and blue.