The Condemned (15 page)

   Ignoring the rational part of her that insisted she was making a mistake, Alecia allowed herself to become lost in the kiss, would’ve given herself to him fully and without hesitation. When he pulled away she was left with a feeling of loss, she opened her eyes and stared into his wonderingly.

   ‘Who
are
you?’ She asked him breathlessly, pulling her hand away from his face slowly but never shifting her gaze from him.

   Amato released her chin and pulled his other arm free from her, turning back to the night and falling silent for so long she began to wonder if he’d forgotten she was there.

She hugged her knees to her chest, confused and uncertain, wondered if she should say something, or maybe just get up and head back inside, he seemed to want to be alone with his thoughts.

   She had just about made the decision to return to the shelter when his voice stopped her.

   ‘I was a part of the party that caught you. I was the one who took down your horse.’

   She tried to be surprised by this but found that she wasn’t. Maybe she’d just been shocked so many times in the past few hours that she’d lost her capacity for it or had been dulled against it, some sort of mental blockage to protect her already weary mind. She made no response and he took that as a sign to continue.

   ‘You’d passed through a camp a couple of hours before, not even a town, just a few tents with some traders and shit. I was meant to be posted at Kingston, further north, quite a big place, but I’d stopped to get somethin’ to eat. All I knew was that I was on the lookout for a blonde kid who was somewhere close by with a stolen horse. Been told not to get close, the kid was dangerous, to report in any sightin's and keep you in view.’ He stopped, and though she wanted to say something she had no idea what, plus she had a feeling that her talking might break whatever it was that was suddenly allowing him to be so honest with her and she badly wanted to hear the rest.

   She waited patiently, allowing him to gather his thoughts, knowing he would tell her more when he was ready to.

   ‘I waited ‘til you left and I followed you. Kept my distance but you were so spooked and looked so tired that you weren’t really payin' much attention. I radioed in and got told to keep you in sights but to take you down without
killin’ you, if I could. They were getting pretty desperate by that point, just wanted you in. I had no fucking clue who you were or what you’d done, I just wanted the glory. Wanted pullin' out of this shithole.’

   He gestured widely with his hand, referring to the open space around them.

   ‘Saw you as my ticket to get on the inside.’ He stopped again, shaking his head, clearly troubled by the memories of what he had done.

   Alecia didn’t know how she was supposed to feel. He was describing to her the details that had led to her arrest, her capture. He was claiming responsibility for being the man who had handed her over to her captors, hell, for being one of them, and maybe worst of all he was telling her that he’d done it to further his own career. Yet... he was her saviour and he obviously felt remorse for what he had done, was trying to put it right, and he had kissed her... She had no idea what it all meant and it hurt her head to think about it too much.

   ‘Your horse was ready for dropping, you’d run the thing close to exhaustion and I kept you in sight pretty easy, just on your tail for a while, waiting on the shot. You never saw it comin', the horse went down like a sack of shit. I was expecting you to get up and start runnin' but you didn’t and when I got close enough I could see you were trapped. I shot the horse again, to shut it up.’

   Leci winced, it was silly, she knew, to feel sentimental over a nag, but that pony had served her damn well in the time she’d had it. It didn’t seem right somehow, that it had died screaming it’s agony, a bullet mercifully administered to put it out of its misery.

   ‘I was half convinced you were dead. You were fucking white as a ghost under all the dirt caked on your face. I radioed it in and then just sat and waited for em, watching you. You never moved. Looked like you were sleeping, real peaceful. I had a bottle of water and I used some of it to clean your face up a bit, dunno why really, I s’pose I just wanted to get a proper look at you. I wanted to know what you’d done, what a kid like you could’ve done to get ‘em so worked up about getting hold of you.’

   She watched him closely, he wasn’t looking at her, had been staring out into the slowly approaching dawn, but his eyes were now closed, as though shutting out the world would shut out what he had done, shut out her questioning eyes, her accusing stare.

   ‘Then they came, in the suits and so I knew you had to be some kind of dangerous mutant.’ He glanced towards her, his expression apologetic, before quickly looking away again.

   She didn’t really take it as an offensive term, there wasn’t any denying that she was one.

   ‘Only I’d never seen one before and I’d always pictured
them as being... I dunno, malformed or with tentacles or some other crazy shit. You just looked like some poor, beat up kid, didn’t look like you could hurt anyone. I went with them, with you, back to the prison. I got exactly what I wanted, cushy job inside the building. I wasn’t assigned anywhere near you. I was a guard in the main prison to start off with, just the regular criminals, or at least anyone who they saw as one. Most of the poor saps in there have never done anything worse than ask an Official an annoying question when he was having a bad day. I didn’t see you again for two years but I thought about you, a lot.’

   It was difficult to absorb. She wasn’t entirely sure she would even be able to, it all seemed like too much, how did you even begin to get your head around revelations like this?

Still, some of the things he had said had aroused her curiosity, stirred in her questions that she hadn’t thought she’d ever get an answer to and now here was an opportunity.

    Leci had very little idea of the length of time she had actually spent on the inside. She knew that it was years, had tried counting the days in the beginning but that became hard when you weren’t really sure where one day ended and the next began. She knew that when Xavian had died she had been sixteen years old, roughly a year on her own reasoned that she had been seventeen upon her capture. It had always scared her a little to consider the fact that she didn’t even know her own
age anymore.

   ‘How long was I in there? Altogether?’

   ‘Four years.’ The speed and conviction of his response surprised her. She had expected him to have to think about it but he answered quickly and with utter certainty.

   ‘Almost to the day, four years and eighteen days.’

   She was lightly awestruck to realise she was twenty-one years old, wow, like, all grown up and everything... She almost managed a smile at the thought.

   ‘How old are you?’ Ok, so that one wasn’t really relevant, pure curiosity on her part, but she wanted to know.

   ‘Now?’ He glanced at her questioningly, she nodded and he shrugged mildly, as though realising the question were unimportant, but seeing no reason to hold back the answer.

   ‘Thirty-two.’

   It made no difference to anything, she wasn’t sure why she had thought that it would and she carried on, probing for the information she actually wanted.

   ‘How long had Beriael been there?’

   ‘I’ve no idea. The first day I saw him was the first day he was brought to you, I’d never seen him or Bitsy before.’

   ‘How long ago was he first brought to me?’

   ‘Almost eight months ago. I was one of the guards who brought him. It was a part of my reassignment. I’d been moved up to the Clone Pen a couple of months before, then one day
seven new ones were brought in and I got told to suit up and pick one of them, any one, didn’t matter which, then to take it to the experimentation wing. That’s where they kept anyone they were running tests on. Where they kept you.’

   Leci was stunned. Amato had been the one who had brought Beriael to her? Had been the one who had chosen him? Had condemned the Clone to his suffering? She tried to reason that he’d had no choice, was simply following orders and if he had not chosen Beriael he would still have chosen somebody, maybe even Bitsy, and nothing would have been any different.

    Although this was a rational way to look at the situation, she couldn’t seem to view it in that way, all that she could focus on was knowing that Beriael hated her for something she had been forced to do, but Amato had selected him of his own free will. She felt cheated somehow, as though she were being subjected to Beriael’s anger unfairly, unjustly. She felt hurt knowing that Amato could’ve prevented some of the pain she was now feeling, but had chosen not to.

   It seemed cowardly of him, allowing her to take the full blame when he had been more responsible than her and she found herself shaking with silent rage.

   She tried to get a hold of her emotions, it wouldn’t do any of them any good to be fighting amongst themselves, not when they were relying on one another for security, protection and companionship. Whether she would’ve picked these three people
as her family, given the opportunity, she very highly doubted; a prison guard, an insane Clone and a woman who could read her mind didn’t seem all that great or reliable a combination to Leci, but she would never know, the choice hadn’t been hers to make and she was stuck with them. It would not help matters to irritate the situation or to cause friction between them.

   Suddenly so weary she could feel her bones aching, Leci felt old like she never had before. Emotionally drained, she stood without another word and didn’t look back as she made her way to the shelter. The Clones were asleep together in a lower bunk and she climbed onto the one she had woken on earlier in the evening. She expected her thoughts to keep her awake for hours, circling her mind, endless questions and conflictions preventing her from finding rest, but the moment her head touched the thin padding of the mattress her lids grew heavy and she succumbed to the darkness that enveloped her.

Chapter 13

‘Leci, wake up... Leci...’

   She rolled over in her sleep and irritably swiped at the hand that was on her shoulder, shaking her.

   ‘Leave me alone. Let me sleep.’ She groaned, knocking aside the intruding hand and tugging the blanket up over her head only to have it ripped from her grasp as the entire thing was pulled away, leaving her exposed.

   In her sleep, the thin prison shirt had ridden up around her waist and she felt cold air rush over her where she was uncovered. She sat up quickly and yanked down the garment, claiming back her modesty before turning with a scowl to whoever it was had woken her so rudely.

   She found herself looking into the startlingly bright and very beautiful green eyes of Morgan, wasn’t sure why but she had expected Amato.

   Amato...

   Thinking his name brought last night back to her with a sudden jolt. The kiss, so gentle, tender, and so very much needed, maybe by them both, but then, the moment destroyed by the things he had told her.

   Her scowl deepened.

   ‘What do you want?’ She demanded gruffly.

   Mornings weren’t her best time. Somewhere in the back of her mind she quietly registered silent joy in finding herself at a liberty to make that decision for herself again. It was up to her now when she slept and she didn’t appreciate being poked and prodded out of it, it echoed of having sleep stolen from her by probing guards and suited experimenters, not quite to the same scale, but it was essentially the same thing.

   Morgan smiled and Leci couldn’t help feeling some of her annoyance fading away.

   What the hell was it with the creepy mind reading chick that gave her the ability to make everything seem a little bit better than it was?

   ‘I was wondering if you wanted something to eat. You must be hungry.’

   It hadn’t really occurred to her until now that she hadn’t eaten for a long time. The last meal she’d had was her regular daily tray of unidentifiable gloop back at the prison, hours before the escape. As though in sudden agreement, her stomach growled loudly and she felt herself flushing slightly as she crossed her hands over her belly, willing her traitorous gut to be quiet.

   Bitsy laughed and handed over a hunk of cheese and some bread that looked a little greenish. Alecia accepted them gratefully and tore into the bread with her teeth. It was hard
and stale and tasted like cardboard, the rubbery cheese followed it quickly and it felt like the best meal she’d eaten in years.

   She wanted more but was satiated and wherever that meagre amount had come from, she was sensible enough to know they would be rationing out supplies between the four of them and not to be greedy.

   Bits sat on the bunk across, watching her without a word and when the food was gone she passed Leci a dented and battered plastic bottle, half full of dirty water. The liquid was kind of warm and had a strange coppery tang to it. It wasn’t any worse than she’d drunk before, fresh water was practically nonexistent. She gulped down half of it before handing it back and running the back of her hand across her mouth and chin to swipe away escaping droplets.