They didn't blindfold me during the trip. Why would they? The whole town belonged to Ash. They drove me deeper into the city on one of the buses, wedged between two of Ash's female guards, semi-automatics held away from their pregnant bellies and pressed into mine. Ash himself wasn't with us. He'd barely stayed a minute after he'd checked that it was really me, Ingo was still his and Haru wasn't going to be a threat.
The bus stopped at one end of the Strip. The road was pockmarked and badly maintained but the neon signs still glowed bright against the blue-grey twilit sky. At one end, the model of a cowboy waved, twinkling at us. The volcano outside The Mirage exploded on cue and, far above us, I could see the roller coaster thundering around the Stratosphere Tower. Only the human beings were missing, leaving the whole place with the feel of a model town, working but unpopulated.
They took me to the Luxor, a monstrous pyramid squatting in the heart of the Strip. Inside, plastic mummies stared impassively at Egyptian-themed fruit machines that no one was using – row after row of them, unlit and silent. We walked past roulette wheels, backgammon tables, long abandoned games of craps. My escorts and I were the only people inside and the silence was more sinister for its contrast with the Disneyland tackiness of it all.
Dim, emergency lighting led us through the vast gambling floor. There were no windows and no clocks; this hadn't been a place where they wanted you to tell time – and I guess Ash didn't much care about it either. The lift took us right to the top, where the high rollers had once lived. He was waiting for me in the penthouse suite, leaning on the railing of a balcony that gave him a view over all of Vegas. This, I thought, was why he'd left the lights of the Strip burning, a crazy extravagance just to make him feel even more like a king.
"Come up in the world, I see," I said when he turned to face me.
He shrugged and smiled, looking so much like the friend I'd once known that it was painful. But I could see the light of madness shining in his dark eyes, and I knew that that was all the explanation I needed for what he'd done.
"You know," he said, "when Ingo told me you were alive, I couldn't believe it. I was sure you'd died in the explosion. If I'd known, I would have returned for you – I hope you realise that."
I looked away. A part of me remembered the five years of terrible solitude and wished that he had come for me. "Don't beat yourself up about it."
He laughed at little, but there was something studied about it, as if normal human responses were something he now had to fake. "Still you're here now, that's what matters."
"Thanks to Ingo. Tell me, if you thought I was dead, how did he manage to find me?"
"He wasn't looking. Ingo's job was to watch Queen M, when we were no longer neighbours. I wanted to know what she made of my Cuban… subjects. You were just a very unexpected bonus. A coincidence I suppose, though in time one of my agents was bound to have found you."
He leaned over the balcony, staring across his kingdom. After a second I joined him. Las Vegas was a spider's web of light in the darkness of the desert. "You sent the Infected against her deliberately," I said, seeing it all suddenly. "You wanted her scientists to investigate them, and then for Ingo to report back what they found."
He was still looking out over the city. It felt almost comfortable, a distant echo of the companionship we'd once enjoyed. I remembered with sudden clarity the one time he'd come on to me, after we'd been in the bunker three weeks and it was all starting to seem hopeless. He'd pushed me up against a bench in the lab at three in the morning and kissed me with a sort of desperation.
I'd pushed him away and tried to laugh it off.
He hadn't let me, though. "I know you've got a husband," he'd said. "But you're never going to see him again. Can't I be the last man you ever fuck?"
I'd just shaken my head and gone back to work and he hadn't tried it again. I wondered if he remembered that too, or if the Voice took away all memories of failure, if you let it.
"Why would I want to do that?" he asked now.
I shrugged, not very interested in playing his games. "Because you needed all the help you could get. I'd thought – I don't know why, I guess I just assumed – that you'd taken the Cure with you when you left. But of course, you didn't plan the explosion and what wasn't buried beneath it was trapped with me." I looked at him, a slight frown on his handsome dark-skinned face, and I knew that I was right. "You recreated it, I suppose, from its remnants in your own blood. But you got it wrong. The Infected of Cuba weren't at all what you intended, and you were hoping Queen M would be able to tell you why."
There was a long silence and I thought that he was angry. He must be unused to challenges to his authority after all this time surrounded by his worshippers, people who gave themselves to the Voice that spoke through his mouth. "Yes," he said finally. "That's true. But here, at least, I've got it right."
"I don't believe you. If you had, why would you need me?"
"Who says I do?"
"Ingo, and the trouble you went to get me here. Tell me just one thing, Ash. Was this planned all along – the Cull and the Cure?"
For the first time, I saw just a flicker of uncertainty in his face. "I don't remember. I've let go of that part of my life. But Jasmine, I want you to be a part of the new life I'm making here."
"If you think I'm going to help you spread the Cure, you've forgotten who I am."
"I could never forget you. And I don't need your help – not in the way you think."
"I'm not giving you any help."
He shrugged, dismissing my objections. "The thing is, I spent all that time, wasted it, trying to recreate the Cure – when I should have realised all along that it was unnecessary. The Cure's already inside me, perfect. The answer isn't to spread it, I know that now."
"A little too late for the people of Cuba," I said bitterly.
"They wanted what I gave them – I didn't force it on them. And I wasn't the one who burnt them to death."
A helpless shudder passed through me at the memory. "You left me no choice, Ash. Better a quick death than rotting away, piece by piece."
"Did you ask them that?" He waved a hand to silence me when I would have objected. "It doesn't matter. I realised that if I wanted to spread the Cure, I didn't need to infect people with it. There's a simpler and older method than that." He turned to face me fully, arms crossed over his chest. The moon was only a sliver of light above us and his face was in darkness.
But I didn't need to read his expression to know what he meant. I looked over at the two silent guards standing just inside the doors to the balcony. I looked at the round swells of their stomachs, pulling the material of their t-shirts tight. "Children. No wonder you wanted all the men castrated. Will every single child born in this city be yours?"
He nodded. "The Cure was an extreme form of gene therapy, you know that. It changed us. It rewrote our DNA and turned it into something more… eloquent."
"And that change will be passed along to your children," I said flatly, forcing the words out past the sudden nauseous tightness in my throat.
"Like all genes, the Cure only cares about reproducing itself. Given the biological raw materials, it can build the meat machines to carry itself, to propagate itself further."
"And they say romance is dead."
He didn't even smile. "Procreation has nothing to do with love. It's more basic than that, the replication of something older and greater than us. Genes are immortal, you know that. They're the only part of us we can truly send into the future."
"Well, I can certainly see the appeal of this little arrangement for you. What I'm finding harder to grasp is why anyone else would agree to it."
He spread his arms, a theatrical gesture playing to an audience of one. "They believe in me, Jasmine. When Jim Jones told his followers to drink poison and feed it to their children, they did it gladly. Suicide bombers turned their own bodies into shrapnel, back in that wonderful world we all remember before the Cull. People will do anything if they only believe, and I'm asking them for so much less than that."
"No," I said, "not so many, not that." And then, clear and unpleasant, I saw the whole picture. "But if you gave them a watered down version of the poison you gave the people of Cuba – then they might agree. Tell me, Ash, just what is in those pills your travelling circus is handing out like sweets?"
He smiled, almost pleased that I'd understood. "Only a little something to make them more… open to suggestion. I learnt from my mistakes in Cuba. The latest version doesn't leave any lasting damage."
"I don't think Haru would agree with you." For a moment I let myself imagine him and the terrible thing that might already have been done to him, all because he'd been foolish enough to listen to me.
"Your companion?" He shrugged. "In time he'll come to understand. That's the other thing I've found. Take someone's freedom, mutilate and brutalise them, and if you offer them a way to keep their pride, to tell themselves that it was all for a purpose, they'll take it. Humans have always lived a delusional life. I'm just giving them a different dream." He paused a moment, and when he carried on his tone was more fervent, almost fevered. I could hear the Voice, resonating through every syllable. "An incomplete dream, until now. But with you…"
"I won't join you. I don't believe, and I never will."
He shook his head. "You misunderstand. I don't need your co-operation, not in the way you mean. Your value lies elsewhere – in the Cure you're also carrying. All these children I've fathered with my wives here are only half-breeds. But our children, Jasmine – they could be the first of a new race."
I shook my head, horrified. The friend I'd once known had taken my rejection and accepted it. This Ash, the servant of the crazy Voice that I knew all too well, would never take no for an answer. I backed away, hands held out in front of me to push him away.
His own lashed out, fast as a striking snake, and grasped my wrist. I tried to twist away, to break his grip but he was too strong for me. Stronger than any human should be. I didn't stop struggling though, because this was something I would never surrender to. The balcony was a hundred feet above the city. I could throw myself over it, maybe even take him with me. Anything, anything, to stop this happening.
Another step, and now I felt other arms pin me, holding me immobile.
"No," Ashok said. "No, Jasmine, I would never do that to you."
I looked him in the eye, but there was no human compassion there. For the first time I accepted that every last trace of my friend was gone. "Yes you would."
"Then let me rephrase. I don't need to do that. I have something else entirely in mind." He nodded at the women behind me and they began to drag me towards the door of the suite. I dug my heels into the thick carpet, resisting with everything that was left in me, but it was futile. They had some of Ash's crazy strength about them. I wondered if it came from the warped new life growing deep inside them.
After five minutes, I gave up the struggle. All I was doing was wearing myself out. I needed to keep my strength for whatever came next – wherever they were taking me. I knew, of course I did, that resistance would be as futile then as it was now, but I needed to cling on to a fragment of hope.
They took me from the top of the casino down to its basement, a vast room that must have run the full length of the building. The light there was neon bright and flat. I thought it might once have been the kitchen but the only remnants of its old use were the long silver tables which lined it from wall to wall. The meat which lay on them was still living, but unconscious. There must have been a hundred of them, maybe two hundred. All women, all attached to drips and heart monitors. All naked. None of them was older than thirty. The youngest might have been sixteen.
"They're brain dead," Ash said. "It was easier that way."
"Are these the people who wouldn't believe?" I asked, sickened. Was this what lay in store for me? My mind gone, just a body to lie here for Ash to use as he wanted. A part of me thought that might not be such a terrible end, if it meant that I could finally rest.
There were more men here, doctors. One of them approached us now, a syringe in his hand. With my arms still pinned behind my back I was entirely powerless.
"I wouldn't force myself on you," Ash said. "That way we could only make one baby every nine months. Inside you, you have the seeds of far, far more than that. All I need to do is harvest them and plant them somewhere else."
I looked at him, then at the rows and rows of comatose women. They were nothing but bodies now – just fertile ground. "No, Ash," I said. "Don't do this." But I knew that there was no chance he wouldn't. He nodded to the doctor and the man reached out, hand almost gentle as he lifted my t-shirt up.
The needle hurt like hell as it went in.
"Just some hormones," Ash told me. "We need you to hyper-ovulate before we harvest. Ten or twenty times and we should have enough."
"You'll kill me if you do that."
"Maybe, but by then you'll have given me everything I need." Then he turned away, as if I was no longer of very much interest to him.
Ingo was waiting in the room they took me to, one of the suites on the upper floors, smaller than Ash's penthouse but still plush and a little gaudy. I tensed when I saw him there, wondering what task of Ash's he was here to perform. He looked almost tentative and there didn't seem to be anything worse he could do to me. The hormones were already racing through my system, flushing my face and speeding my heart. The Voice was louder too, more and more difficult to ignore. They'd taken my anti-psychotics along with my gun. Maybe I should be glad that by the time they tore the ova out of my body I'd probably be a willing victim.
The guard pushed me into the room and then it was just me and Ingo now. I thought briefly about trying to overpower him, but what was the point? I ignored him instead, moving to sit on the long sofa at one end of the room. I stared at the large blank screen of the television but it had nothing to tell me. Ingo didn't move, didn't say anything. Eventually I gave up and turned to look at him.
"Why?" I asked him. "Why would you let him do that to you?"
"Take away my manhood, is that what you mean?" His eyes were wide, face as open and guileless as ever.
"Yes," I said, though I meant more than that. I'd liked Ingo. I wanted to believe that he'd once been a person who wouldn't let the things happen which happened here. Why had he let Ash change him into someone who would?
"The priests of Isis, in ancient Rome, would cut off their own genitals with a scythe in honour of their goddess," he told me.
"Ash isn't a god, Ingo. He isn't even really a man anymore."
"I do not worship him, is that what you think? It is his ideas that have drawn me, right from the start."
"To make everyone in the world as crazy as he is? As master-plans go, I'd say it's one of the more deranged."
"Yes, I know that you believe this. But this is because you grew up in that one small corner of the world where reason ruled. I have seen the look in Westerners faces in this world after the Cull. They cannot believe that it has come to this – that mankind can behave in this way.
"Look in the face of an African and you will see that they cannot believe that humanity could ever behave in any other way. I told you about my country and I think you felt some pity, but there is a part of you which will never really understand. I was five when I saw my first murder. Seven when they raped my sister in front of me. My father they killed, a bayonet to the belly so that it would be slow. I worked in the mines for four years, my lungs full of rock dust. It is there, still, murdering me too. I will not live another ten years. I saw children kill each other for scraps of food.
"Someone once asked, 'Where was God at Auschwitz?' and the rabbi replied, 'Where was man?' Where was man in the Congo? Where was God? The Cull was cleaner than what my people did to each other, as casually as swatting flies."
"I know I can't understand," I told him. "You've experienced terrible things – but why do you want to take a hand in more of them? Ash wants to replace humanity with the Cured. It's genocide. Worse than that – the destruction of an entire species. Your species. Why would you help him with that?"
His eyes burned into mine, the first emotion I'd ever seen in them, a fierce certainty. "Because I lived twenty years, and I saw nothing in humanity that was worth saving." He left before I could say anything else, locking the door behind him, and I didn't know what it was I would have said anyway. That humanity was worth saving? I wasn't sure I really believed that any more.
Except, damn it, humanity might not be worth saving, but I'd met individual humans who were. Kelis was worth saving, and she was somewhere in this town, or this hotel, having god knows what done to her.
I paced the room, twenty paces along one wall, thirty another, weaving between the gaudy furniture. There was no balcony here. The windows were closed and locked. When I swung my fist in despair against the glass it bounced back harmlessly. I guess too many people came up here after a bad night at the tables and thought about ending it all – but dead people didn't pay bills. The only way out was through the door, and Ash's guards were outside.
On a sudden impulse I switched on the television, knowing that the signal had died long ago. The dead static flickered into the dark room and I felt another flickering, deep inside my head; the edge of madness coming to claim me. This time I knew there was no defence against it. My medicines had been taken when I was brought here. I couldn't even dull it with a good strong dose of opiates. The craving for them was the strongest of all, the urge to just stop caring.
Listen to me, the Voice said. Listen to me! I wanted to refuse it but I had no choice.
I can help you, it said. I'm the only thing that can.
And I didn't know if it was because I was already halfway down the slope that led to the place where Ash was, but I believed it. Listening to the Voice had brought Ash here, to this position of power. Letting the Voice speak through him had brought him his army of believers. If I wanted to fight him, I had to become him.
Yes, the Voice said. Yes. Let me lead you.
OK, I told it, with every ounce of strength left in my mind. But only on my terms. As cautiously as a bomb expert defusing a nuclear device, I took down the defences it had taken me five long years to build. I could feel the monumental weight of the madness, dark and unknowable, massing behind the barriers, but I wouldn't let it all through. Just enough. Only enough to do what needed to be done.
No! the Voice screamed at me, a deafening roar now that I had given it a clear path through to my mind. Let me through! Let all of me through. It pushed its weight against my mind and I could feel my sanity bending, bending… With an effort of will more intense than anything I had ever experienced, I pushed back. There was a moment when everything was in perfect balance, the unstoppable force and the immovable object – until, millimetre by painful millimetre, I beat the Voice back. I could feel the sweat dripping from my body, every muscle in me corded with strain. But I wouldn't lose, I couldn't lose. I took what I needed, the knowledge and conviction that the Voice gave me – and then I slammed the door in my mind shut behind it.
Finally, I opened myself to the part of it I'd let through – knowing that there was a risk that I'd already surrendered too much.
The feeling was amazing, my mind clearer, more focussed, than it had ever been. I felt strength flowing through me, a tide of well-being stronger than any opiate rush. I felt absolutely certain that I knew what to do. A part of me questioned this new certainty the dangerous lure of it, but I pushed that down too. I had to do this.
I banged on the door five times before the guard answered it. She was small and dark-skinned with wide-set eyes. Her fingers were a little tentative on her gun as she turned it on me. "It's OK," I said, holding my hands carefully in front of me, "I'm not going to try anything." Although a part of me felt that if I did, I could take her on – I could take them all on.
"What do you want?" she asked after a moment. I looked in her eyes and read everything I needed there. These people weren't like the zombies of Cuba. They could listen to reason.
"I want to talk to you," I told her. "I've got something to say that you're going to want to hear." My voice resonated with my conviction. She would want to hear what I had to say.
"I'm not supposed to talk to you."
"Did Ash tell you that?"
She hesitated a moment before answering, and I knew that she hadn't received any orders directly from him. "No," she said eventually. "But you're to be kept locked up. You're a prisoner."
"And did Ash tell you why I'm a prisoner?"
She looked away, I already knew the answer. "Seems like he doesn't tell you very much, does he?"
"He tells me enough." She set her mouth into a thin, determined line. I was only a few words away from being pushed back into the room and having the door locked on me.
"Did he tell you I'm Cured, too?"
She tried to hide it, but I saw the slight flutter of the pulse at her throat, the nearly imperceptible tightening of the muscle in her jaw.
"It's true," I told her. "I knew Ash years ago, back before the Cull. We studied together, worked together – and developed the Cure together. Then we tested it on ourselves."
"That… that can't be true," she said. "He told us he was the only one."
I nodded. "Yeah, that's what he thought. He thought I was dead and so he came here and set about breeding this race of half-Cured children. Like the one you're carrying inside you. How many months gone?"
"Five," she said, the words dragged reluctantly out of her. "Five months."
"Four more till he's born. That's pretty amazing – carrying one of the first of a new race." Her smile was cautious. "Although not really an entirely new race, I suppose. He'll be more of a half-breed, won't he?"
And the smile was entirely gone.
I ploughed on relentlessly. My voice was soft, persuasive. "All the children here, they're only half of what Ash wanted. You can guess why he wants me here, can't you? Maybe you've seen the women downstairs, the ones he's keeping in a coma. He doesn't need their minds – all he's interested in are their wombs. I think you know what he's planning to plant in them."
Her face told me that she did.
"Our children, mine and Ash's, now they'll be the real thing," I continued relentlessly. "The first of a new race. The culmination of all Ash's work, ready to start creating his brave new world. I wonder what place your child will have in that world."
"Ash would never…" Her voice was too loud and I saw her make an effort to quiet it. "This is his son too, he'd never do anything to hurt him, or us. He loves us."
"Yes," I said. "Yes he does. It's just that he loves me and what I can give him more."
"I could…" she swallowed. Her hand was shaking. The barrel of the gun she'd raised to point straight at my heart was shaking too. I could feel it brushing up and down against the material of my t-shirt. "I could make sure there are no full-breeds."
I should have felt afraid. The tightrope I was walking had no net beneath it. I'd locked my fear away along with the Voice, and that alone made the bargain worthwhile. Everything you used to be and value isn't that high a price to pay not to have to live in fear anymore. Queen M's press gangs, the zombies of Cuba, the new serfs of Oklahoma, the Party People – they could all tell you that.
"He'd never forgive you," I told her. "And he'll know it was you. Who else could it be? But if you let me go he'll never find me – then you and your sisters can have him and his children all to yourselves."
"Why would you do that?"
"Because if I stayed they'd be his children, not mine. I'm nothing but a brood-mare to him. But I won't be subordinate to anyone, not even Ash."
She must have heard my absolute conviction because she finally lowered the gun and stepped back. "He'll know this was me too. He'll punish me anyway."
I shook my head – then, before she could react, I swung my fist straight into her face, twisting my hips to put the full weight of my body into the blow. She crumpled with only a small whimper of pain. I'd broken her jaw and my knuckles were bloody and torn from where they'd broken her teeth.
Nothing in me cared. I pulled the gun from her slack fingers and walked away, down the long, quiet casino corridor. My footsteps were muffled by the red carpet which was the exact same colour as her blood.
One objective achieved, my mind was straight onto the next: find and release Kelis and Haru. There wasn't any kind of warmth about the thought, just cold calculation. I knew I needed allies.
I looked around, but there were no cameras up here at the apex of the casino. Ash wanted to watch, not be watched, and in his arrogance it would never have occurred to him that anyone could challenge him at the pinnacle of his power.
I walked through the corridors confident and certain, and nobody challenged me. I didn't know where I was going, but that didn't matter as long as it looked as if I did. I let my eyes drift casually over the women I passed, as if I had nothing to fear from them. Twice, I saw women who had been there when Mike's people had betrayed us to Ash. Before I had listened to the Voice I would have tensed and given myself away. Now I walked past them without a twitch and, even though one of them looked right at my face, they didn't see me. This confident woman, one of their own, was nothing like the frightened prisoner they'd dragged here only an hour ago.
People see exactly what they want to see. Six years ago I'd looked at a world where children were sold into slavery before they could talk, where girls were genitally mutilated so that they'd never have a reason to betray their future husbands, where millions died in floods and famines that never had to happen, and I'd seen somewhere that was just fine.
It seemed likely that Ash would be using the casino's old control centre as his command base. The place where they'd once watched the gamblers and tried to see who was cheating and who was just card-counting. The lift was silver and gold and mirrored, vulgar and loud. My eyes stared back at me as I travelled down. There were no questions in them now, just certainty. I barely recognised myself.
The ground floor was more crowded, but it was easy to slip unnoticed through the ranks of fruit machines, between the green baize of the game tables. I came to a service door marked 'staff only' and walked right through. I turned left, then right, then headed down a long, dingy stretch of corridor, no attempt to prettify the place for people who'd never be spending their money here. And then I arrived.
The banks of screens stared back at me as I walked in, images of neon and night from all over the city. There were three men manning the monitors, scrawny types who might once have been accountants. They looked up at me with wide startled eyes, but I wasn't even looking at them, as if they didn't matter in the slightest. After a second I sensed them looking back down at their screens. Ash, then the women, then the men. That was the order of things here.
And there on a screen at the far right of the room was Kelis, pacing the confines of a small room in a tight, angry circle. "Where is that?" I asked one of the men.
He startled, then bent forward intently, as if to prove how seriously he was taking my question. "Room 597," he said. "She's waiting to be processed." I didn't have to ask what 'processed' meant. I'd seen its end product laid out on silver slabs, waiting for little pieces of me to be planted inside them.
Her room was in one of the poorer parts of the casino, where the tourists from Wisconsin, Ohio and Leeds would have stayed. There was only one guard outside her door but there was a camera eyeing me from the far end of the corridor. Once this started we'd have no time. They'd know and we'd be running. I paused a moment to calculate whether rescuing her was really worth it. Benefits, costs. A second more and I decided that the former outweighed the latter.
The woman struggled when I put my arm around her neck, arms and legs thrashing back at me. But her windpipe was crushed, her carotid artery blocked, and a second later she dropped to the floor unconscious. I didn't waste a bullet finishing her off.
Kelis must have heard something through the door. She was waiting for me, when I entered, with a roundhouse kick launched at my head. At the last minute she saw who I was and tried to pull back, and I tried to duck, and her foot ended up grazing the edge of my ear and she ended up on her backside staring up at me.
"We have to go," I told her. "They know you're free." I threw her the semi-automatic I'd taken from the guard outside.
She caught it easily, then pushed herself to her feet with her usual catlike grace. Her eyes, brown and deep, stared into mine for a long second. Then she pulled me into a rough embrace, hard enough to push the breath out of me. "I thought you were dead," she said. Her voice sounded choked, as if there were tears in it, but when she released me a moment later her face was as mask-like as when I'd first met her.
But just for a second, when she'd held me in her arms, the Voice had separated itself from me, and I'd known that here was something I did care about. Then the first guard came for us and I thought that maybe I had to let that part of me go, because it would only get me killed. But without it I was dead anyway and I chose to keep on caring. The Voice shouted at me but it was safely locked away again, behind the barriers in my mind, where I could ignore it.
The guards weren't able to come at us en masse. They'd had no contingency plan for this escape and so they came one at a time and that's how we took them down. The first people to find us were men, running towards us down the long red corridor that led to the lifts, and them I shot easily. They'd let Ash cut away the most vital part of them. I didn't feel anything about their death.
At the end of the corridor we made it into the lifts, and headed down, with a few seconds to breathe before it started again.
"Where's Haru?" I asked Kelis.
She shrugged. "I don't now. They just took me."
"Back to that hospital, then," I said. The Voice told me to leave him, that it was too late anyway. It was almost certainly right, but I refused to listen.
Then we were out on the ground floor and here I knew that we'd be facing the women. I knew now that every single one had a new life inside her and that I'd be taking two lives each time I killed. A screaming, blonde-haired woman came at us from a side corridor and my shot went wild, taking her in the stomach when I meant to aim for the head. Kelis was already running on and I knew that I should too, but I looked at the blonde hair splashed with blood and the face beneath, mouth set in a rictus of agony. I knew that somewhere inside that body a little life was feeling the same pain.
It only took a few seconds to throw up everything that had been in my stomach, then I was running after Kelis. Her own face was pale and I knew that even she couldn't be indifferent to the lives we were taking.
Still, we took plenty more as we fought our way to the back doors, then spilled out onto the neon-brightness of the Strip. There were announcements over the loudspeakers now, Ash's voice a horrible echo of Cuba. The blood was pounding too hard in my ears to hear what he was saying, but I was sure it was about us. More and more people were heading towards us, gunfire spitting sparks from the pavement, the neon cowboy waving down at it all.
There was a jeep right outside the casino, keys still in the ignition, maybe the one that had brought Kelis here. Too convenient? No, probably just arrogance again, the certainty that no one would oppose him here, right in the heart of things.
I took the wheel and gunned the engine hard enough that the wheels screeched and skidded, leaving a layer of rubber on the road before they got traction and took us away. Kelis straddled the seat to fire behind her. Her semi-automatic was close enough to my left ear that the sound was deafening. If I looked in the mirror I would have seen the people she was shooting at, but I didn't want to.
I concentrated on driving down the straight deserted roads. Every second I expected more cars, a fleet of them, the full force of Ash's army to range itself against us. It never came, which left me wondering whether it was all an elaborate trap, yet another layer to his scheme that I'd have to peel away.
Listen to me and I'll tell you, the Voice said. The temptation was stronger than the junkie draw of heroin, but I'd learnt to fight that in the last month, and I fought the Voice too.
I don't know how I found my way back to the hospital. I hadn't thought I was paying attention when I'd made the trip the other way, but fifteen minutes later we were there, the building looming big and blocky against the night sky ahead.
No cars had followed us. "What in hell's going on?" Kelis said. "Don't they care that they've just lost their prize prisoner?"
But no, for some reason they didn't. One guard met us at the entrance to the hospital, a sixty-year-old man with the wide innocent eyes of a baby. I shot him through the left one and we ran inside.
The doctors in the hospital were unarmed. They watched us run past and didn't try to stop us. "Where is he?" I screamed at one of them, but they weren't going to help us either.
We banged open doors to operating theatres – empty – to private rooms and to wards where a few patients lay in beds with broken legs and who-knew-what other injuries. A maternity ward, eerie and empty in the darkness, waited for the flood of occupants who would soon come.
We didn't find him until we came to the recovery room, and by then I already knew that it was too late. The room was small, only fifteen feet square, with two beds and a window high up on one wall showing nothing but darkness. One bed was empty. Haru looked very small lying in the centre of the other, as if he'd shrunk since we last saw him. "Sweet baby Jesus," Kelis said. Her brown skin looked a little green.
There was a thin sheet resting over his legs and midriff, but when I pulled it back I could see the bandages swathing him from the middle of his thighs to just below his belly. They looked clean and fresh, just one small spot of blood in the centre of them.
Haru's eyes flickered open as I leant over him. I knew the moment that full consciousness returned because that was when he started screaming. He was still screaming when Kelis threw me her gun and scooped him up in her arms, flinging him over her shoulder. The scream increased in pitch, a sound of pure agony now, but she ignored him. We were running for the stairs, bounding down them, passing the same expressionless doctors we'd seen on the way in.
My finger itched to pull the trigger on them for what they'd done to Haru. But they'd done it to themselves, too, and they weren't the ones to blame.
No one tried to stop us leaving the building. They stood and watched us in silence, our panting breaths the only sound in the deserted wards and sterile white corridors. Then we were through the front doors and out. Kelis put Haru down on his feet to walk the few paces to the car.
He'd only taken one of them, face crumpled with agony, when they came. There were a few faces I recognised, many I didn't, but I'd only spent a few weeks on the boat and Queen M must have called in every reserve she had for this. She was right in the forefront of them, hair still in the same braids, wearing the same carefully studied pastiche of a pirate's outfit.
Haru's face twisted into an expression it took me a minute to recognise as pure hate. "You cunt!" he screamed. "You're too late – look what they've done to me!"
Because of course Haru was her man. Of course he'd been hers all along. I remembered with sudden clarity, the way he'd removed his watch before letting Ingo pass the current through him that killed the tracker. A spare chip hidden in the workings of the timepiece, where none of us would ever have thought to look for it. It was the final betrayal which made everything else make sense.
I think I would have killed him then, except letting him live now seemed that much crueller. And anyway, someone I hated far more was standing just a few feet in front of him, smiling that infuriatingly patronising smile of hers.