Going cold turkey is no one's idea of fun. It's a private kind of hell. What can I say about it that hasn't been said already? Just sobbing and puking and sometimes fitting and nearly dying. I didn't know where I was – but I was somewhere. We'd arrived. The visions of my past eased up after that first rush, leaving nothing to relieve the monotony. That's the biggest secret about illness and pain. How monumentally fucking boring it is.
People drifted in and out, shot things into my arm and sometimes forced them down my throat. Some of those things must have been anti-psychotics, because after a while the Voice faded into silence. My mind felt clearer than it had in five years. When I'd stopped screaming in agony, I guessed I'd be grateful for that.
On the fourth day, I realised that the rocking sensation I was feeling had nothing to do with drug withdrawal. I was still on a boat. Something about the motion told me it was a big one, an order of magnitude above the yacht which had brought me here. I spent ten minutes lying there wondering if it was worth the effort to get up and walk towards the port hole I could see to my left. The shutters were closed over it, a relic of the stage when any light stabbed into my eyes like a knife, but the diamond splinter pain behind my temples had faded to a dull ache, and I thought I could risk a look.
If I could make it the five paces across the floor to the porthole… my knees buckled the instant I stepped out of bed. My joints felt like they were held together with weak glue. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror against one of the dark-stained wooden walls. Dark shadows circled my eyes like bruises and my hair hung lank and unwashed around my face, grease turning the vivid red of it almost brown. My skin was so white it looked translucent, a spider's web of blue veins beneath it. I realised that this was the first time I'd seen myself in years. I'd deliberately smashed the one mirror in the base after the first few months of staring at my blank, desperate eyes. I'd hidden the fragments of glass in the closet along with my colleague's corpses.
The catch on the porthole was tight. I had to stop to gather my breath four times before I finally managed to twist it open. I flinched from the light that poured in when I finally did, but my eyes adjusted without problem. I suddenly realised that I felt alive, really alive. It was a weird sensation.
The sky was only a little paler than the sea, a brilliant, tropical blue. The water was far below, fifty feet or more, the waves smacking against the hull in sharp little peaks and troughs. The ship was even bigger than I'd realised. There was a coastline ahead of us, a crescent of pure white sand leading back to dark trees then rising into jagged volcanic peaks. Almost certainly the Caribbean.
A long way from Lake Eerie. I wondered what the people who'd found me had been searching for, all that way from home. And I wondered why they'd bothered to bring me all the way back here, when they hadn't thought I was worth the trouble of saving. Had I said something in my delirium that had made me sound valuable? But what use was an expert in a virus that had killed everyone already?
I heard the sound of a key turning in the lock of my door and realised for the first time that I had been a prisoner. The man who stepped through was big, blond and handsome in the kind of way that just wasn't very interesting to look at.
"Dr Kirik?" he said. He had a faint Scandinavian accent and a lighter voice than I'd expected from such a large man.
I nodded, and a wave of dizziness washed through me. I leaned an unsteady hand against the porthole for support, feeling like I'd been on my feet for ten hours, not ten minutes.
The man seemed to realise what was up because he strode over in two long paces and carefully supported my arm under the elbow. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to make a run for it.
"I have a lot of questions," I told him.
"Yes, I guess so." It was immediately apparently that he wasn't going to be the man to answer them. "Are you well enough to…?" he nodded at the door.
I wasn't, but I couldn't stand the thought of spending a moment longer in that room. A waft of cool, fresh air was drifting in through the door and I realised for the first time that it stank in here. I reeked of old sweat and the toxins that had washed out of my body along with it. "Yeah, I think so," I told him. "Maybe I could take a shower first."
"After," he said.
I wasn't going to argue with him, I'd just noticed the handle of the semi-automatic poking out of the waistband of his jeans.
There was another person waiting outside the room – a tall woman with olive skin and a face as elegantly carved and impassive as a mask. She didn't say anything, just fell into step behind me as the man led me forward. The ship was a warren, corridors snaking fore and aft with cabin after cabin leading from them. The carpet underfoot had once been expensive but was now frayed and a little threadbare. The chandeliers hanging from the ceiling were covered in grime. I was almost certain now that I was on board a commercial cruise liner. It seemed so improbable, a relic of a time before the world had sickened and died.
We passed other people, some of whom nodded greetings to my two guides. No one ethnic group seemed to predominate; a mixture of brown, black and white faces. They were all dressed colourfully, many of them in leather and silk, and there was something old-fashioned… a little studied about their clothes. They almost looked like costumes, or a bizarre sort of uniform. I felt their curious eyes following me as I passed. So, a big ship but not that big a crew – small enough, anyway, to recognise a stranger among them.
At the end of one seemingly endless corridor we came to a lift. The walls were entirely covered in mirrors, dusty but clear enough to give me an unwelcome view of myself. I'd seen homeless junkies on the streets of London who looked more promising. No wonder no one wanted to talk to me.
The lift seemed to go up a very long way. I felt the sea-breeze the moment I stepped out, tasted the salty tang of it. Five paces and we were out in the open. The sun deck of a ship, even larger than I'd guessed – a floating city.
And here, at last, was a crowd. They were as colourful as the people on the lower decks, and far noisier. The babble of talk hit me the moment I stepped out and I found myself physically recoiling from it. People are a habit it's easy to lose. I felt like a wild animal encountering humanity for the first time.
In the centre of the deck was a big rectangular pit which I realised after a moment was a dried-up swimming pool. An over-sized wooden chair had been placed at one end of it, and though not everyone was facing it, I could tell that it was the centre of the gathering.
I realised that I'd stopped short when I felt something pressing into my back, nudging me forward. It might have been my escort's finger, or maybe her gun, but either way I wasn't arguing.
The woman on the chair watched me all the way. Her eyes were brown and cynical, a shade darker than her coffee-coloured skin. Mixed race I guessed, and definitely part Afro-Caribbean. Her hair clung to her head in tight cornrows, then hung down her back in a long cascade, stiff with beads. I could feel the power emanating from her. This was a woman who ruled – and these people were her subjects.
She smiled, finally, when I was only a few paces away from her. The expression was startling, suddenly making her seem entirely normal, like someone you'd be introduced to at a friend's party who turned out to work for the local council. She was quite young, maybe in her late thirties. But the lines around her mouth told me that she didn't smile very often. She was dangerous, however friendly she seemed.
"Thank you Soren, Kelis," she said to the two who'd accompanied me. I was surprised to find that she had a British accent, an upper-class one. I don't know what I'd expected but it wasn't that.
Soren nodded and fell back to the side of the woman's chair. Behind me I felt Kelis shift, but I knew that she hadn't gone far. And everywhere around me there were guns. Knives too. And the brightness on some of the clothes was blood.
I looked back at the leader of this informal army. "Thank you for rescuing me."
She shrugged. "It wasn't intentional. We were just scavenging and there you were."
"Still," I said. "I'm grateful."
"Are you?" she studied me closely. "You'd been taking industrial quantities of opiates and benzoids." I noticed that she used the correct medical term. So, educated too.
"Yeah. The time in that bunker just flew by."
She smiled slightly at that. "How much time, exactly?"
"Five years. Give or take."
"Since it started."
I nodded. "We were a government research project but – the shit hit the usual apparatus. There was an explosion and half the place collapsed with me on the wrong side of the rubble." It was close enough to the truth.
She seemed to accept it. "And what were you researching?"
"The cure."
I felt a buzz pass through the crowd like an electric current. The woman's face remained unreadable, though. "Did you find it?"
I crooked an eyebrow and looked around me.
"I guess not," she said. "But you – you told us you needed anti-psychotics. Those aren't usually needed for opiate detox."
"I have mild schizophrenia," I told her. "Totally controllable, with the right medication."
She seemed to take a little longer to accept this half truth. Or maybe she was just wondering what the hell kind of use a head-case like me was going to be to her. Some, she must have decided, because then she asked, "You're a doctor, right?"
I nodded.
"Academic?"
"And practical. I was a haematologist before." I already knew that I didn't need to say before what. Time was now divided into 'Before' and 'After'.
"Can you set a broken limb? Sew up a cut or take down a fever?"
"Yeah," I told her. "Give me the right equipment and I can do all that." I glanced over the deck to the distant shoreline, palm trees leaning over the pure white beach. "I know my stuff when it comes to tropical diseases, too."
She smiled fully and stood up. She was exactly my height, our shoulders level as she reached out to embrace me in a hug that I sensed was more ritual than emotional. "Then welcome to my kingdom," she said. "I used to have another name, but now people just call me Queen M." She smiled, as if it was a big joke. But I knew damn well that she was a queen, and I'd better be sure to treat her like one.
Queen M took me on the tour herself. The flagship was just what I'd thought: a luxury cruise liner which had been stranded off the coast of St Martin when the Cull struck and its crew were too sick to think about anything but dying.
"We threw off the corpses, scrubbed down the decks and took her over," Queen M told me. She was standing at the prow of the small catamaran they'd launched from the belly of the cruise ship, the wind rattling through the beads in her hair.
"Where do you get the fuel to move her?" I asked.
Queen M looked at me, judging the question. Why did I want to know? Was I figuring out their weaknesses? "We don't very often," she told me eventually. "But it's useful to know that we can if we need to."
The catamaran circled the prow of the boat and I got my first view of the rest of the fleet. Hundreds of vessels, almost all of them sailboats, some big enough to carry a crew of fifty, others barely big enough for one. There were fishing boats as well as luxury yachts, and somewhere in the middle I saw the flying boat which had taken me from the compound. After a second I noticed that all the vessels were all flying the same flag: a stylised drawing of a red blood cell – the outline of the platelet picked out on red against a white background. A survivor's celebration. And also a subtle sort of warning.
"All following you?" I asked, watching one ship hove away from the fleet, the wind billowing its sails.
"I brought them together," she said, a non-answer.
"And the rest of the world?" In the back of my mind, always, were the thoughts of him. Of what had happened back in London and whether there was any chance he might have survived it.
She looked at me almost with pity. "You don't know?"
I looked away, not liking what I was reading in her eyes. "I can guess, but…"
"Yes," she said. "Everything you've guessed, and worse. There's no government left in Europe or America. The Cull took most people, but other illnesses and fighting and just outright stupidity took an awful lot more. Infrastructure broke down. The rule of law. There are crops rotting on the plains of America while the people of New York starve. You wouldn't believe, would you, that civilization could fall apart so quickly?"
I shook my head. But I saw in her face that she'd believed it – and prepared for it.
After that, the catamaran headed for one of the more distant islands, a small hump on the horizon. We passed more ships as we travelled, some with long thin lines stretching into the water from their bows, trawling the deep waters for fish.
"Yours too?" I asked.
She nodded at me and then at the dark-skinned fishermen on the boat as they shouted a greeting. Nearer in to the island I saw something stretching across the waves, barring our way. "Fishing net?" I guessed.
"Wave farm." The turbines stretched entirely around the shore, ringing the small island in steel. They must have generated enough power to supply everyone on board the flagship and then some. Civilisation might have collapsed elsewhere, but it seemed to be alive and kicking here.
"Food?" I asked. She didn't answer, just waved an instruction to our skipper. The catamaran veered sharply to starboard, throwing up a cliff of water as it turned, and we headed for yet another island.
At first I thought a massive fire had scorched this island's soil, but as we drew nearer I realised that it was just black, volcanic sand. The interior was flat, stretching off to a distant horizon, but it was vibrantly green. Closer still and I could see the pattern to it, a patchwork of fields with flourishing crops. There were people there; slowly working their way up the lines of crops, planting or weeding, whatever the hell you did when you were a farmer.
"Food," I said.
"The Caribbean's a fertile place," she replied.
"And that's why you came here?"
"One of the reasons. My mother was Trinidadian you know. We used to come here on family holidays when I was a child." Her face had a faraway look for a moment, drifting in memory.
"It must have taken a while to set this up, though. Time to gather resources…"
She smiled. "The scarce resource these days is people. And all you really need to do to gather them is offer a tiny bit of hope."
I looked over at the island again, the crops thriving in the region's benign climate as field workers sweated under the tropical sun. Maybe she was right.
After the tour they took me back to the flagship, to a different room from the one I'd detoxed in, bigger and cleaner. I had the impression that I'd passed some kind of test. But the instant I stepped onboard my two shadows joined me; Soren and Kelis, falling into step behind me as naturally as if they'd been doing it for weeks. I kinked an eyebrow at Kelis – figuring she'd be the more communicative of the two – and she seemed to understand the question.
"Bodyguards," she said. "For you protection." She had a Latin – American accent. A pleasant, light voice with an air of lethal competence about her. Kelis looked like she could kill without even raising a sweat.
"And what exactly am I going to need protecting from?"
Kelis smiled slightly. "Oh, I didn't say we were going to be protecting you."
I shut the door of my cabin on her smile and Soren's frown and heard the key turn in the lock. As soon as I was alone I realised how exhausted I was, almost on the point of collapse. There was so much I should be doing, so many things I needed to find out about my rescuers, but there wasn't an ounce of energy left inside me to do it. I lay on the bed, closed my eyes and that was all I knew.
When I woke it was dark. I had no idea what time it was but it felt late. I realised that I needed a watch and ridiculously, it was that, more than anything, that made me realise I was back among people. I wondered if I should try sleeping again, but I knew it wouldn't come. It would take some time to get my body clock back in sync with the normal, sunlit world.
There was a small bathroom attached to the cabin with hot and cold running water. Someone had even left me towels, soap and shampoo. And when I emerged, naked and still a little damp, revelling in the sensation of finally, finally feeling clean, I found that the wardrobes had been filled with clothes, the same colourful silk and leather as I'd seen everyone else wearing. I understood the pirate theme, obviously, but I didn't quite get it. Just because you hung around on boats didn't make you a buccaneer. What wasn't I being told?
Something else had been left for me too. A vial of a strong anti-psychotic with a new, sterile syringe. Just one vial. There was something about that I didn't like, the implication that the drug was to be rationed, the threat of its withdrawal used as a way to control me.
Still, I pushed the dose into my arm, and slipped on a loose pair of maroon trousers and a tight-fighting white blouse. When I looked in the mirror I saw that I was still far too thin and far too pale, but washed and dressed I could at least pass for heroin – chic rather than straight-out junkie. My eyes were still ringed with black circles. I wondered if those would ever fade, the knowledge that had drawn them there was not something I could unlearn.
I opened my door and Kelis and Soren were there waiting, looking as if they might never have moved from where I'd left them hours ago. I nodded a wary greeting to Kelis, then Soren. Only she bothered to return it. His eyes looked almost as shadowed as mine.
"It's three o'clock," Kelis told me when she saw me surreptitiously glancing towards her wrist. "We saw you were awake." So that meant a hidden camera, shit!
"Sorry," I said, though really why should I apologise?
"Let's go for a walk," Soren said. "You can explore the rest of the ship." So maybe I wasn't a prisoner anymore. It seemed that Queen M trusted me now. We set off along another of those endless, intestinal corridors which seemed to fill the entire vessel. The cabin doors were all shut but it was impossible to tell if they were occupied.
"Are these all used?" I asked Kelis, but it was Soren who answered.
"They will be, eventually."
"By new recruits?" I asked, but that seemed to be it for him, conversationally.
At the end of the corridor was a larger room with marble stairs leading up and down from it and glass-fronted shops lining the walls, long-emptied of their goods. No money economy here, I guessed. At the foot of the stairs was what I'd been looking for, one of those cross-sectional maps of the ship that long-ago voyagers had used to orient themselves.
Jesus, it was huge. The ship must have carried a good thousand or more passengers when it was a cruise liner. I had a sudden, unwelcome vision of the way it must have been for them when the Cull struck. No time to make it to shore. A ship of the dying. Suddenly desperate for homes and families they never realised they'd said good-bye to for the last time. Queen M's crew must have had a strong stomach to clean all that out. The decks would have been literally running with blood.
But maybe Queen M's crew didn't mind the sight of blood too much.
We drifted along the corridors and decks of the ship like ghosts, my two shadows wafting along behind me. The whole place was eerily quiet. If I'd been a superstitious type, I might have thought it felt haunted.
I found the casino next, still fully stocked, piles of chips on green baize tables.
"Queen M opens this every Friday night," Kelis told me. "People come from all the ships."
I picked up a blue hundred-unit chip and spun it in my fingers. "And what do they gamble for?"
"Duties," Soren said. "Jobs no one wants."
"Like body-guarding cleaned-up junkies?" I asked, but only Kelis smiled.
I wandered for a while among the tables, threw some dice on the craps board, spun the roulette wheel. It seemed appropriate, somehow, that it landed on double zero. Everything you'd gambled lost.
But perhaps not everything of mine was. Somewhere, maybe, I had a husband. Did I want to tell them that? He was – well, he was a useful man in anyone's army. If I told them about him, there was a chance I could talk them into looking for him, bringing him back here.
I opened my mouth to tell Kelis – then slowly closed it again. No. I still knew too little about what was going on here.
After the casino I found the ship's kitchens, deserted at this time of night but still obviously in use. Kelis and Soren watched impassively as I pulled open store cupboards and refrigerators, poked my nose into spice racks and big bowls of dried herbs. They didn't go hungry here, that was for sure. A walk-in cool room was hung with animal corpses; tiny rabbits, birds, and something so big that I thought it could only be a horse.
I found four separate dining rooms, six bars, a theatre and a cinema. There was an indoor pool and a gym that looked like it still got plenty of use.
After a while, Kelis and Soren seemed to get into the spirit of it. When we hit a corridor we knew was unoccupied we went into the cabins, saw what was in the wardrobes, the dressing tables. They'd cleaned the corpses out when they'd taken the ship, but left the possessions behind. All these relics of unfinished lives. In one room there was a digital camera, the battery still miraculously charged. Morbidly, unable to stop myself, I flicked through the pictures in its memory. Almost all shots of an older woman, standing on a series of interchangeable beaches, sometimes with a chubby, grey-haired man beside her. In the last photo the two of them looked scared, but I didn't think they knew yet exactly what lay in store for them. I put the camera down and we didn't go into any more rooms after that.
Instead I headed down, below the water line, into the bowels of the ship. For the first time I sensed reluctance from my two guards, but neither of them said anything until I'd bottomed out into a drab metal corridor that looked like it belonged on a submarine, not a cruise liner.
"Time we went back," Kelis said.
I ignored her and walked further down this corridor that seemed to lead nowhere.
Her hand clamped on my arm like a vice. "Far enough."
I turned to look at her, but there was no humour in her face now. "Why?"
Soren shifted, just a little, and for the first time since we'd set out that night I got a glimpse of the gun he kept tucked in the waistband of his trousers. "No reason," he said. "I want to go back to sleep."
"So go," I said. "I can find my way back."
Kelis slowly released my arm, but she didn't look away from me. "Believe me Dr Kirik, there's nothing down there you want to know about."
After a second I shook my head and smiled as if it was no big deal. But I tried to memorise the route to that forbidden corridor as we wound our way back to my cabin.
Not that I was given much chance to use it. It seemed like the entire crew of the ship had something wrong with them and had just been waiting for a doctor to show up and fix it. Another day passed, and then another, and then a week and I still hadn't been allowed a single second in the ship without my two bodyguards doggedly following at my heels.
Then, on the eighth day, everything changed. I woke to the sound of pounding on my cabin door. They didn't wait for me to answer and a second later I opened my eyes, disoriented, to find Soren's blue ones looking down at me. His very blond lashes blinked three times over them without either of us saying anything.
"So, I guess you want me to get up," I said eventually.
He nodded, taciturn as ever. I wondered suddenly what he did when he wasn't traipsing around after me. He was one of those people you couldn't really imagine relaxing, knocking back a few drinks with his friends or sunbathing with a good book. He didn't look like a man who ever really enjoyed himself.
"Why?" I asked him. "Has something happened?"
"No," Kelis said. I realised for the first time that she'd been hovering by the door all this time, brown skin almost the same colour as the mahogany panelling on the wall behind her. "It's time for you to really earn your keep."
A catamaran took us to the island and from there a car drove us to the airport, just two strips of tarmac cut through the trees. There were twenty others with us, and this time there were none of the bright colours, the play-acting at pirates. This time it was clear that I was travelling with a regiment from someone's private army.
Soren was dressed all in black. There were ammunition belts slung over both his shoulders and he was carrying more guns than he had limbs. It was almost absurd, but I could see the way one of his thumbs was tapping a jittery rhythm against the barrel of the largest rifle and the small drop of blood forming on his lip where he couldn't seem to stop chewing it. Anything that made Soren nervous made me very nervous.
Kelis' face was as calm as ever, her body entirely motionless. Only two spots of colour, high in her cheeks, told me anything about what was going on inside her. I'd been given combats to wear, an ugly olive green that clashed horribly with my red hair. I felt ridiculous, a little girl playing at being a soldier.
They'd given me a medical kit but they hadn't given me a gun.
The small jet took off from the runway, wheels bumping alarmingly along the pock-marked surface, without anyone having said a word to me about where we were going. After an hour though, as the sea crawled on endlessly beneath us, I was sure that we were travelling east, crossing the Atlantic.
"May as well sleep," Kelis told me. "We'll be nine hours yet."
Going all the way to Europe then. Bringing me closer to my husband, a small, hopeful voice said in my head.
But not, in the end, close enough. I woke up seven hours later to a rising sun and the approaching coastline of a country that I knew wasn't England.
"France," Kelis said.
"OK," I answered. "Why?"
"Recruitment drive," one of the others told me, a middle-aged white man with leathery skin and a thin, mean face. He'd introduced himself as Curtis, though whether this was his first or his last name I never found out.
I remembered what Queen M had told me, that people were the scarce resource now. I thought about pirates and the British navy of old, and the weapons that everyone but me was carrying – and I began to guess what we were. A press gang.
Paris approached. More golden than I'd remembered it; like a vast human honeycomb. There were blots of darkness in the gold, relics of a recent burning. As the plane sank lower I saw that whole streets and neighbourhoods had been reduced to rubble. Strange, how people can face a disease that wants to kill them all and still have the energy to kill each other.
The plane sank lower still, low enough that I could make out the insect forms of people on the city's streets. Never alone, always in crowds of ten, or twenty, or greater. Safety in numbers.
Soon, the plane was low enough that I could see individual faces. I could also see the Eiffel Tower, prodding the sky above the heart of the city. I began to wonder where, exactly, they were planning on landing.
A few minutes later and we were a hundred meters or so above the roofs of the buildings and a few hundred meters away from the start of the Champs Elysees. "You have got to be fucking kidding me!" I said.
Kelis grinned, making her look like a little kid for about a tenth of a second. "What's the matter?"
The list that sprung into my head was too long to recite in the few seconds before we ploughed towards the ground at several hundred miles an hour. I settled for, "What about the cars?" I'd seen news broadcasts in the bunker, the streets of every major city choked with vehicles abandoned when their owners sickened and died.
"Cleared them the last time we were here," Soren said.
And when was that? I wanted to shout. How do you know people haven't been piling the road high with broken-down cars and trucks since you left?
No time left for that. The plane had started its final, fatal plummet to the ground. Now I could feel the breakfast I'd eaten four hours ago rising up to choke me and I think I might have screamed for real, because roads are narrow and aeroplanes are wide and no one in their right mind tries to set one down on top of the other in the middle of one of Europe's biggest cities.
The golden blur of buildings rushed by on either side. I looked across at Soren but he was just frowning faintly, like a man wondering whether there was a chance he'd forgotten to buy milk that morning. Kelis was still smiling, the expression more feral than happy.
And then we were only twenty feet above the road. There were cars there, three of them right ahead of us, but there was absolutely no way we'd be pulling up now. The wind screamed past the wings and I screamed too, but it didn't matter because the back wheels had finally hit the ground with a noise louder than I could have believed possible. As they scraped along with the front wheels still stubbornly in the air, the plane jerked underneath us like a wild horse which had just been saddled for the first time. Suddenly I wasn't the only one screaming.
I was buckled in, but the strap nearly broke around me as we swerved violently to the right. There was a hideous crunch beneath us, as if we'd just run over the world's largest cockroach and I knew that we'd passed the first of the cars. But there were still two more to go. For just a moment I wished that I hadn't taken the drugs which had killed the Voice inside me. That I could have heard it still, telling me that everything was going to be OK, that I was invincible. But maybe even the Voice would have had a few doubts right then.
Another swerve, to the left this time. Another horrible crunch. A firework display spat gold past the windows. After a second of confusion I realised that it was the spark of the undercarriage dragging over metal. There were screams outside the plane too now. Our landing must have come out of the blue sky without warning for those on the ground. I wondered if anyone had been caught beneath it. If some of the crunch we'd heard had been bone, not metal. But I didn't wonder too hard. Other people's deaths don't count for much when you're facing your own.
Then, almost incredibly, we were slowing down. The awful rasping sound of metal on tarmac was still shuddering the inside of the plane. I guessed that we were pulling one of the crushed cars along with us, the drag of the undercarriage fighting against our vast momentum. We were going no faster than a car on a motorway now, the buildings rushing past us on either side finally individual and recognisable. And then we stopped altogether.
There was a second of one of the most profound silences I'd ever heard. Then one of the men beside me whooped and soon the rest of the crew joined in, and I did too because, Jesus, it felt good to be alive.
When we got out, we saw that we'd stopped just ten feet shy of the Arc de Triomphe. I wasn't the only one who let out a jagged, slightly hysterical burst of laughter at the sight of the plane's nose, sniffing at the base of the world-famous landmark. The plane itself had seen better days: one of the wheels had torn off, and an engine was hanging loosely from the wing.
Soren scratched at his short cropped hair. "Guess we're going to have to do some work on that." I couldn't see it being a quick job. But then I had no idea how long we were supposed to be here.
"Philips, Mitchell," Curtis said. Two of the crew crouched to begin work, others standing close by to guard. "The rest of you – it's time to rock and roll."
Every single person in the party save me was suddenly holding some very serious ordinance in a very serious way, and the few ragged people I'd seen melting out of the side streets around us were melting right back into them. There was a 'don't fuck with us' vibe going on that made me feel safe and uneasy at the same time.
Paris was eerily quiet. This was the first time I'd been in a major city since the Cull. I'd known, intellectually of course, what it would be like. Less than two per cent of the population left alive by now – the place was bound to be a ghost town. But nothing prepares you for the sight of somewhere you've seen full of people, noise and motion suddenly so still. Worse because the buildings – the bones of the place – were mostly intact, with no visible reason for what had gone so wrong.
Still, but not deserted. There were subliminal flickers of motion out the corner of my eye as we walked the narrow side streets in strict military formation: point man, scouts, rear guard. They'd placed me in the centre of their small arrow of personnel. For protection or to stop me escaping? I couldn't tell, it didn't make much difference. There was no way I'd be heading off into these mausoleum streets alone.
We were being watched – everyone knew it – and not by friendly eyes.
Still, the attack was unexpected when it came. Queen M's people were watching forward, sideways, behind. They were watching above, scanning the roofs of the buildings for snipers or spies.
They weren't looking below.
Being right in the middle is no protection at all when the attackers are coming at you out of the sewers. There was a quick, loud grate of metal as a cover was shoved aside. And then the whine of bullets and the crack of their impact as someone stuck his arm out and fired round a full 360 degrees. I felt a stinging graze on my right thigh and knew that one of the bullets had winged me.
Not everyone got off so lightly. Kelis let out a grunt and I could see that a bullet had struck a rib, probably snapping it. Another of the men went down and didn't get up. More bullets thudded into his corpse, the blood now oozing slowly out without a functional heart to pump it.
A second later, Soren had stepped in front of Kelis, pushing her to the ground behind the tree-trunk solidity of his body. His semi-automatic was firing round after round, and even over the noise of them, I heard the splash of our assailant's body falling into the filthy water below.
But he wasn't alone. Drain covers were popping up all over the street, figures pulling themselves acrobatically out of the sewer. Our formation was shot to hell. Everyone had scattered after that first, shocking burst of gunfire. I felt horribly exposed, unarmed and unprepared. My first instinct was to fall to the ground, but that's where the threat was coming from. Instead I found myself kneeling beside the fallen, bloody body of our lost man. Up close I could see that he was young, maybe still a teenager. His eyes were open, blankly reflecting back the last daylight he'd ever seen.
I didn't know exactly what I was doing there. My body seemed to be moving without my mind having to give it any instructions, as if it had realised that this was more than the conscious me could deal with. I wondered for a second if I'd meant to try to help him, but then my hands were reaching for the gun he'd never had a chance to fire, slicking the barrel back and forward to load a bullet into the chamber. Before I'd quite registered what I was doing I'd fired a round point-blank into the head just emerging from the dark hole of the sewer in-front of me.
The force of the shot twisted the man round, giving me a perfect view of the exit wound ripped out of the back of his skull, the bloodied shards of bone and the white meat inside.
I heard the ragged breath of someone behind me and twisted, firing at the same time. The shot was wild but good enough to take the man in the chest. He fell, gasping, with hands clutched against his body, trying to keep in everything that belonged inside. It was a battle he couldn't win, and after a few seconds his hands slackened and fell. I'd taken two lives.
After that I made it to the side of the road, crouching in the lee of a small brick wall. I could taste the adrenaline in my mouth, a bitter tang. It had flooded my system the moment the fight had begun but already it was washing back out again, leaving fear and weakness in its wake. I saw my hand holding the gun begin to droop and then shake. I brought my other hand up to steady it but that one was shaking so hard now too that I was afraid I might pull the trigger by mistake.
After a moment, I let it drop. Only three of our attackers were still alive and above ground. As I watched, Kelis kicked one of them in the knee, snapping the joint with a wet crack I could hear from fifteen feet away. When he was down she reached round and snapped his neck. The other two didn't last much longer, and as suddenly as it had begun, it was all over.
Only then did I notice the uniform our attackers had been wearing, sashes draped round their shoulders in the old revolutionary Tricoleur. Old tribalism revived, I thought. And old instincts coming back, even in the most civilised of us. The cold ability to kill or be killed.
I thought I might be sick but in the end I wasn't. Because they hadn't even spoken to us before they'd opened fire and I wasn't in any way sorry they were gone.
"Hey, you OK?" Kelis asked, crouching down beside me and staring at me in unexpected concern, as if her own body wasn't leaking blood onto the cobbled pavement.
"I'm fine," I said. "Bullet grazed me, that's all. But let me take a look at that."
She frowned for a moment, whether unsure if I really was all right or just not keen to let me treat her, I couldn't tell. But then, the heat of battle wearing off, her pain must have begun to register and she slid down the wall beside me and nodded.
The wound wasn't as bad as I'd thought, though she hissed in pain as I probed it with my fingers. "I think one rib's cracked," I told her, "but the bullet's gone clean through and it hasn't nicked any major vessels."
She looked down for a moment longer, as if mesmerised by the sight of my white fingers moving along her brown skin. I realised that I was closer to her than I'd ever been, and for the first time really registered her as another person, with thoughts and feelings inside her head which I couldn't know.
Then she swatted my hand away impatiently and nodded over to the other side of the street. "Go see to Michaels. He took one in the leg and he doesn't look so good. I can bandage this up myself."
It took me half an hour to patch us all together. Michaels needed something more major than the field surgery I could offer him, but he was safer with us than alone so I improvised a splint for his leg and shot him so full of opiates that he wouldn't care if it dropped off on the journey. For a moment, just a moment, I felt a fierce desire to turn the needle round and plunge it into my own arm, feed the hunger which would never quite die. I didn't though. Not this time.
The constant, never-ending war of the addict. Not this time. Not the next. The one after that? Yeah, that one you're never quite sure about.
I realised that one of our attackers was still alive. She was groaning quietly, body slumped half in, half out of the sewer. She looked to be middle aged and bald from some skin condition which left her looking like a medieval leper. The woman had taken a bullet to the gut but I probably could have saved her. Curtis spared me the effort though, not even wasting a bullet on her, just smashing the butt of his rifle hard against her head, driving it down into the pavement until the skull shattered.
"Stupid fuckers," he said. "Try to get us every fucking time. Never fucking learn."
We walked off east, one man light and even more cautious. But I guess news of the fight travelled because no one else challenged us and the pressure of unseen eyes against my back eased.
The streets soon broadened again, into the grand, tree-lined boulevards of central Paris. I started to recognise the buildings we were passing from a romantic holiday he had taken me on. Palais de l'Elysee. La Madeleine. Our route led straight through La Place de la Concorde and I wondered again just where we were going. Who we were looking for.
No one had taken the gun from me after the fight, and it hung limp and useless from my hand as we walked. I guessed it was a sign of trust, but I didn't feel particularly flattered.
Kelis saw me looking down at it and gently pried it from my fingers. "Might want to reload that," she said, doing it for me. When she handed it back I tried to hold it in a firmer grip but it still felt alien in my hand.
He'd taught me to shoot, back when we first met, said it was something everyone should know how to do – almost as if he'd seen all this coming. But I'd never learned to love guns the way he did. I didn't like the potential for death I could always feel curled up in their barrels.
When we stopped at the huge glass pyramid, I thought for an insane moment that we'd come sightseeing, that this was what it had all been about. But the tense set of Kelis' shoulders and the sudden tight wariness around Soren's eyes, told me different. This, for whatever reason, was our target.
"So we're what?" I said to Kelis. "Stealing artwork? Desperate to get our hands on the Mona Lisa? Unable to go another minute without looking at the Venus de Milo?"
She flicked a quick, hard smile at me. "Long gone. We're here for something much more valuable."
"Is it going to require the use of my gun?"
"That's not the plan, but…" Kelis shrugged.
Right, because when did anything ever go according to plan? My hand tightened on the trigger, so hard that I almost let loose a volley when the lone figure emerged from the glass pyramid. But he was unarmed. Hands held high.
Curtis wasn't taking any chances. He waited until the figure walked right up to him and then grabbed him round the neck, pulling him into the shelter of an old magazine stand.
The man didn't resist when Curtis frisked him, and he proved not to be armed. He was thin-faced, deep smile lines etched at the sides of a wide mouth, hair so brown it was almost black. When Curtis finally released him, the smile lines deepened as he grinned at us, as if he wasn't staring down the barrels of enough heavy ordinance to take on a small army.
"My name is Jules," the man said, his French accent only faint. "Welcome to Paris."
"Yeah, it's been real welcoming so far," Curtis said. "I'll be giving it a five star write-up in my travel guide."
The man frowned. "Ah. I think perhaps you have met with the Revolutionary Guard. They see it as their duty to protect this great city against incursions from elsewhere."
"No kidding," Kelis said. "And what about you? You planning to live up to the Parisian reputation for warm hospitality?"
He turned to face her, hands lifted in a conciliatory gesture. "We are always keen to welcome newcomers." And then, for just a moment, the smile slipped from his face. "We also have twice as many armed men as your numbers, and not all of them are inside the pyramid. But this does not matter, I think, because you are not here to make war."
Curtis' mouth pulled into a thin line. "No. That's not what we're here for at all."
It surprised me how readily Curtis allowed his men to surrender their weapons, leaving half his force behind to guard them while the disarmed contingent – myself included – was led into the pyramid by Jules.
Kelis hadn't been kidding. Everything of value was long gone, horded by some unknown collector for some unknown purpose. The bare walls of the gallery looked like an accusation, or a metaphor. The stripping away from this new life of everything that wasn't purely functional.
Still, there was no denying it made a great base. There were fifty-six of them here, camped out in the shell of the museum, sitting on a stockpile of weapons and ammo they'd scavenged from who knew where. They weren't soldiers – there were families, children as young as two and a silver-haired old woman well past eighty – but they knew how to fight. Or they'd learnt, in those last five brutal years.
They had food too, fresh food. After we'd toured the empty, dismal galleries of the museum and seen the homes they'd carved out for themselves in the shell, they took us to their farm. I smiled when I saw it. The Twilleries, the formal gardens long dug up, rows of lettuce, beets, potatoes, planted in place of the roses and neatly mowed lawns.
"How can you defend all this?" Kelis asked.
Jules shrugged. "We have guards."
But she shook her head. "Not enough. Not for this."
He looked at her narrowly, assessing. Then he nodded. "No, not for this. But without us it would not grow so well, nor the hydroponics underground. We have scientists among our number, agronomists, and biochemists. We make medicines too. They, the Revolutionary Guard, and others like them, let us make the things they need. They take what we give and we make sure that the price for taking it all would be too high."
Curtis looked impressed. Or maybe he was just pissed off – he had the kind of face which made it hard to tell. "We want to trade," he told Jules. "Groups like yours and ours need to connect, share technology. Rebuild society from the bottom up."
Jules nodded, a reflex gesture rather than an indication of agreement. "Trade requires the possession of something that another desires. And we have everything we need."
"When was the last time you ate a pineapple?" Curtis asked.
Jules smiled. "That wasn't tinned?"
"Coconut, too. Peaches, lemons, oranges. Fresh fish, fresh meat. And that's just the basics." It was the most animated I'd seen Curtis. His face was filled with an almost evangelical fervour and for the first time I considered that Queen M's kingdom might be something her people believed in. "We have higher technologies too. Some manufacturing. We have access to oil fields."
Jules looked suddenly wary. "You have all this, and yet you would cross an ocean to trade with us. What is it we have that you want?"
Curtis's expression shifted, just a little, and I knew that whatever answer he was about to give, it wouldn't be the truth. But for the moment the conversation moved on, and soon they were bartering, figuring out exchange rates in a world without currency. They talked about technologies, the possibility of getting generators running again without enough people to staff them. There was drinking and eating too and after a while some chatting and bonding. It felt strangely ordinary. Just one group of people visiting another and chewing the fat. A little boy came to sit in my lap, his curly brown hair brushing against my chest as his head turned backwards and forwards, following a conversation he couldn't understand.
Some time after midnight, it all began to wind down. Jules hesitated, then told us that we could sleep in the safety of the Louvre with them. I was the only one watching Curtis' face as he said it, and I knew instantly that he'd made a terrible mistake in his invitation.
The attack came at precisely four in the morning. At the first sound my eyes snapped open, then snapped to the clock on the far wall – an instinct I'd picked up years ago when he and I had been living together, and there was no telling when he might get called away or where to. Four o'clock is the deepest part of the night – the time when most people who die in their sleep pass away.
But there weren't many deaths that night. Not as many as there would have been if our crew had struck during the day. I guess that was the point. By the time my eyes were open and I was fully awake there were already three bodies on the ground by the door. I could hear the sounds of fighting further out and Curtis was holding a big black Beretta against Jules' head. The awareness of it spread like a ripple through our hosts and, one by one, the weapons they'd picked up were dropped to their sides.
Somewhere at the back of the room a baby was crying. I could hear the harsh, desperate whispers of its mother as she tried to quiet it down. She was probably afraid that our people would kill it, if she couldn't get it to stop. I wasn't sure they wouldn't.
For a moment, Jules' eyes glared into mine through the gloom and I read a bitter accusation there. I wanted to tell him that I hadn't known this was going to happen – except that would be a lie.
Soren had a gun in his hand and he looked happy, or at least satisfied. He herded our hosts out of the gallery, pushing them towards the grand marble stairs that led to the ante-chamber below the glass pyramid, then up into the big, empty square. The sky was dark and starless above us.
Kelis carried one of the women who had been wounded in the brief crossfire, blood oozing from her side onto Kelis' t-shirt. She avoided my eye as she walked past and I wanted to believe that it was because she was ashamed – because I'd thought I might be starting to like her.
There was more sobbing now, not just from the baby. They thought we were going to kill them all; a death squad come to end their little social experiment. But that wasn't it at all.
They divided them up: men, women, old, young. The four oldest were pushed into a far corner, away from everyone else – discarded. Historical memories washed up, of other times when one group of humans had sorted another in this way, but I let them ebb. We weren't a death squad. I was sure of that, at least.
"Check them over," Curtis said to me.
I folded my arms, not wanting him to see them shaking. "Check them over for what?"
He frowned. "Disease. Injuries – you know, doctor stuff."
"Treat them like animals, you mean."
I saw his hand tighten on the trigger of his gun, the barrel twitching reflexively towards me.
"I'll treat the wounded," I said, and there was no disguising the shake in my voice. "That's the only 'doctor stuff' I'm prepared to do."
"Listed, lady. We've been doing this for a long time before you joined the show. And we can carry on just fine without you."
"So why do you need me at all?" I asked.
His lips curled in a sneer, but Soren stepped forward before he could speak. "Check them all out," he said, "and you can treat that lady. She'll die if you don't look at her. You can see that."
I could. The bleeding from her side hadn't slowed, and her face was the ivory pale of someone a few pints short of a full load. "Promise me no one will die," I said.
"No one will die," Curtis said, so quickly that I knew there had to be some kind of catch. "You've got my word on that. If everyone plays nicely, no one gets hurt," he added, and I could see that he wasn't lying.
The woman's injuries took half an hour to patch up: a pressure bandage, some stitches and antibiotics. I wanted to give her some painkillers too, but Curtis' hand clamped around my arm as I reached back into my medicine bag. "She'll live without that, won't she?"
I nodded reluctantly.
"Then it's time to do your job."
I approached Jules first. His face was numb with shock. I stood awkwardly in front of him for a moment, wondering what exactly I was supposed to be doing. Taking his temperature? His pulse? Holding his balls and telling him to cough? In the end I settled for the first two and rolled back his eyelids to check for anaemia. Curtis was still looking at me impassively, so I took his blood pressure too – sky high, but that was hardly surprising – and then I examined his tongue. After that I turned to Curtis and shrugged. What the hell else was I supposed to do?
"Strip," Curtis said, and for one moment I thought he meant me. Then he turned to include all our captives in the instruction. "Strip – all of you."
Now the visual really was like something from the darkest pages of history. I saw the women look at each other, look at the men – look at their children. But when there are fifty odd guns pointing in your direction, there isn't much time for modesty. And they'd heard Curtis' promise that no one would get hurt. I was clinging on to that hope too. Quietly, trying not to look anyone in the eye, I gave each of them a more thorough exam, peering at bellies sagging from childbirth or the bitter scars of acne on a teenage face. After each one I gave Curtis a report, a run down of past ailments, possible present conditions. A young woman's eyes stared at me, wide and uncomprehending, when I told her she was in the late phases of breast cancer, almost certainly fatal.
After me it was Kelis, questioning each of them about their background, their qualifications, their skills. They were kept shivering and naked as they answered in the chill Paris air, dank with a mist which smelled as if it had come straight from the sewers.
And then, finally, Curtis began pointing. There were seventeen empty seats on the plane and fifty-six people to choose from. I could do the math. The true scarce resource these days are people, Queen M had told me. And I guess however many plantations and wind farms you build, you can still only pump out new people at the same old slow rate.
Unless you go and steal them from somewhere else, of course.
A lot of jet fuel for seventeen new subjects, but you're looking at a lifetime of work. Especially if you pick the young and the healthy, and you leave behind the old and the barren. The seven year-old child – bright-eyed and full of energy – had been sorted into the wheat; worth the investment of a few more years training. But the baby, the child's sister, got left behind – a chesty cough that might just be a cold, might be something more serious.
I saw the awful realisation of what was about to happen in the mother's eyes a second before she started screaming. Curtis didn't say anything, just backhanded her across the mouth. She fell to the ground, the scream boiling down to a desperate whimper.
"Whatever you're doing," Jules said, "don't do it. Please. We're happy here. We're… we'll trade with you. We'll give you what you need. We'll… anything."
Curtis shrugged, looking not just uncaring but actively bored. I wondered how many times he'd witnessed this little scene before. Just variations on a theme to him by now, I guessed, the same words coming out of different mouths. "Yeah, we'll take some technology back with us," he said. "But the only thing we really want is you."
"Then take us all! You're separating husbands and wives. Families. You might as well kill the people you are leaving behind – you know they have no chance on their own." Jules voice was soft and persuasive, but I could tell he already knew that Curtis was deaf to any plea or persuasion. His face hardened.
"Fine. Take us. Point a gun to our heads and take us – but do not expect us to work with you. Do not imagine that every second of every day we won't be searching for a way to pay you back for what you have done."
And that was the one thing I still didn't understand. Queen M could take them, but how could she control them? How do you keep a whole slave kingdom docile? I'd seen the scientists working on her flagship, the people in the fields – unguarded.
It was Soren who put the final little piece into the puzzle, the picture springing out clear and clever, and ugly as hell. He drew something from his belt that I'd taken for yet another gun. But I saw now that the barrel was too thin to spit out conventional bullets. It was meant for something else.
He approached Jules first, and the man flinched away. But when Soren dropped to his knees in front of him, he looked briefly taken aback, not quite sure where this could be heading. Before he'd even begun to guess, Soren grabbed his leg, pressed the barrel of the strange silver gun against his thigh, and pressed.
Jules let out a scream of profound agony, dropping helplessly to his knees as Soren moved on to the next woman, shooting whatever it was into her too. He turned back to me before the third victim, waiting for this one, struggling and screaming, to be restrained by our soldiers. "They'll need dressings for that," he said.
There was no point refusing. The wound on Jules' leg where the gun had fired was small but weeping a blackish fluid, as if something had penetrated to the deepest parts of him. It would get infected if I didn't cover it soon. I tried to figure out what had happened as I worked on him and the rest. The only thing I knew for sure was that the hole wasn't empty – something was lodged inside.
The process didn't stop with those who'd been chosen. The discards, too, were shot. Only with the baby did Soren hesitate, before a short, angry jerk of Curtis' head urged him on and – face turned away – he pressed the gun against his tiny leg too. The child's agonised wail went on and on, overlaying everything that followed.
"You've all been fitted with tracking devices," Curtis said flatly. "Long range, ten years of battery life. And that," he said to Jules now, seeming to take a sort of pleasure in it, "is why you'll be doing every fucking thing that we tell you. Because not only will we know where you are at any time, we'll know where they are." He pointed at the small, frightened group of those to be left behind. "And if you do something we don't like, they'll be the ones to suffer."
I realised suddenly that Kelis was hovering at my shoulder, watching my face rather than the bloody little drama playing out in front of us. She touched my shoulder lightly. "We're taking them to a better life, you know. We're rebuilding society – the only people who are."
"And that makes this all right, does it?" I asked bitterly. "That's how you live with yourself?"
She shrugged one elegant shoulder. "I live with myself because I haven't got any more choice than they do." She rolled up the rough green cotton of her combats, and I saw a small white scar on her outer thigh, right where her own implant had gone in.
It only took me a second to understand it all. My fingers shook as I rolled up my own trouser leg. And even though I was expecting it, the sight of the puckered little scar on my right thigh still sent a wave of nausea through me, the bile rising in my throat.
"I don't have a choice," Kelis said. "And neither do you."
The plane was fixed by the time we returned, but there wasn't much of an air of celebration as we climbed onboard. The newcomers were silent, shell-shocked. I caught the eyes of the little seven-year-old girl as we taxied and took off, and read a dawning knowledge in them that someone that young wasn't meant to have.
I'd been sleeping, fitfully, when I felt the plane begin to descend. A glance at my watch told me we'd only been airborne a few hours, and I looked out of the window and saw the green-grey land beneath us. No way was that St Lucia or anywhere else in the tropics.
Ireland, I realised as the plane landed, more cleanly this time, a strip of concrete that might have been a road once. Curtis didn't take everyone this time, just Jules and me and four of the others – no explanation, just a brusque order to follow him.
The people he was looking for were nearly a mile's walk away, over the hills and the long wet grass. There was a fresh smell to the air, cleansing after the decay of Paris, but I didn't find it refreshing.
When they saw us they raised their hands to their heads, three little matchstick figures in the distance. They must have known we were trouble but they didn't try to run. Perhaps they'd realised there wasn't any point.
Curtis was watching them through military grade binoculars, still and silent for two minutes. Whatever he saw must have satisfied him because he made a sharp gesture and we all walked forward. They stayed stock still, waiting.
"There were six of them when we came," Curtis said. "We took two. The rest were too old or two weak. They had the trackers put in, same as you. But I guess they just didn't believe us."
Close up, and they'd gone from stick-men to stick-thin real people. I guess subsistence farming isn't so easy when you have a climate like Ireland's and no wind generators. I thought they were probably younger than they looked, but fear and hunger had hollowed out their faces. They could have been in their sixties, three women and a man, stooped over the hoes with which they'd been tilling the fields.
A fine drizzle had started as we walked, plastering everyone's hair to their heads, dripping from the tips of their noses. The same nose on each of them, with a little up-tilt at the end that must have looked cute back when they were children. All the same family, I guessed. The separation must have hit them hard.
"They ran away," Curtis suddenly said, to us and to the four forlorn figures in front of us. "Your sisters or wives or, who the fuck knows, maybe both. Just so as you know who to blame for what's about to happen."
Then he pulled out his gun and shot all four of them – two in the back as they'd finally realised that they needed to run away. Even the blood looked grey in the watery sunlight. I wanted to look away, but I didn't. Everyone ought to have someone watch, and care, while they die.
And then we went back to the plane. Lesson over. Of course, there was no way of knowing if what he'd told us was true, if they really were the relatives of runaway slaves. For all I knew, they could have been some random strangers he'd seen from the air.
But in a way, that was the point. Because now we knew exactly how ruthless he was. We knew he didn't make empty threats.
I saw in the hopeless droop of Jules' shoulders that the knowledge had broken him. He'd do whatever Queen M wanted him to. And, in time, maybe he'd even come to enjoy his new life. Now that he knew he had no choice, he could forgive himself for his desertion – I knew how people's psychologies worked. Self-justification. Cognitive dissonance. We need to believe that what we're doing is the right thing, always. If our beliefs say it isn't, we're more likely to change our beliefs than our actions. I guess human beings are lazy that way.
In his own brutal way, Curtis had given Queen M's newest recruits a sort of freedom – to embrace their new life without guilt.
But not me, I'd learnt a different lesson. If I wanted to escape I'd have to be very clever, and very, very careful.