The hummingbird killer, p.28
The Hummingbird Killer, page 28
It’s good to know her reckless self-destructive behaviour worked out for somebody, at least. ‘You don’t think Comma would have come for you?’
He stares down at his beer. ‘Like I said, everyone thought I was dead. And I… I don’t know if knowing otherwise would have changed anything.’
Isabel knows that feeling – letting yourself fall and trusting that the guild will be there to catch you, only to realise they’re the ones who pushed you and there’s no safety net at the bottom. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah.’ Will shrugs and finishes his pint. ‘I’d say I ought to get to bed, but if I could sleep, I’d be there already.’
‘Nightmares?’
‘Something like that.’
Isabel considers telling him why she’s so restless tonight, but she doesn’t know him enough for that, so she contents herself with taking a few sips of her drink and saying, ‘Most people get them. For a while I thought I was the exception to that rule.’
‘But not any more, or you wouldn’t be here.’ Will calls for a refill, and the bartender obliges. ‘You’re young to be in this business.’
‘Nah,’ she says. ‘I was young when I started, but now…’ Now she’s exactly like everyone else, wasting the prime of their life in this shitty basement drinking hole.
‘You were Cocoon,’ he says. ‘Weren’t you?’
She looks up sharply. She didn’t realise it was public knowledge already: news about Project Emerald might be spreading, but Comma’s history has yet to come out. ‘How do you know about Cocoon?’
‘One of the guys in the lab used to be Parnassiinae. Under Ian Ryans.’
At the mention of her father’s lab, Isabel tastes bile. She should have known his team would remember her – her father never missed the chance to brag about his daughter. Or to use her as a lab rat.
She takes a hasty sip of her drink and tries to sound calm and unsurprised as she says, ‘Oh. Well, that would explain it.’
‘So you were?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I was the youngest.’
‘Can’t have been easy.’
‘It wasn’t.’ It made her into this. Sometimes she thinks she’s only scratched the surface of the damage Cocoon did to her.
For a while they sit together in silence. The close atmosphere of the bar and the murmur of other conversations lulls Isabel into something as close to tranquillity as she’s going to get, and the cool glass against her fingers is a soothing contrast to the raging blood in her veins. Part of her wants to stay there all night.
Eventually, Will says, ‘I’m heading back to my room. Want to walk with me?’
Isabel hesitates, then drains her glass. ‘Sure.’
Back in her tiny room, she sleeps, and dreams of dying.
When she ventures downstairs for breakfast the next morning, she’s informed that a car is coming at eleven to take her to Chadwick Green, just before visiting hours begin. Mortimer was asking for you, she reminds herself, but it doesn’t dispel the dread that gathers in her stomach at the thought of going back to the hospital. She’s been there dozens of times since she was seventeen, but it still holds too many bad memories to feel like a neutral location. Besides, she’s afraid to see how badly hurt Mortimer might be, knowing it’s her fault.
A glance in the bathroom mirror tells her she looks as exhausted as she feels, yesterday’s make-up smudged. It strips away the years, her seventeen-year-old self right there behind her eyes, and Isabel’s suddenly grateful that Laura packed her make-up bag. She needs her armour for this: there’s no way she can go back to Chadwick Green looking like she never left.
When she’s done, hair moussed and eyelids glittering, she takes a moment to put in her piercings: a row of small black rings along one of her ears, and a sharp little stud in the lobes of each. A knife fits easily in her boot.
Isabel looks in the mirror again. Better. The fear’s still there, but she can’t see it any more.
She goes down to the lobby to wait for her ride. It’s a bare, concrete space with little ornament and few soft furnishings, and it feels cavernous with the cold morning breeze whistling through the open doors. There’s too much air around her, piercing her from every side, full of invisible enemies waiting to leave tiny wounds under her skin that nobody else can see. It takes Isabel a minute to realise that what she’s feeling is cold, her emotions so fraught that she can hardly separate them from what her body is experiencing. She zips her leather jacket to the top and crosses her arms over her chest while she waits. It makes her feel a little safer.
The drive from Cowlam to Weaverthorpe is shorter than she’d like, the traffic sparse, and Chadwick Green Hospital looms into sight before she’s ready for it. Somewhere in there is the room where she nearly died, where she dragged herself back from the brink, where she traded her freedom for survival. Maybe they’ve put Mortimer in the same room, so that Ronan can make her go back there.
The staff are clearly expecting her: she’s barely greeted the receptionist before she’s told, ‘Third floor, room six.’ That’s not her old room. Isabel thanks them, relieved, and heads for the stairs, passing doctors and agents alike.
The third floor is relatively quiet, with only two rooms occupied. Three and six. Isabel steels herself for the sight of her friend lying wounded in a bed, and knocks on the door of six.
A nurse opens the door. She gives Isabel a quick once-over and says, ‘You must be Isabel. We thought you might come.’
She steps nervously over the threshold and looks at the figure in the bed. It’s not Mortimer. Even with wounds she knows she’d recognise him, and this isn’t her teacher. Nor is it a stranger.
The figure in the bed is her mother.
Isabel grabs the chair next to the door for support, willing her legs not to drop her, not again. ‘Is everything okay?’ says the nurse. ‘Shall I leave the two of you alone?’
‘No,’ she begins, fighting to stay calm enough to breathe. ‘No, please don’t go.’ But she herself doesn’t have the strength to leave.
Her mother doesn’t look dangerous, lying there with her eyes shut. Under the glare of the hospital lights, Isabel sees what she didn’t notice at Hummingbird: that her mother’s jaw has been broken, and has set badly; that her nose is crooked; that she has new scars – new to Isabel, at least, but long-healed. Signs that her defection didn’t come without some… encouragement. Her legs are hidden below the blanket, but one is bulky inside a cast. They’d have had to reconstruct most of the kneecap, she imagines, and she can’t bring herself to regret that.
If she wanted to, she could destroy Judith before she opens her eyes. Lean over and throttle her, smother her, steal her breath before she can wake. But the mere sight of her has caught Isabel in a vice, squeezing her with fear, and she’s dizzy, her pulse racing and skipping as though her heart can’t decide whether to keep beating or whether to give up just to get away from her.
Even without moving, her mother has reduced Isabel to nothing, and she hates her for it.
Isabel chokes slightly when she tries to breathe, and Judith opens her eyes, fixing her gaze on her daughter.
‘Issy,’ she says. ‘You came to see me.’
34 MALESPERI (TO DESPAIR)
The nurse is gone. Isabel is alone in this room with her mother and her lies and a lifetime of fear, carving her open, grinding her into nothing.
‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you,’ says Judith, almost fondly. ‘Our little Moth. I have all the cuttings. You know, your father would be so proud of you, Issy.’
‘I killed him.’ She means for it to sound brash and defiant, but it’s barely a whisper. ‘Or did you forget that?’
Her mother’s lips are colourless and thin. The monitors and IVs chain her down, the cast around her leg immobilising her, but none of that reduces the sense of threat. ‘I don’t forget anything,’ says Judith. ‘It’s a shame you couldn’t see his vision. He built Katipo for you, Issy. A place where you could be the best, and never have to hide it.’
‘I didn’t want it. I never wanted it.’ The Isabel who encountered Judith in Hummingbird has abandoned her, leaving behind a frightened child. Isabel would be furious with herself if she could muster the strength; instead, all she feels is shattered, the encounter a shock even though it shouldn’t have been, piercing straight through her defences.
‘You were always so determined,’ says her mother, as though she hasn’t spoken. ‘Neither of us thought you should start training so young, but you wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t take no for an answer. So we let you, and you proved us all wrong. Of course you did. It’s in your blood.’
That’s not how Isabel remembers it. That isn’t true. It can’t be true. She remembers—
‘But Comma didn’t get it, did they? Unstable, they called you, and maybe they were right. All those terrible things you did to yourself. Locking yourself away in your room without food for days on end because of some imagined problem. Hurting yourself in a frenzy, saying you weren’t good enough… your body was never enough for you, was it? You kept trying to destroy it. Poor little Issy.’
‘Stop.’ Isabel’s voice is hoarse and desperate, because memory is the one thing she’s never been able to trust, and everything Judith is saying worms its way deep into the cracks of her self-assurance. ‘Stop. You know that isn’t true.’
‘Your father did his best to restrain you, but you were a wild thing. And when you got yourself together, you used to scream that it was us. You blamed us for your madness.’
Isabel swallows, and her next denial is stronger. ‘You know that’s not how it happened.’ She hasn’t spent three years learning to live with her trauma to have her mother lie to her face about it. And sure, maybe her version of living with it looks a lot like repression, but she knows what happened. She remembers what happened.
Doesn’t she?
‘Issy, it’s okay,’ says her mother. ‘You can admit it now. You’re so much better, aren’t you? Comma has given you the help you needed.’
‘There was never anything wrong with me.’ Nothing except what they did to her. Nothing except what they made her. Everything rotten about Isabel Ryans is their fault.
‘Nothing wrong with you? All those nights you spent screaming at nothing, at nightmares and hallucinations, tearing at your skin with your fingernails?’
‘I didn’t do that to myself. You did it. You hurt me.’ Maybe if she says that enough times she’ll be able to hang onto the truth, which even now is slipping away, pushed out by the doubt she told herself she’d never feel again.
She can’t, in this moment, remember how it was that she was able to point a gun at her mother. How she had the courage to shoot. Not when Judith’s voice is getting inside her head and breaking apart her courage. She knows there’s a knife in her boot, but the idea of reaching for it is utterly alien, unknowable.
‘We were so worried. Do you know how difficult it is, looking after a child as damaged as you? What a strain it can be?’ Judith’s always been so fucking good at playing that part, the put-upon parent talking to a wayward child. ‘Sometimes the only way we could get a night’s sleep without worrying you’d hurt yourself was to tie you down.’
‘You tied me down so I couldn’t fight back.’ Isabel can hardly speak. She’s furious that her mother thinks she can tell these lies and get away with it, but she’s angrier that part of her almost believes them. Judith’s tricking her into doubting her own truths, destroying her memories of the life she fled. Wants her to believe this doctored, violent version of her story. ‘You burned a butterfly into my chest. All my scars—’
‘Delusional,’ says her mother, shaking her head. Her hair is silvery grey against the white pillow; Isabel wants to rip it from her scalp. ‘Such a tragedy in a girl your age. None of Comma’s psychologists could help you.’
She never said a word to the Cocoon therapists about her scars. She always assumed they knew the truth. ‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up.’
‘Issy,’ Judith reproves her, ‘don’t speak to your mother like that.’
Isabel puts her hands over her mouth as though she’s about to throw up, feeling the warmth of her breath on her palms and the press of her thumbs on the tender skin of her throat. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s a reminder that she’s alive. That she’s awake.
That she got out.
You’re safe, Isabel tells herself. You’re safe now. But if this were really a nightmare, she’d have woken up by now, sweating and tear-stained but awake and safe, and here she is and she can’t wake up. It’s a thousand times worse for being real.
‘You know you’re lying,’ she says unsteadily. ‘You know none of this is true.’
‘We loved you so much. We only wanted what was best for you. You had so much potential, but your emotional issues held you back. It’s clear that’s still a concern.’ Judith heaves a sigh. ‘It’s disappointing.’
Isabel feels a flicker of triumph. ‘I’ve never wanted anything more than to disappoint you.’
‘Always so defiant.’
She could walk out of the door right now, walk away from all of this, but something keeps her here. Something that demands to know how Judith convinced Ronan to keep her in a hospital rather than a cell, despite her defection. And deeper than that, some masochistic fascination with how far this will go and how much it will hurt. Like she’s staying almost to see how bad it can get.
Isabel has never been good at knowing when to stop.
She looks at her mother. ‘You’re a liar,’ she says simply. ‘No matter what else you say, you will never again convince me that’s not the case.’
Her mother shrugs. ‘And you’re so truthful, are you?’ she says, and smiles, teeth bright in the hospital lights like the after-image on Isabel’s eyelids when she wakes from a nightmare. ‘I suppose you’ve told Ronan all about your Free Press friends and the abolitionists you were meeting with at the library. And the smugglers, of course.’
So Judith knew. Of course she did. And she kept it to herself, waiting for the right moment to play her hand, but she probably knew the library staff were abolitionists before Isabel did. ‘You were spying on me this whole time,’ she says, nauseated. ‘Weren’t you?’
‘Who would begrudge a mother the chance to see her daughter grow up?’ says Judith sweetly. ‘It took a little wrangling, when my Daphne stopped reporting, but I did think there was a certain poetry to hiring an Atwood to replace her. He’s been mine for years, you know,’ she adds. ‘If Katipo had thrived, he’d have thrived with it. He had the good sense to keep a low profile when it failed, but once he knew I was alive… Well, it’s been illuminating.’
It’s nothing Ronan hadn’t already told her, but it confirms that Judith was Kieran’s main contact, which is something – it minimises the number of people Isabel still needs to find and eliminate. ‘So what happened to Daphne?’ she asks, carefully casual.
‘She—’ Judith falters for the first time, catching herself on the verge of giving too much away. Then her smile’s back. ‘You don’t know, do you?’
More mind games. ‘I’m sure we’ll find her,’ says Isabel – her, that’s a piece of information they didn’t have before, either. ‘You’re a shitty secret-keeper, you know that? No wonder you keep turning traitor. Comma’s well rid of you.’
‘Issy…’ begins her mother, but before she can continue, the door opens.
Isabel turns. Daragh. His eyes widen in alarm at the sight of Isabel, and he reaches out a hand towards her. ‘You shouldn’t be here, Isabel,’ he says. ‘You weren’t meant – I wasn’t expecting – Why are you here?’
Her fragile composure threatens to shatter under the unexpected weight of a kind voice. ‘I was just leaving,’ she says, and grabs him by the arm to pull him from the room with her. There are some visitors’ chairs in the corridor outside, but they’re not far enough away, not with the glass panel in the door through which her mother might still be able to see her. ‘Is there somewhere we can go?’
Daragh takes her hand, his firm grip more comforting than a thousand words of reassurance as he leads her into an empty patient room at the far end of the corridor. ‘I didn’t know you were going to see her.’
‘I didn’t mean to.’ Out of sight of her mother, her hands are beginning to shake. She sits on them, trying to contain the fear. ‘I came to see Mortimer. The receptionist must have given me the wrong room number.’
‘Mortimer’s…’ Daragh trails off. ‘Isabel, whatever your mother said to you, ignore it. You’re safe now.’
‘She tried to say she never hurt me. That I did it to myself.’ Painting Isabel as an unreliable narrator of her own life, making lies of all the time she’s spent working to reclaim her past and everything she was never allowed to talk about.
‘She’s trying to mess with your head,’ says Daragh. ‘You can’t let her.’
As if it’s that easy to decide not to let Judith gaslight her. ‘Why are you treating her?’ she says. ‘Why is she here? She should – she should face justice. For defecting. For what she did to me. Instead, you put her in a room like that, not in a cell, not in a grave where she should be, not—’
‘You shot her in the kneecap and then forced her to walk, Isabel,’ says Daragh, without judgement. ‘She lost a lot of blood. If she’s to face trial – and she will face trial – she needs to be well enough to do that.’
‘But you’re letting her just… talk to people, tell them whatever she wants, and Ronan will take her word over mine, and—’
‘He won’t.’ Her doctor sounds very sure about that. ‘He’s seen your scars, as have I, and he knows more about Cocoon than you realise. There is no way he believes what Judith is saying in there. Don’t doubt me on this.’ He squeezes her hand. ‘And don’t doubt yourself. You know what happened to you.’
‘You think I’m doubting myself?’
‘I know you are.’
Daragh knows her too well, and notices too much. ‘She’s always been like this,’ she says. ‘The way she lies. For years, I didn’t know what was real, what I’d made up. It wasn’t until…’ She rubs at her scarred left palm with her thumb. ‘This. It wasn’t until this that I realised I wasn’t confused, because I didn’t do this, I wouldn’t have done this. But it was only after I left home that I felt sure of any of it. As long as they weren’t there, I could be certain about what happened, but hearing her talk like that blurred all the edges again.’
He stares down at his beer. ‘Like I said, everyone thought I was dead. And I… I don’t know if knowing otherwise would have changed anything.’
Isabel knows that feeling – letting yourself fall and trusting that the guild will be there to catch you, only to realise they’re the ones who pushed you and there’s no safety net at the bottom. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah.’ Will shrugs and finishes his pint. ‘I’d say I ought to get to bed, but if I could sleep, I’d be there already.’
‘Nightmares?’
‘Something like that.’
Isabel considers telling him why she’s so restless tonight, but she doesn’t know him enough for that, so she contents herself with taking a few sips of her drink and saying, ‘Most people get them. For a while I thought I was the exception to that rule.’
‘But not any more, or you wouldn’t be here.’ Will calls for a refill, and the bartender obliges. ‘You’re young to be in this business.’
‘Nah,’ she says. ‘I was young when I started, but now…’ Now she’s exactly like everyone else, wasting the prime of their life in this shitty basement drinking hole.
‘You were Cocoon,’ he says. ‘Weren’t you?’
She looks up sharply. She didn’t realise it was public knowledge already: news about Project Emerald might be spreading, but Comma’s history has yet to come out. ‘How do you know about Cocoon?’
‘One of the guys in the lab used to be Parnassiinae. Under Ian Ryans.’
At the mention of her father’s lab, Isabel tastes bile. She should have known his team would remember her – her father never missed the chance to brag about his daughter. Or to use her as a lab rat.
She takes a hasty sip of her drink and tries to sound calm and unsurprised as she says, ‘Oh. Well, that would explain it.’
‘So you were?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I was the youngest.’
‘Can’t have been easy.’
‘It wasn’t.’ It made her into this. Sometimes she thinks she’s only scratched the surface of the damage Cocoon did to her.
For a while they sit together in silence. The close atmosphere of the bar and the murmur of other conversations lulls Isabel into something as close to tranquillity as she’s going to get, and the cool glass against her fingers is a soothing contrast to the raging blood in her veins. Part of her wants to stay there all night.
Eventually, Will says, ‘I’m heading back to my room. Want to walk with me?’
Isabel hesitates, then drains her glass. ‘Sure.’
Back in her tiny room, she sleeps, and dreams of dying.
When she ventures downstairs for breakfast the next morning, she’s informed that a car is coming at eleven to take her to Chadwick Green, just before visiting hours begin. Mortimer was asking for you, she reminds herself, but it doesn’t dispel the dread that gathers in her stomach at the thought of going back to the hospital. She’s been there dozens of times since she was seventeen, but it still holds too many bad memories to feel like a neutral location. Besides, she’s afraid to see how badly hurt Mortimer might be, knowing it’s her fault.
A glance in the bathroom mirror tells her she looks as exhausted as she feels, yesterday’s make-up smudged. It strips away the years, her seventeen-year-old self right there behind her eyes, and Isabel’s suddenly grateful that Laura packed her make-up bag. She needs her armour for this: there’s no way she can go back to Chadwick Green looking like she never left.
When she’s done, hair moussed and eyelids glittering, she takes a moment to put in her piercings: a row of small black rings along one of her ears, and a sharp little stud in the lobes of each. A knife fits easily in her boot.
Isabel looks in the mirror again. Better. The fear’s still there, but she can’t see it any more.
She goes down to the lobby to wait for her ride. It’s a bare, concrete space with little ornament and few soft furnishings, and it feels cavernous with the cold morning breeze whistling through the open doors. There’s too much air around her, piercing her from every side, full of invisible enemies waiting to leave tiny wounds under her skin that nobody else can see. It takes Isabel a minute to realise that what she’s feeling is cold, her emotions so fraught that she can hardly separate them from what her body is experiencing. She zips her leather jacket to the top and crosses her arms over her chest while she waits. It makes her feel a little safer.
The drive from Cowlam to Weaverthorpe is shorter than she’d like, the traffic sparse, and Chadwick Green Hospital looms into sight before she’s ready for it. Somewhere in there is the room where she nearly died, where she dragged herself back from the brink, where she traded her freedom for survival. Maybe they’ve put Mortimer in the same room, so that Ronan can make her go back there.
The staff are clearly expecting her: she’s barely greeted the receptionist before she’s told, ‘Third floor, room six.’ That’s not her old room. Isabel thanks them, relieved, and heads for the stairs, passing doctors and agents alike.
The third floor is relatively quiet, with only two rooms occupied. Three and six. Isabel steels herself for the sight of her friend lying wounded in a bed, and knocks on the door of six.
A nurse opens the door. She gives Isabel a quick once-over and says, ‘You must be Isabel. We thought you might come.’
She steps nervously over the threshold and looks at the figure in the bed. It’s not Mortimer. Even with wounds she knows she’d recognise him, and this isn’t her teacher. Nor is it a stranger.
The figure in the bed is her mother.
Isabel grabs the chair next to the door for support, willing her legs not to drop her, not again. ‘Is everything okay?’ says the nurse. ‘Shall I leave the two of you alone?’
‘No,’ she begins, fighting to stay calm enough to breathe. ‘No, please don’t go.’ But she herself doesn’t have the strength to leave.
Her mother doesn’t look dangerous, lying there with her eyes shut. Under the glare of the hospital lights, Isabel sees what she didn’t notice at Hummingbird: that her mother’s jaw has been broken, and has set badly; that her nose is crooked; that she has new scars – new to Isabel, at least, but long-healed. Signs that her defection didn’t come without some… encouragement. Her legs are hidden below the blanket, but one is bulky inside a cast. They’d have had to reconstruct most of the kneecap, she imagines, and she can’t bring herself to regret that.
If she wanted to, she could destroy Judith before she opens her eyes. Lean over and throttle her, smother her, steal her breath before she can wake. But the mere sight of her has caught Isabel in a vice, squeezing her with fear, and she’s dizzy, her pulse racing and skipping as though her heart can’t decide whether to keep beating or whether to give up just to get away from her.
Even without moving, her mother has reduced Isabel to nothing, and she hates her for it.
Isabel chokes slightly when she tries to breathe, and Judith opens her eyes, fixing her gaze on her daughter.
‘Issy,’ she says. ‘You came to see me.’
34 MALESPERI (TO DESPAIR)
The nurse is gone. Isabel is alone in this room with her mother and her lies and a lifetime of fear, carving her open, grinding her into nothing.
‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you,’ says Judith, almost fondly. ‘Our little Moth. I have all the cuttings. You know, your father would be so proud of you, Issy.’
‘I killed him.’ She means for it to sound brash and defiant, but it’s barely a whisper. ‘Or did you forget that?’
Her mother’s lips are colourless and thin. The monitors and IVs chain her down, the cast around her leg immobilising her, but none of that reduces the sense of threat. ‘I don’t forget anything,’ says Judith. ‘It’s a shame you couldn’t see his vision. He built Katipo for you, Issy. A place where you could be the best, and never have to hide it.’
‘I didn’t want it. I never wanted it.’ The Isabel who encountered Judith in Hummingbird has abandoned her, leaving behind a frightened child. Isabel would be furious with herself if she could muster the strength; instead, all she feels is shattered, the encounter a shock even though it shouldn’t have been, piercing straight through her defences.
‘You were always so determined,’ says her mother, as though she hasn’t spoken. ‘Neither of us thought you should start training so young, but you wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t take no for an answer. So we let you, and you proved us all wrong. Of course you did. It’s in your blood.’
That’s not how Isabel remembers it. That isn’t true. It can’t be true. She remembers—
‘But Comma didn’t get it, did they? Unstable, they called you, and maybe they were right. All those terrible things you did to yourself. Locking yourself away in your room without food for days on end because of some imagined problem. Hurting yourself in a frenzy, saying you weren’t good enough… your body was never enough for you, was it? You kept trying to destroy it. Poor little Issy.’
‘Stop.’ Isabel’s voice is hoarse and desperate, because memory is the one thing she’s never been able to trust, and everything Judith is saying worms its way deep into the cracks of her self-assurance. ‘Stop. You know that isn’t true.’
‘Your father did his best to restrain you, but you were a wild thing. And when you got yourself together, you used to scream that it was us. You blamed us for your madness.’
Isabel swallows, and her next denial is stronger. ‘You know that’s not how it happened.’ She hasn’t spent three years learning to live with her trauma to have her mother lie to her face about it. And sure, maybe her version of living with it looks a lot like repression, but she knows what happened. She remembers what happened.
Doesn’t she?
‘Issy, it’s okay,’ says her mother. ‘You can admit it now. You’re so much better, aren’t you? Comma has given you the help you needed.’
‘There was never anything wrong with me.’ Nothing except what they did to her. Nothing except what they made her. Everything rotten about Isabel Ryans is their fault.
‘Nothing wrong with you? All those nights you spent screaming at nothing, at nightmares and hallucinations, tearing at your skin with your fingernails?’
‘I didn’t do that to myself. You did it. You hurt me.’ Maybe if she says that enough times she’ll be able to hang onto the truth, which even now is slipping away, pushed out by the doubt she told herself she’d never feel again.
She can’t, in this moment, remember how it was that she was able to point a gun at her mother. How she had the courage to shoot. Not when Judith’s voice is getting inside her head and breaking apart her courage. She knows there’s a knife in her boot, but the idea of reaching for it is utterly alien, unknowable.
‘We were so worried. Do you know how difficult it is, looking after a child as damaged as you? What a strain it can be?’ Judith’s always been so fucking good at playing that part, the put-upon parent talking to a wayward child. ‘Sometimes the only way we could get a night’s sleep without worrying you’d hurt yourself was to tie you down.’
‘You tied me down so I couldn’t fight back.’ Isabel can hardly speak. She’s furious that her mother thinks she can tell these lies and get away with it, but she’s angrier that part of her almost believes them. Judith’s tricking her into doubting her own truths, destroying her memories of the life she fled. Wants her to believe this doctored, violent version of her story. ‘You burned a butterfly into my chest. All my scars—’
‘Delusional,’ says her mother, shaking her head. Her hair is silvery grey against the white pillow; Isabel wants to rip it from her scalp. ‘Such a tragedy in a girl your age. None of Comma’s psychologists could help you.’
She never said a word to the Cocoon therapists about her scars. She always assumed they knew the truth. ‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up.’
‘Issy,’ Judith reproves her, ‘don’t speak to your mother like that.’
Isabel puts her hands over her mouth as though she’s about to throw up, feeling the warmth of her breath on her palms and the press of her thumbs on the tender skin of her throat. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s a reminder that she’s alive. That she’s awake.
That she got out.
You’re safe, Isabel tells herself. You’re safe now. But if this were really a nightmare, she’d have woken up by now, sweating and tear-stained but awake and safe, and here she is and she can’t wake up. It’s a thousand times worse for being real.
‘You know you’re lying,’ she says unsteadily. ‘You know none of this is true.’
‘We loved you so much. We only wanted what was best for you. You had so much potential, but your emotional issues held you back. It’s clear that’s still a concern.’ Judith heaves a sigh. ‘It’s disappointing.’
Isabel feels a flicker of triumph. ‘I’ve never wanted anything more than to disappoint you.’
‘Always so defiant.’
She could walk out of the door right now, walk away from all of this, but something keeps her here. Something that demands to know how Judith convinced Ronan to keep her in a hospital rather than a cell, despite her defection. And deeper than that, some masochistic fascination with how far this will go and how much it will hurt. Like she’s staying almost to see how bad it can get.
Isabel has never been good at knowing when to stop.
She looks at her mother. ‘You’re a liar,’ she says simply. ‘No matter what else you say, you will never again convince me that’s not the case.’
Her mother shrugs. ‘And you’re so truthful, are you?’ she says, and smiles, teeth bright in the hospital lights like the after-image on Isabel’s eyelids when she wakes from a nightmare. ‘I suppose you’ve told Ronan all about your Free Press friends and the abolitionists you were meeting with at the library. And the smugglers, of course.’
So Judith knew. Of course she did. And she kept it to herself, waiting for the right moment to play her hand, but she probably knew the library staff were abolitionists before Isabel did. ‘You were spying on me this whole time,’ she says, nauseated. ‘Weren’t you?’
‘Who would begrudge a mother the chance to see her daughter grow up?’ says Judith sweetly. ‘It took a little wrangling, when my Daphne stopped reporting, but I did think there was a certain poetry to hiring an Atwood to replace her. He’s been mine for years, you know,’ she adds. ‘If Katipo had thrived, he’d have thrived with it. He had the good sense to keep a low profile when it failed, but once he knew I was alive… Well, it’s been illuminating.’
It’s nothing Ronan hadn’t already told her, but it confirms that Judith was Kieran’s main contact, which is something – it minimises the number of people Isabel still needs to find and eliminate. ‘So what happened to Daphne?’ she asks, carefully casual.
‘She—’ Judith falters for the first time, catching herself on the verge of giving too much away. Then her smile’s back. ‘You don’t know, do you?’
More mind games. ‘I’m sure we’ll find her,’ says Isabel – her, that’s a piece of information they didn’t have before, either. ‘You’re a shitty secret-keeper, you know that? No wonder you keep turning traitor. Comma’s well rid of you.’
‘Issy…’ begins her mother, but before she can continue, the door opens.
Isabel turns. Daragh. His eyes widen in alarm at the sight of Isabel, and he reaches out a hand towards her. ‘You shouldn’t be here, Isabel,’ he says. ‘You weren’t meant – I wasn’t expecting – Why are you here?’
Her fragile composure threatens to shatter under the unexpected weight of a kind voice. ‘I was just leaving,’ she says, and grabs him by the arm to pull him from the room with her. There are some visitors’ chairs in the corridor outside, but they’re not far enough away, not with the glass panel in the door through which her mother might still be able to see her. ‘Is there somewhere we can go?’
Daragh takes her hand, his firm grip more comforting than a thousand words of reassurance as he leads her into an empty patient room at the far end of the corridor. ‘I didn’t know you were going to see her.’
‘I didn’t mean to.’ Out of sight of her mother, her hands are beginning to shake. She sits on them, trying to contain the fear. ‘I came to see Mortimer. The receptionist must have given me the wrong room number.’
‘Mortimer’s…’ Daragh trails off. ‘Isabel, whatever your mother said to you, ignore it. You’re safe now.’
‘She tried to say she never hurt me. That I did it to myself.’ Painting Isabel as an unreliable narrator of her own life, making lies of all the time she’s spent working to reclaim her past and everything she was never allowed to talk about.
‘She’s trying to mess with your head,’ says Daragh. ‘You can’t let her.’
As if it’s that easy to decide not to let Judith gaslight her. ‘Why are you treating her?’ she says. ‘Why is she here? She should – she should face justice. For defecting. For what she did to me. Instead, you put her in a room like that, not in a cell, not in a grave where she should be, not—’
‘You shot her in the kneecap and then forced her to walk, Isabel,’ says Daragh, without judgement. ‘She lost a lot of blood. If she’s to face trial – and she will face trial – she needs to be well enough to do that.’
‘But you’re letting her just… talk to people, tell them whatever she wants, and Ronan will take her word over mine, and—’
‘He won’t.’ Her doctor sounds very sure about that. ‘He’s seen your scars, as have I, and he knows more about Cocoon than you realise. There is no way he believes what Judith is saying in there. Don’t doubt me on this.’ He squeezes her hand. ‘And don’t doubt yourself. You know what happened to you.’
‘You think I’m doubting myself?’
‘I know you are.’
Daragh knows her too well, and notices too much. ‘She’s always been like this,’ she says. ‘The way she lies. For years, I didn’t know what was real, what I’d made up. It wasn’t until…’ She rubs at her scarred left palm with her thumb. ‘This. It wasn’t until this that I realised I wasn’t confused, because I didn’t do this, I wouldn’t have done this. But it was only after I left home that I felt sure of any of it. As long as they weren’t there, I could be certain about what happened, but hearing her talk like that blurred all the edges again.’
