Shoreline of infinity 4, p.3
Shoreline of Infinity 4, page 3
Owen pressed fingers into Bill’s arm. We can take him with us. We can trust Reilly.
“Of course,” said Bill. This was Reilly Burns, after all, famous - or infamous, depending on your politics - for his stirring denunciation of National Unity in Parliament, just days before they seized power. If they could trust anyone, thought Bill, they could surely trust him. And yet he felt a powerful sense of disquiet, although he could not have said why.
Burns had his own questions, of course. He learned Bill’s blindness was a punishment for articles he’d written denouncing National Unity. Ade had refused to disclose the names of fellow musicians who’d similarly spoken out. Owen, by contrast, was a computer technician who’d never learned the reason for his arrest.
“How long have you all been here on this island?” asked Burns.
“Nearly two years,” said Ade. He spoke for Bill’s benefit, chalking the words down for Reilly and Owen to read. “We’re stuck here unless we give them names we don’t even have.”
“What about the rest of the inmates?”
Bill shook his head. “Most are regular prisoners - people caught hoarding or scavenging. There are mines on the Greenland coast that opened up when the ice melted. Most of them wind up there after a couple of months.”
Ade paused in his writing. “We should tell Reilly,” he said to Bill. “About our escape plan.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Why not?” Ade insisted. “Reilly Burns is a goddamn hero! Nobody else had the balls to say the things he did, even when he knew what would happen to him.”
“Let me talk to my contact first,” Bill insisted.
“What are you saying?” slurred Reilly, watching them argue.
“Tell him we’re trying to figure out why they brought him here,” said Bill, suddenly realising what had so disquieted him. Reilly’s skin smelled of soap - the same one Hannegan used. Not that that meant anything on its own, of course. But it was perfumed, and utterly unlike the coarse stuff they gave them in the camp.
“Ask him,” said Bill, “if he spoke with Hannegan.”
Scritch scratch. “No,” said Reilly, after a short pause.
“Not at all? A woman with red hair and very pale skin?”
“No,” Reilly repeated. “I don’t know that name.”
Reilly Burns was lying. Bill felt it deep in his bones. They’d taken his sight, but he’d gained so much more; the helmet had made him into a human lie detector. The same enhanced senses had warned him when O’Hare was about to lash out at Ade. He could smell the deceit on Reilly’s breath, commingled with the perfumed scent of the soap.
Even then, Bill wanted to believe he was wrong. A part of him wondered if perhaps his senses weren’t as accurate as he had come to believe; perhaps there was some other, perfectly reasonable explanation.
If only he could think of one.
Owen gave Reilly his bunk for the night, taking a thin blanket for himself and curling up on the hard floorboards. Reilly slept like the dead, which made it easier for Bill to slip out before dawn, carefully prying up first one loose floorboard, then another, pausing from time to time when Reilly shifted or muttered in his sleep. He could sense Ade watching him silently in the dark from his own bunk.
Bill climbed down into the narrow space beneath the hut, which stood on pilings. A gorse bush had grown up next to their hut, obscuring a section of the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp. Some weeks before, Bill had sneaked down on several successive nights and had dug a shallow pit under the fence where the bush hid it from view. There was just enough of a gap that he could squirm his way under the wire.
He emerged outside the camp and scuttled through wild grass, bent low. His blindsight told him it was a moonless night, and he tasted salt from the Atlantic. The freezing wind blowing across the island, somewhere off the coast of Scotland, was enough to shrivel the skin beneath his shirt.
The remains of a village stood just a few hundred metres from the camp. He made his way to a house just above the high tide-line; much of the village had become submerged over the years as the waters rose.
After its original occupants fled, the village had briefly served as an evacuation point for refugees escaping the plagues. Many of them had left their luggage behind, and a few months before, a number of the inmates had been set to digging through the half-rotted suitcases, keeping anything useful and heaping the rest in a pile to be burned.
Owen had found a child’s toy computer, and risked serious punishment smuggling it back to their hut. It was a cheap little plastic thing, but it could be hand-cranked, and had some limited voice interactivity. To their shock, it worked on the first try. Owen, who had been a sysop before his arrest, even found a way to log undetected into the camp’s network and send encrypted messages to the resistance on the mainland.
The computer was wrapped in oilskins, pushed to the back of a shelf in the sodden basement of the house. Keeping the computer anywhere inside the camp perimeter was out of the question: there was too much risk of it being found during a raid. And blind or not, in many ways Bill was the least handicapped of the three of them. He brought it up to the living-room and, crouched on the edge of a half-rotted table, cranked the machine’s tiny pink plastic handle until it emitted a tinny bell-like sound.
Owen had set the machine up so that it spoke each letter when he pressed it. He’d had enough practice by now it didn’t take too long to compose an email and send it.
Reilly Burns arrived at camp, he wrote. Took us by surprise. Should we bring him?
The reply came only minutes later. Sometimes he waited hours.
Bring him to evac point if it’s safe. We’ll make room. Is he in good health?
They took away his hearing. Can I give him any news? He thought for a moment. Does he have any family? Anyone on the outside he needs to know about?
Another long wait followed. He blew on his hands, then tucked them into his armpits. Surprise raids on the huts were not unknown, although there hadn’t been one in months. If one was ordered tonight, it would be worth all their lives if they discovered him missing.
The reply finally came. No such news. His family all died in a Unity camp on the Isle of Man two years ago. The computer read the words out in a childish falsetto.
Bill shut the computer down, put it back in its oilskins, then sat back on his haunches, thinking. Planning their escape had taken months. Just twenty-four hours from now, they’d slip under the fence and board a trawler that would carry them to Europe.
Bill made his way back to camp, taking care not to make a sound as he climbed back through the floorboards. He needn’t have worried: Reilly was still sleeping the sleep of the dead.
Reilly accompanied them to the canteen later that morning. Bill held onto his sleeve, so Reilly could “guide” him there. Bill didn’t need the help, of course, but he didn’t want Reilly, or anyone else, to know that.
“Is it safe to talk here?” asked Reilly once they were all gathered around a table.
“It’s noisy,” Bill said quietly, sipping his broth. “That helps.” He heard Ade scratching the words onto Owen’s slate before showing them to Reilly.
“Is our hut bugged?”
Bill shrugged. “I don’t think anyone cares enough about us out here at the end of the world. Mostly, we get left the hell alone - although I think Hannegan is looking to change all that.”
“Who is she?” asked Reilly, reading Owen’s slate.
Bill could taste the man’s evasiveness.
“She strikes me as the kind of person,” said Bill, “who thinks she can get results where others can’t.”
“These people…” Reilly made an exasperated sound. “That thing they call the helmet started out as a medical miracle, you know that?” Bill nodded. “A way to cure blindness, deafness, a list of ailments and disabilities a mile long.”
“And they turned it into a weapon,” muttered Ade. “That’s Unity for you.”
“You had a family, right?” Bill asked, not caring if the question seemed abrupt. “What happened to them?”
“I…” Reilly’s sudden indecision tasted tart and sharp, like he couldn’t figure out the right response. “They were arrested and put in a camp. They... they died.”
“Jesus,” said Ade. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too,” said Bill, fighting not to show his confusion and anger. Reilly was lying - which probably meant his family were still alive, whatever the resistance seemed to think.
Bill had never had a family of his own, and had no idea what he might be capable of in order to keep them safe. Perhaps he should have felt sorry for Reilly Burns. Perhaps.
Bill and Ade leaned on each other as they walked back to the hut, the others following a few steps behind. “Don’t tell Reilly about the escape,” Bill muttered.
Ade became suddenly tense. “Why?”
“He said his family are dead. They aren’t.”
“How do you…?”
“Believe me when I say he’s lying. Unity must have kept them alive, and now they’re using them to control Reilly. We’ve all heard stories of them doing the same thing to other people. We have to assume he’s a spy.”
“How can you be so damn sure?”
“The same way I always am.”
Later that evening, the first raid in months was carried out while the inmates were all getting their evening rations. When Bill and the others got back to their hut, they found their bunks pushed aside, their mattresses lying outside on the damp gravel.
Bill got down on his hands and knees and pressed his fingers against the floorboards that gave him access to the outside world. There was no sign they had been pulled up, no scent belonging to any of the guards. He closed his eyes in silent relief.
If Reilly had wondered what he was doing, pressing and sniffing at the floorboards, he didn’t ask. “It’s Hannegan,” said Bill, standing back up. “Everything’s been different since she arrived.”
If only he could figure out what it was she wanted.
Not long after they’d pushed the bunks back into place and dragged the mattresses back in, two guards came to escort Bill back to the main building. Inside, he scented several other inmates all waiting to be questioned. He was led past all of them and straight into Hannegan’s office.
“Mister Sharpe,” she said. “We searched your hut.”
He sat across from her, trying not to show how worried he was. “And?”
“We found nothing. But you interest me. The way you move around this camp, I could swear it’s like you can see.”
Bill chuckled to hide his nervousness. “Maybe you missed it, but your helmet made me blind. I can’t see a damn thing.”
“And yet we’ve had one or two reports of Senseless in other camps having their remaining senses extraordinarily heightened following their treatment. You can understand why that might be of great scientific interest.”
“I don’t see what it has to do with me.”
“I’ve interviewed half a dozen inmates who witnessed your assault on Mister O’Hare. It’s not the first time you’ve been seen acting precisely as if you were still sighted. As if you know exactly what’s going on around you regardless.”
As she spoke, Bill heard a drawer slide open, slowly, as if Hannegan was working hard to keep it as quiet as possible. He heard her feet move around the desk until she stood to one side of him.
Immediately he knew there was a gun to his head. He could picture its barrel hovering just an inch from his right ear.
“I have something in my hand, Mister Sharpe,” said Hannegan. There was a slight edge of strain in her voice, no doubt, he thought, from holding the heavy weapon level with his skull. “Can you tell me what it is?”
Bill willed himself not to move, but thinking was far easier than doing. He couldn’t ignore the thrill of alarm surging up his spine, or the shortness of his breath.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice tight.
“I don’t believe you.”
He knew, just a moment before she did it, that she was going to shoot him. Instinct took over: he jerked away just as she squeezed the trigger, tumbling off his chair and onto the floor.
The breath rattled out of his throat in quick spasms. The gun had made a clicking sound and nothing more. “You tricked me.”
“You’ve been tricking the idiots running this camp for a lot longer,” said Hannegan. Her voice was colder now. “Go back to your hut and stay there until tomorrow morning.”
And then? he nearly asked, but he already knew the answer. Then they’d put him in the one small motorboat the camp authorities kept fuelled by the dockside and send him back to the mainland, to have his brain picked apart.
But he’d be long gone by then - and not a moment too soon.
They let him out on his own, without even a guard to guide him back to his hut. It felt like Hannegan was laughing at him.
“Jesus,” said Ade when he walked back in, “what the hell happened? You’re shaking like a leaf.”
“I need to talk to you,” said Bill, ignoring Owen and Reilly. “Alone.”
He led Ade back out into the chill evening air. He could easily imagine Reilly’s puzzled stare as they closed the door behind them.
“She’s onto me,” said Bill. “She pulled a gun on me without any warning or sound and I flinched away from it before she pulled the trigger. It wasn’t even loaded.”
“Jesus…”
“I have an idea. We’ve got no choice but to take Reilly with us. If we don’t and he realises we’re gone, he might alert Hannegan before we can get to that trawler. But we won’t tell him what we’re doing until the moment we do it. If he tries to betray us or stop us, we’ll… do whatever we have to. But if I’m somehow wrong about him, we can still all get away.”
Ade swallowed hard. “So the plan’s otherwise the same?”
Bill nodded. “A launch will be waiting to take us to the trawler from the beach on the far side of the village, but it’s too risky for them to hang around more than a minute or two. If we’re not there at the exact scheduled time, they’ll leave without us.”
“I just can’t believe Reilly would inform on us,” said Ade. “It goes against everything I know about him.”
“Goddamn it, he lied to us about his family!” Bill hissed. “I smelled the same damn soap on his skin that Hannegan uses. The son of a bitch has been getting preferential treatment. Do you understand? It’s him or us.”
He heard Ade swallow. “Sure. I understand.”
Bill didn’t sleep that night. From the sound of their breathing, neither did any of the others - all except Reilly, who still had Owen’s bed. When the time came, Bill rolled out of his bunk and pushed Owen awake. He grumbled and sat up.
Bill held up five fingers. “Five minutes,” he mouthed, then did the same for Ade.
“What’s going on?” asked Reilly, when Bill pushed him awake.
Bill pressed a hand over Reilly’s mouth, then put a finger to his lips.
“What’s happening?” Reilly demanded, too loudly. “What are you doing?”
Bill shook his head, then ignored him, waiting while Owen laced up his boots before doing the same for Ade. Then he helped Bill lever up the two long floorboards.
“You’re escaping?” asked Reilly.
“I’ll go first,” Bill said, tapping his own chest, then pointing to the gap in the floor for Reilly’s benefit. “Then you,” he pointed at Reilly, and then at Owen and Ade, “then the others.”
Bill slid down through the narrow gap before Reilly could say anything more. His knees pressed into damp soil and he squirmed beneath the floorboards towards the gorse bush. A body pushed through the gap behind him, and he heard Reilly cursing and muttering as he flailed around in the dark.
Bill crawled under the gap in the fence. Reilly came next, standing up and staring around. Ade followed, half-dragged by Owen.
Bill took Ade’s other arm. It was always going to be slow going; Owen and Reilly at least could walk, but they’d have to carry Ade most of the way.
“This way,” said Bill, pointing in the direction of the village.
Reilly grabbed Bill’s free arm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Bill shook him free, then tapped at his arm as if he were wearing a watch and mouthed the words no time at him.
“Of course there was time!” Reilly’s speech was becoming more slurred; he’d been relying on the memory of what his voice sounded like in order to speak, and that memory was fading. “You didn’t trust me.”
Bill shook his head. There was nothing more he could say.
They reached the village. Bill felt the water lapping around his feet as they navigated a street. He could sense Reilly’s amazement at the way he moved as easily as a sighted person.
Then they turned a corner, and then another, and Bill suddenly realised Reilly had slipped away. He heard the man’s retreating footsteps as he hurried back in the direction of the camp.
“Reilly,” said Ade, his voice urgent. “He’s-”
“I know.” The words felt heavy in Bill’s mouth. He sniffed the air, cold and sharp in his nostrils. “Keep going,” he told Ade. “Make sure you and Owen get to the rendezvous.”
“But what about you?”
“Just get there,” he snapped. “If he alerts the camp authorities, it won’t just be our skins - it’ll be everyone on that trawler as well.”
Had he known this moment would come, he wondered? Could things have gone a better way, a way that didn’t end in betrayal and death?
He didn’t, couldn’t, know. There was only this moment, and the next.
He pulled Ade into a tight embrace, then gave Owen a final nod before turning and hurrying back in the direction of the camp. It didn’t take long for him to pick up Reilly’s scent.
It soon became evident that Reilly had got lost in the dark. Bill could hear his laboured breathing, and followed the sound of his splashing feet down a side-street.
Bill stepped towards him and sensed Reilly’s alarm. “I’m sorry,” said Reilly. “I got lost. I-”
