On the second floor, a closed white door. Markse knocked once, then opened it with a click of latch, a round brass handle, cold daylight seeping through from outside, the sound of gunfire, far off and bitten down at the edges.
sofa
giant TV screen
wires across the floor
Lucy sat cross-legged in the middle of it all.
She wore pyjama bottoms and a green fleece jumper. She was shooting aliens. The aliens were half mechanoid, half insect, with six flailing limbs, guns held in four of them, and couldn’t aim for shit. Lucy’s gun fired pale purple bullets of light and every now and then she charged up some sort of special attack that made the screen shake and go briefly white and left many scattered pieces of dead things all over the place, but the landscape seemed oddly okay.
“Lucy,” said Markse. “This is Mr. Miller.”
“Hi,” she grunted, not taking her eyes from the screen.
“Mr. Miller, this is Lucy Rainbow Fardell. She’s been sponsored by the Fardell family. She had some… difficulties… but now the family are paying her way and keeping her from… well. Are you enjoying your game, Lucy?”
“Yeah.”
A grimace flickered across her face as a new alien started lobbing something green and sticky that exploded in an emerald splash across the screen. She rolled behind cover, reloaded, came back up shooting, jumped, jumped again, landed next to a scuttling centipede thing that spat hot acid, killed it with knives, then ran to avoid another blast of digital gloop.
Markse looked at Theo; Theo stared at Lucy.
“Mr. Miller?”
Theo didn’t move.
An arm on his arm, gentle. “Mr. Miller? We should leave Lucy to her game.”
“Mr. Miller?”
“Mr. Miller?”
“Mr. Miller?”
An alien died.
Lucy’s eyes flickered up from the game, met Theo’s.
A flicker of
well she doesn’t know what’s on his face but odds are that weird look is just another weird fucking thing so
deal with it the way you always
scowl
shrug
look away
collect loot from fallen machine-alien corpses
carry on.
Bang bang splat bang wowzers!
This is of course the moment when Theo is going to say something profoundly important, something to establish some sort of
“I hope you enjoy your game,” he says as Markse guides him away.
Chapter 76
They took him to some place in east London, near the Mile End enclaves. It had been a wood workshop where they made bespoke furniture, nice dressers for you to put your pretty things in, bespoke handrails—really hard to make a handrail actually it took a huge amount of craft to balance the twist with the drop but
now it was a prison.
They gave him a grey tracksuit and white T-shirt to wear, shoes without laces, bright trainers he wondered where they’d found them and time is
Neila does a three-point turn on the canal. It’s tricky, you can see the place where metal hull has rammed concrete towpath, but if she’s careful…
And having turned she turns again to point back north, then realises that’s ridiculous and turns again and for a while is spinning, spinning and time is
time is
the real Theo Miller, the one who died
now when they were in the back of the ambulance did he say
it’s your fault
it’s not your fault
it’s your fault
it’s not your fault
it’s your fault it’s your fault it’s your fault it’s
They gave him porridge with jam, which was remarkably nice, and they sat down at a grey table in a grey room and Markse said:
“What happened with Helen Arnslade?”
Theo’s words were a drone from a script he’s already read, bored, tired, enough. “She found out her son was hiding the mass murder and kidnapping of patties and people from the enclaves. The skint. People who wouldn’t be missed. Petty crooks who got lost in the system. He was feeding slaves to Simon Fardell, the Company and the patty line. Helen wasn’t impressed. She gathered proof and gave it to Dani Cumali. Her son found out and dosed Helen with drugs. Had Dani killed.”
“And you and Dani were…?”
“We’d been friends once.”
“But Lucy is your daughter.”
“Yes. Perhaps. No. She might be.”
“She… might be?”
“Yes.”
“You did this for… ‘might be’?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Theo thought about it for a long time. Shrugged. “I imagine… that after nearly fifteen years of playing along, keeping my head down and selling indemnities against murder, I imagine… something had to change. Something had to switch, otherwise I’m just…” Stopped, searching the air for the word. “I am, fundamentally, a failure. I’ve known this most of my life. Since I was a child, it was always clear to me that the world I inhabited was not one I had contributed to. Everything that was good, other people made and paid for with their own sacrifice. Everything that was bad, I couldn’t control. All the ideas and dreams I thought were mine were in fact someone else’s, and the more I talked about taking control, being my own man, all the things you’re meant to say, the more I was talking to cover the very simple truth, that I wasn’t. I am not. I made some choices, of course, but they weren’t defiant acts of judgement. They were made because the alternatives were significantly worse. I coasted down the path I had with the feeling that it was the only path that was really before me, and when I chose to choose to do nothing, it felt like a kind of release, an admission that this was my life and I may as well live it. Nothing changed. Murderers walked free, people died and begged and grovelled and lives were destroyed for so little, for fear and anger and… but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Because it was just the way the world worked.
And then Dani
I just wanted her to go away, she wasn’t
but she didn’t go away and I felt that this was yet another case of the universe coming and depriving me of my choices of making me
and she had a daughter.
Probably not mine.
I did the maths and Lucy is almost certainly not…
What do you think the point is of us, Mr. Markse? I don’t believe in God, I don’t think there’s a celestial paradise, and humanity appears to be a virulent species that destroys, strips and lays waste to the world and each other. Every day in every way we invent new methods for curtailing our own liberty. The pursuit of happiness, but there are so many happinesses to pursue that sometimes it’s hard to say that this is me, pursuing this truth, because instead I could just buy and sell truth for £2.99 down the local chemist and so I guess
it didn’t matter if Lucy wasn’t my daughter.
It didn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter.
Just one thing in my life, if not for me then for someone else a choice
a choice
I wanted her to have
to wake in the morning and see the sky and feel
I wanted her to know that there is more than what she’s been told. That she can find a value in herself, that mankind isn’t just a plague species, that we can be better, aspire to better, that ideas have meaning, value, that there is another way of living, that we can give more and be more and exceed the limits that we think we have or that have been put upon us and that one day we shall build something better, something kind and that