Slumped in a chair alongside the bed where Nim lay sleeping, Hellequin dipped in and out of consciousness. He dreamt of his parents’ farmstead, his family out on the porch. The land around the house was desolate, but the family smiled and waved. Hellequin felt a rush of half-emotions as his mind played snapshots from his past. Collecting peckers’ eggs as a child, hand-in-hand with his mother. Soothing his twin brothers with spoonfuls of clothhod curd. Tearing the ribbons from the sisters’ hair ahead of church. Feeling his father’s disappointment like a gob of spit to the face.
And he was in his lung basket suddenly, staring down at the farmstead as he shot the flare to give the order. Soldiers spilt in from all sides and they brought with them the great lime dust guns designed to raze the Soul Food crops to the ground in minutes. Except, the dust drifted on a sudden, freakish gust of wind. He saw his family wave on, flesh melting off their bones like dripping wax.
“ Mi smo victorios!” he cried. Asenath’s cry of victory.
“Hellequin.” The voice was soft. It bled inside his mind, closing off the fantastical nightmares and bringing him back around. While his natural eye blinked, the HawkEye implant fed in its compound spread of images – the fold of Nim’s knees as she sat up, legs slung over the edge of the bed; the tentative placement of one of her hands over the fabric which bandaged her rewired arm.
She put her hand to her throat. “Is there water here?”
He was already handing her a metal cup. His shoulder pulsed angrily where the ex-soldier, Lars, had stabbed him. Asenath had stitched the wound then charged him with the role of acting bodyguard to Nim. It had made sense. No one could alter his permanent wakefulness. He might as well make use of the condition.
Nim’s hand shook as she sipped from the cup. She stared at Hellequin. “You called out. I thought you were asleep.” She narrowed her beautiful red eyes, scrutinising him. “Asleep is the wrong word, I suppose. But you didn’t seem quite conscious.”
“I have waking dreams sometimes.” Hellequin didn’t care to expand. He gestured to her arm. “That bitch scientist took your arm apart. We made her put you back together again.”
“And then what?”
“Then I cut her throat.”
Nim’s chin jutted. “Good.”
If she was bloodthirsty, Hellequin understood. Nim had been made to feel like a foreign body squatting inside her own flesh.
“We were hoping the only good to come might be if she’d gone and fixed your shorting circuits. That’d help with your act and such.” Hellequin trailed off. He’d no ability to judge the right or the wrong thing to do when it came to Nim. But Asenath had also acted in Nim’s defence, so the crime of having saved her again should prove forgivable.
“We?” Nim went to put down the cup. Hellequin took it from her, placed it down on the side table.
“Asenath, Pig Heart, Rust. Pig Heart got his ticker thanks to that blood worms’ witch. He led the others to us. Good thing too. I wasn’t exactly on track to play hero before they came along.”
“You tried though, I bet.” Nim flexed her hand, a dancer’s movement. Light rippled across her forehead. From beneath her loose blouse and satin bloomers, a neon glow bloomed. She seemed to notice her attire.
“Did you assist me into these?” It was a question without weight. Nim was used to sharing her nakedness.
“Asenath,” Hellequin clarified.
Nim shrugged. Her mouth slanted, almost playfully. “So what’s the story, son of Jackerie, purveyor of Soul Food?”
Hellequin leant forward in his chair. He put his hands together and looked down. For a moment, he could picture himself strapped into his lung basket again a hundred metres or so up. Across the wilting acres, he saw his parents’ homestead and his platoon, invading the territory like termites. As they ran, the soldiers hosed the land with the red counter-agent powder pumped from backpacks. The atmosphere had clouded with the discharge until there’d been nothing to see but blood red miasma.
Hellequin pushed the memory away. “I betrayed my family,” he said stiffly. “For the good of Humock some might say.”
“And what do you say?”
Hellequin stared up, the concentric rings of his eyepiece magnifying her face. He saw a patch of raw flesh at Nim’s lower lip, the concentrated brown pigmentation of a small mole at one cheek.
“I say my father was an idiotic dreamer. Too selfish to see the pain he’d inflict on other folk and on the land, too greedy to care. But he didn’t deserve that switch in the wind that blew the neutraliser over the house and killed him. I lost my momma too that day. Same with my grandmama, sisters and kid brothers.”
Nim’s playfulness evaporated. She nodded slowly. “It hardens the wet parts of you after a time. The tongue, the heart.”
The soldier frowned, twin bone ridges exaggerated like horns.
“Watching your family die,” Nim explained. Her skin glowed with a gentle incandescence. “D’Angelus and his men did for mine.”
Hellequin sucked in his cheeks. That didn’t surprise him given the pimp’s line in disposing of others’ flesh as he saw fit. There was little difference between D’Angelus and Zan City’s blood worms, he thought with dulled anger.
He watched the interplay of light nodes under the skin at Nim’s throat.
“You’re glorious,” he said on impulse.
She laughed then, in spite of herself. “Not a biomorphed freak?”
“No more so than the rest of us.”
Nim cocked her head and stared at him. Really stared, as if studying a still life.
“Why’d you let the bastards fit you up like that? That tick-tocking eye and Saints only knows what stitched into your brain? What made you do it?”
Different angles of Nim overlaid Hellequin’s left cornea. He focused on a wide angle of her face.
“Pig Heart betrayed Cyber Circus and you and Rust. Some might say he betrayed the only family he’d got. In defending the pitchman, everyone thought I’d joined the ranks of the mad HawkEyes who’d gone before me. You included.”
He got to his feet, towering over Nim, and started to pace. Aware of the throb of his newly stitched shoulder, he rested his hands on the back of the chair. “I know what it’s like to betray family, both blood and platoon. I tried to warn my father ahead of the assault. He wouldn’t let me set one foot on the porch. The Guard though, they heard of my attempt to play both sides, and they had their own unique punishment for the crime of being Jackerie’s son.” He tapped the HawkEye implant with a fingertip. The amber lens flinched.
“You mean you didn’t choose to become a HawkEye?” Nim looked aghast.
“Twenty years hard labour at Zan City Prison or submit to the biomorph procedure. So there was a choice, yeah. A lousy one.”
“Did it hurt?” Nim stood and reached a hand towards him. Hellequin clutched her wrist on instinct. He released her. As if working out the planes and angles of him, she felt about the steel HawkEye. “Like acid on a wound, I imagine,” she answered for him.