Welby imagined Fuller sitting in there on his own bunk, a small and nervous-looking man with a bald spot ringed by fluffy brown hair, whom Welby had always found it somewhat difficult to like. Maybe Fuller’s dodgy heart was finally about to give up the ghost. Still, he was one of the faithful, and as such, was Welby’s responsibility. ‘It is all right to be scared, Prisoner Fuller. Those who came before are watching us, judging us. This is their system, and what happens here happens in accordance with their wishes. Don’t you feel it? This is their very cradle. Trust in their wisdom, lest they return and find you wanting.’
‘You really think all this — whatever’s going wrong here — is their doing?’ asked the voice from behind the wall.
‘I trust that it is so. Perhaps they are punishing the owners of this facility for their treatment of us. Perhaps they don’t want us to be trapped here.’ Welby would have liked Fuller to shut up now. He really did feel sleepy. Funny, because he hadn’t so much as walked a hundred metres all day, but it seemed that the less he did, the more tired he felt of late.
‘Maybe they mean to free us,’ said Fuller, a note of hungry longing creeping into his voice.
‘Maybe they do,’ agreed Welby, lying down and trying to get comfortable. He certainly hoped so. It would be good to have a word, up close and personal, with that snooty bitch, Officer Kown. But he was happy to wait and see. He turned over onto his side — that was better. ‘Go to sleep, Prisoner Fuller, and we’ll see what happens next.’
‘I’ll try,’ said Fuller. That excited note remained in his voice, though. ‘I sure would like to be out of this cell, Welby.’
‘Of course,’ said Welby drily. ‘Now go to sleep.’
Mercifully, Fuller didn’t speak any further. Welby drifted slowly into the peaceful, dreamless sleep of the just, safe in the knowledge that the Old Ones had a plan. They were not done with him yet. It was not his destiny to rot here in this cell. He knew it.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
‘No, he’s sleeping, but that isn’t the point, Lina.’
‘Look, Jayce, I just want to see that he’s okay.’
‘He is okay, but Hobbes says he isn’t to be disturbed.’ Jayce managed to bristle, tensing his armoured body without actually moving.
Lina looked around herself, then leant towards him secretively. ‘Hobbes isn’t here,’ she said.
Jayce hesitated slightly, managing to convey uncertainty even from behind his featureless facemask. ‘No. . .’ he said. ‘But–’
‘I’ll be a few minutes max, all right? His friends will want to know that he’s okay. I want to know that he’s okay.’
‘Ella didn’t specifically tell me not to let anyone in. . .’ said Jayce, relaxing from his guard-standing-at-attention posture. He craned his head to check the medical room’s wall-clock, but of course it had stopped. He looked like some futuristic machine, made from polished ebony, but Lina knew that beneath that exterior he was at least ninety-percent idiot. She supposed Ella had been desperate, to have left him here in charge.
‘Well then, that’s settled,’ said Lina decisively. ‘Thanks, Jayce!’
He stammered something that she didn’t catch, but she was already past him and into the red-lit dimness of the medical department, looking through the open doors of the treatment bays. She thought perhaps he would follow her, but he didn’t.
The first room was empty. The second contained one of the medical techs, bent over some shiny piece of equipment, doing something precise-looking that took all of her attention. Lina moved on without the tech seeing her. The third room, just round the corner, contained Eli. She slipped inside as silently as she could, feeling illicit and slightly wired. The foul taste in her mouth had become ubiquitous now, an ever-present reminder of how bad things had become, like the taste of failure itself.
At first, she thought that Eli was indeed sleeping. He lay curled up on the hospital bed like a comma, with his face to the wall, dressed in light hospital pyjamas. He looked as if he had shrunk somehow, collapsed in on himself. His breathing was rapid and shallow.
‘Hey,’ she said softly, not really expecting any reaction.
Eli jerked as if he had been electrocuted and turned to face her, pushing himself up on one elbow before collapsing again limply. His eyes were wide and blank and his face looked vacant, paralysed in an expression of bewilderment.
‘Hey, Lina,’ he said in a small, weak voice.
She went to his bedside and embraced him, alarmed at how brittle he felt in her arms. It was as if something had been extracted from him, like he’d been bled by some vampiric parasite to within an inch of death. She felt a shudder go through him, and he stiffened for a moment, before becoming boneless and relaxing against her. She held him for a while, wishing there was something she could do to help him. Eventually, he pushed himself away from her and lolled against the wall, defeated-looking.
‘Eli, I know this is hard to believe, but what happened is for the best,’ she said, trying to look him in the eye. She wished she’d had the foresight to plan what she would actually say at this moment. Eli wouldn’t look at her — he seemed to be staring deep into the wall behind her left shoulder. ‘Nik was sabotaging the station, trying to kill us all, I suppose. I know that’s insane, but that’s what was happening. You may just have stopped him in time. Perhaps he was going to blow the reactor next. He had to be stopped, Eli.’ She moved closer again, forcing him to look at her. His lower lip was trembling minutely. ‘He had to be stopped,’ she repeated, more emphatically.
‘Yes,’ agreed Eli distantly. ‘I had to do it. That’s right.’ A wave of emotion washed briefly across his features, distorting his face for a moment into a caricature of purest misery, then was gone again just as quickly, leaving only that awful blankness behind. ‘And I have to do more, yet.’
Lina shook her head, feeling tears well up inside her. ‘Eli, you don’t have to do anything now except get better. You just have to accept what happened, and somehow move on. I can’t tell you how to do that, but that’s what you need to do. That’s all you need to do right now. Maintenance are on the power problem, and they’re gonna crack it, I know they are. We’re going to be okay. But you have to get better. And that means accepting that you did what was necessary.’
Eli exhaled slowly, his head wobbling slightly from side to side. He looked like one of the shell-shocked soldiers Lina had seen on the news, back in the days of the Platini Alpha Civil War.
‘There’s more,’ he said darkly. ‘There’s more there’s more there’s more there’s more there’s–’
She cut him off, a little spooked: ‘Eli, you’re done,’ she said. He turned his vacant cow’s eyes on her and she couldn’t even see the man behind them any more. All she saw was her own frightened face, reflected back in perfect miniature, cast in glass. She lurched upright and involuntarily fell back a step, feeling her heart beginning to race in her chest. ‘You’re done,’ she said again, but it came out in a whisper this time. His eyes. . .
Eli’s head shook ponderously, but that vacant gaze stayed fixed on her. ‘No,’ he said simply. That one word, filled with grim significance.
Lina suddenly felt a lump in her throat, so pronounced that it was hard to breathe. Something was wrong. That’s not Eli! some dark and irrational part of her mind screamed. That’s not Eli in there! In another, more stable part of her brain, a grim and undeniable thought was taking shape. She fell back another pace, her hand feeling behind her for the doorway. ‘What?’ she breathed. Her mind was whirling again — damn it, she felt like her whole body was whirling — as if the station had suddenly begun to spin in the opposite direction, like a waltzer in some nightmare theme park, a ride designed to induce insanity and sickness in equal measure. Eli’s mouth cracked open, showing his teeth, and slowly widened in a smile. And then, without knowing she had any intention of doing so, Lina turned and simply ran from the room.