“She was trying. God, she was… She killed herself, Lore. Can you imagine that? Feeling so bad you don’t want to wake up ever again and eat breakfast, you don’t want to look up ever again and see tiny white clouds in the sky. Just wanting to forget. That bastard. She…” More weeping.
Lore’s heart feels so big she can hardly breathe. “Tok, who’s dead?”
Tok looks up, astonished. “Stella. She killed herself. She…”
Lore does not hear the rest. She is flooded with relief that it is not Katerine. Tok is looking at her. “Why? Why did she kill herself?”
“Because of what that monster did to her. Almost every night. She only started therapy six months ago, Lore. She was finally facing it. But then I think it just got too much, I think she looked ahead and saw this thing, this black swamp inside her, this cloud that looked like it would stain her life forever, and couldn’t face it. Well, I can face it. I’m going to make that monster pay. Come back home, Lore, wherever you are. I need you. We’ll do this together.”
Lore just looks at him, horrified. What is he talking about?
“I’ll contact you in a day or two, tell you where I am. I’m going to put a stop to it. This has gone on too long.” He reaches to the side and his picture blips out.
Lore stares at the blank screen, unable to move. What is he talking about? Stella is dead. What does he mean? Who is the monsters. A quick image of Greta and a locksmith glide through her memory. She shakes her head. Stella is dead. She has a sudden image of Stella and her friends standing around the net screen, drinks in hand, vying to send money to some amateur charity. Stella is dead.
She does not know how long she sits there, but when someone knocks at the door and she gets up, she finds she is stiff. She expects Sarah, and opens the door without checking the peephole.
Two masked figures burst in. One takes her arms and the other points something at her face. There is a funny smell, and the floor comes up to hit her.
Chapter 21
I opened my eyes again at eleven in the morning and thought it was the message tone that had awakened me. I was halfway out of bed before I realized it was the door.
Someone was knocking on my door.
This was the first time since I had lived alone that anyone had knocked. It made me think of Uruguay.
“Hold on.” I found a shirt, padded to the door. “Who is it?”
“Why, who’re you expecting’.”
Tom. Even so, I made sure both chains were fastened before I opened the door a crack. “I’m not dressed.”
“We don’t mind.” He held up his hand. I saw it was attached to some kind of string. “Brought you a present.” A leash. And a dog. A black, stocky-looking thing with a startlingly pink tongue.
“No. I can’t –”
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” he said cheerfully.
“He’s not to keep. Just to borrow for an hour or two every day, Can we come in?”
I opened the door and the dog dragged Tom in. “Sit down while I dress.”
“I’ll put the kettle on.”
“Fine.”
I went into the bathroom and showered quickly. I could hear the dog’s claws clicking on the floor as it padded about, sniffing things. When I came out of the bathroom, rubbing my hair, it sat down and panted at me. Its entire hindquarters shuffled back and forth as it wagged its tail.
I patted it cautiously on the head. It wagged harder. “It looks young.”
“He. He’s eight months old. His name’s Gibbon.”
“As in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?”
Tom smiled. “Knew you had an education. Now, hurry up and comb that hair, tea’s ready.” I did, then checked to see if I had any messages. Just one, a notice from the plant, reiterating what Magyar had already told me: tonight’s shift had been extended. For the next three days, the notice said. No please or thank you, just an assumption that we would all cooperate.
We sat at the table by the window. The dog sat on the carpet, watching me carefully.
“I got him yesterday. From the pound. I thought to myself, ‘Tom, you’re getting old. More to the point, you’re thinking you should feel old and lonely. You need something to look after.’ I decided a dog would be just the thing.”
“But…”
“How am I going to walk a young, healthy dog like this every day? That’s where you come in. I saw you dragging yourself in the other night, and I said to myself, ‘That lass needs a bit of fresh air, something to take her mind off things.’ And then I heard about the bit of bother at the plant last night and thought a walk by the river would do nicely.”
I thought Tom thought entirely too much. And then I wondered how he knew I worked at the plant, and realized too late he’d been guessing. I smiled wryly. “By the time I get him to the river we’ll both be exhausted and it’ll be time for me to head back.”
But Tom had evidently been thinking about that, too. He actually folded his arms in satisfaction. “Bet you didn’t know you could reach the river not two minutes’ walk from here.”
I acknowledged defeat. “You’d better tell me how.”
I got to work early. Twelve hours was a long time to spend in a skinny, especially when there was cleanup and overlapping shifts arguing about jurisdiction, and I wanted to be prepared.
Tom had been right about the walk. The fresh air and exercise had stretched the tension kinks out of my shoulders and put vigor back in my veins. Although I knew it was all in my mind, I felt cleaner, as though the breeze had blown away the stain of aliphatics and aromatics from the spongy tissue of my lungs.
I sighed as I took my time sliding on wrist supports and strapping on my waders. Now I was going to clog everything up again.
“It’s going to get worse,” Kinnis said cheerfully. He hadn’t even sealed his skinny yet. “Lot of work to do.”
“I hear these daytime jerk-offs have only got a few more troughs up,” Meisener agreed.
“Less than forty is what I heard,” Cel said as she started stripping off her street clothes. “Hey, Kinnis, you were dumb as a rock on the net last night.”
“Yeah? At least I looked good, not like you, you ugly cow.”
I stepped out of the line of fire. The next stage would be thrown gauntlets, goggles, raucous laughter. It always made me feel out of place, the way the rest of the shift familiarly insulted each other, threw things, played jokes. They knew it, I think, but I never got the sense that they might gang up on me and herd me out. They could have done, in the beginning, but they hadn’t. Maybe I had been as strange to them as they to me. They wouldn’t do it now; I might be weird, but I had worked with them, helped them. I had been adopted and my difference was now taken for granted—like the slowness of a younger sister who is defended fiercely on the school playground. All of a sudden I liked these people, liked them a great deal.
The shift was hard, but we were used to that, and the two shifts meshed together more smoothly than I had anticipated. There was no sign of Magyar, but without any discussion, our shift took on the heavier, dirtier work. The day shift seemed content to let us. I wondered how many more centuries it would take to break the physically-stronger-equals morally-superior equation, then shrugged and concentrated on the job.
Once the day shift had left, the work was faster and smoother. An hour before the break, we had almost fifty troughs up.
“Maybe we should slow down,” Cel said from behind me. She was leaning on her rake, surveying the progress. “Time and a half is a hard thing to lose.”
“I wonder how Magyar got that for us.”
“The way I read it, she can get what she wants right now. Did you know she’s been in executive land all night? Rumor has it they gave Hepple’s job to the day-shift supervisor—Ho? Hu? something like that—and offered Magyar his job.”
“On the day shift?”
“Yeah,” she said, misinterpreting my expression. “What would she do with those soft wankers?”