Dark eyes stared from a half-turned face and the face looked towards the camera. In a looking glass behind the boy could be seen a naked sliver of the photographer, all soft hip and pale skin. Petra Mayer wondered why she hadn't seen it earlier.
When Prisoner Zero put the photograph of the naked boy back again it was face down beside the other pictures on the mattress. Although that still left several shots the right way up.
"They're good," she said.
The prisoner seemed slightly surprised, the first time his face had actually expressed emotion, and Petra Mayer absent-mindedly made a mark on a chart, checking the time on her watch without being seen to do so.
"Technically," she said. "I mean technically. Jake must have owned a good camera."
"It was Celia's," said the prisoner.
He'd only found out how expensive it was when he'd seen the thing advertised in a magazine. A newer model, minimal changes and an extortionate price. He'd thought of all nasrani as rich, that this richness varied Prisoner Zero only realized later, around the same time he finally came to understand how far the blonde Englishwoman had been up that particular scale.
"A Leica, with rapid-load and rewind, proper engraving to the brass, self-timer, functioning shutter and flash socket. They were hand-made," Prisoner Zero added, just in case Petra Mayer didn't know this.
She'd offered him money, Celia had. Cash to get out of her life and start again, somewhere he wouldn't be known and cause her problems. At the time he'd thought the sum incredibly generous, even as he refused the envelope she tried to push into his hand. It was only later, when Jake told him about her father dying and the will being contested by two of the man's ex-wives, that Moz discovered just how much money had been settled on Celia on her eighteenth birthday, with more at twenty-one, twenty-five and thirty-two.
Then Celia's offer began to seem almost contemptuous. Of course, by then he'd done what she wanted and for nothing. He was out of her life and deep into the dregs of his own, a life circumscribed by Jake, heroin and the narrowness of a single mattress on the floor of an unfurnished squat in Amsterdam.
"Celia?" said Petra Mayer. Short questions generally worked best and she was old enough to have taught herself not to fill in the gaps, to leave space for what the other person wanted to say. "I thought Jake was your lover."
"Lady Celia Vere." The bitterness in the prisoner's voice was undeniable now. "Her uncle was British ambassador to Paris, you know."
Petra Mayer shuffled her file. "No," she said, "I didn't know. How did you first meet?"
Prisoner Zero smiled. "I stole her watch."
"Is that true?"
Prisoner Zero shook his head. "No," he said. "I only pretended it was me. Someone else took it."
"Who?"
"A girl called Malika," said Prisoner Zero, and then he didn't say anything else for a very long time.
CHAPTER 43
Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]
"You forgot this..."
The voice came out of nowhere. At least, that's what Tris thought until she realized it was the man she'd left sleeping, if "man" was the right word, which she was beginning to doubt.
"...and you'd better put that down."
Tris looked at the blade she held and then at the half light obscuring the entrance to her rocky overhang, where Luca was unwrapping himself into existence. The Baron had the manners not to point out that the child's sword Tris held was his.
She'd once spent a whole winter wanting his look. She'd been a kid back then, impressed by an older girl's quick and dirty body change. Of course, being a kid, Tris hadn't realized the new body was meant to look like Luca and she doubted if the other girl did either.
"What did I forget?" demanded Tris crossly. There was stuff in bed she'd have given a miss if she'd known she was going to see Luca again. Things like his bite to her throat and leaving one of her nails in his back.
Stepping around the blade, Luca smiled. "You left your marble on the chest."
Tris sighed. "It was a present," she said. "And it's not a marble."
"Oh." Luca looked thoughtful. "What is it then?"
"It's the memory," said Tris, "from my yacht."
"You had a yacht?"
"You saw it, remember? A C-class, X9 interchange." All objects of value in the 2023 worlds were grown individually, that's what Tris had always understood. And yet the owner of All Tomorrow's Parties still gave his ship a number. No wonder Doc Joyce hated him.
"Where did you get a yacht?"
Tris wanted to say, Don't I look like a girl who might own an X9 interchange? Unfortunately they both knew the answer to that.
"I stole it," said Tris, taking the marble from Luca. "Then we crashed into a lake except it was really a river. This is what's left."
They ate wild hare, roasted in the ashes of a fire Luca built in the mouth of the overhang. He took the wood from a long-dead thorn, snapping branches as easily as Tris might have broken twigs and igniting the fire with a snap of his fingers. He also set the trap. A slight thing that was little more than a noose, a thorn branch bent double and a V of twig to peg the thorn to the ground.
"That's it?" Tris had asked.
"Sure," said Luca, "it's enough."
He'd already discarded his leather satchel and was unbuckling his cloak at the time, fussing with a silver knot on its left shoulder. "It used to untie itself," he said. The cloak was already large enough but when Luca unfolded it once and then twice it became very big indeed.
"Find me a long stick," he said.
Tris almost said, Find one yourself. But she restrained herself and after setting the trap outside, she helped Luca make a bivouac from his cloak, the stick she'd found and a dozen small rocks arranged around the edge. Since the cave-like overhang already kept out the worst of the wind Tris wasn't sure this was necessary.
It was when she was putting the last of the stones into place that Luca came back with the hare. "Here," he said, "kill this."
"You do it," said Tris.
Luca shook his head and offered her the animal, which he had by the ears. "I'm not allowed to."
"But you eat meat?"
A nod, quick and totally unashamed.
"That doesn't make sense."
"Maybe not," said Luca, "but that's the way it is."
"Why?" Tris demanded, but she took hold of the hare, only just avoiding one of its back legs which raked towards her wrist. "Tell me--"
"Do you always ask too many questions?"
"Yeah," said Tris, "always."
Luca sighed. "The thing is," he said, crouching down to sit on his heels, "if I started killing I'm not sure I'd be able to stop. You wouldn't like that. So why don't you kill it, I'll cook it and we'll both eat the thing?"
"You're not human, are you?" Tris said, realizing as she said it that this might be a tactless question.
"Nor are you," said Luca, his voice matter-of-fact. "Actually, most people aren't. Not in any sense humans would understand... Now hurry up and kill the hare, anything else is cruel."
"We could let it go," Tris said. "That wouldn't be cruel."
"You need to eat," said Luca. "That's one point. The second is that the animal's half dead with fright so you have a duty to kill it." He nodded towards the small rock she'd only just put into place around the edge of his bivouac.
"Use that," he said. "And hold it the other way up or its ears will come off in your hands when you hit it."
Grabbing the hare by its back legs, Tris hung the animal upside down and thumped it hard with a stone on the back of its head without giving herself time to think. Shitting black raisins at her feet, the animal turned from something living to meat.