He struggled to stay in the present. ‘How many people are hiding in the jungle?’
‘Ten, now.’
‘So what are they going to live on?’
‘It’s not that hard to smuggle out food. Anyway, we’ve already sent word up to Ambon; the situation should be resolved in a couple of days. I gather that it’s all a matter of diplomats calling in favours, until one of West Papua’s major aid donors agrees to apply some muscle. I know that sounds horribly convoluted, but it’s probably a lot safer than Ambon sending in a warship.’
‘Yeah. Can you see anything happening back on the beach?’
Madhusree had brought a pair of binoculars. ‘That guy’s still lying where he fell.’ She added teasingly, ‘Still glowing at body temperature.’
‘I never thought you’d killed them,’ Prabir protested.
‘You’re a bad liar.’
‘Martha might have. Not you.’
‘You don’t think I’m commando material?’ Madhusree sounded disappointed.
‘I certainly hope not.’ He glanced over his shoulder at her; she was grinning. She didn’t remember the soldier in the grass, bleeding slowly to death. He joked, ‘I knew I should have never let you take up muay thai. All that brutality. You’ve been scarred for life.’
After a while they swapped places again. Prabir looked back with the binoculars in IR mode, waiting not only for the prone soldier to vanish, but for the haze of distortion above the water to swallow the entire beach.
‘You can start the motor.’
Madhusree hit the ignition and her dinghy shot forward, pulling the connecting rope taut. The motor was running on diesel, but it was so quiet that Prabir almost wept. They could have fired it up half an hour ago; they’d been making more noise just by talking.
‘Do you think they’ll come after us?’ she asked. ‘It might not be hard to guess the right direction.’
Prabir said, ‘I don’t know if I’m worth the trouble to them. As long as I’m not heading for their country, I’m someone else’s problem now.’
The dinghy’s outboard motor had its own GPS, its own inertial navigation, its own autopilot. Madhusree zeroed in on their chosen destination on a map displayed on a small panel, confirmed the choice, then left the machine to steer. The only thing not automated was obstacle avoidance; they’d have to take over manually if they ran into shipping, and with any luck that would mean cutting the motor and waiting to be rescued, not swerving wildly to avoid getting mown down.
As dawn approached, she tossed Prabir a plastic-wrapped hypodermic. ‘If you’re going to be paranoid, you’ll have to take your own blood samples.’
‘Urgh. This should be fun.’ He tore open the packet; there was a disinfectant swab enclosed, like an airline’s miniature scented towel. He pulled off his belt and tightened it around his left arm. ‘I feel like a drug addict.’
Madhusree shook her head despairingly. ‘Junkies use sonics: transdermal acoustic delivery systems that make the skin permeable to small molecules like opiates. There’s no risk of infection, because viruses are too large to get through. How do you think hepatitis C got wiped out?’
‘I knew all that,’ he lied. He applied the swab then slid the needle carefully into the crook of his elbow, but the dinghy lurched just as he was applying pressure, and the needle transected the vein. ‘Fuck.’ He steeled himself, then tried again at a different point; this time the blood spurted satisfyingly into the low-pressure sample tube. ‘How often do we have to do this?’
‘Every couple of hours at first, just to see what’s going on.’
Prabir left the hypodermic in place and flung the tube of blood across to Madhusree. A valve had shut off the flow automatically, but it was awkward trying to stop the needle slipping out. ‘Have you got some tape or something? I might as well keep this in.’
‘Good idea. There’s an anticoagulant coating on the needle, so it won’t clog up. But you knew that, of course.’ She tossed him a packet of band aids.
‘What are you looking for? In the samples?’
‘Levels of the gene, tissue types affected.’ Madhusree tinkered with one of Grant’s silver boxes until it emitted an encouraging boot-up chime.
‘Tissue types?’
She fed the blood to the machine. ‘If the gene is being incorporated into various kinds of cells in your body, occasionally one will break free and end up in your bloodstream. If I sort the cells with flow cytometry before bursting them and probing the DNA, I can track what’s happening.’
Prabir said, ‘It should only be in my testes, though, shouldn’t it? I mean, it has a promoter that will only switch it on during meiosis, so why bother incorporating anywhere else?’
The machine began whirring. Madhusree looked up and said encouragingly, ‘I hope it hasn’t even got a hold there. We’ll probably never know how it got into your bloodstream, but it certainly hasn’t come to you via another mammal, so its past experience is of limited relevance. Nothing works the first time in a new environment.’
‘You don’t believe in Furtado’s theory, then?’
She laughed and said flatly, ‘No.’
Prabir didn’t challenge her to provide her own explanation; he didn’t want to derail her, he didn’t want to erode her confidence. She’d track the gene through his body, and they’d fight it. However it worked, whatever it did.
When the sun cleared the water there was no land in sight, though Prabir could see Teranesia’s peak to their west through the binoculars. Straight ahead he saw nothing but sea. They wouldn’t reach Yamdena till midnight.
Madhusree said, ‘First results. Are you ready?’
‘Yeah.’
‘The São Paulo gene’s been incorporated into spermatogenic stem cells, complete with the usual promoter.’
Prabir nodded acceptingly. He’d been prepared for that, and however tainted it made him feel, a transplant could still rid him of the gene completely.
‘But it’s also present in dermal stem cells. With a different promoter.’
‘In my skin?’ He stared at her, more baffled than alarmed. ‘Why?’
Madhusree shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
Prabir looked down at his arms and hands; they appeared perfectly normal. He lifted his shirt above his waist. There was a glossy patch on his abdomen, a shiny purplish-black region the size of a large coin. He touched it warily. The surface of his skin felt the same as ever, but when he applied enough pressure to sense what lay beneath, instead of the usual springiness of muscle he met resistance from an object as hard as bone.
‘It’s solid. It’s some kind of tumour.’ He was numb with revulsion. ‘Can you cut it out? Please?’
Madhusree said, ‘Stay calm.’
Prabir removed his life jacket and pulled off his shirt, almost dislodging the hypodermic in his haste; there were two more patches higher on his chest. He turned so Madhusree could see his back. ‘There are five,’ she announced. ‘About the same size.’
‘You could anaesthetise me with the tranquilliser gun,’ he implored her. ‘They’re not that deep. I won’t lose much blood.’ The gene would still be in his body, but he didn’t care. He wanted this visible, palpable sign of it removed.
‘Are they causing you any pain? Any burning sensation? They could be completely benign.’
‘Benign?’
Madhusree held her hands up, pleading with him for cool-headedness. ‘If there’s no pain or bleeding, they might only be replacing the normal dermis rather than invading other tissues. And if there’s no inflammation, at least they’re not provoking an autoimmune reaction.’
Prabir took several deep breaths. He’d handled a peppering with shrapnel better than this. He said, ‘There’s no pain, no inflammation.’