‘Heather’s in this conversation,’ Kennedy said on the walkie-talkie. ‘No pain, no gain. I follow the reasoning, Diema, and I’ll do it.’
But Tillman was still thinking it through and he still had questions. ‘How many exits has that place got?’
‘More than a dozen,’ Diema conceded. ‘But I had a thought about that. My people are going to drop something off — something that gives us a bit of an edge.’
‘What kind of something?’ Kennedy asked.
‘A GPS chip. It’s about the size of a pinhead, and we can implant it under your skin. Once it’s in place, we can establish your location to an accuracy of half a metre — which means if we lose you for any reason, we can still keep track of you. They’ll be dropping it off to me in the next few minutes. I’ll need to get it to you. The easiest way is if I just walk right in there, looking like I’m visiting someone or delivering something. Leave your door unlocked.’
The channel went dead. But only for a couple of seconds.
‘Tillman?’ Rush said.
‘Lad, either use the bloody water bottles or hold it in until we—’
‘It’s not about that. It’s about this whole thing. Taking the Heather Kennedy show on the road.’
‘Well? What about it, Ben?’
‘I think I might have a better idea.’
Kennedy did as she was told — unlocked the door and left it on the latch, so it could be pushed open from the outside. For a few minutes after that, she paced up and down the room, unable to keep still. Finally she went back to the window and stared out at the dumpsters, trying to identify where exactly Tillman had secreted himself. Wherever he was, he was well hidden. But he could see her, so she ought to be able to see him. At any rate, it was interesting to keep looking, like playing a chess game with only one move.
The door whickered momentarily against the thick pile of the carpet and a breath of air touched her back. She turned and saw Diema closing and locking the door.
‘Okay,’ the girl said. ‘Let’s do this.’
She was carrying a shoulder bag. She took something like a Bic lighter out of it and threw the bag on the bed.
‘That’s it?’ Kennedy asked.
‘This is the applicator. And this,’ she held up her other hand, in which she was holding a small, unlabelled tube like a tube of toothpaste, ‘is a topical anaesthetic plus anti-bacterial agent. You need to rub it on the spot and leave it to work for half a minute. Take off your pants and sit on the bed.’
‘Take off my what?’
Diema was matter-of-fact. ‘There’ll be an implant wound — tiny but noticeable. If we had time for it to heal over, anywhere on your body would be fine. As it is, our best bet is to implant the chip internally, so there’s no visible mark. The supplier said the inside of your cheek would do, but he also said there might be swelling on your face, which would look suspicious. So I think we should go with his other suggestion, which was to place the chip in your vaginal wall.’
Kennedy folded her arms and stayed exactly where she was. ‘I think we should stick with the cheek,’ she said, deadpan.
Diema stared hard at Kennedy, clearly surprised and a little impatient. ‘We know Ber Lusim’s men are female-averse,’ she said, in an I’ll-keep-on-saying-this-until-you-get-it tone. ‘If this goes wrong, and they succeed in taking you, they may search you. But the two rogue Elohim you met in London were reluctant even to undress you fully, so I think we’re safe in assuming that they wouldn’t give you a full orifice search.’
She waited for reason to prevail and for Kennedy to do as she was told.
‘Sit down, girl,’ Kennedy said.
Diema seemed bemused at the suggestion. ‘There’s no time,’ she said curtly. ‘If you insist on the cheek, then let’s—’
‘Sit down,’ Kennedy said again. ‘We have to talk.’
‘No,’ Diema said, not even bothering to hide her contempt for the older woman. ‘We don’t have to talk. We only have to work together. I thought that was clear.’
‘Clear to you, maybe. I’m going to sit down anyway. You can stand there, if you want to, but you will talk to me. Because if you don’t, this ends here.’
Diema’s eyes widened. ‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘There are too many lives at stake.’
‘A couple more than you know, maybe.’ Kennedy went and sat, not on the bed but on the room’s one chair. She waited in silence for the girl to join her.
Diema stood irresolute for several heartbeats. Finally, rigid with tension, she crossed the room and sat on the bed facing Kennedy. She put on a sardonic expression. I’m waiting.
‘Why did you change your name?’ Kennedy asked.
Diema blinked. ‘What?’
‘It’s not that tough a question. Why did you change your name?’
‘For no reason that you need to know about.’
The girl’s tone was flat and final. Kennedy waited her out.
‘Because I changed my life,’ Diema said at last, in the same voice.
‘Yes,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘I can see that, Grace. I’m just trying to work out how deep the changes go.’
The girl’s expression didn’t change, apart from a barely perceptible flicker of her eyelids. ‘I was Tabe,’ she said. ‘I was never Grace. Grace was just what the father of my flesh called me.’
‘The father of your flesh? Is that how you think of him?’ Diema opened her mouth to speak again, but Kennedy held up a hand. ‘Never mind. I don’t pretend to understand your customs, but you’re wrong about that and you need to know it.’
‘My name is—’
‘Your mother named you Grace. And she named your brothers Jude and Seth. Normally you’d have kept those names when she took you back home, because none of them were offensive to your people’s beliefs. The tradition, as far as I was told, is to rechristen children if they’ve been given names that are too … what would you call it? Too Adamite. But Jude and Seth were good, biblical names — and who could argue with Grace?’
‘I said,’ the girl repeated, through gritted teeth, ‘my name is Diema.’
‘But your Michael Brand, your Kuutma, he seemed to feel that your past, and your brothers’ past, needed to be more thoroughly erased than that. Perhaps because he loved your mother, Rebecca, and wanted her family to be his family, too. But she killed herself. She didn’t want to live without your father. I mean, the father of your flesh. Leo Tillman. And after she was dead, Michael Brand gave new names to the three of you. He called you Tabe — and your brothers Ezei and Cephas.’
Diema seemed completely unmoved. ‘You seem to think I should care what I was called out here in your world,’ she said to Kennedy, her lower lip twisting. ‘I don’t. It’s never been my world and it isn’t now. It’s just a place where I work.’
Kennedy nodded. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Your world is a big cave somewhere, with the sky painted on the underside of the roof. I can’t imagine what that would be like, but I know you didn’t … don’t … think of it as a great hardship. You never missed what you never had. But doesn’t it seem terrible to you, now that you’ve seen what the real world is like, that anyone should grow up in that way and live in that way? In the dark?’ Kennedy heard the tremor in her own voice. She was trying to speak to the young woman, but she kept seeing the child imprisoned inside her, the child entombed, and it was so terrible she felt a sort of sympathetic panic — a feeling of vicarious suffocation.
‘It’s not dark,’ Diema said. ‘It was only dark when you saw it, rhaka. And that was because you saw your own darkness.’
‘No,’ Kennedy said sharply. ‘No. Believe me, I know the difference. And I know there’s nothing I can say that will change you now. I can’t push back the weight of all those years. But at least think about it. Please. Why did they send you? Why you, of all people? Why did they even think to turn you into …’ she pointed at the girl with a hand that trembled slightly ‘… into this? I can’t forget what Kuutma said to Leo, the only time we ever met him. “Your daughter is an artist. She paints. There’s such beauty inside her that it spills out of her fingers into the world.” He said that! And then they turned around and made you into one of their murderers.’