Suddenly, the metal door slid shut between them, as if drawing curtains on the spectacle. Only now did Isserley realize that several seconds had passed, and that she had failed to step out of the lift. The door sealed itself and Amlis was gone; the floor moved gently underneath her.
The lift was descending further, towards the Processing Hall and the vodsel pens – exactly where Isserley didn’t want to go. Peevishly, she banged on the up button with the palm of her hand.
The lift came to a stop, and its doors twitched, as if about to open, but they managed no more than a centimetre or two before the cabin lurched back upwards towards the surface. A whiff of dank animal smell had entered; nothing more.
Back on the men’s level, the lift opened again.
Amlis Vess had moved back a little from the door, closer to the workman guarding him. He was still beautiful, but the few moments’ separation from him had given Isserley a chance to regain her grip on her anger. Good-looking or not, Vess was responsible for a juvenile feat of sabotage which had just put her through hell. His appearance had startled her, that’s alclass="underline" it meant nothing. She’d expected him to have no presence except as the perpetrator of a wickedly foolish act; he wasn’t quite so anonymous, and she had to adjust.
‘Oh good; I thought you’d decided against us,’ Amlis Vess said. His voice was warm and musical, and terribly terribly upper-class. Isserley seized hold of the frisson of resentment it caused in her, and hung onto it resolutely.
‘Spare me the witty comments, Mr Vess,’ she said, stepping out of the lift. ‘I’m very tired.’
Deliberately, pointedly, she turned her attention to the other man, whom she belatedly recognized as Yns, the engineer.
‘What do you think, Yns?’ she said, happy to have remembered his name in time to use it. ‘Is it safe to take Mr Vess back up to ground level?’
Yns, a swarthy old salt of heroic ugliness, bared his stained teeth awkwardly and made fleeting eye contact with Amlis. Plainly the two men had had ample opportunity to talk during the vodsels’ adventure outside, and had come to appreciate the artificial absurdity of their captor—captive relationship.
‘Um… yeah,’ grimaced Yns. ‘Nothing else he can do now, is there?’
‘I think Mr Vess should come up to ground level,’ Isserley said, ‘and have a look at what the men are carrying in.’
Without taking her eyes off Amlis Vess, she twisted one arm backwards and pressed the button summoning the lift. In doing so, she winced in unexpected pain, and could tell he saw her wince – damn him. So rare were her opportunities to exploit her natural multi-jointedness, so careful was she always to move with the crude hinge-like motions of the vodsels, that she was seizing up. Wouldn’t he just love to know what her body could and couldn’t do!
The lift arrived, and Amlis Vess obediently walked inside. His bones and muscles moved subtly under his soft hide, without swagger, like a dancer. He was probably bisexual, like all rich and famous people.
Noting that the cabin wasn’t big enough for three, Amlis Vess looked to Isserley, but she made it clear that he and Yns should go first, and she would follow. She tried to convey, in her stance, a wary, fastidious disgust, as though Amlis Vess were some huge animal that might soil her, just now when she was too tired to clean herself.
As soon as the lift ascended, she felt sick, as if the earth had closed over her and she was inhaling a miasma of spent breath. It was how she expected to feel, though, and she counselled herself to hang on. Being underground was always a nightmare for her, especially a place like this. You’d almost need to be a lower life form not to go insane.
‘Come on,’ she whispered, longing to be rescued.
When at last they were all standing together in the steading – Isserley, Amlis Vess, and five of the farm workers – a solemn and surreal sight had been arranged before them. The vodsels had been carried into the barn; first the live one, then the three gory carcasses. Actually, the live one wasn’t alive anymore; Ensel had given it a cautionary dose of icpathua on the way in, which seemed unfortunately to have stopped the creature’s overtaxed heart.
The bodies were laid in a row on the concrete in the middle of the barn. The legs of the most complete one were still seeping grume; the heads of the shot ones had more or less stopped bleeding. Pale and glistening with frost, the foursome looked like massive effigies made of candlefat, unevenly melted from their hairy wicks.
Isserley looked at them, then at Amlis Vess, then at the bodies again, as if drawing a direct line for his attention.
‘Well?’ she challenged. ‘Proud of yourself?’
Amlis Vess stared at her, his teeth bared in pity and disgust.
‘You know, it’s very strange,’ he said. ‘I don’t recall shooting these poor animals’ heads off.’
‘You might as well have done,’ snapped Isserley, mortified to hear Yns snorting inappropriately behind her.
‘If you say so,’ Amlis Vess said, in a tone (if not an accent) she herself might have used to humour an alarmingly deranged hitcher.
Isserley was rigid with fury. Fucking elite bastard! He was behaving as if his actions didn’t need defending. Typical rich kid, typical pampered little tycoon. None of their actions ever needed defending, did they?
‘Why did you do it?’ she demanded bluntly.
‘I don’t believe in killing animals,’ he replied without raising his voice. ‘That’s all.’
Isserley gaped at him for a moment in disbelief; then, incensed, she drew his attention to the toes of the dead vodsels, an untidy row of approximately forty swollen digits splayed on the concrete before them.
‘You see these parts here?’ she fumed, singling out the worst affected ones with her pointing finger. ‘See the way the toes are grey and mushy? It’s called frostbite. The cold does it. These bits are dead, Mr Vess. This creature would certainly have died, just from being outside.’
Amlis Vess fidgeted uncomfortably, his first sign of weakness.
‘I find that hard to believe,’ he frowned, ‘It’s their world out there, after all.’
‘Out there?’ Isserley yelled. ‘Are you kidding? Does this’ – she jabbed her finger at the frostbitten toes, unintentionally slashing an additional perforation in one of them – ‘look like they’ve been running around in their natural element to you? Does it look like they’ve been having a little… frolic?’
Amlis Vess opened his mouth to speak, then apparently thought better of it. He sighed. And when he sighed, the white fur on his chest expanded.
‘It looks like I’ve made you angry,’ he said gravely. ‘Very angry. And the strange thing is, I don’t think it’s because I caused these animals to come to harm. I mean, you were just about to kill them yourself, were you not?’
With unconscious cruelty, all the men joined Vess in looking to Isserley for an answer. Isserley went quiet, her fists clenched. She was aware all of a sudden of why she should never clench her fists: the ineradicable pain in each hand where her sixth finger had been removed. And this, in turn, reminded her of all her other differences from the men who stood in a semicircle before her, across a divide of corpses. She cringed instinctively, dropping her posture as if to brace herself for all fours, then folded her arms across her breasts.
‘I suggest you keep Mr Vess out of trouble until he can be shipped back where he came from,’ she said icily, directing the instruction to no-one in particular. Then, one slow and painfully dignified step at a time, she walked out of the steading.