In a state of exhibitionist excitement, he flipped open the lid of the oven, releasing a richly flavoursome blast of heat.
‘Isserley,’ he begged, ‘Let me cut you a slice of this. Let me, let me, let me.’
She laughed, embarrassed. ‘Fine, OK!’ she agreed hastily.
He was quick as a spark, his carving technique a performance that could be missed in an eye’s blink.
‘Yesyesyes,’ he enthused, springing up. Isserley recoiled slightly as a steaming, sizzling morsel appeared inches from her mouth, impaled on the razor-sharp tip of the carving knife. Gingerly she took the meat between her teeth and tugged it free.
A soft voice sounded from the doorway of the kitchen.
‘You just don’t know what you’re doing,’ sighed Amlis Vess.
‘No unauthorized fucking personnel in my kitchen!’ retorted Hilis instantly.
Amlis Vess took a step backwards; to be fair, very little of him had been inside the room in the first place. Only his startling black face and perhaps the swell of his white breast. His retreat didn’t even look like a retreat, more like a casual realignment of balance, a shifting of his muscles. He came to rest technically outside the room, but with the undiminished intensity of his gaze still taking up a great deal of space inside. And his gaze was directed not at Hilis, but at Isserley.
Isserley chewed what remained of her delicious morsel self-consciously, too unnerved to move. Luckily the meat was virtually melting in her mouth, it was so tender.
‘What’s your problem, Mr Vess?’ she said at last.
Amlis’s jaw tensed in anger and the muscles in his shoulders flexed as if he was considering attacking her, but instead he relaxed abruptly, as if he’d just given himself an injection of something calmative.
‘That meat you’re eating,’ he said softly, ‘is the body of a creature that lived and breathed just like you and me.’
Hilis groaned and rolled his eyes in despair and pity, for the pretensions and dopey confusions of the young. Then, to Isserley’s dismay, he turned his back on it all, applying himself to the work at hand, seizing hold of the nearest cooking pot.
With Amlis’s words still ringing in her ears, Isserley took courage, as she had done last time, by focusing on his upper-class accent, his velvety diction groomed by wealth and privilege. Deliberately, she recalled being petted and then discarded by the Elite; she pictured the authorities who’d decided she would be more suited to a life in the Estates, men with accents just like Amlis Vess’s. She invited that accent in, listening to the sharp chord of resentment it struck deep inside her, letting it reverberate.
‘Mr Vess,’ she said icily, ‘I hate to tell you this, but I really doubt there’s much similarity between the way you and I live and breathe, let alone between me and’ – she passed her tongue over her teeth for provocative effect – ‘my breakfast.’
‘We’re all the same under the skin,’ suggested Amlis, a little huffily she thought. She would have to aim for this weak spot of his, his filthy-rich idealist’s need to deny social reality.
‘Funny how you’ve managed to keep your looks, then,’ she sneered, ‘with all the hard backbreaking work you’ve had to do.’
A direct hit, Isserley noted. Amlis seemed poised to spring again, his eyes burning, but then once more he relaxed: another shot of the same drug.
‘This is getting us nowhere,’ he sighed. ‘Come with me.’
Isserley’s mouth fell open in disbelief.
‘Come with you?’
‘Yes,’ said Amlis, as if confirming the finer details of a venture they’d already agreed on. ‘Down below. Down where the vodsels are.’
‘You… you must be joking,’ she said, uttering a short laugh which she’d intended to be contemptuous, but which came out merely shaky.
‘Why not?’ he challenged innocently.
She almost choked on her reply; perhaps it was a tiny thread of meat lodged in her throat. Because I’m so scared of the depths, she was thinking. Because I don’t want to be buried alive again.
‘Because I have work to get on with,’ she said.
He stared intently into her eyes, not aggressively, but as if he was judging the distance, the logistics for a leap into her soul.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘There’s something I’ve seen down there, that I need you to explain. Honestly. I’ve asked the men; none of them know. Please.’
There was a pause, during which she and Amlis stood motionless while Hilis kept the air generously stocked with banging and clashing. Then, astounded, Isserley heard her belated response as if from a great distance. She heard it only vaguely; couldn’t even be sure of the exact wording. But whatever it was, it meant yes. In a dream, to the surreal accompaniment of clashing metal and the sizzle of meat, she was saying yes to him.
He turned, his lithe body flowing away. She followed him, out of Hilis’s kitchen, towards the lift.
Several men were gathered in the dining hall by now, loitering, murmuring, chewing; watching Isserley and Amlis Vess pass among them.
No-one made a move to intervene.
No-one threatened Amlis with death if he dared take another step.
Alarms failed to scream into action when the lift opened for them, nor did the lift’s doors refuse to close when they stepped inside together.
All in all, the universe seemed not to appreciate that anything was amiss.
Utterly bewildered, Isserley stood next to Amlis in the featureless confines of the lift, facing front, but aware of his long dark neck and head somewhere near her shoulder, his smooth flank breathing inches from her hip. The cabin descended noiselessly, arrived with a hiss.
The door slid open, and Isserley moaned softly in claustrophobic distress. Everything out there was steeped in almost complete darkness, as if they had been dropped into a narrow fissure between two strata of compacted rock with only a child’s faltering flashlight to guide them. There was a stench of fermenting urine and faeces, a few spidery contours of wire mesh sketched in by feeble infra-red bulbs, and, swaying everywhere before them, the firefly glints of a swarm of eyes.
‘Do you know where the light is?’ said Amlis politely.
8
ISSERLEY FUMBLED, AND found the switch. A flood of harsh light rushed to fill the compound from floor to ceiling, like a tide of seawater into a crevice.
‘Ugh,’ she groaned squeamishly. To be so far inside the earth was a nightmare come true.
‘A nightmare, yes?’ said Amlis Vess.
Isserley looked to him, scared and in need of comfort, but he meant the livestock, of course, not the claustrophobia – she could tell from that infuriating grimace of pity on his face. Typical man: so obsessed with his own idealism he was incapable of feeling empathy for a human being suffering right under his nose.
Isserley stepped clear of the lift, determined not to humiliate herself in front of him. A few moments ago, she’d felt like burying her face in the soft black fur of his neck, clinging to his perfectly balanced body; now she felt like killing him.
‘It’s just the stink of animals,’ she sniffed, eyes averted from him as he padded up to her side. The lift hissed shut behind them and disappeared.
In excavating this deepest of the levels, the men had burrowed out no more of the solid Triassic rock than they absolutely had to. The ceiling was less than seven feet high, and the accumulated steam of cattle breath hung in a haze around the fluorescent strips. The vodsel enclosures, a corona of linked pens all along the walls, took up almost the entire floor space; there was just enough room left down the middle for a walkway. In the cages to the left, the monthlings; to the right, the transitionals; at the deep end, against the far wall facing the lift, the new arrivals.