The doctor takes a clicker out of his lab-coat pocket and switches on a hologram in front of them. It’s like a hotel brochure in 4D: there is a picture of a beautiful suite, impeccably furnished, followed by other images the doctor clicks through.
‘We have a heated swimming pool, sunlight rooms, halls of trees for nature walks. Movies, games, room service 24/7. As a bonus, you’ll have a personal assistant who will make sure that your every need is fulfilled. Mouton, remind me, what is the young lady’s name again?’
‘Fiona,’ says Mouton. ‘Fiona Botes.’
Seth’s face flushes.
‘The finer details will all become clear once you settle in.’
The doctor switches the projection off.
‘You’ll also have access to all of this,’ he says, gesturing at the lab equipment. ‘Everything you need. We have equipment you wouldn’t believe exists.’
‘But I’ll be your prisoner.’
‘That’s looking at the cloud, instead of the – rather significant – silver lining. I’m giving you – giving all of you – a way out. A unique mercy. I’d advise you to give it some serious consideration.’
‘Five-star prison, with benefits, or death,’ says Seth. ‘I guess I’ll take prison and see how it works out.’
‘You can’t work for them!’ says Kirsten. ‘They represent everything you hate.’
‘Did you not hear the options presented?’ asks Seth. ‘You’d prefer me dead?’
‘Of course not. I just thought… I just think you’d prefer it, over this. Over them.’
‘Then you overestimate my moral compass. Or underestimate my will to stay alive.’
As they re-enter the den Kirsten sees Keke’s eyes flutter closed. Without warning, James leaps at Mouton, tries to bring him down, scrabbles for the gun in his hand. Mouton roars. Kirsten whisks the baby onto the couch, needing both hands free to unlock Seth’s cuffs. The doctor, now behind his desk, calmly opens a drawer, takes out a shiny pistol, snicks off the safety mechanism. Mouton, outraged to see that Kirsten had Seth’s keys, aims his gun at her and fires.
The shot knocks her to the ground and she feels a sudden heaviness in her chest, and a sick warmth spreading. Her hearing is muted but she can hear the baby crying, as if he is behind a wall. She can’t see, can’t breathe. Her breastbone is on fire. A mint-coloured lightness; a searing sadness. The baby – her baby – wails.
This is what it feels like, she thinks, to die.
She expected relief, if anything. Instead it feels like her heart is being stretched, shredded. She tries to reach for her child but she can’t move. She waits for the eventual blackness, blankness of death, but it doesn’t come.
She senses movement through her closed lids and opens them. Her vision is blurry: the animated shapes of James and Mouton are still struggling in silent slow motion, the white figure of the doctor has his pistol pointed at them. Keke on the couch.
She can’t see Seth. Where is Seth? She feels her heart beating, so she knows she is still alive. Things are coming into focus. She’s pinned to the floor. She tries to move again and that’s when she sees him: her brother, slack-mouthed, white-skinned, lying on top of her.
‘Seth?’ she says, but can’t hear herself. ‘Seth?’ but he doesn’t move, and then she knows that the warmth and the crushing weight is his. Knows that he had jumped in front of the bullet meant for her heart and had trapped it in his own instead. She shuffles under him, uses her good arm to try to ease his body off hers, tries to get free. Her sense of hearing starts to return and the baby’s screaming slashes her vision. She hunches over Seth, tries to find his pulse, but there is too much noise and too much yellow adrenaline singing through her body, numbing the pads of her fingers. She begins CPR, just as James had taught her.
1 and 2 and 3, she says to herself. 1 and 2 and 3.
Blue sparks travel up her injured arm and lodge in her clavicle, shock her jawbone. She continues the compressions: wave after wave of jagged Pollen Yellow and Traffic Light Red and Fresh Sage Leaf Green. Van der Heever keeps his gun aimed at Mouton and James as they struggle.
‘Stop it!’ shouts van der Heever. ‘Stop it immediately!’ but the men carry on their clumsy wrestling. ‘This has been my life’s work. It cannot end today!’
No one pays any attention to the flailing doctor.
‘This lab will self-destruct as soon as my heart stops beating. Do you understand that? Do you realise what is at stake?’
Kirsten looks up momentarily, sees his face is taut with anguish, and feels nothing for him. She turns her attention back to Seth, only then realising that there is no blood. She sticks her finger into the bullet-hole and finds it dry. Kevlarskin. Tries for a pulse again, and finds it. Out cold, but alive. The baby screams and screams from the couch. Mouton is eventually able to throw James to the ground. He stops resisting when he looks up into the barrel of Mouton’s gun.
‘Let me reiterate,’ says the doctor, taking a calming breath, ‘If I die, we all die. There are explosives in every room that were designed specifically to blow this place to dust. We cannot risk anyone finding any evidence here. I have a one-of-a-kind pacemaker in my heart: if it stops beating, the pacemaker sends a signal to the bomb and detonates it.’
This seems to calm the room. Kirsten crawls over to the baby, gathers him up, tries to comfort him. Puts a pants-polished knuckle into his mouth to suck on. Van der Heever follows her with his pistol. James moves to stand up and go towards her, but Mouton shakes his gun and says ‘Uh-uh,’ motioning for him to stay where he is.
‘You said you wouldn’t harm her if I brought her in! I had to believe you. I’m asking you as the person you raised as your son…’
‘You were never my son,’ says the doctor, giving Mouton the signal to shoot them both. Mouton takes aim at James, and Kirsten shouts ‘No!’
Before Mouton squeezes the trigger, Keke presses the button on the magic wand that Kirsten had tucked into her fist earlier and tasers him in the back. He yells out, his body convulsing with the current, letting off a few shots into the ceiling and then into the wall.
She tasers him again, knocking him off his feet; unconscious. The doctor fires at Kirsten but she ducks, and the bullets land in the gilded frame of an oil painting. Keke points the lipstick at Van der Heever. Just as James gets Mouton’s gun out of his hand and points it at the doctor, the doctor turns his pistol on him.
‘If I die,’ he says again, ‘we all die.’
Keke hesitates, not sure what the taser would do to the incendiary pacemaker. Kirsten cries out as the doctor shoots James in the shoulder. James clenches his jaw and pulls the trigger, twice, and Kirsten sees two black apertures appear in the doctor’s white coat. The force of the shot pushes him back a few steps, and he looks at James in astonishment.
‘You were never my father,’ says James.
Somehow, the doctor has enough strength to grasp his trigger, and he shoots James again, this time in the chest, causing his body to fall backwards and collapse at an awkward angle. Now, battling to stand, Van der Heever aims at Kirsten and the baby, but Keke moves quickly and tasers him before he has the chance to fire, and he falls down onto his knees, then onto his front. Kirsten crouches over James.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she says, putting pressure on his wound. ‘It wasn’t your fault. You were four years old.’
James’s face crumples.
‘You were four!’ Her hands, slippery with blood, slide off his torso. ‘Hold on,’ she says, putting them back in place. ‘Just hang on,’ she says.
She tears open his shirt, front and back, grabs his medical bag, claws it open, empties the contents onto the floor beside her. She finds some Platelet-Plasters, rips the backing off with her teeth, and sticks them onto the entry wound. She knows it won’t help.