Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

"Funny," I said flatly, "she didn't seem too bothered about the artistic qualifications of the people we left behind when I went recruiting."

He winced. "Yes, well – I guess culture's a luxury still. You can only afford so much of it." His eyes skittered around, trying to avoid mine, and after a moment I looked back down at his work, flicking through the drawings.

They were good. They were all in the same style as the first, some of them divided into actual panels, super-heroic figures leaping across the page in tight-fitting, brightly coloured costumes. I was pretty sure the beefy guy in the blue spandex rescuing a little child from a fire was supposed to be Soren. I wondered if that was something which had actually happened. "So I'm guessing you were a Manga artist in a previous life," I said, looking back at him.

He shrugged. "Wanted to be. Never seemed to find the time to go professional."

"Then Queen M came along. Lucky old you. She just leaves you free to wander, does she? Draw when the inspiration strikes?"

He flushed slightly. "I travel the islands. I guess you could say I'm the court reporter. A sort of… photo-journalist."

"So you've been pretty much everywhere?" And this, suddenly, was interesting. A short cut to finding out what I needed to know if I was ever going to get out of here.

"I've been here seven months now so… yes, I'd say I've seen most of it."

"Good." I smiled, almost sincerely. "Then you can give me the tour."

He took me round the plantations first. It was cotton-picking season and the fields were crowded with people of pretty much every nationality, backs bent achingly over the scrubby plants. It was like a scene from three hundred years ago, given a United Colours of Benetton makeover. I wondered how many people here were natives of the island, survivors of the Cull. Had Queen M used the already available resources or had she wanted a clean sweep, no complications from people who saw this place as their home and her as an interloper? For once, without Soren and Kelis watching and judging every move I made, I felt free to ask.

"I'm going to speak to some of them," I told Haru. "Find out if there are any parasites, diseases, something that might get passed on to the rest of the crew."

He shrugged, not very interested. When I looked back at him a few moments later he was already sitting cross-legged on the ground, sketchbook on his lap.

I could see the workers snatching quick glances at me as they toiled. There were two women, armed, lounging at the end of one of the fields. But they seemed more concerned with the game of dominoes they were playing than with watching the workers. I ignored them and they ignored me as I headed over to the cotton pickers.

"Hi," I said to the first person I came to, a petite white woman who couldn't have been much older than twenty. Her hair was almost the same shade of red as mine, darkened only by the droplets of sweat wriggling out of her pores in the punishing heat.

She smiled shyly but kept on picking.

"I'm Jasmine. The new doctor."

"You come to treat George, then?" Her accent was hard to place. Czech maybe.

"Is George the guy who got too friendly with a machete?"

She nodded.

"Yeah. He's going to be fine."

"It wasn't an accident, you know."

I raised an eyebrow, and she finally looked right at me. "Yochai meant to hit him. George was making moves on his woman."

"And what's George going to do about it now he's staying in the land of the living?"

She became very interested in her work; small, clever fingers pulling out the cloud-puffs of cotton, and I knew that I wouldn't get any more out of her. Still, this was interesting. Queen M's rule wasn't absolute if nasty little squabbles like this broke out. There was some freedom of movement in the chains.

I spoke to more people: a dockworker from Portsmouth who'd been chosen for his knowledge of ship repairs; a Jivaro from the Amazon, picked I guessed, for his sheer brawn. It was hard to tell from his few words of English. There were several Americans, mainly from the Southern states, and there were people who'd been born and raised on St Kitts, then watched five years-ago as everyone else around them died. They'd been trapped here with food rotting in the fields; the corpses of their friends and family for company, before Queen M had come. They didn't see Queen M as an interloper; they saw her as a saviour.

Some of the others though – they were a different story. Hidden in their eyes was the same burning anger I'd felt in myself, tamped down now but ready to burst into flames at the right provocation.

I believed that they would rise up, if they were given the chance. But I didn't get the slightest sense that they'd begun to plan it yet. There was no underground railroad spiriting slaves away here, as there had once been in the Deep South. Most of them barely spoke each other's languages. They'd never met before being brought here, terrified and powerless. I began to appreciate Queen M's strategy, the reason she was willing to burn jet fuel, travelling to every corner of the world. These people's diversity, their disunity, was her strength.

And she didn't make their lives too unbearable. There was one day's rest a week; food and drink for everyone in the evenings along with parties, good times. They had something to live for and therefore something to lose.

Still, there was a power in their buried fury, here under the relentless Caribbean sun, the brilliant blue skies. I had to hold onto that hope.

After an hour, I went back to Haru. He looked up when my shadow fell across the page and flipped round the last sketch he'd been working on without my asking: the workers in the field, bent over the crop. It was a surprisingly melancholy picture. He'd captured the blankness in some of the eyes, the sense that the labour was given unwillingly. A sort of hopelessness.

"It's good," I told him.

"Yeah." He looked back down at his picture. After a moment he carefully tore it from the pad, rolled it up and shoved it into his backpack. "Maybe I won't show that one to Queen M."

I could still see it in my mind, though, all the faces, the people I'd talked to today. And I knew that escaping wasn't enough. I had to free them too. Don't get me wrong – my motives weren't that altruistic. A big part of it was because it would piss Queen M off, and I really wanted her to realise that she'd underestimated me. But it was also because if he were there, I thought it was what he would do.

I asked Haru to take me to some other plantations. I spoke to more people, who told the same stories, only in different languages. But that wasn't really why I was there. By the third plantation I'd figured out that there were two guards for every hundred people, and neither of them stayed the whole night. There was only one permanent garrison on the island according to a rickety old Barbadian, but the soldiers there tended to stick to themselves. Queen M was pretty bloody confident in her power over these people.

Pretty bloody confident of her power over the guards too, I realised. The people she armed and let out of her sight.

"How are people chosen for guard duty?" I asked Haru.

He looked at me suspiciously, a raised eyebrow asking why I wanted to know.

I shrugged. "Seems like a pretty plumb job to me – sitting on your arse all day when everyone else is working in two hundred degree heat. I just wondered how people landed it."

"Thinking of signing up?"

"Guns have never been my thing," I told him. "I don't like the feel of them, you know? The knowledge that you've got something in your hand that could kill everyone around you and you wouldn't even raise a sweat."

"Really?" He frowned. "I think I like them for exactly the same reason. That incredible potential to change the world, in such a small thing. But the soldiers – she chooses them because they're big and strong and maybe a little stupid. Same as everywhere, I guess."