Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

There'd only be so long I could stand, looking at one of those wall-mounted plans of the ship, without it looking suspicious. I thought I knew where I was going. I thought I did. So I worried about that rather than worrying about the camera, after camera, after camera I was passing with my face visible for God and everyone to see. Or the fact that I had only the vaguest idea how to pilot a boat, even if I could get to one. I particularly didn't think about what Queen M would do if she caught me. About that autopsy table in the lab, and the runnels up the side to carry away the blood.

The ship felt haunted at night, by all the people who'd been so happy right before they died. I walked through the endless, bland, carpeted corridors; down the marble stairs and through the empty galleries with blank bare windows that used to hold things the dead people had wanted to buy. Soldiers passed me now and then, glanced once and then looked away. They had the white, weary look of people who were missing their beds. They didn't want trouble, anything that would force them to act. I made myself easy to ignore.

And I went steadily down, towards the water line. On deck 4 I took a wrong turn, left rather than right. I realised it two strides too late. No turning back. That would be too noticeable, too much the act of someone who didn't belong. All I could do was carry on, to the next staircase, down to the next deck, hoping it was built on the same plan as the previous one as I turned right this time and, yes, it was. Because suddenly the stairs were metal, the walls a dull institutional brown.

I was out of the guest quarters and into the parts of the ship only the crew were meant to see. My feet echoed loudly on the metal treads but I didn't care. I was nearly there.

So what was I going to do about that little fragment of metal in my leg? I was going to get clear of the ship, get to one of the islands Queen M had only recently begun to colonise, Isla Marguerita, or St Thomas, somewhere there weren't too many people around, and then I was going to operate on myself and remove it.

I'd only be using a local anaesthetic, obviously, and I'd be digging deep through muscle and into bone. I'd probably be breaking the bone. There was a chance I wouldn't survive the procedure and every possibility I couldn't walk away from it. But I was desperate and willing to try.

One more flight of metal stairs and I was on the Tender Deck. Little detachable jetties led from here into the water only a few feet below. I could hear the slap of it against the hull of the ship, always more violent than you expected after you'd seen it from the sundeck far above, so tranquil and blue. Sometimes the tender boats stayed overnight. Sometimes they went back to the islands when they'd unloaded their cargoes. But so many came and went, there had to be one still here, right?

And there was. Right at the far end, an open hatch in the side of the ship. The waft of salt air and the audible bounce and crash of a small boat moored outside drifted through the hole as it hopped on the rough waves.

I was only ten feet away from it when I realised that the floor beneath my boots was covered in a thin rubber sheath, good grip for when the water washed in. The floor was rubber, but I could still hear the echo of footsteps on metal. Two sets of them.

I turned round to face Soren and Kelis. "So," I said. "I guess this doesn't look good."

Soren huffed out what might have been a laugh.

Kelis looked… almost upset. Like I'd let her down somehow. "You were thinking you could operate on yourself, take it out, right?"

I shrugged. "Or maybe I just wanted to stretch my legs."

"It wouldn't have done you any good." She came closer, but her hand was empty. She wasn't pointing a gun at me, just yet. "The tracker system's more sophisticated than you realise. There's a roam-zone programmed for every individual. An alarm goes off when anyone breaches it."

"And I just breached mine," I guessed, but she shook her head.

"Twenty meters out in that boat and you would have. We thought we'd stop you before that happened." She glanced at Soren and he stared straight back at her. For the first time I registered the way he leant subtly towards her whenever she was near, like a plant responding to the sun. He doesn't care about me, I thought. He came because she asked him to. Another piece of information I could file away for later use – if there was a later.

Their hands were still nowhere near their guns. They weren't looking like they thought I was any kind of threat. Tackle Kelis, a voice inside me said, surprise her, take her gun. Shoot Soren. Possible, maybe. But I wasn't going to do it.

"So… how exactly did you find me?"

Kelis shrugged. "I knew what you were planning – you'd been twitchy all day. Acting too casual. I was a corrections officer, back before. You learn to read the signs." That startled me. Not so much the information, because it wasn't that hard to imagine, but the fact that I'd spent so many hours with her and I'd never asked about her previous life, hadn't even really wondered.

The Cull was like a big black wall cutting across the past. You couldn't climb it, so why would you want to know what was behind it?

"So you came down here and waited, right?" It was dispiriting to realise I'd been that transparent. "Why?"

She shifted and, for the first time since I'd met her, looked unsure of herself. It was Soren who answered. "Queen M would kill you if she knew what you were planning."

"And you didn't want that?"

He shrugged and looked at Kelis. "She didn't."

"You're here to stay," Kelis said. "Accept it."

"And what if I can't?"

She looked away, out into the dark void of the open hatch and didn't bother to answer me.

Next day I was back in the lab, researching a problem whose answer I already knew. Still, the source of the infection might be obvious, but how it had metamorphosed remained a mystery. A couple of years as a research assistant had taught me to perfect the art of looking busy while remaining essentially idle and I didn't think the other scientists in the room had any idea that the tissue cultures I was taking, and the slides I was carefully preparing were entirely meaningless. The only thing I managed to establish for sure was that the virus was transmitted though blood and not an air-borne contagion. That at least was something I could tell Queen M.

Kelis and Soren were back, shadowing me from the moment I woke up. Their decision, I guessed. I wanted to believe that Kelis hadn't told Queen M what happened the night before. My eyes twitched briefly, involuntarily, to the autopsy table in the centre of the room. To the convenient little grooves to carry away the blood.

I felt the tension in the lab before I saw her. I felt it most of all from Kelis, and when I looked up to see Queen M standing in the doorway of the room, I didn't know if it was because she'd betrayed me or because she hadn't.

Queen M smiled and I still didn't know, her expression as un-giving as an investment banker. "Come and walk with me," she said, nodding at Kelis and Soren in a way that let them know that they weren't included in the invitation.

A little trickle of ice-water seeped down my spine.

"We haven't really spoken properly since you arrived," she said when we were out of the lab, heading up the stairs which would take us to the sun deck and the empty pool.

"I'm sure you've been very busy." I injected a note of irony into the words. She knew I didn't like her and she'd get suspicious if I started pretending that I did.

"I used to be an academic, did you know that? Reader in evolutionary psychology at the LSE."

My head snapped round to look at her: cornrows, beaded braids, wide, thoughtful eyes. It wasn't that difficult to believe. "You've come up in the world."