Rebecca Levene - Kill or Cure

I tried to catch Kelis' eye, or Ingo's, but we'd been separated quite efficiently and now the party people were moving towards the hospital entrance, pressing us along with them. "What's this about?" I asked Mike, trying to swim uselessly against the tide of people carrying me forward.

"It's just routine," he said. He was still smiling but the smile looked like something frozen now. Fake.

Helplessly, I was pushed through the hospital doors. I drew my gun finally, however useless it might be, because I knew this was where the storm I'd been sensing all day was going to break.

A hand grabbed my arm and the gun was taken from me before I could even think of using it. I snapped my head round but the woman had already backed away from me. She was big, armed and unsmiling. She was also pregnant. I heard a cry of pain to my left and saw Kelis drop to her knees. I knew that she'd been disarmed too. There were twenty or more women waiting in the room, all armed and all of them pregnant. As soon as they had our weapons they stepped in front of the doors behind us, blocking our escape.

I looked at Mike, leaning relaxed against one wall. "You didn't get any message from the Collector," I said. "It was Ash who sent you to pick us up."

He smiled and shrugged, as if none of it really mattered. "It's OK. They won't hurt you if you co-operate."

There were doctors in the room, men in white coats with friendly reassuring faces, and it almost could have been just a routine physical. Except I remembered Paris and there was something about the set-up here, about the way they herded the women to the right and men to the left, that sent a spike of unease through my nerves.

"It's OK," said one of the girls, the young Goth with the black hair. "They'll do the men first. And you're not… you know… are you?"

"I'm not what?" I asked, my voice a dry rasp. And then, before she could answer, a horrible suspicion began to form. "I'm not pregnant?"

"Right," she said and I tried to back away but there was nowhere to go and about twenty guns pointed right at me. I didn't think they'd hesitate to shoot through the girl to get at me.

"You'll need to strip," the doctor said to the men. Exactly like Paris, I thought, as the men from the buses stripped while Ingo and Haru watched, motionless. It was almost comedic, the sight of all that tanned, naked flesh and the two clothed figures in the middle of it, upright and tense. I was so focussed on Ingo and Haru that it took me a moment to work out what was wrong. It was only when Mike turned his dazed, not-all-there smile on me that I saw it.

Mike's stomach was flat, abs perfectly sculpted, a thin line of hair leading down from the middle of his belly to… nothing. There was nothing there, not even a stump, nothing left of his genitals but a healed over white scar. I felt a rush of bile to the back of my throat and pressed a hand against my mouth to hold it in.

I looked past Mike at the other men. All of them were the same. Some of the scars were angry and red, recent. Some were clumsier than others, the mark of a more amateur surgeon. But every one of them was a eunuch. Worse than eunuchs – geldings. No longer men in the way that really mattered.

I saw Haru's face, frozen with horror, as he took it in. Beside him Ingo was utterly impassive. Mike turned his smile on them both. "It's really all right," he told them. "They'll give you an anaesthetic, you won't feel anything. And you can take hormones, if you want them, to replace what's lost."

"To replace..?" Haru said, voice high and incredulous. And then his paralysis suddenly broke and he was running towards the entrance. The men reached out for him but their hands slid away as Haru's desperate flight carried him past. He was only ten feet from the door when they finally brought him to the ground, five of them piling themselves on top of him. I could hear Haru's ragged, half-sobbing breaths from beneath the pile of naked men. When they slowly let him up, arms locked behind him, he was crying.

Throughout it all, Ingo had remained entirely still. He might have used the distraction to make his own escape, but he didn't. When Haru was finally subdued, Ingo calmly shucked first his own loose green t-shirt, and then the khaki trousers he was wearing underneath. When he was entirely naked, he turned to face me.

I don't know why I was so shocked to see the same angry red scar on Ingo's groin, the same absence beneath. I should have worked it out long before.

"You were working for him all along," I said.

"Yes," Ash said. "He was."

They didn't blindfold me during the trip. Why would they? The whole town belonged to Ash. They drove me deeper into the city on one of the buses, wedged between two of Ash's female guards, semi-automatics held away from their pregnant bellies and pressed into mine. Ash himself wasn't with us. He'd barely stayed a minute after he'd checked that it was really me, Ingo was still his and Haru wasn't going to be a threat.

The bus stopped at one end of the Strip. The road was pockmarked and badly maintained but the neon signs still glowed bright against the blue-grey twilit sky. At one end, the model of a cowboy waved, twinkling at us. The volcano outside The Mirage exploded on cue and, far above us, I could see the roller coaster thundering around the Stratosphere Tower. Only the human beings were missing, leaving the whole place with the feel of a model town, working but unpopulated.

They took me to the Luxor, a monstrous pyramid squatting in the heart of the Strip. Inside, plastic mummies stared impassively at Egyptian-themed fruit machines that no one was using – row after row of them, unlit and silent. We walked past roulette wheels, backgammon tables, long abandoned games of craps. My escorts and I were the only people inside and the silence was more sinister for its contrast with the Disneyland tackiness of it all.

Dim, emergency lighting led us through the vast gambling floor. There were no windows and no clocks; this hadn't been a place where they wanted you to tell time – and I guess Ash didn't much care about it either. The lift took us right to the top, where the high rollers had once lived. He was waiting for me in the penthouse suite, leaning on the railing of a balcony that gave him a view over all of Vegas. This, I thought, was why he'd left the lights of the Strip burning, a crazy extravagance just to make him feel even more like a king.

"Come up in the world, I see," I said when he turned to face me.

He shrugged and smiled, looking so much like the friend I'd once known that it was painful. But I could see the light of madness shining in his dark eyes, and I knew that that was all the explanation I needed for what he'd done.

"You know," he said, "when Ingo told me you were alive, I couldn't believe it. I was sure you'd died in the explosion. If I'd known, I would have returned for you – I hope you realise that."

I looked away. A part of me remembered the five years of terrible solitude and wished that he had come for me. "Don't beat yourself up about it."

He laughed at little, but there was something studied about it, as if normal human responses were something he now had to fake. "Still you're here now, that's what matters."

"Thanks to Ingo. Tell me, if you thought I was dead, how did he manage to find me?"

"He wasn't looking. Ingo's job was to watch Queen M, when we were no longer neighbours. I wanted to know what she made of my Cuban… subjects. You were just a very unexpected bonus. A coincidence I suppose, though in time one of my agents was bound to have found you."

He leaned over the balcony, staring across his kingdom. After a second I joined him. Las Vegas was a spider's web of light in the darkness of the desert. "You sent the Infected against her deliberately," I said, seeing it all suddenly. "You wanted her scientists to investigate them, and then for Ingo to report back what they found."