Paul Braddon: The Actuality

He rounds the shrubbery, blocking the path behind her, breathing heavily.

She turns to face him. He has his gun out again and the green beam strokes her cheek. He raises it to linger on her forehead, before sliding it down her nose. He is toying with her, would not want to shoot her, or at least not in the head. If he is forced to immobilise her, he would aim for somewhere less deadly.

She glances around herself. She has allowed herself to be trapped by the trellising and the vehicle with its yawning maw. He couldn’t have done a better job in corralling her if he had planned to chase her into this dead end from the outset.

Snow eddies between them. She wipes it from her lashes.

He edges forward. ‘That’s right, get in the car, sweetheart,’ he says. ‘You’ll be safe in there. Nothing bad will happen to you if you do as I say. The sooner we can get this over with, the sooner help can be got for the old man.’ The flakes cling to his clothes and the reddish facial hair exposed by the opening in his mask, turning his bearded mouth into a dark hole.

She looks fleetingly towards the hova. She doesn’t believe his promises. That he would help Matthew. What do I do? she murmurs to Simon. Can I drive it? Do we know how? He has access to the full inventory of her capabilities and has sometimes found surprising things like mixing cocktails and being able to waltz, that she had no idea she could do, and that have enabled her to astonish Matthew and Daniels, even after they thought they knew all there was to know about her.

No, we don’t , he says, voice trembling. In the current situation, he has no more clue than she does. She senses him retreat inside, leaving her to face this alone.

The man strides towards her, shoulders hunched, arms stretched the width of the path, gloved fingertips brushing the snow from the hedges.

Evie withdraws until she is standing with her back to the open door. He comes in close, his breath all over her, boxing her in, and grips painfully her left arm through the thin sleeve of her nightdress just as she lifts the blade with her right and presses it into his side, forcing the sharp point through his clothing.

If he had been expecting her to be incapable of holding the knife firmly enough to do anything much, or behavioural inhibitors to click in, he has allowed himself to be fooled. She has always been stronger than her appearance suggests and although she was programmed to act like a lady, she was given a powerful determination to survive.

They stand locked together, his jaw pressing into her forehead as she slides the needle-sharp tip of Daniels’s knife beneath his protective clothing and drives it up between his ribs. His blood, surprising in its quantity and heat, streams over her wrist.

The strength leaves his fingers. His hand falls from her arm and he slips down against her. His face slides open-mouthed past her cheek. For a moment an eye, gleaming through the hole in his mask, gazes glassily into her own.

Evie detaches herself from him, leaving the blade buried in his side. He grips the hilt with gloved hands, attempting feebly to extract it, but collapses against the car, his head banging on the window, and slithers sideways into a heap in the snow.

She kneels beside Matthew and takes his hand in hers. His breath is coming with difficulty. The tissue below her eyes swells – it is the closest she is able to come to shedding tears. With the infinite lengths her makers went to in providing her with the ability to simulate human emotion, including being able to realistically weep, it is a shortfall in her design that her ducts blocked in only her second year.

‘Evie,’ he says. His voice is noticeably fainter than a few minutes before. ‘I am so sorry.’

She bites her lip, squeezing his fingers more tightly. She has known properly only two people in her life, her husband and Daniels, and now one of them is being snatched from her.

‘There is nothing to be sorry for,’ she murmurs.

A tear leaks from his eye. She has never seen him cry and the shock of it sends a shot of pain through her neural gel.

‘I have been unfair to you,’ he says. ‘I brought you here to fill the place of a ghost but you deserved better.’

His breath catches and a bout of coughing takes hold. As he regains control and lifts his chin to once again look into her face, a dribble of blood trickles from his lip.

‘Without you, I would not be me,’ she says in a whisper. ‘I would be another perhaps but not me. I exist because of you. You have been kind to me, provided me with a home, ensured I am safe. You have been my… husband.’

Matthew flinches at the word and a fresh wave of blood flows over his lip. ‘Husband!’ he repeats weakly. ‘A wife is entitled to expect more than you ever had from me.’

She wants to tell him that he has loved her, and that is enough, but she cannot be sure that he ever has. She was only intended to be a stand-in.

His fingers lie powerless within hers. The only animation remaining is in his upper chest and face. She nestles his head in the curl of her arm and strokes his thin hair.

‘I am going somewhere,’ he says, ‘I can feel it drawing me. It is where maybe I will meet Evelyn again. But if I do, I fear her soul will be a stranger to mine.’ He is sinking fast but finds the strength to open his eyes a final time and look up into her face. ‘She will be a stranger because you made her so, because of all the ways you have not been her but have been you.’

Evie hears the front door open and Daniels stamping his boots on the mat. She imagines him crouching to untie the laces so that he can carry them to avoid making work for himself tomorrow, then stopping as he sees for the first time the signs of struggle in the corridor – the maritime painting hanging askew, the rifle fallen in the doorway. She calls out and hears him approach the bedroom door.

As he steps around it, she looks up forlornly. She has not moved for the last hour. She has been dwelling on her husband’s final words, how she had not been good enough and how in her imperfect efforts she’d corrupted his precious memories of the actual Evelyn. She will never now be able to ask him for his forgiveness. He is gone and she has as much chance of joining him in heaven – if there is even such a thing – as passing through the eye of a needle.

His body remains cradled in her arms. His blood has dried on her skin and clogs her nails; her hair hangs about her face, thickened and darkened with it. The cotton of her nightdress is stained from the ripped collar down to her knees.

‘He’s been shot,’ she says. How can she start to explain what has happened?

Daniels stares. He is struggling to take in the scene. She looks like she has been through a slaughter.

He reaches out to support himself on the door frame.

‘Who did this?’ He looks back out into the hall. ‘Where’re they now?’

She shakes her head, she feels so helpless. ‘His body is in the garden.’ It was she who killed him but she doesn’t know how to put that into words. What do they do with creatures like her who kill humans?

Daniels straightens and staggers into the corridor. She hears him reach the kitchen where he retches in the sink, before going outside through the French windows, letting them bang behind him. His boots crunch over the snow-covered lawn.

After five minutes, he returns to her in the bedroom. ‘Tell me everything,’ he says, ‘from the beginning, and leave nothing out.’

He looks at her in a way he never has before when she describes stabbing the man. She must have severed a major blood vessel because of the huge quantity of blood. When she has finished, he asks her, ‘Have you contacted anyone, like called an ambulance?’