help you, did it? How come you’re part of that set?”
“Maman. She used to be a top model. She is still the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.” Kestrella went silent for a moment and her lips curled inwards as if she was swallowing something that she didn’t want to let free. “She was on the covers of glossy magazines and in the gossip columns.”
I was wondering what to say when her phone rang. It was a slender model in the style popular a couple of years ago. The keypad was where her palm might have been and the screen was in place of her fingers. It was one of the most common types of rewrite. I filed a picture of it alongside the dozens of others I kept in a database.
I’d already sensed that the vehicle we were in had a built-in wireless satellite system, probably for her father’s work given the nature of the passwords I’d picked my way through, and I uploaded the database on to a remote server. I’d actually not lost much except hardware from the attack on my place. I was always careful to copy my files on to several servers, sometimes splitting them up and distributing the pieces on servers across the world so that nobody picking up one of them would ever be able to tell what it was.
I’m not paranoid, just realistic, OK?
The 4x4 was passing through an area of old office blocks. A long section of hoarding was plastered with competing posters from different political parties for a public demonstration and counter-demonstration. Some read COMPULSORY QUARANTINE NOW! Others read PROTECTION NOT PERSECUTION.
At the next intersection, the car slowed down as it passed a Gene Police van and two patrol cars, recognisable from the logo on their sides: a DNA double helix snaking round a flaming torch. They had spilled out a dozen foot soldiers in their white, hermetically sealed suits, who were surrounding a scooter that had smashed into a lamp post. Only it wasn’t just a scooter.
I could see a human face contorted in agony, and I’m sure that the driver’s right hand somehow merged with the handlebars…I cringed inside: nothing could be done. The GP had probably spotted and given chase to their quarry, pushing him harder and harder through the city’s back streets until he’d crashed.
Kestrella was talking in her light French accent to someone about being somewhere. She finished and turned to me with a fierce Gallic look in her eye. “This time you’re not to argue. We’re going back to Salvation House and you’re going to meet my aunt Cheri, OK? Dominic?”
The red light flashing angrily on my screen bounced off the slight sheen of perspiration on her forehead. “You’re not going to register me. I don’t want to become a Blue like you. I’m a Grey and I intend to stay that way, got it?”
She smiled wryly. “You know something? I’m beginning to think you are your own worst enemy.”
A statement like that left me cold. After all I had that block of ice to keep from melting. “I’d rather be free, don’t you see?” I said defiantly. “I need to be free.”
She laughed. “What good is freedom if your life is in danger, if you’re in hiding and can’t function properly?”
“You, you may be free to jet to your own island in the sun whenever you like,” I threw back, “but you don’t understand what freedom means, and you never will until you have people trying to take it away from you just because of what you are!”
“Ha! How romantic!” She threw her head back. “Your freedom is nothing if you can’t make good use of it!”
I turned away from her, breathing heavily. Why was I so angry? I had nowhere to go, but why should that make me dependent on her and her aunt? I could find another place to be, couldn’t I? I could break into another house and squat, as I had so many times before. There were clubs, cafés, dens I knew that could tolerate someone like me: they were part of the subculture.
My heart was pounding, I was hyperventilating and I could feel my transition points flaring up and feeling hot. There were—
The next thing I knew I was on the floor of the car, staring up into Kestrella’s face—was that a tear in her eye?—writhing like a wounded animal at the pain down my left arm. Pain like a hot needle pushing down into my wrist, where the keyboard poked out—one of my transition points. She had pulled up my sleeve to see what it looked like and the expression of horror on her face made even me feel frightened. I don’t know how long I’d blacked out for, but Dominic had stopped the car and he too was reaching over me, his mirror shades reflecting the white noise on my monitor.
He’d opened the fridge and got out a spray can of I-So-L8 and was spraying it on to the affected area. It felt cool. The soreness gradually faded away, the white noise went, a screensaver picture of one of my favourite bands now bounced off Dominic’s shades as he pulled away from me and Kestrella breathed a sigh of relief, the tear gone.
She turned to Dominic: “Are we nearly there yet?” she said.
I always liked coming to Salvation House. The building itself was Victorian redbrick, but with a modern wing, all light, gleaming glass and potted plants. It seemed happy in spite of the suffering it held; it appeared to hold its darkness easily. This was due to the staff, who always tried to give their dependants hope that it was possible to get better and one day lead a normal life.
Of course, no one ever had.
But that didn’t matter, it was the feeling that counted; that you were among people who cared. Many of the willing workers here were volunteers, and the hospice survived on grants and donations given by anyone who could get beyond the idea that hybrids should be feared or blamed for their condition. But there weren’t many compared to those who did fear or blame them.
This place owed so much to the personality and drive of one woman: Cheri Dubois. She had been, from the time when she used to hoist me on to her knee and sing nursery rhymes, ma tante Cheri, my mother’s elder sister.
She was now behind the door I was looking at, inside an examination room with a nurse and this obstinate boy who I’d finally managed to drag in here, but under a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep.
They were inside for ages. I passed the time by having a cappuccino and a Danish pastry in the caféteria in the leafy conservatory with Dominic and some of the regular drop-in visitors. They came to pick up medication, have a massage or a check-up. I read the adverts on the noticeboards, about campaign meetings, fundraising events, therapies such as herbalism or acupuncture, and pleas for supportive carers for newly registered sufferers, who needed a sponsor to avoid being sent to the dreaded Centre for Genetic Rehabilitation.
No one could stay in the hospice forever. Pressure on space was too great. Cheri had told me that last year they had 1300 people passing through their doors, but they only had beds for thirty-five at any one time. And it was getting worse.
I left Dominic in the café and wandered to the residential section in the quiet south wing where the smell was antiseptic. When I popped in on Julian, he was sitting up in bed looking as thin as a stick insect. He was sixteen and yet his skin was like brown paper stretched over chicken wire. His eyes were trying to hide deep in their sockets, but shone with electrical energy. His body seemed to hum like a generator.
“Kestrella darling! You look more beautiful than ever,” he smiled weakly.
He
