Hindsight (31 page)

‘Lose him? Why?’

‘It’s possible that someone may recognise
him
. That makes him a security risk, so I’ll have to reassign him elsewhere or put him back on leave, provided he doesn’t return to the area of operations.’

‘Oh, no you won’t! Surely you must send MPs to investigate every military-related shooting in public?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Then he won’t look out of place with them at the beach.’

‘The beach?’ Garland said, sounding surprised and worried. ‘You can’t go back there. It’s too dangerous!’

Mira laughed. ‘I’m not afraid of dying for real, General. I’m afraid that my life won’t ever begin. The beach is obviously the best place to pick up the trail
my
way, and I need to find Ben and make sure Greppia can’t hurt him ever again. You want Greppia and Mr Mystery. If you’re lucky, the trail from the beach leads straight to him, and if I fail, you can have my eyes. You can’t lose by letting me go back — and since death is a form of freedom, I can’t lose either.’

‘You’re a brave woman, Miss Chambers. You’ll have support from every resource I have. You want Lockman? You’ve got him. Get me Greppia or Mr Mystery and I’ll get back your friend. We should have him in time for visiting hours with his mother.’

‘Then it’s a deal, General.’ Mira offered her the first handshake of her life. ‘This time my heart is in it.’

Garland posted a female guard at Mira’s door until Lockman was done arranging her transport. Mira wasn’t quite sure why she’d been assigned a
female
guard, or any guard at all, despite the incident with the cleaner, since she could see through her window that the military airfield had all the security she needed. Too much as it turned out, since the cleaner had confessed to being little more than a nosey security contractor; an ex-navy man commissioned on the up-and-up by the base commander to keep an extra eye on the place for misconduct from personnel. So Mira wondered if Garland arranged the female guard in anticipation that she’d try to escape, but she saw no logic in escaping prematurely when she had a general and her own personal security team assigned to help her leave anyway — at least as far as the gates.

She reached for the uniform and found plastic instead of material.

Bitch
, she thought.
Might as well hide the toothpaste.
Mira tore into the topmost packet, pricked her finger on something sharp, and recoiled as if stung.

Sucking off a spot of blood, she resisted the urge to call the guard.

Footsteps approached in the hall, then Lockman knocked and called through the door to her. A brief silence followed, as if he was waiting for permission to enter, but Mira couldn’t utter a word — as if drawing blood on the uniform had caused her mind and body to lock up on her.

He knocked again, called louder, and when she still didn’t reply, he burst in anyway. She tried to despise him for it — and failed.

‘Ma’am? Are you okay?’ He came to her side but stopped short of touching her.

If she could have moved, she might have laughed. She was anything but okay. Without her sunshades, she was standing midair over a blue airfield. Any step in the wrong direction and she risked losing Ben, yet frozen between moments, she felt almost safe.

Lockman touched her shoulder, startling her as he turned her around.

‘Hey, are you okay?’

Pushing him away, she recognised the crisp stiffness of his shirt, and her Braille sensitive fingers detected the colours as earthy browns.

‘You’re in uniform now?’

‘Necessary,’ he said, ‘and less conspicuous for getting you out of here.’

‘You can’t just smuggle me out in a truck as I am?’

‘That’s the plan, more or less. Garland gave me a blank cheque; anything you need, and that’s top of my list. Only you can’t make it from this building to the canteen in your current kit. Coming in unconscious was a different story. There’s only two colours out there — army-khaki or airforce-blue — and it only takes one hired goon to spot you as you leave, and you’re no longer “dead”.’

She nodded, knowing she’d have to leave soon if she wanted the best chance at backtracking Greppia’s trail while he was busy with General Garland and the trade for Ben.

Reaching again for the army shirt, her fingers clenched short of touching it.

‘It won’t bite,’ Lockman promised.

‘Actually, it did. See?’ She offered her fingertip for inspection — and startled when he kissed it. ‘What was
that
for?’

‘Reflex, sorry. Spit makes it heal faster, according to my kid sister.’

‘You have a sister?’

‘Two actually. Kirby is fifteen and a bit of a handful, but my older sister Helen just made me an uncle to twins — one of each.’

Mira relaxed a little. ‘The closest I have to family is Ben.’

She touched her forehead, still feeling pressure from where the bandage had been. ‘I need to get my head together.’

‘Want me to hail the docs?’

‘They can’t help with this.’ She squeezed her frustration down into a fist and punched the pile of clothes, annoyed by her weakness. It didn’t make sense. She desperately wanted to help Ben and find the joey, and yet she was paralysed by the thought of reinstitutionalising herself with an army uniform in order to do it.

A sob escaped her, and she pressed her fist against her mouth, determined not to cry. Aside from the pain of losing Ben, the agony of glimpsing the future through tears would be too much for her to bear.

‘Hey, there,’ Lockman said, rubbing her shoulder tentatively. ‘We’ll get him back. It’s only Greppia’s goons against the whole homeland defence force.’

Mira bristled and straightened her shoulders. ‘It’s not that … exactly. It’s the uniform. It sounds silly, I know but …’ She could feel it, almost throbbing there in its heap like an invisible beast. ‘It’s going to eat me — not just devour, but digest me into something else.’

‘I think that’s the idea. That guy with the guitar and the marshmallows last night, that’s me; but this guy in here,’ he said, bringing her hand to his chest, ‘is who I want to be.’ She flinched, feeling a sting of attraction, but he didn’t protest when she pulled her hand away. ‘When you wear the khaki,’ he explained, ‘you know you’re part of something big, something worthwhile. But we salute the rank, regardless of the dweeb who’s wearing it.’

‘You don’t understand.’ She couldn’t imagine him as a dweeb anyway. ‘Neither do I, apparently. I can’t fathom how you could willingly allow yourself to become so invisible as a free individual. I mean, I spent the past decade trying to escape rules and regulations. Why do you do it? I need to know. Aren’t you afraid of losing who you are?’

He chuckled and drew her hand back to cup his face. ‘Do I feel worried?’

Her skin electrified with the warmth from his cheek — prickly! Not like Ben’s smooth face at all.

She recoiled from the intimacy, but Lockman caught her by the waist.

‘Hey, sorry for the five o’clock shadow,’ he said, pulling her back to him. ‘Don’t be frightened. I’m only rough on the surface, and I do pack a razor in my kit with my hand grenades …’ He chuckled as if that was meant to be funny. ‘I just haven’t had a chance to use it.’

‘Five o’clock?’ she asked, confused. ‘Is it that late now?’ She glanced to the window, then the clock, hating that it was taking her so long to get away, but yesterday’s purple moonrise only confused the matter further, since it seemed to support the ghostly digital clock on the wall which reported the time as 2:07am.

‘It’s sixteen hundred,’ Lockman said. ‘That’s four in the afternoon, but I only meant that I shaved earlier than usual this morning.’

‘You should have tried sleeping.’

‘I power-napped. I’m fine.’

‘Standing up? I mean, I understand the benefits of power-napping, Lieutenant. I’ve done it a lot myself. Great for giving the appearance of being weary while staying alert for the next escape opportunity. Somehow, it also taught me to stay alert enough while sedated. But it takes a cruel environment to compel that kind of need. How much crueler can the army be compared to a psychiatric hospital?’ She expected there to be only one reason for a soldier. ‘Have you spent a lot of time in a war zone?’

He hesitated, and she could almost hear the memory surfacing until he shifted his feet and the thought vanished. ‘Not in this life, ma’am. You’ve got your own war zone to contend with. I know it’s hard after everything you’ve been through. Depression can knock you pretty hard the first time you dodge a bullet. The shakes can hit you unexpectedly too. Just stay focused on your goal, not the pitfalls around you. If you want your friend back safely, keep that happy picture in your head and you’ll either achieve it or die trying. No shame in that. No reason to fear death either. It’s happening anyway, so you might as well make peace with the idea.’

‘Actually, the real me died a decade ago when I lost my sight. You’re dodging the point.’

‘Am I?’ He walked away from her briefly, but the room seemed so electrified by his presence she could still feel him as if he hadn’t let her go. ‘Seems to me,’ he said, gravitating back to her, ‘you’ve been reborn. You burn more passionately for your independence than anyone I’ve ever known. To see you … to watch you … well, it’s hard
not
to be inspired by you.’

‘Ha! What good does it do me? I can’t even think of being reinstitutionalised without being struck numb with depression. Yet you choose this life,
voluntarily
?’

‘Maybe I like the MREs.’ He laughed, sounding a little nervous. ‘That’s Meals Ready to Eat. Are you hungry?’

Mira’s stomach rumbled at the reminder that she’d missed lunch. A certain sore spot in her throat also warned that she’d been forced to swallow a tube to have her stomach pumped while unconscious — not an uncommon experience for her either, considering how many times she’d tried to escape institutions by dying and if staff had ever needed to clear her system to reduce the risk of mixing too many medications, it was the first thing they did. Her belly couldn’t be any emptier, yet her nerves kept her too upset to keep food down. ‘Not until I’m away from here.’

‘Let’s do it then.’ He leaned away from her briefly, as if reaching for the pile of clothes, but she trembled and froze again.

‘Would it help,’ he asked, ‘if I could prove that it won’t change who you really are?’

Curiosity raised her brow. ‘How exactly?’

Clasping her hand, he drew her fingers back to his cheek, but encouraged her to explore further down his neck this time, and around his throat and Adam’s apple as far as his collarbone. There she found a soft pad of hair in the vee of his top three open buttons.

‘See?’ he said, sounding amused. ‘It’s still all me underneath.’

Embarrassed but also intrigued, her hand trembled, at first wanting to pull away, yet she didn’t really care if she embarrassed herself with him — not nearly so much as she cared about impressing Ben. Lockman was just a soldier — a uniform — and she needed to know as much as she could about him if she was ever going to escape him and his kind eventually. He might even be the one with a weakness that she could exploit.

She explored further down his shirt, lightly trying to feel through the material to judge if his chest grew hairier or perhaps cleaner like Ben’s as the vee of his torso narrowed towards his belt.

Just as she began to form the image of a lightly haired chest and well-muscled stomach in her mind, her fingers found his belt and he leaned away.

‘Woah,’ he said, gathering her fingers and drawing them level again with his chest. ‘You’d better keep those magic hands up here, I think.’ His tone suggested she’d taken him off guard somehow.

He leaned again and took the shirt from the pile, flapping it open with a snap that made a breeze beside her. ‘Here, put this on,’ he said, wrapping it about her shoulders. ‘Your blouse and skirt are skimpy enough to keep on underneath.’ He pulled her closer to assist her arms into it. ‘How’s that?’ he asked, doing up only one button before hesitating awkwardly, then standing back to let her attend to the ones over her breasts.

‘Stiff,’ she said of the heavy cotton.

‘Yeah, I just had the same problem. You’ll get used to it.’

‘I certainly hope not!’

Rustling more plastic as he opened the next packet, Lockman then snapped the air with her trousers, but instead of helping her to put them on, he handed them to her and moved away. ‘Your skirt should bunch up okay.’

Part of her was grateful. It seemed as if he could already appreciate how much she naturally resented too much help from anyone. She slipped off her sandals first; however, pulling up the trousers, she felt her short skirt riding up her thighs.

‘I’m not looking,’ Lockman said. His boots shuffled as if he did turn away, but Mira had no way of knowing if he’d lied.

She decided it didn’t matter in his case. After ten years of round-the-clock nursing, she couldn’t resent the loss of her personal freedoms any more than she already did — and unlike the hopes she’d held for Ben, she held none for Lockman. He was just a uniform, she told herself again, and she’d expected him to lie to her sooner or later.