Leopard Dreaming (63 page)

A
t the funeral, Mira wore red shoes with her black dress. Not so much
in
trouble any more, as laying it to rest. Black veil to hide her identity from the other clients, and all the tears that she’d shed silently and in privacy. Mostly into the shoulder of Lockman’s shirt.

Hues set to black, with no pain, and no painkillers, so long as she dosed up on endorphins with Lockman at least twice a day. And around her neck she wore his black chain and dog tags, sitting neatly out of sight and staying warm against her heart.

Ever the sentinel, he stood close behind her, watching the crowd gather.

She’d never seen so many people in one place. Or all the inmates turned out and behaving themselves all at once. Past patients and their families too. Crippled children from Maddy’s last job arrived in a convoy of buses. A freight truck followed with their wheelchairs and crutches. Staff cars filled the lawns between buildings, double parked to make room for both the night and day shifts. Dignitaries filled and overflowed all the car parks.

Only one had come for Freddie, and she was standing in her shoes.

Until that moment, Mira had never realised how many lives had been touched by Maddy Sanchez. The list of families who couldn’t make it stretched twice as long as those who could; their cars cramming the driveway and trailing through the great iron gates of Serenity, down the full spine of the island and over the new bridge to the mainland.

Mira stood apart from them, as they assembled around the centuries-old hanging tree. First time in history that it would fail to provide shade for the full crowd of mourners.

From the window of Freddie’s old cell, they would look like fallen fruit; hers fallen the furthest as she stayed with Lockman in the shade of her old cell block. They gathered solemnly, murmuring and most of them already sobbing.

Like a spiralling vortex, the tree drew in all the clients who could sit cross-legged first. Many in straitjackets by choice to prevent bickering and picking at each other while compelled into such close proximity for the service. Wheelchairs and crutches circled in next, each client bearing a flower they’d picked earlier from the scented gardens.

A neat path to the centre waited only for Mira.

In her hands she clasped the two stones that she’d lay to rest in the memorial rock garden, which spiralled out from the base of the Methuselan tree. One stone for each soul who now resided forever at Serenity. Each etched with a name and a date of passing. Some barely scratched, some worn down by weather. Some sandstone, some beach rock and others chipped from the crumbling limestone walls of Serenity itself, but all spiralling back to the date of the first inmate who’d crossed the ultimate threshold into history.

Barely the size of her fist, Maddy’s rough cut diamond weighed heaviest in Mira’s right hand. Spectacular compared to the other stones already laid,
yet it hardly seemed tribute enough. In her left, an obsidian river stone from Lockman’s property. Black, but speckled with the colourful ores of an aggregate. Smooth and worn down by waves until most of the cracks and chips seemed almost negligible. Each stone one of a kind.

Staring at them, and remembering, Mira didn’t hear any of the service. She almost missed the call for her role in it until Lockman cupped the small of her back, prompting her. More prompts along the way: daisies that lined the neat narrow path, keeping her on track, and a ring of roses around the site where two shallow pits had already been filled with their ashes — now awaiting their capping stones.

Mira kissed each stone with mixed emotions and laid them down gently. Black and white crystals, shoulder to shoulder, forever together in the timeless earth.

As she returned to Lockman’s side, she found Maddy’s replacement there, stretching up on tiptoes to whisper to him. Matron Steffi Nagle; already wearing the badge and pager.

Lockman only nodded in reply, keeping his eyes and smile for Mira.

‘You’re getting around well for a girl who’s been dead a month,’ she repeated as Mira drew nearer. ‘Has your sight improved or your ESP?’

‘I don’t need either to find my way around here.’ Mira smiled, enjoying the first encounter with Nagle that didn’t involve a taser glove. ‘I take it you’ve received the memo from General Garland?’

‘With a very generous donation.’ She handed Mira a platinum gate pass with no end date, effectively handing her the electronic keys to Serenity. ‘You’ll be posthumously commended and laid to rest here in a private ceremony tomorrow.’

Her pager buzzed, summoning her elsewhere.

‘Gotta go,’ she said, without bothering to read the message.

‘May I come?’ Mira asked. She didn’t need to see the message either, since there seemed to be only one client conspicuously missing. ‘I need to see him for myself.’

‘As you wish. It’s not like I can stop you now. You’ve got the security clearance.’

Mira followed her into the nearest building. Lockman too, although she felt strong enough now to face all her old fears alone. She listened to Nagle’s rubber soles on the floor. Smelled the lemon antiseptic from the walls and linoleum. Saw the long rows of observation windows into rubber rooms on either side of her. All terrifying once, but no longer.

At the ninth door along, jokingly labelled Cloud Nine, Nagle withdrew her own key from her pocket.

Inside, the client screamed.

‘Hello, Colonel.’ Nagle stepped up onto the rubber floor and approached cautiously. ‘Having a bad day as ruler of the world, I hear?’

He spat at her, but the drool stuck mostly to his chin and new straitjacket. Gold buckles, red lining. ‘Monsters in my blood,’ he muttered, shuffling sideways away from her. ‘You wait! They’re building me a new super power.’ Yet as he curled up in the corner, a human ball against the rubber walls, he began to hug himself, rocking and bumping the wound on his forehead where the last metal shards had been extracted a week ago.

The bandage seeped with a long trail of his blood that soaked his clothes, the floor and most of the walls where he’d been punishing himself.

Mira watched him through the moon-shaped observation window, touching the thick glass with her hand. Inside a concealed camera clicked and hummed the same annoying pianissimo as it always had, yet blinded momentarily with Mira’s signal jammer so near.

‘We each have our own hell to conquer,’ Nagle said as she crouched beside him. Mira knew the song and dance so well she didn’t need to hear the chorus. She mouthed the words silently one last time from a safe distance.

Behave, or I’ll send for a taser glove.

‘Seen enough?’ Lockman asked, as she caught hold of his hand.

‘Just one last thing. Would you come with me to the bunker please?’

Lockman laughed. ‘Are you kidding? Garland’s locked that place down tighter than a —’

‘Duck’s butt, I know. But my whole life is ahead of me now. It’s about time I make peace, finally, with my grandfather.’

In a detention centre on the mainland, General Garland watched over the processing and sorting of Kitching’s submariners into two groups for either prosecution or return to their home islands.

Amongst the queues for medical checks, fingerprints, photos and interviews, she noticed two young women with babies on their backs and an elderly woman, labouring with the drowsy burden of a boy. Six years old, according to his file, which doctors had already marked with a note that he was deaf.

A toy rabbit fell from his hand, and Garland stooped to pick it up.

‘Sergeant, get this woman a chair,’ she called to the nearest attendant, but as she handed back the toy, she found the child had drifted off already.

And in his sleep, he was singing in English.

‘Serennniteeeeeeeeeee is the place for me.’

A.A. Bell is the first writer to twice win the Norma K. Hemming Award, presented for excellence in the exploration of themes of race, gender, sexuality, class and disability in science fiction and fantasy, first for her thriller,
Diamond Eyes
, in 2011, and in 2012 for the sequel,
Hindsight
.

Writing as Anita Bell, she is also the author of three of the Top 10 Bestselling Business Books of the Decade in Australia (2000+) and the first author to win the International CrimeStoppers Award (2002) for her children’s adventure series
Kirby’s Crusaders
.

Anita lives in the beautiful Lockyer Valley, Queensland, with her family and a menagerie of farm animals.

Diamond Eyes

Hindsight

Harper
Voyager
An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers

First published in Australia in 2012
This edition published in 2012
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au

Copyright © Bleetie & Co Pty Ltd 2012

The right of A.A. Bell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the
Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000
. This work is copyright.

Apart from any use as permitted under the
Copyright Act 1968
, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Bell, A. A.
Leopard dreaming / A. A. Bell.
ISBN: 978 0 7322 9138 9 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978 0 7304 9779 0 (epub)
Bell, A. A. Fantasy trilogy; 3.
Fantasy fiction.
A823.4

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Cover images by shutterstock.com