Nylon Angel (13 page)

Kiora Bass. I remembered Slummers named themselves after the fish of their area. Down the coast a bit they were Trevallies and Breams. Sounded stupid, but you didn’t want to say that to a Slummer’s face. They were as handy as Muenos with knives, only they used filleting blades.

A tinge of rage crept into her voice. ‘Don’t believe you, you lie. She your woman, Loyl-Dark? You don’t want me!’ She followed with an obscenity that curled my toes and broadened my mind.

‘Shut it, Kiora.’ He leaned over me and slapped her across the jaw. The whole sling sagged, jolting my shoulder.

‘Hey, quit the domestic shit!’ I growled at them. ‘Put me down or stop jerking around.’ I glared at the woman. ‘And quit with the insults. He’s not my type.’

And it had. She bowed her head, a small satisfied smile playing on her lips.

I didn’t look at Dark.

He’d hit her. I’d never forgive that in a man.

So much for The Tert town saviour!

They bundled me along in silence, between humpies and past smoking fires, to an open stretch of beach. I could hear the sea lapping, an oily, flat sound. Then the high whine of something mechanical drowned it out.

A buzz saw?

When I saw what made the noise, I was damn near right. A buzz saw connected to a metal frame with wings and a pair of seats. A primeval ultralight.

I’d seen them occasionally in the sky above The Tert. They always looked so frail and hesitant. Like they might get tired at any moment.

Kiora Bass and Dark rolled me on to the frame and strapped me to it in three places. My feet dangled over the end.

I struggled, gripped by panic. Jumping ditches on motorbikes was one thing. Flying in a mutated power tool was something else.

‘No way am I going anywhere in this. Dark! Listen! Get me
off this thing
!’ I tried to scream, but my lungs hurt too much. ‘For Womssakes, get me off.’

The Slummers crowded closer, pointing at me. I saw Mama at the back, towering over them, his fat body quaking with laughter.

High point to his week, no doubt!

Kiora Bass smirked openly.

Dark ignored the whole proceedings.

Craning my neck backwards, I saw him strap in, straight-faced, alongside the pilot.

The ultralight gave a little jerk and we accelerated along the sand. Next it hopped three or four times, like a demented frog. Then the rushing air and the engine drowned my moans. Two or three outrageous swerves cleared us of the power lines, and we were airborne.

I held my breath for as long as I could. And some more. My stomach turned inside out and then back, and tried to crawl out of my ears and nose.

As the wind tore at my clothes and blasted my face, I swore if I made it off this thing alive I’d never complain about my life again.

I followed that up by a string of stupid things you promise yourself when you think you’re going to die - which you immediately forget as soon as you realise you’re still alive.

A few minutes after that, my whole body began to shake with terror - great uncontrollable rigors. If I hadn’t been belted in, I swear I would have bounced myself straight over the side.

My leg, where my clothes had torn, turned numb. Fear took me in a way I’d never known. I wanted to get my feet on the ground so badly I would have jumped. I moaned, over and over; no sane part left to tell me I was acting like an idiot.

I closed my eyes and begged some god - any god - to let me survive it. Just another day of life, another night . . .

 

We put down an age later on a potholed bitumen road on the rural sweep of Viva. Landing was like being stabbed by large steak knives. But my relief, so enormous after the terror, cancelled out the pain.

The ultralight taxied along the road until a building came into sight. There was nothing else close by, apart from a bunch of trees that partially hid a house, some paddocks studded with dried plant carcasses and in the distance a four-metre-high perimeter fence made of solid ferro. Across the top of the fence a blue security light crackled like lightning in a thunderstorm.

I couldn’t remember how long it was since I’d seen so much open space - apart from The Tert wastelands.

Dark came round to unstrap me. ‘OK?’ he shouted over the engine.

My mouth was too dry to reply the way I wanted to.

He and the pilot hauled me inside a sleek building, through a dust-proof door and deposited me on to a hard morgue-like slab. Then they disappeared outside and the sound of the buzz saw soon faded into the distance.

For a moment I thought Dark might have gone with him and I struggled to get free of the blanket that had wound itself around me. It stank of fresh fish guts. No doubt Kiora Bass had lent me her best.

‘Keep still until I’ve examined you,’ a cold voice commanded out of the darkness.

I craned my neck around to locate it, then fixed on a faint glow - the reflection of a screen. The outline of a woman sat behind it, tapping at a keypad.

‘In a moment you’ll be scanned. Loyl darling, can you remove her covering? It’s imperative she
keeps still
.’

Darling?
Was she talking to Dark? I glanced up, relieved and annoyed. Where the hell was he? Where the hell was I?

He stepped out of the shadows and bent over me. ‘Parrish, she’s a medic. Let me take the blanket away so she can check you over.’ He said it carefully, like he was planning to dismantle a bomb. ‘OK?’

I nodded slowly, resisting the urge to sink my teeth into his arm - just for the heck of it.

‘Does it hurt much?’ He smelt of wind laced with a faint musk, and his concerned tone took the sting out of my anger.

‘I - it’s all right,’ I allowed. Maybe it was a reaction to my first-ever air flight, or maybe I really was losing it. But with his face so close to mine, and me feeling so damn fragile, I suddenly mislaid my reasons for disliking him.

The gloom softened his face with kindness. Kindness wasn’t a thing that featured on my life’s highlight reel. I didn’t know what to do with it.

‘Stand away,’ the woman ordered sharply.

Dark tugged the last of the blanket from under my legs and squeezed my hand for a second. ‘It won’t take long.’

The slab slid into a cylinder, covering my body like the lid and sides of a coffin. I concentrated on remembering to breathe and told myself at least I was on the ground, not hurtling through the air on the back of a buzz saw.

A few minutes later, when it retracted, I was shaking all over. My muscles seemed to belong to someone else. I drew a long steadying breath.

The woman operating the coffin stood up. The halo lights brightened.

‘She’ll live.’

She walked over to the slab and peered down at me, taking in my torn clothes. ‘When did the accident happen?’

Dark moved to stand next to her. The top of her head was in line with his elbow. She looked breakable next to his size, though her pale eyes shone with a kind of fierce, cold intelligence. But it was the pigmentation on her face that stopped me. Two inflamed red birthmarks under her eyes, fusing on the bridge of her nose, gave her a tragic, bruised kind of look - like she’d been punched in the nose, or belonged to a bizarre cult. She wore nothing to cover them.

I sensed her natural antagonism to strangers - people who hadn’t seen her before - and understood some of it. Sympathy stirred in me. Punters were paying a fortune for this kind of thing in The Tert. Being born with it was another thing altogether.

‘Whenever I called you. A couple of hours ago. Why?’

‘Remarkable,’ she said. ‘The scan shows fractures to three ribs—’

‘Just what I thought,’ Dark cut in.

She placed cool, he’s-mine fingers on his wrist. They were the same colour as her hair - white as the moon when the smog thinned. ‘Yes, but the injuries are those of an accident that might have happened two weeks ago. The healing process is already well advanced.’

‘Impossible,’ he countered.

They both looked to me for an explanation.

I shrugged. I mean, really, what could I say?
The Angel did it!

‘Good genes?’ I proffered limply.

‘Drugs?’ Dark said.

‘No’. The woman shook her head. ‘I tested that. Apart from her olfactory enhancement and compass implant there was only one other unusual thing in her profile, augmented or chemical.’

‘What was that?’ Irritatingly, Dark beat me to it by a second. Whose flesh were we talking about?

‘Her adrenal glands are showing excessive activity. But that may be a result of her high-risk lifestyle. I assume she’s one of those body-for-hire types.’

I could live with her description, not with her superior tone. Even Rene - my mother - didn’t speak to me like that.

 

‘Parrish? Parrish? Are you listening?’

I blinked back into the present and abruptly swung my legs out over the edge of the slab. My knee banged against the medic woman’s arm and she retreated like I’d contaminated her.

It made me want to cover my exposed upper thigh - but shuffling modesty was not my style. I ignored it instead.

‘Yes. I’m fine. In fact much better. What’s this place?’

Dark expelled a breath of annoyance. He’d gone to some trouble to get me here and I was halfway to mended already.

‘Parrish Plessis, meet Dr Anna Schaum.’

I bit my tongue and held out my knuckles, Tert style. ‘Thanks for the help. ’Preciate it. Now how do I get out of here?’

One side of her mouth moved. It could have been a smile, but I didn’t think so. She didn’t return the shake. Instead she staged a whisper. ‘Where did you get this one from, Loyl? She’s a healthier physical specimen than Bass, but her manners—’

The flake of sympathy I’d felt earlier shrivelled and died. The woman was talking about
me
.

Dark put a warning hand on my shoulder, intervening as smooth as a rat. Obviously he didn’t want his precious little medic with broken teeth and a bent nose.

‘Thanks for your help, Anna. But let’s keep the remarks clinical.’

‘I thought I was.’ She gave him an innocent smile.

He patted her gently. ‘Parrish and I will be here overnight. Is that OK?’

She gave a tight shrug, then walked back to her screens and resumed working.

Call me paranoid, but I got the feeling Anna Schaum’s instant, obvious dislike of me was totally personal. First the fish bitch, and now Doctor Ice-Cold. Who else did Dark have on his lust list?

‘Can you walk?’ he asked me.

‘Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘Can we get out of here? It stinks like a hospital.’

He gave a strange laugh and showed me the way.

 

The sun was setting outside. I resisted an impulse to go foetal when we got into the open. I hadn’t seen proper trees and grass for so long it was like a horror flick. Heat clouds bathed everything in a dull yellow. Even the ferro fence.

Dark placed his flesh hand lightly on my shoulder again, steering me towards a house partly hidden by white gums. I wanted to shrug him away but the feel of his hand was comforting. In the distance the noise from Vivacity droned, reassuring me.

‘It takes a while to adjust to the space,’ he said.

We walked slowly. I might have been healing, but everything still hurt.

‘Same as my first day in the Heart,’ he added.

‘What was it like?’ I couldn’t help but ask. No one left the coast any more. Living in Central Australia had gotten too harsh.

‘Like? Barren. Hot in a way you can’t imagine. Terrifying. Even underground. Too hot to breathe. They gave you cool suits but it didn’t help a lot. Just kept you alive enough to work in the mine. In the evenings when you’d come out of the shafts, the sky was white with stars. I got used to the nights there, and how big they were. Coming back to The Tert, well . . . I keep wanting some space.’

I looked around. ‘Anna’s got some cred. A place like this must cost.’

Silence.

I’d hit on one nerve. So I tried hammering another. ‘Funny you turning up in Fishertown like that. You never mentioned you were going to Viva.’

‘Nor did you,’ he countered.

‘I didn’t know - exactly. If I didn’t know better I’d think you were following me.’

‘Maybe I am. Maybe I can’t bear to be away from you.’

My heart skittered for an instant.

‘Or maybe . . . we’re chasing the same thing,’ he finished.

My heart settled into an altogether different rhythm - suspicion. It quelled my agoraphobia. I suddenly remembered that he was a jerk who liked to hit women.

He stopped walking abruptly, like he could hear my thoughts. His breath fanned my face. A tinge of musk still clung to his body.

‘Where are you going in Viva, Parrish? What are you doing for Lang?’

I stepped away from him, wincing from the sudden movement. It still hurt to breathe deeply, so I settled for panting. ‘What makes you think I’m here because of Lang?’

‘He’s offered you something important. Enough to risk leaving The Tert during the embargo.’

‘How do you know that?’

His eyes got calculating, his words measured for effect. ‘I know more than you think. I know that Jamon Mondo owns you and that you’d do just about anything to change that. I know you are pretty much alone and inclined to violence. I know you are impulsive and often irrational.’