While Devlin was waiting, he thought the waiting had to be the hardest part.
Three hours until lock-up, riding herd on six hundred women who were on the edge of rabid the whole time. He’d read in some tabloid once that women who lived together ended up going on the rag together. The image he’d conjured up in his mind when he read that article was something close to the way Goodall wing was right now. Whenever a warder even looked at a prisoner, it was a challenge. Every unguarded word flared up into a shouting match.
But lock-up rolled around at last. And that was the hardest part, no doubt about it. Forcing the rabid bitches back into their cells like ships into bottles. He kept thinking it was going to start, but time after time Corcoran was there to talk it down or bluff it out. The two of them went back to back. They kept poker faces, like nothing was wrong. Joked to each other and to the prisoners. Nonchalantly walked and waved and waltzed them through the doors. Nodded the count through.
Turned the keys.
CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK: done.
“Holy fuck,” Corcoran said, leaning back against the wall. “I am going home and drinking a whole bottle of Bacardi. Someone can pour the Coke into me after I pass out.”
“Bourbon any good?” Devlin said. And on her nod, “Follow me.”
They went to the second-floor guard station. There was a camera there, but it only showed the left-hand side of the room. Devlin drew up two chairs against the right wall.
“Here.” He took his hip-flask out of the first aid box, where he stowed it for use during night shifts, and handed it to her. They sat side by side, taking alternate swigs.
When Corcoran’s head was thrown back, gulping down the sweet whisky, Devlin punched her hard in the throat. It was meant to be a killing blow, but he didn’t hit hard enough. At the last moment, his mind wouldn’t let him commit to what he was about to do.
Corcoran went down, but she was still trying to breathe, and she struggled in his grip when she realised what was happening. Devlin had her arms pinned but she used her head as a weapon, slamming it into his face so hard that he saw fireworks. So hard he let go of her.
But he caught her again as she crawled towards the door, and this time she was on her stomach so it was a lot harder for her to defend herself.
It took a long, long time to get the job done, because she was still fighting and he had to make sure that no part of her flailing body crossed the invisible line that was the camera’s field of vision.
That was the hardest part. He cried the whole time he was killing her.
89
Physical distance didn’t count for much in the night world. Liz Earnshaw was only a few feet away from them in waking reality – was Jess’s next-door neighbour in solitary – but it still took her and Alex a long time to find her. When they did, Jess was surprised and disturbed at what she saw.
Earnshaw wasn’t an ocean and she wasn’t a tower. She was a ruin – inert and broken, the pieces of her mind lying in overlapping layers that hardly seemed to move or change. The trail that Jess and Alex had followed tasted of fury and violence and belligerence, but the ruin had none of those things. Emotionally, it was empty. Burned out.
Don’t think about fire, Alex warned Jess.
“I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
You have to try, Jess. If you think about fire, you’ll get upset and you’ll change things the way you changed me. You’ll make everything look like what you remember.
She knew that was a real danger. She tried her best to calm herself – to pull her thoughts and emotions back inside her and lock them down. It was hard.
“Perhaps you should go in on your own,” she said.
No! Alex was dismayed, pleading. You said you’d stay with me. I’m not going unless you come too.
Faced with that ultimatum, Jess surrendered. Alex took her hand – she did her best to make it firm and solid and real – and they stepped inside.
Once they took that last step, once they were inside Earnshaw looking out, everything changed. From the inside, Earnshaw – like anyone – was vast beyond any reasonable measurement. They weren’t wandering in a ruin; they were lost in a world.
But they weren’t lost for long. Earnshaw was catatonic for a reason, and the reason was Alex. She’d folded herself like a fist around some buried thing, some memory, some part of her lived experience. That folding had left marks on every part of her. They followed the only path they could see through that endless, scarred emptiness.
To the dense, impacted core of Earnshaw. A vast blotch of something and nothing, yellow-blue like a bruise, beating like a heart in a sky of brass.
Jess and the ghost that wore the shape of Alex Beech walked out across that sky, ignoring the drop below them because it wasn’t real and didn’t merit their attention. The thing they were walking towards knew they were there and it threw out snaking tendrils of itself to whip in the air above them.
GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY, it shouted at them endlessly in Liz Earnshaw’s voice.
“No,” Jess said.
One of the tendrils lashed her across her face, exploded in her eyes in a flare of hate and rage. She flinched back, the pain taking her by surprise. A second blow hammered on her shoulders, and then a third in the exact same place. Earnshaw was trying to swat her out of the sky.
But Jess was pretty schooled up on pain by this point. After the fire, and the endless surgery to save her face, and what Stock had put her through with the needle, she was inoculated against random agony – especially if, like this, it was mostly “let’s pretend”.
“We’re coming in,” she said, trying to sound resolute and determined despite the tremor in her voice. “Nothing you can do will stop us, Earnshaw, but if you fight us, we might have to hurt you. It’s up to you.”
The bloated thing screamed and struck again – only against her, Jess noticed, not against Alex. Some of the tendrils hovered in the air over the boy’s head but they offered him no harm. And Jess ignored the blows, only ducking her head as though the lashing filaments were heavy rain.
She knew they had to make a breach in this thing that towered over them, and she thought she might know a way to do it. It was brutal, but she had no particular reason to be gentle.
“You see who’s with me, Earnshaw?” she shouted. “Does this face seem familiar to you? Maybe it doesn’t because she’s changed a lot since the last time you met. But I’ll give you a clue if you want one. I’ll tell you how you killed her.”
She gathered her strength and shouted as loud as she could. Not just with her voice, but with her mind.
“You cut off the fingers of her left hand. You sliced her cheek open. Her
You cut off the fingers of her left hand. You sliced her cheek open. Her right cheek, I think it was. You took her eye out. Then you stabbed her in the throat right cheek, I think it was. You took her eye out. Then you stabbed her in the throat and let her choke to death on her own blood. Is this ringing any bells?” and let her choke to death on her own blood. Is this ringing any bells?
Alex whimpered at Jess’s side. Clung to her arm like a castaway clinging to a spar.
She was describing the wounds he had told her about in their very first conversation. Told her about and – she knew now – tried to show her. He’d held up his hand, touched his eye and his cheek. But she had already been writing her own memories on to what she was seeing. The wounds were invisible to her because they didn’t fit with what she knew about Alex’s death.
The pulsing bruise above them made no response, but Jess felt that it was listening. The silence sucked at her.