She gets off a huge blast – she knows she’s hurt someone badly, could feel them crumble and she hears the scream – and she’s ready for another go, she’s wheeling round and trying to get the bag off her head, and she’s spinning and letting off jolts wildly into the air. She shouts out, ‘Don’t you fucking touch me!’ and pulls at the thing on her head. And blood and iron bloom at the back of her skull because someone’s hit her as hard as she’s ever been hit and her last thought is ‘A leopard, as a pet’ as she goes down into night.
She knows, even in her half-sleep, that they’re cutting her. She’s strong, she’s always been strong, she’s always been a fighter and she’s wrestling with the sleep like a heavy, sodden blanket. She keeps dreaming that her fists are clenched and that she’s trying to open them, and she knows that if she could only make her hands move in the real world she would wake up and then she would bring down such blood upon them, she would make the pain fall from the sky, she would open up a hole in the heavens and tumble the fires on to the earth. Something bad is happening to her. Something worse than she can imagine. Wake up, you fucker. Wake the fuck up. Now.
She surfaces. She’s strapped down. She can see metal above her, can feel metal under her fingertips and she thinks, Stupid fuckers. She goes to set the whole bed humming because no fucker’s coming near her.
But she can’t. She goes for it, and her accustomed tool is not in its place. A voice very far away says, ‘It’s working.’
But it’s not working, that’s the whole point, it is definitely not working.
She tries to send a little echo along her collarbone. Her power’s there, it’s weak, struggling, but it’s there. She’s never felt so grateful to her own body.
Another voice. She recognizes it, but where, where, whose is that voice? Has she kept a leopard as a pet, what is going on? Stupid fucking leopard padding through her dreams, fuck off, you’re not real.
‘She’s trying to break through. Watch her, she’s strong.’
Someone laughs. Someone says, ‘With what we’ve given her?’
‘I haven’t come all this way,’ says the voice she knows, ‘I didn’t sort this all out, to have you fuck it up. She’s stronger than any of the others you’ve ever taken it from. Watch her.’
‘Fine. Mind out of the way.’
Someone comes near her again. They’re going to hurt her and she can’t let them do that. She talks to her own skein, saying: You and me, mate, we’re on the same side. You need to give me just a little bit more. The last little bit, I know you’ve got it. Come on. This is our life we’re talking about.
A hand touches her right hand.
‘Fuck!’ someone shouts and falls and breathes heavily.
She’s done it. She can feel it now, coursing more evenly through her, not like she’d been drained, like there’d been a block somewhere and now it’s clearing like debris in a stream. Oh she is going to make them pay for this.
‘Up the dose! Up the dose!’
‘We can’t give any more, we’ll damage the skein.’
‘LOOK at her. Fucking do it now, or I’ll do it myself.’
She’s building up a great charge now. She’s going to bring this ceiling down on them.
‘Just look at what she’s doing.’
Whose is that voice? It’s on the tip of her tongue, once she’s out of these restraints she’ll turn around and see and somewhere in her heart she already knows who and what she’ll see.
There’s a loud elongated mechanical beep.
‘Red zone,’ says someone. ‘Automatic warning. We’ve given her too much.’
‘Keep it coming.’
As suddenly as the power had built up in her, it went. Like someone had flipped a switch.
She wants to scream. She can’t make that come either.
She goes down for a moment into the black mud, and when she fights her way back up again they’re cutting into her so carefully it feels like a compliment. She’s numbed, and it doesn’t hurt, but she can feel the knife going in, along her collarbone. And then they touch her skein. Even through the numbness and paralysis and dreamy half-sleep the pain sounds like a fire alarm through her body. It’s clean, white pain, like they’re slicing very carefully through her eyeballs, shaving off layer after layer of flesh. It’s a minute of screaming before she realizes what they’re doing. They have lifted up the string of striated muscle across her collarbone and they are sawing at it, separating it strand by strand from her.
Very far away, someone says, ‘Should she be screaming?’
Someone else says, ‘Just get on with it.’
She knows those voices. She doesn’t want to know them. The things you don’t want to know, Roxy, those are the things that’ll get you in the end.
There’s a twang all through her body when they cut through the final strand on the right-hand side of her collarbone. It hurts, but the emptiness that comes after is worse. It’s like she’s died, but she’s still too alive to notice.
Her eyelids flutter as they lift the thing out of her. She knows she’s seeing now, not just imagining. She sees it in front of her, the strand of meat that was the thing that made her work. It’s jumping and squirming because it wants to get back inside her. She wants it there too. Her own self.
There’s a voice to her left.
The leopard says, ‘Just get on with it.’
‘Sure you don’t want to be under?’
‘They said you’d get better results if I could tell you whether it’s working.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then get on with it.’
And even though her head is in a vice and her neck is full of grinding gears, she turns her head so that just one eye can see what she’s looking for. A single glance is enough. The man lying prepped for the implantation operation next to her is Darrell, and sitting beside him in a chair is her dad, Bernie.
There’s the fucking leopard, says a tinny, chattering part of her brain. Didn’t I tell you there was a fucking leopard somewhere here. You tried to keep a leopard as a pet, didn’t you, you fucking idiot, and you know what happens then. Teeth at the throat, blood everywhere, got what you deserved, messing with a leopard. They don’t change their spots, Roxy, or is that cheetahs, either way.
Shutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutup, she says to her brain, I’ve got to think.
They’re ignoring her now. They’re working on him. They’ve sewed her up – just to be neat maybe, or surgeons can’t make themselves not sew up a wound they’ve made. Maybe her dad told them to. There he is. Her own dad. She should have fucking known that even not killing him wouldn’t be enough. Everything’s got its vengeance. A wound for a wound. A bruise for a bruise. A humiliation for a humiliation.
She’s trying not to cry but she knows she is: leaking from the eyes. She wants to mash them into the ground. The feeling’s coming back into her arms and legs and fingers and toes, there’s a tingling and an emptiness and an ache and she’s got one chance now because there’s no reason at all for Darrell not to kill her, he might think she’s dead already, with any luck. Fucking snake in the grass, fucking shit-stain on the earth, fucking fucking Darrell.
Bernie says, ‘How’s it looking?’