“What about the rest of the inmates?”
Bill shook his head. “Most are regular prisoners - people caught hoarding or scavenging. There are mines on the Greenland coast that opened up when the ice melted. Most of them wind up there after a couple of months.”
Ade paused in his writing. “We should tell Reilly,” he said to Bill. “About our escape plan.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Why not?” Ade insisted. “Reilly Burns is a goddamn hero! Nobody else had the balls to say the things he did, even when he knew what would happen to him.”
“Let me talk to my contact first,” Bill insisted.
“What are you saying?” slurred Reilly, watching them argue.
“Tell him we’re trying to figure out why they brought him here,” said Bill, suddenly realising what had so disquieted him. Reilly’s skin smelled of soap - the same one Hannegan used. Not that that meant anything on its own, of course. But it was perfumed, and utterly unlike the coarse stuff they gave them in the camp.
“Ask him,” said Bill, “if he spoke with Hannegan.”
Scritch scratch. “No,” said Reilly, after a short pause.
“Not at all? A woman with red hair and very pale skin?”
“No,” Reilly repeated. “I don’t know that name.”
Reilly Burns was lying. Bill felt it deep in his bones. They’d taken his sight, but he’d gained so much more; the helmet had made him into a human lie detector. The same enhanced senses had warned him when O’Hare was about to lash out at Ade. He could smell the deceit on Reilly’s breath, commingled with the perfumed scent of the soap.
Even then, Bill wanted to believe he was wrong. A part of him wondered if perhaps his senses weren’t as accurate as he had come to believe; perhaps there was some other, perfectly reasonable explanation.
If only he could think of one.
Owen gave Reilly his bunk for the night, taking a thin blanket for himself and curling up on the hard floorboards. Reilly slept like the dead, which made it easier for Bill to slip out before dawn, carefully prying up first one loose floorboard, then another, pausing from time to time when Reilly shifted or muttered in his sleep. He could sense Ade watching him silently in the dark from his own bunk.
Bill climbed down into the narrow space beneath the hut, which stood on pilings. A gorse bush had grown up next to their hut, obscuring a section of the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp. Some weeks before, Bill had sneaked down on several successive nights and had dug a shallow pit under the fence where the bush hid it from view. There was just enough of a gap that he could squirm his way under the wire.
He emerged outside the camp and scuttled through wild grass, bent low. His blindsight told him it was a moonless night, and he tasted salt from the Atlantic. The freezing wind blowing across the island, somewhere off the coast of Scotland, was enough to shrivel the skin beneath his shirt.
The remains of a village stood just a few hundred metres from the camp. He made his way to a house just above the high tide-line; much of the village had become submerged over the years as the waters rose.
After its original occupants fled, the village had briefly served as an evacuation point for refugees escaping the plagues. Many of them had left their luggage behind, and a few months before, a number of the inmates had been set to digging through the half-rotted suitcases, keeping anything useful and heaping the rest in a pile to be burned.
Owen had found a child’s toy computer, and risked serious punishment smuggling it back to their hut. It was a cheap little plastic thing, but it could be hand-cranked, and had some limited voice interactivity. To their shock, it worked on the first try. Owen, who had been a sysop before his arrest, even found a way to log undetected into the camp’s network and send encrypted messages to the resistance on the mainland.
The computer was wrapped in oilskins, pushed to the back of a shelf in the sodden basement of the house. Keeping the computer anywhere inside the camp perimeter was out of the question: there was too much risk of it being found during a raid. And blind or not, in many ways Bill was the least handicapped of the three of them. He brought it up to the living-room and, crouched on the edge of a half-rotted table, cranked the machine’s tiny pink plastic handle until it emitted a tinny bell-like sound.
Owen had set the machine up so that it spoke each letter when he pressed it. He’d had enough practice by now it didn’t take too long to compose an email and send it.
Reilly Burns arrived at camp, he wrote. Took us by surprise. Should we bring him?
The reply came only minutes later. Sometimes he waited hours.
Bring him to evac point if it’s safe. We’ll make room. Is he in good health?
They took away his hearing. Can I give him any news? He thought for a moment. Does he have any family? Anyone on the outside he needs to know about?
Another long wait followed. He blew on his hands, then tucked them into his armpits. Surprise raids on the huts were not unknown, although there hadn’t been one in months. If one was ordered tonight, it would be worth all their lives if they discovered him missing.
The reply finally came. No such news. His family all died in a Unity camp on the Isle of Man two years ago. The computer read the words out in a childish falsetto.
Bill shut the computer down, put it back in its oilskins, then sat back on his haunches, thinking. Planning their escape had taken months. Just twenty-four hours from now, they’d slip under the fence and board a trawler that would carry them to Europe.
Bill made his way back to camp, taking care not to make a sound as he climbed back through the floorboards. He needn’t have worried: Reilly was still sleeping the sleep of the dead.
Reilly accompanied them to the canteen later that morning. Bill held onto his sleeve, so Reilly could “guide” him there. Bill didn’t need the help, of course, but he didn’t want Reilly, or anyone else, to know that.
“Is it safe to talk here?” asked Reilly once they were all gathered around a table.
“It’s noisy,” Bill said quietly, sipping his broth. “That helps.” He heard Ade scratching the words onto Owen’s slate before showing them to Reilly.
“Is our hut bugged?”
Bill shrugged. “I don’t think anyone cares enough about us out here at the end of the world. Mostly, we get left the hell alone - although I think Hannegan is looking to change all that.”
“Who is she?” asked Reilly, reading Owen’s slate.
Bill could taste the man’s evasiveness.
“She strikes me as the kind of person,” said Bill, “who thinks she can get results where others can’t.”
“These people…” Reilly made an exasperated sound. “That thing they call the helmet started out as a medical miracle, you know that?” Bill nodded. “A way to cure blindness, deafness, a list of ailments and disabilities a mile long.”
