Liberation (I Am Margaret Book 3) (3 page)

I pulled a face.

“Well, no. I still want to sign it.”

“Do we
have
to sign it?” Bane waggled his eyebrows and added, “...Unicorn?”

Jack groaned and waved to the guy next to him.

“I should introduce you. This is Jacques. Which is dead confusing for everyone. So they gave us both nicknames. He’s from France, as you can probably hear, so he’s Snail. I got stuck with Unicorn. Why, I cannot imagine.”

“He’s so modest,” smirked Jacques/Snail. “I’m sure they can guess.”

I could, and from Jon’s slight smile he got it too. Jack was a bit posher than most people I’d known in my life but very... well...
pure-hearted
. You wouldn’t catch his eyes lingering on my bum for even a moment... well,
actually
... when we’d first met he’d directed that look of unconscious appreciation guys sometimes give me at Bane, so it wasn’t my bum you wouldn’t catch him checking out, but. He could give me lessons in chastity, any day. Could use some, right now...

Bane looked blank, though.

“Unicorns are very pure animals that can only be captured by virgins,” I explained.

He glanced at Jack.

“Oh, right.”

“So, Snail, you’re saying
you
couldn’t capture a unicorn, are you?” teased Jack, clearly embarrassed.

Snail went brick red.

“That wasn’t what I meant... Of course I... I’m quite sure
everyone
here could... Er...” he broke off abruptly and shot an awkward look at Bane, who went red too and said nothing. He didn’t need to say anything, he wasn’t that sort of nonBeliever... but I accidentally caught his eye.

Bane went even redder, but slipped his hand into mine and said, “Bring on the unicorns. But not now, I’ve somewhere to be...”

He tried to lead me across the entrance hall to the canteen – I resisted.

“You haven’t signed this yet!”

“
Margo
...”

“Go on! It’s a complete travesty of justice and you know it!”

“Fine!” Bane scribbled quickly on the form and handed it to Jon. “Here, by my finger...” he kept his fingertip beside the next empty line. Jon sighed, but wrote carefully.

“Thanks,” said Jack and Jacques cheerfully, stopping by the canteen door, no doubt to ambush the unwary as they tried to reach their breakfast.

We headed on in to eat. Then all too soon we were back in the entrance hall, empty now – Jack and Jacques had gone – and Bane was shouldering his rucksack ready to go out to the jeep waiting to drive him to the harbour.
Be strong, Margo, just be strong
… Bane clasped hands quickly with Jon and Father Mark and turned to me with similar briskness.

“I’ll be back tomorrow or Thursday, Margo; you’ll hardly know I was gone.” He hugged me and placed a gentle kiss on my lips.

And drew away. To go. Back into the EuroBloc.

I broke.

I clung to him. I cried. I sobbed. And yes, I begged him not to go, to forget the whole thing. To stay.

He hugged me and kissed my hair and told me over and over it would be okay – I fought to get hold of myself and shut up, but much like my horrible dream I just couldn’t seem to control myself, couldn’t stop weeping, couldn’t let go of him, couldn’t be strong...

“Bane…” Eduardo’s voice eventually broke in on my hysterics. “Boat to catch, remember?”

“Yes, yes, okay, I know…” He sounded upset, damnit. And I just couldn’t, couldn’t seem to… “Margo, I’m coming back, okay? Tomorrow, hopefully – two nights at most… but I’ve got to go now, okay?”

He tried to ease out of my grasp and my arms tightened around him of their own volition. I fought for control – Bane was going to go whether I liked it or not.

“You come back,” I choked. “You come back, d’you hear me?
Come back
…”

I couldn’t let go, but he took my words as a kind of permission. Kissing me once more –
so
tenderly – he pried me from him and pushed me gently into the clutches of Jon and Father Mark – walked backwards a few steps towards the door, then stopped, looking at me. The distress on his face only made me feel worse.

“If you’re going to go, then go!” I cried, yanking free of Jon and Father Mark and running, running up the stairs and away, ‘cause I couldn’t, just couldn’t watch him walk out of that door.

Reaching my room, I went to the window and looked out. Off to the right the steep ramp-like road came up to the gates; the jeep sat waiting under a discreet awning. Bane strode out, head down and shoulders hunched as though he could still hear me weeping. He got into the vehicle and away it went down into the ruins of the all but abandoned capital.

When the last whirl of dust faded on the horizon I crumpled onto the window seat and cried until I could barely think or feel or move.

Eventually Jon’s hand on my shoulder drew me from my excesses.

“He’s gone?” Observation – Bane had gone out the front door – and question – had I seen Bane drive off?

I drew in a massive gulp of air, tears finally exhausted, stupidly nodded, then managed to get my brain operating enough to say, “Yes. He’s gone.”

“It’s okay,” Jon said gently. “He’ll be back. This is really very safe.”

“I
know
it is. I’m being so
silly
. I was going to be strong. And I have to go and have a total meltdown and I don’t know
why
!”

Jon sat beside me and slipped an arm around my shoulders.

“Because you know if they catch him, he dies. Simple as.” No trace of recrimination in his voice. “After the last few months, I’m not surprised you can’t bear to let him out of your sight. The only wonder is that he’s prepared to leave
you
.”

“Well, I’m not in danger, am I?
Well
… I’m as safe as everyone else here. Oh
damnit
,” I half sobbed, “I wasn’t going to make it hard for him…”

“It’s okay. Shss...”

I rested my head on his shoulder and soaked up his calming presence.

Father Mark stuck his head around the door after a while.

“Feeling better?”

I nodded. Couldn’t look at him – so ashamed of myself. I didn’t hear him approach, but a mug appeared under my nose. Hot chocolate. Hot, Mediterranean chocolate.

“I think they’re missing an angel in heaven,” I joked weakly, accepting it.

“Just what the doctor ordered,” said Jon, sniffing appreciatively, as another mug touched his hands. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” smiled Father Mark. He raised his own mugful in a toast. “To Bane, then. May he be back soon.”

“To Bane,” I whispered.

“To Bane.” Jon sipped impatiently at his chocolate and swore. We all laughed.

I sipped mine more cautiously and the warmth began to soak outwards from my stomach.
Lord, please watch over him
... I’d survived four months in the Facility never knowing what danger Bane was putting himself in. I could manage two days.

I could.

***+***

3

NIGHT THOUGHTS

Bane wasn’t going to contact us except in an emergency, so not hearing from him was a good sign, or so I told myself over and over. Out of respect for my ‘recuperation time’ I’d been assigned light duties only so far, but now I went to the kitchen to join the washer-uppers. Busy, soapy, wet, lots of laughter, highly distracting.

Surprisingly tiring too. Or perhaps I just wasn’t really fully recuperated yet. Still, wasn’t complaining. Being tired enough to sleep without dreaming was seriously underrated, especially when your fiancé was in mortal peril.

So much for that.

...
I was racing along a moonlit beach, desperately searching for Bane. Sand under my bare feet, sharp, scratchy sand, and then, oh no, my hands held two slick, round things, and I tripped and it was the forest clearing and not-Margaret was in control
…

I jerked awake with a gasp – then a curse. Almost the same dream as two nights ago. I ran my – dry, empty – hands through my sweat-dampened hair.
Thank you, Lord, that I woke so soon. I never want to do that again.

But I did. The aborted rerun brought the nightmare back full force. I could feel the goo on my hands, feel the pain in my eyes, remember the terror and anguish at committing such evil and being unable to stop.

Stupid, mad, illogical night thoughts began to creep around me. How could I expect to have Bane returned to me when I could do a thing like that? I’d sealed his fate with my own two hands…

“Enough, Margo!” I gasped into the darkness, grabbing my dressing gown. “It wasn’t even
you
!”

I hurried to our corridor’s kitchenette, heated some milk and took it back to bed. Sipped slowly, trying to concentrate only on the warmth and the taste...

...“Please,” appealed Major Everington, holding out bruised, sap-stained hands, “please, just give them to me…”

Not-Margaret laughed, and crushed them, and this time he screamed with us, feeling it too, and it was done, by my hands – unfixable – and the soldiers were coming…

Argh! Back to the kitchenette. Coffee, not hot milk. I could sleep when Bane got back or when I fell down in a heap, whichever came sooner and please Lord it would be the former.

I switched on all the lights in the TV room and turned on the TV – though not too loud.
Veritas TV: Greenwich band
was broadcasting again from somewhere in Africa. Night meditations, uh oh. I was terrified of nodding off again. What if my subconscious found some even worse permutation of the dream?

I flicked to EuroVee and found something fairly unobjectionable – and rather more lively. But no amount of TV or prayer or coffee could keep the nightmare out of my mind – seemed the only thing I could think about other than Bane, and thinking about Bane was worst of all.

I toughed it out until the sun began to rise. Six o’clock… a marginally more civilised hour. I went back to my room and pulled my clothes on, then headed off across a stairwell and along another accommodation corridor, where, feeling horribly selfish, I knocked quietly on a door. Father Mark opened it almost at once. Apparently wide awake, but in his pyjamas – one of those people who popped out of bed in full alert mode.

“Margo? What’s wrong?” Probably thought the EuroGov were on our doorstep or something...

“Nothing. I mean… there’s no big crisis. It’s just… I’m sorry, I know it’s really early but… can I confess?”

He gave me an involuntary look –
how can you possibly need to confess this urgently when you confessed to me five days ago and Bane isn’t even here?

All he said was, “Of course. I’ll throw my clothes on and meet you on the battlements. Nice up there at this time of day and there aren’t any satellites due overhead until nine.”

“Okay.”

He ducked back into his room – I went out of the old chapter house’s back door onto the ramparts and headed past the south-east bastion where the ancient cannons stood rusting. The Citadel of Rabat was extraordinary, a perfect little city in miniature. Clustered around the big buildings of the square were a mere four or five short, narrow streets, decked out with all the ancient sconces and balconies of old cities the Mediterranean over. Just a handful of little houses graced each tiny street, some half ruined.

A patchwork of livestock enclosures divided by high stone walls and wound through by a couple of sunken lanes took up the other half of the space within the protecting walls. The lintels of rough shacks could still be seen in the corners of each enclosure. For hundreds of years, under the ever-present threat of pirates, the law of Gozo had required every man, women, child and beast to be within the Citadel from nightfall until dawn.

In satellite-free hours the aptly named prickly pear bushes had been chopped down – Bane and I had done a few stints and been far from sorry to be chased off to ‘rest’ – and camouflage netting rigged across the enclosures and thatched with prickly pear branches to create a safe camouflaged zone for outdoor exercise and relaxation. Deserted at this hour, of course. A gentle breeze failed to flap the tightly stretched netting below as I stopped and sat on the battlements, looking down at the dizzying drop.

The island stretched out all around, bleak and arid and bare. And tiny – the sea visible in several directions. When the reForestation elsewhere had failed to save the island from drying out, Gozo was left destitute and gradually the people moved to Malta, which had raised the funds to build a desalination plant.

But there were still a couple of hundred Gozitans left on the island, growing crops with what little water still welled up from struggling springs, or extracting freshwater from the sea with homemade desalination apparatus, stubbornly eking a living from their beloved home. Undoubtedly they all knew we were here, but were happy to pretend we weren’t, pleased to see daily Masses in their ancient cathedral once again, and to welcome the African registered speed boats that docked in the night, loaded with supplies and as many barrels of water as they could carry…

A movement at the corner of my eye – Father Mark approaching already. He sat on a bit of wall – actually, on an Anti-Aircraft Lattice camouflaged to look like a bit of wall. It wasn’t switched on – we couldn’t put up a dome of electromagnetic interference without telling people. But they’d been set up just in case our hideout was discovered…
okay, not thinking about that right now
…

Father Mark took a length of purple wool from his pocket – a stealth-stole – he probably didn’t own a real set. Murmuring the prayer of preparation, he kissed it and placed it around his neck, then looked at me.

“Okay? In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

I made the sign of the cross with him, then... In broad daylight, no longer alone, a little distracted by my thoughts about the fascinating history of our new home, the desperate need had eased its grip. I couldn’t think how to begin. There
was
no way to begin.

“Aagh.” I put my face in my hands. “I haven’t
done
anything! It was a dream... it’s not even
me
, anyway, it’s someone in control of me, not
really
me at all... I’m sorry, I’m being
stupid
and
you
should be in bed.”

“If something’s bothering you, I should be right here. Now, why not back up and tell me what it is you or someone else does in this dream that’s so awful?”

“You can’t absolve me, can you,” I said glumly. “Not when it’s my subconscious coming up with this stuff.”

“No, I can’t. But you can make a normal confession afterwards and I can absolve you for
that
, hmm?”

I brightened slightly. Unless you’d held back a mortal sin, absolution covered all sins committed since one’s last confession whether you could remember them or not –
if
one was genuinely sorry – so if my subconscious thought I’d sinned, it would also think itself forgiven.

“You’re right. Okay, so… I’ve had this dream – nightmare – three times now, more or less the same. I’ve had a lot of nasty dreams since my…” I swallowed. “Since my… almost-dismantling… but this one... S’pose most of the dreams have been things happening to me, but this one feels like me doing something. And in a way that’s worse.”

He nodded as though this made perfect sense, so I went on, “Well, the dream starts, pretty standard nightmare stuff. I’m on a beach and the boat we came here in has sunk and I’m alive but there are bodies everywhere, everyone else who’s drowned, and I’m running, looking for Bane.” My throat tightened.
Bane, don’t think about Bane right now
… “It’s horrible, but it’s not the bad bit. Eventually I trip and fall and when I sit up I’m in a forest glade, all pretty-pretty, and there’s someone coming through the trees and I hope it’s Bane, only it’s not. It’s someone else. A man. An enemy.”

My own voice came into my mind, squeaky with fear, saying, “I forgive you.”

“No,” I corrected myself. “Not… not an enemy. But… someone I cannot love.”

Father Mark nodded again, respecting my decision not to name names. I’d rather he be able to think about it objectively.

I told him about the eyes, about the man asking for them, pleading for them, how much I wanted to return them to him, not-enemy or not. What it felt like to be helpless, to feel my own body, my own voice, doing and saying such vindictive things. How it felt to be so eaten up with hate I’d allow myself to be captured rather than help my not-enemy escape.

“Well, that’s a stinker, isn’t it,” said Father Mark, when I’d finished. “Now, what is it that frightens you so much? That not-Margaret, as you call her, is a manifestation of your subconscious? That a part of you could actually do that?”

I thought about that. Nodded.

“Well, maybe,” he said simply. “There’s a part of pretty much everyone capable of doing that, if they hated someone enough and their conscience didn’t stop them. But I don’t reckon you hate this guy enough. Or you wouldn’t want to give him his sight back. Has… this guy lost his eyes?”

I sighed.

“
No
. I had a nightmare, right after I was rescued, that made perfect sense at the time, but now eight out of ten times this guy ends up in my dreams, he’s got no eyes! It’s just irritating. I seriously doubt his eyes are in any danger. Well, I mean… not on their
own
.”

“If it makes you feel better, I think your conscience is highly visible in the dream as well.”

“You mean wanting to give him…?”

“I was thinking more of the fact that when you destroyed his eyes you destroyed your own.
Do unto others as you would have done unto you
. A not particularly subtle message from your conscience, unless I’m mistaken.”

“Oh. Yes. Hadn’t thought. Just... seemed like justice.”

“An eye for an eye,” said Father Mark irrepressibly.

But I felt the goo again, heard my victim scream in more than just physical pain, and gagged.

“Please, it’s not funny…”

“Sorry. You’re right. It’s a nasty, nasty dream. But you were right when you said you hadn’t done anything.”

“I know. I just... couldn’t get it out of my head.”

“Fair enough. Well, do you want to tell me a few actual sins, then I can absolve you?”

“Ah… right.” Despite waking a priest at the crack of dawn specifically to confess, I’d not actually examined my conscience at all. Embarrassing but true. “Um… well, I’ve been kissing Bane again… urm, not in a chaste way.”

“I had noticed. Only you can say whether it was chaste, of course. But it didn’t
look
very chaste.”

His eyes twinkled slightly, but he looked serious as well.

“It’s so
hard
.” The words burst from me. “Before, I could kiss him and it was just love and concern and no lust, most of the time, anyway, but now we’re here with three square meals and soft beds and chaste doesn’t get much of a look in. But how can I turn around and tell him I won’t kiss him anymore? However carefully I try to explain, I’m just not sure he’d understand. I couldn’t bear him to think that I… don’t love him any more. He’s really insecure about people loving him, though he puts on a good face – I’m sure you see that.”

“Well, there is a solution, which I was under the impression you were going to take as soon as possible. I think you’ve known each other quite long enough not to need a lengthier period of engagement.”

“We
want
to get married, we really do.
I
really do. But… well, I admit I’ve been stalling a little. ‘Cause I’ve got this stupid wish for my parents to be there. And I know even if they get to Africa, this place is like a secret within a secret within a secret, so…” I stumbled to a halt.

“Is that… the only reason you’re stalling?”

His gentle tone undid me. Tears welled, infuriatingly and unstoppably.

“No, it’s, it’s the way I feel right now,” I sobbed. “Can we stop talking about Bane? I’m like a wet
tissue
! One minute I’m fine, and then I’m snapping at… at B…B…Bane, and Jon, and then I’m sobbing all over them and one minute I think everything’s going to be fine and the next I’m sure the EuroGov will be at the gates the next day and I’m a mess, I just can’t do pretty much the most important thing in my life while I’m like this and... Why am I being like this? I hate being so… so…
weak
.”