The Rainbow Maker's Tale (40 page)

Why had they stopped?

I watched the man to my left
wobbling on his damaged leg. A large lump protruded from the front
of his knee, straining at the material of his suit. I couldn’t
begin to guess how it was possible for him to be standing up,
apparently unconcerned by what looked like a compound fracture in
his leg.

Looking from one face to
another, I found only staring eyes, focused on me. There was no
warmth about their features, and no flickers of emotion – anger,
excitement, pain – revealing what was running through their minds.
There was just…nothing. I was sure that every thought, every fear,
must be painted plainly across my face; they would probably know
exactly what I was thinking without needing to use their ability to
read my mind.

“Not quite what you
expected?”

It was the taller man at the
back who addressed me, the one who had not tried to attack me –
yet. He must be some sort of leader, directing the other two
men.

Not what I expected…
His
words repeated in my mind as I heaved in a breath. How could I not
be shocked?

I’d spent years feeling like
some deviant Neanderthal, intrigued with working out why men were
violent with one another and how we had evolved that way. Now I
found that there was some secret division that existed on the space
station, oriented around exactly that. Why would they be needed –
why would violence be something they prepared for – if our society
was so perfect and peaceful?

“What you can do – it’s unusual
– we haven’t seen
real
fighting for quite a while now.” He
shrugged dismissively. “I thought it must have died out.”

There was scorn beneath his
words and it irked me, although it was his second comment that
caught my attention. It sounded as if he had experienced violence
on the station itself. That was something I’d never heard before,
or even considered: we’d always been told that the peace and
segregation agreements were decided before our ancestors left
Earth…is it possible that the violence followed them to the SS
Hope?

“It’s very impressive, of
course, but it won’t get you anywhere.” The same man spoke again,
his eyes raking across my face, searching for some kind of a
response.

Was it possible that I was
still managing to conceal my thoughts from them?
I wouldn’t
have thought it possible, especially in my panic during the fight,
but perhaps I was wrong.

“Huh.” Was all I said; I
wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of distracting me. Whether they
expected me to fight back or not, whether I had any chance of
winning or not, it didn’t matter. I
was
going to fight them,
with everything I had. And I wasn’t going to wait for them
either.

Focusing on the more vulnerable
looking figure I feinted towards them, encouraging him to try and
catch me. He took the bait and lunged, but his injury slowed his
approach and seizing the moment of weakness as his weight pulled
him forwards, I grabbed hold of his wrist. With a single, sharp
jerk I yanked him in then forced him roughly to the ground. The
snap
of a shoulder dislocating cracked through the otherwise
silent room.

I loosened my hands and stepped
back, leaving the man on the floor, expecting him to stay down.
Within moments he was getting back to his feet. It was obviously a
struggle, but mainly because of his injured leg and arm, not
because he was writhing in agony – as he should be.
What the
hell were these people?
How could someone stand such pain?

The injured man leaped for me
as soon as he found his feet, despite his right arm being near
useless and hanging limply at his side. From the corner of my eye,
I saw the other man circling to attack as well. A hand gripped my
arm: it was the wounded man trying to pin my arm down, but he
wasn’t strong enough. I pushed him away easily and he fell to the
side. Unfortunately, the second figure was faster: his arms wrapped
around my chest in an instant, locking my arms tight to my
body.

Struggling to free myself I
spun around, trying to dislodge the heavy man. As we whirled past I
saw Cassie move in the shadows.

No!

There was fear in her eyes,
concern for me and I knew that she was going to reveal her position
to try and help.

“DON’T!” I screamed through
gritted teeth. The word choked off when my assailant clamped his
arm around my throat.
“Please,”
I begged inside my head,
hoping that Cassie would hear me without spoken words.

I couldn’t breathe. The man’s
arm had become a vice around my neck, reducing my movements to
nothing. Terror flamed inside me, pushing me to struggle harder,
but I couldn’t shift him.

They must have sensed me
weakening because his companion approached now, a syringe in his
good hand, primed and ready.

NO! I would not give up.

With my right leg I kicked
backwards at the shin of the man holding me, aiming for the soft
spot on his foot when I couldn’t get a clear shot higher up. It
should have hurt him: the impact jarred my heel and ankle. Nothing
changed though – his grip remained tight.

I tried again, shoving hard
against him and pressing my feet into the floor to lever myself
backwards. It was enough to move me away from the syringe and three
paces back we slammed into the wall. The impact loosened his grip
for a precious moment and I pulled my arms loose.

Mobile once more, I lunged
forwards, smashing my forearm into the man’s throat as he
approached with the needle. He fell to the ground and this time he
did not move.

I had no time to process being
surprised at my sudden success, as the other two men – the one
who’d not approached me so far - flew ferociously at me now. There
was nothing I could do to get away. The first man grabbed me around
the chest again: pinning my arms against my sides, his forearm
pulling hard on my throat. I was instantly immobilised. The leader
was already on the floor, diving for the syringe that was still in
the limp hand of my fallen attacker.

There was no way to resist them
as they wrestled me to the floor, kicking my legs from under me,
choking me into submission. My hands and feet lashed out
ineffectually and I knew it was over: they were going to take
me.

“NO!” I shouted out to Cassie,
hoping against hope that she was not thinking of doing anything
stupid, like trying to help me. I was beyond that now. Dragging up
the images from my memory I pushed them out to her, reminding her
of the promise she’d made me only a short time ago.
“No matter
what happens to me – you will get out of here.”

I bucked my hips, still trying
to wriggle free. With an angry grunt, one of the men shifted his
weight onto my chest, straddling me and preventing my legs from
lifting up to kick at them. My arms burned as they were pressed
into the floor, held tight at the elbows. As the needle slid into
my arm I felt a small prick, and then…nothing. For a few seconds
the drug had no effect, then it swam deeper into my system and
began to take hold.

At the edge of my sight, things
began to get fuzzy. I blinked, trying to clear my vision, but it
only got worse. One of the men leaned in close over my face, but
all I saw was a pinky-coloured oval.

“Where’s the girl?” he
asked.

I’m not speaking to you, bad
man.
A little sing-song voice floated through my mind and
swinging my head away from him, I slurred: “not – saying – ”

With the last conscious thought
I could summon, I did my best to protect Cassie. I pictured her
alone and scared, cowering in a dark corner of an engineering plant
room. From my memory, I picked one with lots of pipes and cabling
so that it would not give them a clear target.

“
I’m sorry, Cassie,”
I
whispered to the darkness inside my head…then I let it swallow
me.

Consciousness came back to me
slowly. I became aware of my body first: muscles aching from the
fight in my parents’ apartment. My neck was stiff from lying at an
odd angle…the surface beneath my head was firm…the floor maybe? And
my tongue was fluffy and tasted of acid when I swallowed.

I wanted to open my eyes to sit
up and look around, but even lying down I could tell I was still
too dizzy from the drugs to be able to do that. So, I listened
instead.

Everything was quiet really. I
could make out no sounds beyond the soft whir of an airflow unit
and my own breathing. After a while of listening to nothing, the
dizziness and nausea began to pass and I was able to open my eyes.
When I sat up, the room swam and even with my head between my
knees, it took a good thirty seconds to stop. Blinking seemed to be
a major task: when my eyelids drooped they didn’t want to open
again.

What was in that syringe?

More time passed and I found
myself looking around the small grey, windowless room I was in and
wondering. I wondered where I was. I wondered about Cassie: what
was she doing, where was she, was she safe…? After a while I took
to wondering about what was going to happen to me, but I didn’t
have any positive answers to offer and so I stopped thinking about
that.

Instead I counted my bruises –
there were quite a lot – and analysed the fight in the apartment.
There were so many things I’d noticed that weren’t right, but
hadn’t had time to process when I was in the middle of everything:
now I had some time on my hands. I began with the obvious
things.

Each of the men had been
stronger than I expected. Not just a little stronger: they had been
unnaturally strong, in relation to their stature and build.

What would cause that?

Drugs, perhaps, but the
difference seemed too big from what I could remember. When they’d
managed to hit me, it was like running into something solid, not a
flesh-and-blood person. The same when I hit them: even their weak
spots felt more substantial than I would have believed
possible…perhaps they wore some kind of flexible armour… But, why
would they need armour? What had they said about not having to
fight…I dragged the words up from my memory.

“
What you can do – it’s
unusual – we haven’t seen real fighting for quite a while
now.”

I was unusual – I’d always kind
of known that – but perhaps I was not as different from other
humans on the SS Hope as I’d always thought. If those men had
experienced fighting on the Station, surely that meant that life
had not always been as peaceful as we were led to believe…and how
old did they look? The same as every other adult I’d ever seen in
the Family Quarter: thirty, maybe forty years old. Did that mean
within the last generation there had been violence on the station?
Perhaps there was truth in their system after all: we were
separated for our own safety…

That would be quite a nice and
neat explanation, if it weren’t for the fact that the men appeared
to experience no pain from any of the blows I landed on them, with
the exception of when I caught that one guy across the throat. When
I hit them, my main successes had been related to momentum, using
their movements and weight to dislodge them or unbalance them…but
for all of that, none of their reactions demonstrated that they
felt any sort of pain.

How could you stand on a broken
leg, or move normally with a dislocated shoulder?

Their reactions had been all
wrong. You could not experience that level of pain and not show it.
I pictured Cassie after her fall: the limited movements, intense
pain around her shoulder, nearly blacking out…

When Cassie had been injured,
the effects were immediate and debilitating; just as they had been
with the children I saw at The Clinic, when we dealt with them
after accidents. I didn’t believe for one moment that Cassie was
weak and these men were not. Their reaction to their injuries was
just the same as their extra-strong bodies: unnatural.

Children.

The word bubbled through my
mind, as if it were significant. For a few moments I could not
think why, but then I realised what my subconscious was telling me.
We only ever treated children at The Clinic – some were about our
age, but I had never seen an adult being taken for treatment.

Why had I never realised
this?
I could have kicked myself for not seeing something so
obvious before now.

What connected all these
things?
I began laying out my observations one by one.

The adults I fought with didn’t
feel pain; the adults in the Family Quarter didn’t appear to get
sick or have accidents that need treatment. Their bodies felt
different to ours: the normal points of weakness did not exist, and
they were much stronger than they should be.

Then there was the mind
communication. Again, only the adults seemed to communicate with
one another using just their minds – with the exception of Cassie,
it didn’t appear to happen in the children and young people. And,
they worked hard at hiding this ability from us.

Did they hide it to keep us
safe?

In many ways that would make
sense: so much of what we did or didn’t do was connected to
protecting us, from what I had seen.

Until now…

That was true: the situation
had changed. What happened in the apartment confirmed everything
Cassie had said – everything she had seen in her dreams. What I
couldn’t understand was why the adults would work so hard at
keeping us safe, but at the same time, have no issue with removing
us violently from the Family Quarter. The sedative they had given
me had not diminished my memories… Did that mean they didn’t care
what I remembered…?

My list of observations made
nothing clear. I found myself asking the same two things over and
over: how could any of this be possible? And what did it mean.
Unfortunately, right now I didn’t have an answer for either
question.