She lies amongst the shattered glass, a twisted doll; broken blood vessels in her eyes, open mouth, broken voice, cracked mid-scream. Broken skin, split in a perfect circle just above her pelvic bone. Broken sinew. Broken spine.
Her fingers curl a fraction – an involuntary twitch – and her eyes move, rapidly, from side to side, straining at the miniature ligaments that keep them in their concave cages. She tries to move her lower body. It is cut off entirely: she feels nothing from the waist down, save for the pain that moves from an unplaceable point in the space below her chest out into her torso.
Почему, she mouths at the shadow man. Почему.
The shadow man walks around her in a slow, soft-footed circle. He doesn't smile. She hears the gentle click of his shoe soles on the wooden floor, feels the vibrations in her head.
"I never liked hackers," he says.
He gestures at the man behind him – taller, much taller, holding the glittering eye of the gun – and he steps forwards, shifting his rifle over his shoulder. She can't see either of their faces, she can only hear their voices, their language strange and intonations stranger.
"Safiya," he says. She recognises her name. "It was Safiya, wasn't it?"
When she doesn't reply, he crouches down, to her level, balancing easily on the balls of his feet.
"Computers are hopelessly overrated."
"Почему."
"I'll tell you why. Computers can be hacked by people like you. Books on the other hand," he says, lowering his voice, "books can't be hacked. Paper. Paper and pens. Do you know who else likes books?"
She makes a hoarse, blood-saturated noise at the back of her throat.
"Let me give you a hint. He's got lovely teeth." The shadow man holds out a hand as he talks. "He's Russian too, just like you. Ringing any bells? No?" A camera is placed into his waiting palm: he turns it on, squinting at the little red light. "He adores his books."
Her eyesight focuses then, and she sees the shadow man for the first time. He's dark: black hair, black eyes, suit the colour of ink on blue paper. White skin. There's a fluidity in him she can't quite place – even in her pained paralysis she picks up on his energy, that humming, untrappable, furious buzz that sets the air trembling like a taut string. She can't stop looking at his tie pin. It sits in the centre of the silk, a fox's head; thumb-sized snout and pinprick eyes.
He was waiting for her when she stepped into her apartment.
The morning had been perfectly unremarkable. It was snowing heavily, and she'd struggled with the lock – the metal was frozen stiff – for five long minutes before the door had given way. When she succeeded in breaking into her own flat, she had shrugged off her furs and her coats and headed towards the kitchen. She knew exactly what she wanted – the vodka she'd been given by the minister, one of Vladimir Putin's little rats, in payment for the quick data removal job she'd conducted earlier. It had reminded her of Emily Yakovich née Schott, the English woman with the ringlet curls and bottled temper.
As she walked into the kitchen, she wondered what had happened to London's famed female delinquent. All had gone silent. Near seven months had passed since those hazy days spent hacking with Emily Schott and the other women, and she was beginning to forget her memory. She missed Ivan's company too – their business arrangements, their intoxicated nights, the occasional carnal tryst – but wasn't overly concerned with his lack of communication. He often disappeared without notice. They were longstanding friends. He'd have been in contact if he needed her.
She was just reaching for the bottle when the muted gunshot fired.
"People are like books," continues the shadow man. "They're so full of words, all of them, packed with their little elaborations and explanations and excuses. It's all façade, all a nice cover – although admittedly, some make for very pretty decoration. Not this one though. This one isn't in a good condition." He points at the paralysed woman, his finger centimetres from the bullet wound. "There's a hole in the jacket. Staining on the pages." His smile widens. "Damaged spine."
The executioner grunts and adjusts his rifle, the click of the safety guard audible.
"Be patient. I haven't finished the literary puns." He laces his fingers and looks back down at the dying woman. "This one won't be walking off the shelf any time soon. In fact, I think walking in all its forms is out of the question for poor Safiya here. It's a pity, really. I would have had you driven to a library to properly bring my point home, but alas, my cars don't cater for the disabled."
"Jim."
The shadow man sighs and straightens up, rolling his head to crack the stiffness from his neck. "Always a killjoy."
"The police are on their way. We need to shut this one up for good."
Jim lifts a halting finger. "Don't rush me, Sebastian. I don't like to be rushed. I need to play photographer first."
He holds the camera up.
"Smile for Mr Yakovich."
The flash goes off. She blinks, stunned by the light, and tries to speak again, only to feel the warm movement of rising blood at the back of her throat. The light dims. Her vision starts to fracture.
"Why?" The English comes back to her at last as she struggles with consciousness. "Why do you come for me?"
The shadow man brushes dust from his suit lapels.
"To remind the conman who has the best hand in this game of kings and spades. You were his friend, see." He mimes a gun with two fingers, firing it, a make-pretend weapon. "I'm hurting his friends. I'm showing him I can hurt his friends. I'm unstitching his security blanket. I'll whittle them down, until it's just him and Little Miss Millie. Then comes the guillotine." The flat of his hand meets his palm. "Heads will roll."
He nods at the executioner and raises a hand; finger to thumb, his signature snap.
"No guillotine for you, I'm afraid. I didn't come all the way out to Moscow for one fated hacker, no, I've got to visit the rest of his friends. You're just a pit stop."
He smiles a wolf's smile.
"Besides, I've got a party to attend."
~~~~~~
-Millie-
~~~~~~
His grip is relentless, now.
He does not let me out of his sight: I wake to find him watching me, fall prey to sleep under his gaze, am lifted from bed to chair, from chair to table, from table to chair, from chair to bed, am spoon-fed, dressed, undressed, laid to rest on the white sheets like a mortuary centrepiece. He doesn't speak to me. He watches, fearfully and with a constant wariness in his pale eyes, as if I'm the criminal in a yellowing straight jacket. There is, however, no more forced intimacy – he scarcely touches me now, save to prepare my external appearance for the world that never sees me.
At first it was a blessing. It was heaven-sent, a reward for my attempt at snuffing out my own dimly-lit flame. He was no longer a physical punishment – instead, he was simply there, an outline, something to endure, dedicated to prolonging my existence until my stuttering heart decided enough was enough. He tried to fathom excuses. He insisted my suicide was not my own doing, that it was the cocaine making me delusional, that I'd been sleepwalking. I let him convince himself. He picked up my hand, the skin translucent, and held it between his own: I was told I could not have my fix again, not after it addled my brain and put my life and the life within me at risk. I was told he was going to throw a party, a celebration, to honour our mutual infatuation and to show me his version of the world in all its money-saturated vibrancy. I was told everything would be all right. I was told everything is as it was.
Withdrawal shattered his illusion and my post-death calm in one, fatal slice of its scythe.
Until this morning, I must have been running on excess. Prior to my self-execution I'd deliberately overdosed; I wanted to be fully immersed in shimmering euphoria before I stepped off that bath ledge and into strangulation. The drugs remained in my system for days, mingled with adrenaline and hopelessness, and so his decision to end my alleviation didn't strike me as particularly concerning.
The cravings started, then. Their familiarity was almost comforting.
They found me with a force and a ferocity so vicious, I didn't have time to draw breath: I was struck around the skull with a bone-splitting headache, the type that – had I been standing in the first place – would have forced me to my knees in surrender, followed by a rising sense of panic so acute I could have clawed the skin from my body and still have felt caged. I'd turned to him and begged. He'd shaken his head. My begging rose in volume. He flinched, but held firm. I tried to get to my feet and find the glowing needles myself, but he stopped me with a hand closed around my wrist. I tried again, and again, until eventually he let me stand and I tore through the room and ripped drawers from their stands, upturned boxes, shaking the contents onto the floor and scrabbling with my fingertips.
He watched my unsuccessful hunt and the consequent breakdown, but did nothing to aid me. I remember crawling back onto the bed and pleading, bargaining, threatening, promising, telling him I would never leave his side again – and then I remember nothing. I presume the exertion was too much, or perhaps the intensity of craving too strong, because the next thing I knew I was lying back in my original position – facing the ceiling, arms folded across my chest – and he was no longer beside me.
I sit up, dully aware of the lack of his presence, and begin formulating a plan. This is the wonderful thing about substance abuse, it focuses the mind, hones it in, fashions a fine point out of the cerebral chaos and directs it towards one simple path of action. It takes apathy, and it creates awareness. I feel the cogs within my skull begin to strain, then give, then commence their slow, stilted rotations. Possibilities resurface.
I close my eyes and try not to let the weight of my intentions suffocate me.
He enters the room suddenly, and my head jerks towards the sound: he's walking quickly, eyes down, looking at a piece of white card in his hand. I push the sheets off my skin and stand up, steadying myself on the bed frame. He doesn't so much as glance in my direction. I take a slow, testing step – and then I take another, and another, until his shimmering outline is too close to warrant sanity. I realise then that the white card in his hand isn't a piece of white card at all; it's a photograph, a Polaroid photograph, a picture of a dying woman. She's young – younger than me, certainly – and in blatant agony, her pupils small in the centre of her eye whites. There's blood on her jacket. She's been shot.
I could not care less.
"Please," I say. "Give me my fix."
He doesn't move.
"It is a game," he says, quietly, under his breath. "To him, it is a game. He will not stop."
I take a soft inhalation – a steeling preparation – and, with alleviation in mind, I reach out and place my hand on his arm. As anticipated, his attention is forcibly shifted from the photograph to me. He looks down at my hand, then follows it up, along my arm, to my face.
"I think," I say, as I run my palm down the length of his sleeve, "you should give me my fix."
He swallows hard. "I cannot."
There's a tremor in his voice; a giveaway crack that provides me with the incentive I need to continue.
I take a handful of fabric in my fist and I rotate, on the spot, turning him. He complies like a child. I push his chest, watching him give under the light pressure, and feel him move with me, until he is sat acquiescent on the bed – chin upturned, eyes wide – and I am stood above him.
Stiffly, gracelessly, I lower myself onto his lap.
The photo of the dying woman falls from his grasp, settling face-down on the carpet. Through the static in my head, I make out words on the back of the card.
Heads will roll.
I stabilise myself on his knees, holding his shoulders, keeping him at arm's length. He makes a noise that nauseates me, and moves to catch my mouth with his. I recoil instinctively. His fist tightens at the back of this chiffon chemise to the point where I feel pain, and the wanton mist in his eyes – the look of a pining romantic – clears, shifting into something wholly unsettling. It's sharper, now. Unfocused. I sense the impending return of the man I can no longer control.
"I think you should give me my fix," I repeat. I put my hand on his knee. "Really," I say, as I slide it up his leg. "I do."
Lust makes him predictable. He says something incoherent in Russian and takes my hips in his hands, a little too roughly, forcing me closer, forcing contact, until my chest is flat against his and our mouths are dangerously close. I draw on my dwindling strength and, when he shifts to re-initiate a kiss, I twist my head away.
He hesitates, as if the two sides of his mentality are grappling for control, and then he groans; a broken, desperate groan, one of collapsed resolve and desire and inability to process anything but his own denied mitigation.
"It is in the jewellery box. Only one."
I am standing in seconds, at the box in moments, and the lid is off, and the needles are warm in my hands, and I am bursting with elation. The needle tip has barely pierced the crook of my elbow when I feel him behind me, his mouth at my ear and my neck and then the sloping jut of my shoulder. I empty the liquid silver into my bloodstream. Euphoria is instant, and it is forgiving: my mind is torn from my body and released, my thoughts are loosened, sensations numbed. I am not present as the clothes are pulled from my skin. My head is pushed into the gap between the pillows, my hips are lifted, but I don't feel the pain of his satisfaction.
I sigh, and lose myself in memory as the repercussions of my actions unfold above my body.
~~~~~~