All That She Can See(77)

‘No, 598. I don’t know how you pulled off this little stunt but it’s time to get yourselves back inside.’

Chase’s knees buckled and they slammed into the ground. A blue suit ran at him and tried to pull one of his arms behind his back. Chase struggled and caught the man across the jaw but he threw himself off balance and landed face-first in the grass on the roadside. Sally ran from the van and screamed their names but Peter couldn’t risk it. He ducked back inside the car and started to rock back and forth.

‘Can’t go back. Can’t go back. Can’t go back,’ he mumbled.

‘I suppose it’s quite endearing,’ Happy said to Chase, ‘that you thought you could escape.’

‘Happy…’ said a blue suit.

‘But I don’t feel endearment, so it was all for nothing, really.’

‘Happy!’

‘So it’s lucky for you I’m just —’

‘HAPPY!’ The blue suited man screamed as experiment 347 climbed onto his back and clawed at his face.

Happy spun around and stared into the eyeless faces of nine experiments she’d had a hand in caging up for almost a decade.

‘No… no, you shouldn’t be here. What happened to your faces? YOU.’ She kicked Chase in the neck. ‘That’s how you did this. That’s how you broke the lenses. Shura. WHERE IS SHURA!’

‘Shura?’ Peter’s head snapped up.

‘I told you I’d find a way back to you,’ Experiment 341 said from the front passenger seat. She didn’t look around for fear of what Peter would say when he saw her face but it was undeniably her voice.

‘Shura!’ Peter clambered between the seats and into the driver’s side next to her. Tears poured down his cheeks when he saw that underneath the burnt hair, the blood and grime it really was her and he knew for certain when he saw the yellow rag, now bloodied and full of holes, wrapped around her ring finger that he had tied there years before as a promise. A promise that he would always be hers. A promise he’d been willing to keep even when he saw her lifeless body wheeled away in the Guild, sure she was dead. Yet here she was. His Shura. ‘Oh God!’ he cried.

‘Where are you? Let me hold you.’ Her hands tentatively reached out and searched for him and at first, Peter just watched her hands colliding with nothing but air but then, he circled his fingers around her wrists and gently guided her hands to his face. She traced the outline of his nose, his eyebrows, his cheeks, his chin.

‘Peter,’ she sighed, smiling through her tears.

‘CHERRY!’ screamed Sally, crouching down by the back tyre and clutching the mud guard, not knowing what to do. Cherry’s body lay still on the ground and Chase was barely moving.

‘Wait here,’ Peter said to Shura, planting a firm kiss on the top of her head before getting out of the car and walking towards Happy with a determination so strong that the ground shook.

‘What did you do to her?’ Peter said, crouching down next to Cherry. Five of the experiments had blue suits pinned to the ground, fighting them with all the hurt and anger they’d been saving up while they’d been locked away.

‘Ahh, Peter, dear son. Couldn’t stay away from Mummy for too long, could you?’

Peter narrowed his eyes at Happy. ‘You may have given birth to me, but you’re not my mother.’

Happy tutted. ‘Come now, why would you say such a thing? I do my best.’

‘This is not your best.’ Peter stepped over Cherry and Chase and stood between their barely conscious bodies and squared up to his mother. ‘Your best would’ve been staying. Not leaving me and then locking me away.’

‘I didn’t want you to turn out like me,’ Happy said matter-of-factly.

‘I was always going to be like you. It’s because of you that I’m like this.’

‘I didn’t know that when I left, Peter. And you ended up here anyway, so you got what you wanted. We were together at last.’ She looked at him blankly.

‘Got what I wanted? As soon as I arrived you put me in a cell! You didn’t treat me like your son, you treated me like any other experiment. You even gave me a number! I was seven years old and I was experiment fourteen.’

‘I couldn’t have shown any favouritism, now could I? Nepotism is —’

‘Nepotism? Is that what you think it would’ve been?! Stopping them from locking me in a cage wouldn’t have been favouritism. It would’ve been human!’ Peter spat. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the four other experiments silently making their way towards Happy. The blue suits now lay unconscious in the trees so Peter knew all the experiments were getting ready to pounce. He inhaled deeply. ‘Occasionally, Mother, I still jerk and jolt like the electricity is still passing through my body while you were trying to pull all of my feelings out of me. Hatred stuck by me through it all and now she’s bigger and far more dangerous than you could ever have imagined.’ Hatred heard her name and waved a hand that was covered in embers. The wind fanned it and it burst into flames, making Happy jump.

‘You can hardly blame me for that,’ she said. ‘That’s just what happens to people who don’t know how to behave.’ Happy clasped her hands together and shrugged.

‘You’re a lost cause.’ He shook his head, a tear running down his nose.