Girl Minus X by Anne Stone

Author:Anne Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd
Published: 2020-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

| Chapter 0 = X + 21

Dany leaves Faraday’s scooter by the old swimming pool. Once upon a time, the pool was a pretty blue jewel set in all the green, mountains framing it in the distance. The water was as blue as the sky and littered with hundreds of kids. But when Dany parks the scooter by the rusty old fence, all that remains of her sky-blue memory is a cracked concrete depression in the brown earth. She can’t see the prison-hospice from here, but it’s close, close.

Over the last two months, Dany learned everything she could about the prison-hospice. Internet searches didn’t turn up much – and the internet’s satellite-view of the place was blacked out – but Jasper is doing a field study there. Was doing one. Him and Lauren Ko.

Jasper told her what she needed to know. Jasper, who is gone now too. The place, he told her, is run by a skeletal crew of guards, the dangerous work mostly handled by female prisoners – who muck out stalls, scrub down floors, empty out buckets, herd the dying by day and, in the morning, carry the night’s dead to the mobile crematorium. Inside the old coliseum, he told her, there are hundreds upon hundreds of cots. The cots, Jasper said, are the same kind used in cholera camps, the kind with a hole to put a bucket under. There, like elsewhere in the prison, it is prisoners who care for the terminals.

And watching over this forced work?

The kind of ex-soldiers the government can leverage. The kind who might, Jasper said, prefer “community service” to a court martial.

Lauren, passing by Jasper’s desk, overheard them talking.

Dany remembers her face. How she looked at Jasper, narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “I swear, some of the soldiers I met were sociopaths. Keep your distance,” she said to Dany. “Creepy sons of bitches. Creepier than the virals.”

“Jesus, Lauren,” Jasper said, giving her a look. “These are patients. People with lives, with families.”

For a brief second, Ko flinched and closed her eyes. When she looked at Jasper once more, she held one hand up in apology. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I just, I forgot myself.” She flinched again as she said it.

Dany frowned, trying to read what was passing between them. When Ko had gone, she turned to Jasper. “What was that about?”

But Jasper shook his head. “Look,” he said. “I haven’t interacted with the soldiers as much as Lauren, but I did meet privately with more than one. They were having … difficulties with the job. I referred them to a colleague, someone who specializes in PTSD. It’s pretty common among soldiers and first responders, and,” he said, with a chagrined shrug, “laboratory ­macaques.”

Standing by the abandoned pool, Dany considers all of this. When it comes to guards, Dany doesn’t know what to believe. Jasper is probably right, more or less, but if she had to put money down, she’d put it on Lauren Ko.

Leaving the pool behind, Dany makes her way up the embankment and crosses the railway tracks.

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