Mardock Scramble полностью

Balot had been assigned a private room on the second floor, and as she settled into her bed there, Oeufcoque spoke to her. “Shall I stay by your side until you fall asleep?” He was hanging upside down from the pull-switch of the night lamp.

–I’ll be all right.

Balot leaned over to touch Oeufcoque.

–Thank you.

And that was all she had to say. Not only that, she realized that this was all she had wanted to say, right from the beginning.

Oeufcoque pulled the light switch to turn the lamp off, left the room, and shut the door gently behind him.

In the darkness Balot cried, but just a little.

As she cried, she thought. About progress. Oeufcoque and the Doctor both looked to the future. They stood for progress—they defined themselves by fighting against vague and equivocal values and targets. They aimed for tangible results.

But Shell and Boiled were different. They’ve turned their backs on progress, she thought. They had spun themselves around, so that each stared at his own past even though it was supposed to have been long since dead.

The past was just a skeleton, and you could do what you liked with it.

That is, provided that you had come to terms with it, given it a proper burial. So Balot thought.

But even if the past were firmly buried in its grave, it was still looking back up at you, and all it took was a small crack to emerge in the sod and the past could thrust a half-rotten arm right up toward you. And when the hand of the past grabbed hold of your leg and tried to drag you down, you could end up losing sight of where you were even heading in the first place.

When the gaze of the past boring into their backs became too much for Shell and Boiled, they turned around to face it and were swallowed up by the darkness.

The same darkness that Balot knew she could be swallowed by at any moment.

Balot considered what she could do.

When she left this silver egg, what exactly would she be able to do?

Eventually her tears subsided, and Balot fell asleep.

≡

“Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” Oeufcoque jumped onto the chair and then up onto the kitchen table.

“What’s this, now?” The Doctor had been gleefully sorting their plans out on the table, and now he turned to look at Oeufcoque, a little fed up.

“The gifts that we gave to the girl…they’ve put her in a real dilemma.”

“You mean the plan of action that she’s chosen? The plan derives from her own consciousness, you know!”

“Yes, but you can’t say for sure that her latent desire for revenge hasn’t unduly influenced her subconscious mind.”

“You may be right, but it’s not as if she’s burning with the need for revenge at the moment, is it?” asked the Doctor.

“Hmm…no. I think she’s humbly putting her mind to the task at hand—solving this case.”

“Then I think she’ll be all right. Besides, if Balot hadn’t chosen the path of Scramble 09 and had just been relying on the Ham & Eggers, by now she’d be in little strips, being sold off down at the marketplace.”

“Marketplace?” said Oeufcoque.

“Intelligence from the police that’s just come in. About the assassins Boiled hired. They were well known among the human-body-part-fetishist community, apparently. They sold off quality body parts.”

“Hmm.”

“They’re the ones who deserved to be torn limb from limb. I think so, anyway, and I’m sure Balot thinks so too. But Balot doesn’t consider it to be our job to do so. She doesn’t have to tear them limb from limb to be satisfied or achieve closure. That’s a good thing, surely? That’s not to say I’m pleased that our old hideaway is now in ruins, of course. But even that can be fixed up one way or another with reparations from the Broilerhouse when we manage to solve this case properly.”

“That’s true, I suppose.”

“I also feel that we definitely did the right thing in strengthening the girl. As per usual, someone had been systematically tampering with the Ham & Egg circuits. An inside job, most probably—a mole taking money to look the other way, not caring in the slightest whether the people bribing them were murderers or fetishists,” said the Doctor.

“So what’s happening about the inside man?”

“The police are on the case there—it’s out of our hands. You’re looking at serious money to try and bail out someone involved in hacking a public network. I’m sure there are plenty of police looking to their next bonus, eager to pin down the mole.”

Still, Oeufcoque didn’t seem entirely satisfied, and he remained sitting on the table.

“Talk about wishy-washy, Oeufcoque. Anyway, what do you think?”

“About what?”

“The girl, of course.”