Under the Skin

7

WHEN ISSERLEY FINALLY clawed her way back to the surface from a black hole of sleep, she opened her eyes to find that it was still dark. Floating in a void, her little clock’s digital numbers were feeble and flickering, and said zero, zero, zero, zero. The internal power source needed replacing. She should have anticipated this, she thought, instead of… instead of what? Instead of wasting money on a box of chocolates she had no intention of eating.

She lay tangled in the bedclothes, confused, disoriented and mildly anxious. Though she could see nothing in the blackness except the flickering clock, she suddenly had a vivid mental picture of the floor of her car, the last thing she could recall seeing before plummeting into sleep. She must remember to clear out the spilled chocolates before driving off again, or else they would get squashed underfoot. She’d seen the dog breeder bite into one. They had some sort of goo inside them that would make a sticky mess and no doubt decompose in time.

She’d let things veer a little out of control lately; she must restore some order at the earliest opportunity.

Isserley had no idea how many hours she had slept; whether the long winter night was still young or would soon be ending. It was even possible she’d slept through the brief pale hours of daylight, and that it was now already the dark afternoon of the following day.

She tried to gauge from how she was feeling how long she had been unconscious. She was as warm as an overheated engine, sweat simmering out of those parts of her that could still sweat. That meant, assuming she could still trust her cycles, that she had slept either a very short or a very long time.

She stretched her limbs cautiously; the pain was no worse than usual, but usual was bad. She would have to get up and do her exercises, regardless of what time it was, or she would end up unable to get up at all, trapped in a cage of her own bone and muscle.

Moonlight was sketching some detail into her bedroom now as the pupils of her eyes at last began to dilate. Because her room was bare, though, the details were things like cracks in the walls, shards of peeled paint, functionless light switches, and, in the hearth, the dull pearly gleam of the sleeping television. Parched, Isserley fumbled for the glass of water beside the bed, but it was empty. She raised it to her lips and tipped it upside down just to make sure. Empty. Never mind: she could wait. She was strong. Needs could not bully her.

She sat up, clumsily disentangled herself from the bed-sheets, and launched herself off the mattress onto the floor, landing crookedly, almost pitching sideways. A long needle of pain stabbed through the base of her spine, the amputation site; she’d tried to steady her balance with her tail again. She swayed back and forth, finding her new centre of gravity; the palms of her feet, damp with perspiration, adhered slightly to the frigid floorboards.

The moonlight was not enough to do her exercises by. She didn’t know why she should need to see her limbs in order to exercise them, but she did. It was as if, in too profound a darkness, she could not be sure what sort of creature she was. She needed to verify what remained of her body.

Perhaps the television, as well as providing some illumination, would serve to orient her. Unreality was swirling all around her like the delirious miasmas above the oxygen pits at the heart of the Estates; she had been dreaming again.

After dreams of the pits, it would have been comforting to wake up in the sunlight of a safe world. Failing that, it would have been reassuring to see the clock glowing promisingly at her. But if she could have neither, she could do without.

Isserley stumbled over to the hearth and switched on the television. Its tarnished screen revived sluggishly, like embers fanned by a breeze; then a bright image materialized like a psychedelic fire in the hearth, as Isserley prepared to contort herself into shape.

Two male vodsels dressed in mauve tights, ruched blouses and bizarre green hats like stuffed Loch Ness Monster toys were standing next to a hole in the ground, out of which loose earth was being jettisoned like little puffs of brown breath. One of the vodsels was holding a small white sculpture in the palm of his hand, a three-dimensional version of the danger symbol displayed on Ablach’s main steading.

‘…and now my lady worms,’ he was saying, addressing the sculpture in an outlandish accent stranger still than Glaswegian. ‘Chapless, and knocked about the muzzard with a sexed unspayed.’

Isserley pondered this for a few seconds, grunting with effort as she tipped her stiff torso repeatedly against her right hip.

The television camera took her (ugh!) inside the hole in the ground, where there was an ugly old vodsel digging in the earth. He was singing as he laboured, in a slurry voice like John Martyn.

‘A pee cacks and a spayed, a spayed friend, a shrouding sheet, oh, a pit of clay for to be made…’

It was all a bit depressing, so Isserley changed channels with the fingers of her foot.

A large crowd of vodsels was advancing down a wide sunlit street paved with stones. Each member of the procession was shrouded in a bedsheet, with a narrow slit cut out for eyes. One held aloft a placard on which was affixed an enlarged and indistinct newspaper photograph of a bedsheet-shrouded creature just like them. A reporter’s voice was saying that with the whole world watching, the big question was just how far these women would be allowed to go.

Isserley watched the procession for another couple of seconds, curious how far the vodsels would be allowed to go, but the camera didn’t show her; it switched to something entirely different, a large crowd of male vodsels in a sports stadium. Many of them resembled the dog breeder, and some were punching and wrestling each other while police tried to shepherd them away from the others.

The camera switched to a close-up of an impressively beefy vodsel bulging out of a colourful football shirt. He was pushing his upper lip over his nose with his thumbs, revealing the word BRITISH branded on the wet pink flesh squirming above his yellow teeth. Then he pulled his lower lip down over his chin, revealing the word BULLDOG.

Isserley changed the channel. A female vodsel with breasts almost as big as Isserley’s was screaming hysterically, clutching her cheeks with her hands, at the sight of a creature Isserley could not identify. It resembled a giant insect and waved pincers like a crab, but advanced clumsily on two legs. A male vodsel ran into the picture and shot the insect creature with what looked like a beam of torchlight from a plastic pistol.

‘I thought I told you to stay with the others,’ barked the male to the female, while the poor insect creature writhed in agony. Its dying cries, barely audible above the din of animal orchestrations, were alarmingly human-sounding, as sibilant as sexual passion.

Isserley switched the television off. More awake now, she’d remembered something she should have known from the beginning, which was that there was no point trying to orient yourself to reality with television. It only made things worse.

Years ago, television had been a wonderful teacher, offering her titbits of information constantly, which she could consume if she was ready, leave alone if she wasn’t. Unlike the books Esswis had gathered together for her to study, the luminous box in the hearth chattered indefatigably whether she was listening or not, never getting stuck on a word or a page. In all those early months of reading and re-reading, Isserley never managed to get through more than a few paragraphs of History of the World by W.N. Weech, JP, FSA, MA (even the fearsomely detailed farming pamphlet Which Rotovator? was less daunting) but the basics of vodsel psychology had been made crystal clear by the television within a couple of weeks.

Strangely, however, she seemed to have reached a point, years ago already, when there wasn’t room for any more titbits from the television. It had passed its prime of usefulness, and was reverting to babble.

She still wanted to know what day of the week it was, and whether the sun was near or far. She would, she decided, go outside as soon as she was limber, and interpret the night for herself. In fact, why wait? She could finish her exercises at the beach, under cover of darkness; she suspected strongly it was the small hours of the morning. Monday morning.

She was regaining her grip.

Feeling her way down the banister, she descended the stairs to the bathroom. The bedroom and the bathroom were the only rooms in her cottage that she knew well; the other rooms were a bit of a mystery. But the bathroom was not a problem. She had gone there countless times in the dark – virtually every morning during the winter months.

Isserley walked in, blind. The palms of her feet sensed the change from wood to mouldering linoleum. She had little difficulty finding the things she needed. The tub, the taps, the shampoo, the sudden pressurized torrent of water: all these things were in their usual places, waiting for her. No-one ever tampered with them.

Isserley showered with care and patience, giving special attention to the scar-lines and alien clefts in which she had a dangerous lack of sensation: places where infections could grow and where wounds that had never quite healed could slyly venture open. Her hands smoothed great foams of lather back and forth across her body, spongy slathers of creamy detergent which she imagined as more copious than they probably were. She pictured herself wreathed and haloed in foam, little clouds of it like the frothy spume of pollution carried on the waves sometimes at Ablach Beach.

Abstracted, she drifted away from consciousness, slowly revolving under the warm cascade of water. Her hands and arms continued to slither around on her flesh, slick with lather, settling into a regular rhythm, a regular route. She closed her eyes.

Only when she realized that some of her fingers had strayed between her legs, searching blindly for what was no longer to be found there, did she come back to her senses and rinse herself with businesslike efficiency.

Fully dressed as if for work, Isserley walked through a tunnel of trees towards the sea. Her boots made soft crackling sounds in the frozen mud; her wet hair steamed in the chill air. She moved carefully, measuring her steps in the dimness, her hands hovering away from her hips, ready to break a fall. At one point she turned, waiting a moment for her cloud of breath to clear so she could see how far she had come. Her cottage was a vague silhouette hunched against the night sky, with two upstairs windows reflecting moonlight like the eyes of an owl. She turned back to the firth and kept walking.

After the avenue of trees, the land was opened up to the atmosphere; the size of Ablach Farm became obvious, and Isserley walked a long grassy path snaking between great fields of dormant barley and potatoes. The sea was already visible from here, and the sound of waves seemed all around her.

The moon hung low over the firth, and countless tiny stars shone clearly from the darkest, furthest reaches of the universe; the time must be about two or three in the morning.

Back in the steading, the men would most likely be loading the ship at last. That was a good thing. The sooner they finished, the sooner it could leave. The moment would arrive when Amlis Vess was sent back where he had come from. What a wonderful release of tension that would be!

She breathed deeply, anticipating it, visualizing him being bundled off. The men would usher him into the hold of the ship, and he would saunter in arrogantly, showing off his pampered, glossy body, holding his head high in an attitude of adolescent disdain. He would probably turn, just at the moment before entering, and cast a piercing glance at whoever was in range, his amber eyes burning in the exquisite blackness of his fur. Then he would be gone. Gone.

Isserley had reached the boundary of Ablach’s farmland, fenced off from the cliffs and the steep paths down to the water. The gate was a massive construction of cast iron, half-petrified planks and wire mesh, hingeing on a couple of posts as thick as tree-trunks. The locks and hinges resembled, especially in the moonlight, unwieldy chunks of car engine welded to the wood. Fortunately, the farm’s previous owners had built a little wooden stepladder on either side of the gate, to save trouble for two-legged passers-by. Isserley scaled these little steps, three on either side of the gate, with clownish difficulty, thankful no-one could see her struggling. Any normal human could have leapt over.

On the other side of the fence, not far from the gate, a small herd of cows was camped on the narrow fringe of grassy earth between Ablach ‘s boundary and the cliff rim. They snorted nervously at Isserley ’s approach, the paler-coloured ones luminescing faintly in the gloom. A calf started to its feet, the glints in its eyes swirling like sparks off a fire. Then the entire herd roused itself, and retreated further along the boundary, making the utterly distinctive sound of countering hoofs and the heavy ploff of faeces.

Isserley turned to look back at the farm. Her own cottage was hidden behind trees, but the farmhouse stood exposed. Its lights were off.

Esswis was asleep, probably. Yesterday morning’s gruelling adventures had, she was sure, taken more out of him than he could have admitted to a woman. She pictured him stretched out on a bed just like hers, still wearing his ridiculous farmer clothes, snoring noisily. Tough man or not, he was much older than she was, and had toiled in the Estates for years before Vess Industries had fished him out; Isserley had been offered rescue after only three days. Also, he’d been operated on a whole year before her. Quite possibly the surgeons had done a worse job on him, experimenting with techniques they didn’t perfect until Isserley came under the knife. If so, she pitied Esswis. His nights could not be easy.

Isserley walked down the cattle path towards the beach, choosing her footing carefully on the steep slope. She got half-way, almost to the point where the gradient became gentler, then she paused. Sheep were grazing at the bottom, and she didn’t want to scare them off. She liked sheep more than any other animal; they had an innocence and a serene intentness about them that was worlds away from the brutish cunning and manic excitability of, say, vodsels. Seen in poor light, they could almost be human children.

So, Isserley stopped, half-way down the cliff, and finished her exercises there. With the cows dawdling uneasily somewhere above her head and the sheep grazing unperturbed below her, she assumed the correct positions, extending her arms towards the silvery horizon, then bending down to the shore of the Moray Firth, then tipping sideways, north towards Rockfield and the lighthouse, south towards Balintore and the denser populations beyond, then, finally, reaching up towards the stars.

After a long time repeating these actions over and over, she achieved a state of half-consciousness, mesmerized by the moon and the monotony, and persisted far longer than usual, becoming so limber in the end that her movements became graceful and fluid.

She might have been dancing.

Back in her cottage, still hours before dawn, Isserley found her mood darkening again. She loitered in her bedroom, bored and irritable.

She really would have to ask the men to fix up the wiring in this house, so she could have electric light. The steading had electric light, Esswis’s farmhouse had electric light; there was no reason why her cottage shouldn’t. In fact, come to think of it, it was quite amazing that her cottage didn’t – outrageous, even.

She tried to recall the circumstances of her coming to live here. Not the journey, certainly not what had happened in the Estates, but what had happened immediately upon arrival at Ablach Farm. What arrangements had been made? Had the men expected her to live under the steading with them, in their fetid burrows? If so, she would have knocked that idea on the head pretty smartly.

So where had she slept the first night? Her memories were as indistinct as the fused and blackened contents of an exhausted bonfire.

Perhaps she’d chosen this cottage herself, or maybe it had been suggested by Esswis, who’d had a whole year, after all, to become familiar with what was on the farm. All Isserley knew was that, unlike Esswis’s farmhouse, her cottage had been derelict when she’d moved into it, and of course it was still more or less derelict now.

But the electrical extension cord that snaked all the way through her house, connecting the television, the water heater and the outside lamp to a generator: who had organized that, and how grudgingly? Was this another example of her being exploited, used like a piece of brute equipment?

She strained to remember, then was embarrassed and slightly bewildered when she did.

The men – mainly Ensel, most likely, though she couldn’t recall any individuals – had fussed around her from the moment she arrived, offering to perform all kinds of miracles just for her. Ogling her in fascinated pity, they had ganged up to douche her with reassurance. Yes, they appreciated that what had been donngredients. ‘Sugar’, ‘milk powder’ ande to her by Vess Industries couldn’t be helped now, but it wasn’t the end of the world. They would make it up to her. They would make this cottage, this draughty near-ruin, a real home for her, a cosy little nest; she was a poor little thing, she must be so upset at how she had been… messed about with, yes, they understood all about that, I mean, look at Esswis, poor old bastard; but she was brave, yes, she was a plucky girl, and they would treat her as if there was nothing odd or ugly about her at all, for she and they were all the same under the skin, weren’t they?

She’d told them she wanted nothing from them, nothing.

She would do her job, they would do theirs.

To do her job properly, she would need a bare minimum of things provided for her: a light in or near the shed where the car was kept, running hot water, and one electrical connection to power a radio or some similar apparatus. For the rest she would be fine. She would take care of herself.

In fact, she’d spelled it out more crudely still, in case they were too stupid to take the hint: what she needed most was privacy. They were to leave her alone.

But wouldn’t she get lonely? they’d asked her. No, she wouldn’t, she’d told them, she’d be too busy. She had to prepare for a job whose complications and subtleties they couldn’t hope to understand. She had a lot of brain work to do. She would have to learn everything from first principles, or this whole thing would come falling down on all their heads. The challenges she was about to tackle couldn’t be mastered quite so easily as carrying bales of straw into a barn or digging holes beneath the ground.

Isserley paced her bedroom now, aware of the clock radio’s constant feeble flashing. Her footsteps rang loud and hollow against the bare floorboards; it was rare for her to be wearing shoes indoors unless she was on the point of leaving the house.

Irritably, she switched the television on again, even though she’d tried it once already since returning to the cottage and given up in annoyance.

Because it had been switched off so recently, the machine came back to life at once. The vodsel who, a few minutes ago, had been peering through binoculars at an assortment of brightly coloured underpants fluttering on a washing-line was now licking his lips and twitching his cheeks. Female vodsels had gathered under the line, reaching up to unpeg the garments. Inexplicably, the twine hung higher than they could easily reach, and they teetered on tiptoe, jumping like infants, their pink breasts quivering like jelly.

On another channel, several very serious-looking vodsels of mixed gender were sitting behind a desk, shoulder to shoulder. Above their heads, a long narrow electronic sign, like a toy version of the one near Kessock Bridge, was displaying a sequence of letters and spaces:

‘R?’ ventured one of the vodsels.

‘No-o-o, I’m afraid not,’ purred an unseen voice.

Isserley’s car stood idling next to the shed, lit up by the lone tungsten lamp. She was cleaning out the car’s cabin, slowly and contemplatively, making each small action last. The sun was still a long way from coming, hidden behind the curve of the planet.

Isserley was kneeling beside her vehicle, leaning in through the open door. She was using the Ross-shire Journal as a groundsheet, to save the green velvety knees of her pants getting muddy. With the tips of her fingers she felt for the spilled chocolates and threw them one by one over her shoulder. Birds would eat them by and by, she was sure.

Suddenly, reminded, she felt weak and sick with hunger. She’d eaten nothing since the potato crisps yesterday afternoon, a little snow, and about a litre of warm water she’d drunk this morning straight from the shower stream. It was not nearly enough to keep a human being fuelled.

So strange, the way she never seemed to be aware she was hungry until she was ravenous, almost collapsing. An unfortunate idiosyncrasy, and a potentially dangerous one: she would have to be careful managing it. A routine was important, like eating breakfast with the men every morning before going out on the road – a routine which had been disturbed by Amlis Vess.

Breathing deeply, as if a few good mouthfuls of air might tide her over for a while longer, Isserley continued cleaning out her car. There seemed no end to the spilled chocolates; they had found hiding places in every cranny like rotund beetles. She wondered if her body would let her get away with eating some of them.

She picked up the box, which, along with the dog breeder’s gloves, she’d laid on the ground for burning later. Holding the cardboard rectangle up to the light, she squinted at its list of ingredients. ‘Sugar’, ‘milk powder’ and ‘Vegetable fats’ sounded safe enough, but ‘cocoa mass’, ‘emulsifier’, ‘lecithin’ and ‘artificial flavours’ had a chancy ring to them. In fact, ‘cocoa mass’ sounded positively lethal. Her gut-reflex queasiness was probably Nature’s way of telling her to stick to the foods that she knew.

But if she went into the steading to eat with the men, she might run into Amlis Vess. That was the last thing she needed. How long could she hang on? How soon might he go? She gazed at the horizon, yearning for that first glimmer of light.

Over the years, her reluctance to have more than the minimum necessary contact with men had made her very self-reliant, especially when it came to caring for her car. She’d already replaced the broken side-mirror, a job she would once have needed Ensel for. If she could just avoid trouble, she could keep this car forever without having to change it. It was made of steel and glass and plastic – why should it wear out? She put fuel in it whenever it needed it, oil, water, everything. She drove it slowly and gently, and kept it safe from police.

She’d got the new side-mirror from the already much cannibalized grey Nissan estate. A sad-looking carcass it was now, but there was no point being sentimental. The mirror fitted perfectly into her little red Corolla; all sign of the accident was expunged.

Isserley, still admiring the neatness of the surgery she’d performed, cleaned her little Corolla some more. Its engine was still idling, a well-oiled machine breathing aromatic gas into the raw air. She liked her car. It was a good car, really. If she took care of it, it wouldn’t let her down. Meticulously, Isserley wiped mud and grease off the foot pedals, tidied the glovebox, topped up the icpathua reservoir under the passenger seat with a sharp-nozzled flask.

Perhaps she could drive out to find an all-night garage somewhere, and buy herself something to eat. Amlis Vess would be gone very soon, probably within a day or two. It wouldn’t kill her, surely, to eat vodsel food for a day or two. Then he would be gone, and she could get herself back to normal.

She knew, however, that if she went out on the roads now there was a risk – remote but real – that some miserable lunatic of a hitcher would be out there too, thumbing a ride. And, knowing her, she would probably pick him up, and he would be totally unsuitable, and she would end up in the Cairngorms. She was like that.

The men always had a big breakfast, high in protein and starch. A dish piled high, steaming. Meat pies, sausages, gravy. Bread fresh out of the oven, cut in slices as thick as you liked. She always cut hers thin, and made sure the slices were neat and of even width, not like the deformed clumps the men hacked off for themselves. She usually had two of these, three at most, with gushu or mussanta paste. But today…

Isserley stood up and slammed the car’s door shut. There was no way she was going underground to be harangued by some pompous troublemaker while a bunch of Estate trash looked on, wondering if she would crack. Hunger was one thing, principles another.

She walked round to the front of her car and opened the bonnet. Leaning in, she surveyed the warm, strong-smelling, gently trembling engine. She confirmed that she had replaced, in its correct groove, the slender antenna of stainless steel with which she’d recently penetrated the oil tank and checked the level. Now, with a canister of spray from Donny’s Garage, she tended to the spark-plugs and the ignition cables. With her fingers she exposed the gleaming cylinder of liquid aviir, the one imported modification to this vehicle’s indigenous motor. The metal of the cylinder was transparent, and Isserley could clearly see the aviir inside, its oily surface tension vibrating in sympathy with the engine. This, too, was as it should be, though with any luck she would never have to use it.

She closed the bonnet and, on an impulse, sat down on it. The warm, vibrating metal gave her a pleasant sensation through the thin fabric of her trousers, and distracted her from the insistent rumbling in her stomach. On the horizon, a glimmer of sunrise defined the contours of the mountains. Right in front of her nose, a single snowflake spiralled down.

‘Isserley,’ said Isserley into the intercom.

The door of the steading rolled open immediately, and she hurried into the light. A whirl of snow, sharp as pine needles, followed her inside, as if sucked by a vacuum. Then the door rolled shut again, and she was out of the weather.

As she had expected, work was well underway in the hangar; two men were busy loading the ship. One was perched inside the hull, waiting for more glistening cargo to be handed up. The other was with the trolleys, which were by now piled high with pinky-red packages. A fortune’s worth of raw meat, all neatly parcelled into portions, swathed in transparent viscose, packed into plastic pallets.

‘Hoi, Isserley!’ The workman pushing the trolleys was stopping to greet her. Hesitating on her way towards the lift, she waved back, as perfunctorily as she could manage. Encouraged, the man allowed his little wheeled tower of pallets to roll to a standstill and ambled over to her. Isserley had no idea who he was.

No doubt she’d been introduced to each one of the men personally when she’d first arrived at the farm, but this one’s name escaped her now. He was stupid-looking, fat and squat – a full head shorter than Amlis Vess – and his fur reminded her of some dead thing drying out on the side of the A9, a wiry grey pelt made indistinct by car tyres and the elements. Into the bargain he had some sort of disgusting skin ailment that made half his face look like mouldy fruit. Isserley at first found it difficult to look at him directly, then, for fear of offending him and causing him to retaliate on her own disfigurement, she leaned closer to him and concentrated on his eyes.

‘Hoi, Isserley,’ he said again, as if the effort of coming up with this much of their shared language was too good to waste.

‘I thought I’d better have a meal,’ announced Isserley in a businesslike tone, ‘before I start work. Is the coast clear?’

‘The coast?’ The mouldy man squinted at her in confusion. His head turned unconsciously in the direction of the firth.

‘I mean, is Amlis Vess safely out of the way?’

‘Oh yeah, he don’t bother us,’ drawled the mouldy man in an accent twice as thick as Ensel’s. ‘He just stays down in the food hall, or down in the vodsel pens, and we get on with the loading up here, no problem.’

Isserley opened her mouth to speak, couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘He won’t do nothing now,’ the mouldy man assured her. ‘Yns and Ensel take it in turns to watch him. He basically just hangs around and talks crap. He don’t care if nobody’s got a clue what he’s on about. Goes and talks to the animals when the humans get sick of him.’

Just for an instant Isserley forgot that the vodsels were tongueless, and was alarmed at the thought of them communicating with Amlis Vess, but she calmed down when the mouldy man laughed coarsely and added, ‘We says to him, “Do the animals talk back to you, then?’”

He laughed again, a despicable whinny tainted by half a lifetime in the Estates. ‘Funny bastard, good for killing the boredom,’ he winked in summation. ‘We’ll want him back when he’s gone.’

‘Well, maybe… if you say so,’ grimaced Isserley, making a break for the lift. ‘Excuse me, I’m starving.’

And she was away.

Amlis Vess was not in the food and recreation hall.

Isserley verified this, by casting one more glance across the sterile, low-ceilinged barracks, then resumed breathing.

The hall, though large, was a simple rectangle, crudely excavated without nooks or recesses, and containing little except for the low dining tables; there was nothing big enough to hide a tall man with strikingly beautiful markings. He simply wasn’t here.

Though the hall itself was empty, the long low bench outside the kitchen was already laid with bowls of condiments, tureens of cold vegetables, tubs of mussanta, loaves of newly baked bread, cakes, pitchers of water and ezziin, large plastic trays of cutlery. A divine smell of roasting was coming out of the kitchen.

Isserley pounced on the bread and cut herself two slices, which she spread liberally with mussanta paste. Pressing them into a sandwich, she started eating, pushing the food past her insensate lips into her yearning mouth. Mussanta had never tasted so delicious. She swallowed hard, chewing energetically, impatient to cut more bread, spread more paste.

The smell from the kitchen was intoxicating. Something much better than usual was cooking in there, something more adventurous than potato in fat. Admittedly Isserley was rarely here when the cooking was being done; she often took her meals cold after the cook had left and most of the men had already eaten. She’d pick at leftovers, trying to look inconspicuous, concealing her distaste at the smell of cooling fat. But this smell today was something else.

Still clutching her sandwich, Isserley edged up to the open door of the kitchen and peeked inside, catching a glimpse of the great brown back of Hilis, the cook. A notoriously sharp-sensed character, he was aware of her presence immediately.

‘Fuck off!’ he yelled cheerfully, before he’d even turned around. ‘Not ready!’

Embarrassed, Isserley made to retreat, but as soon as Hilis swung round and saw who she was, he threw out a singed and sinewy arm in conciliation.

‘Isserley!’ he cried, smiling as broadly as his massive snout allowed. ‘Why must you always eat that crap? You break my heart! Come in here and see what I’m about to serve!’

Awkwardly she ventured into the kitchen, leaving the offending sandwich on the bench outside. Ordinarily, no-one was permitted in here; Hilis was protective of his gleaming domain, beavering away in it alone like an obsessed scientist in a humid and luridly lit laboratory. Oversized silver utensils hung all over the walls like the tools in Donny’s Garage, dozens of specialized implements and gadgets. Transparent jars of spices and bottles of sauce on the shelves and workbenches added some colour to the metallic surfaces, though most of the actual food was stashed away inside refrigerators and metal drums. Hilis himself was unarguably the most vividly organic thing in the kitchen, a thickly furred, powerfully built bundle of nervous energy. Isserley barely knew him; she and he had exchanged perhaps forty sentences over the years.

‘Come on, come on!’ he growled. ‘But watch your step.’

The ovens were inside the floor, so that a human could tend to the food without overbalancing. Hilis hunched over the biggest of them, looking down through the thick glassy door into the glowing recess. Gesturing urgently, he invited Isserley to do the same.

She knelt next to him.

‘Look at that,’ he said with pride.

Inside the oven, shimmering in an orange halo, six spits rotated slowly, each loaded with four or five identical cuts of meat. They were as brown as freshly tilled earth, and smelled absolutely heavenly, sizzling and twinkling in their own juices.

‘Looks good,’ admitted Isserley.

‘It is good,’ affirmed Hilis, lowering his twitching nose as close to the glass as he could short of touching. ‘Better than what I’ve usually got to work with, that’s for sure.’

Everyone knew this was a sore point with Hilis: the best cuts of meat were always reserved for the cargo ship, and he was allotted the poorer-quality mince, the necks, offal and extremities.

‘When I heard old man Vess’s son was coming,’ he said, basking in the oven’s orange glow, ‘I assumed I’d be free to put on something special for a change. I wasn’t to know, was I?’

‘But…’ frowned Isserley, puzzling over the delay between Amlis’s arrival and these wonderful steaks revolving in the oven now. Hilis interrupted her, grinning.

‘I had these steaks marinating for twenty-four hours already before the mad bastard even arrived! What was I going to do? Rinse ’em off under the tap? These little fuckers are perfection, I tell you, they are absolute bloody perfection on a skewer. They are going to taste fucking unbelievable!’ Enthusiasm was making Hilis hyperactive.

Isserley stared down at the roasting meat. Its aroma was pushing through the glass and floating straight into her nostrils.

‘You’re smelling it, aren’t you!’ Hilis proclaimed in triumph, as if he was responsible for conjuring up something that had, against all odds, managed to penetrate her pathetically tiny, surgically mutilated nose. ‘Isn’t it glorious!’

Isserley nodded, dizzy with desire.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

Hilis, unable to keep still, paced around his kitchen in tight circles, fidgeting and fussing.

‘Isserley, please,’ he implored her, transferring a prong and a carving knife back and forth from hand to hand. ‘Please. You’ve got to have some of this. Make an old man happy. I know you can appreciate good food. You hung around with the Elite when you were a girl, that’s what the men say. You didn’t grow up eating garbage like these dumb goons from the Estates.’

In a state of exhibitionist excitement, he flipped open the lid of the oven, releasing a richly flavoursome blast of heat.

‘Isserley,’ he begged, ‘Let me cut you a slice of this. Let me, let me, let me.’

She laughed, embarrassed. ‘Fine, OK!’ she agreed hastily.

He was quick as a spark, his carving technique a performance that could be missed in an eye’s blink.

‘Yesyesyes,’ he enthused, springing up. Isserley recoiled slightly as a steaming, sizzling morsel appeared inches from her mouth, impaled on the razor-sharp tip of the carving knife. Gingerly she took the meat between her teeth and tugged it free.

A soft voice sounded from the doorway of the kitchen.

‘You just don’t know what you’re doing,’ sighed Amlis Vess.

‘No unauthorized fucking personnel in my kitchen!’ retorted Hilis instantly.

Amlis Vess took a step backwards; to be fair, very little of him had been inside the room in the first place. Only his startling black face and perhaps the swell of his white breast. His retreat didn’t even look like a retreat, more like a casual realignment of balance, a shifting of his muscles. He came to rest technically outside the room, but with the undiminished intensity of his gaze still taking up a great deal of space inside. And his gaze was directed not at Hilis, but at Isserley.

Isserley chewed what remained of her delicious morsel self-consciously, too unnerved to move. Luckily the meat was virtually melting in her mouth, it was so tender.

‘What’s your problem, Mr Vess?’ she said at last.

Amlis’s jaw tensed in anger and the muscles in his shoulders flexed as if he was considering attacking her, but instead he relaxed abruptly, as if he’d just given himself an injection of something calmative.

‘That meat you’re eating,’ he said softly, ‘is the body of a creature that lived and breathed just like you and me.’

Hilis groaned and rolled his eyes in despair and pity, for the pretensions and dopey confusions of the young. Then, to Isserley’s dismay, he turned his back on it all, applying himself to the work at hand, seizing hold of the nearest cooking pot.

With Amlis’s words still ringing in her ears, Isserley took courage, as she had done last time, by focusing on his upper-class accent, his velvety diction groomed by wealth and privilege. Deliberately, she recalled being petted and then discarded by the Elite; she pictured the authorities who’d decided she would be more suited to a life in the Estates, men with accents just like Amlis Vess’s. She invited that accent in, listening to the sharp chord of resentment it struck deep inside her, letting it reverberate.

‘Mr Vess,’ she said icily, ‘I hate to tell you this, but I really doubt there’s much similarity between the way you and I live and breathe, let alone between me and’ – she passed her tongue over her teeth for provocative effect – ‘my breakfast.’

‘We’re all the same under the skin,’ suggested Amlis, a little huffily she thought. She would have to aim for this weak spot of his, his filthy-rich idealist’s need to deny social reality.

‘Funny how you’ve managed to keep your looks, then,’ she sneered, ‘with all the hard backbreaking work you’ve had to do.’

A direct hit, Isserley noted. Amlis seemed poised to spring again, his eyes burning, but then once more he relaxed: another shot of the same drug.

‘This is getting us nowhere,’ he sighed. ‘Come with me.’

Isserley’s mouth fell open in disbelief.

‘Come with you?’

‘Yes,’ said Amlis, as if confirming the finer details of a venture they’d already agreed on. ‘Down below. Down where the vodsels are.’

‘You… you must be joking,’ she said, uttering a short laugh which she’d intended to be contemptuous, but which came out merely shaky.

‘Why not?’ he challenged innocently.

She almost choked on her reply; perhaps it was a tiny thread of meat lodged in her throat. Because I’m so scared of the depths, she was thinking. Because I don’t want to be buried alive again.

‘Because I have work to get on with,’ she said.

He stared intently into her eyes, not aggressively, but as if he was judging the distance, the logistics for a leap into her soul.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘There’s something I’ve seen down there, that I need you to explain. Honestly. I’ve asked the men; none of them know. Please.’

There was a pause, during which she and Amlis stood motionless while Hilis kept the air generously stocked with banging and clashing. Then, astounded, Isserley heard her belated response as if from a great distance. She heard it only vaguely; couldn’t even be sure of the exact wording. But whatever it was, it meant yes. In a dream, to the surreal accompaniment of clashing metal and the sizzle of meat, she was saying yes to him.

He turned, his lithe body flowing away. She followed him, out of Hilis’s kitchen, towards the lift.

Several men were gathered in the dining hall by now, loitering, murmuring, chewing; watching Isserley and Amlis Vess pass among them.

No-one made a move to intervene.

No-one threatened Amlis with death if he dared take another step.

Alarms failed to scream into action when the lift opened for them, nor did the lift’s doors refuse to close when they stepped inside together.

All in all, the universe seemed not to appreciate that anything was amiss.

Utterly bewildered, Isserley stood next to Amlis in the featureless confines of the lift, facing front, but aware of his long dark neck and head somewhere near her shoulder, his smooth flank breathing inches from her hip. The cabin descended noiselessly, arrived with a hiss.

The door slid open, and Isserley moaned softly in claustrophobic distress. Everything out there was steeped in almost complete darkness, as if they had been dropped into a narrow fissure between two strata of compacted rock with only a child’s faltering flashlight to guide them. There was a stench of fermenting urine and faeces, a few spidery contours of wire mesh sketched in by feeble infra-red bulbs, and, swaying everywhere before them, the firefly glints of a swarm of eyes.

‘Do you know where the light is?’ said Amlis politely.