Free Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer by Adam Roberts

twisted into as much of a smile as the swelling and soreness allowed: a freaky-looking half-smile. He caught Jac’s eye, and the half-smile wilted.
    But Jac needed a drink now, more than ever. He needed to wash the blood from his mouth. Leaving the spigot alone he took a piece of ice and fitted it between his lips, past the raw, bent tooth.
The back of his head stung fiercely. He felt the cut in his scalp with his fingers. It did not seem too deep. But the tiny space had an aura of unreality to it now; as if he had been jolted out of
a particularly cheap virtuality. He went to the wall and tucked his heel into an anchoring declivity. Then he surprised himself again: he fell fast and instantly asleep.
    With every waking Jac made a careful examination of his environment, as if looking for something about it that had changed. Of course nothing had: the same rock, black as squid
ink; the same ashen taste in the mouth; the same weary shine of the lightpole, the same unappetising strips of ghunk.
    Two more chambers were finished, and the other two diggers were moved to join the first excavating the central tunnel. The aim was to make this as wide as possible, and to run it ten or twenty
metres straight in before adding any more rooms to it. Lwon, Davide and E-d-C took up residence in the three chambers that had been made, of course; and whilst Jac was glad of the extra elbow-room
in the original cavity – miraculously, their absence made the tiny space seem cavernous – the others were less content. ‘Twenty metres of tunnel?’ roared Mo. ‘I want a
room now! Concentrate all three diggers, and you can scoop me out a room quick as mustard.’
    ‘I’m in front of you in the queue,’ said Marit, knocking his two fists against one another.
    ‘You ladies can fight for it later,’ said Davide. ‘We need to dig some tunnel before we can make your chambers.’
    ‘Not twenty metres of tunnel, though!’
    ‘No,’ said Lwon. ‘Just enough as we need.’
    So the new task was tunnelling. The bruises on Gordius’s face thinned and went brown and yellow, and his swollen eye slowly returned to normal. But Marit continued his idle persecution of
him, with an irregular regimen of random slaps, pinches and punches. One day he announced that he’d decided they needed to increase their growth of ghunk, and that Gordius’s tunic was
the ideal growing medium. At first the fat man took this for a jest, but it quickly became apparent that Marit was in earnest.
    ‘Sure,’ agreed Davide. ‘Why not?’
    ‘I’ll freeze!’ complained Gordius.
    ‘Oh, it’s much warmer than it was when we arrived,’ said Marit. This was true, although the slight increase in warmth did not change the fact that the main cavity was still
refrigerator-cold. The individual rooms were more comfortable: each of the three alphas had taken turns with the fusion cell in each chamber, leaving it there whilst they slept: the smaller space
had warmed nicely, with some of the chill taken out of the walls. The fusion cell was back in the main cavity now, but only because Mo and Marit had complained so loudly. ‘Come on,’
Marit pressed, with sadistic glee. ‘Take your tunic off! I’m doing you a favour – you’ve lost weight, my boy. I’ll grow more ghunk, you can eat a little more heartily
and you can put a bit more fat on your bones.’
    The others were smiling, and Gordius looked with mounting panic from face to face. Then he made a mistake. ‘Lwon,’ he said, appealing directly to him. ‘Don’t let them do
this . . .’
    ‘What are you begging him for?’ roared Marit. ‘You should be begging me , you slug!’ In a moment he was on him, slapping him – open-handedly this time
– on his face and about his ample torso, tugging at his tunic and screaming ‘off with it! Get it off!’ directly into Gordius’s face. Whimperingly the victim complied, and
soon enough he was clutching his naked chest and shivering visibly. ‘I’ll freeze