Free Savage City by Sophia McDougall

exhausted, and he couldn’t see much point in a conversation now. ‘You know what I’ve done,’ he said. ‘You need it.’
    Una knocked the bowl over as she headed for the door, casting about clumsily for some kind of impossible escape from the encroaching softness that was already pulling the ground away, dragging at her eyelids, weighting her limbs. ‘You lying bastard,’ she said thickly.
    Sulien looked up at her with weary patience that made her nerves ring with betrayal, and then rose slowly to his feet, in obvious preparation to catch her when the drug had completed its work, on the correct assumption that she wasn’t going to lie down of her own accord. She had a furious impulse to see if she couldn’t reach the top of the stairs before he could get to her, and was even more maddened by the thin tether of self-control that kept her from trying. ‘You and Dama,’ she gasped, ‘knocking me out—’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Sulien.
    Una glared at him, and muttered bitterly and accurately, ‘No you’re not,’ and toppled forward.
    The relief was so strong as to make everything, even Una’s fall, look slow and languid. Sulien caught her awkwardly but easily enough and brought her down onto the bed so that they were sitting side by side, Una propped against him, her head limp on his shoulder. He sat there, his arm around her, staring at a knot in the wood of a wardrobe standing against the opposite wall, and could not move. He didn’t want to look at Una; he wished there were a way of getting out of the room without having to do that again.
    ‘Marcus,’ he said aloud, into the quiet room, ‘please.’
    He eased Una around and down onto the bed. Her eyelids strained half-open and she made a cramped, angry motion, as if to raise herself, before her hands fell helplessly still and her face smoothed again. Sulien watched in bewilderment, almost a kind of admiration. She couldn’t possibly want to be awake, so what was this effort for? Could anyone be as vengefully perverse as that, even Una?
    He went out and refilled the bowl with water, picked up the rest of the things from the clinic and got to work on her arms. It was good to have the tweezers and scalpel to slide out the glass slivers, though he didn’t need the suture kit to close the skin. But it took a long, messy time, longer because he was dizzy with tiredness now. And there was still the injury to her head.
    She looked as if she’d been murdered. He hated to think of her sleeping in the blood, waking up to this tomorrow, but the idea ofundressing his sister, having already drugged her unconscious, made him squeamish. Maybe if another girl did it? He tried to think through all the girls and women he knew nearby. Lal was the right person, really – Una might not mind so much if it was Lal. She had looked after Lal when she was ill; there would be a kind of reciprocity. But of course he couldn’t ask Lal; he could not call her back to the very same flat in which he had been trying to coax her to give up her virginity only a few hours ago, and where now there was blood everywhere. And Lal would have her own family to deal with when they heard this. He wondered if they knew yet that Marcus was dead, whether they’d guessed it from what was on the longvision; if you could, if you hadn’t been there.
    To his own surprise, for it was years since even the idea of her had occurred to him, he found himself thinking angrily that their mother was probably still somewhere in London; there was no reason to think she was dead. Perhaps she had been watching the Games on longvision and had seen the explosion. She would not know it had anything to do with her children. She was doing something right at this moment and it wasn’t looking after her daughter, or helping him. He tried, more aggressively than wistfully, to pull up a single solid memory of her, and could not find anything there. What was wrong with him? How was it that he had always forgotten so