Free Inkers by Alex Rudall Page A

light bled through a filthy window in the roof, high up a wide chimney in the corner of the room.
    Hours passed. Eventually Mark brought in a narrow camping bed for her and a thin mattress and blankets. He went out into the corridor and brought back a bucket, leaving it in the corner. He did not speak at all. As evening came on Lily tried the light switch. It didn’t work. Lily rattled the door as hard as she could, but it was utterly solid. She tried to climb up towards the skylight, but could barely reach up to the start of the wide chimney. Finally she lay down on the bed and covered her face with her hands.
    After a long time Lily heard footsteps approaching. There was a knock on the door and the lock clicked. Annie came in holding a plate of hot food; meat from the latest cow she had slaughtered and some beans and potatoes.
    “Are you OK, sweetheart?” she said. “We’ll have you out of here in no time.”
    “What’s going on?” Lily said, the urge to cry stabbing painfully in her throat. “I didn’t do anything.”
    “Brian and Tom are just… deciding what to do next,” Annie said. She came closer but didn’t touch her. “They looked at the pregnancy test.”
    Lily moaned and put her head in her hands. Annie paused. Finally she said simply, “Was it Tom?”
    “No!” Lily shouted, standing up, furious with Annie for her blindness. Annie took a step back. “It was Brian , can’t you see, he —injected me —or something, look!” and she lifted her t–shirt over her belly, but it had been over a week and the three little spots were barely visible now.
    Annie started to back out of the door, her face a mask of confusion and concern.
    All she could say was “We’ll sort this out,” and she slammed and locked the door as Lily ran to it and started hammering, shouting “No, no, no!” She kept banging until she was exhausted and fell to the floor. She sobbed into the concrete.
    Late that night, Tom came to see her. He stood by the door, keeping his distance. Lily just looked at him from the bed.
    “Do you remember that night?” he said, pain in his voice. “If it was me, if something happened, I swear to you, I never meant to – I never meant to,” he finished lamely.
    “No,” she whispered. “It was Brian,” she said.
    Tom frowned.
    “He put something in me. With a needle.” She looked up at him, pleadingly.
    Tom shook his head, looked at the ground. “I’ll take you to the mainland,” he said. “He doesn’t want me to but we have to. We’ll get rid of it. We’ll figure something out.”
    “No,” Lily said, “He did this to me. I saw the needle on his desk.”
    “Annie uses the syringes,” Tom said, shaking his head. “For the cows,” he said, his voice faltering.
    “It was him,” she said. “Please, take me to him. I have to talk to him.”
    Tom looked at her.
    “If you care about me at all,” she said.
    He nodded slowly.
    They walked across the courtyard in silence. The door was not locked. They were all hanging there in their suits, Annie, Mark, Leonard and Brian. Tom switched the lights on and shouted up to them.
    “Wake up, you lot. I’ve brought Lily down.”
    Lily pushed past him and shouted up, “I want to know what you did to me, you bastards! You’ve got no right to keep me here, none of you, you have to let me leave!”
    They started to gently sway and wriggle, and then, with a whine of the motors in the rafters, lowered to the ground. They unzipped their hoods.
    She felt Tom standing behind her. He said nothing. Brian stared at her, slowly peeling off his VR suit. The others were already clambering out of theirs. Brian shook his head.
    “You let her out?” he said, “What happened to sleeping on it?”
    “What have you done to me?” Lily shouted, storming towards him. Tom grabbed her arm to hold her back.
    “Nothing,” Brian said. “You slept with Tom. Maybe you don’t remember, but I doubt it. Now we have to deal with the