Bargain

Chapter 9 - Act I - INGRESSION

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Chapter 9 - Bargain

Paysha

So, Lewey, you bastard: new game, new rules. But I’m too tired for games. My rash ascent from the Aleutia is doing my body no favours, the symptoms I’m feeling a flashing red light for any diver. I don’t need another life-threatening situation. I need oxygen and to be decompressing a hundred metres below this viper’s den.

Markus’s battered head hangs limp, chin touching his chest. “Paysha,” he mumbles through bloody bubbles of saliva. He knows I’m here, but I don’t know why he is. “I didn’t tell him, I swear,” Markus says in the hoarse voice of a twice-broken man. “He knew. He already…” I can’t make out the rest, slurred by split and swollen lips. Bosun flexes his steroidal mettle and lashes out to silence him. The blow snaps Markus’s head around, a spray of blood and spit lit by bright sunlight. He groans and slumps forward, forehead almost touching his knees. A pearled string of red-tinged spittle stretches from his mouth to the floor. He’s top of Lewey’s expendables list and everyone here knows it.

“Leave him alone, you meatheads,” I shout at Lewey’s goons, limping towards Markus, fighting my pain with renewed strength from witnessing his. Collapsing to my knees, my hands grasp his trembling thighs. “Markus,” I whisper, my head next to his. “Why…why are you here? What have you done?”

“Leave. You must leave, Paysha,” he answers in brief gasps. “They both made me…I told him. I am sorry. So sorry…” As Hicks drags me away, Markus descends into a sobbing mess. I’d chided myself for using two of persuasion’s oldest tools – alcohol and a woman’s tongue – but now we’re both trapped by the third: violence.

A pit of desperation is forming in my stomach. Keep your shit together, Pash. I lift my head to face my gloating audience. “What do you want?” I ask, detesting the quaver in my voice.

Bosun is dying to show me, but Lewey’s words ooze like caramelised butter: “Do you know what your base favours bequeathed to us, my whoring Mata Hari? What your tongue’s duplicitous deftness releas—?”

“That isn’t why, you devil!” Markus cries out, his voice cracking. “I wanted to tell her. Not like you. Or that other monst—”

I wince as Bosun’s fist crunches into him again. They know what I’ve done, and their words gnaw at my gut, creating a yawning hole inside me. “No, I don’t know,” I reply, almost whispering. “I thought it might be valuable.”

Lewey snorts with the confidence of a gambler holding a winning hand. “How valuable?” he probes, coming closer.

“I…I don’t know. Enough to clear my debts? You know how much I want that.”

His laugh echoes around the room, his eyes looking for easy affirmation. “Do you now, Mz Anoman? Yes, it would have definitely repaid those, my sonar-driven siren. And then some.”

“But it’s still mine. I scavenged it. Believe me, I just want a trade. I don’t know and don’t care what it is. Give me something – crypto even – and I promise I won’t tell anyone.” I try to stand, but Hicks straddles my back with knees clamped around my ribs and hands pressed down on my shoulders. Every joint in my body is screaming.

Lewey loves a captive audience. He draws closer until I can smell the newness of his clothes and a musk-laden cologne. The contrast with the human degradation both inside and out is obscene. Hicks’s grip grows tighter, but I still refuse to look up. I’d rather die than stoop again to what they know I’ve done.

“I’d love for you to return to the cosy little concrete block I so generously gave you, my secretive sub-letter. But that would assume you have more to give me. However, your efforts today have placed us in a far stickier situation.” His index finger lifts my chin, forcing me to meet his gaze. He looks almost apologetic, but I still sense the cold inhumanity of a circling shark in his eyes and words. “I never meant for you to be my guest today, Paysha. My fine fellows were supposed to retrieve the sunken treasure – not you, my tenacious terrapin. So, even though your daring dive saved them the effort – and my junior associate here is desperate to reward you – you can’t ever repay me what it’s worth. And, sadly, like your execrable excuse of a craven captain, I also can’t afford to let you go, because…well, it’s pointless telling you now.”

Lewey displaying regret is not an auspicious sign. The implication of his words dangles in the fraught air as he withdraws his finger. My head sags until my nose almost touches his metal belt buckle. It’s embossed with the insignia of a flaming demon with a lewd, protruding tongue. Perhaps a scavenged emblem of factional allegiance, or a futile gift to avoid a high-level departure. But it’s too late to add any pieces of clarity to my life’s random jigsaw. Today’s outcome is crystal clear: neither Markus nor I will leave here alive, no matter what we say or do.

I feel the walls closing in as I decompress physically and emotionally. Hicks slackens his grip on my defeated body. This is it, the miserable end to my pointless life. Instead of finding a cure, I’m going to die for something I pulled out of the Stink on a drunken man’s say-so; something I know nothing about. It’s so fucking unfair. Then I remember those I’m leaving behind and I crumble into utter wretchedness. I’m sorry I didn’t come back, Py. I’m sorry I lied, Tom. Look after each other. You’ll be much happier together than with this selfish, heartless dreamer.

Through heaving sobs, Markus wails, “I did not mean for this to happen, Paysha. I promise you. I only wanted things better. For both of us.”

There was never any ‘us’, you fool. And my being here is a million miles from ‘better’, especially if Bosun has his way. What have you done, you inebriated idiot?

Lewey steps away from me to continue his warped appraisal. “You’re my favourite diver, Paysha. One of my most valuable assets. A precious, passionate pearl. With more training…” He looks across at Bosun, who doesn’t care about the potential competition, only our unfinished business. His voice rises, the vocal butter burning as the door to his insanity’s furnace swings open: “But now, I have this”—his arms extend to encompass Markus, myself and everything else in the room deserving of his unleashed rage—“fucking mess to deal with!” He walks back to his desk, fists clenched, muttering under his breath. He hates any display of weakness which might diminish respect. He snatches up my bag, the earlier care for its contents forgotten, and returns to squat in front of me. “But this”—pushing it into my face as I still refuse to meet his gaze—“this timeless beauty is worth any sacrifice. Even you, my memorable, miserable mermaid.”

I’m going to die without knowing why. Just another worthless scrap of Stink fodder tossed into Lewey’s bottomless well of unhinged lunacy. My life is collapsing back in time, through my teenage deprivations, back to the hollowed-out young girl clutching her blanket as soft hands grip tense limbs with false words. There can’t be a more pointless death. Sniffing back loathed tears of self-pity, I make one last plea to find some meaning: “But what…what is it? Why does it matter so much? It’s just a…a thing!”

My chief tormentor grips my face in a vice stronger than Bosun’s, twisting my head from side-to-side to examine me as a lover might. “Such a shame,” he whispers. “Your mind would have been so useful.” A deranged smile of commiseration for his pathetic victims accompanies another barely controlled surge of mania, all previous words meaningless and forgotten. Pushing my face away, he struts to the window. Eyes fixed on the horizon, the Stink’s psychotic kingpin gives an emphatic nod for mine and Markus’s existence to be erased.

Hicks crosses to a closet and takes out a coiled cord, similar to Markus’s bindings. I look up, tears blurring my vision, refusing to cry out and beg for my life. I detest being like this, powerless to prevent being ripped apart by these men’s desires and failings. A bone-deep throbbing wracks my knees and shoulders and my face is growing numb, lips tingling from a thousand tiny needles. To slip into a coma now would be a blessing, another forgotten victim of the Stink’s ceaseless appetite for treasure, driven by the dappled monster standing by the window. Then I glance sideways at Bosun, who mimes unzipping my skins and thrusting his hips, and I doubt I’ll enjoy such mercy. Instead, my ill-fated end will come as a sordid offering to coarse prejudice.

My fickle internal companion might have evaporated with my imminent departure, taking my last hopes with her, but I can’t keep my terminal frustrations in check: “I hate you! I hate you all, you fucking monsters,” I scream. “You’ll all burn in hell!” But the only responses are mocking laughter and a diver’s death knell ringing in my ears. Markus and I are just Stinkers who know too much and serve up too little – unless Bosun gets his way.

Ignored and wretched, I wipe my streaming nose with my sleeve and bend to hug my knees, forehead touching the ground. Bosun asks Hicks for the rope and I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for my arms to be gripped, for the ghastly sound of pulled zips. I don’t want to regress into that young girl and her man-handled, withdrawn remains. Instead, I try to think of Py stood at my hover’s bow, enjoying the bright sunshine and salty breeze. But Markus begins a pathetic keening, punctuated with desperate cries to herald both our sufferings: “No, not Paysha. Leave her. Kill me instead.” He still hasn’t grasped how high Lewey has set his stakes – for reasons I’ll never fathom.

“Shut the fuck up, blabber-mouth,” sneers Bosun. “We’ll get to you later. Now watch while I give your Stinkin’ slut a proper lesson in bare-faced cheek.”

I crave for my brain to be as numb as my body. But it won’t. I silently beg for my life’s guttering candle to be snuffed out quickly. But it won’t. I’ll instead succumb like millions before me: a victim granted either a lingering death or a lifetime of silent shame. Both will entail endless pain.

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