Regardless of the way her life had unravelled, as she walked around the Agrarian Compound, Grace had an overwhelming feeling of gratitude to be back at Tier Two. This was where she belonged.
As though the universe was trying to reinforce this idea, a smiling woman carrying a baby and holding hands with a toddler walked past her as they made their way to join other mothers and toddlers picnicking on blankets in the warm sunshine. Grace recognised the mother as Nikki, the woman she’d brought here just a few weeks before. It was almost as if the two women had swapped places on the well-being scale. Nikki had already put weight on and her face was rosy and relaxed. Grace briefly returned the smile, feeling relief and satisfaction. But then her smile faded.
She made her way into the soldiers’ enclosure with a temporary security pass that Shannon had given her. The smell of cut grass mingled with the aroma of cooking. A group of soldiers sat around a makeshift barbecue, occasionally poking at sizzling meat on a grill with long-handled forks. Grace’s stomach roiled.
Their conversation and laughter halted as she approached. Remy was sitting in their midst, pale, but smiling, dressed in the white vest and cargo pants that the lads had adopted as a uniform. Immediately she saw him in another life.
His face fell as he turned to look in her direction. He made his apologies and walked over to her under the curious watchfulness of his newly adopted brethren.
They walked for some minutes in silence until they reached the shade of a copse of trees. She turned to him. ‘Are you okay?’
He didn’t reply. With his head shaved his grey eyes looked bigger – more like the child she’d once known.
‘You’ll be well cared for here. You need to get some rest, take some time. You’ve been through a lot.’
‘I asked you for help!’ He spoke quietly, but with venom. ‘And instead you put me in Tier Four!’
‘Remy, please, listen to me…’
‘Do you know what it’s like in there?’ Spit flew from his lips as he spoke.
‘Yes… I’ve been in there.’
‘Oh, you’ve been in there!’ He turned away angrily, caught his breath and turned back. ‘You’ve got no idea! It’s hell, watching yourself get beaten up and stabbed over and over again, actually believing it’s happening to you… not being able to do anything about it…’
‘You weren’t supposed to be there. It was a mistake!’ She briefly explained about the protest, the man trying to take Remy, and how she blackmailed Conrad into letting them come to the Agrarian.
‘Mistake? Diros don’t make mistakes,’ Remy said.
‘It was chaos. We had to get you somewhere safe.’
‘Am I allowed to leave?’
‘You’re not here in an official capacity. You can go whenever you like. I just thought maybe you needed somewhere to be for a while.’
‘Who the hell are you, Grace?’ He stressed her name. ‘The Gracie I knew wouldn’t have worked for the authorities, wouldn’t have put me in a place like that.’
‘Remy, for Christ’s sake, you were either going to be killed by Diros or go to Tier Four. I was trying to help you, getting you into the clinic was the only way I could fix your brain.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me!’ He punched the air in frustration. Some of the soldiers looked over in their direction at his raised voice.
‘I know that now!’ she hissed in frustration. ‘I know you’re angry and hurt, but please believe me, I was trying to help. I believed the scans instead of trusting my own instinct, my own experience. I know I’ve messed up, but look, we’re here now. I got you out, didn’t I? We’re safe here. But you’re right, there’s nothing wrong with your brain. Someone swapped those scans, but I only found out just before those people broke into the clinic. It must have been Diros, but how the hell did they get access to the scans?’
‘They’ve got connections, insiders… I think they…’
The sound of an engine approaching got their attention.
Shannon pulled up in her jeep. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but you really need to see this.’ She held out her shell to show a NewsFlex report on pause. Grace took it from her, a sense of dread rearing. ‘I’ve got to get back to the kids. I’ll leave it with you.’ She nodded solemnly at Remy and drove off, waving to the other lads as she passed them.
Grace hit play. Dan stood outside the Janus Justice building, the large blue double-faced god above him, looking to the past and the future. It was dark, so it must have been late the previous night. She felt furious and hurt at the same time, confused, even. He knew she wasn’t on drugs! Why was he even saying these things? She knew he was coming from a place of hurt, but the betrayal stung.
‘I know what this is. Conrad’s using me as the scapegoat. He’s told Dan that I stole the drugs!’ Grace looked up from the screen. ‘He’s punishing me because I dared to blackmail him.’ She shook her head. ‘We were nearly home and dry – me back at Tier Two, you with somewhere safe to stay, and Conrad could keep his dirty little secret. Now everyone thinks I’m a bloody dealer and they’ll never believe a word I say.’
Of course Conrad would do this – there was no way he was going to let her get away with it. His ego wouldn’t let him.
‘It’s not Conrad, it’s Diros. Don’t you see, Grace?’ Remy took the shell from her hands. ‘They’re setting us up. Perfectly. You look as though you’re stealing drugs. I look like I’ve killed a drug dealer. They’re going to get to us. They’re going to find us and make it look as though I killed you – and everyone is going to believe it. It’s what they do.’
‘But why would they set us up like this if they think you’re still in Tier Four? I think this is just about discrediting me.’
‘Diros are very thorough, Grace. They’ll protect themselves at all costs.’
‘So why didn’t they just kill you when they were in the clinic?’ Grace asked. ‘They had you in their hands! Why didn’t they just kill me too, if they wanted rid of me?’ She shuddered thinking about it.
‘I don’t know. Maybe it was too tricky. They want us both out of the way. If they’d killed us there someone would be looking for suspects, and that’s the last thing they want. They hide behind other criminals’ actions. It’s what they do. Hiding a crime within a crime.’ His shoulders dropped and he leaned against a tree, looking tired and defeated. ‘They’re playing with us, Gracie.’
After a few minutes, Grace said, ‘Let’s get them arrested. We’ll go to the police. I’ll tell them about the scans and how it was all faked.’
Remy laughed, a sad, hollowed-out sound. ‘The evidence all points to the original offenders that Diros copied, so the police aren’t going to believe it. We don’t have any credibility now that I look like a two-time killer and you look like a drug-dealing addict.’
The sound of laughter drifted over from the soldiers.
‘Anyway, they have an insurance policy,’ Remy added.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I didn’t get the chance to tell you the whole story before. When we worked as bounty hunters, Sarge collected bio-samples from all of us. Told us it was so we could be identified by the police and eliminated as suspects. We were employed by the government, I assumed it was protocol.
‘The next job that came in was to catch a drug dealer. Things got out of hand. The guy ended up in hospital, slashed with a knife across the guts. It wasn’t me, Gracie. But I was there. One of us had to take the fall for it, Sarge said, so that we could protect the group.
‘He chose me. I went along with it, thinking it was for the best, told the police it had been a street-fight that had got out of hand. Thankfully the guy didn’t die. I had Aversion Therapy…’ He shook his head.
‘I trusted Sarge, so I thought all the jobs he set up would be kosher, official, but soon he started going rogue. When we caught offenders, they usually ended up at Tier Three, but Sarge was of the opinion that Aversion Therapy wasn’t enough to punish anyone.’ Remy laughed sadly. ‘If only he’d known just how bad it really is. So he decided he wasn’t going to take the criminals we caught to Janus any more. He was going to do to them what they’d done to others.
‘Then the killing started. It was either stay with them and go down a very, very dark road, or take my chances and escape.
‘I told Sarge I wanted out, that it wasn’t my thing. I’d already found a small flat and started to think about getting a regular job and sorting my head out after Africa. I wanted to start a new life for myself, a quiet life. But he’s not the sort of man to take no for an answer. He told me I’d have to prove my loyalty or he’d frame me for a crime.
‘We often took footage to show the authorities or the contractor that we’d made the arrest above board, avoid any problems with the court case. When we were sent on a new case to catch another drug dealer, Biz killed him. We’d gone from bounty hunters to vigilantes to just plain killers.
‘Biz killed the drug dealer to set me up, even planted my bio-evidence. He was a genius on the computer and, under orders from Sarge, he tampered with the bodycam footage and made it look as though I’d done it. They were trying to force me to stay, or get me put away for good.
‘Of course, I tried to tell the police what had really happened when I was arrested, but they didn’t believe me.’
‘So you ran,’ Grace said. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you. I didn’t understand.’
He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
‘But they’ve got away with it,’ Grace said angrily. ‘Those offenders that they framed, they’d done their punishment. They’d made a fresh start. They could have had new lives and Diros destroyed that.’
‘Diros are corrupt to the very core,’ said Remy.
‘Which means they’re never going to change. At least the contrite feel shame, there is a chance of redemption… but the corrupt…’
‘I know,’ Remy said, his face darkening. ‘You can’t fix everyone, Grace. Maybe some people are just bad bastards who want to watch the world burn.’
‘They’re not going to stop, are they?’
Remy shook his head.
‘And they’re not going to let you go free, are they?’
‘No.’
Grace put her hand in her pocket and pulled out the Funland keyring. She pressed it into his hand.
He looked down and gave a sad smile. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘I found it in your bag at the library. I’ve still got mine.’ Had they really changed so much? ‘Remy, do you remember those kids who used to say stuff about Lottie? There were three of them. They were bigger than us. But we got them.’
He nodded.
‘We can do this. I’ll be bait. We’ll lure them in and finish this once and for all.’
There was a brief flicker of anxiety on Remy’s face. Then he said, ‘There’s the Gracie I remember.’