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By Root 511 0

the boy. He suddenly shuddered, neck muscles and shoulders convulsing. The movement threw back his head and exposed the pale skin of his throat, tight over his Adam’s apple. Ace thought she could see the flutter of a pulse in the vulnerable patch of flesh. There was something attached to the boy’s neck. A cheap jewellery chain sagged around his throat, disappearing into the thick fluid. As the boy moved something shifted on the chain, floating to the surface. It looked like a leaf under dark pond water. It glittered as it broke surface. It was a metallic‐looking dogtag, but so light and thin it had to be some kind of plastic. Ace recognized it as the kind of thing you won on a cheap arcade game, usually the combat simulation variety. The tag floated among the scum on the surface of the liquid. The Doctor reached in and lifted it out. He wiped the gel off the plastic, inspected the dogtag for a moment, then handed it to Ace. There was embossed lettering on the silver‐coloured plastic. On one side it said O Rh + 1794 meso/ akg dlt ugn.

On the other it said, Wheaton, Vincent.

‘Ace,’ said the Doctor, ‘Meet Vincent. And by the way, I’d put on a swimsuit if I were you.’

‘Swimsuit?’

‘Or go naked. You don’t want to get that gel all over your clothes.’

‘Why would I get gel on my clothes.’

‘It will be almost inevitable when you help him upstairs.’

‘Oh, good.’

‘And into the bath.’

‘Bath?’

‘Hot, but not too hot.’

* * *

The bathtub was massive, sunken into the black tiled floor. Its wide curving inner surface was a pale ivory yellow, broken only by the daggers of green mineral deposit under the taps, heritage of fifty years of dripping water. The taps squealed and shook, pipes rattling deep in the old house as Ace turned them on.

‘Don’t let him move around before he eats something.’

‘What?’ Ace reduced the thunder of water from the taps.

‘Sorry,’ said the Doctor. ‘I was saying that his blood sugar is extremely low. We’d better feed him before he exerts himself too much.’

Ace looked at the boy slumped unmoving in the chair. ‘He isn’t going anywhere.’

‘And by the way, that gel is also a topical anaesthetic. Get yourself under the shower as quickly as you can. Your skin will begin to absorb it if you don’t wash it off.’

Before Ace could reply the Doctor was out of the bathroom and gone.

She went back to the boy. Her arms were still shaking with the effort of getting him up the stairs and her shoulder was beginning to ache again.

The boy was sitting in a wicker chair between the sink and the shower unit, naked and pale. He had a towel under him to keep the chair safe from the gunk. The Doctor had been right. As usual. Ace’s body was thoroughly oiled with the stuff after wrestling the kid up to the bathroom. She was still breathing hard.

If he’d simply been a dead weight, it wouldn’t have presented much of a problem. She could have carried him, even with her bad shoulder. But part of the time he was completely slack, like his muscles were cut, then suddenly he’d move. Leaning against her and walking, staggering along like a drunk. Helping her out. He’d gone halfway up the stairs like that, a good boy, as if his body remembered staircases and how to climb them. Then, just as suddenly, the motor control had cut out and she’d had to grab him before he fell and split his skull.

He stirred now, slumped in the wicker chair. One hand spasmed, settling into an intricate movement at the wrist, fingers dancing. Like a one‐handed keyboard player with an imaginary piano.

Then one eye opened, a startling blue, and orbited blindly in its socket before the lid drooped closed again. The kid’s skin was bright red in bands across the soft meat of his thighs where the wicker chair made contact, as if blood was moving close to the surface. The rest of his body was still the white of fish meat and shining, greased with the barrel gunk. He smelled like Vicks VapoRub cut with chicken fat and pesticide. And after the odyssey up the stairs, so did Ace. As the Doctor suggested, she’d put on a swimsuit. If she’d been wearing her clothes they