Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [65]
The nondescript man (how can you describe someone as nondescript? – but it was just the right word for Mr Jamey) had warned him that his resistance cell had been broken. He’d just dropped it into the conversation, right there at the dance club, while Simon was handing over the stolen software from a particularly unimportant Imperial cleaning robot. Telepaths, Mr 151
Jamey had said over the roar of the music, probably. And something about Simon needing to see a Doctor.
Genevieve slammed the door behind him. Simon leapt off the bed as though it had been electrified, narrowly missed banging his head on the low ceiling, and glared at her.
She was naked under a white bath towel, her hair wet and falling in ringlets to her shoulders. There were beads of water on her arms and the slopes of her breasts. He was struck by sudden memory: Sibongile on the night before the day she died, light from the candles she’d placed around her dorm room reflected in her eyes. Simon looked away, towards the window again.
‘There’s a Venusian in the bathroom,’ she said.
‘How do you know it’s a Venusian?’ he said.
‘It said so.’ She got a firm grip on the towel and sat down on the bed. ‘What were you doing?’
Simon eyed the wallpaper. ‘Checking for gingerbread.’ It was her, of course, the one who’d been making the Centcomp requests. Jamey had just tapped into her information and sent him here. Partly to see what was here, partly to find out why she was interested. He wondered who she was working for.
‘What do you suppose this is all about?’ he said.
Genevieve shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s a sort of miniature amusement park, meant to accommodate people who get lost in the woods.’
‘Maybe he is the Doctor.’
‘A Doctor.’ She stroked one of the cats, which stretched luxuriously. ‘I want to know what’s behind all of this alternative-reality business. I can’t believe it’s just an old man’s fantasy.’
‘Because there’s a Venusian in the bathroom?’
‘I’ll wager that if I looked now, it would be gone. Just another hallucination brought on by whatever was in the tea.’
Simon got a sudden glimpse of long brown limbs as Genevieve shed the towel and slipped under the duvet. One of the cats grumbled as her legs pushed it out of the way.
She propped herself up on her elbow and looked at him. He stared back.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘are you coming to bed or not?’
152
He woke up in the darkness with his arm going numb under the weight of her head. Carefully he tried to extricate himself without disturbing her.
‘You can move,’ she said. ‘I’m not asleep.’
Simon shook his arm to get the pins and needles out. He felt Genevieve shift position, her arm slide over his chest, her breasts press against his side. Something else, warm, invisible and not Genevieve moved near his feet. ‘The cats are back,’ he said.
‘Tell them to stay at their end of the bed,’ she said. ‘Can you hear something?’
Beyond the soft rumble of the cats Simon could hear singing. A human voice, soft, ancient. ‘I think it’s Doctor Smith,’ he said.
‘Perhaps he’s singing the Venusians to sleep,’ said Genevieve.
He rolled over to face her, putting his hand on her hip, feeling the smoothness of her skin as it pulled over the muscles of her thigh, tentative in a way that he’d never been with all those countless others before Sibongile. They were face to face now but invisible in the darkness, her breath against his cheek.
There would have been a room, he knew that, a room with white surfaces, hygienic and stain-resistant. A routine autopsy performed by machines that ticked and murmured as they peeled back the layers of Sibongile’s body and invaded its secrets.
Killed stone dead by a non-lethal crowd-control weapon.
Something sonic.
He’d thought of that terrible room often enough, the minuscule cracks throughout her body, woken drenched in sweat with the dream smell of disinfectant in his nostrils.
And now her face