Rohan, by contrast to the others, seems to be trying to edge further and further away from all of us. I half suspect him of contemplating another ill-advised escape attempt.
“What do you need to get rid of the chip?” I ask him, in a hurry to get the chip out so we can contact FISA.
“A knife,” he responds immediately.
I ignore the malice in his voice because I know he isn’t joking and go off to retrieve a knife from a drawer in the adjoining kitchen.
I still have the weapons I took off Rohan and Jack earlier, but they’re in the oven. I don’t want them to know where I’ve hidden their shit yet.
After a quick look through the cupboards, I find a FISA first aid kit. Inside, there’s a bottle of antiseptic. I stand over the sink and pour the antiseptic over the blade.
Liquid Onyx survivors are, apparently, immune to all diseases, but I still think it’s better to sterilise and be safe.
When I come back with the knife, a short, thin blade that should be used for cutting up potatoes, not a person, Rohan has moved the coffee table out of the way.
I’ve also brought in a tea towel, a bowl of water, and the first aid kit. I put it all on the coffee table.
Rohan looks at Jack with cold eyes and tells him to lie down on the carpeted floor.
Jack swipes his gaze along to settle dead eyed on Rohan, making it seem like he was never not keeping him in his field of vision. It makes me wonder, once again, which of them is supposed to be the threat, except no, because it’s been made crystal clear they’re both a threat.
There’s a dispassionate air of menace pulsing between them. It feels as if their seemingly innate hostility towards each other is at once deeply personal and entirely impersonal.
Jack and Rohan move with the same practiced awareness, their bodies constantly poised for a sudden shift in atmosphere from calm to chaos. There’s a similar method of calculation in their stares, in how they take in the world around them, like everything is carefully and ruthlessly balanced as either a hindrance or a help in forwarding their aims, whatever those may be.
I’m struck by the sudden thought that no matter how well I might come to know either of them, I will possibly never understand them quite as they do each other.
My aunt once told me there is a bond forged in shared strife that is like nothing else. There’s an indomitability and endurance to it which surpasses even ties formed through love.
In my experience, pain lasts where love does not. My mum took her pain and turned it into a vocation. In some respects, you have to admire the resolve, the sheer fortitude it takes to hit rock bottom and then make the fuck-’em-all choice to dig a hole with your fingernails just so you can carry on falling.
Once, when she was drunk and bent over the toilet, hacking up stomach acid and whiskey, tears blurring her eyes, snot streaming from her nose, she told me something I’ll never forget. She said,“All of our choices should belong to us, even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. Because we’re at our most honest when our worst selves are sitting behind the desk, behind the wheel, giving orders and signing promises, driving round corners and over cliffs.”
She told me honesty should mean something more than it does as there seems to be so little of it in our world.
She told me honesty is more priceless than power, rarer than love, a worthier pursuit than sanity could ever hope to be.
“This is my truth,”she said, blood leaking from a cut she got when she fell over and hit the edge of the pavement, clothes ripped by someone she wouldn’t name, hair matted with sweat and hairspray. “So, have some respect, Leo, because most mothers are fucking liars.”
Maybe she was right.
There are glass ceilings, and then there are molten cores within the earth. Impossible feats should be able to go in either direction.
“Okay,” Damon says, holding his hands up a little defensively, drawing the attention of both Jack and Rohan.
They eye his hands with a blandness that probably means they’re thinking of how they could snap them right off his wrists, twist bone away from tendon.
I don’t trust their passiveness. It’s the calm before the storm, the stillness before the strike. I’ve had enough experience with trained killers like these to know the appearance of boredom should be viewed as a warning flare, likely the only one you’ll get before it’s too late.
“Are we actually going to open someone up and carry out surgery with a normal kitchen knife, here?” Damon asks, disapproval thick in his voice. “Because. Yeah, no. That does not seem like a thing we should do. It doesn’t sound like a thing any mentally stable person would consider an acceptable replacement for proper medical treatment.”
Rohan heaves out a sigh and gifts Damon with his special brand of scathing charm.
“Well, unless you know any surgeons who live close by and don’t mind going up against a supervillain organisation for the sake of liberating a superhuman assassin who will very likely try to murder every single one of us after I’ve removed the torture chip from the top of his spinal cord.”
Damon looks Rohan over with a mocking show of dismay.
“Blimey, mate, doctors who make house calls? Where did you grow up, Downton fucking Abbey?” He adds sardonically, “Big surprise, everyone, crime reallydoespay.”
