Chapter Fourteen:

Robert looked like he needed an ambulance but managed to pull her through the lobby of his building. Outside, the heat hit them in a wave of pressure that instantly made her head throb. Her face ached and her throat was raw from the vomiting, but the pain kept her lucid. 

She could only imagine how Robert felt. 

The rinse he had given his face was less than perfect and his nose was still bleeding rapidly through the wad of paper she had shoved at him in the bathroom. His shirt was torn and spotted with blood and he seemed to be limping slightly on his right leg. With one hand gripping her arm, the other pressed to his face, the artist pulled her towards the main road. 

Quinn’s head spun with each step but she kept up with him – she didn’t have much choice. 

Just as she was about to pull him to a stop and demand that he explain what was going on, he let go of her wrist and waved to a taxi. She was confused. 

Where were they going? 

The new question clattered amidst the as yet unanswered bundle that was growing in her head: Who were they running from? What had Robert gotten her into? Was she safe with him?

A green taxi – pristine like it had just left the showroom of an early twenty-first century dealership – pulled up at the curb and Robert opened the door for her, his body resting heavily against the vehicle. His gaze drifted lazily, apparently unfocused, until… She watched as his eyes lit up with shock. Something over her shoulder, back towards the apartment building, was drawing him out, dragging his attention away from her and the taxi. 

She turned to follow his gaze but couldn’t see anything at first. Then there was a dark man and a toned woman clambering out of a black van and pointing in their direction. Their movements were fluid as they broke into a sprint, but it was the voice behind them that made Quinn’s blood run cold.

“Robert!”

The artist whispered the name that Quinn had half-forgotten before snapping to his senses, grabbing her wrist and the top of her head and pulling her into the taxi in an awkward fall. He yelled at the driver to go, but the man merely stared at them over his shoulder and asked for a destination. The two figures had stopped running, the man yelling something she couldn’t make out at the woman. Quinn could see her reaching for something behind her back. 

Robert began to cough – spittle and blood at the corner of his mouth.

“Hospital!” she screamed in Japanese, righting herself and pulling the door closed as the woman’s gun came into view. The driver didn’t appear to notice their pursuers, or if he did he didn’t hesitate to accelerate after one more quick glance at Robert. Quinn pushed at the artist’s legs while pulling at his arm to get him into an upright position where he swayed buoyantly before attempting to reassure her that he was alright. 

He didn’t look alright. He wiped at his eyes with his free hand and coughed again. She felt like she could see right through the facade he was trying to resurrect. There was something desperate and fragile behind his eyes and she was watching it crack and break as he gave her an empty twist of his lips that was meant to be some kind of smile.

“Who are they?” Quinn hissed through short breaths. She was on the verge of hyperventilating and she needed answers. “Who was that in the van?”

Robert had closed his eyes. “Misaki… They had Misaki… I don’t–” A sob interrupted his words taking him by surprise and he opened his eyes to look at her, his hand fumbling to clasp hers. “I’m so sorry, I never should have even… Whoever they are they want you, Quinn. I don’t know why,” he coughed again, “but they took Misaki when I told them I wouldn’t help…”

Quinn looked at him, aghast. 

He wasn’t making sense. 

None of it made sense. 

The only things that felt certain were that her face ached and Robert needed someone to examine his nose. That was all she had to work with. Moment to moment tasks that would keep her mind focused while her body tried to give up. 

There was a dark curve making its way under the artist’s right eye and Quinn knew that he was more hurt than he was letting on. Could she even trust him? In less than two hours she had seen him accosted by Yakuza and assaulted by strange Americans. But the man in the bathroom, the one Robert had left on that terrible angle in the tub – he had known her. She couldn’t doubt his interest in her. Was Robert telling the truth about any of it? 

Quinn felt the sudden need to call her mum. 

She needed to call Stevie. 

It was at that moment that she remembered the phone call from in Robert’s pantry – the one that had slipped completely from her mind amidst the insanity of the minutes that followed. She rifled through her purse.

Stevie’s face was smiling on her screen when she found the sleek grey handset. Robert looked over at the phone without comment, his hand once again clutching at his nose. Quinn unlocked it and listened to the voice message. 

“Stevie,” Quinn said by way of explanation as much to Robert as to herself. “She rang before, I need to let her know I’m okay.”

Robert reclined his head and closed his eyes. The taxi swerved to navigate traffic. Quinn admired the driver’s efficiency – he hadn’t asked a single unnecessary question and yet after seeing Robert he had accepted the need for haste. She pressed the handset to her ear and looked out the window, willing her heart to slow down as Stevie’s voice message began to play back.

“Hey, Q. Just checking in on you… Hey! That rhymed! Anyway… if you’re too busy to answer – wink wink nudge nudge – then that’s fine. Remy and I have just been walking around Harajuku Temple. Call me when you get this. You know how I worry!”

Stevie’s voice disappeared with a little burst of static. She didn’t know how she could explain what was happening. For once Stevie was right to be worried – except that she was worried about all of the wrong things.

“You shouldn’t tilt your head back,” Quinn said to Robert and he opened his eyes slowly as though they weighed several tonnes. “If you’re still bleeding then you’re probably drinking the blood and it’ll make you sick.”

The man smiled tiredly. “That’s what you’re thinking about?” His voice was a nasal mumble, the air catching in his nose and then causing a clicking noise to sound in his throat. But after a moment or two he sat up. The car slowed down rapidly for a set of lights. He switched into Japanese. “Excuse me. Which hospital are we heading to?”

“Sanno. Three minutes.”

Quinn watched the exchange without really seeing it, she then hit ‘call back’ on her phone and listened, imagining Stevie’s phone ringing somewhere over in Harajuku. 

“Moshi moshi?” The male voice filled Quinn’s ear and made her move the phone further away. Robert turned to look at her.

“Who is this?” she asked in English. Her heart started to thud again, feeling tired from the limited time it had had at a resting rate.

“Oh, sorry! Is that you, Quinn? Stevie is in the bathroom. She will be out shortly.”

“Remy?” Quinn was confused, but she pushed the feeling aside. “Remy, tell Stevie to get a taxi to the Sanno Hospital, Roppongi. I don’t know if they’ll let me answer the phone once we get there. Just tell her to hurry over…”

The driver pulled to an illegal stop outside the front door of the hospital and ushered them out of the car. Robert tried to pay, but the driver shook his head, telling him in sharp Japanese to get fixed up and that health was more important than money. Remy was talking but she hadn’t been listening.

“Just tell her to hurry, Remy!” She hung up the phone and accepted Robert’s hand as they walked through the entrance. 

Quinn could only imagine what they looked like, but she was thankful that at four o’clock in the afternoon there didn’t appear to be a lot of hospital traffic. She felt a little light-headed but as she watched Robert stagger to the counter she reflected that she felt undoubtedly better than he did. He coughed with a look of surprise and there was more fresh blood on his hand. His nose was still leaking and Quinn was certain that it had to be broken. 

A nurse rushed to him and lead him by the elbow into a small examination room not far from the waiting room. She asked Quinn a lot of questions while she settled Robert onto a thin bed and began to examine his nose. Most of what she asked, Quinn didn’t know. 

A doctor arrived within a few minutes and with one look at the nose pronounced it broken. He explained in soft English that he would have to realign it so that it would stop bleeding and Robert closed his eyes and nodded. Quinn saw his hands grip the edge of the bed tightly and the muscles in his jaw flexed in anticipation. Her stomach felt detached from the rest of her – it was sending signals that were being distorted and lost before they reached her brain. Her mouth began to salivate and her breathing came thickly as though there was intense pressure on her chest. The nurse put her hands over Robert’s and held them against the bed while the doctor reached around and gripped the base of the artist’s neck with one hand in order to stop his head from recoiling. 

Quinn’s tongue was felt impossibly large inside her mouth as she watched. Each piece of her body was a million miles from the next and all of the messages were being scrambled by the overriding imagery of the events before her. 

The sound resonated in her ears. A crack that slipped through the silence of breath being held that wrenched it all apart. 

Robert gasped and a wash of crimson drained from his nose across his lips. The doctor collected tissues and gave them to his patient. He explained that the rush was a build up of semi-clotted gunk that needed to be removed for him to heal properly. He then applied a thin strip of tape to the bridge of Robert’s nose and told him not to smile too much.

With a little chuckle the doctor left and the nurse turned to Quinn to examine her eye. As the woman’s hand touched her face her legs gave way folding neatly underneath her. The nurse gripped her arm before she hit the floor and she noticed that Robert had stood up, ready to grab her. She smiled at him through a daze. 

He must be telling her the truth. 

He cared for her.

Quinn’s head weighed a million kilograms and the nurse had to use her shoulder to get Quinn over to the bed beside Robert. She leant against him heavily and he raised an arm and put it around her back. He smelt hot, with a mixture of his deodorant and sweat emanating from his shirt. She felt a prick in her arm and the awkward feeling of being drawn away from herself but it disappeared nearly as quickly as it had arrived. 

“What are we going to do, Robert? My friend is on her way here but I don’t know what to say to her… What if they come again?”

Robert kissed her hair gingerly, trying to avoid knocking his nose. From his chinos he pulled his phone, a thin black model that did little more than make and receive calls. Quinn could remember looking at it in a shop in Brisbane a few months earlier. It could receive text messages but not send them which was why she hadn’t bought it. It was more like a pager that could make calls, but she had liked the size and feel of it. 

As Robert looked at it a pale orange ball of light fell from the top of the screen to the bottom, its shape sending out ripples through the black around it. He watched it for several seconds before answering, as though he was afraid of who it might be. With a tap from his thumb, he raised the device to his ear and listened without speaking.

She watched him without comment. His face seemed to harden but, when she tried to think through how that could be the case, she couldn’t make sense of the idea. After a pause he spoke sharply. Quinn could hear his throat clicking uncomfortably and she swayed across the room to get some water. “Sending thugs doesn’t- What? I was the problem? Fuck you, Takami!”

Quinn drank from a plastic cup of water facing away from the artist. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to see his face. Would he be angry that they had tried to take her violently? Or was he genuinely angry that the men had come at all? 

She reached into her purse absently, her fingers brushing against something hard and angular – she squeezed it for reassurance. It was the triangular block of wood from the exhibition opening and it felt good in her hand. The wood was remarkably tactile, the grain beneath her fingers just a subtle disturbance to the otherwise precisely cut object. She smiled at the block as her thoughts drifted aimlessly for a moment.

“What?” The startled shift in Robert’s tone made her turn to him. He was staring at her with an intensity that made her feel self-conscious. In one movement he mashed the end-call symbol, dropped the phone into his pocket and stood up. “They’re here!” he hissed at her. 

Quinn’s head lolled on her neck. “What? What do you mean? How- How could they-?”

His looked silenced her completely and she leant her hips back against the little sink in the corner of the room, her heart thumping in her chest. Her mouth started to open but there were no words to speak. Instead, she just stood there waving her jaw at him trying to think of a way to express how exhausted she felt. He crossed the room to her and pressed his palm against her cheek to focus her attention.

Their eyes met.

“I don’t– I can’t stop them, Quinn… All we can do is try to sneak out.” She nodded into this hand and the pressure on her skin made the bruise on the other side of her face throb, but she didn’t care – it felt good. It felt real. “I’ve been here once before and there’s no street parking, so they must be in the carpark. If we can get to where the ambulances come in–”

“But my friends are coming here…” Her voice sounded regrettably pathetic and small, like a child who wasn’t getting what she wanted.

She hated herself for sounding that way.

But what would Stevie do if she wasn’t there when she arrived?

“Call them when we’re out.” 

Robert stepped away and looked at the drawers behind Quinn. Without speaking again he opened and closed each one in quick succession as though he was looking for something particular, but he didn’t find whatever it was and gave up with a frustrated huff of breath. He then moved to the door, making an obvious effort to stay clear of where it could swing open. She watched as he cautiously twisted the handle and peered through the gap into the hallway outside.

The artist reached for her without turning and she took his hand. It felt heavy and warm in hers. They slipped into the hallway at a kind of rambling trot, walking in the opposite direction from where they had originally entered the building. Robert pulled her along, the occasional jerk from his hand hurrying her lethargic legs into something between a walk and jog. His head darted from one door to the next – systematic, searching. He glanced behind them as they reached a corner and then edged his head around the bend to see what was coming. 

The fact that he seemed to know what he was doing made her both more and less comfortable with the situation. If he actually knew what he was doing that would suggest that he was still lying to her. But, if he was just putting on a show of confidence fueled by too many Hollywood films then they were both probably in real trouble.

She didn’t like being a passenger in their escape. She wanted to be helpful, but she couldn’t read Robert’s thoughts and it felt like he was telling her as little as possible. As Robert stepped around the corner, Quinn looked back again just in time to see the dark skinned man from outside Robert’s building open the door to the examination room they had come from. 

“That was one of them,” she hissed, and he stopped to look around.

“Where?”

“Back at the room we were in. The man from outside your apartment went in there.” Robert made a grimace which turned into something else as the skin around his nose moved. He pulled her around the corner into a jog which almost took her off her feet and then opened a door, seemingly at random, before shoving her inside. 

“Stay a minute,” he whispered through the gap he’d left in the door. “I won’t be long.” And then the door closed and she was left in the dark. 

When the last light disappeared her breath caught in her throat and she thought she was going to choke but she closed her eyes and pressed the back of her hand to her head, willing herself into a temporary calm. The small room smelt overly clean – a harsh mixture of hospital sanitizer and something distinctly like plastic. Quinn turned on the screen of her phone to light up the space. 

The room was much bigger than it had seemed in the darkness. On either side of her stood a long row of floor to ceiling mobile filing shelves, and beyond them she thought she could see more. Away from the door she confirmed that the shelves that had been parted lead through to another layer of the filing system before finally ending at a solid brick wall. Pills and materials of all kinds lined the shelves and in order to occupy herself she found herself walking between them in the hope that she might find something of use for their escape. A bar with prosthetic limbs hanging from it gave her a fright in the near-dark light of her phone, and in the second row of movable cabinets she found scrubs, scalpels, and green sheets like to ones used during operations. 

The door to the room opened. 

Quinn hurriedly stuffed her phone into her bag to block the light. Moments later she heard the click of the handle as the door shut again. 

Would Robert call out to her? Would he think that she had run away? Should she have? Should she call out to him? 

What if it wasn’t him? 

Quinn bit her lip feeling the terror begin to well at the base of her neck and the tips of her fingers. Over the thundrous pounding of her heart she could hear footsteps moving in the room somewhere. The noise was slow but defined. It sounded like boots or someone wearing something with thick immovable rubber soles. Robert would have called out – she was sure of it. He would have turned on a light if nothing else. 

Then she heard the voice.

“You in here, little sparrow? Don’t go trying anything silly, now. Just come on out and I’ll take you to someone who can help you get better…” His voice was thick with an American accent and as he spoke she couldn’t help picturing the photos she had seen of her father when he had travelled the land of the free. He had told her all about the way even English speaking American’s had dialects – the run-on speed talk of New York, or the awkward vowels of Boston, the cowboy flare of Texas, or the southern pomp of New Orleans. She had only been eight or nine but she could remember her father perfectly as he impersonated each one. The man in the room sounded like her father’s Texas-man. 

“Didn’t he tell you?” The man continued and she could hear him getting closer, walking on the far side of the long Compactus as she backed away from the opening in the storage system. “We just want to help you, little sparrow. We know all about your genetic disorder–” Quinn froze and her heart leapt in her chest. “We know that you’re dying and we just want to help.” 

How could they know? 

Nobody knew. 

Nobody that she hadn’t told. 

Who were they?

“Just come on out and I can get you on a plane to our labs where we think we’ve already worked out how to disable the genetic marker that should never have been enabled in the first place…” 

She wanted to hear more. She wanted to know what it was all about. But nothing about the methodology of whoever was trying to catch her made her want to give herself up. And what did he mean ‘enabled’? It was like he was suggesting that someone had made her sick?

Quinn’s back bumped into the wall that marked the end of the room – the wall that had her exit in it, except that it was on the other side of the immense storage system. Her hand touched the side of the Compactus and felt for the handle of the cabinet beside her. It was round like the wheels she had seen on airlocks in movies. Would she be strong enough to move it?

With both her hands on the wheel she started to turn it in the hope that it would move and that it wouldn’t be too loud or too slow. The wheel spun easily and near the other end of the room she heard the loud metallic clangs of the cases bumping together. The sound moved its way up the long line of units and over the noise she heard the man’s boots speed up, moving away from her. 

She tried to imagine what he was doing. Was he touching the cabinets in the dark trying to work out what they were? Did he think she was down the other end and that she was trying to seal him away from her? Had he even realised that he was in a small corridor with the sliding cabinets on either side of him? Quinn heard his hands begin to rap against the storage system and his footsteps started to move more frantically. 

“What are you up to, little sparrow? You can’t hide yourself down here!” His voice was at the far end of the room and she started to turn the wheel more frantically. 

In the distance she heard things falling off shelves as the man moved between the units. There was a grunt and a loud thud which she hoped was her pursuer getting caught in the aisle as she closed it off. 

“Fuck! Hey! Wait!” His voice was a yell, and he was kicking or punching at the shrinking units. 

She continued to spin the wheel with one hand while she peeked the light from her phone out of her purse. There was more than enough room for her to escape through. The wheel had grown much tighter and she could hear the man grunting, pushing back against the shelves. 

In a flurry of steps she released the handle and ran between the two shelves before her. With her phone hidden away in her purse again it was near pitch black and she kept a hand on the right case in order to keep herself straight. Her left shoulder was suddenly pressed by the rapidly closing shelf – the man was pushing the entire system shut on her. She let out a soft yelp and twisted sideways falling out the far side of the system. The shelves snapped shut before she could retract her left foot and two thick sheets of metal clamped down on her and a jagged flash of pain shot through her ankle. 

She screamed.