Excerpt: A Queer Sort of Clockwork

Only the ones who deserve it.

Emilia read the new message and nearly shouted in frustration. She was tired of pursuing this philosophical route of debate through pen and paper, with too-long wait times in between. She crumpled up the paper and threw it across the room, then went off to do something else. She cooked up dinner then sat and watched TV for a bit, curled up on the couch around a pillow, her head leaning on the arm rest, staring blankly at the television set. She only half-watched it, her mind still spinning, churning through his arguments.

You kill people?? They're not lying?

I know how you kill people. Fine. Different question: why?

Only the ones who deserve it.

It was like arguing with a wall. He was so high on his own self-importance. He probably fancied himself a god, an angel of death. And somehow he knew who deserved to live and who should die. She wasn't even pretending to watch the television any more. She was so incredibly frustrated. While she was sleeping, he'd been out there murdering people on the streets!

She turned the TV off then threw the remote control across the room. She got up, stamped around for a while, doing little absurd things that didn't matter; loudly cleaned out and rearranged the pot drawer in the kitchen, washed up the few dishes stacked in the sink, clanking them down loudly on the counter when she was done and nearly breaking a glass. She shoved the sofa aside again, moving it in jerky, rough pushes, and then ripped up the loose boards again. The space under the floorboards was empty, of course. They'd obviously taken all of the knives and (illegal) guns, and had probably taken whatever else they had happened to find there for DNA evidence.

She stared at the hole for a while in silence, their conversation replaying itself in her head again, and then dropped the boards back into place and pushed the sofa jerkily back into place. It was slightly crooked, and its leg had caught onto and carried the rug along with it, but she couldn't bring herself to care.

She felt like crying in frustration. He'd lied to her, or at least withheld the truth. Who knew what else he'd done while in her body? Who knew if he'd ever planned on telling her how she'd played an unwilling accomplice to his crimes?

All she wanted to do was curl up and shut out the world, but she couldn't shut down her mind. She stomped over to the medicine cabinet and noisily located the sleeping pills her therapist had once recommended she buy for her anxiety. It was like cheating, in a way. Who knew what he'd do when she went to sleep; she knew now what he had been doing before... for the most part, hopefully. But she'd drive herself crazy otherwise.

It was cheating. She measured out the prescribed dose, added one more pill, and then downed them with a glass of water. She walked back over to the couch and curled up on it again, staring at the dark TV screen in silence until sleep took her.

She could feel herself waking up, emerging from blackness. The sleeping pills had worked, apparently, and she'd had a dark, dreamless sleep.

She didn't want to wake up, and was finding it hard to throw off the fuzzy mantle of sleep. Her world was still dark and warm, and slightly out of focus.

'Emilia?'

You know how when you think thoughts to yourself, and you can almost but not quite hear your own voice in your head saying the words in your head? This was like that, only it wasn't Emilia's voice.

'Hunter?' she asked, not out loud, but rather as a pointed thought. It was like talking in her head. In her half-asleep state, this made perfect sense.

'Yes,' the voice replied, sounding vague and incorporeal. 'I think we need to talk.'

'I agree,' Emilia thought back. She jumped straight to the point that had been bothering her all day, or at least the few hours she had been conscious. 'How can you say that anyone deserves to die?'

'They're bad people, Emilia. Rapists and murderers. They hurt others.'

'My brother Marco.... he kills people for a living,' Emilia thought. It still hurt to admit it to herself. 'But I would never want him dead.'

The reply that came this time was slow and hesitant, not as self-assured as the first few. 'Your family...' the thought came, 'they're good people. They helped us.'

If Emilia had been more than half-awake, she would have rolled her eyes in derision, or scoffed, or something. 'Morality isn't relative to you,' she thought angrily. He was so self-important. 'How do you know the people you kill aren't also good people? That they don't have wives and sisters and brothers and parents and children that they love and adore and are also good to?'

'I...' Hunter was silent for a long time, and Emilia was worried that she had lost him, that she had lost this opportunity to talk with him. 'Marco doesn't kill innocents,' he said at last. 'He kills other killers.'

'They don't deserve to die any more than he does.'

This time Hunter remained silent, and Emilia slowly emerged into wakefulness. She wasn't sure how they had managed to have that conversation. Had it been induced by the sleeping pills, or was that merely a coincidence, and they could have had that little argument regardless? Or maybe she had just imagined it. Still no more reassured than she had been when she tried to go to sleep, she forced herself to get up and prepare breakfast. She had no choice but to try to make it through another day.