Caitlin turned and saw he and Dale were standing at the opening overlooking the ocean. She joined them, planting her feet on the cliff edge. She looked down, her head swimming with vertigo, and saw a series of rough steps carved in the side of the cliff, leading down to the harbour hundreds of feet below them. She turned to Toby excitedly. “There’s steps going all the way down!”
Toby ignored Caitlin, his attention on Marty. “You mean to tell me the assembly plant is here?”
“Yep, through that door.”
At the cliff edge, Lloyd was tentatively testing the first of the crumbly stone steps to see if it would take his weight. “Seems okay”, he said, a little uncertainly.
Toby didn’t seem to hear, still staring at the door.
Dale called impatiently from the cliff edge. “Come on guys! Let’s get moving.” He gingerly started to follow Lloyd down the stone steps.
Marty glanced at Dale then looked at Toby who was still staring at the door. “Looks like this meeting with the Toymaker wasn’t meant to be.” He patted Toby’s shoulder sympathetically then followed Lloyd and Dale.
Caitlin saw that Toby hadn’t moved from the doorway. “Toby?”
“I’ll see you down there”, he replied distantly.
Caitlin angrily walked away from the cliff edge towards Toby. “Toby, we haven’t got time for this! We need to leave now!”
Toby turned to her, his face anguished. “Caitlin, you’ve got to understand. The whole reason I came here was to win money to help Matt. That’s not going to happen, but now…”
“What happened to getting out of here as quickly as possible?” demanded Caitlin.
“That was before I knew about this place!”
“Toby, De Coza’s mob—”
“—won’t find us now we’ve got rid of the dog.”
“You don’t know that for sure! And what about Greg? If we don’t get help as soon as possible he’s going to die!”
Toby reached out prodded the metal door with his fingertips. It cracked open. “Well go and get help. I won’t be long.”
Caitlin grabbed Toby by the shoulder and spun him round to face her. “You just don’t get it, do you?” she said angrily. “He sacrificed himself so you could escape! You’re the one they’re after, not me, not Marty, not anyone else, it’s you!”
“Caitlin, listen to me carefully”, said Toby slowly. “The man behind this door has invented a neural data sharing platform between digital electrons and the human nervous system—”
“I’m very pleased for him—”
“Not as pleased as Matt will be!” Toby retorted. “This discovery will save his life!”
“What about my life, what about Greg’s life, all of our lives? How can you be so selfish?”
“Selfish? Trying to honour a promise made to a dying brother?”
“It’s selfish because you’re prepared to go your own way, whatever the consequences to anyone else.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true!” Caitlin yelled. “It’s become an obsession with you! You’re blindly going down this path and you don’t care how many people you hurt to get there. What about your mother, having all those PROUD protestors picketing outside her clinic? What about all the disabled people with cyber-prosthetic limbs that are going to be stigmatized because of that monster you created?”
She wheeled round and pointed an accusing finger at Eve who was silently observing the argument.
“Monster?” said Toby, outraged.
“Well she is! I hate her, I’ve always hated her! Everything about her makes my skin crawl. The way she looks, the way she moves—”
Toby unexpectedly laughed and Caitlin stared at him. “What’s so funny?”
“All the things you don’t like about her. I copied from you!”
Caitlin stared at Toby, mouth agape. “What?”
“I wanted to create the ultimate fighting machine and you were my inspiration.”
Caitlin turned to Eve and instantly knew Toby was speaking the truth. Why hadn’t she seen it before? She stood directly in front of the robot and stared at it as if for the first time. A fairground mirror image of herself gazed back impassively. The silver catsuit mirroring her own navy blue tracksuit. The mane of silver hair coiled in a ponytail identical to Caitlin’s. The android’s glowing green eyes echoing Caitlin’s emerald coloured ones. The same height, the same build, the same posture, the same everything.
Toby approached Caitlin, standing behind her. “All this time and you didn’t realize”, he said. “I made her in honour of you.”
Caitlin backed away from Eve, creeped-out by the robot’s resemblance to herself. Toby saw her look of revulsion and shook his head sadly. “And that’s why you hate her. Because you hate yourself.”
Caitlin looked at Toby sharply. “That’s not true.”
“It is true. You’ve always hated the robot part of yourself, ever since you had the arm fitted. And all that hatred you’ve transferred onto Eve. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you were the one who damaged her, purely out of—”
Caitlin flinched and Toby stared at her. “It was you.”
“No!”
“That was why you came here”, he whispered. “To sabotage her.”
“No! I admit I did come here to talk you out of competing—”
“And when that didn’t work you sabotaged her!”
“It wasn’t like that!” stammered Caitlin. “PROUD contacted me the night we were leaving when they found out I was accompanying you. They pressurized me, got me to agree to put Eve out of action. But I—“
“You betrayed me? I invited you here and you betrayed me?”
“No… Toby… Please…”
Toby turned towards the door and Caitlin was horrified to see that his eyes were brimming with tears.
“Toby!” she cried.
Toby stepped through the doorway and the doors swung shut after him. Caitlin turned and ran back down the tunnel.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
CAITLIN ALONE
Caitlin sat miserably on the uncomfortable rock floor, the damp chill soaking into her bones. The blackness was absolute, accentuating her sense of isolation. She had never felt more lost and wretched and alone in her entire life. Sitting in the darkness, Caitlin was able to see her life with a stark clarity and for the first time she was able to appreciate how alone she really was. All her karate teammates had become merely acquaintances once the common bond had been broken. The people who hung out with her at school had turned their back on her now she was no longer the school celebrity, the rising karate star. And the only person who had stood by her after the accident, her only true friend was now gone.
Toby’s face swam out of the darkness like a phantom and Caitlin squeezed her eyes shut, trying to blot out his hurt look of betrayal. The face lingered, refusing to go away and Caitlin heard his voice echo accusingly in her head.
You hate Eve because you hate the robot part of yourself.
Why had he said that to her?
She wasn’t aware that she hated her robot arm. It was true she tried not to think of it too much, that she often pretended that it wasn’t there. But that wasn’t the same as hating it.
Was it?
Caitlin unsnapped her wristwatch and placed it on the ground next to her. She clicked on its tiny light and her immediate surroundings were illuminated in a soft ambient glow. She unzipped her tracksuit top and slipped out of it. Shivering a little from the dank chill, she rolled up her tee-shirt sleeve to the shoulder and gazed at the cyber-prosthetic arm. Her eyes lingered on the long tapered fingers then slowly rose upwards, taking in the smooth blemish-free wrist, the forearm realistically muscled. She clenched her fist slightly, watching the synthetic biceps and triceps tense and flex under the latex skin, then her eyes ran up towards the top of the prosthesis where it joined the remains of her real arm. The join was almost imperceptible, just a faint line where the skin tone of the prosthesis didn’t match
her own colouring.
Before she was even aware of what she was doing, Caitlin reached out and unsnapped the fasteners connecting the prosthesis to the stump of her real arm. She carefully unclipped the neural connectors then slowly removed the prosthesis, placing it on the rock floor next to her. She gazed at her arm stump unflinchingly, hypnotised by the uneven mound of pink healed flesh shining in the light. She had never looked at it properly before and she realized with a sudden flash that it was because she was ashamed. Ashamed of her own body.
She hesitantly reached out with her hand and touched the healed arm stump, delicately tracing her fingertips over it. The gnarled mound of flesh felt strange and unfamiliar to her touch. And then suddenly from out of nowhere a wave of emotion flooded over Caitlin, a sadness so intense that she felt physically sick. She tried to choke it back; she was strong, she was a fighter. But then the sadness overwhelmed her and she gave herself up to it. Her eyes flooded with tears and she started to weep. Her body wracked with deep choking sobs, releasing all the pain that she had kept imprisoned in her heart for so long. She grieved for her arm that she had lost, the arm that had served her so well and she would never have back. She grieved for her poor ugly stump that she kept hidden from the world, neglected and unloved. But most of all she grieved for her old life; the Olympic career snatched away, the karate championships left unwon, the free and easy days forever gone.
Caitlin didn’t know how long she spent crying in the darkness. But just when she was feeling her most wretched and alone and in desperate need of a friend, she became aware of the scamper of tiny footsteps and then felt something small and heavy leap onto her lap. She looked down in surprise and saw Scotty gazing up at her.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered.
Scotty yelped joyfully at the sound of Caitlin’s voice and he jumped up at her excitedly, his little paws scrabbling up her T-shirt. She started to giggle as his rough metal tongue began to lick her tear-stained face. “Stop that, it tickles!” she said, laughing. She stroked his cold metal coat and he nestled contentedly in her lap. “It’s okay”, she murmured soothingly, “you’re not alone anymore.” Caitlin felt Scotty’s stubby little tail wag furiously and she looked down at him fondly, relieved to have a friend who could forgive her so easily. She continued to stroke him and she suddenly realized that she was feeling better, much better than she’d felt for a very long time. It was like she’d unloaded a heavy burden and now she felt as light as air. She had sobbed until she thought her heart had broken in two, but maybe that was what it needed to let the pain out and the light in.
Caitlin looked down at the prosthetic arm lying on the floor next to her. She realized it looked different to her now, less cumbersome and ugly. She picked it up and carefully reattached it to her body. She flexed her arm, clenching and unclenching her fingers and was pleased to see the muscles respond naturally.
She felt Scotty shift on her lap and she glanced down. She saw he was looking up at her inquisitively.
“Hey, did I disturb you?” she smiled.
She realized that Scotty wasn’t looking at her at all, but past her, over her shoulder. She spun around and jolted in shock as three figures loomed out of the darkness.
“Well, well, well”, laughed De Coza. “What have we got here?” The Scannell twins grinned, raising their spears to Caitlin’s throat.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
THE GENESIS OF A KILLER
Toby sat in the darkness not very far away from Caitlin, in his own world of pain. He hadn’t walked very far down the corridor on the other side of the metal doors before he faltered to a halt, unable to go on.
At first he’d been able to control the waves of emotion welling up inside of him. Yes, Caitlin had betrayed him. Yes, it hurt more deeply than he thought possible. But he had to put that aside for now. He was about to meet one person in the world who could save Matt and he needed to be clear-headed. He continued down the gloomy corridor, trying to organize his mind and prioritize the questions he had to ask the robot designer. Moisture blurred his vision and he angrily wiped his face with his sleeve, forcing the mental image of Matt into his mind, the brother that he loved and who would die if he didn’t get his head together.
But the picture of Matt kept morphing into Caitlin.
How could she have done that to him?
Tears swam into Toby’s eyes and he sank to his knees, Caitlin’s treachery a physical pain in his heart. Now that she had confessed to the sabotage, it all made sense. In fact, deep down part of him had known all along that it was her but couldn’t accept this to be the truth.
It’s okay, he thought. He’d lost a friend. No big deal.
But he knew that was a lie. Caitlin was more than a friend. So much more.
It had all started on his journey home from school after watching the school tournament, his mind full of the savage glory of seeing her fight. He replayed the edited highlights over and over as he walked; Caitlin delivering a powerful front kick, Caitlin spinning through the air, Caitlin powering into her opponent like a machine—
A connection was made as he suddenly remembered a rumour he’d heard the previous week in one of the robotics chatrooms he frequented. Something about a new game show being developed involving fighting robots. Big prize money for the winner apparently…
By the time he got home all the pieces of his plan were in place; stealing the outdated spares in his mother’s stockroom, building the robot, entering the competition, winning the prize money, then saving his brother’s life. And that very night he’d made a start on his robot.
He didn’t consciously make Eve so she looked like Caitlin, it just seemed to happen that way. It was as if the experience of seeing Caitlin fight had made such a powerful impression on him that he had absorbed it all and was now subconsciously channelling it into his creation. He worked late into the night, long after Matt and his mother had gone to bed, often to the point of exhaustion. He worked intuitively, trusting his hands to make the correct decision without second-guessing himself and the shapeless, sexless pile of prosthetic parts gradually evolved into Eve. Once the hardware was completed he worked on the robot’s microprocessor, unconsciously programming its wargaming software so it utilized Caitlin’s lithe, fluid movements when she was fighting.
When Toby had finally emerged from his burst of creativity, it felt like he had woken up from a dream. He gazed at the finished robot as if seeing it for the first time, surprised and a little unsettled at how much it resembled Caitlin. But he swept his feelings of unease aside. He had told himself that he had made Eve in the likeness of Caitlin because she was his inspiration. But now sitting in the darkness, his heart broken, he could finally admit to himself the truth.
He loved Caitlin.
He had loved her from the moment he saw her fight and he had loved her ever since. He had created the robot in Caitlin’s image like a sculptor carving a marble statue of a beautiful goddess. Because like a goddess she was unattainable. Caitlin didn’t feel the same way about him and she never would. He was a friend and that’s all he would ever be. He had hoped that when Caitlin unexpectedly accepted his invitation to join him on the island that their relationship would deepen. But Caitlin had only accompanied him for an opportunity to betray him.
Toby wiped his tears away and stood up. He was feeling a little better now and even though his heart was still in turmoil, his head was clear. He was finally in a fit state to seek out the robot designer.
He started walking down the corridor, then a strange thing happened. He felt like he was being pulled into two separate directions. His head was telling him to go forwards to seek out the robot designer to find a cure to save Matt. But his heart was telling him to go back to Caitlin outside. He stood for a brief agonized moment, feeling the tug of the two people he loved most in the world, tearing him in two. Then Caitlin’s anguished face flashed into his mind and before he knew what he was doing he was turning and striding back down the corridor towards
her. He broke into a run, some sixth sense warning him that she was in danger. He reached the steel doors and booted them open.
De Coza stood there waiting for him, flanked by the Scannell twins. And at their feet lay Caitlin, her mouth gagged and her hands bound with electrical flex.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
EVE VS. DUMPMASTER
Toby lunged towards De Coza. “If you’ve hurt her—”
“You’ll do what?” sneered De Coza. He nodded to Kenneth and Gilbert who immediately placed their spear tips over Caitlin’s heart and throat. “I think you’d better calm down with the heroics, sonny, if you know what’s good for your girlfriend.”
Toby froze and De Coza nodded. “That’s better”, he growled, glancing at his watch. “We’ve got an hour until your paymaster activates his robot army, so let’s cut to the chase. Where’s the Toymaker?”
“You already know!” shouted Toby in frustration. “The actor playing the Toymaker left the island with all the others.”
De Coza shook his head wonderingly. “You don’t seem to have grasped the situation here.” He turned to the Scannell twins. “Kill her!”
“No!” screamed Toby. He raced forwards and Dumpmaster swung towards him, clubbing him to the ground. He watched helplessly as Gilbert and Kenneth slowly leaned onto their spear shafts, exerting gradual pressure, savouring Caitlin’s terror as the tips of their spears started to sink into her flesh…
Something shiny flashed through the air and Gilbert staggered backwards. He gasped in pain and Toby saw that Scotty was attached to his throat. The dentist tried to pull the metal terrier away but he refused to let go, his tiny fangs firmly embedded in Gilbert’s flesh. “Get it off me!” Gilbert screeched.
Kenneth tried to wrench the dog away and Gilbert screamed, blood pouring from the wound. Changing tactics, Kenneth jammed his spear in Scotty’s mouth and managed to lever his jaws open. Holding the snapping dog at arm’s length, he viciously hurled it at the cave wall. Scotty smashed into the rock and then dropped to the floor in a mangled heap.
Whimpering pitifully, Scotty clambered to his feet and started crawling towards the dentists again, his broken hind leg dragging behind him on a few wires. De Coza contemptuously booted the robot dog down the tunnel then turned to Toby. “Last chance”, he said.