Them or Us

far end is in almost total darkness. There’s a concertina-like folding wall across the middle, which has been left half open. Scott strides purposefully through the gap and disappears out of view.
    “Do something, you useless little prick!” she yells at someone unseen, her bellowing voice muffled but still clearly audible even through the closed door. “For god’s sake, come on!”
    The hostility in her voice is unnerving, and I actually start to edge back toward the stairs before telling myself to get a grip. She reappears again and mooches through the clutter on the table. She picks something up—looks like an open glass jar—then moves back into the shadows.
    “You know you want it,” I hear her shout. “Come on, react! Don’t just sit there, you pathetic piece of shit.”
    She walks back this way, the jar held out in front of her; then she looks around. Damn, she’s seen me. I try to get out of the way but it’s too late. No backing out now. She angrily yanks the door open.
    “What the fuck do you want?”
    “Sorry,” I stammer, immediately on the wrong foot. “I didn’t mean to disturb you—”
    “Yes you did,” she bawls at me. “No one ever comes here unless they don’t have any choice. You didn’t come here by accident, so you did mean to disturb me.”
    “Hinchcliffe said I should—”
    “You McCoyne?”
    “Yes, I—”
    “He said you’d probably turn up at some point. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll be with you.”
    When she stops talking I become aware of a faint whimpering noise coming from elsewhere in the room. Scott moves away from the door, and I follow her inside. At the far end, strapped to a chair by ropes tied across her tiny torso and around her ankles and wrists, is an Unchanged child. It’s one of the kids from the council depot nest we cleared out earlier this week, I’m sure it is. When she sees that someone else is in the room, she starts moaning in fear, tugging at her restraints to try to get free. The effort’s too much, though, and she gives up and slumps forward sobbing, letting her bonds take her weight, her long, greasy hair hanging down and covering her dirty face. Poor little shit. What the hell has Scott been doing to her?
    “Interesting,” Scott says, watching both the girl and me, her eyes flicking between us.
    “What is?”
    “The way she reacted when you appeared,” she says.
    “She recognizes me, that’s all. I helped catch her.”
    “I just need one of these little cunts to show a bit of backbone and start fighting. Get Hinchcliffe off my back for a while. It wasn’t so bad when Thacker was in charge. Hinchcliffe’s got no patience. He wants results or he wants them dead.”
    The little girl, shaking with cold, cries out again. In a sudden fit of rage that takes both me and the child by surprise, the doctor spins around and hurls the glass jar at her. It hits the wall just above her head and explodes, showering her with sharp shards of glass and sticky globules of food.
    “Jesus, what the fuck are you doing?” I shout, forgetting myself.
    Rona Scott leans back and looks at me disapprovingly. “Looks like someone’s been spending too much time around these things.”
    “It’s not that. I just—”
    Scott’s not interested. She runs toward the girl again, grabs her shoulders, and yells into her face. The child screams back at the top of her voice, tied tight but still straining to get away. “That’s better,” Scott says, taunting the kid, slapping her cheek. “Now that’s more like it.” She turns her back on the still-screaming child and looks at me. “Right this way.”
    She shoves me out of the room and locks the door, muffling the little girl’s cries but not blocking them out completely. She stops in the middle of the corridor, preventing me from going any farther, waiting expectantly. I realize what she’s waiting for and reach into my inside pocket and pull out a half-full packet of cigarettes I’ve been holding on to for a while. She studies the packet for a moment, checks how many smokes are inside, then grunts her approval and heads for the staircase.
    We climb another flight of steps up to the third floor, which looks identical in layout to the second. She takes me into the room at the far end of the corridor, double the size of the others. There’s a wide window on one wall that gives Scott a virtually uninterrupted view out across Hinchcliffe’s compound. On the opposite wall, a smaller window