Panopticon

Crying Wolf

This changed everything.

Kate’s death had been shocking. When James and Durgan followed, Emma began to fear that none of them would survive the day. By now, Noel and Aiden had surely joined them, or if not it was only a matter of time. Murders had come thick and fast, and it was beginning to seem like death was the only way to escape this living hell.

None, though, had hit her as hard as this. Alex had been her colleague for more than a decade, and her friend, her mentor, for almost as long. Emma’s feelings of loss were compounded by her guilt, as she felt partially responsible for bringing this about. Alex had not wanted to come, and had only relented at Emma’s special request. She had hated the idea of the park, but her loyalty was far stronger than her repulsion. It was a favour that had gotten her killed.

It was one that Emma would never be able to repay.

“How..?” She spoke quietly, still fighting the pain in her gut. Charon nodded to the man by her side. He seemed familiar, but Emma didn’t know from where.

His continued presence confused her. He was clearly a convict, one of the island’s many killers, and yet their hostess seemed safe around him. It didn’t add up to Emma. If he was tame, why had he murdered her friend? Why had Charon forgiven him, and agreed to work together? Was he working for her ends, or was she working for his? It made little sense, even by the standards of a world in chaos.

There was a certain order, on the other hand, in the nature of Alex’s end. After spending her whole life caring so much about prisoners, fate demanded that her death should come at an incarcerated hand. In fact, Emma had begun to wonder if the irony ran still deeper. Alex’s sympathy for convicts went beyond the call of professional psychiatrist, and had even seemed questionable to her on more than one occasion. Could she have taken it one step further, and brought this all upon them?

Emma was far too sceptical, far too scientific, to believe that this was some sort of coincidence. The breakout could not be due to a random technical fault, even with last night’s storm. Not with this timing; they had all arrived, and then the problems had begun. Correlation didn’t equal causation, but in this case it was far too suspicious to have happened by chance. It could have been the hackers Durgan had mentioned, having carefully planned their strike on the park’s first day, but there was no real evidence that these remote villains even existed. Personally, she suspected problems much closer to home.

With all the controls in one building, the Hub was the perfect place from which to wreak havoc. Emma remembered that the atmosphere in the tower had been less than cheery when she’d left, and Alex had recently stormed out of the observation room. Searching the building with anger in her heart, who knew what she’d found? If she’d found some sort of power supply, might she have impulsively shut it off? Emma would never have even thought her colleague capable of such things, but after seeing so much horror today there was little left beyond her imagination. Alex had not been a cruel woman, but emotion could so easily trump reason. On this island of monsters, in fact, reason barely seemed to exist.

Emma regretted her own feelings towards the prisoners, her concern for their well-being above that of the staff and guests. After spending time with Elena and her family, and seeing her pain at their loss, she realised that the latter group were far more deserving of her care. Not that there was anything she could do, now. They’d been heading back to the Hub to get help for Noel and Aiden, and to check that Alex was safe, but now everything was lost.

If Charon was out here in the open, flanked by a killer, the Hub must have been breached. Alex had been no safer in the tower than they had been out in the truck, and her fellow observers could hardly have fared better. Emma didn’t ask after Henry Pike, or Shah the security man. If they were dead, as seemed overwhelmingly likely, she couldn’t bear to hear it. If they had somehow survived, it would probably have only been because the killers hadn’t known they were there. She hardly wanted to give them away.