Miss Quill threatens Charlie with an alien gun, an excerpt from the Class novel What She Does Next Will Astound You
[Charlie had know he needed to be prepared.] Because one day, she’d find a way around her processing and shoot him.
In some ways it was a relief. Having Quill point a gun at him felt like being able to breathe out at last. There it was. As suspected. Yet, at the same time, he felt a twinge of disappointment, regret. As though, maybe, in their time together they’d become... well, not fond of each other, no, but still that they’d developed some sort of bond.
All the same, it wasn’t stopping her from aiming that gun.
[...]
Charlie’s voice was even calmer than usual. His posture shifted, with regal delicacy, and he leaned forward, into Quill. ‘Go on. Do it.’
She stared back at him.
April began to have doubts about how this was going to end. She’d assumed that she was right, that Quill was bluffing - she wouldn’t really, she couldn’t really, could she? She talked all the time about it, but she wasn’t really a cold-blooded killer, was she? April remembered the three Skandis exploding on the beach. Or maybe she was wrong.
‘One word’, said Quill, eventually, that little smile back on her face. ‘I just want to hear one word from him about how sorry he is - about what he did to me, about what happened to my people. And then I’ll let him go.’
‘You’ll pull the trigger’, Charlie corrected. He still seemed icily calm.
‘Well, yes’, Quill admitted. ‘But you’ll die knowing you’re the better man. That’s what you love, isn’t it?’, she sneered. ‘The moral high ground. Slavery and slaughter that you can feel smug about.’
‘You keep saying that you are my slave.’ Charlie’s calm carried on until even April felt infuriated. ‘You are not my slave. People buy slaves because they want them. I appreciate you, what you do for me. But,’ and the calm got a degree chillier, ‘I do not want you.’
‘Suppose there was another way?’, began Quill. She seemed to have stopped blinking. April wondered if she actually needed to blink, or if it just was something she did to appear more human that she’d forgotten about. Come to think of it, Charlie wasn’t blinking either. The two were just staring at each other like chess players. With a gun.
Charlie picked up Quill’s sentence. ‘If there was another way to keep me safe? Then yes, I would happily take it. And we would both be free of each other.’ He smiled a very calm smile. ‘I’m afraid that is all you are going to get out of me.’
The two stood there. Quill pointing the gun. Charlie, head tilted back insolently, eyes daring her to do it.
‘See?’ Quill turned back to April with a helpless shrug. ‘Even at gunpoint, even in the last moments of his life, he cannot say sorry. He is just impossible. And the more human he becomes, the worse he gets. Unbelievable.’ She rolled her eyes, dropped the gun and walked out.
April let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
Charlie picked up the gun and looked at it.
‘Are you okay?’, April said to him. ‘After all that? Are you sure you’re okay?’
Charlie turned to her, baffled for a moment, and then smiled the dazed smile he used for trying to understand a joke.
‘Ah’, he said, and pointed the gun at his head. It clicked. Nothing happened.
He passed it back to April.
‘It’s genome-locked’, he said. ‘It’s set to only kill one species - the Skandis.’
‘You knew?’ She was incredulous.
Charlie was nonplussed. ‘It was a reasonable surmise. Humans are, forgive me, violent. Genome-locking the gun is a safety precaution to prevent the soldiers here from turning on each other or on whoever runs this facility.’
‘But you were absolutely certain?’, April continued, amazed. ‘You knew that she’d not be able to use the gun, that she’d not found a way around that. Did she know that you knew too?’
Charlie continued to examine the gun placidly. ‘Oh, she may have guessed. She may even have disabled the lock, but, there’s one thing you have to remember.’ He looked up at April and his eyes were sad and serious. ‘Ever since she was assigned to me, I knew that sooner or later she would point a gun at me. From day one, I have been rehearsing what to say.’
