Thirty-two: Interrogation

Silence. I fell silent, weighing the Bosky soldier's threat with the threat of execution by my own government. It was a dead end either way and I didn't know what I should do.

Photos were taken out of a folder and placed in front of me. One by one.

There I was sleeping on the Bosky soldier's shoulder in front of a shop. His jacket had covered me, his head faced away from the camera. The submerged train station could just be made out in the blurry background.

There he was slipping that wonderful baguette into my hand while putting something in my mouth. There he was walking past me. It was obviously him. In the photo, it looked like our hands were touching. Then there was him nodding to me from a cafe table and I seemed to be nodding in return. There was a photo of my colleagues and I walking home. I had stopped to pick up a piece of paper I had dropped and there he was in the alley shadow, crouching beside me - it was as if I was picking something up from him. There was even one of when I had fallen asleep on the hill behind the toilet block in the Field. He was leaning over me, making it look like we were kissing. There were more and all of them looked like I was involved in suspicious activity. Somehow, the Bosky soldier's face never showed clearly in any of the photos.

As if he'd known the camera was there.

As if he'd been using me.

Setting me up.

Any icy claw gripped my chest.

How was I supposed to explain my way out of this?

While I was still blinking, more photos were tossed on top. Some were old, from the previous year or so. These photos were more recent and had black marker recording the date and day on the backs of them. Someone had been stalking me. In more than one, the figure of the Bosky soldier could be seen somewhere in the background, but never his face.

Was he more than just a Bosky soldier and actually more of a Bosky spy? Was there a difference?

One photo showed a schedule. After a moment's thought, I realised it was my schedule. My regular hours and habitual patterns, with the times I was more exposed explicitly highlighted. Then there was a diary calendar. It showed the dates when I had been ill and recorded the movements of the Bosky soldier in relation to me. A rough war timeline and plan was visible. The Boskies had pushed harder during the times I had been sick.

In some photos, I recognised other Boskies from the night of the invasion. They wore different disguises but I could still tell it was them. It showed their various attempts to get close to me. A bare, gleaming knife was obvious in one picture. A thin fishing line was seen in the hands of the man whom I had first labelled a flamboyant musician. It looked like they were trying to kill me. But the moment my Bosky soldier turned up, they turned away.

My, it looked like all my stalkers had been busy. It also looked as if I owed the mountain climbing Bosky my life a few times.

Besides that, there was the occasional photo that showed the government spies who had been following me. I recognised them from their body shapes and postures more than their disguises.

There were photos of me going to and from work. Me running, shopping, climbing the Compound walls. I had known my government was spying on me. I had known the Bosky soldier had been following me around, although I couldn't fathom why. Unless perhaps he was making sure I didn't report him? As for being on a hit list, what for? I was just an ordinary girl, trying to survive the war, so that I could go home to my family one day.

With shaking hands, I sorted the photos out. The two agents didn't say a thing. They just watched. Some photos had the same kind of flair and I assumed that they were taken by the same photographer. Those with black marker obviously belonged to a different set. Some pictures were obviously taken from surveillance cameras. In the end, there were four groups.

The first group were the surveillance camera photos. They were the most objective and yet one or two of them looked suspiciously like brush drops where me and my stalker were exchanging information.

The second group were the staged photos. If I wasn't wrong, these were staged and shot by the Boskies themselves. Whoever had done them had been either very professional or had been set up by the Boskies who had already been alerted to his presence.

The third group were the ones with black marker pen. This group was obviously out to get me. From what I had gathered, they were Boskies too. The Bosky soldier's own team that I had seen at Heartly Station on Invasion Day.

The last group, I guessed, were genuine snapshots taken by my government appointed watchers. These weren't bad. A bit blurry but at least they had caught a few different Boskies in the same frame. Even so, this photographer had still always somehow missed taking the picture of my Bosky soldier.

Did I just say my Bosky soldier? I meant the Bosky stalker.