Cerys grinned. She was starting to feel just as nerdy as Catriona or Amy, getting excited over GPS signals. She hadn’t spent much time with Catriona before these past couple of days, but she was beginning to appreciate her talents and her dedication to the task in hand. She had the same drive as Cerys, and they seemed to complement each other’s working styles. When her training was over, Cerys wondered if she could go wherever Catriona was, to continue their winning partnership.
She climbed out from under the blanket, stretched into the chill air of the room, and went to find both towel and shower. When she returned wrapped in the towel, Catriona was seated at her computer, and a pile of unfamiliar clothes rested on the end of the sofa.
‘I thought you might want something fresh to wear,’ she said. ‘Coffee’s on the table.’
Cerys pulled on the cord trousers and soft knitted jumper, pleased to find they fitted her well, even if their sense of fashion was miles apart. She sat back down on the sofa and sipped at the strong, dark roast. The sleep-deprived, caffeine hangover clearly demanded more caffeine.
‘I got a text from Jason,’ Cerys said. ‘Or maybe Amy. Probably Jason.’
‘Oh?’
Cerys waited a few moments, allowing Catriona’s brain to catch up with her mouth. She suddenly turned in her chair, staring at Cerys.
‘From inside the compound?’
‘Has to be. The signal jammer must be dead.’
‘We can go out there and get an exact location now.’
‘First, we have an errand to run.’
‘We do?’ Catriona frowned at her. Her coffee clearly hadn’t kicked in yet.
‘Find Alby Collins and shake him down for information.’
Catriona turned back to her computer. ‘Do you have a phone number for him?’
Cerys stood up and swung Catriona’s chair back round.
‘Oh no. We do this the old-fashioned way.’
As Cerys parked her bike outside Dylan’s garage in Canton, she could sense Catriona’s regret at agreeing to be her wingwoman on this trip. They were both battered by the rain, Cerys’ leather doing a better job of keeping out the elements than Catriona’s denim. They trudged through the puddles in silence, Cerys resisting the urge to kick out at the muddy water and send it flying. Cerys’ feet led them to her favourite no-go pub and the place to find out about any bad behaviour in the local area, probably because it was happening right in front of you.
‘Welcome to The Black Sheep,’ she said, ushering Catriona to a dark table in the corner, in a place filled with shadowy corners.
It was very early for a pub to be open, but then Cerys suspected the place didn’t actually close. No copper was going to come and look too closely, not when he risked losing his good looks over it. They were probably the first police to set foot in there for years.
Cerys ordered them both bitter, and was pleased that Catriona drank deeply, even though it was first thing in the morning. They sat for a few minutes, saying little, as Cerys scanned the place for a likely target. Her eyes landed on someone she hadn’t expected to see, someone she didn’t want to see, but he would be able to give her the information she needed.
‘Give me two minutes, then follow me in.’
Without waiting for an answer, Cerys got up with her pint and crossed the bar in a few strides, sitting down at the table with three Cardiff boys who were clearly hanging from more than caffeine, more than alcohol.
‘Stuart,’ she said pleasantly.
Stuart Williams looked up at her and mustered a shadowed grin, the expression pulling at the thick web of scars on his face. He had aged in the years since she had seen him, the confident and cocky gang boy fading into obscurity and a love of hard drugs. She couldn’t believe she had once dated him. She didn’t want to think too closely about how much that was just to piss off her big brother.
‘Cerys Carr. I hear you’re a pig now.’
‘I am,’ she said, owning it. ‘But I’m off duty. You seen Alby Collins?’
‘Yeah, I have. What’s it to you?’
‘He owes Jason.’
Stuart laughed. ‘With four years of interest, is it?’
Had it really been four years? It didn’t feel like so little time since Jason went down. Which meant it was less than three years since her and Stuart…
‘Can you help me?’
‘What’s in it for me?’
The real question. She saw his eyes roaming her body and felt sick with it. Then, she realised he wasn’t interested in her – just assessing her clothes, her look, her confidence, to see how much she was worth. How much she could give to him in cold, hard cash.
‘I’ll give you twenty.’
It was too low for Stuart’s pride, but enough for a few bags. Enough to blow away another night. It was a sign of how much he craved the hit that he didn’t even haggle, just held out his hand and twitched his fingers.
Cerys pulled out the twenty from her pocket, where she'd stashed it earlier, and held it out. He reached, and she withdrew – playing the game. His eyes never left the note.
‘He’s at his mam’s place. Stuck in a K-hole for days.’
Cerys flicked the note into Stuart’s hand, annoyed with herself that she'd had to give it up for such an obvious tip. His fingers brushed over hers, lingering, but she didn’t let him take hold. She was up and leaving, just as Catriona was rising from the table. Cerys caught her arm and they swept out of the pub together and back into the rain. She walked quickly, trying to put some distance between them and Stuart, just in case he took it into his head to follow. Catriona didn’t ask questions, just kept pace with her, until they were out of Canton and over the bridge into the centre of town, the Millennium Stadium on one side and Cardiff Castle on the other.
‘Was that Stuart Williams?’ Catriona asked, at last.
‘Yes.’
Catriona subsided into silence again, which Cerys was grateful for. She wasn’t in the mood to talk. She also wasn’t in the mood to dwell on her past mistakes, or her more recent good fortune, but her brain took her there anyway. Without Jason and Amy, without Owain, she could’ve been sitting at that table with Stuart, never thinking further than the next hit. It had been two years, four months, and a handful of days since she'd dumped Stuart for breaking her brother’s arm. It felt far too close. She felt right on the edge of that life.
‘Do we need backup for this?’
Cerys suddenly realised she'd walked them all through town and out into Butetown, standing in the street outside Alby Collins’ mam’s house. Only one street over from where she lived. They'd spent a lot of time at Alby’s house as kids, because Alby’s mam worked shifts and therefore they had free run of the place all evening, all night.
‘No, it’s fine. Wait for me.’
Cerys walked up to the front door and knocked. She wasn’t surprised when Mrs Collins answered the door in her dressing gown, bleary-eyed and taken aback by her presence.
‘Little Cerys Carr. What do you want now?’
‘I’m here to talk to Alby.’
Mrs Collins beckoned her in quickly, shutting the door before Catriona could mount the steps. She walked upstairs at a pace, with Cerys close behind her, noting absently that nothing had changed since she'd last been here a handful of years ago. She gestured towards the closed door of Alby’s room.
‘He’s a good boy,’ she said, sounding like she was desperately trying to convince herself, before retreating to her own bedroom and closing the door.
Cerys knocked and pushed open the door without waiting for a response. The wood pushed aside an empty pizza box and several discarded cans. The room smelled of stale sweat and cannabis. Alby was sprawled on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, nowhere near reality. Cerys crept towards him, watching his flickering eyes, before leaning in to give him a shove.
Alby lur
ched upright and grabbed for her neck.
‘Surprise, bitch.’
Cerys tried to wrench his hands away, but he had secured his grip now, looking at her calmly and assuredly.
‘You’re my special gift, aren’t you? I thought you'd come find me, but not so soon. Not so fucking soon!’
Cerys tried to kick out at him, but the man just laughed
‘You’re still a tiny twiggy thing, Cer. Don’t fight it now. You’ll pass out soon, and then we’ll have fun. I’ve got a needle with your name on.’
Her vision was starting to go black at the edges. She had to do something. She grabbed for the nearest thing – an empty bottle – and threw it. The bottle smashed against the window, showering them in warm lager and shards of glass.
‘Mam can’t help you. She won’t help you. She’s so pleased that her little boy’s home.’
Cerys felt her body go loose, saw Alby’s grin widen, then saw him jerk once as glass rained down once more. She fell to her knees, gasping, as Alby crumpled to the floor in a bloody heap.
Catriona was kneeling beside her, rubbing her back, and radioing for police assistance and an ambulance. Cerys tried to tell her that she was okay, but it came out as a rasp.
‘Shut up,’ Catriona snapped, and Cerys did as she was told.
Chapter 33: Stairway to Heaven, Elevator to Hell
Sick of bed rest and being alone in the dormitory, Jason decided he was done playing the invalid. Lewis had found a pair of crutches lying around a store cupboard, and Jason used them to manoeuvre his way down the corridor and towards his old haunt: the kitchen.
The water was gone from the floor, but the place was freezing cold. The hole in the roof had been patched with a plastic sheet but nothing else, so it was draughty like some haunted castle on a crag above the sea. There was also a bucket acting as a trip hazard, collecting steady drips of water, even though it had stopped raining yesterday.
Jason started work on a bean chilli for lunch, chopping up the last of the onions and carrots, before getting the tomatoes, beans, and spices into the pot. With the rice simmering away, and his cover story firmly established, he turned his attention to the wall of the kitchen that was not, in fact, a wall.
He remembered clearly what he saw before he fell through the ceiling, and that was an extra space beyond where the kitchen should end. Carefully, he worked his way along the wall, tapping on the plaster and examining it for any marks or cracks. He opened the storage cupboard and inspected the back panel, as if it were the door to Narnia, but he couldn’t see anything unusual.
He opened all the cupboards along the wall and, crouching painfully, checked them for any way into the space. Maybe there was access from the Project Room, but it was locked at night and he wasn’t ready to share this theory with anyone else yet. From the chat around him in the mess after his fall, he realised the consensus was that he'd jumped, that Dreadlock had been right to put a watch on him, and that they should continue with that plan. No one realised that someone else had been up on the roof with him, not even Lewis, and he wanted to keep it that way.
Something happened to people when they stepped inside this place. He remembered the effect from prison, the crushing of questions, the swift kick if you stepped out of line. Everything was the routine and keeping your head down and getting on with business. This was like that, but twenty times worse. Because they had all just accepted the price of admission and so they didn’t care about why or how or what happened next.
So, when someone died or got thrown off a roof, everyone took the easiest explanation and ran with it. No one wanted to openly rock the boat, to be the one that sank their chances. He had seen the relief in Lewis’ eyes when Jason stopped asking questions. Questions could get you killed.
If he hadn’t been hanging out with Amy for these past few years, he would’ve been exactly like them. Prison had taught him well. But Amy liked to question everything, and he had caught the bug. Yet even he found himself slipping into the habits of the place, the stupor of the convict, and he had only been here a few days. In a week or two, he might be just like the rest of them.
Opening up the cupboard in the kitchen island, Jason suddenly struck gold. Behind the pots and pans, there was a metal plate on the side nearest the false wall, about the size of the average letterbox. Jason gently pushed at it, and it opened inwards, with a draft of cold air spilling out. What the hell was it for?
He started to let go, then stopped. Very faintly, he could hear something echoing up from below, when it was half-open and allowing air to travel freely to his ears from wherever down there was. At first, he thought it was water or some kind of animal, but the more he listened, the more it sounded like talking.
Then someone laughed.
Shit, they’re right underneath us.
‘Jay Bird? Are you in here?’
Jason let the plate close with a metallic snap. He cursed under his breath and stood up slowly, holding onto one of the small pans.
‘Alright, butt?’ he said to Dreadlock, who was looking at him with something like panic.
‘You’re meant to be in bed,’ he said. ‘Someone was meant to keep an eye out for you.’
‘I thought I'd cook,’ Jason said. ‘Do you like chilli?’
Dreadlock looked at the stove, then gestured at the pan in Jason’s hand. ‘What’s that for then, if you’re doing chilli?’
‘I was thinking of some custard for afters.’
‘You’ll need a bigger pan.’
Jason looked at the pan in his hand. ‘Yeah, you’re right. Don’t know what I was thinking.’
He looked at Dreadlock, waiting for him to leave, but it seemed he was making himself at home. Keeping up the suicide watch. Between his elite duties and this renewed concern for his wellbeing, he was going to have less than no chance at discovering anything worth finding.
Jason bent back down into the cupboard and changed the pans, staring longingly at the plate in the wall. If someone was down there, someone watching them, it meant the hatch was for someone up here. Someone to communicate with their overlords underneath.
They had a spy among them.
His mind jumped between the inmates, sizing each one up in his mind. It had to be someone who'd been in a long time, to get established. Maybe even from the beginning. He returned once more to the elite, the trusted few – and also to the Governor. He was their official overseer, but he was in formal communication with the controllers of this experiment. He didn’t need a secret drop point in the kitchen.
Had it been Mole – by name and nature? The kitchen was his domain, after all. Had he volunteered for the post to gain a line of communication? Had he been murdered for being an informer? Had the killer now marked Jason as a grass, an outsider? It was not the first time the thought had occurred to him, but now it came back stronger, more insistent. He couldn’t walk the walk anymore, and someone had noticed.
‘Is that thinking hurting you, Jay Bird?’
Jason mustered a grin for Dreadlock and shook his head. ‘Just thinking about how long this place has been going.’
‘It’s been 35 weeks,’ Dreadlock said, immediately.
‘That was fast.’
‘We record it every eviction. 34 people gone. 35 weeks.’
‘You’ve been here from the beginning.’
Dreadlock nodded, picking up a cutlery knife and tapping it against the edge of the work surface. ‘A bunch of us have. When it works, it works.’
‘The Governor, you…’
‘Nikolai and Bo too. Stoker came a bit later, a few weeks in. Mole and Gareth are from around that time too. The others have all been pretty recent, in and out – we can’t find the right people for the job.’
‘And what job’s that?’
‘I could tell you.’
‘But then you'd have to kill me?’
Dreadlock laughed. ‘This ain’t the Mafia. I guess you should know, as you’re elite now. The mission we were given, when we came in, was to escape: all of us, outside the perimeter, no wounded or dead. Then we'd get our orders for stage two. Easy, we thought. If this was only the first stage, they must expect us to get on with it. We made half a dozen attempts in the first month alone.’
‘What happened?’
‘We realised it was a fucking waste of time. The odds are so stacked against us that we’re never getting out of here. We might as well just make it into a half-decent place to live until the morons in charge get bored and let us out.’
‘So, what happens in the Project Room?’
‘The new boys throw themselves at the problem, over and over. Sometimes, they look like they’re making progress, but mostly they’re just retreading the same ground. Hijacking the prison transport, cutting the fence, arming ourselves with sticks and climbing trees. All of it’s bollocks. The only way out of here is a vote or total shutdown.’
‘If the game is rigged, why are we playing at all?’
Dreadlock laughed again. ‘You’re smarter than you look, you know that?’
He dropped the cutlery knife to the floor with a clatter, waiting until it had stopped bouncing and settled.
‘It passes the time, don’t it?’
Chapter 34: Collateral History
A severe panic attack could drain her energy for hours, even days. Without Jason to bring her chocolate and tea, to ground her, Amy felt like her anxiety was an entity that she had spent all night and all day fighting against, boxing at shadows.
It was past midday when she roused herself from the folding bed in the corner of her office. She shook off the cobwebs, the wrung-out feeling invading her muscles, like she had been drained of all energy. Was this how marathon runners felt after the finish line? She wished she felt a sense of achievement at surviving, rather than shame at falling down that hole again.
Five minutes without Jason and all her bad habits had kicked in. She needed to shower and dress, eat something with a vitamin, and drink a strong dose of caffeine, but she felt listless and drifting. What was the point? She couldn’t stop Jason from getting hurt. She couldn’t do anything to influence the outcome for him. She could only watch.
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