by Eoin Colfer
His final word was to Cosmo. “Sorry,” he said, and slipped over the edge.
It wasn’t a long way down. Schoolchildren have jumped from higher trees and escaped without so much as a twisted ankle. But when Ziplock went over, he went over backward, dragging Cosmo with him.
There was no time for prayer, or screams. Cosmo’s life did not flash before his eyes. One moment he was pleading with Marshal Redwood; the next, land and sky flipped, and he was facedown in the next building’s rooftop generator.
Alive, though. Definitely. In some considerable pain, but alive. Pain was proof of that. Cosmo’s vision was filled with multicolored wires, sparks, ancient transformers, and rust chips that fluttered around his head like bloody snowflakes.
His arm jiggled. Ziplock was moving.
“No,” Cosmo whispered, no air for shouting. “Don’t move.”
Ziplock moved again. Maybe he had heard, maybe he hadn’t. Cosmo would never know. His partner’s movement dragged the metal cuff across two exposed wires, diverting ten thousand volts from the supply wires and into the two boys.
The charge catapulted the boys from the generator, spinning them across the roof puddles like stones across a pond. They came to rest against a guardrail. On their backs. Looking up.
Redwood peered down from above. Both boys’ patterns had disappeared from his tracker. The generator could have shorted out the electronegative halogen microbeads in their pores. But most likely they were dead.
It was obvious what could have happened. The fugitives had been knocked from the roof by the rainstorm. It was a simple lie, and believable, so long as he did not stick around here to get photographed by some snoop satellite. The marshal hurried to the stairwell. Better to let someone else find the bodies. He would be in the restaurant helping the injured when it happened.
Cosmo did not have the energy to speak. His entire body felt bleached by the electric shock. All he could hear was his own heartbeat, slowing with every breath. Missing beats. Shutting down.
His eyes played tricks on him. Hallucinations, he supposed. Strange inhuman creatures appeared on the walls of the surrounding buildings, crawling at amazing speeds with no regard for gravity. They hurtled over the lip of the building, veering sharply downward toward the crash site. Two split from the group, swerving toward the injured boys. One settled on Cosmo’s chest. Weightless. Watching him with large, expressionless eyes. The creature was the size of an infant, with smooth, blue, translucent skin, four slender limbs, and an oval head. Its features were delicate and impassive. Hairless and smooth. Sparks rolled in its veins instead of blood.
The second creature flickered in the corner of his eye, settling beside Ziplock, cradling his smoking head. Cosmo felt his heart skip another beat. Maybe two. What were these creatures? Fear sent a shiver through his chest, like another blast from the generator.
His spine arched in shock and panic, bucking the creature on his chest, but it held on effortlessly. It reached out a blue hand. Four fingers, thought Cosmo, only four. The hand settled on his heart and sucked. Somehow the hand was pulling the pain from his body. The agony dipped, faded, and was gone. The more the creature sucked, the brighter its light became, until its blue glow morphed to sunset gold. Cosmo used the last of his energy to look down. Something was flowing from him in a starry stream. He knew what it was. Life. Cosmo felt his days and months slips from his body like water through a fractured dam. The creature was killing him. The panic rose in him again. He wanted to struggle—he tried to grab the creature, but his muscles had turned to jelly.
Then things happened very quickly. Three kids appeared on the rooftop. Two boys and a girl. They weren’t medics of any kind—that much was clear from their clothing and their ages—but at least they were human.
“Two here,” said the first, a tall older boy clothed from head to foot in black. “I’ll take them. You check below.”
His comrades scurried to the roof’s edge, peering down to the street.
“They’re looking, but they’re not landing,” said the second newcomer. A Latina girl, maybe fifteen, with a gang tattoo over one eyebrow. “Too much water. The fire brigade are hosing the truck.”
The first youth drew what looked like a torch from his shoulder holster, twisting a ring on its base. White sparks flickered at the business end. He fired the device on the move: two blasts of pure electricity erupted from the barrel of his strange weapon. The effect was spectacular. The white bolts sank into the ghostly creatures’ skin, branching into a million tendrils. Each one traced a vein, fusing with the sparks already in there. The creatures shuddered and convulsed, their skin swelling to bursting point. And past it. They both exploded into a dozen perfect spheres of light, which drifted away on the breeze.
“Wow,” croaked Cosmo, wasting his last gasp of air.
“A live one!” said the group’s third member, who seemed about six years old. Blond, with a child’s disproportionately large head, he knelt beside Cosmo, checking his heartbeat and shining a light into one pupil. “No dilation and irregular heartbeat. He needs a defibrillator, Stefan. We need to kick-start his heart.”
Hallucination. It must be an hallucination.
The tall youth, Stefan, loomed in Cosmo’s fading vision. “What about the other one, Ditto?”
Ditto placed a hand on Ziplock’s chest. For a second Cosmo thought he saw lifestream playing around his fingers. Then . . .
“The other one? No. He’s gone. Not a peep.”
Stefan adjusted his weapon. “Well, I don’t have a defibrillator.”
Ditto stepped away hurriedly. “You sure? This roof is wet.”
Stefan pointed the weapon at Cosmo’s chest. “No,” he said, and fired.
Cosmo felt the charge going in like a sledgehammer through his ribs. Surely it must have broken every bone in his chest. Surely this was the last straw. His body could take no more. He felt his hair straightening, tugging at the pores in his scalp. His jumpsuit caught fire, dropping from his skin in burning clumps. Ditto doused him with the contents of a nearby fire bucket, but Cosmo did not feel the cold. Something else was happening.
Ba-doom . . .
His heart. Beating again. And again.
Ba-doom. Ba-doom.
“We got him!” crowed Ditto. “This guy’s got the will to live of a hungry dog. But he needs serious medical attention. His head is cracked open like an egg.”
Stefan sighed, relieved that his gamble had paid off. He holstered the lightning rod. “Okay. The lawyers will find him. I don’t want them to find us too.”
Cosmo drew his first breath in over a minute. “Please.”
They couldn’t just leave him here. Not after all this. “Take me.”
Stefan did not look back. “Sorry. We have enough trouble looking after ourselves.”
Cosmo knew that Redwood would never allow him to reach the institute alive. “Please.”
The girl leaned over him. “You know, Stefan? Maybe he could make the sim-coffee or something.”
Stefan sighed, holding the door open for his team. “Mona, we go through this every night.”
Mona sighed. “Tough break, kid.”
Cosmo’s heart beat steadily now, sending blood pulsing to his brain. “If you leave me,” he rasped, “they’ll come back.”
And suddenly Stefan was half interested. “Who’ll come back?” he said, striding across the roof.
Cosmo struggled to stay conscious. “The creatures.”
Ditto clapped his hands. “Did you hear that? The creatures, Stefan. He’s a Spotter. Wrap me if he isn’t.”
Stefan shrugged. “It could be nothing. Maybe one of us mentioned the creatures. Maybe it was an hallucination.”
Cosmo coughed up some smoke. “The blue creatures, with electricity in their veins. They were sucking the life out of me.”
“Pretty accurate hallucination,” noted Mona.
Stefan nodded at Ditto. “Okay, we take him. He’s a Spotter.”
The Span
ish girl examined the cuffs. “Okay, Stefan. Gimme a minute.”
“A second, Mona. We can spare a second.”
Mona picked a clip from her hair, jiggling it expertly in the cuff’s lock. In slightly more than a second, Ziplock’s wrist was free, not that it was any good to him now.
Stefan hoisted Cosmo onto his shoulder. “Let’s go. We can open the other cuff at the warehouse.”
Cosmo hung there like a side of meat. He could have spoken then, asked a few more questions. But he didn’t, afraid that if he pestered this tall young man, they would decide not to take him wherever it was that they were going. And anywhere was better than the Clarissa Frayne Institute for the Parentally Challenged.
Cosmo’s brain decided that there was no room for this new feeling of relief and shut him down for repairs.
CHAPTER 2
Spotter
The smell woke Cosmo. The bitter pungent aroma of a nearby sim-coffee pot had set his nostrils twitching. And even though the smell was not unpleasant, it was too much for his raw senses. Everything made the headache worse. The rasp of material, the light hammering on his eyelids, and now this smell.
But even worse than the pain was the thirst.
Cosmo tried to open his mouth, but his lips were dry-gummed together. A frustrated moan escaped through his nose. Footsteps approached across a hard-sounding surface.
“Okay, bueno,” said a voice. Female. “Welcome to Abracadabra Street.”
A wet cloth brushed his lips, breaking the seal. Cosmo opened his mouth, squeezing the material between his teeth. The water tasted like life, trickling down his throat.
“Easy, not too much.”
Cosmo opened his eyes a crack, squinting against the glare of sunlight. The girl was ringed by a corona of white light. For a second he thought . . . But no, it was the girl from the roof. The roof?
“Welcome back. Though the way you’re gonna be feeling for a couple of days, maybe you’d rather be dead.”
Cosmo remembered it all then. The crash, the climb, the fall. “Ziplock?” croaked Cosmo, his voice alien and distant.
The girl scratched her forehead, stretching the DNA strand tattooed on her forehead. Cosmo knew that the tattoo was the signature of one of the various Satellite City street gangs. The ink was probably loaded with an isotope that could be tested by a bar scanner. This prevented police infiltration.
“Ziplock?” she said. “You got the energy for one word, and that’s the word you pick?”
Cosmo felt a single tear crawl down his cheek. Ziplock had been just about the closest thing he’d had to a friend.
The girl saw the tear, and made the connection. She winced at her own blunder. “I’m sorry. Ziplock, that was your friend’s name?”
“Is he . . . ?”
“Sorry, kid. He was gone when we got there. We left him behind, remember?”
Cosmo raised his arm. The only thing around his wrist was a bandage.
“The electricity fused part of the cuff to your skin. Ditto had to peel it off. You were lucky the vein didn’t pop.”
Cosmo didn’t feel so lucky, and it wasn’t just his wrist.
“In fact, Ditto had to do quite a bit of work on you. You never would have made it to a hospital, so we had to use whatever was lying around. Your painkiller drip was a bit past the sell-by date, but hey, it didn’t kill you.”
Mona consulted a wall monitor over Cosmo’s bed. “Ditto glued the Achilles tendon in your left heel and replaced your right kneecap with grown-bone.”
Cosmo nodded, aghast.
“We also had to go into your chest and plasti-coat a few of your ribs. I took the staples out this morning. And, of course, I had to shave your head.”
“What?”
Mona shrugged. “It was either that or let your brain fall out on the floor. Lucky for you Ditto had a couple of robotix plates lying around. He used one to patch your fractured skull. Those robotix plates are made of the same material used to armor assault tanks. When your skin heals up, Ditto says you’ll be able to head-butt your way through a brick wall.”
Cosmo remembered something. “Ditto? The little boy.”
Mona glanced over her shoulder. “Shhh! Don’t call him that. He’s very touchy.” The girl stepped closer, lowering her voice. “Ditto is a Bartoli baby. That “little boy” is twenty-eight years old.”
Now it made sense. Doctor Ferdinand Bartoli’s genetic experiments were an infamous chapter in modern history. The doctor had performed gene-splicing tests on a batch of infants in an attempt to create a superhuman. Instead, he corrupted the babies’ own DNA, resulting in a series of mutations. ESP was one side-effect, but the most common was arrested physical development. The Bartoli scandal led to the outlawing of gene experimentation for more than ten years.
Cosmo gingerly rubbed his bristling scalp. A section of his forehead felt hard and stippled.
“There are pressure-release pores in that plate, so don’t poke anything through the skin.”
Robotix plates in his head and Bartoli babies. It was almost too much to take in. “Anything else?”
“That’s about it. Of course there are still a hundred or so staples in various cuts and bruises, but I disguised them with skin-spray. All in all, you’re a lot worse than you look.”
But not worse than I feel, thought Cosmo.
Mona peeled the foil from a patch and stuck it to his arm. “The best thing for you is rest and recuperation. This sedative patch should keep you out for a while. The next time you wake, you might even be able to walk around a bit.”
“No,” protested Cosmo, but it was too late. The sedative was already seeping into his bloodstream.
“’Nighty night,” said Mona gently.
Cosmo’s limbs felt weightless. His head wobbled like a toy dog’s. “ ’Nighty night,” he echoed.
Or maybe he only thought it, because the world was dripping down his eyeballs like wet oil paint down a canvas.
Cosmo woke again about five seconds later, or so it seemed. But that couldn’t be right, because the halogen strip lights were on, and muffled stars poked through the smog beyond old-fashioned hanging curtains. Not many people used curtains anymore, generally react-to-light glass came with the building.
Cosmo ran through his memories as if they were files on a computer screen. Who was he? Cosmo Hill, fourteen years old. Fugitive no-sponsor. Where was he? A warehouse maybe, rescued by a band of creature hunters. A tall teenager, a Latina girl, and a Bartoli baby. Could that be true? It seemed impossible. Could he become part of this strange band? Was that what he wanted?
Cosmo’s brain stuttered to a halt. What did he want? This was a question that nobody had ever asked him. He rarely asked it of himself. The only thing he had ever wanted was to escape from Clarissa, and now that he was out, he had no idea what to do next. But Cosmo did know one thing with absolute certainty. He was never going back to Clarissa Frayne. Never.
Cosmo checked his injuries. The pain was still there— muted, but there. Like a troll under the bridge, ready to pounce if he moved too quickly. The bandage was gone from his wrist, and his entire forearm was covered with skin-spray.
After several minutes of basic breathing and blinking, Cosmo decided to put his limbs to the test. He sat slowly, dizzy from the sedative patch stuck to his arm. He peeled it off, checking the sponge. White. No more juice. That explained why he was awake.
His new knee was covered with a plexi-cast. The transparent cast was filled with an anti-inflammatory that would accelerate the healing process. A green LED over the cast’s x-ray panel told him that the leg was safe to walk on.
Cosmo tested the ground like a swimmer testing arctic waters. His knee twinged, but nothing more. He must have been out for at least forty-eight hours for the cast to have done its job. His forehead was a different story. Every movement, however slight, sent a steel nail of pain hammering into his skull. Almost as bad as the pain was the itch of new skin growing over the robotix plate in his forehead.
He gritted his teeth and began walking, his initial target being the jug of filtered water on the table five yards away. Not exactly a marathon, but not bad, considering what he’d been through.
Cosmo almost reached the table. He would have made it, if it hadn’t been for one thing. A steel mirror bolted to the wall. Cosmo caught sight of his own reflection and, for a moment, thought there was someone else in the room. His dry lips parted to form a single syllable. “Oh.”
The figure in the glass reminded him of a war child from those history vids. Battered and thin, haggard and hangdog. He looked like a miniature Frankenstein’s monster. Cobbled together from various parts. None of them the right size, some of them not even intended for humans. His head was especially grotesque. Completely shaven, with a dozen staple scars crisscrossing the scalp. The robotix plate in his forehead bulged slightly beneath the swollen skin, the pressure pores clearly outlined against the pink tissue. The only things that he recognized were the wide-spaced round brown eyes.
Cosmo completed his journey shakily, grasped the jug with both hands, and drank from the neck. Most of the water splashed down his front, but some went in. Everything was being fixed, he told himself. It was all temporary.
But not for Ziplock. It was too late to fix him.
Ziplock. His friend should have been here with him. But where was here exactly? Cosmo looked around for the first time. He was in a large open warehouse constructed from pig-iron polymer. The windows were tall and thin, church style, with blackout curtains hanging on each side. Workbenches and electronic equipment littered the concrete floor, and power cables flowed from every wall socket like multicolored snakes. Various cubicles were sectioned off by mobile dividers, and a dozen hard drives hummed inside the makeshift rooms. But no people. Besides him, the warehouse was completely deserted.
Cosmo moved slowly, getting used to his new knee. There was a kitchen area in one corner. Nothing cozy. Just a two-ring burner, molded garden furniture, and a pot of sim-coffee. A bunch of lilies lay on the table, cellophane wrapped, with a bubble of water at the base. Real flowers. Expensive. There was a card stuck between two of the lilies. Mother, it read. I miss you more than ever.
