Sleepless

by Lou Morgan

  “No. Too risky.”

  “For who?”

  “You.”

  Mia had forced Kara to lean back over the balcony rail. She was alarmingly strong, and Izzy recognized the strength. It was the same strength that had pinned her to the wall beneath Grey’s hand. It was the same strength that had smashed up the cars and the door downstairs. It was the same strength that had hoisted Juliet’s body on to a meat hook and up into the roof. It was the kind of strength you found when you lost your mind.

  Kara’s eyes flicked desperately from one to the other of them. She must have seen Izzy’s panicked expression. She certainly saw Grey’s stern glare at Mia – it showed on her face, just as it showed on Grey’s that he was trying to figure out how to knock Mia away from Kara. A single tear spilled down her cheek, and she took as deep a breath as she could manage with Mia’s hand locked round her throat.

  “Under the sofa,” Kara gasped. “Look under the sofa.”

  “So you’re not completely useless after all, then,” Mia said, with a flick of her hair, then she shoved her other hand hard against Kara’s chest.

  It happened in slow motion – Kara’s wobble as she lost her balance, bent achingly far back over the rail. She slipped back, back, back, tipping over and starting to fall. Grey leaped towards the balcony, but it was too late – Kara had gone too far over. But as she fell, her fingers reached up and closed tightly around the top of Mia’s arm beneath the soft fabric of her T-shirt. Taken completely by surprise, Mia tipped forward – and in an instant, the two of them had vanished over the edge.

  Izzy didn’t wait for the sound.

  She could see Grey trembling even as he stepped in through the balcony door. “They… She…”

  “They fell.”

  “I wanted to get to her. I wanted… I wanted to…”

  “I know.”

  Her legs gave out beneath her and she slumped to the floor. She needed to cry, but she couldn’t. She just felt hollowed-out and empty. The pain that had been building behind her eyes was now a violent headache that made the edges of everything jar. She could barely even lift her hands to push her hair out of her face. All she could think about was lying down on the floor and going to sleep, right where she was. It was close enough to the time now, surely – it had to be. A couple of hours each way couldn’t possibly hurt. Not after everything they’d been through.

  She lay back on the hard floor. Maybe she didn’t even need to sleep; she just needed to rest her eyes for a minute. If she did, the headache might go away.

  All she had to do was close her eyes…

  “Hey!” The next thing Izzy knew, Grey was shaking her shoulder. “Don’t you flake out on me now. Not now, Iz.”

  “I didn’t – did I?” She sat bolt upright. Everything whirled around her as her body tried to keep up with the sudden movement.

  “No. You’re fine, but it was close enough. I turn my back on you for a second, I look round and you’re settling down for a nap. You can’t do it, Iz.”

  “I’m so tired.” It came out as a whine.

  Grey raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re not the only one. I keep wondering whether this is all really a dream and when we’re going to wake up.”

  “Some dream.” She knew the feeling. However, she’d also pretty much decided that if it was a dream, there would be a lot more Liam Hemsworth and a lot less dying.

  Grey held up a phone and smiled grimly. “I looked under the sofa, like Kara said.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “Kara’s. Well, obviously. But she’d left the voice memo running…”

  “She taped Mia?”

  “Every word. It’s been running for ages.”

  “So, it was definitely all her?” The truth started to sink in. There were no shadowy people chasing them. No one was hunting them down – it was just another one of Noah’s conspiracy theories. They were so paranoid from the pills, that they’d swallowed the idea whole, and it had fuelled itself.

  Dom’s death, Juliet’s, Noah’s, Tigs’s and now Kara’s… They had all been Mia.

  “She killed Dom?”

  “That’s what it sounds like to me.”

  “But she killed Dom. She killed her twin brother. What’s worth that?”

  “Think about it. The pills made her as good as him, at least for the exams. You know what they’re… What they were like.” He corrected himself sadly. “All that teasing each other? Competing over everything? I guess all that, with the pills, made her turn on him.”

  “And when he started to freak out and threaten to tell someone…”

  “He had to go.” Grey hung his head. Looking down at himself, he drew a sharp breath in. “We need to leave, Izzy.” There was sudden panic in his voice.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Look at us. We’ve got blood all over us, and there’s three bodies down there on the podium.”

  “The police.”

  “Exactly. They’re going to be looking for wherever they fell from – and they’re going to start pretty high up.”

  With perfect timing, one of the lifts on the landing pinged.

  “We need to not be here,” hissed Grey. “This way.” He held his hand out to her, helping her to her feet. He stepped through the door on to the balcony – the exact same place Mia had been standing.

  “I can’t.” Izzy froze to the spot. “It’s so high. So high.”

  “You have to – because any moment now, there are going to be police everywhere. And that’s if there aren’t already. We have to go now, and this is the only way out.” He tugged on her hand, and that was when she realized he was still holding it. “Stay as close to the wall as you can. There might be someone down there, looking up.”

  Someone hammered on the front door of the apartment. “Did you hear that?” Izzy asked and Grey nodded. “I guess it’s real, then.”

  He gave her a puzzled look. “We’re going to follow the balcony round till we get to the fire escape stairs, and then we’re going to take them all the way down to the car park.”

  “The door down there – it’s smashed. The lock won’t work.”

  He gave her another look. “We’ll cross that one when we get to it, shall we? For now, we just need to not be here.”

  “But…” Izzy struggled to clear her head. Everything was moving so fast – too fast. Was there any way out of this? “What if we just … told them. If we told the police everything. We could just give them the phone. Maybe they could help? It would be over…”

  Another knock on the door.

  Grey wasn’t listening. Not to her, anyway. He slipped the phone into his pocket. “All right. Let’s go.”

  They made their way along the balcony, peering around the divider to the next apartment. All the curtains were drawn and the doors on to the balcony were closed.

  “I think we’re good,” Grey said, giving the divider a shove. It grated against the concrete, but grudgingly it swung aside. They closed it behind them and padded along the outside of the flat as quickly as they could. At the far end of that side of the tower, a door much like the one to the car park opened into the wall. It wasn’t locked – instead, it was fastened with a glass safety bar, which Grey smashed with the side of his fist. “Ladies first,” he said, holding it open for her.

  A gust of wind rushed up the stairs and through the door as the pressure inside the building shifted. So high up, the slightest breeze whistled through the ventilation shafts and made eerie moaning noises. Izzy peeped over the edge and looked right down the stairwell.

  That was a mistake.

  Thirty-plus floors of bare concrete stairs spiralled away from her. As she watched, they actually started to spin round and round. Something metallic flashed through the centre of the tower and was gone.

  “You OK there?” Grey was waiting for her on the third step.

  “Sure,” she said weakly. Her problem with heights was on the verge of being A Serious Problem.

  “Just don�
�t look down.”

  “I’m trying not to. It’s just that there’s such a lot of down. It’s kind of hard to miss.”

  “Stick to the wall and you’ll be fine.” He was trying to be reassuring, but he was starting to sound impatient, too.

  “‘Fine’ is such a loose concept, don’t you think?”

  “All you’ve got to do is hold it together a few more hours.”

  Izzy was so tired. She was somewhere beyond tired. She was even ready to be led down the stairs, one flight at a time, by Grey. She didn’t care any more. She could barely lift her feet. Her tongue felt three sizes too big for her mouth and her eyes had been replaced with small, round stones that someone had left in a fire for a while, then stuffed back into the empty sockets. Her head throbbed more with every step she took, and there was a loud buzzing sound that she could have sworn was a…

  A saw.

  The metal flash.

  As the buzzing sound got louder and louder, she could see Grey talking to her, but she couldn’t hear him. And she could see him frowning, watching her, wondering what was wrong and why she had stopped moving. He couldn’t see what she could. He couldn’t see it, so it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be real, could it? But what about the gouges in the walls? They looked real enough, and Izzy was sure that if she touched them, her fingers would catch on the rough edges. What about the dust piled on the edges of the steps where the blade had sliced through concrete and paint and anything else it happened to find in its path? She could almost smell it.

  Suddenly, the razor-sharp disc was swinging straight at her. Vicious metal teeth hurtled towards her, spinning first one way and then another – and she had no time to move. It knocked her back, pinning her to the wall. She felt the cold, hard pressure of the blade on her stomach – and felt it tearing its way through her, ripping right out through her side. She tried to cry out but could make no sound. Blood bubbled up into her throat as she reached for Grey, standing helpless on the stairs. He had his back to her now – hadn’t seen, hadn’t heard. How could he not have heard?

  The blade was swinging back, heading straight for him.

  No sound came out, no matter how hard she tried. She felt herself sliding down the wall as the saw blade scythed through Grey’s shoulder. He dropped to his knees, turning as he fell and crying out. His face twisted in pain and in shock. Their eyes met as the saw came back for another swing.

  “Come on, Izzy!”

  She was jolted out of the trance by Grey calling to her. There he stood, still three steps ahead of her and without a scratch on him. Her hands jumped to her stomach, feeling for the spot where she’d been sliced by the blade. Nothing.

  She peeled herself away from the wall and took a couple of unsteady steps down. “I don’t think I can take much more of this. I just want it to be over. I don’t care any more. I just want it to stop.”

  “Bad one?” he asked gently.

  “You could say that.”

  “Can’t be worse than the yellow line trying to eat you, can it?”

  “You want to bet?”

  They made their way down the stairs, clinging to the handrail, to the walls, to each other. Every step was a mountain. Every breath was a fight. Izzy lost count of the number of times she stumbled and nearly took the pair of them down. Grey wasn’t much better, either; his usually confident step unsteady and unsure. By the time they’d made it down more than thirty floors, all the way to the car park level, her legs were shaking so hard that she couldn’t ever imagine feeling steady on them again. Her feet throbbed and her heart sank as she stared at the broken glass in the door.

  “I told you. It’s broken.”

  “And how can you be so sure?”

  “Because I did it. You know, when I was all woohoo…” She made a corkscrewing motion with her finger alongside her ear.

  “You’re always woohoo. But you only smashed the one side, didn’t you?” Grey pointed to the lock. On this side, it was untouched.

  The door opened into the car park.

  “Show-off.”

  “Well, yeah. Let’s face it, if I went psycho on a door, at least I’d do it properly.”

  “You’re not helping.” Izzy shook her head.

  “I’m just trying to hold on to what’s left of my mind.”

  “You and me both,” she sighed.

  She let him go first. He seemed to know the car park level better than she did – after all, he had lived there longer. He turned sharply right, away from the smashed cars still lurking in the gloom and the faint sound of sirens filtering through from the Beech Street tunnel. It wouldn’t be long before the car park was full of police, too – and how long would it take them to put the bodies in Smithfield together with what they found at the bottom of the tower? How long before they found Dom? How long before someone worked out that the one thing all these dead kids had in common was that they went to Clerkenwell. And where would it go from there?

  “Shouldn’t really come this way,” he muttered as he checked around them and put his shoulder to a rusty sheet of metal covering a door. “They’re meant to have locked this one down properly, but it’s still open. One of the lobby porters showed me once. I think everyone else has forgotten it…”

  The sheet of metal fell away to reveal a solid steel door. Both the door handle and lock were missing. In their place was a large strip of rubber, nailed into a loop to make a temporary handle. Judging by how cracked the rubber was, it had been a temporary handle for a very long time. Grey hauled the door open and closed it again after them.

  “Where are we?” They had come out into a short corridor. Behind them was a blank wall, in front of them was another glass and steel security door. Everything beyond it was dark. Lining the corridor itself were two rows of what looked like wire mesh cages, each of them just taller than an adult and wide enough for both Grey and Izzy to stand side by side in them.

  “Residents’ stores,” Grey said. “You never been down here?”

  “No, I haven’t.” Izzy peered into one of the cages. It was largely empty, except for a looming circular shape.

  “Just a bike,” said Grey, holding up Kara’s phone. The light from the screen illuminated the inside of the storage locker, proving that it was indeed just a bike balanced on its rear wheel and wedged into the cage.

  “The way out?” she asked, pointing at the door. “Where does it go?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The door opened on to the steps down to the garden, which gave them a choice between taking the stairs up to the forecourt of Lauderdale, hoping they weren’t spotted, or across the garden and round into the back of the tower through the parking levels.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Grey said with a shrug. “Both suck.”

  “Yes, they do. They really, really do.”

  They chose the garden.

  Izzy tried to ignore the shadows beneath the bushes. She pretended she didn’t see the shape swinging from the branch of the big tree – the one that looked uncannily like a body strung up by its throat. She chose not to look at the darkened windows of Juliet’s house as they crept past it. This wasn’t how the summer was supposed to go; wasn’t how her life was supposed to go. None of it was. And somehow, knowing it was Mia who had done all those things made it worse than if it had been a stranger. Mia, whose apartment they’d all been in. Mia, who was always the one who knew where classes were and would cover for you if you were late. Mia, the organized one. The one who would always have time for you if you had a problem. She’d never let on that she was that jealous of Dom. She’d always shrugged off the idea of competing with him or comparing herself to him as a joke – at least, she’d never let on to Izzy that it was anything more.

  Maybe Grey had been right. Maybe you never did really know your friends.

  They slipped through the garden, and the solid blocks of the Barbican loomed overhead, looking down on them. Lauderdale Tower rose so high above them that it seemed to go on forever, and for a hear
tstopping moment Izzy was convinced it was about to topple over and come crashing down right on their heads. She shook the thought away.

  The sky was already pink and starting to darken at the edges, and high above, there were fine streaks of orange-purple clouds. How could it be the evening already? Time had taken on a soft, stretchy feel – minutes had turned into hours and hours into seconds. She couldn’t tell any more. It was all distorted and wrong.

  Wrong. If ever a word could sum up a situation, that was the one. Well. There were others, but they were definitely not the kind of words a Clerkenwell student wanted to be caught using…

  She stifled a giggle and Grey stared at her, shocked.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I was just thinking, and then I thought about school … and then I kind of wondered exactly how all this is going to end. Because, you know, even if they don’t find out about the pills, we’re still basically the only two left out of all our friends and there are going to be questions and I don’t think it makes a whole lot of difference how we answer them because every way you look at it I reckon we’re pretty much screwed!” She could hear her voice getting higher and higher until it had taken on the same sing-song tone as Mia’s had.

  Grey gawped at her – and took a very careful step back. “I think we need to get you home.”

  The car park level of Lauderdale was as deserted as always, and Izzy was glad that she wasn’t there alone. Just in case she got any more secretly destructive urges and decided to take them out on her neighbours’ cars with a lump of metal – or, for a bit of variety, tried to kick the windscreens in.

  Except suddenly there weren’t any cars. And she wasn’t in the car park any more.

  She was in the lower lift lobby, waiting for the lift with Grey. He was staring at her again.

  “What?”

  “You.”

  “Weren’t we just in the car park?”

  “Yeah, we were. And we walked through and came here, and you started whispering something to yourself and you’re really freaking me out.”

  “But we were…”

  “And now we’re here, OK?” He poked at the button again. There was a sign next to one of the lift doors, written in careful block lettering and informing them that lifts two and three would be out of service for the next forty-eight hours. No wonder things were slow.