One Word Kill (Impossible Times Book 1)

by Mark Lawrence

The night had that bitter January edge to it that makes you so very glad we live in centrally heated houses and have warm beds to sleep in. I shivered at the thought that just a dozen generations ago, we’d have counted ourselves lucky to have mud and twigs between us and the outside, that we would have had to go out and labour in the frost, and huddle at night around a pile of burning sticks.

  ‘Freezing.’ I hugged myself. The orange glow of streetlights and the whiter illumination in the hospital car park both conspired to chase the darkness under the bushes, but any warmth they promised was a lie. Frost had started to trace its way across the cars, and the sounds of the street had taken on that brittle quality that cold brings.

  ‘He could be watching, you know.’ Mia stood close, her shoulder to my arm.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rust. If he was after me, then he would only have to know which hospital they took Mum to. He must have known I would come to see her. So, all he had to do was wait out here and follow when I left.’

  ‘Uh.’ It had a certain uncomfortable ring of truth to it. It sounded like the sort of strategy a creature like Rust would use. Exploiting those bonds of human affection that he knew existed but didn’t understand. ‘Wouldn’t he be more interested in your mother? She was the one that cut him after all . . . What did you do? You were a bit late paying a debt that was mostly fake anyway.’

  ‘I crossed him. We both did. And we saw what Mum did to him. And last night just made it worse. He’s the sort that keeps score.’

  ‘He is.’ I knew that much. Once he got a taste of you, Rust wasn’t the sort to let go. Not even now, with Sacks’s crew out hunting him. The interest he had in Mia had moved well past being financial. It may have been more than financial right from the start. And she’d told him no, seen him humiliated, twice. ‘OK, what do we do?’

  ‘Well, we don’t go to Simon’s. Not if we think Rust might be following.’ Mia shook her head. Her breath plumed.

  I sighed. Our options seemed to have been whittled down to a selection of unpleasant choices. ‘Demus told me that once we have the chip he can make the “Rust problem” go away. He also reminded me that we need to get it done in the next few days, or the timing on the memory-wipe won’t match with how it happened for him.’

  ‘Easy then.’ Mia didn’t hesitate. ‘We call the others and get this chip for Demus tonight. That way, we’re all together if Rust comes and we’re not anywhere where our families can get hurt.’

  I bit my lip and nodded. We did need to get the thing done. And as much as I didn’t like the idea of facing Rust out in the dark, I liked it more knowing my friends would be there and knowing he wouldn’t be letting himself in through my back door in the small hours, walking upstairs toward Mother’s room with a knife gleaming in his hand.

  ‘Let’s do it.’

  CHAPTER 21

  We called Elton first, from a piss-stinking phone box just down from the hospital. Mia stared out through the little graffitied panes of glass and held the door open against its leather hinges while I fumbled a ten-pence piece into the slot with numb fingers.

  ‘Elton. We gotta do it tonight. No. Tonight. I’m not kidding. Yes. Yes, she should be fine. Smoke inhalation. She has to stay in. No. No. Yes. We’ll call you from outside the Spot. About half an hour.’ I put down the receiver. ‘Said we’ll meet him outside The Spotted Horse.’ The pub was close to his flat.

  I called John next. He bitched and moaned, of course, but in the end he said he’d come. I could hear the TV in the background and he sounded as if he was eating. ‘I’ll have to work on an excuse to get out, then call to say I’m staying over somewhere. Better to apologise after than to ask permission and be told no!’

  ‘Great. Thanks, John.’

  ‘Hey, tell future you to get me a hover board and we’re all good. Catch you later. The Spot at eleven, right?’

  ‘Right. See you—’

  ‘Hey, wait. I forgot. How’s Mia’s mum?’

  ‘Should be OK. Breathed in a lot of smoke. High tar.’

  ‘Good. Good. And the lovely Mia?’

  ‘She’s coming with us.’

  ‘Really?’ A pause. ‘Fine. She’ll probably be more help than you, anyway.’

  I hung up and dug in my pockets for another ten pence. ‘Now for the difficult one . . .’

  Mia offered me the necessary coin. ‘I can sweet talk Simon, if you like?’ She fluttered her eyelids in my direction. ‘I think he likes me.’

  ‘Simon?’ I scoffed. ‘He’s less interested in girls than Elton is!’

  Mia punched my arm. It hurt. ‘You can be interested in girls without wanting to take them to bed. We’re people, too, you know.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I rubbed my shoulder. ‘Boys’ school education. It’s true. He likes you.’ I handed her the phone.

  She dialled the number and I took my turn at holding the door open, the extra cold being a price worth paying for fresher air.

  The half of the conversation that I got to listen to didn’t make much sense to me, but when she hung up after a far longer phone call than I had ever managed with Simon, Mia was grinning. ‘He’ll be there. He’s telling his mum he’s staying over at yours. I doubt she minds where he is, to be honest. She’ll just be glad he’s not in his room all evening.’

  We walked back to the Miller blocks. I told Mia it was too far, but she said it was too cold to wait for buses. I think she was too agitated to stand still and wanted to be on the move. I relied on her for directions and we stuck to the high streets and the main roads, staying where it was well lit and well trafficked. If Rust was following us, he would be waiting for his moment. A dark alley, a lonely park. I was damned if I would just give it to him. I looked back a few times, but in London there’s always someone following you by chance, so picking out someone doing it on purpose isn’t exactly easy.

  We crossed the Thames by Battersea Bridge, getting back south of the river where we belonged. The four great chimneys of the power station stood illuminated on the far bank, smokeless for the last couple of years now. A dinosaur on its back, legs in the air. I wondered what stood in the spot in Demus’s time. Then it struck me.

  ‘How’s he going to get back?’ I stopped dead centre of the bridge, the black waters of the Thames sliding beneath us, traffic roaring past a foot to our left.

  ‘What? Who? And where?’ Mia stopped a yard ahead and turned to face me.

  ‘How will Demus get back to the future?’

  Mia grinned. ‘This really does sound like the film. You have to see it.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘Back to the Future, silly. They need a lightning bolt to get back. It’s the only way to get the power they need.’

  I shook my head and gazed at the dead power station. ‘There’s not a lot of energy in a lightning bolt . . .’ I nodded toward the chimneys. ‘From what he said, that whole place over there couldn’t do it, not if you ran it flat out. He’d need to drain the national grid.’ I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it earlier. How was he . . . I . . . going to get back?

  Mia frowned. ‘I guess he has it covered. He’s a grown-up, after all. And it’s not like he didn’t have time to think this through.’

  ‘You’re not worried for him?’ I felt slightly betrayed.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know him. I guess I will, one day. I mean, I’ve only known you for just over a month. And thinking of Demus as you, well, that’s difficult. It’s great that he went through this effort to help me. But . . . you know . . . it’s just really hard to think of any of it as real. It hasn’t happened yet. And, whatever he says, I can’t think of the future as set in stone. I can’t wrap my head around that one. It would be like nothing we do matters . . . The most important thing here is that he says he can get Rust off our backs if we do this.’

  ‘I guess . . .’ My guaranteed recovery seemed important, too, but she was right, it was further in the future, less tangible.

  ‘And even if he does somehow make Rust forge
t about me, I’m still not sure that breaking and entering is a clever move.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just the least dumb move?’

  ‘Come on!’ Mia shrugged and set off again. ‘It’s freezing up here.’

  She was right again. The wind over the river cut through my coat as if it weren’t even there. I bent my head, gritted my teeth against the ache in my bones, and followed her. I didn’t know what Demus’s escape plan was, but I found it hard to care too very much. He was old, unimaginably distant in time. I cared for him in the same vague way I had always cared for my future self, i.e. I made the occasional short-lived resolve to eat sensibly, I saved my pennies for the future in a high interest building society account, and I took the trouble to acquire useful qualifications. The rest had always been future-me’s business and good luck to him.

  We skirted by the Miller blocks, coming close enough to see the black stain above the windows of Mia’s flat. It would be a long time before anyone lived in there again. The council would move them somewhere, but it might not be close.

  ‘Bastard.’ Mia muttered it under her breath.

  ‘Could have been a lot worse.’ It still could.

  By the time we reached The Spotted Horse we were cold and tired and ready to quit. It looked inviting – the warm light through the puddle glass windows, the hubbub of conversation through the door – but I knew from experience that they wouldn’t serve us in there. Not even a coke and a bag of crisps.

  ‘I’ll call Elton.’ I nodded to a bank of phone boxes. The others should already be on their way.

  ‘You realise this is seriously stupid?’ Elton surprised us by coming down the high street rather than up it and stepping in between us, a hand on both our shoulders.

  ‘We do,’ I said. ‘Mia’s been trying to talk me out of it.’

  ‘You don’t believe this Demus guy anymore, Mia?’ Elton sounded so grateful that I felt immediately sorry for him when Mia answered.

  ‘I believe he’s from the future, and I believe he’s trying to help. I mean . . . if you had that power, to travel back and change things . . . There’s so many ways you could help yourself. Why would you waste time doing what he’s doing unless you meant it?’

  ‘So what you trying to stop us for?’ Elton asked, releasing our shoulders.

  ‘Because of what you said,’ Mia replied. ‘This is seriously stupid. If we get caught we could get put in an institution. Nick, John, and Simon could get expelled from their posh school and miss out on university. Hell, if there’s guard dogs, they might eat us. And for what? To make me better when I’m forty? I don’t even want to be forty. Me? Forty years old? Whatever Demus says, I can’t believe it’s going to be like that. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. I could. I don’t care what he says about it.’

  ‘I want you to be forty,’ I said.

  ‘I do, too,’ Elton said. ‘My parents are way past forty. There’s still plenty of life to live. Don’t give me this die young, stay pretty shit.’ He reached into his pocket and drew out a crumpled bit of paper. ‘Besides, there’s this.’ He offered it to Mia.

  She straightened it out. The words were in my handwriting. The note Demus gave Elton in John’s house. Mia paused to find her voice, then read it aloud. ‘You marry him. Your friends and family come to the wedding.’ Her eyes glistened. ‘Who is “him”?’

  ‘I’ve got an idea. But in the end it’s not the important part,’ Elton said. ‘I want the future Demus has seen.’

  ‘So . . . we’re doing it then,’ I said.

  ‘Yup.’ Elton nodded.

  John and Simon arrived together about a quarter of an hour later. Just long enough of an extra wait in the freezing cold for us to start cursing them for chickening out.

  ‘So, we all know what we’re doing then?’ I said, setting off up the street.

  ‘No fucking idea.’ Elton caught up with me. I tried to remember if I’d heard him swear before.

  ‘Well,’ John called after us. ‘Not really. But I know where we’re going, and it’s not in that direction. We need the tube station.’ And he headed off the opposite way.

  It was a hike to Clapham South tube. I knew I’d overdone it. I doubted I’d be able to get out of bed the next day. But at least the pace kept me warm. Warmish. Warmer than I would have been standing still. We stopped once while I was sick into someone’s garden hedge.

  At the station we dug in our pockets for the required fare.

  ‘It doesn’t seem right, having to pay for the privilege of committing a crime.’ John poked through his change. ‘Really, we should jump the barriers.’

  We paid for our tickets, though, like upstanding members of society, and went to stand on the musty platform.

  The train was crowded with the people who would be our competition when it came to escaping the city centre in the small hours of the night. The tube trains ran late enough to fill up London’s nightclubs and theatres, then inexplicably closed down before anyone wanted to come home. Since we didn’t have a getaway car, I’d made sure we had enough cash on us for the extortionate return by taxi.

  It was a straight shot from Clapham South to Old Street, eleven stops on the Northern Line, back across the Thames. For the best part of an hour we rattled through the subterranean night, passing beneath the river and the heart of the city. We used the time trying to firm up the very loose plan we’d already come up with, shouting over the clatter of the train. John had given us a rough layout of the place and secured the computer passwords from his father. Simon had been hitting his dad’s books, sharpening the edge of his talent for rooting stuff out of computer files without permission. To my knowledge, Elton had never broken a law in his life, but he could climb like a gecko, and from his dad’s stories about keeping bad guys out of buildings, he knew a few things about how to get into them. Mia and I were hopefully just going to be interested observers. We could keep watch or something . . .

  ‘We’re probably just going to fail to get in and end up coming home again,’ Simon said.

  Nobody disagreed with him.

  I sat beside Mia and our hands found each other in the gap between us. I tried not to hold on too tight. We clattered through one station then the next, spitting out a few passengers, squeezing in three times as many. I watched our reflection warped by the curving double layer of the carriage window. Our images hung ghostly above the advertisements as they slid by, cigarettes, lingerie, cars, then darkness. I tried to think of us not only on steel tracks thundering inevitably on into the inky tunnel, but on equally un-jumpable tracks carrying us forward into a future just as certainly at a steady sixty minutes an hour whether we liked it or not.

  Just before Christmas, as light relief, our English master had set us the task of writing an essay in which we described what advice we would have to offer ourselves if we could go back to when we first entered Maylert aged eleven. Or, if we were feeling more imaginative, what advice our future selves might offer us right now if they could step back from the end of our, hopefully, long and illustrious careers.

  I had written something worthy about paying more attention in class then lightened it with some tips on buying shares in Atari. But, right now, it seemed that Mr Arnot’s direction to ‘kiss the girl’ was pretty sound advice. Certainly Demus didn’t seem to have discovered anything in the following decades that he felt important enough to pass on.

  ‘We’re here.’ John tapped my shoulder. I’d been dozing.

  ‘Sorry.’ I got up after Mia, swaying with the motion of the carriage and reaching for the hanging supports to keep my feet.

  We pushed out onto the platform, then up the escalators until the station regurgitated us back into the cold.

  ‘Come on, it’s this way.’ John glanced at his A to Z and led off.

  ‘You sure you been here before?’ Elton asked.

  ‘Once. Months ago. And I really wasn’t paying much attention.’

  John took us away from the late-night bustle of pubs and wine bars around the stat
ion down darker and lonelier streets. If we were in the suburbs, they would have called the area he navigated us into an industrial estate, but inner London has too much history and too little space for such contrivance. I guessed that the looming structures around us had once been Victorian factories where children dodged in and out of steam-driven engines while trying to keep all their fingers attached. Now most of them were probably fashion houses or design studios. We passed a grim doorway to a building that looked as if it might have once been an abattoir. The sign said ‘Dance Studio 44’.

  ‘Here.’ John stopped where the wall of the previous building gave way to a high wire fence with a thick hedge behind it. Ahead of us a driveway led in, sealed by a drop bar. A darkened reception hut stood a few yards back.

  ‘Doesn’t look like a laboratory to me,’ Elton said as we walked past.

  ‘What are laboratories supposed to look like?’ Mia asked.

  ‘The sign says Motorola.’ Simon pointed.

  ‘It looks like an office building,’ Elton said.

  ‘That’s pretty much what labs are,’ I said. ‘It’s not all boiling cauldrons and Frankenstein machines. Besides, did you notice the chimneys?’ A number of long thin pipes led up into the air from the top of the rear wall. ‘That’s a lab. The chimneys vent the fumes from fabrication with semi-conductors.’

  ‘What he said.’ John nodded. ‘It rings a bell now Nick mentions it.’

  John turned around and led us back up the deserted street, toward the main entrance. A lone man walked by on the other side of the road, head down, focused on his own business.

  John paused at the entry. ‘The primary defence seems to be a metal bar across the access road, approximately . . . hmmm . . . three feet off the ground. Elton, as our all-star athlete, do you think you can get past it?’

  ‘Come on.’ Elton ignored John and led us all in along the narrow path between the gate and the admissions block. We came into a car park before the main building, an empty expanse of tarmac lit by sporadic lampposts.

  We gathered in a dark corner out of sight from the street. Elton shouldered the sports bag he’d brought with him. The contents clanked and appeared to be heavy. ‘This place will be alarmed. Our best bet is for me to check out the fire escapes and see if any of the doors can be opened from the outside. If that doesn’t work, I can go up on the roof and see if there’s a way in through the access door or a skylight. Often they don’t bother to alarm inaccessible entrances.’ He looked around. ‘If the police come, or a security guard shows up, then leg it through those bushes at the back, get clear, then start walking. Deny everything.’