by Joe Craig
Eva Doren sat alone in Miss Bennett’s office, waiting. Even though she was only thirteen, she’d become essential to the Head of NJ7— personal assistant, secretary, even protégée. Her notepad and pen were ready in her hands for her usual note-taking job. But this time something felt different. First there was the urgency with which she’d been summoned, then there was the bustling in the NJ7 corridors. The atmosphere was more than simply busy. People seemed frightened. And this was the first time that Miss Bennett hadn’t been in her office waiting for Eva to arrive.
Eva studied the walls. All of NJ7 Headquarters looked similar—grey concrete breeze blocks with the only colour provided by exposed electrical wiring. There were no windows—NJ7 was housed in a labyrinth of tunnels below Westminster.
Miss Bennett had obviously done her best to brighten up her part of the network. Postcards of old paintings of horses were stuck up on the walls and directly behind her desk there was a huge Union Jack flag. Like the one in the Cabinet briefing room, this also had an additional vertical green stripe in the centre.
But Eva wasn’t looking at the decorations. She was trying to work out whether this room, like the rest of NJ7, was covered by security cameras. Elsewhere, the cameras were visible. In here, they were either hidden or there weren’t any. And if there weren’t any, then this was Eva’s first chance to investigate some of Miss Bennett’s secrets.
Of course, Eva already knew more than her fair share of secrets. After all, Miss Bennett took her almost everywhere. But that wasn’t good enough for Eva. She stood up casually, as if she was just stretching her legs. She had to look for cameras without seeming suspicious, just in case. Her head was throbbing. Somewhere in that huge desk there might be plans concerning Jimmy Coates, or Jimmy’s family, and what Miss Bennett planned to do to punish them for helping Jimmy to disappear. As Eva began her search, the discomfort spread down through her body until her stomach was churning. It made her sick just to imagine that she might find a document bearing the names of her friends—even her best friend, Georgie Coates.
She circled the desk, eyeing the drawers, unable to blink, and went back to her seat. The drawers were probably locked, but was it worth trying them? Eva realised she would never forgive herself if Jimmy or his family were harmed by NJ7 in an attack that she could have tried to warn them about. After all, that’s why she was here. She lived with the constant fear that NJ7 would discover she was a traitor, working undercover for the Government’s enemies. But that danger was worth it if she could find something that would really help Jimmy, or something that would end the rule of the current Government and replace it with a democracy. Yes, Eva thought, I have to. This might be the only chance I ever get to be alone in this office.
She stood up again. Her hands were shaking and she could barely keep a grip on her pencil. Her legs were suddenly stiff, but she forced them to move and stepped round the desk.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Eva.” Miss Bennett’s voice stabbed into Eva’s chest and stole the breath from her lungs. “I’ve been briefing some members of the press about the explosion.” Eva didn’t yet know about any explosion and Miss Bennett’s words weren’t sinking in. Her sudden arrival had frozen Eva to the spot. The Head of NJ7 strode in and took her seat behind her desk. Only now did Eva start to wonder what had exploded. She was about to find out.
“Take all of this down, Eva,” Miss Bennett began. “You’ll need to circulate a memo containing all these details…”
When Jimmy finally came to, he tried to work out how much time had passed. The sounds of the hospital had changed. Everything was much calmer, with no screaming, just the insistent whirring of the heating system and the distant clatter of a trolley in the corridor outside the ward.
Before he even realised he was doing it, his mind was running through his whole body, feeling the bandages and dressings, gently testing his joints and muscles. Only now did he notice the cool pressure from a gauze bandage that covered his whole head, except for a mouth hole and two holes for his eyes.
As his memories returned, Jimmy had to fight back panic. How many had survived the bomb? He tentatively manoeuvred himself until he was sitting up in bed. His pain was much less intense than earlier and he could tell that it wasn’t just because his programming was numbing it. He must have actually gone some way towards healing as well. How long had he been in hospital?
The children’s ward was packed. Extra beds had been squeezed in and all of them were occupied. The boy in the bed to Jimmy’s left looked a little younger than him. He was sitting up as well, and Jimmy couldn’t see immediately what injuries he’d suffered. Jimmy knew this was the perfect chance to gather some information, but he felt so awkward. It had been so long since he’d been in the company of people even remotely his own age. He felt completely out of place.
“Hey,” he said, hearing the nervousness in his own voice. He had to remember how to speak and act like a normal human boy, not a genetically-created organic assassin.
The boy turned to look at him. Jimmy shuddered—the whole left half of the boy’s head was swathed in a huge ball of bandage. He looked like he’d got his face stuck inside a giant ping-pong ball.
“Don’t worry,” the boy said with a smile. “Apparently it looks worse than it is. It doesn’t really hurt. I’m going home in a couple of hours.” Suddenly he realised something. “Oh, wait. Not home, but out of here anyway. Home’s been blown up!”
Home, thought Jimmy. The word landed in his chest like a bomb. Everybody in that ward except him had a home, and even if it had been blown up, they’d find a new one. Jimmy felt a flash of longing to swap places with any of them.
“You from that tower block?” he asked, to force away his thoughts.
“Er, obviously,” came the response. “Everybody here is. I thought you were too.”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” Jimmy told himself to blend in. He was already afraid the doctors would have noticed something unusual about him when they were treating him. The last thing he wanted was the other patients being suspicious of him as well. “I’m Michael,” he lied, instinctively hiding his identity.
“Hi, Michael,” the boy replied. “I’m Iqbar.” He laughed nervously. “That must hurt a lot.”
Jimmy’s hands jumped to his face, but both were completely covered in bandage. He’d forgotten that he was wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy, but it made Jimmy less nervous about asking questions. After all, there was no way he could be recognised.
“No,” Jimmy replied. “It doesn’t hurt much. You know —looks worse than it is.” He nodded casually and tried to smile, but wasn’t sure whether that was even visible. “So er…” he hesitated, unsure how to ask the question on his mind. “How did, I mean…Are the people in this ward the only people who survived?”
Iqbar furrowed his brow in confusion. “Everybody survived except the car park attendant,” he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “There was nobody else in the block when it went down.” Jimmy didn’t think he could possibly have heard correctly. Maybe the bandages covering his ears were distorting things, but then Iqbar continued. “We all got out. Somebody set off the fire alarm and we thought it was, like, a fire drill. But it wasn’t. Obviously.”
The fire alarm? Jimmy’s mind was racing. Could he possibly have saved everybody after all? He didn’t dare think it could be true. He vaguely remembered smashing his hand against the fire alarm, but he hadn’t heard it go off. He’d assumed the bombers had disabled it, but perhaps they hadn’t. Could Jimmy have been that lucky? No, he told himself, not lucky. It was the power inside him made him hit the fire alarm, and that’s what had saved everybody. Not for the first time, Jimmy felt that strange mix of relief and fear. But he still didn’t understand what was going on, or how there’d been enough time for everybody to evacuate before the bomb went off.
“What about all those people who were brought in at the same time as me…?” he said.
“Yeah,” Iqbar replied matter-o
f-factly. “There were loads of people. It’s from when half the building came down. There was, like, glass and rocks coming down on us, and a lot of people got burned a bit.” He leaned towards Jimmy and dramatically pointed to his bandage. “I nearly lost an eye,” he exclaimed. “Think what would have happened if the whole building had come down. Apparently it was just luck that the bomb wasn’t in the middle of the car park, it was at stuck at the entrance, so it didn’t do so much damage.”
Luck again, Jimmy thought to himself, his insides fizzing.
“We were all standing there just watching it come down,” Iqbar went on. “And I told everyone it was stupid to be standing so close, but they didn’t believe me.” He shrugged. “Anyway. You know. That’s how it is.”
“Yeah, I know how it is.” Jimmy’s voice was nonchalant, but inside he was flooded with relief. He’d done it. Without even knowing that it would have any effect, he’d set off the fire alarm and moved the bomb to the place in the car park where it would do the least damage. I saved them, Jimmy thought, unable to believe it. I saved everybody. It was the first time he remembered that anything positive had come from his assassin programming. His joy was only dampened when he remembered that the men who’d loaded the bomb into the van, and the man who’d driven it into position, were still out there. And Jimmy had no idea who they were.
“Who put the bomb there?” Jimmy asked quietly. Iqbar looked at him like he was from another planet.
“Who d’you think?” he asked sarcastically. “It was the Frenchies.”
“The French?” Jimmy gasped.
“Yeah. Everybody knows. We knew it straightaway.”
“What about the metal shutter on the car park?” Jimmy asked. “Has that always been there?”
“No, those builders put that in this afternoon. Didn’t you see them? They’re the ones who filled up the stairwell with, like, rocks and stuff.” Iqbar shook his head slowly. “I should have known it was the French then.”
Jimmy was struggling to make sense of it all. Would France really try to blow up ordinary members of the public? And how had they managed to organise that kind of attack without British security forces having any idea it was happening?
Then his heart began pounding, as if it was trying to break out from underneath the layers of bandage. Everything had spiralled out of control. What if the British were planning to strike back? When they’d thought the French had blown up a British oil rig, they’d retaliated by attacking a French uranium mine. Jimmy imagined that any second there could be a British van driving explosives into the basement of a tower block in Paris. It had to stop. There was no reason for it.
I have to get out of here, he thought. He knew that the attack on the tower block was just a part of the ongoing battle between Britain and France—with Jimmy himself stuck in the middle. He hoped desperately that somebody out there was spreading his message about the oil rig, despite this new violence from the French.
Jimmy flexed his arms, then felt confident enough to pull out the wires that connected him to the machine next to the bed and swing his legs sideways to stand up.
“Hey,” protested Iqbar. “What are you doing?”
“Thanks for the chat, Iqbar,” Jimmy replied, watching the nurses at the end of the ward, trying to work out the rhythm of their conversation so he could move without being seen. “I hope your eye is OK.”
“Are you going to the vending machine?” asked Iqbar. Jimmy didn’t reply. “Will you get me some crisps?”
Jimmy shut out Iqbar’s voice. He didn’t want to be reminded of Felix, his best friend—or the fact that he was hungry. Concentrate, he told himself. Do what you’re here to do. He had to forget about the temporary trouble his body was in—the burns and the bruises. He gathered his strength and prepared himself to find somebody—anybody—that knew about radiation poisoning. The trouble was, he had no idea how to do that.
He slipped out of the ward with ease, but out in the corridor he realised his injuries hadn’t healed as much as he’d thought. Every shift in his body weight sent a stab of pain through his nerves. As if that wasn’t bad enough, his whole body was covered in tight bandages, making it impossible to move easily or inconspicuously.
He walked as quickly as he could, but people passed him constantly. He had to slow to a shuffle and drop his head, hoping desperately that hospital staff would be too busy to concern themselves with why a patient in an obviously serious condition was out of bed.
He wasn’t so lucky. The very first nurse that passed gave him a confused look. The next one did the same, and slowed down to watch him pass. Jimmy knew he didn’t have long. He frantically rubbed away at his bandages as he went, loosening his hands and trying to unwrap himself. If he could reach the end of the corridor without being stopped, he could change his appearance in the lift, make it to another floor then look for some kind of information board that would give him a clue about where he should be going.
Then he heard the rapid tapping of footsteps behind him. When he picked up his pace, so did they. He could feel his programming surging to the forefront of his mind. It was building a picture of the person catching up with him—male, about 180 centimetres, slim build…It was also estimating the optimum moment to strike out and render this person unconscious.
Jimmy pushed on, extending his stride, hurrying without looking like he was hurrying. The rhythm of footsteps picked up speed. Jimmy could feel them hammering into his spine, every one closer and closer. If he could just reach the end of the corridor…
Jimmy heard the man’s breathing close behind him. He didn’t dare look back. He was terrified that if he did, he’d lose control and flatten this person before he could draw another breath. Instead he shuffled on. But then Jimmy himself felt flattened—by the man’s calm, deep voice.
“Hello, Jimmy Coates. We need to have a little talk.”
08 DOCTOR’S ORDERS
Jimmy slowly turned to look at the man looming over him. The rest of the corridor was suddenly deserted, as if the two of them were all alone in the world.
“How do you know who I am?” Jimmy asked quietly.
“I didn’t until you just confirmed it. But it was worth an educated guess.”
Jimmy was puzzled for a moment, but then his eyes jumped to the brown file in the man’s hand. Suddenly it was obvious—this was a senior doctor who’d looked over the chart of Jimmy’s progress since coming into the hospital. It must have made interesting reading.
The doctor reached out slowly. Very gently he unravelled the bandaging from around Jimmy’s head. It took all of Jimmy’s effort to let him. His programming fizzed, snarling at every touch. At last the boy’s face was revealed. The doctor studied him intensely, biting his bottom lip. His eyes twinkled in a face that looked like padded leather— too tanned, too many creases. His hair was dark grey and neatly trimmed.
“I heard rumours,” he muttered, half to himself. “I followed some of the research in the journals all those years ago. It was fascinating. Then all mention of it suddenly disappeared and I remember wondering what happened. Lots of us did. That was so long ago. But when I saw the Government blaming some boy for an assassination…for chaos…I wondered…I didn’t actually believe…”
Jimmy held himself completely still. His programming was ticking over, restless, itching to flatten this man and escape.
The doctor shook his head in awe. “At first I assumed this was full of mistakes.” He gestured to his file. “You know—human error.” His expression darkened. “Until I considered the possibility of superhuman recovery.”
“There’s always that possibility,” said Jimmy softly. He could only imagine what his own face looked like now. It felt hot and cold all at once—uncomfortable, like he was wearing a skin that didn’t fit him, but not too painful.
“Doctor,” said Jimmy, interrupting the man’s examination, “when they brought me in…” he paused, waiting for the doctor’s full attention, “did they test for radiation poisoning?” T
he doctor’s face froze.
“I think I’m ready for that little talk now,” Jimmy added.
Up on the top floor of the hospital, Jimmy and the doctor rushed into an empty ward.“This is the most isolated space we have,” the doctor panted. “It’s meant to be closed.” He pointed to one corner, where a pile of cloths, buckets, a mop and some plumber’s tools told half the story. The smell gave away the rest.
“It’s just a precaution,” the doctor went on, sounding panicky, “in case you still have traces of radioactive substances in your system.”
“I haven’t,” Jimmy reassured him, wishing he could be more certain himself.
“OK, that’s good. That would mean you can’t harm anybody else, but we should take a blood test just in case.” Growing ever more frantic, the doctor rushed to a bedside unit and scrabbled with the packaging of a syringe, then took a sample of his own blood. Jimmy was amazed that even a man with so much experience was shaking while he did it.
“Do you feel nauseous?” the man asked. Jimmy shook his head. “Have you been vomiting?”
“I haven’t eaten anything,” Jimmy replied, shaking his head again. “Do you have any crisps or something?”
The doctor ignored him, caught up in his thoughts, then babbled almost to himself, “If you had radiation sickness, you’d be vomiting, you’d be nauseous, your hair would be falling out…you might even be bleeding inside your mouth. It depends on the level of exposure. Are you more tired than normal?”
Jimmy shrugged. Normal. The word repeated in his head like a mocking laugh. He couldn’t stop it.
“Never mind,” said the doctor. “We won’t know for sure until we’ve tested anyway. Come on!” He flapped urgently towards the same bedside unit. “I’m not coming any closer than I have to, so you can take blood yourself.”
Jimmy was taken aback, but tugged at his bandaging to free his hands and expose his forearm so he could draw a blood sample. He grimaced when he saw his skin. It was marbled with red and grey. It was like a battleground where the explosion had flayed his flesh and his body was fighting back. Jimmy forced himself to look away from his burns. He calmly unpacked another syringe and without hesitation he jabbed it into his arm.
