by Tom Pollock
I get up and knock on the door, sliding the empty sandwich tray towards it with my foot. The handle turns and I stand aside meekly.
“Trust me,” I whisper to her as she passes. “I learned from the best.”
Eleven minutes later, Ingrid’s dragging me down abandoned basement corridors at breakneck pace, past a shuttered-up canteen (“we put the pies in spies!”), back out into the maze, and, after only a handful of turns, into an ancient cargo lift. The lift clatters and creaks as it ascends in a way that screams, ESCAPED PRISONER! GET YOUR ESCAPED PRISONER RIGHT HERE! But Ingrid doesn’t seem worried.
“There’s one thing you haven’t told me,” I say. She has her back to me. I watch her rock with the motion of the lift. “Why? Why did they put you on me for three years?”
She seems surprised at the question.
“Pete, your mum’s the most strategically important mind since Turing—think about it.”
For a moment I’m baffled, but then I remember Rita’s voice.
“A scientist as brilliant as Louise Blankman . . . selling their research to the highest bidder.”
“Insurance.” As soon as I’ve said it, it’s obvious. “You weren’t watching me; you were watching Mum, making sure she stayed on the right side, except . . .” I fall silent.
Except why snuggle up to me instead of going to her directly? Because, Pete, she’s a savvy operator embedded deep in the secret world; she’d be wise to that sort of thing. I, on the other hand, was falling over myself to make a friend, any friend. I was the easy mark, her entry vector.
The lift creaks to a halt. It spits us out into what looks like a young family’s garage. A rotting plastic tricycle lies embalmed in cobwebs in one corner. A brown streak on the concrete catches my eye. It’s too red to be rust. With a jolt, I realise this must be where they brought Mum in. Ingrid lifts the door and the honeyed sunlight of an autumn evening floods in. Cool air washes over me and I inhale deeply. It’s only been four hours since I last tasted it. It feels like years.
The light’s broken up into slats and slabs by a mess of scaffolding over the exit. Ingrid peers through it.
“This should give us cover,” she murmurs. I come to her shoulder and peer out at the innocent-looking terrace. I imagine the sharpshooters behind its dormer windows.
“Isn’t it a security risk having the scaffolding up?”
“It is, but then so would having the whole false front of the agency’s secret HQ sliding off because of subsidence. Thank god for crappy foundation work and soft London clay.”
“Thank god indeed.”
Ingrid hesitates only once, at the corner by a heavily graffitied postbox. She looks back, her fringe shading her eyes. I recognise that stance, the same half hunch she makes over a sink when she’s washing her hands, hand over hand until the sink runs red.
I think of the missions she’s been on, all the slaps on the back from her proud dad.
Repetition builds meaning; repeat enough times and that meaning becomes a cage, a cage whose bars you can rattle and shriek at, and never move.
“This is my family.”
I’m asking her to give it up. And I know how that feels.
In my head I hear the regular mechanical breaths of Mum’s ventilator. I feel the electrode burn on my chest, and the nauseating anxiety of leaving her here, with these people—people she thought were colleagues and friends, people prepared to hunt and torture her children.
She can’t have known what they’d do to me.
Ingrid pulls her phone from her pocket and drops it through a sewer grill.
“They can track it.”
“Come on,” I urge, pulling her arm.
“Where are we going?”
“Well, since every gun that Britain’s secret intelligence service can call on is out hunting for my sister, I figure we should warn her. Why? You wanna go for some ice cream instead?”
17-20-13, I think. You’re on, sis.
We start to run.
Recursion: 2 Years,
9 months Ago
I started to run.
Up until that point, I’d just been walking, fast and stiff-backed, squeezing the acid back down my throat like toothpaste down a tube, trying to pretend I wasn’t afraid. But now I broke, my feet hammering on the concrete floor. Behind me, the rhythm of their footsteps shifted to match mine like an echo, an auditory shadow dogging me.
I fled from the maths block to the old wing, through wood-panelled hallways and past portraits of old head teachers. I knew every inch of the school, every disused maintenance hatch and old service stairway.
I guess I only had myself to blame for the place I wound up.
The door reared up in front of me. I kicked it, and a chain I knew was barely more than rust gave way. Rain hammered down on my face and shoulders, plastering my hair to my scalp as I emerged into the night. Under me the floor turned to slippery tile, and sloped sharply down. I skidded and threw out my arms for balance, grabbing onto a redbrick chimney stack.
Barren trees, black and blasted, reached into the storm-swept sky, and I was level with the tops of them. I could barely see where the roof ended and the drop began.
Behind me, the footsteps faltered. For a blessed instant, I thought they wouldn’t follow, but then the tiles behind me clinked.
Ben Rigby stood on the roof with me. I didn’t turn, but I knew it was him.
“What are you so afraid of, Blankman?” he called over the wind.
I didn’t know. I didn’t know and perhaps I’d never know. Gödel’s black-and-white photo, dark, starving eyes staring out from behind thick spectacles, blurred into Mum’s picture of Roosevelt smirking at me from the fridge.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
I could feel the panic mounting in the back of my throat, eternal and nauseating. I was afraid of being afraid of being afraid of being afraid of being afraid of being afraid of being afraid of being afraid . . .
“Wh . . . wh . . . wh . . .” I began, but I couldn’t even finish.
“What?” Rigby snapped, and I heard his patience snap with it.
“What do you want?” I whined.
He thought about it for a long time, and then said, “I want you to jump.”
I looked around then and our eyes met. And I saw something change in his face, or maybe it had been like that this whole time and I was only just now seeing it. He was as scared as I was. Perhaps he was afraid of the fall, the treacherous rain-slick slate. But mostly I think he was scared of his friends, of losing face, letting this opportunity slip away in front of them: me, up here, alone with him, with no staff and no parents to hold him back.
Sometimes kids need someone to hate. He’d chosen me.
“Jump!” he said, louder this time. I shook my head, but without much conviction. I looked out at the boiling weight of the storm.
I eased my weight forward a little and my feet slid closer to the edge, my fingers still clinging to the chimney.
“Jump!” he barked. I started and scrabbled, slipped, caught myself. He smiled at me, his teeth nightmarish in the rainy half-light.
Bel. I imagined her springing from behind a gargoyle, slamming his face into the slates, grinding them up into powder, and making him snort them. I imagined her taking my hand and guiding me back inside.
But Bel wasn’t there.
“I’ll do you a deal, Peter,” Rigby said, leaning casually against the doorframe, ignoring the assault of the rain. “If you jump, if just once you show some guts, you’ll never hear from me again. Otherwise I will be on you. Every day. It will never stop.”
My feet slid a little farther towards the edge, until the toes of my shoes slipped over it. If just once you show some guts. Fighting it was so hard and giving into it suddenly seemed so easy.
It will never stop. Ever. I
pictured myself at university, at work, at home, gnawing my knuckles and counting and crying; eyeing up the potential of every sharp object; afraid afraid afraid. Forever.
Maybe it will get better, I tried to tell myself. But maybe wasn’t anywhere close to enough. ARIA was dead. Gödel had killed it, and without it there was no way to be sure.
“JUMP!” Rigby screamed at me, and I almost did, a jolt shooting up my spine. He laughed. I was shivering, freezing rain running down my collar like electrical currents.
I looked out at the storm.
“Jump,” Rigby ordered in a flat, deadly voice.
My teeth chattered so hard I could barely whisper the words: “Bel, where are you?”
And there she was, standing next to me, her warm hand curling into my freezing palm.
“It’s okay,” she whispered to me. “Do you trust me?”
“You’re my axiom,” I told her.
“Then look down.”
I looked and I could have laughed. The wall where we’d practised our leaps of faith was a dizzying distance below, carving off churned playing field mud from unyielding playground concrete.
“Do the maths,” Bel whispered. “How fast would you fall?”
“I’d accelerate at nine point eight metres a second squared,” I said. “It looks about twenty-five metres down.”
“So how hard would you hit?”
“About a hundred and sixty thousand newtons, give or take.”
“Survivable?”
“It’s a toss-up,” I said. “Feetfirst, maybe. Skull-first, not a chance. Depends how I fall.”
“Ah.” Bel smiled, a secret smile that only I could see. The knowing smile of someone with a PhD in falling. “What do you want to do, Petey?”
I didn’t know. I was one with the weather, so delicate and chaotic a system that every raindrop that struck me seemed to change my mind. I kept flickering: yes/no, on/off, true/false, heads/tails.
I felt drunk, violent, unpredictable, random.
I dug a coin out of my sodden pocket. It glimmered in my bloodless palm. “Heads, I do it,” I whispered.
“Okay,” Bel whispered, and gave my hand a reassuring squeeze. I squeezed back, but my fingers curled around empty air. I was alone again.
I flicked the coin. Caught it. Turned it. Looked.
If Bel had really been there, maybe I could have held out, but she wasn’t.
And without her, I was incomplete.
It takes a quarter of a second—
I jumped.
I pitched forward, over the edge. I was tumbling, spinning, end over end, my knees by my ears.
Heads or tails, heads or tails, heads or tails . . .
Heads. The ground surged up. Heads, I thought. Heads. I tried desperately to wrestle my legs behind me, angling my head downward, to make sure.
Heads heads heads . . .
A tree branch blurred for a second at the corner of my vision. There was a savage pain on my forehead. I saw an instant’s brilliant daylight, and then—
NOW
“Nothing.” Ingrid looks around glumly. “There’s nothing. There’s no one here.”
I turn in a slow circle, taking in the school’s crumbling terra-cotta facade, its black drainpipes and whitewashed window ledges, the three-metre-high brick wall running around its grounds, hemming it in; Bel’s classroom for Fearlessness 101. Behind me, a curtain of trees, their branches on fire with autumn, seal out prying eyes. It’s just as it was the last time I was here.
I run a reassuring thumb through the rough-scarred dent in my forehead and squint up through the canopy, as if I could identify the branch that made it. There’s so much of my life—mine and Bel’s—in this quiet bubble behind the school that I marvel that anyone could describe it as nothing. But I guess it all depends on what you’re looking for. To me, this place matters, but to Ingrid, it’s all noise and no signal.
I trudge through shin-deep red leaves. They break up the ground beneath like static.
“You’re sure this is the place?” she asks me.
“You know I am.”
“Then . . . I don’t know, Pete. Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think.”
A part of me hopes that’s true, that Bel’s taken her own advice—17-20-13—and run and run and is warm and safe, far away. I like that part and I wish it was the whole of me, but it isn’t, because another deeper, realer part is whispering, My axiom my axiom my axiom, over and over in breath after panicked breath, while the world pitches on its axis at the thought that she could be gone.
“Peter.” Ingrid sounds worried and I follow her gaze up. The light’s draining rapidly from the sky. “If she isn’t here, then we shouldn’t be, either.”
I nod dumbly, but instead of heading back out through the trees, I trudge towards the school, kicking up puffs of leaves like a ten-year-old. Couldn’t we wait? I want to ask. We’ve only been here five minutes. But Bel’s had five hours to get here if she’s coming.
If we leave, I don’t know how I’ll ever find her again.
My right toe kicks something hard. Something that skips and rolls and comes to rest against the wall. I freeze.
“Peter?” Ingrid says from behind me. “What is it?”
An apple. A Granny Smith apple, brilliant green against the red. It nestles in the leaf mould at the bottom of the wall. A concave wound of purest white stands out starkly where sharp teeth have taken a bite out of it.
“Peter?” Ingrid asks again.
I stay frozen, sweat pricking my neck. Stop. Go. Red. Green . . .
White. For a dreadful instant, my brain is blank and then, thank Gauss, I begin to think.
Enzymes in fruit don’t mess around. The chemicals in apple juice will oxidise flesh exposed to the air fast. If Bel’s teeth met in that apple much more than about six minutes ago, its flesh wouldn’t be white; it would be toffee brown.
Six minutes. We’ve been here five. And we didn’t see anyone leave.
“Peter?”
“Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think.” Maybe, but my heart’s beating faster with relief and fear, because I bloody bet I do.
In which case . . .
A chasm opens up in my stomach as I think it. We did get away awfully easily, didn’t we?
For a world-champion paranoiac, Pete, you’re really slipping.
I turn back towards Ingrid but peer past her, to the thicket of trees that shield the clearing. Deep in the shadows, something glints.
I exhale once, to steady myself.
“It’s nothing,” I say.
Keep it cool, Pete, not too loud, not too showy, make it just clear enough to carry. To my ear, my voice is cracked, my fear spilling out of it.
“She’s not here.” I stick my hands in my pockets and set off towards the tree line. “Let’s just go.”
“DON’T MOVE! DON’T FUCKING MOVE!”
I’m expecting them, but my heart still shrinks to a tiny point as they run at me: four figures in dark jackets and jeans with black guns levelled at my head.
“TURN AROUND AND GET ON YOUR KNEES! PUT YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD! TURN AROUND NOW!”
I’m a skinny unarmed kid, but they’re screaming at me like I’m juggling grenades. My spine locks up at the violence in their voices. I turn and sink to my knees, interlacing my fingers on my scalp. Despite the cool of the evening, my hair is soaked in sweat.
The apple sits blithely in my eye line, nestled against the wall. I will a wind to pick up, to blow the fallen leaves over it, but it just sits there, screamingly green for all to see.
Something hard presses into the back of my skull.
“Peter Blankman.” It’s a male voice, Irish-tinged. Familiarity tantalises me for a moment; then I have it: Seamus, from the museum. “If you even think about turning to fac
e me, I will blow your head clean off your shoulders and all the way to Ballymena. Clear?”
“Yes,” I croak.
“If you try to run: Ballymena. If you lie: Ballymena. In fact, any attempt by you to do anything I don’t like will result in an all-expenses-paid trip to County Antrim you will find difficult to enjoy. Clear?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Ingrid. Did she know? In that half a heartbeat I try to read her like she reads me. She’s corpse white, her eyes flicker from me to the apple and my breath stalls, but her lips stay pursed shut.
“Are we CLEAR?” Seamus bellows at me.
“Y-y-yes.”
“Good. Now, so that we can all go home, tell me. Where the fuck is your sister?”
I start to shake. A hot, wet stain spreads down the side of my trousers, sticking the fabric to my thigh. My jaw’s trembling. Good, it’ll make the lie harder to spot.
“I—I—I don’t know. She must have gone.”
“Jack!” Seamus calls to someone else. “Can he be right? I thought we were certain she wouldn’t leave him behind. What does her psych profile say?”
“Her psych profile says that the only thing that knows her better than her psych profile is him.”
This voice is familiar too. My memory offers up a flash of paramedic green. “You did good.” The museum again. This must be the same team—makes sense. It’s a secret agency; there can’t be that many of them. With every new person that you let in, you take on a little extra risk of blowing the whole game. My heart is beating wildly and I grasp frantically for details. Details are control.
Seamus spits, and a foamy gob of saliva hits the leaves to my right.
“Check the woods.”
Behind me I hear the crash and rustle as they enter the trees. A couple of moments later two of the agents—a bald man in a leather jacket and a woman with a pixie haircut—jog past me to the wall. The man treads the apple into the mud with one heavy boot, but doesn’t look at it. I try not to breathe too hard.
Neither of them look at me, either, which is just as well, because I suspect right now my tear-twisted, frantic face would be pretty useless for poker. The man slips through the green metal gate and vanishes into the dark. When he reappears, I can just about make him out, flitting from window to window in the empty school like a ghost.
