by Tom Pollock
“Pete?”
I look back up at her. Her eyes are very wide. “I tried. I really did. The others, I . . . I only broke bones. I put them under quick, but these three came up so fast and I just, it was instinct . . . I know we had a deal, but . . . Please don’t hate me.”
She tails off. The body at my feet stares up at me, a dull sheen on his eyeballs. I’m shaking, but I hug her. She’s utterly still in my arms.
“It’s all right. It was self-defence. You did good, sis, you did good.”
I become aware of the quiet of the tunnel and I ease her back off my shoulder. We smile at each other through our tears.
“Show me the others.”
She leads me around through a series of sharp turnings. In each passage we pass a single black-clad figure, groaning or slumped silently in the dust. A lot of limbs are bent in too many places, but the rise and fall of their chests eases the pressure in mine.
“You used the maze to isolate them.”
She shrugs as if this was merely competent.
“That was the deal,” she says. “You said alive, and alive is tricky.” She wobbles a hand to and fro like a plumber describing an expensive repair. “Could only manage it one on one.”
There are eleven in total including the dead, a number that bothers me, but I can’t put my finger on why. We come to one who seems less damaged than the others, a shaven-headed young man huddled into a corner, chin on his chest. Aside from a bloody scrape down one cheek, he could just have fallen asleep.
“Let’s use him,” Bel says. “He’s not even concussed. I’ve been choking him out again every couple of minutes. His retina ought to get us through that door.”
We drag him upright by his armpits and his head lolls alarmingly. Eleven, I think. What’s wrong with that number? And then I have it—I see a flash of red leaves and green paramedic uniforms. Eleven isn’t divisible by four, and the 57 agents I’ve seen on operations have always worked in teams of four.
“Bel, do you think we got all of—?”
BANG!
I’m falling before I hear the shot. I feel hot liquid seeping through my shirt, but there’s no pain. My first reaction is relief—I blink, and behind my eyelids I see the school roof. Got there in the end, I think.
But I’m not bleeding.
It’s Bel. Oh Christ, it’s Bel. She’s falling and pulling me down with her. She’s glassy-eyed, breath catching with the pain, but still she shoves me into the wall. She drags the shaven-headed man up onto his shoulder, between us and the gunfire. He shudders in time to three more shots.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
His eyes don’t open again, but the tang of blood in the air thickens. Breathing is like drinking it, and I almost puke. Above our human barricade, I see a figure duck back into a side tunnel. I only glimpse her for a second, but it’s enough. Rita.
26, 17, 448, 0.3337, 9 billion, pi, triangles, cosines, integrals. My head is full of mathematical shrapnel, my thoughts shattered by the shots. My heart feels like it’s ripping its way out of my chest. I barely hear Bel’s shriek.
“PETEY!”
Squirming from behind the bulk of the shaven-headed man, I stagger to my feet, thinking only one thing: to pour all the sheer, crippling fear I feel into my face, my hands, my voice, and hurl it at my enemy; enough to burst a heart, enough to kill. I am a weapon. They made me one, and now they can repent.
I scream, shrill and teeth-shaking. It fills the tunnel and I imagine my fear following it, invisible and toxic, like a nerve gas. Rita sidesteps out of cover, and our eyes meet along the barrel of her pistol.
Fucking have that, you manipulative shit, I think.
She doesn’t even blink before she fires.
Again I’m falling, but this time I am shot. Right shoulder, a tearing, burning sensation like someone’s pressed a car cigarette lighter to my clavicle. My scream shakes my teeth to their roots. My back hits the floor. Bel’s looking down at me, and it’s only when my tears clear that I see her incredulous relief.
“You’re fine!” she yells. “It barely grazed you. Now run!”
More shots, more shattering concussions. Bel has a gun. She’s firing from the cover of the dead guy, her eyes alight.
“Run!” she yells again, jerking her head behind her.
A doorway yawns open only two metres behind us. She’s covering me, wasting her bullets so I can escape. I hesitate. You can’t leave her. Not again. Jesus, my shoulder hurts.
I roll onto my belly and elbow-drag my way past the cooling form of the shaven-headed man. There’s a pistol strapped to his hip and I grab it. It’s heavy and alien in my hand. I struggle onto my knees, glimpse Rita through stinging, tear-filled eyes, and jerk the trigger back.
Fuck! The recoil hurls me backwards. The bullet ploughs into the ceiling, and masonry fragments shower down. My shoulder feels like it’s been ripped off. I blink, flat on my back, the dust from my misfire stinging my eyes.
A hand grabs my collar and hauls me to my feet.
“Peter William Fucking Blankman,” Bel yells. I can barely see her through the brick dust. “If you die here, I swear I will hate you forever. Now run.”
She shoves me hard, off-balance, my gun dragging like an anchor on my punctured arm. The last thing I see before I stagger through the doorway is my sister’s silhouette, slipping away through the dust.
Hunting.
Recursion: 5 Days Ago
Rita folded her arms. Her brown eyes watched me patiently. In her bloodstained dress she exuded a surgeon’s unnerving pragmatism. Behind her, the huge metal door hung open, ready to swallow me whole.
“You’re the boy who’s afraid of everything,” she said. “And I am tremendously scary.”
I think of those brown eyes sighting steadily down a gun barrel levelled at my sister’s skull . . .
Yes, I thought then, and I think it again now, you really are.
NOW
57’s front door gapes open, heavy as a mausoleum gateway. This time, instead of Rita standing before it, arms folded and pugnacious, men and women stream out of it.
They hurry, head down and silent, scattering down the tunnels, their shadows flitting over the bricks. There are dozens of them. I vaguely recognise one or two of them, analysts from my first time here. Their hands are empty, not a file or laptop anywhere.
My breath stalls, jagged and painful in my chest. I huddle into my brick crevice, certain that one of them will spot me and cry out in vengeful recognition. The gun is a dead weight in my hand. I shiver and try to imagine myself pulling the trigger again, but I can’t.
But as the seconds tick by, no one comes near me. Slowly, my terror-fogged brain sieves the pattern from their flight.
Random doorways; they must each be heading for an exit, taking the shortest path to open air. They’re not hunting me. They’re fleeing. What are you running from? I wonder stupidly. And suddenly it’s obvious: You’re running from us.
They’re spies, not soldiers. Of course. They will have been primed for this, ready on a hair trigger to flee at all times. No panic, an orderly evacuation. Why would they bother defending this place? It’s just a shell, a disguise; once discovered, it’s no longer useful. All they care about is the intelligence they guard. The moment their kill team started screaming for help into their headsets, they would have been shovelling documents into furnaces and hammering delete commands into computers. The data, the precious pattern, would be backed up safe and sound at some other secret location.
But ones and zeroes on a hard disk aren’t the only way to store secrets. The last store is the spies themselves, the secrets inscribed in the architecture of their brains, and so they flee, saving themselves, scattering like deer to confuse the predator stalking them. A predator that wears my sister’s face . . .
. . . and mine.
“You’re pretty
scary.”
Thanks, Bel, I’ll try to live up to that. Coming from you, it means a lot.
I wait for the last—a burly, broken-nosed man—to slip away. My fingers tighten their grip on the gun and I walk towards the open door, the empty husk that was 57.
The office is a graveyard of blank computer screens, wires splaying from their backs like nerve clusters where the processors have been ripped away and carted to the incinerator.
It is twelve strides to the lift. Twelve chances for my nerve to fail me. I look back at the exit. I know I shouldn’t but I do. You can still run away, Pete. You’re so good at running away. You’re a real world-beater at it.
The exit is a black hole behind me, exerting its gravity. It tempts me with the same violent pull I get from a cheesecake when my stomach’s already bursting.
Give in, it says. Run. Get it over with. If you don’t, you’ll only face the same choice in the next second and the next and the next after that. How many times do you think you can hold out?
“Eleven . . . twelve.” I let out an explosive breath. I hadn’t realised I was counting, let alone aloud. I punch a sweaty thumb onto the button and am grateful that the doors hiss open immediately. I step in, holding myself rigid as a corpse, and don’t look around until I’ve heard them hiss closed again.
Part of me hopes that the doorway to the little repurposed office will be locked. It’s not. The handle turns easily.
The same part of me hopes that the bed will be empty. It’s not. Indeed almost nothing about the makeshift hospital ward has changed: the black scuffs made by the wheels of the bed on the threshold; the strip lighting glaring off the white lino floor; the window looking out onto the flat-roofed London terrace, under the same bright autumn sky.
The sole difference is that the room’s only occupant is sitting up in bed, hands folded in the lap of her mint-green hospital gown. Her eyes are very calm.
“Hello, Peter,” she says.
Relief breaks over me like a wave. I run to her. The gun clatters to the floor as I hug her tight. I laugh and cry into her shoulder. You’re all right, I whisper, my tears blotting her gown. You’re all right. I was so scared.
Except I don’t. I want to, but I don’t. Instead, I lock the door behind me, and then one painful inch at a time, I raise the gun until it’s pointed at her forehead.
“Hello, Mum,” I say.
Recursion: 5 Days Ago
We stood in the car park, huddling tighter into our coats as the wind picked up. The huge edifice of the museum blotted out what sunlight there was. Bel sauntered ahead, but Mum stopped me with a touch on the arm.
She held my face in her hands. Pride glowed in her eyes, and like fire giving off a drifting ember, it kindled in me and I glowed too.
“Peter, today is because of you and your sister. My work, my life, I wouldn’t have any of it without you, you know?”
Yes, Mum, now I know.
NOW
Improbable things happen every day. You shouldn’t be surprised when they happen to you.
I stand in the headquarters of the UK’s most secret intelligence service, crying and bursting with the need to pee. I’m holding a gun on my own mother, and when she speaks, her voice is as calm as a lake on a windless day.
“What has she told you?”
She. There’s only one person Mum speaks of with that tone of voice.
“Nothing. Bel told me nothing. I found out myself.”
“Found out what?”
I stare at her, denying the question. The throbbing in my head surges, as if the blood vessels in my temples are trying to squeeze marbles through them. Black spots dance in front of my eyes.
“Peter—”
“You couldn’t resist, could you?” My vision clears and I see she’s wearing Look No. 49: Perplexed Maternal Concern. “Or maybe you didn’t even try. Twins—two minds, two lives to control, right from conception. You’d had the idea and here was your opportunity to put it into practice. It must have seemed like providence. What scientist could resist?”
“Peter, I—”
“‘You’ll get better, Petey!’” I croak through my tear-hoarse throat. “‘We’ll beat this together, Petey,’ you said. You lied. For all that time, all our lives, you lied and I stayed scared and Bel stayed angry, because that’s how you designed us. To read each other’s moods and write each other’s minds. Write read, read write. White Rabbit, Red Wolf!”
I scream the code names at her. The pain in my shoulder makes the gun shake in my grip, and she flinches. I wonder, does she even think of us as Peter and Anabel, or do we go by our code names in her head?
Her concerned look is gone: tried, failed, and cast aside. Now her face is fixed in shock—a mask of innocence.
“Peter, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She shakes her head slowly but doesn’t break eye contact. “Yes, I lied. I admit that. The work I do—for the government—it means I have to lie sometimes, even to you. But I would never, ever, do anything to hurt you. I know you get scared. I know you do, honey. But the way you deal with that, for what you’ve achieved in the face of it, I’m so proud of you.”
And this at least is true. She is proud of me. Her word for me echoes in my head and I mutter it aloud.
“Extraordinary.”
“That’s right,” she says with conviction. “You are.”
And it’s only then I really get it. For her, that’s what makes this all all right. For Mum, there could be nothing worse than being ordinary.
I remember standing in her study two years ago, drunk for the first and only time in my life, her showing me her notes on the capabilities of exotic animals: the octopus with its poison, the prehistoric fly with its wings, while I did party-trick sums for her.
Camouflage and flight are adaptations to a threat environment, Peter. So is that.
In every atom of her being, she believes she’s given me a gift.
“I don’t want to be extraordinary. I just want to stop being scared all the time.”
She shrugs. “None of us gets to choose that, Pete.”
I can’t swallow. I can’t breathe, I’m so angry.
“It hurts—do you get that?” I howl it at her. “Do you get that the way you made me fucking hurts every day?”
She looks aghast. “I don’t know what you’re saying. I would never hurt you. I love you—you’re my son.”
“You love me,” I echo woodenly. “I’m your work.”
The corner of her mouth twitches, a crack in her mask, but I can’t interpret it. I can’t read her. I guess I never could.
“Peter,” she says. “Please. Just calm down and talk to me. If you’re saying what I think you’re saying it . . . it isn’t possible.”
“Don’t.” My voice is hard and flat, and she falls silent, eyes on the gun. “I’ve been into your study. I found your notebooks, the hidden ones. I know.”
“My . . . notebooks?” Now she looks puzzled, afraid, stricken, hurt. “Peter, those are complex ideas, written in shorthand. I don’t know what you think you read or how you deciphered them, but—”
“Ingrid read them. She confirmed it.” I’m pleading with her to stop, just stop lying. I’m holding the gun and I’m pleading. “Okay? Ingrid—Ana confessed. So stop pretending. I know.”
Her face finally stills, and I see an expression I’ve never seen before. Better give it a new number, then:
Look No. 277: Pity. Hopeless, anguished, pity.
And before she opens her mouth, I know what she’s going to say.
“Peter.” Her voice is dreadfully gentle. “Ingrid’s not real.”
Recursion: 5 Days Ago
The three of us crouched in the woods behind the school, the trees around us on fire with autumn. We heard shouts, running footsteps, and the sounds of breaking undergrowth, coming closer ev
ery second. I was sweating, shaking, somehow functioning, in a state the other side of panic.
Bel flicked the safety off her gun, seemed to consider giving it to me, and then, thank Christ, thought better of it. Instead, she swung it almost idly past me and—oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit—she aimed it at Ingrid’s forehead.
She knows about Ingrid, I thought.
But did she? Remembering it now, the sound of 57 agents crashing towards us through the woods, coming from the trees directly behind Ingrid’s head.
I turn the memory over and over in my mind, like checking a proof, looking for the one, oh-so-natural, unjustified leap in logic.
Was Bel aiming her gun at Ingrid? Or was she aiming through her?
Did she even see her at all? Had she ever?
Had anyone?
Yes! There was . . .
Recursion: 1 Day Ago
. . . Rachel Rigby! Smoking and pacing the rutted tracks of the Edinburgh meadow, while Ingrid explained the intricacies of a life on the run.
Relief unwinds in my chest, but it’s short-lived, because my anxious, sceptical speculations are already crawling over the memory like mortuary beetles, and now that I think on it, I can’t remember a single time Rachel spoke directly to Ingrid, or acknowledged her at all. Her words were addressed only to me.
I’m going to kill your mother, I think you should know that.
And now I’m trying to remember the sound of Ingrid’s voice, and it sounds too much like mine. I can’t . . . I can’t tell the difference between the two. The harder I focus the more it sounds just like my own inside-the-head voice, the one I hear when I’m reading.
The memories are coming thick and fast. I shuffle through and discard them like cards, looking for any other human acknowledgment of Ingrid’s existence, but they whirl past me in a blur, too fast to focus on.
And then, like a soloist in a choir, something rises above the clamour . . .
