Kit took the long way home, walking past closed shops and down alleyways where it was dangerous for a girl to walk alone at night, or so people said. She didn’t much care. Anyone who was dumb enough to try something would get the heel of her boot where the sun don’t shine.
I’ll walk the streets at night, to be hidden by the city lights.
“Love is Like Oxygen” by The Sweet played in her head as she walked past dozens of people without seeing them. Love is like oxygen, you get too much you get too high.
Not enough and you’re gonna die.
She was tired. Maybe Jeeves was right. Maybe he was always right and she was always wrong. Or maybe it was she who was always right, but spoke up just a second too late for it to matter. Jeeves was careless, impulsive, brave, idealistic, the man himself more of a fever vision than a flesh and blood person. Her little encounter with him in the dressing room didn’t even register, like a riff she’d scribbled out then abandoned once she realised it didn’t fit anywhere, and was derivative to boot.
Sam was like a song she’d been working on for years and could never finish. Lyrics she’d written and re-written but failed to get the meaning across. Notes that danced along the edge of something important but didn’t make your heart soar and then plummet the way a great song is supposed to. Her Sam song was a song forgotten after a year or two.
So forget him, she told herself. Know a lost cause when you see one. They were no Sid and Nancy, though considering how that story wound up, she should be grateful. Anyway, it wasn’t like she loved him, it was just the comfort and familiarity of it. They had spent too much time together. It was the persona, she realised, the image of him that she wanted. Like Jeeves himself, Sam projected a dream up on the stage, possessed an energy, a magnetism no one could keep up 24/7 once they were behind the curtain. Like a naïve young woman before the storm of life hits, she thought she could save him, make him better than he was, keep him from self-destructing. No one can save anyone from themselves. She knew that now.
Kit turned down a path where the breeze was cut off and the street lamps were out. A horn blared. What time was it? Late. So late that only fog and demons and lost children were out at this hour.
Letting go is never really letting go, she thought. You tell yourself you’re moving on, you’re a different person now, but all it takes is one little thing to set you back. A scent, a scar, a bent dinner fork, a song, a song, a song, ones he gave you, ones you gave him, ones you’d written together.
Love gets ya high.
Long live the revolution, long live GGcoin. If the country had awoken from their slumber just enough to put the tea kettle on, it was worth it. If layers of greedy, ugly darkness had been torn down and were now crystal-clear glass thin as a pin, transparent and shatterproof, then it was worth it. A little heartbreak was worth it, getting caught up in the storm. The mistake of making a man in your own image, building him from cardboard and feathers and E strings, when behind his eyes, he was really just the cardboard.
They should be trying harder to find Sam, should have heard something by now. Just continuing the band without him, reveling in each small triumph while god knows what was happening to the real Saint Fox—it wasn’t right. If he was in danger, there was nothing she could do about it.
I can’t shake off my city blues
Every way I turn I lose
She reached her building, climbing the stairs with heavy feet, exhausted from the show, exhausted from everything.
She would have to begin writing a new song. A whole album maybe. One she would sing herself, no one else telling her what to do. In her flat alone, in a dingy little nightclub to an audience of ten, to a stadium full of thousands, she would crash through her strings however she wished, sing whatever her heart desired.
As she had wanted in the beginning.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
INVISIBLE MAN
Some people are natural born killers, they say. Not so for Sam Numan.
Sam was, in fact, born rather decent, someone who was always willing to lend a hand to his fellow man. A diamond in the rough, ready to be chipped at and moulded.
Now, they had chipped away until there was nothing left.
Alone inside his cell, Sam Numan tried to feel something, anything decent. Tried to remember former lovers, great nights out with mates, but when he looked inside, there was only bile. Only desire for vengeance upon those who had done this to him. Those who had delivered him into the fires of hell, delivered him to faceless men with cruel grins and heavy fists. Those who had never delivered him—from evil. Those who had broken their promises.
The promise breaker of all promise breakers was Janus Jeeves.
When Sam pictured his narrow, silly putty, crocodile-smile face, it felt like a bolt of lightning shooting down his spine, and then his blood would run cold. His eyes would tear and burn, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Janus Jeeves was a liar. He had promised a revolution. He had practically delivered a massacre.
Sam lay back against the thin, stink-infested cot and closed his eyes. He pictured wrapping his wiry, calloused hands around Jeeves’ wiry, callous neck, and squeezing tighter tighter tighter. Each time he imagined it, it produced an increasingly comical result. The first time Sam had the fantasy, Jeeves’ neck had snapped like a too-taut guitar string. The second time his head popped like a great red balloon. After that, Sam moved on to more colourful delusions, facsimiles of techniques that had been used upon himself. He pandered to Jeeves’ love of dramatic eye makeup by painting around his eyes in blood-red streaks, cutting wide holes around those beady mismatched peepers. He followed up this butchering by submerging the maestro’s head in water, red liquid from the cuts on his face bleeding into the tub in swirling patterns. Sam would pull Jeeves’ head up as he gasped for air, begging for mercy when he found his voice again, his cries blending into a soothing, syncopated, babbling cacophony that was music to the frontman’s ears.
Sam’s eyes flashed open. He leaned over the side of the cot and vomited once, twice, suddenly appalled that he could ever conceive of doing such a thing.
When daybreak came, two of Simsworth’s dog men came into the room, sidestepping the pool of sick and hauling him up by the shoulders.
They dragged him through a long, cold alleyway to a garage where Simsworth was waiting, flanked by a dozen or so uniformed slaves to the Crown.
“You’re a free man,” Simsworth said, the unreadable grin of the soulless upon his face.
The garage door groaned open as they pushed Sam unceremoniously into the daylight. Blinding light—white, with hints of blue and red.
Stage lights, Sam thought.
The uniformed men who were all the same shoved him into the back of a van. They drove for a time in silence. He might have fallen asleep.
When he awoke, he was alone. He blinked frantically, eyes attempting to adjust as he tried to determine where the hell he was.
Beige buildings, scene kids, street lamps filtering through smoke in the night air. A dingy little club across the street. Broken beer bottles along the sidewalk.
He was back in South London.
The passersby seemed to take no notice of him. Just another skiver on the street, like the good old days. An advert flew past him, a flyer printed on neon-green paper from a home instaprint.
The flyer advertised a show for a local band. A grainy, black-and-white image in which none of the band members’ faces were recognizable, and fat words in some obnoxious font stating the venue, time, and date. The club was one he knew well—The Independence had played there many times before in the early days. The date on the flyer...what was the date? The show could have been days ago for all he knew. Sam stared at the grainy faces on the flyer, almost familiar. Some kid must’ve thrown this together all unofficial-like, else this band is really shyte at promoting themselves, he thought.
He tucked the flyer into his jacket.
Prime Min
ister Harold Waterman turned up the volume on his Dolby 11.1 5D surround soundsphere system so that he could properly enjoy the nuances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor. The two cubes of ice in his glass were perfectly square, and his drink was the perfect temperature. The electronic fireplace was at a measured 20 degrees, and no one had called to bother him for at least an hour.
Everything was perfect. And then his wife entered.
Amelia waved her hand, turning down the stereo volume. She positioned herself so the holo display she held was directly in front of Harold’s face. He couldn’t make out what it said—she was standing too close and he didn’t have his reading glasses—but it appeared to be some news article about the latest military action. An unflattering 3D image of him with his mouth open mid-speech accompanied the article.
“So, you’re a murderer now? Is this who I’m married to?” Her voice pierced through Bach like a laser beam.
“Amelia, please,” he said, leaning forward in his chair.
“Don’t you ‘Amelia, please,’ me. Your men are out there killing innocent civilians.”
Harold sighed. “Look around you. Look at this house. Look at your clothes. You do your own shopping; you know what these things cost. How do you expect us to pay for all this without restoring our already precarious financial system to its former disglory? We’re protecting a way of life that has been successfully in operation for decades. A way that has allowed you, me, and our children to live comfortably. It’s not as if I derive any pleasure from what has to be done—I don’t like it any more than you do.”
“Of course, you’ve got it all figured out as usual. You’re doing what’s best for the country. Well, if you expect me to just sit by and let this happen, you’re dead wrong, Harry.” Amelia’s lips were set in a thin line, something like regret on her face. Something like it, but not quite. More as if she had encountered a question on an exam she didn’t know the answer to, in a requisite class she’d never wanted to take in the first place.
“You don’t seem to understand, Amelia. We are at war. With war comes casualties. Now, whether this is a revolution or an anarchist uprising that must be quelled, I don’t properly know. No one is truly capable of judgment until a godforsaken mess such as this is where it belongs—in the past. But I do know that it is my job to orchestrate the fight for the side that I’m on, for as long as I’m required to. And it will come to an end. Perhaps sooner than you think. The fact is, whatever military action we’ve taken doesn’t seem to be working. People aren’t scared unless they’re face to face with the barrel of a gun, and we simply don’t have the arms and the manpower to keep this up. It’s not a physical world we live in anymore; you can’t kill a digital virus with 20th century weapons. You adapt, or you die out. For goodness’ sake, Amelia. Maybe you should go out there and open up a GGcoin account for yourself.”
“Very funny. Spin it any way you like—you’re still a killer and a coward.” Her short, perfectly manicured nails gripped the back of the cream-coloured leather sofa, one they had bought just before the chaos began.
“You also realise I don’t care what you think.” Waterman turned away from her and faced the fireplace, taking a sip from his drink before it got too warm.
“No. You don’t care what anyone thinks. Just doing your duty, is that it? Well then, you won’t mind if I leave. You won’t mind if I divorce you, take Felicity and Stephen—one sick with fear, the other infected with that awful virus—and go to Windermere to live with my parents.”
“I won’t mind if you go,” Waterman said. “As for the children—they aren’t as fragile as you think. I have my doubts about Stephen’s illness… the boy’s symptoms are practically non-existent. Nevertheless, considering the circumstances, perhaps it would be good if they spent some time away.” Waterman waved his hand to the left, turning the sound back on.
Amelia’s eyes were colder than usual. “You’d say anything to silence whatever’s left of your conscience, Harry.”
She left, then, carrying with her the scent of her subtle woodsy perfume, and all her accusations of the things he just could not get right, no matter how he tried.
He would miss her, a little.
Waterman smiled, as much as a man like him ever did. He gazed into the crystal ball of his expensive drink. He had done the right thing.
He would play it on their terms. In the present, in the future, not the past. The Crown would acquiesce, let the hippie-geek uprising think they’d won. Tell the world that they would no longer hold back progress, that it was okay to come out of hiding.
Of course, the best plan of action had been to set the fox free. The lad had proven himself a useless source of information, so they’d done what they had to do, and now his indoctrination was complete.
He is a wild fox now, intent on destroying his little movement’s key players, Waterman thought to himself. He’ll do all the work for us, and then—then we will get back to setting things right.
It’s hunt or be hunted, now.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
KING OF KINGS
Saint Fox and The Independence will come alive again. Just life Frampton, Jeeves thought, smirking.
Tonight. They would come alive tonight. Now that they had won.
He sat in his plush velvet chair, facing the window as the morning sun filtered in through the jewel-toned curtains, and replayed the video on his holo display. The broadcast they had been waiting for. The beautiful new song they all wanted to hear.
The British government would allow GGcoin as an alternative form of currency.
“Only as a secondary form of monetary exchange,” said the overly polite news anchor on the screen. The official currency of the United Kingdom would still be the pound. Backed by a universal standard, they said, which wasn’t true.
“GGcoin will be recognised as an allowed method of payment, but is only expected to circulate on a small scale,” the announcer repeated in a patronizing tone, his plastic face taking on a scolding demeanor. “It will phase out soon enough; its use will return to the fringes, but for now, we must find a way to continue.”
Jeeves grinned and slapped a palm against his knee, shooting a glance over at Benson and the others who were slinking in through the front door, like lizards coming out from under rocks once it had cooled down enough.
The kids were returning.
Jeeves waved his hand, sending the video feed from his cleverband display to the large main screen in the Morden flat. A modest screen by the standards of most, and secondhand, but it was plenty big enough. The driftwood rascals of the Arcana gathered round.
“Stores nationwide will accept GGcoin,” the man on the screen continued, “but don’t expect a paradigm shift. We plan to give everyone back their dues in due time, and will revert to transactions via cleverband, the predecessor to the Dot. No more swiping and risking infection.
This is not acquiescence to terrorism. This is damage control. Now is a time for peace, a time to put down our arms and work to repair the harm that’s been done. All infected P.O.S. terminals will be destroyed, and retroactive technology set up in its place. Resources nationwide will be available for Dot removal.”
Jeeves held up his index finger to the room, showing them the scar where the Dot had been. It was almost completely faded. One by one, others raised their fingers in the air, showing similar small pinkish circles on the pads of their fingers where once there’d been pieces of metal with too much power.
The announcer went on to tell people when they could expect to resume commerce as usual, hopefully within a matter of weeks, and where they could get their Dots removed, the same places they had them installed.
Benson Bridges sat on the floor, leaning back on his hands. His hair was flat against his head, washed and anti-static for the first time in a long while.
“They’re wrong about the pound,” Benson said. “It ain’t gonna make the comeback they think it is. Even with them reverting to old tech
.”
“Aha! That’s exactly right,” said Jeeves. “And why is that, my economic wizard?”
Benson smiled a little, mouth lifting in a slight curve. “They’ve lost faith in it. In the pound. The government has the power to declare anything legal tender, but they don’t have the power to give it any value. The people decide what has value, not the government. The government still doesn’t realise that, but now, the people do.”
“Gold star for you!” exclaimed Jeeves. “All we needed was bodies, I told you. GGcoin’s been in operation long enough for everyone to recognise its superiority. The peer-to-peer transaction model has spread like a fire in the desert. People keep what they make; their finances are plain straightforward with GGcoin exchange rates. We did the maths—or rather you did, Bezzy Bez—and folks have helped each other figure it out, like the kind and caring members of the communiteee they should have been all along. It’s all about making them feel like they’re a part of something. Connected. The previously rich will try to return things to the old paradigm, but they will fail. We are the majority.”
Jeeves turned the large screen off with a wave of his hand, facing the room.
“Now, we celebrate! Sing and dance to our victory march,” he announced. Faces around the room lit up as members of the Arcana congratulated one another with high-fives and hugs.
“The Independence will play a comeback show tonight,” Jeeves said. “Out in public this time. Where everyone can see.”
Sam awoke in the bed of his old flat, his former flatmate hovering above him.
“Fucking hell, Sam. I weren’t even sure it were you. I’ve seen you look a lot of things, but you’ve never looked quite this shyte before,” Sailor said. He wore a jumper with a big old rifle printed on the front, and a red taffeta skirt.
“How’d I get here?” Sam asked. The words formed slowly, sticky and bitter like marmite.
The Rise of Saint Fox and The Independence Page 24
