by Kim Curran
I squeezed the bridge of my nose between my fingers and tried. “It was so I could get to the competitions,” I said, as the pieces slotted into place. “Mum didn’t want me to get one. She was convinced I’d kill myself.” I laughed bitterly at the irony. “She and Dad argued over it. He wanted to let me have the moped. He’d wanted one when he was a kid.” It was all coming back now. “But his Mum hadn’t let him. So I think he wanted to make up for it with me. He’d shouted that it was just another example of how Mum tried to control everyone. That she was stifling us all. In the end, he won.”
I dropped my hand from my face. Suddenly, I remembered the exact moment Mum gave in and Dad had turned to me and smiled. I’d never seen him look prouder. That moment hovered like a seesaw between two points, perfectly balanced. I focused on that moment. Mentally willing myself to listen to Mum. To ignore the desire to please my father.
I felt a flipping sensation in my chest, as if my internal organs had decided to rearrange themselves. My head pounded and I saw a flash of light. I looked up as Abbott’s smiling face started to flicker. Then everything went black.
When I dared to open my eyes I was lying on a tatty red couch, a purple throw pulled up to my chin. The room glowed in the pale morning light breaking through Aubrey’s curtains and traffic hummed on the road outside. I checked my watch. 8.15am – a full hour since I’d been dragged off to ARES. But in this new reality, I was still in Aubrey’s living room. I probed my memories. They were a mess. A flash of car crashes mixed in with the feeling of freewheeling down a long hill on a bicycle. There were no memories of mopeds.
I kicked off the blanket and checked my body. The muscles were still there, but the bruises were gone. I sprang off the couch.
“Aubrey!” I shouted. “Aubrey!”
“What?” came a muffled reply from the room I assumed was her bedroom. I skidded down the hallway and threw open the door.
“Get out!” She pulled her duvet up over her shoulders.
“You know me?”
“Yes, you idiot. Stop shouting and get out of my room. My head hurts.”
Mine felt spectacularly clear. “How did we meet?”
“You were lying on your back, having singularly failed to climb a pylon.”
“Yes!” I punched the air. It had worked. Things were back to how they had been. I launched myself on to Aubrey’s bed, threw my arms around her and hugged her.
She pushed me away. “Scott, what’s going on?”
“I Shifted. I think. And everything went to hell. But then…”
“You what?” She didn’t appear happy.
“I Shifted.”
“Here?” She threw her duvet away. She was only wearing a singlet and shorts. “You absolute moron. You have to get out. If you’ve been Shifting, ARES will be here any minute.”
“I, er…” I didn’t know why she was so upset. I’d just brought my sister back to life and I didn’t care what ARES would do to me. Besides, they had been the ones to help me. They’d been a little rough in getting there, sure, and given the choice it would be better if I didn’t have to be dragged out of Aubrey’s flat with a bag over my head. Then I realised, I did have the choice. If I left now, I could save myself the embarrassment and Aubrey the guilt of handing me over.
“Calm down. It’s OK. I’ll leave.”
Aubrey twitched her button nose. It was all I could do to stop myself from kissing it. She reached down to the opposite side of her bed and retrieved a notebook with a pen hanging from it. She scribbled down a number, tore the page out, and handed it to me.
“Call me. Leave it a couple of days, till things have calmed down. Then we’ll talk. Till then, try not to make any more Shifts.”
I pushed her number into the back pocket of my jeans. “Thank you,” I said. “You have no idea.”
She waved me away and lay back down on her pillow. “Just close the door on your way out.”
I left her sleeping and raced out of her front door, down the staircase and out onto the street. Where I ran straight into the arms of someone who wanted to kill me.
Chapter Ten
At first I thought it must have been a member of ARES who’d caught me after all. Running into him was like running into a soft rubber wall. To say he was fat was an understatement. He was enormous. Gargantuan. He was just a few all-you-can-eat buffets away from ending up on one of those freak documentaries where the guy ends up being winched out of his house by a crane or where they get dragged into hospital to have their TV remote surgically removed from a layer of flab. I was surprised he was able to stand under his own weight without a small, motorised vehicle to carry his stomach for him.
I bounced off him, muttered a hasty apology and tried to sidestep him. But there was too much of him to sidestep.
“Excuse me,” I said, staring at him. His eyes glinted like black buttons in a sagging sofa.
He didn’t move. “Excuse me,” I tried again.
He grinned, revealing a row of black, stained teeth, inside a mouth so red it was like looking into a raw wound. His breath stank and I had to turn my face away to avoid being sick all over him. “If you would just let me past…” I said, trying not to breathe in.
Instead of moving out of the way, he took a step forward, pinning me to the shut door with his wobbling stomachs. He licked his lips with an ulcerous purple tongue.
Heart pounding, I hesitantly pressed my hands against his shoulders and pushed. My palms started to disappear inside the folds of flesh and I pulled them back with a squeak of terror.
He still hadn’t said a word. “I don’t know what you want,” I stuttered. I knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted to eat me. Clearly, there wasn’t enough food left on the earth for this guy and he’d moved on to human flesh. If I’d known how right I was at that moment, I think I would have fainted in fear.
“A fresh Shifter.” He breathed in, as if he were inhaling a delicious aroma. “I do love it when they’re fresh. So much sweeter.” He licked his lips again and I felt my stomach curdle.
“How… how do you know?” I gagged.
“Oh, you silly boy. I can smell you.” He sniffed my face like a dog.
“Please, please,” I begged. “I don’t know who you are. But I’d really like it if you let me go.”
He laughed, a snorting, wet laugh. “You should be thanking me. I’ve put ARES off your trail so I can have you all to myself. So, tell me this. Are you going to try and Shift your way out of this… tight… squeeze?” He wriggled his flesh tighter against me, pushing the air out of my lungs. My head went dizzy and white lights danced in front of my eyes. Any second now I was going to pass out.
I thought of Aubrey upstairs, safe under her duvet. Weird, wonderful, Aubrey. I’d only just met her, the girl of my dreams, and now I was going to die. Squashed to death by Jabba’s big brother. And I didn’t even know what I’d done to deserve this.
Shift! A desperate, instinct driven part of my brain cried out. But nothing happened. My head was spinning and I barely had a grip on this reality, let alone a good enough picture of another one I could Shift to. I was stuck.
Blindly, I felt along the wall for the row of buzzers and started pressing random buttons, hoping someone, anyone, would open the door and free me from this blubber creature. He caught my hand in his sausage-like fingers and licked from the base of my palm to the tip of my fingers. The stench of his breath combined with the pressure on my stomach was enough. I heaved, and a projectile of last night’s drinks hit him straight in the face.
He staggered away, pawing at his eyes, trying to rub the contents of my stomach away. I didn’t wait to apologise. I ran. Even halfway down the road I still heard him screaming, like a toddler who’d just had his toy taken away from him.
I only stopped after making it a few roads away. If I’d been thinking logically, I’d have realised there wasn’t much chance of a guy as fat as him catching up with me. But after what I’d been through in the past twelve hours, I’d sort o
f given up on logic.
I slowed to a jog and finally, breathless and shaking, started walking. This day was getting weirder by the second. It was only as I started walking normally that I realised I was walking with a limp. I stopped and pulled up the jean on my left leg and winced at an angry red scar that ran from my ankle to my knee. It was pocked on either side with the marks of stitches. It wasn’t a scar I remembered. Clearly, whatever reality I’d found myself in now still wasn’t perfect – fat, murderous men included. But I was safe now. And it didn’t matter what had happened to my leg because my sister was alive. The thought of seeing her face wiped the image of the fat man from my head. I had to get home to see her.
I hesitated for a moment before our blue front door. Inside I heard the clanking and muffled shouts of breakfast in the Tyler household. I dug my key out of my pocket, opened the door and raced down the hallway and into the kitchen. There they were. My mother, father and little baby sister. In two leaping steps I scooped her up into a hug.
“Geroofme!” Katie said, her face pressed up against my chest. I let her go. “Oh. My. God, Scott. You are such a freak. I should call Childline.” She rubbed at her shoulder and scowled at me. No one could scowl like Katie. I ruffled her mousey hair, just for good measure. She mimed stabbing me in the thigh with a fork. Everything was back to normal then.
Mum watched me a little oddly, while Dad peered over his newspaper. “So,” Mum said. “What exactly did you get up to last night?”
“Huh?” I said, a big grin on my face, although I was starting to lose hold on the precise reason I was so happy to see everyone. Mum raised a suspicious eyebrow. “I was at Hugo’s,” I said. “We hung out. Played games, you know?” I took a seat at the kitchen table and started pouring myself a bowl of cereal.
“Sure… games,” Dad said.
I looked from Mum to Dad, trying to work out what they were on about. Mum reached into her dressing gown pocket and pulled out a black rectangle of cardboard. She handed it to me. Punched out of the black were four letters. ARES.
A tingling was working its way up the back of my thighs and heading for my neck. I had completely forgotten that ARES had paid my parents a visit.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Them.”
“Yes, them. They said they wanted to talk to you about a special government programme. What exactly have you been up to, Scott?”
“Nothing. Really. It’s something to do with college. A recruitment thing,” I said, turning the card over and over. I forced my mouth into a smile. “Seriously. Nothing to worry about, Mum.”
“Hmm, OK,” Mum said, fixing herself another cup of coffee from the fancy machine she’d bought when she was thinking about opening an art-gallery-cum-café thing last year. I didn’t know if she believed me. “They said they’d be back.”
“So could you tell them to come at a more reasonable hour next time?” Dad said, shaking his paper out and yawning. “They made me miss The Cube.”
I mumbled something about being sure to tell them, and scooped a spoonful of muesli into my mouth. I was ravenous and realised that in this new version of events Mum had served up a measly salad last night, instead of the meatballs I’d eaten in the other reality. I was still hung over but, I realised, not bad as before. In the club with Aubrey, I’d stuck to beer. The subtle differences between this reality and the other jostled against each other, falling quickly into place.
I put down my spoon and pushed the empty bowl away. “I’m going to have a shower.”
“Good,” Katie shouted as I left the kitchen. “Because you stink.”
I bounded up the stairs, closed the door of my bedroom behind me, and threw myself onto my bed. My quicksand brain registered slight differences in the room. A movie poster I didn’t remember pinning up, although it was for a film I had seen about thirty times. A pile of comic books in a different position than I’d had them before. And a brown kick-boxing belt slung over the back of my chair. I ran it through my hand, remembering now that I hadn’t been to training in weeks. Not since I’d come off my bicycle and mangled up my leg. I rubbed at the scar under my jeans. It had been a nasty accident. I’d been on my way to practice when I skidded on a puddle and went sliding towards a moving truck. They’d said I was lucky I’d only hurt my leg. Only I knew just how lucky. The ghost memory of the moped crash made me shiver.
I sat up and moved a model robot to where I thought it should have been. But then that felt weird too, so I moved it back. I didn’t know if the changes were because someone had been in my room, or if I’d been the one to arrange it like this. A paranoia itched at my temples. How could you be certain of anything in a world you could change with a thought? And what scared me most of all was that I had no control over any of it. I hadn’t even meant to Shift last night, and it had almost destroyed my life.
I needed help. Training. And I only knew of one place for that. I stroked the card I still held in my hand, feeling the embossed number printed under the name.
Chapter Eleven
“Y ou what?” Aubrey said, glaring at me.
It was Sunday morning and we were sat in a greasy spoon. Aubrey was tucking into a full English breakfast and I’d ordered toast and a cup of tea.
I didn’t meet her eyes. “I rang ARES. I’m going in tomorrow.”
Aubrey threw down her knife and fork. “What?”
“I said I–”
“I heard you. Who did you speak to?”
“I was put through to a guy called Morgan–”
Aubrey groaned and threw her head back. “Morgan is such a dick. I bet he gave you his power and responsibility line.”
“Yeah, and he said he was glad I’d called as it would save us all the embarrassment of having to come and arrest me, and that my mother seemed like a very nice woman.”
“But you could have said it was a mix-up. All they had was that Lucas kid giving them your name. They had no real way of connecting you with the Shift. You should have just played dumb, Scott. You of all people would have been good at that.”
“You mean they didn’t know that I’d Shifted?”
“No! The sensors at ARES only register when and where a Shift has been made. They can’t actually sense who made it or what it was.”
I hadn’t known that. I’d just blurted everything out about the Pylon and my sister and begged Morgan for his help. I’d stuck to the story about how some mysterious guy had told me I was a Shifter and kept Aubrey out of it. Morgan had tutted and sighed and patronised the hell out of me going on about how lucky I was that it was him handling my case.
“Oh, well, they know now. But Morgan said that he’d pull his connections and try and get me on the training programme. That has to be good, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know which one of you is worse! Him with all his self-important bull or you for buying it! It’s standard procedure to get all Shifters on the Programme, Scott. He wouldn’t need to pull anything. Not that he could if he tried.”
I took a bite out of my toast, only now realising just how naive I’d been.
“I can’t believe you. I had it all planned,” Aubrey said, waving her fork around. “Well, don’t expect me to vouch for you.” She stabbed her fork into an unfortunate sausage. I knew how it felt.
“I’m sorry Aubrey. But I need help. I need to understand what’s happening to me.”
“I’ll teach you!”
I met her eyes. “And who taught you?”
She shook her head as if she didn’t understand what I was saying.
I tried again. “Who taught you to control Shifting?”
She twisted her mouth over to the left, chewing the inside of her cheek. “OK, yes, ARES taught me. But…”
I reached out my hand to cover hers. “I’m sorry. But I just can’t do it alone. You have no idea what I went through after meeting you. What I did. What I did to my family.” I hit the table with the clenched fist of my spare hand and the ketchup bottle fell over. “I can’t let something like that hap
pen again.”
“But it’s not too late. I’ve been thinking about this. If I can get my hands on a pair of the cuffs from the Regulators, they will stop you Shifting. OK, you’ll look a bit weird wearing them for the next few years. But it means you can just go on living your normal life.”
“But I don’t want to be normal. I want to be like you.”
She pulled her hand away from under mine and folded her arms across her chest. “All right then. See if I care. Oh, and just you wait till you start training.” She stood up and grabbed her coat from the back of the chair. She leaned over to stare at me, her face only an inch from mine and I smelt vanilla. “It will break you.” She straightened up and walked away.
“So, do you want to do lunch on Monday then?’ I asked, ever the optimist.
She opened and closed her hand in a jerky wave. The café door jingled as she left. I picked up her abandoned fork and stabbed a sausage off her plate. Well, if she wasn’t going to eat it, I thought. It tasted of sawdust.
Explaining it all to my parents wasn’t much easier.
“It’s a fast-track programme for IT skills?” Mum said as I sat them down to explain why I wasn’t going back to school in September.
“That’s the idea. They train you up and there’s a guaranteed job at the end of it. If you make the grade that is.” I remembered Morgan’s whiney voice being quite clear about that on the phone.
“And it won’t cost us anything?” Dad asked for the third time.
“Nope,” I said. “Not a penny.”
“I don’t know Scott, what about your A-Levels? And university? I always wanted to see you in one of those black hats.”
“Do you have any idea how much university costs these days?” Dad said, turning to Mum. “This ARES place makes sense. Good training. A good job at the end of it. We have to face it, Gloria, he’s not the sharpest kid. We should take this opportunity while we have it.”
“Gee, thanks, Dad,” I said.
“Oh, you know what I mean, Scott,” he snapped.
“You’re very good with science and computers and stuff but you’re not really cut out for the real world are you?”
