Now she pushed herself upright and walked away from the bus, trying to look like this was something she did all the time. She deliberately took longer breaths in an attempt to stop herself gasping at every new thing she saw. A sign twice the size of Uncle John’s workshop wall flashed every few seconds, showing up-to-date information about the routes offered. Joni saw that she could, if she chose, get on another bus during the next fifteen minutes and head for Oxford, Bristol, Birmingham, Cork, Antwerp or Paris.
She realized how little she really knew about geography in the real world. It all looked much more straightforward on a map. All she really knew about London was that it was enormous and densely populated - ideal for someone who wanted to disappear. She would stay here, lose herself alongside the other nine million souls and work out how she could use her ability to draw out and stop the bald man. As plans go, it was pretty poor, she knew. But what choice did she have? Stay on Innisfarne, and she’d be putting everyone’s lives in danger. At least here, it was only her own life she was risking.
Joni’s mouth was dry, and she was beginning to feel lightheaded. She realized she was dehydrated and hungry. Not forgetting scared shitless. She shifted the backpack more comfortably onto her shoulders and walked purposefully under the departures board as if she knew exactly where she was heading.
She joined a line of people at a sign saying Underground and copied them as they held their disqs against some sort of device which beeped and opened a gate. There were moving stairs beyond, leading down and out of sight. She created a reset point. Taking a deep breath, she held up her disq, walked through the electronic gate and perched carefully on the top step of the moving staircase—escalator, she remembered—and slowly descended into an unknown chamber, full of echoes, snatches of music and the roar of distant trains. She half-wished she believed in some kind of traditional god, so she could pray for protection, but then decided that any personal god worthy of the term would hardly have allowed her to get into this situation in the first place.
There was a stall near the bottom of the long escalator, and Joni stocked up with bottled water, some fresh fruit and a chocolate bar called a Smudge, which tasted sweet and oily but made her feel slightly sick.
She decided that if she chose a destination randomly and found a hotel to stay wherever she ended up, there was no way the bald man would be able to find her. Not quickly, at any rate, and if she could keep moving, surely she’d always be a step or two ahead of him.
Between leaving the bus and boarding the underground train, Joni’s image had been captured by seventeen security cameras.
24
Near Innisfarne
From his boat, Adam watched the beach again, the sniper rifle at his feet.
He was prepared, mentally and physically for the task ahead. Yesterday, he’d had to watch impotently as the girl came tantalizingly close to the beach before suddenly walking away.
She hadn’t been alone. The descriptions had matched those of Meera Patel, her mother, and John Varden. According to the reports, John Varden was a long-lost brother who’d shown up on Innisfarne a few weeks before Sebastian had died, or left, or taken a particularly long swim. John Varden was of no interest. Neither was Meera Patel. If they stepped onto the beach with the girl, he would simply take them out first, before bringing her down in preparation for the sacrifice.
He’d waited an hour after they had gone, but they didn’t return. Today was another no-show. It was already well past the time she would usually show up. He knew there was no way anyone could know he was there, let alone who he was or that he represented any kind of danger to them. It was a puzzle.
Adam could feel the frustration start to build. Even his patience had limits. Only the fact that he knew there was no way the girl could have been warned allowed him to keep his mood fairly level.
He still watched the old man’s boat go back and forth from Innisfarne every morning. Sometimes, the only thing the old man carried was mail. There had been a single visitor this morning - a frail, stooped, gray-haired woman. No one had left the island.
So it was a surprise when, mid-way through the afternoon, Penelope hove into view, heading directly toward his boat.
Adam made sure the knife wasn’t visible and rewrapped the AWSM in its sacking. He put down the binoculars as the other boat approached.
“Guess I picked the wrong time of year for it,” he called as Penelope drew up alongside. “Nothing but the common gull so far.”
The old man grunted in return. Not the talkative type. That was fine with Adam. “Got this for you,” said the old man, pulling an envelope from his pocket. It was sealed and there was no name on the front.
Adam looked at it but didn’t take it. “For me?” he said. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.” The old man leaned forward and tossed it into Adam’s boat. It landed at his feet, on top of the hidden rifle.
“Well. Thank you, I guess.”
The old man nodded and pushed the throttle, guiding his craft away from Adam, heading back to the mainland.
He opened the letter.
Dear Bald Man, it began. Adam didn’t react outwardly, but he felt suddenly cold. The handwriting was neat, the grammar precise. There were no misspellings. The report had said she was intelligent.
I don’t know your name. I don’t know who you are. No one here knows you even exist except me. I left a note for Stuart asking him to deliver this to you the day after he found it. If you’re reading this on your boat, that means I left Innisfarne hours ago.
Adam looked around him, using the binoculars. If this was a set-up of some kind, he couldn’t see how. And there was no sign of anyone apart from Penelope, which was shrinking rapidly as it headed back to land.
You’re wondering how I know about you. And how I know you’re bald. Well, perhaps you’re not quite as clever as you think. I certainly found it pretty easy to get the better of you, didn’t I?
He took a long breath in. No one had got the better of him since he’d been a child. He wasn’t about to let that change because some kid thought she had the measure of him. And she’d shown her hand - he knew now that she must have some kind of enhanced sensing power. He’d been far enough from the island that no Manna user could have sniffed him out, but perhaps Varden’s daughter had no such limitations. And he had felt no trace of it at all. An impressive ability, if it were true. In the absence of a better theory, he would proceed with that in mind. He would have to cloak himself with the darkness when he next came within a few miles of her.
I’ve left Innisfarne forever. No one has any way of getting in touch with me. The world’s a big place. We won’t meet again.
Goodbye.
It wasn’t signed. Adam smiled. The letter was bad news in one way, certainly. The girl—somehow—knew a little about him. But not enough. And she wasn’t as smart as she thought.
Firstly, the world was not a big place at all, these days. Adam was an expert at leaving no trace as he passed, but Joni Varden had no such experience. He could track her.
Secondly, she’d made a mistake including that word: again. She hadn’t said they’d never meet. She’d said they wouldn’t meet again. He’d been mistaken about her ability. He remembered the report on her father. Reputedly, he’d been able to travel vast distances instantaneously. No Manna user could do that. What abilities might his daughter have? Something new, something unique. Whatever it was, it was some kind of defensive mechanism. She hadn’t counter-attacked, she had run. Which showed weakness.
Adam was used to dealing with weakness.
25
London
Joni got off the tube after three stops. There were two reasons why it seemed a good idea. Firstly, she was unable to prevent herself squealing every time the clattering, swaying, screeching train came to a halt, or set off. She guessed this wasn’t a normal reaction, by the looks she was getting from the other passengers, who seemed to number in the hundreds just in her carriage. There are more people i
n this tin box than live on the whole of Innisfarne! Secondly, she knew Westminster was the seat of government. She just had to see the Houses of Parliament. She couldn’t let the opportunity go by. Surely even a runaway girl with weird powers being pursued by a mad killer was allowed to be a tourist for an hour?
As she emerged from the almost unending maze of white-tiled corridors and sets of staircases, Joni had a sense of being outside herself, looking in. She could see a terrified teenager in a city for the first time, trying not to make a fool of herself. She could see the deeper fear, the dread that would underscore every conscious moment until the bald man was locked up. Or, even better, dead. She wondered at her lack of compassion. Surely she should think of him as unstable, ill, not evil. Yet she couldn’t think of him as anything other than evil. The blank expression, the dead eyes, the sense of emptiness, of a brutal simplicity of purpose. She had felt no hint of common humanity - it was as if he were a different species entirely.
And yet, separate from the fear, and somehow managing to free itself from being dragged down by it, was an undeniable feeling of happiness. It seemed ridiculous under the circumstances. But, as she stood at the top of the steps and looked across the street at the iconic government buildings and the ancient clock tower that dominated them, her heart felt light. Happiness bubbled up unbidden. She had to fight a sudden urge to dance about like a toddler.
About twenty yards from the station exit, a large statue gazed across at the Houses of Parliament. Made out of some dark, solid material with which Joni was unfamiliar, it was roughly double the size of a normal human. Its subject was an old, powerful-looking man in an overcoat, hunched slightly, leaning on a walking stick. His expression was so real-looking, it held Joni spellbound for a few minutes. At first, he looked determined, defiant, proud and strong. The inscription identified him as Winston Churchill, the leader who led Britain through the war years, fighting—and defeating—the Nazis under Adolf Hitler. Joni enjoyed history and had been studying the Second World War, but seeing this statue made it all seem plausible, somehow. She knew it had happened, but looking at the dark carved figure, she felt the shock of a historical event freeing itself from the pages of books and taking on an undeniable reality.
I wonder what he would have made of Manna? And the Manna War?
It was what journalists had taken to calling the regular clashes between police and gangs of Manna users. Areas of London were now considered off-limits to all except battalions of police, properly tooled-up with EMPties, Manna-spanners, and tags. The suspicion voiced by some of the press was that these highly visible raids were staged more to allay public fears than actually make any difference. Everyone knew that the authorities were playing a waiting game. Manna users were dying out, their numbers shrinking all the time. Those Users who had gone public were circling the wagons and seeking strength through numbers. They were holed up in various London boroughs. The same ghettoization was mirrored in cities worldwide. But the majority of Users had hidden their abilities; scared, on the one hand, by the brutal behavior of the gangs and, on the other, by the failure of new anti-Manna legislation to differentiate between criminals and law-abiding citizens. These days, if you Used, you were an enemy of the state.
Joni carried on staring at Churchill’s face. Over time, more subtle expressions emerged. She felt sure she could see regret now, a weight of sadness, a world-weariness.
Never mind Manna. What would he have done with my ability? Would World War Two have been over faster? Would millions of lives have been spared?
For the first time, Joni thought about what her power might mean for the future. She had inherited it from her father, which meant, according to what Mum and Uncle John had told her about him, that her body must contain alien nanotechnology at a level far beyond that offered by Manna, which had been present on Earth before her most distant ancestor crawled out of the slime. Her power, the integrated technology woven into her molecular structure, felt entirely natural to her. Its use was becoming instinctive, almost effortless. Which wasn’t Dad’s experience when he became a World Walker. Whatever that meant.
She crossed the street and joined the rest of the tourists looking up at Big Ben, many of them taking pictures of the famous clock tower.
If she survived long enough to have children, what abilities might they inherit, if any? She had no sense at all of the tech inside her being in any way separate. It was her, all of it. She felt like she was just beginning to stretch herself, explore the possibilities of what she could do.
Dad couldn’t die, apparently. Joni knew the same didn’t hold true for her. Lying on the beach, she had felt her consciousness swirling away into nothingness. If she died, she died. And yet she had a strong feeling of continuity that was hard to explain; hard—even—to formulate in a way that made any sense. In some peculiar way, she felt far, far older than sixteen. Her afternoon walks on Innisfarne had supplied a metaphor that gave her a way to express how she felt about her mortality. She had watched the waves as they crested and broke, thinking about their relationship to the body of water that produced them. A wave seemed—no, was—individual, discrete. And yet it was also an illusion of individuality. Without the sea, there was no wave. Before it was a wave, what was it? Where was it? And when it rejoined the water, where did it go?
Joni wondered if she would only be able to think so deeply about life while she was a teenager. She felt as if no one else would ever understand. She imagined a future self, worn down by age, experience, and worries. Surely even that version of herself wouldn’t remember, or understand, the profound connections Joni was making as a sixteen-year-old.
She giggled out loud, causing an Italian family posing for photos nearby to move their children away to a safe distance. Joni giggled again. She realized she was having a proper, clichéd, teenage moment.
Nobody understands me. Even the future me, apparently.
She walked to the street, clogged with a bewildering variety of vehicles. She pressed a button on a waist-level box, as she’d seen others do. It would make the lights change so that she could cross the road back to the underground station. As she waited, she looked across at Churchill’s statue. At this angle, he looked completely bald. She stopped smiling as she remembered why she was here, and who would be trying to follow her.
As she descended once again into the sticky heat of the station, heading toward the roaring echo of the rattling trains, she found she could still hold on to a faint sense of happiness and peace.
I may only be a wave, but I’m also the ocean.
She took the tube to Canary Wharf. There was no logical reason to pick that destination, but she liked the sound of it. Wharf meant it must be near water, which she would find comforting. And Joni liked birds.
As the train clattered her closer, she pictured an idyllic riverside row of cottages, the street lined with trees, the branches of which struggled to bear the weight of the hundreds of bright yellow exotic birds perching there.
The reality, when she finally emerged, was about as far removed from her mental picture as it was possible to be.
Canary Wharf had once been touted as a center to rival that of the City, London’s traditional financial heartland. It had prospered for decades, its great glass and steel hymns to capitalism thrusting out of a coveted piece of real estate, proudly squatting inside a loop of the Thames.
During the past decade and a half, things had changed.
As Joni exited the station, she paused and created a reset point. She was doing it habitually now, whenever she could look around and feel she was—temporarily, at least—safe. A small man sweeping up looked at her, stopping what he was doing. His gaze was so intense that Joni stopped walking, her pretense that she knew what she was doing dropping momentarily. The man shuffled closer to her before speaking.
“Miss? You know where you going? Someone meeting you?”
Joni felt the unease of being in an utterly strange place. She was suddenly, uncomfortably, mistrustful of
the man’s motives in approaching her.
“Yes, actually, I am meeting a friend. She’s expecting me, I’d better go.”
She started to walk away, but the man moved more swiftly than she expected, grabbing her arm.
“Not safe here,” he said. “Trouble every night now. The gangs, they have been moving in. Police can’t stop it. You should get back on the train, Miss. Go back into town. Not good here, not good.”
Joni shook free of his arm and forced a smile onto her face.
“I really am meeting someone. I have to go. I’ll be late.”
She walked quickly away, risking a look over her shoulder to make sure he wasn’t following. The small man was leaning on his broom, watching her, shaking his head. His expression was unreadable.”
“You take care please, Miss,” he shouted after her. “I have daughters. Please. Take care. If you change your mind, the station will be clo—,”
She hurried away, feeling bad about her unwillingness to trust him. It was so hard to know how to behave here. She was deliberately trying to cultivate a more street-wise cynicism, hoping to avoid appearing as some guileless, clueless visitor. Which was exactly what she was.
She kept her head down as she hurried around the corner, not looking at her surroundings until she had put a few hundred yards between herself and the station.
The sun was beginning to set, and the tall buildings on either side cast long deep shadows onto the concrete walkways. There were trees here, but they weren’t the old, established oaks, elms, and yews Joni had pictured. They were saplings, for the most part, planted in squares of earth, fenced off from the concrete. They hadn’t been well looked after, most of them either wrenched half out of the ground, some missing entirely. Joni looked to the left and right and saw that many of the buildings had once contained stores or offices, with big signs advertising brands she’d never heard of. But the windows were smashed or boarded up.
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 80
