by Joe Craig
Mitchell’s head was spinning as fast as the teacup he was sitting in. He looked around, frantic. Surely everybody in the fairground could hear the secrets this girl was shrieking at the top of her voice. But nobody else seemed interested. If they could hear at all, they probably didn’t speak English.
“Who are you?” Mitchell shouted.
Slowly, he raised the restraint off his shoulders. The boy next to him stopped screaming and tried to raise his restraint as well. When he couldn’t, he took up screaming again, with even more vigour.
Mitchell twisted, trying to keep his eyes on the girl, but now her seat was empty. He scanned the other compartments. She wasn’t there. He looked down at the four other teacups, spinning in the opposite direction. They were rising now.
After a second, Mitchell’s compartment jolted to a halt and immediately started hurling round the circle the other way. He was thrown off his feet and smacked his chin against the floor. The metal scraped off a layer of skin and his jaw jarred into his head.
When Mitchell staggered to his feet, all the teacups were spinning the same way. He looked round the circle. There she was – in a compartment two along from Mitchell’s. Suddenly, she leapt up, rolled over in mid-air and landed in the next teacup.
It was only now that the young man in the charge of the ride noticed that something was going on. Panic twisted his face. He waved his arms about, desperate to remember how to stop the ride in an emergency. He hauled on a lever, but the ride sped up. Everybody’s screams went up a notch in intensity. The man’s face went white and he scrabbled for his walkie-talkie.
“I know what you’re looking for!” the girl shouted again. Then her teacup lifted with three others and changed direction. Mitchell lost sight of her again. He stared at the teacups whizzing around above his head, trying to catch another glimpse of her.
He was only faintly aware of the ride slowing down and the crowd of funfair staff. The music stopped and the screaming stopped with it. The drone of the machinery gradually came down from its insistent pitch.
Does she really know what I’m looking for, Mitchell asked himself. How can she? How can she know who my target is?
At last, he heard her whisper again: “It’s me.”
Mitchell shuddered. He couldn’t see where the voice had come from. Then, on the other side of the ride, he caught a glimpse of a shadow. It was a figure that leapt from the top level and rolled in mid-air. As soon as she landed, she was gone. If any normal person had jumped off a moving fairground ride like that, they would have broken limbs. That’s how Mitchell knew for sure.
He jumped up and caught the edge of the teacup above him. The kid next to him was left stunned, licking ice-cream off his cheeks. Mitchell gently swung round half the circle. The ride had almost stopped now, but he used what momentum was left to heave himself off again.
The ground came to meet him with a surprising bump. Mitchell smiled as his programming cushioned the pain. He just hoped none of the other kids were stupid enough to try and copy him.
He knew he was too late to chase after the girl. He knew she would be racing away at a pace too fast to catch. For now. Instead, he jogged in the direction she had gone, away from the fairground, across the park and back into the urban jungle of Fontenay-aux-Roses. Mitchell didn’t need to meet his NJ7 contact any more. He had just met ZAF-1.
“Having a nice little Parisian holiday?” Miss Bennett asked sarcastically. She and Mitchell were on a bench in the Place des Vosges, both huddled against the cold. The geometric lawns were precisely trimmed and the canopy of leaves above them dappled the whole square with shadows. The trees clearly thought it was early Spring, though you would never have guessed it from the temperature.
“I found ZAF-1,” Mitchell announced. He wasn’t in the mood for Miss Bennett’s teasing. He had a job to do. “She’s a girl.”
Miss Bennett raised an eyebrow. “How’s her health?” she asked. She kept her voice low, while three or four metres in front of them a lone child was building a tiny castle in the sandpit – or was it a chateau? Meanwhile his mother stood by, desperate to get back indoors.
“She’s not dead, if that’s what you mean,” Mitchell replied.
“So you know where to find her?” Mitchell paused. “What happened?” Miss Bennett went on. “You gave her your number but she’s not calling? Is that it?” There was a cheeky smile playing on her lips. Mitchell decided he didn’t like this playful side to Miss Bennett. He preferred the way she acted back in the bunkers of NJ7.
“I’ll track her,” Mitchell insisted. “She knew I was looking for her, so she came to check me out. I think she enjoyed the risk – as if it’s a game to her.”
“A game?”
“Maybe. That might be her weakness.”
“Interesting.” Miss Bennett thought for a second, then added, “So you’ve called me out here because you need access to the imagery intelligence for the time after she got away from you, correct?”
“Sort of. You’re right – I need to see what the satellite saw, but not for the time after she got away. She would have been prepared for that and made sure she couldn’t be tracked by satellite.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Track her backwards,” Mitchell explained. “Find the point when I saw her, then work backwards so I can see where she was before then – not where she went afterwards.”
“You intrigue me, Mitchell Glenthorne. What have you got planned?”
In front of them, the little boy had finished his sandcastle. Now he smashed his fists into it, mashing sand into the fibres of his mittens. His gleeful giggle echoed round the square.
“Wherever she’s been,” said Mitchell, “she’ll go again – sooner or later. And when she does, I’ll pick up her trail. No matter how clever she thinks she is or where she goes, I’ll track her. There’ll be nowhere on earth she can go to get away from me. Then we’ll see whether she likes playing my kind of games.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN – STAR OF MANCHURIA
As soon as Jimmy saw Chinatown, he knew that Viggo had been right. He couldn’t imagine anywhere else on earth where they would be better hidden – not a cave in the middle of a desert, and not halfway up a mountain in Outer Mongolia. He’d never seen so many people crowding in the streets – even in the centre of London. They all bustled against each other, shoulder to shoulder across the width of the road.
Viggo had abandoned the mini-van a few streets away and now they were all following him. Every other step, Jimmy was delighted by a thick and exotic smell that he didn’t quite recognise. Above him, the night air was illuminated by a million neon lights in every colour. It was mostly Mandarin lettering, but with some Korean and Japanese. Suddenly, Jimmy realised that for the first time in his life he could tell the difference.
He picked a word at random. To his eyes it was just a collection of lines and squiggles, but he heard himself sounding it out under his breath:
“Mian tiao,” he whispered. “Noodles!”
“Where?” Felix blurted out. “I’m up for noodles. But shouldn’t we follow Chris?”
Jimmy shook his head in wonder. He knew his programming gave him the ability to speak French, but he never imagined he would be able to read and understand Chinese.
He felt himself starting to relax. Surely there was no way NJ7 could find them here. But he couldn’t allow his concentration to wander. In a crowd, a killer can come out of nowhere, he thought. He deliberately tightened his shoulders. Every time the lights reflected off a watch or a mobile phone, he flinched, imagining it was the blade of a knife aimed at his throat.
“Don’t worry, mate,” said Felix. “We’ll go for noodles later. Or dum sum. ”
“Do you mean dim sum?” Georgie chuckled.
“Yeah, whatever, we can get some of that as well if you like.”
Gradually, Jimmy noticed how different New York was to how he had expected. The streets were as dirty as they were at home, and a few of the shop f
ronts were boarded up – not as many as in London, but some. Jimmy had imagined it would be a place where everything was clean and everyone was successful.
“America’s not like it is on TV,” he whispered to Felix. “It’s as miserable as England. If this is a real democracy, it looks just the same as a Neo-democracy.”
“Yeah,” Felix agreed, “but they have real Coke here. I think that’s the difference.”
Viggo stopped beneath one of the only English signs in the street. It was a bright orange neon announcing the ‘Star of Manchuria’.
“Is this us?” Felix shouted above the hubbub of the crowd. Viggo nodded. “Awesome,” Felix went on, clenching his fist. “We get to stay in a restaurant.” He pushed past Jimmy and opened the door. It rang a little bell as he entered and a venetian blind clattered against the glass. Before Viggo could stop them, Jimmy followed.
The smell hit them first. It was almost overpowering – so much stronger than it had been in the street, but utterly wonderful. Every face in the room turned to stare at them. One man had a string of noodles still dangling from his mouth. Even the immense carp in the fish tank next to them seemed to have paused to examine Felix and Jimmy.
“Er, hello,” Felix announced meekly. He grinned, revealing the gap between his two front teeth and stretching the faint freckles on his cheeks into fat oblongs. Then a face appeared on the other side of the fish tank. The water magnified it and warped it into a hideous mess of distorted features. It rose from the depths and emerged over the other side of the tank as the face of a small Oriental lady.
Her wrinkles looked like scratches, as if a cat had once attacked her face. But the only thing that had really attacked her was time. She immediately started screeching at the top of her voice. It was a passionate tirade of incomprehensible sounds. Jimmy felt like each syllable was attacking his brain. His mind was trying to keep up, throwing up the meanings of odd words but moving far too slowly. Each phrase echoed in his head, obscuring the next one, until all he could hear was a babble of disjointed English, mixed with every foreign language in the world.
His head was swimming. He staggered to one side and held himself up against the fish tank.
“OK, OK!” It was Viggo, waving his hands about, trying to put this woman at ease. But she didn’t stop. Jimmy took a deep breath and again tried to piece together some of what she was saying. He couldn’t keep hold of any of the words long enough to string them together.
Viggo bundled Jimmy and Felix out of the restaurant. The others were waiting, confused about what was going on.
“Come on,” Viggo whispered. “We’re not staying in a restaurant; we’re staying above it.”
He hurriedly pulled out a key from his pocket and unlocked the door right next to the restaurant entrance. This one had no window, no menu and no ‘open’ sign. Behind it was nothing but a grimy staircase covered in a stained brown carpet. It was torn at the edges, where the dirt blended into the walls. There was no light.
Without hesitating, Viggo marched up the stairs. Felix was next in line, but was unsure whether to follow. Jimmy gave his friend an encouraging shove from behind.
“All right,” Felix moaned, scrunching up his nose. “I’m going. But I prefer the smell of the street.”
“You would,” Jimmy quipped. They all followed Viggo up the stairs, to the rooms above the Star of Manchuria.
“Why was that Chinese lady shouting at us?” Felix whispered when they reached the second floor.
“That’s Mrs Kai-Ro,” answered Viggo. “She runs this place. She’s agreed to hide us for a while.”
“She is one angry lady.”
“She’s not Chinese,” Jimmy blurted out suddenly.
“What?” asked Felix.
“You said, ‘that Chinese woman’ but…” Jimmy paused, surprising himself with his own certainty, “…she’s Korean.”
Felix stopped and turned to stare at him. His mouth hung open. Jimmy smiled sheepishly. Finally, Felix unfroze and exploded with excitement.
“Oh my God,” he gushed. “YOU SPEAK KOREAN! That is SO COOL!”
Jimmy tried to explain that he still needed a bit of practice before he’d really be able to speak to Mrs Kai-Ro, but that didn’t dampen Felix’s enthusiasm.
“All right, Felix,” said his mother. “That’s enough.”
Viggo unlocked another door and they filed into the second-floor rooms. They were as dingy as the staircase: a living area with a beaten-up couch, an old TV and one corner that had been converted into a tiny kitchen; a bedroom with no furniture at all, just a couple of mattresses on the floor; and a bathroom that looked like a cave made of damp and rust. It smelled like one too. The small square window opened on to a fire escape at the back of the building. Beyond that was a tiny courtyard where the bins were kept.
“We’ve got the next floor up as well,” Viggo announced, flicking on the light – a bare bulb in the centre of the room. “Neil and Olivia, why don’t you take the room upstairs, and then…” He cut himself off. He and Jimmy’s mother were standing awkwardly by the door to the remaining bedroom. They glanced at each other and Helen’s face went red. So did Viggo’s. “Erm, no, wait…”
“How about girls upstairs, boys down here?” Neil suggested quickly.
Everybody murmured their agreement. Georgie, Helen Coates and Felix’s mother, Olivia, dragged themselves up one more flight of stairs.
Suddenly, Jimmy clasped the side of his head and cried out in pain.
“What is it?” Viggo demanded.
“My head,” Jimmy gasped. His eyes were watering and he could hardly speak. “It’s that pain… ah! In my ear…”
“This happened to him this morning as well,” Felix added. “He should see a doctor.”
“The last thing we want is a civilian doctor examining him,” said Viggo. Then he turned back to Jimmy. “Are you OK?”
Jimmy wiped his face with his hands. “Yeah,” he said wearily. “It’s gone now. It’s always the same. It’s like a stab right here.” He pointed to the side of his head, where his ear met his skull, but at that moment, the light flickered and died. The room was pitch black.
“Jimmy,” Felix whispered. “You caused a power cut.”
“No way,” Jimmy protested. “It’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything, did I?” He searched his programming, terrified that it really had been him that had caused the darkness.
Gradually, a noise filtered through to them from the restaurant below. It cut through the building almost as much as Jimmy’s strange headache had pierced his brain. It was the furious rant of an old Korean woman whose restaurant had been disrupted by a power cut.
“She is definitely one angry lady,” Felix whispered.
“The whole block is out,” came the deep tones of Neil Muzbeke. “I don’t think it could be you, Jimmy.” He was standing at the living-room window, overlooking the street. His voice always came as a comfort to Jimmy, and even more so now.
“Let’s just sit tight,” Viggo suggested. “I’m sure this is nothing to do with us.” Jimmy appreciated him saying it, but there was still a note of doubt in the man’s voice.
“Everyone OK down there?” Jimmy’s mother shouted down.
“Yeah,” Viggo yelled back. “All good.”
With the lights off, time seemed to stretch so that every second lingered in the air, refusing to pass. Jimmy looked over the faces of the others. They were lost without the light, frozen still. Only Jimmy had night-vision, of course, and yet he was wishing harder than any of them that the wait would be over. In those moments, he imagined what it would be like if he could control time. He could make these minutes of darkness flash past in a single blink, so nobody would notice them. Then he could slow everything down, stretching the hours into years so that he would never reach the age of twelve.
Jimmy tortured himself with that single thought. If he never reached twelve, he would never reach thirteen. Then he would never reach eighteen, and his powers would become no
stronger than they were now. He could stay as human as he would ever be. The assassin in him would die before it was ever fully born. But that was just a fantasy. Every second Jimmy breathed, even here and now while the lights were out, his programming grew inside him. It hurtled him towards his fate: total submission to the assassin inside.
CHAPTER TWELVE – PREMONITION
The lights flickered back to life. Then, through the window, came the dazzling colours from the neon mess outside. They cast strange, colourful shadows on everybody’s face.
“It can’t be a coincidence,” Felix insisted. “There was that power cut back in England and then, as soon as we arrive, they start happening here too.”
“But it wasn’t me, OK?” Jimmy tried not to sound too upset, but really he was terrified. He hated the idea that he could somehow cause something like this and not realise. A simple power cut didn’t seem too dangerous, but what if he could also do worse, without intending to? Could he be blamed for it when he had no control over it?
Felix’s father smacked the side of the television a couple of times. The screen was scrambled. “Come on,” he insisted. “What have I got to do to get a picture?”
Meanwhile, Viggo was dashing in and out of the rooms. “Right,” he announced, “everything seems secure. I’ll go and have a look round upstairs. Then I’ve got to go out.” He looked at his watch, studying it a little longer than usual. “What’s the time difference here?” he asked.
There’s no difference, Jimmy thought to himself. It passes at the same rate wherever we are.
“By the way,” Viggo went on, not waiting for an answer, “they left a little cash for us.” Everybody turned to look at him. “You know, so we could eat.”
“Yeah, but who’s ‘they’?” Jimmy asked.
Viggo turned away. “I’ll tell you when I know it’s safe,” he mumbled. “Meanwhile, get yourselves some food. Don’t go out in pairs. One person should go, alone, then come straight back.” He picked up one of the cushions on the couch and unzipped the lining. His hand came up clutching a bundle of ragged dollars.
