‘Call Holland again,’ he said. ‘Call them. I want searchlights up. I want everyone coming through that port to have a torchlight in the fucking face. I want men patrolling the barbed wire. I want every single lorry open and every single person trying to get somewhere cursing my name because it takes so bloody long. I want the entire Great Escape, do you hear me?’
Young PC Mbele reflected that some people did manage to get away in The Great Escape, but he didn’t feel this was the right time to mention it. They’d all had a very long day, and he didn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon, which was annoying because he had a date at the cinema with Magenta, the really hot A&E nurse. But she’d laughed that low, sweet laugh she had when he called her. She knew a bit about shifts overrunning. He smiled just thinking about her voice: it was like syrup.
‘Something funny?’ snapped Nigel.
‘No, boss,’ said PC Mbele, turning back to his phone.
Nigel stood in the door looking at Evelyn. She would be, he suspected, the toughest nut to crack. Arnold was all talk, but he wouldn’t like the discomfort and would likely give them up for Amazing Fantasy Vol. 15. Ranjit talked a lot of rubbish and was probably a terrible choice, in retrospect, for the project. Sé was all about sitting stoically with his mouth shut, but Nigel reckoned Evelyn was the toughest of the lot.
‘How are you getting on?’ he said, standing in the doorframe. Evelyn had her own pile of papers she was working on half-heartedly.
‘Dinner was awful,’ she stated. ‘And late. And I want to go home.’
Nigel looked down.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Last time we let you go home, two of you ran away. You do understand that?’
Evelyn made a tight jerk with her head.
‘I can’t believe they left you like this to pick up the pieces and pay the price for their behaviour,’ said Nigel, shaking his head.
‘Well, you haven’t met many people then,’ observed Evelyn calmly, carrying on as if she were marking undergraduate essays.
Nigel shook his head.
‘You are one of a handful of people in the world who knows what they are risking,’ he said. ‘That without their help we might never understand the message and what it means to us. To everyone on Earth.’
Evelyn stared into space stoically. She bit her lip then turned round and opened her mouth. Nigel held his breath.
‘Also, could you ask them not to be late with breakfast? It’s not good for my brain alertness if I’m trying to work hungry.’
Connie had a near-perfect internal clock, always had done. When she was very little, she had been fascinated by the old grandfather clock that was screwed into the walls of the communal hallway of the big Victorian house subdivided into flats she was raised in. As soon as she could talk, she had made her father, a logistics manager at a chemical factory, teach her how the day was split into hours, and had toddled about, at three or thereabouts, announcing the time to strangers and dividing things by twelve. It was the first time the MacAdair family had first noticed something different about her, but not the last.
Ever since, Connie had kept a clock in her head almost by accident; she couldn’t help herself. She always knew what time it was.
She had no idea what time it was.
They had washed ashore in a tiny inlet. As soon as Luke was no longer a part of her – and he had, she realised, blinking with astonishment, he had been a part of her, part of the whole of her, encompassing her, just as she had been a full part of him – she knew on some level she was cold. She lay on her back with her hair in the wet sand, and discovered another thing: she couldn’t move. Or rather, she didn’t want to move. The cosmos had lifted her up, squeezed her, wrung her dry, and now she wanted to lie here, emptied, clear, and let the echo of the afterglow run through her.
Where was Luke? Where was he? Suddenly, she sat bolt upright. She stared out at the dark waves, blinking several times to clear her vision; to adjust it again to look at the ground, not sink into eternity. She focused gradually, and stared out to sea. There he was, although she could not see him properly; he was flickering, a dense, glistening shadow underneath the water.
She put her arms around her legs, which suddenly appeared to be made completely of jelly, and rested her chin on her knees. Beside her was the plastic-bagged-up rucksack, miraculously still watertight – they really were bags for life, she thought – and she shook out Luke’s coat and put it around her shoulders, and watched him flicker happily. Beyond happy. She couldn’t think of anything other than that: not what they had left behind, not what they were going towards – nothing but this moment. Even if it was beyond sense… she couldn’t think about that now, she knew; she couldn’t. Couldn’t think about what it meant for her. She forced herself not to dwell on it; just to keep herself in the moment.
And this was the moment: watching someone she knew she would be with, wherever they went now and whatever happened, without a question of a doubt, and without a glance back, as they ran towards whichever strange, new world they now inhabited.
There was a huge whomping noise suddenly, and a hooting alarm went off. Lights – great big spotlights that reminded Connie of a war film – suddenly flicked on up and down the barbed-wire fence of the nearby ferry port. Luke must, Connie realised suddenly, have travelled in a straight line, just as the boats did. Why hadn’t he come in somewhere else? Regardless, he would barely see the light and wouldn’t recognise the sirens. She jumped up and waved wildly at him.
‘Luke! Luke! Come in! Come in!’
There wasn’t the tiniest sliver of doubt in her mind, not an ounce, that they were looking for them. Of course they were looking for them. They held the key to the biggest thing to happen to the world since the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Her heart started to beat more quickly.
‘Come in! You have to come!’ she shouted, waving her arms. Finally he noticed her and surfaced, his big, clear head shaking off the droplets of water.
‘I don’t want to,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to come in. I don’t want to get back in there.’
‘I know,’ said Connie, glancing behind her. The lights were getting closer. From the furthest perimeter she thought she could hear dogs barking. They couldn’t be searching them with dogs. They couldn’t.
‘Quick, Luke. QUICK. Quick. If they see you… if they see you and they see you like that, you know what will happen. You know.’
For just the tiniest of seconds Luke stood there, looking defiant, glancing back at the sea she now understood why he could never bear to gaze upon; looked back for one last time at his freedom and the only place he could truly be himself.
Then, he came towards her, shuffled up the beach. With every step, as the water splashed off him, his beautiful, shining skin contracted, became more and more solid, until he was once again human-shaped, and then, as she gave him his shirt and he began to return to air temperature, the pigmentation too began to show, until he was, once again, a man – a tall, rangy man with long fingers and toes, but nonetheless a man, with dark brown eyes and a shaggy mop of curly brown hair, high cheekbones and a full mouth, which at the moment was drawn back in pain.
‘Does it hurt?’ asked Connie anxiously. Luke nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
‘Give me a second,’ he said, clear beads of sweat appearing on his forehead, which he quickly wiped away with his free hand. He grabbed her, briefly, to steady himself, and let out a small ‘oh’.
‘We have to move,’ said Connie. ‘We have to go somewhere. They’ve got dogs.’
‘I can’t…’
Luke could barely move: his legs wouldn’t support him.
‘Argh,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s okay,’ said Connie. ‘Lean on me.’
He was heavy; far heavier, of course, than he looked. She half dragged him, half stumbled up towards the cliff and up the scree.
‘Oh God,’ she said, her heart pounding. ‘Those dogs probably can’t smell you. But they wi
ll sure as hell be able to smell me.’
She kept away from the perimeter, trying to watch her feet, as gradually Luke pulled himself back together, and was able, finally – although he could not yet speak – to keep up with her, both of their breathing tight in the night air. At the top of the dune he turned round, once, very briefly, and gazed out at the roughening sea. He looked at it for a long moment. Then he turned back, grabbed her hand and they stumbled on.
‘Don’t stop,’ Connie told herself. ‘Don’t look back. Never look back.’
They kept moving, only just metres ahead of the lights, it seemed, that were pointing behind them, as the port and the town and the road were lit up, bang bang bang, the light chasing them across the darkness of the great continent that lay before them, and they ran until Connie was exhausted, Luke hurling her over walls and fences if she needed that, and offering to carry her, which she felt would only slow them down even further.
‘Go!’ She pushed on, muttering under her breath. ‘Go, go, go.’
But the noises of the dogs and the sirens seemed to be falling behind them. She looked up, incredibly grateful there was no helicopter. Then she tripped in a dark ditch, and fell straight into a barbed-wire fence.
‘Shit,’ Nigel was saying. ‘Shit shit shit. It’s been hours. They could be anywhere by now.’
‘We’re still searching the ferries,’ said Malik. ‘There’s a million places to hide on those. We don’t know if they even took one. They might still be hiding down Ipswich way. We’ve got the helicopters out. We’ve got as much manpower as we can summon.’
‘It’s not enough,’ growled Nigel.
‘This isn’t an ordinary manhunt, is it, sir?’ said Malik.
Nigel didn’t answer.
The fence seemed unending in either direction.
‘We’ll have to find another way,’ said Connie.
Luke shook his head. ‘This is the way,’ he persisted.
‘Yes, but on Earth we have these things called roads,’ she said.
‘Incredibly impractical,’ said Luke. ‘Just take the latitude.’
‘But it runs you into things like this.’
Luke gave a weak smile. ‘Call this a wall?’ he said.
Connie was still terrified from the great commotion at the ferry port, and wasn’t nearly as far away from it as she’d like to be at that precise second.
‘Can we go please?’ she said anxiously. ‘I don’t care where. Just keep moving.’
Luke nodded. Behind the barbed-wire fence were lines and lines of trucks. Connie looked up and down but she couldn’t see a camera.
‘Through,’ said Luke without hesitation. ‘The best way out is always through.’
He picked her up by the waist and held her over the wire, letting her feel with her feet on the other side. She saw the lights, bright at the port beyond, and shut her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, he hadn’t moved or changed: he was still holding her straight up in the air like a ballet dancer, without the least strain or effort.
Lightly she lowered herself down the other side. Luke clambered to the top of the barbed wire – the sharp points didn’t seem to bother him – and jumped down lightly.
‘Wow,’ said Connie, following him down.
They were in a large scrubby area, dimly lit, full of lorries. It was dark and gloomy. There were, Connie assumed, people asleep in the lorries, which gave it a sinister atmosphere. Sure enough, she could see three men around a campfire at the bottom end of the field, lit ends of their cigarettes going. She stayed in close to the edge, flattening herself out of sight, breathing heavily and wondering what on earth they were going to do next.
Luke wandered closer up to the men. He stayed behind in the shadows, Connie watching him, wondering what on earth he had planned. He stayed, quiet, listening, then snuck back.
‘Well?’ said Connie.
‘They’re on their way to Poland,’ he said. ‘Making jokes about being stopped and searched, wondering what the hell for. They don’t think there’s anything to transport out of England except rain and fish and chips and fat children. Sorry, would Evelyn say that is rude?’
‘You speak Polish?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Luke.
‘You understood what they said?’
‘I don’t understand what you’re asking me now.’
‘You know there are different languages? That people speak differently?’
‘Ohhh. Yes. I do know that. I just forgot. So you wouldn’t understand him?’
Connie shook her head. ‘Not a word, no. Of course not. Can’t you tell he speaks entirely differently from me?’
‘Everyone speaks differently from you,’ said Luke puzzled. ‘Nobody sounds the same.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Do you think you sound like Ranjit? You don’t to me.’
‘But you seriously understand everything everybody says?’
‘Of course,’ said Luke. ‘It’s just mouth shapes and noises that apply to subjective worldviews.’ He looked confused. ‘You know those very large brains humans haul about everywhere that weigh down the rest of you?’
‘Hmm?’
‘You could probably use them a bit more efficiently.’
Somewhere, from across the distant field, a faint church bell rang. The men around the campfire looked at their watches: 2 a.m. They worked to tightly controlled shifts on how long they could drive for, and a new one was just beginning. They threw their cigarette ends into the fire and started to disperse, anxious to get going.
‘Luke,’ said Connie. ‘Can we…? I mean, Belarus is that way, isn’t it? If we go with them?’
‘What do you mean?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘They drive these things. What did you think they were?’
Luke regarded the lorries all around them.
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘Well, they move,’ said Connie, ‘in the direction of Belarus, unless my geography is worse than I thought, which it isn’t because I got straight As in everything.’
‘Oh,’ said Luke.
‘How on earth did you make it coming the other way?’
‘I just walked in a straight line,’ said Luke, ‘until I found some maths.’
‘How long did it take you?’
Luke squinted. ‘5.2. About three months.’
‘We’ve got three days,’ said Connie, threading her way through the trucks until she came upon one just starting off. It was huge, oppressively big, each of its enormous twelve wheels nearly the height of her. Some words she couldn’t read were written on the side, along with WARSAWSKA. She nudged Luke. ‘That one,’ she said.
Lightly, he jumped up the back plate and, with a quick downward pull, opened the lorry’s huge strong lock. The noise of the engines was incredibly loud, and the cab of the truck was on a suspension pivot. The driver did not feel the weight of their arrival: compared to the contents under the tarp, it was nothing. They slipped inside the door and rebolted it, just as the huge beast started to slowly pull away.
There was a flap of tied-down canvas at the side of the truck and Connie threw herself on the ground and peered through it. She saw a light at the gate of the lorry park. To her horror, there were men with dogs on leads patrolling it.
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Oh bollocks. They’re going to catch us.’
‘How?’ asked Luke mildly.
‘They’ll smell us. Well, they’ll smell me.’
‘The people?’
‘The dogs,’ said Connie. ‘Bugger. We’ve got so far.’
Luke blinked.
‘Why won’t they smell me?’
‘I don’t know. It’s hard to understand. You don’t smell like person. Nothing like. You smell good, but you don’t have a human smell. I don’t think they could find you, I truly don’t.’
Connie remembered the way the dog at the railway station and the animals at the facility had completely ignored him. She didn’t think they were fooled by his human glamour fo
r a second.
Something occurred to her, and she looked up and him, awkward and blushing.
‘Um.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Maybe you could do that, um. Thing again. That thing where you kind of, uh… Completely surround me? I mean, uh, I think I ended up slightly unconscious before. That last time you… we… ha, ha… did it. But…’
Luke shook his head.
‘It’s too warm in here.’
Connie went brick-red.
‘Uh, yes, it is,’ she said. ‘Um…’
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