by Patrick Ness
But Ram doesn’t know that because he’s leaning back against Fletcher’s car having taken possession of the man himself.
‘Freaky,’ he mutters, rubbing his face.
It’s nowhere near as disorienting as when he woke up in O’Donnell’s body. This is just a simple transfer. Aside from a few seconds’ imbalance as he adapts to moving in Fletcher’s body, Ram is firing on all four cylinders by the time he’s back in the transfer room. He needs to hide his body.
It’s really weird looking down at himself, lying on the floor, face slack, arms and legs splayed. You only ever see yourself in a mirror and he realises now it’s just not the same. Picking himself up is even stranger, feeling what he feels like to other people. Just so, so weird.
He does it carefully, worried that he might somehow break the connection. He cradles his head and keeps an eye on the wire to ensure the headset doesn’t come off. He pulls his body over to the bench he hid under before stashing himself in the same place.
Then he moves back along the wire, tucking it out of the way so it’s not too obvious and not so taut that someone might catch it and disconnect it.
All done. He thinks he just might get away with this.
He hears the front door swing open, and is hit by a sudden wave of nerves. He really hopes nobody asks him anything he can’t bluff.
‘Sir?’ he hears someone shout and the voice seems familiar and yet, somehow, not, all at the same time. ‘Mr Fletcher? It’s me, Steve. We’ve got them!’ Steve? Who’s Steve? And who has he got?
This is already threatening to be more than he can handle. He shakes himself out of his panic; he’s the boss here, remember? He can just brazen it out. If somebody doesn’t like it, he’ll just shout at them until they accept it.
‘Sir?’ the voice calls again.
Ram takes a deep breath and steps out of the transfer room. He finds himself face-to-face with Matteusz. That’s why the voice was familiar—it was just lacking an accent.
Beyond Matteusz he can see Quill and Charlie, clearly hostages, with April and Tanya behind. Except it’s not April or Tanya, is it? He can tell by the way they’re walking—swaggering really—down the corridor towards him.
The three people on the benches, the two men and Eighties Rock: this is them. They’ve taken over the bodies of his friends.
He realises he hasn’t said anything.
‘Alright, alright, calm down, I’m here,’ he says, nodding towards Quill and Charlie. ‘And you’ve been busy, I see?’
Tanya steps forward. ‘Told you we’d get them, didn’t we?’
‘Walk in the park,’ adds April, ‘though I wouldn’t mind swapping back now if you don’t mind. Day’s getting on and this isn’t quite what I had in mind for my session, you know? I want to get myself inside someone comfortable!’
‘Yeah,’ Tanya agrees, ‘time for some real partying.’
OK, so Tanya and April must be the two guys he hasn’t met before. Clients, by the sound of it. Which means Matteusz is really Eighties Rock. Fine. He’s up to speed. The sooner Tanya and April are back to normal and these two are transferred somewhere else, the better for all concerned.
He’s pulled it off once but he really doesn’t want to try operating the machine in front of other people. If they see how uncertain he is, it might give the game away. Best to let Eighties Rock do it.
‘Of course,’ he says, looking at Matteusz. ‘Do you want to do the honours?’
Matteusz looks shocked. ‘Me?’ he asks.
Has he blown this? Surely Eighties Rock must know how to use the thing if he works here?
‘You can manage, can’t you?’ he asks, because what choice does he have except to brave this out? ‘Or do you need me to hold your hand?’
Whoever it is that has taken over Tanya laughs at this. ‘He’s got your number!’ she says. ‘You should have seen him out there,’ she adds, and this seems to make Eighties Rock panic.
‘Of course I can manage,’ he says, all flustered. ‘Come on, then,’ he says, beckoning to Tanya and April, ‘let’s get you changed back.’
All three of them head past Ram and into the transfer room.
‘Not just changed back,’ Tanya says as she passes, ‘relocated! I’ve an evening of fun ahead of me!’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ replies Eighties Rock.
‘Good lad,’ says Ram, looking at Quill and Charlie. ‘And while you’re doing that, I’ll talk to our new friends.’ He hastily gestures for the two of them to back up down the corridor. They ignore him. In fact, Quill raises an eyebrow and looks as if she’s about to say something. Panicking, Ram puts his fingers to his lips and desperately mimes for her to be quiet. She’s so surprised that she doesn’t say a word.
He leans in close, flinching as she clenches her fists, ready to punch him.
‘It’s me!’ he whispers. ‘Ram! Now move back into the reception, quick!’
She narrows her eyes, but he can see that Charlie believes him because he smiles and moves back down the corridor. After a second, Quill follows and the three of them turn around the corner where they can speak more freely.
‘I swapped with the bloke running this place,’ Ram explains. ‘You know they can do that, yeah?’
‘No,’ says Quill. ‘We just assumed that April, Tanya, and Matteusz all chose the same day to enjoy a nervous breakdown.’
Ram rolls his eyes at her sarcasm.
‘You know how to work the machine then?’ Charlie asks.
Ram shrugs. ‘I’m not stupid, I picked up the basics.’ This is overselling things rather, but he likes being the clever one for once. ‘When Eighties Rock back there swaps everyone over—’
‘Eighties Rock?’ Charlie asks.
‘The one that looks like Matteusz,’ Ram says. ‘He works here.’
‘Weird name.’
‘Just shut up for a minute, will you?’ Ram can’t believe this kid sometimes. ‘When he’s changed all three of them back, he’s going to transfer the two blokes straight out again. Which means they’re not a problem, they’ll just be lying there sparked out.’
‘So we only have one person to deal with?’ asks Quill. ‘This “Eighties Rock” of yours.’
‘Yeah. I think his name might actually be Steve, now I think about it but, yeah, there’ll just be him.’
‘What a pity,’ Quill sighs. ‘I was looking forward to more of a fight than that. Oh well, I suppose one’s better than nothing.’
‘Not a chance,’ says Ram as they walk back towards the transfer room, ‘he’s mine.’
In the transfer room, April, Tanya, and Matteusz are looking confused but Charlie holds his fingers to his lips and leads them over to where Steve is waking up.
‘Rise and shine,’ says Ram.
‘All done,’ Steve says, ‘just feeling a bit woozy.’
Steve looks towards them and, just for one beautiful moment, Ram soaks up the look of worry on the man’s face.
‘Sir?’ Steve asks. ‘Is everything alright?’
‘It is now,’ Ram says, and breaks his nose.
THIRTY-ONE
STEVE NEGOTIATES FOR THE CONTINUED USE OF HIS LEGS
Steve’s lap is full of blood. He just knew today was going down the drain.
‘Let me explain to you what’s about to happen,’ says Quill, and he looks up at her and fights the urge to cry. He can tell that this is not someone who will be swayed by the sight of a few tears.
‘The happy children are away being happy,’ she continues, ‘doing the hugging and backslapping that they so love to do. They will be swapping stories, bringing each other up to speed. You know, the boring stuff.’
‘He hit me,’ says Steve, ‘Fletcher hit me.’
‘Do use a brain cell, Steve of the Eighties Rock. That wasn’t your boss; that was one of my lot. He took over the body of your boss so as to indulge in all the turning of tables and punching of noses.’
‘Oh.’
‘Concisely put. So, as I was saying, we have
reached the stage of your day where all the pain starts to happen.’
‘What?’ Steve tries backing away but that’s nigh on impossible when you’re sat on a bench, so really he just ends up scrunching himself into a ball like a hedgehog. A hedgehog with a broken nose.
‘Why?’ he asks.
‘Why?’ Quill sits down on the end of the bench and smiles at him. He’s not sure, because his panic is making his nerves get all confused, but he thinks that smile may have just caused his bladder to empty.
‘Well,’ she continues, ‘let’s see. Maybe it’s because you’ve been part of a business that has been using alien technology to offer body tourism? Letting the rich occupy the bodies of others’—she leans in—‘without, of course, their explicit approval, a point that particularly sets my knuckles whitening.’ She sniffs as though smelling something unpleasant and leans back. He guesses he must have wet himself after all.
‘As if that act of violation wasn’t enough,’ she continues, ‘these rich body-tourists have then been going around committing acts of violence and murder, spreading the misery far and wide.’ She sighs. ‘Stealing people’s lives wasn’t sufficient—you had to end the lives of those close to them too.’
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he says. ‘Fletcher gave clients free rein, no questions asked. I just worked here. Keeping an eye on things, a bit of tidying . . .’
‘A bit of kidnapping?’
‘What?’ He realises she means what he, Banks, and Taylor have just done. ‘Oh, that, well, Fletcher insisted, I thought he was going to kill me. I just didn’t know!’
‘Well,’ says Quill, ‘let me remove any similar doubt from your current position. I won’t kill you.’
‘No?’ Steve looks relieved.
‘No, I’m afraid not. Sorry. I know you’ll want me to after the torture really gets into full swing but I have principles. Not many, but I draw the line at murder. I may handicap you for life, reduce you to a paralysed, vegetative state . . .’ She laughs. ‘It’s always so hard to predict when you get carried away. Human bodies are so fragile: one cut here and that’s your spinal cord gone, one stab there and you’re vacating into a bag for the rest of your life.’
‘Oh God!’ Now Steve does start crying, sobbing and sobbing. He hasn’t cried this much since he could count his birthdays on one hand. ‘Please don’t hurt me—I’ll do whatever you want, but don’t hurt me!’
Quill sucks air in between her teeth, as if caught on the thorns of a particularly tough decision. ‘I’m not sure I can trust you. Well, obviously I can’t. No, sorry, I think it has to be the torture.’
‘But I’ll tell you everything I know! All of his clients, he keeps them in a notebook in his pocket. The room at the end of the corridor, there’s something awful in there that he never lets me see.’ He has a sudden brain wave: ‘The machine! I can work it better than he can! I figured out how to do a full swap, so two people completely transferred!’ He doesn’t admit this was an accident. ‘And I figured out how to reverse that. He didn’t have a clue. I did it while he was out . . . Awkward, actually, because I think that means he probably killed Mr O’Donnell when he thought he was killing—’
Quill interrupts him. ‘You’re waffling.’
‘But it means I can show you how it works, and you could do whatever you want to do with it.’
Quill makes a show of considering again.
‘OK, let’s discuss this a little more. Maybe, just maybe I can leave you with the continued use of your legs after all.’
THIRTY-TWO
AN UNEXPECTEDLY BUSY DAY FOR THE METROPOLITAN POLICE SERVICE
Viola Cummings is not normally one for public displays. She simply hasn’t got the confidence for it. Those that know her are, therefore, extremely surprised to hear the news that she has been arrested for running naked through the Barbican Centre.
If it were simply a matter of her public exposure, the sentence would have been relatively innocuous. But after a brief lap of the reception area, she then stole a backpack from a distracted tourist, strapped it on, and gave local security the exercise workout of their lives while screaming, ‘Bomb! I have a bomb! Going to blow this whole place sky-high!’
This behaviour resulted in a more severe sentence.
Initially, a weeping Mrs Cummings spent a considerable amount of time as an unwilling guest of the security services (constantly insisting she had no idea what anyone was talking about; not only would she not expose herself within the Barbican Centre, she’d never owned a backpack in her life). She was then forced to serve a lengthy term of community service, plus compulsory counselling sessions.
The latter actually proved useful and she would later admit (to her entirely new set of friends—it’s funny what being on a terrorism watch list does for your social circle) that counselling had been the making of her.
James Banks, property developer and terrible human being, also has a bad day.
It’s extremely confusing. One minute he’d been preparing to start a fight in a particularly rough pub, happily ensconced inside the body of an eighteen-year-old from Brixton. The next thing he knows he’s himself again and being thrown out of the backseat of a car. He doesn’t hurt himself much in the fall, though he does get a sudden glimpse of the driver, the blonde woman he and Taylor were sent to kidnap earlier. How’s this happening? Has Fletcher tried to shaft him or something?
Then, for a period of five minutes, he knows nothing at all. The policeman currently standing next to his hospital bed assures him that he ran into a pound shop and started punching the goods. When the store manager tried to restrain him, he ran out into the road and attempted to karate kick an approaching minivan. The manoeuvre did not work out well for him, as the heroic quantity of plaster and bandages now covering his body attest.
The unusual experiences of Barry Taylor, financial analyst and self-proclaimed ‘bit of a lad’ are, initially, not dissimilar. He too experienced a brief moment of being pulled out of one encounter and into another.
He had been weighing up his options between a pretty brunette and a pretty blonde, half tempted to take on both.
Then he’d found himself briefly awake, the blonde woman he’d followed earlier grinning down at him.
After that, the next thing he knows he’s squatting in the open doorway of his boss’s office at work.
Later, he will have the impossible task of trying to explain a considerable quantity of illegal pornographic material on his work computer’s hard drive. But that, and the court trial it will lead to are all future problems. Right now he is staring his boss in the eye and wondering quite how he’s going to laugh off the fact that he’s pleasuring himself with a gold-plated industry award.
The conversation does not go well.
To begin with, the police aren’t sure what to do with Imogen Farmer. She’s walked in off the street with a story they simply can’t believe. She claims that she’s the one responsible for the fire at the Collinses’ household. That it’s down to her that Max Collins, still tearfully protesting his innocence, has been charged with the murder of his family.
The evidence against the boy is so clear that they simply can’t accept the crime could be attributed to someone else, as much as they might wish otherwise.
While Ms Farmer seems clearly frustrated at not being believed, she can’t actually give them any reason to change their mind. Eventually, the police officer in charge of the case insists she be taken away and charged for wasting their time. At which point, Ms Farmer goes through a period of extreme disorientation. The court will later hear—indeed it will form part of the evidence for ‘diminished responsibility’—that she looked around and asked what she was doing there.
When, with more patience than she truly feels, the lead officer explains the events of the last hour or so, Ms Farmer breaks down in tears. She then begins to give far more useful evidence. She describes the precise method she used for starting the fire; the removal of the battery from the fire
alarm (‘I put it in his pocket,’ she says); the places where she poured the petrol; even young Tommy’s pyjamas and the plastic ties she used to fix him to the chair.
The police are at a loss as to explain how it’s possible, but a court later decides that they’d much rather convict a woman who has all the belief of having committed the crime than a child who doesn’t. Max Collins will be in care for the next few years, but at least he won’t be in prison.
There are many similar cases. All involving affluent individuals, all involving bizarre lapses in behaviour, acts of public self-sabotage, police confessions . . . It is a strange day indeed for the Metropolitan Police Service.
And finally, there is the curious case of Mr Garry Fletcher.
It isn’t the first time the police have had someone confess to a hit and run. It’s actually surprisingly common. Guilt has a habit of building over time, and he won’t be the first motorist to suddenly realise he has to atone for what he’s done.
Yes, it is strange that he will change his opinion so completely, shortly after having submitted his signed statement. His screaming and the violent manner he hurls himself around his cell is put down to a psychological breakdown. No doubt this is also why he now insists: ‘I didn’t say any of that! It wasn’t me! It was the aliens!’
On the subject of aliens, what really surprises the investigating officer is the mess he finds in the backseat of Fletcher’s car. Almost every available space is filled with what appears to be—but simply can’t be—body parts. Legs, arms, torsos, but all of a strange, clearly nonhuman variety. Sitting amongst all this, and the one claiming it to be of extraterrestrial origin, is a man who is alternatively sobbing and vomiting. The man is identified as Steve Hopley, and he later admits to being complicit in the hit-and-run.
The investigating officer is inclined to view the body parts as some form of strange hoax—though they will later be removed from evidence by a team from UNIT, so who knows what the real story is?
