by Tim Lebbon
And see what? he thought, heart racing. What are these bastards doing here? But he knew very well. This was vivisection.
He planted his hand on the woman’s chest and shoved her aside. She felt strange to the touch, her chest almost solid, yet not quite mannequin-hard. Her expression did not alter, but as she bounded from the wall and slid along the floor the effect of the impact was dreadful. Her right arm was crushed slowly, violently around her body, shoulder popping, and as her hand glanced from her face her nails opened ugly gashes across her nose and over her forehead. Even though in Jack’s view she moved normally, in her reality the impact would have been impossibly rapid and brutal. He hoped he had not killed her. But he didn’t care enough to check.
Fleeter was behind him as he shoved the handle down on the metal door and shoved it open.
It was a store room. All four walls of the container were lined with shelving, and eighty percent of the shelves contained glass sample jars. They were strapped in for safety. Their contents were not easily identifiable.
“Bastards,” Fleeter said.
“How many people?” Jack wondered. There must have been two hundred jars there. “How can they…?”
“What, justify this?”
Jack nodded, but he already knew the answer. “They don’t have to,” he said. “As far as the world knows, London is filled with monsters.”
“Camp H certainly is,” Fleeter said. “Come on. The girl.”
They stepped over the woman sprawled in the corridor—her expression changing infinitely slowly from mildly distracted, to shocked and agonised—and kicked open the next door. The room was filled with equipment, tools, and a heavily stocked weapon rack. Fleeter grabbed a pistol and several magazines and offered them to Jack, but he shook his head. She raised an eyebrow.
“It wasn’t an invitation,” she said.
Jack took the gun. She pointed briefly at the switch above the trigger. “Safety. And there’s one in the handle, squeeze that when you’re shooting.”
The next room was a bathroom, and then the corridor ended with another door. Fleeter went to kick it open but Jack held up his hand, one finger raised.
He half-closed his eyes and cruised his star-scape of potential, realising even as he tried that he had yet to employ one talent whilst already using another. His awareness of Fleeter and his surroundings diminished, and he probed outwards, projecting his senses through the metal door and into the room beyond. There were three warm sensations in there. Jack closed in and merged his own senses with the first—
He smells coffee, thick and bitter; hears a long, low moan, and realises it is someone else in mid-sentence, their words slowed to an impossible crawl; sees two women across from him, one of them biting into a bar of chocolate, the other open-mouthed as she speaks, both cradling guns across their laps, the room lined with computers and wheeled chairs, a map on one wall, screens buzzing mid-flash. And in that other person’s mind which is more alien than Jack could have possibly imagined, a frozen image of what its owner would rather be doing right now. The stilled thought includes both women across from him.
Jack notices the grille in the wall behind the women, then, and the shadow outlined beyond. There is a weak light in that smaller room. When Jack shifts his perception he touches upon an incredible, tortured mind, and the pain within is—
—Jack pulled back through the door to himself, shivering as he reined in his senses. He panted heavily, rubbing his hands across his eyes as if that might clear him of another person’s distress and wretchedness.
“What?” Fleeter asked.
“Horrible,” Jack said. “The poor girl, the poor…”
Fleeter shoved him against the door. “What?”
“Three Choppers. Control room. The girl’s in a smaller room…a cell…and she’s—”
Fleeter slammed the handle down and entered the room. Jack went to follow but slumped against the cold doorframe, watching helplessly as Fleeter shoved the two women aside. When they struck the desks and floor, blood flowed. She tried the door but it was locked and bolted. When she glanced back at Jack, he was already moving towards her.
“Stand back.” He concentrated, and the two heavy hinges glowed red, white, then dripped and melted. Fleeter pulled the door again, and sweat flushed down Jack’s face as he concentrated some more. Then the door squealed open, molten metal pattering across the floor. Smoke hung lazily in the air.
And Jack saw the girl, who was no girl at all. She must have been eighteen. Pretty once, perhaps, now she was restrained by ropes tied around her arms and legs, her emaciated body wrapped in shapeless clothing, dark hair knotted and dirty. A waste bucket sat beneath her seat, and it was the indignity of this more than anything that stirred Jack’s rage. He’d seen body parts and blood, jars filled with dissected brains and other organs, and the evidence of the slaughter carried out here in the name of science—or perhaps simply in the name of fear and hate—was incontrovertible. But seeing this poor girl and the bucket she had to piss in brought it all home.
“Bastards!” he shouted. Fleeter glanced at him, her usual manic grin absent. She pulled a flick-knife from her pocket and sliced through the ropes. Then she lifted a thinner strand and held it up for him to see.
“What?” Jack asked.
“Drugging her.”
“Cut it.”
Fleeter did so, and as the girl slumped slowly onto her seat, the pipe started to swing away, dripping a hazy fluid across the floor. She moved to her own time, and Jack had plenty of time to catch her before she fell.
“Won’t it kill her moving her at our speed?” he asked. “She doesn’t have what we have.”
“It’ll hurt her,” Fleeter said. “But we need to get her back through there. Just be careful not to bump her against anything.”
Jack glanced behind at the three guards. Fleeter had shoved them all aside, and now they sprawled on the floor, still gradually shifting from the staggering impacts her contact had subjected them to. Maybe they were dead; right then, Jack did not care. He hated them enough to kill them himself, but every second they had was precious.
“Give me a moment, then bring her,” Fleeter said. Her voice had grown serious, and in her eyes Jack saw his own rage reflected. At the sight of the girl she’d lost some of her aimless anger, and now her fury was defined.
“Fleeter…” But she was gone, across the room and out into the corridor. He could have called her back. Could have prevented her from doing what he knew she was about to do. But his own fury held his voice, and as he lifted the poor girl into his arms he heard a sound like paper tearing.
Fleeter was waiting for him back at the door into the container. Jack only glanced into the torture room, and barely winced slightly at the sight of the man and his slashed throat. She’d used the same knife that had freed the girl, and there was some justice in that. But Jack was also unsettled that the sight of murder troubled him so little.
The girl was light, emaciated, hungry, and might well have been dead. But he could sense her life, and something about it was unbelievably strong. Without even trying—without clasping a talent—he could tell that she was alive, and furious, and that he would get to know her well. That was not some prescient thought, but a silent vow.
“They must be keeping my mother and sister in the other containers,” Jack said as he followed Fleeter down the boxy steps.
“If they’re not dead already.”
“We have to look.”
The scene was much as they had left it…but not quite. The Choppers across Camp H were all backing away, confused at whatever had compelled them to drop their weapons. Beyond, Sparky and Jenna had taken half a step forward, and Breezer, the Irregulars, and Puppeteer were all advancing as well.
Fleeter glanced across at the other conjoined containers, then up behind Jack. “Out of time,” she said, pointing.
From atop a stack, something was growing. Jack frowned, squinting against the light. Even the sunlight felt slow.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“They’ve started shooting,” Fleeter said.
“Shit.”
“We’ve got maybe a minute before—”
“You go,” Jack said, nodding down at the girl in his arms. “And take her with you.” He was now more convinced than ever that the other three containers formed a prison. A cattle truck, where they kept the subjects for their gruesome, inhuman experiments.
“You really want to play a lottery for whom that bullet’s aimed at?” Fleeter said. She was pointing up, and Jack could now see a metallic smear to the air ahead of where the flash of gunfire and smoke was blooming from high up. I’m watching a bullet travel through the air, he thought, amazed. It was just about the only thing visibly moving.
Neither of them knew whom the shooter had been aiming at.
“Damn it.”
They hurried back across the clearing towards their friends and allies, and as they reached them Jack saw a smear of blood hazing the air around the girl’s face and across her chest. She was bleeding from her nose and eyes, but he had no time to help her right then. He set her gently on the road.
“Hurry!” Fleeter said. Jack glanced back and saw the silvery trace of the bullet. It was already halfway between the sniper’s rifle and its intended target, and Fleeter was standing at Reaper’s side. “Remember, gentle,” she said. “Just ease them aside. It’ll hurt, but if you shove them over into the ground, the impact might kill them.”
“Did it kill those guards?” he asked, but Fleeter did not answer. She was guiding Reaper to one side, lovingly, reverently, and Jack had to look away. That was his father she worshipped. A man he loved, and now the most brutal person he knew.
No, not quite. That title now went to Miller.
He stood in front of Sparky and Jenna and turned to watch the bullet, tracking its path. “It’s him,” Jack said. “Fleeter, it’s my dad.”
“Safe now,” she said. “Kneel by the girl, flip back, make sure they see her.”
“You think we can stop this now the first shot’s been fired?”
She looked around more urgently. “Can’t see any more flashes. Come on. Flip.”
With a smack against the dulled air, Fleeter grew dull and motionless in Jack’s vision.
He closed his eyes and did the same.
The gunshot and ricochet were deafening.
Jack gasped in a heavy breath, winded, and scooped the girl from the ground.
“Bloody hell!” Sparky said. “Where did you—?”
“We’ve got the girl!” Jack shouted. “And your torture doctors are dead! One more shot and the rest of you die too. Every…single…one of you!”
“Hold fire!” a voice shouted. It was electronically amplified, and Jack recognised Miller right away.
The rush of sound and input shocked Jack. The breeze against his face, his friends’ heavy breathing, the rustle of clothing, mysterious, distant noises from elsewhere in the huge container park or beyond…he heard none of these when he was flipped. I accelerate, he thought, but knew that was not quite right. He could not fully explain what he and Fleeter could do.
The girl moved in his arms. She moaned something, and whined, and blood was still flowing from her nose and eyes. She was much too light, and he could feel bones he should not be able to feel. In using her, they had also neglected her. It was so brutal that it made him want to cry, or rage.
He chose rage.
“One more gunshot, you bastards, and you’ll only kill one of us!” he shouted, voice echoing from stacked containers around the clearing. “That’ll leave the rest, and others you can’t see. Check on your torture hole. Check it!”
A rustle through the hidden loudspeaker, and then two Choppers jogged from different directions towards the doorway Jack and Fleeter had exited moments before. But they did not need to check. As they approached, a woman crawled into sight in the open doorway. She was on her hands and knees, bloodied head nodding slowly up and down, hair matted with gore. A high, soft keening came from her mouth, but Jack could not pity her.
“We’ll kill them,” Miller said. Faceless, voice crackling and distorted through speakers, he was more inhuman than ever. “The ones you want are still alive, but we’ll kill them the moment something happens. One of you moves, one of you even blinks, and they die.”
“We can be on you in less than a blink, Miller,” Reaper said. His voice was low and casual, but it echoed from metal walls, and grit vibrated across the ground. Jack could already hear the fury in his father’s voice. Good, he thought, elated. Good! He is here to help. He does want Mum and Emily.
The girl in Jack’s arms opened her eyes. “Jamie?” she said.
“No, I’m not Jamie. My name’s Jack.”
The girl blinked bloodily, slowly raised a weak hand and wiped at her eyes. She looked at Jack for a few seconds, so sad, so soulful. His heart sank. He could have fallen in love with those eyes in an instant. “Oh,” she said. “You’re not Jamie.”
He set her down, but kept an arm around her shoulder. Leaning against him for support, she felt dreadfully cold and weak.
“Every one of you,” Jack said. “Every one of you, Miller! You’ll be shooting at shadows, strangled by hands you can’t see, seeing things you can’t imagine. You think you know what the Irregulars can do, just because you’ve sliced them up and taken samples of their brains? You think you have even an inkling of what the Superiors can do, because you lose Choppers to them every week? Do you…do you have any idea what I can do?” He felt the others watching him—his friends, in fear; the Irregulars, nervous and yet ready to fight. And his father, with what might have been respect.
The scene fell almost silent. Hidden speakers crackled with Miller’s doubt. Choppers stood tensed, uncertain, glancing down at their dropped weapons. Jack, Reaper, and the others faced them. And the girl leaned against Jack, starting to shiver with the knowledge that she had been released.
“We’re the New,” Jack said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “The fighting stops now. The killing ends here. You, Miller…you’re the old. History. The past. And you know how the saying goes.”
Beside him, Sparky chuckled softly then shouted, “Out with the old!”
“And in with the new,” Jenna said.
“You really think we’d stay in London, here, without protection?” Miller said. “Without an insurance policy?” Jack was sure he could detect a note of resignation in the Chopper’s voice.
“No good when you’re dead,” Reaper shouted.
“No more killing unless we have to, Dad,” Jack said. Reaper did not even glance at his son as he started forward.
Puppeteer moved Choppers aside. Others backed away of their own accord, leaving their weapons where they had fallen. Jack and his friends followed, Breezer with them, and the New moved across Camp H unopposed.
Yet Jack felt no sense of victory. Something was wrong. The girl by his side was a living expression of Miller’s inhumanity, and those rooms he had seen in the container buildings, the jars, the smears of blood and chunks of something—of someone—being cleared away….
With all that, could he ever really hope for peace?
As they approached the three joined containers, a door creaked open at the top of a gentle wooden ramp. Miller appeared strapped into a wheelchair, his terribly mutilated legs resting on footplates, his left arm ending in a stump just above his elbow. He looked thin and drawn, corpselike and lessened. Yet it was his smile that shocked Jack the most.
“Like your new chair, Miller,” Reaper said. “Maybe this time I’ll take your other arm, and your cock, and one of your eyes. Then how will you—”
Miller started laughing. He tilted his head back and guffawed at the sky, and Sparky and Jenna shot Jack a glance that said everything he was already thinking.
Something terrible was about to happen.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE HOLLOW GIRL
“We need to leave,”
Rook said. “Really. Now. We’re going the wrong way, Lucy-Anne!”
“Leave if you want, I’m going the right way.”
They had been following Nomad since she had left. At least, Lucy-Anne had been leading them north. And soon after the strange woman had seemingly abandoned them, things had started to change. The wilderness around them had grown wilder, and more shapes and shadows made themselves known. They darted across hillsides and huddled beside lush growths of shrubs, and though the two of them kept to the open spaces, Lucy-Anne feared that soon they would meet more residents of the Heath.
Dusk approached, crawling across the hillsides like a living thing and driving the sun into the western expanses of London. Rook’s birds drifted along above them like echoes of night, turning and spiralling up into the sky before swooping down again. Lucy-Anne was becoming used to their constant flap and swoosh, and she feared not hearing that anymore. He’s scared, he’s terrified, and if he leaves me I’ll be just as scared.
Something burst from the trees ahead of them and came rapidly down the slope. Rook grasped her shoulder and pulled himself in front of her, squatted down, ready for a fight. He sent his birds and they angled in towards the shape, but then veered away at the last moment. Their caw-caws sounded panicked to Lucy-Anne, and she dreaded meeting what could scare them so much.
But it was Nomad, only Nomad, and she grew from shadows to meet them.
Lucy-Anne went to her knees. I’ve found him, Nomad had said, and if that were the case, where was Andrew now?
“I’m…sorry,” Nomad said. It was the most emotion Lucy-Anne had heard in her voice.
She took the gold chain and signet ring from Nomad’s hand. Their parents had bought Andrew the ring for his eighteenth birthday, and the chain had been a present from one of his first girlfriends. His parting with her had been difficult, yet for some reason he’d still worn that chain, and treasured it. She’d once asked him why, and he’d told her it was because it reminded him of good times, not bad. She loved that about him—his positivity, and optimism.
