by Kim Curran
Frankie turned, reaching up to adjust the drip next to one of the kid’s beds. “Patching up children and sending them back out to fight,” she said with another sigh, “exactly what I trained for.”
I took this as a yes. I yanked on a pile of clothes I guessed must have been left for me along with my boots, and limped for the door before she had a chance to say anything else.
“Goodbye, sir,” a girl said, as I reached for the doorknob.
I stopped. I knew which kid it was. The one without her arm. I couldn’t face her. I threw the door open and left without a word.
CHAPTER THREE
I walked out into a tunnel illuminated with a sickly green light. It looked and smelt like something from a fairground haunted house.
“I didn’t think she would let you go,” Zac said, stepping out from a shadow. “Last kid I saw had a reality attack, they hooked him up for three days solid. And even then…” He shrugged.
“I’m not having a reality attack.” I said, looking at the pills Frankie had given me. The label said Tramadol. I didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her, but the pain was a distraction I didn’t need. I popped the lid off with my thumb and dry-swallowed two of the white tablets.
“Whatever. We’re wanted in the command room.” He nodded to the left and led the way up the tunnel.
It sloped gently upward, and the damp smell lessened as the tunnel grew wider.
We passed a few adults dressed in combats with military insignia on their arms. Each person greeted me with a sharp salute and a glowing smile. “Congratulations, sir,” and “good work,” they said, over and over, until I was sick of hearing it. Each of them looked at me like I was something special. A hero, even.
Zac chattered the whole way about my earlier Shift and what had been going on. About how we’d blown up an enemy base and how I was probably going to get a commendation for it, if they didn’t haul me over the coals for disobeying an order.
None of it sounded familiar. But unless I wanted to end up in Frankie’s hands, I was going to have to keep my mouth shut. I just needed enough time to find Aubrey again.
The tunnel opened up into a cathedral-sized space of heavy grey concrete. I stepped out and stared at the roof overhead. Four great pillars standing on a circular floor held up the domed ceiling. The floor itself was covered in black-and-white tiles that created an image of a cartwheel of arrows pointing in all directions. As well as the tunnel we’d exited, two more led off of the central hall, pointing north and west.
“Welcome to the Hub. Home of the S3.”
“S3?” I said, my jaw hanging open in wonder. I knew, somehow, that this whole place was deep under the streets of London. How long, I wondered, had this place taken to build? How long had we been at war?
“The SSS?” Zac hissed, looking around to check no one had heard me. “The Special Shifting Service? You really can’t remember?”
I shrugged. “Guess not.”
Green-tinged light illuminated the room, which was filled with bustling people: soldiers dressed in various shades of camo and armour; kids in black jumpsuits; and a host of other personnel, all moving with determined purpose.
I remembered the handful of NSOs – non-Shifting Officers – we’d had at ARES. Most of them were ex-service specialists brought in for our protection. But this was something else. There had to be two if not three hundred people here. Each of them very much still in service.
Zac shook his head. “I’d keep that to yourself for now. Come on, they’ll be waiting.” He headed towards a tunnel on the right.
At the bottom was a metal door with a red light above it. Zac paused and stood aside, letting me go first. I tugged at the handle. It was shut tight. There was an electronic pad on the side of the door.
“Let me.” Zac pressed his hand against the lock.
“Captain Black. Access level four,” an electronic voice chirped, and the door opened.
The room looked like the control of a rocket launch: screens lined the far wall, showing live video feed and streams of data; men and women sat behind desks, wearing headsets and tapping frantically away on keyboards. I recognised a few of the faces from my ARES as I was starting to think of the old reality. I wondered where my friend Jake was. I prayed that somehow he and his sister Rosalie had gotten themselves away from London and out of this mess.
To the side of the screens was a large circular table where Turner and Cooper stood, looking as confused as I was.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“The Red Hand have pushed deeper into the city,” Turner said, pointing at the table. “I guess they didn’t appreciate us tramping around their area yesterday.”
The top of the table was a large touchscreen, like the tablets we’d used at ARES, only on a much bigger scale. It showed a map of London with the familiar loop of the Thames in the centre. Bright red squares were overlaid in what I assumed were strategic positions.
Zac leaned over and dragged a square so it covered an area in the east of the city. “That means they hold everywhere south of the Marsh Wall now.” He drew a line with his finger from one edge of the loop in the river to the other.
“And we,” a man said from behind me, “can’t allow that.”
I knew that voice. I’d both feared and loved it. But hearing it now wasn’t possible. He was dead. I’d watched him die.
I turned around to see a man whose face was a mass of scars, with one milky eye.
“Cain?” I said, stunned to see my old fighting instructor alive and, apart from a few new scars, well. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been lying in a pool of his own blood, missing part of his brain.
“Tyler,” Cain said, the only person not to address me as sir or Commandant. “I hear congratulations are in order after last night. Although we will need to have a word about you failing to follow orders. Again.”
I scanned his face, hoping for some kind of answer, and my eyes lingered on the scar across his forehead. The scar combined with the golden S pinned to his collar reminded me with a cold dread that Cain was an adult Shifter. That he was carrying part of a kid’s brain. In this reality, did Cain know the truth behind Project Ganymede? Did anyone know? And was the man behind the project still alive?
“Is Abbott here?” I said, a sudden hot anger rushing through me.
There was a ripple of uncertainty in the group behind me, and I noticed a few of the intelligence officers tore themselves away from the screens to look my way.
“Abbott?” Cain said, his mismatched eyes tightening.
I knew I’d slipped up and considered Shifting to undo having asked the question. But I needed to know. I nodded.
“Abbott died in the attack on Old Street,” Cain said. “I would have thought you would have remembered that, Tyler. Being as it was you who dragged his body out of the rubble.”
So, Abbot was dead. And with him, I assumed, his attempt to restart the Ganymede programme. I was glad he was dead. Glad in a way that scared me a little.
I tried to think of something to say to cover my mistake, some excuse I could make that would stop everyone staring at me. But I had nothing.
Zac came to my rescue. “Commandant Tyler is going through a bit of an adjustment after yesterday.”
Cain’s face softened. “Unsurprising, really. I hear it was a big Shift.”
“Sixteen on the Lawrence scale, sir,” Cooper said.
Cain raised a ragged eyebrow. “I didn’t know the scale went up that high. Well, you’ll find your feet soon enough, Tyler.” He slapped my shoulder with his massive hand.
“Of course,” I said, coughing to hide my embarrassment.
Find Aubrey, I said to myself. Find Aubrey and you can work a way out of here. Till then, I needed to play along. I turned back to the table. “What do we do?”
“We wait,” Cain said. “We’ve got someone on the inside, and once we have their report, we’ll be able to see what we’re up against. Then we go in hard.” He dragged a l
arge black circle to cover all the red squares on the screen. “In the meantime,” Cain said, “I suggest you go get yourself cleaned up. You look like shit. And can someone get the Commandant an S3 uniform? I know you’re attached to the old kit, Tyler, but ARES is over now. You’re in the army now, boy.”
I looked down at what I wore and noticed the splatter of blood over the white ARES badge on my chest. It wasn’t my blood.
“Do you know where I can find Au… ah, Captain Jones?”
“The new transfer? She’s out on a mission,” Cain said.
“Right. Can you get her to, um, report to me as soon as she returns?”
“Report to you, sure thing, Tyler,” Cain said with a sly smile. “Now get out of my sight.”
“I’ll drive you home, sir,” Zac said. He looked at me kindly and I realised, with a weird feeling of guilt and annoyance, that in this reality, he and I were friends.
“OK,” I said, uncomfortably aware of the curious looks I was getting from the people in the room. They were all expecting something of me. “As soon as you get the report back on the Red Hand, I want to know.” This seemed to work. They returned to whatever they had been doing, and Zac and I slipped away.
We walked back across the Hub and towards a set of silver doors. Behind the doors was a small metal room, which looked to be made of the same solid material. I followed Zac as he stepped inside and turned to face the way we’d come. The doors slid back into place, throwing us into near darkness. Before I could ask what was going on, the room jolted and I had the sense we were ascending. It was a lift. There were no counters ticking down floor numbers to let me know how far up we were going, but judging by the popping of my ears, it was a long way to the surface.
“Feels like Shifting, doesn’t it?” Zac said
The massive lift shuddered to a stop and the doors inched open again, revealing what looked like an aircraft hangar. I saw the Rhino in the far corner and next to it a row of sleek, black armoured cars and various other vehicles that looked decades ahead of anything I’d ever seen. All of them, including the Rhino, had a Union flag painted on them somewhere. Only now that I looked closer, I realised that instead of a red and white cross on a blue background, the flag was on a black background.
“Look at the state of her!” an angry voice carried across the room.
I looked to where the voice was coming from to see a man with a long, lanky ponytail slide out from underneath the Rhino. He stood up and I could see he wore a Led Zeppelin T-shirt underneath his black overalls and rubbed an oily rag in his hands.
“Carl?” I said, walking towards him.
It was my old head of IT. Only instead of computers, it seemed he was in charge of the machines here.
“You were supposed to bring her in for an overhaul a week ago,” Carl said.
“Don’t call it a her,” CP said. She was sitting on top of the tank’s tracks, swinging her legs back and forth. “It’s so creepy when you call it that. It’s a machine. Not a woman.”
Carl opened and closed his mouth, then decided against complaining. “Well, you’re lucky she… it didn’t sustain more damage the way you pounded it.”
“We were in a bit of a hurry. Isn’t that right, Com?” She smiled over at me, pulling off a swift salute: two fingers brushing against her temple.
Carl spun around and fumbled a salute, slapping himself in the face with his rag.
“How’s the leg?” CP said.
I looked down. “Still attached, thanks, Cleo,” I said, her name from this reality coming too easily. It was good to see her. Of all the people here, she seemed to be the only one who hadn’t changed. “And thanks. For getting me back to base before I bled out.”
“Not a bother,” she said, blushing under her fringe.
Seeing her blush reminded me of how she used to act around my other old classmate. “Is Jake around?” I asked, a longing to see his crooked smile and mess up his hair welling up in me. Even though Jake was five years younger than me, I still considered him as one of my best friends.
“Jake, sir?” CP said.
“Jake Bailey? About your age. Sandy hair. Dark eyes.”
She twisted her face to the side, thinking. “I remember a Jake from training, a year or so above me. But I haven’t seen him since he graduated. I think he failed his final tests, so he’ll be out on civvy street.”
“Oh, right.” So Jake wasn’t part of ARES – or S3, as we were now called. I guessed that that was a good thing.
“I can put a request out to find him, if you need,” she said, pulling out her tablet.
“No, that’s fine. Thank you.” As much as I was sad about not seeing him, I was glad to think he wasn’t caught up in this nightmare. I hoped that he and his sister Rosalie were far away from the capital.
Carl’s cough snapped me out of my thoughts about Jake. “It’s good to see you, too, Carl.”
“I, um, we’ve never met, sir.”
I was really going to have to keep my mouth shut. “No, of course. It’s only I’ve heard so much about you.”
Carl beamed. “Good to meet you too, sir. Did you get my report on the upgrade ideas I had for the girls?”
CP groaned.
“I mean, the vehicles. Tech combined with the power to Shift presents some pretty exciting weaponry possibility. We’ve already proven it can work with the quantum grenades. And I also sent you a report on some further ideas on the defences for the Hub.”
“Don’t tell me. You want to bring in some sharks?”
Carl blinked. “Sharks, sir?”
I waved him away. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, right. Well, some of the legacy systems are a bit antiquated, and many were disabled after the last war, but–”
“I’m sure the Com will look forward to hearing all about your ideas at a later stage,” Zac said. “But for now, he needs to get some rest.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. But if you have a few minutes, I could explain my idea for a quantum cannon.”
“Later, Carl,” Zac said, pulling me away.
“See ya, sir,” CP said.
“See ya, Cleo,” I said.
“We’ll talk later, then, sir,” Carl shouted after us as we walked away.
“Well, he hasn’t changed,” I said.
Zac laughed. “Wait till he starts going on about his plans for a robot army.”
We walked towards a huge set of stainless steel doors, easily twenty feet high, embedded in the grey concrete. Zac slammed a yellow button and slowly the doors inched open, revealing a row of large spikes protruding out of the bottom, making it look like a portcullis.
Two soldiers stood on guard on the other side. They turned to us as we ducked under the door, avoiding the spikes.
“It’s you, sir,” one of the soldiers said, a bright smile on his shiny face. “We heard about the level sixteen. That’s the highest so far, am I right?” He looked over at his friend while I stared, wide-eyed.
“Um…”
“How do you do it?” the other guard asked.
“Well, I just… you know… do?” It was weak, but it seemed to suffice. In fact, they nodded as if what I’d said was in fact totally profound, rather than being utter nonsense.
I flinched as the door started to descend again.
“What do you think of the new defences, sir?” the first guard said. “Ten inches thick, able to withstand a bomb strike. It’s official; the Hub is the safest place in Britain.”
“Very impressive.” I smiled grimly at the guards. They returned my smile with glowing pride. I felt sick.
Zac saved me from any more of the adoration of my fans. “If you’re quite done wasting the Commandant’s time…”
The guards muttered their apologies and went back to their guard duty.
“Wait here,” Zac said, “I don’t like to park it in the hangar. You never know what modifications Carl might make.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask what “it” was before Zac went
jogging off away from the doors. I walked forward, leaving the soldiers and the defences behind, and onto the street.
We were somewhere in one of London’s more upmarket areas, guessing by the looming white buildings in the Palladian style: all stone columns and pediments. The hulking great lump of grey concrete that was the first level of the Hub had been squeezed in between two buildings, which must have been at least three hundred years old.
I could see a small park up ahead, an oasis of nature in a city of stone. Pale morning sun shone through the rustling leaves and I saw a squirrel dash across a branch. It was good to be out in the open air, even if I could smell the cloying sweetness of burning. The recycled air in the Hub had made my eyes dry and my throat scratchy, like when you’ve been on an airplane for too long.
A low rumbling sounded and I jumped, scanning the sky to check for another helicopter or drone. There was nothing but the felt-grey clouds.
The rumbling grew louder and a sleek black car pulled around a corner. The door opened.
“Get in,” Zac said, then added an awkward “sir” as an afterthought.
I climbed into the seat and closed the door. “One thing, Zac,” I said. “You can quit it with the ‘sir,’ OK?”
“Sure thing, Tyler,” Zac said with a crooked smile. “Like old times, hey?”
He slammed the accelerator and the vehicle leapt forward.
“Sure,” I said, looking through the holes in the metal plates and out onto streets I didn’t know. “Just like old times.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I didn’t know where we were going, and I was content to let Zac drive. I sat back, hardly able to see anything outside. Every now and then, I would catch a glimpse of a face in a window. But they always turned away, terrified, and scuttled back into hiding. What had this war done to these people? What had I done to them? Guilt coiled around my spine like a snake pulling tighter and tighter.
The only sign that anyone still lived in these streets was graffiti on walls and across fences. Most of it appeared pro-army; images of brave British soldiers fighting off enemies. But there were a few scrawled phrases that didn’t see quite so keen on the war effort. “Screw. This. War.” was written in six-foot-high letters on the side of a derelict building. I couldn’t agree more.
