Mutant City

by Steve Feasey

  ‘No. Because I have no idea what my full potential is.’

  ‘Well, it’s not my intention for you to explore that tonight, but I think it would be good for you to get an idea of what your gift is really all about.’

  ‘Am I going to feel like crap again after? Like I did when we escaped from the alleyway?’

  Jax and Silas exchanged glances before the albino turned back to the teenager.

  ‘Almost certainly,’ he said. ‘But it’ll get better the more you practise, and I think you’re going to need your gift if we’re going to rescue Brick.’

  Rush didn’t need to hear any more. He nodded back at the albino. ‘Do it,’ he said.

  Jax placed his hands on either side of the boy’s head, his thumbs resting on Rush’s temples. When the albino closed his eyes and took a deep breath, Rush’s entire body tensed as if he was expecting a bolt of pain or blistering light, neither of which came. Instead Jax simply stepped away, nodding his head slightly.

  ‘Er, I don’t know what just happened, but I don’t think it worked,’ Rush said.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Jax said, suddenly sounding extremely weary. He gestured towards the corner of the yard nearest to Rush and asked him to stand there. In the opposite corner, about fifty metres away, was a rusty old oil drum standing on its end, atop it a small tin can, no doubt retrieved from one of the dumps. Bending down and picking up two small stones, the albino tossed them to Rush, who caught one in each hand. ‘You could hit that target if I asked you to, couldn’t you?’

  Rush nodded.

  Jax started to walk towards the barrel, talking back at the boy over his shoulder as he went. ‘And if I asked you to do so a hundred times, you could hit it one hundred times, isn’t that right?’

  Aware that the three girls were watching all this, Rush shrugged. ‘I guess,’ he said.

  ‘You guess?’

  ‘OK, yes. I could hit it every time.’

  ‘Demonstrate for the others, would you?’

  There was a moment’s pause, then with no more than a flick of his wrist, Rush sent one of the stones hurtling out of his hand. It hit the tin can smack in the centre, sending the thing flying.

  ‘Flea?’ Jax said, raising an eyebrow in the girl’s direction. Rush glanced at the remaining stone in his hand, and when he looked back at the barrel, the tin can was standing on top of it again. He hadn’t seen Flea move.

  Jax had stopped walking now. He stood almost exactly halfway between Rush and the barrel, completely obstructing the teenager’s view of the target.

  ‘Could you hit the can now?’ Jax called out.

  ‘But I can’t see it.’

  ‘Is that important?’

  ‘It is if I want to hit it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because . . .’ Rush stopped, realising that he didn’t have a good answer. Frowning, he thought hard about how he did what he did – connecting with the missile at some elemental level and using his mind to control its tiniest particles. He was also aware that he ‘merged’ with the intended target in some way and made a link between the two things. But did he really need to see the target to make that connection?

  As if he was aware the teenager had reached this conclusion, Jax grinned at him and gave him a nod. ‘Go on, hit it.’

  Rush threw the second stone. It shot out like a bullet, grazing the tip of Jax’s ear and then swerved viciously to smash into the can again.

  Jax led the applause, which was taken up by Silas and the others.

  Rush couldn’t help but grin back. Maybe Jax had unlocked some hidden part of him.

  Thinking he was finished, Rush was about to walk away when he noticed Jax was still standing looking at him. The can was back in position on the drum and a slightly breathless Flea had rejoined the others.

  ‘Not bad,’ the albino said. ‘But now I want you to ask yourself this: why did you bother with the stones?’

  ‘Because you gave them to me. You asked me to hit that thing with them and –’

  ‘No. I asked you to hit the target. I didn’t say anything about the stones.’

  Rush looked down at his now empty hands.

  ‘Hit the target, Rush,’ Jax said, standing a little taller in anticipation.

  ‘What . . . ?’

  Remember what happened in the alley when the men came through the door. Jax’s voice was right inside his head. Rush looked up again to see the intent look on the young al­bino’s face. Don’t think, just do it!

  Rush raised his hand, palm up, as he had during the ambush. Something built up within him, some invisible force that felt both alien and familiar at the same time. When he could hardly hold on to it any more he let it go, willing it to hit the can.

  Jax flew backwards off his feet as if he’d been hit by a car, arms and legs out before him, head down, back arched. When he hit the oil drum the front of the thing caved in from the force. The crumpled figure of the albino lay in an unmoving heap.

  With cries of dismay everyone ran across the yard, swarming around Jax until Silas demanded they step back and give him some room. The man crouched down and placed two fingers on the side of the albino’s neck, feeling for a pulse.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Anya asked.

  ‘No, he is not dead,’ Silas said, shooting her a withering stare. He was about to tell them to go and fetch the medical supplies when Jax groaned and stirred, his eyes flickering once before opening and looking about him in a daze.

  ‘Stay still,’ Silas urged, but Jax gently pushed his hand aside, nodding that he was OK and slowly getting himself into a sitting position. He shook his head as if to clear it, and looked up at Rush, who had been terrified he might have killed him.

  ‘We might need to work on that a bit,’ he said, before passing out again.

  Tia

  A short while later, after they’d got Jax comfortable – the albino waving away Rush’s repeated apologies – Tia found Rush standing outside the front door of the school, head tipped back, taking in some air. She stopped short of calling out to him straight away, observing him for a moment instead. He seemed lost in thought, no doubt trying to get his head around everything that had happened to him since arriving at this place. It was hardly surprising. She herself found it almost impossible to believe some of the things she’d seen and heard. Inside the city wall there had always been rumours about mutants with gifts, but these had always been dismissed as fairy tales or anti-Mute sentiment.

  Like the others that Melk had created from the stolen embryos, the boy was handsome and unblemished in a way that marked him out from most other mutants. Of course, he wasn’t strictly a mutant, not in the true sense of the word. He was . . . he was something else. They all were: Rush, Jax, Anya, Flea and Brick. None of them could be easily pigeon-holed; they were neither one thing nor the other. Outsiders. Perhaps that was why she’d come to feel so passionate about their plight. Because she too was an outsider, caught between two worlds. She’d never felt she belonged inside the city, and now she was outside she felt equally adrift.

  She followed his line of sight. He was looking up, past the rooftops of the buildings in this part of the ward, out beyond the slums to the highest floors of the tower complexes of C4 in the distance. Bright light shone out from these places, even at this late hour.

  She saw him tense a little, as if becoming aware that he was not alone.

  ‘It’s a nice evening,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’ He continued to look at the towers.

  ‘I was sent to find you. The others were worried when you walked out.’

  Silas had called a meeting to try to formulate a plan.

  ‘There’s too much talking and not enough doing! Brick is in that place –’ he nodded in the direction of the city – ‘and despite what he says, Silas doesn’t seem in much of a hurry to get him out.’

  ‘I think that’s unfair. He’s pulling his hair out trying to come up with a plan that doesn’t get everyone killed.’

  They
stood in silence for a moment.

  ‘What’s it like?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘In there. Inside the wall. What’s it like?’

  She thought for a second before answering. ‘Unkind.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘City dwellers have so much; they have the technology and science to enable them to do so much good, and they choose to use it in such frivolous ways. They genetically, chemically and cosmetically alter themselves and their pets and their children in some vain effort to achieve “flawlessness”.’ She huffed and shook her head. ‘It’s as if, having abandoned the dream of creating a perfect world from the ashes of the last one, they strive to perfect themselves instead. It all looks beautiful, but inside it’s as ugly, if not uglier, than anything you’d ever see out here.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand . . .’

  ‘What do you hope to achieve by being out here, with us?’

  She heard the accusation in his voice and stiffened a little. ‘I want to expose that ugliness. I want to show them that the real monsters are inside, not outside, the walls.’

  ‘Don’t they already know?’

  ‘They pretend not to.’

  She gestured towards the building behind her. ‘They need you inside.’

  The first thing Silas did was to ask Tia to give the group an account of the security measures inside and around the metropolis.

  She did so, pointing out the passive and active systems they could expect to encounter. ‘Without a CivisChip you can’t go through any of the entrances. The wall wardens are instructed to use lethal force on anyone failing to stop should their entry set off a checkpoint alarm.’

  ‘I could fly over the wall,’ Anya pointed out. ‘All I’d need to do is avoid being seen by the guards and the drones.’

  ‘You could, but you’d be alone.’ Tia held up her hand as the other girl started to protest. ‘As freaking awesome as you are, Anya, you can’t possibly do this by yourself. Besides, getting inside the wall is just the start of things. Every building inside the city is set up in the same way: internal and external doorways will, at the very least, alarm if you pass through them unchipped, and the most import­ant places – government buildings, for instance, including the ARM headquarters – are rigged to send a deadly electrical charge through anybody attempting unauthorised entry. You walk through a doorway you have no right to . . . you die.’

  They sat in silence, taking this in.

  ‘So there’s absolutely no way in without one of these things in your leg?’ Rush said in a low whisper.

  ‘Brick doesn’t have a chip,’ Tia said, a sly smile playing about her lips. She waited.

  ‘Yeah, but he was . . .’ Rush stopped when he realised what she was suggesting. ‘We give ourselves up?’ He stared at her in disbelief. ‘That’s your plan? We just offer ourselves up to the ARM and Melk?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  The vehicle carrying the two ARM officers was making a routine patrol of the fence perimeter when the driver shouted out in alarm. One second the way ahead had been clear; the next a young Mute kid – a cute, freckle-faced girl – was standing right in front of them. There was no look of fear on her face. She just stood there, in the beam of the headlights, staring in through the windscreen at them. The driver wrenched on the steering wheel, knowing even as he did there was no way to avoid hitting her. The thump of the impact was followed by the unmistakable sound of what could only be a body rolling beneath the vehicle’s chassis. Both men cried out in dismay.

  ‘Where the hell did she come from?’ the driver asked as soon as they’d come to a halt.

  ‘Damned if I know. Just seemed to appear out of thin air.’ If anything, the officer in the passenger’s seat seemed even more shaken than his colleague.

  Both men opened their doors and climbed out, forgetting the protocol that stated one patrol member was to remain inside at all times. They walked around the back of the vehicle and stared down at the figure on the ground. The stitched seams that had held its right arm and leg in place had been ripped open so straw stuffing spewed out, but the dummy’s crudely drawn face smiled vacantly back at them.

  ‘What the . . . ?’

  There was a loud bang as a surveillance drone crashed to the ground no more than a stone’s throw away. The thing rolled over, but the glass eye that hung beneath it was already blinded.

  The officer who had been the passenger was first to react, his hand instinctively dropping to his belt to where his shock-rod ought to be, only for his fingers to close around nothing but air.

  ‘Looking for this?’

  Both men spun round to see a tall, white-skinned mutant smiling calmly back at them. Their nerves were already shot to pieces, and the sight of their shock-rods in the weirdo’s hands did nothing to make them feel any better. Standing at the pale figure’s side was the small redhead they thought they’d hit with the car.

  The albino stepped forward and shoved the devices at the officers’ chests, watching as they crumpled to the floor, where they jerked a few times before becoming quite still. Just before he’d rendered them unconscious, Jax had dipped into the men’s minds and retrieved the information he needed.

  Tia turned the wheel, steering the vehicle down the gently sloping ramp, nodding nonchalantly at an armed guard standing on one side. The jumpsuit she’d taken from the driver was ill-fitting, but the helmet sat well enough now she’d tucked all her hair up inside it, and with the visor pulled down, something that was not uncommon when driving out of the darkness into the brightly lit areas around the vehicle entrance, she thought she wouldn’t draw any unwanted attention. Rush, in the other man’s uniform, was sitting in the passenger seat. Separating the front seats from the rear of the car was a clear plaziglas divider, behind which the two ARM officers were slumped unconscious on the back seat.

  The metal shutters to the entrance began to rise, revealing the stark, brightly lit space beyond. Another set of shutters, these still closed, lay at the other end. Tia slowly drove the car into the holding zone, stopping it within the brightly coloured hatched markings as indicated. There was a camera in every corner, and hanging down from the ceiling in front of them was a large screen displaying instructions. The shutter behind them descended noisily and eventually shut with a loud, jarring bang.

  The HALT! instruction flashing on the screen was replaced by a prompt for Tia to lower her window. As she did so, a voice spoke from a small panel set into the wall.

  ‘Identification and pass-key.’

  Rush leaned over and spoke through Tia’s window, trying his best to make his voice sound as gruff as possible. ‘Lacroix and Masters. Today’s pass-key is “humble237”.’ He knew the scanners buried somewhere in the floor beneath the vehicle had already identified the unconscious men’s Civischips, and Jax had provided the rest of the information they needed. He thought of the albino curled up in the boot of the car, and couldn’t help but wonder how uncomfortable it must be for somebody of his height. ‘We’ve brought in a couple of Mutes we found hanging around the perimeter. Masters got punched in the throat by one of the goons and needs to go straight to the infirm­ary. Poor bastard can hardly talk.’

  Tia croaked and pointed to her throat.

  ‘Why didn’t you call for backup?’

  ‘No need. We took care of them, and when we get them into the cells we’re going to take care of them again.’

  There was a brief pause and then the voice instructed, ‘Come on through.’

  The metal shutter in front of them rose. The noise was almost deafening inside the enclosed space, and Tia used it as an excuse to shut her window again. They both stared out at the long tunnel slowly being revealed. Illuminated at regular intervals by orange lights, the road sloped gently downwards.

  ‘It leads to the underground garages below the agency’s headquarters,’ Tia pointed out. She softly depressed the pedal, and they set off.

  Silas appro
ached the entrance gate. It felt strange to be in city clothing after all this time, and he secretly relished the feel of the soft material against his skin. He was next in line, and as he stepped forward into the free-standing frame that was the scanner, he felt the waft of a draught flash past his left cheek. It was all he could do not to smile. If the wall wardens felt it too, they didn’t react.

  The scanner made a loud howling noise and two armed men levelled their weapons at him.

  ‘Stop right there!’ the first man said, looking down at the monitor. He frowned, swiped his hand across the screen and refreshed the data. When he turned to his colleague he looked even more confused. ‘He came in alone, right?’ He received a nod. ‘Then this damned scanner is on the blink again!’ He kicked the frame with his steel-toed boot. ‘According to this –’ the man gestured at the screen – ‘two people just came through that portal, and this one is dead.’

  ‘I can assure you both, wardens, I’m not deceased. I am, however, President Melk’s brother and the uncle of Principal Zander Melk who shortly hopes to accede to that role.’ He smiled at the astonished looks on the men’s faces. ‘I’m sure they’ll both be very interested in seeing me.’ He held out his arms, hands together so the men could easily cuff him. ‘Take me to your leaders.’

  Tia pulled to a stop in the underground car park, choosing a corner space away where the shadows were deepest.

  Rush opened the boot and looked down at Jax, who grimaced up at him. ‘Comfortable journey?’ he asked, offering the albino a hand.

  ‘You have no idea,’ Jax said, wincing as he straightened up to his full height. He reached into the boot and retrieved Rush’s usual clothes, handing them to him and looking away while the youngster slipped out of his jumpsuit and put them on.

  Tia had already pressed the button to call the elevator, so the doors were open by the time Jax and Rush approached.

  ‘The custody suite and the cells are all on the third floor,’ Jax said, pressing the appropriate button.

  ‘How do you know that?’