by SJ Griffin
Chapter Five
I checked that everything was in order then pulled the drive from my tablet, the update was perfect. As it should have been given the amount of care and attention I’d lavished on it. I was expected to deliver it to Massey’s House of Mirth by lunchtime and I was right on schedule.
I left Prophet’s snores reverberating around the hotel as I wheeled my bike through the revolving door, drive stashed in my battered bag. Massey’s House of Mirth was an illegal gaming house, as opposed to a joke shop, down in an old underground station right on the intersection of the NW and N Sector boundary lines. This meant that Enforce coverage was patchy and confused, falling as it did been station coverage zones, leaving Massey and his charges to cast themselves off into fantastical worlds to their hearts’ content. We tried to find a place to live that benefited from boundary blindness, as it was called, but they’d all been burnt out as a precaution. Every time someone tried to rebuild one of the buildings along a sector line, so it could be squatted, someone came along and set fire to it again. In the end people gave up.
‘Hello, Sorcha,’ Massey said. ‘Nice to see you.’
I liked Massey. He had a nice relaxed way about him and smelled very clean, like soap or washing powder. He never got high on his own supply either, so he relied on customer feedback to know what people wanted from his games. It was that receptiveness to his customers that made his the most popular gaming house outside the official, more expensive outfits in the Administration sector. The other illegal houses tended to be playthings for their owners. One of them liked gangster shoot outs so that’s all she held, another was into aliens and intergalactic sex, but Massey ran four different games which rotated according to what people seemed to want. He was also not the most competent technician so he’d adopted me and Minos as his experts, and quite a lucrative contract it turned out to be. I gave him the drive and he turned it over in his fingers with great wonderment, as though I handed him a miracle.
‘Step into my office,’ he said, once a kid had appeared to replace him.
The minion was a hardcore gamer. He was pallid and his eyes flitted around the room, bewildered by all the peripheral vision he had in real life. Although describe this as real life to him and he was liable to get into a heated debate about what was real and what was life anyway. I followed Massey down a stalled escalator into the guts of the station. There were four platforms fitted out with the different games. We turned and turned down a spiral staircase heading towards the only platform with a train in it. This train was Massey’s office. I’d managed to get over the novelty of sitting in it pretending it was hurtling through the tunnels, although from what I’d heard they never got faster than a crawl when they’d been running.
Massey stood helpless by his server, looking around for some suitable socket to stick the drive in.
‘May I?’ I pulled my tablet out of my bag and hooked it up thus saving almost two hundred people from certain brain trauma.
‘Shall I get you a drink?’ said Massey.
‘Yeah and get one for yourself,’ I said handing him a bottle. ‘A gift from Minos. He’s sorry he missed your birthday.’
‘Where did you get this from?’
‘That’s classified, I’m afraid.’
‘I do love you guys,’ he said.
While Massey crashed about looking for glasses I uploaded the patch to his system. It was a new development in one of the games, it allowed for bigger weapons and faster vehicles. There was also a red head who would appear at random and grant a special upgrade to certain players. Massey liked these random elements because they didn’t happen in the legal games. They were all under strict administrative control but Massey’s games were famous for being expansive and responsive. One gamer Massey really liked found himself in the game one day. After that story got out Massey found himself with a two year waiting list and people prepared to pay four or five times more than the going rate for an hour in his House. He didn’t often ask me to put a customer in a game for him but when he did I always tried to get them just right for him.
‘Right, pay attention,’ I said. ‘You need to update at midnight and the patch will automatically assimilate itself into the game. If anyone reports any issues tomorrow, message me and one of us will come and fix them.’
‘OK,’ said Massey. ‘Midnight. Message. Got it.’
I looked out of the carriage window. On the platform was a row of three tier bunk beds. Each of them was occupied by someone wearing a full body suit and goggles. It was like some emergency had been called up above, maybe an air raid or a chemical weapons scare, and people had moved down here waiting for the danger to subside. Every so often, a hand would rise up and make a strange gesture but on the whole people could have been dead. It was creepy. I wasn’t a fan of the games myself, Casino and Roach had played at Massey’s once or twice but they weren’t regular players. Minos hated them with a venomous passion and playing wasn’t worth the lecture.
‘We’ll have a new job for you soon,’ said Massey. ‘It’s a knock off of one of the official games. Some quest mission title. I’m just waiting for my contact to snag a copy.’
‘Really? It’s not like you to follow the in-crowd.’ That meant a big job, with a big pay-off.
‘I know but we want to make it the opposite. Very subversive and rebellious. It’s an intuitive development program, except we want to make a few adjustments. And make it a bit less individualistic. I was talking to a man in a bar about it. Some rich guy from out near the Western Disaster Zone. Odd man. Seemed to know me though.’
There was another problem with the official gaming houses, they were watched. You could find yourself blowing up aliens or New Canadians, whoever the bad guy in fashion was, and if you got a very high score or left a particular pattern of activity in the game you could find yourself dressed in a suit being interviewed for a covert role at Enforce HQ. Although no one ever knew anyone who this had happened to, there were some very good gamers, legends, who just vanished and their accounts were deleted. Work and Labour gamers too, not underclass riff raff or Massey’s clientele.
‘In the official game you score for making sensible, logical decisions, in ours you have to follow your heart. If you do the right, the expected or the reasonable thing you lose. You’d be brilliant at it,’ Massey said.
‘I’m sensible and logical,’ I said.
Massey howled with laughter, he never could hold his drink.
‘I am,’ I said.
‘Once your head and your heart start arguing there’s only ever going to be one winner and it ain’t this,’ Massey knocked on my head like he wanted to be let in.
I tried to look menacing.
Massey grinned, ‘This rum’s good.’
I showed my glass to him. It was all sad and empty.
The ride home was a bit wobbly, but by the time I got there I was feeling fine and dandy, I’d also remembered to organise the transfer of our fee which was some going given how drunk Massey had managed to get. I left him in the care of his vampiric minion. It was already late and dark and Roach had left me a note to tell me he was working the night shift, as was Minos. Even his handwriting had improved. The note also informed me that everyone would be out, he didn’t know where Lola and Casino were, and that Prophet had slept all day and none of them had been brave enough to wake him up. I decided I would join the cast of cowards and leave him be. Minos had been involved in the writing of the note, there was a sooty fingerprint at the bottom of the page. I couldn’t remember getting home the night before, never mind what mood everyone was in but I figured that the note indicated that I was cool with Roach and Minos, even if Lola and Casino might be sulking.
There was nothing to watch on the television. We picked up pretty much all the channels in the world but more interest could be found scrolling through the listings sniggering at the titles than watching any of the actual programmes. No one really made anything new apart from the interactives where you could change the plot as you went
along. I preferred the old films. Minos had found a container full of them and we’d fixed up an old machine to play them on. I wasn’t in the mood for that though, I didn’t know what mood I was in. I shouldn’t drink in the day. I made some dinner and I watched the news with the sound down until I felt both sleepy and sober. Prophet was still snoring as I turned the light out. I assessed volume levels and then put the light on and rummaged around in a drawer for my ear plugs.
It was still dark when I woke up. My ear plugs had escaped my ears. The snoring had stopped and the only sound was the occasional car as it rumbled past. Enforce, most likely. The street lights were out so I guess it was after midnight but before five.
‘Sorcha Blades,’ said Prophet from the doorway.
I growled to see if he would go away.
‘I must tell you something.’ He was not going away.
I growled again.
‘Are you asleep?’
‘Not anymore,’ I sat up.
‘Listen,’ he sort of wafted across the room, like a ghost.
I put the light on. He looked asleep. I was almost disappointed that his arms weren’t outstretched in the customary pose, but as his sat on the edge of my bed there was no question that he wasn’t in the same state of consciousness as I was.
‘The three are close to the end,’ he said. ‘The project is almost complete.’
‘What three?’
‘The three are close to the end,’ he said. ‘The project is almost complete.’
‘What project?’ I said.
Nothing. He had nothing to more to say.
‘Prophet?’ I poked him.
He began to snore. I poked him again, for fun if I’m honest, then to my very intense and precise horror he sagged in the middle, slumped onto the mattress and helped himself to half of my bed and all of my duvet.
I beat a hasty retreat to the streets. It turned out to be two thirty in the morning. It was dark in the NW Sector and the sky was full of stars. I stood for a few minutes trying to see a shooting star but there weren’t any. They said that before the flood you couldn’t see the stars, it wasn’t dark enough. Whenever I thought of that I felt that maybe, just maybe, something was better and I hadn’t missed out on everything good. The only cars were Enforce and the occasional tro-tro ferrying my fellow workers from somewhere or another. Biker sects cruised the main roads on their motorbikes shouting to each other, their words whipped away from me by the wind. I rode the whole way above ground and on the ground, no tunnels and no rooftops, I went the long way round. I rode into the atrophied heart of the city taking the quiet narrow roads towards the parks where most of the houses were boarded and squatted. A couple of people waved to me, yelling my name as I flew past but I didn’t stop to recognise them. Everything was carrying on as normal. I headed out to the docks, to see Minos. I focused on my wheels spinning as they carried me over the tarmac like a meditation. They seemed to go faster, skimming above the surface like it was water, no, like I was water. I felt like I was pouring into the warm wind as the streets slipped behind me.
Unlike the neighbouring streets, the docks were a hive of activity at that time in the morning. There were various reprobates hanging around, waiting for buyers or sellers.
‘All right?’ said Chunk, one of Minos’s esteemed crew. He was wearing a wet suit. He was well named so it was not a pretty sight.
‘Yeah, you?’
‘Boat’s sunk off the Project. They say it was torpedoed. I’m going out with the salvage crew. It’s going to be so awesome.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Yeah,’ he flapped around in his flippers. ‘Which one are you after? Roach or Minos?’
‘Minos,’ I said.
‘He’s down there.’ He pointed to the right, down a long slope that curved out of sight, then waddled off.
‘Good luck,’ I shouted after him. He seemed so excited.
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know Minos. He’d always been there, even though at times I hadn’t wanted him to be and he hadn’t wanted me to be. Most of those times coincided so we were still there for each other, yinging and yanging. There was no record of my having any parents because they were all washed away, both the parents and the records. I was found floating in the upturned lid of an incubator, believed to be the only newborn to survive the hospital’s flooding. I looked for my parents, a while back, I became kind of obsessed with where I’d come from and who I was. It took a few months before I got bored of looking and decided that there wasn’t any answer to that question better than the one I’d find riding my bike too fast between oncoming traffic. Like all small babies without guardians I ended up in a children’s home that had been established in one of the hospitals in the N Sector. But I guess it wasn’t called that then, that came later. Minos had the bed next to mine until we were eight and then he got sent to the boys’ room over the hallway. He rebuilt his first short wave receiver from salvaged scraps so we could talk in the middle of the night. I’d never told him I thought that he was kind of a genius because he’d be kind of unbearable. The bottom fell out of the adoption market after the flood so we were stuck there. When we were old enough, to stop us from going too feral, we were educated through the vocational training programme. I started to learn some basic computer programming and Minos did reclamation engineering. Back then little courses would pop up to provide the solution to whatever problem seemed to be most pertinent that week. Knee-jerk knowledge. Textiles washing up on the west coast? Teach us sewing and tailoring. Loads of bombs and protests? Teach us first aid skills and citizenship. When the first of the freight containers from capsized or abandoned ships drifted up the river reclamation engineering was invented. When some bright spark in the Ministry of Administration decided that computer systems that barely worked needed security systems they taught those of us with an aptitude how to code. And if that sounds like child labour it’s because that’s what it was. On the positive side it meant we could turn our hands to anything. We were born survivors anyway. There followed a few years of my mouth getting me into fights and Minos’s big brother routine getting me out of them, then I finished the bicycle I was building in the mechanics class which was a condition of my leaving education early. The education authorities and I were in total agreement, they would be better off if I wasn’t under their feet all day. I was too young but they made an exception as they said I was exceptional. I don’t think they meant it in a good way. Minos, being older than me, was due to leave anyway. We’d been selling small communications devices and credit hacks for a couple of years, dealing our talents for cigarettes and spirits. It didn’t take much imagination to work out how suitable a life of crime would be for us. Not that there was much of a choice, the Work and Labour posts were given to the plastic baby dolls in the paid-for education system. The flood babies, I think that’s what we were called, didn’t have that kind of credit. There was never any question of me and Minos going our separate ways once we’d escaped institutional life. We didn’t have separate ways. We had each other.
I wheeled my bike down the ramp, went to the very end of the tunnel and turned the dark corner. I could see a large shadow on the wall, the black cast against the bright flickering light from flames. It was a man on fire. Minos was a bundle of flames at the far end of the storage bay. I didn’t know how he was casting a shadow because all I could see was fire. I am sure that if my brain had been able to process what I could see it would have been horrified. I’m not big on tears but I felt them then. It was like one second I knew him, remembered him, then in a moment he’d gone, I’d lost him. He was somebody else. He was somewhere I couldn’t go. I turned to get away, my wheels caught on some rubbish and sent a can clattering across the ground.
‘Sorcha!’
I turned and there he was, back to normal.
‘Your clothes,’ I said. ‘They’re not burnt.’
‘I’ve sprayed them with some flame retardant stuff I found in a submarine,’ he said.
‘Makes them a bit stiff but I don’t have Casino’s physique so I’m staying clothed.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m practising.’
‘Do they know?’ I gestured up the slope.
‘No, they think I’m burning evidence. Which I am.’
I nodded.
‘Are you all right?’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’
I shrugged to dilute my frown. I’d never needed an invitation before.
‘Let’s have a cup of tea and watch the boats go out,’ Minos said, guiding me towards a small metal door. ‘There’s been some kind of incident off the Project.’
The door opened onto a narrow concrete shelf on the underside of the pier. I could see the shapes of roosting gulls on the roof to my right. They were huge and vicious, in the spring Minos and his crew had to wear big plastic hats to stop the gulls attacking them. A man called Clane made a pretty good living shooting them and selling them up at the OP as a delicacy. I’d seen what the gulls ate so it wasn’t a delicacy I would partake of. We sat side by side, leaning against the wall. Every so often the edge of a fin or a tail would disturb the surface of the water a few metres below us. Minos produced a flask from his backpack and a packet of cigarettes.
‘I’ve started smoking again,’ he said. ‘I thought it fitted the new image.’
He put the cigarette in his mouth and inhaled. The cigarette lit itself.
‘That’s very bad for you,’ I said.
The cigarette went out. Minos frowned and lit by blowing on it.
‘Maybe it isn’t, maybe I’m immune now,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
I told him about Prophet while he poured tea. He somehow managed to knock his cup into the water while he was attempting to get some tea into mine and I almost cheered with relief that he was still my Minos.
‘The three are close to the end, the project is almost complete,’ he said. ‘You’re sure that’s what he said?’
‘Yes. He said it twice. And then he went back to snoring. In my bed.’
‘What’s the three?’
‘He didn’t have anything else to say.’
‘Well, we’ll have to find out,’ Minos said. ‘Won’t we?’
‘Yes. Otherwise it’ll just be annoying.’
We finished our tea in thoughtful silence. It wasn’t uncomfortable, you could almost hear us both thinking. We were making our way back when he turned to me.
‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ he said, and then carried on walking with his face hidden by the shadows. I hoped he didn’t want any answers because I couldn’t think of a single one.
Minos got a tro-tro back to the hotel, so he was lucky he made it home at all. A tro-tro was a very small bus that carried people along specified routes through the city. They sounded like a great idea except they didn’t follow the specified routes and although you could only fit about seven people and the driver in, you could find yourself the eighteenth passenger and hanging off the roof rack. They were only used by the underclass, as we were called. The tro-tro Minos caught was driven by Starboy, a very old friend who we’d gotten a carriage licence for, and a driving licence, and I think also the tro-tro but it looked like a different one when he pulled up and almost ran over my foot. I beat them back to the hotel by a good ten minutes, even though a gang of seven or eight foxes attempted to hijack me on the way. They chased me for a couple of miles and just when I thought I’d lost them they dashed out of an alley way in a failed suicide mission, somehow slipping between my wheels as I rode through them. I made sure Starboy saw that I’d won by sitting outside the hotel on my bike and waving when he pulled up. He was very good humoured about it even though due to his hasty driving one of his passengers had thrown up on another.
Minos and I let ourselves in and got straight to work. We were hooked up to every database, every feed, every point of information available. We had access to government, military and Enforce records. Not that there was much point of military records anymore. The world’s armies were still in disarray after a small nuclear device had gone off in the Central Eastern region a few years ago. They went into free fall and no government seemed willing to step in and make a decision about anything so they were still falling. Some lived in Mole Town and some had hijacked a large freighter off the east coast and had set up another alternative community there. They bought their women from the poorest region of New Europa, so it was easy to guess what their version of alternative was. If there was anything more boring than watching someone search a million databases I couldn’t think what I was, and I got to think very hard about that for two or three hours. The sun was coming up when at last Minos shook his head.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not one single thing. Not the three, not a likely project. There are lots of projects, they are all owned by someone though and not the three of anything.’
‘Maybe, and I realise I’m going out on a limb here, maybe the weird old man upstairs is just that. A weird old man.’
‘Maybe it’s covert ops. In which case someone at work might know. I should have thought of that before we charged off. Sorry,’ Minos said.
‘I think Prophet is probably just some crazy old homeless guy and because of...everything I just got carried away. I’m sorry.’
‘I am not crazy,’ Prophet stood in the doorway.
‘Then you may wish to put some clothes on,’ I said. ‘What is it with people and clothes in this house?’
Minos gave a low whistle. ‘Baggy,’ was all he could manage.
Prophet found us in the kitchen, where we had decided to hide from him, ten minutes later. He was all bundled up again. We were eating breakfast listening to the activity on the closed Enforce channels. A cargo train had derailed on the edge of the N Sector and nothing was coming in or out of the city. There were only two lines in use and the other one could only carry light rail. It was causing a pleasing amount of chaos and people were rioting in the seventh district of the N Sector. They loved a riot up there, just for kicks and giggles they once rioted when someone dropped a hat. The rolling news tickers on the television were as hilarious as we’d hoped they would be.
‘I am not crazy,’ Prophet said.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.’
‘I woke up in someone’s bed,’ Prophet said. ‘I hope I have been taken advantage of.’
‘Right, that’s it.’ I said. I called Roach on the intercom.
He appeared in the kitchen moments later, looking huge and determined despite the fact that he was wearing his spotted pyjamas.
‘I’m sorry to hear that you’ll be moving on,’ he said to Prophet. ‘It’s been really nice to meet you but I guess if you have to go, you have to go.
He put his arm round Prophet and manoeuvred him towards the door with great expertise. Prophet protested, of course, but Roach was implacable. I watched Prophet on one of the security monitors as he lingered on the path outside the main entrance, still trying to convince Roach that he had something vital to say. He looked up and down the street a couple of times, had a whole conversation with someone who wasn’t there and then wandered away. There was nothing happening on any of the other monitors. We had the whole perimeter under surveillance. The bank of screens was imposing but, as is often the case with surveillance, it was quite dull. Minos said that was good but sometimes I wanted something to happen so much that I’d even lay out a welcome mat for some serious trouble if it appeared. I went to retrieve my wristset from my room and considered asking Minos to burn my sheets for me. When I got back Minos and Roach were talking about our investigations over cereal and tea. Minos was wondering about putting a shout out across the DarkNet. Other than noting the number of freaks that would attract, a very good point, Roach had no helpful suggestions to make.
‘I propose that for the moment we keep this to ourselves,’ Roach said. ‘Just between the three of us.’
‘OK,’ Minos said.
I wasn’
t so sure. We just didn’t keep things to ourselves like that. Personal stuff, yes. It was your own concern who you brought home and what for, the rules were that we asked no questions unless there was an issue. We didn’t have secrets, we had lives. But when it was business we were a team, and this was business so this agreement to keep something from the other two was a new departure and not one I cared for.
‘Where’s Casino?’ Roach changed the subject, seeing my face.
‘I haven’t seen him,’ Minos said, then sighed. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘Maybe Lola knows,’ Roach said, gesturing with his spoon through the door to where he could see Lola approaching.
She had a set of enormous headphones on, ridiculous when attached to her tiny player. I could hear the music she was listening to as if the headphones were over my own ears.
‘Have you gone deaf?’ Minos shouted.
‘No, I’m listening to music.’
‘We can hear it,’ he shouted.
Lola selected a cleanish bowl from the industrial-sized dishwasher and helped herself to some cereal. ‘Is there coffee?’
I reached over and turned off the player clipped to her jacket.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said.
‘I can’t hear myself think,’ I said.
‘That’s the idea,’ she switched it back on.
‘I’ll make some coffee,’ Minos said. He tended to avoid Lola when she was in what he called a difficult frame of mind. And she was in just such a frame of mind.
I switched it off again, ‘Lola, leave it.’
‘Why?’ she switched it on and sat down at the table.
‘Because it’s annoying.’
‘You think this is annoying?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do you?’ she turned to Roach as she switched it on.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘It is a bit. But more than that, Lola. It’s odd.’
‘What?’ she shouted over an enthusiastic bout of drumming.
I switched it off.
‘It’s odd,’ he said.
‘Odd?’ Lola was using her dangerous voice. This meant a severe loss of temper was imminent. Minos was lingering over the coffee.
‘Yes. Odd.’ Roach said. ‘It’s like you’re shutting yourself off from everything.’
‘I am?’ Lola said.
‘Yes.’
‘And what about you lot?’ she pulled the headphones off her head and flung them on the table. ‘You’re shutting yourselves off.’
‘We aren’t,’ Minos said.
We were, I thought.
‘See. You are,’ Lola’s temper was now missing in action.
‘Lola,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t keep things from me.’
The three of us looked at each other under Lola’s watchful gaze. Then she snatched up her headphones again and turned on the player, her hands were shaking with rage.
‘OK, we’ll tell you,’ I gave in first, as usual. ‘Turn off the music.’
She put the headphones back on the table and the music stopped.
‘It’s just something that Prophet said, that’s all,’ I said. ‘It’s not important.’
‘It is,’ she said under her breath.
‘What? It is?’ Roach said.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ Lola pushed her breakfast away. ‘He knows it’s important but he doesn’t know why. Someone told him it was.’
‘Why, what did he say?’ I didn’t know they’d talked.
‘He didn’t say anything,’ she said.
‘Someone told him it was important?’ Minos put the coffee in front of her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t think that it matters though, that he doesn’t know the why.
I knew then what was going on.
‘He doesn’t think?’ I said.
She looked me in the eye. She knew that I knew. ‘Yes, he thinks, in his head.’
‘In his head?’ Minos said. ‘I don’t understand...’
‘What you mean. How can you see inside his head?’ Lola finished his sentence for him.
Minos clamped his hands over his mouth and then over his forehead.
Roach put the headphones back on her head and switched the music back on.
‘She can read minds,’ Roach said.
‘Is she doing it now?’ Minos said.
‘Yes. And also don’t be so rude,’ Lola said.
‘How near do you have to be to me?’ he said.
‘In the next room,’ Lola switched the music off. ‘Who am I kidding? This doesn’t work.’
‘I’ll be in the room next to the one next to this one if you need me,’ Minos got up and almost ran out of the kitchen.
‘Can you read all of my mind?’ Roach said.
‘No,’ Lola said. ‘Only the bit you’re actually thinking. The live part. Does that make sense?’
‘No sense at all,’ I said.
‘You worked it out yesterday,’ she told me. ‘But you thought it was the rum talking.’
‘I’m going to have to stop drinking,’ I said.
‘Does she mean that?’ Roach asked Lola.
‘She always does,’ Lola wound the cable around the headphones. ‘This is going to freak everyone out, isn’t it?
‘No, I’m not in the least...’ Roach trailed off.
‘I can tell when you lying, you know,’ Lola looked at me. ‘You’re not freaked out?’
I shrugged. I don’t know what I’m thinking half the time so I didn’t see why anyone else would.
Lola smiled, reading the thought. ‘You really don’t know what you can do?’
‘Do you?’
‘Not if you don’t,’ she said.
We sat there drinking cold tea and warm coffee for a few minutes.
‘What do we do?’ Lola said.
‘No idea,’ I said. ‘I’m going to see if I can pick up some work.’
‘But what about Prophet?’ Roach said. ‘If it’s important.’
‘I guess if it’s important he’ll be back,’ I said. ‘What about the people at the hospital?’
‘That was no hospital,’ Roach said.
‘I couldn’t see what they were thinking,’ Lola said. ‘Apart from once when someone remembered that they hadn’t taken their medication so I would be able to see what they were thinking. But before that they were only thinking about calling their mother.’
‘Their mother?’ Roach said.
‘Yes, she had something wrong with her that I’ve never heard of.’
I left them discussing the finer points of telepathy, pyromancy, invisibility and being a genius and went to call Packet. Yum was on despatch.
‘You want to work?’ he said, making it sound as though I’d suggested something obscene.
‘Yeah, I need to occupy my mind.’
‘Sorry, Blades. I am full today. You can work double hard tomorrow,’ he cut the connection.
The day stretched ahead of me like a prison sentence, an ordinary prison sentence for an ordinary person having the ordinary sulks. I got on the bike and rode north west to Stadium City. It was a short ride through Harlestone, or the ghetto. Why it was called the ghetto I didn’t know, it was just a political thing. A bogey man for the plastic dolls to fear, to keep them content in their southern offices blocks. Keep chasing the numbers, it said to them, or else you’ll end up in the ghetto. The only problem I had with the ghetto was that Enforce would shut down whole blocks making it a slower journey than necessary. There was never any reason to shut anything down, but all those flashing lights looked great on the news as the word ghetto scrolled across the bottom on the blue and red ticker of doom.
I was not troubled by roadblocks that day. I flew along the roads again, I guessed that the two weeks away from the bike had proved that absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder, or the muscles stronger. I rounded a long bend, slipping between two freight lorries
like the breeze, and Stadium City filled the horizon. After the flood and the crash and all the rest of it, they said people knew they were in trouble because sport stopped. There was no money to pay players or athletes, no money to buy tickets. There was no market for any of it and it curled up and died along with everything else. The city was littered with massive stadiums which stood empty for a few years until enterprising people started to move in. They ripped the seats out and replaced them with makeshift huts. Communities sprang up in no time and a couple of decades later I was riding up to the biggest of them all, Stadium City. The national stadium had never been so popular, the arch was now hung with pod-like structures where people lived, entering down the rope ladder these nests were suspended from. It was a jungle.
We got stiffed in a business deal in Stadium City once, it was so bad it took us a while to recover. It was the only place, other than the black market in the OP, that we wouldn’t trade. Stadium City was an anomaly in the city in that it was under the jurisdiction of a single group, the McBrides. Minos had got a load of tobacco off a boat, and we were selling it for a heavy price that would bring a weighty profit. We’d managed to shift a lot of it off to a guy he knew who smuggled such goods over to the northern countries of New Europa. But we still couldn’t get rid of the rest, so we put the word out to some unreconstructed types who might be interested in such old school merchandise and the McBrides popped up on our radar. They met Roach, Minos, Casino and I in an abandoned multi-storey car park, tooled up and high, loaded the tobacco into their van and then beat us all up and stole everything we had, including our stolen van. There were rules and this wasn’t the behaviour they encouraged. Minos had dropped his wristset in the back of the van and activated its terminal security features. That is to say he blew it up and the McBrides fled the burning van just in time to watch the tobacco smoke itself from a safe distance. Now we let them mind their own business in case the sight of us caused any memories to float to the surface along with thoughts of revenge.
I left the bike somewhere safe. I had activated some of the more devious security measures so anyone attempting to steal it would be in for a terrible shock. As I walked away from it I saw a familiar model of car disappearing down to one of the underground levels. It didn’t matter, it would be impossible to follow me where I was going. I did almost send Minos a message to let him know that I’d seen them, but then he’d call me and talk to me and I just wanted to be left alone. I walked up to the very top level, through the bustle of crowded markets and streets making my way to one of the old maintenance staircases. There were people everywhere, all too busy going about their business to notice me. There were all kinds of things going on. Furtive meetings, fights, people just hanging around makeshift cafes drinking bright red tea and smoking black cigarettes. I caught sight of the area where the pitch used to be, deep down in the bowl inside the city. It was a muddle of colour and the noise that rose up into the half closed roof was incredible. The narrow metal staircase I took up to the top wasn’t used very often, the door protested when I prised it open.
The whole city spread out before me beneath the clouded sky that sat on the city like a lid. I could see the swollen river and the arrogant towers of the Riverside Sector. The dock where Minos and Roach would soon be busy and industrious, was black and smoky out East not far from the Project, the tall needle puncturing low cloud, its top hidden. To the south I could see the office high rises, the doll factories, and out to the west, in the river I could see the biggest of the disaster zones. Between it all humanity was crammed into every inch. Everything green was behind me or to the very edges almost out of sight. The city was a patchwork quilt of brown, black and grey, everyone huddled beneath its warm folds, hiding like children from the monster in a bedtime story.
I sat on the base of one of the cables that supported the arch, looking into the city. I wasn’t the only soul hiding out in the quiet maintenance passages. Just below me, on a narrow balcony running around the inside of the sliding roof, a man was playing cards with himself. It reminded me of where I had sat with Minos the night before, before I found out that Lola was some mindreading freak. Jealousy was not one of my more attractive qualities. I tried to list all the downsides of being able to do something amazing, but the lists just kept morphing into other lists detailing all the exciting things I would do if I was invisible or telepathic. I distracted myself with the man playing patience. I lay on my stomach with my head over the edge so I could watch him, my chin resting on the backs of my fingerless gloves. He’d made a small table out of an upturned crate. The cards were laid out in front him in piles, some fanning down in columns of black then red, black then red. His hands were swollen and covered in homemade tattoos. Badges from a prison boat. It took a lot to get sent to a prison boat and more to get off one. I wondered what he could have done. Murder, I bet. But even then it depended who it was he’d knocked off. Not a political crime, he wouldn’t be out now, or ever. Maybe a financial crime, that had a hefty penalty and you had to pay for your own incarceration. An idea not without its own poetry but, like most laws, it meant that the rich could afford to break it and they did. The man’s crime remained his secret and he turned three cards over from the pile in his hand, laying them out with great care. We both scanned the columns of cards to see if he could make a move, he couldn’t. Three more cards were turned, we both surveyed the cards again. There was red seven that would go on a black eight but my convict friend was turning three more cards. I almost spoke aloud to point out his mistake but just stopped myself in time. Not the most sensible move, pointing out the inadequacies of a prison boat veteran’s card playing. Besides, he seemed to have realised his mistake and the seven was on the eight. He must have heard someone coming because he started looking around. It was always fascinating watching people when they didn’t know I was doing it, they’d tell me all sorts of things they’d never let slip if they knew they were under observation. I wasn’t at the best angle to watch the man but he was confused about something, or maybe suspicious, he kept looking around. I thought maybe he heard something from the stairwell but there was nothing there. The only sound was the city and that was little more than a buzzing in the background. He went back to the cards. Again, revealing the three from his hand with great care. All the cards were lined up across the table in perfect formation. He must have some kind of condition. Maybe that’s why he’d done time. He wasn’t the brightest, again he’d missed a black three for a red four.
It didn’t matter that he hadn’t seen it, as he turned the next three cards, the black three moved without his help.
And then a black six moved to the red seven, all on its own.
I yelped. No, not on its own.
The man looked up, he’d heard me. A bright, white scar was vivid against the flushed skin of his cheek.
It was me.
The man backed away from me, afraid. He knocked his table over and tripped over it. And he fell. He fell over the short railing and down into the city below. I jumped down from my ledge and looked over the railing. I could only see a gathering crowd far, far below. The cards flew out across the vast space like a flock of birds.
It was all me. The blinds, the radio, the doors. I wasn’t an ordinary person with four extraordinary friends anymore. I was extraordinary too. I felt immense, magnificent. The question foremost in my mind was not what could I do, but what couldn’t I do? And in my excitement I forgot that a man had just died.
