The Vanguard

by SJ Griffin

Chapter Eleven

  Early next morning, the five of us were standing on a pier in the northern dock waiting for a contact of Minos’s to turn up in his boat. It was just before dawn and cold, none of us had slept. I felt a little like we were running away such was the speed of our departure, but Roach found a boat leaving for Nexus with a shipment of something classified and Minos had made the necessary alterations to everyone’s work placement data before the rest of us could raise even the smallest query. It would be a flying visit not the hedonistic jaunt Minos had been dreaming of.

  We drove to the security cordon surrounding the rioting sectors just before four in the morning and slipped through in the chaos caused when a small generator exploded, not at all of its own accord, during a shift change. We picked up a tro-tro around Arch and Park and found ourselves at the dock in double quick time. Even under those circumstances, at that time in the morning the city was still as unlike itself as we would ever see it, as though it was taking a breather before putting its uniform on, strapping its boots up and punching everyone it happened upon in the face.

  ‘I really like sleep,’ I said. ‘I miss it.’

  ‘Me too,’ Roach said.

  ‘Is he late?’ Lola said.

  ‘Not yet,’ Minos said. ‘But he will be.’

  He was ten minutes late. Lola, who was a stranger to being on time herself, was freezing cold and therefore angry. A battered barge chugged up to the short pier.

  ‘Minos, Minos, Minos,’ the man on the barge said. ‘Minos.’

  ‘Just Minos once is fine,’ he said.

  ‘Minos once, I want paying up front this time,’ the man said.

  I held up a card with the required amount of credit on it. ‘And I want to set foot on that boat before I hand this over.’

  ‘And you’ll be most welcome, me name’s Rosy,’ Rosy said. ‘I’m named after me vessel.’

  I wondered if he too had his name written in bright, curly lettering along his flank. We threw our bags onto the deck and jumped after them in time-honoured smuggler fashion. Rosy had a pot of thick hot chocolate on a stove in his cabin. He’d fitted up an old fashioned galleon ship’s wheel to steer the barge. He stood in front of it like a proper old skull and crossbones pirate. He had long, plaited hair with different coloured rags and beads woven into it. He’d lost his front teeth in an argument with a goose which he’d also lost. His shirt was voluminous and his chest full of pendants.

  We made conversation about the riots. Rosy was not much affected, he lived on the river, so it was hard going and Lola was no help because she was tired and grumpy. I sipped hot chocolate and watched the river slide by the window, the water thicker than the chocolate but not as sweet. Once we’d stopped trying to be polite Rosy slipped into a well-rehearsed repertoire of tales about adventures he’d had as a young sailor. He was an entertaining story-teller.

  ‘Why do you want aboard the Vanessa?’ Rosy said, asking the question he’d been dying to ask. ‘It’s not carrying anything you’ll be interested in.’

  ‘It’s also going to wrong way,’ Minos said. ‘Mysterious, isn’t it?’

  ‘There’s no need to be secretive,’ Rosy said. ‘I’ll not tell a soul.’

  ‘We’re going to Nexus,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Nexus. It’s a new island, just been discovered,’ I said.

  ‘An explorer, are you?’ Rosy smiled at me.

  ‘A spy,’ I said.

  The Rosy pulled up next to the Vanessa, as the sun was coming up over the tower blocks to the south. The Vanessa had dropped anchor just near the old Barrier. It should have kept the flood from the city but now its fins didn’t even rise above the surface of the water at high tide and at low tide they looked like the peaks of the rib cage of a dinosaur, fallen, abandoned and just as useless.

  ‘Safe trip,’ said Rosy as he gave me a leg up and then watched us climb up the massive links in the Vanessa’s anchor chain. Minos was up it like a rocket, practice having made perfect, the rest of us struggled up behind him. We climbed into the anchor housing and listened to the guttural cough of the Rosy’s engine disappearing as it sailed back up the river.

  I slept until Minos woke me up to show me something he claimed was amazing. I joined Casino, Roach and Lola at the porthole expecting a windsurfing unicorn.

  ‘It’s enormous,’ Roach said.

  ‘I have never seen anything like it in all my days at the docks,’ Minos said after an awed whistle. ‘It must be a mile long.’

  ‘It’s a ship,’ I said. I was not at my most astute when I’d just woken up.

  It was a few hundred metres away but its black hull filled our view. It looked more like a submarine than a ship, there were no windows, no identifying marks apart from a code painted on the bow.

  ‘NX-ETW,’ Casino said. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It must mean it’s from Nexus, usually the first two letters tell you where a ship’s come from. NX must be Nexus. I don’t know what the rest means, it’s from their fleet inventory. I’ve never seen anything like that before.’

  ‘What do you think is on it?’ Roach said, more in wonder than in expectation of an answer.

  ‘No idea, I’d love to find out though,’ Minos said.

  We watched the ship sail out of our field of vision, then I went back to catch up on the sleep I’d missed.

  We didn’t have a sneaky plan to get us off the boat once it had docked almost a day later, so we just marched down the broad gangplank looking as though we knew exactly what we were doing and were exactly where we should have been doing it. It was a tried and tested technique that had only failed us on one occasion because Minos had tripped over a small child and sworn in his usual comprehensive fashion. People just didn’t expect a man dressed as a surgeon to do that. Pale, picture-book sand stretched out either side of the narrow dock which was operating with efficient smoothness. There was something balletic about the way people fetched and carried, back and forth. I feared we may find fitting in difficult.

  ‘It’s so warm,’ Lola said, taking off her jacket. ‘Lovely and warm.’

  The sun shone unclouded. We looked up at the blue sky and I realised I hadn’t seen the sun look like that for a long time, if ever. At best I’d seen it achieve a hazy impersonation of this sun. The sky hadn’t been blue since they tried to clean the clouds and methylene hung over us until it turned cobalt. Then it went an indescribable shade of green and fell in hailstones the size of footballs. There would have been serious injuries had the hailstones not been so brittle they shattered on impact. Nexus was troubled by the occasional white, fluffy cloud but it was a beautiful day with no sign of change. Far off on the horizon, clouds gathered but they showed no sign of coming any nearer. I’d watched clouds full of thunder racing up from the coast, from the roof of the Project thousands of feet above the city, but here they waited as though they’d been forbidden to approach.

  ‘And it’s so green,’ Roach said.

  Between the many paths and narrow roads that ran away from the docks grew palm trees and other shrubbery that didn’t quite look indigenous. There was something wrong with Nexus. The whole place felt like it had been built, like it was handmade. We headed away from the dock and towards some buildings huddled around a quiet square. It was an inviting space after the busy dock. It begged you to kick off your shoes and relax beneath yet another palm tree. It looked like a brochure. The buildings were the squat pop-ups made from the easy-build kits that had been popular right after the flood. Here they were grander and cleaner but it was the same simple technology.

  ‘This place is giving me the creeps,’ I said, sudden homesickness striking. The dirt was the only thing holding home together, here everything was so clean it would fall apart in a heartbeat. It had never survived anything, rebelled against anyone. It was horrible.

  ‘It is very unusual,’ Roach said. ‘Let’s have a drink and acclimatised.’

  Minos led the way to a bar heaving with
people who had the cheerful air of having just finished a shift. We occupied a dark booth up some stairs at the back so we could maintain a low profile. We found ourselves at a useful vantage point. Huddled around soft drinks we gazed through the window. We could see all the way across the island. Apart from three large, white domes some way off, there didn’t seem to be much there, nothing to suggest that the enormous ships we’d seen could have come from the Nexus. The island was flat and the only boat in sight was the Vanessa.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ Casino said, taking his hand off Lola’s head. ‘I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.’

  ‘It would make things much easier,’ Lola said.

  ‘Yeah, I realise that, but I can only make myself invisible.’

  ‘And your clothes,’ Minos said. I think he was trying to be helpful.

  Roach was sitting with a focused look on his face, he was listening to three men sitting in the booth next to us. They were chattering away in one of the Latin State languages, their voices and laughter drifting over the high partition between us. He chuckled.

  ‘It’s underground,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’ Lola said.

  ‘Nexus. The whole island is underground.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they mentioned where the entrance was?’ Casino said.

  It was Minos who found the way in, although it’s more accurate to say it found him. One minute he was standing next to me, arguing with Casino about whether the light from our torches would attract unwanted attention in the darkness that had gathered in the hours that we’d been searching, the next he was gone. He’d attempted to storm off and disappeared down a hole. The rest of us used the metal ladder that had been installed for our convenience.

  ‘Nice one,’ Roach said, picking up Minos by his collar. ‘We’d have never found that otherwise.’

  We tried to head north, towards the domes that we’d seen, but the passages kept twisting around so we spent a tense half hour going in a direction we were sure was south. Time was not on our side, we planned to get the Vanessa back home. Underground, Nexus reminded me of the hospital, there were the same bright white walls and frosted glass panels. Everything was so generic, so unidentifiable somehow. We arrived at an automatic glass door that needed to be opened with swipe card. We hid around the sides of the door.

  ‘Can we open that?’ Roach said.

  ‘No,’ Minos said, after swiping and jabbing at his tablet. ‘No we can’t. We can’t do anything because there is no technology in the air here. There’s only air. And what good is that?’

  On the other side of the door was a guard, asleep in a chair. He looked just like one of the guards they had in the Arts Academy to stop the paintings from running away. Attached to his belt was a karabiner with a swipe card hanging from it.

  ‘I think I can open it,’ I said.

  The karabiner began to unscrew itself, the movement so slow it would have been almost imperceptible to unsuspecting eyes. The card then rose and freed itself. It moved through the air towards the door, which it slipped under with only the slightest scraping sound, to arrive in my hand. I got a very quiet round of applause. I held the card up to show the others. Just as Marshall’s interview had suggested, Nexus was in the hands of Imagination Industries. The card had their logo embossed on one side. It stared out at us like an evil eye. I opened the door and we crept past the guard so as not to wake him. The swipe card seemed to open all the doors without a problem and we were making steady northern progress. I felt a vague concern about how deserted everywhere was, but we rounded a long curve in the tunnel and that was no longer an issue. Our tunnel had opened up into a much larger tunnel which was carrying very light vehicle traffic, like those battery run carts they use at the airport for rich people who can’t walk very far. There was a steady stream of people coming from the east. They had the air of the commuter about them. We fell in line. I wished I had been able to find at least one small piece of information that would tell us something about what we were going to encounter.

  ‘We need to find somewhere to base ourselves,’ Minos said. ‘Once we’ve got our bearings. Somewhere in a maintenance shaft or something. Keep your eyes peeled.’

  We followed the crowd until we arrived at the lip of a long slope that plunged down into a huge, sunken basin. The sides of the basin were honeycombed with smaller tunnels leading away from the central space. One side of the space had been opened out, its huge door rising up to the domed roof. We were under one of the domes that we’d seen from the bar. Inside was a huge ship, like the NX-ETW, its rear doors open. The rest of the crowd made their way down the slope.

  ‘Let’s go this way,’ Casino said. ‘We need to hurry up or we’ll get spotted.’

  We followed him along a narrow path which swept around the top of the basin. There were no security cameras anywhere. There was no surveillance equipment of any kind.

  ‘How are they going to spot us?’ I looked around to see if there was any more security. ‘There are no cameras or anything.’

  ‘Maybe they think they don’t need them,’ Roach said.

  The idea made me shudder. Everyone watched everyone, that was what we did, everyone was afraid of everyone else. These people weren’t watching because they had nothing to fear. Or, I reasoned, maybe they weren’t watching because they were too stupid to think they needed to. It was a comforting thought but I wasn’t convinced, there was an air of intelligence and invincibility about Nexus. They’d mastered the weather after all. Minos did one of his whistles, a quiet one. We were opposite the huge ship and although it was some distance away, our new perspective afforded us an interesting view. There was no mistaking the long lines of figures marching aboard.

  ‘There must be thousands of them,’ Lola said. ‘Thousands.’

  ‘Army servants,’ Roach said. ‘That’s what Stark called them.’

  ‘No wonder,’ I said.

  They moved in formation, as one, on to the huge ship with their golden hair shining in the bright, artificial light. The basin was buzzing with activity, just like the dock. There were more of the now familiar cars lined up on one side and they were being driven on the ship beside the army, while crates were loaded on the other side. The ship was sitting in dry dock and in another vast hall beyond there was water behind a transparent dam of some kind. There seemed to be some serious equipment in the hall which I assumed was for raising and lowering the ship and controlling the flow of water. The ships must be able to go above and beneath the water, if they could do that, they wouldn’t need permission or paperwork to dock anywhere, they could just hide.

  ‘Who are all these people? Where have they got them from?’ Minos said, watching the people below. They looked like little insects rushing back and forth. They weren’t Galearii. They were just people, just like us. Well, maybe not just like us.

  ‘From everywhere,’ Roach said. ‘I think they’ve come from all over the world. But how?’

  ‘They can’t just have turned up,’ I said. ‘They must have been recruited.’

  ‘Let’s find somewhere to set up,’ Minos said. ‘We need to try and get into the system to find out what’s going on.’

  We made our way to the right, away from the disturbing sight of the army of angels and their worker ants, and found a maintenance tunnel. We set up camp in the tunnels that serviced the lift shafts. We didn’t see any lifts moving up and down but the shaft the lifts travelled was so deep you couldn’t hear anything land at the bottom. I insisted Minos tie himself to a pipe, in case he had an accident and fell down the shaft. Even though it was in the next room it wasn’t inconceivable that he could trip over and tumble down it. I’d seen him have more ridiculous accidents. Casino disappeared and went off to explore. Lola went down the tunnel to play look out. Minos plugged himself into a laptop and began the process of trying to pick up any connection.

  ‘Neat trick with the card,’ Roach said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Right back at you for the underground disc
overy.’

  ‘And thank you,’ he smiled. Then frowned. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘I’m OK. None of us looked fabulous.’

  ‘Get the others back,’ Minos said. ‘Now.’

  Minos was all in a fidget about something. While we waited for Lola and Casino, Roach untied Minos from the pipe, before he chewed through the cable, and he hopped around with sparks fizzing around his ears. He looked like a malfunctioning firework. It was harder to hang on to yourself on when you were upset, like having an extra temper somehow.

  ‘I’ve got some particularly bad news,’ Minos said. ‘We’ve been here for too long. We’ve just missed the boat.’

  ‘How did that happen?’ Lola said.

  ‘There must be a dead spot or something where all the receivers went down. I don’t know, I thought they were working,’ he looked like he was going to vomit. ‘I have to be honest with you, I’m completely out of my depth here.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Casino said.

  Everyone looked at me. Why did they always look at me?

  ‘There’s another ship leaving,’ I said. ‘We’ve seen it.’

  ‘No way,’ Lola said.

  ‘I can find out a way for us to get on it,’ Casino said, disappearing and reappearing to prove his point.

  ‘Might be our only option,’ Roach said. ‘Minos?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, as well as having no security they’ve got no real computer system either. These guys are old school.’

  ‘Then how did you find out about the time?’ I said.

  ‘I brought this with us,’ he held up a watch. It was one of those old fashioned, round ones that had little arms pointing to tiny numbers. All it did was tell the time, it was made back when the space on your wrist wasn’t at such a premium. ‘I thought it would be good to rely on some honest, old fashioned hardware. These Galearii go way back according to Stark’s books, I figured it would be good to be prepared. I underestimated them. I’m sorry.’ He passed it to me for inspection.

  ‘It makes a ticking noise, that’s sweet,’ I said. It was more comforting than any sound my wristset had ever made. I handed the tiny clock to Roach.

  ‘How does it work?’ Roach said. ‘Does it have a battery?’

  ‘You wind it up with that little knob there,’ Minos said. ‘Which I have done every morning and evening for weeks, so it’s definitely right. We’ve missed our ride.’

  ‘We’ll just have to get on that ship,’ I said.

  ‘That’s insane,’ Lola said. She passed the watch to Casino without even looking at it.

  ‘If you have a better idea, I’m all ears,’ I said. ‘We could always stay here, I guess.’

  No one had any better ideas. We agreed to get some sleep and then make the most of our unexpected time on the island by having a proper look round when everyone was asleep. If Galearii slept, which I suspected they didn’t. I took the first watch and sat up trying to be alert while the others got some shut eye.

  The restaurant was exquisite and intimate. It was almost as though the other diners weren’t there. They were indistinct against the art deco interior design. The chime of crystal glasses and the clatter of silver cutlery could have been piped, such was the perfection of the ambience. We were sitting at a table. We seemed to have finished eating dessert. The waiter handed her a small silver tray with a key on it. His face slid from my mind in an instant, as every good waiter’s should. The restaurant was in a hotel.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said.

  The lift counted through the floors in a blur of red numbers then announced our arrival on the top floor in a purr more seductive than any machine should have been programmed with. The view from the penthouse suite was even more breathtaking than they usually are.

  ‘Am I asleep?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said, her red hair flickering in the candlelight again. ‘You are caught.’

  I waited.

  ‘You are caught in that moment between being awake and asleep. Once this breath finishes you will be fast asleep,’ she said. ‘Drink?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be the look out,’ I said. ‘I can’t be fast asleep.’ I was always surprised by how hard the bubbles in champagne were, I supposed that contradiction is part of the fun.

  ‘Then you’ll wake up,’ the green eyes were smiling. ‘Are you wondering why you are here?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  The whole face smiled then. It felt like the right answer even though I was only being honest.

  She walked over to the window. The glass stretched from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, beyond it the city lights were bright and colourful. Their light was vast and spread without the dark patches of brown outs. Étienne was wearing a long white gown with her hair tumbling down her bare back to her waist. It was all the colours of red that there could be. Her pale fingers touched the window pane. She was the kind of beautiful that empties your head of everything except the simple fact of that beauty.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘Sit down,’ Étienne said.

  ‘Sit down as in prepare for a shock?’

  ‘No, sit down as in make yourself comfortable,’ she sat on the long leather sofa.

  I joined her. I sat at the other end.

  ‘I’m pleased you recognised me,’ she said. ‘I went to a lot of trouble for you.’

  I murmured something that could have been thanks or a compliment.

  ‘Even this,’ she said, gesturing to herself. ‘Is for you.’

  I was glad I was sitting down.

  ‘You didn’t recognise this one,’ she said and the man from her house was sitting in her chair instead of her. I made sure of what I was seeing, for my poor brain’s sake. Right where she’d been sitting sat the man who took dream data from Imagination Industries, the man who could see the invisible. I must have looked amazed.

  She laughed. ‘It’s all right, you weren’t supposed to. I don’t always look like this. Or that.’

  ‘Why did you...’

  She looked at me in expectation, waiting.

  ‘Why...’

  ‘Yes?’ Étienne said.

  Why what? I didn’t know. How do you formulate a question like that and where would you begin to understand the answer? I shook my head.

  ‘Your friend was rather rude,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I liked him.’

  ‘Casino? He was upset about being Mr Invisible,’ I said. ‘He thought you knew something about it. And, in his defence, he was absolutely right.’

  She smiled. ‘How do you like being telekinetic?’

  I would have preferred an easy question. ‘I don’t much,’ I said. ‘I thought it would be like I imagined when I was a kid, but it isn’t. The cape isn’t up to much either.’

  ‘When you’re a child you don’t have to worry about the why,’ she paused. ‘Well, most children don’t have to worry about the why.’

  I refilled our glasses so I had something to do.

  ‘Ask me a question. I promise to answer it no matter what it is,’ she said. ‘If I can.’

  Don’t think, just ask. ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, it will alter the course.’

  ‘It will alter the course?’ I put the glass down before I dropped it.

  ‘Ask me anything else. Honestly. Anything.’

  ‘Who wrote the prophecy?’ I didn’t want to know anything else, just why.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I suppose telling me why would alter the course?’

  She flashed that celestial smile again. ‘You don’t like the word prophecy. That’s all right, I don’t much like it either but you know how people are. The grandeur is so seductive. It started as a well placed story, and then it grew and grew and people took the characters to heart and now it’s real and alive. This is just as it has always happened. But something else always happens next. And there’s another side to the story, of course. There’s always that.’

  ‘The Galeari
i?’

  ‘Partly, yes. But there are others’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘It’s not entirely under my control anymore. It’s like planting an acorn, you know it will grow into an oak tree but you have no idea how tall the trunk will be, how broad the branches, how deep the roots.’

  ‘Are those others here as well?’

  ‘No one is here except you and me. There is no one else right now.’

  I decided I was going to have to let that one go. ‘No, I mean on the island,’ I said.

  ‘No one important and you shouldn’t there be much longer either. The more time you spend there the more danger you will be in.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It is written.’

  ‘By you?’

  ‘By both sides.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘When you discovered your powers, all of you used them all the time to do the most ordinary things. And then you stopped. Why?’

  ‘Because it was...’ I didn’t want to say it. ‘Boring.’

  ‘Exactly. When you can have whatever you want, after a while you don’t want anything.’

  I wanted to find that hard to believe. She laughed.

  ‘Can you read my thoughts?’ I said with far more composure than I felt. Far, far more.

  She hesitated. ‘Yes, but not in the same way Lola can. And I didn’t just then, I read that in your face.’ She moved along the sofa. We had been metres apart but now I didn’t need to reach out to touch her. ‘Everything you can all do, I can do. And more, as you’ve seen. I can reach every point in space and time simultaneously.’

  ‘Do you know what’s going to happen?’

  ‘Only if I look,’ she said. ‘I haven’t looked. Like you suggested , it’s not much fun anymore.’

  I wanted her to look. I wanted her to show me.

  ‘Your time is coming, Sorcha. It’s nearly here. I sense you are getting anxious and that’s understandable. I want to tell you it’s going to be all right.’

  ‘You don’t know that, you haven’t looked.’

  ‘I don’t need to look, I know you,’ she said. ‘I chose you and you chose them.’

  ‘What about Doodle?’ I said. ‘He was my friend.’

  ‘They wanted to use him to tell part of their story but instead he’s telling ours. They couldn’t keep him on their side. That’s not your fault.’

  It felt like my fault.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ she put her hand on my arm in apology, the thought hadn’t crossed my face. ‘Nothing is your fault. It’s mine, all of it. From the beginning to the end I take the blame, and I will take it, for everything.’

  The clock on the wall above the fireplace hadn’t moved. It was the same as the one on Minos’s wrist. The hands were still. Everything was still.

  ‘I want to give you something,’ she said, her hand was resting on my arm. Its weight was somehow more than it should have been. She paused.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘I want to give you freedom to act without worrying about the consequences, without thinking about what happens next.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘So you can do what you need to do.’

  I felt like kids were meant to, like I didn’t know anything but everything was fascinating. It was her. She made things that way.

  ‘But why will I do whatever I’m supposed to do?’ I said.

  ‘Why do we do anything?’ she said. ‘It’s all about the possibility.’

  ‘The possibility of what?’

  Her lips were warm and soft but the floor in the maintenance tunnel was cold and hard.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ Casino said, sitting up in his sleeping bag. He looked like a caterpillar. ‘And since when were you such an incurable romantic?’

  ‘She’s always been a terrible look out though,’ Roach said.

  It seemed I had taken to talking in my sleep. How inconvenient.

  It was midnight according to Minos’s timepiece. We had a quick breakfast of chocolate, as though it was a special festive holiday, and then formulated a plan. We would let Casino go ahead, unseen, and then take it from there. There was no love lost between us and planning but that was how we had always been and, to be fair, it was how most things had to be when you didn’t know what was going to happen from one minute to the next. We’d been waiting for the electricity to give out for a decade, they said the flood water might recede at any time, or it might rise. We planned for constant change by not planning, that was all we could do. Now a plan would have been handy we found we were terminally spontaneous.

  We returned to our hideout five minutes after setting off, it was impossible to follow an invisible man. We refined our strategy and then set out again. Casino went ahead and then waved a scrap of green cloth torn from Minos’s t-shirt to indicate that we had the all clear and to show a direction of travel, then he hid it in his fist and went off again.

  All the lights were in standby mode, the blue tones giving the white walls a glacial appearance as though we were in the palace of an ice queen. There was not a soul about. Finally, there was a break in the corridors other than the occasional empty room sitting dim and dull behind glass doors. There was a large, secured door baring our way at the end of a corridor that opened into a large garden under a glass dome. We let ourselves in with the key card. The greenhouse was hot and humid. It was full of flowers that we’d never seen, not even Roach had seen them in a book and he gone through botany the week before last. There was one flower that looked like it was chewing, one that smelt like rotting cheese and flying between them were gigantic butterflies that chased Lola because she squealed at them. I could have sworn the butterflies thought it was funny. We wandered through, not daring to touch anything in case we got eaten, until we’d crossed the room and reached a wooden door at the far end. They’d put a sign on this one, it said Administrative Building in seven different languages. The top two floors of the building seemed to be above ground, the glassed centre forming a huge atrium through which the moonlight brightened the hall. We stood in the middle looking up at the long balconies running around the edge of the building. There were some lifts on the west side. The floors went up to two and down to minus fifteen according to the list of numbers and names next to the lift. They were all codes numbers. Roach spent some time trying to work out what they might mean until I recognised one. ATLSB-BNAMAH. I pushed the down button. The doors opened.

  ‘Which floor?’ Lola said, her finger hovering over the panel of buttons inside the lift as the doors closed on us.

  ‘Minus eleven,’ I said. ‘It’s that cheat code.’

  At first I thought the lift had opened in a different building. Whereas everything upstairs had been white and clean, everything down here was dark wood, polished but old. The passing of many years had marked the wood beneath its varnish, even the lights were period authentic. They could have been real, but period authentic was the new real. Large double doors stood at the end of the corridor. We walked towards them as the lift doors closed, darkening the hallway even more. I peered through the keyhole into the blackness on the other side of the door.

  ‘Nothing?’ Lola said.

  ‘It’s too dark,’ I stood up.

  ‘Go and stand down there,’ Lola said. ‘All of you.’

  We all stood by the lift until she gestured for us to return.

  ‘There’s no one there,’ she said. ‘No one sentient anyway.’

  ‘I love a non-sentient being in the middle of the night,’ Minos said.

  ‘Great,’ Casino said from nowhere.

  ‘You don’t need to be invisible anymore,’ Lola said.

  ‘I like it,’ Casino said. ‘It makes me feel safe.’

  On the other side of the door was a huge library, its lights dimmed after hours. We shushed each other and made ourselves laugh a hundred times. We were as nervous as children on the first day of school, our laughter hollow and jittery. But if there was one thing certain in life, it was
librarians telling you to shush. Even the libraries at home, which had no books to speak of and were filled with information leaflets from various ministries demanded absolute silence. The Nexus library was a large hexagonal space with six very long rooms coming off it. Rows of shelves, packed close together, filled these rooms. They were crammed with books that looked like the ones in Étienne’s library. Old magic again. Minos was right, they were old school. We wandered up and down the shelves, Roach trying to pretend he wasn’t very excited.

  ‘Sshh,’ Casino said, appearing.

  We giggled again.

  ‘No, really. Shut up,’ he said. ‘There’s a security guard in here.’

  We scattered. Roach hid behind some shelves, Minos got in a cupboard and Lola and I hid under a desk. Casino tried to run in six different directions all at once and then remembered he didn’t need to hide and disappeared. I saw the flash of a torch on the period authentic carpet. It was only four shelves away and getting closer. I could hear someone whistling a flat drone without a tune, like a chant or a meditation. A guard came around the corner and started to walk towards us between the rows of shelving. One lucky fall of his torch beam and Lola and I would be discovered. I was about to shut my eyes, when I was a kid I used to think that if I shut my eyes and couldn’t see anyone they couldn’t see me, but then I saw a very heavy book floating through the air behind the guard. It followed him for a few steps then rose up to hit him on the back of the head with a dull thud. The guard fell to the ground with another thud, this one not so dull. Casino appeared.

  ‘Nice,’ Roach said. ‘Although next time you’ll have to hit him a bit harder.’ The guard was already groaning. He would have stood up if Roach hadn’t been sitting on him.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I said.

  ‘Hyatt,’ the guard said.

  We tied him to the banister of one of the six spiral staircases that led up to a narrow floor housing more books. It was in an alcove off the main central room of the library behind some doors that folded like a concertina. Hyatt had suggested it as a suitable place. He really was very helpful once he’d realised we weren’t going to kill him.

  ‘I’m really sorry about hitting you with that dictionary, Hyatt,’ Casino said.

  ‘I understand,’ Hyatt said. ‘It’s quite all right really, it didn’t hurt, I was more surprised than anything.’

  ‘OK, Lola get ready,’ I said, as Roach, Minos and Casino backed off to a safe distance. ‘Now, Hyatt, I’m not supposed to be here. I have come from a long way away to spy on whatever is going on here and find out all your secrets. I want you to tell me the one thing you’re not supposed to tell me. The one thing that you’ve been told to keep secret, tell me. I won’t tell a soul, I promise.’

  He shut his eyes tight and shook his head hard a few times. ‘No. I won’t.’

  Lola nodded.

  ‘That’s great, thanks Hyatt,’ I said as Lola slipped her red rubber band back on her wrist. ‘Roach, could you?’

  ‘Man, I am really, really sorry about this,’ Roach said.

  ‘It’s...’ Hyatt managed before Roach knocked him out cold with a right hook.

  ‘Wow,’ Casino said. ‘Brains and brawn.’

  ‘Where to?’ I said to Lola.

  ‘Through that door is the main hall, it’s like a church or a ceremonial place. There’s something going on there now that Hyatt thinks we shouldn’t see.’

  ‘Let’s go and take a look then,’ Minos said.

  ‘The only thing is,’ Lola said trailing off, looking worried.

  ‘What?’ we chorused.

  ‘His head,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t hit him that hard, just in a sweet spot,’ Roach said.

  ‘No, inside his head,’ she said. ‘It’s all, I don’t know, it’s like he’s reciting something over and over. It’s like he’s been brainwashed. I thought I might be able to find out how he got here, but it’s like he has a single train of thought and that’s all.’

  Poor Hyatt. He’d have a hell of a headache when they found him and not just from Roach. Lola and Casino led the way as we left the library for more dark hallways. These ones had light boxes with abstract images depicted as if in stained glass at regular intervals along their walls.

  ‘It’s supposed to be right at the end, just down there,’ Lola said. ‘We should come out on a balcony.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I could hear chanting.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Casino said. ‘But there’s the balcony.’

  A warm glow was coming from up ahead, beyond a thick wooden balustrade. It was from thousands of candles below. The chanting was coming from a very large group of Galearii. We were a dozen metres above a large hall, panelled in the same dark wood. Another stained glass panel, lit from behind, covered the far wall but this one was huge. It felt like a church but there were no pews and no altar. In the middle of the hall were a dozen figures. They wore robes, the hoods pulled up hiding their faces. Most were in red but one wore white and another in black. One of them, in grey, was kneeling. His robe didn’t have a hood. There didn’t seem to be three of anything.

  ‘Is that who I think it is?’ Roach whispered.

  ‘Tulan Haq,’ I said. The Minister of Securities. A man to be feared.

  ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ Minos said. ‘Very bad.’

  ‘Thank you,’ a voice from below said. It echoed, deep and sonorous, in the acoustics.

  ‘You allegiance has been proven,’ another said. The figure in white stepped toward Haq and gestured for him to stand.

  ‘I have fulfilled harder tasks,’ Haq said with a sibilance that set my teeth on edge.

  ‘Still, you have earned your place,’ a new voice with a West Atlantic accent said.

  They all had different accents. The white figure was a New Europan. There was someone from New Canada, the vast country over the Atlantic. The other voice had been Oceanic, perhaps from the Sunken Islands.

  ‘After the war you will guide the eastern Europan lands in the new ways,’ the Oceanic one said, who I thought wore the black robes but it was hard to tell.

  ‘Eastern?’ Haq said.

  ‘Not happy about that,’ Roach said.

  ‘I hear the food’s terrible,’ Casino said.

  ‘Getting anything?’ I said to Lola.

  She shook her head. ‘Only that Haq isn’t happy. I think it’s the chanting. It’s interfering.’

  ‘Or they’re all brainwashed or something,’ Minos said.

  ‘Or they’re Galearii,’ Casino said. ‘They don’t speak English do they?’

  ‘But these people do,’ I said. For some reason we all looked at Roach for confirmation of this.

  The candles shifted in an unfelt breeze, moving the shadows over the walls. I could smell incense. It was like the clash of two cultures. Here everything was old and reverent, removed, and at the docks and the huge loading bay everything was efficient and industrial. Perhaps it wasn’t quite the coming together of two different worlds, more of two different times.

  ‘Welcome to our number,’ the figure in white said. He was the New Canadian, his vowels long and short in all the wrong places. ‘Difficult times lie ahead. We may not have expected them so soon but we are ready. We shall prevail.’

  ‘You may join the feast,’ a figure in red said, gesturing to his left.

  Tulan Haq had started as an Enforce assassin, somehow working his way up to become Minister of Securities. You could see his skill in the way he moved, he walked across the room like a tiger, poised and ready to kill. He was willowy and elegant. His face was flat and unreadable, legend had it that his finger prints had been removed. I would have bet everything I had that he killed Chichester Rhone with those bare, unidentifiable hands, that was how he’d proved himself to them.

  ‘Bring in the initiate,’ a different voice said. It sounded familiar, another minister perhaps?

  Three Galearii emerged from beneath us and between them, his head bowed, walke
d Latch.

  ‘The call to serve as Guardian to the Protector has been answered,’ the black robes stepped forward. ‘Those here present are asked to join as witness.’

  Two of the red figures stepped aside and three Galearii glided forward. The middle one was carrying a long piece of black cloth. Latch knelt before him, it seemed strange, seeing him kneel like that. He was such a violent, sadistic creature that the only time Latch could be seen on bended knee was when he was checking to make sure someone’s fallen body didn’t have a pulse. Haq would kneel if it was politic to do so, Latch was too dumb to know about any of that. The Galearii put the cloth hood over his head. He didn’t move or protest. The angels on the left and right moved away and the chanting stopped and was replaced with a horrible noise somewhere between a scream and a howl. It was Latch, his back was arched and his head thrown back, it sounded too high pitched to be coming from a man of his size. It was so loud instinct made us cover our ears. Whatever they were doing to him it sounded painful beyond all belief.

  ‘No one’s touching him,’ Roach said.

  ‘I think we ought to get out of here,’ I said. No one protested.

  The lift rose without a sound through the floors to level zero.

  ‘Shouldn’t we look round a bit more,’ Casino said.

  ‘What for?’ Lola said.

  ‘What else do you need to know?’ I said. ‘They can make Latch do that. Imagine what they could make you do.’

  We glared at each other, the atmosphere in the lift thick with fear.

  I made us sit down and come up with a proper plan. We watched the activity in the docking bay for an hour. It wasn’t as populated as it had been in the day, but the night shift were rushing about at the same frantic pace. The enormous ship was there but only the huge crates were still being loaded. It was almost ready to leave.

  ‘I’m not sure about this,’ Lola said.

  ‘It’s our only option,’ I wanted to shake the concerned frown right off her face. It was becoming her only expression.

  ‘This holiday hasn’t been the relaxing break I’d hoped for,’ Minos said.

  Casino found us some uniforms and we bustled onto the ship carrying assorted accessories that would make us look official and unapproachable. It was amazing what a couple of clipboards, a broom and a hazard warning sign could do. After much wandering around trying to find somewhere to hide we found a cabin that was used as a store room for unwanted mattresses and chairs, we concealed ourselves in there.

  ‘We’ll be home in no time,’ Roach said as he perched on the end of a pile of foam mats, his knees around his ears and his head squashed into a strange angle by some shelves.

  Minos was studying a small poster on the back of the door which indicated what we should do in the event of a fire. ‘Safety first,’ he said, copying the poster onto his tablet and blowing it up so we could see the tiny map in more detail.

  The ship was part tanker, part cruise ship. It looked like the Galearii would be stationed on the fifth and sixth floors like cars in a car park. Below them were storage areas and the engines. Our floor, the fourth, was taken up with cabins. The other floors were made up of dining halls, recreation areas and executive cabins. There were some offices too.

  ‘How long do you think it will take?’ Lola said.

  ‘Four hours,’ Minos was pinching and swiping at his tablet. ‘Maybe less.’

  ‘They’re just below us,’ Lola shuddered.

  It was an odd thought. I didn’t want to just sit there and wait for us to dock back in the city. I wanted to be doing something, even if it was something futile, I just wanted to be occupied. Étienne had put me off sleeping. Before it had felt like the most effective way of passing the time without disaster striking, now it felt like a huge event I needed to dress for.

  ‘I’m going to take a look round,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to stay here,’ Minos said, drooling over his hardware. ‘The air is full of wonder.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ Casino’s disembodied voice said. ‘But only if you pull your trousers up properly.’

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ I said. ‘They’re too big.’

  After much rustling and squirming Minos handed me his belt but it was too big as well. I rolled my waist band over a few times and exposed my ankles. I commandeered a cleaner’s trolley we found at the bottom of a stairwell and pushed it into a tiny lift.

  ‘Going down,’ Casino pushed a button.

  ‘We wanted to go up,’ I said.

  The lift doors opened and standing in front of us were the massed ranks of Galearii. Identical to each other, they stretched back in neat columns as far as I could see, like some complicated optical illusion. They just stood there, staring straight ahead with empty, quiet eyes. The only sound was their inhaling and exhaling in unison, it sounded like a gentle breeze playing through leaves. I pushed any button that would make the lift go somewhere else and with an amiable chime the doors closed.

  ‘That was both weird and terrifying,’ Casino said after a moment.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and see what the humans are doing.’

  ‘They’re not human?’ Casino appeared on the other side of my trolley.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ I said.

  ‘But if they aren’t human, what are they?’

  ‘I’m not saying they’re not human,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘But what if they’re not?’

  ‘They must be a type of human. What else are they?’

  ‘I don’t know but I don’t think they’re human.’

  ‘They’re just different,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, they’re different as in not human.’

  ‘Maybe they’re aliens,’ I said. ‘And this is a space ship in disguise.’

  ‘Now is not the time to be flippant,’ Casino said. ‘Not the time at all.’

  The lift doors opened and we braced ourselves, but all we found was a normal lobby area with four doors leading fore and aft on the port and starboard sides. I was enjoying the naval terminology. We picked a direction each and split up.

  There were a couple of people milling about dressed as crew, but they all ignored me because I was a cleaner. I walked undisturbed, opening every fourth door with a duster in my hand to see what I could find. This boat was to the Vanessa what the finest filet mignon was to one of Clive’s battered sausages. It was a floating town with a fancy hotel’s detailing. I wheeled the trolley through a canteen and beside a screening room. The corridor passed between two huge rooms kitted out with everything a crew member needed to pass some recreational time. It seemed odd to be making such a short trip in a boat like this. Maybe they had taken longer trips, or had them planned. The people in the hall, with their international accents must have arrived somehow.

  I found a medical centre filled with the kind of equipment sick people in the NW Sector fantasised about being hooked up to. All the beds were empty except one at the far end. I wheeled my trolley over and found a large man attached to bag of clear liquid and a machine that beeped at such irregular intervals there must have been something very, very wrong. He had two pieces of tape holding his eyelids closed. It was Latch. Whatever had happened to him it hadn’t killed him but it had come pretty close. I was glad we’d made a run for it when we had, I couldn’t imagine how they’d done that to him and I didn’t want to know. I’d seen enough. The machine was monitoring all kinds of outputs. His heartbeat flickered across a screen in a pattern that even I could tell indicated he was a mess. He didn’t seem to have any physical injuries apart from a dark bruise in the middle of his forehead, it was a strange shape and I couldn’t work out how he’d got it. It looked most unpleasant, however it got there. I was tempted, for the good of my fellow citizens, to unplug him from anything that might be keeping him alive but I couldn’t. I searched around for some notes or some kind of clue but there was nothing but a nil by mouth sign above his head.

  If Latch was on the bo
at maybe Haq and the others were on it too. I didn’t want to bump into them, not on my own. Maybe Casino would find them, he was a better candidate. I wanted to stay out of trouble, I didn’t want to end up like Latch. Further along the corridor, which I figured I had already walked a quarter of a mile along, I found a suite of offices. They were like the offices in the south of the city, the same carpet, the same desks and swivelling chairs. I did some cursory dusting and sprayed some chemicals around some people who behaved as if I didn’t exist until I found an office that was empty. I tutted as though it was the dirtiest place I had ever seen and closed the door. There was a computer on the desk and someone had been kind enough to leave it on. I introduced my wristset to the hard drive and started a download program that would copy all the information in certain key files then wipe all trace of my presence. The program worked by convincing the computer that it had come up with the command by itself so it used all the native packages. I was subjected to the most ridiculous countdown bar grinding out every solitary kilobyte as it turned from red to green. The pace was agonising. I was just thinking about whether this suggested this computer was, in fact, supplied by our very own government when the door handle moved. I pulled my wristset out, groaning because the data on it would be useless, stashed it back in my uniform and started out with my trolley. A man stood in my way.

  ‘Do you mind?’ I said. ‘This trolley is quite heavy.’

  ‘I bet it is, for a skinny little thing like you,’ the man said. His muscles were straining to escape from his uniform. His head was shaven and his nose had been broken across the bridge and left to set on its own. ‘Pass.’

  ‘What?’ I pulled myself up to my full height, there was no denying the skinny but little?

  ‘Pass, show me your pass,’ he said.

  ‘Show me yours.’ There was no way I could palm his pass, I was too far away and his pockets looked empty.

  ‘Don’t be smart with me,’ he closed the door in a manner that I didn’t much care for. ‘I want to see your pass.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I would love to show you it, but I don’t have one.’

  ‘You don’t have one?’ That had confused him.

  ‘No, I don’t have one,’ I said. ‘I know. Ridiculous, isn’t it? I’ve been here five days already and they haven’t given me a pass yet.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he said, running his finger around the inside of this collar as though it were very uncomfortable. Too tight, maybe.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve asked them every day, sometimes twice a day, but they just don’t seem to be in any hurry to get me one,’ I put my hands in my pockets and stepped back.

  The man’s face was turning red now and he was clawing at his twisted collar. He started to struggle to get enough air.

  ‘Can I get some help here?’ I said under my breath. ‘Someone?’

  He was on his knees as his collar continued to tighten around his neck. His red face was taking on a purple hue. Puce, maybe.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘Just let go and you’ll be fine, it’s just like sleeping.’

  He fell forward on to his face and I let go of his collar in my mind. He was still breathing. I felt like I could do anything. The door opened and Casino appeared.

  ‘Here you are, I heard voices,’ he looked down. ‘I was going to ask if you were all right.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Of course he isn’t dead,’ I said. ‘Help me hide him.’

  ‘Can’t you just think him hidden?’ Casino said.

  I tried as hard as I could but I couldn’t thought-shift his body.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to work on people,’ I said. ‘Only on inanimate things.’

  ‘Is he not inanimate?’

  He moved after that, maybe it was all in my head. Like Lola’s red rubber band. We put him inside a cupboard, he was a tight fit but we managed to get the door closed.

  ‘Haq’s on board,’ Casino said. ‘I saw him through a window. We can’t get to him though, the security down there is immense. I didn’t dare go any further.’

  ‘I am so glad he’s coming back with us,’ I said. ‘That makes me feel a whole lot safer.’