Rifter (The Survival Project Duology Book 1) (22 page)

“Do you think they’ll mind if we just sleep here?”

Kerry yawned deeply. “I’m not sure they’ve got a lot of choice in the matter, I’m bushed,” he replied. “Anyway, no one’s ever told me who
they
are. Everyone always talks about
they
as if they’re some kind of all-powerful god, but no one’s ever ….”

She didn’t hear any more words spill out from his mouth. But Kerry’s puppy dog snoring strangely lulled her into her own dreams.

Twenty-seven

Leo pulled back the gag and let Mayra sip water from the glass. She took a large gulp then spat it back out in his face. His automatic reaction was to slap her across the face. He hit her hard and she whimpered, keeping her head turned away from him. He leaned over her and forced the gag back into place. He didn’t need this.

He was angry with himself, more than anything. It wasn’t just that Mara had realised what he was going to do and left before the guards had seen her, it was the fact that he hadn’t been able to take advantage of the situation.

He had tried to make himself pull the gun from its holster while the gazes of the guards were turned away from him and searching the bushes behind the disruption. He’d tried so hard, but he couldn’t. He would have been killing innocent people. People who were only there under orders. It wasn’t them he was angry with, it was Gordon and Debra. They were the ones who’d manufactured this situation.

He remembered what it had been like to take someone’s life. To deliberately extinguish their flame. He hadn’t used a gun on James, he’d used his stun clip. It had been easy enough to get hold of it. All passwords were stored somewhere, they had to be, and even if you had to go through layer upon layer of other passwords to get there, it was always possible to find them. Death by stun clip was instantaneous. There was no chance of missing the spot because your bullet veered off for some reason, or hit bone, or one of a multitude of other circumstances prevailed. A stun clip on full power was an instant heart attack to the person unlucky enough to come into contact with the live surface.

He’d run into the bushes and thrown up after seeing the way James’ eyes stared up at him, as if … they were accusing him. The only comfort had been that James hadn’t known anything of it. He’d been walking along the street, looking the other way. He didn’t know who’d killed him. And neither did anyone else, not for certain.

Everything he’d worn that night had been burned. He’d chosen the fifth of November deliberately. No one saw it as unusual for a fire to be burning in a back garden. Not James’, of course, and Leo didn’t have one. But Mayra’s flatmates did. He just chucked the clothes on once it was raging and everyone was too drunk to take notice.

James had been found that night, around three in the morning. There had been a phone call and he’d had to go into the office. But no one had even suggested it was his doing. In retrospect, that seemed odd, but at the time, he’d been thankful. For that, and for the fact that James, and all the knowledge he had, was no longer available to The Department. He’d had so many secrets, if only he’d been willing to tell them and to lay his neck on the line, Leo’s future would have been very different.

None of that helped him with the problem with Mara.

How do you better someone whose had the same training as you? Who knows every little thing about rifts and disruptions? He shouldn’t have told her what he was planning to do. If she’d thought he was simply desperate to get back home, she might have bought it. She might not have tried to stop him. But now, he’d given her a reason to fight hard and there was no way he could expunge that from her memory.

He looked down at Mayra, still cowering on the bed. He’d been wrong. She wasn’t enough. They weren’t going to favour her life over stopping him from walking through the disruption. He needed more.

He needed one thing.

There was only one thing they would trade for him.

Mara.

She might be desperate enough to stop him to forget about her own safety. She might think she had his measure by now. That could only be to his advantage.

Twenty-eight

Mara awoke with a start. She quickly realised that the cause was one of the other residents in the room getting their own back on her middle-of-the-night pacing by crashing around loudly while they packed their things and got ready to leave. It took her a little longer to realise she was lying in her bed, rather than sitting in a draughty corridor, snuggled up in Kerry’s arms. She’d always thought she was a light sleeper. In fact, she’d always been told she was. The evidence to the contrary unsettled her. And she was also a little disappointed. Having a strong pair of arms around you, she missed that.

She lifted her head from the pillow.

It was light outside, but that was nothing to go by, as she knew by now that the sun rose way before most people roused from their beds. She craned her neck a little further around so that she could see the clock on the wall. No, it was morning. It was already gone eight. They hadn’t got in till very late, which was probably why her eyelids still felt leaden.

Kerry, she noticed, was still overcome by a heavy sleep. She wondered what time it had been when he’d carried her through to the bedroom. Not that it mattered, other than he cared about her comfort, and probably his own. It was all very well saying you could sleep in a corridor, it was another thing doing it on the hard floor, with a draught blowing around your ankles. She noticed that her jacket and her jeans were hanging across the back of a chair rather than still being on her body and her eyes darted down to see what she was wearing. T-shirt. Pants, thankfully. She blushed at the thought of being undressed. It had to have been Kerry. She decided it was best to ignore it and if she was already dressed when he woke up, there would be no need to mention it.

She ran her tongue around her teeth and wondered if he had any tooth cleaner she could use.

He’d asked her the night before if it would be so bad staying in this world — she preferred to ignore the second part of the sentence, the ‘with him’ part. She didn’t have an answer. It was a question that was often posed at The Project and her answer then had always been that she’d hate it knowing that her true family and friends were beyond reach, but now that it was becoming a distinct possibility, she wasn’t so sure that was true. She would miss the people, of course she would, but she hadn’t seen her family for nearly three years — once you were on The Project, that was your life pretty much set — friends, though important, could be replaced. She had done her duty to try to save her world, as promised, but it wasn’t her fault if she couldn’t return. And who could truly say that they wanted to give up blue skies, fresh air, and coffee that actually tasted of something? She’d certainly learned a thing or two about herself in the past two days. Number one on the list was that, sometimes, she could be extremely shallow.

At that moment, she made a decision, or was it a plan? Anyway, she’d never had the chance to travel. The only long-distance journey she had ever made back on her world had been from her home to The Project. They had special dispensation for the transportation of candidates. If she stayed on this world she would ask to accompany Kerry. He was halfway across the globe from his home, and even if he’d already been to most of the places he wanted to visit, there was always the journey back. She realised with some consternation, that she still hadn’t found out anything about his travels. It wasn’t entirely her fault. He hadn’t volunteered the information. She hoped they would travel in the most sustainable way — walking where possible — and when they’d finished, she would campaign. She would campaign about climate change without revealing her past.

Dreams.

They might be nice while you were immersed in them, but they were all lies.

She knew she wouldn’t do that. She couldn’t. She’d have to go to Leo’s office and tell them everything she knew. She’d have to try to avert the problems this world was heading for.

She looked over at Kerry again and wondered whether what he’d said the previous night had been true — that he still thought he might be in a dream. Dreams were fantastical a lot of the time. Some of hers about the world she might end up on had been quite bizarre, verging on the insane. She’d told Leo about them, and he’d told her his, and they’d laughed. His had been mostly about artificial intelligence and computers taking over the world. Hers had been more along the lines of weird alien beings with bulbous heads and scaly skin. Neither had been pleasant. Neither were likely. But what had happened to Kerry after he’d met her had been equally unlikely. It wasn’t something he could’ve predicted, like ‘This morning, I will meet a traveller from another world and we will become embroiled in a heinous plot to destroy the place she came from.’

Another world. Home.

She heard Kerry groan and then she saw his arms stretch above his head. She sprang out of bed and pulled on her jeans. As she shrugged on her jacket, she sloped over to his bunk and peered in.

“Morning,” she said.

“Hey. Up already?”

“I was just thinking,” she said.

“Hm?”

He turned over towards her and rubbed his eyes. He’d removed all the clothes on his upper body, which became obvious as the bedclothes fell away. She hadn’t realised how muscled he was beneath his clothes and it took her a little by surprise. He was certainly a match for Leo.

She shook her head. She mustn’t think like that. She couldn’t put this complete stranger in any more danger. It wasn’t right. They would eat, and then ….

“Breakfast?” he said.

She nodded.

The refectory was crowded. They must’ve had an influx of people later on the day before. The buzz of enthusiastic travellers filled the air. People talking about where they’d been and where they were going. Which were the best places to visit in London, and which were the rip-offs?

Mara took her opportunity as they waited in the queue.

“Take my mind off things for a moment. Tell me about your travels,” she said. She picked a cereal packet off the counter.

“My travels?” he said, “Oh, you should definitely try that with yoghurt instead of milk.” He was trying to distract her again. But she’d never heard of yoghurt. She took a small pot of it off the shelf and placed it on her tray.

“Really, I’m interested,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows and was just about to say something else when he got a message on his device. His expression changed from relaxed to something a lot more tense when he looked at it.

“It’s him,” he said, flashing the screen at her so fast the only thing she could see was the name Thiessen. She felt a moment of regret. Now, he was never going to tell her about how wonderful the places on this world were.

They paid for their meals and sat down. They couldn’t talk about the message there, not while sharing a table with two other residents.

“Why don’t we eat this quickly and then go for a walk?” he said, after studying the screen properly for a moment.

The trouble with that was that she’d lost her appetite. Even the thought of having to deal with Leo again made her feel decidedly sick. But it also gave her hope. He still needed her to get through the rift. She just didn’t know what for.

Anything she could do to be there when he tried to travel was worth the risk.

Twenty-nine

Leo pressed the send button. He took a deep breath. He was certain Mara wouldn’t come to his flat again, or go to the hotel, but she might meet him somewhere very public and there was only one place he knew she’d been before that she might accept.

The muffled sound of frustrated grunts came from the bedroom. He walked back down the corridor and closed the door. He didn’t need any distractions and there was no way Mayra was going to get free. Knots was one of the things they’d been trained in. Hundreds of knots. For every occasion. Surprisingly, the whole purpose of which was so that they could tie people up quickly and efficiently, in any situation. Who’d have thought he would need that one day? Twice.

He didn’t expect Mara to answer his message straightaway. He imagined a series of heated conversations between her and Kerry. He was the biggest problem. He was probably trying to be the hero type, to protect her and stop her from doing something stupid, whereas she likely would put everything on the line to stop him. If she’d been on her own, there would’ve been no doubt in Leo’s mind that she would accept a meeting, but then he wouldn’t have had a way to send her a message. Kerry was a necessary evil. He didn’t doubt that she would win the argument in the end, but time was one thing he no longer had. One more day and the disruption would be closed. If he didn’t get through, he’d either end up in prison, or on the run.

There was one good thing about the events in the park. The Department would believe he was still on the case, because there was no way his appearance wouldn’t have been reported back. He called in to say he’d be a little late, leaving a message with reception rather than Atwood. He knew it wouldn’t wash for long, if at all.

Of course, he was making the assumption that Mara was still with Kerry, and that he would be able to pass the message on to her. It was just possible that he’d had enough excitement and had left for his next stop on his round-the-world adventure.

It was still early. He probably wouldn’t have left yet.