Zac unfurled himself from the couch. He was almost as tall as me, but had bulk to go with his height. He and Aubrey stared at each other, their eyes locked. It was like watching that couple playing cards, as if they were trying to psych each other out. For a full minute no one flinched. Then Zac stepped back and rubbed at his jaw as if he’d been slapped.
“Do we understand each other?” Aubrey said.
Zac smiled that perfect smile again. “All you had to do was ask, Brey. You know I can’t resist you.”
Aubrey walked away and I staggered after her.
“If you change your mind, you know where to find me,” Zac called out after us. “Oh, no wait. You don’t. ARES don’t seem to be able to track me down, do they? I’m always one step ahead, Aubrey. One step ahead.” Zac’s cronies laughed on cue.
We headed back to our booth. Girls coaxed me to join their games. It was almost tempting. If I hadn’t known I’d zero chance of winning.
A high ringing noise sounded, drilling into my head.
“That’s annoying,” I said, covering my ears.
Aubrey stared around like a meerkat that’s spotted danger. She wasn’t alone. As one, the kids started to scatter, knocking over the cards tables, heading for every exit.
“Come on!” Aubrey shouted.
“What’s going on?” I asked as she herded me through panicked people and towards the emergency exit.
“It’s ARES,” Aubrey answered finally. “I guess it’s time for one of their surprise visits.”
She pushed me towards an open exit and I stumbled out into the night. The door slammed behind us. The stench of overflowing wheelie bins hit my nose and my stomach lurched. But before I even had time to complain, Aubrey grabbed me by the hand and started to run.
We darted down a series of back streets. Each time we came to a choice of a left or right, Aubrey stopped and closed her eyes for a moment. Then we’d be moving again. It must have been the drink, but it felt as if the walls of the alleys and streets she dragged me through kept changing. One second we’d be running down an alley covered in band posters. The next it was a passageway between blocks of council flats. And with each junction she’d stop. I’d just have time to catch my breath before she was off again. Never letting go of my hand.
I gave up trying to work out where we were and just focused on not falling over. We ran and ran, and the streets blurred into each other. We’d been going for about ten minutes and my lungs were starting to burn.
“Stop,” I gasped and pulled my hand free of hers to hold my side. Aubrey skidded to a halt.
She walked back to me slowly. “I think we’ve lost them, anyway.”
“I thought you said you’d called ARES?” I said, gasping for air. “Why are we running away from them?”
“Because agency members aren’t supposed to go to Copenhagen’s. Because I couldn’t let them find you. Besides, Zac was right, the Regulators would never have caught him. He’d just have Shifted.”
“But all that facing off, ‘do we understand each other’ stuff. I thought you were the more powerful Shifter?”
“No. He was just messing with me, the egotistical tosser.” Aubrey scanned the street, a little confused.
“Where are we?” I asked, squinting up at the towering buildings around us.
“I’m not sure. I Shifted so many times back there, I’ve sort of lost track.”
“You were Shifting?”
“I kept changing which direction I chose. Undoing whether we went right or left. It’s pretty simple really, when you know how. Didn’t you sense it?”
“I thought it was the drink. So that’s why you kept stopping?”
“Yes. You can’t just run wildly. You have to make conscious decisions about where you’re going. Decisions you can undo.”
“And won’t these Regulators have registered the Shifts?” I said, straightening up.
“Probably, but in the chaos it’d be hard to pin it down to one Shifter. Come on, I think it’s this way.”
We wandered down side streets as Aubrey tried to get her bearings. The mix of adrenaline and alcohol flooding through my system was making me feel giddy. I was walking the streets of London with a beautiful girl and I was thinking that anything was possible. Apart from going home, it turned out.
It took me a while to place the repetitive bleeping coming from my inside pocket. At first I thought it might be another alarm. I finally remembered it was my phone and answered the call.
“Scott, where the hell are you?”
“Hugo! My man. You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”
“I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours. These men turned up at the Rec. Official looking, like something straight out of Men in Black, you know?”
That started to sober me up. I looked at Aubrey and mouthed the word “ARES”.
“They started asking questions about whether anything unusual had been going on, and Lucas, the idiot, told them about you trying to climb the Pylon and they started asking all kinds of questions about you and what you were like and how they could find you, and Lucas, the absolute moron, gave them your address. And then they left. It was really weird.”
“S’OK, Hugo. It will be fine. I’ll catch you tomorrow.” I hung up as Hugo started to mumble about aliens. “Looks like they’ve tracked me down after all,” I said to Aubrey.
“Well, it was going to happen, I guess. I’ll take you in tomorrow and we’ll try and explain. In the meantime, you can crash at mine,” Aubrey said. “My place isn’t too far from here.”
Shock and confusion chased themselves around my foggy head. Settling on smug satisfaction, I grinned.
“Don’t even think it,” Aubrey said, glaring at me.
“No, of course not, I mean, I never even thought,” I lied badly. “I’d better call my parents.”
I fumbled in my pocket for my phone and tried to bring the glowing screen into focus.
The phone rang about fifteen times before it was finally answered.
“Hello?” I heard a tired Katie from the other end.
“Katie? What are you doing up?”
“Well, there was this annoying ringing noise,” she said sarcastically. “And given that Dad’s snoring in front of the TV and Mum’s out in the shed, someone had to shut it up. What do you want, Scott?”
“Oh, right, well, I’m sort of not coming home.”
“Are you drunk?” she whispered, and I could hear a muffle as she covered the phone with her hand.
“No! Well, I might be a teeny weenie bit tipsy. But that’s not important. Katie, I need you to cover for me.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. You’re good at making things up. Just make it believable.”
“I’ll tell them you and Hugo have finally come out and you’ve run away to get married then?”
“Ha bloody ha.”
“I say you’re staying over at Hugo’s. Playing your dumb monster games, will that do?”
“I love you Katie.”
“Yeah, yeah. You owe me, big time. Oh, and you might want to come up with something better to explain why two men from the government came looking for you earlier,” she said and hung up before I could ask any more.
I leant the cold screen of the phone against my head. I was going to be in so much trouble. But I could worry about that tomorrow.
Aubrey was patting a painted sculpture of an elephant, which seemed pretty random in the middle of the street. But given the evening I’d had, I was lucky it wasn’t a dancing, talking elephant.
“All good?” she said.
“Um, yeah. All good,” I said.
We walked down a street of kebab shops and minicab places. This was what my mother would call, “not the nice part of town”. The old tramps growling at us as we walked past and the young men standing on street corners, their hooded jumpers pulled up and hands thrust deep into their pockets, told me that much. One of the hoodies hissed something at me, but Aubrey pulled me on.
“Here we are,” she said stopping in front of a row of concrete flats. A badly-carved sign below the roof said Palace Row. There wasn’t much palatial about it. The windows in the bottom flat had all been boarded up and the walls were covered in graffiti. “Fuck of,” read one particularly misanthropic, not to mention grammatically-challenged, tag.
“Nice,” I said.
Aubrey fished out her keys from the pocket of her jacket. A small toy kitten hung from the chain. She slotted the key into the lock and jiggled. “There’s a knack,” she said as the door opened onto the communal hallway. The floor was lined with broken black and white tiles, and a black gloss spiral staircase disappeared into the roof. Bicycles were propped up along the banisters the whole way.
“I’m at the top.”
My already wobbly legs barely held my weight by the time we got to the fifth floor. Her front door was painted a bright red and had brass numbers on it that I guessed were meant to say 4d but actually said 4p. She threw open the door, kicked some shoes and a pile of letters out of the way, and threw her keys on the hall table.
“Are you going to stand there all night?” she asked, without turning around.
I mumbled an apology and stepped over the threshold. The dark hallway was covered in old sci-fi movie posters. Creature of the Black Lagoon. Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. The Wolfman. They stared at me, as if asking what did I think I was doing here.
I followed Aubrey into what turned out to be the liv ing room. She flicked a switch on the floor and the room lit up. Strings of fairy lights were nailed to the wall and wrapped around pot plants.
“The electricity was cut off a few months ago. So I’m running these lights from the phone jack,” she said, pointing at the tangle of wires coming from the socket. “Neat, huh?”
It looked like a fairy’s cave. “I like it,” I said.
“I still have gas though. So you want a coffee?”
I remembered jokes at school about a girl asking you in “for coffee” and answered automatically. “Does coffee mean what I think it means?” I said, my eyebrows waggling. I wanted to bite my own tongue off.
“Only if you think coffee means a punch in the face.”
“Sorry, no. I mean yes. A coffee would be great. Just white, thanks.” I kept forgetting that Aubrey was just fifteen and I was acting like a serious creep.
She left and I smacked myself in the forehead a few times. The last smack actually hurt, which was a good thing. I collapsed onto a tatty red sofa, and the springs groaned. When Aubrey returned a few minutes later, she was carrying two steaming mugs. I reached for the coffee like a man in the desert and sipped it gratefully.
Aubrey sat on the floor in front of me, cross-legged. She’d taken off her boots, and a painted toenail poked out of a hole in her striped tights. I looked around the room. There were two tall bookshelves that groaned under the weight of piles of books, but, I registered, no TV.
“So,” I said eventually. “Do you think ARES caught those Freedom for Shifting guys?”
“The Shifting Liberation Front? Probably not. They’ve managed to avoid getting caught this long.”
“How?”
“Zac’s pretty smart.”
“You guys know each other well then?” I said, rubbing my finger around the edge of my cup and surprised at the heat of jealousy bubbling away in my stomach.
“We went through training together and were…” She paused, trying to find the right word. “Friends. For a while anyway. Funny how things change. When we first met I was always the one getting into trouble and he was the one bailing me out. We were inseparable for the first three years of the Programme. He called us the Alphabet Squad. A to Z? Get it? He always liked his stupid names. Anyway, I started training to be a Spotter and he started training to be a Mapper. They’re the guys who specialise in predicting consequences. He’s still one of the best around. So good, in fact he hardly, ever needs to Shift.”
“Why wouldn’t he want to Shift?”
Aubrey took a deep breath. “Oh, he has this big conspiracy theory about entropy.”
“That’s when the Shifting power goes away, right?”
“Yeah. Well Zac thinks that it’s not brought about by age but by the amount of times you use it. And that all the training at ARES is designed to make us burn through our power.”
“And is he right?”
“No! He’s just stupid. Entropy is what it is. It’s a reaction to growing up and you just have to deal. But Zac refused. He went on and on about it and I started to get really bored of the whole thing. Then one day he broke into some files at HQ to try to find evidence to back up his theories. He got caught.”
“And ARES have been after him ever since?”
“I guess. Although they don’t have anything firm on him. Just theories. So far all the SLF have done is graffiti some buildings and make some internet videos. Nothing that warrants actually arresting them.”
“But what about that simulator thing he used on the girl? That can’t be legal, can it?”
“A stimulator,” Aubrey corrected. “It sends currents to the part of the brain that controls Shifting and, along with a drug, makes you experience other possible realities. They’re used in Mapping training. The headsets are supposed to let the users try out different Shifts and see the consequences without them actually affecting anything. Zac stole one from ARES and made a few modifications to it.”
“And you’ve tried it?” I asked, resting my mug on my knee.
“Once,” Aubrey said, staring down at her feet. “When we were still friends. But never again. When you Shift normally, you don’t hold on to the memories of the old reality. They fade away. But with the stims… they stay with you.’
A truck rumbled by outside, making the room shake and the fairy lights flicker. I felt as if I might never be on stable ground again.
“I’ve been thinking.” She put her mug down and pulled up her knees, hugging them with both arms. “Maybe I don’t need to take you in tomorrow. Maybe I can tell the Regulators that the Shift was mine and there’s been a big mix up.”
“Would they believe you?”
“Probably not. You’re so old that they’ll be sure to think you’re a rogue. But it’s worth a shot.”
“What if…” I hesitated. “What if I want to go in? I mean the bagging and tagging doesn’t sound too great, but the training and all that does.”
“Oh, and hardly ever seeing your family again? How great would that be?”
“Are you kidding me? That would be awesome! I hate my family.”