‘Stitch started hacking in three minutes ago,’ he said. ‘It might be up.’
Ana shook her head. There wasn’t time to stop and search the news channels. And she couldn’t watch herself find Helen and Tamsin. Couldn’t think about that now. She wanted to feel safe. She wouldn’t be able to relax until they were well away.
Seeing her expression, he switched his interface back to the map. ‘We’ll check later.’
On Bromley Road High Street, grey tower blocks rose sheer from the pavements. People rode past on bicycles, pulling home-made trailers behind them. The sight of normal activity made Ana slow down a little. She smiled at Cole. They’d made it. They’d broken into Three Mills and got away!
From behind a tower, a Psych watch van came careering across a patchy lawn. Ana stiffened. The van bounded over the curb onto the pavement, screeched to a halt. Two masked men jumped out. She reached over her shoulder to grab the Stinger from the rucksack, but she wasn’t fast enough. They’d already got Cole with their own Stingers. Cole dropped a crutch and fell to his knees, spasms jerking his body left and right. She flicked on the Stinger and struck out. The masked man closest to her dodged to one side. And suddenly pain torched the nerve lines of her body. So fierce she felt like she was on fire. Her mind crashed into darkness.
She was lying on a cold floor in darkness. Her head pounded. The air smelt dank and salty. Like the inside of a cave. Light flickered on the wet stone walls showing broken images of a girl running through City streets, checking back over her shoulder.
Ana strained the muscles in her weak arms to sit up. Her head was fuzzy. The wall pictures showed the girl stopping in the middle of a suburban street and staring at a high window. There was something familiar about what was happening to the girl. As though Ana half knew what would come next. And how were the images even appearing on the rocky surface when she wasn’t wearing an interface?
A drumbeat began pounding in her ears, vibrating in her chest. She spun about and suddenly she was the girl on the street.
The front door of a nearby house opened. A man floated down the path towards her. Black holes instead of eyes. Fear coiled tight around her heart. Another door opened. And another. People poured from the houses, moving as though they waded towards her through tidal currents that pushed them back. Their dark eyes all fixed on her.
She was trapped.
A sudden wave of energy slammed over everything. The strange people froze – a swarming mass with her a charged nucleus at its centre.
She stepped away from those who were closest. The pulse inside and outside her body was strong. It seemed to alter the direction of the blood flowing through her veins.
Another step back. She trod on something and spun around. There had been nothing there a moment before, but now a girl with a boy’s haircut faced her. She was small, pixie-like, and the details of her face were scratched away.
‘I’ve been watching you,’ the girl said.
‘Why?’ Ana asked, breathlessly.
‘I’ve been waiting to see if you’re the one.’
‘What one?’
‘The angel.’
‘That’s not real.’
‘Neither is this.’
Ana looked around. The zombie people still stood frozen, empty eyes all fixed on her. There was an unusual light in the street, as though a star had been pulled from the sky and wrapped in a giant silvery cocoon above them.
‘Why can’t they move?’ she asked.
‘It’s the pulse. It’s cutting off the connection between them and their brains.’
‘But we can still move.’
‘We are vibrating differently.’
A light began to shine from inside one of the zombies. It grew out from his chest, brighter and brighter. It was happening to the others too. Lights of all different colours and forms. Everything became so bright, she raised her arm to shield her face. And then there was a great explosion.
*
Ana’s neck and shoulders ached like she had the flu. She hauled her body off the hard van floor. Her head rocked and jarred with every bump in the road. Only a chink of light through the back doors pierced the darkness. But she felt the speed of the van and the consistent direction in which they travelled. They had to be on a carriageway, moving fast.
A smell of rot, damp and sickness permeated the air. Images of the thousands of people that had been snatched off the streets, sedated and carted away in this vehicle, fleeted through her mind.
‘Cole,’ she whispered. She crawled across the floor – a rough, wooden board set over the metal hull – feeling around to find him. Splinters pricked her hands. Panic wormed into her. Had they taken him? Split them up? She couldn’t handle not knowing what had happened to him.
A soft groan filtered through the haze of alarm.
‘Cole?’ She shuffled forward on her knees towards the sound, both arms stretched out. Her hands touched cold metal. She got up onto her haunches, ran her hands along the metal wall. Collided with something soft: somebody’s waist.
‘Cole!’ With a leap of hope, she fumbled up his chest towards his face. She felt his taught arms, strung above his head. His head was flopped forwards. He moaned. She stroked up his arms to his hands. His wrists were cuffed to thick chain links, the short chains attached to a metal railing on the ceiling of the van.
He was hanging from his arms, knees bent but too high off the ground to take his weight.
‘Cole,’ she said, caressing his cheek. ‘Cole, wake up.’
He raised his chin against her hand. ‘Sunshine,’ he mumbled.
The Psych Watch must have sedated him, after knocking them both out.
Shaking, she put her hands under her sweater and searched the pockets of her Three Mills robe. Yes! She still had all the sedatives. They’d taken her rucksack with her Stinger, but they hadn’t searched her person. She squatted down on the narrow ledge beside Cole and emptied the plastic bag onto her lap: three syringes and three phial bottles, plus a packet of muscle relaxants. She prepped two of the syringes, then put the plastic covers back over their needles. She returned one of the syringes to her robe pocket, while clinging tightly to the other. The Psych Watch men would be used to getting attacked, but with two needles, one for each man, she had a tiny chance.
She perched on the narrow ledge, prodding her forehead with the pads of her fingers. She tried to shut out Cole. She needed to think, not worry about how his whole body would be in agony when he finally became conscious again.
Either Stitch had betrayed them, or someone inside Three Mills had alerted the authorities. But why hadn’t the Psych Watch or the Three Mills security stopped them before they left the institution? Why wait until they were so far away? Unless they wanted Ana and Cole to believe they’d got away with it.
But they hadn’t. And now, at best, she and Cole would be arrested. At worst, who knew what the Psych Watch might do with them?
Minutes dragged by. She thought of Tamsin – black hair tangled across her face, blood trickling down the side of her neck. Of Helen – spittle on her chin, big blue bruises under her eyes. She let the desire to fight, hurt, lash out, fill her. She had to try and get them out of there.
She began banging on the wall between her and the front compartment. She kicked and screamed but the vehicle didn’t slow down.
Hunching over, she hurled herself at the back doors. Again! Again! She was barely aware of the pain in her shoulder. It mingled with the anger, fuelling her motion.
The van began to slow. She felt it veer off course.
Panting and gripping the needle in her hand, she stood bent over, facing the back doors, teeth clenched.
Hold on to the anger. Hold on. Surprise them.
Metal clanged. A latch on the doors sprung free. As the door cracked open, she cried out and threw herself forwards. The left door smashed the man’s forehead. Ana raised the needle. Leaping onto the man, she stabbed it down into his shoulder. He howled with pain. She emptied the plunger. He tried to shake her off but she clung to him. He caught hold of her arm, twisted it around and threw her down. As she fell, she saw his face. Her body jarred with the impact; her mind jarred with the shock.
It was her father.
*
Ashby pulled the syringe out of his shoulder. Recovering from her shock, Ana searched about for something else to use as a weapon. They were by the entrance to a private estate. The road was lined with fencing and beyond the fences trees. Spotting a brick crumbled from an old wall, she swept over and grabbed it. As she threw back her arm to lob it at her father’s head, the Warden Dombrant got out of the driver’s side of the van.
‘Thanks for bringing this back,’ he said, swinging his Stinger, which she’d tried to use against him. He clicked it on and ramped it up so she could hear it buzz. Her body recoiled. She felt a jolt, as though an echo of being zapped twenty minutes ago had just rebounded through her.
Her mind whirred. Warden Dombrant and her father. Not the Psych Watch. Not the Board. How had they known about Three Mills? Suddenly it hit her. Stitch hadn’t reported them. So maybe the Three Mills recording had made the news.
Her father was watching her with large, incredulous eyes. She couldn’t tell if he was more stunned by her attack or by the alterations to her face.
‘Come on,’ Dombrant said. ‘You can come and sit up front.’
‘I think I’d rather stay where I was.’
‘What was in the syringe?’ her father asked.
‘Diluted methohexital.’
He swore and began unbuttoning his shirt to inspect his shoulder.
‘How did you find us?’
‘You’re not exactly lying low,’ her father said, irritably.
Dombrant moved towards her with the Stinger. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get in the front with us, and I’ll chain your boyfriend to the floor instead of the ceiling.’
Ana uncurled her fist, dropping the rock. She walked down the side of the van and climbed into the passenger seat. The van rocked as someone got in the back. Chains clanked. Then her father and Dombrant came and sat up front.
For a couple of minutes, nobody spoke. Dombrant drove. Using a first aid kit, Ashby cleaned and bandaged his shoulder. They travelled along a wide road lined with nineteenth-century, white painted houses. On the other side of the road lay a basin, separated off from the River Thames.
‘How much methohexital?’ her father said finally, putting away the medical kit.
‘5 ml.’
He rubbed his brow, then suddenly slammed a fist against the dashboard. She flinched.
‘What are you playing at? Look at the state of you!’
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Home,’ he snapped.
Highgate was north, and though years of being stuck in the Highgate Community meant she didn’t know London well, Ana knew enough to know that wasn’t where they were headed. They were still south of the river, following it west. Besides, she didn’t have a home. Not any more.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The effects will kick in soon. You’ll be able to forget all about me and catch up on a bit of sleep. You’re looking rather pasty and tired Daddy. Something been troubling you?’
Her father stared at her.
She smiled. ‘Like my new face?’
‘It’s not one of your better looks,’ he said. He carefully pulled his shirt back over his bandaged shoulder, and laid his head back against the window. ‘Warden Dombrant’s instructions have changed,’ he said yawning. ‘He now has permission to do whatever he deems necessary to complete his mission.’
Ana curled her fingers together on her lap. Well that shouldn’t surprise her. She waited until her father closed his eyes and his breathing grew slower and heavier, then turned to face Dombrant. ‘So what’s your mission now, Warden?’ she asked.
‘We’re taking you across the border to Scotland.’
‘Well we’re going the wrong way,’ she said.
‘We’ve got to stop off first for supplies.’
Ana looked away. If the Warden was going to lie, he could at least make sense. Ashby Barber could buy supplies anywhere he wanted. ‘So why did he say we were going home?’
‘Because it’s all at that farmhouse where you used to live.’
No, please no.
She fastened her seatbelt and clung to it as though it could shield her from an approaching collision.
She hadn’t been back to the farmhouse since the day she found her mother dead in the barn.
Twenty-three years ago, at the time of the global collapse, hundreds of thousands of people attempted to flee the Cities to the countryside to live off the land. The National Central Bank employed an army to patrol their thirteen million hectares of agricultural territory. The majority of city dwellers were pushed back into the towns. But ten years ago, as a child growing up on a farm surrounded by National Central agricultural territory, Ana sometimes wouldn’t see a guard for weeks.
Now they cruised along the A31 out of Guildford and apart from the cyclists and street vendors in town, the roads were empty. She glanced at her father slumped against the van window. It was true he looked pale. Grey rings circled his eyes. His oval face was gaunt. She thought of Cole on the hard wood floor in the back, and hoped he hadn’t woken up and thought she’d gone missing.
Golden fields of corn swished past. They turned off the main road down a country lane. From time to time they passed abandoned houses owned by the National Bank or rich Pures who never came here anymore.
After the morning she’d discovered her mother dead in the barn, she and the young housekeeper, Sarah, who her father had employed to keep an eye on her mother, went to stay on a nearby farm, run by a stern woman who Ana’s father paid generously for the inconvenience. The arrangement was only meant to have lasted for a couple of weeks. But Sarah, a fairly useless housekeeper, was an even more useless farmhand. She quit, leaving Ana alone with Joan. Weeks turned into months. Ana followed her own home-schooling programme. She’d pretty much been looking after her own education with her mum anyway. Afternoons were spent helping Joan in the fields, or the orchard, and once or twice Joan had taken her hunting.