A body covered with a white sheet emerged from the hatch. Only feet with a tag attached to the big toe poked out from the far end. Dombrant raised the sheet slowly. At the sight of her father’s face, darkness swirled through her. His lips were thin, the cheeks slightly sunken. She touched the pad of her forefinger to his brow. It was cold and waxy.
A small movement on the other side of the tray made her look up. Dombrant was wiping his eyes. Seeing his grief undid her. She hunched over and began to sob. Her heart wrenched around and around. She struggled to think, but she couldn’t even remember the last thing she’d said to her father. The crying took over her body, ripping it up from the inside. She’d seen footage of women wailing and keening beside dead husbands and children in the US petrol wars. She understood their need to moan and lament, trying to push out the pain. It was as though even her bones were leaden with sorrow.
‘He knew what he was doing,’ Dombrant said. ‘He knew the risk he was taking, but he was trying to keep you safe.’ His voice sounded thick and clotted. ‘It’s what he’s been trying to do all along.’
She wept again, for not having understood him, for not having wanted to. She’d hurt her father as much as he’d hurt her and now she could never tell him she loved him, or that she was sorry.
Eventually, the crying ebbed and the grief settled inside her. She rested the side of her head against the sheet covering his lifeless chest. No heartbeat. No rise and fall of breath. She placed a palm over her father’s heart.
‘I did love you,’ she whispered. ‘You probably find that hard to believe . . .’ She smiled, tears springing to her eyes again. ‘But it’s true. I love you, Dad.’
Ana straightened, pressing her hands to her face. Dombrant looked at her.
Yes
,
she nodded, she was ready. He covered her father’s head. The vault clanged as the tray rolled down the shaft. He twisted the lever to lock the door and silence echoed in the narrow room.
‘We should make a move,’ he said. But the three of them lingered, knowing his informer would warn them if anyone came. She breathed out a heavy sigh. However much she knew the body inside that vault was only the shell of her father, it was hard to leave. Once she walked out of the morgue, the final tie that held them both to the same world would be cut. Exhausted, she leaned against Cole’s chest. Her eyes felt puffy and her head throbbed. Cole ran a hand through her hair. She sighed again. All these years she’d been convinced her father’s motives were wholly selfish, that he was driven by greed and status. But the truth hadn’t been so simple.
As she stood pressed into Cole, calm and spent, an unexpected tingling shot through her. The exact feeling she’d had the night her father used a Paralyser to try and stop her leaving the Community.
The vibration.
She breathed in sharply. ‘Someone’s coming,’ she said, looking up at Cole. Her body twitched with shock. He was gone. His face was solid and lifeless. She swivelled to check Dombrant. The Warden was as animated as stone. Panic crashed through her. She grasped the Stinger on Dombrant’s belt as the morgue door creaked open.
She froze beside the Warden, though it was hard to pretend her fingers weren’t trembling. Footsteps approached from behind. A small figure padded through the room. The girl’s pixie haircut framed an expressionless face; her eyes were too large for her narrow chin, her small nose and button lips. She checked the numbered vaults, then stretched forward and pulled out Ashby’s tray.
Ana’s palm squeezed around the Stinger.
Don’t touch him.
The girl turned. Instinctively, Ana blanketed her mind, keeping her gaze distant.
The girl stared at her. ‘You do that well,’ she said. Her voice was as flat as a lake on a windless day. Ana stopped pretending and met her stare. The girl wasn’t quite a girl, more like nineteen or twenty. She wore a black shirt and trousers. Around her neck hung a gold triangular interface with a white circle in the centre – the symbol of the Board. On her belt dangled a metal rod Paralyser.
‘Who are you?’ Ana asked, unable to smooth the quiver in her voice.
‘Tabitha.’ The girl answered as though she were saying cat or dog or human. As though the name meant nothing to her.
‘Why are you here?’
‘I wanted to see who you are.’
A shiver skittered up Ana’s spine. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I was curious about you.’
I’m the girl with the scratched-out face.
Ana concentrated on keeping her features slack. Difficult when she was hearing things. ‘Who sent you?’
‘Nobody.’
‘You’re not taking my father. I won’t let you take him.’
‘I dreamt about you,’ Tabitha said.
A strange echo laced through Ana’s thoughts.
She was standing on the garden path of a semi-detached within arm’s reach of a girl whose face was undefined, as if it had yet to be painted. She could only make out the eyes – large deep wells of black.
‘I used to live inside the Pulse,’ Tabitha continued dispassionately. ‘I was nine when my mother and I became trapped there. We were told the rent in those streets was cheap and that it was an up and coming neighbourhood. Lots of young families were moving in. But a few weeks after we got there the Pulse started. I could have left, but my mother couldn’t. Where was I supposed to go without her?’ Tabitha blinked – the most emotion she’d shown since she’d walked into the morgue.
‘You grew up with the Arashans?’
‘I am one of them.’
‘But you work for the Board.’
‘If I work for Evelyn, she will free my mother. She finds my
talent
both useful and fascinating. As she does yours.’
‘Mine?’ Every muscle in Ana’s body tensed. Her loathing for Evelyn Knight seethed towards the surface.
‘Yes, she knows the Pulse doesn’t stop you.’
Dropping her eyes to the ghostly outline of her father’s body, Ana remembered how he’d said something yesterday about Evelyn watching her for reasons he hadn’t understood. Could it have something to do with the Pulse? She squeezed the sides of her temples. The Paralyser vibration pressed on her, growing uncomfortable.
‘Why doesn’t the Pulse stop us?’ she asked.
‘Some people’s minds work differently,’ Tabitha answered. ‘I believe it’s similar to the way only five per cent of people cannot be hypnotised.’ She slowly cocked her head. ‘After a few months, my mother could work again, sewing and planting her garden. The body adapts. Occasionally, she would even paint. Sometimes it was almost as if she had woken up . . .’ She stopped as though the memory had suddenly vanished. Her eyes bored into Ana’s. ‘We adapt too.’
But differently.
Ana flinched. Beneath Tabitha’s still face there was no sign of recognition that she was talking into Ana’s mind. Was she imagining it? Tabitha pulled back the sheet covering Ashby’s head and pointed to a red prick in his neck. ‘A frozen form of liquid poison. Another hour and it will be undetectable.’
‘Thank you,’ Ana stuttered.
‘Don’t thank me, I doubt the Coroner will be here in time.’ She covered Ana’s father and pushed the tray back into the vault.
Sensing her chance for answers would soon be plucked away, Ana stepped towards the girl. ‘If people adapt and are able to function again in the Pulse,’ she said, ‘what’s the point of the Arashans’ prolonged exposure?’
‘The Arashans are a means to an end.’
Ana’s eyes narrowed as she wondered what
end
.
The boy? The experiments?
‘Make Evelyn believe she is weak. It is the only way you will stop her.’
‘How do I do that?’
Tabitha strolled to the flip doors and paused. ‘I believe you have some feeling for the people of the Enlightenment Project?’ she said, without looking back, ‘They’re not safe.’
‘Not safe? But the Wardens are stepping down.’
‘Two days ago the Project’s water supply was contaminated with Benzidox.’
‘Why?’
‘With Benzidox in the bloodstream, people move and act like they’re hypnotised around the Pulse. The Project members will be exposed to the Pulse and they will obey orders to destroy each other.’ Her hand dropped from the morgue door and she slipped out into the hospital corridor. The vibration faded with her footsteps.
For a moment Ana couldn’t move, as if she too had become immobilised.
Dombrant flexed his shoulders, quickly readjusting. ‘What happened?’ he asked, reaching for his baton. ‘I heard voices.’
‘You could hear us?’ she asked, confused. At that moment a red light flashed on his interface, followed by a beep.
‘Time to get out of here,’ he said, awkwardly flexing his facial muscles. Ana ran to Cole. He was wavering back and forth on the spot, not fully with it. She put her hands on his cheeks.
‘Cole,’ she said. ‘Cole, come on, we’ve got to go.’ His eyes languidly tried to focus. ‘That’s right,’ she said gently. ‘Come on. It’s over. You’re awake.’ Linking her fingers through his, she guided him carefully after Dombrant to the exit.
Dombrant jogged ahead of them through the hospital basement. The young Warden who was supposed to be keeping watch was nowhere in sight. At the lift, the arrow pointing downwards blinked, indicating an imminent arrival.
‘The stairs,’ Dombrant said. They piled into a concrete stairwell and stood quietly. Red beams from the Warden’s interface shone on the brick. He was studying his infrared heat program. Beyond the wall came a ping and the swish of the lift doors. The readouts showed three adults stepping into the corridor, only a metre away. Ana held her breath.
She felt as though she were still holding it when they were a hundred metres away from the hospital, heading back towards the crowds of St John’s Wood Tube station. She climbed a low railing at the side of the pavement into a strip of wasteland, and stalked through the brambles and grass until she could no longer see the road. Dombrant and Cole followed.
‘What happened in there?’ Dombrant asked.
‘My father was shot with some sort of frozen liquid poison,’ she said. There wasn’t time to explain everything. ‘If we don’t get him an autopsy fast, the poison will become undetectable. Evelyn Knight will get away with another murder.’
Cole pinched the skin between his brows, as though he was having trouble thinking.
Dombrant began scanning a list of names on his interface. ‘Whoever went down there when we were leaving, it wasn’t the Coroner.’
‘Can we get Dad moved? Take him somewhere else?’
‘There isn’t time.’
‘I’m not following,’ Cole said. ‘Why would someone come to the morgue with a Paralyser and tell you this? How did they even know we were there? How did they know
you
wouldn’t be affected by the Paralyser?’
‘The girl was an Arashan.’
‘The Arashans, as in that army experiment Lila goes on about?’
‘The Board’s experiment,’ Ana corrected.
Cole narrowed his eyes. The strain of being near the Paralyser had dulled them. ‘So how did she leave the nest?’
‘Tabitha Plume,’ Dombrant cut in, reading information projected from his interface on his outstretched hand. ‘Nineteen. Went to Bromley High School until she was nine. Then abruptly dropped out. She and her mother were reported missing. The report was retracted several months later. She started on the Board’s payroll a couple of months after her seventeenth birthday. And she was ID’d at the hospital a few minutes after I was.’
Cole pressed his palms into his face.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Migraine. Since we got out of there I feel like my head is going to implode.’
‘Cole . . . There’s something else.’ She reached for his hand, recognising this wasn’t an ideal moment, but they didn’t have the luxury of time. ‘We have to get to the Project.’ He frowned at her miserably. Perhaps he wished this was all over as much as she did. ‘I think the Board plans to stage an inside attack. They’ve contaminated the water supplies with Benzidox. They’re going to make them all turn against each other.’
*
They rode in the back of Dombrant’s black saloon. Ana didn’t know what they would do once they got to the Project. Presumably, the Board’s Special Ops, or whoever was going to incite the attack, would be using Paralysers to emit the vibrations. Which meant Cole and Dombrant would be unable to fight. They could only hope they arrived in time to warn everyone.
Cole fidgeted the whole way there and left message after message on the Project hotline. At the bottom of Highgate village, only a couple of hundred metres from the northern Project wall, Dombrant pulled into a side street. He parked across from a single-storey red-bricked building with a sign hanging above the entrance:
Warden Station
.
‘Won’t be a minute,’ he said.
Ana watched him jog across the road and disappear inside. She shifted in the backseat, uncomfortable and nervous.
‘Do you trust him?’ Cole asked.
A woman in a grey suit. The Warden Dombrant behind the woman, holding a Stinger.
‘We need him,’ she answered.
Cole squeezed his eyes shut. He pressed two fingers against the centre of his forehead.
‘Is it the Paralyser?’ she asked. ‘Did this happen to you before?’
‘No. The night I waited for you outside your Community and your father’s guys were using the same thing, it wasn’t like this afterwards.’
‘Maybe it’s something to do with the face gels.’
‘Ana,’ he said, wincing, ‘What you saw with Tengeri, it wasn’t an assault on the Project was it?’ She shook her head. He lay back, the frown on his face lifting.
Dombrant emerged from the station slinging a holdall over his shoulder. He crossed the road and got into the car, throwing the bag in the passenger seat.
‘Supplies,’ he said. ‘Now we can go.’
It was early afternoon, the sun high in the blue and grey sky. Blaize’s T-shirt stuck to his back beneath his rucksack. He was covered in sweat and grime – more so it seemed than anyone else. He’d rinsed his clothes in the pond two days ago, but the T-shirt and pants smelt bad afterwards. Metallic. And as he didn’t have any soap, he hadn’t bothered to wash them again.