‘You may have gathered, but—’
Salter, seemingly fuelled by impulse (or perhaps fear of what Grant would do to him if he put up no resistance), reached for his holster to draw out a little pistol. Before he could do so, Alex fired a bullet, which popped through his right hand and tore through most of its tendons. Salter stumbled around in agony, producing a sound that Ewan almost didn’t recognise as human. It certainly wasn’t monotonous anymore.
‘Didn’t have to do that, did you?’ Alex said to him as he and Ewan grabbed his arms.
Salter’s body did the only thing it knew how to do under the circumstances, and a small pool of vomit spilled over his bottom row of teeth. Most of Ewan froze in disgust, except for his feet which shuffled away from the floor beneath Salter’s mouth. He looked at the man in disbelief as he choked on the thin trickle that hadn’t quite made it to the top.
‘Really?’ he asked, forcing Salter towards the centre of the room and bundling him onto the table with an Underdog at each corner.
Not all monsters look fearsome, Ewan thought to himself as he stared at Salter’s face. Some monsters hide away in their offices signing death warrants. Some monsters wear suits or sit at computer desks. Some vomit in fright when they’re caught.
Kate returned from seizing the automatic weapons from the dead guards, dumped them onto the desk and gripped Salter’s right wrist. Alex removed the man’s firearm from its holster and lay a forceful hand against his forehead, pressing the back of his skull against the table. Ewan inspected the man’s face, tracking where his eyes went in case they revealed his intentions. His gaze seemed to land on McCormick.
‘You’re him,’ Salter gasped with widening eyes. ‘You’re actually him… you’re Joseph McCormick!’
McCormick chuckled, and raised his hands in fake astonishment.
‘Wow, this identification chamber really does work!’ he said with a laugh. Ewan tried not to smile, but it was difficult to resist the ageing man’s wit. McCormick walked to the clones and picked up their radios, before leaning directly over Salter’s face. Ewan had never seen Dr Joseph McCormick as an imposing figure – authoritative, maybe, but not imposing. Perhaps he was seeing what the man had once been like with his university students when they needed a serious talking-to.
‘We don’t have much time,’ started McCormick. ‘It’s a quarter past eight, and we need to be done by midnight. You must be clever enough to know what we’re doing here.’
‘The AME shield,’ Salter gasped. ‘You want me to stop it going up, otherwise you’ll kill me… if killing is your modus operandi…’
‘Our what?’ asked Kate.
‘Our way of doing things,’ answered McCormick.
Ewan gave no reaction, glad that Kate had been the one to ask the question. He had spent enough of his life looking like the stupid one in large groups.
‘I know you’ve killed hundreds of clones between you,’ Salter said with a panicked squirm, ‘but clones are clones, here today and gone tomorrow. Could you really bring yourself to slaughter a human being? One who can look you in the eyes and speak in your own language?’
Ewan trembled at the memory of the real humans who had died by his hands. Salter was wrong in assuming he couldn’t kill humans, but the words affected him anyway.
But still, Ewan could use his history to his advantage.
‘Remember Steven Elcott?’ he asked. ‘Fat guy, worked in the officers’ sector on Floor S, died last month?’
Salter’s eyes widened as they met Ewan’s, which alone answered the question.
‘Yeah, that was me. He was my third human. Strictly speaking, I’ve been a human-killer since Takeover Day.’
‘Who the hell did you kill on Takeover Day?’ asked Alex with a curious laugh.
‘Shut up, that’s who,’ Ewan replied.
Ewan turned his eyes away from the inevitable hurt in McCormick’s face, and hoped he didn’t look so guilty that Salter picked it up. But either way, their captive must have had other things on his mind.
‘You still remember Steven’s name,’ Salter whispered. ‘He must still haunt you.’
Ewan’s mouth dropped open, and his blinking increased. Salter, despite his helpless situation, had struck him where it hurt: right in the conscience. But Salter said no more, perhaps aware that the strategy of hurting his captors would not help him escape his situation.
‘I can’t stop the AME shield from being raised,’ Salter continued, ‘and no matter wh—’
‘Oh, we know,’ said Alex. ‘For all your sins, and despite all the horrific things you’ve said yes to during your employment with Grant, you’re still a generic nothing-special vehicle port officer. We’re not expecting you to help that much. We do need your keycard though.’
‘It’s in my left pocket. Take it.’
Kate’s hand rummaged through Salter’s left trouser pocket and emerged with his keycard. Salter began to gasp in even more erratic, panicked breaths, and Ewan understood why. Without that card, Salter was no different to a clone soldier, or even one of the rebels. His life in the upper floors of New London was over.
‘OK,’ Salter said, tears emerging in his eyes, ‘make it quick.’
‘Oh, we don’t like killing humans,’ answered McCormick. ‘Unless it results in saving the lives of more humans. And we don’t need to kill you, so we won’t.’
‘Sir,’ said Alex, ‘not to contradict you in front of the enemy, but—’
‘He won’t give us away. He’s dead the moment he speaks. He’s let rebels into New London and given them access to the higher floors. Grant won’t let him live.’
McCormick’s right, Ewan thought. If one bit of information spills out from Salter’s lips, Grant will probably save him for Oliver Roth.
‘But I can offer you a deal,’ McCormick continued. ‘It involves us staying undetected, and you staying alive. Win-win, I’d say.’
‘I’m listening,’ Salter gasped. Ewan was astonished at how quickly this man complied with their every demand. For a man with no good options, Salter seemed to instinctively know where his best chances of survival lay.
‘You leave this room,’ McCormick began, ‘unarmed and without your keycard. Carrying nothing but your radio, and the radios from the two clones on the floor. You use the authority you still have in Vehicle Port Three, take a van of your choice and leave New London, sheltering in a nearby village away from Grant’s forces but within radio range.’
‘I can actually recommend a nice little bungalow—’ said Alex, before Ewan shushed him.
‘In return,’ McCormick continued, ‘you keep all three radios by your side and check in whenever commanded.’
‘Which is every fifteen minutes tonight,’ said Ewan. ‘I took the dead clones’ radios at Oakenfold so they wouldn’t detect them missing. Had to check in so many times on the way to New London, I almost wish I hadn’t bothered.’
‘Once the night is over,’ finished McCormick, ‘you can live out the rest of your days in the English countryside, away from Grant’s brave new world. How does that sound?’
Salter nodded.
‘Wait,’ said Kate, ‘you’re just going by trust? How do you know he won’t give us away the moment he’s out of sight?’
‘Because,’ Ewan said, ‘when Grant finds out what he’s done, he’s dead. What do you think, Arnold? Is it worth giving your life to reveal our presence?’
‘No. Now please, just let me get out quickly.’
The soldiers backed off, and McCormick passed the dead clones’ radios to Salter. Even unrestrained, Salter didn’t move a muscle, perhaps magnetised to the table through fear.
‘Here,’ said Alex, tossing a little green box towards him. ‘Have a med-kit for your hand. No hard feelings, mate.’
Salter tried to catch it, but it slipped through the remains of his wounded hand.
‘Right,’ said Ewan, ‘let’s head off. The Central Research Headquarters and the Experiment Chamber are both on Floor F. A
lex and I will take that.’
‘Wait—’
‘And no, Alex, you’re not doing your lone wolf thing again. We can’t afford the risk. Sir, you and Kate can take the data servers and the paper archive, since Floors P and R are next to each other.’
‘Learn the alphabet, Ewan,’ said Alex.
Ewan didn’t waste time checking whether Alex was right. It would do him no good.
‘One thing I’ve been meaning to ask,’ said Kate. ‘Even if we destroy all those things, won’t all the border points still be around the Citadel? Can’t they get something back from them?’
‘Border points don’t contain software,’ answered McCormick, ‘they just respond to a remote computer. Trust me, Grant trying to extract data from a border point would be like looking for files inside a printer that just printed them.’
Ewan nodded, pretending to understand. At his side, Alex opened the exit door and wandered straight into the corridor without checking for enemies.
‘Alex!’ snapped McCormick. ‘Where’s your concentration?’
Alex looked up and down the corridor. Once he knew the coast was clear, he rolled his eyes at his allies.
‘I’m a clone, remember? Why would I need to be careful walking around my own corridors? I don’t even know we’ve got intruders yet. Come on, Ewan.’
Ewan fought his way past the blatant demand from Alex, and forced himself to hold his tongue since Salter was listening in. McCormick passed him the rucksack, after reaching inside to remove the cigar-shaped little detonator which he passed to Kate.
‘Salter,’ said McCormick, ‘aren’t you supposed to be going somewhere?’
Ewan looked back at Salter, who hadn’t moved a millimetre from his position on the table.
‘Yeah, get out of New London,’ said Alex, as Salter’s legs woke up and slid off the table towards the floor. ‘And quick, before you throw up again.’
Salter obeyed. He tucked the two clone radios into his pockets, double-checked that he still held his own, and left Office 35 to flee for his life.
With the enemy no longer watching, Ewan’s emotions ran straight to the front of his mind. He stared at McCormick, finally coming to terms with the fact that they were separating.
He must have looked openly afraid. There was fear in McCormick’s eyes too. Fear and love.
‘Take care, my boys,’ McCormick said with a smile on his face and in his voice. At the door, Ewan smiled back like he had once done to his father.
‘You too, sir,’ Ewan answered. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’
‘There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for the British people, Ewan. So I can assure you I won’t.’
Alex walked further down the corridor, blank-faced and confident once again. It hurried Ewan and McCormick’s goodbye, and Ewan briefly hated him for it.
Nonetheless, Alex’s haste was necessary. And all being well, Ewan would see his mentor again at the end of the night anyway.
All being well? He thought to himself as he left McCormick and Kate to chase Alex down the corridor. We’ve got to avoid losing a war tonight. All being well is a bloody tall order.
Chapter 17
‘We’re taking the lift?’ said Alex. ‘Seriously?’
Ewan stood up straight, self-assured and confident. It was an act and he knew it, but it was what non-autistic people did all the time in moments of self-doubt.
‘We’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘If we were going to be caught, we’d have been caught in the vehicle port when everyone was looking. Besides, it’s half eight. Time’s a factor here.’
The lift arrived and Ewan marched inside. As Alex joined him he pressed the button for Floor F: the highest available button, and the floor where their first targets lay. Ewan could not be bothered to work out how many floors lay between F and X, but—
Ewan’s heart was thrown into his stomach. After a year without using an elevator, he was unprepared for the seasickness when the lift rose at the speed of an accelerating car. To his side, Alex gripped the side rail with tightening fingers. Twenty seconds later the lift slowed to a halt as if a driver had slammed on the brakes. The two young men, supposedly toughened through a year of battle, glanced at one another and shared a nervous laugh.
They fell silent as the doors slid open. It was time to become clones again.
The Central Research Headquarters was a fifteen-minute walk from the lift, with the Outer City monorail several floors away. But the walk was anything but boring. Ewan had to stop his eyes from widening as he gazed at his fancy surroundings, a world apart from the bland yet haunting atmosphere of the lower floors. Floor F looked like a serious attempt at a laboratory complex: the walls had white paint, and the floor was textured with the flat, patterned material found on the hospital wards of old. There were metal labels on every door from security offices to store cupboards, and the whole atmosphere had an air of quality. Ewan had not felt so amazed at man-made beauty since his brief visit to the officers’ sector three weeks earlier.
It’s not the beauty I remember about that visit though, he thought, with Charlie on his mind.
Wait, Alex was on Floor F for that same mission , at the clone factory . Why is he looking as fascinated as me?
Alex, Jack and Kate had all seen Floor F, but none of them had told Ewan what it looked like. It had been a minor detail compared to everything else that had happened that week. But Alex’s face – as much as he tried to disguise it and as difficult as Ewan found it to read – suggested he was seeing it for the first time.
Do you even remember this place?
At the end of their fifteen-minute journey, there was no mistaking the door to the Central Research Headquarters. The set-up of the surrounding area had based itself around that one chamber: octagonal, wide, and placed mid-crossroads between four approaching corridors. Ewan walked to the windowless entrance and swiped Arnold Salter’s keycard through the slot. When the LED flickered from red to green, he pushed through the door looking as unexcited as he could.
The chamber’s interior looked just as he had predicted. Its walls were lined with computer desks and monitors, an air conditioning unit rumbled loudly on the ceiling, and a trolley of spare laptops lay by the door. A security camera hung from one of the top corners.
However, Ewan had not imagined he and Alex would be the room’s only occupants.
‘Empty?’ he whispered, his lips facing away from the security camera. ‘The Central Research Headquarters can’t really be unattended?’
As Ewan glanced around the room, Alex walked to the computer furthest to their left. There were no blind spots in the octagonal chamber, but he picked a chair that would face away from the lens of the spying CCTV camera.
‘Why not?’ Alex answered. ‘The AME project is complete now. How much else do you think they need to do here?’
Ewan followed his teammate to the furthest edge of the room and sat himself at the neighbouring computer. It gave him access to every delicious scrap of information an Underdog could want to get their hands on. He just needed to locate them.
‘Fair enough,’ he answered. ‘Looking for the research files now.’
‘You do that. I’ve got something personal to search for.’
Ewan shot Alex a surprised glance.
‘Personal? Like, your dad or something?’
‘Yeah,’ said Alex with blatant sarcasm, ‘my taekwondo coach stuck down in New Brighton prison, who they’re definitely keeping an eye on because he’s such a fascinating guy. No, you numpty. I’ve got missing memories to find.’
Ewan felt a little pool of rage bubbling up inside him at Alex’s insult, but he took a deep breath and composed himself. The insult must have been based on hurt, and he knew better than to take things personally when they were said by a teammate going through a rough time.
For a moment, Ewan wondered whether those thoughts were truly his own, or planted there by his experiences among other Oakenfold students. Or even by McCormick, during his year
of positive influence.
Then, without his permission, his fingers twitched and he slammed a hand on the table.
‘You OK there?’ asked Alex.
‘Not exactly.’
‘Worried about the old man?’
‘…Yeah.’
Ewan opened the first of many folders he was set to search through, and found himself lost like a child in a busy shopping centre. He would not be finished in a hurry.
‘It’s not like the other missions,’ he continued to Alex, if only for the sake of expressing his thoughts out loud. ‘Every mission for the last year, all I’ve needed to do to see him again is avoid dying and get back to Spitfire’s Rise. But when I said goodbye to him tonight, it hit me. He’s in danger here. I could do everything right tonight, complete this mission and head home unscathed, and still never see him again.’
Alex took a break from his own search and looked towards Ewan, although the camera prevented him from turning far enough to make his lips visible.
‘Kate will look after him,’ he said in a rare, compassionate voice. ‘And if he goes off on his own, he won’t do anything stupid.’
‘You’re sure about that? He knows what’s at stake.’
‘Well let’s be frank. If he were to do something to put himself in danger, it wouldn’t be out of stupidity. It’d be for something worth putting himself in danger for. He’s an adult – a real adult, I mean – and a mathematician too. He doesn’t have the reckless impulsive side that the rest of us have. He’s too calculating for it.’
He’s right, I guess, Ewan thought. The two of us are at far more risk than him. If death is coming for anyonetonight, it’s me or Alex.
Ewan blinked himself back to his senses. The AME research was somewhere in front of him to be found and deleted, and it was time to regain focus. Once he did, it didn’t take him long to realise that even once he found the data, deleting it would not be simple. He would need special clearance or admin access or something.
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