by Natasha Ngan
‘Course it matters. Don’t be stupid –’
‘Don’t call me stupid.’
‘I’m not –’
‘I don’t care about North or South, Seven.’
‘Look –’
‘I said, I don’t care. Why can’t we be friends if we want –?’
‘Alba, don’t be so effing naive!’
Seven’s shout was swallowed by the storm, the lash of the rain. He dropped Alba’s hands and stepped back.
‘We both know what this is, all right?’ he said roughly. ‘You wanna skid-surf. I don’t wanna get handed over to the London Guard. That’s it. You use me, I use you. That’s how life goes, no?’
Alba glared at him. She seemed frozen to the spot despite the whip of the wind and the rush of the rain. Lightning flashed, turning her eyes into two discs of white gold. For some reason, seeing her like that made something in Seven’s stomach twist, almost painfully.
He’d hurt her. She was trying to care, to be kind, and he was throwing it back in her face.
‘I was never going to tell my parents you stole a memory from them,’ Alba said softly. ‘Just so you know.’
Seven’s face twisted. ‘What does it matter? Tell them if you want. It’s not like I’ve got anything left to lose.’
(That was both a lie and not a lie.)
He coughed, tearing his eyes away. ‘So come have your surf, Princess, and then we never have to see each other again. Thank gods.’
Seven grabbed Alba’s arm and pushed her forward. With every step, he forced himself not to look at her, or think about everything he didn’t have, yet might have just lost.
36
ALBA
The storm had died down a bit by the time they got to Seven’s memorium, the rain a distant rush on the walls outside.
They hadn’t spoken a word during the journey here. This was partly because for most of it, the rain had been beating down in driving, wind-whipped sheets, thunder growling across the sky. But it was also because of the things they’d just said to each other. Words that were pressed between them like a physical weight in the air, keeping them apart.
Now, in the hushed quiet of the memorium, Alba felt the coldness between her and Seven even more. She was hurt, but also angry with him too; some of the things he’d said were unnecessarily cruel. She couldn’t wait to get away from here and lose herself in a memory. And – though it made her feel a little guilty – she was already feeling the pull of the hundreds of memories calling for her from behind their blue cages.
If this is my last time memory-surfing, she thought, I’m going to make the most of it.
Alba unbuttoned her coat and laid it on top of one of the cabinets. Her plum-coloured jumper, black trousers and boots were all water-logged, her supposedly rain-proof coat beaten by the strength of the storm. She wrung the hem of her jumper out; water splattered onto the floor.
Leaning against the door, Seven stuffed his hands in the pockets of his trousers and stuck his elbows out.
‘Go on, then, Princess,’ he said, sighing, and ducked his head, sweeping out an arm.
Alba didn’t need telling twice. She spun on the spot, looking round at the cabinets, trying to decide what type of memory she wanted to surf tonight (the problem was, she wanted them all). Then her eyes caught a broken mug on top of one of the cabinets. Inside were a few of the small metal clips the memories were recorded on.
‘What are these?’ she asked, reaching out.
But before she could touch the mug, Seven had rushed over and grabbed it, cradling it to his chest. The tips of his ears were pink.
‘These are – these are private,’ he said, avoiding her eyes.
Alba stepped back. ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ Feeling awkward, she dropped her eyes, and noticed one of the metal clips on the floor. She picked it up. ‘Here. One fell out.’
As she held it out to him, she noticed the writing on the label:
24.10.2128, A.W, the White family’s house (Hyde Park Estate)
‘Is this … is this my father’s memory?’ she asked in a whisper.
A thrill of something – anticipation? Fear? – ran down her spine. Before she met Seven, Alba had never really thought of her father as someone who had secrets. Of course, she understood his job was difficult, and he had to do difficult things for it, but after overhearing his secret meeting with Pearson outside their house and his words on the night of the raid, she realised there were so many things she didn’t know about her father.
Holding one of his own memories in her hand made Alba feel sick. What dark things were buried in his past?
Did she want to know?
Alba looked up. ‘Have you surfed it?’ she asked Seven.
He shook his head. ‘I put it there to remind myself to sort it, but I forgot about it ’cause of everything that happened after –’
He stopped abruptly. For a second, Seven’s face was blank. And then it twisted. His eyes were wide. He was staring at the object in her hand as though it were a bomb, about to explode and shatter the world any second.
Alba frowned. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘That skid,’ Seven croaked. He took a step back (now Alba really did feel like she was holding a bomb), and ran a shaking hand through his tangled hair. ‘That’s what Carpenter was trying to warn me about before he – before he was shot.’
37
SEVEN
Seven had been so caught up in escaping the raid and the horror of Carpenter’s death, then wanting to confront Alba, that he’d forgotten all about Alastair White’s skid and Carpenter’s warning.
He stared at the DSC in Alba’s hand, stomach churning. What was so terrible about that memory that had made Carpenter – Carpenter, who never got scared – beg him to destroy it?
I thought it would protect us. That I could protect us by having it. Use it as blackmail, if it ever came to it. Something to keep that White pig away. And after Murray … But it’s bigger than that. I should’ve left it alone.
‘What is it?’ Alba asked, stepping towards him. Her eyes were wide with concern. ‘What’s wrong?’
But Seven barely registered her words. He was back in the night before, back at Borough Market, the noise of the crowd swelling around him, the stink of fish-blood and rotten vegetables so strong he felt like being sick, and a gunshot –
A gunshot that seemed to tear right through the very fabric of the world and split it into two.
The memory, S. Destroy it.
Blood spilling from Carpenter’s lip.
S-sorry.
Seven snapped back to the present. Before he could worry about the consequences of what he was about to do, he ran to Butler and powered up the machine. He sat down on the stool so heavily it skidded on the floor. His hands shook as he closed the wrist-straps round his arms, fixed the metal cap to his head.
‘Seven!’ Alba cried. ‘What are you doing?’ But her voice sounded distant, calling to him as though from another place, another world.
In the fraction of a moment when the DSC had loaded and he hit the ACTIVATE option, Seven wondered whether he was making a mistake. He’d told Carpenter he wouldn’t surf this memory. He’d made a promise to a dying man. What was he thinking, breaking a promise like that?
But then there was a rising, piercing sound and the flash of light like a million cameras going off, and it was too late to turn back.
‘MEMORY ACTIVATED. EXPIRATION IN FORTY-NINE MINUTES, TWO SECONDS.’
Swallowing nervously, Seven opened his eyes.
He was in a small room, bare and clinical. Strips of white light beat down from overhead. An electric hum filled the air. Through the honey-like warmth of the memory-air, Seven felt a coolness on his skin. Cold air was pumping from a hidden air-con unit.
‘Mr White?’
He turned.
A short, greying man with soft brown eyes and a brush of speckled stubble was walking towards him. He wore a white lab coat over a brown suit and plaid shirt. Round his neck
hung a nametag: Dr Merriweather, TMK Division, Chief Science Co-ordinator.
Seven’s heart thudded hard. TMK! That’s what Alba’s father had been talking to Pearson about that night outside her house.
‘Merriweather.’
Seven cringed as his voice came out in Alastair White’s cool, deep growl: it still weirded him out every time he spoke in skids as someone else. But he had to resist the urge to fight it. He had to let the instincts of the memory take control if he was going to experience it exactly as White had.
Merriweather fiddled with his hands. ‘Sorry, ah, about the delay. A technical hiccup. The team are ready for you now. It’s just this way.’
‘A technical hiccup?’ Seven asked as they went out into a narrow corridor, more tubes of light fixed to the ceiling. They passed a series of identical doors. ‘I do not expect any hiccups in this process, Merriweather. Especially not after what happened with the last intake.’
‘Of course, sir. Of course. Just that the cerebral cortex nerves are delicate things. Especially in, ah, Candidates as young as ours. And then with the introduction of a foreign object … swelling and breakages are to be expected.’
‘Indeed. But this is the nineteenth intake since TMK was initiated. I would have expected your team to have addressed these issues by now.’
‘Yes, sir. We hope to have done so with this intake, sir.’
Merriweather stopped outside the door at the end of the corridor. Above it, a red light was lit. A label beneath the light read: LAB 32.
As the doctor bent to grasp the handle, Seven noticed a placard in the centre of the door, only just catching the last word before they went through:
KEEPERS
Keepers? he wondered. Keepers of what?
At first, the darkness of the lab blinded him. All he could make out were glaring spots of light, spaced throughout the ceiling, and a sense of space. When his eyes adjusted, Seven saw that they were in a glass atrium overlooking a large, chamber-like room. The whole place was kept in near-blackness. Strange flickers of light from machinery glowed like small thunderstorms amid a sea of dark clouds.
Merriweather bustled round him, moving to a door at the right end of the atrium. ‘This way, sir.’
A metal staircase led down to the hall. The lab was cold, pricking goosebumps across Seven’s skin. A soft whirring noise filled the space, along with erratic clicks and beeps of machinery. There were incubators spaced evenly throughout the room: around twenty or so, a person in a lab-coat stationed at each one, bent down to adjust something or stood making notes on a tablet.
Merriweather led Seven to the nearest incubator. It was nestled in sleek machinery, wires feeding into the clear curve of its shell and blinking displays showing complex sets of numbers and graphs. A round light hanging over the incubator gave off a comforting blue glow.
As they approached, the woman standing beside the incubator stood straighter, shifting her lab-coat into place. She bowed, smiling.
‘This is Misaki,’ said Merriweather. ‘She’s in charge of Candidate One –’
Something quick, like a flash of electricity, shot through Seven. Did he just say Candidate One?
‘– who is doing well. Very well indeed. Misaki?’
‘Oh, yes, she’s a fighter, all right.’ The woman stroked the plastic curve of the incubator tenderly. ‘Candidate One has had fifteen bleeding incidents as a result of dislocation of the Controller implant after attachment, but has survived them all. Currently she’s in Phase Three, attachment having been stable for at least one month. Her vitals have been steady thirteen days now, though her blood pressure is still a touch higher than we’d like. However, her cerebral cortex seems to be adapting well to the Controller. We expect her to progress to Phase Four soon, when we will begin cognitive testing.’
Seven longed to look down and see what was in the incubator, but White seemed to have no similar urge, and he was letting the memory’s full instincts take over, still determined to experience this exactly as White had.
‘Thank you,’ he said brusquely. ‘The next Candidate, then, Merriweather.’
It went on like this for five more incubators. Then the moment came that Seven had been waiting for.
‘On to Candidate Seven, then, sir.’
Seven’s blood turned to ice, but his focus didn’t waver.
‘I’ve heard of this one,’ he said in White’s cold, curt voice. He stopped before they reached the incubator.
Merriweather nodded, shifting uncomfortably. ‘Ah, yes. Of course. The incident last week.’
‘I need your promise it won’t happen again.’
‘Most certainly not, sir.’
‘Because if it does, and word gets out about TMK … ’
The doctor twisted the hem of his lab-coat. Even in the strange, womb-like darkness of the lab, Seven could see the fear etched in the man’s features; he’d recognised the threat in White’s voice.
‘Understood, sir. Now, ah, please. Candidate Seven.’
The man tending the incubator turned at the sound of their footsteps and nodded in greeting.
‘Sirs. Seven is stable after a stroke eighteen days ago and a prolonged period of cranial fluid leakage. He has currently had stable attachment of the Controller implant for two days. Vitals are within acceptable range. We anticipate he will progress safely to Phase Three.’
White nodded. ‘Good,’ he said, and then he bent over to look at the incubator and Seven was finally able to see what was inside.
His breath hitched in his throat.
It was a baby.
Candidate Seven couldn’t have been much older than six months; his head was still larger than proportionate, with narrow grey eyes and ears that stuck out a little. His eyes were wide, his fingers podgy. Wires crawled all over his body, some connected to a cap on his head, flickering with multi-coloured dots. A tiny heart-shaped birthmark was printed like a kiss on the sole of one foot.
Meeting his eyes, the baby smiled, and for the first time in this memory Seven felt as though someone had actually seen past his appearance as Alastair White to him inside.
But, as White, he didn’t return the baby’s smile.
‘Very well,’ he said, straightening. ‘On to the next.’
It took just under half an hour to finish the rest of the visits. Once they had finished, Merriweather led him back up to the glass atrium at the front of the lab. The doctor hesitated by the exit.
‘So, ah, I trust you are pleased with the progress, sir? Sixteen out of twenty Candidates stable. Our best intake yet.’
‘It is promising,’ Seven replied in White’s cool voice. ‘But we have been at this stage before. I want to see progression to Phase Five, Merriweather. So far, only six Candidates have passed Phase Four successfully. I want to know the Controller implant can work on higher numbers, and that the TMK project is not a waste of resources.’
‘Of course, sir. I have high hopes for this intake.’
‘I do not deal in hopes, Merriweather. I deal in results.’ White’s voice was a purr of a growl, a soft coat hiding a body of blades. ‘I will be back in a month for a further update.’
He said something more, but his words were drowned out by a high-pitched whine, growing steadily louder. There was a flash of light –
A falling feeling –
Seven opened his eyes to blue filing cabinets and the rushing sound of rain. He blinked, disorientated. His eyes adjusted slowly after the darkness of the lab. Nearby, Alba was sitting on the floor against a cabinet, her eyes closed. She must have fallen asleep while he’d been in the memory.
Fingers shaking, Seven unclipped himself from Butler. He drew in a long breath before untying his right boot and slipping off his sock. He hesitated then, staring down at the top of his foot.
‘Just do it, you wimp,’ he muttered.
Steeling himself, Seven pulled up his foot and twisted it round to examine the skin of his sole.
His breath caught in his throat.
<
br /> There it was. A small, heart-shaped birthmark in the middle of his foot. No bigger than a thumbprint, no darker than the lipstick-echo of lips left on the rim of a glass.
38
ALBA
She was silent for a long time after Seven finished recounting what he’d seen in her father’s memory. The sound of the rain driving down again in the night filled the memorium, and a gutter somewhere outside was dripping incessantly. But it all felt distant, as though this small room was another world. A world where North and South collided. A world where pasts were turned inside out and secrets unfurled themselves like thorned vines, winding menacingly out of the darkness.
Alba could practically feel Seven silently screaming at her to say something, and she let out a slow breath.
‘So that’s why you’re called Seven.’
‘Seriously?’ He finally stopped pacing – which was a relief as it had been making her dizzy – and glared down at her. ‘After everything I just told you, that’s all you’ve got to say?’
‘Well, I had been wondering why you’ve got such a strange name … ’
Seven made a strangled noise in the back of his throat. ‘Unbelievable,’ he muttered, dropping his eyes back to the floor and resuming his pacing.
‘I just don’t know what to say.’ Alba tucked her legs underneath her to one side. She fiddled with the hem of her trousers, which were still damp from earlier. ‘I’m so sorry about what you saw in the memory. What it might mean.’
‘You’ve got nothing to do with it.’
‘But my father … ’
He snorted. ‘Bet you’re so proud to have a parent like him.’
Alba flinched.
‘Sorry,’ Seven said quickly, his eyes softening. ‘I didn’t mean –’
She shook her head. ‘It’s fine. You’re angry. And I don’t blame you, after what you’ve just seen.’ She lowered her voice and looked away. ‘What I am surprised about is that you chose to tell me.’
After everything Seven had said earlier, outside her house, Alba didn’t think he’d have wanted to share something as personal as this with her. Perhaps, she thought, he does want to be my friend after all.