by Steve Feasey
The noise of the explosion in the narrow confines was terrible, and the shock wave that followed threw Brick backwards, smashing his head against a stone column near the bottom of the escalator. There was a loud crack! inside his skull – something breaking there – before he passed out. Now, as he came round, having been unconscious for only a few moments, he was aware that his skull was already mending: fibroblasts and chondroblasts producing collagen and fibrocartilage at a rate that should have been impossible. He had stopped bleeding – the open wound having already knitted together – and by the time he got back to his feet Brick’s skull had already started to form the callus that would bridge the two pieces of bone together in his cranium. His ears were ringing, but his perforated eardrums, like the rest of him, were also healing. The disorientation was not so swift to remedy. He shook his head, fighting to work out where he was and what had happened. Somehow he’d managed to keep hold of his torch, and he switched the thing on now, shining it up the grooved stairs at the site of the cave-in.
Letting out a low groan he hurried towards the steps, taking them three at a time.
After the initial agonies there was no pain. That, like her life, was slowly leeching out of her. She’d screamed as the huge block of concrete came crashing down on her, but even that sound had been cut short as its weight forced all the air from her lungs in one go. Things had snapped or been crushed in her small frame, and the relief she now felt from those first few moments of torture was immeasurable. Not that she wanted to die. She was too young and had too many things she wished to do. But she didn’t want the pain either.
Flea felt herself drifting – drifting towards nothingness …
She became aware that Brick was holding her hand. Not aware in a physical way – she was well beyond that – but aware that he was there with her. It was good not to be alone. She felt a halt in that drifting sensation, a jarring shudder. And with it was the awareness that Brick was trying to bring her back from the brink. She also somehow knew that it was hopeless, despite his powers. She was too far gone. She felt his … essence, his soul in those moments, and understood what a truly good person he was. She would miss him. And Tia. She would miss her friend Tia most of all.
Aware that the slab that pinioned her had been lifted free, she looked up to see – really see – Brick kneeling over her. She felt him trying so very hard to infuse her with his own life force. And then she felt nothing.
The thick dust made Brick want to cough, but that would have made him drop the plastic torch clamped between his teeth as he threw the rocks and debris out behind him. The din of the masonry crashing down the metal escalator steps hardly registered with him. Neither was he aware of the wounded-animal-like moan emanating from him. Tears streamed from his eyes, making salty tracks through the grime that covered his face before they fell down into the rubble. Somebody, maybe everybody, was alive in there – he could feel it. He stopped for a moment when he saw the small, slender arm. A delicate bracelet, little metal flowers with blue centres – a gift Tia had given Flea – around the wrist. Resting the torch down, he grabbed the hand in his own, closing his eyes and praying he wasn’t already too late. He could heal almost anything, broken bones, disease, terrible wounds, but he couldn’t reawaken a body if life had already departed.
There was the tiniest glimmer of life force remaining, a solitary star in a nothingness of space. But it was receding. Concentrating hard, Brick pulled the darkness out of his friend, swallowing it up into himself. This was how he healed others: he took their hurt. He wasn’t sure how he healed himself afterwards, but he always did. But it wasn’t working on Flea. She was too far gone. With one hand still holding on to hers, he shifted more debris, the weight of the stuff fully registering now that his own strength was ebbing away. There was a large slab of concrete on top of her, too big for him to shift one-handed. He hated letting go of her, even for the few seconds it took for him to heave the mass from her broken body, but he had no choice. He threw the thing behind him and looked back down, grabbing for her hand at the same time.
‘Flea,’ he said.
Their eyes met, a last flicker of recognition registering in her pale blue irises before slipping away. He was too late, and Flea’s tiny star winked out forever.
The roar that escaped the huge man filled the space more completely than the exploding rockets had. Sobbing, he lifted her gently from the debris and carried her up to the top of the steps, where he laid her down.
He wanted to stay with her. It didn’t seem right to leave that small ruined body all alone up there, but he had no choice. Because he could feel that there was still life down there. He spoke to her as if she was merely asleep, and before he moved away he wet the pad of his thumb on his tongue and removed a smudge of blood from her cheek. Then he clambered back down over the wreckage to where the explosion had hit.
The two remaining bodies trapped in the rubble were almost on top of each other, as if they’d carried on their struggle even as the ceiling came crashing down. He uncovered Silas first. Face down on the rubble, Brick’s friend and childhood saviour lay unmoving. Brick didn’t need to reach out and touch the man to know there was nothing he could do for him.
Which meant that the life force he could still sense was …
Brick stood, panting with exertion, struggling to control the rage that quickly bloomed inside him. With his fists he pounded the thick black rubber handrail at his side again and again, crushing and buckling the metal underneath until he was finally spent. Then, in the same way he’d done with Flea, he gently carried his friend away.
He was in no hurry to go back down. Instead, after wrapping their bodies in blankets, he took each of his dead friends up out of the underground hideout, into the fresh air. He didn’t want them down there with that … thing. He lit a fire and placed them by its edge. Silas would have prohibited it, argued that it would draw attention, but Brick doubted that mattered right now. All he wanted was for their cold bodies to be near some light and warmth. He stood, staring down into the dancing flames, letting the smoke and the heat wash over him.
‘Must go back down,’ he said, half to himself and half to his dead friends.
Brick’s mind, often muddled and slower than everybody else’s, was a jumble of confusion now. A part of him wanted to leave the man-machine-thing there, but a bigger part of him knew that wasn’t the right thing to do. He wished his best friend in the whole wide world was here. Rush always knew what to do for the best. But Rush was gone. Gone with Tia and Jax. Jax! Brick let out a loud sob at the thought of how the albino would react when he discovered that Silas, who had been like a father to him, was dead. Brick had never had a father. But he’d had Maw, and she had been like a mum and a dad all wrapped into one. He thought about her now. Maw had brought him up, just like Silas had brought Jax up. She’d loved him and told him what was right and wrong – she was very big on that. And when he needed help on those things, right and wrong, he always tried to think about what his guardian would do. So he imagined her here now. He remembered how she looked at him when he did something foolish or stupid, and how her expression was very different when he did something bad. He imagined her standing next to Silas’s and Flea’s lifeless bodies, and he imagined asking her what he should do – what the right thing to do was.
He knew what she would say. It didn’t feel right, but deep down, he knew it was.
With a sigh he tipped his big head back so he could look out at the stars twinkling and dancing up there in the void of space. Then, after taking a couple of deep breaths of the cool, fresh air, he walked back down the steps, returning underground to dig his friends’ murderer out from beneath the rock and stone.
Jax, Rush and Tia
Standing in a darkened doorway at the very end of the alleyway, Jax peered out at the group guarding the passage. The woman in charge might be his only problem. Briefly reaching out and touching their minds with his own, Jax had deduced she was the least susceptible to the type of ps
ychic trickery he planned. Still, he felt reasonably sure he could pull it off.
Jax had made his way here after Rush and Tia had failed to meet up as they’d agreed. It hadn’t been easy finding the place – this Juneau character had done a good job of staying off most people’s radar – and Jax had been forced into some fancy detective work, dipping into people’s heads in an effort to discover something that would lead him to his friends. The information had eventually come from an unlikely source: a city guard just north of here had had some illegal surgery done in the past and knew exactly where the bioengineer could be found.
Now Jax was here, he was faced with the not inconsequential task of getting access to the man. The albino thought there was a good chance that Juneau had double-crossed them, taken the young mutants captive so he might hand them over to the authorities and claim whatever reward was being offered. His only hope was that the scientist still had the youngsters in his keeping and he was not too late to free them.
Movement ahead drew his attention back to the task in hand. As one of the lookouts broke away from the others, Jax remained perfectly still, waiting patiently for the man to come closer. Jax’s black clothing helped him remain unseen, but even if he’d been dressed in a bright orange jumpsuit the man would have had trouble spotting him, thanks to the ‘fuzz’ Jax had placed in his mind. As soon as he’d gone, Jax stepped out and headed back towards his group.
‘Hey, Boz. What you doing back so soon?’
‘Forgot something,’ Jax said. In the group’s eyes he looked exactly like the individual who had just left: clothes, hair, walking gait, everything. ‘Yesterday Juneau asked me to take something to the market. Need to pick it up from the surgery.’ It wasn’t proving difficult to make four of the five people see what he wanted them to. The only one he was having to work hard to convince was the tall woman, and he was fairly certain that she too was buying the phantasm he’d created in their minds. He was almost at the door when he spotted the small wooden lean-to beside it. A shallow metal bowl of water had been left there, and beside that the savaged remains of what had once been a large bone. When Dotty poked her head out from the lean-to she recognised Jax immediately and jumped up at him. It would have been obvious to those watching that the gesture was a friendly one had she not been suddenly pulled to a halt by the short metal chain attaching her to the wall. Jax, taken aback by the sight of the rogwan, momentarily allowed the illusion he’d created in the others’ minds to slip.
‘Boz?!’ the woman shouted.
Jax turned and looked at her, noticing the flicker of confusion in her eyes.
‘What?’
When the woman looked from him to the rogwan, it was clear she thought something was up.
‘Dammit,’ Jax mumbled under his breath.
And that might have been the end of Jax’s ruse if Dotty, somehow understanding what was happening, hadn’t taken up an aggressive posture – head low, muscles tense, baleful eyes fixed on the man in front of her. Deep hurghing noises, in complete contrast to the friendly greeting she’d initially gave him, came from the rogwan, who topped the display off by peeling her lips back, treating him to a glimpse of her lethal-looking teeth.
The tall woman’s attention was redirected to Dotty, giving Jax a chance to reinforce his illusion in her mind so that when she looked at him again, Boz was back. ‘Mind you don’t get too near that thing,’ she said. ‘You know what happened to Grubs when he tried to take its bone away!’
The rest of the group, with the exception of one man, who gingerly reached across to hold his left forearm, laughed.
‘Dotty, you are a clever girl,’ Jax said to the rogwan under his breath.
With that, he slipped through the door and entered the building.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Juneau said as the tall albino walked into his secret laboratory from the waiting room. ‘And how did you get that door to open? And why didn’t my security buzzer sound?’
‘To take your questions in order: I’m Jax; I didn’t – you opened it; and when your buzzer went off, you chose to deactivate it.’
‘Now hold on just a –’ The bioengineer paused, deep frown lines creasing his forehead. The buzzer had sounded and he had disabled it. Not just that, but he’d gone on to activate the device around his neck to open the hidden panel. Why had he done that? He’d been working on cracking the security-code problem that Tia Cowper had left him when he’d suddenly come over a little dizzy, a brief touch of vertigo that had made him a little queasy. Then, for no good reason, he’d reached down and pressed the button to let this guy in and …
The frown disappeared, replaced with a look of realisation. ‘Oh, wait a minute. I get it. You’re another one of them, aren’t you? One of those hybrids or whatever. The ones the Cowper girl is mixed up with?’
‘I’d like to ask you some questions.’
Still peeved at whatever trickery he’d been subjected to, Juneau shook his head. ‘Won’t do you no good. Doctor–patient confidentiality is the buzz-phrase here, my pasty-faced friend.’ He pointed a long finger from one of his extra hands at the albino. ‘Say, I could sort out that melanin-deficiency thing you’ve got going on there. Wouldn’t be too expensive. Let’s say about –’
‘Where are Tia and Rush?’
The strangest thing happened to Juneau then. At one level he believed he was giving his albino interrogator the standard spiel about not divulging client information – he could almost feel his lips forming the words and then saying them aloud to this intruder – but on another level he was aware that he was in fact telling the white-skinned freak everything he knew, the words seeming to be spoken by him and not by him at the same time.
‘So you chipped them? Both of them?’
No. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Why what? ‘So she could help her father.’
Juneau shook his head. What the hell was going on here?
‘If I find out you’ve done anything to endanger my friends, I’ll –’
‘We’re fine, Jax.’
The albino spun round to see Tia standing there smiling back at him. Perched on her shoulder was a small monkey. Behind her were Rush and Dotty.
‘Nice to see you, Cowper,’ Juneau said. ‘In fact, I’d go so far as to call your timing impeccable. Now perhaps you’d be so kind as to tell Whitey here to get the hell out of my head.’
Once Tia and Rush had convinced him that Jax would not be listening in to his every thought – something the backstreet bioengineer seemed to find a truly terrible prospect – Juneau returned to his usual cocky and brash self. Holding court around a vis-unit that he’d put the image of the nanobots on to, he made a big show of producing the security-encrypted holo-player, placing it on the desktop alongside an omnipad so they could all see it.
‘Now,’ he began, when he was certain he had everybody’s undivided attention, ‘as you know, the file we wanted to access was highly protected. Only a person of almost genius-level intelligence could crack such a cipher.’
Rush groaned, but the bioengineer ignored him.
‘However, it just so happens that I am a genius. A much maligned genius, but a genius nevertheless. If I’d been born on the other side of the Wall I’d have been lauded as a –’
‘Could you just cut to the chase?’ Tia said. She turned to Jax. ‘Or maybe you should go back into his head and find out what it is we need to know.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ the four-armed man hastily said. ‘In fact, I was on the verge of trying to access the file for the first time myself before Dax, or whatever his name is, bust in here and started doing his little mind tricks. So your coming back when you did is a double bonus. We can see what’s on it together.’ Leaning over and opening a drawer, the scientist took out a weird-looking device – not unlike a gas mask – and placed it over his mouth and nose.
‘What the hell is that thing?’ Tia asked.
‘Vocal imitation apparatus. Neat, isn’t it?’ her own v
oice answered her back. She stared at Juneau, who winked, clearly enjoying the startled look on the young woman’s face. He waved a hand over the holo-player and tapped a series of figures into the holopad that appeared in the air above it. When he spoke again it was neither in Tia’s nor his own voice. Instead it was the unmistakable accent and intonation of the President of the Principia. ‘Cracking the code is only half the task, so it’s a good job I had this thing programmed with Melk’s voice, not to mention those of a number of other high-ranking city officials, a while ago. Following Melk’s most recent broadcast, I was able to fully update the voice records I had on him.’ He gave them all a sly look. ‘You’d be amazed at the stuff you can get done if you place orders in the voice of that old nutjob.’ Gesturing for them all to turn their attention to the holo-player, he continued. ‘Security access code five-nine-alpha-four-four.’ There was a bleep. ‘Play N22 research file, number forty-six.’
An image of a laboratory appeared in the air above the player, and Juneau enlarged it. There was no sound, only a faint hiss, like low-level static. When a man wearing rubber gloves and a long white coat appeared, the camera operator honed in on him. White Coat proceeded to approach a number of rabbits housed together in a large cage. Three of the animals were a dark grey colour, the remaining trio pure white. One by one, the scientist removed the white rabbits from the pen. Holding each one still on the work surface, he reached out his other hand into small polished steel dish and withdrew a syringe which, except for being about a tenth of the size, was identical to the twelve hundred or so that lined the hidden walls of the hijacked transporter back at the dead city. The scientist injected the blue liquid into each of the white furry animals, holding them firmly while they kicked and bucked for a second or two. The rabbits were returned to the cage with the others, where they seemed unfazed by their experience. Having recorded this, the camera panned across, focusing on the structure beside the rabbit pen. There was something about the way the cameraman concentrated on the large metal cylinder that made the watchers uneasy, even though it had no markings to identify what it might be or do.