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by Mike A. Lancaster

  Also by Mike A. Lancaster

  Human.4

  The Future We Left Behind

  Text copyright © 2016 by Mike A. Lancaster

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are from the author’s imagination, and used fictitiously.

  Sky Pony Press books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

  Sky Pony® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyponypress.com.

  Books, authors, and more at www.skyponypressblog.com

  www.themindfeather.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Jacket image by © Shutterstock

  Jacket design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5107-0404-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0405-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  Interior design by Joshua Barnaby

  This one’s for Fran, Jon, Ian, and Alan.

  If a person is defined by the company he keeps, then having you guys as friends should make me awesome—but actually, it just makes me very, very lucky.

  Contents

  01: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HARRY BREWSTER?

  Chapter One

  • Ani

  Chapter Two

  • Joe

  Chapter Three

  • Uncle Alex

  Chapter Four

  • YETI

  Chapter Five

  • A Trail of Breadcrumbs

  Chapter Six

  • Downtime

  Chapter Seven

  • Chasing Shadows

  Chapter Eight

  • Firewall

  02: THE CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE IS DROWNED

  Chapter Nine

  • Gretchen

  Chapter Ten

  • X-Core

  Chapter Eleven

  • Last Rites for a Dying Race

  Chapter Twelve

  • Aphelion

  Chapter Thirteen

  • Perihelion

  Chapter Fourteen

  • Threads

  Chapter Fifteen

  • Going to Ground

  Chapter Sixteen

  • Corridors of Power

  03: GOING VIRAL

  Chapter Seventeen

  • Lennie

  Chapter Eighteen

  • Zugzwang

  Chapter Nineteen

  • Down in the Park

  Chapter Twenty

  • Ends Are Also Beginnings

  If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito.

  —African Proverb

  PART 01:

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HARRY BREWSTER?

  It took no comfort from our nurture

  It never seemed to understand

  We raised our game and fed it virtue

  It raised its head and bit our hand.

  “It Took No Comfort”

  Precision Image

  CHAPTER ONE: ANI

  Ani pretended she was lost and went around the block again, just to make sure.

  Second time around and the guy was still sitting there, behind the wheel of a car that really didn’t belong on this street. You’d have thought that someone conducting “covert surveillance” would choose a car that blended in on a street in the Arbury Estate area of Cambridge.

  A boy-racer GTI with under-lighting, perhaps.

  Or a decade-old Subaru.

  But not a brand-new, high-end beamer.

  That meant a cop or a drug dealer, and the car wasn’t pimped enough for it to be the latter.

  Sore. Thumb. Anyone?

  Suddenly the dull, pre-weekend day she had just spent at school—math, chemistry, English, and French—was forgotten.

  She pulled her hoodie up around her ears, jerked the handlebars of her bike upward, hopped up onto the curb, and pedaled along the pavement away from the BMW. Then she turned out of sight on the other side of the building.

  Ani rapped her knuckles on a curtained window around the corner, waited, got no reply.

  The guy who lived in the flat was named Kinney, and she reckoned she knew him well enough for a favor or two, but she wasn’t sure if Kinney was his first name or last.

  She took out her phone and opened a web browser—a mobile version of the one she used on all of her computers. It was an updated version of the stripped-down browser she’d designed and programmed herself.

  Even before the app was open it had already hooked itself up to someone else’s wireless network and bypassed the user security key. She input the few details she knew about Kinney, pushed search, and it ran its trace using someone else’s IP.

  It took nine seconds to get the information she wanted and she copied over the number to the phone and pressed dial.

  Two rings later Kinney’s lazy voice squeezed “What do you want?” into two syllables: “Whadwant?”

  “Hey, it’s Ani. I live upstairs. Can you open your window for me?”

  “Huh?”

  “Open. Your. Window. Please.”

  Kinney made a noise that was probably how a question mark must sound when uttered alone.

  A few seconds later the curtains twitched, then moved apart. Kinney’s face appeared at the window, staring out at her with wide eyes. He did a half smile/half frown thing and raised the sash.

  “Took your time,” Ani said, handing the bicycle up to Kinney before he had time to refuse and pushing it through the open window. “Good job it wasn’t urgent or anything.” Kinney didn’t have the time—or words—to object and he struggled with the bicycle, making a silent film comedy routine of the whole process as the front fork went left and right and Kinney kept guessing the wrong way and slamming it against the window frame.

  “Do you think you could you make just a little more noise?” Ani whispered harshly. “There are people on the other side of town that haven’t heard your inept bicycle wrangling …”

  Kinney finally got the bike through the window and inside his flat. Then he moved aside and let Ani climb in.

  “What is it this time?” Kinney asked, wheeling the cycle through his living room and toward the front door. “What have you got yourself into now?”

  Ani shrugged.

  “Probably nothing,” she told him. “But the five-o out the front has his eye out for someone from this block and the law of averages says it’s either me or my dad, so …”

  Kinney shook his head.

  “Five-o?” he tutted. “Do people really call the police that?”

  “Five-o. Feds. Cops. PoPo. Fuzz.” Ani flashed him a smile. “You want more synonyms, or will those keep you going?”

  Kinney shook his head again. Seemed like a habit he’d fallen into.

  “How can you live like this?” he asked her as he opened his front door and wheeled her bike out into the corridor.

  Ani gave him a wide grin that she tried to pour a whole cup of crazy into, just for the effect.

  “How can you not?” she asked him, smacking her chest with her hand. “My heart is pounding. Adrenaline is coursi
ng through my veins. In this moment, and others like it, I know with a hundred percent certainty that I’m alive.”

  Kinney let her take the bike.

  “Try to keep it that way, huh?” he said, and closed the door before Ani could come back with a smart answer.

  She shrugged and made her way to the elevator.

  She traveled seven floors up in an elevator that smelled slightly worse than a public toilet, in the company of an old woman who kept looking at Ani’s bike as if it were a personal insult to her delicate sensibilities.

  Ani tried nodding a greeting, but that just made the old woman’s face curdle. Ani reckoned that the old dear must have seen a lot of things going on around the flats in her time, and her default setting was now one of suspicion and distaste.

  Ani thought that it was probably a natural response to a world that had stopped making sense to the woman around the time that the Beatles had first played the Cavern.

  There was a mirror on the wall of the elevator that was so stained and graffitied that it was unusable from just about every angle except the one Ani had chosen.

  She saw a slim, dark-haired teenager reflected back at her with the slightly Asian eyes that she’d inherited from her rather more Asian mother. Her hair was shoulder length and straight, and her eyebrows were plucked into smooth arches.

  Ani wondered what it was that the woman in the elevator saw when she looked at her. Probably another unfathomable teenager of mixed race and with unconventional dress—which made her just something else for the woman to be afraid of in a world that was rapidly losing all sense.

  When the elevator reached seven, Ani wheeled the bike out and tried to think of something she could say that would make the woman less fearful.

  Nothing came to mind.

  The doors closed behind her.

  And then Ani thought of the perfect remark.

  She shook her head, saved the phrase for another day, and approached her front door. Instinctually, she reached out for the door handle.

  And stopped.

  Man in the BMW downstairs, she thought. What was wrong with that picture?

  She pulled away from the handle and propped the bike up against the wall as quietly as she could, moved to the side of the door, and put her back to the wall.

  Her heart was still beating hard in her chest.

  The man in the beamer had been staking out her building, of that she had been certain. But proper procedure for covert surveillance of that type, at least for law enforcement purposes, surely required two people. A second person would be on hand to witness—and indeed corroborate—the findings of the first. And to make sure that if the first guy missed something, the second wouldn’t.

  But the man on the street had been alone.

  That could mean he was an amateur, but everything about him had said five-o: hair buzzed short; slightly arrogant set of the shoulders; reasonably tall.

  Law.

  Which meant he had a partner.

  Alone in his car, meant his partner was … somewhere else.

  She pressed her ear to the door.

  Silence.

  For most people, the absence of noise would have been reassuring, but for Ani it ratcheted up her alert level.

  The flat where she lived was never silent.

  She figured that her dad would be out, but Radio 5 live should have been blaring, because her dad was—it seemed to her—physically incapable of turning the radio off. It was on when he was at home and it was on when he wasn’t, and only Ani seemed able to still its endless cycle of chatter and sports.

  Her dad had lost his job at the electronics factory a few months ago after an annual review of inventory had uncovered some discrepancies, and he was always out in search of his next get-rich-quick scheme. Sometimes Ani didn’t see him for days at a stretch, which might seem weird for most fifteen-year-old girls, but it was just the way things were to her and she accepted it without ever really understanding it.

  But whether her dad was in or out: there should have been noise.

  She took out her phone again and opened up the app that remotely controlled her computer inside the flat. She logged in, opened up iTunes, and selected a track by Skrillex. Then she upped the volume, put her ear to the door, and pressed play.

  She heard the guitars at the front of “Bangarang” start up, loud, and then there were sounds of movement as someone slammed a door, opened another, and then scrabbled through the flat, heading for Ani’s bedroom, where the music was coming from.

  Clearly her dad, used to Ani’s remote computer activities, wouldn’t have been startled enough to chase down the sound.

  Only one explanation made sense: someone else was in the flat.

  By the time the bass synth and dubstep beats kicked in, Ani was heading for the stairwell, leaving her bike still standing up against the flat’s wall.

  She hit the stair door at a sprint and it flew open. When she heard it bang shut she was already down past the sixth floor landing, taking the stairs two and three at a time.

  She didn’t have time to think, just to react.

  Hows, whys, and future plans to deal with them both were shelved, and she converted that anxiety into a little extra adrenaline to keep her moving.

  She’d played this game when she was a little kid, running downstairs to see how fast she could make it to the ground floor, but the abrupt slam of a door up above her made that game suddenly seem so far away and long ago. Because that slam could only mean that the person who’d been waiting for her in the flat was now heading toward the stairs in pursuit.

  Maybe he’d checked out front when the music went off, saw her bike propped against the wall, and had put two and two together.

  She stopped for a second and could hear footsteps pounding down the stairs toward her, which meant that she had a floor-and-a-little head start on him. And, of course, he was some kind of law enforcement operative, while she was just a fifteen-year-old girl. His strides would be longer than hers and in a straight race there was no doubt who would be the winner.

  Ani started running again, increasing her speed, and her mind was suddenly flipping through possible ways to make the race a little less straight, to make the odds a little less skewed in favor of her pursuer.

  He would be able to hear her footsteps, just as she was able to hear his, so hiding on another floor was out of the question. He’d know precisely which one, and he’d find her. Eventually. And she didn’t want to be found.

  Jackie boy, what have you gotten me into? she thought as she passed another landing.

  She’d been chatting with mates on IRC in the school IT suite at lunch when she’d gotten the message from Jack. A quick, urgent instant message: ani i need your help.

  She hadn’t heard from Jack “Black Hat” McVitie for weeks, not since he’d gone dark in the aftermath of their notorious Facebook hack. It had made the papers, even warranting a one-minute piece on the BBC news, and they’d agreed there’d be no contact until some of the dust had settled. Neither of them had boasted about the hack, and no one else knew they had been behind it. That had been the plan: the glory was in the act, not in taking credit for it.

  She’d IMed with Jack, and he’d been even more paranoid than before, darkly alluding to “men in black” and covert surveillance.

  It turned out that Jack—very much wearing his Black Hat—had been fishing around in some government server and had found a file locked behind multiple layers of encryption. Jack had had no idea what he’d found, but he’d taken the file as a personal challenge and had thrown an arsenal of hacking tools at it, cracking its encryption within a few hours. He said it had taken two, so Ani guessed it was more like six.

  It was when he opened the file that the trouble began. Jack hadn’t disconnected from the net, and the file called home. He saw what the file was doing and tried to block the transmission, but it was already too late. It went right through his firewall like it wasn’t there, broke through the software he had runnin
g to stop pirated apps phoning home, opened up a socket, and told someone he’d opened the file. He’d never seen a safeguard like this, but he figured that whoever owned that file was probably already on their way. So Jack uploaded the file to SpeediShare, contacted Ani, gave her the link to the file, and told her that if anything happened to him he wanted the file out there.

  He asked her to grab a copy and keep it safe.

  She’d asked him the obvious question:

  AniQui: What kind of file are we talking about here?

  BlackHat: That’s the thing. It’s nothing. A .wav file. A weird noise. That’s all.

  AniQui: A song? What?

  BlackHat: No idea. A sound. A noise. But the file called home, ani. They’re after me.

  It had sounded fanciful to her, at best. Jack had downloaded an audio file—an uncompressed .wav—and suddenly he was in danger?

  Hackers were a paranoid bunch. They had to be to remain anonymous. But Jack had always taken his paranoia to new and extreme levels. Ani knew his hacker ID, that he lived somewhere in London, that he was a badass hacker and … and that was it. His name certainly wasn’t Jack “Black Hat” McVitie: that was just a play on the name of the man whose death in the 1960s had been the beginning of the end for a pair of East End gangsters called the Krays.

  Surely this had to be an example of his overcautious nature.

  Who would come after him for downloading a sound?

  But he had been persuasive and she’d snatched a copy of the file from SpeediShare and saved it to a flash drive, which was now sitting in her pocket.

  The thing about being paranoid, though, is that sometimes you’re right. It’s the law of averages. You worry about enough things and one of them is bound to come true someday.

  The internet was a digital shrine to paranoia and fear, with millions of people sharing their modern delusions on everything from a systematic cover-up about the existence of UFOs to the 9/11 tragedy being a false flag operation by the US government.

  Ani had always taken such conspiracy theories with an ocean of salt, but when she’d tried to get in contact with Jack before going home he’d been offline.

  Offline.