‘Kloe,’ I said. ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ Clumsy. Blurt. ‘Or, you know. Girlfriend, anything.’ Just so I had all my bases covered.
She didn’t answer, just bent slightly further over the cooking. Her back looked pained, though. ‘No,’ she said, after a moment.
Great. More awkward silence. Well done Stanly, congratulations on your new career as social Black Death. Once again I tried to change the subject. ‘So we pretty much know as much as each other about all this crap now, eh?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I don’t know much about you, though. I assume you have a story.’
‘You could say that,’ I said. ‘Where to begin . . .’
‘I hear the beginning is good.’
We sat down to the meal, which would have tasted spectacular even if it hadn’t come after an extremely tiring few hours, and I told her my story, from the second I turned sixteen and started floating above my bed, to my fighting soldiers minutes before she’d met me. I told her about Eddie and everybody, about fighting Smiley Joe, about leaving Tara and Kloe in the woods – although, as usual, I left out the familial and temporal complications. And then, for a change, we chatted about some normal things, like music and books. Just like real life.
We were just finishing when a phone rang. The tone sounded like something from the 1980s. ‘That’s the spy phone,’ Lauren smiled. She hurried to the other room, and after a few seconds of muffled mumbling she returned, offering the phone to me. ‘Nailah,’ she said. ‘She has your cousin for you.’
My heart leapt, and I took the phone. ‘Eddie?’
‘Stanly! Jesus. You’re all right.’
‘I’m fine. Are you?’
‘We’re all fine. Shouldn’t talk for long, Skank and Freeman say these lines are secure but it’s not worth taking any chances. We’ll use the web thing in future, save these for emergencies.’
‘The web thing?’
‘Some deep web messaging system or other,’ said Eddie. ‘Or dark web. Dodgy web? I haven’t got a clue, to be honest, but Nailah and Skank are all over it. We need to meet, anyway.’
‘Yes. Tonight?’
‘Probably too hot at the moment,’ said Eddie. ‘What with you fighting soldiers and everything.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was trying to be sneaky. I just . . . I wanted to find you guys.’
‘I know, it’s fine. Nailah’s pretty certain that they don’t know where you two are. So it’s best if you sit tight for now and I’ll try and get to you tomorrow. Just wanted to hear your voice.’
‘It’s good to hear yours.’
‘Don’t think that you’re not still in trouble, though.’
‘Seems like we’re all in trouble.’
‘Yeah, fair enough. How are Kloe and Tara?’
‘Fine. Safe.’
‘Good. I’ll be in contact tomorrow. Get some rest for now.’
‘Will do. Take care. Say . . . hi to everyone? I guess? Is Daryl there?’
‘No, he’s with Freeman, Connor and Sharon.’
‘They’re not with you?’
‘We decided it was best to split up. Wouldn’t want us all to get caught at the same time. I’ll explain everything tomorrow. Tell Lauren to keep an eye on the web thing.’
‘OK. Bye.’
‘Bye.’ Click. Lauren had left the room to give me some privacy, which I appreciated. She came back in wearing a half-decent ‘I didn’t hear anything, honest’ smile and I handed the phone over. At least one of the weights in my stomach had lifted. ‘They’re fine,’ I said. ‘They’re all fine.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Eddie’s going to try and arrange a meeting tomorrow,’ I said. ‘He said to keep an eye on the web thing? Sounds like he knows as much about it as you do.’
‘Pretty professional group of covert rebels, eh?’ Lauren smiled darkly.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Until then . . . guess I’ve just got to sit tight.’ This is awkward.
‘You’re welcome to stay here,’ said Lauren, and to her credit she made it sound as though it were completely fine, and not an obligation.
‘Thanks.’
‘Cup of tea?’
‘Please.’
We took our tea through to the living room, which was small, friendly and full of books. There was also a shiny upright piano against one wall, its ivories so polished that I almost didn’t want to touch them in case I dirtied them. There’s something about a piano, though, like they’re inviting you to have a play. I’d dabbled a bit, years ago. Mum had known a woman – she must have been in her nineties – who had given me some lessons, but I’d never had much aptitude. The guitar was the only instrument I’d ever been remotely good at, and I wasn’t exactly good at that, certainly not by any Earth definition of the word ‘good’.
‘Pretty gorgeous, isn’t she?’ said Lauren.
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you play?’ I shook my head and Lauren sat on the red stool and laid her long fingers on the keys. She said nothing, just started to play. I didn’t recognise the piece; I could just about work out that it was classical. She was an expert, her fingers flying up and down the keys almost casually, as though she wasn’t even thinking. My old teacher had played like that, even though her hands were bent and crinkled with arthritis. Hannah, Eddie’s on-off girlfriend, was also a great pianist, but her style was completely different – funky, heavy, in charge, like she was showing the instrument exactly how it was done. Lauren seemed to duet with the instrument, like they were partners.
I like both styles.
As the music flowed from the piano I felt myself begin to think about everything that was going on, all the feelings and craziness rising, but at that precise moment it was too much, and the music was too lovely, so I just stood and closed my eyes and shut everything else out, listening to Lauren build the piece up and up and up, adding more and more layers, until it was like a tornado of clear, melancholy notes. After a while I opened my eyes and looked at her as she played, really looked at her. I could practically feel painful memories pouring out of her, flying on the mournful wings of the piece she was playing. There was something unfathomably beautiful about it, beautiful in the way that pain can be sometimes, and I almost felt as though I should look away, like I was intruding, but no, she was sharing this with me. Or at least, it was there, and if I didn’t want any part of it I could just ignore it. So I just sat down and listened, and wondered what could have happened to her. I wanted to clap when she’d finished, but it didn’t quite feel appropriate, so I just said ‘Wow’ and she immediately looked embarrassed. Probably not a good idea to clap, then. I hurried to pave over it. ‘Thanks, by the way. For fixing my hand.’
‘Not a problem.’
‘Do you have actual medical training? I figured that might help, if you did.’
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Basic first aid, and a bit of reading around the subject. Mostly it’s in the mind. That’s the bit I’m best at, power-wise. Manipulating and fixing. Not so great when it comes to fighting. Hardly any practise, for one thing.’
‘You handled yourself OK earlier.’
‘Thanks, I suppose. I’d prefer to avoid it, if at all possible.’
‘I should give that a go,’ I said, and I did kind of mean it, although I couldn’t pretend that part of me didn’t get a cheap thrill out of it.
Let’s try and make that not be a problem, yeah?
•
Much later I lay on a blow-up mattress in Lauren’s tiny spare room, comfortable in a mass of blankets but unable to sleep, everything rushing around and around, trapped in revolving doors, never reconciling, no solutions. So many questions. They bubbled and seethed and spat inside my brain, driving me nuts, scaring sleep away like rabid guard dogs. I lay on my right side, my left side, my back, my front, curled into a ball, stretched out, under the cov
ers, on top of the covers, swapping pillows, unable to switch anything off, and even when I did manage to stop my brain from bellowing questions, I was left with Tara and Kloe’s faces, and despite myself, despite knowing that I’d had to do it, I hated myself for leaving them alone.
But I told me to.
The last thought I had before my consciousness unravelled into sleep was that if there was any way to change the future and avoid what was going to happen so that Kloe and Tara and I could have something approaching a normal life together, I was going to do it. I didn’t care what it took, if I had to burn all the power out of me, level a city, tear down the sky, I’d do it. For them.
I was standing on the burning deck, and that immediately made me laugh. I knew I was in a dream and I was glad, because it meant that I’d fallen asleep and could simply follow whatever whacked-out script my brain was improvising, the lunatic logic of limbo. The ship was a galleon, an old pirate vessel with creaking wood and whispering sails, and many fires and many spiders running from side to side as if trying to put out the fire, although they had no water. ‘But we’re surrounded by water,’ I opined. ‘For God’s sake. We’re in the ocean. Water, water, everywhere. Why can’t we put it out?’
‘Because,’ replied Mr Freeman, who was trying and failing to put out one of the sails with water from a bucket that was more hole than bucket, ‘fire does what it wants.’
‘You’re dressed like Jack Sparrow,’ I pointed out. ‘You look ridiculous.’
‘Well, why not?’ he responded, swinging his Johnny Depp hair and straightening his hat. ‘It’s all about fancy dress these days.’
‘I don’t wear a costume,’ I countered.
‘Maybe you should,’ he rejoindered. ‘Maybe lycra would suit you.’
‘Wouldn’t mind a cape,’ I mused. I would mind a cape.
Now Tara came in, riding on Daryl’s back. She was giggling, and he was energetic and puppy-like, dancing in and out of the flames. ‘It’s all about how you think,’ pontificated a voice. It was my dad, calling down from the crow’s nest. I didn’t look up. I really couldn’t be bothered to talk to him.
‘Get lost, Dad, will you?’ I riposted.
‘You shouldn’t talk to your father like that,’ admonished Lauren, who was sitting cross-legged in mid-air cleaning her nails, nodding her head to some inaudible song.
‘This is getting me nowhere,’ I announced. ‘I’m going overboard.’
Freeman doffed his hat and started passing round a tray of rum. ‘Drink up, me hearties, yoho!’ he intoned.
‘Whatever,’ I retorted, and dived off the ship. The water was vast, black glass, and as soon as I was in it I wished I was somewhere else. I could see shapes moving hundreds of feet below, an entire world of unnatural things with legs and eyes and tentacles where they shouldn’t be, writhing in a melting pot, ready to be freed, all of them howling and roaring, desperate. I tried to turn my head away but the water was too thick, thick with memory and forlorn questions that had lost their answers, and when I finally managed to hit the surface I was standing in an empty, echoing tube station, and something was coming, I could hear it. I could feel it, coming down through the tunnel, still invisible at this point, and I knew it was about to scream and I couldn’t listen, no, no, no. I turned around and Tara was standing there in her red pyjamas, smiling. ‘It’s not me you should be worrying about,’ she said. ‘Actually.’
And the monster roared, and I had to close my eyes and fall to the ground, because if I couldn’t see it, it couldn’t see me . . .
We can, though . . .
Chapter Fifteen
I JERKED ABRUPTLY AWAKE at eight. I felt profoundly unrested but couldn’t get back to sleep, so I sat at the window for a while watching the blur of cold grey city lurking in the misty morning. You know when you hear about a band or person for the first time, say, or maybe you hear a word you’ve never heard before and then suddenly you start seeing that band or person everywhere, or hearing that word? I felt as though now that Lauren had said it, I could sense something too. Like . . . undercurrents. Layers of physical unease, unseen but definitely present, prevalent, pushing. Dark shapes beneath the surface. I wondered if it was because Lauren had told me about it, or if my heightened senses would have picked up on it eventually anyway. Maybe it was something to do with the shimmer, although I doubted it. I didn’t feel invincible today. Quite weak, in fact. Perhaps the effects had worn off. Or perhaps I was just tired.
Tiredness is physical. Shouldn’t make a difference.
I wish I knew how it all fitted together. What the power was. I knew that that whole idea of ooh, you only use ten per cent of your brain, what if you could unlock the other ninety per cent was bollocks, but it had to be my brain. Working on a higher level. That was what did it.
Why were our powers different, then? Why were Eddie and Connor super-tough, physically, and I was still a weakling? Why could Connor walk up walls and on ceilings when Eddie couldn’t? How come Sharon could practically read minds and I couldn’t? How come I was able to fly the way I did, but nobody else was? Connor’s ability was the closest thing to flight I’d seen in anyone else, but . . .
Maybe Sharon’s right . . .
It’s all the same thing . . .
Manifesting differently . . .
A knock at the door jolted me out of this aggressive spin cycle of questions. ‘Come in,’ I said.
Lauren poked her head round the door. ‘Morning,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure how late you wanted to sleep.’
‘Been up for a while,’ I said. ‘Just . . . thinking.’
‘Coffee?’
‘God yes.’
We had coffee and some toast, then I borrowed Lauren’s phone to ring Kloe. She said that she and Tara were both fine, but her tone was more than a little cold. I could feel anger down the phone, and I said I was a million miles beyond sorry that they had to sit and stew on their own. I trotted out the same old lines about it being necessary and she said she knew. ‘I do realise that,’ she said. ‘I do. Really. And I appreciate you protecting me. Us. But I still don’t have to like being here. Neither of us do.’
‘I know.’
‘When can we go home?’
‘Soon,’ I said, feeling like the worst person ever. ‘I love you.’
She paused before she said ‘I love you too’, and that preyed on my mind a lot more than it should have.
Lauren popped out to get me some spare clothes because I didn’t really fancy going full method with my stinking-homeless-guy act, and had neglected to bring anything else along apart from my black coat. She came back with some T-shirts, a hoody, a pair of jeans and some underwear, which wasn’t that awkward, just incredibly. Luckily, she then suggested that we try some power stuff while we waited for Eddie to get in contact.
Best distraction ever.
I’d done this a lot before but it was very different with Lauren, partly because I was already finding it much easier to do things, although we did go straight to very complex exercises. Odd ones, too. One of the first involved Lauren showing me how to play a simple tune on the piano, and when she was satisfied that I had a handle on the notes she got me to stand and play with my brain. It took a while. You’d think that not having the problem of clumsy fingers falling over each other would be a bonus, but I still kept on playing five keys when I only wanted three, or getting the chords and the melody backwards. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing to do with being musical. It’s precision. That’s the word I always keep in my head. You’re not learning to play the piano with your mind – although I think that’s a pretty good party trick – you’re learning to focus more directly on things. What you said yesterday got me thinking: throwing cars around really is mental strength over agility. Taking the car apart and juggling all its individual components, that’s different.’
Once I’d picked it up, I started i
mprovising. I was glad we were doing this because it meant I could keep my worries buried a little, for now. Every time Tara’s face came back, or Kloe’s, or the dark twisting dreamscape of monsters, or the weirdness bubbling beneath the air in London, I just concentrated harder on what I was doing. I played the tune while balancing books, pouring drinks, folding and unfolding clothes, lighting and snuffing out candles. The candles were where things really started to get interesting. I had about ten books hovering at different levels around me and was keeping them afloat and perfectly still while pouring water from a jug into a glass, and as I was moving the lighter towards the candle I was thinking light. A full two seconds before the lighter had even reached the candle, the wick caught fire. Just like that. Only for a second, but it definitely caught fire. Lauren let out a shocked noise and I very nearly dropped everything. Calm. I let everything down gently, my eyes flickering from the candle to Lauren and back again. ‘Do it again,’ she said. I noticed that she’d stopped saying ‘try again’. I stared at the candle, my face scrunched in concentration, one fist clenched. ‘Don’t strain like that,’ said Lauren. ‘It needs to flow. Think of water.’
‘I’m trying to think of burning.’
‘Think of both. You’ve shown you can multi-task.’
‘I’ve always been able to do that,’ I said, keeping my gaze fixed on the candle. ‘I used to eat, read, watch TV and chat to my dog at the same time.’
‘How well did you do any of those things, though?’
‘Well,’ I said, staying focused, ‘a lot of the food missed my mouth, I read whole chapters without taking in anything that happened, and my dog kept saying I was repeating lines of dialogue from the TV rather than carrying on our conversation.’
‘Points for effort.’
‘Cheers.’
Suddenly the candle lit. Making sure not to let the triumphant feeling distract me, I focused on the flame, breathing into it, in and out, as though it were coming from my lungs, from my body, my blood. It grew bigger, and then I relaxed and it stayed burning. Lauren whistled. ‘That’s pretty impressive. I can’t do that.’
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