Ace of Spiders

by Stefan Mohamed

  ‘We took the sewers,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Eddie. ‘Fair play.’

  Daryl nodded. ‘Yeah. But we had a first-class seat with Stanly Air, so it wasn’t too bad.’

  ‘And what air it was,’ I said. ‘Seriously, you might think we smell bad right now, but down there . . . I hope none of you ever have to experience that.’

  ‘Not pleasant, is it?’ said Sharon, one eyebrow half raised, and I immediately remembered the Worm and felt like a complete knob head. But she smiled, and so did I.

  Connor was standing behind her, and I chanced a smile. ‘Hey. You OK?’

  ‘Tip top,’ said Connor. ‘You?’

  ‘You know. Struggling on.’ He was still off. I didn’t like it.

  We were joined today by Fitz and Box. Fitz was a lanky guy with dreadlocks, his neck and arms a forest of tattoos. He offered me a grin and a handshake that suggested someone you wanted to stay on the right side of. Box, meanwhile, had military-short black hair and an improbably muscled, peculiarly proportioned body that made him look like he’d been drawn by Rob Liefeld. He also looked like he could have killed me with his bare hands. He turned out to be the opposite of chatty.

  Lauren, Daryl and I started proceedings, relating what had happened with the three guys and the soldiers earlier. Eddie punched a wall and Fitz cracked his knuckles. ‘Bastards,’ he said. ‘This won’t stand.’

  ‘There’ll be more where that came from,’ said Maguire. ‘Big mistake on their part, though. People won’t put up with it.’

  ‘No,’ said Skank. ‘Between the military and police presence, the lack of information, the suggestion of terrorism, the bizarre weather conditions and now this . . . I wouldn’t want to be so on the nose as to say that I predict a riot, but . . .’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Fitz. ‘Could be a good thing.’

  ‘City-wide chaos?’ said Connor. ‘Yeah, I can see how that would be a positive development.’

  ‘Cover for us,’ said Fitz. ‘Army and police are busy sorting out civil unrest, petrol bombs, all that jazz, and we can take out our targets quickly and easily in the background. They’ve got plenty of resources, but they ain’t unlimited. Thinner they’re spread, the better for us. Plus, bunch of pigs and fascists getting bricked in the head? Kinda tickles my warm bits.’

  ‘Well, that’s just lovely,’ I said. ‘Speaking of things that are not Fitz’s warm bits, does this mean we have a plan?’

  Mr Freeman laid a map of the city out on the table and addressed the room. ‘We’ve discovered that Unique Initiatives have two primary sites where their empowered experiments are taking place.’

  ‘I presume they’re what’s causing the freaky weather?’

  Freeman nodded. ‘Not a side-effect I’d foreseen.’ He placed a very blurry photograph on the table along with the map, and although it was hard to make out what it showed at first, the realisation sent a cold collective shudder around the room. It was a human body, pale and old-looking, lying slack on a hospital bed with far too many wires and tubes poking out. The wires snaked into a large machine at the head of the bed, and I could just about make out many more in the background, disappearing into indistinct distance.

  ‘My God,’ said Sharon.

  ‘Morter Smith’s master plan,’ said Freeman. ‘Quite brilliant, in its own twisted way. It serves their two main purposes – subduing the threat of the empowered, while simultaneously using them as an efficient and powerful energy source. And they need a lot of power for what they’re trying to achieve.’ Which is what? Get more power?

  How much do you need, for God’s sake.

  ‘Does it . . . kill them?’ said Eddie.

  ‘As far as I know,’ said Freeman, ‘the Group has found a way of keeping them preserved. There is no limit to the amount of power produced, it can be mined for as long as the body and mind stay even slightly alive.’ He looked at our horrified faces, into my eyes. I felt sick. ‘I should warn you,’ he said, ‘that once we release the subjects, which is how the plan currently stands, many of them will be in a disturbed, and disturbing, state. Extremely agitated, possibly violent, potentially even vegetative.’

  ‘Better to be dead,’ muttered Connor.

  ‘The primary site is beneath Canary Wharf,’ said Maguire. ‘Secondary is upriver, beneath the East India Docks. The Shard acts as a central hub, directing their efforts.’

  ‘The Shard?’ I said, pulling myself away from the awful photograph. ‘Why there?’

  ‘Perfect cover,’ said Fitz. ‘As far as the public knows, it’s just Middle Eastern oil barons and Russian plutocrats buying up luxury office space because they can. Those kinds of people aren’t obligated to actually give any information to the citizens of the country they’re squatting in, so everyone just accepts it. Ideal for the Angel Group’s headquarters in London. The plan is for us to split into groups, one for each of the three sites. We take them down, and bye bye Angel Group, monsters, black snow, everything.’

  Everybody looked at each other. This was starting to feel pretty damned real now . . . but I was ready. The picture of the body had been the last straw, the final nail in the coffin for the Group as far as I was concerned. I was ready to destroy them.

  Freeman produced a number of diagrams, maps and photographs from a manila folder and looked around with an uncharacteristically intense expression. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I doubt I need to remind you all that this is going to be somewhat on the risky side, so I just want to make sure that everybody is still . . . game.’

  I looked at Lauren, knowing that she had the least combat experience and had been properly thrown in at the deep end. But there was no fear in her face that I could see. She was resolved, and so was everybody else; even Connor seemed to have been galvanised by the photograph.

  Surprisingly, it was Box who spoke up. ‘Seems like the moment for someone to give a rousing speech,’ he said, in a surprisingly high-pitched Cockney accent. ‘And I can’t be arsed with that bollocks. So let’s just get on with it, yeah?’

  Freeman smiled. ‘Seconded. Now. Here it is.’

  For several days we sneaked around assembling the plan, working out who would be where at what time and what they would need to do. Those of us with telekinesis practised fiercely with one another, taking it in turns to play as unstoppable forces and immovable objects, and between them Skank, Maguire, Fitz and Box gave us a kind of Wikipedia version of paramilitary strategy to observe. And all the while, black snow continued to fall, thickly.

  There was nothing on the news about the murders of the men on Lauren’s road, but we were starting to notice more and more people out in the streets when they weren’t supposed to be, which made it both easier to traverse the city and much more tense, because if anyone had recognised us as terrorist suspects we’d have been screwed. I phoned Kloe whenever I could find a signal, reassuring her that it was nearly over, constantly going over what my future self had told me, that within a week and a half of leaving them in the woods everything would be over, everything would be fine. It was what allowed me, eventually, to sleep at night, to put up a lead screen between my inner eyes and the mental projection of Kloe and Tara’s scared faces, or the rows upon rows of sleeping prisoners, their power sucked from them against their will, or the imagined face of Morter Smith, whose name and phantom image I was starting to hate more than I’d ever hated anyone or anything. I couldn’t wait to come face to face with him, to hold him down as I tore his horrific work down around his ears, to rub his face in his failure.

  By the end of the meeting on Sunday everyone was ready, and we were set to strike the following night. First Maguire, then Fitz and Box, then Nailah and Skank, then Connor and Sharon left our latest shabby meeting place, but I hung back and went through to the kitchen, where Eddie was staring out of the window, smoking a cigarette. ‘Yo,’ I said. ‘Can I have one?’

  ‘N
ope.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I sat on the counter. ‘Ready for this?’

  ‘Not even remotely. Why, are you?’

  ‘Haven’t got the foggiest.’

  Eddie laughed grimly.

  ‘Eddie?’

  ‘Stanly.’

  ‘Remember back before I came to London? When you just rang up out of the blue?’

  ‘Dimly.’

  ‘Why did you? You never really told me.’

  ‘Why did I call?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Eddie shrugged. ‘I . . . I just had a feeling. That’s all. Turned out I was right.’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah.’ A feeling.

  There’s always more to these powers than you think.

  My cousin laughed again, but ruefully this time. ‘Pretty good job I did of protecting you from all this stuff, eh? We’re not even on the same team tomorrow.’

  ‘Makes sense to split the superpowers equally,’ I said. ‘Although I do enjoy watching you laying smackdowns, so I’ll be sorry to miss that. And as for protecting me . . . you didn’t have to take that responsibility quite so literally.’

  Another rueful chuckle. ‘I suppose not.’ Eddie looked at me. ‘You know, you’re a pain in the arse,’ he said. ‘In everyone’s arse. In fact, you’re such a pain in the arse that you remind me very much of me at fourteen.’

  ‘I’m eighteen.’

  ‘Like I said, me at fourteen.’ Eddie’s eyes flashed with mischief, a look that I wished I saw on his face more often. ‘But you’re pretty impressive too.’

  ‘Gee, thanks cuz,’ I said. ‘Best pep talk ever.’

  ‘You’re welcome, squirt.’

  ‘Admit it,’ I said. Please do. Please admit it. ‘A part of you, even a tiny part, ever since you’ve had powers, has wanted to do something like this. Crazy mission taking on the bad guys, all righteous and outnumbered.’

  Eddie took a last drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt out into the night. Then he winked at me. ‘Don’t tell anyone. It’ll spoil my image.’

  ‘The image of a perpetually worried, nagging old woman?’

  Those mischievous eyes again. ‘Best secret identity ever.’

  I grinned, and we exchanged an incredibly manly hug, and I left.

  I got to sleep surprisingly quickly that night, what with the merry-go-round of new information and worries twirling in my brain, and at some point my eyes opened and I was standing in the garden of the first house I’d ever lived in. The garden was long and tangled and wild, a jungle for a small child. My dad hated gardening.

  Mum stood behind the kitchen window, looking out at me. I waved and she half-waved back, distracted. My dad was leaning against the fence, smoking. ‘You’ve been gone a long time,’ he said.

  ‘So have you.’ The sky was changing so fast, blue to silvery mirror to twilight, burning sunset to night, back to blue.

  ‘How does it feel? Having to do things yourself? Look after yourself?’

  ‘You threw me in at the deep end a bit.’

  ‘You taught yourself to swim.’ He exhaled smoke and it curled into different shapes, dancers and guards and animals, shimmering.

  ‘Never been much of a swimmer.’ I ran my finger along the grip of the gun. ‘More into my flying.’

  ‘I never really did either,’ said Frank. He looked towards the kitchen. Mum was making tea or something behind a window made of things they never said to each other.

  ‘I’m sorry I turned out wrong,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘Can’t have been all your fault.’

  ‘But this isn’t how it’s meant to work,’ I said. The gun was a comfort. ‘I’m not grown yet. I’m supposed to call you when things get scary. You’re supposed to come and sort it all out. That’s what parents do.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be a superhero,’ said Frank. ‘Batman never rang his parents when the going got tough. Superman didn’t.’

  ‘Their parents died before they assumed superheroic status.’

  ‘Kind of the point. A bit.’ Frank sounded sort of like Daryl now. ‘We’re not dead. But we can’t help you.’

  ‘You should be doing this for me.’ The gun, trembling in my hand. The barrel, pressed against the head of the man. The man, kneeling in the grass. His face, shifting like the sky, too rapid to be anyone real. ‘I shouldn’t be killing. What would Mum say?’

  ‘She certainly wouldn’t be happy,’ said Frank.

  I raised the gun to the sky. ‘Just one thing, before I go.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘This is not a daddy-issues thing.’

  ‘I never said it was.’

  I laughed a gallows laugh and pulled the trigger, and even though the BANG was written on a piece of comedy paper that fluttered to the ground, even though I didn’t even point it at the man with the shifting face, he still keeled over, dead. I sighed, a sigh that made the whole town shake, and tossed the gun to Frank. ‘Do me a favour and empty it.’

  ‘What did your last slave die of?’

  ‘Insubordination.’ I looked back towards the kitchen.

  Mum had turned away.

  Chapter Eighteen

  LAUREN AND I spent most of Monday going over and over the plan, ad nauseum. I kept wanting to call Kloe, and when I eventually worked up the courage I didn’t even hint that there was something going down. She was OK again, tired but bright. She said that she and Tara were thick as thieves now, sharing secrets left right and centre. This was so achingly wonderful and warming to hear that I found myself laughing much louder than I should have.

  Probably a good clue that everything’s very much not OK.

  Six o’clock rolled around after another full day of coal black snow and fear, and as I watched real darkness overtake the peculiar not-quite-darkness of the day, I almost felt ready. Lauren was strangely calm, although I knew how apprehensive she was about fighting. I’d given her as much advice about combat as I could based on my limited experience, testing her reflexes by throwing things that she had to deflect. She was stronger and more adept than she would give herself credit for. I knew she’d be fine.

  I hoped she’d be fine.

  We went out into the city wrapped in our coats, keeping to the shadows. There were no patrols in the vicinity at the moment and we quickly reached the point where we needed to split up. ‘You be careful,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘You too.’

  ‘Please. Be careful.’

  ‘I will. Don’t worry.’ She patted my shoulder as if she wasn’t sure what to do or say. ‘See you later.’

  ‘Yeah. Good luck.’

  She disappeared into the thick, overbearing night, armed with the weapons I had taken from Connor and Sharon’s safe, to meet Eddie, Box and Nailah at their rendezvous near the Shard. Their part of the plan involved storming the place, creating a healthy amount of havoc, finding Nailah’s contact and stealing as much data as possible. It almost sounded fun.

  I had a feeling that mine was going to be less fun.

  I glided through the night, low against the black carpet. Although my group’s target, the inspiringly-named Research Site One, was positioned beneath Canary Wharf, the actual entrance was almost a mile away, and it would take some high-level hacking – something that, unsurprisingly, Skank was taking care of – before we could even think about getting in there and raising the requisite level of hell. I kept turning the plan over in my head as I flew, thinking about how much violence my role was going to require.

  Seems to be what I do these days.

  I reached the Tube station and hid across the road behind a car. Once again there was one truck at the entrance, and three guards that I could see, leaning against the vehicle talking.

  Speaking of violence . . .

  All the colours were weird, the orange street lamps and black snow disto
rting everything, giving the street an unpleasant drunken quality. I blinked to re-focus, narrowed my eyes, concentrated. The truck spun away from the entrance and came to rest about twenty feet down the road, knocking two of the guards to the ground, the other sent stumbling off-balance. I took advantage of the confusion and flew full-pelt towards the Tube station. Without slowing down I lashed out mentally, knocking the third guy into the other two, shot straight past them and carried on flying, down the steps, tearing open doors and gates like they were nothing, gliding over ticket barriers and down the still, silent escalators. The lights were off and I held my torch in front of me as I flew down into the bowels of the station. I took a right, alighted on the platform and breathed. The silence was complete down here, no voices or distant clanking and rattling, not even the murmur of wind. It seemed more unsettling today.

  Ain’t everything?

  The leftward tunnel would take me where I needed to go. I took one more deep, not-particularly-calming breath and stepped towards the edge . . .

  The noise that suddenly erupted from the darkness fused all the hairs on my body and my spine iced over. It was an impossibly deep roar, something huge and very, very alive, and it was coming from the other tunnel. Eastbound. It reverberated around the platform for an agonisingly long time before dying away and I tried to remember how to move my limbs.

  OK.

  What. The HELL. Was that.

  The word monster suggested itself to me. I wished that it hadn’t, or at least that it wasn’t such a plausible suggestion.

  It wasn’t close, which was a slight comfort, but it definitely wasn’t as far away as I would have liked it to be. Ideally, I wanted it so far away that there was no physical way that I could hear even a suggestion that it existed. I stood for a second, waiting. Should probably move. Guards will be down here soon. The familiar silence after the roar was both comforting and worrying, because it wasn’t peace, it was just a gap between terrors. Five seconds, ten . . . and then it came again, distant and enormous and unknowably furious. It made the giant blue dog’s roar seem like the yelp of a Chihuahua.