by Mike Essex
“I can’t be alive. I have no Tether.”
“You’re Tethered to me,” I replied. “Those feelings you experienced? The foul taste, the intense sound, the blinding light? I did that to you.”
“No one could do such a thing,” he cried out in pain as his eyes started to burn and he realised I wasn’t kidding.
“You have your life now,” I told him. “I will be watching you and if you so much as hurt anyone again then I will torture you for the rest of your days.”
“Then I’ll just die and take you with me.”
“Just try it. I’ve survived one broken Tether and I’m pretty sure I can survive yours too. If not for Suri I wouldn’t have been so kind. Now get out of here.”
He took Suri’s wheelchair and pushed her from the room. I could see him whisper goodbye to her as he left.
As he made his way into the corridor I could hear Grace shout out for him to stop. I ran after him and watched Grace aim her weapon directly at him as he walked away, pushing his sister as he went. She struggled with the weapon in her hand, countless voices no doubt running through her mind telling her to kill him.
I placed a hand on top of her own and told her “He can’t harm anyone else now.”
Reluctantly she lowered the pistol. We watched the snatcher leave and hoped we would never have to see him again.
Whilst Will recovered we helped Jacobi and his citizens to round up the remaining soldiers who were no longer under the control of SO13. Bit by bit their humanity was slowly being restored to them and they were returning to their normal selves. People like us; people who had never wanted to fight.
They were teachers, mechanics, builders, farmers and more, all of them classed as “have-nots” in terms of wealth but no less valuable for it in my mind. They had all been residents of London, survivors trying to forge a new life in this broken city; a new life that was almost taken from them by SO13.
None of them could remember what had happened during their time under SO13 control, when their actions had not been their own. Over the hours that followed their own memories started to slowly return to them. I felt a sadness for those who we had killed in self-defence.
“What are you planning to do with them?” I asked Jacobi.
“They aren’t a threat any more so we’ll either let them go or they can choose to join Q-Whitehall.”
“But the base is gone?”
“Not at all. We’ve simply relocated to the surface. London is our Q-Whitehall now.”
“So you aren’t going to give the city over? The McDougals are incredibly powerful and there’s no way to know how long they’ve been stopped for. They will come back here.”
“Let them try,” said Jacobi. “We’ve just taken on a lot of new recruits and this time we’ll be ready.”
“I’ll help,” Grace interrupted. “I can’t think of a better cause than this,” she shook hands with Jacobi.
“Well then it’s settled,” said Jacobi. “My citizens will live on the surface and we will make this city our own. Where once we hid, we will now stand tall.”
Jacobi may have been stripped of his chance to be King but as I stared at him on the repaired streets of London I couldn’t think of a better leader. His city had been fixed, the signal had been destroyed, his opponents defeated and his army had grown. If anyone could protect the city it was Jacobi.
“Thank you,” said Jacobi.
“What for?” I asked.
“Telling me your name.”
SIXTY TWO
Jacobi’s medical team put my arm into a plaster cast so it could start to heal and bandaged up the cut on my hand. They treated Grace’s burns, although they said she would be scarred for life.
Grace agreed to stay in London, at least for the short term. She had longed for a cause to support and the situation in London had given her an entire city to help. She wasn’t ready to abandon this city in the same way the Government had. If more people had been like Grace, her parents would have been alive today. This was her chance to put things right.
“Are you sure you don’t need me to come with you Emzie?” asked Grace.
“I’ll be fine,” I replied. “I deactivated the mines around the city and I need to get Will back to The Deck. I promise I’ll be back in a week, ok?”
“It’s a deal.”
“And promise you’ll take care of Anya and Alyx?”
“Of course,” Grace hugged me and waved goodbye as I ran towards the prison’s medical centre. I’d received word that Will was finally awake and I still had a lot of questions for him to answer.
Will was sat up in his bed, waiting for me to arrive. “Emmie,” he said weakly, his face still white, his body weak.
I didn’t care how he looked, here was my brother sat in front of me. Not dead, not a murderer, just my brother, alive and well. “Will,” I replied, almost in disbelief that he was finally here. I held his hand in my own and placed my fingers between his.
As I looked at his worn face I wondered if this was really Will or if it was another trick. I held his hand and raised it up towards his face. He looked at me confused as I turned my hand and placed it behind his. Before he could question me I placed his hand over his face and waited for the smoke to appear, for the fake skin to disappear and his real identity to be revealed.
He mumbled whilst I held his hand over his face, trying to fight it, but I had to be sure. As I looked up at his face I dreaded what I would see, or rather who I would see, but was relieved to find that Will’s face remained. It was really him.
“Are you crazy?” he shouted at me. “Is this your idea of a reunion?”
“I had to be sure. I… it’s a long story,” I replied and then dumbfounded I asked. “How are you alive?”
“That’s a long story too. I guess I should start at the beginning, one week before my death,” he moved two fingers on each hand to emphasise the word ‘death’ was in inverted commas. “It all started when Dad came to see me and told me I had to die.”
“He what?”
“I hadn’t seen him for years and then one day he just shows up with some stupid mask on and tells me that Tobias Zen is going to try and kill me.”
When I’d been reunited with my father he had been using a fake identity then too. He’d also claimed to be working with Tobias, so it was possible what Will was telling me was true.
“I didn’t believe him,” explained Will. “But then he showed me the data Tobias had gathered and how it would lead to a desire for him to kill me to see if you would survive. The only way to be sure you would be safe was to fake my own death.”
“But I felt you die? Vlad killed you.”
“No, you felt our Tether being destroyed and that was what happened. The device that Vlad used to separate us was one that I’d modified back at TethTech.”
“Modified how?”
“I’d been working on an experiment to separate Tethers by blocking all the senses at the same time but it had proven unsuccessful. So I based the final device on those experiments.”
“You used an unsuccessful device on yourself? We could have both been killed!”
“It was a calculated risk. The data I was shown by our father made it seem like the unusual Tether we share would allow it to work, and it did,” he smiled.
“But how can we be alive without a Tether?”
“That I can’t explain,” said Will. “Even our father and Tobias, who have studied Tethers for their entire lives, could not crack that mystery. Something happened on the last day of the Siege that changed us and made us different. That’s all I know.”
“Well we’re here now,” I hugged Will, whilst inside all I wanted to do was hit him for leaving me without so much as a goodbye. “So how did you get to London without being seen?”
“After you saw me die and Vlad had gone our father took my body to his lab underneath the Houses of Parliament. He had promised to keep me in his most secure lab, one that only he knew existed and that Tobias would nev
er find. He promised to wake me when you were safe.”
“So you just left me to survive on my own?” I released my arms from around him.
“No. I left you a DualCam with instructions that would lead you to The Deck and to Tobias’ final machine so they could stop him. Didn’t you get it?”
I had. Will had arranged for the parcel to be delivered to me on my Birthday and his fiancée had been the one to hand it to me. He had stuck to his word. “Yes, although The Deck found me first.”
“Trust Dad not to stick to the plan. I guess he wanted to protect you as soon as possible. Trust me when I say that this was the only way Emmie. Neither of us wanted to hurt you.”
I was used to shades of grey from my father but it was hard to hear that Will had been alive all this time and had kept it from me. “Well you did!” I replied, the wounds too raw for me to forgive him.
“You have to know, if I could have reached you then I would have, but the safest thing to do was stay away. That’s why I wore the cloak,” he pointed to the purple cloak on the bed beside him, identical to the one worn by the snatcher.
“After our father rescued me, he promised to wrap me in a Separationists cloak. That way he could ensure that if any signal remained between us it would be masked and you wouldn’t come looking for me.”
Just like the snatcher blocking out Suri, my brother was trying to block me out as well. I tried to argue that I wouldn’t have come looking but he would have known that was a lie. “But why wear it now? Our Tether is broken.”
“If even the slightest part of our Tether remained I wanted to be sure that if someone found me, they wouldn’t find you.”
“Who’s they? Tobias is dead.”
“Yes but his research lives on. We’ll never be completely safe Emmie, that’s why we have to get back to Dad so he can make this right,” he started to raise up from the bed.
“Don’t you’ll hurt yourself.”
“It’s fine, I can manage. We’ve wasted long enough talking.”
As my brother placed a foot on the floor, the door to our room opened and in walked Vlad, repeating those four words that changed everything. “Are you ready Will?”
SIXTY THREE
“Stay back,” I drew my gun and pointed it towards him. “Stay back Vlad, or I will shoot you.”
“Emmie,” said Will.
“I won’t let you finish the job.”
“Emmie,” Will placed a hand on my shoulder. “It’s ok, he can’t hurt us.”
“Just because his hands are broken doesn’t mean he can be trusted.”
“No, I mean he can’t hurt us. Vlad, hit me,” my brother walked towards Vlad and closed his eyes. “Go on.”
“Stop messing about,” said Vlad. “We’ve got places to be.”
I looked on confused at my brother and his supposed killer as they walked towards me with no sense of malice between them.
“It’s ok Emmie, he’s one of us now,” said Will.
“He tried to kill us, countless times!”
“Yes I did,” said Vlad. “Tobias promised me immortality and I did whatever he asked without fail, including trying to kill your brother. But when your friend, Grace, tried to kill me, Tobias left me to rot.”
“That doesn’t change who you are.”
“It’s true, I’m a killer but I’m your killer now. Your father saved me, healed me and reconnected me.”
“Reconnected?” I asked.
“It’s complicated, I…”
Will interrupted. “Vlad was one of Tobias’ first experiments and he was Tethered to a mainframe in TethTech. It was designed to keep him alive whenever Tobias wasn’t in control of him. Dad must have found a way to hack into that server and keep Vlad alive.”
My father was no hacker. I started to suspect that Jill had been involved and wondered just how many more people had lied to me.
“So he’s being run by a computer?” I asked.
“Kind of. It simulates a Tether event and gives out orders that are then followed. Vlad still has his own freewill but the computer can override it,” said Will. “Unfortunately SO13 must have also hacked their way in, allowing them to use Vlad to attack you in the prison.”
“But why didn’t he hurt me?”
“Your father reprogrammed my brain chemistry not to,” explained Vlad. “When SO13 told me to hurt you it clashed with my other programming and I couldn’t do it.”
His story held up but I still didn’t trust Vlad. I’d seen too much blood on his hands for that; especially that of my brother.
“It’s time to go,” said Vlad, tossing Will the purple hooded cloak, which he refused.
“There’s no point hiding anymore,” he replied.
We left through the back entrance to the prison where Jacobi had arranged for a car to be left with what little fuel he could find. I thought about saying goodbye to R&R but knew I’d be back soon enough. The priority now was telling March the truth about my feelings for Rex.
Grace knew where we were going, so I was sure she’d tell them. It would give me the time I needed to set things right.
I sat in the back seat of the car while Will drove us to The Deck’s base; following instructions from Vlad. As the dense city streets turned to farmland and industrial estates it was my first sight of the future homes SO13 and the Government had planned for the have-nots. They had regenerated this part of the city but whilst the heart of the city had been rejuvenated into a place of excess this area had been twisted into a place of squalor. Given the option to change things however they wanted, they chose to keep the have-nots in rundown, horrific conditions. To keep them in their place, I assumed. There really was something sick about what our world had become.
As I tried to wrap my mind around everything that had happened I started to feel my eye lids grow heavy. It had been such a long week and the attack against the McDougals along with the painkillers for my arm had really taken it out of me.
All I wanted to do was sleep and as soon as I thought about sleeping the next thing I knew I was dreaming.
I dreamt about Jacobi rising to claim his crowd, Grace caring for Anya and Alyx, R&R helping with the clean-up and Tom trying to form a life without a mission to guide him. Lastly I thought about Chris and the sacrifice he had made. He’d died a hero and maybe that was the only mission he’d ever wanted.
The car screeched to a sudden stop and I was jolted awake.
“Sorry about that,” said Will as he turned off the ignition.
“Where are we?” I asked, looking at the decaying warehouse in front of us.
“We’re here. It’s time to catch up with Dad.”
“This isn’t right,” I told them as they walked from the car ignoring me. “This isn’t The Deck’s base.”
“It is,” replied Will. “Just not the one you’ve seen anyway.”
“How many bases do they have?” I asked.
Will held out his hand. “It’s not important,” he told me.
I pushed his hand to one side in disbelief. “It is important! No more lies. Tell me everything.”
“All will be explained inside,” he told me as he pointed towards the structure.
Three black silos surrounded the rusted warehouse, my father climbing down from one of them. He jumped to the ground and waved at us. “Emmie, Will, it’s so good to see you both.”
He embraced Will and pulled his face against his chest. “It’s been too long son.”
Then he turned to me and pulled me into his arms gently so as not to cause me further pain. “And you, we will never be apart again. I promise. The family is back together now,” he motioned towards the ramshackle warehouse. “Look at our new home.”
“Our home?” I asked.
“Sure it’s not a fancy high rise or anything like that but we will be safe here. No one is ever going to hurt any of us. I promise,” my father led us inside the warehouse where a small bundle of joy raced towards me.
“Pixie!” she immediately rol
led onto her back, eager for her belly to be rubbed. “Who’s a good dog?”
“She missed you,” said March, who followed closely behind her. “And so did I.”
He moved into kiss me and it was just like I had never left, the feelings running through my body, reminding me just how safe he made me feel. I pulled away when I remembered what I had to tell him. “I’m sorry,” was all I could muster.
“It’s ok. I know you’ve had a hell of a week.”
I wondered how much March had been told whilst we had been apart. We’d barely talked all week but I knew Jill had been watching us for some time. Had she seen my kiss with Rex? Did March already know?
“March, there’s something I need to tell you.”
“Tell me in a minute, there’s something I need to show you first,” he took my hand and walked me through a network of corridors each one locked by a different door and access code. Although it certainly felt secure it didn’t seem like a welcoming family home.
“What was this place?”
“An old weapons testing factory,” he replied. “Don’t worry it’s perfectly safe.”
Behind us walked my father and Will, barely speaking two words to each other. “Just like old times” I thought to myself. It was great to have my family back together but I had no intention of living every second of every day with them. We’d probably all kill each other!
Nonetheless March and my father seemed positively excited with this place and whatever they were keen to show us. I owed them at least a cursory look at it.
As I walked through the largest set of doors I realised that what they were showing me was something I’d already seen, something I dreaded seeing again.
“Why did you rebuild it?” I demanded. “Why?”
SIXTY FOUR
I tried to turn and run from the room but the large doors slammed shut behind me. Will just looked ahead with curiosity. “It’s ok,” he told me. “This has to happen.”
I stared at the machine in front of us. The same machine that Tobias had trapped me in when he had tried to kill everyone on the planet. The machine my father promised me he had destroyed. “You haven’t seen what it can do,” I desperately told Will.