“Hell if I know. Imagine my surprise when I walked in and found you.”
“C’mere and give us a cuddle,” Sam said.
Sailor rolled his eyes. “Oh alright, you.”
Sam reached his arms up and around him, squeezing tight.
A car alarm sounded. Sam opened his eyes.
The harsh glare of the sun reflected in dirty pools of rainwater. Cardboard boxes and other bits of rubbish. Not in bed, then. No Sailor here. Sam’s arms were wrapped tightly around himself, curled up in an alleyway that smelled of piss and vinegar. His torn shirt stuck wetly to his skin. The swirling mass of clouds above him made patterns in the sky, orange and violet.
He didn’t remember, but he knew he’d just had a fix. He felt too good to be anything other than high.
Sam closed his eyes and saw himself on a dancefloor. Beautiful boys and girls bathed in aquamarine light moved in slow-motion liquid love, their eyes shining brightly. Sailor was amongst them—Kit too, both shimmering gorgeous, eyes smeared with shadow, lips glistening, painted in reptilian leather. They waved at him, smiling.
Then, he saw him. On the edge of the dancefloor, the sinister, phantom form of Janus Jeeves. His eyes were black and bloodshot, his teeth metal spikes. A white flame surrounded him as he cackled like the demented maniac he was.
When Jeeves waved his hand, the people danced. They squirmed and twisted, leapt through the air. They kissed, they tore off all their clothes. They laughed and cried.
When he waved his hand a second time, everyone froze.
Another wave and they were dancing again.
Sam made his way through the vast crowd of bodies towards his former mentor. When he reached his target, Janus Jeeves grinned at him with all his teeth.
“So, the prodigal son returnssss,” he taunted, clasping his bony fingers together.
“I ain’t your son,” said Sam. “You ain’t nothing to me.”
Jeeves only shook his head, tisking at him like a child.
Sam looked down and noticed a six-inch blade held tightly in his right hand. The blade was thick and sharp, the handle enameled in black glitter.
He lashed out, two quick slashes. X marks the spot across the body of a man who should never have existed in the first place.
But Jeeves did exist, and he bled like a stuck pig.
He didn’t scream, just looked down at his open wounds, as if now that Sam could see his insides, he could really see him. He smiled and snaked out an arm, grasping Sam’s wrist in a vice claw. “I’m not the enemy,” Jeeves gritted out through eyes of stone. Or were they eyes of light? Sam couldn’t properly tell.
Jeeves let go of his wrist, then vanished. No cloud of smoke, no flash of light, but as if he was never even there.
The boys and girls on the dancefloor kept right on swinging.
Sam was left amongst the disco-blind. The knife fell from his shaking hands.
He opened his eyes, and found himself back in the alleyway, cold air biting his wet face. Had he been crying?
I would never do that to Jeeves, he thought. He don’t deserve it, not really.
His jeans pocket beeped. He was surprised to find a cleverband inside, its navy blue plastic shell a little worse for the wear.
Where’d this come from? he wondered. Is it even mine? Didn’t have one with me back there in the pen. Didn’t have nothing. Shyte but my feckin’ head hurts.
Sam activated the cleverband. An alert appeared on the display:
Rejoice! We have TAKENBACK what is ours. Come see Saint Fox and The Independence play their comeback show at Wembley Stadium.
Why would they be playing out in the open like that? Sam wondered. And how are Saint Fox and The Independence supposed to play without Saint Fox?
Sam scratched at an itch on the back of his neck, an itch he’d felt since Simsworth had set him free into the harsh light of the city.
He checked the display again to make sure he’d actually seen what he thought he’d seen. Maybe he just wanted to see his band’s name, wished they were playing again, to a crowd of adoring thousands who all believed in them.
He squeezed his eyes shut tight, then opened one eye to stare at the tricky holographic words.
Saint Fox and The Independence, the display said. And the concert was tonight.
It was a show he wouldn’t miss.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
SONG OF SONGS
The lights had never been so bright back when Sam had fronted the band.
It seemed as though there were millions in the crowd tonight at Wembley Stadium, thousands upon thousands of jubilant faces bathed in blue and red light, singing along to words they knew by heart, some of which they’d written. They got high on the music, spirits soaring as the notes climbed.
It scared him. That huge mass of people, all thinking as one.
Saint Fox and The Independence roared into the next song, led by one of Kit’s dazzling guitar licks that left Sam feeling hungry and slightly sick. The song was one he’d barely played a part in creating, music by Kit and Muzzy, lyrics by an eighteen-year-old girl in Suffolk via the FoxDen app.
Hold my hand, ‘cause you’re not alone
Together we will fight
Hold my hand, hold on to someone, anyone
Help me make it through the night
Whisper to me dear, and tell me
That what we did was right
Fight! Fight!
We’ll put up a good fight
Hope we make it through the night
It blared across the loudspeakers, a live recording from a previous show, and Sam barely recognised his own voice. He’d recognise Saint Fox anywhere, though. That swagger and fey jut of his hips could only belong to his former flatmate.
The frontman wore a red and gold suit of flames, face done up in iridescent makeup to match, his red shock of hair moulded into rebellious spikes. Like a fuckin’ gay outer space Joan of Arc, Sam thought. His arms spread wide like the proverbial sacrifice, radiating with the high of being the center of attention in a stadium packed to capacity.
No one in crowd seemed to realise it wasn’t him. No one could tell. The audience stared at the stage enraptured, surging forward to get closer to the band, taking Sam right along with them.
His fans didn’t know him from a minute or a mile away. He’d been nothing more than another manufactured ticket. And yet, Sam found that he didn’t really care whether or not they knew him.
All he felt was hatred towards Janus Jeeves. The more he thought about it, the more the back of his neck itched.
Up on the stage, Saint Sailor strode over to Kit as they entered the second chorus of the mid-tempoed “Money Dance.” He was bending, spinning, writhing, tarting it up proper-like, more than Sam ever had. He should have been Saint Fox all along, thought the former frontman. And Kit’s guitar solo is rubbish. She’s playing too fast, missing notes. S’not like her.
No one appeared to notice this, either. The audience screamed their approval at the frantic screeches she wrought, hair a tangle of electricity, fingers flying across the strings. Cleverband cams went off like fireworks in the night.
Muzzy and Seth played like perfect machines, not a beat out of sync, their faces painted with energy.
Where is he? Sam wondered, as the band glided seamlessly into the next song. Where’s big daddy, the maestro, the puppet master?
The song was a ballad, now.
I’m a lonely, lonely man
I just do what I can
Can’t face the day
Without you, baby
Gotta keep hangin’ on
If we stop, it all goes wrong
I’m drowning, and you
Are drowning now, too
This song was one of the few he’d written all on his own. Just an acoustic guitar and brushes ghosting softly against the drums. The vocal track playing over the PA system was familiar to him, a recording from a half-packed Wednesday night show at the Wormhole, that little club in
Brixton they’d played at almost every week when they first started. He’d been happy to play then. Just a few people really paying attention, people whose eyes met his and held his gaze, if only for a moment.
The acoustics are all wrong, thought Sam. A vocal cut from a little dive bar laced with too much reverb played back through an enormous stadium. Can no one hear that it sounds wrong?
Sailor, of course, knew the words by heart. Sam had played it for him before anyone else. His performance makes it believable. Hell, I almost believe it’s him up there singing. Maybe it always was.
So fuckin’ tired, he thought. I’m so fuckin’ tired. I feel good though. Feel high now, all the time. How do I feel this good and this pissed off at the same time?
Sam slid snakelike through the crowd, making his way towards the front of the stage. In a raggedy grey pullover and black jeans he was unrecognizable, eyes sunken in and vacant, looking just like any other scene kid.
One skinny bloke by himself can successfully navigate his way through the swarm of bodies that is the general admission section of a rock show, pressed together like the rear of the stadium was on fire. He wormed his way through gaps in the crowd—lulls in songs made for lulls in waves of bodies, and Sam knew how to read a crowd like a favourite book. Before long he made barrier, standing right at Saint Sailor’s feet.
They locked eyes almost immediately.
Sailor paused his lip-syncing. He stood still, looking wide-eyed and other-worldly. Something like guilt, too, underneath the shock.
The band stopped playing. Muzzy spotted Sam next, letting the deep echoes of his strings fade out. Kit and Seth followed his lead and silenced their instruments, puzzled looks on both their faces.
“Sam...” Sailor said into the microphone.
The sound of Sam’s plaintive, out-of-body voice still drifted from the speakers. Whoever was operating the PA cut the vocal track.
The bewildered audience craned their necks to try and see what was happening. Most figured there was some sort of malfunction with the sound system.
For a moment, the stadium was silent.
Standing in the wings watching the band play their audacious comeback show, Janus Jeeves felt both proud and ashamed. Proud of the Arcana’s success, proud that they’d managed to pull this together tonight given the short notice and the technical challenges, but sorry that in their finest hour, they’d had to resort to deception.
But the show must go on—and would, if necessary, go on without Saint Fox.
Or at least, that’s how it had gone at first.
“Go get him,” Jeeves said to one of the security crew. “Bring him to me.”
Below, the crowd grew restless. Jeeves shook his head as he watched Sailor, his new Saint Fox, standing before them alongside his silent band, opening and closing his mouth like a landed fish. Meanwhile, it seemed Kit had not yet spotted Sam amongst the crowd. She began fingerpicking a slow tune to try and diffuse whatever unnerving situation was unraveling. Seth, a.k.a. Zephyr, started rat-tat-tatting on his drums in accompaniment, a cautious, steady beat.
Down on the floor, Sam was seized by two well-built security guards who dragged him away from the railing and up the webbed metal stairs towards the stage. The way they roughly manhandled him and commanded that he move forward was oddly comforting, reminiscent of his previous role as the Crown’s prisoner.
The security guards soon brought him face to face with Janus Jeeves.
Both men appeared barely human as the lights and shadows from the stage flickered across their bodies. Jeeves’ face was green-toned, whether from the stage lights or his natural pallor it was impossible to tell. His head and shoulders appeared almost disconnected from his body, which was clothed in a flowy, black-violet suit, making him appear watery and boneless.
Sam struggled in the security guards’ grip until they released him. He stood jagged like a broken statue, his hands balled into fists.
Jeeves took in the former rock star’s unshaven face, sallow cheeks, and the black emptiness in his eyes that said he was gone, gone, gone. No Sammy left here, he realised grimly. No Saint Fox, either.
“Sammy, listen...” he began, hands open in surrender.
“Don’t you...wrap your snake words around me,” Sam spat out, his breath coming in shallow puffs. “I’m done with you. Done with your lies.”
Jeeves reached out to him, placing a silver-ringed hand on his shoulder. “We won, Sam,” he said in a quiet voice, taking on an unusually calm demeanor. “Because of you. Couldn’t have done it without you. I’m so happy to see you, I—”
Sam wrenched himself away from Jeeves. He took two steps backwards towards the stage, his face ensconced in shadow, his eyes on his former mentor’s mismatched ones, before turning around and breaking into a run.
Back on stage the band had started up another song, a fast-paced jam to get the audience’s energy roaring again. There were only a few in the crowd who’d noticed the brief seconds when Saint Fox’s voice rang through the stadium independent of Saint Fox’s lips moving. A few were belligerent that their beloved Saint Fox was apparently a lip-syncer. The rest made excuses to themselves—a delay in the sound system, a one-off where they had to use a recording to produce a vocal effect, a backing track turned up too loud, a mistake made by the sound guy. Now, the silver electric squeals entering their ears drowned out all other thought. They wanted only to shout and dance, to be carried away. Their energy continued to rise. A small mosh pit had begun front and center, fans jumping high in time with the beat, crashing into one another.
Sam ran out onto the stage. He happened to do it just as the stage lights went black at the end of the song, the last wails from the guitars fusing with the audience’s screams.
When the lights came up again, Saint Fox in costume was standing beside Saint Fox in street clothes.
The audience came to the same shocking realization in the exact same moment, or so it seemed. They stopped singing along, lowered their cleverband cams. Hollow, absolute silence filled the stadium.
Then, they turned.
Shouts rose up from the crowd, slurs and curses. They threw anything they could find at the stage—cups, glow-sticks, shoes. Fights erupted in the pit, in the stands, as they sent their anger in every and any direction. Friends and strangers connected fists with jaws and feet with shins, punching, pulling, wailing, getting into the bloody war with unabashed enthusiasm, a 90,000-bodied screaming whore who could not get enough of the violence. Wembley pulled and surged with the weight and the sound of it.
On stage, Sailor numbly handed over the microphone. He gazed dazedly back and forth between Sam and the crowd, his face an apology laced with fear that slowly engulfed him.
Sam stared back at Sailor, then looked away, out into the crowd where angry bodies swarmed en masse, just like in his fever dreams. He looked at the mic in his hands like it was a foreign thing, then lifted it to his lips. He doubted there were any words he could say that would have any effect. Maybe there never were. Words didn’t make any difference.
“Stop,” he said into the microphone, dully, quietly, without conviction.
The weak protest was swallowed up in the din. The fighting continued. Sam imagined he could hear every shattered bone, every tooth smashed, every echo of that sickening squish-splat sound that blood makes as it sluices between fingers.
He dropped the microphone cord, letting it hang limply at his side.
It was picked up by Janus Jeeves.
“Ladies and gentlemen, and those both or neither...” he began.
And was not allowed to finish, for Saint Fox had pushed him into the crowd.
Chapter Forty
DIAMONDS AND RUST
When Charlotte Piebald watched the broadcast announcing the nation’s plan to rebuild their broken economy, she broke down in tears. But they were not tears of joy.
All will be fine now, back to business as usual, she thought.
As long as you’re not infected.
Some of us aren’t so lucky, thought Charlotte, her mind reeling. She thought back to her last visit from Dr. Wender. I surmise it’s only a matter of time before you move on to Phase II, he’d said, face drawn and solemn. The symptoms being reported are most alarming. If you feel this poorly now, you’ll find the discomforts that await you unbearable. I wouldn’t wish that on you, Miss Piebald, wouldn’t wish that at all.
The dear man had prescribed her three more medications to try and ease her pain. The name of one of them, she noticed—iFixor—matched an engraving on the doctor’s cleverband.
All I can do is try to stave off the inevitable, he’d said, entering her new prescriptions into the system.
Inevitable?
I’m afraid so, he said gravely.
Over the past several weeks, Charlotte had received an endless slew of invite alerts via her cleverband. DWD: The Final Hour. DWD: Countdown to Extinction. DWD: The Last Reich. DWD—Death With Dignity, the latest fad to arrive on the scene in response to the Dot virus’s merciless rampage. Rather than suffer the slow decay of the virus, proponents of the cause advocated the right of the infected to take their own lives, and before long, the idea of beating the virus to the punch had spread as quickly as the virus itself.
Charlotte could just picture it. Gruesome drunken orgies, free-flowing narcotics, deafening heavy metal raging while overgrown teenagers dressed in black with hideous gobs of makeup on their faces indulged in one last hurrah before the final whimper. Death With Dignity indeed. Unlikely.
The title of one invitation, however, caught her eye before she could touch Delete.
DWD: Whispers on the Wind
Ladies and gentlemen, we somberly invite you to join us on the Twelfth of May, Eight o’clock p.m., in this dark year of our Lord. Let us end our suffering with dignity, and bravely embrace whatever awaits us on the other side.
The Rise of Saint Fox and The Independence Page 25