They knew I was coming. How?
Adam knew he would have to deal with the threat behind him, even though it meant risking losing his quarry.
He was about to turn and shoot the boy now standing framed by the broken window, when everything suddenly, impossibly, went wrong.
A woman ran from the passageway to his right. Adam immediately registered two facts about her. She looked like an older version of the girl. It’s Meera Patel. The second fact was that she was unarmed. Stupid. He decided he had time to shoot the boy, then deal with her.
And so it was, mere seconds after experiencing the unfamiliar sensation of complete surprise, Adam felt it again. This time it was followed by the crushing shock of failure.
The woman moved faster than any human had the right to. Faster than Adam could move. She punched him in the neck. He knew the spot she had chosen very well. It had taken him years of study and practice before he was able to accurately hit that spot time after time. She hit it perfectly. His brain’s signals to his limbs were briefly interrupted, and he fell. His fall was broken by his face hitting the edge of the sidewalk. He felt—and heard—his cheekbone crack as the impact spun his body and he landed heavily on his back.
He looked up at the woman as she pulled the gun from his limp fingers.
“Not my daughter, fuckface,” she said, then emptied the remaining four rounds into him. The first bullet went straight through the flesh of his upper leg, but the rest went exactly where they were intended: into his chest.
Everything went dark.
Joni reached the end of the street oblivious to everything around her. She ran with the focus of an Olympic athlete, her entire world shrinking to the thud of her sneakers on the sidewalk, the burn in her legs, the sweat beginning to prickle on her forehead and cheeks. She had spotted the alleyway Odd had described. It was near the end of the street. As she hurled her protesting body toward it, her brain discarded anything unrelated to the task of saving her life. She only saw the alleyway and the path she needed to follow. She heard sounds, but they were meaningless.
“Joni.”
She ran as if it was all she had ever known. The pain from her muscles was acknowledged, then ignored as she tested her lungs’ ability to effectively use oxygen. She reached a point when her heart was beating so strongly she could hear it in her head, and she began to match her stride to its thumping pulse.
“Joni.”
She had heard two shots, a pause, then another four. She couldn’t afford to turn around and check if the plan had worked. She knew she had to keep moving, get away, meet Odd, Charlie and the twins back at the boat. She couldn’t stop for anything. Even her mother screaming at her.
“JONI.”
It was a strange trick for her brain to play. Why would she hear her mother’s voice?
“JONES. IT’S OK, HE’S DEAD.”
The entrance to the alleyway was on her right. Joni turned and, as she did so, risked a glance over her shoulder. The glimpse lasted less than a second, but it was enough to bring her to a halt in the alleyway. She had to bend over and put her hands on her knees, gasping, her throat raw, her eyes streaming and her heart still pulsing with all the torso-rattling urgency of a four-on-the-floor dance anthem.
She allowed her body a few seconds to dial down its emergency flight response, then mentally reviewed what she had just seen and heard. Surely, it couldn’t be. Could it?
“Jones?”
It could.
She walked out of the alleyway. About a hundred yards away, on the sidewalk in front of the house, the bald man was lying on his back, completely still. Fifty yards closer, and jogging toward her, was Odd. Just behind him was her mother. Joni stopped walking and watched them get closer. Mee put on a burst of speed, overtook Odd and hugged Joni to her so hard that her protesting lungs struggled to get enough air for a few seconds.
When Mee released her, Odd stepped in and held her briefly, his lips finding her neck and leaving the ghost of a kiss there.
Joni. Not the time for inappropriate thoughts. There’s a dead guy over there. And your mother is present.
They all started speaking at once, then stopped, before starting again, each talking over the other in an attempt to make sense of what had just happened. Before they had a chance to try again, the blip of a siren made conversation impossible.
They all turned as the blue lights started to play across their faces. At low speeds, police cars were the only electric vehicle allowed to disable the warning hum that alerted pedestrians. They had driven to within thirty yards of them without being noticed.
There were three officers. Two of them, shielded by open doors, had drawn weapons and were pointing them towards Joni, Odd and Mee. The third remained in the driving seat and addressed them over the car’s PA speaker.
“You are under arrest. Keep your hands where we can see them. Drop the weapon.”
The three of them looked blankly at each other.
“Drop the weapon, Ma’am. Now.”
Mee looked down at the gun in her hand. It was still warm. She let it drop to the pavement.
Odd spoke quietly.
“The alleyway,” he said.
“I’ll count to three,” said Mee. Joni nodded. “One…two…”
On ‘three’ they bolted for the alleyway. The police didn’t fire, but Joni heard the sound of running footsteps behind them. She looked toward the far end of the alleyway, just as blue light started to flicker on the houses on the street ahead. The only exit was blocked by a second police car.
“Shit,” said Mee, “we’re trapped. What now?”
They stopped running and turned to face their pursuers, just as something small and hard rolled and bounced up the alleyway toward them.
“What’s that?” said Joni.
Odd reverted to swearing in his native language.
“Faen,” he said, and kicked the grenade back toward the police officers. It had only traveled a few feet when it exploded.
Joni was thrown against a fence, the back of her head smacking into a post. As consciousness slipped away, she tried for a reset. Nothing happened.
40
Joni woke slowly and painfully, the back of her head throbbing. She was sitting up, and her whole body was in pain. She decided against opening her eyes immediately. Instead, she tried to piece together where she was and what was going on. Her limbs were twitching uncontrollably, as if she were terribly cold. And yet the ambient temperature was—if anything—too hot. She couldn’t move. Her ankles were held in place by something hard. Her wrists, too. Alongside the general aches was a constant, throbbing pain just above her right hip.
The hard seat she was sitting on kept moving, pushing her first one way, then the other. It felt like she was in a confined space - the smell was heady, a mixture of fresh sweat and older body odors with a faint metallic undertone.
Joni tested the restraint on one wrist, pulling gently and slowly. She had perhaps an inch of free movement. Why was her body twitching like this? It was as if she was constantly on the end of an electric shock. As she puzzled over this, she remembered the alleyway, her mind put the pieces together, and she knew where she must be.
She let her head fall forward slightly, and opened her eyes.
As she had thought, Joni was sitting bolt upright inside a police van. She’d only ever seen one on TV before, on the news. The inside was about as salubrious as she might have guessed. A metal bench lined each side, with regular holes cut into it to enable handcuffs to be looped through. She was held fast by cuffs on both ankles and wrists. She looked down at her right side and saw the adapted taser—a Manna Spanner—supplying a constant flow of electrical current. That explained the twitching.
She tried to reset. She reached back for the reset point, but it was impossible to find. It was like a 3D picture book she had tried once. Mum said you just had to relax your eyes, let them lose focus, and an amazing three-dimensional image would magically appear. Joni spent a half-hour go
ing cross-eyed and seeing nothing but squiggly lines. Mum thought it was great fun, Joni thought it was some kind of elaborate torture, designed to simulate migraines. It was the same now, nothing was coming into focus. The Spanner was doing its job.
Lifting her head slightly, she could see a pair of oxblood Doc Martens on the feet of a another prisoner to her right.
Mum.
Opposite, a pair of hiking boots, well-worn and comfortable looking.
Odd.
She risked a swing of her head to either side to check if there were any guards. No. They were alone.
She raised her head, then, wincing at the institutional bright light that exposed every corner of the van’s interior. Odd was awake, looking at her. He was twitching, too. His eyes flicked to Mee. Joni looked. Her mum was awake too, smiling at her. Her teeth were chattering from the effects of the Manna Spanner. No one was going to be able to use any nanotech-fueled abilities to get them out of this mess.
“What is there to smile about?” said Joni, her voice a croak at first. She coughed. “We’re not exactly home free, are we?”
Mee was still smiling.
True enough,” she said. “But that arsemonger who was trying to kill you is dead. You’re alive, you’re safe, you’re in reasonable health. I feel like a good mother tonight.”
“You’re always a good mother,” said Joni, “although I can’t wait to hear how you turned into some lethal ninja killing machine.”
Mee shuddered at the memory of the rage she felt as she emptied the gun into Adam. She didn’t regret it for a second, but without Sym sharing her brain, she would never have been able to bring the man down in the first place.
“I had some help,” she said. There had been no voice in Mee’s head since the EMPty went off. She felt a sudden sense of panic. If the electromagnetic pulse disabled all nanotech, did that mean Sym was gone for good?
Odd spoke up from the opposite side of the van.
“Yoni? When did you last make one of your resets? Can we get out of this that way?”
“I think the last reset point was erased by the EMPty. I’ve tried to…feel…for it. There’s nothing there. I can’t make a new one until they turn the Spanner off. And by then, we’ll be in jail. I can’t help.”
All at once, the intense relief at the bald man’s death mixed with the fear that she, Mum and Odd would now be going to prison broke the last of her reserves, and she wept like a small child, her chest heaving. She knew Odd would get an automatic life sentence, because of his tag, and Mum had killed a man. What would happen to her?
The uncontrolled sobbing made her lean forward, the tears splashing onto the metal floor. This caused the handcuff on her left wrist to pull her arm slightly. Suddenly, there was a hot flash of excruciating pain in her left shoulder. Joni screamed and slumped back in her seat, panting.
“Jones, what is it? Are you hurt?” said Mee.
Odd was looking across at Joni’s shoulder.
“I think it’s dislocated,” he said. “Try not to move so much.”
At that moment, the van went round a sharp corner, and Joni squealed as her shoulder flashed with pain.
“Easy for you to say,” she said, hissing the words through gritted teeth.
Odd looked crestfallen. “I am just glad you are alive,” he said. “Your plan was good, I think. Charlie and the twins will have taken the boat. She will find another safe place. It will be ok for them.”
Joni looked at the tag on his ankle, just visible at the top of one boot.
“And what about you?” she said.
Odd looked strangely unmoved. It was strange how dispassionate he could seem, how he could remain detached from his situation. Joni had yet to decide if it was an admirable quality or not. She had seen the awful emotional pain he was carrying when he had told her about his family. And he could certainly be passionate in other ways, too, as she had discovered on the writing course. As that memory resurfaced, she broke eye contact and looked at the door at the back of the van. It looked very solid, and there was no way of opening it from the inside.
“What will happen, will happen,” said Odd. “We must try to escape. We are very likely to fail if we look at our situation in a sensible way. I do not have much hope of getting away. But there are different kinds of hope.”
“But if we don’t get away, you’ll be locked up for life,” said Joni. “They don’t care that you’ve never hurt anyone, that you have saved people’s lives. They just see you are a Manna user and want to punish you. It’s not fair.”
Odd didn’t say anything for a while. Joni found herself wondering what his parents were like. What they had been like. She had a feeling she would have liked them.
There was silence in the van apart from the subtle hum of the engine and the buzz of the Spanners.
“It’s funny,” said Odd, finally. “I didn’t always want to write. Not until I read Anne Frank’s Diary Of A Young Girl at school. She was young, the age everyone says, ‘you have your whole life in front of you.’ That’s kind of a stupid thing to say, yes? Nobody knows how long a life will be. She died in a Nazi concentration camp when she was sixteen years old. About a year younger than I am now.”
The van went over a bump, and Joni winced. Odd paused, but she nodded at him to continue.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about her words. You have read it?”
Joni shook her head. “Not yet.”
“You must. I will not tell you her story. It is well known, but it is very different when you read it for yourself and recognize someone very much like you, or one of your friends. And she was someone you would want as a friend. But it is not her I thought about when I decided I wanted to write. It was her guards.”
“The guards in the camp?” said Mee.
“Yes.” Odd didn’t seem to twitch as much as Joni, although when she looked at his hands, resting on his legs, she could see he was pushing down firmly to control the shaking.
“Her guards - they were the ones with the power. We cannot know what kind of men they were. When she came into their camp, she was just another Jewish girl with a number on her arm. Not human. Worthless. They extracted as much physical labor from her as they could, then when she got typhus, they let her die.”
Odd stopped and shook his head. Then he smiled at Joni and Mee.
“And do you know the names of those guards?” he said.
“No,” said Mee. Joni shook her head.
“Exactly,” said Odd, softly. “Exactly.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, then the van slowed to a stop. They looked at each other.
Just then, the back doors rattled as some bolts were pulled across. There was the snick of an electronic lock being opened, then the doors began to slide open automatically.
Mee spoke quickly and quietly. “I doubt they’ll give us a chance to make a break for it,” she said, “but if it happens, take it. Run, and don’t look back. Promise me. I’ll do the same. Get free, get help, then come back if you can.”
A big policeman stood there, gun holstered, Manna Spanner on his other hip. The word Police on his dark blue jacket was partially obscured by the belt full of EMPties slung over his shoulder like an old-fashioned gunslinger.
His bulk was intimidating. He wasn’t particularly tall, but he was built like a bear. Not the cuddly kind, the tourist-eating kind. His bearded face was grim.
“You want the good news or the bad news first,” he said.
Mee leaned forward and peered at him.
“Sym?” she said. “I wondered where you had got to.”
“Shit, Meera,” said the bear, “you just totally ruined the good news.”
41
Sym jumped into the back of the van. The whole thing rocked as he walked around the interior, first turning off the electric feed to the spanners, then releasing them one by one. He left Joni until last, looking at her intently as a big, slow smile spread across his face.
“Well, I wondered how it would
feel to meet you, Joni,” he said. “Now I know. And it’s even better than I’d imagined.”
He bent down and hugged her. She screamed in pain, and he took a quick step back.
“What is it?” He saw the angle of her arm. “Shit. Dislocated?”
“Yeah,” said Joni through her tears. “It really, really hurts.”
“Yep, I hear ya,” said Sym. “I’ve pulled a few arms out of their sockets in my time, and no-one’s thanked me yet.” He smiled at the three of them, then coughed.
“Yeah, well. Never mind. I’ve pretty much parked on a Thin Place here. Get your asses out, refill your tanks and sort out this arm.”
“Who are you?” said Joni.
“Your mother will explain later,” said Sym. “Crap, that made me sound like a sanctimonious asshole. Sorry. It’s a long, weird, story.”
“I can handle weird,” said Joni.
“Yeah, I believe that. Let’s get this done first. I’ve bought us about three hours, four if we’re lucky. My police colleague up front,”—he motioned back to the van—“will sleep another ten hours unless I tell him otherwise. The police database has no record of any incident at Canary Wharf, so don’t worry about that side of things.”
“What about the body?” said Mee.
Sym scratched his beard. “Well, that was the ‘bad news’ I was leading up to. The ambulance got there pretty fast. They’re rushing him to hospital. Reckon they might save the son of a bitch?”
Mee remembered his body twitching as she’d emptied the gun into his chest. She shook her head.
“Adam’s dead.”
Joni looked at her then. “Adam?” she said. “His name is Adam?”
“His name was Adam,” said Mee.
They exited the van into what, at first, seemed like an enormous cave. It was dark, and drips of water fell at regular intervals into long-established puddles. The van’s headlamps were off. A sickly yellow light—the only illumination—was produced by reflections in the puddles from the streetlamps outside. There was a rumble that quickly turned into a roar, making speech impossible for about twelve seconds. Then it was gone, and the rumble faded to nothing.
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 88