Shade paced a second, shaking his head. “No,” he said. “Think about it.” He began laying his plan out with all the strained patience he had left. “Once you’ve sorted the meds, get to the convention center. That’s where the party conference is tonight, yeah? That’s where Armstrong will be. Watch the place. Figure out a way in. Don’t get seen, don’t get caught. Surely we’re all thinking the same thing here, aren’t we?” He looked up at them. “Well, aren’t we?”
There was a silence.
“Yeah,” said Mace. Then he added for clarity, “We’re thinking about how Armstrong might be funding secret donations to military groups using the Federal Reserve, right?”
Shade blinked, cleared his throat. “No,” he said, raising a single finger for emphasis. “We’re not thinking that.”
Mace scowled. “Well, we should be.”
Ryan said, “You’re thinking we might show up at the party conference?”
Shade wiped his forehead and nodded. “Soon enough, Armstrong will know you’re out. None of us is safe. We need to get to him before he gets to us. So, yeah, I’m thinking we all show up tonight, and we announce our presence. We make it uncomfortable for him. We expose the whole project in front of the cameras. We bring Armstrong down just by being there.”
“But we’ll never get in,” said Ryan. “The security will be massive. Cops, TV crews … ”
Shade raised an eyebrow. “You’re the Jupiter Hand kid, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Ryan.
“C’mon,” Shade said with a laugh. “We need you here. I can handle Axle Six alone. But you and your lot have found ways into a whole bunch of places under tough circumstances, haven’t you?” He fanned his hands out. “Be creative. Take someone with you, scope out the convention center, find a way in, hunker down.” He made it sound easy. “And for God’s sake don’t get caught.” Shade flashed them a grin. “This is up to you now. I have to stay here, get the databands ready. If things go well, I’ll be with you tonight. But before that, I need to go BTV.”
It was late morning by the time they got there, so the parking lots at Manchester Royal Infirmary were full and the front entrance was busy. They wolfed a plastic pack of supermarket sandwiches, relishing every bite, as they watched the building. Three sliding doors hissed constantly back and forth as patients and visitors came and went.
Ryan checked the list again, squinting at Shade’s hurried scrawl. “Faulkner,” he said. “Which is the best way in if we’re to get to the second-floor stockrooms?”
Preston had been making a silent assessment of the hospital as he ate. He took the list of instructions and studied it. “We could try getting in farther along. It’s the eye place—you know, laser vision correction and stuff. We could use the main corridors to work our way back,” he said. “It looks too busy to go straight in here.”
Mace checked his watch. “It’s past eleven. We need to be quick,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The Royal Eye Hospital adjoined the main building, but seemed quieter. A group of student doctors were sharing coffee by the entrance. Reception was empty. A nurse in a white coat, hairnet, and blue plastic shoe covers was pushing a trolley of files.
“Which floor again?” Mace said as they made their way across the entrance hall, their footsteps echoing. Ahead were two elevators and a gray-haired man at an information desk.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
Mace stuttered. “We’re here to see our gran,” he said. “My mum’s texted us the ward number.” The guy nodded and, when the phone at his desk started ringing, turned his attention to the call.
The elevator doors slid open on the second floor and they stepped inside. They emerged to a series of sanitized and polished corridors. Colored signs—blue, purple, lime green, orange—directed them to the Acute Referral Center, toward Ophthalmic Imaging, or in the direction of Electrodiagnosis and Ocular Prosthetics. Big displays heralded “200 years at the forefront of global eye care.” “Help us celebrate our bicentenary,” declared an arrangement of banners and information boards.
Preston knew that to falter would invite curiosity. Nurses, cleaners, and doctors were moving swiftly from one unit to another. If a group of unidentified kids loitered about, Preston knew, someone would soon spot them. Whatever they did, they’d need to do it confidently.
“This way,” Preston said. They began the walk back toward the infirmary departments, swapping whispered suggestions to each other as they went, trying not to refer to Shade’s instructions too openly.
“That looks like it,” Ryan said as they passed. “Keep walking.” There was a cafeteria only a handful of paces farther down. Customers were coming and going. There was a cleaner in coveralls driving a machine with a rotating disk for polishing the floors. They reached a junction and U-turned their way back again.
Preston tried not to appear obvious. It was just a pair of doors with two glass panels and a magnetic lock—one of those doors that opened from within once a buzzer had been pressed. Through the windows he could see a corridor beyond and a member of staff working at a desk, a hunched shoulder pressing a phone up against her ear. She talked and typed at the same time.
They walked on again, then back once more, and took a table near the door in the cafeteria, where they sat with a hot chocolate in a Styrofoam cup watching the midday news cover the buildup to the party conference on a wall-mounted TV. “And worse,” Mace finished as they passed the cup between them, “how do we get past the woman at the desk?”
“We could wait for someone to come out,” Ryan suggested, eyeing the TV, watching for the time.
“Don’t fancy our chances,” Preston said. His hands were jumpy. He bit his nails. “How about some sort of distraction?”
Mace finished the chocolate slowly, thinking it over. “I’m with you.” He licked the chocolate from his lips. “I look lost and confused, ask a load of weird and wonderful questions … ”
“… and one of us gets past while you’re at it,” finished Preston. The friends looked at each other for a moment, not quite believing what they were about to do. Then Ryan flattened the cup slowly and deliberately, folding the Styrofoam over until it became the shape of a wedge. “This,” he said with a grin, “will come in useful.”
Preston and Ryan watched as the woman at the reception looked up, responding to Mace’s open hand against the glass of the door.
Mace gave a grin and a stupid wave, then mouthed a lot of nonsense at her. The door buzzed. In his right hand, Mace held close to two pounds in change, and this he scattered about his feet as the door opened. “Damn!” he said. “Sorry! One second … ” The woman watched patiently as he scooped up the cash. And as he did, Mace jammed the folded cup into the gap between the door and the floor. It wouldn’t hold long. Ryan crouched low, and began a crawl forward, staying out of sight. Preston followed suit. “Sorry!” Mace called, making it to his feet and moving toward the desk at a jog. “I’m all over the place! I’m looking for my gran, you see.”
The woman at the desk looked bored, blinking. Preston made his way through, following Ryan, crawling carefully along the corridor, keeping Mace between him and the receptionist.
Mace was pushing on. He dropped his coins on the desk in front of her, being careful to obscure her view. “Sorry,” he said again. “I’ve got an obsessive-compulsive disorder, see. I have to have my coins in … ”—Mace paused, improvising—“date order. If you’ll just give me a second, I’ll … ” He began checking each one, announcing the date of issue aloud and then pocketing it carefully. “Even years of the nineteen-nineties go in the front right pocket of my jacket,” he explained. Preston crawled on, his stomach gnawing and his hands trembling. “Odd years from the two thousands go in front left … ”
“Can I help you, young man?” the woman said. Preston could see she had steel-gray hair and lined cheeks. Her lips were crabbed and severe. It didn’t look as if she was buying Mace’s story. “My gran,” he said feebly. Behind him,
Preston heard the door close. The temporary doorstop had come loose.
Ryan had made it as far as the curved reception now, and pushed himself tight against it under Mace’s feet. Preston joined him, brushing Mace’s leg and disrupting his flow. Dammit, he actually looked down. For a stupefied second, the two friends gaped at each other. Preston stared up at Mace from his position on all fours, making a fearsome face at him, eyes wide and pleading. Mace remembered himself and looked again at the woman. He smiled, trying not to blush. “I can’t find my gran,” he said weakly.
Farther up the corridor was the ward, and some open stockrooms. Ryan nodded toward them, and the two of them made their way forward as swiftly and carefully as they could, listening as Mace tried the emotional approach. “She’s ill,” he was saying about his imaginary gran. “I saved up these coins to buy her some flowers or something. But I can’t find where they’re keeping her.”
“Have you a ward number?”
Mace was working his magic. “I’ve forgotten it. If I could just buy her something nice … ”
“There’s a shop on the floor below.”
Preston kept up his crawl, wincing as his sneakers squeaked against the polished floor.
“One from last year!” said Mace. He was onto his coin story again. “If they’re less than four years old, I keep them in my shoes,” he explained, and began demonstrating, unlacing his sneakers. “You’ll have to excuse my socks … ” he said, bent double.
That did it. “Yes, well,” said the woman, rising from her chair. “Perhaps you could organize your coins later. If you’ll follow me, I’ll point you in the right direction for the gift shop.” She began to make her way back up the corridor toward the door, massaging her back with chubby hands as she did so. Mace scooped up his change in a fist, shoved it into his pocket, and gave Preston a wink. Then he followed.
Preston tucked himself against the wall at the back of the walk-in stockroom, shoulder to shoulder with Ryan. He was already checking the medication, the dog-eared list in his hand. He was finding it hard to hold it steady, Preston noticed.
The walls were lined with open shelves and glass-fronted cabinets, and an array of blister packs, plastic bottles, prescription boxes, and packages were stacked and stock-checked, signed off and sequenced in lines. The labeling didn’t make it easy to work out what they were looking at. He leaned across Ryan to examine Shade’s scribbled instructions. Vico-parastatin.
A minute or two passed. Outside, Preston could hear the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on polished hospital floors. The phone at the reception desk rang. They had to abandon their search and press their backs against the far wall of the room as a doctor in a white smock passed by. Dammit, that was close. Preston let a breath go and wiped the sweat from his palms on his jeans. If they got caught here, no amount of smart-ass storytelling was going to get them out of it.
Ryan hissed “Yes!” and pointed. Vico-parastatin. Preston nearly cheered—relief consuming him as he bundled a handful of boxes into his bag. He pulled the rest of the stock forward, trying desperately not to dislodge the neat stacks of labeled boxes and bottles. But his hands were shaking stupidly and his fingers felt thick with guilt and fear. A couple of bottles tipped and one hit the floor.
And—dammit, dammit—the cap popped off and a bunch of blue pills slid in a thousand directions. Ryan cursed as he squatted to try and gather them up. It was hopeless; they’d skimmed and spun everywhere. And now there was someone coming, the regular beat of footsteps. Big strides. A dark-skinned guy, a male nurse in a green uniform, pulled up, surprised, nearly dropped his clipboard. Preston felt his legs buckle.
For a second, the guy didn’t know what to say. There was a couple of teenage kids in his stockroom, stealing drugs. He swore. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said, his shock turning to hard outrage, his forehead creasing and his black eyebrows converging.
Preston pushed the bag behind his back, speechless. In the end it was Ryan who cleared his throat and somehow found the composure to say, “Who, us?”
Preston and Mace watched the darkening sky through the grubby windows of the empty warehouse. It was nearly four now; pretty soon the traffic up Deansgate and Cross Street would thicken and the cars would line their way out into the suburbs, little metal boxes in the rain.
The steal could’ve gone better, that was for sure. It had taken everything he’d got to sprint clear after Ryan had shouldered the nurse to the floor. And the guy had been so damned furious he’d followed for ages, yelling after them. At one point a couple of orderlies had joined the chase, which had been useful, in a way, because it made it easier for Mace to spot them and join the escape. But when Mace had taken the stairs near Outpatients on his butt after a comic slip, it looked as if they’d be caught. Then a couple of ambulances tore in to accident and emergency at once, sirens whooping, and somehow, they got free during the melee that followed. The trek back across town had been slow and nervy, the lads leaping for cover at the sound of every siren.
Preston left Mace at the window, bit his fingernails, and paced in a pointless circle around Ellwood. She was still unconscious, a coat rolled into a pillow for her head, a blanket from the third-floor stockrooms across her body, her eyes flickering a little under their lids as if she was dreaming. Ryan had checked on her, spoken to Shade, and then made his way across town to the convention center, where Preston had agreed to join him. Preston checked Ellwood’s pulse again, touching her wrist and feeling the blood push back against his fingertips.
Shade came down from the upper floor, his tired tread heavy on the stairs. He seemed distracted as he packed a heavy bag with sealed plastic packets of databands, counting them in batches of twenty, packing them tightly, checking and double-checking, adjusting his goggles. “Right,” he said, putting his stuff to one side. “We need to go carefully here. Let’s see the meds.”
Preston and Mace unloaded the blister packs of vico-parastatin. Little glass vials—Shade called them ampoules—of clear liquid that you could safely snap open; a couple of syringes in sealed plastic bags.
He nodded his satisfaction as he checked them.
Shade’s hands were surprisingly steady as he flicked the tip of the syringe lightly a couple of times, chasing the air to the top, and nudged the liquid out. He looked at Preston. “Ready?” When Preston nodded, Shade pressed the metal to Ellwood’s forearm.
The boys watched as the plunger dropped and the medicine entered her system. When it was done, Shade placed the empty chamber on the floor and rubbed his palms together slowly, watching. He placed a gentle hand on Preston’s arm. It took him a moment to see what the nightwarden wanted, until he realized how hard he was holding Ellwood’s shoulder. He loosened his grip. He was a frenzy of suspended breath and taut tendons. Mace paced, prickly and energetic.
“What will happen?” Preston said. He cleared his throat, adjusted his position, making sure the girl was comfortable.
Shade rubbed his chin with a cupped hand. “It could be as long as a couple of hours before we know. But oxygen levels in the blood should stabilize. Pulse will strengthen and breathing will deepen and get more regular. Like I said”—Shade spoke levelly—“it’ll be a couple of hours. Put her down, kid.”
Preston felt himself blush. “Yeah,” he said.
It was a tormented wait. There was something on Preston’s mind and he couldn’t let it go. He smoothed Ellwood’s blanket. “Shade,” he said. “When I went through the valve, I arrived at this cave. There were all these big dark rooms that looked like they’d been dynamited out of the rock.” Shade sat crossed-legged next to Ellwood, checked her, then tucked his knees up and nodded. “And the kids over there were all sleeping together, head-to-toe in this room, all getting ill and half starving to death.” Preston realized as he was speaking it would be hard for the warden to hear, and stammered his way to the end of his sentence. “One of the last things I saw down there was this massive riot for food … ”
Shade
’s eyes had lowered. He was biting his lip. It took him a couple of goes to get his voice started. Then he said, “We started hearing rumors about shutdown months ago. So we stockpiled cans and bottled water and kept them out at the Blackstone Edge valve. Then we’d try and get through every week or so.” His voice had dropped to an exhausted rasp by the end. “Armstrong was bound to find out sooner or later. He was spending a lot of time at M.I.S.T. We had to stop the deliveries. I’m sorry I’ve not been able to get any more through. Is everyone still … alive?”
Preston nodded, hoping so. Then, he told Shade about the trapdoors, how they’d carved recesses in the walls and hauled themselves up there. He described the long white corridor and the escalators.
When he described the foyer of Axle Six and the black night and beating sea beyond, Shade’s expression darkened. Preston reached the end of his description. “So where is that place?” he asked.
Shade took a long time to answer. “I don’t know,” he said.
Preston frowned. “C’mon. Seriously—where is it? Who built it?”
“We didn’t build it,” Shade said, weighing his words very carefully. “My brother and me just … found it.”
It took a long silence for that to register—for Preston’s thinking to sift through it all, trying to make it fit together. “Found it,” he said. He remembered the third desk—the empty one back when the warehouse was the headquarters of a prison system. He’d asked Shade who it belonged to. My older brother, he’d said. “So you and your brother opened the valve and that place—Axle Six—was just there, on the other side?”
Shade brooded silently. “You’re asking me,” he said, “like I’m the guy with all the answers. I’m not.”
“I’m asking,” said Preston, pushing his luck, “because there was a kid BTV who said we weren’t the only ones down there.”
The corner of Shade’s mouth twitched. His eyes went big and still. “What do you mean?”
“The story goes there’s an old man out there,” Preston said. “The kids call him Robinson Crusoe.”
Lifers Page 17