‘He won’t say, but he told me it’s going to be a special night.’
Rani gripped her arm. ‘Did he use those words? Special night? Those exact words?’
‘Yeah, I think. I’m pretty sure.’
‘Then he’s going to ask you back to his place! Oh my God, what are you going to wear? And what are we going to do with your hair? You’ll need a total spa day – mani, pedi, the works. Maybe a haircut.’
‘Whoa,’ Zee said, recalling that it had been Rani who’d talked her into the pineapple haircut that had made the top of her head look like an erupting volcano. ‘Nothing drastic. I still want to look like me.’
‘You’ll look exactly like you,’ Rani promised. ‘Only sexier.’
By the time Zee left to meet David, she felt very nearly glamorous. She’d never felt glamorous before, but then, she’d never been seventeen before either. She couldn’t afford a new dress, but Rani had raided her own bursting wardrobe and found a midnight-blue silk sheath that rippled like water and ended in a little flare just above the knees. Zee wasn’t tall but the way Rani had swept her hair up on top of her head made her feel tall.
It was a mild evening for early November. With the holidays just around the corner, there hadn’t been this many people out in the West End since the bombings began. That morning the Prime Minister had announced that the suicide ambulance driver’s apartment was yielding significant information about the anarchists’ network, and that spark of good news had floated in the air like a champagne bubble all day long, touching everyone.
As she walked towards the theatre, Zee was aware of being looked at. Usually when she was out at night, it was with Rani or some of the other empaths, and when boys looked at them and smiled or tried to start a conversation, their attention was directed to the group. But now Zee was alone, and it wasn’t only boys who looked and smiled, it was young men of David’s age. Was this what being a woman was like? If it was, life was going to be great. Suddenly, an old-fashioned phrase of her dad’s popped into her mind. Life is your oyster. She wasn’t completely sure if it meant an oyster to eat or an oyster with a pearl inside, but whenever her father said it, he meant that life was going his way.
At first she couldn’t find David in the crowd, and wondered if she’d got the wrong theatre, or was early or late. But then suddenly he turned and the sleek, young man in the pale grey suit turned out to be him. With his dark shirt and narrow white tie, slanting dark brows above grey eyes, he could have been a hologram ad for bespoke suits or a movie holo for the latest heart-throb. When he saw her, his stare cut through the crowd, and her pulse quickened.
He kissed her, a kiss that was more than just hello. ‘You look beautiful, Zee. All the time I was walking over here, I was wondering how I got so lucky, to be here with this beautiful girl.’ They kissed again. ‘You all set?’
‘I can’t wait,’ Zee said. She knew she sounded like a kid, but as they joined the crowd entering the theatre, their reflection in the windows looked deliciously grown-up.
David had waited until only the day before to tell her where they were going, and Zee knew he must have jumped through a lot of hoops and handed over a lot of cash to get tickets. The Thatcher Theatre, nicknamed the Lady Meg, was London’s newest theatre, a seven-storey counterpart to The New Empire in New York. The entire theatre was the stage, and rows of seats broke apart, moved, and took flight to accommodate the action. Walls could turn into 3D glaciers or vistas of a Beijing street market. When Titanic! played, the floor parted to reveal the ocean and seats became watertight capsules that went down briefly with the ship, then popped to the surface and became lifeboats. But the show playing now, Moonwalk, was even more spectacular – the hottest ticket in town. A musical about the first moon colony, it was performed in a weightless atmosphere as the audience watched from mobile pods. At the end, the audience was free to leave their pods and float down to ground level as the theatre re-gravitised.
Zee giggled as David handed the usher – dressed in a cumbersome, tent-like suit reminiscent of the first moonwalkers – their tickets and said, ‘Space pod for two, please.’
Inside, the pod was cosy and romantic, and David put his arm around her as it floated to the top of the theatre. The lights dimmed and a voice came through the pod’s soundfabric walls.
‘Throughout the show, your pod will be controlled by Mission Control. However, should you need to temporarily land for any reason, you only have to press the red emergency button. Now, if you are all ready . . . Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . ignition sequence started . . . six . . . five . . .’
And for the next two hours Zee and David floated, cruised, ascended, descended and hovered as actors zoomed around the theatre’s vast interior, singing and dancing. Well, not exactly dancing, Zee thought. You couldn’t really dance in zero gravity. Instead, the actors formed complex human sculptures that changed effortlessly and continuously, like a kaleidoscope. At the end, as promised, the actors invited people to leave their pods and float down through the now-completed space station with them as gravity was slowly restored.
‘You want to?’ David asked.
‘You bet.’
Seven storeys up, floating near the ceiling, it was hard to leave the pod, and some people turned back. But Zee didn’t want to miss the experience, and finally reached out and took David’s floating hand and swam into the air. They held hands all the way down and, magical as the experience was, it was good to feel the weight of David’s arm around her shoulders again when gravity was completely restored.
‘You choose the restaurant,’ David said afterwards. ‘I love all your Earth food, so I’m not a good judge.’
Zee hadn’t been to the place she chose and didn’t know if the food would be good or not, but it had candles on the tables and was the kind of restaurant she’d always dreamed of going to on a date. They agreed to order dishes they’d never heard of and had a good time trying to figure out what was in them. They shared dessert, even though both claimed they were too full to eat even a spoonful.
At last, pushing aside his plate, David laid a small gold box on the table. ‘Happy birthday, Zee.’
She wanted to say it was too much, that the theatre tickets and dinner had cost a lot already, but she saw his excitement and sudden shyness, and didn’t want to do anything to spoil his pleasure in the evening he had planned. She slid the white ribbon off the box and lifted the lid.
‘Oh. Oh! Are these —? Oh my gosh they are – orbiting pearls!’ Zee stared at the two perfect earrings, each one a tiny pearl stud with six more pearls circling the pearl nucleus. ‘Can I put them on now?’ Carefully, she lifted one of the pearl studs and watched as the six circling pearls followed it like a flock of tiny, obedient doves. ‘How do I look?’ she asked when they were both in place.
‘You’re beautiful, Zee. Just beautiful.’
It was almost midnight when they left the restaurant, and Zee was glad she had the next two days off. The evening stretched like a long golden thread, drawing the two of them closer and closer together. David must have felt the same way because as they walked, he held her close by his side and ruffled her hair with his lips, murmuring, ‘I can’t let you go yet, Zee.’
In his voice she recognised the deep, sweet longing she felt herself. She slid her arm around his waist and felt the warm tide of his pulse in the smooth muscles beneath the fabric. ‘Then don’t let go of me, David. Don’t let go of me ever.’
They’d been walking for a while and were no longer entangled in the thick crowds of the West End. David stopped and turned her towards him, gently lowering her arm from around him. ‘Zee —’
‘I mean it, David. I don’t want to let you go either. Again she felt the struggle within him, the wanting of her and the pushing away. ‘I want to be with you, David.’
‘Zee, please.’ He pulled away from her abruptly.
Without his warmth, she felt the chill of the night air, and shivered. ‘Then why all of this?’ she question
ed, her voice rising. ‘The theatre, the dinner, the earrings? Am I some kind of research project? Earth Girls 101? If you don’t really like me —’
‘I like you more than you can know, Zee. This has nothing to do with you.’
The chill went away and anger suddenly flooded her chest, hot and burning. ‘Nothing to do with me? To you, maybe. To me, it has everything to do with me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He took a step towards her. ‘You’re shivering. Let me put you in a cab and —’
‘Don’t bother!’ Zee turned and walked as fast as she could, moving consciously into the shadows so he couldn’t see her. She felt the first hot tear run down her cheek. It was the last thing she’d wanted to happen, and it had happened. She tried replaying the last few minutes in her mind but it made no sense. How had everything gone so wrong so quickly?
Within a few blocks she realised she had no idea where she was. She’d simply headed away from him into the dark, determined not to let him follow. Now she was alone on a dim, unfamiliar street. She couldn’t have gone that far, she reasoned. She’d just walk until she came to a busy street, then find a cab and go home.
At first when the shadow rose up out of the darkness and rushed at her, she thought it was David and felt a sweeping relief. But it wasn’t David. It was someone grabbing her bag and yelling at her not to make a sound. She couldn’t see his face but his shape was huge.
‘Nothing more than this, love?’ he asked, emptying the bag and tossing it aside, into the gutter. He held up the only paper money she had. ‘This is a poor showing for a night’s work. What else have you got that might comfort a poor bloke?’
Zee felt a tremor of icy fear but refused to give in to it. If he saw that she feared him, he’d know he could do anything to her. She couldn’t outrun him, not in Rani’s silver sandals, so she forced herself to raise her head and look him in the eye, or where she thought his eyes would be if she could see his face.
The motion must have caught the lamplight, because he said, ‘Ah, them pearly earrings all the girls are going for. They’ll do me fine.’
Her orbiting pearl earrings! The earrings from David. His hand, huge and dirty, reached out to her. Until she heard her own piercing scream, she’d thought she was too terrified to make a sound.
‘No!’ she cried, reaching instinctively to protect the earring.
She was never sure which she saw next, the flash of the knife blade or the second shadow, the one she knew was David, running towards them. ‘No, David!’ she cried. ‘He has a knife!’
‘Shut up,’ the mugger yelled. As he whirled away from her, she felt a flash of pain skitter along her neck and collarbone.
The mugger held the knife in front of him, slashing the air in a way that made Zee dizzy.
He slashed savagely as he advanced and caught David as least once, Zee thought. But David, though unarmed, was younger and faster. In the end he caught the mugger’s wrist and twisted it until Zee heard a crunching pop. The knife clattered to the ground and David kicked it away. ‘If anything happens to her,’ he hissed, ‘I will find you and I will destroy you. Do you understand?’ He released the wrist, the hand now flopping at an odd angle, and the man fled into the darkness.
Zee felt cold, and when she touched her fingers to her throat and shoulder, her hand came away wet and sticky. She didn’t remember sitting down on the kerb, or how long David had been sitting beside her. She thought she must be delirious because David had his handheld out and was talking urgently but calmly.
‘I need you to take me offline. I’ll explain when you get here. How long? Make it as soon as you can; I’m not sure how much time I’ve got. First-aid kit – ours, not theirs – and make sure there’s an accelerator in it. Clean clothes for me and one of your raincoats. I’ll buy you a new one. Okay. Hurry.’
‘David?’
‘Shhh, it’s all right, Zee. Everything is going to be all right. Listen, do you trust me?’
She remembered the way he’d run towards the knife to save her and felt ashamed of the way she’d quarrelled and walked away from him. ‘I trust you,’ she said.
‘Okay, that’s good. Someone’s coming to help us. I’m going to be sort of out of commission for a while. Do what she says, okay? If you trust me at all, do what she says.’
As he talked, he was taking off his suit jacket. Zee saw the huge, spreading bloodstain on his shirt and gasped. Wincing, he stripped off the shirt, pressed it over the wound, and tied the sleeves around him to hold it in place. ‘Can you help me get the jacket back on? Let’s go slowly, you’ve lost some blood yourself. Okay. Two more things. Your residence hall – is there a guard or someone at the door? Can you pretend you’re drunk long enough to get by him? Is there someone there you can trust?’
‘Rani Kapoor,’ Zee said.
‘Is there a way she could sneak me into the building and your room?’
She remembered Rani’s joking complaints about Zee getting the room next to the outside window and smiled in spite of herself. ‘Are you kidding? This is just what she’s been waiting for.’
The next thing Zee remembered was David shaking her gently. ‘Cavalry’s here.’
Zee opened her eyes and found herself looking into a strangely familiar face. A face with delicate features framed by a waterfall of black hair.
‘It’s you,’ she said, too disoriented to be surprised.
David was trying to stand up but couldn’t. ‘This is my partner, Mia,’ he explained.
So she’d been right after all. The beautiful girl she’d seen hovering near so many times was connected to David. Only now that she saw them together, the romance she’d imagined didn’t seem to be part of it.
David and Mia were talking, and Zee recognised the same quick, compressed speech David had used the night they met in the A&E. Omuran, Zee now understood. If she had to guess, she would have said that Mia was asking David if he was ready, and when he said he was, she pulled him into an upright sitting position and bent his head forward. She pulled a small device from a zippered pocket in her jacket, held it just behind David’s right ear, and fired two red beams into his head.
David’s body went rigid for a second, then he slumped forward and would have toppled if Mia hadn’t caught him and laid him down gently.
‘You killed him!’ Zee gasped. ‘You killed him!’
‘Possibly,’ Mia said. ‘I don’t think so though. He should come around in a few minutes. Now, I’m going to find a taxi. When I come back you and David are drunk and I’m the responsible friend getting you both home, understand?’ She started to walk away, then suddenly turned back and squatted down in front of Zee.
‘One thing you should know,’ she said. ‘He just risked his life for you. In fact, he’s been risking his life ever since he met you.’
With that she bounced up, zipped her leather jacket up to the chin and disappeared into the darkness. Zee could hear her boot heels striking the pavement for a long time and when they too vanished, she felt truly alone.
CHAPTER 10
THE OUTLIER SPECIES
Zee was aware of swimming up through warm, heavy rivers of sleep. But each time she neared the surface she dived back down. Once the darkness turned rosy against her eyelids and she knew it was daylight, and knew that someone had set her windows for natural light. She just had time to wonder who before she dived again, just for a few minutes, she told herself. When she swam up once more, the rosiness was gone. It was evening, and this time she kept going until she broke the surface.
The last of the day’s light came through the window high on her bedroom wall and from the small sitting room walls turned down low. She got up and stood in the doorway.
‘David?’
He was sitting on her sofa. It seemed right that he was there, but she wasn’t sure why.
For a moment neither of them spoke. Then he crossed the room and put his arms around her. ‘I’m so sorry, Zee. I should never have let you walk away like that.’
&nbs
p; She noticed she was wearing scrub bottoms and an oversized T-shirt that said Royal London Lacrosse, clothes she usually slept in. ‘Where are my real clothes? You . . . I . . . we didn’t . . . ?’
‘No. Mia and Rani got you cleaned up and changed into those. Before Rani snuck me in. She’s quite the watchdog where you’re concerned.’
Zee began to remember small bits and flashes, but was having trouble piecing them together. ‘The beautiful girl. Mia? You asked me to trust her and she helped us. She brought us here, right?’
‘According to her, you made a fantastic drunk.’
‘Who is she?’
‘My research partner.’
‘Who is she besides that? I’ve seen her places we’re at, like that day at Brighton, and you always know she’s there but never introduce us. What’s going on?’
He ignored her question. ‘And your friend Rani could be an actress. Mia said she came out into the lobby to get you and gave you the lecture of a lifetime, to make sure everyone would hear about it and leave you alone with your hangover for a few days. She brought some food, too. You should probably try to eat. You lost some blood and I had to give you something to help you sleep.’ Zee heard and felt again the sickening scrape of blade against bone. Cautiously, she touched her collarbone with her fingertips, then traced a line up her throat to her jaw. The skin was smooth and unbroken.
‘I don’t understand. The man with the knife . . . I’m sure he stabbed me. And you too. I can’t have imagined it, there was blood all over your shirt.’
David took her hand and slid it inside his shirt, her palm against his midriff. ‘He did stab me. Right about here. Feel it?’
‘No.’ Zee felt nothing but smooth skin and muscle. No dressing, no wound. ‘How did you do this?’
He held up a small silver bar. Zee recognised it at once – it was just like the bar she thought she’d seen David put in his pocket the night they met in the emergency treatment room.
‘An accelerator. It identifies damaged cells and kicks their repair rate into hyperdrive. The cells along your collar bone,’ he explained, ‘will always be a few weeks ahead of the rest in the ageing process. You may get a wrinkle there first. Or, when you’re a very, very old woman with dozens of descendants, there may be a slight discolouration or the hint of a sag.’
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