“It’s started,” the guard said.
His earpiece crackled. “Stay with it.”
The paint on the door blistered. The smell of charred wood prefaced the sudden shape of two hands emerging through the door. At the same time, in the small viewing window, a face appeared, rippled to nonsense by the cracks and the natural warp of the wire-enforced glass pattern. The face became the glass, cracks and all, oozing squarely through the frame. Coins of blood fell from its skin and the guard noticed how the glass had somehow fused with the flesh. He was so taken by the beauty of its passage that he sat back against the wall to watch, his lips shock-dry, his need to both laugh and bawl cancelling each other into awed silence.
He could see every nuance of her progress through the door; an intimacy between the living and the inert – if living was what she was. Only when her eyes, freshly blinked free of paint, splinters of wood and glass, met his own did he feel the first stitch of panic.
As she plucked the last shreds of her body from the door, the guard realised she was naked, but it had taken him until now to establish that. Her body was of a rudimentary configuration only; much of it ran in loops and strands. Liquid parts of her dribbled to the floor then swiftly collected and rejoined her mass like quicksilver. They wrapped around gaping, bloodless holes in which hints of muscle and bone could be seen. Her body turned brilliant white in an instant, generating a burst of intense heat that did for the cameras and tanned the guard’s face.
“What is it, Exley?” The fussy voice was full of needles. Exley, the guard, had forgotten all about his grenade launcher.
The flux of her face was at the same time both horrific and bizarrely tranquil; he was put in mind of lava lamps. When his voice came back she’d surged across the few feet between them, flowing over his legs, numbing them with her delicious chill.
“I don’t know what it is,” he whispered, as she covered his mouth with what passed for her own.
Although they were on her within fifteen seconds, dragging her away from Exley, the damage had been done. The soft tissue of his face was a pulped mass. Gleave, in the moment before he shot him through the forehead, couldn’t work out whether what dangled from the centre of his face was a tongue or an eyeball.
“Impressive,” came a gravelly voice at his shoulder. “And I don’t mean your sharp-shooting.”
“She’s the fastest we’ve seen. She’s almost ready. And this is, what... eighteen hours after we put the draw on her?”
“Give or take.”
“So what now?”
“Come and have a drink.”
Gleave followed the older man along a corridor carpeted with deep, wine-dark pile. He had been with the Junction for almost fifteen years now, yet was no closer to knowing Leonard Butterby than he was his partner, Thomas Lousher, or the history that they shared. Rumour was a rogue bull in this place: it could gore you if you messed about with it. The only whispers Gleave allowed himself to believe involved the suggestions of violence that had followed the pair around as they grew up in London during the ’60s and ’70s. Neither Butterby nor Lousher had any previous; at least, there was nothing on record. What the linens had printed on the couple over the last quarter of a century you could find in a few paragraphs devoted to their charity work. They were barbed wire without the barbs; nothing snagged.
“Absolut, isn’t it?”
Gleave nodded.
“Absolute disgrace, more like. Arseman’s drink, if you ask me. Here–”
Gleave took his drink and sat opposite Butterby, who had poured himself a large Scotch. A big desk, empty but for a blotter and a Meisterstück fountain pen, separated them.
“I don’t need to tell you how bollock-shrivellingly important the next few weeks are going to be–”
“No,” said Gleave.
“–but I’m fucking well going to. Fuck up once, just once, mind, and your arse is going to look like a choice cuts diagram on a butcher’s shop wall.”
Gleave swallowed hard, wishing there was some ice in his drink, something to chink against the glass and lend a little relief to this ordeal.
“We had word come in this morning. There’s agitation.”
“Where?”
“You know where. Fifteen years of nice and easy, and now the blood’s up. Check out this convergence. I want them wasted. I don’t want any fuck-ups. Now finish your drink and fuck off.”
Gleave put the glass down, even though he had barely wetted his lips with the contents. He knew Butterby well enough not to piss him off; at least he went through the motions of hospitality. Butterby and Lousher were yesterday’s men; they just didn’t realise it yet. Old, old men. Their power was failing. A tingle in his gut, unlike anything he’d felt in a decade and a half, drove him to pick up his pace on the way back to the ops room. A convergence. He wondered which of the Inserts it might be. Chances were, they’d be able to hit them fast before they became aware of their abilities.
Cheke was mopping up the juices on the carpet. Everyone else was watching her, afraid to say anything. Gleave went to her. “Come with me,” he said. And to one of the suits: “Bring me a file on the lost.” He would have to work through the night to train her on the basics of human interaction. She must learn not to draw attention to herself. She must be a ghost, until circumstances demand she reveal her gifts.
Pausing in the chill corridor, before allowing her into his office, he said: “Cheke. How are your eyes now?”
She shifted behind him, in the brown gloom of the passageway. “I can see...” Her voice was that of a child’s opening a Christmas box and finding what its heart had ached for. “I can see the pores on the back of your hand closing. I can see your pulse in the cut of your clothes.”
Gleave moved, all the better to disguise the shiver that ran through him. “That’s good,” he said.
She digested the file within minutes, the photographs and names committed to a mind that was still sharpening yet was already far beyond the swiftness of anything human.
“We’ll start you off on someone easy,” Gleave said. “It’s the man in the flat. The man we should have finished off, but he got away. He could be dangerous. He might expose us. Then there will be others.”
“When I’ve caught them–”
Gleave leaned forwards across the desk. For the first time, he was able to scrutinise properly the face that was gathering itself from the genetic spaghetti of its constituent parts. She was going to become rather lovely. Her eyes were hooded, and cat-sly, a blue so pale it was almost dangerously conspicuous. Her hair was black, piled in thick curls. The cruelty in her mouth made up for the innocence of the arch in her brows.
“Yes?”
“When I’ve caught them...” She smiled, desperation edging her words.
Gleave tried to return the humour, but his lips failed him. “Yes?”
“Can I eat them?”
CHAPTER NINE: CONTACT
IT HAD BEEN a good five years since Will had set foot on Dartmouth Park Road. He hoped Elisabeth still lived here and hadn’t moved on. He pushed through the gate – which still wailed in the same high-low fashion – and rapped on the door. When it opened, there was a hand that flew to a mouth, a dreadful crash as the plate Elisabeth had been drying fell to the floor.
Will said, “Pleased to see me then?”
WHAT HAD BEEN their living room contained the same curtains they had picked together from IKEA. Mango, the cat they had chosen from a litter belonging to a Maine Coon breeder in West Croydon, regarded him from the windowsill with the same mix of disdain and suspicion. Elisabeth was sitting with her slim legs winding around each other, elbow resting on her knee, cigarette burning between well-manicured fingers. Her hair had been cut short; her high cheekbones formed the inverted base of a triangle completed by the thick, ruby bow of her mouth.
“You look fantastic,” he said.
“You look like a stunt, Will,” she said. “You look like shit in a jacket.”
“I aim to
please.”
“That’d be a first.”
Will held his hands up. “Look, Elisabeth. I’m not here to fight you.”
“What the fuck are you here for? Money? You still living in that shit pit with vinegar tits? My fucking patient, she was. I should have pulled the fucking plug on her before you got wind of her.” Elisabeth took a huge, violent drag on her cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray that might as well have been Will’s face.
“Elisabeth, I–” And then he couldn’t go on. The grief that had been rattling around inside like a loose coin in a machine spat out of him with such force that Elisabeth moved back in her seat, her hand covering her mouth, her eyes large in their sockets. As she blurred before him, Will slid onto the floor and let it happen. By the end, his chin and chest were a thin gravy of snot and tears and saliva. His chest hurt from all the sobbing. He was exhausted.
Elisabeth said, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not you,” he said. “Cat. She’s been kidnapped. I think she might be dead.”
Elisabeth closed her eyes and for a while the two of them were silent. Then, very slowly, Elisabeth moved over to him, sat by him, and slipped an arm around his shoulders.
She said, “You’ve lost weight.”
“There was a baby. Our baby... I mean, one that me and Cat were going to have. We lost it.”
Elisabeth tensed but did not remove her arm. Her voice was cold when she spoke again. “I don’t know what you think I can do for you, Will. I mean, it’s not as if we parted in a way that would ever be described in the maturity textbook, is it? I’m very sorry about what’s happened to you, but why have you come here?”
“You’re all I know,” he said. His voice had dwindled to breath and little else. “Men came to our house. They were going to kill me.”
“Will? What are you talking about?”
The urgency in her voice couldn’t rouse him from the exhausted sleep that he suddenly fell into. Elisabeth was able to grab a cushion from the sofa before his head hit the floor. One of his hands retreated to his eyes, covering them as though to prevent him from seeing something awful. It was hours before she could get him up, in any sense of the word.
ELISABETH SAID, “THERE’S nobody called Slowheath on the net.”
“Fuck it,” Will spat. He was sitting at her shoulder, watching as her fingers flew over the keyboard of her laptop. The computer’s hard drive softly chirruped and chuckled as it processed Elisabeth’s request and vomited the results up on screen. The window in the basement study showed a mass of foliage, topped by a portion of pavement. Occasional legs would stride by, casting stop-start patterns of shadow across the room.
Will said, “Are you sure?”
“You can see for yourself. Hang on. What about Sloe Heath?”
“Who he?”
“It’s not a he. It’s an it. It’s a hospital in the Northwest. Just outside Warrington.” She jotted an address on a piece of paper.
“I’m not sure.”
“Well.” Elisabeth swivelled to face him. The whiteness of the screen behind her made it difficult to see the cast of her features. She pressed the scrap into his hand. “There’s nothing else. You’ll have to try. Tell the police. They’ll look into it for you.”
“I can’t get the police involved. I’m already on their shit list.”
“What do you mean?”
“Receiving stolen goods. And there was an affray in the town centre.”
“An affray? What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t talk copspeak with me. What did you do?”
“I was in a fight. A knife was pulled–”
“Oh, Will...”
“Not me. I didn’t have the knife. I headbutted this guy. Broke his nose.”
They were quiet for a while. Then Elisabeth said, “That’s why we aren’t together any more.”
“You don’t have to explain, Eli. That was five years ago. I can work it out for myself. But I can’t go to them. They’ll think I did it.”
“What will you do now?”
“I have to go up there. Catriona might still be alive.”
Elisabeth was becoming, in these moments, much as she used to be when she grew agitated by their arguments. She drew breath as though to say something and then fell silent. It was like watching a shy person struggling to express herself.
“The police,” she blurted finally, persistently. “You must go to them.”
“I can’t,” he said, simply. “There’s no time. They wouldn’t listen to me.”
“I’ll back you up.”
“No. I have to go now. Do you still have the car?”
It was as if, in a second, Elisabeth’s rigidity towards him had returned. She gave him a better view of her chin. “Fuck off, Will. My help desk has just closed.”
“Eli–”
“Don’t Eli me. You’re on your own.”
The burbling computer and a slow foot on broken glass in the street filled the silence. Will was grateful that Elisabeth wasn’t pushing for him to leave, but he knew that it wouldn’t be long in coming.
He said, “Can you smell anything burning?”
Elisabeth regarded him blankly. “Do I look like I’m cooking?”
“Well something’s caught. Are you sure you haven’t got anything on the stove?”
A finger of smoke curled around the door.
Elisabeth said, “Shit.”
She flew upstairs to the kitchen, but there was nothing on the cooker. Will checked her when she hurried back into the hallway. Something in his poise stopped her dead.
He put his finger to his lips; his reddened eyes shifted their focus to a point behind her. She turned to find the back door smouldering, a black handprint gaining definition in the grain of its wood.
“What–” she managed, before Will gripped her hand.
“We have to leave,” he said. “Now.”
She nodded.
“Where’s the car?”
They left by the front door. The sun was a fat, orange, cold thing wrapped in mist, low in the too-blue sky. Frost marbled the roads. A heavy woman in a nurse’s uniform laboured over the handles of an ageing bicycle.
“Show me,” said Will.
They hurried to the corner of Dartmouth Park Road as a series of muffled crashes peppered the stillness they’d vacated.
“I was followed,” Will said.
“Who?” Elisabeth glanced back at him as he propelled her along the pavement. She caught his strangled answer I don’t know, and then her attention was dragged over his shoulder by frenetic movement in their wake. Elisabeth could see, over the top of Mr. Royle’s neatly clipped hedges, a head, jerky with intent. Whoever it was moved fast. Faster than them.
“Where’s this fucking car?”
Elisabeth was about to answer when their pursuer stepped out from behind the hedge, sucking the breath from her.
“How can she run?” she managed at last, before Will pulled her off the road. He had spotted Elisabeth’s car – a cherry-red Volkswagen Golf – parked in a familiarly skewed fashion in a side street. It still bore a scratch from a visit they had made to Abersoch years before.
“Keys,” he demanded. He was wondering how the woman could walk, let alone run. Her legs had been molten, running into each other in shapeless flesh loops before rediscovering normality.
One hand had hovered beneath her chin, like a soup-eater aware of his lack of skill with the spoon, to scoop back great drifts of skin that oozed off the boss of her skull.
Elisabeth was laughing, her eyes as big as eggs. “The keys are on the fridge. Next to a bag of plums.”
They moved on, past Elisabeth’s car, aiming for the top of the road. Will could see there was no way they would make it before the woman caught them. What was wrong with her? Was it leprosy?
“Maybe you should talk to her?” Elisabeth gasped. She was clutching the side of her stomach, fighting a stitch. “Maybe she needs help.”
“Fuck that. She’s not after a
cup of sugar, I assure you.”
The woman – if she could be called that – continued to gather pace and form. Now Will saw that she was only able to observe them since coins of flesh had peeled away from her face, allowing vague smears of colour to resolve themselves as eyes. Her targets locked, she arrowed towards them.
God, Will thought. She sniffed us out.
She was almost upon them when Will jinked left, hauling Elisabeth down a narrow alleyway. Up ahead, Hampstead Heath rolled away from them, raked by mist.
Will glanced back; her cornering wasn’t too clever. The effort to right herself meant she lost control of her substance. When she hove into view once more, her extremities were knitting themselves back into true.
In this fashion, he was able to put some distance between them. On the main road, he chanced upon a taxi pulling away from its rank.
“Anywhere. Drive,” he ordered, as they spilled into the back seat. She came for them out of the lane like a greyhound from a trap. Will watched her receding through the back window as she gamely attempted to pursue. As soon as it was evident she could not catch them, she switched off and set a new course instantly, never once reciprocating Will’s interest in her.
“So,” Elisabeth said. “Who’s she?” Her hands were covering her face and he could see her lower lip trembling. Nevertheless, some of the sass was creeping back into her voice now they were safe. “Jealous girlfriend?”
CHAPTER TEN: TORPOR
CHEKE INVADED A house and fed on the woman who lived there. She found a dark room underneath the building and slowed her heart, hoping that wisdom would creep into her and show her how to plan her next move. Sleeping, she allowed the flux of a new code to infuse her, amalgamating, refreshing her with otherness.
She was losing her hold over her own identity, the original that had mapped out her character from the start, although she could no longer remember enough about that being to gauge whether or not that was a good thing. The mirror was showing a woman where there’d been a girl the day before. When her mind wasn’t distracted by the fizzing of synapses as new thoughts – too complex for her to even begin to unravel – started to bloom, she considered the circumstances of her birth. All that diabolical screaming. And, just before the shock of the real, a feeling of being invaded with freshness, of being augmented with substance. The man who had wrapped her in a towel and warmed her – the thought of him made her shiver with love. She would do anything for him. Anything. Although a tiny part of her wondered why, when she regarded him with nothing but affection and respect, she saw all others as nothing more than meat.
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