Falling

by Debbie Moon

  ‘I’m a ReTracer,’ Jude told him, ‘and I want a full makeover.’

  There. Not a reaction, but the absence of one. The surprise, the worry that should have been in his eyes – and wasn’t.

  ‘I see,’ he said, lowering himself into the chair opposite. The springs creaked faint protest. ‘Madam does appreciate that changing any part of her genotype, however small, may have unpredictable effects upon nebulous genetic variables – such as her ReTracing abilities?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Jude found that the dry smile came easily. ‘Madam appreciates that very well.’

  His mouth contracted into a thin, pale line.

  ‘Do I sense a sudden lack of interest in taking my hard-earned cash?’

  The receptionist looked briefly away. ‘Madam must also appreciate that what she is asking for is…’

  ‘Perfectly legal.’

  ‘In the strict sense, perhaps.’

  ‘Is there any other sense?’

  He frowned. ‘This is a licensed clinic, madam, not some fly-by-night backstreet operation. Licenses are not cheap, and have to be renewed yearly. If someone in authority decided that we were no longer worthy of holding a licence…’

  Exactly what he said last time. I don’t need to be here. This is all a waste of time.

  ‘That didn’t stop you,’ she said, ‘when Emma DiFlorian came knocking.’

  He moved faster than she’d imagined possible.

  Bioteching doesn’t just change the shape of your nose or the size of your ears. It makes you strong. And fast. And other, scarier stuff. If he’d come at her, in anger or panic, she wouldn’t have survived.

  But he didn’t.

  He went over the back of the chair, tumbling it across the room as he rolled, and plunged through the door to the foyer. Jude rose in what felt like slow motion, trying to resolve the blur back into the shape of a smiling man with catalogue eyes, and wondered if there was any point in following.

  And then she heard the faint ping of machinery in the foyer and couldn’t quite stifle her laughter.

  Mr Human Streak here, faster than a speeding bullet and all that, who could have outrun her in any direction he wanted, was taking the lift.

  The indicator panel told her where to find him. Nineteenth floor. Of course, if he was smart, he’d have got out of the lift there and hurtled back down the stairs while she was on her way up, using the whole subterfuge to buy himself some escape time.

  Jude suspected that he wasn’t actually that smart. Which was a pity, because she’d feel a lot happier about going up there if there was a good chance he’d be long gone.

  Desperate measures.

  What happens if I die here? Will my future just unravel, no falling from windows, none of this ever happening? Will Fitch weep at my funeral tomorrow or the day after, instead of boycotting it in six months time?

  In the end, you don’t save yourself at all. You just change the date of your death. No one gets out alive.

  Ping.

  The doors opened.

  Blank corridors, still patched with rectangles of bright paint where pictures had once hung. Open doors bled grey light into her path as she emerged. Glimpses of equipment waiting placidly under dustsheets, shelves of papers bleaching slowly in the sun. End of the corridor here. Only one way to turn.

  Has the bird flown?

  She could hear faint sounds; rustling paper, perhaps, draughts through broken windows. Mice, or worse. Nothing else. Nothing human.

  Not good. Smacked of a trap.

  ‘OK, Superboy,’ she called. ‘Let’s be sensible about this. You come on out, without the faster-than-light thing, tell me what I want to know, and I walk away and forget I ever had this conversation. Just anonymous information I picked up off the streets. How does that grab you?’

  No reply.

  ‘No, I had a feeling it wouldn’t. You just remember, buddy. When they come for your licence. When they fling you in Newgate and all those nice muscleboy Green activists start offering to share your shower cubicle. I offered you a way out of this, you just remember that.’

  Still no reaction.

  Damn.

  Jude started down the corridor.

  One thing was for sure. She was going to have difficulty kicking backsides in this skirt. Bloody Schrader and his bloody disguises. ‘They’ll never suspect you dressed like that,’ says he. I’ll bet he only wanted to see my legs, the –

  Schrader.

  The only person who’d been involved in this complex tangle of ReTracery twice. He’d been the one who’d handed her this assignment. Deputising for Warner while he was in a meeting. Was that significant?

  Answer: she had no idea. For all she knew, the clue to sorting all this out could be tied to the price of bean sprouts or her mother’s shoe size. Too many variables.

  Still. The way he’d looked at her on the Millennium Bridge. ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you for a long time.’

  About what?

  Movement.

  Instinct, unhelpful as always, froze her to the spot.

  Yes, there. Behind the door. Very slight, just the twitch of a hand perhaps, or a head. Then stillness, and the shouts of the barge-men on the distant river, bellowing for trade or cursing their steersmen as another collision was narrowly avoided.

  Well, she thought, I have two choices. I can stand here until this hideous skirt gives me a wool rash, or I can take the initiative.

  Deliberately not stopping to think things through, she hurled herself at the door.

  With a terrible grinding of hinges, it slammed into the wall and bounced back at her, throwing her off balance. Something rose from behind it with a screech of terror, flapping and fluttering among the cobwebs. Wings beat briefly, desperately against the window glass. Behind the door, she could hear the faint cheeping of small and vulnerable things.

  Finding the missing section of glass at last, the raven launched itself out into the rain, crying out in triumph as it spiralled cloudwards.

  And then she saw him – felt him, more likely, registering the movement behind her with older, deeper senses than mere sight. Already gone when she turned, leaving just the blank absence of a corridor newly vacated.

  He was still here, then.

  ‘Sorry about the birdbox.’

  The deserted chicks twittered panic and were silent, as if she’d somehow confirmed their worst fears.

  ‘You don’t talk much, for a salesman. How’d you get this job anyway?’

  In the room the raven had abandoned, a box of cleaning supplies was perched on top of a heap of broken furniture. Stepping inside, Jude picked up a broken table leg, hefted it uncertainly. No. No, that was just silly.

  Whereas the spray detergent – well, that would be very useful indeed.

  Clutching her new-found weapon at her side, she marched back out to the corridor.

  How long would you be able to move at that speed? Not long. Even if your nerves were hyped enough to handle it, your heart couldn’t keep up the effort. Couldn’t move the blood round the body fast enough to feed the muscles. More than a few seconds and you’d basically suffer a stroke.

  No wonder he’d taken the lift. He couldn’t outrun her. He could use the speed burst to evade her, yeah, but in the long term, all it would do was wear him out.

  The next door. Ultramarine light and barricaded windows; she paused on the threshold, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Realising too late that standing outlined against the corridor lights wasn’t such a great idea.

  Shelves, glass-fronted and reflecting luminous blue. She raised a hand to shield her eyes. Papers rustled in the frigid currents circulating from the wide grilles in the ceiling. Goose pimples rose on her bare arms.

  Her reflection stared back at her from the glass: and behind it, something else was staring too.

  Shivering, transfixed, Jude moved closer.

  It was exactly the way she’d always imagined it. Jars and bottles and tanks lined up on the shelves, a Frankenstienian m
useum of the unwanted. She leant closer to read the labels. Mrs this. Mr that. Dated last year, this year, years back. Same red stamp on the corner of every label. UNWANTED MATERIAL. Removed to be replaced by something new, stranger, better.

  Inside the cabinet, rows of carefully paired eyes stared disfocusedly back at her.

  She stepped back and hit the door, knocking it closed. Revealing a whole new dog-leg of the room, flat and depthless in the unsettling light. Square coffin-like tanks on steel benches bubbled with thick, gelatinous liquids, lapping the limbs of hunched and humanoid shapes.

  Suddenly, horribly sure she’d found what her past had summoned her back to witness, Jude edged towards the nearest tank.

  The bubbles rose in unbroken columns, blurring the details of the olive skinned huddle behind the glass. Dark hair floated horizontally on the surface, penetrated by tubes and pipes and long steel needles.

  As she pressed her cheek to the glass, finding it strangely warm, the creature on the other side shifted in her sleep and turned to face her near relative.

  Emma DiFlorian.

  Pale and cold and drawing hard on the oxygen mask buckled to her face, while the thick sea-green rose and fell, waves breaking over her shoulders in torture or in healing. Her lips parted – to offer some strange wisdom, perhaps, or to plead – but Jude was already stumbling backwards through the shelves, flailing arms knocking jars of once-precious body parts to shatter on the floor.

  Definitely time for back-up.

  Crashing back into the corridor, wide-eyed with panic and disbelief, she found that the salesman was trying to get past her.

  That was the only explanation for the suicidal headlong rush, the smudge of movement hurtling up the corridor towards her. She froze.

  For an instant, his face stabilised, still among a blur of racing limbs, and his dark eyes fixed on hers. Startled and somehow hurt, as if he’d expected something better from her.

  Jude raised the antibacterial spray bottle she’d lifted from the cleaning supplies and pumped the trigger.

  His head snapped back. Something too fast to resolve hit her in the ankles, the knees. The dark blur slowed and fell. Becoming a body, then limbs. A body she was falling onto as it slid along the corridor, face-up, knuckles ground into eyes, sweeping her feet from under her.

  Something hard and flat connected with her back, fell away; an opening door, spilling them into a darkened room. A table leg connected with her ribs, triggering a landslide of papers and coffee mugs and, finally, they were still.

  She was lying on his chest, staring into his face as he squirmed and struggled to cough up disinfectant.

  That was the other problem with heroics. They hurt.

  Swaying to her feet, Jude was astonished to discover that she hadn’t broken anything. Not even the stupid pointy heels on these ridiculous shoes. Last time she went anywhere in disguise.

  Last time, actually, she went anywhere on Schrader’s say-so.

  Superboy didn’t look like he was going anywhere for a while. In fact he looked sweaty and incoherent, which made sense, if he was suffering from exhaustion.

  She went and stood over him, doing her best to exude power and control over the situation. Which seemed to work. He looked dazed, and actually rather happy that she’d taken command. The relief of surrender.

  Either that, or she’d misjudged the angle, and he could see up her skirt.

  ‘So. Tell me about DiFlorian.’

  ‘I don’t know any more than you do,’ the young man wheezed.

  ‘I know she’s in a tank down the corridor, breathing jelly, five or six days after you said she’d checked out.’

  He rolled his eyes heavenward, as if she’d completely missed the point. ‘We told you it – might take longer than usual. Several attempts. She’s fine. You have nothing to worry about.’

  You.

  GenoBond?

  My dear employers – DiFlorian’s dear employers – dispatched her here and then denied all knowledge, even sent me here to perform some entirely cosmetic ‘investigation’.

  Time to use a few brain cells.

  ‘So how is the process going?’

  ‘We told you. Difficult. The other two we tested… natural ability. Hers is barely half developed, and tweaking a ReTracer’s abilities is always a hit and miss process.’

  An impossible process, that’s what she’d been told; but then a lot of what she been told recently hadn’t exactly been the whole truth and nothing but.

  Taking a risk, she accused, ‘You said you could do it.’

  ‘And we will. You’ve got to be patient.’ He levered himself into a sitting position, shaking his head to clear it. ‘You should have said you were here to check on progress. Scared the hell out of me.’

  ‘Trust me, you returned the favour.’ Remembering she was supposed to be throwing her weight around, she added, ‘Call it a little test of your integrity.’

  ‘Why do I get the feeling I didn’t pass?’

  ‘You could have been less conspicuous, put it like that.’ And then the words came tumbling out of her, before she’d time to check their plausibility. ‘Maybe I should get any paper evidence out of here before anyone puts you to the test again.’

  He frowned. ‘We said there’d be no paper trail.’

  ‘We said that – but did we stick to it?’

  The salesman’s doe eyes clouded. ‘There’s technical paperwork. The lab techs are going to need it if we have to make another attempt.’

  ‘Then we’ll hand it back.’ She made an attempt to look apologetic. ‘Cut me some slack here. If I come back with a couple of sheets of paper to wave at my boss, I’ve saved the whole project from a dangerous potential leak, right? You know how this corporate shit works. In return, I’ll keep your name out of it, and we’ll forget you tried to run the twenty-second mile the instant I mentioned Emma’s name.’

  He looked at her for a moment, taking in the bargain. Appreciating the trouble he was actually in.

  ‘Okay.’

  She offered him a hand up.

  ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘you should consider suing whoever sold you that modification. It’s obviously about as much use as eight legs and a tail.’

  ’Funny,’ he muttered, and she couldn’t tell if he meant it or not. ‘We had someone in for one of those last week.’

  The corridor was eerily quiet. Jude wondered idly if anyone else here knew about floor nineteen’s dirty little secret. Maybe the whole company was a front for some GenoBond lunacy, and all the staff were downstairs right now shredding the evidence.

  What were they doing to Emma DiFlorian?

  Whatever it was, it had happened to two people naturally; GenoBond wanted more. She remembered the alley behind Club Andro, and Harchak, muttering darkly about GenoBond experiments. It looked like she was going to have to follow through on her promise, if she ever saw that part of her life again.

  Secret genetic experiments. Passing information to Harchack’s illegal gene clinics. Knowing about a missing ReTracer who was actually metamorphosing in a jar in Dr Frankenstein’s lab. Now, doesn’t that sound like the kind of thing that could get a girl thrown out of a ninety-storey building?

  The dark-eyed man was still out of breath, trailing one hand along the wall as if he really wanted to cling to it for support. Jude wasn’t feeling much better herself.

  No time for a rest. Get the paperwork, get out. That’s obviously what you’re here for. To expose this. That’s how you save yourself. So just hang on in there, you’re almost –

  Ahead, the lift doors opened, and Warner strode into the corridor as if he expected to find all hell waiting for him.

  Superboy stopped in mid-step.

  ‘Marcus Arturo, I presume,’ Warner said, with barely a glance down at the electronic prompter cupped in the palm of his left hand. ‘You’re under arrest for failing to observe the proper waiting time before making alterations to the DNA of a registered ReTracer.’

  The dark-ey
ed man spun round, poised to run. Jude stepped aside. One head-on collision a day was quite enough to satisfy the terms of her contract.

  But he didn’t get that far. His knees buckled and he crashed forward, slumping sideways against the wall. With his legs tucked under him, he looked like he’d started melting from the ankles up.

  Jude raised one hand in a nervous salute. ‘Mr Warner.’

  He just nodded uncertainly. Not sure what to say to her.

  Or not sure how much to give away.

  ‘Schrader said he’d sent you in,’ he announced. ‘Rest of the squad are downstairs, turfing out the customers. Find anything?’

  ‘Oh yes. And how. I think we may want to strike a deal here. This man is our only witness –’

  The dark-eyed man shuddered and hung his head. Something about the ensuing silence stopped her mid-sentence. It was only when Warner reached her, frowning as he moved her aside, that she realised Superboy was no longer breathing.

  ‘Shoddy workmanship,’ Warner murmured. His hand lingered on her shoulder as if he was trying to transmit something to her by touch. ‘Adrenaline activated modifications, practically suicide.’

  Staring down at the young man’s eyes, as blank now as the ones she’d seen in jars, Jude murmured, ‘I don’t remember that.’

  Breaking the Recommendation, damn it.

  ‘I haven’t heard anything. About that.’

  ‘Really?’ He cleared his throat, only managing to draw attention to his nervousness. ‘It’s been quite –’

  ‘Did you know that Emma DiFlorian is down the corridor in a regening tank, being modified on the orders of GenoBond?’

  Panic illuminated Warner’s eyes.

  ‘So how about an explanation?’

  He took a step back, tugging nervously at his hair. ‘We should, I mean, there may be more employees – Back-up, we need –’

  ‘Like Schrader? He’s tied up in all this, isn’t he? Best of buddies, you two – when it comes to pulling the wool over my eyes.’

  ‘Jude. You can’t afford to get involved –’