“Who are they?” said Jack. “How long have they been here?”
“And how did they get past Laura?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” agreed Jack. Then he fell silent. Below them on the main floor, the squad were searching for them. One—it seemed to be the leader—hurried over to a supervisor. There was a hushed conversation, the supervisor leaning in to listen. Then he stood back, yielding authority to the people with the guns. In pairs, the squad spread throughout the room, interrogating the workers. The leader and supervisor watched the floor for anyone who tried to run.
Jane quickly placed her gun in a gap between two of the machines beside them. She hovered by one of the machines, making a show of checking the reading given on a screen. Jack examined the display on the next machine, some distance apart from her.
“They’ll look up eventually,” whispered Jane.
“I’ll go first,” he said. “Back down the ladder. Then round the reactor to the stairs. I’ll wait for you there, then we go up together. To the control room.”
“Without the gun?” said Jane.
“With it, we won’t get across the floor. Without it, we at least stand a chance.”
“If you say so.” He assumed, somewhere underneath her visor and mask, she was rolling her eyes.
Jack made his way back to the ladder, stopping to check another of the readings as he went, taking his time and showing anyone who might happen to glance up towards the gantry that he was in no rush. His feet clanged horribly loud on each rung as he made his way back down to the main floor but no one came to investigate. Not too hurried, not too casual, he walked over to the main working space around the reactor core, just one of the many anonymous people in protective suits getting on with their jobs.
So far, he thought, so good. The vast reactor core thrummed with deafening power. The whole floor trembled with energy. Jack could almost feel the radiation pressing close against his suit.
The leader of the squad Jack had seen earlier still stood with the supervisor. Closer, Jack could see the supervisor had blue stripes on his or her protective suit; otherwise, the only difference between Jack and the other people around him was that some of them carried assault rifles.
He didn’t make directly for the doors at the far end of the huge room, but headed to a computer bank as if to check the readings and confer with the two operators there. The men or women working the controls reacted in surprise—at least as far as he could tell. One backed away from him, and in their visor Jack saw reflections of a couple of the armed staff suddenly taking an interest. He couldn’t walk away without drawing more attention, so he walked on until he was stood with the two nervous operators.
Jack couldn’t think of anything to say or do that might not give him away. His silence only seemed to make them more nervous.
“It’s Alexa,” said one, her accent Germanic just like everyone else. As she spoke, she tapped her chest then indicated her colleague. “That’s Boas. I can vouch for him. Hasn’t been out of my sight.”
Jack nodded curtly and kept moving. No one intercepted him as he crossed the floor. He stopped at another bank of controls. On one display screen, a needle hovered in the safe zone of whatever it was reading. Jack kept his body posed as if inspecting the data, but behind the visor of his protective suit he turned his head to look back the way he’d come. A number of blank-faced visors stared back at him.
Jack caught his breath, remaining rigidly where he stood, trying to work out his next move. He couldn’t tell if any of them were actually watching him, or just happened to be facing that way. The doors were near enough that he could make a run for it and they might not catch up with him. But that would cause problems for Jane. He couldn’t see her, either—she should have been following him across the floor. But then he couldn’t be sure which one of the identical suits was her anyway.
There didn’t seem to be much option but to carry on, so he backed away from the readings and then, as if an afterthought, made his way to the doors. He pressed again the door with his hand—and it didn’t budge. He felt rising panic, then spotted the green button to one side and stabbed it with his gloved finger. The door yielded and he went through.
He stood at the bottom of a stairwell. Signs warned him that he was still in a high exposure zone and not to remove his suit. He didn’t want to linger at the bottom of the stairs, as that might look suspicious if anyone saw him. Jack made his way up the stairs, waiting at the first turn, where he could keep an eye on the door. If anyone appeared—at the door, or from further upstairs—he would be mid-stride, heading somewhere with purpose.
Jane didn’t come. Through the wall, he could feel the thrum of the reactor, but apart from that all was agonising silence. His heart hammered and the mask over his face made it difficult to breathe. Sweat pooled around his toes. Where the fuck was Jane? Something must have gone wrong.
Then there was a click from the door below him. A suited figure entered the stairwell—a suited figure holding a pistol. Jack froze—as yet unseen. The figure with the gun closed the door carefully, then looked all round. He felt a sudden relief, recognising Jane’s body language.
“Hey,” he called to her, and she almost shot him. Jack held out his hands reassuringly and made his way down the steps to join her. She didn’t say anything but held the gun at him. He realised he’d made a terrible mistake and raised his hands, surrendering.
“Gotcha,” she said.
“Funny,” he told her. They headed back up the stairs. It was slow going in their heavy suits. At each level, a door led off to some department or area—the signs explaining that the viewing balcony and main station control room were still some way above them. Jack, short of breath as he climbed, still had questions. “Where’d you get the gun?”
“Easy,” said Jane. “The ones with the rifles also have these in holsters. I figured the holster is on top of their protective suits, as well as whatever they’re wearing underneath. So if I slipped it from the holster, they wouldn’t feel a thing.”
“Risky,” said Jack.
“No one spared me a glance. Not like Mr Nonchalant Stroll Around The Room.”
“I was trying not to be noticed.”
“So we all saw.” She stopped. “Shit.”
Jack looked back the way they’d come, but couldn’t see or hear anything. Jane was staring at something on the wall, reflected dead in the centre of her visor; a camera. Jack hadn’t seen a working camera since he was a child. He’d certainly never seen one twitch.
The movement made him jump. “Fuck,” he said. The camera turned to regard him. A small red light winked on and off.
Jane grabbed his arm and they raced up the stairs. They passed another level and another door, and Jack wished the signs leading still further upwards gave some indication of how far they had to go. Then, below them, they heard charging footsteps as armed personnel poured into the stairwell.
“Stop!” shouted a man from at least two levels below them—still horribly near. “Stop or we fire!”
“They can’t risk it,” Jack told Jane. “We’re too close to the reactor.”
They hurried on, bounding up two stairs at a time, though Jack’s thighs were already burning and his stump jarred with each impact. Suddenly, gunfire echoed in the enclosed space of the stairwell. Something ricocheted off the bannister just by Jack’s side. He and Jane kept running as more bullets clattered around them.
“Fuck!” said Jane, falling forward to smack hard into the stairs. Her pistol rebounded off the concrete and out of her hand, but Jack caught it before it arced away down the stairwell. He quickly handed it back to Jane, then grabbed her under the armpits to help haul her to her feet. She cursed him under her breath and her whole body was shaking. When she tried to put weight on her left leg, it buckled and she fell backwards, threatening to send them both tumbling down the stairs. Jack held onto the bannister tight until she could right herself.
“Fuck,” she said again, looking down. Bl
ood seeped from a neat, round hole in her calf.
“It’s not so bad,” said Jack. “Come on.”
She clutched her arm round his shoulder and they struggled up the next flight of stairs—each step agonising to Jane, and agonisingly slow.
“Go on without me,” she told him.
“Not a chance.”
But she shoved him onwards up the stairs. “I mean it. I’m dead anyway. Hole in my suit; I must be taking a full dose.”
He wanted to argue, but she sat on the stair, resolutely turning away from him to aim the gun towards the soldiers fast catching them up. Jack, furious with her, hurried up the stairs. This hadn’t been the plan!
The gun shots continued. A man screamed and there was a pause before the shooting resumed. Jack dragged himself up the next flight of stairs and reached the next landing.
More armed guards stood waiting there, assault rifles trained at his head. Behind them, through thick glass, he saw the main control room—a row of ancient-looking computer banks, staffed by intelligent young people in lab coats, all staring back at him in alarm. At one desk, a tall, thin woman in a black suit jacket stood poised by a silver bulb on a stick. When Jack caught her eye, she smiled thinly at him—and then turned to someone else, another, shorter woman, sat in a chair to one side.
It was Laura.
The thin woman turned back to face Jack and silently pressed a button by the silver bulb on a stick.
“Your Majesty,” a Germanic voice said from a box in the wall of the stairwell. “You seem to have killed us all.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THEY STRIPPED JACK naked, sheared off his body hair and forced foul gunk down his throat that made him spasm and vomit and shit. The mess was cleared with jets of icy water, the pressure so high it propelled Jack, all knees and elbows, across the hard, tiled floor and wedged him against the wall. He might have blacked out in the numbing onslaught, and then they were on him again, clipping his toe and finger nails, swabbing the insides of his ears and nose and arsehole, before turning the hoses back on.
Eventually, a fey man with a Geiger counter decreed that Jack has passed whatever line constituted danger, or that they could do no more. Jack was coarsely towelled dry, then manhandled into loose cotton pyjamas a few sizes too big. His prosthetic leg wasn’t returned to him. His head pounded, he was covered in bruises where they’d held him down and his insides felt scraped out. But the fey man checked him over and, not hiding his surprise, concluded that Jack would live.
“Jane,” he asked them. “What about Jane?” The fey man wouldn’t say. Jack felt the loss deep in the pit of his stomach. He would have sobbed were he not utterly exhausted.
They put him in a square room with an ancient bald man who had to be carried in. No, he realised with a start—that was his reflection. Apart from the mirror, there was no furniture, no window, just a strip light on the wall that made everything over-bright and unreal. They lay Jack on the thin carpet on the concrete floor, and before they’d left the room he’d succumbed to sleep. There were fitful, indistinct nightmares, his body dissolving as dead friends looked judgementally on.
When he woke, his first thought was of Jane. But no, sat cross-legged by the wall was the thin woman he’d seen in the control room. Her piercing black eyes watched him with amusement as Jack struggled to sit up.
“Jane,” he said.
The woman’s mouth twitched in what might have been sympathy.
“We’re doing what we can,” she said.
“I want to see her.”
“We will have to see.”
He got himself into a sitting position, propped against the hard, cold wall. “You’re Germans.”
She smiled. “You think we’re an invasion.”
“I don’t know what to think. You seem to know what you’re doing.”
“I am Doctor Sara Brandt, formerly of the Max Planck Institute for Kernphysik—for nuclear physics—in Heidelberg. Since The Cull, I have been part of the cabal of scientists under Chairman Weber.”
The name didn’t mean anything to Jack—and Brandt was clearly disappointed. “We have a simple ambition,” she went on. “To lead the world through enlightenment and science. Look at this institution. We rendered it safe, we had useful electrical power and restored some semblance of the civilised world. Speaking of which...” She clapped her hands, the sound sharp and echoing in the unfurnished room.
After a moment, the door opened and a woman walked in with a tray. Jack instinctively edged away from the sight of Laura. She looked different in a lab coat, her hair tied back in a neat plait. But there was the same steely look in her eyes.
“Join us, please,” said Brandt, the tone making it an order. Laura didn’t seem keen, but did as she was instructed, placing the tray down and sitting beside Brandt by the far wall. The tray contained two china cups and saucers, a plate of homemade, elegant little biscuits and a cafetière. Jack’s stomach turned over and he thought he might be sick, and he had a sudden, vivid impression of his mother smiling.
“You see?” said Brandt, leaning forward to push down the plunger on the cafetière. “Civilisation. When was the last time you experienced real coffee?”
Jack didn’t answer. He watched Brandt pour the coffee and took the cup she offered him. His hand trembled, and dark, strong-smelling coffee slopped over the side of the cup, scolding him. He put the cup down quickly, and his smarting hand to his mouth. The coffee tasted extraordinary. Brandt was clearly delighted by the wonder on his face.
“Civilisation,” said Jack bitterly. “That’s what you call what’s happening outside? Her stringing up children who step out of line?”
Laura snorted—and spoke in her native German accent. “We had a system of control. Deaths were kept to a minimum.”
“You lied to all those people!” Jack snapped back at her. “You made them complicit in what you were doing, butchering innocent people. My friends!”
Laura only nodded. “The operation demanded it.”
Brandt was more conciliatory. “We had to keep people out of the reactor buildings—for their own good.”
“You could have told them the truth,” said Jack.
Brandt sighed. “The irony is, for all we wish to advance enlightened thinking, people remain irrational and afraid. They would have interfered with our work, and we could then not have made them safe.”
He didn’t like it one bit, but Jack needed to know one thing. “Is it safe?”
Brandt took a deep breath. “It was, at least in the short term. We engaged a number of protocols and brought the systems under control. But the A reactor had ceased to generate power before The Cull, and is long overdue for defuelling. We do not have the resources to effectively decommission the site. Our colleagues have had to attend reactors in other parts of the world—those in Russia have taken priority. We hoped to maintain safety levels here until more of our team could be deployed. But now that won’t be possible, thanks to you.”
“Me?” said Jack. “What have I done?”
Laura snarled at him. “The community outside! Oh, they’re cowering now, waiting for you to do what you promised and put everything right. But how long do you think they will last before they need to see what’s happening? Come the morning, they’ll be here.”
“And they’ve got guns,” said Jack.
“So have we,” said Brandt sadly. “But a gun battle around the facilities of a nuclear reactor would not be a good outcome for anyone.”
“You could evacuate now, before they arrive.”
“How far would we get? And what would happen to the reactor without us to maintain it? If the people streaming in here decide to vent their frustration and fear, who knows what damage they could do? And if they manage to contain themselves, it remains a ticking clock. It is quite the dilemma, but I must say I prefer they destroy it quickly. Better to die in a sudden explosion than wait for slow and lingering death. So we will stay, and if need be we will be the ones to ignite the fi
nal end.”
Jack could hardly take it in. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’ve killed us all,” spat Laura. “You’ve killed the children out there! Your country!”
She was right. Jack felt sick inside, thinking of what he said to Singhar before he took his life. He was only thankful that Jane couldn’t hear any of this, that she might never know how massively he’d screwed it up. He knew what she would say: that it was all his fault for trying to game the situation, to use it to his advantage, as a ploy to help him take power.
And a thought struck him. He started to smile. Laura glared at him with hatred, but Brandt watched him curiously.
“It’s probably a stupid question,” he told her.
“It is a saying among scientists,” she said. “There are no stupid questions.”
“Well,” he said. “The thing is, why does there need to be a fight at all?”
“Because,” said Laura wearily, “the people outside will only stay outside for so long.”
“Exactly,” said Jack. “They want to know what’s happening. They want to know if there’s a possibility that things can be okay. So, why don’t we go tell them?”
Laura opened her mouth to protest—but the words stuck in her throat. He could see it in her eyes, the sparking of hope.
“We are scientists, foreigners,” said Brandt. “We tricked them. They will not listen to us.”
Jack didn’t answer, because he could see she was getting it, too. Brandt started to smile.
“But,” she said, “they will listen to their King.”
THE SKY AND sea were blood red as Jack stepped out that freezing morning in an ill-fitting suit. He didn’t think anyone would recognise the frail, bald figure but, of course, the people waiting out in the cold only expected him or Jane. They were clearly shocked by his appearance, but also delighted to see him alive. He walked with confidence—still getting accustomed to his new prosthetic—and smiled a reassuring smile. They couldn’t help but applaud.
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