And all that meant only one thing:
I’m a freak, and I’m going to die.
Episode III: Flight
Chapter 1
Mercedes
She did not think even Xec really understood how much she preferred the Utopia Genetics office tower when it was deserted over the weekend. She could relax and feel genuinely alone without the staff working in the offices below her. Even on a weekday, like today, not all the floors were occupied; there just weren’t enough people. The rest of the building was sealed off or used for undocumented purposes. There had been an argument, at one time, that they should keep all their assets and acquisitions in the building on one of the higher but unused floors. Her personal reasons for not wanting freaks close to her was not something covered in the meetings; however she was very glad when it was agreed that older buildings out of town would be used instead.
Unfortunately this was not a typical Monday. And the other members of the board had decided they wanted an extraordinary meeting to discuss the latest problem. Mercedes shook her head as she walked the length of the corridor towards the meeting room.
‘They’re well within their rights, Mercedes,’ said Xec.
‘When I want your opinion, I’ll tell you what to say,’ she said. ‘And before you say anything else, yes I know that’s not opinion.’
‘Sorry for breathing.’
Mercedes scowled, which she knew was not a good look for her, but there were times she hated that smart-arse machine. And yes, Xec, I know you’re not actually a machine and some part of you somewhere is breathing.
She paused at the door to the meeting room and closed her eyes. Was this really worth the stress? She could just resign. But if she did, her successor would probably do everything in his power to terminate her. It was not safe to have someone with her knowledge floating around society.
She had never hesitated before entering the boardroom before.
She grabbed the handle and went in.
She had barely sat down, ordered Xec to switch off his monitoring, and brought the meeting to order when Kingsley Upton let loose.
‘Did you know this freak was so powerful?’
Upton had been addressing her, which technically was the correct thing to do since she was the chair; however, it annoyed her. ‘I think you’re asking the wrong person, Kingsley. What do you have to say, Alistair?’
‘Yes, well, no,’ said McCormack.
Upton leapt to his feet. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean? One of your senior researchers has been fried by a fucking freak, while she was completely immobilised. And she destroyed all the electrical equipment in the room. Expensive equipment.’
McCormack lounged back in his chair. ‘What do you expect me to say Kingsley? This is how things go. This kind of research is dangerous. Sometimes people get hurt. And sometimes they die.’
Upton was still on his feet. ‘And that’s all you’ve got to say? It happens?’
‘Yes. It happens.’
‘All right Kingsley, that’s enough,’ said Mercedes. ‘It wasn’t McCormack’s fault. If anything it was the researcher. What can you tell us about it, Alistair? What additional protocols should we now be putting in place?’
McCormack got slowly to his feet and stared at Upton until the latter finally sat down in a huff. ‘Yes, well, it seems the researcher in question was a little hasty. They had not completed their anatomical analysis of this particular asset. Although clearly we now have a much better idea of what she can do.
‘In terms of new protocols, existing ones are satisfactory. If the researcher in question had not broken the rules, he would most likely still be alive today.’
‘Most likely?’ Upton growled from his chair. ‘So, you’re saying it was his own fault he died and all that expensive equipment was ruined? And you’re not going to do anything about it?’
McCormack looked Upton in the eye. ‘Yes, that is what I am saying. On a more positive note, it does mean other researchers are going to be much more careful. What we can say is that thus far we have been unable to recognise any commonalities between the modified DNA structures of those we have collected so far.’
Mercedes was looking at Paul Banner; if anyone was likely to betray them it was him. Although after all this time there would be difficult questions asked as to why he hadn’t reported Utopia Genetics before. ‘How do you see the situation, Paul?’
‘I can’t see any particular security impact here,’ he said. ‘It was an accidental death, as McCormack said. The researcher failed to follow established protocols and was electrocuted.’
‘The next-of-kin has already been informed,’ said Margaret Jenner. ‘They will receive the usual pension. I don’t see there being any particular issue here either.’
Mercedes turned her attention back to Kingsley. ‘So, does that answer your concerns?’
‘Yes .’ His eyes said something completely different. ‘While we’re at it, what’s the latest on re-acquiring the asset we lost?’
Mercedes smiled. ‘We just have to play the waiting game with that one. Alistair?’
‘Well, I have the team in place, this time with additional backup. We have her under constant surveillance, not only monitoring her riffy, but we have a plant in the reporters outside her door and people to keep her in view whenever she goes walkabout.’
Jenner caught Mercedes’ eye, and she nodded to her.
‘Did you watch the news reports about the girl?’
McCormack sat up straight. ‘Anything in particular?’
Jenner looked at him across the table. She didn’t look very happy. ‘I understand from our records that apart from the changes of her upper spine she’s also lost a lot of weight.’
McCormack nodded. ‘Aye, that’s the information we’ve been getting.’
‘She’s on film leaping a ridiculous distance for someone of her size, and running very fast. I’ve seen the footage myself.’
Upton had a self-satisfied smile on his face, as if he was happy that there was a problem.
‘I hadn’t seen that,’ said Mercedes, ‘but I’ll have Xec see if we can do something about it.’
‘Aye,’ said McCormack, ‘can’t have that kind of evidence floating around.’
The meeting dragged on for another few minutes but they had covered all the ground they wanted to. And Mercedes was glad that she had managed to direct most of Upton’s anger towards McCormack, who didn’t give a damn about it. Still the footage that Jenner described certainly could be an issue; it wouldn’t be possible to suppress it now, but they might be able to discredit it.
What bothered her more was that Xec apparently had not known about it either. Otherwise he would have told her.
Wouldn’t he?
Chapter 2
Dog
Mr Mendelssohn’s limousine crunched away from the old warehouses and out on to the main road. In the rear passenger section Dog stared at their new guest. Mr Mendelssohn had chosen to ride in the front, with the privacy window rolled up.
It was dark in the compartment with only a small light in the ceiling providing limited illumination. It made the shadows even deeper than they already were and emphasised the horrific look of the thief’s face. Dog wasn’t sure he would ever get used to it. Everything else about him was so normal, if you didn’t count the fur. The smell coming off him was interesting though. If you subtracted the stench of the fights, and the kind of dirt anybody picks up from hoofing long distances, the boy was really clean. In fact, Dog was pretty sure he could smell soap. His fingernails were dirty, but cut neatly short, as were his toenails. No one who lived on the streets took that much care of themselves. He must have somewhere to stay.
The journey continued in silence. More than once, when the car slowed, their guest tried the door. Normally Dog would be able to see it coming and do something to stop him, but this kid was so fast he’d tried to open the door and failed almost before it registered.
‘You’re not getting o
ut,’ said Dog after the fourth attempt. ‘Look, just go with it for the moment, okay?’
The kid’s face was unreadable because of the four tentacle things where his nose ought to be. His mouth was there underneath in the proper place, more or less.
‘What you going to do anyway?’ said Dog and nodded at the plastic ties round his wrists and ankles.
The kid sat back.
‘Don’t say much, do you?’
Nothing.
‘Can’t say I like having him here,’ said Mr Mendelssohn the following morning.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Dog. He wasn’t really sure what the problem was, since Mr Mendelssohn kept the place tight, and it was his decision to bring him to his home anyway. After all, he didn’t want anybody discovering Delia, but maybe that was the point. They were all the same.
‘This boy cost me money, Dog. And that debt is yours, until he gets to pay it off.’
‘I’m still not quite getting what it is you want me to do.’ Dog looked across the garden to the small building a couple of hundred yards away. It was Mendelssohn’s wife’s studio when she was here, which was almost never. It wasn’t something that was talked about.
‘I can’t have him running away. He needs to work. I need you to convince him his best interests lie here with me. Right now he’s tied up, but he’s no use to me like that. I don’t care how you get his cooperation, Dog; you can bribe him, threaten his family, assuming he has one, whatever you need to do. But he stays with us. Is it clear now?’
Dog glanced out at the building. It was a squat brick-built thing like a wart on the rolling meadows of Cheshire. He nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’
Mr Mendelssohn leaned over him. ‘You just make sure you do.’
Dog collected some food from the cook. He wasn’t sure what the little freak would want to eat, but except for those weird nose tentacles and the fur he looked to be pretty normal. Yeah, apart from those.
Delia stopped him at the back door.
‘We going out?’ she asked. He didn’t turn round for a moment but instead took a deep breath in through his nose and across his tongue so that he could taste her scent. He really did like it a lot, even though she was wearing the moisturiser. He turned round, her skin shone with the cream she put on it. Every square inch, as far as he knew, or could imagine. And her hair was wet, as usual.
‘I am. We’ve got a prisoner out in the studio,’ he said.
‘That kid you and Dad brought in last night?’
Right, of course, she never really slept.
‘Yes, the kid we brought in last night who is now our prisoner in the studio. But I’m not sure how much your dad wants you to know about it.’
Delia smiled the smile that tended to get him into trouble. ‘You know I can wrap him around my little finger.’
‘Yes, but if you got hurt your dad would kill me, and if you were dead you wouldn’t be there to do the protective wrapping.’
‘He’d kill you for a lot less than that.’
Dog might pride himself on being a bit of a rogue and a joker, but he would certainly never touch the daughter of Mr Mendelssohn, no matter how much she wanted it. ‘Well look, I need to check him and make sure he hasn’t broken loose and wrecked the place, or escaped, or turned into some sort of raving monster that would tear you to pieces.’
She giggled.
‘But if he’s still tied up, I imagine you could probably get to know him a bit better.’
‘I could just follow you.’
Dog sighed. ‘Yes, you could do that, but you want somebody to play with right? And if something bad happened then I’d be gone and you’d have nobody.’
He thought perhaps his logic was working, because she didn’t argue this time. Instead she went to the door, opened it and held it for him.
‘Thanks. I’ll come back and tell you all about it, okay?’
With the bag of food in one hand, Dog unlocked the studio door. The main workroom smelled of old clay and oil paints. There was a workbench along the back wall facing the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up the opposite north-facing wall. There were several tables, and a pottery wheel, with stools and chairs scattered about. They hadn’t cleared out the tools last night, and in daylight he looked at the ranks of chisels, gouges, hammers and all the other things he had no name for that could be used as nice stabbing or cutting weapons. What a great place to put a prisoner, he thought.
Their new acquisition, however, was upstairs. Dog went through the opposite door which led into a small hall with two other doors leading off and a spiral staircase to the living area.
Dog wasn’t quite sure of the whole relationship between Mr Mendelssohn and his wife. What it amounted to was that sometimes she was here but most of the time she wasn’t. The studio was covered in dust and the remaining scents were so old he didn’t think she’d been in here for years.
The freak-boy was where they had left him: handcuffed to the radiator pipe. He straightened up as Dog came through. He had tried to pull off the cuff. There were scrape marks on his wrists and the pipe, and the smell of blood. Dog felt sorry for him.
Apart from the radiator, this room contained a couple of sofas, an armchair and a table for eating with four hard-back chairs round it. A door on one side went through to a kitchen, and on the other, to the bedroom. Dog put the bag of food down on the table, pulled one of the hard-back chairs round so he was facing the prisoner and sat down.
‘Look, I don’t like to see you chained up like this. It was just a precaution until we could talk properly.’
The weird nose with its five prehensile-looking tentacle things that stuck out a few inches was quite distracting. Although Dog relied a great deal on his sense of smell and people’s overall body language when he was talking to them, he still liked to see their faces. But this fellow was just too weird.
‘I know you can move pretty fast, so I am going to take precautions. Like I said, what we really want to do is talk to you, so if you could refrain from trying to escape at least until we’ve had a proper conversation, I would really appreciate it.’
He looked expectantly at the prisoner, hoping for some sort of response, but he was disappointed. The kid didn’t move and there was nothing in his face Dog could interpret as being agreement, disagreement, or even hate.
Dog pulled another set of handcuffs from the bag of food. On the one hand he was relaxed in his attitude towards life and had no desire to imprison people, but on the other was Mr Mendelssohn and the debt. He wanted to be able to pay off all his debts so that he would be free at some point. Not that he was entirely sure what one was supposed to do when one was free. Having a family and a place to call home was what really appealed.
Staying alert he crossed to a few feet away from the prisoner. ‘If you wouldn’t mind giving me your free wrist, I’ll attach you to me and then we’ll go and get some food. How’s that?’
He stared into the eyes of the prisoner, trying not to be distracted by the nose tentacles. He looked for some sort of agreement, maybe if he just said okay that would help. But nothing. Dog attached the cuff to his own wrist and then held out the open part of the other cuff to the boy. The boy’s eyes flicked towards the cuff and its open jaw. Then he looked back into Dog’s eyes. It was a long moment. Dog could not imagine what might be going through the kid’s head. Then slowly, and that in itself seemed strange for this freak, he let his free hand stretch out and into the cuff.
When Dog reached to close it, there was a blur. He got pulled forward off-balance. Another blur. A chink-chink of metal. A movement of air across his cheek as he continued to fall forward. Dog caught himself on his hands only to see his wrists were handcuffed together. The freak-boy was no longer in front of him and the other pair of cuffs was dangling loosely from the radiator. The key that had been in Dog’s pocket was now in its lock.
‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’ Dog glanced towards the exit. Nothing. The boy had already gone. ‘Shit!’
Sudden noise behind Dog nearly made
him jump out of his skin. He whipped his head round. The prisoner was sitting at the table investigating the bag of food.
Forcing his breathing to some level of regularity, Dog plucked the key from the other handcuffs and unlocked the ones around his wrists. Behind him, the sound of munching as the thief chewed his way through a cucumber and cheese sandwich.
Chapter 3
Mitchell
The door opened cautiously. Mitchell saw a tired and thin woman. He knew from the records she was no older than him, but she looked it. Much older, and poorly nourished from the minimum food rations everyone without an alternative income suffered.
Protected professions got additional rations, apart from also having the money to pay for extras. Police got plenty, and Graham, standing slightly in front of him, did not have any nutritional deficiencies—the Purity was the most protected profession of them all.
Mitchell wondered whether Graham had any clue what these people had to live on. Well, he might have been told, but he had probably not experienced it. He was in his thirties, he would have been aware of the fall, but his accent betrayed a protected lifestyle. His parents would have been able to ride out the privations for as long as money continued to have value.
They might not even have been in the country. There were places where S.I.D had less impact—those places that had less reliance on computers.
Mitchell had not bothered listening to Graham introducing them. Ellen Lomax betrayed more fear than most, but it didn’t mean anything. Nobody truly liked the Purity, he wasn’t even sure Purity agents even liked each other.
He followed Graham inside and removed his hat as he did so. Proper hats were old-fashioned and, apart from a few hobbyists, no one really knew how to make them. Cloth caps were the mainstay, but Mitchell kept the old fedora Catherine had given him. He had hated it when she bought it. Now he treasured it.
‘Good morning, Mrs Lomax,’ he said as he passed her. She shut the door and followed them. Graham had gone into the front room. The furniture was old and threadbare, but the wooden surfaces were free of dust. They didn’t sit.
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