Sitting on the end of my bed, Abos admitted that he had indulged in all the sexual rewards offered to him hoping they would one day lead back to me.
Rather drily, I pointed out that his ultimate superior—the head of our government—was a woman. Did he consider her to be inferior, available as a 'treat' perhaps, despite the fact that she was Carstair's superior? He visibly struggled with the logical disconnect between what had been strongly suggested under the influence of mind-altering drugs, and what I was telling him now. That all women should be treated the same as men, that explicit consent, and mutual respect, must be present before any sexual relationship can begin between adults.
When he was at his most confused, literally holding his head in his hands, I told him about the drugs Father had formulated to control him. I knew this was likely to lead to me being permanently sectioned by Station, but I had to tell him he was being chemically manipulated, that his freedom was an illusion.
He was silent for a long time. I told him my theory.
"Abos, when I met you, you were a baby. An infant. Not a human infant because your body was fully grown and you could reason and speak. But an infant of, well, whatever species you are. While I was teaching you, you showed a capacity to learn, you were curious, you began to mature. But, even if your mental faculties develop far faster than humans, I believe, emotionally, you were like a small child. Now the way you're behaving, the way you've been encouraged to behave, is like a male adolescent. An exaggerated, more selfish version of an adolescent. You act as if the world exists for your gratification, your view of life centres around yourself. That's very common in a thirteen-year-old human. But it's not a true picture. Everyone has the same rights as you - the right to live, learn, be happy. The right to choose."
He lifted his head and looked at me, his golden eyes full of tears.
"Cress. Don't you want me?"
I squeezed his shoulder in as close to a maternal way as I could manage.
"That's not the point. You assumed I did. You didn't respect my right to a choice."
He stood up.
"I'm sorry, Cress." He looked the model of a repentant adolescent. I half expected him to stick his bottom lip out. I felt a wave of sympathy for him. Whoever, whatever, he was, Abos did not deserve the treatment he had received.
"No," I said, "it's I who should apologise. On behalf of my Father, my government, and my country. You should never have had to suffer this."
"What do I do now?"
He looked at me and waited. The most powerful being on the planet. The mystery Station was no closer to solving than it was when we retrieved the cylinder from Marsham Street in 1969. Asking me what he should do.
"Abos," I said, looking straight back at him, "you need to grow up."
He didn't look away.
"Cress, you are my teacher still. I will learn this from you."
He turned, then seemed to change his mind.
"May I kiss you, Cressida? Just kiss you?"
Diary, I kissed him. That's all I'm saying. Don't judge.
When he left, I knew it was forever. I watched him from the window as he flew east, quickly hidden from sight in the darkness.
That was a decade ago. No one has ever seen him again. Station paid me one visit in the weeks following his disappearance. It was an officer I had never seen before. He asked a few cursory questions. Carstairs had long since dismissed me as a threat. His mistake.
One day, someone will read this. My fervent hope is that it won't be anyone from Station, but someone who can use the information to expose what happened.
I'm sure Abos will never allow himself to be controlled again if he ever does reappear. But what of his children?
One last secret, diary. Before he left, Abos asked me for a gift, one that I gave willingly. A gift that I will not reveal, even in these pages.
Good luck, Abos. I miss you.
39
Daniel
What George had feared might take her weeks, actually took minutes. She found information online about Cressida, even a photograph of her awarding prizes at a library in Clerkenwell.
She dropped a message in the dark web to a hacker who seemed to live online. Within seconds, a response pinged back with Cressida Lofthouse's address.
Ten minutes later, George was in the back of a taxi.
She reached the leafy Clerkenwell street at dusk, on a Spring evening in 2013. As she approached the house, the front door opened, and a woman hurried down the steps. George slowed, but the woman was much too young to be Lofthouse. As they passed each other, George let her mind reach out, absorbing a little information. The woman was a military nurse, completing a shift. She had just handed over to a colleague. Cressida Lofthouse was inside. Dying.
George continued past the house. The impression she had just received was clear. There was no room for misinterpretation. Lofthouse was in the final stages of a rare disease. She was asleep, or in morphine-assisted unconsciousness much of the time, and was rarely lucid. George felt a flutter of panic. To have come this close to her best lead and have so little time to do anything.
She reached the end of the street and paused. She knew she couldn't afford to wait. The risk of Lofthouse dying was too great. Even now she might find nothing useful in the poor woman's mind.
She turned her chair and headed back the way she had come. She eyed the elegant stone steps leading up to the front door of the house. Round the back as usual, then.
She got as far as a locked gate. She looked up and down the street. It wouldn't be fully dark for a couple of hours, and a woman in a wheelchair sitting outside a gate was sure to be noticed, even on a street as quiet as this.
She shrugged. It would take some effort, and she would undoubtedly feel the consequences for the next couple of days, but she couldn't be sure of ever getting another chance.
She closed her eyes and let her mind drift. When she was in this state, she had to open her field of attention at first, encompassing as much as possible. That meant that anyone within half a mile might add a note to the music George was hearing. Once she had settled into this phase, she had a choice. She could widen the field, in which case, far more minds contributed to the noise, but the information she received became more general. Or she could narrow it, capturing one or two minds and bringing a finer focus to bear.
George found the new nurse—Andrew—and, more faintly, and less coherently, the fevered ramblings of Cressida Lofthouse. They were both on the ground floor, which was an unexpected piece of good luck. Cressida's illness must have forced her to move her bed to the front room.
George honed in on the nurse first and planted a simple idea. The more complicated an idea was, the more energy it demanded of her. She could have convinced the nurse there was an emergency which required him to run to the gate and let in a doctor. Or, as George chose to do, she could plant the idea that he had forgotten to leave the gate open for a delivery he was expecting. A simpler idea, using less energy.
It took twelve minutes for him to act on it. While she waited, a man walking his dog paused and looked at her with the beginnings of concern.
"Waiting for a cab," she called, waving her mobile phone as if that corroborated her story. The man walked on. Thirty seconds later, George heard the sound of a bolt being drawn back.
She waited another minute, then opened the gate and followed the wall around to the French doors at the back of the house. There was a small step to negotiate by the door, but George pulled the wheelchair over it backwards. Her left hand had been getting weaker during the preceding months, but there was still enough strength left in it for her to complete the manoeuvre.
As she waited in the kitchen, the door to the front room opened, and Andrew emerged, crossing to the sitting room where, thanks to George, he had decided to spend an hour lost in a book.
George entered the front room. The curtains were closed, but a bedside light and a standard lamp made the room seem warm and comforting. A large bed domin
ated the space. Propped up against the pillows, her complexion so pale she almost disappeared against them, was Cressida Lofthouse.
George had seen others close to death. There was an atmosphere around those whose ties to this world were stretching and breaking. George knew others felt it too, but it presented her with a problem. Cressida was lost in memories and dreams, rarely coming back to the world she would soon be leaving. George would have to interpret what she found in her mind and hope to glean something useful.
She closed her eyes. After a few seconds, she reached out and took Cressida's hand. There was no need to establish a physical connection, but, according to Major Harris's memories, this dying woman had been close to The Deterrent. A friend, even. Holding Cressida's hand seemed like it was the right thing to do.
Images, smells, sounds. A man pushing her up against a wall, his breath beer sour. An older man crying, pouring whisky from a green bottle. A woman dying in this house, a daughter holding her father's hand, not knowing who was supporting who. A pair of eyes, opening. Golden eyes.
With a start, George looked at Cressida. She was awake. She was looking straight at her, her expression a mixture of surprise and awe. Cressida wet her lips, tried to speak. George took the glass of water from the bedside table and held it to her cracked lips. She sipped, then spoke, smiling.
"You have his eyes."
George blinked, the gold flecks in her deep brown eyes catching the glow of the lamps.
Cressida's head fell back on the pillow. George reached into her mind and saw The Deterrent floating outside a window, his helmet and goggles removed. She saw him put his hand on the trunk of a tree, heard him read words from a children's book. Then she felt him rip her nightdress...
...and then, as if Cressida knew she was there, she was suddenly presented with a pin-sharp series of images. A hamster in a shoebox, being lifted into a cage. Cressida as a child, playing with the hamster, feeding it sunflower seeds, talking to it while she sat by her bedroom window. Then a tiny, furry body in a biscuit tin, and a wooden cross with a name laboriously carved into it in a child's hand: Mr Biffles.
A cough from the sitting room brought George back, and she backed out of the room, through the hall and kitchen and into the garden, closing the door before Andrew crossed to the front room.
Mr Biffles? What could be so important about a dead hamster that would cause Cressida to fixate on it? The last few minutes had just been the same few images over and over on a constant loop. The hamster, the cross, the name...the biscuit tin. The hamster, the cross...something wasn't right, something about the memory didn't quite ring true. George felt exhaustion starting to claim her as she sat in Cressida Lofthouse's garden, trying to work out what the dying woman had shown her.
It was as she had turned back towards the gate that she realised. It was the biscuit tin. It was much too big. Why would you bury a tiny creature like a hamster in a biscuit tin?
George swung around and went back to the garden. On the far side, just next to some rose bushes, was a tiny cross. From that distance, and in the failing light, George couldn't make out the letters carved there, but she didn't have to. Mister Biffles.
Fifteen minutes later, after Andrew had experienced an uncharacteristic urge to do some gardening, George was in the back of a taxi, so tired she could hardly keep her eyes open. She was clutching an earth-encrusted biscuit tin. She prised the lid open and took out the book inside. Unable to wait, she clicked on the internal light, opened the first page, and started reading.
March 22nd, 2013
To whom it may concern.
The notebooks you are holding comprise the diary I kept during the years since the discovery of Abos - The Deterrent.
40
I had put the diary down and was staring out of the window again when George came back to the suite.
She eased herself out of the wheelchair and onto the sofa, propping herself up against the cushions. Her smile was unforced.
"You know, I think I needed that. Station didn't even have muzak playing. I'd forgotten how lovely it is just listening to music. And it wasn't all songs from shows, thank goodness. He sneaked in a Dr John number, so I was happy."
I had no idea who she was talking about.
She pointed at Cress's diary.
"Well? What do you think?"
I didn't know where to start. My father—George's father, too—began as a blob of slime in a cylinder buried in London. He hadn't been born, he'd grown. What did that make the pair of us? Halfhero made us sound cool. Halfblob, not so much.
"I feel as if someone's answered a bunch of my questions but given me twice as many."
She nodded. "That's pretty much how I felt when I read it. And, judging from Cress's account, even Abos may not have all the answers."
"You think he's alive, then? The Deterrent?"
"I do. So does Station."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because they've been looking for him for thirty-five years. I got myself into Station to break you out and steal all the information they had about Abos. All their theories, all the dead ends they'd already investigated and rejected."
"And did you succeed?"
"Better than that, I copied the algorithmic program they've been running for the past five years, based on their best guess at how Abos has been hiding. My guess is better."
My leg was twitching. I knew my pulse rate was up.
"What do you mean?"
"Can you bring me the laptop?"
I handed it over. She patted the seat next to her. I sat down while she clicked some keys. The screen showed a male face which changed to another after a split second. Then another man replaced that, followed by another. I had to look away after a few seconds as dozens of faces flicked by at a nauseating speed.
"What is that?"
George clicked again, and the images disappeared.
"That's Station's program. During the first decade of searching for The Deterrent, they came up with a theory that might explain how the man with the most famous face in the world could hide."
I said nothing, but she saw my expression and laughed.
"I'm getting there, Daniel. It's a facial recognition program. They rolled out an early version in the 1990s, but it was only three years ago that processing speed became fast enough to make it useful. You remember who Abos looked like? In the diary?"
"Of course. That arsehole, Roger."
"Exactly. His blood gave Abos enough genetic material to make a superior version, based on Roger Sullivan's DNA. They reasoned that to enable him to disappear, Abos might have pulled the same trick."
I looked at her, my eyes boggling. I didn't know eyes actually did that. My mouth was dry.
"You mean, he might look like someone else now? Someone in the team?"
"You've got it. They scanned photographs of every man who had worked with Abos. There was no record of any other opportunity for him to get blood, but perhaps a shaving cut, or even a discarded plaster might have been enough."
"But...couldn't he have got blood from someone outside Station?"
"Yes. They are still adding faces to the database based on everyone they have records of him meeting."
"Everyone? But that could take..."
"Years? Decades? Quite. They started with those who had the most contact with him, then widened the search. It's a long shot, Daniel. But they will keep exploring every possibility, however remote. Station is terrified Abos might reappear as a superhero affiliated to another country. They'll do anything to prevent that. One reason Station is so keen to find and capture us—The Deterrent's children—is that they hope Abos might come looking for us one day."
"Do you think he will?"
"I think Station is clutching at straws. They can't unravel Abos's motivations any more than we can. If they hadn't kept their pet superhero drugged...well, who knows? Maybe they would have understood him a little better."
George grimaced as if in pain, but waved me away when I
offered to help.
"It took ten weeks for Abos to grow first time round, and he was in the cylinder then - whatever that was. No one knows if he can repeat the trick without the cylinder. If it was just providing him with nutrients, then maybe he can. They've been running those faces through the program, but morphing the features, making them more symmetrical, removing blemishes. They've also artificially aged the faces. When Abos copied Sullivan, he appeared younger, as if he were in his twenties. If he did the same, and then aged as normal, he might look like he's in his fifties now."
I had only known George for a couple of days, but the expression she had on her face could only be described as mischievous.
"What?" I asked. "What is it? What aren't you telling me?"
"Come on, Daniel, you read the diary. All the clues are in there. She practically spells it out."
I groaned. "Come on, George. Put me out of my misery. Where is he? What does he look like?"
"You're asking the question all wrong."
For the first time in my life, I understood how siblings could fall out.
"George. Please."
Her expression became more serious.
"I'm coming to it, I promise. Daniel, I spent three weeks in Station. I let Harris bring me in. She told me she wanted to help. She asked me why I was spending so much time investigating The Deterrent. I told her I thought I might be his daughter. Then, as I'd hoped, they imprisoned me. Invited me to a meeting in a building near Station, drugged me and took me in."
"You planned for them to abduct you?"
"Of course. They had to think they were in control. To them, I was an intriguing opportunity that had dropped into their laps. I couldn't let them suspect for a moment that I had any kind of power. They ran every test conceivable. They were desperate to find something, I think. Station is still looking for children like us, the ones who survived puberty. You're the poster boy. There must be others out there, but Station hasn't found them."
Children Of The Deterrent (Halfhero Book 1) Page 23