I thought of the so-called terrorist cell I had been set loose on, the blood on my hands from that day. I said nothing, but made a silent vow that if Station somehow recaptured me, I would kill myself before letting them use me again. I remembered my hands, wet with blood, round the throat of the red-haired woman who must have been my half-sister.
George saw the look on my face and put a hand on my arm.
"I know what happened that night in Shoreditch."
I couldn't have replied even if I'd wanted to.
"You feel terrible guilt and shame. I can't stop that. No one can. Intellectually, you know you are not responsible for their deaths. Station is."
She waited until I nodded.
"Emotionally, though, you still feel responsible. Even though you were brainwashed and drugged, even though you were in a chemically induced state of rage, you still carry that guilt. Use it. Turn it into anger and use it against those who still want to control or kill us."
I nodded again. There was a long silence. I asked what had happened to her inside Station.
"I didn't need to be a mind reader to see how excited the scientific team were to meet me. It took about ten days before the disappointment set in."
"They didn't find your power?"
"No. By the time they had concluded the tests, they thought it was likely that some inherited ability may have begun to manifest at puberty, but my body had been too weak to withstand its onset. They think my illness is the result. They all felt a bit sorry for me."
"Nice of them."
"Yes. Well. By then, I'd had time to sneak into a dozen minds. I was planting ideas in various brains for weeks, leading up to your escape. Shifts were rearranged, a few people called in sick, and security staff looked the wrong way while we walked out. I also had a data guy drop me an email with a link to the online search program. He included details of the backdoor he'd programmed. I was able to copy and adapt it. Well, not me, my hacker."
"You're amazing," I said.
"I'm constantly underestimated," she said. "Station underestimated Cress, too. Hopkins has built an appalling patriarchy down there. It's his greatest weakness. Well, that and halitosis."
"And The Deterrent? Abos? You were about to tell me..."
"Nearly there."
"George!"
"Wait. This is important."
I took a deep breath to stop myself banging my head against the wall, which would have wrecked some very expensive wallpaper. Was that real gold flake in the design?
"The hybrid programme hit a limitation years ago. They can't get hybrids to live past one or two missions before their bodies collapse. Their physical development is accelerated through growth hormones from the time they're foetuses, but even an enhanced physique can't withstand the damage when they are sent into action."
"They're berserkers," I said, remembering my encounter with the Tweedles. "They run on pure rage. They want to kill everything in their path."
"Their lack of predictability, and their short lifespan, makes them a bad bet for the military. The funding is being withdrawn next summer. I got that from Hopkins himself."
"You were in his mind. Ugh."
"Not somewhere I ever want to revisit. But I needed information, and I planted an urgent appointment on the other side of town the day we escaped. Daniel, he's not shutting down the programme. He's contacted some private investors."
"Hopkins? Going against orders? He wouldn't."
"He's convinced himself it's in the best interest of his country to keep the hybrids. He plans on breeding an army. He thinks he'll be seen as a hero, not a traitor when the truth comes out."
"He's delusional."
"Yes. But he's also persuasive, and dangerous. He sees this as his legacy. We need to close down the hybrid project before he moves all the research and data elsewhere. His paranoia will come in useful for once - everything is held in Station, and the computer network is a closed system. We destroy that, we destroy the project."
She stopped talking. Finally.
"George!" I was almost shouting. "You still haven't told me. You've found our father, haven't you? Where is he? Who is he? What does he look like now?"
She gave me an odd look.
"What?"
"One more thing. You're going back to Station, Daniel. Tonight."
"I'm what?"
"You're going to destroy it."
"I, er, excuse me? What?"
"You know the layout, you know where the hybrids are. Hopkins will be there, but this evening, he's sending half of Station's staff to help flush out a suspected terrorist organisation in Kent. That will help."
"Your work?"
"Of course." She looked even more frail than she had the day before. If using her power exhausted her physically and shortened her lifespan, the past few months of pursuing Station, getting in there and arranging my escape, then setting the stage for tonight...well. It must have taken a hell of a toll. She would need a long rest after this. Especially as I was about to let her down. I don't think of myself as a coward, but walking back into Station would be suicide.
"George, I can't fight hybrids. I took on two of them fourteen years ago, and I only just survived. They will be stronger, faster, tougher now. And there will be more of them. They'll tear my legs off and use them to crush my skull."
"But you won't be alone. Abos will come with you."
At last. I felt my heart lurch.
"Where is he?"
George handed me a piece of paper with an address on it. My hands were shaking.
"What's this?"
"My flat. Take a taxi. Abos should be there by now. Go have a chat. Come back after the two of you have wiped out that horror show Hopkins is running."
I brushed imaginary dust off the collar of the gorgeous suit, feeling suddenly terrified. This was it. I was going to meet The Deterrent, the disappearing superhero. My father. And, assuming he still had the same powers, taking Station down suddenly seemed eminently possible.
"George - what about you? Come with me."
"I don't come with you," she said. It took me a few moments to work out what she meant.
"Your power? I thought you couldn't be that specific."
"This time I can be. What happens today has been very clear for a long time. I don't go with you. I wait here. There's something I need to do, too."
George fell silent for a second, then spoke so quietly I could barely hear her.
"It has to happen the way I saw it if we're going to win. If I change anything, we might fail."
She held out her arms, and I hugged her for a few seconds. She was crying.
"I'll bring him to see you," I said, giving her as gentle a squeeze as I could manage. "We can have a family meeting."
She laughed a little at that, still choked with sobs. Then she lightly pushed me away and waved towards the door.
"See you later," I said, as I walked out, all my thoughts focussed on the meeting ahead. Much later, I thought back to that moment and remembered that she hadn't replied.
George was the one who could see the future. Me, not a chance, even when it's blindingly obvious.
I went downstairs, got in a taxi, and drove off to meet my dad.
41
George's flat was on the ground floor of an imposing Edwardian terrace within sight of Putney Bridge.
I paid the taxi driver with a fifty and let him keep the change. He was gruffly grateful, eyeing my suit and probably assuming money meant little to me.
My generosity was down to expediency. If I waited for change, I might lose my nerve.
I was shaking, my mind skipping from half-formed thought to half-formed thought like a butterfly on crack.
I found I could only function if I allowed myself to complete one simple task at a time. Open the taxi door. Step onto the pavement. Close the taxi door. Walk across the pavement to the front door. Push the buzzer on the door. Stare at the door as it swings open under the pressure of my finger on the buzzer.
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I could smell freshly baked bread.
I stepped into a wide hallway with a tiled floor. A reproduction of Picasso's Guernica hung on the wall. There were four doors off the hallway. The two doors on the right and the door on the left were shut, but the one ahead, at the end of the hall, was open. It led to a brightly lit kitchen, where a figure moved across my line of sight.
I willed my feet to move, or my voice to speak, only to discover that my brain was the victim of a coup. I remained dumb, rooted to the spot.
A voice called out from the kitchen.
"You must be Daniel. Come on in. I'm just making a cup of tea, and George has got some of that posh honey that costs a fortune. You have to try it on toast, it's smashing."
My feet belatedly accepted my earlier instruction and started to move as my brain clunkily processed what was wrong about the voice. Two things. A Welsh accent was one of them. The other, which was confirmed as I walked into the kitchen, was that it belonged to a woman.
I went straight to the table and put both hands on the back of a solid oak chair to stop me falling over.
Standing with her back to me was a tall woman with short, grey hair, wearing dark jeans and a thick blue woolly jumper. She was cutting bread into slices. A teapot sat on the counter, steam curling from its spout, two mugs next to it.
She turned and smiled at me.
"Hello, Daniel."
She looked to be in her mid-sixties. Her face was lined, her brown eyes surrounded by creases that deepened as she smiled. It was a kind face, a gentle face. A maternal face. It was also, unmistakably, a face I'd seen in a photograph a few hours previously, although she had been nineteen or twenty in the picture.
It was the face of a dead woman.
"Hello," I said, because I didn't know what else to say.
It was Cressida Lofthouse.
We drank tea, and I tried the toast. She was right, the honey was excellent.
Eventually, I found my voice.
"You're not...?"
"Cressida Lofthouse? No, love, I'm not. George told me she had died. I was very sorry to hear it. Cressida was a very special person."
"Then you're...?"
"Yes. Yes, I am."
The woman who looked like Cressida took a small case out of the bag at her feet and put her hands up to her face. She removed her contact lenses and placed them in the case before looking back at me.
Her eyes were golden.
"Abos," I said.
"Yes. Well, I've been known as Amy since 1981. But, yes, your father. Or mother. Maybe 'parent' would be easiest. Pleased to meet you."
We shook hands. In a life not devoid of surreal moments, this one took the proverbial biscuit. I was sitting in the kitchen of the mind-reading half-sister I had never known, shaking hands with my father, who was now a woman, although not really, as she wasn't human.
"George emailed me a week ago," said Amy. Abos. Dad. The Deterrent. Abos was a non-gender-specific name. I decided life would be simpler if I used it.
"How did she find you?"
"She told me, and I quote, that 'those prats at Station have spent years looking for a man just because it happened to be Roger Sullivan's blood that spilled on your cylinder in 1978.'"
"But how did she know you'd look like Cressida Lofthouse?"
"She told me she'd read Cress's diary, and that Cress had mentioned the gift she'd given me that night."
"Oh." I felt my face redden. That wasn't the gift I had imagined. I gave myself a mental slap for being so stupid. There was no way Cress would have had sex with Abos after what had happened between them. I can be so dense sometimes.
"She gave me ten millilitres of her blood. I found a long-abandoned cottage in Scotland and started the process. It was faster than the first time. It took three days."
"The first time? You mean you went back to being, er, you returned to the state of, er, you became a..."
Abos smiled. Those creases around her disconcerting eyes deepened again.
"Amorphous Blob Of Slime. Yes, I know what it stands for. George sent me a scan of Cressida's diary. It's a good name. Yes, I returned to that state, then this body grew. I'm about six inches taller than Cress, but that's the only major difference."
"Where have you been all these years? And why come back now? Why not before?"
Abos looked into my eyes and, for a second, I felt as if I had become unmoored from reality. Her eyes were so truly other that her non-human origin was abruptly, unavoidably apparent. It was a chilling sensation, and I looked away. Whatever Abos was, I was its child. What did that mean?
Abos stood up and poured more tea.
"For the past thirty-six years, I've lived in a tiny village in North Wales. I turned up on a freezing, stormy night in 1981, knocked on the door of the vicarage, and, until this afternoon, that was where I stayed."
"Who did they think you were?"
"I told them I had escaped from an abusive relationship." She brought the two mugs over and set one in front of me. "I wasn't lying about that. I just didn't go into specifics. David and Mary never asked. They were good people. They helped me find work at the primary school. I took a distant learning course and started teaching. Like most teachers, I learned more than any of my pupils. They'll never know how much more."
She sipped her tea, cradling the mug in both hands.
"What Cress told me in 1981 came as a terrible shock. The drugs, the brainwashing...but, much worse, my behaviour. That night, for the first time, she made me aware that other people didn't exist for my pleasure. I saw that I was being used, and that I was using others."
Something about the way Abos was speaking sounded off-kilter to me. Almost as if she was describing something she didn't actually remember. I asked her about her memories of that time.
"I remember that life, the life at Station, as if it were a story I'd read in a book. A story I know intimately. I feel connected to those years, but it doesn't feel as though I was there. I know it was me, but there's no strong personal connection. In some ways, I'm grateful for that. I behaved like a sex-mad adolescent. I can't blame everything on Station."
I coughed.
"You read Cress's diary. Roger Sullivan was a sexual predator. You don't think...?"
"Yes, it has occurred to me. Perhaps the DNA in the blood partially forms my character as well as my body. Cressida was my teacher, and look at what I've been doing for the past three decades."
I opened my mouth, but she pointed at the clock.
"We'll have time for questions later," she said, putting her contact lenses back in. She considered what she'd just said before adding, "I hope."
That sounded a bit ominous.
We took a taxi to Station. I was wearing an outfit George had left at her flat for me. Combat trousers, a thick jumper. A pair of army boots.
Abos spoke quickly as the meter ticked up the fare, and we drew closer to the one place in the world I never wanted to see again.
"George gave me instructions for tonight," she said. "She knows what we need to do."
George was an amazing individual, a force of nature, but I still struggled to think of her giving orders to a superhero.
Abos looked at me and answered the question I couldn't bring myself to ask.
"I knew there were children. I read the newspapers. But I didn't feel any connection to them. To you."
She was stating a fact, but I still felt cold hearing it.
"I was a child myself," she said. "My body was that of an adult, but my mind was comparatively unformed. I didn't know what sex was, just that I enjoyed it. There was nothing in the Peter and Jane books about the human reproductive system. Your mother...is she okay?"
I realised I didn't even know if my mother were alive or dead.
"We don't really talk."
Abos looked out at the London streets, the busy pavements.
"I wish I had understood what I was doing. The hurt that I caused. I have spent many years now with children, wi
th mothers and fathers. I am sorry, Daniel."
I had a flashback to George telling me I wasn't responsible for crimes committed while under Station's control. Why was it I was able to forgive anyone other than myself?
I turned to the woman in her sixties who had been my father, but was now a new person. If she could be described as a person, that is.
"You have nothing to apologise for."
"I was used. As were you. And now Station breeds creatures without the intelligence to challenge their conditioning. Did George tell you what Hopkins is planning for the hybrid project?"
"The private investors? Yes."
"It ends tonight. We will follow George's instructions. She is remarkable. Her power is fascinating."
"You can't do what she does? With people's minds?"
"No. I cannot. The combination of human DNA with, well, whatever I am, may, somehow, have produced this ability. Perhaps it is latent in humans, and my genes triggered it. There is so much I want to talk to her about."
She looked out of the window again. I saw a sign for Liverpool Street.
"Now, let me tell you exactly what we are going to do."
She told me. I didn't much like it.
When we drew up a few streets away from Station, she took her bag and went into a cafe toilet while I waited. When she came out, she was zipping up a black quilted jacket. Her handbag had gone. She was carrying a black balaclava. She put it over her head.
"Well?"
I wouldn't have known who she was, even if she was male or female. I told her so. She nodded, satisfied. I pointed at the balaclava.
"Don't I get one?"
"Nope. We want your face on every security camera, Daniel. They know you, but we don't want to give them any clues about me. You ready?"
Ready to return to a subterranean prison that had robbed me of most of my adult life?
"Ready."
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Children Of The Deterrent (Halfhero Book 1) Page 24