by Jule Owen
“You never rowed for Oxford.”
“I did too.”
“You are such a bloody liar.”
“A second arrow to my heart within a morning. I am amazed at your brutality. Look, the river is flowing in. It’ll do most of the work. Get in, Mathew, and grab that rope off the bollard there.”
Quinn scoops the oars from the bottom of the boat and fits them into the rowlocks. He starts to push away using the sides of the other boats around them. “Goodbye, ladies. We will meet again when my wounded heart is healed.” They glide from the cram of the boats into the river but not yet into the swell. “You should go. We’ll be a while.”
Bob and Mike wave. Mathew waves back. They turn and start to walk towards the stairs, as Quinn slowly rows into the river. He watches them climb up, tiny figures on the side of the huge structure.
When they are near the top, Mike stops and stares at the boat. She says to Bob, “You know they are far on the other side of the river.”
“They are fine. Quinn is alright. He’ll get the boy home if he’s says he will. Now come on. We’ve got a historic monument to move.”
16 A Friend of Mr Lestrange
Mathew watches the Shell Centre loom closer and larger with each pull of the oars Quinn makes.
“We’re not going down the river,” Mathew says.
“No, we’re not.”
“Where are we going?”
Quinn is less loquacious since they parted from Bob and Mike. He regards Mathew impassively, puts more back into the oars and they move steadily forward across the fast-running current. Mathew thinks the government agent must be incredibly strong.
“You’re not taking me to Silverwood, are you?”
The man’s face is brutal when he doesn’t smile. The curl at the edge of his lips, so engaging at breakfast, is now like a sneer. Suddenly he isn’t that friendly anymore.
“Are you taking me to the camp?”
“No, I’m not taking you to the camp.”
“You said we needed to row downstream to catch the caravan to Silverwood.”
The Shell building looms above them. Mathew starts to panic. “Why are you bringing me back here?”
Quinn sighs, “I am taking you home.”
Then the knowing comments fall into place. He says, “You’re a friend of Mr. Lestrange.”
The government agent smiles, but he doesn’t deny it.
“Aren’t you?” Mathew persists.
“I’m a man who takes care of waifs and strays, and you are a long way from home, Mathew.”
“You’re lying. Bob said you’re a liar.”
Mathew stands and the boat rocks precariously. Quinn drops the oars and lunges across, grabs Mathew’s arms and forces him back into his seat. “Don’t be an idiot. Sit. You’ll fall in.”
“What do you care?”
“I care very much. I would have to go after you and it would be tiresome. But the result would be the same. I would still take you home. Why waste the energy?”
“I’m not going home. Not yet.”
“But you have to.”
“My mother is dying.”
“Don’t you think you should be with her, rather than messing around here?”
“I am trying the only way I know how to help her.”
“This will not help her. Trust me, I know.”
Mathew gapes at Quinn, appalled. “Whatever it is you people are, you are not human.”
Quinn catches his eye. “Ah, Mathew,” is all he says.
They have come around the east side of the Centre and are now hidden from Parliament and the gaggle of boats across the river. Quinn turns his head, looking for a landing place. It is low tide; the high water mark is etched into the fabric of the building. The lower water level has revealed a broken window, flooded when he had tried to escape the day before.
Quinn prepares to bring round the boat. Then he stops, listens for a moment and sighs deeply. “Quinn Hacquinn,” he says to himself. “You’re getting weak. You’re getting sloppy. You’re going native.”
He turns around slowly just before another boat appears, as if he has seen it coming through the back of his skull. It is a larger craft powered by an electric motor, cutting its way through the water, silent and stealthy, with a crew of four rough men, all on their feet.
One of the men says, as the boat slides towards them, “Afternoon, both. You beat us to it.” His words indicate friendliness, but he does not look friendly. He is white-skinned but black with dirt. He has dreadlocks; not a fashion statement, but what happens to hair when it’s neither cut nor washed for months on end. “We have ourselves a small territorial dispute here.”
The stranger’s boat comes alongside them. One of the other men lunges across and grabs the side of their boat.
Quinn is standing now, watching them. “We don’t want any trouble,” he says.
“Good. Neither do we. So, you’ll be off then.”
“Oh, we won’t be leaving,” Quinn says. “You will.”
The man on the boat laughs and grins at his crewmates, who also think this is funny.
Quinn continues, “No, I mean it. There’s nothing for you here. There’s no unbroken safe, hidden behind a forgotten mildewed painting, containing the forgotten millions of a former oil company chairman. It’s a waste of your time.”
“You think we’re idiots? We’re not here for treasure. We’re here for the furniture.”
“The furniture?”
“Yes, the office furniture. We renovate office chairs and old desks and flog them to blokes in the north who have need of them and possess too much money.”
“The furniture! By all means. You go ahead, gentlemen. Don’t let us interrupt you.”
“And what will you be doing?”
“We’ll wait here.”
The man squints at Quinn suspiciously. “You’re well dressed. Are you one of that lot from there?” he indicates with his head towards Westminster.
“He’s a leech, Seb. I’m sure I recognise his face from somewhere.”
One of the other men says, “I know who he is. He’s the government agent.”
“No, no,” Quinn says. “You’re totally wrong,” he glares meaningfully at the man who has spoken. The man is suddenly doubtful.
“We’re good Edenist folk, father and son, out for a weekday paddle, hoping to find something to brighten our little shack.”
“’Grief, he doesn’t half talk funny.”
“He’s going to report us,” the man with dreadlocks says. “I bet he’s already sent an alarm through to security. He’s probably got neural implants.”
“Aren’t you tired?” Quinn asks.
“What?” the Dreadlocked man says.
“Doesn’t all this scavenging and furniture-hauling make you tired?”
“What’s he saying?” says one of the men who stands behind Dreadlocks. Then he suddenly yawns and crashes to the bottom of the boat, dead asleep. Dreadlocks gapes at his fallen comrade, just as his second companion also falls from standing. He slumps first to his knees and then heavily forward onto his face. The dreadlocked man grabs for his gun, but as he does so, his eyes glaze over, a lazy, rather soppy expression passes across his face, the faint flicker of a soft smile. He drops to the ground, but as he does so, so does his gun, and it explodes.
The next thing he knows, Mathew is lying on the bottom of the boat. Quinn has lunged across him with such speed Mathew hardly believes what has happened. They peel off one another slowly. Quinn sits and examines his side. There is blood everywhere.
“You’ve been shot!” Mathew says.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Quinn says, completely unfazed. There’s no pain on his face. He is mildly irritated, like someone has spilt red wine on his best white shirt. “Now would you look at that? What a mess!” He tuts. “I am going native. Slow as a slug. Pathetic little earth-bound creature.”
Quinn unbuttons his shirt and spreads it, exposing his skin and a red oozing wound. M
athew doesn’t understand how Quinn is not unconscious; the blood loss is profuse.
He says to Mathew, “You might want to turn away, if you’re squeamish. Sorry.”
Quinn holds his fingertips above the wound. The bullet draws from his skin gradually, as if Quinn has finger magnets. Once it is removed, the bullet hangs in mid-air. Quinn plucks hold of it with his fingertips, rubs it clean on his shirt, examines it against the light and then throws it in the Thames.
“Damned stupid things, bullets,” he says. “What sort of a life form would invent anything so pointless?”
Mathew stares at Quinn’s ribcage, his jaw hanging open. The wound is healing itself; the blood recedes, the skin knits together.
“Who are you?” Mathew says to him, wonderstruck.
“Nobody, really,” Quinn says and then suddenly laughs. He shakes his head and stands up and puts his shirt back on, buttoning it as he walks to the front of the boat. “Bloody great hole in my shirt now,” he is saying, pulling at the material, sticking his fingers through the bloodied, ragged hole.
“Can’t you just…?” Mathew says.
“Of course I can!” Quinn stares back at Mathew. He says, “Please don’t sit there gaping. This is getting tiresome. You know you’ve got to go home. You know I will make you go home. Get up. Come on.”
Quinn steps across the boat, grabs Mathew’s arm, hauls him to the broken window and throws him inside the building. Mathew staggers and slips on the slick muddy surface of the room, a green subterranean cave; the walls, carpeted with moss, drip with water.
“Across here,” Quinn says, pushing Mathew from behind. They wade through riverbed sludge as they cross the room and reach the staircase, “We go now. You should know the way. It’s a two-way door.”
They start to climb.
“You could save her, couldn’t you? Why won’t you let me save her?” Mathew says. “I don’t understand.”
“Keep going,” Quinn says. “You’ll be home soon.”
They come to a landing. Mathew hesitates, “What are you waiting for?” Quinn says, “We need to cross the office, don’t you remember?”
This is my last chance.
He makes a run for the roof.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Quinn says.
Taking the stairs two at a time, Mathew scrambles the last ten steps with his hands as well as his feet.
Outside, he gets to the edge of the wall and pauses, wondering whether he’ll survive the fall and if he does, whether he’ll survive the Thames current. Quinn tackles him to the ground. Mathew punches, struggles, yells. He does not know how long this goes on, but eventually he is tired; eventually he calms and sobs and Quinn lets him go and installs himself next to him, a few feet away.
“It will be alright,” Quinn says quietly.
The shots come from nowhere.
A burst of violent sound and with the noise Quinn’s chest bursts open, blossoming red splashes in an impossible number of places. He slumps, face forward, sprawled on the ground, and lies there motionless.
“Quinn!” Mathew says, rushing to him. He turns him over by yanking at his shoulder. There’s a flicker of a smile on Quinn’s lips, “I told you I was going native,” he whispers.
“Do the thing you did before. Take the bullets out.”
“I can’t. They’re watching. They are watching every move we make.” He strains his eyes to focus on Mathew, “Go home. Please. You have no idea what is at stake.” He sighs. “I did always want to know what this was like.”
And he dies chuckling, choking on his own blood.
17 Kilfeather’s Arm
Mathew sits, waits and listens to the steady sound of footsteps on the stairs. They are talking and laughing. He can’t believe it. They’ve killed a man and they are actually laughing. Their voices bounce off the bare walls of the stairwell and echo. It crosses his mind that he should move. He should stand and run for the door, back to Mr. Lestrange’s house. At the very least he should hide, because these men are murderers. But to move he would have to step across Quinn’s body and the surprisingly large pool of blood it is in. So he just sits.
The footsteps get closer.
Then, just as he expects the men to appear, silence falls. After several long seconds, the muzzle of a gun edges around the corner of the doorframe. On the other end is a man in an ill-fitting grey military-style uniform: combat jacket and trousers and bullet-proof vest. His head is shaved, the skin on the side of his skull is tattooed, and he has a long red beard. The gun’s sights rest on Quinn for a moment longer and then drop. The red-bearded man goes to Quinn, crouches, grabs his face, prizes open an eyelid, then drops the dead head with disgust. It falls back and hits the flagstones hard with an unpleasant thump.
“’S okay,” the man says. “The leech is dead. The boy is here. He isn’t armed.”
Two other men come through the doorway; a tall, muscular black man and a shorter, dusky-skinned, barrel-chested man. The latter goes straight to Quinn’s body and riffles through his pockets. He pauses to examine the things he finds and then pops them in a bag.
The black man studies Mathew. “I’m Kilfeather. This is Jonah Marshall,” he says, gesturing to the bearded man. “And the man with no conscience, looting from the dead, is Ran Drake.”
Kilfeather extends his hand to help Mathew to his feet. The hand is prosthetic. Mathew stares dumbly. He finds himself unable to speak or move.
“Are you hurt?”
Mathew somehow manages to shake his head.
“Good,” Kilfeather says. “Then we should be getting along. The leeches in Westminster probably heard the gunfire. We don’t have much time.”
When they reach the bottom of the steps, they wade back through the water across the office to the broken window. There are now three boats: Quinn’s little wooden dinghy with the broken engine, the boat with the dreadlocked man and his companions still asleep inside and Kilfeather’s larger, newer boat.
“What do you think?” asks Drake, who jumps across into the dreadlocked man’s boat and kicks at his boot. “They’re breathing. They’re not drunk.” He bends and sniffs, “Can’t smell it, at least. Drugs?”
Kilfeather shakes his head. “Haven’t a clue and we haven’t got time to find out. They’ll have to take their chances. Listen.”
The sound of voices and a boat slapping on water.
“The leeches are coming. We should go.”
Drake leaps back. Jonah has already started the engine and they creep forward. Skirting the perimeter of the building, they emerge by Waterloo Station and float beneath the Victory Arch, with Britannia and her trident rising still above the water.
“They’re not following,” Jonah says, looking back over his shoulder.
“They’ll have found Quinn’s empty boat and have gone inside to search for him. They’ll think those men asleep did it, and if they don’t we’ll be well away by the time they clock on. Let’s keep the pace steady, though, and steer away from the river until we get to Battersea.”
Something glints on Kilfeather’s wrist, as he takes a seat next to Mathew. At first Mathew thinks it is a glove, but then he remembers Kilfeather’s left hand is prosthetic. Whoever made the prosthetic didn’t try to make it seem like a real hand. It is matte black with silver highlighted joints.
Kilfeather notices Mathew staring at his hand. “Not seen one of these before?” Mathew shakes his head, still unable to speak. He realises he is shaking. Kilfeather must have noticed too, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he says, “It goes right to my shoulder. Want to look?”
Mathew nods.
Kilfeather unbuttons his shirt. The prosthesis is actually attached to Kilfeather’s skin. “It connects to my nerves inside,” he says. “See?” He flexes his fingers. “This is my arm. My fingertips have the same level of sensation as yours.” There is a symbol etched into the black surface of his bicep, a kind of tattoo, an image like a shepherd’s crook, but with extra lines. Kilfeather watches Mathew’s
eyes rest on it.
“Now you’re wondering what that is?”
Mathew nods again.
“It’s the feather of Ma’at. An ostrich feather. It’s an ancient Egyptian symbol. Ma’at was the Egyptian’s idea of truth and justice and also a goddess who battled chaos. When Ancient Egyptians died, Ma’at would weigh their hearts against the heaviness of a feather. If they were full of sin, their heart would tip the scale away from the feather and the soul-eating monster goddess Ammit, who was part-lion, part-hippopotamus, part-crocodile, would eat it. If their heart was light, they started their journey to paradise. Jonah doesn’t like it, do you Jonah?” Jonah doesn’t respond. Instead, he spits over the side of the boat and stares at the buildings they weave their way through. “Jonah doesn’t approve of my ostrich feather or my arm,” Kilfeather says. “What do you think?”
“It’s cool,” Mathew says, finding his voice.
“Aren’t you surprised I have this?”
“No,” Mathew says.
“Didn’t the leeches tell you all Accountants are religious loonies and we don’t use technology?”
“You’re an Accountant?”
Kilfeather laughs, “The real McCoy. What did you think we were?”
“I don’t know,” Mathew says.
“Why do you think we helped you?”
“Helped me?”
“We saw the leech monster attack you. That’s why we shot him. That and the fact he was a notorious leech who arrested free people and locked them in virus-infested camps. He’d been on our list for a long time. When we saw you had got yourself into a bit of a scrape with the leech on the roof of the building back there, we were only too glad to help. So no need to thank us,” Kilfeather says. He uses a tone that suggests he thinks it would be much better if Mathew did thank him.
“Thank you,” Mathew says.
“You’re welcome.”
They pass Lambeth Palace, the old red-brick turrets a reminder of the long period of stable human civilisation now left behind.