“Yes,” I answer, my voice shaking, just a little bit. “Yes, it is over, or it will be for you once I’ve shot myself. I’ll do it. I promise I will. Let the others go, or I’ll do it right now.”
There’s panic in his eyes. I’m right. I know I am.
“I swear to you, if you let them go, I’ll put the gun down. I’ll come with you as soon as they’re free.”
I can almost see his thought process: what’s more important, one live Benedict Baines and three escaped outlaws, or one dead Benedict Baines and three captured outlaws? He looks around at the other officers for answers, but they look just as bewildered as he does.
“Why should I believe you?” he says. “How do I know that as soon as they’re out of sight, you won’t shoot at us, or you won’t just shoot yourself anyway?”
“You don’t,” I tell him. “But think about it.” My hand reaches out and grabs hold of Hoshi’s, clutching on to it for the last time. “What’s left for me if you take them?”
“We’ll keep you together,” he says. “We just want to talk to you. No one’s going to get hurt.”
“You really expect us to believe that? Believe that you’ll let Hoshi go, that you’ll let Greta and Jack go? What are you going to do, send them away with a smack on the wrist after what they’ve done? We all know exactly what you’ll do to them!”
I lower the gun. Hold it to my own heart.
“Please,” I say. “Please let them go. I’ll do whatever you want then, I give you my word.”
HOSHIKO
I can’t believe this is happening. He’s about to turn the gun on himself, right in front of us.
“Ben, you have to stop this,” I say, carefully. “It’s too late now. It’s over – we have to do what they say.”
He turns to me, and his eyes are on fire. He whispers to me, urgently. “It’s the only way we all stand a chance of surviving! Please. Please, if you get the chance, just go. Run, as fast and as far as you can.” He’s gripping the gun hard, still holding it to his own chest. “I’ll find you,” he says. “Wherever you go, I’ll find you, one day.”
Jack reaches for Ben’s arm.
“Mate, you can’t do this.” He speaks to the police officer, waiting silently at the top of the stairs. “Let the girls go, keep us.” He gives a dry laugh. “There, I’ve upped his offer. Two for one.”
“No!” Ben’s tone is resolute. “Let them all go, or I end it, right here.”
The policeman at the top of the stairs finally seems to have regained his composure.
“None of you are going anywhere, except with us,” he says. “If you want to kill yourself, Baines, please go ahead: saves us a job later.”
Ben shakes his head. “It’s too late for that now,” he says. “You’ve hesitated too long – you’ve given the game away. You aren’t going to shoot me; you’d have done it by now.”
There’s a silence. It feels like it goes on for ever.
My mind is whirring. He’s right about one thing – they’ll definitely kill Greta and me; we’re just Dreg scum to them. And they’ll kill Jack too – a turncoat police officer – he’s committed treason as far as they’re concerned. But Benedict Baines, son of Vivian, Dreg Control Minister and wannabe Prime Minister – what will they do to him when they’ve got him? That one’s harder to call. He’s a traitor to his country too, or so they say, but his blood’s a damn sight Purer than the rest of ours.
Still, it’s way too risky. We’ve been through too much. We come as a unit now, the four of us.
“We said we’d stick together,” I tell him. “I’m not leaving you. I can’t leave you. Not after everything.”
His eyes are brimming over, desperately pleading with me.
“Please,” he says to me. “Please let me do this. You have to.” He looks pointedly at Greta, still holding tightly on to me, uncharacteristically silent for once.
I look down at Greta, so frightened that I can feel her trembling, and I know he’s right. She’s so young still. I can’t let them take her and kill her, not if there’s a chance she can get away, and she won’t go anywhere without me – she’s made that pretty clear by now.
We’ll have to run, if we get the chance. I’ll have to leave him; there’s no other way. Damn him for playing the Greta card! He knows my weaknesses too well.
“Keep the guns on them,” the guy at the top of the stairs says. “I need to make a phone call.”
He pushes roughly through the officers crowding the stairwell behind him and walks off, through the doors and back into the office.
He’s gone about a minute. Nobody speaks.
When he returns, he looks even more panicked than he did before.
“OK,” he says to Ben. “OK, you’ve got yourself a deal. Just do not fire that gun.”
BEN
“I want to see they’re not followed,” I tell the officer in charge. “I want to watch them go.”
I look once more at Hoshi. “I’ll be OK,” I say. “I promise.” I nod to Jack, smile at Greta, and stare at Hoshi again. “Be careful,” I say. “Stay safe. Whatever it takes.”
I turn away and the officers part as I walk through them back up the stairs to the office, gripping the gun to my head.
I walk over to the big panoramic window, raising the blinds up with my free hand.
It’s a glorious day out there, not a cloud in the sky.
The PowerHouse building dominates the skyline from here, just as it does across London. All the other monuments – Big Ben, the old clock tower, the crumbling remains of the old parliament buildings, the big white palace – pale into significance beneath the triumphant smile of the gleaming statue. That was exactly the intention when they built it all those years ago: to signify the new world order.
Beamed up on to it, five faces stare down into the city below, draping the whole building in their translucent colours.
It’s pointless thinking they’ll escape. How can they when the whole city, the whole country, the whole world knows what they look like?
At least they can try, though. I haven’t saved them, but I’ve given them a reprieve, and, for now at least, it’s the best I can do.
“I won’t lower this gun until I’ve seen them disappear from sight,” I say to the mass of people standing behind me. “I can see your reflections: if you come any closer, or I see anyone following them, I’ll pull the trigger.”
The boss guy heaves a large, exasperated sigh. “You heard what he said!” he barks angrily at the rest of the police officers. “Let them go!”
HOSHIKO
At the bottom of the stairs, someone opens the door up and daylight floods in. The officers below us lower their guns and stand back against the walls, forming a narrow passageway between them. I feel their eyes boring into me as I pass down the stairs and into the warmth of the morning, right past all the police cars and their blue lights.
I turn and look up.
Ben’s at the window, high above, still holding the gun to his own head.
What are the chances of us ever seeing each other again if I leave him now?
I take a step backwards.
“Hoshi.” Jack’s hand clamps down on my arm. “We have to do this.”
“I can’t. It can’t end like this!” I wrench away from him and start running back towards the building.
“Hoshi!” Greta screams out. “Don’t leave me!”
The sheer fear in her voice stops me in my tracks.
Jack catches up with me.
“I made a mistake,” I tell him. “I have to go back. If I hand myself in, maybe they’ll leave Ben alone! I’m the one they want to punish. Take Greta with you, look after her. You’ll be safer without me. Less visible.”
“You heard what Ben said! He’s thought about this. He’s doing it for you, for Greta, for all of us.”
My head is whirling.
“You know I’m right, Hoshi. We keep going. For him. For Ben. And for Greta. It’s not the end. Things are going
to change for the better. As soon as they do, you’ll be together again.”
Jack believes that with all his heart, I know he does. He left his fiancée, Alice, behind the day he saved us. She was resistance too and, as soon as his cover was blown, she had to flee to Europe. He called her as soon as we got away from the Cirque and told her to run before she was hauled in for questioning. She had fake passports and money all lined up and by the time the police came calling for her, she’d gone.
A woman we’ve never even met is in danger because of us. Jack says she won’t blame us, that they both always knew what the deal was, being in the resistance.
He thinks she’ll be able to come home soon. He says that pro-Dreg sentiment is so strong now that we’re on the brink of a new world, where we can all live as equals. There’s an election next week and, for the first time ever, a pro-Dreg candidate is running for office. Jack says there’s a really good chance she’ll win and, if she does, Alice can come out of hiding and we might be granted pardons.
I wish I could share his conviction, but I don’t. This world is too cruel for things to be any different.
When Jack speaks again, his voice is uncharacteristically stern. “Don’t you dare let Ben down now, Hoshi! You know how we make what he’s doing worthwhile?”
I shake my head.
“We fight, that’s how! We fight to stay alive, just like we always have.”
I stare at him, and then back at the tiny blonde girl behind us, clutching her monkey. Then I look back up at Ben. He lifts his other hand and waves.
I wave back. I mouth the same words I mouthed all those months ago – the last time the police had us surrounded. I love you. He mouths the words back.
“Come on,” Jack says. “Let’s get out of here.”
And we walk off slowly, Jack, Greta and me, the eyes of a hundred police officers on us.
At the corner, I turn once more. There he is, a tiny figure now, at the window. I raise my hand again and he waves back and I feel like my heart is breaking into a thousand pieces.
BEN
I stay there at the window, holding the gun to my head and watching as they get smaller and smaller and then disappear from sight.
The first time I ever saw Hoshi tumbling and turning on that wire the day the circus came to town, I knew even then, somewhere deep inside me, that she’d change my life.
We’ve been on the run for so long that a part of me started to think it would always be that way. The four of us, outlaws for ever.
I had such an easy life before: always had food on demand, a warm house, clean clothes. To be without things you’ve always had in abundance, always taken for granted, is a shock to the system. My back aches all the time now from sleeping on dirty floors and crawling into cramped spaces. My head itches permanently, desperate for the rich, creamy lather of shampoo. My lips have cracked, and my stomach’s concave now, and shrinking more every day.
I don’t miss my old life at all though, not like you might think. I was deluded then. I lived in a bubble. Everything I had was paid for by evil and coldness and cruelty.
Hoshi and me, and Greta and Jack, we’ve become a team: so tight, so strong. I’ve never had that before. Never had that feeling of belonging, of being with people who I knew I could rely on to be by my side through everything, through anything.
Sometimes, I used to look at the three of them and wonder if they knew what on earth they were doing, sacrificing so much for a boy like me, a boy whose mother had done such terrible things. And yet they never blamed me for it, not once, not any of them. For some unfathomable reason, these people – people who were so much braver, so much wiser, so much better than me, somehow saw something in me, loved something in me.
They might make it now, without me. I’m one less person to worry about. They might finally get to the continent and Jack can be reunited with his fiancée. Things are better there. People are more tolerant, borders are open, society is inclusive. I could put up with anything if I knew Hoshi and Greta were free, really free, for the first time in their lives, even if it meant them being in another country; even if it meant not seeing them again.
A lump constricts my throat as I contemplate a life without Hoshi in it. What does it matter what happens to me now, really?
I turn around.
They’re all still there, at least a dozen police officers, their shields up, their guns trained on me. I’ve imagined this scenario loads of times, planned it exactly this way: me bargaining myself so Hoshi and the others can go free. It’s worked, gone exactly as I wanted. The trouble is, I just psyched myself up for this bit. I never really let myself imagine what would happen afterwards. What are they going to do with me: Benedict Baines – the rebel? Benedict Baines, the outlaw?
Like a light going on in my head, I realize I know the answer. I know exactly where they’re going to take me, exactly who they’re going to take me to.
“You’re going to take me to my mother, aren’t you? As soon as I put this gun down.”
Their eyes flick nervously at each other but nobody says anything. If they’re not denying it, it must be true.
My mother is the Dreg Control Minister, and now she’s running for office. My mother hates anyone who isn’t “Pure” English more than anything in all the world. She calls them vermin. She thinks the world would be a better place without them. She wants to “do away” with them.
She must be absolutely livid about all the things I’ve done. My mother is used to controlling people, used to getting her own way, and yet I, her own son, ran away from home, assaulted a security guard, posed as a police officer, helped to blow up a circus and spent nearly a year on the run. A year embarrassing her, casting shame on her, and why? Because of a Dreg tightrope walker, that’s why.
What’s she going to say? What’s she going to do?
Whatever it is, I don’t care. Her power over me has gone. She’ll never turn me back into her meek little boy again. She’ll never win.
I know myself now. I know what’s right. I know what’s true.
I want to see her, all of a sudden, to tell her that. I want to look into her eyes: defiant, unrepentant. I want her to see who I am now, see that I’m nothing like her, see that she means nothing to me.
I look at the police officers, all still petrified that I’m going to turn the gun on myself. Maybe I should. Maybe I should just shoot myself, right now. I won’t though; I don’t want to. I don’t want to die, not while Hoshi, Greta and Jack are still out there. I want to keep fighting, for them. I want to live.
I throw the gun down, step forward with my hands up.
“Come on then, let’s get on with it,” I say. “Take me to Vivian Baines.”
HOSHIKO
Once we’re out of sight, we break into a run.
“Where will we go?” I ask Jack. “They’re bound to find us, anyway. They can track us now, surely; there are cameras everywhere.”
“No,” he says. “Not everywhere.”
He’s leading us further and further away from the city centre, into the outskirts. He runs down a dark alley, then another one, then another.
“Where are we going?” asks Greta. Bojo’s little monkey arms are wrapped around her neck, and she’s panting already, as she tries to match Jack’s long-legged pace.
“The only place the cameras can’t find us.” Jack says. “The only place they haven’t bothered installing them.”
There’s only one place he can mean.
We’re heading for the slums.
Pulling on my hand as we run, Greta’s voice is urgent.
“Where does Jack mean, Hoshi? Where are we going?”
I look down at her. As soon as I mention the “s” word, she’ll get hysterical, I know she will.
“Just keep running.”
“Jack,” she calls after him. “Where are we going?”
“The slums,” he answers abruptly over his shoulder.
Greta stops in her tracks, wrenching my hand back.
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“No! I don’t want to. You said we’d never have to!”
“We don’t have a choice any more, Greta! They’ll be following us. Come on!”
I pull her arm, but she won’t come.
In front, Jack turns and heads back towards us, his eyes panicked.
“What are you doing? Come on! As soon as Ben drops that gun, they’re going to try and grab us!”
“But you said we’d never go to the slums! You said we’d be safer out here!”
“I know I said that, Greta, but they’ll be tracking us! The slums are the only place we stand half a chance of losing them!”
She still won’t move. There’s the sound of a siren in the distance, getting louder. Jack gives a sigh of frustration. I can tell how desperate he is, but he tries to talk gently and calmly.
“Greta. We have to go into the slums. We don’t have a choice. It might not be that bad.”
“No,” she says, stubbornly. “I don’t want to.”
He throws his hands up in exasperation. “Come on! We don’t have time for this!”
There are more sirens now: louder, closer.
What can I do? We’ve always tried to protect Greta when we can, always tried our hardest to make being on the run seem like an adventure. It’s too late for that now. It’s time to let her know how high the stakes are.
“You hear that sound?” I say. “That’s for us, Greta! They’re coming after us and if they catch us again, this time they will kill us. Do you understand? They’ll kill us all!”
I pull her arm, hard, and drag her along with me as I start to run.
She stops resisting and her feet pound along with mine as she gasps stifled cries of shock and fear.
The buildings we wend our way past become ever shabbier, ever more run-down. More and more of them are boarded up, covered in graffiti, and we have to dance our way through the dogs’ mess and broken glass decorating the pavement as we run past burnt-out cars and battered shopping trolleys.
I’ve heard of streets like this: the streets they call No Man’s Land. Not slum territory, not yet, but close enough to the slums that no respectable, clean Pure wants to spend any time here. We see someone eventually: a man, slumped in a doorway, clutching a bottle.
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