The Remnant Vault (Tombs Rising Book 2)

by Robert Scott-Norton

  “Get out!” Jimmy scrambled to his feet and rushed to grab Jack by the arms to restrain him. Jack blocked his advance by lifting his arms and shoving him back against a mirror hanging in the hallway.

  “You’ve got serious issues,” Jack said gesturing at the silvered wall. “You shouldn’t believe everything you read.” But then, Jack wasn’t convinced the man could read. “I’ve told you to keep your music down. I’m not having this shit from you.”

  Jack followed the thumping beats into the front lounge and a music cube that had been set up on a cupboard. The cube fed music to the foot-high speakers on either side and simultaneously projected a light show onto the ceiling above them. Jack grabbed the cube; a black box about ten centimetres square and weighed it up in his hand. The light show wavered across the ceiling. Circles and waveforms coalescing and then splitting in an organic dance of colour and life. Jack held a thumb over the projecting lens and the room became dark, lit only by the thin crack of light coming in through the almost-closed curtains.

  “Put it down. It’s not yours.”

  Jimmy poised like an injured feral cat and glared with cold, flinty eyes. Jack lifted the box and made as if to slam it against the wall.

  “I told you, I wasn’t putting up with this crap anymore.”

  Those eyes, that grin.

  “You gonna kill me as well?”

  Jack hoisted the music box in front of him and smashed it against the wall. Splinters of plastic and metal spun across the room.

  “You fucking bastard.” For a crackhead, Jimmy moved fast. He whipped his hand, pulled a knife from his jeans and suddenly a blade was inches from Jack’s chest.

  Instinct kicked in. A raw survival instinct, or that’s how he’d rationalise it later.

  Shapes and edges and movement and sound all merged into a pattern of energy that Jack predicted with a robotic grace. A hand reached for the wrist holding the knife, slamming the arm against the wall, again and then twice more until the knife dropped and something cracked under his hold. Jimmy screamed a mixture of rage and surprise and then Jack was behind him, twisting his arm up and around behind his back. Jimmy’s body was tight against Jack’s front for a moment before he used the arm to lever Jimmy to his left and forward.

  A foot swiped the floor and caught Jimmy’s leg giving him no option but to fall forward.

  And then Jack rammed Jimmy’s head through the window.

  Letting go, Jack stepped away from the neighbour. Jimmy had fallen backwards onto the carpet, crying for help like a scared teenager.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said, retreating from the room, “but I asked you to keep the music down.”

  9:30 AM

  DI Edward Burnfield tapped the steering wheel and thought back to the discussion he’d had with his wife that morning. Tamara had spelt it out to him in no uncertain terms that if he were to continue coming back home late every night, he could find somewhere else to live. She didn’t mean it—or, at least, Edward hoped she didn’t mean it—but she had the red eyes of a woman who’d done enough arguing about how much time she was prepared to spend alone. This was a marriage, she’d tell him, not a drive-thru.

  His personal life and career were badly under strain. The DRT had been referring more and more rogues to his unit over the last six months. But, his biggest case recently had been the Keeley Winston murder. He supposed that one good aspect of the increased workload was that Jack Winston and his deceased wife could be put from his mind, for the time being at least.

  The district meeting hadn’t gone well. A bunch of suits from various departments talking about rogue telepaths did little to solve the immediate problem of what to do with the increasing number of cases finding their way to his department. He needed people. No matter what they wanted to call OsMiTech: a centre for innovation, a safe harbour for telepaths, a business exchange—whilst there was still the Code to follow and the Registration Act to comply with, a telepath was less free within that crescent building than outside.

  What the hell was wrong with this traffic? He’d been moving slowly but steadily a few minutes ago, but now the cars ahead of him were all indicating to the right. They’d been diverted from the main road and off to the side streets. That would add a good half-hour to his journey. What made it even more frustrating was that the police station was only five minutes down this road.

  He slid his hand over the dashboard and a HUD appeared in the windscreen, arrows indicating he should continue with the diverted traffic.

  No, this wouldn’t work for him. There was a reason he was a policeman. Policemen got things done and he couldn’t get anything done stuck in this metal box.

  “Siren,” he told the car’s AI, then indicated and pulled out into the oncoming traffic. The road was wide enough that the oncoming cars could keep over to the edge giving him enough room to drive alongside the crawling traffic in the wrong lane. He kept his speed down, knowing he could ill afford an accident after a manoeuvre like that. He glanced over to the stuck cars and saw the pissed-off expressions of motorists knowing they were going nowhere fast.

  Fifty metres along, he forced his way through a gap in the traffic and back onto the main road, stopping when a uniform blocked his path. Edward stepped out of the car and the uniform, to his credit, immediately nodded and relaxed his officious posture.

  “Sorry, Sir. You need to turn around. We’ve got accident investigators down there.” The man was young, mid-twenties. Edward recognised his face but the name escaped him.

  “Thanks, Constable. What happened?”

  His expression changed. The hope in the man’s eyes that had lit up upon seeing his superior quickly faded at the news he was about to give.

  “I’m sorry, Sir. It’s one of yours. It was Moira Bailey.”

  “What?” Edward put a hand onto the roof of his car in what he hoped would be seen as a relaxed gesture but was actually the only thing preventing him from falling back. “Moira?”

  The constable nodded. “Stepped out in front of a bus.”

  It was like being spun around and asked to travel forward in a straight line. This made little sense. This couldn’t be his Moira. He knew she was having some financial difficulty, and she’d only recently lost her father. But was the constable suggesting—

  “You’re saying that like you think she committed suicide.”

  The constable shrugged, then realising perhaps how insensitive that gesture might appear, brought his attention up full-height again.

  “Who’s the officer in charge?”

  9:55 AM

  A car screeched to a halt. Then the noise of Jimmy’s front door opening and closing. Jack peered out through the peephole in his front door and saw a battered car, heavily modified to look speedier than it was, with bumps and grazes along the bodywork. Jimmy was outside now, dressed in different clothes, a towel pressed against the side of his head. He’d check it every few seconds and Jack saw the cuts on his face where he’d made contact with the window. Although the wounds didn’t look as serious as he’d feared, the arrival of Jimmy’s friends unsettled him.

  There were two people in the car. The driver, a young man with shaved head got out and inspected the injuries across Jimmy’s face. The passenger door opened and a woman with ebony shoulder-length hair slid out. She wore a black leather dress and jacket with a chain piercing her nose and leading to her earlobe. A smile slid off her face as she looked up at Jack’s front door. He instinctively pulled back despite knowing he couldn’t be seen.

  Damn.

  Not prepared to walk out of the front, Jack headed through the back and into the garden. A short passage led back onto the street, and Jack hesitated in the shadows, eavesdropping, waiting for them to drive off or enter Jimmy’s place.

  When his jaw began to hurt, he realised he’d been clenching his teeth. He’d had the dream again last night. Not the one with the tree, but the one where he walked up the stairs to the first floor of his house and found Keeley in the study with her eyes
destroyed. And when he did get to the top, he would be too late to save her. Jack might not have killed her, but Keeley’s death was on his hands anyway.

  Jimmy led his two guests into his house and Jack waited a moment before hurrying out onto the street and away from the trouble he’d brought upon him.

  He waited at a bus stop and caught the next bus heading away from town. The driver glanced at the telepath tattoo on his forehead and lingered on his artificial blue eye but said nothing.

  There were few people on the bus and for that Jack was grateful. He slipped onto a seat at the back of the bus and tried to ignore the twitching muscles in his left hand. After the adrenaline rush of that morning, the hangover he’d been suffering with was threatening to re-emerge with a vengeance. He closed his eyes, focusing on his breathing whilst feeling the bus bumping over the uneven road surface. Hearing the noise of the acceleration and the rumbling of the engine and using it to cocoon himself in a safe place. The thoughts of the people on the bus were muted and grey. Humdrums.

  Feeling better after a short while, he swiped his HALO ring and watched the messages appear in his vision. OsMiTech had replaced his own eye with this artificial piece of tech following his last remnant case. As a remnant keeper, he was paid by OsMiTech to read the memories of the recently murdered by inserting their modified eyes into his own adapted eye socket. Only, two weeks ago, when he was given the Lavinia Wei case, his own eye had been stolen and was still missing. This artificial one was useful, though, connecting him through his HALO ring to the networks and open access points; a window into the outside world.

  But, it was difficult to appreciate: it had cost him too much.

  A text-only message from his brother, Ethan, appeared in his vision. He hadn’t seen him since the funeral and only infrequently before that.

  “Get in touch. Come out for a meal, just stop ignoring me.”

  Typical Ethan. Blunt and to the point. Jack deleted it and scanned through the abusive messages from the ATL protest group. The Anti-Telepath League had got hold of his personal contact details and were now routinely sending him hate messages. It amused him to think that he scared them so much that they took the trouble to irritate him this way. He filed the messages and considered whether Jimmy was a card-carrying member. They’d love to have someone living so close to a telepath be part of their group. At the meeting he gatecrashed, when he met their leader, Frazier Growden, for the first time, he’d seen their vitriol first hand.

  Forget about Growden.

  The man had tried to kill him. Jack’s ribs were still tender from the kicking he’d been given on the stage in front of the baying crowd.

  The bus stopped to let passengers board and a young woman got on. As she walked to the back of the bus, their eyes met and she threw him the briefest of smiles. Then she hesitated. Her eyes flicked up to Jack’s forehead, then she grabbed a handrail as the bus pulled back into traffic and used the motion to turn back around and towards the driver where she waited, standing in the aisle for her stop.

  With a shake of his head, he leant back on the glass and closed his eyes, trying to forget how obvious some people could be with their prejudice. It would never go away. Maybe she’d also noticed the eye and realised that he was a remnant keeper. One of the most well-paid positions for a class two to have, yet the public were the least tolerant of them. What most people didn’t understand was that Jack didn’t have a choice. OsMiTech chose what department you were to be allocated to based on aptitude tests and complex scoring. He imagined himself storming up to the woman and telling her he didn’t get excited by the thought of putting dead peoples’ eyes in his head either. But he’d helped put away plenty of criminals as a result. Would it make any difference?

  It had been an hour since he’d smashed Jimmy’s head through the window. If Jimmy was going to report it, would Jack have heard by now?

  His HALO vibrated. The caller ID was one he didn’t recognise, and he hesitated before taking it. If he was in trouble, he’d prefer to know about it.

  “Jack?” A man’s voice. Enthusiastic.

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Ha, yes. This is Adam Wills. Your new handler.”

  “Right.”

  “You got my message?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  A pause. “Well, anyway, this is me, your new handler.”

  Jack got the sense of the few people on the bus listening in and realised he’d sooner take this call in private. “Hang fire,” he said to Adam, then got to his feet and walked up to the driver’s cabin. The woman who’d refused to sit down earlier bristled as he approached.

  “Let me off please, I’ve missed my stop.”

  “You’re going to have to wait till the next one,” the driver replied.

  Jack lifted the emergency door handle by the doors and they hissed open.

  “You can’t do that,” the driver shouted.

  “So, stop me.”

  The bus screeched to a halt as the driver applied the brakes and brought the vehicle to a standstill. Jack hopped off. A few of the passengers gave him disapproving looks as he walked past the windows, heading in the opposite direction to the bus. The driver hesitated before shouting abuse at Jack through the open doorway before closing the doors and pulling away.

  “You still there,” he said into the HALO.

  “Yeah, sure. Is everything OK?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “Great. I thought it was about time we met up. See how things lie.”

  “How things lie?”

  “I know you’ve been through a lot, but you are still a registered telepath and a remnant keeper and I was hoping you’d be ready to join us back at work.”

  He was at the end of the leeway he would get from work. Much as he’d like to tell Adam precisely what he thought of coming back to work, he knew it wasn’t worth the grief that would result.

  “I look forward to meeting you,” he found himself saying begrudgingly.

  “Come to OsMiTech tomorrow. We’ll have you reading remnants before the week’s out.”

  Jack hung up and out of reflex fingered the edge of his adapted eye socket, trying not to remember what it was like to put a dead person’s eye in there.

  10:00 AM

  Booth Maguire stood by a green door at the edge of the shopping centre with no memory of how he came to be there. He checked his HALO and saw it was almost time for his shift to start—

  —but he couldn’t remember what it was he did.

  Shoppers and late-running office workers hurried by. Booth ignored them and focused on the door instead. Flashes of images, and words, and smells rushed through his mind, cascading down his thoughts, and then with the lightest of touches, the door opened inward to reveal a brick-lined tunnel, lit by a line of hanging bulbs from the ceiling.

  He thought of turning away and had already taken a step back when a voice came from somewhere inside. A woman’s voice—insistent.

  “Please make your way to door number four.”

  He hesitated.

  “Hello? What am I doing here?” He crossed the threshold, but quickly thought better of it. “I’m leaving.” But when he turned, he saw the door had already closed silently behind him. “Open this door.” He grabbed the handle and pulled, but the door was locked.

  Booth faced the daunting tunnel and thought about how he might have to fight his way out of here. The illumination from the dangling lights wasn’t enough to reach far and the shadows lurked against the tunnel’s edges.

  Booth’s head was full of ideas. The foremost being this was a dangerous place that he needed to get away from as soon as possible.

  “Mr Maguire, please make your way to door number four.”

  “Who are you? How do you know my name?”

  A sigh came over the speakers, then, along the corridor, beyond the reach of the first light, a door opened. A short Asian woman stepped out into the corridor, her hands behind her back. It was obvious to Booth that she wa
s holding something she didn’t want him to see. Hairs on his arm bristled, and his heart beat a little faster.

  “Please, don’t come any closer.”

  “We’re friends. Don’t be concerned.”

  “I’m leaving.” Booth tried to force the exit open by reaching his fingers around the edge, feeling for any amount of leverage he could use. “Please, this is a mistake. I’m not supposed to be here.”

  “No, it’s not a mistake. You know me.” She spoke softly with a Liverpool accent and Booth desperately wanted to believe her. After a few more steps towards him, she smiled and Booth had a flash of recognition, then it evaporated like an interrupted dream.

  “How did I get here?”

  “The same way you get here every day.”

  “I’ve never been here… what is this place… who are you?”

  “You have been here before. You’ll come here again. This is where you work. I’m your supervisor. My name is Megan Phillips.”

  Clouds swam across his memory and he was breathing so heavily and quickly that he wondered if he were having a panic attack.

  “I don’t know anyone called Megan.”

  “You know me. We’re worked together for five years. You have a wife called Helen. You went to school in Crosby, and your parents moved to this district when you were five.”

  “Anyone could find that out.”

  “But why would they bother?” She took another step towards him. “Please,” she reiterated. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  He turned and faced the door. Shouldered it. Banged on it with his fists, but the door was stronger and newer than it looked. “Help me!” he shouted, praying that someone on the other side might hear.

  Booth spun to see the woman rushing at him, finally revealing the injection gun in her hand. She was on top of him before he could move away and the needle pierced the skin of his neck.

  The last thing he saw as his eyes closed was Megan’s smiling face. “See you on the other side.”