by Kim Curran
“We will have no need of adult Shifters, I can assure you. We will close Project Ganymede. You have my word.”
He stretched out his hand to me. I took it and we shook, his cold, dry hand closing over my hot, clammy one.
“And my sister?”
“Will no doubt become as valuable a member of the S3 as you have,” he said.
“And you won’t put her in the Igloo, I have your word?” I said.
“Once the treaty is signed, we may find we have no need of the Igloo, either. As long as we still have our super Shifter.”
I nodded. I would do what he asked. I would play along and tell Emperor Tzen what he needed to hear. I would pretend to be the dutiful solider. Because I knew something he didn’t. As soon as I was out of here, I was going to find Aubrey and do what I should done days ago: make sure this war had never started in the first place.
He let go of my hand and knocked on the door. It opened and the two guards peered in, ready to jump to the defence of the Minister if needed.
“Escort Commandant Tyler to his apartment, please.” Vine said. “Ensure no harm comes to him.”
I knew what that meant. It meant they were to watch me. To make sure I stayed true to my word.
I followed Vine out of the cell and smiled at the men. Let’s see if they could keep up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It took me three Shifts to shake off my escort. Which was almost disappointing. I was bubbling with so much rage and bitterness, I could do with a fight. But I had to see Aubrey first. The look she’d given me as she’d walked out of the cell burned into my heart. It was the same way she’d looked at me another time, when she’d seen me kissing another girl, only a thousand times worse.
Then, it had taken me days to explain that Frankie had Forced me, for Aubrey to even think about forgiving me. I had no idea what it would take now. Not to mention the fact I had no idea where to find her.
I asked the few people still on duty this late if they’d seen her, and they shrugged, noncommittal. There was someone I was sure would know where she was.
“Zac?” I said, after he picked up.
A croaky voice answered. “It is 2am, Scott. What the hell?”
“Where are Aubrey’s bunks?”
There was a pause. And a sigh. “What have you done?” he said.
“Nothing, I mean… something. But I have to explain to her.”
“Is it something to do with why you took off from the party? Did you two hook up?” He sounded delighted.
“No. It’s not like that. But I screwed up, Zac. Really bad.”
“Well, if she’s seriously pissed off, she won’t be in her bunks.”
“Then were will she be?” I asked. He paused again. “Zac, you have to tell me!” I said, the desperation cracking my voice.
“OK. But if you tell her that I told you, I will kill you. That’s if she doesn’t kill you first.”
“I promise.”
“There’s this place she likes to go to clear her head. She calls it her sanctuary. Have you got a pen?”
Aubrey’s sanctuary was on the top floor of an abandoned high-rise building a few miles away from HQ. I arrived, thanked the driver and looked at the building. The bottom floor was a wreck, buckled metal blocking the way in. It must have been hit in a drone strike.
How the hell did Aubrey get in there?
I clambered under the girders, trying to find a way through, but each pathway was blocked. I hit myself on the head when I remembered. We were Shifters, there was always a way through. It was like the poles in training. You just had to keep trying.
The memory of the poles made me try a new approach, getting up high and trying to cross that way. It took a few attempts. With my first, I fell off and was inches away from a large spike piercing my eyeball. In my second, I slipped and ended up hanging by my fingertips. But with the third Shift, I was across.
The lifts, unsurprisingly, weren’t working. So I headed for the stairs.
I was out of breath and exhausted by the time I made it to the top floor. I stopped before opening the door to give me time to recover. I was so much frailer in this reality. So much more tired.
That’s because you’re weak, he said. Strength isn’t in the body. It’s in the mind.
Which is where you are. In my mind.
We both know how this is going to end. There’s no escaping me.
Shut up, I said, pressing my head against the door. Shut up shut up shut up. And he was gone. For now.
I opened the door to see a small glow of light, flickering in the darkness. I walked towards it.
Aubrey lay on her back, staring up at the sky, a cigarette held loosely between her fingers. I looked up and was momentarily stunned by the display of stars. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. The light pollution I’d grown up with meant that all I’d ever seen were a handful of stars at best. Now I could see millions, billions of them, swirling in the dark sky. I understood why Aubrey came to this place. I watched as she drew the cigarette to her lips.
“Still smoking?” I said, as she blew out a cloud of pale blue smoke.
She leapt up. “What the…? How?” She pulled the cigarette from her mouth and threw it to the ground. “Zac. I am going to kill him.”
“I’m sorry, but I had to see you. I had to explain.”
“Don’t bother, Commandant. Like I said before, you don’t have to explain yourself to me.” She turned away from me, staring out across the rooftop.
“Aubrey, please, I need you to listen.”
“To what? Some bull about you not being you?” She spun around to glare at me.
“It’s true!”
“That was your name on those papers. You did that to those children.” She stabbed her finger at me.
“It was him. I wish I could explain better than that. But you have to believe me. I would never, I could never.” It was useless. Even as I said the words myself, I realised how stupid they sounded.
“Then how did you know?” she said.
“It’s complicated.”
“I’ll try to keep up,” she said, her voice dripping in scorn.
“I found out last year. In my reality,” I added quickly as she gasped. “And as soon as I realised, I stopped it. Sergeant Cain and I, we led a raid on the hospital where they were… they were doing the operation. And we stopped it. I promise you.”
She looked at me, her eyebrows drawn together. “I want to believe you. I don’t know why, but I do.” She returned to looking out at the dark city. “Do they know?”
“Do who know?”
“Cain and the other adults who’ve had the operation. Do they know where their power has come from?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. In my reality, when Cain found out, it broke him.”
She shook her head. “They should. Everyone should know.”
“Vine has promised to shut the programme down once the war is over.”
“And you believe him?”
“No. But if he doesn’t, I will make him.” My hands clenched into fists as I remembered Vine’s hidden threat about Katie.
“And how exactly do you plan on doing that?” Aubrey asked.
I paused, the desire to tell her everything, about the depth of my power, bubbling on my lips. Could I trust her? “I’m a Forcer.”
Aubrey looked away. “I know,” she said with a sigh. “I mean, I guessed. The look on your face when Vine told you about what could happen if a Forcer was put in the Igloo. And then I saw what you did to that nurse.”
“Then why didn’t you tell anyone?”
She slowly looked at me. “I don’t know. I guess I trusted you.”
She glared at me and I saw she was fighting back tears. I didn’t have the energy to stop mine, so I let them flow.
“You can trust me,” I said.
“I believe it,” she said, “that there are two of you. I probably shouldn’t, but I do believe it. I see it in your eyes sometimes.
It’s like someone else takes over. I thought it was what you needed to do to get through it all. We all have masks we put up. Walls we hide behind so we don’t have to face what we’ve been through. But that person you become, he scares me.”
“He scares me, too,” I said, taking her hand, remembering how perfectly it fit in mine.
“Now, it’s like, I don’t know, you’re different.” She tilted her head, that expression I knew so well. The look I was able to glimpse in the moments after we’d kissed. When she dropped her guard. When I felt like she’d let me in.
And then it was gone again. She pulled her hand free of mine and walked over to the edge of the building. She kicked a stone off the edge. We watched it disappear into nothing.
“If it’s true,” she said, something in her softening, “if you’re really not from here, if you can remember what it was like before everything went to crap” she waved her arms around, indicating the empty landscape around us “then why don’t you Shift back to there so that none of this will have happened?”
“I’ve tried. But the first rule of Shifting… ”
“Damn the rules!” She stared at me. “You break every single rule. Why not that one?”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried? Ever since I found myself here, I’ve done nothing but try to find a way back to that reality. And sure, there are things I can do, but…”
“So do them!” She walked away from the edge of the roof, circling around me.
“But then I’d lose you!” The words came rushing out before I had a chance to stop them.
She stopped, her mouth half open. “What do you mean, lose me?”
“I mean you die. The last thing that happened before I ended up here was you dying.”
I could hardly see her now for the tears in my eyes.
“So what?” she said.
I opened my mouth and shut it again. I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I’d just told her that she’d died, and she didn’t care.
“So I die. Big deal,” she said. “I’ve spent every day of my life for the past five years facing up to the fact that I may die doing my duty. I made my peace with that.”
“But I can’t,” I said.
“You’re not willing to sacrifice one person to save the lives of thousands, millions maybe? One person you only just met, let me add. Then you’re a bigger dick that I ever imagined.” She walked towards me.
“But you’re not just one person, Aubrey. And we didn’t just meet. There’s a reason I can’t let you die.”
“It had better be a good one.” She was barely a foot away from me now. I could reach out and touch her. Hold her. Kiss her.
“It’s because I love you.”
Her intake of breath was jagged and sharp. She shook her head, as if trying to shake off my words. “No. You don’t even know me.”
“It would take a lifetime to truly know you, Aubrey. But I know you better than anyone else. And I love you.”
I said it again. I would say it a thousand times until she believed me.
“I don’t care. You still have to do it. You still have to make the Shift.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
There was no hiding from the truth now. “You know the way a Shifter can’t Shift into a place where their life is in danger?” I said. “It’s the same with you. It’s like losing you would be worse than dying. I’d die myself in a heartbeat if that would stop all of this. But lose you? Never.”
She took a step closer to me. My stomach jolted at the possibility that maybe, maybe she was going to kiss me.
The slap echoed across the rooftops.
“Wha… What was that for?”
“To knock some sense into you, Scott Tyler. You do it. You do it right now, or I swear I will keep hitting you till you do.”
She swung her arm again. I blocked it and pulled her towards me.
“I can’t,” I said, her face only an inch away from mine. “Even if I wanted to, I can’t.”
She struggled against me. “I’m nothing. Just one girl.”
“You’re everything to me, Aubrey. Everything.”
She stopped struggling and looked at me. Stared deep into me. “If you don’t do it,” she said, in a whisper, “I will.”
She pushed me away, taking a few steps backwards, then lifted her head and looked into the sky, as if enjoying the feeling of a light breeze on her face. She was trying to Shift.
“No!” I shouted, as I realised what she had meant. If I wasn’t willing to let her go, she’d do the job herself. Undo some decision that had saved her life.
I focused all of my energies on keeping her here, in this place, this reality. On stopping all other choices. I was Fixing her.
She opened her eyes. “Don’t you dare!” she yelled, running at me and hitting me again.
“I told you, I can’t let you go.” I held her by her arms.
“This isn’t your choice to make.”
“You’re right. It’s not. There is no choice.” I let her go.
She raised her hand, but instead of hitting me again, she laid it against my face, her fingers curled as if she wanted to claw at my skin. I leant into her and our lips met for the first time. Again.
It was nothing like our first kiss had been. That had been gentle and tentative and filled with promise of tomorrow. This was desperate and lost and fed as much by rage as by passion. And yet it still felt so right.
I wrapped a hand around her waist, the other in her hair, and pulled her into me. Her nails dug into my back. We melted to the floor, a tangle of limbs and discarded clothes and anger at what the world had become. At what it had forced us to become.
In that moment together we found solace. We found oblivion. And the stars looked on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
We lay on the asphalt, the heat from our bodies seeping into the cold beneath us. I didn’t feel it. All I knew was that Aubrey was next to me and the orange-kissed clouds were above. The sun was rising, setting fire to the sky. It could burn the whole world, for all I cared right now.
Maybe the world deserved to burn. Maybe we all did for what we’d done in the name of protecting it. I plucked a blade of grass that had grown up among the concrete and stones. A spore of nature reclaiming the city for itself. I twirled it between my fingers and then threw it into the air. It caught a breeze and danced off.
Aubrey stirred next to me, nuzzling her face deeper into my shoulder.
“Is it morning?” she said, her voice croaky.
“Nearly.”
“We’d better get back to the Hub. They’ll be wondering where we are.”
We stood and started to dress, embarrassedly untangling our clothes from each other’s and pulling them on.
She took my hand, her fingers knitting perfectly between mine. Maybe we both knew that we would never be together again, not in this reality, anyway. Or maybe we hoped this would be the beginning of a long life together. Either way, I held her hand like I was never going to let it go.
We walked towards the exit, down the stairs, and helped each other across the assault course of twisted metal. As we made it to the ground floor, I heard a bleeping coming from one of my pockets.
“That will probably be Cain, checking on us,” Aubrey said.
I pulled out my tablet, but the screen showed no sign of a call or a message. The bleeping sounded again. It was coming from my inside pocket. I pulled out a phone I didn’t recognise. It looked cheap, something you might buy from a corner shop, rather than the high-tech communication devices S3 issued. It bleeped for a third time as the message flashed on the screen.
THE ARCH. 15 MIN. TIME WE MET – S.
“What’s that?” Aubrey nodded at the handset.
“Nothing,” I said, slipping the phone back in my pocket with shaking hands. I didn’t want to admit that I knew exactly who the message was from and why I had a burner phone. I didn’t want Aubrey to know the truth about the other me. I’d only just
managed to earn her trust, but if she knew who S was and why she was texting me, I might lose that trust. And more than that, I might lose her.
My own cowardice burned like acid in my stomach.
Aubrey watched me. She knew something was up. I could never hide anything from her.
“Scott?”
“It’s Katie,” I said, quickly. “She’s at my place. I need to go and check on her.”
“Oh, OK.”
I must have become a better liar than I realised. “Will you be all right getting back to the Hub?”
“Don’t get all macho on me now.” She nudged me with her hip. “I’ll be fine. Go see to your sister.”
I paused before kissing her, the desire to tell her bubbling up inside me. No. She didn’t need to know. I was in control now. She never needed to know about what he had done. Or why he was getting texts from Slate, the head of the Red Hand. She could never know.
I kissed her on the forehead and left without saying a word.
The “arch” was an abandoned space near London Bridge, not far from where I’d woken up a few days ago. I knew this because he had been there before, when he’d first infiltrated the Red Hand.
A memory flared.
They’ve placed a black bag over my head, as if that could stop me from working out exactly where I am. I know this city like I know myself, the feel of the cobbles under feet, the smell of the river all around me. I hear our footsteps echo off brick walls. A bridge somewhere. Waterloo? I hear the lapping of water over shale carry on the breeze. London Bridge. They shove me forward, playing like they’re the ones in control. But we all know what’s going on. I am here because I have chosen to be. I’m led through a door and into a cold room. I hear dripping. Smell damp. They pull the bag off my head, and I have to squint in the sudden light.
“Welcome, Scott Tyler,” a robotic voice says. It’s coming through a speaker system. Slate has not come herself, but she is watching. I am one step closer to finding her. Destroying her.
I could almost taste the musty damp at the back of my throat. So, he hadn’t been working with the Red Hand. He’d been trying to bring them down. And maybe they’d worked that out. Going there alone was a risk. But I had to see it through. I needed to know who Slate was. This could be my chance to stop them and maybe even the war. If there was no going back to my old reality, the only choice I had left was to make this one better.