by Steve Feasey
‘You’re an enterprising individual, Mr Mange.’
Steeleye grinned. ‘You don’t know the half of it.’
‘What does all this have to do with what I’m looking for?’
Steeleye sucked his teeth and fixed Zander with a look before continuing. ‘A couple of days ago, my men intercept a pair of Mutes on the edge of the slums. A woman and a girl. They offer them a place to stay for the night and end up bringing ’em back to Dump Two. The woman is real nervous, and as soon as she’s there she starts making noises about leaving again.’ He stopped and shrugged. ‘It happens all the time. I tell her that she’s not going anywhere, and she goes loopy; she screams at the kid to run.’ Mange looked across at Melk, his good eye boring into the other man’s. ‘The kid doesn’t run, but she does set about my men. This little girl –’ he held his hand out, palm down, patting the air in front of him to emphasise his point – ‘moves like nothin’ you ever seen. Fast doesn’t even begin to describe it. One second she’s there in front of one of my men, the next he’s rolling on the floor holding his balls and crying like a baby. Took two of them out before you could snap your fingers. It might have gone on if I hadn’t shot the woman.’
‘You shot her?’
‘Only with a stunner.’ Steeleye waved his hand dismissively. ‘But it was enough to put a halt to the kid’s shenanigans. I grab the woman and tell the girl that she can earn their freedom by doing a bit of work for me. Somebody that fast can be used in a whole host of ways, but I wanted to start her off easy – a few wallets at the marketplace, you know. I send her out with my lieutenant, and on the very first day she gets snatched.’
‘Snatched?’
‘Taken by a couple of freaks. At the time I thought it was a rival gang, you know? But after what happened next, I know that’s not the case. No siree.’
Zander had to bite his lip at the effrontery of this man in calling anybody else ‘a freak’. ‘What did happen next?’
‘I get a visit from a guy. Two guys, in fact – one regular-looking fellow and a tall, white-skinned dude. They walk into my place as bold as brass. The head man demands I hand over all my stock. Demands it! In my own place! When I tell him where to go, pointing out that there are five of my men in the room with us, he just sighs and gives a little shake of his head. Then he turns and nods to the ghost.’
‘Ghost?’
‘The skinny pale guy he came with. Albino. There’s loads of ’em out in the slums. Anyway, he gives the ghost a nod, and it happened.’ Steeleye stopped, puffing out his cheeks and shaking his head at the memory. Zander thought he detected genuine fear on the man’s face. ‘The two of them turned into monsters: vile, hideous things too dreadful for words. The head guy is this writhing mass of tentacles and teeth, and it moves towards me. I put my hands out in front of me, to protect myself, and as I do so I can see my skin erupting with black worms eating their way out from the inside. Don’t misunderstand me here – I don’t just see them, I can feel them too – a huge host of rotten filth that’s writhing and squirming inside of me. I open my mouth and hundreds, thousands of the things fall out, dropping down into my lap, wriggling and twisting about. I’m so scared it takes me a few seconds to realise the howling noise I can hear is the sound of my own screams mixed with those of my men. They were seeing the same thing! Then the tentacled creature asks me if I want it to stop. I screamed something, and then everything was gone, just like that. I looked across at my men. Two of them had pissed their pants and another one was curled up in the corner crying for a mother who’s been dead ten years! I’m not ashamed to admit that I wasn’t far away from joining him. I had to feel the skin on my own hands and arms to check it was still there. I catch a look at the ghost-kid, who’s standing there with a little smile on his lips, and I know it was him. He done it.’
‘Maybe it was a poison? An airborne gas designed to induce mass hallucinations?’
Steeleye shook his head. ‘We all saw the same thing. It was the albino; I’m not saying the worms were there, but he put the nightmare into our heads. He did something to make us all see that stuff.’
‘Did something?’
Mange gave the politician a hard stare. ‘I’m not scared easily, Zander. This wasn’t like some hypnotist’s stunt. What I saw was as real to me as you sitting there now. I was still shaking when the head guy steps up and asks me how I’d like to experience it all again.’
‘So you gave him your “stock”?’
‘I’d have given him my good eye if that was what he wanted.’
Zander sat back, taking this in. The men his father had sent out to the locations where the children were supposed to be had been returning empty-handed. Some of the units were still out there, but so far there had been no sightings of the kids they were looking for. And then there was the matter of the bomb incident at the very first raid. Somehow the children, despite being separated by huge distances, had been forewarned that they were in danger. The pair Steeleye had described could only be the man Silas and the albino youngster he’d seen in the picture his father had shown him. And now one of the other hybrids, a girl with incredible speed, had also turned up here. This Silas was drawing them all together, and he was doing so right under the Melks’ noses!
But why? That was what Zander couldn’t figure out.
He looked across at the mutant. ‘Nothing you’ve told me explains why you’re so confident I’ll let you go. The individuals you had in your custody have gone, as have the people who rescued them. You have nothing to offer me, Mange.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’
There it was again – that conceited arrogance that rankled so much with him. He waited.
‘There are two more in Muteville.’
There was a knock on the door and a young man appeared carrying a huge tray of food.
‘Not now!’ Zander bellowed, and the waiter quickly backed out of the room. He turned his attention to Mange. ‘Go on.’
‘I have people everywhere out there.’ He gestured towards the windows. ‘Inside and outside the wall. Oh yeah –’ he grinned at the disbelieving look on the politician’s face – ‘not all of your good Citizens see us as untouchables, especially if there’s money to be made. One of my people heard about some strangers who turned up in the slums. One of them magically healed a dying girl and a couple of others. A miracle, by all accounts. In doing so, he himself has become ill and is lying in a ward elder’s safe house right now. I’m not one to put two and two together and come up with five, but two Mutes with special powers turning up in Muteville at the same time doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me.’
‘Where is this healer Mute?’
The finger was wagging again now. The finger accompanied by that infuriating grin that made Zander seethe.
‘I reckon you’re ready to bargain again, Principal soon-to-be-President Melk. Am I right?’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want the albino. I want his head on a plate.’
‘I think we can do that.’
‘And a position in your new force.’
‘A what?’
‘I think it’s time your Agency for the Remonstration of Mutants had a mutant branch.’
‘Now wait a minute . . .’
‘I know the slums better than anybody. You need someone like me.’
‘You’d be betraying your own people.’
‘They’re not my people. They’re too weak to be my people.’
Zander frowned, trying to think it all through. ‘Is that everything?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Somehow I didn’t think it was.’
‘When I deliver you your freaky kids, I want in.’
‘In?’
‘That’s right. I want to live inside the wall.’
‘That isn’t going to happen.’
‘Oh, I think you’ll find a way to make sure it does, Principal Melk. Maybe you’ll need to go and ask your daddy for his help, but one
way or another, you’ll find a way for Steeleye Mange to be a Citizen of C4.’
Tia
After their initial meeting, Silas and Jax took Tia to the school they ran close to the centre of the slum, in an area known as the White Ward. The slums at C4 contained six such wards, and White was the oldest and most established. As such, the housing and sanitation were better there than elsewhere.
Tia had only been at the school for a short while when there was a knock on the door of the room she had been assigned to. She opened it to discover her host, Silas, on the other side.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Cowper, but I regret our plan for you to visit some of the children’s lessons will have to be postponed.’
‘Oh?’
‘Jax and I have a rather urgent errand to run.’
There was something about the way he said this that piqued her interest. Normally calm and reserved, Silas appeared to be on edge. He looked up the narrow passageway towards the entrance to the building.
‘Can I help at all?’ Tia asked.
‘Not this time, I’m afraid. Perhaps we can speak when I return.’
She stood in the doorway, watching him as he walked away. Standing at the end of the corridor was the albino, Jax, and a small girl. Silas stopped, crouching down to her level, and said something that Tia couldn’t catch. He nodded to the girl, who returned the gesture. With that, he opened the heavy wooden door and he and Jax were about to leave when Silas paused on the threshold, turning back to the youngster.
‘Don’t worry, Flea,’ he said. ‘We’ll get her back.’
Tia had gone back to her room to read, only to fall asleep and wake later with the reader on her chest. She powered the device down, scolding herself for being so lazy, and recovered her recording equipment, intent on doing some work and not entirely wasting the day. The school was an ideal backdrop for her journalistic reports. More than anything else, she wanted to show city people that those outside the walls weren’t just weird freaks to be visited and gawked at during a day trip, or talked about over dinner as if they were some abstract problem. She wanted to show the human story, film the children as they carried out their day-to-day duties or played in the streets. She planned to cut this footage in among the more unsavoury recordings she had: she already had some video she’d captured of ARM raids and brutality by the agency directed towards people who appeared to have done nothing to deserve it. The story was a powerful one, and she’d decided she was no longer interested in producing a series of individual reports; instead she would produce a full-length documentary that would make people stop and think. What she wanted more than anything was to show them what Melk was really about, demonstrate that by voting for him they’d allowed these things to happen, and that they might go on unabated if they allowed his son Zander into power this time around.
With these thoughts and ideas tumbling through her head, Tia wandered out of her room and went along to the large space down the corridor used as a refectory.
It was simply a long space full of tables and benches, but when she’d arrived at the school it had been a heaving mass of noise and activity. Now though, she had the place to herself. She set up her mobile editing equipment on one of the tables and began to run through her footage, writing notes on a small pad by her side and losing herself in her work.
After a while she felt thirsty. She looked around and spotted a tap set into the wall behind her. Cups were laid out on a table beside it. After saving her work, she stood up and went to fetch herself a drink.
She screamed in fright as she came face to face with the girl she’d seen Silas talking to earlier. Up close, she realised the girl was older than she’d thought – a teenager, in fact. The girl was petite. Reddish blonde hair and blue eyes set into a heart-shaped face gave her an elfin look, and Tia thought her freckles were the cutest thing she’d ever seen. She was no more than an arm’s length away.
‘Wha . . . ? How did you . . . ?’ She looked around her. There was nowhere the girl could have been hiding.
Pulling herself together, Tia let out a little nervous laugh. The girl must have concealed herself somewhere, maybe beneath one of the benches, in such a way that she could not be seen.
‘You scared the hell out of me. You really shouldn’t creep up on people like that, you know.’
The look of sadness this provoked instantly made Tia feel bad, and she reached out a hand and put it on her arm. She snatched it away again; the heat coming off the girl was incredible. The poor thing must be running a temperature. Tia made a mental note to tell Silas about this; a virus in a place like this would spread like wildfire.
‘Flea, isn’t it?’ Tia said, remembering the name Silas had called her by.
The girl nodded, a smile briefly touching her lips.
‘Are you shy? Is that why you don’t speak?’
The girl shook her head.
‘You can’t speak?’
This question was answered with a tiny shrug.
Tia nodded to the space on the bench next to where she’d been sitting. ‘Do you want to join me?’ She smiled as Flea plonked herself down on the wooden seat.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Tia said, returning to the small screen and her editing. It was after a few minutes that Tia began to notice something odd: the girl beside her sat unmoving and apparently uninterested in her work except when the reporter was fast-forwarding through a video, trying to find a particular scene or moment. Every time she did this, Flea would lean forward and stare at the screen with interest.
The heat continued to pour off the girl. It was like sitting next to a small heating lamp and it soon made Tia feel uncomfortable. The idea of that cup of cold water appealed again, so she got up and crossed the room to the tap.
She brought back two cups and was about to take her seat again when she realised she’d left her omnipad on the table beside the tap. She sighed. ‘Flea, I don’t suppose you’d be a sweetheart and fetch my omni–’
There was a brief scraping sound, as if the legs of the bench had shifted against the hard floor, and Tia stared down at the device that had somehow appeared beside her notes. Dumbstruck, she reached out and brushed her fingers over the gadget, as if to assure herself it was really there. Something was terribly wrong. It definitely hadn’t been there a split second before, and now . . .
She turned to look at the girl beside her who was sitting perfectly still, staring at the screen again.
‘Flea . . .’ Tia couldn’t get her head around what had just occurred. ‘Did you just . . . ?’
‘Ah, there you are.’ Jax’s voice made Tia jump. Her heart was still racing wildly. She turned around to see the albino standing in the doorway. He nodded first at her and then at Flea. ‘I see you two have met. Has she been bothering you?’ he asked.
‘Er . . . no. No, she’s been fine.’
‘Good. Well, I’m afraid to say I’ll have to take her away from you now. There’s someone who wants to speak to her.’ He stared pointedly at the girl. ‘Come on, Flea. Lana is here.’ He paused before adding, ‘She’s safe.’
Tia’s mind was still racing with ideas and theories about what she’d just experienced. At the same time she was already trying to convince herself that she’d somehow imagined it all. It was easier than accepting the alternative: that Flea was able to disappear and reappear again when she wanted – a sort of teleportation.
Tia shook her head, which was filled with an odd fuzzy sensation. Jax was giving her a strange look.
‘Flea has a temperature,’ she said, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice.
‘She does?’
‘She’s extremely hot. She must be coming down with something.’
‘Your concern is touching, Miss Cowper,’ the albino said, ‘but Flea is not ill.’ He paused, continuing to stare so intently at her that she began to feel a little uncomfortable. ‘And she can’t teleport exactly. What she is capable of doing is moving at incredible speed. She can only do it in very s
hort bursts – for now at least. That’s why she is always so hot; her heart beats at an amazing rate. Silas and I are going to try very hard to help slow the world down for our Flea.’
At the mention of his name, the owner of the school also appeared in the doorway. He smiled at Tia, giving her a nod. ‘I think it’s time I told you what’s going on, Miss Cowper.’
Once Silas had finished telling Tia everything that had happened on that fateful night at the Farm, as well as his efforts to keep the hybrid children safely hidden ever since, Tia sat staring back at him in amazement.
‘That’s the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard. Melk is a monster!’
‘I thought so too. That’s why I acted the way I did. We have little choice but to gather the children together and work out what is best for them.’
Tia thought about this for a moment. ‘Why bring them all back here though? Why not somewhere else?’
‘Where else can they go? Like you, they’re young adults now, and it’s not so easy to keep them hidden away. Sure, it was possible when they were very young, but now they have a right to a life where they make their own choices. How would you feel if you were told you could never go anywhere, never properly interact with other people of your age, never explore your talents? No, this moment was always going to come about. Melk’s unfortunate discovery has just brought it forward.’
‘He won’t stop until he finds them,’ she said.
‘No. Now he knows they’re not dead, the president will want his little creations back. He’ll want to destroy them and wipe out his historical indiscretions. Either that, or he’ll try to use them in some other vile way. Whatever it is, our only hope is to empower them so that that doesn’t happen.’
‘Empower them? How?’
‘Jax rewired parts of their brains after we freed them, suppressed their gifts so they would not be fully realised. But we can reverse that. We think the children’s powers might be enhanced by their being together. If Melk Senior really wants to see what he created, I say we give his “progeny” a chance to show him. And maybe change this world just a little while we’re at it.’