The Vanguard

by SJ Griffin

Chapter Six

  I had the hotel to myself when I got back, I’d never spent so much time home alone, and it made the hotel seem enormous. I made myself some lunch. I sat at the table while, to anyone watching, some food liberated itself from the fridge and made itself into a sandwich. I ate it with a glass of water that poured itself and a dull headache behind my eyes. I believed, burgeoning migraine aside, it was the best sandwich I have ever eaten.

  I strode around the hotel, doors opening before me as though I had a troop of invisible servants attending to my every whim. My bike pedalled to meet me. I suppose getting undressed and then dressed again was the most challenging event of the day, it being quite hard to co-ordinate your limbs and inanimate objects. I could only imagine the horrible mess Minos would get himself into. It was quite a distraction, having such a talent, but I kept coming back to the same old question. Each time I made a piece of paper fold itself into a crane I thought why can I do this? And each time I unfolded it to refold it I thought what I am suppose to do now I can?

  I went out into the garden and watched the leaves dancing around. I imagined a wind blowing round and round and watched the overgrown bushes and grass bending and swaying. I sat on the high wall by the gate watching a pair of rats skulk in the shadow of a plastic chair that I’d knocked over. The rats were getting bigger, I’d seen cats smaller than these two. A blackbird landed on the path and in an instant one of the rats was on it. I looked away because when it comes down to it I’m quite squeamish. When I looked back the two rats were fighting over the bird’s corpse. I jumped off the wall thinking it would frighten them away but they just looked at me and then went back to their argument. The bird was lying with its wings outstretched. One of the wings moved. I took hold of the other one in my mind and moved that too. The rats stop tumbling around each other and looked at the bird. I drew it up to its full height, wings wide. The bird rose above the rats, its innards slipping from a gash they’d left in its stomach, they made a run for it, squealing in distress. Apart from its obvious injuries the bird looked alive, it flapped its wings and moved over to a more secluded spot. There was something beautiful about the slow movement of its wings and the shape of its body. My stomach rolled over itself. I dropped the bird in the long grass and rushed back inside. I felt like I’d done something I shouldn’t have, something that I should be ashamed of. I hoped that wasn’t anything like what I was supposed to do with this gift. Or whatever I was supposed to call it.

  Haggia was arranging tins into a pyramid when I crept into her shop through the back door. Marshall Dailly was there, except he was on a monitor over the counter with the sound turned off, not there himself. He was mouthing words with great enthusiasm and waving his arms around to draw attention to a derailed train that was being picked apart by resourceful citizens.

  ‘Sorcha,’ Haggia said in surprise, stepping back and knocking over the pyramid.

  I put it all back together for her without moving more than my eyelids, and that was only out of habit.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, after a moment. ‘So you have that one. That’s nice. I like that one.’

  ‘Good, I’m glad,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ she waddled over to the counter and settled herself on a high stool beside it. Her fat little legs dangling like a child’s from a high chair.

  ‘I want to know what’s happening. I think that’s reasonable.’

  ‘Yes, the thing is... I don’t know.’

  ‘But you said you were here to help.’

  ‘I can only tell you what you want to know if it relates to information I may or may not have been given.’

  ‘You sound like a manual.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say there isn’t one.’

  I knocked all the tins over with my mind just because I could.

  Haggia looked confused for a moment, then pulled the unmistakable face of someone trying to focus on thinking about something very difficult and failing. Some help she was.

  ‘Let’s try another one,’ I said. ‘Why can I do this?’ I picked all the tins up and put them in a pyramid. I was still leaning against the frame of the back door as though I had not a care in the world.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Why don’t you just tell me everything that you do know?’ I said. ‘It will be much easier in the long run, because I’m going to get really tetchy if I have to come back here every day for your funny answers.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can do that,’ she said. ‘I don’t really know very much.’

  I walked toward her in a manner that I hoped was menacing but I suspected wasn’t. I should have practised some threatening uses for my telekinesis instead of extreme origami but it was too late for that.

  ‘Good morning,’ said a voice I felt unfortunate to recognise.

  It was Prophet.

  ‘Good morning,’ Haggia said. ‘What can I do for you this fine day, esteemed customer?’

  Prophet looked a little perturbed and opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.

  Haggia billowed towards him like a ship at full sail. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ she said. ‘What brings you to my fine establishment?’

  ‘We’ve met,’ said Prophet. ‘Me and her. And she’s not so stupid that she hasn’t just worked out that you and me know each other, despite what she looks like. So knock it off, woman.’

  ‘She wants to know what’s going on,’ Haggia said.

  ‘I bet,’ Prophet said.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what’s going on,’ Haggia said.

  ‘What about him?’ Prophet looked up at the monitor where Marshall Dailly was interviewing some people he must have hoped would provide him with local colour. They would probably only provide him with a rash.

  ‘He’s no use. He’s busy all the time.’

  I dreaded to think what with.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what to do,’ Prophet said. ‘Don’t drag me into it.’

  ‘You’re supposed to tell her the prophecy, you’re the damn prophet,’ Haggia said.

  ‘I haven’t had a chance yet,’ Prophet said. ‘The big one threw me out.’

  Either I fell on the floor or the floor rushed up to meet me at such pace that my sprawling on the floor was the end result. Either way I was upended, surrounded by packets of dried lentils and other pulses I’d never heard of.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Haggia said. Her voice came from a long way off, down some kind of tunnel.

  ‘She’ll go mad if anything happens to Sorcha,’ Prophet said in a muffled kind of a way.

  ‘Who will?’ Haggia said.

  ‘Get her some water.’

  This was getting to be a habit of mine, lying vague and insensible while people talked about me over my head.

  ‘Who’ll go mad?’ I managed.

  ‘You see?’ Haggia tutted. ‘You can’t say a word in front of this one.’

  ‘Sit up,’ said Prophet, with far more gentleness than I thought he would be able to manage. ‘You’ll have to bear with me, it’s all a bit new. This place is weird. I’m sure you understand.’

  I leant against the shelves and picked up a cool tin can to rest on my hot forehead. Prophet kicked a few of the tins out of the way and then stood very straight with his eyes closed. His hands were resting, one on top of the other, in front of his chest. In the half light of the shop his rags took on an almost beatific appearance, like robes he’d worn out on a long pilgrimage.

  ‘Oh, is he doing it?’ Haggia said plopping herself down next to me and handing me a bottle of water.

  Prophet made a shushing sound.

  We sat watching him. I sipped the water, rolling the can against my headache. Prophet gave a great sigh and when he spoke it was in the same voice he used when he was asleep.

  ‘And so a time will come to pass when the vanguard will emerge from the underground to battle the forces of darkness for the first of the final times. There will be five to face these foes. One
to speak in tongues, one to cleanse in flame, one to stand beyond sight, one to read beyond the veil and one to move the earth.’

  Prophet opened one eye. ‘Then there’s some other stuff but I don’t understand it, I’ll keep that to myself for now. If that’s all right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And then there’s something about a witch,’ he said, sitting down on a bag of Fossilish Fuel brickettes. This was developed after the coal ran out and smelt like fresh manure, it was very cheap though. ‘But I have trouble remembering that bit. It doesn’t make much sense.’

  ‘Is that witch as in a woman in black with a broomstick?’

  ‘With a pointy hat?’ Prophet said. His blues eyes were quite sparkly up close. ‘No, there’s no costume.’

  ‘Who is she? Or he?’ I said.

  ‘Be a warlock if it was a he,’ Haggia said.

  ‘I think I’ve met her,’ I said, surprising myself.

  ‘It’ll unravel,’ Prophet stood up. ‘Don’t worry about it, youngster. We’ll get there.’

  He picked up an apple on his way out, tossing it in the air with a swagger.

  ‘He won’t pay for that, he never does,’ Haggia said. ‘It’s like he doesn’t understand how a shop operates.’ She shouted after him but he had gone.

  ‘I can’t remember what he said.’ All the stupid pieces of information I had floating around in my head and what Prophet had said failed to stick.

  ‘Don’t worry, I expect he’ll send it to you. Somehow. You might get a pigeon, I don’t think he’s very good with technology.’

  ‘He told me about the three the other day, but we couldn’t find out anything about it. I thought maybe I’d misheard.’

  ‘Now, you see,’ Haggia hauled me to my feet. ‘That’s the kind of enquiry I can deal with.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. The three, you say? ‘

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘You won’t find out anything about that.’

  ‘That’s not very helpful.’

  ‘You need to be looking for Nexus.’

  ‘Nexus?’

  ‘Look for that,’ she patted my cheek. I was amazed she could reach. ‘There, see? That’s old news. It’s all going to work out fine.’

  But I caught a glimpse of her face as she turned to pick up two of the escaped cans. She looked like she was going to be sick, and not because of one of Emirhan’s kebabs, because of something not working out fine.

  I insisted on paying for the water and an apple of my own, then made my way back to my huge, empty home. A heavy humidity hung over the street, making the locals more restless and irritable. Rain was coming. Some kids were sitting on the railings outside the money shop, passing comment on the people in the queue that snaked around the corner. They used to say that if you gave a man a gun he could rob a bank, but if you gave him a bank he could rob everybody. But I guess no one listened to the wise people who said this, so we were stuck with money shops – establishments somewhere between the gun and the bank. The people queuing were waiting to pawn something for the weekend. They swapped whatever it was they had left for a few digits on their cards and blew it all numbing the pain. If they’d come round the hotel we could have done it for free but this was no time for such obvious altruism, we would have drowned beneath the tide of humanity crying out for help. Besides we took a little from here, a little from there and no one noticed, blanket charity was a luxury we couldn’t afford. It would draw attention to us. The kids were trying to get a man with a pram to swap it for a packet of cigarettes. It was a good deal. He’d get next to nothing for that in the money shop, not with the birth rate being what it was. He counted the cigarettes in the packet and pushed the pram at the kids. They fought about who was getting aboard, fists flailing, unsettling the queue, then the smallest one crammed himself in, spiderish limbs dangling over the sides. They hauled him off down the street whooping like hyenas. The man walked away and the queue shuffled forward to fill the void.

  There was a pile of Casino’s clothes on the steps of hotel. I picked them up and brought them in for him lest they be stolen. Roach and Lola were in the pool room. They were staring at each other. I prayed that we weren’t going to have another argument.

  ‘Hello,’ they said in unison. Lola’s headphones were coiled up on the window sill.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘It’s amazing,’ Lola said.

  Roach grinned an enormous grin. He looked most pleased with himself. ‘I can speak languages.’

  I spun a seven around on the green baize, with my fingers. ‘Yeah? Which ones?’

  ‘All of them,’ Lola said.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘All of them,’ Roach breathed on his fingernails and dusted them off on his t-shirt. ‘Even the dead ones I think.’ He said something incomprehensible and claimed it was Aramaic. I had no option but to believe him.

  ‘I guess being able to speak all those languages must have made you cleverer,’ Lola said. ‘Or able to use more of your brain or something. But it’s definitely the languages, that’s the thing.’

  There was something very odd about being in the same room as Lola. I found my mind trying to settle itself into a still, calm pool, a pool without depths of any kind. It would have been almost meditative were it not for all the not thinking anything that I would prefer to keep private, that in itself I found stressful. She looked at me with an apologetic smile and I realised I would need more practice on the still, calm pool front.

  ‘I think I should be able to turn it on and off,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the hang of it.’

  Roach and I looked at each other.

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ Lola said, but I wasn’t sure to who.

  ‘Where’s Casino?’ I said.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Roach said.

  ‘We were just wondering about that,’ Lola said.

  ‘I wondered in Udmurt,’ Roach said.

  ‘It was blissful,’ Lola said. ‘I couldn’t understand a word of it.’

  ‘His clothes are everywhere,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think he can be here,’ Lola said. ‘He can’t make his brain invisible.’

  I tried not to allow a thought to cross my mind about how it would be impossible to be even a casual acquaintance of someone who could read your thoughts.

  ‘I am trying,’ she said.

  I had failed again

  ‘Let’s go to the OP,’ Roach said. ‘Then I can practise.’

  So Roach was the one to speak in tongues, I had wondered what that one meant.

  ‘What do you...’ Lola turned to me and then shook her head. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Right, let’s go,’ Roach handed Lola her headphones.

  I don’t know when I decided not to say anything to them about my telekinetic shenanigans. I kept my mind occupied by thinking about the fastest routes from various points thorough the city so Lola wouldn’t pick up on anything. I filled my mind instead of trying to empty it, it seemed more successful. We climbed over the wall at the back of the hotel and slipped through the network of narrow alleyways towards a quieter back street near the old station. We took a car from the car park at the back of another money shop, they were everywhere. The papers in it said it had been hocked for far less than a quarter of the parts were worth. Some people never got a break.

  Lola drove. I swore for the thousandth time that I would never get in a car that had her behind the wheel ever again and Roach clung onto the dashboard so hard he snapped part of it off. We left the car wide open in a road on the edge of the OP, our nerves jangling to the fizz of Lola’s headphones.

  The OP was an area out East. It was everything Stadium City wanted to be when it grew up. In the massive migration that followed the turmoil after the floods and the invasions our hallowed isle was subject to a small influx of global citizens. Most people headed for the centre of the largest land masses even if most of them were deserts, they were wary of places near water. I guess when you’re
faced with a huge tidal wave that crushes everything you’ve ever known in its path, arid sand could be a comfort. The ones that ended up with us were the victims of an unfavourable current. They turned up in boats, barrels, on bits of wood. They perched on anything buoyant and went with the tides. Many of them made their way to the OP because they’d seen the iconic architecture rotting on the television or the web and wanted to be somewhere familiar. Any port in a storm. They moved into the shops and units in the abandoned shopping centre. Once the biggest mall in New Europa, it became the biggest squat. All the other buildings had been reappropriated, except the actual village which had been blown up by disgruntled people who’d had their estate demolished because it was in the way of something the paper dolls wanted to build but never did. The OP was a massive cultural jumble sale. You could get your hands on anything, anything at all, if you knew who to ask and in what language. It was Roach’s oyster, his personal shellfish platter, in fact.

  Lola lifted her headphones away from her ears a little. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Roach said. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s eat something we can’t identify.’

  The old velodrome was packed with food stalls and merchants. They were crammed in beneath the ripple of the roof like the sardines on sale at stall 4598. Once in a while a stall would slip a little on the banked side and the stall holder would tie the stall back down with ropes, like boat on a dock. It was almost a shame it was no longer a track, I would have liked to ride my bike round it. Roach sauntered through the crowd throwing out greetings like blessings. When it became apparent that he could say more than ‘hello, how you are you, I’m fine’ we attracted quite a following.

  ‘Oh, this is bliss,’ Lola said, pulling off her headphones. ‘I can’t understand a thing.’

  ‘Do you want one of these?’ Roach said, making an almost obscene gesture with something fish-like on a long black skewer.

  We ate many, many free samples, I tried something from every Oceanic island and most of the recovered arctic plains too. My body rebelled against something that looked like an eyeball covered in yellow seeds, but I think only because Roach refused to tell me what it was and Lola, for a telepath, was no help. Whatever it was, my best attempts to swallow it were foiled first by my suspicion and then by my gag reflex.

  ‘Let’s go to the black market,’ Roach said when we were full.

  Only the most hardened OP denizen would go there. It was like an old souk, a maze of blind alleys and twisting hallways. Anything Administration didn’t want you to have, you could get at the black market. Roach and I had never been to the black market but Lola had a brief relationship with a man who sold guns from the Asiatic Front there. He was the reason we had to move from our previous residence. He blew it up. We felt it would be churlish to complain too much though, he was in it at the time.

  ‘So, anyone you can’t speak to yet?’ I said.

  ‘Just one old man, but he didn’t have all of his tongue,’ Roach said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, some gangsters cut it off,’ Roach said. ‘This other guy told me.’

  ‘Gangsters?’ I said. We didn’t have those any more, unless you counted Enforce, even the McBrides were considered business men.

  ‘Yeah, there were three of them, dressed immaculately, golden hair, with what he described as curly knives. I think he mean the edges were wavy, otherwise they would be useless.’

  I shuddered. I don’t mind casual violence but the premeditated, organised kind disturbs me.

  We walked up the broad avenue to the market. I wondered what it had been like when it was white and new, instead of brown and peeling. A plane flew over and we all stopped to watch it pass. The flight to New Europa. It was a huge, white plane that looked too big and heavy to stay in the sky. It flew low to the ground, its engines roaring as it passed over us. It went once a month and a ticket cost more than anyone in the OP would make in a lifetime if they went about it all honest and above board, which of course they wouldn’t. Still, none of us would throw anything hard earned away on a flight when you could stowaway on a reclamation ship for free if you had the right contacts. The plane disappeared into the cloud cover and I looked down in time to see that behind the burnt out ruin of the old media centre a car was circling like a shark. Roach saw it too. And Lola saw the thoughts.

  ‘Who is it?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve seen it a few times. Or one just like it.’

  ‘Minos was thinking about that earlier. He must have seen it somewhere too. You saw it when you did the cash on delivery job, didn’t you?’ Lola realised what she’d said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m trying to...’ she spread her hands out in front of her. It was half shrug, half prayer. I noticed that she had started to bite her fingernails again.

  The rain warning went off. It echoed through the park like a banshee and people started to move with more purpose to get undercover. They weren’t sure what was in the rain at the moment but the puddles left yellow stains on the ground when they dried up. Still, it was an improvement on the rain we had a couple of months before. That rain was like milk and it melted plastic.

  ‘Come on,’ Roach said. ‘Let’s get lost.’

  I couldn’t work out how they’d done it but somehow the black market seemed to have endless floors piled up on top of each other, reaching far higher than the cracked, greying roof should have allowed. At first there seemed to be only endless curtains of cloth or bright plastic but hidden in between were people waiting for a buyer, a dealer or a piece of information. Only the whisper of voices and shifting curtains broke the silence. There were well-worn ladders leading from floor to floor. We stood in the cramped entrance trying to acclimatise.

  A woman poked her head through a curtain of checked fabric to our left. She hissed at us.

  ‘Come on,’ Roach said. He looked very serious.

  We followed and the woman pulled the fabric around us. The black market disappeared. She put one finger over her right eye.

  ‘It means be quiet,’ Roach whispered.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said, keeping my voice hushed.

  Roach hissed and gulped at the woman and then tapped his forehead with the tip of his thumb.

  ‘Where the hell is she from?’ Lola whispered to me.

  I don’t know, I thought so as not to make any noise. She smiled.

  ‘Gangsters,’ Roach said under his breath. ‘Although she calls them tribesmen. She means the same people that old man told me about.’

  ‘The people who cut out tongues?’ I whispered.

  Roach nodded.

  An alarm sounded, it wasn’t loud but it still insisted you paid attention to it.

  The woman made a strangled, whistling noise.

  ‘That’s the door,’ Roach said. ‘It’s wired.’

  I peered through a small, white netted square in the fabric. I could make out three figures through the mist of cloth. I found a small crack in the material and put my eye to it for a better view. The gangsters were tall and slim, I couldn’t see any curly knives but I could take that on trust. Their hair was golden and their suits looked new and expensive.

  Come down the NW sector and that hair will be off your head and in the hands of a dealer before you know it, I thought.

  Lola chuckled.

  The closest of the three men turned towards us. Or perhaps was it a woman. It was impossible to say.

  ‘Run,’ shouted Roach. ‘Now. Run now.’

  We split up. I ran through the curtain and skidded through a sheet of blue plastic and into a pile of empty beer crates. A man with a sniper’s rifle pulled a red velvet curtain aside to my right and I didn’t wait for him to write me an invitation. I was looking for the ladder at the far end of the building but found only a corner. I felt all disorientated. The walls were thick with a dark moss that smelt of chlorine. A low counter had been made out of two folding chairs and a length of chipboard, there was
a slim knife like a stiletto stabbed into it. I pulled it free, although what I thought I would do with it I wasn’t sure. I could hear a pair of footsteps coming towards me. There was a rattle from a beaded curtain, somewhere nearby, and then silence. I felt a nudge near my ankle and I looked down to see a small girl. She had curly black hair and no front teeth. She pointed upwards and then crawled across the stall, under the counter and disappeared. Above me there was a hole in the ceiling. I stood on the counter, pulled myself up and found the ladder. I kept going up and up the ladders until I reached the end of them. It was darker up on the top floor under the low ceiling. There were no curtains, just a mass of low tables and chairs with hundreds of people huddled around them. The air was thick with whispers here. I made my way to the far end and sat at a table near the wall, half an eye on the entrance while I looked for the exit. The table had a number nine scrawled on it in chipped blue paint. A man with a long plaited beard pushed a dog-eared business card across the table to me. I couldn’t understand what it said. I slipped the stiletto out of my sleeve and stabbed it into the table. The man nodded and turned his attention to the other two men at the table. I sat next to the fat one, his bulk straining at his yellow shirt. They seemed to find my presence quite reasonable but they must have seen far worse in the black market. The man with the business card pulled a short roll of black velvet from somewhere inside his voluminous coat. He unrolled it and inside was a long grey cylinder. Its matte surface seemed to absorb all the light around it. The man unscrewed one end and a thin glass vial filled with a yellow liquid slipped into his palm. The two buyers seemed to back away a little. The fat buyer gave a nervous laugh and his business partner pushed his greasy hair out of his face and licked his lips. It was a bomb. I gripped the sides of the chair, if that thing went off it would take out everything in a twelve mile radius, and all the people outside the twelve miles but within fifty miles would spend the rest of their short pain-racked lives wishing they’d been nearer. The bomb was unpacked and then put back together with some skill and the fat man passed over a tiny black bag in payment. I was itching to know what was in the bag but I didn’t like to think what they were going to do with their new toy. The three men looked at me. I put one finger over my right eye and held my breath hoping I wasn’t trampling on any tribal allegiances. They nodded and stood up. It was finished. I moved to table ten, leaving my knife, wondering where the others were. Compared to the other tables this one seemed pretty pedestrian. A woman with thick ginger dreadlocks was buying a small plastic bag filled with drugs. She rubbed the white powder over her gums and handed over an old cardboard file full of yellowing paper and ragged photographs. The dealer flicked through the pages with great interest and then they leant over the table toward each other and kissed for a little too long and I realised that was the real exchange. I wondered what had passed between them. The woman left and the man sat down again. He looked me up and down and raised an eyebrow. I moved to the next table. I found Roach sitting in front of me with a turban wrapped around his head. He winked.

  ‘Not in the mood?’ he nodded toward the dealer with a smile.

  ‘Nice disguise. Where’s Lola?’

  ‘Over to your right,’ he said.

  Lola was also in disguise. She had a woolly hat pulled down to her eyelashes and was wrapped in black. She was watching a man with a lizard on his shoulder gesticulating with great enthusiasm to another man on the other side of the room who watched with huge concentration and then made a complicated shape with his hands, high over his head.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Roach said. ‘I think there’s going to be a fight.’

  Lola looked in our direction and Roach nodded.

  He was right. The two men who had been throwing shapes at each other bounded across the room using the tables like stepping stones. The room was clearing and we slipped into the exodus. Daylight poured in as someone opened the black market equivalent of a fire escape and we slipped down the haphazard wooden steps that had been rammed into the shell of the building, below us I could see the mysterious car parked in a service road. We reached the ground and the crowd melted away into a few small groups of people wandering around the OP, nothing suspicious about them at all. The gangsters were nowhere to be seen. We too wandered away, Roach unravelling his turban as we went. Three gun shots rang out inside the market.

  ‘They’re pretty new on the scene, our golden-haired friends,’ he said. ‘No one knows where they’re from or what they want.’

  ‘It’s their car, isn’t it?’ I said, knowing he would have checked that.

  ‘Yes,’ Roach said.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Lola said.

  ‘Did you get anything from them?’ I said, not sure of the right terminology.

  ‘No. Nothing. Nothing at all,’ she twisted her headphone cable around in her fingers. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Back to the hotel?’ Roach said.

  I nodded. ‘Maybe Casino will put in an appearance.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Lola said.

  ‘Why? What’s going on?’ Roach said.

  ‘He’s up to something,’ Lola said.

  ‘I wish I knew what,’ I said.

  ‘I have a fair idea,’ Lola said. ‘I can try and fetch him home if you want.’

  Roach looked at me too. ‘Yeah, why not?’ I said.

  We dropped Lola near Queens and left the car we’d taken on the main road just up from Haggia’s shop. The walk back to the hotel felt far too short. My problem, one of my problems, is that whatever is happening to me, wherever I am, I’m always yearning for something different. I wanted to go on holiday once, I was desperate to get out of the city, dying for a change of scene. The minute we got there I wanted to go home. As Roach and I wandered up to the side door of the hotel I wished we’d never gone to the arty party, I wished we’d gone to Loop’s birthday party and left Doodle’s money in a drop box for him. I wanted something to happen and now it was I wanted everything to go back to how it was when nothing was happening. I missed the comfort of being bored. Typical.

  ‘What’s up?’ Roach said, keying our security code in.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I don’t need Lola to tell me that’s not true,’ he said. ‘You seem kind of down.’

  It was funny to think that when Roach and I first met it wasn’t him that got me out of a sticky fix, but me that got him out of one. I had a client at Packet who ran a lot of high security data from their office at one end of the city to the office of another client way out west. It was one of those jobs that you could only do for a short while because someone would work out your price, thus working out how to get you to turn over the packages to them. Someone would get you in the end, it was inevitable, so they moved onto the next courier before that could happen. The company would call six or seven couriers and only one of us, me on that occasion, would have the real goods, the others were decoys. The real package would be followed, at a discreet distance, by a security guard, and that security guard was Roach. I thought he was a typical Work and Labour drone, too big and stupid to sit behind a desk so they used him as muscle. He also slowed me down on his silly scooter but I was supposed to remain in clear sight. One day I had dockets coming out of my ears and didn’t have the time to wait for him at an Enforce stop line I ran into, so I skipped through and left him. Minos was providing me with security anyway, we didn’t trust the official kind.

  ‘Sorcha, that security guard of yours,’ Minos came through on my wristset.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘He’s just been pulled.’

  ‘Yeah, Enforce stop line,’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Minos said. ‘They’ve worked out he’s your security.’

  ‘Who has?’ I skidded to a stop.

  ‘Whoever wants what you’re carrying.’

  Of course I had to go back for him, they would rough him up to within an inch of his life whether he gave them my details or not. He may have been slow bu
t he was more civil than the other security goons I’d been lumbered with. He hadn’t made a pass at me and that made a pleasant change. It turned out he was from a children’s home as well, so I felt some kind of loyalty and a little guilt over my dismissing him as a substandard plastic doll. I rode back to the pretend stop line and they were still there, throwing real punches in their fake uniforms. My guy was massive and he wasn’t going down so it was just a matter of time before they loaded him into a car and slipped him into something less comfortable, like the river. I cycled up to them and whistled a greeting, and then I rode off a little way. There were six of them altogether and they stopped hitting my security guard and looked at me, confused. I stopped again and shouted that they better come if they were coming. They shoved the giant aside and came after me, in their car. It was a short chase and I lost them underground. I delivered my package, dealt with two other dockets and then made my way back to Packet and a lecture about losing my security. Again.

  ‘Roach,’ said the big man, holding out his hand. He was sitting on his scooter outside Packet’s office when I came out. He had a fat lip, his left eye was closed by an angry blue swelling and his left nostril was caked with blood. He wasn’t pretty.

  ‘Sorcha,’ I almost lost my hand in his huge paw.

  ‘I owe you one,’ he said.

  ‘No you don’t,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have left you.’

  ‘Well, this stupid thing is so slow,’ he said. ‘I’m too heavy for it I think.’

  ‘You might well be,’ I said. ‘Did you get fired?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re homeless?’ That was how these things often went.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Well, you better come home with me then.’

  He looked all bashful and stared at his shoes.

  ‘I’m offering you a place to stay not a meaningful relationship,’ I said. ‘Or even a meaningless one.’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  I remember that he had the audacity to look relieved.

  I followed Roach into reception and kept following him until he settled down in the kitchen. He was waiting for me to say something but I couldn’t think how to phrase it without sounding insane, even under those circumstances. Instead I made a spoon move itself from one end of the table to the other. He didn’t notice so I made it move back again.

  ‘What was that?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  His eyes bugged out and he waved his hands around. All the languages in the world on the tip of his tongue and he was speechless.

  I made the spoon move around in a lazy circle.

  Roach leapt up and grabbed the chopping board from the worktop, he approached the spoon like he was hunting a tiger and then beat it with the board.

  ‘I think it’s already dead,’ I shouted over the noise. ‘Roach, stop.’

  ‘Did you see that? Did you see that?’ Roach flicked the spoon off the table with the edge of the chopping board, panting.

  ‘Relax,’ I said. ‘It was me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was me.’

  ‘What was you?’

  ‘The spoon moving.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I moved it.’

  ‘You didn’t touch it.’

  ‘I don’t need to.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  The spoon slid out from under the dishwasher where it had been hiding from the chopping board’s attack and floated up onto the table. Roach crept up on it and snatched it out of the air.

  ‘I thought you said you couldn’t do anything?’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t realise it was me.’

  ‘Did you think we were haunted?’ Roach said, examining the spoon, looking for wires I guess.

  ‘No, I...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Roach laughed and slapped me on the back. I almost bit my tongue in half.

  ‘I thought it was odd,’ he said. ‘You being left out like that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Roach said. ‘Because if anyone was going to have something really weird happen to them, it would be you. We sometimes put money on what madness is going to befall you.’

  Roach was so excited he went to wake Minos, who was sleeping after a string of night shifts. He was as mad as a scalded squirrel about being woken but when Roach told him the news, and I showed him the news, he too was very excited. We put on a show for Roach where Minos set something small on fire and I put it out by making a wet towel smother it without any apparent human intervention. We sat back very pleased with ourselves.

  ‘What else have you been doing?’ Minos said. ‘I can’t believe I’ve missed all the fun.’

  ‘We went to the OP,’ Roach said. ‘It was fun until the gangsters turned up.’

  ‘Gangsters?’ Minos gave a long whistle.

  ‘Yeah, they drive a model of car we’ve become familiar with,’ I said.

  ‘They’re the ones who were following you?’ Minos rubbed his chin, sometimes I thought he would wear it out.

  ‘We think so,’ I said. ‘My guess would be that they’re Doodle’s problem. But it’s only a guess.’

  ‘I like your guesses, always have. But cash?’ Minos said. ‘What do they want cash for?’

  ‘Symbolic,’ I said. ‘They don’t want cash, they want to make a point.’

  ‘And what is their point?’ Minos said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Whatever their point is, they’re getting it across loud and clear in the OP,’ Roach said. ‘Even the black market is wary of them.’

  ‘Wow,’ Minos said. ‘I wonder if they do business in Stadium City.’

  I nearly said that I’d been there earlier and had seen the car, but then I remembered the man falling over the railing and how the cards looked flying after him, so I kept quiet. I was lucky because not a minute later Lola walked into the kitchen with a furious expression on her face, dragging Casino behind her.

  ‘Hey, Sorcha is telekinetic,’ Minos said in greeting.

  ‘How delightful for her,’ Lola said.

  The three of us just stared at her and her attitude and Casino continued to look like a small child who’d been caught opening someone else’s birthday presents.

  ‘I’m glad you two are here,’ Roach said. ‘Let’s all have a talk.’

  I pushed two chairs out from around the table for them without moving a muscle and gave Lola an unpleasant smile. Casino slipped into his chair and Lola banged hers around a bit to make sure it was under its own control.

  ‘What have you been up to?’ Minos said to Casino.

  ‘Nothing much,’ Casino said, looking at Lola. ‘Just hanging really. It’s been...’

  ‘Yes?’ Lola said. They’d had some kind of row again.

  ‘Tough,’ he finished.

  They all looked at me. ‘You said we were going to talk,’ I said to Roach.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I did.’

  My wristset beeped to let me know that there was a message for me. It was from Prophet. I hadn’t given him my number but under the circumstances I wasn’t surprised he’d got it. It was the message he’d given me earlier, it scrolled across the display over and over again becoming no clearer.

  ‘What have I missed?’ Casino said.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ I sent Prophet’s message to render, because it seemed like it deserved something old-fashioned like paper, and went to retrieve the copies. I felt like the dolls in the Ministries must feel, striding around with important memos they didn’t quite understand. I was gone for just a couple of minutes but when I got back Lola and Minos were engaged in a full scale argument because Minos had thought that Lola was in a bad mood and Lola, as far as I could tell, wasn’t disagreeing with the observation, more the appropriateness of sharing it with the group.

  ‘My thoughts are my own private business,’ Minos said.

 
‘Do you think I like this?’ Lola ripped her headphones off and flung them across the table at him.

  ‘Yeah, I reckon you do,’ Minos said.

  ‘Come on, can’t you calm down?’ Casino said. ‘I’ve got a headache.’

  ‘Yes, let’s calm down,’ Roach said. ‘Sorcha, what have you got there?’

  I handed round copies of the prophecy as though I were at a meeting in one of the office blocks down south. I had seen them all sitting in meetings when I was couriering. It was like visiting a home for lost pets watching them gazing out of the windows, yearning for an escape. One of the blocks had a huge display in reception which said ‘freedom to work is freedom to live’ in great big blue letters but they didn’t look free. They looked sedated. Similar and sedated. I launched into a quick recap for Casino. He looked a little baffled but took it all in.

  ‘Then this morning Prophet told me this,’ I referred them to the paper.

  ‘And so a time will come to pass when the vanguard will emerge from the underground to battle the forces of darkness for the first of the final times,’ Minos said, with none of Prophet’s gravitas. ‘There will be five to face these foes. One to speak in tongues, one to cleanse in flame, one to stand beyond sight, one to read beyond the veil and one to move the earth.’

  He made it sound like a shopping list but at least my brain didn’t attempt to shut down that way. I managed to stay upright and lucid.

  Casino laughed, a bitter kind of laugh that made Roach frown. Casino wasn’t his usual self and I didn’t much like this unusual self.

  ‘What about the three?’ Minos said, ignoring Casino.

  ‘Haggia said we’ll never find anything on it but that it’s connected to Nexus. We should be able to find something on that.’

  ‘This is ridiculous. Did she say anything sensible?’ Casino said.

  ‘She said it was old news,’ I said not making any sense either.

  ‘That, we can work with,’ Minos leapt up.

  ‘See?’ I said to Casino. ‘Sensible.’

  We all traipsed out to the restaurant and huddled around as Minos searched for Nexus in DarkNet. We fidgeted behind him, until even Roach with his new attention span was sighing with boredom. Half an hour later we had been banished to the kitchen. The DarkNet sprang up about a decade ago, once the government and few remaining corporations took over the web, or whatever they called it. It began as an annex of the official web but decided it would live a life all of its own. It was angry and out of control. You could stare into it and understand what it was like to stare into the abyss, everything and nothing was in there.

  We told Casino about the black market and the gangsters.

  ‘I would’ve been all right,’ Casino said as he vanished.

  It was odd, he didn’t disappear in an instant, but he didn’t fade either.

  ‘I’ve been finding your clothes everywhere,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said from nowhere. ‘I don’t like wearing clothes while I’m invisible. It feels wrong, like you wouldn’t go swimming in a crash helmet.’

  I nodded like that made total sense. ‘The black market, I totally forgot, I didn’t do anything with my,’ I couldn’t think of the word and just opened and closed my mouth like a fish out of water. How apt.

  ‘Well, we were panicking a bit, so you were probably running on instinct,’ Roach said. ‘It takes a while to get used to anything new.’

  ‘I was not panicking,’ I said.

  ‘She wasn’t,’ Lola said. ‘She’s very calm in a crisis.’

  ‘I’ve got inner peace,’ I said. I didn’t, I knew I hadn’t.

  ‘I think it’s more that you don’t quite understand the seriousness of the situation,’ Casino said.

  There was a whoop from down the hall before I could make a suitable retort and we went to investigate the outburst.

  ‘Got it,’ Minos said. ‘Nexus. Watch this.’

  We settled down in front of a huge screen and, after a long pause filled with Minos swearing and hitting the keyboard, a familiar face appeared. It was Marshall Dailly. He was at the Academy University standing beneath a large sign saying Geography and Geo-crisis Faculty. They liked to keep things simple on the local news station. It was a fluff piece at the end of the programme loop. Marshall was standing next to a man whose cardigan was trying to eat him.

  ‘And you’re the man who discovered this new island?’ Marshall said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the man.

  They cut to a map of this new island, it was hundreds of miles of the coast of the ESG region of New Europa, straight out to the west. They cut back to Marshall and his new friend. They talked about why it had appeared. He had no idea.

  ‘And how did you discover it?’

  ‘In a game.’

  ‘In a game?’ Marshall was finding this interviewee hard work.

  ‘Yes, in Global Explorers.’

  Marshall hadn’t heard of Global Explorers so he didn’t pursue that. ‘And I’m right in thinking that they’ve named it after you, yes?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the man. ‘That was the prize for finding it. They name it after you.’

  Who do?’ Marshall looked at the camera, it was almost a cry for help.

  ‘Imagination Industries.’

  That made sense. They built the official games. Global Explorers was a weird one, it hadn’t made it to the illegal houses.

  ‘And remind us of your name,’ Marshall said.

  ‘I’m Nexus. Professor Nexus,’ said the man, twisting a button on his cardigan round and round.

  ‘Thank you, Professor Nexus,’ Minos said, pausing the clip. ‘I wonder if this island is where the three are.’

  ‘Haggia just said they’re connected,’ I said.

  ‘And how does she know that?’ Casino said.

  I looked up at Marshall Dailly’s face, frozen on the screen. I shrugged.

  Roach pulled the paper with the prophecy on it from his pocket. ‘I guess we wait,’ he said. ‘Wait for further instructions.’

  Lola put her fingers in her ears and shook her head. Then she made a growling noise that I didn’t like one little bit.