The Vanguard

by SJ Griffin

Chapter Ten

  Casino was not one of life’s volunteers, so when I said I was going to see Marshall Dailly and wondered if anyone wanted to come with me, I was very surprised when he bounded across the room to join me. Everyone else grunted and carried on with what they were doing, apart from Minos who offered the legitimate excuse of having to go to work at any minute. We watched the live feed of the local news to work out where Marshall was and discovered that he was a short walk away, reporting from the burnt out shell of a warehouse.

  ‘We don’t keep stuff there anymore, right?’ Casino said.

  A surveillance drone flew overhead as we strolled along and it was soon joined by a huge helicopter that hovered low in the sky for an age, like a great big bee. The sky looked like it was thinking about raining down something unpleasant on everyone. When we arrived at the warehouse Marshall was sitting on the rear bumper of a van with an NWTV-24 decal peeling off the side. I got the impression that Marshall, despite being on the screen more than any other reporter, was not very high up the food chain. He was looking miserable, moving small pieces of rubble and charred wood around with his toe. Our appearance seemed to cheer him up though.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Marshall said.

  ‘We need to talk,’ I said.

  ‘That sounds ominous,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that was her ominous voice,’ Casino said.

  ‘I’ve got twenty minutes or so before we’re back on,’ Marshall said. ‘I just have to say the same thing I said before, and before that.’

  ‘Sounds exciting,’ Casino said. ‘Why can’t they just use the recorded footage?’

  ‘Because it’s supposed to be live,’ Marshall said. ‘It’s not a bad story, but no one will talk. Which is funny because usually people are falling over themselves to tell their story.’

  ‘What’s the story?’ I said.

  ‘Rum,’ Marshall said. ‘Let’s go over here.’

  There was a woman listening to our conversation. She was winding a cable round and round her mighty forearm and watching us with an expression on her face that suggested she wasn’t looking to be friends. We walked over to a low wall that was taking a break from falling over. We sat down and the woman was still staring at us.

  ‘What’s her problem?’ Casino said.

  ‘Chronic flatulence mainly,’ Marshall said. ‘Where’s your bike? I thought you were glued to it?’

  ‘It broke,’ Casino said. ‘Touchy subject. She doesn’t like to talk about it.’

  ‘So, rum?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of rum on the market apparently. Good stuff too, but not licensed so not taxed. The Ministry of Securities is leaning on the Ministry of Welfare to sort it out.’

  ‘Why? It’s just a little rum,’ Casino said.

  ‘It’s quite a lot actually and if you mix it with that homebrew made out of turnips you can blow things up,’ Marshall said.

  ‘It’s the radish stuff you mix it with, that’s lethal,’ I said, thinking of the toilet in Minos’s second bathroom and how impressive the explosion was. There were still chunks of ceramic embedded in the ceiling.

  ‘Could be. Anyway, that’s not the real story, of course, but that’s what I’ve got to report,’ Marshall said.

  ‘What is the real story?’ I said.

  ‘I think the real story is about how the forcing people to produce and drink homebrew is having a massive impact on people’s health and the only reason the government and administrators are getting involved, other than the tax issue, is because the consignment was due to go to Tulan Haq. We can’t have the citizens drinking the good stuff. Not when no one’s producing it anymore.’

  ‘And they won’t let you report that,’ Casino said.

  ‘The big old meanies,’ I said.

  ‘I’d love to know who’s selling it,’ Marshall said.

  ‘I hear sometimes they’re giving it away,’ I said.

  ‘They’re nice like that,’ Casino said.

  ‘Do you know who it is?’ Marshall said.

  How did you get involved in all this?’ I said before Casino could open his mouth.

  ‘In what?’

  ‘Involved with us,’ Casino said.

  Marshall looked a little baffled at the sudden change in subject. Too baffled to lie straight off.

  ‘Do you play at the gaming houses?’ I said.

  ‘No, I hate those games,’ Marshall said. ‘Mass mind control, that’s all they are.’

  ‘You could play in an illegal house,’ I said. ‘Some of them are unplugged.’

  ‘There are illegal houses?’ Marshall looked stunned.

  ‘Seriously?’ Casino said. ‘You didn’t know that?’

  ‘No,’ Marshall said.

  On the bright side, I thought, he’ll probably never work out where the rum came from. ‘Then how did you meet Haggia?’ I said. ‘I assume this was all through her?’

  ‘No, not really. It was the same thing. I got a message saying that she would be a good source for a story I was working on and that she knew you guys and you regularly came into information for stories.’

  ‘Who sent the message?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. It was on my desk when I went into the office. I think someone took a call when I was out.’

  ‘What story were you working on?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it was a pet project,’ Marshall said. ‘It was about the prophecy. I didn’t think it was real though, I thought it was from the past, or something. I really like mythology and that. So I did what I do. I followed the story and then I bumped into reality.’ He didn’t use rabbit eared fingers. He meant reality.

  ‘And is Haggia a good source of information?’ Casino said.

  ‘No,’ Marshall said. ‘Hopeless. And you guys aren’t very forthcoming but I was told that when I had more information to give you we’d swap. I help you, you help me. You know, quid pro quo as they say.’

  Casino and I looked at each other. ‘What information?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know, but the message said that I should help you and then you’d help me.’

  ‘Do you have this note?’ I said.

  ‘No, I threw it in the bin so no one else could get hold of it and steal my contacts. It’s all about contacts in this business.’

  ‘All businesses are about contacts,’ I said.

  And this particular contact didn’t seem to be very useful. Not yet anyway. Despite all Marshall’s research he didn’t know anything more than we did about the prophecy. I left Casino at the warehouse. He was simpering about wanting to find out more about how NWTV-24 worked. The woman with the big arms and staring eyes wasn’t happy about it and as I wandered off I realised that Marshall was the subject of two very sweet crushes. Well, one that was cute and one that was that scary woman’s and therefore troubling. I was almost home when I got a call from Roach.

  ‘It’s Doodle,’ he said. ‘The Galearii have got him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Jubilee Market. I was getting a bite with Charlie and they went by. I think your friend from the Detention Centre is with them.’

  Roach was standing on the street outside the Market, I’d run all the way and by the time I got there my lungs felt like they were on fire. They’d taken Doodle down to the storage area under the market. Roach said he went without a fuss but I’d have preferred it if he’d screamed his head off. Roach led me through the busy market to the staircase that led down to the basement, the lift was busy with people bringing goods up to their stalls. We slipped through some storage bays full of crates until we reached a large loading area at the end that had been listed for demolition. Roach pushed the signs and tape aside and gestured for me to be quieter still. We hid behind a pile of boxes and watched.

  Doodle was tied to a chair. Three Galearii stood around him. His back was to us and facing him, on another chair, was Rowling. She didn’t appear to be tied to hers though, she looked like she was having a chat in a Riverside bistro.

&
nbsp; ‘I pay, I pay,’ Doodle said. ‘I pay, I pay.’

  ‘Yes, you paid,’ said Rowling. ‘And where did you get the cash from?’

  ‘I pay, I pay.’

  One of the Galearii gestured to Rowling. She nodded.

  ‘That doesn’t matter now, we’ve gone beyond that. You can’t just swap sides, Doodle,’ she said. ‘We had an agreement and you broke it. The cash was just an excuse, just a little story to go round the neighbourhood. It’s worked wonders at the OP and their silly black market.’

  Doodle shifted in the chair and another of the golden-haired gangsters smacked him across the face with the back of its hand, the echo rang out around the bay.

  ‘Where did you get the money from?’ Rowling stood so she could pace back and forth.

  ‘I pay,’ Doodle said.

  Rowling took a very deep breath. ‘Where did you get the money?’ she screamed at him.

  If he’d fallen backwards with the force of it I wouldn’t have been surprised, even Roach shuddered. I wanted Doodle to tell her. Roach put his hand on my arm. And I thought Lola was the mind reader.

  ‘It’s very important that you tell me, because you have set in motion a series of events that could be catastrophic. For everyone,’ Rowling sat down again, as though exhausted with Doodle’s inability to co-operate. ‘You have provided someone with an opportunity.’

  ‘I pay, I pay,’ said Doodle.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me, are you?’ she said. She looked at the gangsters. ‘This is pointless.’

  The three Galearii, as one, moved closer to Doodle. He struggled.

  Just tell them, Doodle. Tell them everything..

  One of them backhanded Doodle in face again, the force of it spinning his chair around so he faced us. His face was covered in blood.

  ‘Do it,’ Rowling made a gesture, gave a sign of some kind. ‘I’m bored of this.’

  ‘We have to do something,’ I said.

  ‘Like what?’ Roach said.

  I looked around the bay. It was empty apart from some low ranking angels, a high ranking psychopath, a noodle seller, a chair and some rope.

  ‘Anything you do will just draw attention to us and then we’ll be dead too,’ Roach used the same voice he’d use to talk to a cornered animal.

  If only he would tell them, then it would be out of my hands. I’d have to do something. I could hear the sound of choking, and a gurgling. It was Doodle. He was trying to get free of the chair. He was gasping for air but with every breath came a gargling sound. He pulled at his ropes and rocked the chair from side to side. Water was pouring out of his mouth and down his shirt, pink with blood, spreading across his chest. He coughed up more and more water. It was bubbling out of him, pouring across the floor around his chair.

  He was drowning on dry land.

  Rowling and her gangsters watched, disinterested. Two of the Galearii had their hands in their tailored pockets.

  I read somewhere that drowning was peaceful. It wasn’t.

  They loaded Doodle’s soaked body into the back of an unmarked van, which Rowling summoned on her communications unit, and drove away with the siren wailing. Roach and me didn’t move for some time, we just sat there in silence.

  ‘I promised him I would sort it out,’ I said.

  ‘We promised,’ Roach said. ‘We promised.’

  By the time we got up to investigate the pool of water on the floor was almost dry.

  ‘It’s still hot,’ Roach said rubbing his damp fingertips together. ‘Hot water.’

  ‘There’s something very odd about this,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t say,’ Roach wiped his fingers on his trousers with a grimace.

  ‘But no one touched him,’ I said. ‘They just stood there and watched.’

  ‘They didn’t speak either,’ Roach said. ‘I didn’t get a clear sight of the hand movements. I’m sorry.’

  When we told the others Minos and Lola wanted to know what Rowling had meant when she said Doodle had swapped sides. But I couldn’t make sense of that. Of anything. Roach lost himself in a book he’d found written in some Far Asian language, he read it backwards saying that was forwards and that seemed all right to me because everything felt upside down. The hours crawled by.

  Minos poured forth such a bellowing stream of invective that it could be heard far from the incident room in both the kitchen and the games room.

  ‘They’ve killed the Prime Minister,’ he said at a similar volume.

  ‘Who has?’ Roach could beat Minos for volume when he wanted to.

  There was a long silence during which we had enough time to assemble in incident room where Minos was watching four monitors and listening to the Enforce channel.

  ‘Who has?’ I said, watching some surveillance footage of five people running away from the scene of the crime, dreading the answer.

  ‘We have,’ Minos said. ‘Or people quite like us.’

  The story was unravelling on the television at a frantic pace, almost as fast as conspiracy theories were spinning out on the DarkNet. The usual updates were running on the web but it was the same old opinion spewed out by aggregators, repetitive and meaningless. Once in a while one of us would make a sarcastic remark and everyone else would snigger but when references to the Vanguard starting surfacing on the DarkNet we lapsed into our now trademark anxious silence. They were tangential remarks, just asides, but they were there.

  ‘Maybe that explains why they aren’t really looking for you,’ Casino said, pointing to a news ticker on the ministry sponsored channel. I looked over in time to see the words an escapee from the Detention Centre scroll by. ‘They were saving you for later.’

  ‘Why are they admitting someone escaped?’ I said.

  ‘Look,’ Lola said. ‘That’s Stark.’

  Stark was being helped into the back of an Enforce car by Latch, who was finding the presence of cameras rather cramped his style. Stark made it into the back of the car in one unbattered, unbloodied piece. Lola picked up a mug and put it down again, stood and sat down again. They had rounded up all the people who had resigned from the Academies. Stark and a few of his friends had been accused of having criminal links with groups in the NW sector and were to be charged with crimes against the state that no one had ever heard of before. The story was that they wanted to take power while no one was sitting in the hot seat and set up a technocracy. It was clear that they were leaving the viewing public to join the two big news stories together, they were careful not to be too explicit. Agent Tourniquet wasn’t on any of the warrants, but then given how tied up Stark said he was with the Prime Minister’s office I hadn’t expected him to be. Even though the more I thought about it the more he seemed the man most likely to go mad and kill someone for the fun of it.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Lola said to me.

  ‘How do you make that one out?’

  ‘They think he has links with the underclass,’ she said. ‘He does. You lot. Because of me.’

  ‘We can go and get Stark out,’ I said.

  ‘We can’t. The passes have expired.’

  We were sitting on her balcony watching the dark clouds gathering off in the distance as another storm approached. The weather was not helping anyone’s mood and the electrical storms kept putting the power out in the daytime.

  ‘You helped me escape,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but we had help on the inside,’ Lola said. ‘It’s still true that no one gets out of the Detention Centre, you are the exception that proves the rule.’

  ‘But we can do something,’ I said.

  ‘Why don’t you ask Vermina to help?’ Lola said. She seemed to be testing me for some reason.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You can’t do that. And she wouldn’t help anyway, she took a massive risk last time. We can’t do anything,’ Lola said. ‘Except wait.’

  ‘Wait?’ I wanted to help Stark because he’d helped us out so many times, and he was our friend and I didn’t want bad things t
o keep happening to our friends. We couldn’t abandon him.

  ‘Patience is a virtue,’ Lola peeled a flake of paint from the balcony rail. ‘Besides something bigger than you, than me, than Stark is going on and I don’t want to get in its way before I know what it is.’ She flicked the small piece of old paint into the garden below and somehow Minos managed to get his eye underneath it.

  ‘Where did you appear from?’ Lola said, in no way apologising.

  ‘I didn’t appear, that’s Casino,’ Minos said, rubbing his eye. ‘Audi Terminus has been announced as the new Prime Minister.’

  We laughed until we realised he was serious. Every time Audi Terminus opened his mouth the sound that came out was the sound of the bottom of a barrel being scraped. He was around fourth choice for everything, nothing spectacular or special. He had got where he was in politics by being pliable, amenable and above all by appearing to be harmless.

  ‘You owe me, Lola,’ Minos said. ‘You said it would be Tulan Haq.’

  She was about to protest, and I was about to point out why that would never happen, when the perimeter alarm went off and deafened us all. It was Marshall Dailly, he had approached the hotel without giving fair warning or taking due care.

  ‘Was it you?’ he said, once we had shut off the alarm and installed ourselves in the lounge.

  ‘We don’t do politics,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t think it was you,’ Marshall said, to Casino. ‘But it’s best to check.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Casino said. ‘What’s the scoop on Terminus?’

  ‘He tested best in the research,’ Marshall said. ‘I don’t know how they got that in the gaming houses so fast but there you go. Tulan Haq is furious apparently, he wanted to turn it down, you see.’

  ‘He wanted to turn it down?’ Lola said.

  ‘Haq’s too smart to want to be Prime Minister,’ I said. ‘They don’t last long.’

  ‘Rhone lasted less time than anyone,’ Marshall said. ‘Although, to be fair, none of the others were assassinated.’

  ‘Yehudi was,’ Minos said. ‘That was no prostitute.’

  ‘Also, he didn’t like baths,’ I said. ‘He only took showers.’

  ‘What’s the Terminus line?’ Roach said. ‘What’s he selling himself as?’

  ‘Moderate, friend of businesses large and small,’ Marshall said.

  ‘I bet mostly large,’ Minos said.

  ‘I bet mostly Imagination Industries,’ I said.

  ‘His big catchphrase is seize the day,’ Marshall said. ‘It’s seize this, seize that but mostly he just means the day. Like it’s an opportunity not to be missed. At least he’s ditched Rhone’s thing about being in it together. That’s a positive, I suppose.’

  ‘I never understood a word he said,’ Casino said. ‘All those long pauses.’

  ‘He was a stranger to verbs,’ I said. ‘Apt for a man who couldn’t commit to actually doing anything.’

  ‘And those teeth,’ Minos said. ‘Yikes.’

  ‘Did you just come to ask if it was us?’ Casino said in way that suggested he hoped the answer was negative.

  ‘No, well, yes,’ Marshall said. ‘If it wasn’t you I wanted to make a suggestion. I think you need to put out another story, we need to take control of your image.’

  Casino was most upset that he had to go to work and Roach toddled off to the dock no happier. Marshall’s idea was a great one. One we would have come up with ourselves given more time, I was sure of that. We would expose their footage of the incident as fake by distributing our own, more believable footage. Minos and Marshall came up with a convincing alternative. Me and Lola then helped them trawl through hours and hours of footage finding what they needed. In the time it took us to get two minutes of fake surveillance footage together both Roach and Casino had worked full shifts and come home tired and a little bit grumpy. We sat them down, told them there had been a development and tested our masterpiece out on them.

  ‘I knew it,’ Casino jumped to his feet. ‘Enforce.’

  ‘If it fools him it’ll fool maybe two per cent of the general population,’ Minos said. ‘Roach?’

  ‘If it fools him?’ Roach said. ‘Is it fake?’

  The footage was simple but we’d figured the less there was to it, the more active people’s imaginations would be. We just added a couple of specific references to Chichester Rhone and his imminent death to clinch it. The film showed five enforce officers waiting outside a door in the Prime Minister’s residence in the heart of the Riverside Sector, we got that from a documentary about the Prime Minister before the one before Rhone. Then it showed them talking on radios to someone in the Ministry of Securities, we got their voices from the scanner archive. Then the viewers would see them break open the door, this was part of a training demonstration, and then there was a gunshot but all that happened off camera, the view remained outside the door. An officer’s voice could be heard describing what was happening in vague and hysterical terms, that too was from some training material, showing how not to do something. Every extract we used was genuine so when Enforce broke it down to analyse it everything would scan as authentic. Another glitch in their system. By putting together the truth we hadn’t made a lie, we’d made another version of the truth and as far as we knew it could have been what happened. Not that whether it was true or not mattered, all that mattered was deflecting attention away from these five people who were too close to us for comfort.

  ‘It’s very convincing,’ Roach said. ‘Apart from the shot and flash are in sync when the flash should be slightly ahead.’

  ‘Really?’ Minos said.

  ‘Yes, but only by a tiny, tiny fraction.’

  ‘Good spot,’ Marshall nodded in approval. ‘Really good.’

  Casino glared at Roach and I allowed myself a small chuckle.

  ‘I’ll upload this once it’s fixed,’ Minos said. ‘Any bets on how fast it goes viral?’

  It spread faster than the great chicken pox outbreak in the Project and in two hours and seventeen minutes it was at the top of every chart and listing, not only on the DarkNet, it had also been picked up on the web and all the TV news channels. Yomo’s moment of fame was over.

  ‘If they have to make a statement about it I’m going to cry big tears of joy,’ Minos said, pouring another large glass of rum. ‘Refill anyone?’

  ‘Is this the rum everyone talking about?’ Marshal said.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Minos said. ‘This is very secretive rum, it doesn’t like to be talked about.’

  The next morning I resolved, once again, to give up drinking. Once we had finished the rum. I was kind of pleased to find that we didn’t have any milk, it was a comforting, mundane crisis that I felt more than equipped to deal with. Haggia was sitting on a chair in the sun, polishing some tomatoes as she watched the world go by.

  ‘There’s been more sirens and flashing lights flying up and down this street this morning than in the whole time I’ve been here,’ she said. ‘Something’s afoot. You mark my words.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I said, wondering if I could ask her about the games.

  ‘Fine, you?’

  ‘I feel a bit delicate,’ I said.

  ‘You sit down. Talk to Haggia about it,’ she said. ‘I knew it would all come out, you get it out my love. Get it out.’

  ‘Get what out?’

  ‘The trauma, cry if you want, it’s fine,’ she clutched me round the waist, shiny tomatoes rolling out of her lap and across the floor.

  ‘I’ve only got a hangover,’ I said. ‘Not even a big one.’

  ‘You’re all very resilient, you people,’ she said, disappointed.

  ‘We’re all very out of milk,’ I said.

  ‘In the fridge,’ Haggia said. ‘Have you seen Marshall?’

  ‘Not since last night,’ I said, trying to think of a reason why I would have seen him that wouldn’t incriminate us. ‘He was still investigating the rum story.’ True.

&nbs
p; ‘No one’s offered me any rum. I’m starting to feel left out.’

  ‘It’s apocryphal rum,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you seen Marshall recently?’

  ‘No, he’s up to something and I don’t know what it is. Aggravating I call that.’

  ‘I’ll stay out of it, if you don’t mind.’

  Opposite Haggia’s place was a bottle shop. As usual, a crowd of alcoholics were hanging around outside, clutching their cheap bottles of homebrew and bent roll-ups. Haggia was retrieving her tomatoes when a man came flying out of the window of the bottle shop and landed on the pavement in a pile of glass and hobo. Mere seconds behind him came a gang of several men with long wooden bats. They applied these bats to the man on the pavement with great enthusiasm and then moved on to the next shop.

  ‘They’ve got protection, haven’t they?’ I said, pointing to the insignia above the door. It meant that they paid a monthly fee to an Enforce officer who would in turn provide them with some level of security support, depending on their mood. The shop owners would, at least, avoid the kind of official harassment that would drive them out of their business and out of their minds. It was a practice so rife it was like a formal tax, except officers skimmed off the top like they were taking tips in a strip joint.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Haggia said, putting her precious tomatoes on the counter by the cash register. ‘Bring the shutter down, would you?’

  We could hear yelling coming from further up the road. It was interrupted for a moment by some colourful screaming but then started up again. Haggia pulled a stubby shotgun out from under the counter. In those days no one kept pets, so owners look like their weapons. I thought-brought the shutter crashing down, the padlocks at the bottom secured themselves in triple rush time.

  ‘Now, I like a riot as much as the next person,’ Haggia said. ‘But I have a very bad feeling about this.’

  My wristset beeped with stern orders to get back home right away. For once I did as I was told, running along the walls at the back of the shop like a tom cat on a promise. The best riot in living memory was the Harlestone Riot a few years earlier. It was more of an extended street party and barbeque than a riot, and this one was very different. Right from the start there was something wrong. There was no carnival atmosphere, no festival spirit. This one was just violent and dogged. Within two hours they’d started digging up the water pipes. This had no effect on our water supplies, as all our water had to be shipped in from Caledonia, but it did make the streets difficult to navigate, for us. For Enforce, resplendent in the finest gear a frogman could acquire, it didn’t present any challenge at all. Marshall Dailly spent most of his time in front of a camera standing in thigh-high water wearing knee-high boots. Behind him people marauded around waving things they had stolen above their heads as though engaged in a piece of performance art.

  Roach approached the riots as though he were writing a thesis, analysing endless footage and reports.

  ‘It’s not a riot,’ he said. ‘Not as we know it.’

  ‘What is it then?’ Lola said.

  ‘It’s a publicity stunt,’ Roach said.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Lola said.

  ‘People are getting paid to riot,’ Roach said.

  ‘Who’s paying them? Casino said.

  ‘Enforce.’

  ‘Enforce are paying people to riot?’ I thought that was strange, even for them. ‘Why are they doing that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Roach said. ‘But that man that drinks in Michelangelo’s, you know the one with the guard dog on the bit of string, he got two hundred and fifty in unbonded credit to go and cause trouble in Queens.’

  ‘Did he do it?’ I said. The traitor.

  ‘He said he didn’t have a choice. Enforce took the dog.’

  We all watched various screens as the scanner burbled on with its constant babble. The news had been showing round the clock footage of rioting in the NW sector, the presenters benign and tolerant in their commentary, as though we were a spoilt child showing off for some attention. One story did the rounds more than the others. It was a short clip, so frantic it would have been impossible to fake. There was a line of Enforce being pushed back by a thirty or forty strong rabble armed with broken bricks and other choice pieces of masonry. The fact that Enforce were being pushed back by peasants with stones was odd, under normal circumstances a quick burst of gun fire would ring out and the rabble would fall down or fall back. The officers reversed until they almost disappeared from the edge of the frame, then their ranks parted and between them appeared a line of Galearii. They moved into the crowd with decisive speed. In two minutes the crowd had disappeared apart from a dozen or so bodies that twitched on the ground.

  Casino leant forward, peering into the screen. ‘That’s Ginger Yates, isn’t it?’

  The camera panned across the bodies, lingering on the scene as the presenters struggled for words to describe what had just happened. The body on the end, bulky and beaten, was Ginger.

  ‘But it can’t be him,’ I said. ‘He’s in the Detention Centre.’

  ‘Maybe they’re not paying them to riot,’ Minos said. ‘Maybe they’re making them.’

  Roach continued to monitor developments while the rest of us loafed about and waited for it to stop. It was impossible to go out most of the time but we tried for a brief interlude of excitement when they flooded the main road and we took the antique canoe from off the wall in the games room out for a spin. The rash Minos got from falling in the water didn’t bear thinking about, particularly not at meal times. We didn’t venture out again. There was a tension in the air I had never known before. The western part of the city was on lockdown. There were Enforce everywhere operating under emergency protocols and the power outage was extended along with the curfew. Work and Labour sectors received protection to allow them to carry on working and labouring but the rest of the city was shut down. Galearii kept appearing and disappearing, popping up to dispense their terminal brand of justice. Then, when things were about to calm down because they’d beaten or killed everyone they’d paid or coerced into rioting, they cut the credit lines in the NW and N Sectors so no one could buy or sell anything. After that Harlestone and the people in the ghetto rioted for free. And the northern central districts of N Sector joined in as well. The Enforce board of directors released a statement saying that the prolonged activity was having such an effect on their reserve credit that they might have to start selling off parts of the business.

  I started worrying about whether that meant they’d be selling the Detention Centre to Imagination Industries or worse. If they didn’t have any credit how had they paid people to riot? There was something not right about it. We turned off the news in the end, unable to stomach anymore. The Galearii were hailed as heroes in the rest of the city and we couldn’t stand to hear another plastic doll cheering about what they called the clean-up of the ghettos. We had been running wild for too long they said, it was about time someone stood up to us. If Enforce hadn’t been running out of money we’d have all been rounded up and thrown in a camp somewhere. They were so grateful to the Galearii for stepping in and succeeding where Enforce had failed that there was not a single murmur of descent when three angels stood behind Terminus as he made an appeal for calm.

  ‘This isn’t a publicity stunt,’ I said. ‘It’s a coup.’

  ‘We might as well go on holiday,’ an invisible Casino said from somewhere near the sofa three days later. ‘For all the good we’re doing here.’

  We were sitting in a suite on the top floor that we didn’t use very often, just for a change of scene. It was on the sixth floor so we could see all the hardware Enforce had in the sky. It was a wonder we were not in darkness the whole time, so large was the shadow the collected kit cast across the ground. They’d set off a huge sonic bomb in the morning and although the aftershock had knocked over three buildings not far from the hotel, it had done little more than cause temporary deafness in a hundred hardcore rioters who found it a
musing to shout as loud as they could even though they had all recovered their hearing.

  ‘A holiday would be nice,’ Minos said. ‘A couple of weeks on a tropical island. White sand, blue sea.’

  ‘Black sunburn,’ Lola said.

  ‘That was just a rumour,’ Minos said.

  ‘We could go to Nexus,’ I sat up in the reclining chair I’d been lying on.

  Roach looked up from his book. ‘We could.’

  ‘We don’t know how to get there,’ Lola said.

  But Roach, Minos and Casino were already out of the door and on their way to find out.

  ‘You don’t want to leave Stark?’ I said.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Lola said.

  ‘Then what?’

  She picked up the open book Roach had left on the sofa, slipped his bookmark inside and closed it. ‘OK, it is. Annoyingly,’ she said. ‘I’ve realised that I’m a bit more attached to Stark than I thought I was. I can’t imagine how I let that happen, but there you have it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I read his mind.’

  First Casino, then Lola. The things they did for love. I wasn’t going to ask what his mind said.

  ‘Anyway, it’s all your fault,’ Lola said.

  ‘My fault?’

  ‘Yes, it was you he noticed, if you’d noticed him back that would have been it, but you didn’t. That’s why I looked to see what he was thinking. To see where I stood, I guess. Does that make sense?’

  I said yes, even though no would have been the more honest answer. I had met Stark first, that was true, but only because I had longer legs than Lola and could therefore run faster. And any man would notice a woman who knocked him clean off his feet and down a flight of stairs, then hit him with a briefcase for his trouble. We’d been playing a long con and having closed the deal and switched the cases we were making a run for it. Security wasn’t tight at the Arts Academy but it was broad shouldered and vindictive so we wanted out of there before they opened the other case and realised that they hadn’t bought a couple of pounds of a rare pigment. They had, in fact, purchased a similar weight of flour. Cheap, synthetic flour at that. Stark let us into his office and turned a blind eye when we climbed out of the window. Lola was giving him all the right signals that she could muster, so I palmed his credit card from his pocket for later reference because that’s what friends are for.

  ‘So, I blame you for all this wedding nonsense,’ Lola sighed.

  ‘Wedding nonsense?’

  ‘Yes, if he gets out I’m going to ask him to marry me,’ a tear hung from her eyelashes. ‘If you had distracted him instead of picking his pocket I wouldn’t be in this mess.’

  I did a Minos whistle. Sometimes Lola could be very conventional in the most Administrative way. Only a handful of people ever got married and that was because it was a family tradition. The Capuzzos, I suspected, got married as did the Starks, in all likelihood. I didn’t know what the Blades used to do way back when, but I suspected it would involve a massive knife fight.