Part of her remained skeptical. What if he was just a very well-informed crazy person? Or worse, an associate of Barry’s still stringing her along? Why they’d go to such deceptive lengths was beyond her, however. Still, better to maintain a degree of caution than to trust blindly.
‘This is really quite a lot to take in. So what exactly are “people like us”?’
‘People with Knowledge,’ he said casually.
‘Knowledge?’
He stopped and took her hand. ‘It’s an honor, it really is.’
‘What is?’
‘To be the one to introduce you to it. Here, watch this. You’ll like this.’
He rolled up his sleeves and held his hands about two feet apart, grinning like a madman. His fingers tensed. For the first time Elra noticed he had tattoos in the center of his palms; small, circular designs with intricate geometries.
An arc of electricity passed between the two marks. It made no sound, it just bridged the gap in a split second.
Elra screamed.
‘Shhh!’ Kai urged, looking around and laughing to himself. ‘Hey, look again.’
He held his hands back up and made the spark once more. This time he sustained it for a few seconds, like a tesla coil.
‘HOW did you do that?!’ Elra cried.
‘Through Knowledge,’ Kai explained. ‘These are the first marks I got, well, after the Birth mark, that is. My father gave them to me. Great for messing around with electronics. I’ll explain more later.’
Never mind his sanity, Elra was beginning to question her own. Her mother was dead, the corpse of a strange warrior woman was lying in her trashed flat and man with electric palms was taking her to London. Perhaps this was all some surreal delusion she was having.
They made it to the main road.
‘Which bus?’ Kai asked.
‘To where?’
‘The station.’
‘Didn’t you just take one from there?’
‘No, I took a cab,’ he clarified. ‘Couldn’t rely on buses for something as important as this.’
‘The 29. And – oh crap – it’s right there.’
They ran to the bus stop as two 29 buses pulled up at the same time. Kai had some trouble with counting change, but mercifully the driver was feeling patient.
When they had finally sorted their tickets out and sat down at the back, Elra realized something marginally critical. She hadn’t any clothes with her, apart from those she stood up in. Hell, she didn’t even have most of the contents of her wallet, and to her momentary horror she seemed to have misplaced her phone. Somehow, she thought, she might not need it where she was going.
Eleven
The first thing that swelled into focus was a terrifically painful throbbing on the side of Cali's head. No vision as of yet, just a persistent rhythmic pressure, accompanied by a slight numbing sensation. Her hair felt matted on that side and her neck and shoulders were slick with... something. If anything, she thought, it felt like a massive hangover. Not pleasant.
Her eyes managed to open. For a moment her brain didn't adequately process the reflected light entering her pupils, and everything was just random shapes and color. Damn, her head hurt. Then she realized there were people in the room. They were dressed in green overalls, with plastic gloves and bags of equipment. One was crouching right by her side, in fact.
'Can you see me?' he said. 'Can you turn and face me?'
Cali tried to focus on the source of the voice. As her head turned it throbbed particularly unpleasantly. As her mental faculties began to find their feet, she began processing the state of the room and its other occupants.
Unfortunately, things hadn't gone well for them. She registered the red-swaddled corpse in the middle of the room. Was that all... blood? Two paramedics were tending to it, no, more like preparing it to be carried. Something that looked like Barry was being picked up, manhandled and taken outside. There was also a policeman, standing right over by the window, muttering under his breath into his radio.
Then her eyes focused on something nearer. A paramedic crouching over a slumped figure on her left hand side.
'Can you look over here for me, love?' the one assigned to her asked.
She looked at him in dazed confusion. He was preparing some form of pad.
'Can you hold that against the side of your head for me?' he asked.
The pad was thrust into her hand. Cali raised it to her temple and held it there for a second. When she moved it away it was covered in blood.
'No, keep it on there. Don't push, just hold it,' the paramedic instructed.
The one to her left turned to the other. 'She's lost a lot of blood,' he announced. 'Moving her is going to be difficult.'
It took Cali a moment to realize they weren't talking about her.
‘What’s your name, love?’ her one said.
‘Cal... Cali.’ she managed.
‘Can you stand up for me, Cali?’ he asked, offering her both hands for support.
Cali pulled herself up using the medic’s arm for balance and immediately felt the room spin. The floor was tipping and the ceiling was warping, sliding away from her towards an unseen vanishing point.
‘You’re suffering from concussion,’ the paramedic explained. ‘We’re going to have to take you to the hospital and check out that head of yours. Can you walk with me?’
He led her across the kitchen, helping her step over the debris. She was vaguely aware of the body slumped against the fridge below her, its arms splayed out loosely by its sides. It looked like a waxwork of Elra's mother with a deep, dark, angry hole in her stomach, ringed with brutal crimson. Cali almost fainted.
Only when she was finally outside, wrapped in a foil blanket and sitting on the ambulance's rear platform, did she ask the paramedic the inevitable.
'Where's Elra?'
'Who?'
'She's my friend – same age as me – we were in there together.'
The paramedic frowned as he pulled out a collapsible stretcher from the back of the ambulance. 'No, it was just you, that woman in fancy dress with the gunshot wound, the middle-aged woman with the abdomen puncture and the man with severe cranial trauma. No-one else.'
Cali couldn’t decide whether the lack of Elra on that list was a good or a bad thing.
Twelve
Later, Elra and Kai were sitting on a train to London, watching the countryside zip by. At the train station Kai had proved very free-handed with his cash: buying the tickets using fifty-pound notes and making a point of getting no less than eight chocolate bars from a stand in the forecourt.
'Need more calories,' he explained. 'You really burn through them when you use Knowledge, especially the stronger stuff.'
He'd bought Elra a full English breakfast at a restaurant franchise while they waited for their train, and had insisted that she try black pudding. He'd then gone on to eat it himself.
His perception of money was a funny one, Elra thought. He was positively blasé in his attitude towards it: at first she thought he may be trying to cheer her up by showering her with treats, but in the end she realized he just didn’t care about money. Not in the smug sense of ‘look how much I have, be impressed!’ like some young bloods she knew who’d had a good night dealing; for him, it just didn’t register as important. As they sat in a booth in the restaurant, her trying to work her way through her breakfast out of politeness more than anything (she wasn’t that hungry, given her recent loss) and him reading a paper, she asked him about it, somewhat shyly.
‘How come you have so much money?’
Kai looked up from his reading and giggled explosively. 'Money. Oh, you unmarked. Always going on about money.'
He said nothing more.
Elra hadn't been to London before. She'd heard many stories, seen many films and pictures, but for people on her estate it was treated like an abstraction, something large and unattainable on the periphery of life. Cali had often talked about making a weekend trip out of it
(to justify the cost of the train ticket), but they knew no-one with whom they could stay, so their plans had just faded into the background of workaday life. It didn't feel real somehow, she thought, sitting on this train (in First Class, no less), being catapulted away from her life and towards the Big Smoke.
‘Can you tell me what you meant by “people like us”?’ She asked, after a while.
‘Well, where to begin. First, you’ve got to understand that you can’t really be told a lot of this stuff, it has to be shown.’
‘Go on.’
‘Also, I should warn you: I don’t know the exact details, just the broad overview. Some things are unknown even to the Wise, due to how indescribably ancient Knowledge is.’
‘Hang on, first thing’s first. What is Knowledge?’ she asked.
He smiled. ‘Knowledge is what I showed you earlier. Knowledge is having electric hands, fire fingers, screams that create shockwaves and limbs that repel water. Knowledge is being able to run one hundred meters in eight seconds, being able to lift twice your body weight, or jumping your height from standstill. More powerful Knowledge is healing the sick, perceiving from afar and understanding the deeper workings of the world. All this and more. Far more.’
Elra was astounded. ‘How?’
‘Through marks. They channel your power and allow you to manifest your Knowledge outwardly. Take me, for example. Body Knowledge is my thing, since that’s what my parents’ had and what they decided to teach me. So I have those Electromagnetic marks on my hands you saw earlier. I’ve got marks on certain muscles and ligaments on my legs that make them more effective and less
Unmarked Journey Page 5