Fearsome Dreamer (5 page)

Frith pressed the knife a little closer to the throat in his grip.

The assassin whose throat he held was trembling very badly. It was an involuntary reaction, but he wasn't really helping himself. It was taking all Frith had to match his rhythm so that the assassin didn't accidentally slit his own throat on the blade.

Not yet, anyway.

‘Gentlemen, this is growing dull,' he said.

The second assassin stood watching, frozen.

The first assassin screamed as Frith gently nudged his broken arm.

‘Frankly, someone needs to make a decision,' he said, after the scream had dwindled to a scraping whisper.

The second assassin didn't move.

‘Didn't they give you some sort of fancy laser gun, or anything?' Frith tried.

Silence.

Frith didn't recognise him. And after this, he probably never would. He was hired help. It didn't matter who he was, because Frith had a pretty good idea who had sent him.

It would be this: Frith would kill the man in his arms. Then he'd have to twist the body away from him in the shortest time possible, because the other would use that moment to attack him. The window would be small, but the other would take it. Frith might win. But then again, he might not.

Or it would be this: they would stand here, tension thrumming, until something else happened to change the game, or one of them grew frustrated and took a risk. And Frith had an important meeting to get to. A meeting he had travelled a long way for.

Right, then.

Frith lowered his blade, dragging it slowly down the body in his arms. The body in his arms felt it and tensed, preparing to run. Do something. Anything.

The second assassin watched the knife with wide, shining eyes.

Frith punched the blade into the base of the spinal column by his fist, so that the body dropped like a brick from shock.

The second assassin was on him, but it didn't take long.

The thing of it was, they were always so surprised. He knew how it looked on the outside, his skill – to them it seemed supernatural, when it was really just excellent body reading. The man's entire muscular structure was laid open for Frith to inspect, even in microseconds. His opponent's right arm might as well have developed a mouth and shouted, HELLO! I'M ABOUT TO MOVE OVER HERE!

It was powerful, the moment where he physically locked with another human being like this, both of them using everything they had and had ever known to stay alive. It was the closest he ever felt to anyone. The second assassin felt desperate, which was good.

He popped the assassin's shoulder out of his socket, and then rolled backwards and threw him over his head with a well-placed foot.

The sound of bone crunching drifted across the dank little apartment.

Frith had abandoned his knife in the fight, which in a slight miscalculation had lodged between two vertebrae of the first assassin. He tugged it out with a small grunt and crossed to the wall. At the base of it lay the second assassin.

To his credit, he wasn't making a lot of noise. You had to respect self-control, even though Frith had not so far met anyone with as much self-control as him.

The man didn't move his eyes to watch Frith approach. Just stared at the wall, lids heavy.

Frith crouched, balancing his knife carefully.

‘So,' he said. ‘Was there a message you were asked to deliver before you killed me?'

The man didn't answer.

Frith sat down on the floor, far away, to be cautious.

He felt a sudden, yawning loneliness.

He wondered if the man felt the same.

‘No message,' said the man eventually, his voice cracked.

Frith waited. Sat. Listening to him die.

Everyone died, eventually.

He leaned his head against the wall. Resisted the urge to close his eyes, now that the adrenaline had worn off. Resisted the urge to bury his head in his arms and hide.

He had a meeting to go to.

Twenty minutes later, Frith left the main room and went into the back bedroom, closing and locking the door. He washed his hands carefully in the cracked little sink. Sat on the bed, and unwrapped the package he had brought to World with him. Held up the metallic-looking lozenge to the light, checking it for damage.

He hated the lozenge. It was an external Life implant; an invasive, parasitic machine. It was smaller than his little finger, but inside its smooth metal shell were a thousand different realities, just waiting to be set free in his brain.

He hated a lot of things about World. The implants, and the control they put on their own citizens, disgusted him. Their total, immersive reliance on Life, a world that didn't even exist, affronted him. But complaining to the Castle about their insistence on meeting in Life got him a giant bout of silence. Angle Tar wasn't connected to Life. He had to go where the signal was.

So here he sat in an anonymous, cramped room on the outskirts of Calais in what had been France, a long time ago. It was as far into World as he could manage; their public transport networks had slowly vanished with the adoption of Life. Only World police and certain government departments owned any kind of vehicle, and try asking for one of those at short notice.

He clipped the implant onto the back of his neck, grimacing as it extended its tiny needle claws and punctured his skin.

It always took a while to come alive for him, Life. External implants were a tenth as effective as the internal versions all World citizens had placed into their heads at birth. Some Life features would always be closed to him – the more immersive, fully simulated reality aspects. And he had no control over where in Life the implant took him, which was always the same place. It had been programmed that way.

The place the implant led him to was a virtual business hall. A long, low room dominated by a giant glass table, around which were arranged various chairs of height, design and size. Each attendee had insistently requested that they have their own particular type of chair at this meeting. It was almost funny how neatly this encapsulated everything that was wrong with people.

There was no fireplace in this room – Life designers couldn't even fathom the need to replicate such a pointless mechanism. If he'd had a more sophisticated implant, he would have been able to feel a gentle warmth spidering out from the walls, uniform and regulated. As it was, he couldn't feel too much. He felt a chair underneath him when he sat down. The weight of the table under his hands. Everything was slightly off, that was all. Physical senses were muffled, as if he were ill, and couldn't extend sight and sound and touch to their fullest extent.

It drove you mad, after a while. Your body constantly trying to adapt, to make sense of it. Failing. Meetings were usually as short as possible because of it. Attendees from World always scoffed at that. Of course they did. They scoffed at everything.

It would be their undoing.

‘Frith,' said a polite voice at his shoulder. He turned his head.

‘Mussyer Derger,' he said to the corpulent man who had appeared in the chair next to him. ‘And how are things in the shipping business?'

‘I do adore how you always insist on calling me Mussyer, Frith,' the man said. ‘Even in my own language.'

I do it to annoy you, not delight you, you bastard.

‘Politeness, alas,' said Frith, ‘has always been a particular failing of mine.'

‘When is our Castle friend getting here? I have another meeting in half an hour,' said a voice down the table.

‘They're always late,' said Derger. ‘Makes for a grand entrance. So, how long did your journey from Angle Tar take you this time?'

‘Just over a day.'

Derger shook his head. ‘I do think you get the raw end of the deal in this. I couldn't fathom having to move around so much. I'm sitting comfortably at home, right now, whereas you are …'

‘Somewhere.'

‘Ah yes,' said Derger, with a crinkly smile. ‘Secrecy. Very well. Still, if Angle Tar would only connect to Life, you wouldn't be having to go through this every time.'

‘We like our independence,' said Frith.

‘Come, come. You wouldn't lose your independence. All countries in World still maintain their own identities. We're a loose connection of nations, just sharing resources, that's all.'

That was such an outrageous lie, it was almost insulting.

‘I think,' said Frith, ‘I'll pass, thank you. I'm not sure we're particularly keen to leap into bed with the people that wiped out half our population.'

‘Oh, Frith. Oh, really. You Angle Tarain and your hang-ups. The wars were a very long time ago now. We're all unimaginably sorry you were caught up in that. But honestly, harping on about it like it's still relevant today is what makes everyone shy away from doing business with you.'

‘Yes, aren't we silly. Nevertheless, I highly doubt Angle Tar will be joining World while I'm alive.'

‘I suppose we'll just have to wait until you're dead, then,' came another voice.

Frith's heartbeat quickened.

He would know that voice anywhere. Mainly because it was the voice of the man who had quite probably just tried to have him murdered.

He was from World and his name was Snearing, a beautiful illustration of exactly how he sounded. God only knew why the Castle had chosen him as an agent. He appeared to think exactly the same thing about Frith. If he was surprised that Frith was still alive, he was doing an admirable job of hiding it.

Supposedly, World and Angle Tar had stopped trying to kill each other a hundred years ago. Supposedly they now worked together in a facade of diplomacy. Angle Tar kept its walls up, shutting off the outside world to its citizens while maintaining trade with other countries on the sly. World left it largely alone, waiting for the day when that tiny island with its mad inhabitants would cave in and decide to join the rest of civilisation.

None of this stopped the spying game, though. World spied on Angle Tar and Angle Tar spied on World. Secret, dangerous dealings would always exist. Men like Snearing would always be trying to prevent men like Frith from continuing to play the game.

And the other way around, of course.

Frith's hand was itching. So badly. Like a fire was burning it; maddening. It begged to hold a knife again. He waited patiently until the feeling ebbed.

Derger had turned away, apparently bored of the conversation, and was chatting jovially to someone else. Frith listened to their shifting and overlapping voices, not for the words but for what lay underneath the words. He was good at listening. He liked very much that he was good at it. It had saved his life more than once.

There were several World agents here, as always, but then World had so many more countries and citizens under its bloated belt. China was noticeably absent, as was the Hispanic Federation. Smaller nations like Angle Tar had just one agent each, and they always came.

The talk around him was shot with nerves. It usually was before the Castle showed up.

He wondered which of them would come this time.

The Castle was still a mystery to Frith, even though it was now several months since he had been recruited by them. They claimed to be unable to show their true bodies, which is why they liked to meet in Life, where they could cloak themselves in whatever form they liked. He felt uncomfortable around the squid avatar they sometimes insisted on using. The girl that looked like a ghost was the most unsettling, though. He thought they had chosen those forms to provoke the exact reaction that they did; that somewhere in their strange, anonymous brains, it amused them to see people so afraid of something that wasn't even real.

It bothered Frith more and more that he still didn't know for sure what they were, but he was strongly starting to suspect that they didn't even have bodies, as such. That they were all mind.

There was a short intake of breath from further down the table. He looked for the source.

There she was.

Ghost Girl avatar, in all her glory.

She was grey, and thin and odd, her mouth a shadow slash, her eyes like mine shafts. It wasn't that she looked like a ghost, more that she looked how you might represent a ghost. Frith couldn't describe it better than that.

‘Hello,' she said, in World. It wasn't exactly troublesome for Frith, who spoke the language to perfection. It just irritated him that the Castle had picked that language to talk to them all in.

Various mumbling variations of hello echoed meekly around the room.

Frith bit back a laugh.

The Castle avatar went methodically around the table, taking reports from each agent. She always did it like this. The first Castle meeting they had ever been called to had been run by her. In it, she had given them an analogy she seemed to be very proud of.

She said that the Castle was the web.

Frith and their other chosen agents were the spiders.

The Talented were the flies.

Finding and catching Talented was not just Frith's job. It was his passion. Some of the agents called them Dreamers because of how their ability usually manifested; but to Frith the name sounded weak. At least one Talented he had met in his lifetime did a hell of a lot more than dream.

The Castle had chosen well when they had chosen Frith. How exactly they had decided on their agents was still a mystery, but he would never be able to forget the way they had approached him. He still had the nightmares.

He suspected that they made sure of that.

It had been several months ago now. He'd just got back from a short trip to World and another ‘under the carpet' job for his government. Officially he was a minor diplomat. Only a few people knew what he did unofficially.

He hadn't been sleeping well. All he knew was that he woke often in the darkest part of the night, that pocket of time where he felt exposed and vulnerable, as if somehow, while he'd been asleep, the world had changed on him and left him behind. He didn't quite remember what it was that woke him, only that he had been dreaming of the past again, of graceful pillar trees and spotted sunlight and a laugh that reminded him how cruel and awful life was. He had these periods, sometimes, and nothing would do except to wait through it, patiently, until the dreams faded back into his head and left him alone. It was just a phase and it would pass, as always.