Half Lost (21 page)

The Break-In

We're in a new camp, only established a few hours ago but already looking organized. Celia has been through the things I've brought from the Hunters. From the notebook she works out that the Hunters had only found us that morning, like Greatorex thought. They'd been traveling alone and were many miles from any cut. But they had phoned in that they'd found a camp, had our numbers and location, with comments about the replica of the Council building, though they hadn't guessed what it was.

“We're still going on with the attack?” I ask.

“You want to call it off?” Celia replies.

“No.”

“Neither do I. We stick to the plan. The Council meeting will go ahead. They may expect you to get in. Soul might even want that, but they don't know you're indestructible. That's the advantage we have. Just make sure you use it to maximum effect.”

We all patrol the area that day, everyone nervous that we've been followed, but Celia's system of moving and closing cuts seems to have worked. At night, me and Gabriel stay in the camp with the others. We don't talk. He lies down by the fire and I sit and watch it. I go for a run in the
dark to tire myself out and then come back to him. I know I'm doing the right thing. If this can be over soon, then me and Gabriel can leave here for good and find somewhere to live together.

* * *

We're on our way to the Tower. “We” being all the members of the Alliance who are trained to fight, plus two healers, Arran and another witch, who will tend to any wounded.

Once we're through the cut and in London, Greatorex, Arran, and the trainees go off to some place I don't know, but they aren't with me and I don't need to think about them. The advance party is here: me, Gabriel, and Celia.

It's dark by the time we get to the Tower. There's going to have to be two stages to me getting into it. At the midnight changeover of guards, I need to check if the password has changed; given that Soul probably knows our plans, a change seems guaranteed. To find out the password I'll have to stay inside for about ten minutes, maybe more. I've no idea how I'll cope with that, but I've told Celia I can do it. I did wonder if the amulet might protect me against feeling sick and went inside a shop for a few moments when we got here. Within a minute I felt dizzy and within two I felt like puking. It's a full moon—just my luck.

So, anyway, I have to find out the password at the midnight changeover and then we have to wait until the eight a.m. change of guards for me to go in.

The towers are hard to distinguish from one another in the dark; lights are on in lots of the flats but the top of
Roman Tower is all in darkness. There hasn't been much movement into or out of any of the buildings.

Celia is watching the far side of the residential estate. I'm standing with Gabriel where we had our curry. Now Gabriel has a bottle of cider. Some local yobs hang around near us and Gabriel swigs from the cider and offers me some. I shake my head and say, “It's disgusting.”

He smiles. “I'm trying to fit in.”

And of course he does fit in, anywhere he likes, but I tell him, “You're very good but not perfect . . . try not to sound so happy.”

He laughs. “I could learn so much from you.” And now he copies my voice, saying, “Is this better?”

I swear at him and he creases over in laughter. The youths look our way but when I look at them they wander off and Gabriel sniggers again.

There's a cold wind but at least it's not raining. We just have to wait. I pick up the bottle of cider and wander up past all the shopfronts, trying to look natural—bored and mean, I guess. It can't be far off midnight by now. I go back to Gabriel and stand with him.

At 11:47 I go invisible and walk to the Tower. The door is still broken and the stairwell still stinks of piss, but I get to the third floor before I notice my headache. I'm at the seventh floor when I feel the first wave of nausea. I have to hold on to the wall for a second. Then I hear footsteps on the stairs behind me. I take a deep breath and carry on upward, feeling sick but not too dizzy. I get to
the top floor and move to the far end of the corridor.

The guards wander up, not in a hurry. I'm wedged in the corner concentrating on breathing, on staying invisible.

“Jez late again?” one says. I look up now and see there's five of them.

“Just get in, will ya?”

But then there's a shout from below in the stairwell. “I'm coming. Hold on.”

There's general swearing and complaining. My stomach is churning. The walls are closing in on me and it's taking all my strength to tell myself that walls don't fall in; that it's some kind of mind trick or illusion
but whatever it i
s the walls are not
falling in!

And I've got to stay invisible. My stomach cramps and I'm bent over, and someone says, “Hurry up, will ya?” And I hear, “Thrott—” and Jez is shouting, “Wait up.” And my stomach heaves and I have a taste of sick in my mouth and all I can concentrate on is breathing in and staying invisible. Then they're going inside and the door shuts behind them and I run for the stairs and half run, half fall down them and get to the next level and keep on going down and I throw up. The walls
are
closing in and the noises are starting and my stomach's cramping again and I throw up again and I know I've got to get out but I'm not sure which way is out and I can't stand so I crawl and then I'm rolling downstairs and crawling some more and falling some more and the noises in my head are banging away and I want to shout back at them but I can't here and I can't even crawl now. And the
screeching gets louder and my stomach is cramping more and I curl up in a ball and scream back and then I feel hands on my back and Gabriel's voice saying, “I'm here. It's OK.” And I'm being pulled up, hands going under my arms, and Gabriel's voice is telling me, “We've just got to get down two flights and then we're out.” But I can't stand so he drags me backward down the stairs and through the door and the second I'm outside the cramps ease and I heal myself of the headache and nausea and I feel fine. I feel more than fine. I feel fantastic.

Gabriel doesn't complain, though I know he's desperate to. When we're back at our post by the shops he asks, “Did you get the password?”

“‘Throttle back,' I think.”

“You think?”

“‘Throttle' for sure.”

“‘Back' not for sure?”

“It might have been ‘attack.'”

“Or ‘sack'? Or ‘hack'? Or ‘tack'? Or something else entirely!”

“Throttle back.”

I think.

* * *

Then it's back to waiting. The shops are shut now. No one and nothing is around except for the cold. Gabriel and I go down an alley and sit on the ground close to the wall. Neither of us can sleep.

Gabriel says, “Someone once said that war is long periods
of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”

“Minutes of terror, I'd say.”

“Yes, minutes, maybe hours if it's bad.”

“I think today might be bad.”

Gabriel takes my hands and interlocks his fingers with mine. “But then it will be over. No more boredom, no more terror, just lots of peace and climbing and coffee and croissants.”

“Yeah.” But I'm not thinking of peace or climbing or coffee, I'm thinking of hours of terror and all the blood and screams and fear.

It's getting light now. A delivery van comes and drops off newspapers on the street and then the newsagent opens up. Gabriel goes to buy some snack bars. I can hardly swallow them but I force them down. Then there's more waiting.

Celia appears round one of the towers. It's 7:29 and I have to go.

Gabriel says, “I'll join you soon.”

I jog across the expanse of open ground to the Tower, through the broken door, up the smelly staircase, past the sick on the seventh-floor landing and already I feel good. The tension in my stomach has gone. I'm dying to get on with it.

I go invisible and carry on up the stairs to the top floor and the door to the prison. I've got one of Mercury's hairpins that magically picks locks and, leaning close to the door, I say quietly, “Throttle back,” as I put the tip of the hairpin on the lock and push.

Nothing happens.

My throat is dry and maybe my voice was unclear. Or maybe the password is wrong, but I can't go through lots of options.

I can hear footsteps on the stairs. The guards aren't due to change over for twenty-five minutes so it's probably another resident. But still I need to get through the door. I say “Throttle back” again, a little louder and clearer, but it seems like a shout in the quietness of the building. I put the pin on the lock, push the door, and it opens.

Now I'm standing in the dark. I got a quick glimpse of the next door two or three paces in front of me. But there's no handle on it and I don't know which way it opens, so I can't tell which side of the room I should be on to slide in with the guard. I'm not sure if there's a light in here but I daren't look for one and put it on. I've just got to hope that when the guard arrives I have time to get into a good position. It'll be another twenty minutes or so.

But a minute later the outer door opens. It must have been a guard on the stairs. I have a second to go invisible and the guard pulls a cord that hangs from the ceiling, illuminating a bare bulb, and the outer door swings shut. He knocks on the inner door five times. Two loud and slow and three fast, which I guess is another signal.

After nearly a minute, the peephole in the inner door slides across for the briefest of seconds and then back into place. The lock rattles and then the door opens and the guard on the inside says, “Early for once.” He lets the door
swing open for my guard to enter. There isn't much room for me, but I slide to the side and hold myself tight against the wall.

I'm in.

The returning guard swears and looks down. A sweet wrapper is stuck to his boot. As he bends forward to pull it off, I shrink further back against the wall. His jacket touches mine. That's all, nothing more. But somehow I know he knows there's something wrong. And he turns round as if to check behind him, staring straight through me, with the sweet wrapper between his fingers. He turns away again and says, “Is Jake here?”

“You're the first. You're half an hour early. Dale's still finishing his rounds.”

“I thought I heard Jake . . .” Then he wanders up the corridor, the sweet wrapper held out in front of him. And I have a bad feeling he's working it out.

I follow the sweet-wrapper guy through to a small room with a set of kitchen units along one side and a table with a bench seat along the other. He puts the wrapper in the bin then wipes his hand on his trousers. He takes his jacket off and hangs it on a hook on the wall. The other hooks are full. Another guard comes in and says, “You're early.”

“Yeah.”

“She throw you out or something?”

The sweet-wrapper guy shakes his head, as if he has other things on his mind. He fills the kettle and makes a tea. Then more of the leaving guards arrive and comment on
the sweet-wrapper guard's early arrival. Even I'm getting fed up with their comments now but it seems he's forgotten about hearing me say the password. The room fills up with more of the new shift arriving and I move into the corridor and wait out of the way and concentrate again on staying invisible. I count the old guards out as they leave and I make sure all six go. I then follow the Hunters as they leave too, and see where the cut is that they go through to the Council building.

So now there are four Hunters and six Council guards here. And I've got to remove them without letting any escape or raise the alarm. They all go to a meeting room and the lead guard is giving instructions, comments about prisoners. The guards don't carry guns: they don't need weapons as they don't let the prisoners out. They're just a food-dispensing and waste-disposal system. The Hunters do have weapons, of course.

Luck is now on my side, though. The Hunters are standing together at the side of the room. I'm standing in the doorway. The lead guard is talking about the cleaning rota; the other guards are facing him.

Now I have to begin in earnest.

I send out lightning to all four Hunters.

It takes a few seconds for them to begin to fall.

The guards are surprised. They can't see me. They maybe even think it's a weird electrical malfunction. But one shouts, “Raise the alarm.” I blast him too, but with a weaker jolt. I don't want to kill the guards. I let myself
become visible and two of the guards come at me but I send lightning to them too. They're stunned and fall but they're not dead. The others are all back against the wall and I hit two of them with more lightning to stun them so that the only people left standing are me and the guard with the clipboard, and he's gripping his clipboard so tight it looks like he's going to twist it in half. He's totally still as if he too is stunned. But then he comes to life and throws the clipboard at me hard. And then other stuff flies at me: pens and handcuffs, mugs and all the stuff that's lying around the room. Of course it doesn't hurt me; it doesn't even land on me, and the guard's Gift isn't that strong. The chairs wobble as if he's trying to move them but they don't lift.