Authors: Sarah Alderson
I glance at Demos. He’s staring at them, holding them in place, and he’s scowling. But I know that the scowl is really intended for me.
The bathtub alone is bigger than the whole bus. There are closets that I can walk into and which are huge enough to host a runway show. There’s a fluffy white robe and a TV with five thousand channels and room service and boys in cute uniforms to carry my bags and bring me cheeseburgers. And the best thing is that they take Amex.
And the second best thing is Demos doesn’t know where I am. Though I know he’ll find me eventually with Amber’s help – or Nate’s, if he feels like betraying me. But if I have to sit through another lecture about how few brain cells there are occupying my frontal lobes then I’m going to take my new bunny fur shoes and drill a hole through my own head with them.
It’s not as if it’s my fault.
OK. It’s maybe my fault.
I flop on the bed.
Oooh, Egyptian cotton.
And then the knock comes.
I bolt upright. I haven’t ordered room service. I do a quick scan.
Then I think about hiding under the bed.
‘Suki,’ comes Alicia’s voice through the door. ‘Hiding under the bed is a really dumb idea. Just open the door. We know you’re in there.’
We? I listen harder. He
has
betrayed me. Nate is with her.
I roll off the bed with a groan and slouch over to the door.
‘Go away,’ I say to the wood panels.
‘No,’ Alicia answers.
How on earth did they find me?
I wonder.
‘All you’ve been talking about for weeks now is room service and closet space. It didn’t take a detective.’
‘Suki, let us in!’ This time it’s Nate. ‘It’s just us.’
I open the door and Nate shoves past. He takes a flying leap onto the bed. ‘Woooooah, check this place out!’
‘This is
my
room. Get your own,’ I say.
‘Suki . . . I’ve come to get you and bring you back,’ Alicia interrupts.
‘Why? So Demos can yell at me some more?’
Alicia shrugs one shoulder, ‘You know what he’s like,’ she says, with a lopsided smile. ‘He didn’t mean to get so angry. It’s just the Unit didn’t know about you before. And now they do. It makes this more dangerous for you.’
She has a point. She hears me think this because her smile widens.
‘He’s really sorry,’ Alicia says.
I cross my arms over my chest. ‘Yeah? Well, why’s he not here then telling me this himself?’
Alicia’s smile fades. ‘Because he thought you’d just think he was using his powers to convince you.’
I harrumph. ‘I don’t want to be part of his silly gang anymore.’
I turn away but Alicia grabs hold of me by the elbow. ‘Suki – you know why we’re doing this,’ she says quietly. ‘It isn’t for fun. We need to stop them. And now they know who you are, you’re in as much danger as the rest of us. We need to stick together until this is over.’
It’s never going to be over,
I think to myself.
Alicia scowls and then she says quickly, ‘Look, it’s not safe to stay here. We need to go.’ She glances around, and I see the fear take over her face at the same time I hear the thought. And then she speaks it out loud. ‘Please, at least tell me you didn’t use your name or pay for all this with a credit card.’
She hears the answer, even though I try to cover it up with some super-loud
la-la-la-
in
g
‘Suki!’ she screams.
‘What?’ I shrug. But I can already see the pictures in her head . . . pictures of men in black combats . . .
Nate bounds over to the doorway where we’re still standing. He’s wearing the fluffy white bathrobe over his clothes clutching a bag of peanuts from the minibar in one hand and the room service menu in the other. ‘What? What’s going on?’ he asks, looking between us.
‘When are you going to learn?’ Alicia sighs.
‘Learn what?’ Nate asks.
‘They know your name,’ Alicia says, ignoring Nate and talking straight to me. Her nostrils are flaring like an angry horse. ‘You can’t use any ID any more with that name on it. The unit will have your name flagged.’
Oh.
‘Come on, we need to get out of here now!’
And then, just then, we both hear an explosion of voices – commands being yelled – a thousand jumbling ping-ponging thoughts flying like bullets into our brains. It’s as if there’s a game playing and the stadium is my head. Alicia winces and I cover my ears – not that that helps.
Alicia’s fingers grip my wrist and she yanks me out of the door and into the corridor.
‘But—’ I start, my free hand hanging on for dear life to the door post. I’m thinking of my bag and my new shoes and all the little mini bottles of shampoo and conditioner I’m leaving behind.
‘Suki – there’s no time!’ Alicia screeches, tugging me until my fingers lose their grip on the door. ‘We need to go. Come on,
run!’
So we do. We run to the end of the hallway, to the elevator, and Nate jabs the button but the metal doors stay peaceful and shut as a dead person’s eyes.
Alicia pulls us to the emergency stairwell next to the elevator and we fall into an echoey, hollow stairwell. Roaring up from the bottom comes the sound of feet stomping.
Turn around,
Alicia screams silently into my head.
I twist and push Nate back through the door, tripping on his heels. Alicia shoves us down the hallway. Suddenly a doorway opens and a sleepy-looking man with a pregnant hairy belly and wearing just a towel around his waist is standing there. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he asks in a funny accent, peering out into the corridor. ‘What’s all the noise?’
I hear Alicia’s thought a second before she follows through with it and dart out the way of her elbow, which comes smashing down against the man’s temple.
Nate is speechless and blinking as the man goes crashing backwards, letting out a low bellow. Just then the elevator door pings. Alicia’s hands are on my back.
‘Inside! Inside!’ she shouts, shoving Nate and I over the groaning man lying on the floor and into his room.
The man grunts as my foot catches him in the groin and I stumble. I can hear his thoughts tumbling around like pebbles in an empty tin can but they’re in another language I don’t understand.
Alicia screams,
‘Stay put!’
and her eyes are wild. And then she slams the door in my face.
What is she doing?
I jump to my feet. My hand is on the doorhandle, turning it, when I hear feet pounding towards us, shaking the floor like an earthquake and men’s voices yelling so loud it’s as if they’re on fire.
I hear the panic in Alicia’s head, scrambling, fleeting, blurry thoughts –
run run run . . .
she’s trying to run faster, her heart pounding in her chest. I can see the door she’s heading towards, I can see her hand outstretched before her as the footsteps come thundering up behind her, closer and closer. I can feel her fear, can taste the panic. And I can see Demos too, though I know that’s just an image in her head, and in amongst it all I hear her telling me to get Nate and get out and then—
BAM!
I’m being stabbed in the head by someone with razor-tipped acrylic nails. They are poking right into my skull, trying to grab handfuls of brain, and now they are squeezing hold of it. Next to me, Nate goes crashing to the floor, landing on top of the groaning man, who stops groaning altogether and falls silent.
And then the room squishes on top of me and I think I must be on the floor too because I can feel the soft carpet like cloud beneath my cheek.
After what feels like a hundred years the pain does start to fade and it’s like waking up from a coma. I feel like one of the characters in the Mexican soaps that Bill likes to watch when he thinks no one is around. I open one eye and see Nate still curled in a ball, with his arms wrapped around his head. He is lying with his face on the half-naked man’s belly, though the half-naked man is no longer half-naked but wholly naked, his towel tangled beneath him, and he has gloopy stuff dribbling out his mouth. Nate must have knocked him unconscious when he went crashing to the floor.
I turn my head slowly, painfully, to the door and crank my ears. I scan the hallway outside. How long have we been lying here? Where is Alicia?
I roll onto my knees and shut my eyes and silently I yell her name.
But she doesn’t answer, or maybe it’s just that I can’t hear her, not through all the thick clouds of smog filling up my head. Everything is muffled. Then, in the distance – a sound.
I stagger to the door, holding my head in my hands and behind me hear Nate start to make a whimpering noise.
I press my ear to the door and squeeze my eyes shut again, trying to concentrate.
And the noise rushes in like another explosion from that weapon, peeling back layer upon layer of skin and bone until it hits me right in the centre of my head and I fall right there to the floor and burst into tears because it’s Alicia I can hear. She’s screaming so loudly it is splitting my head in two. She is screaming without making any sense. She is screaming although no one can hear her but me.
And my head is filled with images – of men holding her down. Men dressed all in black, and they’re hurting her, gripping her wrists, holding her by the ankles and the waist as she struggles against them, and they throw her gagged into a black car – I only catch glimpses as she sees it – a handle, a darkened window, a gun. And then a face.
It’s Jack.
Demos hasn’t come out and said he blames me and the thoughts in his head don’t say it either. He’s blaming the Unit. But it
is
my fault. And Nate didn’t argue with me about that as we stood outside the hotel, him still wearing the stolen bathrobe, both of us clutching our heads.
So I need to be the one to get Alicia back. Which is why I’m standing outside Jack’s house right now. If I can get inside maybe I can find something useful – like a key to the base or a password or something – anything that might help us get Alicia back.
I’ve been scanning the house for the last fifteen minutes. I’m peering tentatively through the letterbox trying to guess whether the alarm system is on or not because I do not particularly want to end up saying hello to the sidewalk, when I hear the slap of feet. I jump around.
There’s a girl wearing jogging shorts and a t-shirt and sneakers and she’s standing at the bottom of the steps to the veranda. Sweat is pouring down her face. I’m not sure if it’s the same girl that I saw in Alex’s head the other night. That girl was younger and more blurry.
‘Can I help you?’ she asks, out of breath, squinting up at me.
I do a quick mind-scan. She’s wondering who the hell I am. She decides that I look more like a Manga cartoon character than a neuroscientist, which seems like a very random judgement call.
‘You live here?’ I ask, confused, and wanting to check it actually is her – is this girl called Lila.
‘Yeah,’ she answers, wiping the sweat from her forehead and frowning at me suspiciously. ‘Can I help you?’ she asks again, more assertive this time.
I bound down the steps. ‘I think maybe you can,’ I say, ‘I was looking for Jack.’
She sighs. ‘I’m his sister.’
It
is
her! Jack didn’t send her back to London after all. Demos will be happy about this.
‘Nice to meet you, Jack’s sister,’ I say, ‘I’m Suki.’ I hold out my hand, wincing internally as I remember that’s how we got in this situation to start with. Me introducing myself. I really need to get an alias and stick with it.
‘Hi, I’m Lila,’ she says, taking my hand. ‘So, um, should I tell him you called round?’
I almost don’t hear the question because I’m focusing so hard on all the images swirling around her head, trying to make some sense of them. She’s disappointed with Jack, thinking something about a leopard not changing its spots and then I catch a glimpse of Alex. And then another glimpse – the memories of him are everywhere, overlaid like blankets – the strongest one, the most recent is of his hand on her thigh, he’s crouching looking up at her and I feel my own heart stutter in my chest. But then, interrupting all of these memories, cutting right through them, is an image of a knife hanging in mid-air, its pin-point end scraping the white of an eyeball as though about to skewer it.
And I blink at her.
She’s one of us. She’s a psy. This girl Lila, Jack’s sister, is a psy.
I haven’t let go of her hand, and she’s tugging at it now, trying to pull away and I realise I’m grinning at her like a lunatic. And then the thought comes to me – if the Unit are hunting
us,
then surely once they find out about her, they’ll be hunting Lila too?
RECRUITING JACK
Seventeen. She’s only seventeen. I don’t care what Alex says. She is still a kid. And there’s no way this is about a boy.
And if it
is
about a boy then I’m going to kill him. Forget about Lila being on the next flight back to London,
I’m
going to be on it. I let my eyes slide around the arrivals terminal, scanning faces, looking for any suspicious movements, anyone out of place. It’s automatic, I’m barely aware I’m doing it. In the years after my mum died I kept seeing her wherever I went. I’d spot a blonde woman in a crowd and my heart would leap like someone was yanking it on a string. Then a stranger would turn and my heart would plummet to the bottom of my chest as I realised all over again that my mum was gone and I was never going to see her again.
I stopped seeing my mum’s face the day I was shown a photograph of Demos. Now it’s his face I see everywhere I go.
I flex my foot and feel the comforting pressure of the gun in my ankle holster. I wish I was wearing my shoulder holster too but I figured flashing a weapon would freak out Lila as well as airport security. And besides, a gun offers a false sense of security. I wish The Unit’s weapons developers would pull their finger out and get on with whatever it is they’re developing because going up against Demos and his crew with just bullets and grenades is like going up against King Kong with a toy truncheon and I’m getting sick of trying and failing to get close to him.