Lionboy (4 page)

Then Winner stopped laughing, and his jaw fell open a bit to one side.

“Did she just say
we’re
stupid?” he said.

Skinny snivelly Sid stopped snickering to think. It was quite hard work for him, thinking. You could tell by the look on his face, as if he badly needed to go to the bathroom.

“Yeah,” he said at last.

Winner screwed up his face and said a rude word. He didn’t like being called stupid at all. Sid was used to it—from Winner, usually.

“Yeah, well, we’re here now,” said Aneba. “And yes, we weren’t careful enough. We’ll just have to be a bit cleverer from now on.”

“Not much chance for cleverness, while we’re locked in here, being taken Lord knows where,” said Magdalen.

“You know what I mean,” said Aneba.

“Yeah,” said Magdalen. They were both thinking the same thing, though neither of them said it: Charlie. Where was he? What was he going to do without them? They were going to have to be clever to get back to him in one piece, as soon as possible.

Aneba squeezed Magdalen’s hand.

“Sweet,” sneered Winner, the other side of the two-way mirror.

“Yeah,” said Sid.

“Courage,” whispered Aneba.

“Oh, all right,” said Magdalen. “Let me just dip into the handy bag of it that I take with me everywhere.” She was cranky because she was scared.

“Come on,” whispered Aneba.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “I’m just . . .”

“Me too,” said Aneba.

“Aneba,” she said. “Why would Martha and Rafi do this? And who are these guys? What’s this about?”

“I’m going through in my head what it’s not,” he said. “I haven’t got to what it is yet. Or why.”

“I just don’t know . . .” she whispered. She was a scientist. She was used to knowing things, discovering them, recognizing them. She was almost as annoyed about being taken by surprise as she was angry at having been stolen away. “It can only be because of . . . I suppose . . . but why? Why now? And who?”

“I think this is a submarine,” said Aneba suddenly.

“What!” cried Magdalen.

They looked at each other. So much for escaping.

Aneba was hitting his fists gently against each other. He looked up. “And . . .” he said, and went and peered closely at the brown glass wall.

He stepped back again, and then, suddenly, he stuck his tongue out.

A muffled expostulation came from the other side.

Magdalen gasped. “Really?” she said, her eyebrows flying up her forehead. She moved behind him and made rude waggly donkey-ear gestures behind his head.

They giggled.

It didn’t really help, though. Not in a practical way.

CHAPTER 4

A
round three or four in the morning, in the real dark when even the slugs and the night creatures have gone back to sleep and before the birds have woken, Charlie leaped up with a start.

Rats! How much time had he lost?

The apartment was quiet. His bedroom door was closed.

Charlie tiptoed over to it. Locked—on a latch. Well, that was easy: He got his ID card from his bag and slid it gently into the crack of the door. Jake at the fountain had taught him how to do that years ago. A little twitch of the wrist and—bingo. The latch jumped out of its slot, and the door eased open.

Dark in the grimy hallway.

Breathing sounds from the other bedroom: steady, heavy, male breathing. Heavy dog breathing filling up the gaps.

Stay asleep, you big lugs, Charlie urged, inside his head.

His bag over his shoulder, he crept to the apartment door. Locked: two bolts, easily slid, and a double lock needing a key.

Charlie peered through the dim light, and then almost laughed out loud. Here was the key, on the hall shelf. Rafi obviously thought him totally useless. Well, he’d show him.

He slid silently through to the communal landing of the housing tower and let the door shut behind him. Rather than call the noisy elevator, he opened the glass door to the stairwell and scampered down, down, down, down, flight after flight until he was giddy. He stopped to get his breath and his balance back: His head was spinning. Outside he could see the cold gray that begins to light the sky before dawn, and the morning star hanging like a distant gold coin against the gray.

By the time he got to the bottom and out into the yard, crimson streaks were shooting up the sky, gray was fading to let through a beautiful clear blue, and a few strands of white cloud blew like flags high, high up. First hurdle crossed, and it was going to be a beautiful day. Charlie lifted his nose, caught the river smell, and started to run south, following the sweet damp smell that would take him to the river and to the sea.

 

He was starving when he got in reach of the Thames. In front of him was one of the pleasurebanks, which during the afternoon and evening would be bouncing with rides and games and stalls selling fluffed sugar and sweet fruit. Now it was silent, the rides wrapped up in canvas against the damp, and the pleasurebank people all still asleep, or beginning to fry up their bacon for the new day. The smell tormented Charlie’s nose, which actually began to twitch. “Bacon sandwich,” he murmured.

So he skirted the pleasurebanks, feeling rather grown-up (because his normal reaction would be, I want to go on the rides! I want to go!), and moved east toward the rising sun. He started along a towpath lined with pretty houseboats: He could hear the people inside yawning, and see them popping up out of their painted hatches to stretch in the morning air. He kept hurriedly along. He didn’t want people to remember that they had seen him. Rafi would be waking up. The “humans” of whom Petra had spoken might have friends or helpers. Charlie pulled his head in and scurried on like a spider along a wall.

It was only another half hour or so before he was back on the riversides near where he lived. Ahead of him were the ruins, left over from the times when thousands more people lived here, before they fled the car fumes and treachery of city life for the New Communities (Private Gated Village Communities, Space Communities, Empire Opportunity Communities—all kinds of promises of a safer, cleaner life). Along the edge, the muddy flats of low tide, he could see the little fishing boats. Better still, he could see a shimmer of heat rising from near the shore end of the jetty and hear the low crackle of a grill, and smell the unmistakable smell of a riverman’s breakfast: eel, gasper, and sparrowfish, by the sniff of it. Charlie leaped over the little wall from the towpath to the fisherguys’ territory, landed in a shallow splat of salty mud, and ambled over to the jetty.

He recognized the fisherguy at the grill: It was Mr. Ubsworth, Steve’s dad. Mr. Ubsworth looked a lot like a fish himself—long and grayish pink and wet-looking. Behind him was a large canvas with a small mountain of slithery silver fish: last night’s catch. Mr. Ubsworth had a big old eel up on the table and was cleaning it for grilling, scraping the silver skin and crimson innards off the table into an old sack. A skinny brown cat was picking around it.

Mr. Ubsworth looked up and saw him. Too late to be discreet. Oh well.

“Morning, Mr. Ubsworth, sir!” called Charlie cheerfully.

“Hey, Charlieboy!” returned Mr. Ubsworth. Then, “Early!” he commented. Charlie agreed. “Hungry?” Mr. Ubsworth wondered. Charlie agreed again. Two minutes later he was wrapping his mouth around a toasted eel sandwich, buttered up with lemon and pepper, and he’d never tasted anything better. The eels here were huge—eight feet long, some of them. Their meat was more like chicken than fish. Some of the schoolkids said snake tasted like eel, but Charlie had never eaten snake. “Africans don’t eat them,” his father had said. “Like the English don’t eat snails.” So Charlie’s dad ate snails, and his mum ate snake, and Charlie didn’t eat either. When it came to it, he didn’t actually want to. Give him a good eel sandwich any day.

Mr. Ubsworth had a cup of tea ready too.

“Where you off to, boy?” asked Mr. Ubsworth.

“Lessons,” said Charlie, lying automatically.

“Aye,” said Mr. Ubsworth. He carried on with his cleaning, pausing only to take Charlie’s diram, until a group of other fisherguys came up from the water’s edge.

“Be going along then,” said Charlie. “Thank you.”

“Aye,” said Mr. Ubsworth.

 

Rafi did wake up. Troy was whining and slathering at him, so he pulled his head out from under his pillow. He listened for Charlie. Hearing nothing, he leaped lightly from his bed and looked into Charlie’s room.

First, he was just surprised. It hadn’t occurred to him that Charlie would have the guts to run off.

Then he was angry. His lips went thin, and his face grew hard. Turning from the empty bed, he kicked the dog. “Could’ve bliddy woken, couldn’t you?” he snarled. “Barked, or something? Or is that too hard for you?” Troy yelped and skittered across the floor in a way that suggested he’d been kicked often before.

Rafi grabbed his phone and without even thinking started punching in a number so he could shout at someone—when he realized that he couldn’t. If he told his people that he had let the boy escape, he would be humiliated. This could not get out—the Chief Executive must not hear about this. Even when you got everything right, it was tough enough being a teenage criminal—getting people to believe you could do stuff, making them have faith in your abilities. But mistakes—mistakes were out of the question. His reputation was at stake here. Nobody—
nobody
—was going to have the chance to call him a stupid kid.

That bliddy Charlie!

He thought fast. Then he called all the contacts he had for friends of Aneba and Magdalen. None of them had heard from Charlie. They all thought he’d gone off on a sudden trip with his parents, to start their new job in a toxic post-flood area where communications were very bad but they’d be in touch in due course and not to worry. The reason they thought this was because Rafi had spent the previous afternoon on Magdalen’s computer telling them so, by e-mail.

Rafi had done his job too well.

He couldn’t send Sid and Winner after Charlie because they had their hands full on the submarine.

So, what—should he call the police?

He laughed. And then thought: Well, why not?

But he didn’t. Rafi knew which side he was on.

“So, Troy,” he said. “Shall we go for a run?”

The kid couldn’t get far. Troy would track him down, the little rat.

 

As Charlie shouldered his bag after breakfast, he caught sight of a flick of furry brown tail out of the corner of his eye. He looked around. Again, a brown flick. It was beckoning to him—directing him back onto the towpath. With a gesture of thanks to Mr. Ubsworth, Charlie jumped over the little wall again and saw there in front of him as he landed a very proud-looking cat’s bottom, tail waving erect above it as it sauntered away from him. Of course he followed it.

Behind a hedge, out of sight, the cat turned around. Charlie didn’t recognize it.

“So ’ow’s you gettin’ dahn river?” it said briefly. Charlie was used to the quick, brusque way these cats talked, but anyone else might think they were a bit rude.

“Jump a ship, I thought,” said Charlie.

“Funny time of day for stowing away,” said the cat. “Follow me.”

Charlie followed—back along the towpath for a mile or so farther east, then, when they reached the marina, across the larger pool where the pleasureboats lived (again Charlie felt a pang of yearning, to go out on a pleasureboat, with the bunting flapping and the sun shining, and they could eat cherry sherbet and dive off the stern) into the darker, smaller water-yard of the riverpolice. Nearest the entrance was a riverpolice launch; polished wooden deck, extra large engine, riverpolice insignia on the side and a policeguy fast asleep in the cockpit.

“Go in quietly,” whispered the cat. “Curl up in the bow on the anchor chain. ’E’ll be leaving for Greenwich soon on his patrol. As soon as ’e wakes up. He was drunk last night”—here the cat took on a look of disdain—“and ’e’ll be in a rush when he sees ’e’s late. At Greenwich he’ll tie up and go to the pub. Soon as ’e’s gorn, orf you go and catch yourself a seaship. They’re ’eaded acrorss the channel. France.”

“France!” he exclaimed. France! He didn’t know what he thought about that. France!

“Get on,” said the cat impatiently. “Ain’t got all day.”

Charlie would have to climb right over the policeguy to get to the bow. He had to step over him without waking him, then sneak down the companionway into the boat and along to the end. It was all right for cats—they could leap so lightly, it was almost like flying. But a boy makes a thump when he lands.

Charlie edged himself slowly and carefully along the railings that lined the deck, bypassing the policeguy, and was able to sneak past and swiftly down the stairs.

“Whisht!” hissed the cat, and Charlie heard a sort of rumbling snore-y noise, a rumbly, creaking, yawning, groaning sound that could only be the noise of a hungover policeguy slightly disturbed by something and waking up in the open air, on a boat, and feeling stiff and stupid and cold and uncomfortable. Charlie hurtled into the bow, folded himself up in the dark as tiny as he could, and lay still. He could smell engine oil, canvas, turpentine. The anchor chain was cold and hard, coiled beneath him. Never mind. The policeguy, just as the cat had predicted, was already rubbing his head, cursing, and trying to start up the engine. As soon as the noise of the engine was covering any noise
he
might make, Charlie positioned himself so that he could peer out of the anchor’s chain-holes, and settled in to think about Rafi.