That was odd . . . One of the side doors was open and two men were moving in and out. But what was weird was that they weren’t construction workers or clean-up guys. They weren’t wearing protective overalls, respirators, masks, hard hats or even gloves. They were doctors. And the open door didn’t reveal the dingy, unlit interior of a derelict building but the bright clean interior of a functioning unit.
What was going on? Why would anyone be working there?
Maybe the warning notices were out of date? Or maybe they never related to the whole North Wing building?
But as a Guardian, Kaspar always had to consider less innocent explanations. Criminals using the building as a hideout? Or a drugs lab? Or terrorists scavenging nuclear waste in order to build a dirty bomb? Hell! What if there was something bad going on over there, this close to Council members?
Kaspar needed to get closer, to get a good look inside before he informed anyone else. He really didn’t need the embarrassment of calling for another full Guardian raid only to discover two amorous doctors enjoying a private moment. He scraped out some more soil from around the roots of the melon plant, then lay down and wriggled his way through the plants until he cleared them and was on the other side. The two doctors had gone but they had left the door open. It wouldn’t stay that way for long. Kaspar sprinted over to the old building, covering one hundred metres in less than twelve seconds. He caught the heavy door just before it swung shut, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. Until he found out what was going on, he couldn’t afford to be seen. Strange. He noticed that although the door was old, the digital keypad on it was fairly new. Sliding past it into the building, he immediately felt and heard the industrial air conditioning.
So much for the North Wing being abandoned.
Senses on high alert, Kaspar peered through the glass panel in the first door on the left. The vast room was empty of both people and standard hospital furniture. Instead, it had a whole wall filled floor to ceiling with large drawers, each of which looked big enough to store a body.
A morgue.
Kaspar shuddered. He’d never liked morgues, and after getting Dillon’s take on post-mortem romance, he liked them even less. The door had a datapad beside it, set into the wall. Kaspar swiped his fingers across it, only to be confronted by a series of numbers and names that meant nothing to him. He made his way to the second room. He peered through the glass panel again but had to duck down quickly. The two doctors were in there. Fortunately they were too busy to spot him, but this room seemed to be the same as the first. One of the drawers was open and the two were peering in. Kaspar ducked beneath the glass panel in the door and headed down the corridor. The third room was the same, as was the fourth, and the fifth. Each room was full of body cabinets, some against the walls while the majority were placed back to back in columns throughout the room. Each door had a datapad beside it, filled with virtual page after page of numbers and names or – more often than not – the word ‘Unknown’.
How many bodies do they have here? thought Kaspar.
This old building wasn’t derelict at all. It was air-conditioned, spotlessly clean and full to the rafters with neatly filed corpses. So why all the secrecy? He flicked through the datapad outside the room at the end of the long corridor. The numbers . . . were they dates? Yes, they had to be. All the dates on this datapad were recent, within the last three months. He needed to get a closer look . . .
Only just suppressing his natural instinct to avoid dead bodies, Kaspar slipped into the room, carefully shutting the door behind him. Apart from a faint but constant buzzing noise, it was quiet inside. And at least it didn’t smell like a morgue. Just a standard hospital smell. He approached the wall of drawers and peered at the closest one. Near the handle there were a cluster of LEDs, presumably to show the status of the refrigeration. Under them was a digital label with a long central filing index reference. Kaspar pulled tentatively at the handle and the drawer slid out smoothly to its full extent with barely a sound.
He was right. There was a body inside.
But it wasn’t dead.
25
The occupant of the drawer wasn’t a corpse but a patient. This one was a man, naked and fully plumbed in with tubes, catheters, drips and electrodes attached to various parts of his body. He was motionless apart from the slow rise and fall of his chest, but his eyes were open and his eyeballs were scanning rapidly back and forth – like someone in a dream. But there was something strange about his eyes. Kaspar bent down for a closer look, only to recoil, shocked. The man’s eyes were open and would remain so, permanently. He had no eyelids.
Looking down the body, there were numerous fresh scars where there had obviously been major surgery. Kaspar was about to close the drawer again when something made him walk down to the man’s feet and look at him the right way up.
A shock of recognition made Kaspar gasp. This was the black guy he’d encountered outside the level three comms node in Wissant Avenue. What had happened to him? Why was he in such a state?
During the attack, Kaspar had knocked the guy out cold. But he would have sworn that the man was completely uninjured when the medics picked him up. Now he had scars everywhere.
And what the hell had happened to his eyelids?
Kaspar slid the drawer closed and looked at the long number. Now it made some sense. The first bit of the number consisted of a date and a time – about an hour after his encounter with the Insurgent. And the rest of the number? Kaspar had a hunch. He activated his CommLink, switched it to data mode and said, ‘864 Wissant Avenue.’
The screen of his HUD immediately displayed the quickest route for getting there and also displayed its exact coordinates. The coordinates matched the rest of the digits on the drawer.
Kaspar checked the labels on the front of the other drawers surrounding him. One had almost the same numbers on it. Kaspar opened the drawer. It was the second guy from Wissant Avenue that he’d knocked out but he was the same state. Tubes everywhere, scars all over his body and no eyelids. Kaspar checked some of the other drawers. A number had earlier dates. Quite a few were from the date of the Academy’s graduation ceremony. These drawers contained the Insurgents from the attack on the Academy. But why were they all in medical stasis? Why hadn’t they been shipped off to the maximum security holding facility?
Curious, he pulled open another drawer. A woman this time, but apart from the gender it was exactly the same story. Tubes, multiple scars, rapid eye movements and no eyelids.
What is it with the eyelids? Kas wondered. Could it be some kind of secret side effect of being zapped?
Kaspar thought back to the attack. Gina and Mikey had caught a guy who had tried to escape by jumping in the lake, and rather than risk him drowning when they zapped him they had jumped in after him and wrestled him out of the water next to the statue of Virtue Triumphant.
Kaspar used the zoom facility on his CommLink to locate the statue, and its coordinates appeared. He scanned the room for a drawer with the appropriate date, time and location.
‘Eureka!’ He found the drawer he wanted and pulled it open. But his elation turned to confusion as he looked at the man. Kaspar shut the drawer slowly. He knew from his friends that not only had this man been uninjured when he was picked up, but he’d been conscious too.
So how the hell did he end up here, scarred, on life support, and with no eyelids?
On his way out, Kaspar looked into a couple of the other rooms. They were all the same. Insurgents neatly stacked from floor to ceiling. Some of them had dates going back thirty years, and not one eyelid between them.
26
Kaspar was sitting on bone-dry grass. He stared off into the distance. He loved it up here so much – it provided the best view in the whole world. A stream meandered past the back of the cottage. To the far north lay more glens and hills, but a turn of his head and beyond the horizon . . .
That was where they resided.
He made no attempt to dampen down th
e burning hatred gnawing away at him.
It shouldn’t’ve been this easy to feel like this about people he didn’t know, but with each passing moment the feeling grew rather than lessened. They didn’t understand peace and they certainly didn’t understand compromise. Theirs was an ‘if you’re not one of us, to hell with you’ philosophy. Children, women, newborn babes, it made no difference.
Kaspar deliberately turned away to try and drink in the serenity of the cottage and the surrounding greenery. But his eyes were constantly drawn back towards the horizon. And like a fire being stoked, his hatred flared and grew. Moments passed before he realized what he was doing, clutching at the grass beneath his hands and pulling it out of the ground in clumps.
His hands . . .
Those weren’t his hands.
The hands he was looking down at were smaller, more feminine and considerably paler than his own brown skin. But Kaspar barely had time to notice and wonder before a tremor shook the ground beneath him. This one was bad, worse than any of the others that had gone before.
And it was getting worse.
Kaspar leaped up. He had to get off this hill. Get away. But to where?
He raced down towards the cottage. Nowhere was safe once they started running their experiments. Sometimes, if they were lucky, the ground only shook for a few hours. But sometimes, and more often than not of late, the aftershocks lasted for days. Crops, dwellings, people had all disappeared once the fissures in the earth opened wide to roar in protest. And the strength of the last few tremors had shaken the cottage to its foundations, causing plaster and chunks of the wall to fall. The thatch of the roof had split in places and no longer sat true on the cottage walls. The numerous cracks and gaps in the walls and roof meant the wind howled around the cottage like a banshee, and when it rained they had precious little protection.
Lost homes, lost lives, lost souls – all thanks to them.
One day . . . one day, he would make them pay . . .
27
Kaspar had never been one for dreaming. While his schoolmates had enjoyed or endured vivid dreams of surreal intensity, he had never been able to remember anything in the morning. Once or twice he had had the standard naked-in-public nightmare when a big exam or something stressful was coming up, but for the most part, nothing. All that had changed with Dillon’s death. Every night now, he had vivid dreams that employed every one of his senses. Intense, three-dimensional, surround-sound dreams. And the dreams weren’t just about Grandma and the cottage.
He never saw the rocket being fired, but he saw it fly towards the hovercar – and he saw and felt the exact moment it exploded. Every sight and sound was seared on his brain. He might have expected to relive the death of his best friend, but it didn’t end there. Now the floodgates had opened, he dreamed of places he’d never been and people he’d never met and things he had never done – the peace of the idyllic cottage, the sense of freedom experienced while exploring the Donadara Forest, enduring with many others the cramped, unbearably hot living conditions in the Badlands, raids by Guardians Kaspar didn’t recognize who used battering rams to break down doors that were already flimsy and rotting. The images were relentless.
Nor was it confined to sleep. He had what could only be described as mini-hallucinations all the time now. He would have suspected a brain tumour but his medical scans would have picked up on that. In particular, the smell of Grandma’s bread was so intense that he had taken to wandering the market district in his off-duty hours, trying each family bakery he came to in the hope of recapturing the taste. None were exactly right.
On his next day off, Kaspar was strolling along a little side street just north of the Semler Bridge munching a mellisse croissant that came closer than most to the remembered smell and taste when he came across a small dance studio and gymnasium. The gym was mostly glass-fronted, revealing a foyer dominated by a large reception desk, behind which sat a woman in her twenties wearing a black T-shirt with the name of the gym written upon it in large white letters – LURIE’S SPA AND GYM. Kaspar stared at the place, knowing for certain that he’d never seen it before. Yet it was so strangely familiar, he felt compelled to go in. What was that about? Moments later he stood in front of the receptionist with a three-quarters eaten pastry in his hand and no idea what to do next.
‘Hello,’ said the receptionist, eyeing the croissant with something between suspicion and lust. ‘May I help you?’
‘Hi,’ replied Kaspar, shoving the last morsel into his mouth to give himself time to think. His eyes found a price list on the wall behind her, and he chose the first thing on the list. ‘Massage, please.’
A wave of panic swept over him as he realized that the word massage could cover a multitude of things. But the menu also mentioned martial arts classes and aerobics – so it was probably legit. The receptionist took his money and gave him a towel before showing him through a door behind her.
‘Room number three,’ she said cheerily and left him to it.
Kaspar ambled down the brightly lit corridor. Holographic posters extolling the benefits of a healthy diet and lots of exercise lined the walls, their images changing every few seconds, the messages variations on a theme. He entered room three, which was halfway along the corridor. Thank goodness it wasn’t as brightly lit as the corridor, which was almost blinding in its intensity. Inside the room, there were posters of the musculo-skeletal system on the wall and a smell of liniment that the air freshener couldn’t quite mask. Kaspar got undressed before wrapping the towel around his waist and lying face down on a professional treatment table with the appropriate face-shaped gap at one end.
‘What the hell am I doing here?’ he asked himself again as he positioned his face over the hole which gave him a fine view of the dark wood floor.
Less than a minute later, his masseur arrived, or rather his masseuse. All he could see was a pair of sensible tennis shoes, two rather shapely legs and the hem of a crisp, white, knee-length overall.
‘Is there anything in particular you’d like me to concentrate on?’ she asked.
‘Er, my left shoulder blade area?’ Kaspar said tentatively.
Here we go. The moment of truth.
All he could do was hope this place was strictly above board. The slightest hint of impropriety and Voss would be down on him like a Badlands avalanche. A firm, warm hand came to rest gently on the point of his left shoulder and traced the outline of his shoulder blade, exploring the muscles. Kaspar began to relax. This was the real thing; this girl knew her joints.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked as her other hand joined in the ballet of rubbing and pressing that was starting to spread warmth throughout his shoulder.
‘Kaspar,’ he replied lazily. She was good, and he was already starting to drift off. The nagging ache that he’d had ever since his fight in the desert was receding and he was back at the cottage by the stream.
‘You have a lot of minor injuries,’ she said as she continued, expanding across the spine to his other shoulder. ‘Are you an athlete?’
‘No, I’m a Guardian,’ he replied.
The hands paused momentarily. ‘A Guardian? Then why come here? I thought you had extensive gymnasium and medical facilities at your barracks?’
‘Oh, we do, but I just like to get out of there from time to time and explore the town. Besides, you have softer hands than Carlo. He could strangle a wildebeest.’
The hands resumed their ballet, working the muscle groups in his neck. Her thumbs pressed expertly alongside his cervical spine while her fingers inched up by his larynx.
‘Why did you pick this place, may I ask?’
‘I dunno really. I was just passing and eating a mellisse croissant when I saw the sign.’ He was really sleepy now. The faint sound of Grandma singing him a lullaby filled his mind.
‘Mellisse croissant? They can be very bad for you if the mellisse berries aren’t picked at the right time.’ Her voice was calm, her hands worked deeper.
??
?Uh-huh,’ he mumbled, more than half asleep. ‘But all of a sudden I love ’em. Can’t get enough of them. What’s your name?’
The hands stopped again.
‘Rhea,’ she said softly.
A moment’s pause as his brain processed the name, then the room suddenly clicked into focus. But too late. While the mental fog was clearing, Rhea leaped onto the table and straddled him, using the weight of her hips to pin down his waist. Her arms slipped around his neck into a full choke hold, cutting off the flow of blood to his brain. Her upper body pressed down on his back while her legs wrapped around the supports of the table, reducing his ability to wriggle free.
An expert could strangle you unconscious in less than five seconds – and Kaspar already knew she was an expert. He couldn’t bring his arms into play. He was face down so he couldn’t kick, and her legs wrapped around the table meant he couldn’t slide off the table onto the floor. Instead, the world grew faint, and the lights around him dimmed. He was seconds away from passing out, or worse . . . After the initial panic, it didn’t feel so bad, though. He felt relieved, unburdened, like he wasn’t actually playing the game any more, but watching from the stands and able to enjoy the spectacle.
He was past and present, everyone and no one.
He was both Guardian and Insurgent.
He saw Brother Simon in conversation with his mum.
And there before him, standing stock still as they faced him, were thousands of people dressed in white, and all staring at him with lidless eyes in unsmiling faces. Kaspar was desperate to look away, but he couldn’t. The eyes pulsed with an intense, white, blinding light, which grew brighter and brighter until the light was all he could see, and then . . . nothing.