Acid (3 page)

‘It is illegal for a prisoner to be removed from a secure facility without an ACID escort,’ the agent says robotically.

‘I know, but if we don’t get him to a medicentre, he’ll die!’ Dr Fisher says. ‘Please, just let us go, will you? He could no more escape in this condition than . . . than fly one of these rotos!’

‘Speak to me like that again and I’ll arrest you,’ the agent says. He turns away from us and starts speaking into his komm, requesting backup.

Dr Fisher turns too, back towards the roto. I watch as the co-pilot silently slides his door open and holds out his arms. The ACID agent is still speaking into his komm as Dr Fisher carefully unwinds me from his shoulders and the co-pilot leans out of the roto, reaching for me.

But my weight throws Dr Fisher off balance; he stumbles, and the noise of the roto isn’t enough to disguise the sound of his feet scuffing against the concrete. The ACID agent whirls. ‘STOP!’ he yells as the co-pilot drags me into the roto and hauls the door shut. I land on the seat beside him in a heap, my face pressed up against the glass, and somehow I find the strength to reach up and rip the rest of the bandage from my eyes.

So I see everything that happens next.

As the roto starts to lift, the ACID agent aims his gun
at
us. Dr Fisher leaps at him and knocks him sideways, sending the shot wide. I see them on the ground below us, struggling. Then the agent’s back on his feet, but so is Dr Fisher, and as the agent tries to fire his gun again Dr Fisher grabs him from behind, pinning his arms against his sides. He drags him to the edge of the roof and slings him off it, then steps back, his hands pressed to his mouth as the agent plummets down to the yard eight storeys below.

I stare at his rapidly dwindling figure, hardly able to breathe.

Then, from out of nowhere, pulses of white light tear through the air behind him and slam into him. He slumps forward, the electric charge crackling around him in a deadly halo before dying away. Seconds later, more ACID agents come running out of the shadows between the rotos: the first agent’s backup, arrived too late. They aim at the roto, but we’re too high.

The scream that’s been trapped inside me finally escapes. ‘NO!’

‘Shit! She’s awake!’ the co-pilot says. He turns me over roughly. ‘Don’t! It’s OK! It’s OK!’

‘Oh Christ oh Christ oh Christ oh Christ,’ I hear the pilot babbling. The horror in her voice is clear. ‘They killed Fisher, Roy. They
killed
him.’

‘Fly, goddammit!’ the co-pilot snarls.

As the roto jerks forward, I start screaming again. Panic is surging through me, my head filled with images of Dr Fisher toppling over onto the concrete, dead. The
co-pilot
pins me against the seat, telling me to calm down. I try to fight him, but there’s still too much sedative in my bloodstream.

‘I thought she was supposed to be out,’ he snarls to the pilot. He takes something out of a bag on the floor by his feet and presses it hard against my neck. A medpatch. There’s a tingling sensation. I open my mouth to scream again, but my jaw is slack.

My head lolls to the side and darkness rolls over my vision like a wave.

THE FACILITY

CHAPTER 4

13 April 2113

Somewhere in London

‘JENNA? CAN YOU
hear me? You need to wake up.’

The voice belongs to a woman. But there aren’t any female guards in our tower. Am I still in the infirmary? Maybe I got worse, and they had to bring another doctor in.

‘Jenna.’

The voice is kind, but firm. Reluctantly, I open my eyes.

I’m not in my cell. I’m not in the infirmary, either. I’m lying in a bed in a small, windowless room I’ve never seen before, wearing a pair of pale blue pyjamas, a blanket tucked across my legs and waist. My arm’s hooked up to a drip again, and there’s a mask across my mouth and nose pushing cool air into my nostrils. The room’s lit by harsh strip lights that bleach the walls and ceiling to a glaring white.

I gaze at the drip in my arm and, like a blow, everything comes back to me: Creep, my collapse, Dr Fisher trying to sedate me and taking me up onto the roof, the
ACID
agent appearing out of the shadows behind us . . .

I sit up with a gasp, tearing the mask from my face, and wince as pain stabs through my hip. I’m about to yank the drip out when a hand lands on my arm.

‘Jenna, don’t panic. You’re quite safe.’

It’s the voice I heard before. I turn my head, and see a woman sitting in a chair beside the bed. She’s small, plump, the mass of wavy brown hair cascading over her shoulders held away from her face by two silver clips. She pushes her round, gold-framed glasses up her nose and smiles at me. ‘I’m Mel Morrow.’

‘Where am I?’ I ask.

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you. But like I said, you’re quite safe. ACID won’t find you here.’ She pats my arm. Then I hear footsteps outside the door. ‘Ah,’ Mel says. ‘Here’s Jon.’

A few moments later a tall, skinny black man, wearing what looks like a doctor’s coat, comes into the room. He smiles at me too. ‘Oh, good,’ he says. ‘You’re back with us. Do you know you’ve been unconscious for a full day?’

I look at him through narrowed eyes. Who the hell are these people? And why are they being so
nice
to me? ‘Is this a medicentre?’ I say.

‘No,’ Mel says as Jon comes over to the bed. When he tries to check the needle in the crook of my elbow, I jerk my arm away.

‘It’s all right,’ he tells me. ‘I
am
a doctor.’ I continue to glare at him. ‘Please. I only want to take a quick look at it.’

Grudgingly, I hold out my arm. ‘Is it OK to check your temperature, blood pressure and heart rate?’ he asks, holding up a little scanner. ‘You had rather a strong reaction to the drugs you were given.’

‘You mean the sedatives?’ I say.

‘No, the drugs Alex Fisher bribed one of the guards to give you,’ Jon replies as he runs the scanner over my throat to measure my pulse, holds it against my inner arm to take my blood pressure and presses a nodule at one end into my ear, which beeps as it reads my temperature.

I stare at him. ‘Doctor Fisher did what?’

‘We had to get you out of there,’ Jon says, tucking the scanner back into his coat pocket. ‘Making it seem as if you’d fallen ill meant you could be taken up to the infirmary, ready to leave once the riots were underway.’

‘Were . . . were they deliberate too?’ I say, my voice sounding distant and hollow in my ears.

Mel nods. ‘Yes. Alex arranged for something to be added to the food.’

So that’s why the stew had smelled so bad.

‘But Doctor Fisher . . .’ I say. ‘He’s—’

And for the first time, it really hits me. Dr Fisher died. For
me
. To save
me
.

Why would he do something like that? Why would
anyone
?

‘Yes,’ Mel says, her face sobering. ‘ACID weren’t supposed to arrive quite so soon.’

I stare at my hands, lying on top of the blanket that covers me. They’re trembling.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Mel continues. ‘Alex knew the risk he was taking. We all did.’

‘But why?’ I say, looking up at her again. ‘I’m supposed to be in jail. I killed my—’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jon says, cutting me off. ‘We can’t tell you anything yet.’

‘You
have
to!’ I say. ‘You can’t just tell me something like that and expect me not to want to know why!’

This time, it’s Mel who cuts me off. ‘All that matters right now is that you recover,’ she says, before I can ask any more questions. ‘You’re going to have a lot to take in over the next few days; it’s important that you regain your strength. Try to get a little more sleep, and one of us’ll be back in an hour or two with some food.’

She gets up and she and Jon leave, closing the door softly behind them. I hear the snick of the lock.

I tear the drip out of my arm, barely noticing the sting of the needle as it pulls away from my skin, and with a thin line of blood trickling down my arm I jump out of bed and run to the door, the pain in my hip flaring before subsiding to a low throb. I try the door handle, rattling it, but the door doesn’t budge.

I’m locked in.

I pound on it with my fists. ‘Hey!’ I shout. ‘HEY!’

There’s no answer. Nobody comes.

I step back to take a flying sideways kick at it, but dizziness rolls over me. Feeling sick and shaky, I stagger back over to the bed and slump back against the pillows, closing my eyes and taking shallow breaths until the
room
stops spinning. Then I wipe the blood off my arm with a corner of the blanket and stare up at the ceiling tiles, trying to think. It’s like I’m trying to swim up from the bottom of a very deep pool and running out of oxygen. My thoughts are sluggish; they refuse to connect.

None of this makes sense.

I remember the pain in my hip. It’s still there, a low twinge like toothache. I pull down the waistband of the pyjama bottoms and see a neat, centimetre-wide red scar across my left hipbone. The hipbone where my spytag was embedded.

Not any more, apparently.

And what’s on my head? I hadn’t noticed before – I was too busy trying to figure out what was going on – but it feels like I’ve got hair. I sit back up, tangle my fingers in it and give it a hard yank, hissing as pain shoots through my scalp. It’s real. What the—?

I look around the room for a mirror, but there isn’t one. Dragging a chunk of it in front of my face, I see it’s a dark red. It’s cut to jaw length in a bob that swishes around my chin when I shake my head. I’ve even got a fringe.

But I’ve only been unconscious for a day. How did they get my hair to grow back so quickly?

For some reason, the fact that I have hair freaks me out more than anything. I can’t stay here. I’m not staying here. I look down at the pyjamas. How far will I get in them, and without any shoes? And what if ACID are looking for me? Assuming this lot
aren’t
ACID.

I don’t spend the next hour sleeping. I spend it
planning
. And when Mel and Jon return – Mel carrying a tray with a covered bowl, a plate of crackers, a plastic spoon and a cup containing some orange liquid – I’m ready.

‘Could I use the bathroom?’ I say as Mel sets the tray down on the chair beside the bed.

‘Yes, of course,’ Mel says.

‘And could I have something to put on my feet? They’re freezing.’

‘Slippers first or bathroom first?’ Jon asks in a brisk tone. He doesn’t appear to notice I’ve taken my drip out yet.

‘Slippers, please,’ I say, tucking my legs up underneath me as if my feet really
are
cold (they’re not). He nods and leaves the room. When he returns a few minutes later he’s carrying a pair of soft lace-up shoes. ‘No slippers, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘Will these do?’

Will they do? They’re
perfect
. It’s all I can do to keep from grinning as I slip them onto my feet and knot the laces as tight as I can.

Then Jon
does
notice the drip. ‘Oh, Jenna, what have you done?’ he says, frowning at my arm, which now has a black-purple bruise where I ripped the needle out.

‘It was itching,’ I say.

‘It was only fluids,’ Mel says. ‘And they’d nearly all gone. She’ll be OK if she eats and drinks something.’

Jon’s still frowning disapprovingly at me, but all he says is, ‘I suppose so.’

‘Come on, then, I’ll take you to the bathroom,’ Mel
says
. As I climb off the bed again, she holds out an arm. ‘Hang onto me if you like. And if you feel dizzy, let me know straight away. The bathroom’s not that close, I’m afraid.’

I
am
dizzy, although it’s not as bad as before. I wonder if I should eat something before I do this. But changing my mind about the bathroom now would make them suspicious for sure. ‘I’m fine,’ I say, putting my shoulders back and my head up.

We leave the room and I follow her along a series of corridors that turn at sudden right angles – no windows here either, although there are plenty of doors. I wonder if there are other people like me behind them: people lying in beds and hooked up to drips; people who aren’t meant to be here. Eventually, we reach one with a holosign on it that says
LADIES
.