Mind Blind (15 page)

Wires on my chest.

Needles in the backs of my hands.

Lights burning my closed eyes.

I couldn’t build a wall.

I wouldn’t fight her off.

I just had to bear it.

Coward. Wimp. Loser.

I’d been imagining cartoon scientists wearing big glasses and white coats, in expensively equipped labs, for half an hour.

And he still hadn’t lifted a finger.

I needed a rest. But if I stopped, could I start again?

I pulled my vision out into a wide shot. Not just Bain in a chair, but his whole family, in a long line, like butterflies pinned onto a collector’s table. All being experimented on.

He groaned and whimpered. It was the first noise he’d made apart from stuttering breathing since he’d threatened to break my neck.

Then his arm went limp. He’d fainted.
Wimp
.

I let go. Now I could take a rest. I shifted away, nearer the aisle, and grabbed the water and chocolate.

I checked the time on the clock at the front of the bus. We weren’t due in until late afternoon, so I could re-run that experiment horror film a dozen more times. That still wouldn’t pay him back one millionth of the pain he’d caused Mum and Dad and me.

I tried to take another bite of chocolate, but I was holding an empty wrapper. I’d eaten a whole Wispa in two bites. I was shaking.

Could I do it again?

I looked at him under the blue-ish bus light. He’d bitten his lip. He was bleeding.

Viv hadn’t bled when she died. But her blood would have drained out at the autopsy.

I wondered how he’d enjoy a post-mortem scene. Or the dissection of a living brain.

He moaned and stirred.

Could I do it again?

I thought about him wrapping himself in my sister’s death, and thought,
hell
yeah, I can do this all day!

I grabbed his hand again.

She dragged me up out of unconsciousness and started again.

Steel tables. Blood-pressure cuffs. The sound of taps dripping and the smell of sharp chemicals.

I realised I was holding her hand as tightly as she was holding mine, like I couldn’t let go of my punishment. But I wasn’t going to pull away. I wasn’t going to fight or run. I was going to take it, all day if I had to.

Then, past the experiments she was placing carefully into my head, I sensed a hunter, a searcher.

Waiting. Watching.

I forced my eyes open. Through a blur of tears, I saw the bus was moving slowly, caught between lorries.

A traffic jam.

Past the nausea and shaking, past the wires and test tubes, I sensed them again.

Hunters, ahead of us. Stuck on this road or waiting just off the motorway? Checking all the buses as they went past?

She was pressing against me. Clinging to my hand. Taking her time. Building elaborate experiments, her scientists using Latin words I couldn’t understand, chanting scientific magic over my head.

I had to escape from this imaginary laboratory, or when we got closer, the hunters would recognise my overreactions.

I didn’t want to fight her, but I had to.

I couldn’t move. My body really believed I was strapped down, immobile in a lab.

I tried to move my fingers, to break her grip.

But she just had the scientists move nearer, talk louder,
wave more equipment. Sensors on my forehead, lights in my eyes, thermometer in my mouth.

“No!” I spat. “No! Stop!”

“Yes! At last, you’re fighting!”

She leant over me, pushing at my chest.

My brain lit up on a screen. Cells under a microscope. Slices of me, magnified in her eyes.

“No!”

The bus lurched forward.

I lurched too. Shoved at her. Pushed her off me.

I gulped a clean breath of reality while I could.

She pounced and grabbed me again.

I fended her off with my elbows, safely jacketed in leather.

“Lucy!” I croaked, “No, not now. My family –”

“Oh yes,” she hissed, “your family too, all of you, in a laboratory.”

She had my hand again.

“No!” I tried to say that my family were nearby, but I couldn’t get the words out. She was pushing me through the swinging door of a lab, blinding me with science.

I couldn’t go under again. Not now. I had to protect us.

I dragged the picture of the lab from her head. Through her neck, her arm, her hand, I dragged the picture right into me and −

Blew it up.

All those Bunsen burners and test tubes and computers. I took the gas, the electricity, the sparks, the chemicals and I blew it all up.

One massive white-hot explosion in my head.

The explosion blew me out of the black chair and blew the scientists out of windows and doors.

It blew Lucy into the aisle of the bus.

It blew me out of the bus seat.

Suddenly I was crouched on the floor, hard up against the
seat in front.

She was on her arse in the aisle.

Just as our hands were torn apart by the force of the explosion, I saw it happen in her head too. We both heard screaming scientists, and saw cables dropping from the ceiling, ruptured pipes squirting water, a storm of flames and blood and broken glass.

I pulled myself back into the seat. She stood up. We stared at each other.

Our minds were surrounded by shattered glass, singed white coats and the smell of burning paper. But our bodies were surrounded by a dozen passengers, listening to music and reading magazines, not even looking up.

The bus seats were tatty, but not ripped; the air was stale, but not smoky; the floor was sticky, but not with blood or ash. The lab had exploded in our heads, but the bus was fine.

“What was that? What did you do?” She looked dazed and sick.

“I have no idea, but my family are up ahead, scanning the traffic jam. So lose your vindictive little mind in this book. Now!”

She sat down and we both read, the books shaking in our hands. She travelled to a distant war and I went to a land where boys fly on dragons. As we lost ourselves in the stories, the stink of blood and smoke in our nostrils faded.

He whispered in my ear, “You can stop reading now. We’re past them, so you’re safe.”

“Safe? With you? I doubt it!”

He was grinning at me. A cheeky, pleased-with-himself sort of grin.

He bounced back so fast. I’d seen him fainting, vomiting
and weeping, as well as exploding his own mind, but he always recovered so fast!

He held out both bare hands towards me. “Ready for round two?”

He laughed as I scooted away across the seat towards the aisle.

“Surely your imagination hasn’t run out of experiments and scientists?  Don’t you want to punish me again?”

He reached out to grab my hand and I snatched it away. “No!”

“Are you finished then? Have you had your revenge? Am I a free man?”

“I’m done, for now. But I’m not sorry. You deserved it. You’d deserve it if you really were locked in a lab for the rest of your life. Because Viv is dead and it’s your fault, and you use her death and it’s disgusting.” I was hissing at him, almost spitting in his face, and still no one in the half-empty bus had noticed. “You deserve everything bad that could
ever
happen to you.”

“Yeah.” His grin had faded since I refused his challenge. He was slouched in the seat, staring out of the window. “I always deserve everything. Every time Daniel kicks the shit out of me. Every time Malcolm humiliates me…” He whispered so low I almost didn’t hear. “I deserve it all.”

I wasn’t going to let him feel sorry for himself. That was too easy. “Why didn’t you fight? Are you a complete coward?”

“I didn’t fight because I didn’t want to scare the old ladies.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I didn’t fight because I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“I don’t believe that either.”

“Have it your way then. I didn’t fight because I deserved it.”

“No. If you thought that, you’d give yourself up to the police. Why didn’t you fight?”

He turned and looked at me, with those ridiculous pale
eyes. “I wanted to see if I was strong enough. Strong enough to stand you, anyone, anything and everything in the world outside.

“And I
was
strong enough, wasn’t I? I didn’t beg you to stop, not like I did when Mum and Malcolm… I didn’t beg or whimper. I didn’t even fight you, not until I sensed them up ahead, and that wasn’t a whimper that was a…”

“Yes, ok, I get it.”

Shit. It wasn’t just my sister’s death that was making him stronger, it was my revenge too. He was like a sponge, absorbing poison, feeding on his crimes, getting stronger on the pain he caused others.

If hating him wasn’t breaking him, maybe sympathy would. “What did your mum and Malcolm do, that you begged them to stop?”

“They…” He bit his lip, wincing when his tooth touched the cut he’d made earlier. He wiped the blood with a fingertip.

Then I saw that look. The look from the back seat of the double-decker, when he was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

“They questioned me. About Vivien. They read everything in my mind, with Mum’s hand on my shoulder, Malcolm looking me in the eyes and my uncles listening to my voice.

“They dug inside me for every moment I’d spent with Vivien. They dragged out what we yelled at each other when I grabbed her, what she was worrying about, like her maths test and her phone and you and how scared she was. They ripped me apart to get my memory, until I was screaming and crying, begging them to stop.”

He was speaking in a controlled quiet voice, watching me for my reaction. But his fists were clenched and if it was true, if his own mother had held his shoulder to force answers from him, it must have been unbearable.

“Did you tell them everything or did you try to protect Viv?”

“Oh Lucy!” He laughed, as if this was a joke. “You don’t know what it’s like. Of course I gave them everything.”

“So you betrayed her. You did kill her.”

“Not by telling them everything. She was already dead by then. They were only questioning me because they couldn’t question her any more.”

“They questioned her? Your mum
tortured
my sister?”

He looked away.

“Your mother is a monster. You’re all monsters!”

He whirled round. “You’re calling us monsters? What about you, Lucy? Perfect law-abiding Lucy? What have you just been doing?

“You used everything you know about me, all my weaknesses and my fears, to put the scariest stuff you could think of straight into my head, and you watched me shiver and sweat, and you would have kept doing it for hours if I hadn’t blown that hellish lab up in your face. You’d do it again if you weren’t scared of what I’d blow up next time. You don’t think that was torture? You don’t think that was monstrous?

“Don’t you dare call my mother a monster! Don’t you dare judge what my family do to survive in a world that would call us freaks and lock us up, until you look at what you’ve become.”

He grabbed a bottle of water, and as he drank about half of it in one gulp, I tried to think about his life, rather than my sister’s death or my revenge.

I whispered, “You have a horrible life with your family, don’t you?”

“No! No, it’s great most of the time. We have exciting jobs, real training not pointless exams, and we can head off into the hills or fishing or whatever when we’re not working. Where else would I be safe? Where else would I be happy?”

“But you’ve never tried anything else, have you?”

“This is trying something else.” He pointed at me and the rest of the bus. “And it’s making me quite nostalgic for the
loving arms of my family.”

“So you think I’m worse than your family.”

“Oh yeah. Lucy, you’re my worst nightmare.”

He held up his book between us. Conversation over.

I moved to the empty seat in front, to give us both space.

Was I worse than his family? Was I worse than him? Would I have kept going with those experiments all the way to Edinburgh?

Would I have stopped if he had stopped breathing?

I didn’t know.

Which made me a potential killer, just like him.

Only he wasn’t a killer. Not really. It wasn’t a life he’d chosen. Was there a way to give him other choices? Not just a life of crime or a life in prison?

I was startled by a gentle voice from behind me. “Don’t feel sorry for me, Lucy. I’m not worth it. I’m not a stray puppy you can take home, it’s far too late to house-train me. But at least now we know you’re as vicious as me. This book is boring me. Wake me when we’re over the border, and I’ll check for hunters again.”

When I glanced back between the seats five minutes later, he was asleep.

When Lucy woke me at the Scottish border, she was still feeling wretched.

Good. She deserved it.

Even after a rest, I felt rotten too. But I couldn’t let Lucy see that, because if she thought I could recover from her attacks easily, she wouldn’t try again.

But really, I was pretty shaken.

I was shocked by how stupidly I’d given her all the information she needed to attack me. I was shocked by how easy it had been for her to defeat me.

And I was appalled by what I had done to stop her. Getting into her head, pulling out her thoughts, then exploding her vision. I had no idea what I’d done, no idea if I could do it again, nor if I wanted to.

But I grinned and made out that I was indestructible, and she was so miserable in her new self-image as the most evil person on the bus that she didn’t notice I kept biting my cut lip open and couldn’t stop my hands trembling.

We even managed to be almost polite to each other. As we got closer to Edinburgh, I asked, “Can I have your uncle’s address now, please?”

“Not until we get there.”

I traced the bus route on the map. “I need to know if your uncle’s house is near this route, in case my family are already there. It’s going to be hard enough here,” I pointed to the city centre, “where we drive right over the train station, because my family will definitely be there. But our books should protect us, so long as the bus doesn’t get stuck above
Waverley station for ages.”

“I thought your book was boring.”

“It’s alright really. So, do we need to be careful before the train station?”

She shook her head and jabbed her finger at the blue water north of the city. “My uncle lives in Leith. This bus won’t go anywhere near his house. We’ll have to get a taxi.”

“Let’s walk. I’m sick of sitting down.”

She glanced out the window, which had been streaked with rain since the Midlands, and made a face.

I was worried about the train station. But I was more worried about the bus station. I’d never been there, so we would be stepping off the bus into an unknown space, possibly surrounded by enemies.

I split the last of the water and chocolate between us. I stood and stretched, then walked up and down the aisle. I wanted to be limber enough to run.

“Nervous?” Lucy asked, when I sat down again.

I nodded. “I don’t know who’s there and I don’t know the terrain. Do you know Edinburgh?”

“Not really. My uncle usually comes home for visits, I’ve only been up three or four times. With… Viv…”

We both took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But we have to concentrate. And when we get off the bus, please do what I say immediately. I’ll sense my family before you can see them, and I’m trained at evasion and escape, so do exactly as I say.”

“Ok.”

That was too easy. But I couldn’t detect any duplicity. If she really did think I was good enough to get us past my family, she had more confidence in me than I did.

As we reached the city centre, I pointed to our books. “Read, we’re nearly over the station.”

Even past the excitement of a dragon-back battle, I detected my own hunters below as we crossed the bridge
over Waverley. But they didn’t notice us.

Lucy nudged me as we drove into the bus station. I dropped the book and scanned the area. I sensed the hunters at the train station, only three blocks away. But I didn’t sense any familiar minds nearer. Malcolm must have thought that using one team to check the buses going north was more efficient than using three or four teams to watch all the exits at Edinburgh bus station.

So we got off the bus and headed through the station towards the main exit.

It was dark, windy and raining. The few people who were outdoors were walking fast under big umbrellas.

I jogged a couple of steps, then took shelter by a big department store window. Lucy joined me, and I laughed. “Welcome to Scotland.”

“What?”

“Well, it’s pouring with rain and they’ve put on a pageant of my family history. Look!” The bright window behind me had a fairground theme, with carnival booths, a big top, mannequins in ringmasters’ hats and a red rollercoaster painted in the background.

I used the light from the store window to read the map. “Let’s walk a bit, get a feel for the city, stretch our legs.”

“We’ll get soaked!”

“You soft southern girl. It’s just a bit of rain. But if we walk from here to the top of Leith Walk,” I pointed to our right, along the shiny wet pavement,  “we can get a bus to…”

Then I sensed someone, watching, waiting. Much nearer than my family.

I stepped away from the bright window, to the middle of the pavement. In the shop doorway, I could see a man. He walked forward, and his thin grey raincoat was lit up by the garish light from another window, which displayed a bearded lady in a cocktail dress and a strongman in skimpy pants.

“Are you kids just off the London bus?” He asked the
question in his posh English accent, but he already knew the answer.

“Lucy, run!” I sprinted off down the hill, the direction we’d just decided. But she didn’t move.

I sensed her fear and heard her voice at the same time. “Bain. He’s got a gun.”

I turned. He was pointing a handgun at Lucy’s chest.

He wasn’t going to shoot her. He wasn’t going to shoot either of us. The gun was just to scare us, he had no intention of using it in public, though none of the handful of people walking round the square had noticed anything beyond their wet feet and umbrellas.

I walked back towards Lucy. “Get behind me,” I ordered.

“Why, are you bullet-proof as well?” But she did what I asked.

The man was totally confident. He’d found who he was looking for and he thought he had us under complete control.

I knew he wasn’t a local policeman. Not because of the accent, because of the gun. Scottish police don’t use guns that casually.

Then he decided to contact the rest of his team.

I was concentrating now, so I could sense a wide ring of his colleagues outside every exit from the bus station.
Now
I could sense them. Five minutes too bloody late.

I had walked right into this.

When we had got off the bus, I’d stood there grinning at a stripy tent in a window and chatting to Lucy, so I’d forgotten to scan for police surveillance as well as family. Now this grey man was pointing a gun at me. But I wasn’t going to let him tell all his mates he’d caught me.

I stepped forward. He stopped patting for his phone and put both hands on the gun. I didn’t care about the gun. I cared about the phone. That’s what could harm me and my family. I took another step towards him. He sidestepped, towards a window with a fortune-teller’s rose-painted caravan.

“Back up, boy. I don’t want to shoot you. I just have a few questions.”

I lowered my head, like I was scared, took half a step back and waited, balanced over both feet. He was reassured at my retreat, so he let go of the gun with his left hand and went for his pocket again.

And I kicked.

I launched off my perfect stance and kicked the gun out of his right hand, then spun and kicked his left hand away from his body. He kept his balance, dropped to a crouch and got ready to fight.

I sensed his confidence. He was bigger, older and a professional, and I’d just got a lucky shot in…

But I was still moving and I was sick of being the bottom of the heap, sick of being chased, followed, questioned and punished. So I aimed a right-footed roundhouse kick at his face.

Finish it. Finish it, Bain.

My foot connected, his head flicked back, his legs crumpled and his head cracked into the sharp stone edge of the window behind. He slumped down.

And I felt his confidence flicker out. Everything stopped. His belief that he could beat this little London oik, his dependence on his mates, his puzzlement at my attitude to the gun. His existence. His life. It stopped. I felt it crack and drain and vanish.

Oh no. Oh no. That wasn’t what I meant…

I bit down on my lip, where it was already bleeding. I forced myself to concentrate.

I knelt down beside him, in the bar of darkness against the wall, in the shadow before the splash of light from the fortune-teller’s caravan hit the pavement.

I ignored the black endings gathering inside me. I ripped my gloves off, slid my hand into his pockets, found his phone and his wallet.

There was an outraged whisper behind me. “You’re not
stealing
from him, are you?”

I opened the wallet.

Ah. Shit.

He didn’t have a police warrant card. He had a Home Office identity card in the name of William Borthwick. It didn’t say what his job was at the Home Office, but I didn’t think their catering staff carried guns.

This card must mean security services. It must mean MI5.

The surveillance teams weren’t police. They were MI5.

Holy shit.

I sensed growing panic from behind me.

“Is he ok? Bain? Is he unconscious?” Now she was down on the pavement too, her fingers feeling for a pulse.

I already knew, but the shock of her discovery just about knocked me over.

“He’s
dead
. You killed him. Oh my god…”

We were the only ones who had noticed. His mates in the ring around the bus station were still bored and wet. The few folk walking past were in their own umbrella-shaped bubbles. And he was hidden in the dark shadow under the window.

But someone would notice soon. I got up and turned round once. Scanning for anyone I needed to worry about, looking for escape routes.

I saw the park across the road.

“Bain! You killed him.” Lucy wanted me to tell her it wasn’t true. She was going to lose it in a minute. So was I. His mind was switching off again and again and again in my head, like a drum roll. And it was getting louder.

I had to get us away from these bright windows with their caravans and freaks, and from his body in the shadows.

“The park,” I said. “Do as I say and it will be fine.”

“It won’t be fine. He’s
dead
.”

“Shut up, Lucy. Follow me.”

That was all he said to me.

“Shut up. Follow me.”

And I did.

I don’t know why.

I had just seen him kick a man’s head nearly off.

I had just seen him murder someone.

Then he said, “Shut up and follow me.”

And I did.

I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t want to stay with the body. I didn’t want to get arrested. I didn’t want anyone else to point a gun at me.

Bain seemed to know what he was doing. So I followed him.

I’d been calling him a murderer all day. Now he was one.

But I followed him.

He ran across the road and into the park. I followed. It was easier than deciding to go somewhere else.

He sprinted over the grass to a great column of stone, almost as tall as Nelson’s Column. It probably had some Scottish bloke at the top, but I didn’t look up.

Bain ran round the base of the column, to a door in the stonework. He’d unlocked it before I got my breath back. He didn’t tell me to go in, just held the door open and gestured.

It was pitch black inside. I hesitated.

I heard a police siren in the distance. I ran inside. He followed me into the cramped space, closed the door and locked it behind us.

He pushed a torch into my hand. He slid down the wall and he was unconscious before he hit the floor.

I switched the torch on, then panicked about light showing round the door, and switched it off again.

I sat down suddenly. And waited for Bain to wake up.