The Fall (15 page)

‘Coming!’ A voice called back.

Ana tensed. Beside her Cole, who balanced on his crutches and had his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, quickly checked the Stinger in his rucksack wasn’t poking out.

‘Just assume she has no idea who we are,’ he said. ‘Play it lightly, like we’ve got nothing to hide.’

She nodded.

A short, middle-aged woman waddled forwards from the dark recess beyond. ‘So,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you lovebirds? Matching chins? Fluorescent eye-dye? Or maybe something darker? Matching eyes on your eyelids is a popular one. Semi-permanent.’ As the woman blinked, butterflies painted on her eyelids fluttered.

‘We’ve got this big party,’ Cole said. His accent and voice sounded so different, Ana had to stop herself  turning to stare at him. She adjusted her features into the most innocuous expression she could manage. ‘Her ex is gonna be there,’ he continued, ‘but we don’t want any grief. Not really up to it, if you see what I mean?’

The beautician glanced at his crutches. ‘I know I shouldn’t say this,’ she began, ‘as it’s not good for business, but maybe you should skip the party.’

‘We can’t,’ Ana said, widening her eyes. ‘It’s really important. I’ve got this little brother. He’s been acting a bit odd recently. I’m worried about him but I can’t talk him out of going. I need to keep an eye on him. You know, so that nothing happens.’

Cole’s hand tightened around hers, warm and encouraging.

‘Alright,’ the woman said. ‘But if you’re really worried about this ex-boyfriend we’ll have to make you unrecognisable. That’ll mean more than the recommended number of implants.’

‘Are there any side effects?’

‘A little dizziness, perhaps. And it might leave small marks on your skin.’

Cole lifted an eyebrow at Ana. She nodded.

‘Follow me,’ the woman said, moving away from the daylight. ‘I can change your chin, give you new lips, higher cheekbones, different eyebrows, alter your eye colour. The gels only last a week or so, and the eye-dye is semi permanent.’ She stopped abruptly and Ana almost knocked into her. ‘We’re talking about a hundred and fifty each.’

‘We’ll pay in cash,’ Cole told her. Ana’s eyes flicked back to him in surprise.

‘Right you are then.’ The woman opened a door at the back of the shop and showed them into a small room. Light shone through a window which looked across a courtyard the size of a double bed. In the centre of the room was a massage table. ‘Who’s going first, then?’

*

Forty minutes later, Ana hunched forward on a broken toilet seat, lid down, breathing heavily. The sting in her eyes from the dye solution had started as a slow burn, but was now ripping into her sockets. The beauty surgeon had warned her
after
putting the drops in, that if Ana touched or rubbed her eyes in the first ten minutes, the dye could spread unnaturally, and if it got into her pupils there was a risk of partial blinding.

Gripping her hands together, she smacked her feet against the floor to distract herself. The itch in her eyes was unbearable. If she’d known what having the dye entailed, she’d have found a way to get her hands on the more expensive, but far less painful option of dissolving coloured contacts for her and Cole. A useless regret. It was pointless thinking about how they should have been a little more cautious with who they selected to give them new faces.

After a couple of minutes the sting began to fade and she grew conscious of the ache in several areas of her face where she’d been injected with the gel. She rubbed her hands up and down her trousers. There was a smeary mirror above the sink. She wanted to inspect what had been done to her face, but at the same time, her insides twisted with dread at what she might see.

To alter the shape of her face, the beauty surgeon had implanted temporary gels in Ana’s cheeks, chin and jaws. The eye drops had come last. Once the beautician finished, Ana had risen quickly, pulling her hood over her head before Cole saw the damage. She’d asked for the toilet and been directed to this cramped, broken cubicle beside the back room, while Cole now received his implants.

She took a deep breath and stood. The gels wouldn’t deform her permanently. It was just a face – her face.

Her gaze slid up to the mirror. In the glimmer of light from the doorway, a girl stared back. Older. A chin that blended into a round jaw line. Cheekbones that seemed lower, lost in the rest of her face. Eyes dark brown.

Ana peered closer, lifting a hand to her cheek. Her lips, nose and the shape of her eyes hadn’t been altered, but they looked completely different on this potato-shaped face. Of all the alterations though, it was the eyes that were the freakiest. The dark irises changed her into someone else entirely.

She inhaled, trying to control the flash of panic. Her face might look different enough, but inside she was still the girl who had almost been swallowed up by Three Mills six weeks ago. Could she survive it a second time?

13

Stitch

It was evening when Cole and Ana stepped into a shadowed hallway in search of a hacker named ‘Stitch’. Three silver lift doors greeted them. Despite the darkness, Ana didn’t pull down her hood. She’d kept it up for the last couple of hours, her features shadowed, not allowing Cole to see her alterations. Not attempting to look at him.

Half an hour ago, they’d successfully sold the computer and projector parts of Warden Dombrant’s interface to an electronics dealer. They kept the miniature camera for filming inside Three Mills. With the money they’d got, they’d purchased a transmitter. The small transmitter box could hook onto any interface. It worked by capturing information recorded by a nominated interface within a five hundred metre radius, and converted the video to the interface it was hooked up to. Stitch had come highly recommended by the electronics dealer.

Ana pressed the button again to call the lifts.

‘They’re not working,’ Cole said. They climbed the stairs to the fifth floor, Cole limping ahead. By the time they reached the top he was breathing heavily and grimacing. Ana took off the camping rucksack and leaned against a wall. A smell of cabbage stew hung about in the hallway. Clashing music leaked through several apartment doors. A couple argued. The loud bam-bam of video games echoed far down the corridor.

Once Cole had caught his breath, they walked the hall to flat number 32. As they stood outside it, Ana’s stomach churned. Now they were there, her plan didn’t strike her as too brilliant. How could they trust a total stranger? But then she thought of Cole handing himself over to the Wardens and knocked.

A man in his mid-twenties with long hair and baggy trousers answered.

‘Stitch?’ she asked.

He studied her distrustfully, before indicating for Cole to remove his baseball cap and her to take down her hood. She lowered her hood slowly, forcing herself not to turn and stare at Cole. From the corner of her eye, she saw his forehead sticking out like Herman Munster, a character from a 1960s TV show whose reruns were regularly re-released on the net.

‘What do you want?’ the man asked.

‘Pat from Bee’s Electronics sent us. We’ve got a job. Need someone with certain skills.’

‘Leave your bags outside,’ the man said. Cole hesitated. ‘Leave them or don’t come in,’ the man added, backing up through a narrow hall. Planting the rucksacks outside, Cole and Ana followed.

They entered a tiny living room cluttered with baby toys. A woman sat on a torn couch. She had a baby tucked beneath a shawl. Her free hand fluttered through a strange stream of code projecting from her interface.

‘It’s 3D,’ Ana said amazed, forgetting about the rucksacks, her face and the fact that Cole might be looking at her. The woman’s whole interface projection wasn’t flat against the wall like normal, but three-dimensional. It was a glittering hologram right in front of them.

‘Stitch?’ Cole said to the mother.

‘That’s right,’ she answered.

Heat crawled up Ana’s cheeks. She’d assumed a computer programmer come hacker would be male. So much for having overcome her sexist Pure upbringing.

‘Why don’t you two sit down?’ Stitch said.

There was nowhere else but the couch. The man returned to his narrow armchair by the door and began watching a film with two martial arts experts fighting in mini 3D.

Ana squashed down on one side of the woman. Feeling awkward, she glanced at Cole to see what he was making of it all. Horror shot through her. She looked away, then realised she was staring at a corner of flesh where the baby was feeding. She dropped her eyes to the floor and fixed them there.

It was Cole, but not Cole. The man sitting on the couch across from her had a square bulging forehead. His eyes were so deep-set, she couldn’t see them for the shadows. His chin was no longer pointy but huge and round. His bottom lip jutted out slightly. She tried to crush the overwhelming sensation that she was sitting in a strange house in the City, without one person she recognised. Not even herself.
It’s a good thing
. But in her mind she could see her distorted reflection in the beauty surgeon’s toilet, and felt like she was walking in a hall of mirrors and would never find her way out.

‘So you’ve got a job?’ Stitch asked.

Cole cleared his throat. ‘Maybe. It concerns video footage that we want made public on a large scale.’

‘Your timing’s lousy. Government is heavily monitoring at the moment. Anything that goes viral they’re shutting down as a precaution.’

Ana edged forward on the sofa. ‘But there must be some way to get a video out to a large public.’

Stitch eased the baby off her breast and readjusted her clothes. ‘Well, I suppose you could always try and take over a news channel.’

‘You could do that?’

‘It depends.’ Stitch cradled the baby over her shoulder and began patting its back. Ana peeked at the scrunched-up face, the dark mop of hair, the tiny fingers curling and stretching. One of the Board’s conditions in allowing her and Jasper to become joined was the interdiction of babies. Over the last couple of years, as she’d watched girls from her year leave school, fall pregnant, and come back to visit with tiny screaming bundles, faces washed out with exhaustion, she’d been relieved she wouldn’t have to go through it. And even if the Board hadn’t forbidden it, her fear that she might leave her child, the way her mother had left her, had removed all desire for one.

Stitch began humming.

Cole shifted on the sofa. ‘Maybe you know someone else who can help us?’ he said.

‘Oh, I can help you. I just doubt you can afford it.’

‘How much are we talking?’ Cole asked.

‘I’d need to know more first.’

‘This is a waste of time.’ Cole winced as he bent his bad knee to stand. ‘Come on.’

‘What do you need to know?’ Ana asked.

‘What sort of footage you plan on broadcasting for a start.’

Ana looked at Cole. He shook his head.
Don’t tell her.

‘We can’t tell you that.’

‘So how exactly do you think this is going to work?’

‘We would send video to a transmitter. Once you received the video you would take over a live news feed and send out whatever we had sent you.’

‘Four grand,’ Stitch said.

‘You’ve got to be joking!’ Cole straightened his jacket. ‘Come on, we’re going.’

‘Four grand’s a lot of money,’ Ana said, holding her ground.

‘If the hijacking is somehow traced back to me, I’m the one who risks getting caught. And without knowing what it is you’re transmitting, I’m not gonna take that risk unless you make it worth my while.’

‘What guarantees can you give us?’

‘Well,’ Stitch said, rubbing circles on the dozing baby’s back, ‘I’ll give you my ID to hold onto until it’s over, so that you know I’m not gonna cheat you. As for the hijacking, I’d say there’s a ninety-nine per cent chance I can get you at least three minutes of live streaming time. After that, how long I’d be able to maintain control depends on how reactive they are. I won’t know until I’m doing it.’

Ana dipped her hand beneath her sweater where the moon necklace and her joining ring hung hidden from plain sight.

‘Can I have a word?’ Cole said, eyes hard and wide, clearly trying to tell her
now!

‘Take your time,’ Stitch murmured. They moved back through the dim hallway and stood face to face beside the front door.

‘You need the money to get to Scotland,’ he said.

‘I’m not going by myself.’

‘
We
need that money.’

‘Not if you’re going to hand yourself over to the Wardens, or go back to the Project and fight. It’s time to decide. What are you going to do?’

Cole pinched his swollen lip. ‘I can’t leave the City yet.’

‘Three Mills it is then.’

He sighed. Something sad and despondent swept over him. ‘You’re sure you can handle going back there?’

‘No problem,’ she lied.

They returned to Stitch. Ana unhooked the clasp of her necklace and shook the joining ring onto her palm. When Cole realised what it was, he stiffened.

‘It’s real,’ she said. ‘And it’s worth five times what you’re asking.’

‘I won’t be able to find a pawnbroker who’ll take something like that,’ Stitch said. But she swept the ring onto her swollen little finger and smiled.

*

Back out on the street, Cole checked the map on his interface. The main road ran parallel to the River Thames. Between the road and the river sat acres of wasteland – old sports centres, copses, overgrown playing fields. They were an hour’s walk from the bird-watch tower and the Wetlands, too far to traipse back to with his bad leg and it was growing dark. Ana saw him hesitate. He didn’t want to ask her to rough it.

‘It’s going to be another warm night,’ she said. ‘We could sleep outside.’

‘Really?’ He turned and caught her eye.

She shuddered. Fortunately, in the dusky half-light they couldn’t see each other properly. Only the shadow of his bulging forehead and large, round chin were visible. ‘It doesn’t look like it’s going to rain,’ she said. ‘We can share the sleeping bag.’

He carefully drew her into his arms. She examined the interface dangling on the chain about his neck. He tilted her chin up, forcing her to meet his eyes.
Muddy umber brown.