The Glimpse (24 page)

agonisingly slow. There were lengthy waits for the electric, crowded trains. They had to change three times and the silence between them grew leaden, until it was impenetrable. Most of the time, Cole stood apart from the girls, making cals and sending interface messages.

The rattle of the train drowned his voice. Once or twice, Lila attempted to smile at Ana, but the strain and sense of disilusionment in her eyes only made Ana feel worse.

Ana decided to risk powering up her interface for the three seconds it would take to switch offline.

Undoubtedly the Wardens would have her tagged; they’d receive a flutter of activity somewhere between they’d receive a flutter of activity somewhere between Shadwel and Wapping. But she couldn’t take any more of the heavy silence. Besides, Warden Dombrant would already know she was on the move. A train in east London wouldn’t help him find her.

Offline, she selected a compilation of Chopin and Schumann and let her head drop back against the seat.

Jumbled images filed her mind. Her thoughts drifted, and she found herself back in the Barbican car park where she’d looked for Jasper after the concert.

Water dribbled down the wals. A strange light pulsed.

She tried to lift her feet, but slime puled at her shoes.

At once, she realised she wasn’t alone. A shadow moved, puling itself inwards, gathering up the darkness like folds of cloth. From its inky centre a figure emerged.

Ana gazed at the dark holes where eyes should have been. Glacial terror spread through her. She was being attacked by zombies!

Franticaly, she began running for an exit. Al around her shadows amassed themselves into black doorways for 216

zombies to step through. The first creature closed in on Ana. Throbbing light sent forks of pain into her head. Her dream self cried out for Cole. At the same time, her head knocked against the train window.

She blinked awake. They were clattering over a bumpy part of the tracks. Chopin’s ‘Goutte d’eau’ floated through her earphones. Beyond the window, rows of squat houses flew past, their narrow backyards overgrown or deluged with junk.

overgrown or deluged with junk.

‘We’re there,’ Cole said. Ana looked up and gulped in his presence with an uncomfortable mixture of relief and self-consciousness. Opposite her, Lila stood up. The train crawled into Forest Hil station and they alighted.

A simple portico lined the station building on the platform side. Hanging baskets dangled from the shelter, their plastic flowers so old, the greens and reds had faded and ripped. They crossed a footbridge and came out on a busy street. It was almost six o’clock. Vendors had begun packing up their stals and people hurried home.

Ana trudged behind Cole and Lila, vaguely taking in the disorderly array of Victorian and Georgian houses on either side, sprinkled with modern, concrete architecture.

The uphil hike tired her, but at least it was something to focus on; something to distract her from Cole’s broody reticence.

Finaly, they veered into a driveway, climbed three steps, and knocked at a 1930s house that had been divided into a dozen flats.

The front door opened at once. They were ushered into darkness and the door closed behind them. In the glimmer of candlelight, a man led them past stairs and through 217

a second door. He bustled them into a room and went around lighting other candles to reveal a ten-foot-square bedroom with two single beds, a dresser, and a wardrobe.

A faint pink glow from the sun sinking on the horizon spilt around the closed curtains. Cole slipped the man cash and told him they were expecting someone. Then he and told him they were expecting someone. Then he closed and locked the door, and the three of them were alone.

The absence of conversation compounded the bleakness of their surroundings. The dream Ana had had on the train came snaking into her thoughts. She thought of yesterday afternoon, running from the courthouse. She wondered again at the zombie people, at what might have happened if Cole hadn’t arrived when he did.

Lila began to scour the wardrobe, which took her al of a minute because it was smal and empty. Cole unpacked a camping stove, a pan and some tins of food.

‘That’s a waste of fuel,’ Lila said when she saw her brother intended to heat up their supper.

‘Tomorrow night you’l be in the Project,’ he said. ‘You won’t need to worry about fuel.’

‘What about Ariana?’ she asked.

Ana plumped down on the corner of a springy bed and looked at Cole, curious to hear his answer.

‘Hopefuly we’l know where Jasper is by then, and she’l be talking to his father about getting him somewhere safe.’

He twisted a metal opener across a giant tin of beans.

She wondered if he realy believed that. She felt strangely empty at the notion of making contact with Jasper’s parents. And now she was uncertain whether Jasper’s father would be wiling to wage war for a son who’d jeopardised 218

his own empire – without scientific evidence of mental disease, many people would stop their preventative and prescriptive medications and Novastra would lose milions.

But she would have to go back and explain everything to them in the hope that Jasper’s mother could convince her husband to save their son. She would have to face her father and answer everybody’s questions. She wondered what would happen if once Jasper was released, he confron-ted Ashby with the evidence. What would her father do?

After al, it was his research, his reputation that was on the line.

Lila’s angry voice broke through her ruminations. ‘Don’t say that!’ she hissed.

Ana wondered what she’d missed.

‘The future isn’t written,’ Cole answered. He poured sloppy orange beans into a pan. ‘That’s the point. A Glimpse is just a possibility.’

‘The most likely possibility,’ Lila argued.

‘A possibility,’ Cole said.

‘But everything—’

‘No.’ Anger lined Cole’s voice. The conversation was over. Inwardly, Ana shrunk, not quite understanding why.

She didn’t like being the cause of Cole’s bad mood. And She didn’t like being the cause of Cole’s bad mood. And she felt guilty. He’d been supportive and helpful. She missed the closeness she’d felt with him earlier that afternoon after visiting his mother’s, even if it had been unnerving – the way he’d held her.

‘Yesterday, after the hearing,’ she said, changing the subject, hoping to ease the tension, ‘when you picked me up on your bike, who were those people?’

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Cole shook his head, evidently not in the mood to talk about it.

‘What people?’ Lila asked.

‘When I discovered Cole had been folowing me the night Jasper was abducted,’ Ana explained, ‘it scared me. So I ran away and wound up in this street where al these zombie people were coming out of the houses.’

‘Arashans?!’ Lila gasped. Her head whipped across to Cole, then back. ‘You walked into a street of Arashans and managed to leave?’

‘What are Arashans?’

‘They’re an army experiment,’ Lila said.

‘Nobody knows exactly,’ Cole said.

‘There’s something transmitted in the air where they live,’

Lila ran on, ‘that immobilises thought and movement.

After living with it for a while, the person can act and think again, but they’re disconnected, slow, dreamy. The experi-ments are being run by a special Psych Watch experi-ments are being run by a special Psych Watch unit.’

‘Nobody knows exactly,’ Cole repeated. ‘It could be some type of new drug that makes them like that.’ He lit the portable stove with a match and set the pan on the metal ring.

The flame danced beneath it.

‘There’s tons of stuff about it on the net,’ Lila said breathlessly. ‘There are documents suggesting that the government has pumped milions into financing a new army

‘peace’ weapon. They say the Board plans to use it in the loony dumps too.’

‘There were four guys that didn’t look affected at al,’

Ana said.

‘I bet they were wearing hats, right?’

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Ana thought back and remembered they had, in fact, been hooded.

Lila took her silence as a yes. ‘They have some special kind of deflector that goes over the brain and stops the electromagnetic waves.’

Cole pretended to concentrate on their dinner, but in the dim light of the candles Ana could see his interest rising.

‘Cole and I both went in and out of the street,’ she said,

‘and nothing happened. So it can’t be anything to do with wavelengths.’

Cole stopped stirring the beans. ‘Actualy,’ he said, ‘I didn’t enter.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘No, not past the posts.’

‘What posts?’ Ana asked.

‘There were two grey posts at either side of the road.

Like lampposts without the lamps.’

Ana tried to think back but couldn’t remember them.

‘Wel,’ she said, ‘I walked about two hundred metres up the street and nothing happened to me.’

Lila puled the key on her necklace back and forth across its chain. ‘Whatever they transmit,’ she said, ‘it makes thinking like trying to wade through treacle. And it disables the body’s motor-cortex.’

‘Didn’t you notice anything odd at al?’ Cole asked. Ana began to feel uneasy. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, but at least he was talking to her again.

‘The street felt emptier than it should have done,’ she said. ‘There were no cars. Then I noticed a man in a win-221

dow. He gave me the creeps. So I turned around and started to make my way back.’

‘You didn’t feel any desire to, I don’t know, to stay?’

Cole asked.

‘No way. Did you?’

He observed her for a beat then puffed air through his nose and returned to stirring the beans and buttering bread.

‘You felt it, didn’t you?’ Lila asked her brother. ‘Even from behind the posts it was trying to lock you down!’

Cole didn’t answer. Ana’s mind began to buzz. She thought of the zombie eyes, the sensation she had even now that they were stil looking into her mind. How come she hadn’t been affected?

Neither Lila nor Cole said anything more.

After they’d eaten, Lila rose to wash up. Ana, anxious about remaining alone with Cole, offered to help. Using a candle to light their way, they left the bedroom and passed through a door on their right. It led down a cobalt-blue corridor to a second, open door.

In the bathroom, Lila rinsed the plates, using the water sparingly. She chatted as she did so.

‘Once,’ she said, ‘a house like this would have been for one family. Then maybe eighty years ago each floor was divided into flats. And now every room is a separate unit and everybody has to share a bathroom. I suppose the whole housing crash wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the petrol crisis. Only a smal percentage of the railways had already switched to electrical so commuting to the City 222

became impossible from certain areas. Did they teach you about the 2018 Colapse in the Community?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ana cut in.

Lila stopped the running tap. ‘Sorry?’

‘We only met in Camden Lock that day because I was looking for Cole. I thought he was an ex-member of the Enlightenment Project and that he could help me find Jasper. When Mickey told me there was a free room on a barge, I took it hoping to get closer to you al, and I helped you with Cole’s pre-charge detention because I thought he’d be able to give me inside information about the Project.’

‘It’s OK. You got Cole off. You saved Rafferty. Besides you could hardly say, “Hi, I’m Ariana Barber, my father’s the mad scientist responsible for the Pure tests and I’m looking for the Pure guy that was abducted yesterday”.’

‘Thanks,’ Ana said. A lump of anxiety inside her softened.

‘I prefer Ana.’

Lila nodded. ‘No problem.’ She scrubbed a plate and put it on the side beside the bath to dry. ‘Are you in love with Jasper?’ she asked.

Ana swalowed. Out of habit, she lifted her arms to pul back her long hair and found it al had been cut off.

‘When I was eleven I thought Jasper was the most amazing boy I’d ever met. I barely knew him, but I daydreamed about him al the time.’ She laughed at herself, then picked up a tea towel. Lila handed her herself, then picked up a tea towel. Lila handed her another washed plate and she began to dry. ‘I used to secretly watch the stars at night from my window and wish that I would have my chance –

that he wouldn’t be joined before I turned fifteen. And then 223

on my fifteenth birthday he sent me a binding invitation. I thought my dream was coming true. Three weeks later the Board came to my school and told me I wasn’t Pure.

It was like my world had been blown to pieces and nothing could make it right again. Not even Jasper.’

Ana leant back on the edge of the bath, brushed a hand up the back of her neck. ‘After that everything got complicated. I was suspended from school until my father’s investigation had been concluded and a fortnight later, Jasper’s brother died. It was al a mess. And the only way to fix it was to bind with Jasper and hope he’d want to join with me.

I stopped knowing what I wanted after that.’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be,’ Lila said.

‘I don’t believe in destiny. I don’t believe something’s meant to be or not meant to be.’

Lila put aside her scrubbing brush and smiled. ‘What about Cole?’

A prickly sensation roled across the inside of Ana’s stomach. ‘What about him?’

‘He’s been waiting for you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The Glimpse!’ Lila said, as though it was obvious. ‘He never said it,’ she continued, grabbing Ana’s hands in her own wet ones, ‘but I know you’re the reason he left the Project and got into al this political stuff in the first place.

And then six months ago he came back from visiting Richard in prison and it was like he began preparing for you. He knew the time of the Glimpse was catching up with him. He split up with Rachel and took on more risky as-224

signments because he knew you had something to do with disproving the Pure tests.’

Ana’s heart skipped in her chest. Her grip on the plates turned slippery. ‘He knew I had something to do with disproving the Pure tests? What are you talking about?