The Miranda Contract (12 page)

Chapter 17

Miranda

M
iranda felt the
rough edge of the wall behind her as they stopped running. It felt safe, solid. The whole world seemed to be falling apart outside, with roads being ruptured by blasts of fire and strange people throwing cars and doing impossible things all around her; but now she felt like it was a whole other world away, somewhere out there.

The darkness wasn’t absolute. As her eyes adjusted, she could see Dan’s outline, listening for pursuit. He seemed calm. Her own breathing was erratic and she concentrated on bringing it under control, but it was hopeless. Her tai chi instructor never taught her how to bring about calm in such a crazy situation. It was all about controlling emotions before a concert, about channeling the nervous energy, harnessing the adrenalin.

“We can’t stay here,” Dan said softly. She felt his breath, they were that close. She nodded, watching his lips. It was only a matter of time before she would be running again, and without Sully to stop the threats she really didn’t know what would happen to her. She was scared. Probably more than she’d ever been.

When she signed on to the international tour, her father introduced her to Sully. They knew each other, apparently, although how a family man from Riverside, California knew a Turkish adventurer, she never found out. Sully was very good at evading conversations when he wanted to, and her father was on the other side of the world. But in the first few days Sully put her at ease, being there as a stand-in parent as well as a bodyguard against the more intrusive demands of her manager and the local crews in each city.

After the protests in Los Angeles and Seattle, they made a pact to always be honest with each other, to be there no matter what the personal cost. At first Miranda thought it was more about making her feel comfortable, that the promises were really one-way. But Sully needed her too. He missed his own family: his wife, his two sons. Miranda didn’t know where they were or why he couldn’t be with them, but she soon learned that she made his life a little better just as he did for her. They went horse riding in the Rockies for three days before her tour left the United States, and during the long, anxious nights, she heard him speaking in his sleep.

His mouth twisted in pain and he shouted out to someone he couldn’t see. Miranda didn’t know Arabic but she could interpret the emotions. When he woke the next morning she made it her goal to keep him smiling as much as possible. Even through the stress of travel, the terror of Jakarta, Sully remained her keystone. But now he had been taken away, brought to his knees by a sinister man in a top hat.

“Who was that back there?” she asked as they waited.

“A bad man,” Dan said, his breath still close, like he was watching her. She touched her cheek and felt it was wet.

“And what does he want?”

Dan pulled himself up and then held out a hand for Miranda to take. She had no other choice and he pulled her up and then pressed his other hand against a door. Shafts of muted light filtered in as the door opened. They were stepping out onto one of the upper levels. She heard a helicopter in the distance, and then an explosion like three popping firecrackers, all in a row. She held her breath as the silence returned, and then she heard the helicopter again. It was safe.

“Have you got a credit card?”

He pressed her hand gently, pulling her out into the open space. She could see him clearer now. His face looked so normal, like any other boy she’d known. He didn’t look like he belonged to this kind of mess, like he’d be comfortable trading blows with supervillains, tossing cars, shooting out balls of fire. He just looked normal.

Maybe even cute.

A closer explosion rocked the building and she grabbed for his arm to steady herself. He looked towards the edge of the car park, a long way off.

“Come on,” he said. “I need to get to the phone.”

“I’ve got a phone,” she said, instinctively pulling it out of her jacket pocket. She pressed her thumb to the side and the screen jumped to life. Dan’s eyes widened and she felt a vibration in her phone. There was a bearded man on her screen looking furtively from left to right, his eyes digitized specks of light. The face pushed forward against the screen and it was suddenly a three dimensional image.

Dan grabbed the phone from her and turned it off.

Her hands were shaking, but he pressed the phone back into her palm and closed her fingers around it.

“Better put it away,” he said. Then he tilted his chin towards a pay phone. “Needs to be … anonymous.”

She nodded. Her eyes blinked back tears as she dropped her phone back into her bag. There was a second explosion, closer, and she clamped her hands over her ears. The ringing was so intense, and the image of the holographic man seemed to yell at her even though it was gone. Dan mouthed something at her, pointing to the purse she had pulled out with her phone.

“Credit card!”

She heard him the first time but it didn’t seem like it was important considering the amount of danger they were in.

“Why?”

“I need to use it.”

Dan pulled the handset from the phone booth and listened for a dial tone. He pumped the cradle twice and then started dialing a number.

“If you’re ordering pizza…”

She heard her own words, amazed at the way she sounded confident, flippant even, despite her heart racing against her chest.

“Have you got the card?”

She passed him the platinum piece of plastic and huddled down next to the wall, her hands over her ears but still watching him. He shifted the phone to his other ear and then lifted the card, squinting at the number.

“Bree, it’s me,” he said. Miranda let her hands slip from her ears. “I’ve got a problem.”

He rolled his eyes and nodded, once, then again.

“Need an evac, not a lecture. Yes, there’s a card here. It’s good to go. I’m punching the number in now.”

He looked quickly down at Miranda as she sat still beside him.

“No, it’s not stolen.”

Dan pulled out his own mobile and was entering numbers into it while cradling the other phone with his neck and pressing the credit card against the glass to help everything stay balanced. It was funny, or would have been, in a different situation.

“It’s in,” he said. “GPS co-ordinates too. We’re on the third floor. Can you get us out now?”

He hung up the phone and stepped away from the wall, handing back the credit card and slipping his mobile back into his pocket.

“I thought you lost your phone,” she said. “At the airport.”

“This is my other phone.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s the secret one. For superhero business.”

“Since when are you a superhero?”

Dan looked around the semi-darkness, anxious.

“I was being sarcastic,” he said. “She should be here by now.”

Miranda stood up again. Her jeans were torn, her hair a mess. She needed to get back to Sully and then to an airport. Dan started to chew his fingernail as he paced the lot. She smiled, despite herself, and realized just how much younger he was. As she pulled her hair back into a ponytail she turned around and saw a woman standing just behind her.

“I’m Bree,” the woman said. “Your credit card checked out. I won’t be able to give you a receipt though. The machine’s down.”

Dan pushed past Miranda, grabbed her hand in his and then held his other hand out to Bree. The new woman smiled at him and gave him a slow look from his trainers to his cut-up face.

“You’ve been having fun.”

“Can we talk about this later?” he asked.

“Sure.” She took his hand and Miranda watched in horror as first Dan, and then Miranda herself, began to dissolve into grains of sand. She opened her mouth to scream but nothing came. She lifted her hand but it was nothing but sand. And then everything was gone and she had the feeling of being whisked up twenty floors in an elevator.

There was a gritty feeling in her mouth and a tightness in her throat. She found herself on a polished timber floor, her legs splayed to the side and her hands rubbing her neck.

“It’s psychological,” a voice said. “There’s nothing in your mouth. You’re as I found you in the car park.”

Miranda looked over her shoulder and saw the girl from before. She stood with a bottle of water in her hand and when Miranda’s eyes locked on to it, the girl smiled and tossed it to her. Miranda caught it with two hands and hurried to open the lid, scarping down the water to ease the soreness.

“Thanks,” she said.

“You’re the paying customer, I presume,” the girl said. “Dan’s not the kind of boy who goes around waving exclusive credit cards.”

Miranda took another drink and then helped herself off the floor, taking the time to look around her new environment. The space was obviously a loft of some kind, and there was a view which included an ocean, the lights of ships red, green and white. It reminded her of Christmas parades back home.

“I’m Bree,” the girl said. “Your boyfriend’s fixing his face.”

“Miranda.”

“I know,” Bree said. “You’re on the telly.”

Miranda was impressed with the Spartan décor: wide spaces, minimalist style. She had the impression that it wasn’t a room that was lived in. Bree gave a similar impression: practical, transient. She was Middle Eastern, or North African. Her hair was tightly braided in short stumps. Miranda felt for her own hair which was falling over her shoulders. There were times, she admitted to herself, where a team of stylists was a blessing, but she knew any contact with her tour team would likely end in more explosions, more blood and more clashes with things that were better off left to the imagination.

“What do you mean, fixing his face?” she asked, processing Bree’s earlier words. The other girl smiled, but then Dan appeared through a door: shirtless with a towel over his shoulders, his hair partly wet after being hurriedly dried. There was a gash across his forehead, another wound he’d collected in her service.

“You’re okay?” he asked.

Miranda nodded and took another drink of water, pulling her eyes away from his fresh face, those green eyes, those abs. He walked past her and gave Bree a quick hug. Miranda turned to watch them, but they pulled apart quickly, almost like brother and sister.

“What now?” Miranda asked while Bree pulled away from Dan and leaned against the wall, a smile playing on her face. “Have you called the police?”

“You can’t do that,” Bree said, even as Dan was about to speak. “This is out of their league, and they know it. Even if you did get them to believe you, any help they sent would be fresh meat for the likes of the Mad Russian. You’d be sending them to their deaths.”

“Dramatic, much?” Dan murmured, grabbing his t-shirt. “We better just keep out of sight, until I can work out what’s really going on.”

“You mean, whether you’re the one they want dead or me, right?” Miranda asked. “Why don’t you just say it? I think we’re a bit past secrets, pizza boy.”

Dan’s face shifted from one expression to the next, as if he couldn’t find the words or the tone to respond. She’d watched him enter her life as a cynical, hard-done-by kid and then some kind of weird monster who could survive being flattened by a hotel. She wondered how he would show himself next.

“It’s Dan there’re after,” Bree said. “There, I’ve said it. Miranda can go home.”

The words washed over her in a mixture of relief and fear. It sounded so simple, like a rear exit from the stage. She could leave this mess, get on a plane and fly home to California. She could fade away. But she’d done that before, in Jakarta.

She didn’t want to be that person.

“How do you know that?” Miranda asked slowly, and she could tell that’s what Dan wanted to know too. “People have been after me as well, here and at the last few concerts overseas. A … a thing came out of my phone. How can you be so sure?”

“Because they approached me,” Bree said. “Asked me to join the reunion tour, but I said I’d outgrown them.”

“Who?” Dan asked, moving to her, moving back into the shared space with Bree. Suddenly Miranda wasn’t even there as far as he was concerned. “Did
he
come here?”

“God no,” Bree said. “Just a man, representing a man and so on. The Russian is never that direct. Besides, I think Grim is more involved with this thing. I see you’re carrying his work.”

Dan lifted his wrist, the silver cuff clear to the three of them.

“This is Grim’s work?” Dan asked.

“He was commissioned by the Russian. Having trouble with your powers lately? It’s a standard restraining device, probably calibrated especially for your DNA. I’m sure your grandfather was more than happy to oblige with a sample if Grim didn’t already have it on file.”

“So what did they offer you?” Dan asked, dropping his hand.

Bree laughed.

“The usual.”

“And you said no?”

“Dan, I’m not going back to that world. You got out of it, so you know what I mean. But there’re loose ends and they all wind back to you. You can’t go to the police or the super heroes. They’ve been bought or scattered. Every inch of the city is under surveillance in some way or another.”