The Petitioners (17 page)

I didn’t even believe in telepathy, which made me feel even sillier about the whole thing.

JEN

I tried to wait for Mum. I stood there as if glued to the spot while people detoured around me, in a hurry to get to the next stage, whatever that was. After a while two men in green uniforms came along and took me away. We didn’t go through the door my mother had been taken through, but they rushed me up the stairs, to the landing at the top where almost everybody else had been heading.

The room that led off the landing was like a large movie theatre. It was a while since I had been in a real one. We didn’t get movies from outside Scotland any more. I had been too young to notice anything at the time, but apparently it had started when we weren’t allowed movies made in England, and then the Americans refused to send us theirs because of the embargo on English ones, and then the Scottish movie companies which the new laws were intended to benefit mostly went out of business because people stopped going to see their output. Then we were left with government information films, which were always a barrel of laughs.

The one showing in this room was no exception.

It was a sort of disaster movie, I suppose, except it was for real.

Even having lived through the storm, we hadn’t really known the full scale of it or the devastation that resulted, particularly on the west coast, so I was interested to see it, at first. The pictures on their own would have been impressive, but unfortunately somebody had imagined it was a good idea to add a soundtrack. Not just wild stormy music, but a voiceover which re-formulated the whole narrative of the event in a way that was obviously skewed in a certain direction. Apparently it hadn’t been our own government’s fault that we were so ridiculously unprepared for the storm. It seemed to have been mainly the flood prevention measures taken in England that were to blame.

There were some seats available but after I had stood watching for a few minutes I wasn’t sure if it was worthwhile sitting down just to hear all this nonsense. However, there was a tough-looking uniformed man between me and the only exit, and I thought it might be safer to wait until other people left so that I would have a better chance of being invisible in the crowd. I even started to look around for possible groups I could tag along with.

Of course, if Mum had been with me, she would have used the opportunity to collect signatures for the petition. I gritted my teeth and prepared to approach some complete stranger and ask them to commit possible treason.

Luckily, before I had done anything of the kind, I became conscious just in time of a movement behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to find that my mother had come into the room.

She didn’t speak to me or show any sign of recognition, not even when I gave her a tentative smile. There was something wrong. Either she knew somebody was watching, or she had been instantly drugged or brainwashed… Another option unexpectedly popped into my head, but I didn’t get as far as putting it into words.

I tightened my grip on the recording device. I could tell this wasn’t the right time to bring it out. Maybe that was why she didn’t say anything – she was trying to communicate some sort of unspoken warning. I couldn’t see anybody in the room who was taking any notice of us, but of course there would be electronic surveillance going on all the time, and computer-based analysis of the footage that would automatically recognise the faces of people who were known to the authorities, in a bad way that was.

My mother moved a little closer to me in the crowd. I stared at her, willing her at least to show a sign that she had recognised me. But there was nothing. I could only see blankness in her eyes. This couldn’t be good.

While my head was still turned to watch her, someone took hold of my arm.

It was the security guard from the doorway.

‘This way, Ms Hepburn,’ he growled. He led me towards my mother. ‘Here she is, Mrs Hepburn. We told you she wouldn’t have gone far.’

‘Oh! – yes, Jennifer, of course,’ said Mum in an unfamiliar, cool voice. Her eyes were still blank. ‘Thank you.’

There was something different about her. Not just the blank expression and the failure to acknowledge me until forced to, but something else. I stared at her for a moment too long. The security guard gave me a little shake.

‘You can stop staring now, you’ve seen her before,’ he told me. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

‘With what?’ I asked.

‘With finding out what you’re up to,’ he said.

He led me and my mother to the exit door and down a long corridor which looked as if it had once been decorated in some ornate manner – maybe when it had been a long gallery filled with pictures of royalty.

There was no royalty in Scotland any more.

EMMA

I knew things had gone badly wrong as soon as I spoke my name. If only I had thought to use an alias. One of the men at the table nodded to the other one, and then pressed a button that was built into the surface of the table. Then the door behind them opened and another man, in uniform, came through it. He took my arm and hustled me out. I was too shocked to fight or scream. The only thing I could think of was to call out to Jen. I hoped they wouldn’t get hold of her too.

The uniformed man hurried me along a corridor. It must at one time have been part of the servants’ quarters in the castle, because it was decorated plainly with white tiles and brown woodwork, and it led in a straight line past several other rooms.

We went into the last room, and I came face to face with a man who was sitting behind a desk there.

‘Mr Goodfellow!’ I exclaimed. ‘We wondered where you had gone.’

I looked again. It was my former colleague Jim Goodfellow, last seen at the hospital, and yet at the same time it couldn’t be. This man seemed quite a lot younger, with hair that hadn’t gone quite as grey, and hands that hadn’t acquired age spots or gnarled knuckles. But the face was Jim’s face.

I put my hands up to my own face as I remembered the last thing that had happened in the hospital.

‘You’ve stolen his face!’

‘Please don’t think of it as theft, Mrs Hepburn,’ said a voice which resonated in the small room. A voice I had heard before. ‘The doctors merely cloned his face from a cell or two. Unfortunately he didn’t survive the experience. Unlike you.’

‘Me?’

So that was what the screams in the night and the persistent sensation that somebody meant to harm me were all about.

The man who wasn’t Mr Goodfellow smiled unpleasantly. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Hepburn. You haven’t lost your face – yet. We merely cloned it, and you were lucky enough to make it through the cloning process.’

I noticed there was somebody else in the room. She stood at the window, looking out. She was about the same height and build as me, with a similar hairstyle – or lack of style, as I hadn’t been to the hairdresser for almost a year – and, as she turned towards us, I saw something else.

She had my face.

I gasped, but I couldn’t speak. It was just too uncanny.

The man who wasn’t Mr Goodfellow smiled again.

‘Mrs Hepburn – may I introduce Mrs Hepburn? I think the two of you will get along well together. You’ve got such a lot in common.’

‘But – why?’ was all I could think of to say.

‘We’ve had you and your family under surveillance for some time,’ said the man. ‘Surely you don’t think we would give up on that just because of the storm?’

‘I don’t understand any of it,’ I said. ‘We’ve always been perfectly harmless and law-abiding.’

‘All of you?’ he said. ‘Including your son Daniel?’

‘He’s only a boy. What damage can he possibly do to any of you? It’s a complete over-reaction.’

‘Oh well,’ he said with a nonchalant shrug. ‘We’ve got the power – might as well use it.’

‘Brad McWhittle,’ I breathed. ‘You haven’t changed, even now you’ve got his face.’

His smile broadened a little – it couldn’t do much more than that now – but didn’t become any less sinister.

‘But do any of us ever change, Mrs Hepburn? Having said that, I don’t think you’re as sharp as you once were. Is the result of the anaesthetic, I wonder?’

He nodded at the other woman – the one with my face. ‘Time to go now. We don’t want to keep Jennifer waiting, now do we? Or the other very important people who are about to arrive for the meeting.’

‘No!’ I cried. ‘You can’t do this.’

‘Just watch us, Mrs Hepburn… Off you go now, Mrs Hepburn. Play your part well and you’ll be rewarded.’

‘No! I won’t let you!’ I lunged forward to try and grab the doppelganger by the arm or the hair or any part of her that I could reach. But there was somebody else in the room. I hadn’t noticed him before but as I started forward he stepped out from the shadows behind the door and pointed something at me. I felt a sharp pain in my arm and then a numbness that spread from there into all my limbs, slowly and inexorably. I was going to fall – something caught me. That was all.

5. The Council of War and Peace

GAVIN

I was never quite sure how I had managed to talk the others into making a detour by Balmoral. At first Mark was the only one on my side, and come to think of it, he positively encouraged me to persuade them. Maybe they had been planning to go there anyway and they had just pretended it was my persuasive powers that had worked on them and made up their minds. Or maybe it was idle curiosity on their part.

There was no doubt, as things turned out, that it was the right thing to do.

We came to the place very early in the morning, arriving over the hills because we were unsure of our welcome. Or at least, Declan and the others were unsure. I was fairly sure we wouldn’t be welcome, except possibly if the authorities were looking for somebody to torture.

There was somebody else up there already, gazing over the lawns towards the house itself. It just wasn’t really a castle, no matter what its name.

By the time we saw him it was too late to hide. I suspect we were all too tired of that kind of thing anyway. We had been walking for two days and the food supplies had more or less run out. If we didn’t get a square meal soon we would all just fall over and never get up again. Even Declan didn’t show any sign of wanting to overpower the man.

In any case he turned to us with a friendly smile and said, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

I blinked. He must have mistaken us for another little group of people. Or maybe he was some sort of seer. He had that kind of look about him – straggly beard, wide innocent eyes, an expression of trust and wonder. He had predicted our arrival using only the moon and stars, or some rune stones from his pocket, or tea leaves, or the palm of somebody’s hand.

‘That’s odd,’ said Declan cautiously. ‘We weren’t expecting to be here.’

‘Have we met before?’ I asked politely, certain that we hadn’t.

‘No, but I know your wife and daughter,’ he said, with equal politeness. ‘I’ve seen a picture of you. And your son,’ he added, nodding in Dan’s direction.

Dan looked as if he was ready to attack the man, but I was more circumspect.

‘I didn’t realise Emma carried around pictures of the family,’ I said, rather cheered by this revelation.

‘She doesn’t,’ he said. ‘I saw it in her mind.’

‘In her mind?’

‘It’s all right, I only read the good things,’ he assured me. I didn’t find it all that reassuring though. I had always thought of mind-readers either as complete charlatans who found out what they wanted to know by the usual means – which normally involved asking people the right questions – or agents of the government who had somehow planted dangerous electronic devices in people’s heads to read the minds for them. ‘Except occasionally if a signal’s really strong. I picked something up from Jeff – that’s why I’m here.’

‘Jeff?’ said Declan. ‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’

‘A friend of mine.’

He obviously didn’t trust us. I didn’t blame him. Even if he did recognise us from some kind of mind-reading trick, he didn’t really know Dan and me, and he probably didn’t have a clue about Declan and Fiona, except that they were with us.

‘Have you seen Emma and Jen lately?’ I enquired.

He frowned. ‘Not since they went off with Jeff to the next safe house. But things have moved on a bit since then.’

‘This isn’t exactly a safe house,’ said Declan with a hollow laugh, indicating the large building below us. ‘In fact, I would say it’s probably one of the least safe houses in the country right now.’

‘We don’t know that for sure,’ I said for the sake of argument. I tended to agree with him really, but it didn’t do to give way to Declan too easily.

‘Come on, Gav, it’s always been their headquarters. You of all people should know that.’

‘I thought your lot had taken over,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Maybe they’re all in there now, relaxing in front of a roaring log fire while they plot the downfall of anybody who happens to think they’re running the country. And if the last couple of months have shown me anything, it’s that we need somebody to be in charge.’

It was getting a bit heated and I think we might even have started to fight properly if Dan, of all people, hadn’t intervened.

‘So you said you picked up a signal or something from Jeff?’ he asked. ‘Have you found him here, then?’

He had asked the right question, of course. If Jeff had gone off with Emma and Jen, the chances were that he might still be with them or at least, not far away.

‘No,’ said the man with a frown. He glanced round at our faces again and suddenly held out a hand to me. ‘I’m Will, by the way. Jeff brought them to my safe house in the first place – when they got away from the hospital. That’s when I met them. It was only when Emma came round and was fit to move on that they left.’

It wasn’t really the time or the place to go into long explanations, but I insisted Will should tell me more, so we sat in the heather with a few chocolate capsules Dan had found in his pocket, and Will narrated the hospital escape story as he understood it.

‘And then they went off to find the next safe house,’ he concluded. By some miracle nobody had interrupted him, or at least not seriously. There had been a few moans and groans along the way, mostly from me, but no heckling.

‘Cool,’ said Dan. ‘It’s like the underground railroad.’

‘A bit,’ said Will. ‘We’ve been building it for quite a while. During the bad times. You know.’

Yes, we did know only too well. It didn’t seem as if they were going to be over any time soon, either.

‘So can you read their minds now and find out where they are?’ I asked eagerly.

He frowned. ‘It’s all gone a bit fuzzy, I’m afraid. Maybe it’s interference.’

‘Interference in your thought waves?’ said Declan.

‘No – sorry, I must have misled you. This doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s an implant in my brain. I was a volunteer. When they were testing it out a while ago. I think they abandoned the programme but I never went back to have it removed.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That makes more sense… What about your friend Jeff? Is there any way of tracking him down?’

He shook his head. ‘Fuzzy as well. Sometimes that means they’re wearing electronic blocking devices, and sometimes, I’m afraid, it means bad news.’

‘What sort of bad news?’ I rushed to ask, immediately wishing I hadn’t.

‘Well, it could be that they’re all asleep. But it could mean unconsciousness, a coma or even…’

‘Death?’ said Declan.

‘Thanks for spelling it out, Declan,’ I said. ‘We really needed to hear that.’

‘Saying it doesn’t make it any more or any less likely,’ he said.

‘Sometimes it’s better to face up to the worst,’ said Mark, who had been very quiet up to now. ‘Then it’s a huge relief when something less than that happens.’

‘Fine if it isn’t your family involved!’ I snapped.

‘Chill out, Dad,’ said Dan. ‘What are we going to do next? That’s the real question.’

‘I was just pondering on that,’ said Will. ‘There aren’t enough of us yet to storm the place and mount a rescue mission. On the other hand again, maybe there are.’

‘Does this electronic implant of yours let you conjure up extra people from your imagination too?’ I said. ‘And are they guaranteed to be on our side?’

Declan elbowed me aside so that he was face to face with Will.

‘Don’t mind Gav, he’d be prostrate with grief and panic if the heather wasn’t so damp. Let’s work out a strategy.’

Will stared at me doubtfully. Then he, Declan and Fiona went into a huddle a few metres away, talking in low voices so that I could only make out about one word in ten. After a while Mark wandered over to speak to them too, and they didn’t immediately shove him away, which was good. Dan didn’t seem at all put out at being excluded from the planning stage. I would have to make sure he didn’t try and join in when it came to the action either.

It got dark while they were talking, and a few lights came on in the Castle. Unless most of the occupants were unconscious, there couldn’t be very many people in there to judge by the number of lights. Only about five rooms were lit, and that was a generous estimate. I knew that many of the rooms were big enough to have several windows.

Maybe they were round at the other side, though.

Dan lay back in the heather, eyes half closed, apparently doing nothing, while I fretted and fussed and tried to think of anything I could possibly do to help. My mind was fairly blank on the subject.

DAN

If I had been Dad I would have been angry about the others talking amongst themselves, but he didn’t seem at all agitated. Maybe he was so used to being left out that he had started to take it for granted. Or maybe he thought this new friend Mark would say anything that mattered. Dad was probably too old to change his ways now, though. He must be at least forty-five. When was his last birthday? Had I missed it while I was locked up at the Castle?

I didn’t want to seem as if I was trying to lip-read or anything, so I wandered over to look down to the little loch beyond the hill we were standing on.

When something moved, I rubbed my eyes. I must have been staring at the same spot for too long. But when I looked back that way, there was quite a bit of movement going on. Just darker shapes in the darkness. The only reason I could see anything at all was that the moon was coming up, looking enormous as it dragged itself away from the horizon, and its light reflected off the water in the loch. There was a kind of rippling effect with the light that confused me for a bit, but there were definitely things down there.

‘What’s going on?’ said Dad’s voice just behind me. He was peering over my shoulder. ‘Are those people moving about?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s a herd of deer. Going for a drink at the loch or something.’

We both kept our voices low, I noticed. It was almost as if we didn’t want the others to hear us. Not that they’d have noticed.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘They’re heading the wrong way. And they don’t have antlers.’

I glanced back at him uncertainly. ‘Do you think they’re friendly, or what?’

‘With my luck,’ he said, ‘it’s definitely going to be what.’

‘Do you think we should get down – hide behind a rock?’

‘Hmm. I don’t suppose they’ll have seen us.’

There was a buzzing sound and something flew past my head.

I ducked instinctively and lowered myself to the ground. Dad joined me there, head resting on a clump of heather.

‘I think somebody has,’ I said. It was redundant, but I felt as if I had to say it anyway.

‘I suppose we’d better tell them,’ he said, gesturing towards Declan, Fiona, Mark and Will. I considered that for a minute. The three of them were shielded by the higher part of the hill, and it wasn’t impossible that whatever trigger-happy idiot was roaming about in the darkness wouldn’t see them, but on the other hand, it didn’t seem all that fair not to warn them.

I was just about to start wriggling over in that direction when they turned and moved towards us. I saw Fiona’s expression change from extremely worried to panicky when she caught sight of our positions. She broke into a run.

‘No!’ said Dad in an urgent half-whisper. ‘Keep down!’

She ducked, and then fell to her hands and knees and crawled. Declan and Will stood back a bit. It seemed wrong for them to let her crawl into danger, but of course women were more than equal these days and Fiona was definitely more equal than others. Declan looked over-excited and Will slightly anxious, which seemed to be his default position. Mark’s expression was neutral, as far as I could see. Maybe he didn’t want to reveal too much of his thinking in this company.

‘What’s going on?’ said Fiona as she got close enough to speak in a low voice.

‘Somebody just fired at us,’ said Dad. ‘From over there. It looks like there’s an army massing for attack down by the loch.’

She glanced over her shoulder at the other three. ‘We’d better get back into the shelter of the rocks, then. Come on.’

‘Did you tell them?’ said Declan, as we all arrived and straightened up.

Fiona laughed, not loudly and not with hilarity. ‘Wait till you hear this,’ she said.

Dad broke the news to them. Declan swore a lot. Will just looked more anxious and sadder than before. Mark remained impassive.

‘I was hoping to just find Jeff and then get out of here again,’ Will whispered. ‘I don’t want to get involved in any violence.’

Hmm. I had learned a few things during the past year or so, and one was that nobody wants to get involved in violence, but it sometimes lands on your doorstep anyway. I didn’t know how Will had reached whatever age he was without knowing that. He must have led a very sheltered life.

‘You stay here then,’ said Declan. ‘We’ll go and check this out.’

Fiona tugged at his arm. ‘Not you. It’s too dangerous – don’t forget you’re an illegal.’

‘An illegal?’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Fiona told me. ‘It’s true. He was meant to have been deported two years ago.’