On the other side of the lift, the large woman scowled, her green eyes flicking like razorblades across the faces in the car. Big-boned rather than fat, with ginger hair and tribal scars, dressed in the same set of multicoloured rags she’d had on when Will shot her in the chest with Stein’s Zapper.
Floors passed, and each time the lift juddered to a stop more people squeezed their way out of the car, doing their best not to brush against the big woman. Keeping out of trouble.
Twenty levels later the doors slid open and the redhead stomped off down the corridor. Now Emily and Will were alone in the lift, and as the car began to rise again, he pulled back from Emily’s lips.
‘Why Mr Hunter,’ she said with a smile. ‘How impetuous of you.’
Will grinned and let her go. ‘Thought she was never going to leave!’
The expression on Lieutenant Brand’s face didn’t alter much, but it took her a heartbeat before she said, ‘Who was it?’
‘She was the first of the mob to reach Allan Brown’s place. I had to zap her.’ He slumped back against the handrail and scrubbed his face with his hands. Heart still thumping. ‘Sorry about jumping on you like that. It was the only thing I could think of at the time.’
She kept the smile on her face and straightened out the tatty hem of her tunic. ‘Don’t worry about it. Just try to give me a bit more notice next time. Maybe dinner and a spot of dancing. Something like that.’
She stands there in the storeroom, with a brand-new reader in her hands, the packaging torn and discarded at her feet. The reader hums as she runs it across the barcode above her left eye. And then it bleeps. It knows who she is.
Holding her breath, she lowers the device and reads the words on the small screen: ‘SAMPLE 1. ID: SH-O/D- 10286’
Disappointment.
She tries again, but all it says is, ‘SAMPLE 2. ID: SH-O/D- 10286’
What good is that? How is that supposed to help?
She was expecting a name, something that would trigger her memory. Something that would tell her who she was.
‘SAMPLE 3. ID: SH-O/D- 10286’
The reader explodes when she hurls it to the floor. She stamps on the plastic fragments, kicking them away into the store. All she wants is a name, is that really so much to ask for? Is it?
IS IT?
She closes her eyes, taking deep shuddering breaths.
Calm down. Calm. Slow breaths.
Stay in control.
Bees and broken glass…
She stares off into space, tapping her fingetips gently against her exposed teeth. There will be records in the system somewhere. They halfheaded her in one of the theatres upstairs, they will have her records on file. What she needs is a doctors’ terminaclass="underline" one with direct access into the hospital’s secure patient database.
Maybe she’ll find someone to satisfy her other needs on the way? Someone to while away the hours with. Someone to spread across the floor like raspberry jam…
Just as long as she’s careful. Just as long as she stays in control.
That’s what went wrong before: she stopped taking her medicine, because she thought she didn’t need it. She stopped taking her medicine, because she thought she could control herself without it. She was wrong. She needs her medicine…but she can’t take her medicine-can’t remember what it is.
But once she finds out who she is, everything will be all right.
She will take her medicine.
She will be good.
She will behave.
She promises herself that.
Carefully, she slots her mop into the bucket she stole yesterday and wheels it out through the storeroom door.
Cool. Calm. And in control. Dragging a cloud of bees behind her.
The elevator doors slid open on the forty-seventh floor of Sherman House. There was a faint, lingering smell of burned bacon as they walked up the scorched corridor. Fresh graffiti marked the wall in shiny red paint where Stein had caught fire: ‘ONE-NIL!’
Allan Brown’s stinking nest had been boarded up since they were last there; large plasticboard sheets welded over the entrance. Two doors down, flat one twenty-two was safely locked. Will punched in the entry code and scowled as the lock went ‘clunk’ at him.
‘Problems?’
‘Code’s been changed…Hope they haven’t assigned the place to new tenants.’
He knocked and they waited. Then knocked again.
No answer.
Will popped the cover off the lock and thirty seconds later they were standing in the empty flat. The place was exactly as he’d remembered it: tidy, but shabby.
Emily stared at the faded yellow-and-green wallpaper. ‘This isn’t the place on the recording. It can’t be.’
‘It is. I double, triple and quadruple checked. And then I got Brian to do the same. This is where Kevin McEwen slaughtered his family.’ Will walked from room to room, retracing his steps. There was no sign of blood anywhere.
‘If the place’s been cleaned, how come it looks so tatty?’
‘Exactly.’ Will rubbed a hand across the wall nearest the kitchen. ‘Scrub that much blood off the walls and you’ll take half the wallpaper with it. I wonder if they’ve…’ He took a step back. Frowned. That couldn’t be right. There was no way that could be right.
‘What? What have you found?’
He pointed at a shadow on the wall-ingrained dust showing where a picture had hung for years. The grime framing the rectangular silhouette was made up of tiny dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
‘The dirt’s not real, it’s been printed on…’ He lurched to the other side of the room. There was a little stick-figure family scribbled on the wall in red crayon. The smiling figures were made up of the same magenta and yellow spots. Everywhere he looked, he found more and more counterfeit squalor.
Emily announced that the kitchen was full of the same fake grime, but Will wasn’t really listening. He’d positioned himself in the middle of the room, just where the SOC team’s scanning equipment would have sat. The computer reconstruction was full of holes, blobs of no data, and as he stood there he got the nasty feeling he knew why. The blobs hid the upper corners of the room, just where you’d put surveillance equipment if you wanted to keep an eye on the flat’s occupants.
‘This gets weirder,’ said Emily emerging from the kitchen, ‘there are damp patches under the sink and they’ve been printed on too. Inside a cupboard! Who in their right minds…What are you doing?’
‘Give me a leg up.’
Emily braced herself into the corner, hoisting him up as if he was barely there.
Will peered at the join between the walls and the ceiling. It looked normal enough, but then it would, wouldn’t it? Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out Brian’s Palm Thrummer, twisted the little canister open, and set it on minimum. It burred in his hand, numbing his fingertips as he carefully stripped the upper layers of wallpaper and plasticboard away, turning them into a cloud of grey dust that billowed out into the room.
There was something in there…
Will took a deep breath and blew, clearing the fog away. Two sonic probes and a small jammer were bolted into a little metal box, mounted behind the plasticboard. The whole array was lit up: the probes grumbling away to themselves as they recorded him and everything else in the room.
‘Shit!’ Will leapt to the ground. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. Now!’ He grabbed Emily and hauled her towards the door.
‘What the hell’s got into you?’
‘How long have we been in here?’ He pulled back his tatty rag sleeve and glanced at his watch. ‘Five minutes. Shit, shit, shit!’
Will slammed the door of the apartment behind them, and hurried down the corridor, back towards the lifts, muttering all the way. ‘Come on, come on…’