Gauguin hears it, shouts a warning.
I throw the firecracker through the door.
A scurry, a scuttle.
I close my eyes.
Nebulas condense into suns; comets lose their endless battle with the force of gravity and burn through the atmosphere of massive worlds.
The firecracker pops.
The pepper spray pops with it, a cloud of yellow goo filling the room, bursting into the atmosphere. Through the shirt across my nose and mouth, it burns; no, burn is not the word for it, burn does not pull up your stomach lining, doesn’t make your throat contract. It sears, it sickens, it tastes of swollen tongues spat out whole.
I step into the room beyond. A yellow, acid cloud swirls in the air, obscuring sight. Fire crackers still burst and hiss, loud enough to shake the eardrums, sparks spitting from their ends, the red stalks hopping up and down on the floor as they fire, flapping, a suffocating fish in a pan. Through the fog of chemicals and smoke, I see six of them, one already on the floor, all smartly dressed. All except Luca — he’s come casually, or as casual as he can be: unironed shirt, trousers a little too short, a hint of black sock rolled up high against his calf, eyes closed tight shut, choking on the fumes in the air.
I would feel pity for him, but there’s no time for that now.
The man nearest the door has a gun. My left hand pushes his elbow up, right smashes the baton down as hard as I can on his wrist. These men are blind, but someone fires anyway at the sound, until Gauguin, his hands pressed over his face, cries out no, don’t shoot, you’re shooting blind at us you imbecile!
His accent, when he is in pain, isn’t as refined as I thought. There is a hint of something West Country in it, a change in vocabulary, his face is swollen like a pumpkin, and perhaps it is pity
whatever pity means
which makes me smash my baton into his knees, rather than his throat.
Could I kill him now?
In the busy way of things, it is not an entirely disquieting thought.
Neither is it very exciting.
One man, keeping his eyes forced open against the settling yellow cloud, tries to grapple with me. A flailing arm catches at my wrist; with his other he tries to punch me in the stomach, misses. He has power, which he generates by moving his body, arm never extending, but rather legs, chest, hips, coming into my space. Usually that power is devastating; today it is too much, and the momentum of his own punch throws his balance. I smash his arm as it passes me, drive the butt of my baton into his neck, kick his knees out as he begins to fall, and move on.
One man with a gun left; he doesn’t even know where to point it. I take it from him without a word, without needing to break anything, throw it into the room behind me, pull my own weapon, holler, “Everyone down!”
“Do as she says,” says Gauguin, wheezing, and was that a hint of Bristol in his accent? Perhaps, but he was fighting it, pulling himself together. “Do as she says,” he repeated, a little more himself, pressing his chest into the ground, and they all did as I said, even Luca Evard, eyes squeezed shut, face a crinkled plastic bag.
I stood in the middle of a room at my mercy, and thought that this too was a kind of perfection. Perfect thief; perfect control.
Silence in the room, save for the groans of the injured, one man dribbling thin yellow saliva out of the corner of his mouth.
I barked, “Are you recording this?”
Silence.
“I think you are,” I concluded, looking from Gauguin to Luca and back again. Neither man raised their heads. “I think you have realised that machines don’t forget, even if you do. I want you to listen to the sound of my voice, when I’m gone. My name is Hope. I want you to remember my words. These words are the only part of me that exists. Do not follow. Do not try to find me. Do not forget.”
I walked to the door, counted my steps, counted my breath.
Luca, the nearest to the exit, his head turned away, eyes closed tight, lips red, face swollen.
Words: a cascade of words.
I felt them on my lips, and sealed my mouth shut.
I ran.
Chapter 50
Preparation, preparation, preparation.
Police coming, no way out below, but that was fine.
Preparation, preparation, preparation.
The security office was on the sixteenth floor. I walked in at gunpoint, held three men at bay, shot out the computers, watched the screens go dark, and walked away.
Me, they forgot, though the bullets would take some explaining.
A cleaning cupboard on the eleventh floor. I chose it for the ceiling void above; especially large, to accommodate some piece of environmental apparatus they’d never got round to installing.
I broke into a vending machine and took three bottles of water, two packs of wasabi beans, and a bar of chocolate.
I lay in the ceiling void, drinking slowly, eating chocolate. I smeared yoghurt onto my face, hands, wrists, neck — anywhere which had been exposed to the fumes of tear gas. I ate the rest, waited.
An hour.
Two.
Three.
Nine hours.
A day.
Time passed, and I waited.
Police ransacked the building, and no one looked for me.
I closed my eyes, stayed on my back in the ceiling void, ate a few wasabi beans, needed to go to the toilet, counted to one hundred in the silence and the dark, and waited.
Time passed, and I waited.
Waited for memory to fade.
Wondered where Gauguin was, where Luca Evard was staying.
A cheap hotel — he always stayed in cheap hotels, even when someone else paid. Was he listening to the sound of my voice, did he have my words on repeat?
Perhaps he could cheat, write my words down a dozen times, and then a dozen more, and in doing so he would remember the act of writing, and in that way words would survive, even if the link between me speaking them and what entered his memory grew thin.
I counted to a thousand, and perhaps I slept, and when I woke, I counted to two thousand, and stayed wide awake.
And when it was done; when I reached twenty-four hours by the clock, I slipped out of the ceiling void, took the stairs down to the sub-basement, smiled at the security guard by the door. My picture, captured by CCTV, was on the wall behind him as I passed by, but his back was to it at that moment, and though he must have studied it all day, its features had faded in his mind, and he smiled at me as I walked away.
Chapter 51
My name is Hope.
I am the queen of the fucking universe.
I am the best thief ever to walk this fucking earth.
I am…
… I am fine.
I’m…
… fucking great, just, amazing, I’m…
… professional.
Disciplined.
A fucking fuck-you fuck it all fuck fucking machine.
Lines of code in a machine, in ascending order:
Least —
• Space shuttle
• Windows 3.1
• Mars Curiosity Rover
• Android operating system
• Windows 7
• Microsoft Office 2013
• Modern internal car software
— Most.
Data.
I sat on a bench, in a place, and stared into nothing.
I ate food.
I drank water.
I walked from a place to another.
Data only becomes information when it is translated.
I am
crying now
don’t know why.
This is the thing I am doing but it is not information.
On the high-speed train out of Tokyo, how did I come to be here?
I had bought a ticket in advance, an escape route, now I seem to be using it.