A Day Of Faces (6 page)

I glanced back and forth between Marv, who was still seated but clearly poised to leap up, and Cal, who remained as a selection of disembodied items of clothing.

“Well?” I asked. “Is it
true?
13
”

infection

ɪnˈfɛkʃ(ə)n/

noun

the process of infecting or the state of being infected.

Here’s how it went
down.
14

If you thought of the city as a bicycle wheel, the Aviary was where all the spokes met, right in the middle. It was a spire, reaching hundreds of feet into the sky. Most of the spire was office space, occupied by lowly peons who slaved away to keep the city - and the country - actually functioning. I think they’re called civil servants. As you go higher up the spire the pay gets better, the offices fancier, and the view better. Then, right at the top, perches the Aviary, inaccessible to anybody without wings or a really long ladder. The spire ended, and then the Aviary sat on top, with no connecting walkways or elevators or stairs.

From there they ruled the world. Turned out that being able to fly gave you a certain advantage over everyone who couldn’t fly. The year that the wings were born changed the socio-political landscape on a global scale, first in subtle ways and then totally. I wasn’t even born back then, obviously, but I’ve been living in a world run by them my whole life. An alisocracy, maybe?

The Aviary was parliament, so only some of the wings actually worked and lived there. But even those that didn’t still had fancy elevated apartments all of the city, slightly divorced from their neighbours, and always looking down - literally - on everybody else.

Point is, getting in wasn’t really possible. The first five floors were packed full of security, and nobody got past them. A couple of climbers had tried to scale the outside of the building but had been shot down before they’d reached the third floor. ‘Aviary’ made it sound too nice, really. It was more of a fortress.

Marv and Cal went in first; Marv with his cleaning staff pass and Cal following close behind in his spectre form. I’d pointed out ahead of time that Cal would have to be completely naked for it to work, but Marv didn’t seem to be bothered.

Me, I sat in the park the surrounded the base of the spire, leaning against a fountain and trying to tell the difference between birds and people flying around the top of the building. Wings didn’t bother going in the ground entrance, of course. They just flew in from wherever. It was a school day, so I got a few curious glances but was mostly ignored. The handy thing of being squamata is that a lot of people weren’t really sure where to look - some idiots even believed that we could turn people to stone if they stared in our eyes for too long. Not at all true, but that was one lie I’d always rather enjoyed.

Marv had recommended going in just after lunch, because everybody would be in their mid-afternoon slump and less likely to risk their necks. So it was about half two when the alarms started to ring out. People started pouring out of the huge, glass front doors, spilling into the park. Even as they began to form orderly groups for head counting I was on my feet and heading in the opposite direction.

As I neared the entrance there was a distant but loud sound of smashing glass. Fire ripped out of the side of the building a long way up, sending a desk and assorted office detritus flying into the air, where it tumbled down and down before crunching into a sculpture a few feet away.

Amid cries of bomb warnings I ducked into the foyer, a grand, double-height chamber with an enormously long reception desk and a row of elevators on the far side. The crowd was pushing still to get out with increasing frenzy, and security guards were occupied either with that or with the escalating issue upstairs.

“Is it a fire or is it a bomb? What are we talking about here?” I heard one of the guards shout, as he waved his gun wildly in the air, as if desperately hunting for something to shoot.

I kept a wide berth and headed for the bank of elevators. Right on cue the middle one opened. Fifteen harassed-looking office workers ran out, squinting blearily against the light. As they cleared the elevator they left one man inside: it was Marv, with his cleaning cart.

“Need a ride?” he said, grinning.

“Cheesy,” I replied, stepping in beside him.

He flashed his ID card and the doors closed. The elevator began to rise.

“Here we go.”

Marv grimaced. “You know you’re on camera now, right? They’ve got your face.”

“I don’t care.”

“You might.”

The floor lights lit one by one as we ascended the spire. Marv stared around us, his eyes focused on something more distant than the walls around us.

“The building is emptying,” he said. “Hardly anybody left.”

There were still several floors left on the elevator’s display but it came to a halt. “This is far as my clearance goes,” Marv said, waving his card. “And I doubt it’s going to take me even this far again.” He had his finger on the door-close button. “There’s four guys out there. Two have guns. Pointed at us.”

I put my ear to the doors but couldn’t hear anything. “Show me where,” I said, pushing in the door button myself.

Marv kneeled on the floor and took a dirty rag from his cart. Pushing the cart out the way, he smeared oily marks onto the floor with the rag, drawing out a plan view of the hallway. “This is us,” he said, pointing, “and the corridor splits immediately into a t-junction. The two armed guys are straight ahead, and the unarmed dudes are either side of the doors.”

I memorised all their positions, nodding to myself as I did so.

“OK,” I said, “sounds doable.”

“Really?”

“I dunno, might as well try to live up to my reputation, though, right?”

I opened my mouth, letting my tongue flick out. It was the most sensitive part of my body and could detect creatures far better than, say, my hearing. I pulled my lips back, letting the fangs show.

Then I paused, withdrew the fangs, and grabbed Marv by the back of his neck with my free hand. It was a pretty good kiss. Seemed like one of those things you were supposed to do before doing something stupidly risky.

“Ready now?”

I shrugged. “Ah, whatever.”

I let go of the door button.

The elevator let out a polite chime and the doors slid open. As soon as they were wide enough for me to pass through I was moving, dropping down low and darting forwards, my squamata muscles serving me well as I jittered from side to side. A bullet whizzed overhead, where I would have been standing.

I was at the far side of the junction, and sprang at the closest guy with a gun. He clearly hadn’t been expecting someone like me and had totally frozen. I was on him in a second, wrenching the gun out of his hand and flinging it back along the floor towards the elevator. As the guy toppled onto me his colleague fired, straight into him. He didn’t even get time to cry out. I always felt kinda bad about that, afterwards. It was a really shitty way to go out, especially if, you know, you were meant to be a security guard.

But, hey, trying to kill me, and all.

I rolled back out, ran halfway up the wall and propelled myself at the trigger-happy guard. He had pretty good armour on, head to toe and even with his neck covered. Thing is, they always made helmets so that they covered the top of your head but left your face open. Always seemed a bit weird to me - wouldn’t it just encourage people to shoot you in the face?

Anyway, I didn’t have a gun, so I just bit him on the nose. That’s not a nice thing to experience under any circumstances, but being bitten by a squamata is definitely something to avoid. He dropped like a sack of potatoes about three seconds later.

Marv already had the other guys at gunpoint, which was pretty badass.

They cowered - actually cowered - as I approached.

“Don’t kill us,” one of them whimpered, “please, I have a kid. A little boy.”

“Aww, cute,” I said.

Marv glanced over at me. “What now?”

“Knock them out, I guess?”

He nodded. “Right.” He swung the butt of the gun, smacking the guy closest across the forehead. He doubled over and swore. “Man, I’m sorry,” Marv said, genuinely apologetic, “that always works in movies.”

“Listen,” the Guy With Kid said, “can’t you just tie us up somewhere? We’re not even guards, we just work up here.”

“OK,” I said, “but if you try anything, I will find you. And your kid.” I flashed my fangs.

It took a couple of minutes to find anything we could use to tie them up. Seems that your average office doesn’t have handcuffs or rope lying around. After that we moved quickly to the staircase, and continued making our way up the spire.

“So, saying you’d go after his kid?”

“Yeah, what?”

“Kinda creepy,” Marv said. “Pretty cold.”

“Hey, I was just trying to sound serious,” I said.

“And the other guy? The one you bit?”

My stomach crawled. For a moment I thought I was going to retch. “It was just a quick bite. Probably just knocked him out.”

Marv nodded. “You don’t actually know, do you?”

“I’ve not made a habit of trying to kill people, if that’s what you mean. And no, I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

I didn’t even want to think about
it.
15

“You’re going to have to at some point,” Marv said.

We reached the next floor without incident. It was entirely deserted.

“I totally thought you were going to get shot, you know?” I watched Marv as he gazed through the walls and the ceiling, looking for heat signatures.

“Still might, you know?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Not everyday I do something this monumentally unwise, Kay.”

“Fun, though, right?”

“Hells yeah it’s fun,” he said. “I can see Cal. He’s on the next floor. And then it’s the Aviary.”

“Answers or death.”

“You know it.”

lineage

ˈlɪnɪɪdʒ/

noun

BIOLOGY

a sequence of species each of which is considered to have evolved from its predecessor.

The good news is that they were wildly unprepared. The bad news is that we’re now holed up in the records office with every exit barricaded and a squad of particularly angry and armed people waiting just outside. Looking on the bright side, this
is
the room we wanted to be in.

“Found anything yet?” Marv was stalking around the perimeter of the room, glaring out past the walls and blocked-up doors, reading every heat signature buzzing around outside.

I slammed shut another filing cabinet. “Not yet!” This task seemed to define the concept of needles in haystacks. Finding records of the orphanage fire should have been easy, but there was nothing. Cal had managed to uncover the names of some other people born the same day as him but they’d seemingly been erased from history as well. The room was huge: an octagonal archive of everything that had ever happened and been recorded in the country, and possibly the world, organised onto hundreds of thousands of microfilm rolls. Everything was labelled and categorised perfectly but it would still take a month to go through everything.

“Did you really expect them to leave a paper trail?” Marv shouted over the banging from outside.

“I was hoping for something,” Cal said, pushing a stack of shelves over in frustration. He was wearing the same clothes as Marv, who had brought him a spare set of cleaning overalls. “Everything I’ve seen and heard indicated that orders always came from here. All the kill orders.”

I found myself sitting on a fallen bookcase, head in my hands. I knew this was going to be dangerous, and that we’d end up in prison, or worse, but I’d expected to at least get some answers. For there to be some kind of heroic point. But for it to just end without any resolution - I couldn’t even think of it. What a waste.

My dad’s face popped into my mind. It did that, from time-to-time. I hated him my whole life, until he was dead, and now I just wanted to talk with him. There was no changing him, sure, but there was so much unsaid. I don’t think he quite understood how much I loathed him.

I used to be so uncomplicated.

Moral of the story? Don’t find weird men in your shed.

“There’s something else here,” Marv was saying from the other side of the room. “This wall is different. Everywhere else we’re surrounded, but this wall is different. There’s another room back here.”

My stupor evaporated and I ran to where he stood, passing row after row of shelving and filing. The room was a maze of curated history. “Anybody back there?”

Marv shrugged. “There’s something there, but it’s vague. Dunno what I’m looking at.”

“Not a problem,” Cal said, dropping to his knees as he genoshifted, brown fur pushing out of his skin even as his body bulked up, pushing at the seams of the overalls. His jaw and nose became more pronounced, his features heavier. Standing once more, now a clear foot taller than Marv, he picked up a filing cabinet, hefting it carefully, then pivoted forwards on one foot, swinging the metal cabinet forwards and into the wall. The force sent cracks spreading out from the impact point and plaster fell to the floor.