Acid (22 page)

‘Shut up,’ the agent says. He hauls me to my feet. I see myself looking at Max, whose face, in the torchlight, is pale and frozen with anger. ‘Max,’ I hear myself say.

‘Shut up,’ he says. ‘I hate you. I HATE YOU!’

Then the agents holding him manhandle him out of the church at gunpoint.

That was the last time I saw him.

‘You knew about the other bombs,’ Sub-Commander Healey says. ‘How?’

‘No comment,’ I say. ‘Where’s Max? What have you done with him?’

‘We’re asking the questions, not you,’ Bullfrog says. ‘How did you know about the bombs?’

‘No comment,’ I say again.

The interview goes on like this for what feels like hours, with Bullfrog and Sub-Commander Healey shooting questions at me about Manchester, Mileway, about Dr Fisher; about how I met Max and where I was living after I escaped.

I answer
No comment
to every single one.

‘So you say you knew nothing about the plan to get you out of Mileway? That it came as a complete surprise?’ Bullfrog says for about the twentieth time. He looks bored as hell.

I yawn. ‘No comment.’

As I wait for the next question, Sub-Commander Healey stands up and nods at the securikomm mounted
on
the wall in the corner. Clearly, this session’s over. A few seconds later, the door behind me slides open and the two ACID agents come back in. I’m unshackled from the chair, then marched back to my cell.

Inside, with my restraints removed, I slump on my mat with my back to the wall. My stomach rumbles and I try desperately not to think about food. There’s no way of knowing when my next meal might be; I don’t even know when I’ll be dragged back to the interrogation room. It could be twenty minutes before they come to get me again, or it could be twenty hours.

I think about Max again, sick to my stomach that I couldn’t make him believe what I told him about my parents or his dad. He’ll never know, now, how much I care about him. I want to be back in our little den in the library with him. I want that moment back where he tried to kiss me. And this time, I want to let him, and I want to kiss him back.

And knowing I’ll never have that again makes me want to curl into a ball and howl.

Four days pass. In between interrogation sessions, I eat every bit of food they bring me and exercise and sleep as much as I can, determined to keep my strength up. My clothes and hair are disgusting now, but I try not to care, and take pleasure in the fact that most of the agents who come into my cell have started wearing face masks.

I’ve just got back from an interrogation session and have started doing squat thrusts in the middle of my cell
when
the door suddenly clunks open again. It’s an ACID agent. Sighing inwardly, I straighten up and wait for him to cuff me. Five minutes since the last session? This has to be a record. But instead of going back up to the interrogation room, we take the lift down a couple of floors. Two more agents are waiting for us: a woman with a short, squareish haircut and a skinny guy with a face like a rodent’s. Square Hair takes my arm and propels me down the corridor to a little room with a window in the door, which she opens before removing my cuffs and pushing me inside.

‘You’ve got five minutes,’ she says as she closes the door behind me again. ‘Leave your clothes by the door.’

Puzzled, I look around me. The walls, floor and ceiling are covered in dark green tiles and there’s a smell of damp in the air. Over in the corner, I see pipes. A tap coming out of the wall beside them. A thin, ragged towel hanging on a hook nearby.

Oh my God. A shower. They’re letting me have a shower. Despite my determination not to let anything get to me, I feel an overwhelming rush of relief, and have to swallow hard against the lump that rises in my throat.

I strip my filthy clothes off as fast as I can, and run across to the shower with my arms crossed over my chest, ignoring Square Hair watching me through the window in the door. The water’s cold, but I don’t care about that either. Grabbing the bar of bitter-smelling soap from the floor by the shower drain, I scrub myself all over with it, rubbing it through my hair and using my fingers to rake
out
the worst of the knots. Before I turn the water off I scoop some of it into my mouth and sigh in relief as I feel it flow down my parched throat. Then I wrap myself in the towel, trying not to shiver.

Square Hair opens the door. ‘Here.’ She hands me a bundle which, when I unwrap it, I discover contains a pair of trousers with an elasticated waist, a shapeless shirt, some underwear and a thin pair of slip-on shoes. Nothing fits properly – the clothes are too big and the shoes too small – but they’re clean. The other agent, Rodent Face, pulls on plastic gloves and piles my old clothes into a bag marked
BIOHAZARD – FOR INCINERATION
.

It’s only when we’re in the lift again that I start to wonder what the hell’s going on. Am I being moved? As Square Hair jabs the button to take us up, my stomach starts twisting with nerves.

But when the doors open and I see we’re on the interrogation-room floor, I relax again. It’s just another session with Sub-Commander Healey and her pet troll. They probably got fed up of me stinking the room out every time I was in there.

Square Hair takes me to an interrogation room – not the one I was in previously, but a larger room with no plexiglass screen. Apart from the table in the middle, which has two ordinary chairs on one side and one with restraints on the other, it’s empty. I sit down in the one with restraints, and Square Hair shackles me to it, then leaves.

I crane my neck, looking round the room. For some reason, I feel nervous again, apprehension fluttering inside me like moth wings. Behind me, the door hisses open. Two ACID agents walk around me and sit down at the table. One is Sub-Commander Healey, her face as smooth and emotionless as if it’s carved from stone.

And the other . . .

He smiles at me, and my heart lurches up into my throat.

‘Hello, Jenna,’ General Harvey says. ‘What a long time it’s been.’

CHAPTER 34

GENERAL HARVEY. THE
chief of ACID. The IRB President.

My one-time godfather.

The general and my father trained together, were rookie agents together, even headed a department together. But then the general started to rise through the ranks, leaving my father behind. He was elected ACID chief – which meant he automatically attained the status of IRB President – just after my ninth birthday. He and my father kept in touch, though. Sometimes, he’d come over for Sunday lunch with his son, Greg, whose favourite pastime when we were kids was picking his nose, and when we both hit puberty, staring at my chest. The older I became, the more I used to dread being left alone with him. Remembering the way he’d breathe noisily through his mouth as he looked at me makes me shudder even now.

‘Have they been treating you well here?’ the general says with a small smile that tells me he knows damn well they haven’t, and it’s probably been on his orders.

I shrug.

‘You’re not being very co-operative, are you, Jenna?’ he says.

I raise an eyebrow. ‘What’s the point? You’re going to put me back in jail no matter what I say.’

The general raises an eyebrow. I glance at Sub-Commander Healey. She’s fiddling with her komm, not looking at me. ‘We know Doctor Fisher got you out of jail,’ the general says.

‘Really? I thought
I
held him hostage and made him smuggle me out,’ I say sarcastically.

‘We both know what really happened,’ the general parries. ‘What
I
want to know is who he was working for. And I would like
you
to tell me.’

‘Can’t,’ I say. ‘Because they wouldn’t tell
me
.’

‘Who are
they
?’

‘The three little pigs.’

‘Jenna . . .’ He smiles again, but it’s a tight, humourless smile. I can see I’m getting to him. Good.

‘I’ve got a question for
you
,’ I say. ‘Why did you say I’d killed Doctor Fisher?’

‘Never you mind about that.’ The general flicks an invisible piece of dirt off his sleeve. ‘Who got you out, Jenna? What are their names?’

‘Eeny, Meeny, Miney and Mo,’ I say.

A flush is starting to steal up the general’s neck. I watch as he clenches and unclenches his fists. Sub-Commander Healey is still looking at something on her komm, obviously happy to let him do all the questioning. Then he puts a hand to his ear. ‘Excuse me,’ he says to Sub-Commander Healey, frowning. ‘I must take this link.’

He leaves the room, saying, ‘What? Be quick – I’m in the middle of interrogating the Strong girl!’

As soon as the door hisses shut behind him, Sub-Commander Healey snaps off her komm and leans forward. ‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘You can tell him Mel and Jon’s names. He won’t find them. They’re safe.’

I stare at her. What? How the hell does she know about Mel and Jon? What if ACID have got them and she’s taunting me, trying to make me confess to knowing them? I start to ask her, but General Harvey returns. He sits down and sighs.

‘I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,’ he says as I stare at the table top, my mind racing as I try to make sense of what Sub-Commander Healey just said. ‘But you’ve left me no option.’ I look up at him again and he leans his elbows on the table, steepling his fingers. ‘I’m going to offer you a choice,’ he says. ‘And I want you to think very carefully about it before you make your decision.’

‘What?’ I say. For once, I can’t come up with a smart answer. My palms are damp with sweat.

‘If you tell us the names of the people who helped you,’ he says, ‘we will allow you to be LifePartnered. You’ll be given accommodation – in Upper, mind – and a job.’

‘LifePartnered?’

‘Yes. Wouldn’t that be nice?’

I stare at him. ‘But why would you do that?’ I say. ‘I’m supposed to be a murderer.’

‘We will, of course, take steps to ensure your identity is kept secret,’ the general says smoothly, as if I hadn’t even spoken. ‘You’ll undergo a process called cognitive realignment, which will make you, and those around you, believe you are someone else. It’s harmless, but necessary if you are to make a smooth transition into your new life.’

‘You’ll do what?’ I say. Now I don’t just feel confused – I feel like none of this is real. I’ll wake up in my cell in a minute, still in my old, filthy clothes, and realize that all this is just a dream. ‘Cognitive
what
?’

‘Cognitive realignment. We use a combination of hypnotherapy and drugs to make subtle alterations to your prefrontal cortex. It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t remember anything about your old life afterwards.’

I stare at him. I’ve never heard of it, but it sounds . . .
awful
.

‘The other option,’ the general says, ‘is rather more drastic. At this very moment, ACID are bringing in a new law. One that will allow us to deal with this country’s most troublesome criminals – of which you are certainly one – in, shall we say, a rather more effective manner than we’ve been doing up to now.’

He presses his fingers together again and looks straight at me.

‘We are bringing back the death penalty, Jenna,’ he says. ‘If you don’t sign a confession and agree to be LifePartnered, you will be publicly hanged in one of the city’s ceremony squares in three weeks’ time.’

CHAPTER 35

A WAVE OF
freezing cold goes through me, pins and needles scattering all over my body as, in my mind, I see the Zone M ceremony square with a gibbet at one end instead of a stage.

‘Why is that the other option?’ I say, hearing my voice as if it’s coming from a long way away. ‘Why don’t you just send me back to prison? I don’t understand.’

‘I’m not asking you to understand,’ the general says, standing up. ‘I’m asking you to choose. You have until the next interrogation session.’

It’s only after he’s gone that I realize he hasn’t said when that will be.

Back in my cell – which, in my absence, has been swabbed down with a disinfectant strong enough to make my eyes sting, and the blanket on my sleeping mat exchanged for a clean one – I sit down on the floor with my legs crossed, trying to figure it out. Why has he offered me this choice? Why is the other option being given a new identity and a new life, and not just going back to prison?

It doesn’t take me long to figure it out. If I go to jail as Jenna Strong, I’m still me, with my own thoughts, my
own
identity. Prison didn’t break me before and it won’t this time, either. And because I have associations with the NAR now, there might even be people in jail who view me as some kind of hero. It would be better –
much
better – for ACID to turn me into someone else; someone who’ll quietly and willingly become just another cog in the wheel of IRB society.

No!
I think, despair ballooning inside me.
I won’t do it!

But I don’t want to die, either. Could I find some way to fight the cognitive realignment – resist the hypnotherapy or stop the drugs from taking effect? I pound a fist against the floor. What the hell sort of choice
is
this?

A short while later, an ACID agent comes to fetch me. General Harvey and Sub-Commander Healey are waiting for me in the same interrogation room.

‘Well?’ General Harvey says.

I glance at Sub-Commander Healey and she gives me an almost imperceptible nod.

I stare at the table.

‘Well?’ General Harvey says again.

I look up at him and tell him my decision.

JESSICA