Acid (29 page)

As the first roto lands, another rises into the air. I notice low buildings close by, and flags fluttering in the breeze. Is it a rotoport of some kind? It seems a strange place for one, out here in the middle of nowhere.

Another wave of exhaustion crashes over me. I sink back down onto the bed. Maybe I just can’t remember who I am because I’m so tired. Maybe some more sleep will help. I pull the quilt over myself again, close my eyes, and drift off almost immediately, lulled by the rhythmic thumping of the rotos.

I don’t know what time it is when I wake up again, but I can hear someone moving about downstairs and a voice out in the garden. I push back the quilt and look out of the window again. A woman’s standing in the middle of the lawn, a pair of scissors in one hand, a bunch of flowers in the other. My stomach lurches with almost
instantaneous
recognition. I know her. But from where? Trying to figure it out is giving me a headache.
She’s called Mel
, I think.
And she was looking after me when I lived in
 . . . Oh, God, where did I live? London, that’s it. I lived in London. I had an apartment. And now I remember something else too: I was trying to get hold of her for something – it feels as if it was something important, although I have no clue what it could have been. When was that? Yesterday? Last week? Last month? Last year?

And why aren’t we in London now?

Unsteadily, I get out of bed, one hand against the wall for support. When I’m sure my legs are going to hold me, I strip off the cotton nightshirt I’m wearing and put on the clothes that have been left on the chair – underwear, trousers, a T-shirt, a jumper, a pair of light-soled shoes. They’re not mine, but they fit perfectly. Then I look through the drawers, wondering if there’s anything in them that might give me a clue to my identity. But they only contain more clothes and toiletries.

Disappointed, I open the door. Outside my room is a narrow landing with a bathroom at one end; I splash water on my face and use a finger to rub toothpaste across my teeth, then look at myself in the mirror. The face that looks back at me is familiar, yet different. Have I dyed my hair? I’m sure it should be darker. Now, it’s wavy and mousy-coloured, tangled on one side where I’ve been lying on it.

My name is
 . . .

Nothing.

I grip the edge of the sink and try again.
My name is
 . . .

It’s so close I can almost touch it, but just like earlier, when I try to get hold of it, the memory slithers away from me.

I turn away from the mirror, feeling angry and disappointed with myself. I should go downstairs. I need answers, and it’s clear I’m not going to find them staring into a mirror. Perhaps Mel will be able to help.

My legs still feel wobbly, so I hold onto the banister with both hands as I make my way down the stairs. At the end of the hall is a big kitchen with old-fashioned wooden furniture and lots of shiny, high-spec appliances, with a walk-in pantry on the left-hand side.

Mel’s at the sink, arranging the flowers from the garden in a glass vase. Another woman, small and slender with fine features and pale skin and dark hair, is sitting at the table. She’s familiar too. They both look round at me and Mel says, ‘Jenna!’ Then she shakes her head. ‘No, silly me, I meant Jess, of course. How are you feeling?’

I stare at her. That’s it. I’m Jenna. Jenna Strong. I was jailed for the murder of my parents, and someone got me out. A doctor. Even though I can’t remember his name, it’s like a lightbulb going on in my head. Several lightbulbs. ‘No,’ I say, my voice croaky and thin-sounding, as if I haven’t used it in a while. ‘You got it right the first time.’

‘You remember?’ A smile spreads across her face.

I frown. ‘Where am I?’

‘Come and sit down,’ Mel says, leaving the flowers to
go
over to the table and pull out a chair. ‘You look tired.’

She hasn’t answered me. I feel a flash of irritation – and also déjà vu. We’ve done this before, me asking questions and her evading them. When?

‘Where am I?’ I say again, crossing my arms, not moving. Mel and the dark-haired woman look at each other.

‘You’re in Lincolnshire,’ the dark-haired woman says.

‘Lincolnshire?’

‘Please sit down,’ Mel says, her voice firmer this time. ‘I know you’ve got a lot of questions, but you do look rather pale.’

Although I don’t want to admit it, my legs still feel shaky, so, frowning again, I sit down.

‘I’m Anna Healey,’ the dark-haired woman says, holding out a hand for me to shake. ‘We met quite recently, although you may not remember.’

I shake my head. I have no memory of that at all.

The thudding of a roto cuts through the air. Both Anna and Mel look up, following its path as it flies right over the house. ‘I wonder where
that
one’s going?’ Mel says, looking pensive.

‘Why is there a rotoport out here?’ I say.

‘It belongs to ACID,’ Anna says.

‘ACID?’

‘Yes.’

‘But aren’t you worried they’ll find you here? Find
me
?’

Anna has just opened her mouth to answer me when
someone
else comes into the room: a tall black man with greying hair.

‘She remembers her name,’ Mel says before he can speak, ‘and she knows who I am, but I’m not sure about anything else.’

‘That’s to be expected,’ the man says. He smiles at me. ‘Do you know who I am?’

I do, but his name won’t come to me. Tom. No, Bob. No – but it’s something short. It begins with a—

‘I’m Jon,’ the man says, and another one of those lightbulbs go on in my head.

‘How are you feeling?’ he says.

My stomach rumbles loudly. ‘Hungry.’

Jon makes toast and coffee. As soon he sets it down in front of me, I grab a piece of toast, shovelling it into my mouth, then pick up another, and another. I feel as if I haven’t eaten in for ever.

‘OK,’ Jon says when I’ve finished. ‘I need to check you over. Then we’ll explain what you’re doing here.’

As he takes my temperature and pulse with a small, hand-held scanner, I get another of those maddening flashes of déjà vu. We’ve done this before too.

‘How long have I been here?’ I ask when he’s finished.

‘Just over three weeks,’ he says. ‘You’ve been unconscious for most of it.’

‘Why?’ I say. Suspicion starts to grow inside me. Have I been drugged? Then another memory flashes into my head. I’m in a large, gloomy building, and I’m tied to a chair. There’s someone in another chair nearby – they’re
tied
up too – and someone else standing in front of us.
Her name’s Jenna Strong
, he’s saying, but to who, and why?

I grip the edge of the table.

‘Jenna, are you OK?’ Mel says, sounding concerned.

‘No,’ I say. ‘My memory’s all fucked up. What happened to me?’

‘What do you remember?’ Anna asks.

Resting my elbows on the table, I dig my fingertips into my temples.

‘I remember living in London,’ I say, pointing at Mel. ‘I was trying to get hold of you. Then I was on a train and . . .’ I shake my head. ‘I don’t know. Everything’s mixed up.’

‘Do you remember Max?’ Mel asks.

Max
. The name sets off another wave of déjà vu. But I can’t picture a face to go with it.

Mel begins to talk. I listen with growing amazement as she tells me that I hooked up, somehow, with the son of the doctor who got me out of prison; that we ended up on the run together, and got involved with a cell of the New Anarchy Regiment who carried out a terrorist attack on an ACID rally in Manchester, setting off a bomb that killed ten people.

‘You and Max were found tied up in a church,’ Anna says. ‘An anonymous member of the public linked ACID to say he’d apprehended you.’

I stare at her in shock. A terrorist attack? Bombs? I don’t remember any of it. Was that the weird memory
I
just had, about being tied to a chair? Was Max the other person who was tied up with me?

‘Don’t panic, I don’t think for a moment that you had anything to do with the bomb going off,’ Anna says. ‘A short while before, someone else linked ACID to warn them about the bombs. We think that was you.’

I feel myself sag with relief. The thought that I might have been responsible for those ten deaths is almost too horrible to contemplate.

‘What happened after that?’ I say, staring at the crumbs on the plate in front of me.

‘You were arrested and questioned, but that was really just a formality,’ Anna says. ‘Then you were taken to see General Harvey—’

My head jerks up at the mention of his name. ‘I saw him? Recently?’

Anna nods. ‘He offered you a choice – to be given a new identity and be LifePartnered, or be put to death.’

‘I was
LifePartnered
?’ I say.

‘Yes. The boy you were Partnered with and his family had no idea of your true circumstances, of course. They were led to believe that you were a girl whose parents had been killed in an accident, hence you’d missed your proper LifePartnering slot – and were offered money to let their son be Partnered to you.’

‘You were put through a process called cognitive realignment to make you think you were someone else,’ Jon adds. ‘But because it had already been done to you before, they had to do it with medication this time, which
you
were told was an antidepressant. You may have been subconsciously fighting it, which is why you’re getting some memories back now. We tried various things to trigger it – hacking your news screen, sending you a device with a message on it – but it didn’t work. In the end, we had to have two of our operatives pose as ACID agents and get you out of there.’

His words are generating flickers of memory, but nothing more. Nothing that makes sense.

Then I replay what he’s just told me in my head. ‘Hang on, what do you mean, it had been done to me before?’ I say.

I see Mel, Jon and Anna exchange glances.

‘When?’ I say.

‘After your parents were murdered,’ Anna says.

‘But they
weren’t
murdered,’ I say. ‘It was an accident! I only meant to scare my dad but my mum tried to grab the gun and it went off. She—’

‘Jenna,’ Anna says. ‘You had nothing to do with your parents’ deaths at all.’

‘What?’ I say.

‘You didn’t kill them. Not even by accident. It was ACID.’

CHAPTER 49

MY HEAD BEGINS
to spin. I hear a rushing sound in my ears, as if I’m falling. Any moment, I’ll hit the ground, wake up and realize this is all a crazy dream.

But it doesn’t happen.

Because I’m not dreaming.

It’s real.

I try to speak, and can’t. My vision starts to grey at the edges, the roaring in my ears growing louder.

‘Jenna?’ Mel says, and I realize I’m holding my breath. I gasp, filling my lungs with air, and my vision returns.

‘But – but I remember—’ I say.

‘They’re false memories,’ Anna says. ‘ACID implanted them in your head using CR, but because you were younger, and it was the first time it had ever been done to you, it was a lot more successful.’

‘Wait,
what
memories are false?’ I say. ‘The ones about killing my parents? Or are there more? There was this boy—’

‘Dylan,’ Anna finishes for me. She shakes her head. ‘There’s no such person. He never existed. ACID put him in your head, and made you think you wanted to rebel against your parents and ACID so there would be a
reason’
– she makes inverted comma signs with her fingers – ‘for their deaths. They really were very thorough the first time around, I’m afraid.’

I stare at her. How is that even possible? Those memories are too clear, too
real
.

Then, with a surge of shock, I remember a dream I had back at the flat, the one with an ACID agent killing my parents. Is that what really happened? Did my subconscious cling onto the true events of that day and feed them back to me in my sleep?

The shock turns to bewilderment. I feel as if the earth has shifted on its axis, everything I thought I knew about who I was unravelling with breathtaking speed.

‘I don’t understand,’ I say in a shaky voice. ‘Why would ACID kill my parents? They
were
ACID. My father was a lieutenant.’

Anna, Jon and Mel look at each other. Then Anna says, ‘Your parents also worked undercover for an organization called FREE – the Foundation for Rights, Emancipation and Equality. You’ve probably never heard of them. They do have a public face, as a charity working to help those most in need, but even that’s frowned upon by ACID so they keep it very low key.’

Suddenly, I remember the day after I got out of Mileway when I was taken to see Steve, the guy who told me about my new identity as Mia Richardson. There’d been something on his computer screen when I came into the room – a document with the word FREE at the top, and a logo that looked like a butterfly.

‘Is that who you are?’ I ask them.

They all nod.

‘The group has been around for a long time – almost twenty-five years,’ Anna says. ‘Our ultimate aim is to topple ACID and free this country from their regime. Several top-ranking officials in ACID also secretly work for us – as a Sub-Commander, I’m one of them – gathering evidence against ACID to prove they’re ruling this country through tyranny and fear. Because ACID are so powerful, we’ve had to take things slowly, but we’re now at the point where very soon, and with the help of the European Criminal Justice Bureau, we’re going to put them on trial for human rights abuses. If we’re successful, it will finish them.’

‘You’re a Sub-Commander in ACID?’ I ask, and then one of those memory flashes hits me, and I realize why I recognize her. ‘You’re always on the news screens, aren’t you?’ I say.

Anna nods. I stare at her for a moment. Now it’s clicked who she is, it feels strange to see her sitting in front of me in the flesh. And it feels even stranger to hear her talking about overthrowing ACID.

‘So is that why ACID killed my dad?’ I say eventually. ‘Because they found out he was in FREE?’

‘Not exactly,’ Anna says. ‘Your father discovered that ACID were building an offshore prison. No one knew about it except for General Harvey, who was the one who’d ordered it to be built in the first place – even I had no idea it existed. But your father slipped up. He tried
to
copy the plans from the general’s personal kommweb, and didn’t cover his tracks properly. The general found out what he’d been doing.’