Acid (32 page)

As Felix nods, the agent spots the commander’s triangle on his arm and salutes. ‘Sorry, Commander, didn’t see you there,’ he says. He points a gloved finger. ‘You want launch pad seven.’

We walk across to the launch pad in a huddle. The rotoport is bigger than I thought it was, and the rotos themselves are huge, towering above us. The one on launch pad seven is at half power, its bottom blades turning, its top blades still. A gigantic hatch in its belly lies open, revealing a cavernous space packed from floor to ceiling with crates and containers.

‘What is all that stuff?’ Fiona says.

‘Supplies for the prison,’ Felix says, motioning for her to keep her voice down as another ACID agent appears. ‘This way, please, Commander,’ she says, saluting Felix.

We follow the agent round to the side of the roto where there’s another, smaller hatch at the top of a metal ladder. Through the hatch is a cramped cabin, lit by strip lights, with padded seats around its edge and straps hanging down from the ceiling. A thin plexiglass screen separates us from the cockpit. As we sit down, stowing our bags under the seats, the pilot turns to give us a thumbs-up through the screen. The door to our cabin is slammed shut, and there’s a loud hydraulic drone from somewhere beneath us as the hatch in the roto’s belly is raised, and a boom that shudders right through us as it closes. The top blades begin to power up with a deep
whapwhapwhap
that, even inside the soundproofed cabin and with our helmets
on
, is almost deafening. It climbs to a steady scream, drowning out the whine of the blades underneath.

With a jolt, the roto rises into the air, and inside my helmet, I grin so hard my face starts to ache.

I’ve made it.

CHAPTER 55

IT TAKES JUST
over an hour for the roto to reach the island. Everyone is tense; the atmosphere in the little cabin feels like the air before a thunderstorm, prickling with electricity. ‘Good God, I could fly this thing better than this,’ Felix snaps as the roto bounces in the air, his voice coming through my helmet-komm, and we all grab onto the ceiling straps to keep from being tipped out of our seats.

‘Got a rotopilot’s licence, have you?’ Nik says. Felix turns his head to look at him, and even though I can’t see his eyes through his visor, I can sense the ice in his gaze.

‘Yes, I have,’ he says. ‘And all my flying hours.’

Nik goes quiet.

When the roto lands, we retrieve our bags and stand up, and Felix taps his visor to remind us to keep them pulled down. A few moments later the cabin door is opened by an ACID agent, who salutes him. Outside, it’s almost light.

‘Whoa,’ Rav says when we get down the ladder. I turn, looking in the direction he’s staring in, and see Innis Ifrinn prison for the first time.

To my surprise, it isn’t on the island at all, but built on
a
rig about a mile out to sea. It’s shaped like a squat grey cube, a walkway with a low railing running round the bottom and two rows of windows at the top. The lower of those two floors also has a walkway round the outside. There are no windows anywhere else, just solid, seagull-shit-streaked concrete.

We follow the agent down to a small cove where three ten-man inflatables are moored to a jetty, a much larger boat bobbing up and down on the water just out to sea. We get into one of the inflatables, and just five minutes later, we’re drawing up alongside the prison, where a second larger boat is moored to one of the legs of the rig.

An elevator takes us up to the first walkway with stomach-plunging speed. ‘Staff quarters are on the top floor,’ the agent tells us as she leads us through two sets of reinforced doors and inside, to another elevator next to a wide stairwell.

As we travel up through the prison, I think of all the inmates in the cells around us. Which one is Max in? He could be close enough to touch.

‘I’ll leave you to get settled in,’ the agent says when we reach the top floor, a long room with a kitchenette and two large tables at one end, and a few grubby-looking sofas, some lower tables and a holocom at the other. ‘The bedrooms and bathrooms are through there.’ She points to a door on the other side of the lounge. ‘And there’s stuff for tea and coffee in the cupboards over there.’ She jerks a thumb at the kitchenette. ‘Once the supply boat’s
brought
the rest of your stuff over, I’ll come back up here and go over everything with you.’

‘Very well,’ Felix says, and the agent salutes him and hurries to the door.

After she’s gone, everyone visibly relaxes. Rebekah pulls off her helmet, shaking out her hair. The others remove theirs too.

Then they look at me.

‘You gonna keep that thing on for ever, Hol?’ Rav says, one side of his mouth twitching up in a smile. My heart begins to race, and inside my gloves, I feel my palms go slick with sweat.

This is it
.

I swallow, steeling myself, and take off my helmet.

CHAPTER 56

A STUNNED SILENCE
falls across the lounge.

‘Je—’ Steve starts to say.

Felix silences him with a furious ‘
Shh!
’ Then he turns to me. ‘What did you do to Holly?’ he whispers through clenched teeth. His eyes glint with anger.

‘Nothing,’ I say. I shake my fringe out of my eyes. ‘Well, she might be a bit . . . tied up. But Mel and Jon should have found her by now. She’ll be fine.’

‘You stupid girl,’ Felix says. ‘Do you have any idea what will happen if ACID realize you’re here?’

‘I have a right to be part of this,’ I say fiercely. ‘ACID took my whole life away from me. You can’t honestly expect me to just wait around at the cottage and do nothing.’

I don’t tell him about my plan to rescue Max and confront the general. If I say anything about that, he’ll find a way to stop me for sure.

Felix makes a frustrated hissing sound between his teeth, glaring at me. I glare back. ‘We have to send her back,’ Drew says, shaking his head.

‘It’s too late,’ Rebekah says. ‘If we do that, they’ll realize something isn’t right. We have to pretend she’s Holly – we don’t have any other choice.’

Felix walks across the room, then comes back. ‘OK,’ he says to me, still speaking through clenched teeth. ‘This is how it will work. You’ll stay in your room, and—’

‘She can’t,’ Steve interrupts.

Felix and I both look round at him.

‘The other staff here are expecting a team of eight agents,’ he says quietly. ‘That means they’ll expect eight of us to be clocking in for shifts.’

‘We could pretend she’s ill,’ Drew says.

‘They’ll send a medic to check on her,’ Rebekah says. ‘Or ask for someone to replace her.’

‘What about if they see her on the cameras?’ Nik says.

‘They only have those in the cell blocks, don’t they?’ Fiona says. ‘As long as she keeps her helmet on when she’s down there, she should be OK.’

‘
Christ
.’ Felix rubs a hand across his scalp. Then he lets it drop and gives a sharp sigh. ‘OK,’ he says to me. ‘You got your wish. You’re on the team. But don’t you forget for one second that I’m in charge, and that you’re going to follow my orders to the letter.’

I nod, resisting the urge to snap him a salute.

Shaking his head, he says, ‘We’d better go and find our rooms.’

As I follow him and the others across to the door, I let out a slow, silent breath. Now all I need to do is somehow give them the slip so I can find Max.

And get ready to face General Harvey.

CHAPTER 57

TO SAY THE
staff quarters are basic is an understatement. The bedrooms are tiny and, apart from a hard bed, a metal locker to hang clothes in and a news screen on one wall, as bare as my old cell at Mileway. Everything looks worn out and shabby, even though the place is less than two years old. As I chuck my bag down on the bed and go to look out of the window, I’m half expecting Felix to come in and start ranting at me again, but he doesn’t. Maybe he’s too angry. Well, good.

My room faces out to sea. The water, stretching away to the horizon in a great grey sheet, looks restless, mirroring exactly how I feel inside.

Half an hour later, when the agent who brought us up here returns, we all go back out into the lounge. I stay at the back of the group, wearing a cap that I found in my backpack pulled down low over my face.

‘Your duty rotas are on the holocom,’ the agent says, turning it on. ‘You’ll be twelve hours on, twelve hours off. There’s also the contact details for the other staff who are on the floor below – the cooks and medics and maintenance crew – on there, and the keycodes for the doors, which change weekly.’

‘Do we have to do that?’ Felix asks.

‘No, they update automatically. And whatever code you have to get onto your block, you can use that to get into the cells too. Although you shouldn’t need to, with any luck.’

‘So you don’t anticipate any . . . problems?’ Felix says.

‘Oh, no, Commander,’ the agent says. ‘They’re a pretty docile lot here. And if any of them do try to kick off, well, there are ways and means, you know?’

I shudder. If this place is as bad as Anna says it is, I
do
know. Threats. Kickings. Beatings. Electric shocks. Stripping away every last little thing that makes you human until you’re just a shell, and you don’t care any more – just like Mileway, but worse.

‘Well, that’s it, I think,’ the agent says. ‘Good luck!’

When she’s gone, Felix calls up the duty rotas on the holocom. ‘Looks like we’re not on duty till eighteen hundred,’ he says. ‘I’ll link the rota and prisoner lists to everyone’s komms. Then I’m going to get some sleep, I think.’

When I go back to my room, I turn on my komm, thinking I’ll be able to find out where Max is. But I only have the link for the rota.
Damn it
. I wait a while, then go back out into the lounge. As I’d hoped, it’s empty, but when I turn the holocom on, all I get is a screen saying
PLEASE ENTER PASSCODE
. I turn it off with an angry sigh. Obviously, Felix is determined that I don’t try to make any contact with Max.

It’s a long day. I spend most of it in my room. I’m
exhausted
, but too wired to sleep, so I sit by the window and gaze out again. The glass is so thick I can’t hear the sea; the only noises are the hum of the air conditioning and the occasional thud of a door further along the corridor as the others go in or out of their rooms. From the prison below us, there’s no sound at all. When I get bored, I turn on the news screen, half wondering if there’s anything about ‘Jess Denbrough’ disappearing from Upper London, but I don’t find anything.

Lunch is sandwiches – sub ham and sub cheese on sub bread, with a side dish of vitamin pills. Dinner is sent up in covered dishes from the floor below in a sort of miniature elevator set into a hatch in the lounge wall – a stew made with sub meat. With every minute that passes, this place reminds me of Mileway more and more.

Then, from somewhere deep inside the prison, a siren sounds. It’s time for our shift.

‘Steve and Rav, you’re on Block One, the floor under the staff quarters,’ Felix says. ‘Drew and Nik, you’re on Two. Rebekah and I are on Three, and Holly and Fiona, you’re on Four.’ It takes me a few seconds to realize he’s talking to me.
Holly, Jess, Mia . . . when will I get to be Jenna again?
I think as he gives us the keycode for our block. After checking our equipment belts, and loading our packs with enough supplies to keep us going during our long shift – bottles of water, packs of jerky strips, dried fruit and nuts, and chocolate – we put on our helmets. Then we head to the elevator, travelling down to the bottom floor in silence.

‘You need to turn on your komm’s vidfeed in a minute,’ Fiona says. Although I can’t see her face behind her visor, I’m pretty sure her expression is grim.

‘I’m not here to cause trouble, you know,’ I say quietly.
Not for you, anyway
.

I see her shoulders lift as she sighs inside her helmet. ‘I guess—’ she starts to say, but I never find out what she guesses because the elevator stops and the doors slide open to reveal two ACID agents standing on the other side. We’re here.

Beyond the doors is a short corridor with a set of reinforced doors at the other end. The agents shove past us into the elevator without a word. We walk down to the door and Fiona types in the keycode. With a hiss of compressed air, the doors slide open. On the other side I see two padded chairs and a small table with a holocom on it, a door nearby marked WC and, to our right, another reinforced door.

We put our packs down by the table and Fiona types the block code into the keypad beside the reinforced door. It slides open to reveal a space a bit like an airlock, with a second door at the back. We step inside, waiting for the one behind us to close before Fiona opens it. Beyond, I see a dimly lit corridor.

Inside my helmet, I take a deep breath.

Then we step into the bowels of Innis Ifrinn prison.

CHAPTER 58

I WAS EXPECTING
it to be like Mileway, but it isn’t. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.

The noise is what hits me first: moans, screeches, shouts, cackling laughter that’s utterly devoid of any humour. Then the smell, seeping into my helmet despite the breathing filters inside it – a stench made up of shit, piss, mould, unwashed bodies and hopelessness, all of it coated with a layer of industrial-grade disinfectant. Another corridor, much longer than the one outside and so dimly lit that the other end is lost in shadow, stretches out in front of us. On either side are rows of cells, with barred gates instead of doors.

Fiona touches the side of her helmet to turn on her vidfeed, and motions for me to do the same. As we start to walk, a night-vision overlay in my helmet’s visor kicks in, making everything glow faintly green. We turn our heads from side to side, looking straight into each cell to capture the horror of what’s inside on our vidfeeds. Each cell contains two inmates. Some appear to be sleeping or unconscious, some watch us go past in silence. Others shout and call out, lunging at the cell doors, but no one can get to them because they’re all shackled by
one
wrist to the walls. The prisoners are all ages, male and female, and without exception look thin, filthy and exhausted.