Acid (7 page)

For all of two seconds, I’m annoyed with him. Then I realize that I could use this to my advantage. I did an extra half-shift at work last week, so I’ve got a couple of hours owing to me. If I get off early, I can go to the plant where Cade works and wait outside for him to finish. Then I’ll follow him back to wherever he’s staying and try to get him to talk to me, to make him see that he’s got to come back. If I can do that, Mel and Jon won’t even have to know he left.

And if that talk ends with my knee in his throat and his arms up behind his back, well, he’s in just as much danger going around without a Partner as I am, and I’ve got to make him see that.

The mystery is finally solved when I check my kommweb messages on my way to work and find one from Mel, saying her mother’s been taken ill unexpectedly and she and Jon have had to go up to Birmingham.
Sorry we
didn’t
link you
, the message says,
but we had to leave in the small hours of the morning and we didn’t want to disturb you. Mum’s not seriously ill, but there are a couple of things we need to sort out for her. We should be back in a day or two
.

When I get to the factory, everyone’s gathered around the news screen that dominates one wall in the foyer, talking in shocked murmurs. Glancing up at it, I see a head-and-shoulders shot of a teenage boy. I can tell from his clothes, casual but smart, and his clear, tanned skin that he’s from Middle, not Outer. His mop of dark hair falls in a curtain over his eyes, which are a shade somewhere between green and blue, and his grin, which is endearingly crooked, shows two rows of straight, white teeth. In my old life, he’s the sort of boy my friends – especially Nadia – would have looked down their noses at for being from Middle, but that I’d have daydreamed about when I was on my own. He’s not handsome, exactly, but he looks friendly and normal and nice; the sort of guy, if you were lucky enough to get Partnered to him, you could imagine curling up with and talking to until the small hours of the morning, and not even noticing what time it was.

There’s also something about him that’s maddeningly familiar. Then I see the headline:
MURDERED MILEWAY DOCTOR’S SON STILL MISSING
. Underneath is a line that reads:
Max Fisher, 16, disappeared shortly after the escape of killer Jenna Strong
.

The screen changes; there’s a picture of me now too, which ACID must have found in the prison files, my head
shaved
, my mouth twisted in a scowl. My fantasy about Max dissolves into a wave of freezing cold which leaves my hands tingling, and I want to charge out of the foyer as if ACID are already on my tail.

The mutters and murmurs around me rise to an almost hysterical pitch. ‘Just imagine, he could be anywhere. He could be here . . .’ ‘Look, it says his c-card was traced to a mag stop in Outer!’ ‘What if he’s helping her?’ ‘What if they both start killing people?’

The girl who just spoke, Louisa, is someone who works in my department. I wouldn’t say she’s a friend, exactly – I’ve kept myself to myself since I started here, too wary of making a slip-up that would reveal my true identity to want to get close to anyone – but we’re friend
ly
, I guess. She looks round at me, her eyes wide with fear, and for a moment, I forget how to breathe.

She can’t know it’s you
, I tell myself.
She can’t
.

‘Oh, Mia,’ Louisa says. ‘Did you see that? Maybe we should set up a rota so no one has to go home alone – find out who lives near each other and get them to drop each other off.’

‘Yeah, definitely,’ I say, and push through the crowd to go to my station just as our floor manager appears, demanding to know why no one’s started work.

To my relief, she grants my request to leave early without asking any awkward questions, and after lunch I take a mag to Zone Q. The food packaging plant where Cade works is nearly a thirty-minute walk from the mag terminal, a squat building opposite a huge statue of
General
Harvey, which I notice, with some satisfaction, has a huge streak of bird shit across its forehead. I find an empty doorway across the street to wait in, leaning against the boarded-over entrance behind me as I keep watch, not only for Cade but for ACID patrols and spotters – small, crescent-shaped drones that have vidfeeds and link information directly back to ACID – too. In Outer, if you’re not careful, just being out on the street is enough to get you stopped and searched. Hell, some days, just existing is enough.

Seventeen hundred hours comes and goes. People start to leave the plant, but there’s no sign of Cade. I wait a bit longer, gazing at the giant news screens on the sides of the buildings, displaying ACID public warnings in between news stories which seem mostly to be about me or Max Fisher. Agent Robot’s face looms down at me as she appears on the screens at various intervals to read out statements. When I get bored of watching her, I look at the drifts of litter that people have thrown at the vacuu-bins, and missed; the flock of mangy-looking pigeons settled on top of the statue of General Harvey; the bank of ancient-looking PKPs – public kommweb points – under a glass shelter nearby, all but one of them smashed up; at the girls not much older than me struggling past with screaming babies or hyperactive toddlers, their faces prematurely lined with exhaustion and despair.

If I’d been Partnered for real
, I think,
I might have had a kid by now
.

The stream of people leaving the plant dwindles to a
trickle
, and I still haven’t seen Cade. I ask a girl coming out if she knows where he is.

‘Don’t think I know him, sorry,’ she says.

I think about going inside, trying to find his supervisor, but what if he’s gone AWOL for some reason? ACID could be involved already, and if I turn up saying I don’t know where he is, they’ll want to speak to me about it. And if he is supposed to be somewhere else, shouldn’t I, as his Partner, know about it already?

Face it
, I tell myself.
He’s not here. You’ll have to try again tomorrow
. I push myself upright with an angry sigh and start the long walk back to the magtram terminal.

A few hundred metres down the road, I realize I’ve lost my bearings. I pass an elderly woman carrying an empty shopping bag on her arm. ‘Excuse me?’ I say.

She stops and peers at me. She’s so hunched over that the top of her head is only just level with my shoulder. ‘Do you know how I get back to the Zone Q magtram terminal?’ I ask her.

‘Head in the direction of the old town hall,’ she says, and points at a tall brick building some streets away. Even from this distance, it’s clearly derelict, with a rust-streaked clock tower rising from its roof, the hands frozen for ever at fifteen hundred.

‘Thank you,’ I say. I’m about to start walking when she plucks at my sleeve.

‘Did you see if there were queues to get into the shops back there?’ she asks me.

I shake my head. ‘Sorry, no. I didn’t come that way.’

She sighs. ‘I expect there will be, but I suppose I’d better go and have a look anyway.’ Then, all of a sudden, she beckons me to lean closer. ‘You know, it never used to be like this,’ she whispers. ‘You’re too young to know any different, dearie, but before the Crash people had a say in who ran this country. You didn’t have to queue up to get into the shops, and you didn’t have ACID agents pointing guns at you to make sure you didn’t complain about it.’

The Crash
. She’s talking about fifty-three years ago, when, after a decades-long global recession, the IRB went completely bankrupt and got kicked out of Europe, and the government collapsed. ACID, who were just a police force at the time, seized power and have run the country ever since. I remember learning about it at school. There, we were told how corrupt and lazy the old government had been, how it was their incompetence that allowed the Crash to happen in the first place, and how, if it hadn’t been for ACID, the IRB would have tipped over into complete disaster. It wasn’t until my conversations with Dylan that I started to wonder what ACID
weren’t
telling us about life before they took over, and to see them in a different light – the same light this woman sees them in, apparently.

The woman’s eyes burn with anger as I take an involuntary step away from her, automatically looking around for ACID agents.

‘Oh, I’m too old to worry about getting into trouble,’ the woman grumbles. ‘But I guess it’s different for you young folk.’

She shuffles away in the direction she came from.
If only you knew the trouble
I’ve
been in
, I think as I watch her go. Certainly, she’s right in thinking I don’t want any more.

Keeping the clock tower in my line of sight, I find my way back to the mag terminal. Soon, a mag going to Zone M pulls up, bullet-nosed and incongruously sleek in the midst of the squalor surrounding it. I get on and flash my card at the kredzreader, waiting for the glass doors that lead from the vestibule into the pod to hiss open. As the mag begins to pick up speed, I grab a strap hanging from the ceiling near the doors and wonder, with a growing sense of despair, what I’m going to do if (no, face it, Jenna,
when
) Mrs Holloway realizes Cade’s not around. I guess I could say he’s got a family emergency or something, but with her links to ACID, she could check up on things like that.

When I get off, I scan my c-card again to deduct the right number of kredz for my journey. I decide to take the footpath along the river back to Anderson Court. As I’m about to turn onto the footpath, I see something out of the corner of my eye. A flash of bright green. I stop and turn. There’s nothing behind me except an empty alleyway.

But as I start walking again, I think I hear footsteps. I whip back round. Nothing. I walk a little further. Then I turn, and this time, I catch sight of a shadow disappearing down another alleyway.

It could be anything
, I tell myself.
A kid, a cat, a feral
dog
 . . . But unease is pricking at the base of my spine – a sixth sense which, in prison, saved my life a hundred times. Just because I’m not in prison any more, it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to ignore it.

There’s a wall sticking out from the side of a building to my left, concealing a row of recycling hatches. I duck behind it and wait, peering round the corner at the entrance to the alleyway. Several moments pass. Then someone emerges. A boy in a stained green hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and filthy, ripped jeans.

He stands looking up and down the street. Although the top half of his face is hidden by his hood, I can see his mouth, twisted in a frown. Clearly, he’s wondering where I’ve gone.

He starts walking up the street towards where I’m hiding. My first instinct is to jump out and challenge him, but as he gets nearer I draw back into the shadows so he won’t see me. If I cause a scene, someone might link ACID, and once they’ve arrested me, all they have to do is take a blood sample and I’ll be back in jail.

I wait until Hoody Boy is ten metres or so ahead of me, then slip out and creep after him. He stops, and I draw back into the shadows.

When I emerge again, he’s gone.

I walk slowly, trying to figure out where he went. But he’s nowhere. I finally reach the footpath and turn onto it; at the mag bridge, NAR has left a new lightffiti tag in glowing orange letters, almost too bright to look at.
I
frown at it – what
is
that? – but my thoughts soon return to Cade. The sound of my trudging feet echoes off the wall opposite, and I shove my hands in my pockets. Maybe I should go to Zone Q on Sunday and find out if anyone there has seen him. But where would I start? The closer they are to London’s periphery, the bigger the Outer zones get.

Then I hear them.

Footsteps.

I stop. So do they. I look behind me, but deep shadows pool across the path and the murky surface of the water, and it’s so gloomy that I can’t see anything.

‘Whoever’s there, you don’t scare me,’ I say, whirling round. ‘Come out and face me if you’ve got the guts.’

I fold my arms, waiting.

‘I mean it,’ I snarl. A familiar sensation is creeping through me, adrenalin distilling into anger, pure and sharp and cold.

Nothing.

Wrapping my arms across myself, I turn back round. I’m thirty seconds from home. Whoever it is can go jump in the river.

I’ve barely gone two steps when someone runs up behind me. They slam into me with full force, grabbing me around the waist and trying to pin my arms against my sides. ‘Give me your c-card! And your komm!’ a male voice growls, blowing hot, foul-smelling breath into my face. ‘I’ve got a knife!’

CHAPTER 10

I JAB BACKWARDS
with my elbow and heel, connecting with his groin. As he grunts and staggers back, I twist out of his grip, hook my arm round his neck and spin him forward and over my shoulder, swatting him onto the ground and pinning his neck with my foot.

He stares up at me, gasping.

Hoody Boy.

‘You know, your breath stinks,’ I say.

His mouth moves, but nothing comes out.

‘Why are you following me?’ I say.

He makes a wheezing sound. Realizing he can’t speak because of the pressure of my foot on his throat, I step on his chest instead.

‘I – just – needed – some – stuff,’ he chokes.

‘So you thought you’d pick on some poor defenceless girl?’

‘I’m – sorry—’

‘You will be. Where’s this knife, then? If you’ve actually got one.’

He shakes something out of his sleeve.

‘Give it to me,’ I say.

When he passes it to me, I laugh. It’s a knife, all right –
a
butter knife, the blade dull, the plastic handle yellowed and chipped. Almost an antique. ‘Wow, terrifying,’ I say, tossing it into the river.

‘I – I’m sorry,’ Hoody Boy says again. His teeth are chattering.

‘Who are you?’ I say.

‘I—’

‘No, actually, don’t tell me. I don’t care. All I’m bothered about is that you made my already crappy day even worse.’ This time, my anger’s hot and spiky. ‘Who the hell d’you think you are, trying to rob me? No one’s got anything around here, or hadn’t you noticed?’ I know he probably doesn’t give a shit, but I need to vent. ‘And as for trying to nick my c-card, how would I get to work or buy food? You can’t use other people’s cards anyway.’