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useless information, like date of last tetanus shot, and name of GP. Not a lot to work with,

but enough for now. I wondered idly what she looked like.

Rebecca

Crutches are hard work. You’d think they would make life easier; I believe that’s what

they’re supposed to do, but no. I was stuck at home for three days following the accident,

trying to get used to the things so I wouldn’t fall over and kill myself as soon as I went back to school on Monday. I was hampered by a five ton cast that extended from around my

ankle to just above mid thigh, and it itched. Still, it could have been worse. As soon as my

codeine induced fog faded, it occurred to me what could have happened, and I went into a

kind of delayed shock. Admittedly, it was pretty minor; I am not one for histrionics – I don’t see the point, but I came to realise how lightly I’d gotten off. And then I started being angry with that idiot that had hit me. He could have killed me, and he would probably have driven

away then too.

Mum seemed to take it well at first when she got home that evening, but when I went

up to say goodnight to her later, she was sobbing quietly. I felt awful, even though I knew it was not entirely my fault. I hated to see my mother cry, especially since crying was

something I seldom did.

“You OK, Mum?” I asked lamely, knowing that she wasn’t really.

“I’m fine, baby,” she said, smiling ruefully through her tears. “I’m crying from relief

more than anything else. How is the knee?”

“Not too bad.”

“Don’t forget to take some of those painkillers before you go to bed,” she reminded me

for the tenth time.

“I won’t,” I said, leaving the sentence ambiguous for a reason. I was tired of the hazy

head feeling and the pain seemed to be settling. I’d be OK tonight. I’d take the tablets when

I got the pain again. As I left my mother’s bedroom I marvelled at how it was that some

people could cry so easily, while others couldn’t. I wondered if there was something wrong

with me.

Angus

I drove past her address twice that Friday morning. It had taken an hour or so to get

from the hotel in Oxford to Banbury, a medium sized town that squatted over the M40 just

as the South East became the Midlands. She lived in a semidetached house in the middle of

a long row of similar properties. Relatively new builds, it looked like. Maybe ten years old,

but already showing minor signs of wear and neglect that seemed to pervade so called

middle income areas. I found Rebecca’s house easily. Neat garden, peeling paint on the

window sills, elderly Peugeot in the driveway. The second time I drove past I examined the

surrounding houses. No for sale or for rent signs. People must like living here. Interesting,

but potentially problematic.

I’d been thinking about how to approach the situation ever since Marcus had told me

that they’d found a match. Straightforward abduction was certainly an option, but it would

inevitably lead to complications. Police involvement, media, that kind of thing. Not that that would necessarily stop me. I had abducted people before – it wasn’t hard. I guess you could

say that it’s another one of my talents. It’s just that the people I usually abducted, well, their opinions of me were more or less completely irrelevant. This girl, this Rebecca Harding, she

was different. It was part of our vague plan that she become one of us, and the smoother

the integration, the better. It would be counterproductive to have an infuriated or severely

depressed girl on our hands back home.

I decided to move my base of operations to a nearby hotel for a few days. Oxford was

too far away to be driving back and forth each day. I also needed to discuss a few issues

with both of my brothers. It had been blind luck that I had been in the same country as this

girl, but things needed organising now. I had considered various options for surreptitiously

inserting myself into Rebecca’s life, and becoming a neighbour seemed the most practical

solution. It would mean that I would be able to keep an eye on her too. Fergus would have

to buy one of these neighbouring houses for me. It wasn’t likely to be difficult to persuade

him to do it. He would relish the challenge.

I booked myself into a generic hotel above a pub a few miles from Rebecca’s home, and

phoned Marcus and Fergus at the lab, where I knew they would be at this time, and most

other times too. Marcus was and had always been obsessed with his lab and his research,

and Fergus had set up a wall of computers inside it so he could keep an eye on his brother,

or so he said. I reckon he liked the company, though he’d never admit it.

“Angus!” Hearing my name always came as a bit of a jolt for me. I often wondered why

my father had named us as he had, besides the fact that we’d all been born in Scotland over

half a century ago. He had told us that he wanted our names to be similar, so that we could

have a kind of collective identity. Pretty bloody ironic under the circumstances, really. Being fundamentally and extraordinarily different to everyone else and alike only to each other

was a given for us. It was our affliction.

Those crutches were trying to kill me. I abandoned them after a couple of days and

managed to get about in a kind of hip grinding straight legged stagger. My brothers thought

it was hilarious to watch me trying to negotiate the stairs to my bedroom, and laughed a

little too loudly for my taste. Fortunately Joe was away at a friend’s for most of the

weekend, but I had to contend with Mark giggling and my mother trying not to smile.

Then I thought about trying to negotiate all the stairs and passages at school, and I

shuddered. The school I attended had more than its fair share of bullies, and my own

personal nemesis was an oversized thug called Shanice. She infested my life with her greasy

hair and her sneers and her motley collection of equally dysfunctional friends, and was one

of the main reasons I was looking forward to the next academic year. Shanice would be

leaving then to go and work in some factory or shop or live off the welfare system. I didn’t

really care what she did, as long as I didn’t have to look into those piggy eyes ever again.

Unfortunately that beautiful day was a good few months away, and until then I was stuck

with her.

I have to say, I was really not looking forward to Monday morning.

Angus

I spent the weekend doing a bit of investigating of my own. Fergus had given me a

broad description of the car that had hit Rebecca, which he’d probably hacked from the

police database; and then a list of matching cars in the region, starting with the ones

reported stolen, and then those with a male teenager in the family, and then the rest. It

took me four hours to find the hit and run driver. Turns out he had had an argument with

his partner and had driven off in a blind rage after smacking her around a bit.

I’d actually narrowed the list of potential suspects down to fourteen likely candidates,

and twenty six more possibles. I visited each in turn, pretending to be looking for someone

called Jack McShane, an entirely fictional character of my own making. I had asked for the

same person at twelve different residences when I stumbled upon my target. I knew it was

him as soon as he opened the door, and I felt the tangle of his thoughts sliding over the rage and frustration and meanness that was his mind. That was another of my talents, you could

say – an ability to sense the general gist of someone’s thoughts without actually reading

them in detail. It was a useful ability in situations such as these, where finding the correct quarry was not a straightforward “follow the clues” exercise.

I looked briefly at the cowering woman in the background, with a fresh black eye and a

small baby clutched in her arms, and I made a decision.

In situations like these, where the man’s infraction was easily reported and proven,

given the necessary resources, and which was punished by the laws of the country, I usually

simply contacted the police and gave them the information needed anonymously, and made

sure that they followed it up. But in cases where the law did not recognise the crimes being

committed, I intervened. Wife beating was not usually considered a crime until the woman

broke out of her prison of abuse and fear and reported it. I disagreed. I glanced again at the small vulnerable frightened mouse of a woman and her helpless baby, and I knew that this

teenage thug needed a bit of corrective manipulation. It would give me something to do to

pass the time.

I picked him up the next day.

Rebecca

Sunday was a strange day all round. Big brother Joe was away someplace, so it was just

me and Mark and Mum, who always cooked a vegetarian roast dinner for us on Sundays.

She was rubbish at it, and usually turned out yellowed vegetables, crunchy roast potatoes

and lumpy gravy, but we never complained. I cooked weekdays, or the boys would heat up

some microwave meal and present it with a flourish, but Sunday was Mum’s day, and she

took it seriously. Taste buds adapt, eventually.

Our street was not a bad one for the area. The occasional gang of feral teenagers would

come wandering down the road, hurl a few stones and be obnoxious to any passersby, but

they would soon get bored and amble off again. So when the commotion kicked off across

the road, everyone came out into their front gardens to see what was happening.

The house that appeared to be at the centre of all the attention was more or less

diagonally across the road from our place. It was occupied by a middle aged woman and her

thirty-something son. They were a creepy pair. She had bright yellow hair and the deep

wrinkles that you get from smoking too much, and a mouth like an upside down ‘u’. He

always looked like he needed a bath, with his lank greasy hair and stained clothes. I never

got close enough to him to find out, but he looked like he would smell funny, kind of musty

and stale. They were both outside in their rubble-strewn front garden. She was yelling at a

man carrying a settee into the removals van that was parked half-on-half-off the pavement.

I was impressed. I had never seen anyone make so much noise with a lit cigarette dangling

out the corner of their mouth.

“Looks like they’re moving,” said Mark.

“Good,” said Mum.

And that was that.

Angus

It took me a while to explain to Mr Hit-and-run why he was tied to a chair in the middle

of a conveniently deserted warehouse. He didn’t believe it at first, that someone would take

the time to kidnap him because he’d run over some girl. When I told him that I didn’t like

wife-beaters either, he looked positively stunned.

“We’re not married!” was his excuse. That said it all for me.

Make no mistake. It’s not that I don’t enjoy violence. I do. I was designed for violence,

for tearing and crushing and snapping flesh and bone. So if I can control the brute in me, the seething rage and hunger that threatens to erupt every living minute of my life, if I can

control that, then mindless idiots like the one whimpering in front of me had no business

assaulting a defenceless woman because he was
upset
.

I reached out and tasted the texture of his thoughts. I smelt the fear in his sweat. This

one would be easy.

About the time Marcus was setting up his lab and doing various degrees in genetics and

physiology, I set out to explore the potential that my father had seen in me just before he

died. I discovered that I was able to delve into the minds of people, to pick out the essence

of who or what they were. I could sense fear, and anger, and greed, and lust, and hatred;

although I couldn’t actually read people’s minds or hear what they were thinking, I could get

a sense of their thoughts and feelings. And one day, as I was dealing out my own form of

justice to an unrepentant paedophile, I realised that I could modify that essence, those

emotions. Inserting anything into a human mind was almost impossible under normal

circumstances. The rapidity and randomness of their flickering thoughts made it almost

impossible to get through. It was like trying to penetrate a firewall.

That day I discovered that there was one thing that slowed thoughts and concentrated

the mind, allowing me to drive a specific concept or set of values into that briefest of gaps.

Pain
. Severe pain crystallised thought, and the amount of hurting required depended on the individual. Pain is always subjective. That paedophile had required hardly any. Some needed

a lot more to render their thoughts motionless.

I broke Mr Hit-and-run’s left femur with one hand while I searched for that elusive gap.

It shimmered briefly into existence, and I thumped a silvery wedge into his mind. He would

never knowingly hurt another living thing again. I cut the restraints that held him, and

carried him to a nondescript white van parked just inside the massive doorway. I’d leave

him near a deserted road, and then call emergency services anonymously. They’d find a

bewildered man next to a road, he wouldn’t remember what had happened, or how he got

there, and they’d assume that he was just another hit and run. Ironic, really.

Rebecca

The racket died down at about 6 that evening. It had been dark for an hour already, and