iBoy (17 page)

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

As we sat there grinning at each other, I couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t look quite so withdrawn as before. She was wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt, no socks, no makeup, and her hair was freshly washed. She looked really good. She looked . . . I don’t know. She just looked
good
.

“What?” she said, self-consciously flicking her hair. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I said, looking away. “Where
is
Ben, anyway? You said he went out?”

“Yeah, I asked him not to, but he said it was urgent.”

“Urgent?”

She shrugged. “He got a text from someone just before he went out. Maybe he had to meet them . . . I don’t know.” She reached down and scratched her bare foot. “Anyway . . . you should have
seen
this guy, Tom. It was
amazing
. I mean, when he had O’Neil at the window, I really thought . . .”

As she carried on telling me how amazing iBoy was, I tracked down Ben’s mobile — he was in a ground-floor flat in Baldwin House — and I opened up his texts. There was one from someone who identified himself only as “T” which just said
here now
. Ben had answered
cant sorry
. T had written back
NOW! OR UDED
, and Ben, unsurprisingly, had replied
ok 5 mins
.

I traced T’s mobile — he was in the same location as Ben — but I couldn’t find out anything else about him. It was a brand-new phone — pay as you go, unregistered — so my iBrain couldn’t tell me much about it, but my normal brain told me that T was probably Troy O’Neil.

I stayed at Lucy’s until about nine o’clock, when her mum came back, by which time Lucy had finally stopped going on about iBoy and we’d spent a really nice hour or so just talking to each other about not very much at all — TV shows, school gossip, music . . . just good old ordinary stuff.

As Lucy was seeing me out, I said to her, “If anyone starts bothering you again, just give me a call, OK? I mean, I know I’m not as superheroic as your oh-so-wonderful Mr. iBoy —”

“Shut up.” Lucy smiled, punching me lightly on the arm.

I looked at her. “I mean it, Luce. Any trouble, or even if you’re just on your own or anything — call me.”

She nodded, still smiling. “Thanks, Tom.” And then, without a word, she reached up and gently caressed the scar on my head. “It tingles,” she said quietly.

“I’m Electro-Man,” I told her. “Honestly, I’m truly shocking.”

“Yeah,” she said, grinning. “You
wish
.”

Ben wasn’t expecting to see me standing in the corridor when the elevator doors opened, but I was expecting to see him.

“Tom . . .” he said, unpleasantly surprised. “What are you —?”

“A word,” I said, taking his arm and leading him out of the lift.

He started to pull away from me. “I don’t really have time —”

“Yeah, you do,” I told him, tightening my grip on his arm. I led him down the corridor, past his flat, and through the door into the stairwell. “Sit down,” I told him.

“What is this?”

“Sit down.”

He did as he was told, sitting down hesitantly on the steps, and I sat down next to him.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked him.

“What? Nothing —”

“When I talked to you yesterday, you made out like you were all eaten up with guilt about Lucy. Do you remember? You said you couldn’t help thinking that it was all your fault.”

“Yeah . . . so?”

“So how come today, twenty-four hours later, you leave her on her own in the flat after she’s just been scared shitless by the bastards who raped her?”

“No,” he said firmly, shaking his head. “No, she was OK —”

“You left her on her
own
, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yeah, I know, but they weren’t coming back —”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I mean . . . I didn’t think they were —”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I interrupted. “That’s not the point. You left Lucy on her own.” I glared at him. “Don’t you
get
it?”

He lowered his eyes, staring sulkily at the ground.

“God, Ben,” I sighed. “You’re so full of shit. You really are.”

He shrugged.

I sat there looking at him for a few moments,
trying
to feel something good about him, but I just couldn’t find anything. After a while, I said quietly, “What did Troy want?”

His head jerked up and he stared at me. “What?”

“Troy O’Neil. What did he want with you?”

“How do you know I was at Troy’s?”

“Lucky guess. What did he want?”

“Nothing . . .”

“What did he
want
?” I repeated

Ben just shook his head again.

“Your mum’s home,” I reminded him. “Do you want me to go and tell her how you stole that iPhone?”

“No,” he said quietly.

“So tell me what Troy wanted.”

He sighed. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

I started to get up, as if I was going to see his mum.

“No,” he said quickly, grabbing my arm. “I didn’t mean it like
that
. . . I just meant . . .”

“What?” I said, removing his hand from my arm and sitting down again. “You just meant what?”

“It wasn’t
about
you. Troy, I mean . . . he didn’t want to see me about
you
. It was about this guy . . .”

“What guy?”

Ben frowned. “Shit . . . I don’t know. It was when Yo and the rest of them were outside the flat earlier on. This guy . . . shit. I don’t know
what
he was. He had this really weird stuff on his face . . . like lights or something, but
not
lights. Some kind of camouflage . . . a mask . . . I don’t know. He just appeared out of nowhere and started smacking everyone around. Christ, it was
unbelievable
. And he had one of those Taser guns . . . you know? Those electric things, like the cops use. He was zapping the fuck out of everyone.”

“Yeah?”

“He even tried to throw Yo out the window. He probably
would
have if Yo hadn’t chopped him one.”

“Really?”

“Yeah . . . Yo knows karate. He chopped this guy in the neck, and the guy let him go.”

“You saw that?”

“Yeah, I saw everything. That’s why Troy wanted to see me. He wanted to know all about this guy, you know . . . I mean, he tried to kill Troy’s brother.”

“So you told Troy everything you saw?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything else?”

“Like what?”

“Did you tell him anything else?”

“No . . .”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, yeah . . .”

“You don’t
sound
very sure.”

Ben looked at me. “I didn’t tell him anything else, all right? I don’t
know
anything else.”

I stared at him. “You’d better not be lying to me.”

He shrugged.

I said, “So what do you think Troy’s going to do about this guy with the Taser?”

Ben shrugged again. “Find him, I suppose.”

“Then what?”

“Kill him, probably.”

“What does he actually do?”

“I’m sorry?”

“God . . . I mean, what does he actually
do
?”

“Well,” the priest says slowly . . . “it’s not really a question of what God
does —
”

“It is for me.”

Kevin Brooks

Dawn
(2009)

After I’d let Ben go back to his flat, I found myself — somewhat surprisingly — heading
up
the stairs instead of going back down. I didn’t consciously know what I was doing — I mean, I hadn’t planned it or anything — but I knew that the stairs led up to the roof, so I suppose there must have been
some
thing inside me that knew what I was doing.

Two flights up from the thirtieth floor, I came to a padlocked iron gate. It was a full-length gate, reaching from the floor to the ceiling, and it was secured with a thick metal chain and a huge brass padlock. I took hold of the padlock in my hand, closed my eyes, and let the energy flow through my arm, into my hand . . . and after a moment or two, I felt things moving inside the lock. I heard soft clicks, the sound of metal on metal . . . and suddenly the padlock sprung open.

I unwound the metal chain and went through the gate, closing and locking it behind me, and now I was faced with a steel-reinforced door marked
NO UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS
. It was locked, of course, but not with a padlock this time — there was a keypad on the wall. I’d need to know the security code to get in.

Not a problem.

I hacked into the council’s database, searched through a load of security stuff relating to all the towers in Crow Town, and found the four-digit code. I keyed it in — 4514 — and opened the door. It led through into a little room filled with all kinds of stuff — cabinets and shelves, pipes and cables, heating controls. A metal ladder was fixed to the far wall, leading up to a padlocked hatchway. I climbed the ladder, iUnlocked the padlock, then pushed open the hatchway and stepped out onto the roof.

The rain had stopped now, but as I closed the hatchway behind me and walked over to the edge of the roof, I could feel the cold night air breezing through my hair. I was thirty floors up, high above the ground, and I could see for miles and miles all around. Lights were glowing everywhere — lights of houses and flats, streetlights, traffic lights, streams of headlights — and away in the distance I could see the bright lights of central London — office blocks, luxury tower blocks, streets and streets full of shops and theaters and traffic . . .

I’d seen it all before, of course. I saw it every day, every time I looked out the window. But the view from up here — outside, on the roof — somehow felt different. It felt wider, clearer, bigger . . . more
real
.

I sat down, cross-legged, on the very edge of the roof.

In the darkness below, Crow Town was getting ready for the night. Groups of kids were hanging around — on street corners, in the shadows of the towers, at the side of the road — and others were cruising the estate in cars or on bikes. Faint sounds drifted up into the night — shouting, dogs barking, cars, music — but up here, high above the rest of the world, everything was quiet.

I gazed up into the starless night, and all I could see was a boundless world of darkness and emptiness . . . but I knew it
wasn’t
empty. The sky, the atmosphere, the air, the night . . . the whole world was alive with radio waves. They were everywhere, all around me, all the time — TV signals, radio signals, mobile-phone signals . . . WiFi, microwaves, VHF, UHF . . . electromagnetic waves.

They were everywhere.

And although I couldn’t see them, I could
sense
them. I could connect to them. I
knew
them.

I closed my eyes and tuned in, at random, to a mobile-phone call: . . .
it’s just past the post office in the High Street
,
someone was saying
. You go past the post office and there’s a pub, and it’s just there.

What pub?
someone else said.
The George?

No, that’s on the other side of the road . . .

And another random conversation:
. . . why not? You said it’d be all right if I didn’t do it again.

Yeah, I know, but you did . . .

And another:
. . . take the fucker down, innit? He can’t fucking do that, I’ll fucking pop the fucker . . .

Someone, somewhere, was sending an email to someone called Sheila, telling her that unless she sorted herself out, she wouldn’t be seeing her baby again. Someone else was emailing someone in Coventry from a supposedly untraceable email address . . . but I could trace it.
the bio is easy
, it read.
anyone can make a germ bottle and drop it in the water supply and kill 100000. the martyr would commit himself leaving no trace of j involvement.

And someone else was texting a really obnoxious message to a girl called Andrea, saying all kinds of nasty things to her . . .

And on the web . . . God, there was a whole
world
on the web. A world of so many things — good things, bad things, dull things, mad things — it was just like the real world. Just as wonderful, just as beautiful . . . but also just as vile and sick and heartbreaking.

I stopped scanning.

There was too much going on out there, too much bad stuff, and I didn’t know how to cope with it all. All the stuff I knew, but didn’t
want
to know . . . everything that wasn’t good, that wasn’t right, that wasn’t fair . . . I
knew
it. And I knew that I
could
do something about it . . . or, at least, I could do something about
some
of it. I mean, for example, I
could
find out who’d sent that obnoxious text message to Andrea, and why they’d sent it, and I
could
find out where they lived, and I
could
go and see them and try to persuade them that sending obnoxious text messages is a really shitty thing to do. But then what about the millions of other bad things, the things that are a million times worse than sending shitty text messages — the abuses, the terrors, the sick things that people do to each other — the things that I wouldn’t be able to do anything about because I’d be too busy trying to help Andrea, like terrorist plots to kill 100,000 people with a biological weapon . . . ?

What was I supposed to do about
them
?

I couldn’t do
every
thing, could I?

I wasn’t God.

I was just a kid . . .

And besides
, I told myself,
at least you’re
trying
to do
some
thing about
some
of the bad stuff, the stuff that happened to Lucy . . . and that’s a hell of a lot more than God ever does. I mean, God does fuck all, doesn’t he? He just sits there, luxuriating in all his superpowers, demanding to be adored . . .

It was 22:42:44 now, and the night was getting colder. I pulled up my hood and turned on my iSkin, warming myself with the electric heat . . . and as I gazed down over the edge of the roof, I wondered what I looked like from down below — a softly glowing figure, sitting cross-legged on the top of a tower block . . .

Like some kind of weird hooded Buddha . . .

A skinny, glow-in-the-dark iBuddha.

Or maybe an iGargoyle.

I closed my eyes again and opened up my Facebook page. There were two messages from aGirl: an old one that said
have you gone?
and a slightly longer one from five minutes ago. The longer one read:

sorry if i asked too many questions and scared you off or anything, but i was just curious about you. you have to admit you’re kind of unusual! it’s ok, i mean you don’t have to tell me anything and i won’t ask you anything else if that’s what you want. but please don’t go away. we can just talk about things.

aGirl

Lucy was online right now, so I wrote back:

no, it’s ok, you didn’t scare me away, i was just a bit busy for a while. i’m back now. so, anyway, how are you feeling? you don’t sound quite so down as before. are things a bit better for you?

hello again, iBoy. i’m glad you’re back. no, things aren’t really any better for me, and i don’t think they ever will be, but i don’t feel quite so empty and dead anymore. i think talking helps. talking to you, of course. and i have a friend called tom who is very kind and listens to me. can i ask you something about the boy you nearly pushed out the window? do you know what he did to me?

yes.

were you really going to push him out?

i don’t know. what would you think if i said yes?

i don’t know. part of me thinks he deserves to die, but another part says no, that’s wrong. do you know what i mean?

yes, i know exactly what you mean.

let’s talk about something else.

ok. what?

where are you?

i’m sitting in the sky.

yeah, right. what’s your real name?

i’ll answer that if you tell me about tom.

what about him?

is he your boyfriend?

no! i’ve known tom forever, we grew up together. he’s not my boyfriend, he’s just a very close friend. i like him a lot, and i think he likes me, but i don’t think he likes me in that kind of way. he just cares for me. i care for him too. he’s quite a sad person, i think.

maybe he likes you more than you think. maybe he just can’t work out how to tell you.

maybe . . . what’s it to you anyway?

nothing. i was just curious.

all right, so i answered your question. now you answer mine. what’s your real name?

you already know it.

see you later.

iBoy

I closed myself down, opened my eyes, and carefully got to my feet. I took one last look over the edge of the roof, then I turned round and went home.