Mutant City (21 page)

‘Wha
.
.
. ? How did you
.
.
. ?’ She looked around her. There was nowhere the girl could have been hiding.

Pulling herself together, Tia let out a little nervous laugh. The girl must have concealed herself somewhere, maybe beneath one of the benches, in such a way that she could not be seen.

‘You scared the hell out of me. You really shouldn’t creep up on people like that, you know.’

The look of sadness this provoked instantly made Tia feel bad, and she reached out a hand and put it on her arm. She snatched it away again; the heat coming off the girl was incredible. The poor thing must be running a temperature. Tia made a mental note to tell Silas about this; a virus in a place like this would spread like wildfire.

‘Flea, isn’t it?’ Tia said, remembering the name Silas had called her by.

The girl nodded, a smile briefly touching her lips.

‘Are you shy? Is that why you don’t speak?’

The girl shook her head.

‘You can’t speak?’

This question was answered with a tiny shrug.

Tia nodded to the space on the bench next to where she’d been sitting. ‘Do you want to join me?’ She smiled as Flea plonked herself down on the wooden seat.

‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Tia said, returning to the small screen and her editing. It was after a few minutes that Tia began to notice something odd: the girl beside her sat unmoving and apparently uninterested in her work except when the reporter was fast-forwarding through a video, trying to find a particular scene or moment. Every time she did this, Flea would lean forward and stare at the screen with interest.

The heat continued to pour off the girl. It was like sitting next to a small heating lamp and it soon made Tia feel uncomfortable. The idea of that cup of cold water appealed again, so she got up and crossed the room to the tap.

She brought back two cups and was about to take her seat again when she realised she’d left her omnipad on the table beside the tap. She sighed. ‘Flea, I don’t suppose you’d be a sweetheart and fetch my omni–’

There was a brief scraping sound, as if the legs of the bench had shifted against the hard floor, and Tia stared down at the device that had somehow appeared beside her notes. Dumbstruck, she reached out and brushed her fingers over the gadget, as if to assure herself it was really there. Something was terribly wrong. It
definitely
hadn’t been there a split second before, and now . . .

She turned to look at the girl beside her who was sitting perfectly still, staring at the screen again.

‘Flea . . .’ Tia couldn’t get her head around what had just occurred. ‘Did you just
.
.
. ?’

‘Ah, there you are.’ Jax’s voice made Tia jump. Her heart was still racing wildly. She turned around to see the albino standing in the doorway. He nodded first at her and then at Flea. ‘I see you two have met. Has she been bothering you?’ he asked.

‘Er . . . no. No, she’s been fine.’

‘Good. Well, I’m afraid to say I’ll have to take her away from you now. There’s someone who wants to speak to her.’ He stared pointedly at the girl. ‘Come on, Flea. Lana is here.’ He paused before adding, ‘She’s safe.’

Tia’s mind was still racing with ideas and theories about what she’d just experienced. At the same time she was already trying to convince herself that she’d somehow imagined it all. It was easier than accepting the alternative: that Flea was able to disappear and reappear again when she wanted – a sort of teleportation.

Tia shook her head, which was filled with an odd fuzzy sensation. Jax was giving her a strange look.

‘Flea has a temperature,’ she said, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice.

‘She does?’

‘She’s extremely hot. She must be coming down with something.’

‘Your concern is touching, Miss Cowper,’ the albino said, ‘but Flea is not ill.’ He paused, continuing to stare so intently at her that she began to feel a little uncomfortable. ‘And she can’t teleport exactly. What she is capable of doing is moving at incredible speed. She can only do it in very short bursts – for now at least. That’s why she is always so hot; her heart beats at an amazing rate. Silas and I are going to try very hard to help slow the world down for our Flea.’

At the mention of his name, the owner of the school also appeared in the doorway. He smiled at Tia, giving her a nod. ‘I think it’s time I told you what’s going on, Miss Cowper.’

Once Silas had finished telling Tia everything that had happened on that fateful night at the Farm, as well as his efforts to keep the hybrid children safely hidden ever since, Tia sat staring back at him in amazement.

‘That’s the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard. Melk is a monster!’

‘I thought so too. That’s why I acted the way I did. We have little choice but to gather the children together and work out what is best for them.’

Tia thought about this for a moment. ‘Why bring them all back here though? Why not somewhere else?’

‘Where else can they go? Like you, they’re young adults now, and it’s not so easy to keep them hidden away. Sure, it was possible when they were very young, but now they have a right to a life where they make their own choices. How would you feel if you were told you could never go anywhere, never properly interact with other people of your age, never explore your talents? No, this moment was always going to come about. Melk’s unfortunate discovery has just brought it forward.’

‘He won’t stop until he finds them,’ she said.

‘No. Now he knows they’re not dead, the president will want his little creations back. He’ll want to destroy them and wipe out his historical indiscretions. Either that, or he’ll try to use them in some other vile way. Whatever it is, our only hope is to empower them so that that doesn’t happen.’

‘Empower them? How?’

‘Jax rewired parts of their brains after we freed them, suppressed their gifts so they would not be fully realised. But we can reverse that. We think the children’s powers might be enhanced by their being together. If Melk Senior really wants to see what he created, I say we give his “pro­geny” a chance to show him. And maybe change this world just a little while we’re at it.’

‘That’s dangerous talk, Silas.’

‘These are dangerous times, Miss Cowper.’

‘So where do I come into all of this? You knew the children’s existence had been uncovered. It seems to me that the last thing you would want would be a nosy reporter snooping about the place just as you were gathering them all together.’

The older man offered her a resigned smile. ‘I want you to meet them. I want their existence, hidden for so long through no fault of their own, to be documented and recorded. If Melk is intent on erasing his grubby little secret to save his and his son’s political careers, I want people to know the true story.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I would have thought something like this was every journalist’s dream, Miss Cowper. I don’t believe in coincidences, and I think your decision to cross the wall when you did happened for a reason. This
is
that reason.’

‘Have you really considered what all this might mean? If these children really are as powerful as you say they are – and Melk fails in his attempts to apprehend them – have you thought about what might happen next?’

‘Yes, I have. But perhaps you’d be so kind as to tell me what you think?’

‘I think there’ll be trouble. Big trouble. Maybe even war.’ She glanced across at him. ‘What?’

‘There is a man coming here by wagon with a girl called Anya. The people who know this man call him Tink or Tinker, and he has been a good friend to our hidden children over the years. Tink also has a “gift”, although he would describe it as a curse. He has the gift of foresight. He has visions, revelations about possible futures. I asked him once if he’d ever had a vision that involved the children, and he told me he’d had many. He told me that one day they’d be discovered; that they’d be drawn into a conflict; that they’d be at the centre of a fight for freedom.’

‘And how did he say the conflict would end?’

‘He couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, say.’ Silas paused. ‘For too long now, the mutant inhabitants of this world have suffered in silence. They have had no choice but to do so – how can you stand up to people who have all that technology and weaponry at their disposal? Maybe a display of what some of
us
are capable of will make them stop and think.’

She smiled, giving a small shake of her head. ‘You said “us”. You’re not even a mutant, Silas.’

‘I was referring to all of those who live outside the walls, Miss Cowper. You’re one of us too now. I’ve told you all this in the hope that you can show the city dwellers what has been happening out here, and what their leaders are capable of. None of us wants a war, Tia, but that’s exactly where we’re heading if we can’t put a halt to this madness.’ He stood up. ‘As soon as you’ve made your mind up, will you please tell me what you intend to do? I will completely understand if you want to simply go back to your life inside the city.’

It was Tia’s turn to smile and shake her head. ‘That may not be quite as simple as it sounds. Besides, as you said, this is the journalistic opportunity of a lifetime. I’m staying put. Whatever lies ahead, I’ll do my best to see that the people know who was at the heart of it.’

Melk

Zander stood in the hallway, looking through the glass section of the door at his father in the room beyond. It was dark except for a glowing heat panel on the far wall, the light it emitted casting long, fuzzy shadows. In the short time since he’d last seen him, the old man’s health appeared to have deteriorated further.

Unaware he was being observed, the former head of Bio-Gen sat hunched in his chair, a shadow of the formid­able figure who’d done so much for the Six Cities and their inhabitants. The old man coughed, a nasty sound that carried and made Zander cringe. Pushing the door open, he cleared his own throat to signal his presence.

His father immediately straightened up and turned, beckoning his son to enter and take the seat opposite his own.

‘Father.’ Zander nodded.

‘Junior.’ His father knew how much he hated this moniker, and the smirk on his lips said as much. ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’

‘I’ve come to update you on that little matter we spoke of the last time we met.’

‘The items that were taken from me, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’ve found them? They were at the locations I gave you?’

‘No.’ He watched as the old man’s shoulders sank.

‘None of them?’

‘None of them.’ He paused. It was unkind, he knew, but he was enjoying watching the old man squirm. He glanced at his watch. ‘However, it seems that our search was not entirely in vain. Despite our failure to reach
them
, your chickens appear to be coming home to roost.’

His father remained still, his brow furrowed as he tried to make sense of his son’s words. Always insightful, it took only a few moments for realisation to dawn. His face lit up. ‘They’re here?’

‘In Muteville. Three of them, at least. One, a girl, has joined the man Silas and his albino friend. Two others arrived in the slums this morning and are in Green Ward. They’ve been put up in what the inhabitants believe to be a safe house.’

‘Jax,’ the old man said.

‘What?’

‘The albino. He has telepathic powers, although I had no idea they were powerful enough to communicate across such distances. He’s called the children back.’

‘Why?’

The old man ignored the question. ‘What of the eldest? The one called Brick?’

‘The healer?’

‘Don’t toy with me, Junior.’

‘We’re pretty certain he’s one of the two who arrived today. It seems he has already used his powers to cure a sick mutant. That’s why they’re still in Green Ward: it appears that in helping cure the sickness, he’s left himself weak and unable to travel – for the time being at least.’

‘You said there were two?’

‘It seems he’s travelling with a younger boy – about fourteen years of age – they arrived together.’

‘This other one – any indication that he has a special gift?’

‘Not that we know of.’

The older man began coughing again, his face going from red to purple as he gasped for air. Eventually he stopped and mopped at his chin with a handkerchief. Unhooking the oxygen mask from the tank by his side, he put the thing over his mouth and turned a lever, releasing the gas in a sharp hiss and taking a few lungfuls before putting it to one side.

‘How did you find all this out?’

‘I’ve formed an unlikely alliance with a mutant hoodlum – a man rather appropriately named Steeleye, who has spies everywhere. One of his informers is the cousin of the girl cured by your healer. It seems this family relation has aspirations to take over the running of the ward, and Steeleye has –’

‘What are you planning to do?’

‘We have three spy drones in the air overhead as we speak.’ He looked at his watch again, then got up and crossed the room to the huge screen on the wall across from his father’s chair. ‘I’ve arranged for the live feed from the drones to be patched through to here from the command room. A crack squad of my best men is about to raid the place. You and I will have the best seats in the house.’ He waved his hand across the front of the device, stepping a little to one side so his father could see the images as they appeared on the screen.