The Fall (32 page)
Ana turned around slowly, searching for something from her dream. Had they come to the wrong place?
Dombrant sidled to the only other door and peered through the oblong window.
‘Toilets,’ he said.
A click struck the silence. He raised his rifle. Ana gripped her Stinger. Both of them swivelled to the place in the wall where they’d heard the noise. The dark line of a doorway took form, the wall split and opened revealing a passage. A girl stepped through. Long dark hair, pleated skirt, about eight years old.
A young girl appearing from a wall.
The girl noticed them a second after they saw her. She froze.
Dombrant arced slowly around, so that the secret door no longer blocked her from his view. Ana stood opposite the girl, every fibre in her being electrified. What she’d seen in her glimpse was real.
The experiments exist.
Slowly, she crouched down and placed the Stinger at her feet. Dombrant lowered his rifle.
‘We won’t hurt you,’ she said gently.
The girl stared at them with a detached expression that ran deep into her eyes. Her pupils were large and dark.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘My name is Ana. This is Jack. We were told about the experiments and we’ve come to check they’re all being done right.’
The girl cocked her head to one side. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘No one’s ever come to check before. My name’s Lemon. I’m eight. I’m the oldest. When I turn ten I’ll be able to go home.’
Ana smiled. Her vision blurred at the edges. To her right she heard Dombrant sniff.
‘Would you like to show us the others?’ she asked.
‘OK,’ the girl said. She stepped back into the passage inside the wall. Ana went first, then Dombrant followed, clicking the secret door closed behind them.
‘Are you all allowed to wander around wherever you want?’ Ana asked quietly.
‘The others don’t,’ Lemon said, offering no further explanation.
The short corridor finished in a dead end. Lemon ran her hand across the wall. Her fingers bumped over a small ridge. She pushed her palm against it and there was a second click followed by a door releasing. She stepped down into a large room resembling a hospital. The vibration grew stronger.
Light shone through big plated windows at the far end. On either side of the linoleum floor hospital beds were pushed up against the walls with tall wheelie tables between them. A double-sided flatscreen hung on poles from the ceiling playing cartoons. Between the two large windows at the far end, there was a sink and a round clock like the ones they’d had in the assembly hall of Ana’s school.
But Ana hardly noticed any of that. She was staring at the children. Drips in their arms, shaved heads, hollow faces. They lay on white sheets, eyes unfocused or slanted towards the flatscreen. Lemon sat down on an empty bed and began watching the television.
Burning rose in Ana’s throat. She’d witnessed the Shockers at Three Mills and been drowned in the tanks, but nothing could have prepared her for this. Everything about the ward reeked of illness. The children were empty vessels, broken, souls torn from their bodies and flown away.
Dombrant rested a hand on her shoulder. She jerked. He pointed to the far end of the ward where there was an opaque glass door.
The second door
. A shadow shifted in the brightness beyond it.
Ana and Dombrant crept through the ward, weapons at the ready. Dombrant cocked his rifle and signalled her to open the door so that he could enter first. He adjusted the rifle so the butt lay in the pocket of his shoulder, his cheek against the stock, his right eye looking through the scope. Crouching down, she edged open the door. As it cleared the doorframe Dombrant pulled the trigger. One of the three doctors around an operating table fell back. Cotton and needles tumbled to the ground with him. A second doctor grabbed a scalpel and hurled it at the Warden. Dombrant squeezed the trigger again, the reverberation pushing his shoulder back. The scalpel flew past Ana, hit a wall and clattered to the ground. The second doctor slumped to his knees.
Only a woman remained. Terror flickered in her eyes. Her hand, still holding a small surgical knife, trembled.
Ana entered the room behind Dombrant. A naked boy lay on the operating table. Not more than two years old. A large scar crossed the centre of his chest and his legs were as thin as his arms. Green lines on his shaved head mapped various zones of the brain. At the front of his skull blood dribbled where an incision had been made.
Ana glanced at the woman’s scalpel with its matching drop of blood.
‘You have no right to be here,’ the woman said. ‘Leave at once.’ The woman flinched as Ana reached towards her head. With a quick flick of her fingers, Ana disconnected the Paralyser resistor beneath the doctor’s plastic cap. The woman’s eyes widened before she turned to stone.
‘What is this, Ana?’ Dombrant said, his voice hoarse.
‘This is the lab, Jack.’
A gurgling sound sputtered from the boy.
Dombrant’s hand shot up to his mouth. ‘Jeezus! He’s not even under.’
Ana wedged the Stinger she carried into her belt. Hands trembling, she fumbled to unstrap the boy.
‘What are you doing?’
She swept her arm across a bench of medical instruments. Scalpels and pliers clattered to the ground. Glass tubes smashed. ‘I’m looking for cloth.’
He glanced at her wanton destruction, then bent down to take the headsets off the other two doctors. She flung open a cupboard below the operating table and tossed out the contents. Dombrant got back up and began to film the lab and the boy with his interface.
‘I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Let’s record the other kids in their beds and get out of here.’
Ana tore off her grey blazer and wrapped the boy in it.
‘We can’t take him with us.’
‘Then you go!’ she shouted. Her face was burning and wet. She must be crying. Her whole body coursed with rage. She scooped up the boy, crushed his little cheek against her chest, and stared defiantly at the Warden. She wasn’t leaving the boy behind.
‘We won’t make it through the Headquarters with him,’ Dombrant said, trying to reason with her. ‘I’ll film all this. And we get out of here with the film.’
‘You go ahead then.’ She wiped her running nose with the back of her hand. She was unravelling. Taking the boy made no sense. She could never get away with it, but she didn’t care. The anger felt like venom in her blood. Nothing about what was happening was reasonable. Her logic and reason had run aground. They didn’t matter any more. All that mattered was that this boy knew something existed beyond these walls. That he knew the whole world wasn’t full of monsters. That for a brief moment, he saw someone cared for him enough to treat him like a human being.
She staggered to the door, the boy light in her arms.
So light!
She could barely see where she was going. The walls and beds fuzzed with the hot sting of her tears.
‘I don’t need looking after,’ she said, her voice thick and guttural. ‘I know the risk I’m taking.’
The Warden nodded. ‘I never thought you needed protecting from yourself, Ana.’
She lifted her shoulder and rubbed one of her blurred eyes against it to see him better. Sadness, fury, and unspeakable horror lay folded in his gaze. Like looking in a mirror. Something in her unfurled. He was right. She’d never needed protecting from herself. She knew who she was. She knew who she was, and she wasn’t afraid of herself, not any more.
They strode through the ward side by side. She paused next to Lemon’s bed, the wetness on her cheeks beginning to dry, the shudder in her chest softening. ‘Are you coming?’ she asked.
The girl shook her head. ‘If I’m good I’ll go home soon. Six hundred and eighty four days.’
Ana nodded. ‘Sooner than that,’ she murmured. ‘If I make it out of here, it’ll be sooner than that.’
She strode to the hidden door and stepped into the wall after Dombrant, who didn’t waste time closing up behind them. He pushed ahead, running down the brick passage into darkness. Jogging after him, she kept her movements loose so as not to jolt the child.
A crack of light shone up ahead. As she reached the door leading out into the empty offices, she turned to Dombrant. ‘If someone raises the alarm and there’s too much security, you make sure you get out with the video.’
His eyes sparked. ‘They could never have enough security,’ he said. ‘Or have you forgotten? I’m worth ten Wardens, and at least fifty of the Board’s poxy guards.’
*
Cole and Blaize returned to the atrium lift on the third floor and waited for Ana. Cole’s fingers rested on the Stinger in his security uniform belt, shoulders back, eyes scanning the vast hall stretched out below. So far, he’d counted eight guards patrolling the ground floor in pairs. None on the balconies.
Blaize lounged against the glass wall panel by the lift, swivelling his knife. ‘So how long are we going to wait?’ he asked.
‘As long as it takes.’
‘None of the other security guards stay put. They’re all milling around.’
Cole gritted his teeth. ‘Put the knife away.’ They were on the third floor with a view of all the Headquarters’ open space – the second and third floor balconies, the escalators, the arched doors at the front. At some point, Ana and Dombrant would have to come through the main atrium, the heart of the Headquarters, to get back to the car park. And he would be there to cover her exit. He would not let Ana die.
The lift pinged. The metal doors swooshed open and two Board members exited. They passed Cole and Blaize without showing the slightest hint of interest. Cole’s skin prickled. Their presence was chilling. The Arashans were dreamy, confused, other-worldly. The Board were something else altogether. He’d never been near the Board before, but now he understood why Ana loathed and feared them so much.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s mingle.’
He and Blaize began wandering across the wide arcade in the direction they’d last seen Ana and the Warden. Their stolen rifles were strapped over their shoulders. They held the gunstock grips with the barrels pointing down.
Up ahead, a dark cloud of people swept into the arcade from an offshoot, moving fast. Four security guards flanked a tall woman. A girl marched along at her side.
Cole’s hands grew sweaty. He might not recognise the assistant, but he knew the Chairman of the Board. He’d seen her a hundred times on the news, stepping out of chauffeur driven saloons, shaking hands with the prime minister, visiting schools. He continued to match Blaize’s calm pace, forcing down the voice in his head shouting
Run!
As they passed by, he nodded at no one in particular. And then his heart skipped a beat. The teenage girl – five-foot nothing, short pixie haircut – was staring at him with a look of recognition, and her attention had drawn the interest of the Chairman.
‘Stop!’ the Chairman ordered. Her words penetrated his body, like their intention alone was enough to bring him to a halt.
Cole and Blaize turned, eyes meeting for a fraction of a second.
‘We have visitors today,’ the Chairman said, addressing Cole. ‘All security was ordered to remain on the ground floor.’
His throat dried. He envisioned head-butting the guard on the Chairman’s left, then jabbing the handle of his gun into the next guard’s throat. Blaize could handle the other two. But then the whole of the Board would be on full alert. Ana and all the captives from the Project would never get away.
While Ana and Dombrant had been in the labs, the Headquarters’ third floor had stirred to life. Board members strode through the corridors, appeared from closed white doors and stood officiously consulting each other in the passages before moving on.
‘The hive’s woken,’ Dombrant said. ‘We need another way down.’ He closed the stairwell door, shutting them back inside the fire exit. Then he slipped in his contact lens with the circuits and powered up his interface. Ana clung to the boy, watching the light dancing on Dombrant’s iris.
‘There’s another fire exit near here.’ He moved his hands in front of his chest like he was typing on an invisible three-dimensional control board. The pin-pointed lights in his eye turned red. ‘We can get there via a couple of back corridors. Ready?’
They half walked half jogged away from the third floor stairwell. Dombrant abruptly opened a door on their left and ushered Ana inside. As he shut it behind them, she heard footsteps round a corner. She stared at the darkness, while he watched his infrared heat readouts. A few seconds later he gave the all clear and they were off again.
‘Almost there,’ he said, three identical corridors later. The infant was growing heavier in her arms. She hitched the child up against her. Ahead, she sensed the Warden hesitate. A young woman in the Board’s grey blazer came out of a small office carrying a cup of tea.
‘Oh my goodness,’ the woman said, rushing towards them. ‘Is he all right?’
We run into the only kind Board member in the history of its existence.
‘Sorry,’ Ana mouthed. Confusion filled the woman’s eyes and then Dombrant stepped up behind her with the Stinger, and she dropped to the floor convulsing.
*
Fourteen Project guards huddled in the back of the Psych Watch van, two unconscious patrollers lying across them. Tobias closed the black van doors. He strode around to the front where Ed and Nate sat dressed in the Watch’s uniforms. Ed was driving, but he had little experience. Neither did anyone else.
‘Keep calm,’ Tobias said. ‘There’s no reason why they shouldn’t let you through.’
‘Chief,’ Nate said. His face was pinched, lips pursed. Tobias knew he was nervous about leaving his brother. Fleetingly, he remembered how at twelve years old Cole had tracked down Nate in an orphanage and broken him out. The two had always been inseparable. The kind of bond that came from learning young there was no one else you could trust.
‘I’ll look out for Cole,’ Tobias said. ‘It’ll be all right, we’re all going to walk out of here.’ That was the plan. Sixteen guards would leave in the Psych Watch van, the remaining ten, plus Ana and the Warden, would simply walk out the front door in stolen security uniforms – right into the crowds beyond the gates with the camera crews and protestors.