Acid (28 page)

‘But I have to have it!’ I say. ‘If I don’t take my medication I’ll—’

‘For the last time, move.’ He pushes me roughly into the lift. The first agent gets in too and pushes the button to shut the doors.

Outside, it’s raining. A van is sitting beside the kerb – grey with blacked-out windows. A scream bubbles up inside my throat and I have to bite down hard on the insides of my cheeks to keep it in. My mind’s shrieking at me to run, but my feet are bare, and the agent with the gun is still pointing it straight at me. This might be quiet, crime-free Upper, but I’ve no doubt that if I tried to escape, they’d shoot me. I remember two agents coming to talk to us at school, and they told us that if ACID are arresting you, you go, no matter what.

As the agents shove me into a cage in the back of the van, I glance back at the apartment and see the lights blazing on every floor, faces at all the windows. Shame surges through me.

The first agent slams the cage door and locks it. There’s nowhere for me to sit, so I slump onto the floor. When he shuts the van doors, I’m plunged into almost total darkness: the only light, bluish and dim, comes from two small bulbs above me. I feel the van shudder as the agents climb in the front and, with a barely audible hum, it powers up and we start to move. I stare at the cage bars, too shocked to even cry.

Soon, my teeth are chattering together, and my feet and hands are mottled with the cold. My pyjamas are damp from the rain, and I can’t even wrap my arms around myself to keep warm.

The van keeps driving.

And driving.

And driving, until it feels like we’ve been travelling for hours.

My panic has returned, bubbling inside me. I’m so cold I’m shuddering constantly, and I keep hearing sounds like whispering voices which dart away when I try to listen to what they’re saying. Lights flash at the edges of my vision. Then the memories come, assaulting me in waves.

Rubbish-strewn streets. Crowded, run-down buildings. A tall, thin boy with dark hair and green eyes who I want to put my arms around and hold for ever but I don’t know why. A room with bookshelves for walls. A place that looks like a train terminal. I’m running from something – someone – what? No, not running from, approaching. I’m walking into a room, a living room in a large, luxurious house, and there are two people backed up against the fireplace, and an ACID agent with a gun—

Now I’m a little girl again. I’m in the same house, the same room, but the sun is streaming through the windows. There’s a man and a woman, and the woman is laughing at something the man has just said. When they turn and see me the man scoops me up in his arms and turns me upside down and tickles me until I shriek. I feel happy and safe and loved. But these people aren’t my parents, and this isn’t my house, so how is that possible?

I close my eyes, moaning. Make it stop.
Makeitstop-makeitstopmakeitstop
.

The van turns sharply, throwing me sideways so I
bang
my head against the bars. Dizzy, I struggle upright. The road underneath us has got rougher, the wheels bouncing and jolting. Then it smoothes out again, the tyres crackling on gravel.

The van comes to a halt. The agents in the front get out, their feet crunching on the gravel as they come round to the back. The doors open and a blast of rain-soaked air hits me in the face.

Both agents have removed their helmets. The one who cuffed me unlocks the cage and removes my restraints, then helps me get up. ‘Steady now,’ he says, his voice much gentler than before. ‘I’m sorry we had to keep you in those cuffs, but we couldn’t risk you being out of them if we were stopped.’

Still holding onto me, he helps me from the van, an arm round my waist to keep me upright. We’re in some sort of yard, the van’s headlights shining on the front of a large, white-painted cottage with lights gleaming softly in the windows.

Then the cottage’s front door bursts open and a small, plump woman with gold-rimmed glasses comes running towards us, her long brown hair streaming out behind her. ‘Oh, Jenna,’ she cries. ‘Thank goodness!’

INNIS IFRINN

CHAPTER 46

I BACK AWAY
from her. Who is she? Why is she calling me Jenna?

‘Oh no you don’t,’ the woman says. She’s smiling, but her voice is firm. Before I can take another step the two ACID agents have taken me by the arms and propelled me into the house. I struggle to get free, but they’re too strong.

I’m taken into a large room that has logs burning in a little iron stove and thick curtains drawn across the window to keep out the night. One agent lowers me into an armchair and the other brings a thick blanket, which the woman wraps around me. Then the first ACID agent fetches a bowl of hot water for my bruised, frozen feet, and the other places a mug of hot chocolate on a little table beside me.

‘What’s happening?’ I croak. ‘Where am I?’

‘Don’t worry, you’re quite safe,’ the woman says. ‘I’m Mel. You don’t remember me?’

I stare at her. I’ve never seen her before in my life.

Just then, a tall, thin black man with greying hair comes into the room.

‘Jenna,’ he says, smiling.

Mel shakes her head. ‘She doesn’t remember,’ she says.

The man’s smile disappears. He crosses the room and crouches down in front of me. ‘What’s your name?’ he says gently, peering into my eyes.

‘J-Jess Stone,’ I say. ‘I mean Denbrough.’ For some reason,
he
seems familiar, but I can’t work out why.

If only I wasn’t so dizzy. If only I could
think
.

‘I’m Jon,’ the man says. He asks me a few more questions – about my age, about my family, about my childhood – and straightens up with a grim look on his face. ‘They’ve done a really thorough job,’ he says. ‘
Again
. And as for the alterations they’ve made to her face—’

‘What can we do?’ Mel asks. She looks worried. I gaze at Jon and wonder what on earth he means about my face. I bring up my hand, touch my cheek. Is he talking about the surgery I had after the crash?

‘Nothing, at the moment. We know they mostly did the cognitive realignment with medication this time – perhaps once that’s cleared out of her system, things will start coming back. But until then . . .’ He shrugs.

‘Who are you?’ I ask them. ‘What do you want from me?’ I try to make my voice sound firm, but it breaks on the last word. Have I been kidnapped? If so, what are ACID doing here? I look around for the two agents, but they’ve gone.

‘We don’t want anything, Jen— Jess,’ Mel says. ‘You weren’t safe in London. We needed to get you out.’

‘Why?’ I say. Then I remember the hacked news
screen
, and the strange device I found at the party. I start to shiver again.

‘We’ll explain everything when you’ve had a rest and feel more like yourself,’ Mel says. ‘Drink your hot chocolate. You look like you need it.’

Obediently, I reach for the cup, but my hand is shuddering so hard that I knock it onto the floor. The chocolate makes a dark, spreading stain on the carpet. I stare at it, mesmerized by a hissing, ringing sound that’s swelling inside my head.

‘Jess? Jess!’ Mel is saying my name, but her voice has gone distant and echoey. My vision starts to darken at the edges, until it’s like I’m looking down a tunnel. All I can see is the stain on the carpet. It doesn’t look like chocolate any more – it looks like blood.

Blood on the carpet. Blood on the walls. Two figures slumped on the carpet. A man in a black jumpsuit with his face hidden by the mirrored visor of his helmet turning towards me as I stand in the doorway, too shocked even to scream. He’s holding a gun, and it’s spattered with blood too
.

Vaguely, I’m aware that I’m shaking all over now, not because I’m cold but because my muscles are jumping and twitching as if I’ve received an electric shock. To try and stop it, I curl into a ball, hugging my arms around myself and drawing my legs up. I close my eyes. I hear the man swear. ‘She’s withdrawing from the drugs they gave her – we need to do something quick,’ he says, his voice as distant and echoey as Mel’s.

Someone calls out. Another blanket is wrapped
around
me so tightly I can hardly breathe. And still I’m shaking. It feels as if it’s never going to stop.

‘We need a sedative. And something to bring her temperature down,’ the man says. ‘Fetch me my bag – it’s in the bedroom at the top of the stairs.’

Bring my temperature down? What are they talking about? I’m freezing. I try to open my eyes, but it feels as if there are lead weights on my eyelids. I try to speak, but my teeth are chattering together so hard I can’t get any words out. The voices around me blur into a sludgy mess of noise.

Something stings the side of my neck, and I fall, fall, down into the deepest dark I’ve ever known.

CHAPTER 47

I’M FLOATING, AS
light as air, gliding through curtains of mist. I’ve come untethered from my body, somehow, and as I drift, whispers bump against me, then spin away again, like shoals of tiny fish.

Is she conscious

Shh don’t wake her don’t

How long till she

Another ten milligrams

The drifting is interspersed with long periods where I seem to be in another world altogether. It’s as if I’m dreaming, but not, because the world seems so real, with none of that wonky logic you always get in dreams. At one point, I’m sitting in a little den that appears to be made out of bookshelves, lit by small, globe-shaped lamps that give out a hazy, flickering light, sheets draped over it to make it private. There’s a boy in there with me, a boy with tangled dark hair, lying on a blanket spread on the floor. His eyes are closed, his mouth slightly open, and his cheek is pillowed on his hand. I think about leaning over and brushing his hair out of his face, but I don’t want to wake him. As I watch him, a mass of emotions wells up inside me – tenderness, sadness, longing and guilt. I try to
work
out what I could have done to him to feel this way, but before I can figure it out the bookshelf den and the boy fade away, and things go dark for a little while.

The next time I surface, the mist seems brighter, the whispers louder. Shapes, indistinct and nebulous, move around and above me. I want to speak, to let them know I see them, but my body won’t respond, my mouth won’t move.

Thought she was getting stronger

Vital signs are

A few more days yet

Drift. Nothing. Drift. Nothing.

Think she’ll make it?

Too early to tell
.

I dream about the boy again. He speaks to me. He tells me his father’s dead, and it’s all my fault.

Try this. If it doesn’t work, we’re out of ideas

Nothing.

CHAPTER 48

HE’S BEHIND ME
. Right behind me. I turn to face him and see he’s grinning at me, showing his yellow, peg-like teeth.
Must be lonely in here for a young lady like you
, he says.

Yeah, and you know what?
I say.
I like it that way
.

You don’t mean that
, he says.
Think what a good time we could have, me and you
.

Believe me
, I say.
It’ll be anything but good. For you, that is
.

He lunges at me, and I spin and kick out, but just as my foot’s about to connect with his stomach, I jolt awake, opening my eyes with a gasp.

I’m lying in a bed in a tiny room with white walls, a heavy patchwork quilt tucked over me, pillows piled beneath my head. Although the sun’s shining through a gap in the curtains above me, it feels early; there’s a fragility to the light, a coolness to the air blowing in through the open window, a riot of birdsong coming from outside.

I try to sit up and am shocked at how much of an effort it is. Just propping myself up on my pillows exhausts me, and I have to close my eyes for a few moments to recover. When I open them again, I look around the
room
. The only other pieces of furniture in it are some wooden drawers beside the bed and a chair in the corner with some clothes – mine? – folded neatly on the seat.

Panic stirs inside me. Where am I? And how did I get here?

Calm down, Jess
, I think.

No. I’m not Jess. Where did that come from? I’m Mia. Mia Richardson.

No! I’m . . .

I’m someone else, but no matter how hard I struggle to remember who that someone is, the memory hovers at the edge of my mind, dancing out of my grasp whenever I try to get hold of it.

I lean back, my head swirling with more memories that don’t make any sense and have great empty spaces in between. A tiny room that looks like a prison cell – no, it
is
a prison cell, with peeling walls and a single metal bunk and a polished metal mirror riveted to the wall. The sting of rain against my face and the
whapwhapwhap
of roto blades and someone shouting. Gunfire. Screams. And then one of those gaps, before another memory surfaces, frustratingly vague, of an argument with someone. I think it’s a boy, but when I try to picture his face, it won’t come to me. Another gap. A train journey. A building full of books and dust. I’m with someone again. Is it the boy I was arguing with? I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I hear something over the sound of the dawn chorus outside – a faint thudding that’s familiar, yet totally out
of
place. I get shakily to my knees and push the curtains aside so I can see out of the window. The room I’m in is at the back of the house, overlooking a garden over-flowing with flowers. At the far end is a vegetable patch and some fruit bushes, then a low wooden fence, and beyond that, the flattest, widest landscape I’ve ever seen, all fields and hedgerows and small copses of trees, stretching away to a perfectly level horizon. The sky sits over it like a vast, upside-down blue bowl.

The thudding sound, which had faded slightly, gets louder again. In the distance, I see a black shape sinking to the ground. It looks like an upturned slug with two rotors on the top and two on the bottom – a roto.