Against Gravity (11 page)

That would be good but, because he was a Labrat, there were some serious risks involved.

Which was why Malky so often proved useful in these matters. There was always the slim chance that background checks could lead to Kendrick’s real identity being exposed. Altering the
necessary records to maintain his independence was a risky operation all on its own, but creating a personality that would allow him to work fully above board in the media – well, all he had
to do was decide if it was worth the risk.

Either that or he’d have to find some other way of making a living before the last of his money finally ran out.

As far as the incident at the Armoured Saint was concerned, it appeared that the heat was now off. Todd had done his job well: Kendrick had been scrubbed from the security records.

So what do I do now?
he asked himself, waking in his own bed the next morning. A half-packed duffel bag still sat near the door, but thoughts of fleeing after the incident at the Armoured
Saint had faded following his encounter with Marlin Smeby. Besides, he realized belatedly, if the Legislate had developed any concerns over his identity he would have known about it long before
now.

His meeting with Smeby had occupied Kendrick’s thoughts while he was sleeping as much as they had earlier when he’d been awake. Taking up any offer from Draeger was a wrong move, he
knew that. What he’d been promised might not even be true – but even so, why couldn’t he stop thinking about it? Why had he just accepted that information and left so meekly,
without trying to find out anything more about why Draeger was so interested in him?

Perhaps he wasn’t the hero he would have liked to be. He didn’t want to die any more than anyone else did. When Smeby had offered the rest of his life to him, he’d very nearly
gone down on his knees in gratitude at the hint of such a chance. He’d left the Arlington hotel disgusted with himself, having told Smeby that he’d need to think further about any
face-to-face meeting with Draeger.

But the intervening hours had allowed Kendrick to reflect on ways of turning such a meeting to his own advantage. It offered a chance to do something that, as a journalist, he’d relished
for a long, long time: a personal encounter with Max Draeger, the architect of Wilber’s vision.

Kendrick had long ago given up any hope that his wife or child might still be alive. After escaping the Maze he’d spent a couple of years interviewing witnesses, vainly following up leads.
After Wilber’s fall from power, however, records had mysteriously disappeared overnight. The bureaucrats and army officers involved in the arrests of citizens following the LA Nuke had
suddenly discovered that they’d been doing something else at the time.

The men and women trapped in the Maze weren’t even the only ones who’d disappeared. There had been others, countless thousands now resting in unmarked graves by chilly roadsides.

Exactly why the children of parents deemed to be security threats had also been taken into custody had never been adequately explained. Probably the intention had been to use them as bargaining
tools to force people like Kendrick to do whatever Wilber wanted them to do. On that long-ago morning in Washington, his daughter Sam had vanished along with the children of dozens of other
detainees – and none of them had ever been seen again.

It wasn’t in the least likely that Draeger would know anything about Kendrick’s family. But the man had worked closely with Wilber, had been close to the heart of the political
machine that had ruled America for a number of years. He was therefore, in his own way, responsible. Kendrick knew how badly he needed some kind of closure, and a meeting with Draeger might
eventually lead him towards it. That would make it all worthwhile.

Giving up any hope of further sleep, Kendrick got up and dressed. It was early, very early, but he needed to think, so he went out into streets still quiet and empty in the hours immediately
following dawn. As seagulls circled in a slate-grey sky above him, he found his way to the Meadows, knowing he could lose himself in the open-air market that sprang up there every Tuesday.

The Meadows, originally a stretch of green near the ancient heart of the city, was now lost and churned to mud under an impromptu shanty town of home-made tents inhabited by refugees sleeping
rough. Some of these, remembering the can-do capitalist spirit of their forebears, had found it within them to scrape a bare-bones living selling anything that might just possibly turn a
profit.

The airbases that had once constituted the USA’s strongest foothold in the Old World had been abandoned with unseemly haste, and it was surprising just how much stuff had been left behind
in deserted barracks and mess halls. Pieces of uniforms, even medals, along with all kinds of miscellaneous paraphernalia and electronic equipment. There were also books, music, clothes, and
half-dead data-storage gear from yesteryear, too old and ruined to qualify even as antiques – a vast jumble of fascinating exotica and useless shit in pretty much equal measure. You could
browse in the Meadows for hours, even if you never bought anything.

Because it was still so early, half of the stalls weren’t open for business yet. Kendrick got a coffee from a van sitting, engine-less and wheel-less, on piles of bricks and wandered about
idly, wondering why it should even matter to him to discover that Caroline had been the one to design the hotel’s window environment.

Who was to say that wasn’t just blind coincidence? But it occurred to him that there was only one way to know for sure. He glanced at the time – not quite so early now, so maybe
she’d be up.

His wand beeped to confirm that someone had picked up on the other end of the line. He caught the sound of a breath, a faint, barely audible exhalation.

“Caroline, is that you?”

Something else . . . Suddenly the ambient sound of the Meadows faded. Experience told him that his augments had recognized something in that background hiss and were now trying to isolate
it.

Patterns weaved in and out of the near-inaudible static, and Kendrick’s head swam. A faint wash of dizziness almost made him lose his balance – as if, he thought, the eye of God had
reared over the horizon and gazed, unblinking, down at him.

The wand beeped again, indicating that whoever was there had hung up. It felt as though a spell had been broken. Kendrick dropped the wand back in his pocket and leant against a corrugated-iron
wall, waiting for his head to stop swimming.

When his thoughts had cleared, he pulled out his wand again.

“Hi.”

“Erik?”

“Hey, Kendrick! Good to hear from ya.”

“Listen, I was thinking maybe I do need to talk to you or Buddy. Were you serious when you said you were in close contact with him?”

“Jesus, of
course
I was. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

So they made arrangements.

It rapidly became clear that Caroline wasn’t in.

Kendrick stood in the street outside her building and cursed out loud. He then scrolled through screeds of information on his wand until he found what he was looking for.

Perhaps she just didn’t want to speak to him. In that case, why not say so? Why just pick up the wand and listen in silence, before hanging up?

Or perhaps someone else had picked up and listened at the other end. And then that same someone had carefully hung up again. Kendrick thought of the suitcase bomb, he thought of what Whitsett
had already told him, and then he let himself in the main door.

To his surprise, Caroline hadn’t changed the cryptkey that was still stored in his wand; nor had she removed his biometric details from the building’s database. He gained access to
her flat without a problem.

“Hello?” Kendrick stuck his head around Caroline’s kitchen door, his mind full of half-convincing explanations for why he’d just barged in. But nobody was there.

Maybe she’s off somewhere else
, he thought. She could have taken her wand anywhere with her. She might not even be in the country. Somehow, he suspected otherwise.

Nobody was in the living room, either, and her study was empty. He put his hand on the door leading into her bedroom, then turned to look at the workstation.

It took a full two seconds for the machine to boot up, then Kendrick navigated his way to Caroline’s work directory, soon locating a file named “Archimedes”. He routed the same
file through to the windowscreen, and what he saw displayed there was recognizably the same scene he had seen displayed across the front entrance of a hotel the day before.

But what did it mean, if anything? That Caroline had been suffering the same hallucinations, the same seizures? If so, why hadn’t she told him about them?

He studied the ’screen, wondering if he would catch a glimpse of a boy with butterfly wings if he waited long enough.

Next, he pulled up the TransAfrica sequence, watching as that corporate logo rushed towards him out of darkness again.

The list of interactive options was impressive. You could dive deep into the Straits, for instance, drill virtual holes into the subaquatic structure of the TransAfrica Bridge, and bring up an
enormous mass of engineering, environmental and geological data; or call up projections for the effect of the construction on the economies of neighbouring countries, or even on their flora and
fauna. Using his wand to control the simulation, Kendrick brought his point of view swooping down until it hovered inches above the surface of the bridge itself, so real that he could almost feel
warm southern winds full of Moroccan sand harrying the waves far below.

The simulation guided him, again, towards the
Archimedes
. He let the software sweep him around the simulated circumference of the station. Its great metal walls rushed in towards him, and
then—

And then he was inside it.

It was all terrifyingly familiar.

Kendrick let his POV drift forward until it was near the centre of one of the cylinder’s two main chambers. Then he set it to a slow rotation. Grass rippled far below – or perhaps
above – and, watching the windowscreen, he felt a strange tug in the area of his stilled heart.

Far down the length of the station he saw a dense cluster, like a swarm of locusts, hovering in the air. Then they were moving, uncountable minute dots growing denser one moment, thinning out
the next, but moving gradually closer. The nearest ones resolved into tiny, familiar shapes with gossamer wings.

Kendrick reached out with his wand to shut the simulation down, his mouth suddenly dry. It came to him that if his heart were still capable of beating, it would be rattling like a drill in its
cage of ribs.

This was the point at which he became aware he was not, in fact, alone.

“Caroline?”

He stood up. Something had moved in the bedroom, making a sound. He swore at himself, several possible explanations for his presence here competing for his attention all at once.
Stupid,
stupid bastard
, he thought. He hadn’t even looked in there properly.

He put his hand against the bedroom door and pushed gently. Caroline stood at the far end of the room, naked, staring out over the rooftops. She didn’t react or even turn round as he
entered. Something was very wrong.

“Caroline, are you all right? What are you . . .?”

Kendrick’s voice trailed off then. No reaction, no sign that she was even aware of his presence.

He stepped up to her, reaching out a hesitant hand to her shoulder. He moved around to her side, and was shocked at what he saw. Her augments had turned rogue: thick ropes of augment-growth lay
under her skin, wrapping themselves around her spine and ribcage. They hadn’t yet spread up past her neck, which explained how she’d managed to keep her condition hidden from him.

Kendrick wondered if she had become catatonic, which happened when the augments interfered too much with the central nervous system, effectively reducing the mind to a prisoner in a bony
cell.

Caroline’s expression remained vacant and he noticed that she appeared to be gazing upwards, past the rooftops and into the sky. He touched her chin, carefully turning her face towards
him. He wanted to lead her away from the window, get her back into some clothes – anything.

Out of the corner of his eye, Kendrick noticed Caroline’s own wand sitting on a table by the bed. So it
must
have been her who had picked up on the line when he’d called.

And then, finally, her stare locked on to his. He felt a seizure rushing on him like an express train.

A white-hot comet exploded inside Kendrick’s head, and Caroline’s face reeled away from him as he tumbled to the floor, her expressionless gaze shifting fractionally to follow his
descent. He screamed as pain rippled like fire through every part of his being. As he screamed again, his tongue burned like molten lead.

Kendrick prayed for death, for a cessation of such terrible, overwhelming pain. He lay at her feet and his back arched and twisted as he writhed on the carpet, desperate to escape his own
body.

It was the boy with the butterfly wings again.

Kendrick could see his face more clearly now, and wondered what it was about it that looked so familiar. The wings were beautiful and diaphanous, two or three times larger than the diminutive
torso from which they grew. The eyes were tiny azure things like gems glittering in that curiously blank face.

The idea that he somehow knew who the boy was haunted Kendrick.
I could swear I’m really in this place
, he thought. For the bedroom was gone, and all around him the walls of the
world curved up to meet each other. Shimmering shapes of bright energy flickered across the landscape, and a sound came to Kendrick’s ears, barely audible, as if a million-strong choir was
humming quietly to itself, somewhere very far away.

He strained to listen, remembering the background sound he had heard when he’d called Caroline from the market earlier: like listening to the whole world having a conversation at once. But
instead of cacophony everyone could understand everything that was being said. A perfect meeting of minds . . .