Angel Stations (2 page)

Up they went, higher still, until Elias could feel the sting of the occasional snowflake on his cheek. It didn’t take a genius to recognize Mik was deliberately leading him on a long and convoluted trail. The higher they got, the more inclined the boy seemed to lead him across yet more of those spiderweb bridges, high enough to make Elias’s head spin if he risked looking down. At first he thought it was a ploy to confuse him and thus make it hard for him to find the safe house again if he wanted to. But after a while he realized his companion was only playing with him, wanting to see Elias lose his cool, to buckle at the knees, or balk at crossing one of the uppermost bridges running just below the Arcology ceiling.

Finally, finally they left the damned bridges behind and went deeper into the Arcology’s internal structure, farther from the soaring central atrium. The Mala Pata graffiti was now everywhere, while faces emerged from the shadows, both men and women, all cruelly scarred. The only light now came from a string of coloured bulbs crudely tacked up along one side of the long corridor, above walls dented and scratched. Music blared out of open doors from sound systems ramped up to ear-splitting levels.

Elias thought he could hear someone screaming behind the intense noise, a woman, perhaps. He kept walking. Interfering would just get him killed.

They came eventually into a long, low-ceilinged room that looked like it might have been a corporate meeting area in another era. A heavily scarred table stretched almost the entire length of one wall, and the original wallpaper was hidden under years of graffiti and water stains. Boxes of contraband were stacked up in one corner, and two tall, bulky men stood by the table itself. They were dispensing white powder out of a crate, using a set of scales to measure it before pouring the powder carefully into small plastic bags, which they tied at the neck with practised ease. Both men wore small, surgical-style masks, and a couple of rifles lay further along the table, within easy reach.

Then, Elias saw it: a small, plain-looking attaché case sitting by the far end of the table, leaning against a leg. He felt his hands grow damp and clammy. Objective achieved. He wasn’t even supposed to get it out of there, that was for the genuine professionals. Elias was just supposed to confirm it was there, then get out.

Unfortunately, there were certain niceties still to be dealt with.

Mik had stepped ahead of him in the few seconds it had taken Elias to appraise the large room, and now he stood by a darkened doorway at the far end. He nodded into the gloom beyond, and Elias followed.

Her face had been so badly cut up it took Elias a few moments to be sure it was really her, Mia. Her brother Josh was high up in the Mala Pata, a loyal soldier. A distant memory came to Elias, still surprisingly sharp: a smile, soft breath against his earlobe, softer hands caressing his back. She’d have been, what, seventeen, back then? Late twenties now. Although it might have been due to the relative gloom within the cramped space Mik had led him to, it had been difficult initially for Elias to tell whether the body he observed had even been a woman. She lay naked on a sheet spread across a bare mattress, and as Elias’s eyes adjusted to the low lighting, he realized that not only had her breasts been cut off, but also her heart had been pulled halfway out of the ribcage. Elias turned away, then, automatically, almost grateful that her face had been so badly mutilated it was impossible to discern what the final expression on the once beautiful features might have been.

‘That is Reavers making a joke,’ explained a voice from the far side of the room. He’d been so preoccupied with the state of Mia’s body, he’d failed to register her brother Josh sitting in a far corner.

‘Joke?’ said Elias, stepping away from the mattress. The stench of death in the room was almost unbearable.

‘Think they funny.’ Josh stood and stepped towards Elias. He wasn’t the hardest man to spot in a crowd, because he’d had his nose sliced off in a particularly nasty fight a few years before and, like the rest of the Mala Pata, he refused cosmetic surgery and wore the mutilation like a badge of honour.

Of all the Mala Pata, it was probably Josh – brutal, psychotic Josh who used white-hot pokers to torture and then murder his victims – who most struck fear into Elias.

‘Take my sister, kill her Mala way. Big joke to Reavers. Get me?’ he growled.

‘I get you,’ said Elias. Almost to his disappointment, things were going exactly as Hollis had predicted they would. ‘What do you need me for?’ Elias asked, already knowing the answer.

‘You do stuff for Mala. Now you do stuff for me. Tell me who do my sister. Then I cut their balls and eyes out and make their mother eat ’em for lunch. You say who, I give you reward. You be grateful.’

Elias glanced at Mik, who was still hovering in the room. Mik had a cocky smirk on his face, though he gazed with open admiration at Josh. Clearly, for Mik at least, there was some very definite mentor–protégé stuff going on here.

‘It true you do what they all say, Elias?’ Mik asked him then. ‘You do stuff like magic, all kind shit?’

‘Not magic,’ said Elias carefully. ‘Something else. It’s hard to explain.’

‘Bullshit. Not magic, what then?’ said Mik. ‘I hear about you. Stuff you do, no people dare lie to me. They tell truth. I hear you only half-person: fucked-up mongrel made in lab.’ Mik’s voice had taken on a jeering quality.

‘Shut up, Mik,’ said Josh and, to Elias’s relief, the boy shut up. ‘I don’t give shit what you do, just you find out who kill Mia. Then I give you reward. Okay?’

‘Sure,’ said Elias. ‘Give me a couple of minutes.’ His mind was racing. Maybe Mik was just guessing about the lab, but he’d stumbled on the truth. Somehow Elias didn’t think so. And with stories about him like that flying around, it would get harder and harder to avoid official government attention. And if it came to that, maybe Elias would be better off dead.

Josh and Mik fell back into the shadows, leaving Elias to do what he had to do. He forced himself to sit by Mia’s broken, ruined corpse, breathing through his mouth to alleviate the stench. He touched her hair, soft and dark, knowing as he did so that in future any time the memories came back of those few days when he had known Mia so long ago, they would be mixed with the memories of now kneeling on a bloodied mattress, studying her ritually mutilated corpse.

Elias let the light take him. He thought of it as a tiny star, bright and fierce, something that had always been with him, part of him. Like a star, it seemed to flicker in his subconscious with a thin, pale light, which neither he nor Trencher had ever been able to find appropriate words to describe. It was as if they could each open a mental valve and let it spill out into the world beyond. With that thought in mind, he felt it flow out of him, discharging through his fingertips, seeking out the flickering trace of life still trapped somewhere inside Mia’s body. Josh and Mik meanwhile stood near the wall, staring, but unable to see the light.

So he reached out, touched the flickering residual life within Mia, already deep into the terrible abyss it sought and craved. In his mind’s eye he pictured his hand probing to grasp that last tumbling fragment of Mia’s life-force, feeling it writhe, holding it back.

Mia’s eyes twitched rapidly, then widened. Someone nearby gave out a low moan of horror, but Elias didn’t look up to see if it had come from Mik or Josh. A keening sound, almost like whistling, now came from Mia’s throat. Elias didn’t want to know what it felt like to be trapped again, no matter for how short a time, in that shattered body.

‘Tell me who did this, Mia. Tell me, and you can go.’ He glanced up, saw Josh standing right above them, clenching and unclenching his fists. Elias ignored him, looking back at Mia’s face. Muscles writhed like snakes under her cheeks. He wondered if she could feel anything.

‘Let me go,’ Mia whispered weakly, partly in Elias’s mind, partly out loud; it sounded as if she were gagging on the words.

‘Tell me first,’ said Elias. ‘Tell me who did this to you, Mia. Tell me now or I won’t let you go, do you understand?’

‘Macey,’ she said, her voice so small and frail Elias could barely hear it. The flickering life within her seemed to grow a little weaker. Elias tweaked here and there, and Mia’s back arched, a high keening sound escaping her lips. ‘Oh fuck,’ she whispered, entirely in the real now. ‘I can’t, I can’t—’

Her back arched again, and blood sprayed out of her open mouth.

‘Stop it,’ said Josh. ‘Stop it now. You’re hurting her.’

‘I can’t help that, Josh. She says Macey did it. What else do you need to know?’

‘I – nothing. Tell her I love her, Murray. Just tell her I love her.’

Elias stared at him for a moment, unable to imagine Josh capable of ever expressing any emotion remotely like love. But maybe he was wrong. Maybe people really were that unpredictable. He turned back to Mia, grateful now to let the life within her slip away, her body slumping down as that brief spark of light left her eyes for the last time.

‘Did you tell her?’ asked Josh, his mouth twisted in distaste.

‘Sure, Josh, I told her. I can’t guarantee she heard me, though.’

‘You tell me how to do that,’ spoke Mik from the corner in a low, awed whisper, ‘I make you a fucking king.’ Elias ignored him, kept his attention focused on Josh. ‘Macey? The name means something to you?’

‘Does, yeah,’ said Josh. ‘You done good, Elias. You deserve reward. Mik, take him next door. Make sure he gets his reward. Okay?’

‘Sure,’ said Mik with a wide smile like a shark’s. Mik beckoned to Elias, heading back through the door they’d come through, and back into the large room where the two men had been bagging drugs on a long table. Elias stood studying Josh’s features for a few moments, before turning and walking slowly after Mik. Something felt badly, badly wrong here. It wasn’t so much what Josh had said . . . it was the way he had said it.

Back in the larger room, the two men were still there. Elias cleared his throat, and watched as Mik walked over to the table and picked up a tiny diskette. He swaggered back over to Elias, a wide grin on his face.

‘Here,’ said Mik. ‘That what you wanted?’

Elias took the diskette, and looked down at it cradled in the palm of his hand. So tiny, but it held the secret to a man’s life.

Elias nodded, and pocketed it.

The attaché case Hollis had told him to watch out for still sat unattended to one side of the table. Like it signified nothing, nothing at all. It seemed strange they would leave it just sitting in open view like that—

Unless they knew?

Elias looked casually towards Mik, but the kid, damn him, just grinned like he was playing some game. Then Mik walked over, picked up the case, and hugged it to his chest.

He stood in front of Elias. ‘So. You lookin’ for this, maybe, Elias?’

Elias heard the gentlest movement behind him, then the unmistakable chill of a steel gun barrel being laid against the nape of his neck.

‘Elias,’ – he didn’t need to turn around to know it was Josh speaking, Josh holding the gun to the back of his head – ‘you did me a great service tonight, a very great service. Macey will not live out the night. His death will be protracted, painful. Thank you.’

Elias cleared his throat, preparing to speak. Then he stopped in his tracks, the boy Mik still standing in front of him, grinning and clasping the attaché case to his chest. Elias didn’t turn, didn’t want to stare straight into the barrel of a gun. ‘You’re welcome. But you’ve – got an odd way of thanking me, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘You been lyin’ to Mala, Murray, set us up good. That bad. Mala good to its people, but very bad, though, when you fuck ’em. Don’t want fuck with Mala, no,’ said Josh, and it seemed to Elias that the other man’s voice was filled with genuine sorrow. Like the pity a man might feel for some injured animal found by the roadside, right before he breaks its neck.

‘I haven’t been lying to you, Josh. I’m your friend. The Mala Pata have been very good to me.’

The blow came suddenly, unexpectedly. Elias found himself slumping to the ground, lying directly between Mik and Josh. Pain filled his head, and at first he thought Josh might have shot him. Then he realized Josh had merely slammed him across the back of the head, presumably with the gun butt.

He was distantly aware of the two other men, still measuring a crate of powder into those little bags. One of them glanced briefly in Elias’s direction with an expression of amused contempt.

‘Heard everything, Murray: you meetin’ with police, passin’ information. So bad, bad. You tell police, London, everything want know about Mala Pata, about Arcologies. What you get for that, Murray? What price they give you, even when you know anyone fucks with Mala Pata, always end up dead? So don’t lie to me, Murray. I know everything.’

His head still throbbed, but at least he could think again. He rolled slightly over to one side, trying to keep alert. He could see the case still clasped in Mik’s small sweaty hands; enough Blight contained in it to waste half of Europe.

‘When did the Mala Pata start dealing in biological warfare, Josh?’ Elias asked from where he lay. ‘You must know what’s in that case. They call it the Blight.’

‘And it better in your hands?’ Josh scoffed. ‘I told you I’d give you the information you wanted. And you got it, though it’s not much use to you now. You think stuff in that case be better in hands of London Authority? Or in hands of people it came from? You think they make any better use, huh? Least if we all gonna die, Mala Pata get a little reward on way. This
your
reward, Elias. You told me who kill Mia, and I grateful, really.’ The gun had been hanging by Josh’s side, but now he levelled it at Elias’s head.

‘Killing me is no way to thank me,’ Elias protested. ‘Killing me isn’t going to fix anything.’

‘Other part of reward is, Murray, you die quick, not long and drawn out like you would do otherwise. Gettin’ tired talkin’. What say we finish this?’

And then, it came to Elias. If he only had the strength . . .

‘Mia,’ Elias said, and Josh frowned.