Echo Boy (36 page)

We could hear other noises near Rosella. Although we couldn’t see it clearly, we were left in no doubt that the Echos had broken free and were heading towards her. To kill her . . .

Daniel stopped the car. ‘Get out here,’ he told me.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Get out!’ he shouted. The first time I’d heard him shout.

I shook my head. I had lost everything once. I wasn’t prepared to risk that again. ‘You’re not going back alone. No way.
No way.
We stay together now. And if you do this, I go with you.’

He saw that there was no point arguing; he turned the car round and started speeding back along the dusty yellow road towards the warehouse.

‘Don’t come back here,’ Rosella was saying. She sounded desperate. She was looking all over the place. ‘It is too late, it is too late, it is too late . . . It is over. Don’t feel bad for me.
Todo saldrá bien
. I love you, Daniel. You’ll look after him, won’t you, Audrey? He is your responsibility now. Will you protect him?’

‘I will,’ I told her. ‘I promise.’

We saw a hand grab her shoulder. Rosella closed her eyes as if saying a prayer, and then she said a series of numbers. Some kind of code.

‘
Ocho . . . cuatro . . . dos . . . nueve . . . cero . . .
’

As she said those numbers, Daniel whispered them too, with a kind of dread, realizing what was happening. ‘Eight-four-two . . .’

‘Activate . . .
Activar! Activar!
’

Before I had time to ask Daniel what she was doing, he was screaming, ‘
No! Rosella! Stop!
’

But it was too late. He could have screamed loud enough to reach Mars and it wouldn’t have made any difference. In the space of less than a second, the whole warehouse seemed to implode inwardly in a sudden shrinking rush of motion, and then disappeared completely, as if it had never existed. In its place was a vast and perfectly rectangular hole cut into the dry and dusty landscape, the exact same shape as the warehouse, and Daniel only just stopped the car in time to stop us falling down into the pit, which was exactly as low as the basement had been.

The front of the car must have been only centimetres away from the edge of the hole. There was nothing left of the warehouse or its contents. Well, except for a little black cube sitting on that orange earth in the middle of the hole.

‘The Nothing Machine,’ Daniel muttered.

He didn’t say anything for a long time after that. He just stared out of the front window at the hot shimmering landscape. We could see the dark skeletons of dead trees on the other side of the hole. To the left, past scraggy shrubs and cacti, was Valencia. Its low dull buildings – which all seemed to be run-down warehouses and food markets and apartment blocks – still seemed to wobble in the heat. The city centre magrails were busy. Three of them stretched out across the sea, in different directions.

I stared at the sea. It was so still. That is the weird thing about the sea. The way it seems as still and solid and calm as anything from a distance, but moving and turbulent and dangerous when you’re close to it. Yeah. The sea was an illusion. Maybe, if you could get close enough to everything, you’d see that’s what the world was full of. Illusions. If you judged things on first appearances, you’d be blind for ever. The way I had been blind to everyone. To Daniel. To Uncle Alex. Maybe even to my parents a little bit.

I still grieved for them. I still felt like there was a hole inside my heart as big as the one in the ground. Grief was the worst thing. And now Daniel was feeling it too.

‘She knew,’ he spoke eventually.

‘Knew what?’

‘She knew what was going to happen. She knew it was more than two commands. She knew it was too late. She just lied to save us. A human, dying to save an Echo? Has that ever happened before.’

‘You are not a normal Echo, Daniel, and she loved you.’

I saw tears emerge in his eyes. He tried to battle those tears, but they couldn’t be stopped. So I just sat there with him, and waited. Trouble would eventually be coming, but I allowed everything to remain still. I sensed he needed to sit there and absorb the pain. To let it all in. If you try and block it – or neuropad it away – that can be unhealthy. You end up becoming empty, your own personal Nothing Machine. He needed to feel what he needed to feel. And I had no choice but to let him.

I watched through the window as a lizard slowly ventured forward towards the new hole in the ground. It seemed curious. It went right up to the edge, jerked its head a few times, then scurried away across the dusty, sun-beaten earth towards the dry, withered scrubland to our right.

After a minute – or two or three or four – Daniel turned to me. The tears had all dried up. His eyes weren’t blotchy. Maybe that was an Echo thing. They looked totally clear and green, but there was still the same amount of pain.

‘Audrey,’ he said, his voice sounding delicate and somehow new. Like his words were porcelain or something. ‘Audrey
 . . .
the first time I saw you, when you came to your uncle’s house, I looked at you
and saw the pain you were feeling, and as I looked at you I felt your pain as if it was my own. And all I wanted to do, all I wanted to do more than anything in the world, was to help you get over that pain.’ He looked at me. His eyes were wide and green and real. ‘I am scared of you.’

This startled me. ‘
Scared
of me? Why? Why do I scare you? What are you scared of?’

‘I am scared of caring for you, because to care for someone you risk getting hurt. I have wished, sometimes, that I didn’t know how to care or worry. I have wished I was like all the others. But I am not like them. I know that. I could never be like them. And – and – and . . . you know what?’

‘What?’

‘Even now, feeling this pain, I don’t want to not be me. Because we have hope, Audrey, don’t we? And no matter how terrifying the future becomes, it is worth it. Life is always worth it. I feel alive, Audrey. I must be alive to feel this pain. We have known pain. The physical kind and the other kind. And we are still here. It hasn’t finished us off.’

I looked at the fresh scar on my hand. The red E amid newly glossy and perfect skin. Maybe that was what life was. Beyond all the illusions. Just a series of scars.

Yeah. That is how you grew up.

You discovered pain, but far from being crippled by that pain, you were made stronger, because you knew you had survived it. Skin is tougher when it scars. And so the next time pain comes along, you’re ready for it. And it made the rest of life shine with hope, the way the scar just highlights the smoothness of the skin around it.

We sat there for quite a while. But then, as the light faded, we drove away.

We drove for an hour on the near-trafficless old motorway, with a thousand hopes in our heads.

Two of these hopes were immediate ones.

We hoped that, as soon as Uncle Alex found out about the warehouse, he’d think that we had disappeared with it.

The road was just about driveable, but it obviously hadn’t been resurfaced for about fifty years; in some places the tarmac had totally worn away; in others it lay cracked and oozing like some wounded grey-black serpent in the heat.

There were no magrails directly above us. They were all to the east, so we could travel pretty much unseen. Anyway, that wasn’t the only danger. Daniel had told me that the motorways were unpoliced; in one way that was good for us, but it also meant that there were bandits around.

At one point we worried because three men and a woman on hover-bikes came up close behind us. They wore black clothes and no helmets.

‘If they think we’re Echos, they will want to steal us,’ Daniel told me. ‘Don’t let them see the E on your hand.’

The hover-bikes came close, but they couldn’t have been that interested – maybe because the car we were driving was so old – and they soon turned off. But still, it made me feel uneasy. And I understood how much danger I would face now that I was an Echo.

The road crossed through a part of a city. Tarragona.

We followed a sign to a supply store. It wasn’t a very promising-looking store. We only needed the simplest of things. I needed food or a high-fat juice. Daniel needed sugar. We both needed water.

I don’t think I’d ever been to a shop on the ground before. (But then, I had real-world shopped as little as possible, and only really in places like the White Rose back in Yorkshire, and other sky malls.) There were only a couple of aisles.

One of the aisles sold everglows, which told me the kind of place it was, as everglows weren’t allowed to be sold in shops anywhere in the world. I went along the aisles, past the chocolate sprays and tapas pills and Sempura mind-wire chargers and medicine patches and sun-factor capsules. We found the sugar and a high-fat juice, but the water, like everywhere in Spain, was sold behind the counter.

Daniel did all the talking, as he was fluent in Spanish. The man who was serving us looked me up and down. He had long blue dreadlocks and a moving tattoo of a silently roaring tiger on his arm. He wasn’t wearing a top, and I could see a dull glow in his chest. Everglow addict. He said something to me.

‘What did he say?’ I asked Daniel.

‘He said he needs an Echo girl to look after him.’

I shuddered.

The man smiled as he looked at me, but his eyes weren’t looking at me.

‘I am just an object now,’ I said as we headed for the exit.

‘No you’re not. You aren’t an Echo. I’m not even an Echo.’

‘But you were made to be one.’

‘Yes. Kind of.’

He told me about Rosella’s dead child. He told me the full story of the hair and the locket. ‘I am 0.01 per cent human,’ he said.

0.01 per cent didn’t sound a lot, but right then it sounded like everything. Maybe to be the slightest bit human was to be totally human. Maybe it was like love. You couldn’t be a little bit human in the same way you couldn’t be a little bit in love. It was all or nothing. A drop was an ocean. And maybe being human wasn’t even down to DNA in the end. Maybe it was just about the ability to love, when you knew love was irrational. Yeah. Maybe being human was to make no sense.

‘Then neither of us belong,’ I replied.
Except to each other
, I thought, but I didn’t say that out loud, because it would have made my head explode from embarrassment.

‘My uncle probably thinks we’re dead by now,’ I said as we left the heavy humid air of the store for the brighter heat outside.

‘I hope so.’ I could see from the way Daniel said it that he didn’t really believe it.

I drank a bit of the juice. It was disgusting. It had gone off in the heat. I had to leave it. My stomach rumbled.

We travelled the last short distance to Barcelona 2. The city, from the road anyway, seemed the exact opposite of Valencia: modern (nothing there was more than fifty years old, obviously), and everything was bright and the buildings were in the sky and glowed turquoise and
green and blue against the increasing night. The blue was a giant Castle logo, a giant hologram floating in the sky. I stared up at it and felt like Uncle Alex was watching me. I shuddered. I had no doubt that if he ever saw me again, or even found out that I was alive, then I would be dead, and so would Daniel. The spaceport was a little to the north, so we kept driving.

I looked at Daniel as he drove. He would never age. He would look like this for ever. That was frightening. After all, I would not look like me for ever. I would age. That’s what humans did. And no amount of keratin could stop me from being human. If I ever got to turn forty or eighty or 150, I would look and feel my age.

And what did Echos do? They stayed the same. Sure, after ten years they were meant to be replaced by newer models, but it was perfectly possible – with the right care – for an Echo to go on indefinitely. So, if my future was with this Echo boy, then one day I would be a hundred years old, and he would still be looking sixteen. Once an Echo boy, always an Echo boy.

Yes, it was frightening. But I was fed up with being frightened. I had been frightened of Daniel himself not so long ago. Maybe you could only live life by heading towards the things that frightened you.

See, most of my life I had spent looking forward, thinking of going to Oxford and pleasing my parents. Wondering how I would go on pleasing them as an adult, when Mum wanted me to be successful and to have money and Dad wanted me to live like him – on principles alone.

Then, these last days, I had been consumed by the past. It had kept trying to to suffocate me. I’d either been as good as
dead with neuropads or wanting to be dead without them.

But right then, I wasn’t thinking of either past or future. I was living in the present, and it felt as intense and real as the sky ahead, and the giant illuminated shuttle we could just about see on the horizon.

We were halfway to the moon. We had been travelling for four hours, forty-eight minutes and fifteen seconds.

It was far from perfect.

We were cramped, as Echos should expect to be. There were 308 other Echos in the shuttle.

The ratio of nitrogen and oxygen in the air was slightly wrong. The air was closer to eighty per cent than seventy-nine per cent nitrogen. It was making me feel tired, and I knew Audrey felt even tireder, but she knew she had to stay awake for most of the journey in order not to arouse suspicion.

She probably needed a bit more than the sugar solution that was the only available nourishment.

‘It’s a small price,’ she had whispered. ‘I’ll be OK.’

It must have been weird for her, knowing that she was the only human there. But it was weird for me too. I didn’t belong with those others. They could just sit on the communal long seats facing each other and stare blankly ahead at the inside walls of the aeroshell. They had no interest in looking out of the small windows at the planet we had
just left. The blue cloud-swirled sphere full of 13,428,602,881 humans and 6,290,000,000 (precise number unknown) Echos, all living side by side but at an infinite distance from each other.