Falling (18 page)

Movement; an earthquake of shifting muscles as her mother stood up again. ‘I don't think you have anything we want. I shouldn't have come.'

‘But we're offering –'

‘Stick your offer.' The red-haired man was swept from Jude's view by the curve of her mother's arm as they turned away. ‘My daughter is no one's slave.'

Looking up into her mother's face, Jude smiled the brightest, most approving smile her baby muscles could muster.

And then her grip on reality slipped, and the whirlwind sucked her back in.

ELEVEN

Location Unknown

‘– bringing you the latest news; city-wide, country-wide, world-wide. Today's headlines: Romanian right-wingers told to get with the action as regening on demand is passed by a majority vote. Crime up, police presence down. Could there be a connection? And – forget film, the new generation of entertainment is here!'

Jude sat bolt upright in bed, left arm swinging out automatically to slap the SILENCE button on the clock-radio. Her hand passed through mysteriously empty air and tangled in soft draperies before hitting something solid, reawakening old pain in bruised, raw knuckles.

She opened her eyes, and immediately wished she hadn't. Not that it wasn't a nice room. The white satin drapes around the four poster were slightly parted, offering her a limited view of the mock-georgian furnishings, heavy velvet curtains, an opalescent washbasin with brass fittings. Fantastic: but what would a girl like her be doing sleeping here?

Jude tugged the drapes open, revealing the radio – a big old brass thing with mahogany inlay, as solid as a police response tank and twice as expensive. Mystified by the array of dials, she eventually found the volume dial and turned it down to a low buzz that combined unpleasantly with the ache at the base of her skull.

There was a creased trouser suit flung over the back of a chair, a briefcase and heavy, expensive-looking watch on the seat. That certainly looked like her idea of getting ready for bed. Wardrobes and hangers were an alien concept to a Bankside girl, who rarely had more than one change of clothes.

The problem was that the suit wasn't hers.

No, she corrected, leaning across to finger the fine weave, assessing the cost with the professional precision of a street-corner pawnman. The real problem, Jude DiMortimer, is that you've never set foot in a hotel this expensive in all your born days.

The real problem is that you have no idea when or where you've ended up.

Her stomach turned over and she barely made it to the washbasin in time to bring up the evidence of yesterday's transgressions, primarily blood and bile.

The towels in the shower-room bore the legend IMPERIAL PARADISE HOTEL in English, German and Japanese, which told her something about the clientele. It also worried her severely, until she remembered the radio announcer. English, and English only.

Good. GenoBond doesn't tend to get involved in overseas operations, and I can't see them paying to fly me home from God knows where.

She took a good, long shower, hoping that somehow everything would dissolve in the spray and she'd wake up somewhere sensible, rational; preferably in bed with Fitch, and right now she didn't much care if that was pre- or post-operation…

But she came out of the cubicle to the same pristine tiles and complimentary toiletries, and the dull, shamefaced realisation that she was going to have to call the emergency number and tell them that she was Adrift.

Not least because she didn't have the money to pay the hotel bill.

The speed with which the connection clicked together and the phone began to ring told her she wasn't far from home. On the city limits, maybe. Her window looked out over a flat expanse of greenery, far too large for a park. Did they have luxury hotels in Hursts?

‘Warner,' the low familiar voice growled. ‘Make it snappy, I've got a barber's appointment.'

‘It's Jude.' She cleared her throat, trying to force her voice down to a sensible register. ‘Jude DiMortimer.'

Silence.

‘Mr Warner?'

‘Ah,' he managed, hoarse with astonishment. ‘Jude. It is really…?'

‘Of course it's me. Who'd want to imitate a life like mine? Just listen. I'm in a lot of –'

‘Jude, where are you calling me from?'

‘Just listen, right!' Jude gulped at the can of ginger ale she'd found in the near-empty minibar. ‘I was in trouble. I got shot. While I was ReTraced –'

‘Jude, you can't –'

‘I don't have time to worry about what I'm not supposed to tell you. Just listen. Someone killed me. But not me, because reality had split. They shot and killed the other me, and I ended up Adrift.'

Ambulance sirens wailed a long way off, filling the silence.

‘And now I've fetched up in a four-poster bed in some hotel I've never even heard of, let alone visited. I don't know where I am, or when. I think – I think I've died in my present, and I can't ever go back. And I'm scared.'

‘All right,' Warner said softly. The tremble in his voice was fading, which had to be a good sign. ‘It's going to be all right. Things like this have happened before. We don't publicise them, no point in alarming people, but they do happen and we always sort them out. I just need you to get a grip and help me to find you. Can you do that, Jude?'

Shivering in the armchair, bundled in a hotel towel, tears withering her cheeks, Jude didn't feel at all sure that she could. But she snuffled and croaked ‘Sure,' and Warner seemed satisfied.

‘Right,' the soft, calm voice said. ‘How are you physically?'

‘All right. I think. I threw up. And I have bruises. But nothing serious.'

‘And you think you're in a hotel.'

‘The Imperial Paradise Hotel.'

‘Oh, sure. I know. The administrator's daughter had her divorce party there. Real classy.'

‘I guess.'

‘That's the difficult part over with. Now, listen. There's been another separatist bombing on the Ring Road, the traffic's shot to hell. It might take us a while to reach you. So sit back, take a long hot bath, order breakfast, whatever. We'll pick up the bill when we arrive. Well…' Warner managed a forced, feeble laugh. ‘Within reason. Don't send out for, ah, paid companionship or anything. There's a limit to what GenoBond considers reasonable expenses.'

Lightheaded with relief, Jude found herself laughing in unison.

‘Just one thing, Jude. Do not, under any circumstances, leave the hotel.

‘With all this on tap, why would I?'

‘Indeed. But with recent developments, you could be in considerable danger. You'll be fine as long as you stay in the hotel, but –'

‘Yeah. I get the idea.'

His voice tight with strain now, struggling to mask his true feelings and failing miserably. ‘I should get people making calculations. You know, to get you back where you started from. What year did you say that was?'

‘I didn't – but it was May in twenty-seven.'

‘Twenty-seven,' Warner echoed. ‘That's twenty-seven After Migration?'

‘No, it's twenty-seven B.C., what do you think?'

‘Okay, don't get touchy. We'll be there as soon as we can. Oh, and steal me some that violet-scented soap they put in the washbasins, huh? Jenni just loves it.'

‘Sure thing, Mr Warner.'

The phone hummed mockery as she replaced the receiver.

The suit was more flattering than she'd expected, and by the time she'd slicked her hair back with a tube of scented gel and opened the curtains to a bright, powder-blue spring morning, she was beginning to feel slightly more in control.

‘Breakfast,' she told the auto-waiter, slamming her thumb-print on the sensor pad to add it to the bill. ‘Something easy on the stomach.'

The panel pulsed green and red for a moment, sorting the key words and searching for an appropriate stock response.

‘May I recommend the Continental? Coffee, chocolate and orange juice with croissants, a selection of sweet and dainty breads –'

‘Yes, fine.'

‘Anything further?'

‘Yes. A newspaper. Uh,
European Times
. That's all.'

‘Thank you for making use of me, madam.'

She laughed like a drain at that, but it was cold laughter, queasy with fear.

Warner was a bad liar.

Nothing particular, nothing obvious, just little mismatches, little mistakes. The fear in his voice, the way he didn't even seem to recognise her name.

Which meant there was another reason why they didn't want her to leave the hotel.

Could be innocent enough. She'd been close to hysteria for a while there; maybe he was scared she was losing it, about to wander off in a daze, or flip into paranoia and start running from the very people trying to help her.

Or perhaps his badly concealed interest in the year 27 After Migration was the key.

The auto-waiter hatch opened with a discreet ping and Jude bolted back across the room, driven by something more desperate than mere hunger. The breakfast tray smelled like heaven, and she scooped up the cup of chocolate with her left hand as her right closed on the newspaper. Proving this was a classy hotel, one that didn't expect you to read your news from a video screen.

Shaking out the single fold, she held it to the light.

Good thing heart disease doesn't run in the family.

February 27th, said the date under the ornate header. February 27th, 32 A.M.

She walked for a long time. It took her mind off things.

The perimeter fence wasn't guarded. Wasn't even electrified. A quick scramble took her over the edge onto a path surfaced with crunchy fragments of industrial slag. A few hundred yards brought her to a bridge, and a slippery, winding stairwell down to water level.

The canals. Some old, many built about the same time as the SideRide, to tackle freight-related pollution. They'd been about as popular as the SideRide, though less compulsory, and the Migration had finally rendered them obsolete. However, their creator's grand plan had not gone entirely to waste.

The towpaths and bridges formed a vital network of short-cuts and escapes that traversed the whole city – if you had the nerve, and the contacts, to pass safely through the territories of the Water Gangs.

This was going to be her “safe” – inverted commas essential – passage home.

Picking slag fragments from the soles of her boots, Jude tottered under the bridge to look for the map. In the shadow of the sodden, mouldering brickwork, the tick of falling condensation followed her footsteps like echoes. She paused a few feet in, allowing her eyes to adjust to the light flickering in undulating patterns across the underside of the arch.

Yes, it was stupid. She knew that. Walking straight back into a city full of GenoBond's allies, servants and paid informers. A city full of strangers who'd sell her, alive or dead, for a pittance, and so-called friends who'd probably betray her without charge.

But the countryside was an Abomination to her. The countryside was open and green and windswept and bare, devoid of territories and boundaries. The countryside was a place of Hursts, model communities packed with smiling people with important jobs and action-packed social lives, people who had everything planned and timetabled and organised, and she didn't belong.

Not to mention the mantraps, barbed wires and officially non-existent army patrols dedicated to ‘neutralising' any New Earthers, loafers or Green sentimentalists out there littering the pristine landscape with their messy little lives.

Down on the waterline, something moved.

Jude froze: the brain-dead panic of the fatally exhausted. A montage of unpleasant possibilities, many of them physically impossible, strobed through her mind.

Whatever was in the water turned over with a sodden splash. Light reflected across its dead white eyes.

She bolted.

A hundred yards up the towpath, gasping and stumbling, she turned to look back at her pursuer.

It was a dog. A big, shaggy thing, German Shepherd going on Great Dane, salt-and-pepper fur greased with detergent residues and algae. A little blood remained encrusted around the bullet hole in its skull; as it bobbed unsteadily along the canal and drew level with her, she noticed the raw wound in its spine where the loyalty chip had been torn out to prevent the Animal Militia tracing the owner. They had a variety of ways of punishing negligent owners, and most of them were fatal.

Unwilling to travel in its company, Jude forced herself to walk faster.

A mile further on, the canal spilled over a ruinous lock into a larger, faster waterway, creating a bubbling system of rapids laced with barbed wire and half-submerged bicycles. The dog had vanished into one of the automated cleansing filters at some point between her anxious, haunted glances back at it, and though there were occasional stairways up to street level, there was no sign of the locals.