Falling (26 page)

Great idea, Jude. Just walk straight into an ambush.

‘This is it, isn't it?' she breathed, trying, and failing, to keep an eye on all of them simultaneously. ‘This is the first, illegal, gene-clinic. This is what you came to destroy.'

‘Destroy?' DiFlorian sneered.

‘”Take possession of” would be closer,' Little Miss said, moving back from the bench she'd been listlessly examining. ‘After all, no gene-clinics, no ReTracers. Even the Government isn't that stupid.'

‘You do surprise me.'

‘Jude,' the third ReTracer said, stepping forward into the blue glow of a monitor screen. ‘It doesn't have to be like this. You're one of us, for God's sake. Join us.'

‘Well. Schrader. Wondered how long it would be before you showed up. If you're supposed to be the surprise twist, you're pretty damn predictable.'

He tossed his head, blond fringe flopping in a manner that was probably supposed to be sexy and commanding. He looked plumper, and there was a slight scar on one temple that hadn't been there before. Future-Schrader? she wondered absently. Or uber-Schrader, the sum total of all Schrader-ness from all periods of his life?

‘I should have told you what you were,' he admitted, without making much of an effort to sound remorseful. ‘But then we didn't know ourselves until fairly –'

Swallowing bile, Jude retorted, ‘Until you threw me out of a window, you mean?'

He spread his hands in half-hearted apology. ‘Now, now, Jude. What's a little defenestration between friends?'

She was too winded – or too worried – to find a come-back line. Instead, she stepped back to take a real look around to supplement the quick scan for danger she'd taken as she entered.

It wasn't a big operation. Or particularly well-equipped. You didn't have to be an expert to tell that. But it was definitely a gene lab. Big refrigerators labelled with typed notes, names and dates. Centrifuge, microscope, analysis machines of some kind. A little neat for the white heat of scientific progress, surfaces dull with a layer of dust. No one had worked down here for a while; maybe even before the raid this week.

He must still have the notes; the potential, at least. Or they wouldn't be here.

‘Oh hell,' Martin sighed, jolting down the stairs behind her. ‘How did all you people get in here?'

Jude glanced back at him, deadpan. ‘I hate to say “I told you so”, but…'

He shook his head. Clinging to rational explanations. ‘If you're the police, I surrender. If you're another hallucination, then remind me to engineer a cut-off time into my next batch of dope, and go back to hell where you belong.'

‘Get him down here,' Schrader said, without even looking at him.

Little Miss Prim smiled, tilting her hips a little in invitation, and beckoned him further into the lab.

‘Run,' Jude told him. ‘Now.'

He wouldn't. She knew that. Not with everything he cared about down here, vulnerable to these hallucinatory strangers. But she said it anyway.

Martin looked from her to Schrader and back, and slouched down the last two steps into the lab.

‘You people, right,' he said, after clearing his throat. ‘I know my Freud. You're some kind of manifestation of my inner paranoia, aren't you?'

‘Actually,' Jude told him, ‘these delightful people are what's going to happen if you don't complete the research you're doing here.'

Schrader blinked, a ‘Didn't you get that the wrong way round?' look crumpling his mouth, narrowing his eyes. But then, he never had been smart.

Martin frowned too. To give him his due, he was very good at it. ‘It's too hard,' he slurred. ‘These days. No money. Got raided last week. They didn't find the good stuff, but the harassment, you know? And too much dope, I guess. It's just too hard.'

‘I know,' Jude murmured. Though she didn't, not really. ‘I know. But what you're doing here is very important. World-changing. I think you know that.'

‘Sure,' DiFlorian said. ‘If you're a body purist. A fascist by any other name. If you want a world where everyone's the same, everyone's “perfect” –but by whose definition?'

‘Yours, I presume. If you get control of biotech at its earliest stages, only give it to those you consider fit. Or unfit.' Anger flared in Jude, fed by garbled memories of late nights in Club Andro, strange and ecstatic creatures flitting in the shadows. ‘And you say I'm a fascist. What are your parameters going to be? Who deserves biotech, in your brave new world? And who's going to get it, whether they want it or not?'

Schrader tossed his head. He probably wasn't used to being disagreed with. ‘The alternative is the world we grew up in. A world where everyone has to follow fashion. Obsessed by the skin-deep. Everyone has to have the latest body, the latest face. Is that right, or fair? You were lucky, Jude, you look pretty much okay even without bioteching –'

‘You really know how to flatter a girl, don't you?'

‘But what if you didn't match up to the accepted norm? Imagine the pressure. The whispers. Isn't it better to keep biotech for the sick and the diseased, the ones who really need it, than to allow criminals to coin new identities –'

‘Sheesh,' Martin muttered, following the conversation round the room with those wide, startled eyes. ‘I'm hallucinating ethical philosophy.'

‘Yeah,' Little Miss growled. ‘You should really take a holiday.'

Jude shook her head. ‘You don't give a damn about anyone but yourselves and your bloody superhuman powers. The only people you'd be “keeping” the technology for are yourselves. And what you need,' to Martin, backing unsteadily up the steps now, ‘isn't a holiday. You need to carry on where you left off. Finish the research, distribute it as widely as you can. Share the secret. They'll rip you off, and you will get pretty bitter about that – but you were never that interested in big business anyway. You just want to change the world. And that's exactly what you're going to do.'

You're going to give me a little time with the woman I love, who wouldn't be a woman at all if it wasn't for your dope-filled experimentation. A little time being better than no time.

Which is about what I have left here.

Schrader took a step forward. ‘It's unfortunate, Jude, but we just can't allow that to happen.'

She returned his stare. ‘Well, yes, Schrader. That is unfortunate.'

Mainly because I have no idea how to stop you.

I should never have listened to Warner, that's for sure. Should have joined the Ferrymen while I had the chance. Moved in with mummy dearest and started imagining towers into existence. Should have stayed Adrift.

Of course. And how did I end up Adrift in the first place?

I died. My physical body died.

‘Martin. Why don't you wait upstairs for a moment? Let me and the Hitler Youth here sort this out between ourselves.'

Miss Handbag blew air through her teeth. ‘There's no need for that sort of association. GenoBond has no racial or –'

‘Now, Martin.'

Blinking in panic, he backed up the last two steps and closed the door on them. The click of the latch echoed strangely off the tiled walls, the glistening metal cabinets.

Schrader regarded her sourly across the heaps of jumbled equipment. ‘If he makes a run for it while we're down here…'

‘Fat Boy's not going anywhere,' DiFlorian muttered. ‘His whole life's work is here.'

Jude turned her attention to the bench in front of her.

Yeah, I really should have paid more attention in Chemistry, too. When I get all this over with, I'm going back to evening classes, to patch up all these irritating little holes in my education. It's not like I won't have the time, because, after all, I won't have a job after I break Mr Warner's nose…

Little Miss Handbag was looking at her. ‘Let me get this straight. You want to work things out?'

That flask there should do the trick. If she could only get to it.

‘Well, you know me. Always the accommodating type.'

Schrader pulled a face.

‘No, really. I mean, what's the point? The way I see it, you people have everything worked out. Control bioteching, control people's desires. No more nasty incidents with people convinced they're a llama trapped in the body of a man. The way you see things, you're making everybody happy, healthy and compliant to the New World Order.'

‘Jude –'

‘And that's all very well.' One more step; no, another, just be sure it was well within reach. ‘But the thing is –'

‘Stop.'

Schrader, abruptly still, frozen, his gaze fixed to her hand as she leaned forward, oh so casually, to rest against the bench. ‘Whatever you're going to try, don't.'

‘Sorry guys.'

Her fingers closed around the glass flask, flipping it up into the air. Little Miss was going for the ugly-looking revolver holstered under the arm, but it was too late for that. The flask clipped the edge of a ceiling beam and shattered, broken glass and fumes spiralling in an expanding cloud. Schrader, closest to her, fell back, choking. For a moment, he was there, reaching for her
and also on the ground, clawing at his raw throat, spitting blood

And then the air conditioning kicked in, a long, laboured rattling that barely thinned the white and spiralling fumes. And the smoke of her burning, some garbled memory chimed in, goes up for ever and ever…

And she just stood there, listening to three people dying.

Not dying, really. I mean, they're dead the same way I'm dead, and here I am, happy as a sandboy. Whatever a sandboy is. And they're criminals, killers, I mean, how did I end up dead in the first place?

I'm still killing human beings.

I'm going to break a lot more than just Warner's nose when I get home.

The air conditioning was making headway now, clearing a small and continually threatened space immediately below the out-take vent. For a moment, there was just the machinery hum.

Then DiFlorian stumbled forward into clean air, brushing ineffectually at the acid splashes on her sleeve. ‘That was so childish. I don't know what you thought you'd achieve –'

‘Bang, bang,' Jude said, finally allowing herself a smile. ‘You're dead.'

It wasn't a thing you could see, as such. It was more a feeling, an unconscious reading of tiny clues. The thinness, the fading, the brittle look in their eyes. The way they looked at each other, the widening of pupils, the terrible, laboured slowness of their realisation. Oh, and the way she could see right through the trailing edge of Miss Handbag's skirt.

No wonder Doctor Gene'n'stein there thought we were hallucinations. We're worse than that. We're ghosts. Revenants. Beings caught outside their own time.

Tossing that overgrown fringe back out of his eyes, Schrader pushed DiFlorian aside and kept coming.

‘Time,' he muttered, ‘to see if you really can kill the dead.'

Jude just smiled.

‘Don't you feel it, Schrader?'

She could. Exactly as she'd felt it in the street, as she looked back at her own dead body. The swirling, the vertigo, the beginning of the end.

One moment Schrader was there, reaching for her; then the floor gave way beneath him, and he was falling.

Instinctively, Jude jumped back, cursing herself for not having anticipated the one small drawback to the plan. The fact that she, also being somewhat dead, might get sucked in too.

The wall was at her back, and, even if there'd been room to run, it wouldn't have helped her. The whirlwind that had once been the floor was expanding too fast. Jagged fragments of time spinning like an exploding mirror, reflections still trapped behind the glass as it came apart. Sucking DiFlorian and Little Miss down like spiders in a bath tub, plucking at her toes, tugging at the hem of her jeans – and then vertigo engulfed her, and, for the last time, she was falling.

SIXTEEN

Adrift

It was going to end the way it had started.

Four ReTracers, all Adrift. All points of reference wiped by their deaths, each lost in the cracks between the moments of their lives. She'd been here before, of course, and found a way out. But it had been her life passing her by in fragments and glimpses, hers alone: now the flashes of time flickering past were the lives of strangers, the men and women trapped there cried out for people she'd never known, and she wasn't sure her luck was going to hold.

The others were trying to save themselves, just as she'd done. Lunging and clutching at whatever passed, at the slivers of reality that danced between them like snowflakes, groping for the detritus of past and future, slashing their naked hands on the edges of time. Some of those lives flashing by were theirs. All they needed was the right moment to jump to, and they were safe.