Shadow Breakers (9 page)

I can't help feeling I'm being watched.

Looking up and down the Esplanade, I can see a few people — families, kids, retirees — all doing their own thing, but not really paying me any attention. The sea is lashing the beach, cold and unfriendly, and there's a salty bite in the air today, along with the moldering smell of seaweed.

I take out the special pass Miss Bellini has given me — slim, matte black, the size of a bank card — and swipe it in the reader, a little white box at about waist-height. The light on the white box goes from red to green, there's a
beep
, and the door clicks open.

I hurry inside, and the door closes behind me as I pick my way across the dusty, cobwebby hall, down the old stairs, into the underground parking lot and the Datacore. Everyone is there except Miss Bellini.

“You're late,” says Cal, looking up from her computer as I clang down the metal staircase. She sounds tense.

I chuck my skateboard on the table. “Sorry. I had netball.”

“It's Wednesday,” says Cal, pausing with her plastic coffee cup halfway to her lips. “Netball is Tuesday.”

I glower at her. “Extra netball. I need the practice.”

Why do I lie? I don't know. Something about liking Jade, I guess, and feeling protective of my “normal” life with my friend. Not wanting them even to know about it, so they can't make fun of me for it.

“Can you please move
that
?” says Cal, pointing at my skateboard.

“A girl has to park her transport somewhere.”

“Yes, well, not on the table, please. This isn't some tawdry little seaside café for Mundanes, you know.”

“Sorr-
eee
,” I say, sitting in the nearest chair and sticking my board underneath it.

Josh is standing by the illuminated map of Firecroft Bay, a notepad in his hand. He flashes me a grin. “Nice of you to join us.”

“Okay,” says Cal, swinging her hair. “Update, team?”

“I've isolated that Terminal Thirteen computer,” says Ollie from his seat, “and cross-matched it with the user data.” He holds up a strip of printouts and they fall to the floor like an enormous roll of toilet paper. “Want the short version, or the long version?”

Cal holds up her hand. “Brevity is a virtue.”

“Sorry?”

“Short and sweet, Ollie. Minimum geek-speak.”

Lyssa giggles. “She means she wants it in English!”

Ollie says, “That computer was being used by a readily identifiable log-in ID.” He stabs at a button on the keyboard, and a face springs up on the monitor, picked out clearly in black and white.

I jump. I recognize the face immediately.

“So it was Jade's computer,” I say, puzzled.

This is disturbing. I've just been talking to her, and now here we are, looking at her photo as if we're spying on her.

Josh waves a pencil at me. “Well done, Miranda. You have to get up early to get one past you.”

Ignoring him, I peer at the screen. It looks like Jade's official school photo, date-stamped with the day she joined.

“Where did you get that?” I ask Ollie.

“Local authority records,” he says. “We're all stamped, filed, and indexed these days, you know. In case any of us turns out to be, you know, a bit of a wacko.”

I frown. “Nice thought. I take it the Civil Liberties people don't know about this?”

“They know nothing about
anything
,” says Cal dismissively. She sits down, gnawing the end of her pen. “So. We need to think about all this.” She points at me suddenly. “Was Jade on the bus? That first morning?”

“Er . . .” I think hard, trying to remember. “Not sure.”

Lyssa closes her eyes, as if trying to picture the scene. “No, I don't think she was.”

“She wasn't,” says Josh calmly. “I'd have remembered.”

I can't help thinking there is something wrong about this conversation. It sounds rehearsed, like it's being put on for my benefit.

“She was definitely in the computer lab when the big zap happened,” says Ollie.

For a moment there is silence.

“These energy surges,” says Lyssa. “Interesting stuff.”

“So . . . we keep an eye on her,” says Josh. “Ollie's the surveillance expert. Why don't you go along with him, Miranda? Might learn a bit.”

Ollie and I look at each other.

“I'm not very happy about it,” I say uncertainly. “She's my friend.”

It feels as if the world is tilting. Where do my loyalties truly lie?

Nobody says anything. Four pairs of eyes are fixed on me.

I shrug, helplessly. I'm still the new girl, and it seems I have to do as I'm told. For now.

“She hasn't moved for twenty-seven minutes.”

I put down my teacup. “What?”

Ollie and I have been talking about this and that and the other for a bit, about computer games and TV and books, here in the Pier Café — and it's a surprise when he brings me back to business.

He flips his phone around to face me. “Jade Verdicchio,” he says. “We're supposed to be watching her. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah. That.” I look, uneasily, at the phone screen, which is showing a grainy image of Jade on a bench on the end of the pier, nibbling at a fluffy, pink stick of cotton candy. She is literally just around the corner from us — beyond the tacky shops and the bumper cars — but we're not watching her directly. “Ollie, how are you
doing
that?”

“Just tapping into the security camera feed,” he says. “Easy when you've got a few hack codes.”

“And you get those
how
, exactly?”

“Oh, you'd be surprised what a couple of upperclassmen geeks will swap for the rarest StarBreaker Gold Cards. The ones with the limited-edition watermark featuring their favorite babe, Angelica Dupree, playing Space Commander Nikki Tempest.”

I smile. “Ah, and you think, because I'm not a geek, I'll be bamboozled by that. But I know enough about StarBreaker to know that the Gold Cards with the limited-edition watermark featuring Space Commander Nikki Thingy —”

“Tempest.”

“Whatever . . . they were never actually
made
, were they? Or at least, only one ever was and it's in a sealed glass block in a safe in some famous comic store in New York. Am I right?”

Ollie grins. “They don't know that,” he says.

I like talking to Ollie. He's the most normal of the Weirdos — sorry, my new friends. He isn't slinky and threatening like Cal, or a robot superbrain like Lyssa, or cool and superior like Josh. He's just a really smart, nerdy guy with a fantastic memory.

“So what are you
actually
giving these techno-geeks?”

“Well, they're Commander Nikki Tempest cards all right. Just . . . not exactly with a watermark. All right, all right. With a fake watermark.” He leans back in his chair, as I pretend to be shocked. “C'mon, Miranda, it's so easy to fool these dudes. Seriously.”

He glances at his phone. “Still not moved,” he says with a sigh, and sips his Coke. “Where does your mum think you are tonight?”

“Philosophy Club.”

“You are
kidding
me. She thinks King Eddie's has a
Philosophy
Club?”

“Seriously! My mum thinks I'm in the French Club, the Chess Club, the Astronomy Club . . . I'm running out of clubs!” I take a reassuring sip of tea. “I've got to go home and read something to make it look convincing.”

“Cogito ergo sum,”
Ollie intones.

“If you say so.” I smile. “So, what brought you into this, Ollie?”

He smiles, not looking as if he doesn't want to answer, exactly, but not quite meeting my gaze. “Aaaah, y'know . . . this and that.”

I shake my head. “What and what?”

He shrugs. “I moved here three years ago,” he says. “Me and my mum and dad. Perfectly normal family. Except for the fact that my big sister had disappeared.”

I'm stunned. “Ollie, I'm so sorry. Are the police following it up?”

“Oh, the police did what they could. But when I say Bex disappeared, I mean
literally
disappeared. I don't mean she went missing on the way home from school or on a camping trip or anything like that. I mean she popped out of existence.”

There's a new look on his face, one I haven't seen before. He's keeping it under control, but I can see the sadness there.

“How?”

“It was Bonfire Night. I was, what, nine. She was eleven. I was standing on one side of the village bonfire, burning hot, seeing how close I could get with a marshmallow on a stick.”

“As is the Bonfire Night tradition,” I encourage him.

“Yeah. And I looked up, and I could see Bex, just around the corner of the fire from me, partly hidden by the smoke. And then . . .” Ollie shakes his head. “I've gone through this a thousand times in my head, and it still doesn't seem quite real.”

“Go on,” I say gently.

“Miranda, I swear I saw Bex
vanish
. One second she was standing there, the next she was gone. Like someone had flicked a switch and turned her off. Pop.”

We're the only customers in the café. It's silent apart from the boy serving behind the counter, drumming his fingers on the till.

“Of course, I tried to tell my mum and dad, and the police,” Ollie says, “but it's not the kind of story you can easily get people to believe. Nine-year-old boy, plays a lot of video games, reads a lot of books, overactive imagination . . . You can see what they thought. Typical grown-ups. So literal.” He looks me in the eye. “She wasn't
abducted
, Miranda. Not like they said. On a November evening, in the middle of a crowded field, the whole village there? Kids on bikes all over the place, teenagers hanging round at the gates?
Someone
would have seen. No way could anyone have taken an eleven-year-old kid out of that place.”

I nod. “We all know the Stranger Danger drill.”

“Yes, and I know Bex. She'd have been spitting, swearing, kicking. She'd have been screaming,
‘That's not my dad,'
the way you're told.” He finishes his Coke. “Nah. Something happened that night. Something that ordinary science can't explain.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“And then we came here. New start. All that. But I got a sense there was something special about this place the moment we arrived. And then I started at the school, and everything was just normal, until Miss Bellini started last term. One lunchtime, when I was helping her fix a disk error, it all came out. Bex, the bonfire, all of it. And you know what, Miranda?
She believed me.
” Ollie leans back, shaking his head, blowing his cheeks out. “It makes me . . . when I think about it . . . I just wanted to . . . you know? She was the first adult ever to believe me. To listen and to actually think I wasn't making it up.”

“Could she do anything?”

“Not directly. But she said she knew of things like that happening. So that's when it all started to snowball. And I met Cal and Josh. And Lyssa came along later. The stuff we do, Miranda, the things we investigate, I'm kind of hoping that, somewhere buried inside it all, there's an answer about Bex.”

“I hope so, too,” I say softly.

“And you?” he says. “Who did you lose?”

Startled, I feel my heart skip a beat. I'm about to say something, when he glances at his phone and his face turns to shock. He leaps to his feet and grabs his coat. “Come on!”

I don't have time to see what he has seen, but I rush out of the café, following him along the pier, our feet thudding on the wood, until we are there at the very end, as far out as you can go in Firecroft Bay without hitting the water. Jade's climbed up onto the lowest rung of the barrier. We skid to a halt, and she turns around and sees us.

Ollie whispers, “She looked like she was about to —”

“What?” snaps Jade, jumping down. “Chuck myself over the edge? Is that what you thought? Hello, Miranda. Nice of you to let me know you were coming to the pier. I might have come with you.”

I look down, blushing. “It's . . . I mean . . . It's not . . .”

“No, I bet.” Her voice is cold and steely. “Hello, Weirdo Boy,” she says to Ollie.

“It's Ollie.”

“Sure. Mind if I still just call you Weirdo Boy? It helps my concentration. What you got, then, Weirdos? Spit it out. What you got?”

“Got?” I ask.

“Yeah. I mean, it's obviously Let's Investigate Gypsy Girl Day, so what've you found out?” She comes right up to us, arms folded, chewing ostentatiously, her earrings glinting in the sun. “Yeah, my gran was a Romany, a Gypsy. Yeah, my dad's an unemployed layabout who can't be bothered to leave his new girlfriend in Italy an' come an' see his own daughter. And yeah, my mum's best mate's named Gordon's Gin, and some days she can barely remember her own name. And nobody wants to foster me because I'm too ‘difficult,' apparently. You got enough now?”

“Come on, let's go,” I say to Ollie.

She glares at me. “What do you
want
? So much for being friends.”

“She's perfectly normal,” Ollie says, disappointed, monitoring readouts on his phone. “A boring Mundane. There's not even a trace of any unusual activity around her. And yet she
was
the one using PC Terminal Thirteen.”

I look her in the eye.

“I'm really sorry, Jade,” I say. “Please, Ollie, let's leave her alone.”

Jade tosses her empty cotton candy stick into the sea and glares at us. “Do they let you lot out for the day?” she snarls. “I mean, seriously, are you all mental or what . . . ? ‘Boring Mundane' . . . I mean, for real?”

“We're wasting time, here, Miranda,” Ollie says. He nods at Jade. “Sorry to have got in your way,” he says. “We won't bother you again.”