Inkers (21 page)

“It is just a dream,” she said, her voice sounding unreal, soundless, empty.

Tia was standing in the centre of the room. Lily realised that she had always been in the room with her. She wondered why she had been so scared all that time, though she could still feel the fear boiling within her. Despite her great black eyes and her blank expression Tia looked like Lily. It was like looking at a mirror in the dark.

“This is just a dream,” Lily said, and Tia’s mouth moved with hers.

“I don’t understand,” Lily said. “Please, help me. We have to escape. Brian will take you, he’ll hurt me. I don’t know how we can escape. Please help me.”

Tia watched her for a moment, then reached a long arm out towards Lily’s face, long fingers spreading.

“No!” Lily shouted, stepping back, raising her dream–hands to protect herself.

Tia paused, holding her hand poised.

“No, please,” Lily said. “Last time, it was too much, it woke me. You have to go very slowly.”

Tia reached out once more. This time Lily let Tia press her hand on her face,
into
her face.

The first image was a grey woman, arm wrapped in bandages, walking slowly through a forest, glaring left and right. The trees burst into flames around her and she disappeared.

The second was a white man with a dark face sat in a great black winged drone, rushing high through the atmosphere. The drone was covered in ghastly weaponry, all of which began to fire at once.

Then Lily was back in the barn, Mark still alive, Annie’s face still whole, both rushing towards her, the red anger rising up again within Lily, and then Tia was there, floating demonic, and the flash of light and heat happened all over again, and Mark disintegrated, and Annie’s face was ruined forever. Lily did not scream this time. Then the bloodied barn was gone.

The next vision was a bright globe rushing through space, blazing with light. Its forward surface was pockmarked with planet–sized craters and collision marks, but Lily could see the regularity of the geology beneath the surface where it had been cut away. It was all straight lines of light and darkness. It was an unnatural planet. She swung around and she could see a tiny bright blue dot, far far away. She knew that it was the earth.

Then Lily was looking from a perspective she could not understand. It was as though she could see all depths at once. There was a honeycomb of black rooms with no doors and no connections, each with a human trapped inside, silent, aware, unmoving, undying. Some were bleeding, spraying infinite red ink into the weightless darkness.

Last of all she saw a white flower, opening to reveal a flower within it, also opening. It continued, flowers within flowers, and Lily felt that she was falling into the opening flowers, and yet she was not moving at all.

Lily was back in the nightmare room, looking at Tia.

“I don’t understand,” Lily said.

The arm flicked out again before Lily had a chance to stop it.

The images were a rush this time, first the six colours of ink, green, yellow, red, blue, white, black, desire, excitement, anger, sadness, hate, love, swirling together in a great whirlpool. Then the farmhouse falling to the ground, masonry flying into the air, Leonard and Tom ruined beneath it. Then Brian standing on the top of the mountain, his pale skin flaying, his muscles and fat underneath completely white, hair white, eyes white, a long silver knife gripped in his hand, red ink dripping from it, plunging it towards Lily. Then he was gone and she saw people all over the world bursting into ink monsters, mutating, great jaws opening wide, humanity lost to emotion, demons of greed and hate destroying everything around them. The whole world disintegrated, the tectonic plates coming apart in chunks, the oceans slipping from the surface of the earth and freezing into space, the molten core spreading, every living thing in existence dying. Then a blur of faces, of explosions, of warped recursive images that she could not comprehend at all. She felt herself start to lose her grip on the dream, a scream building in her lungs.

“Stop, please!” she shouted. “Stop!”

She was back in the room with Tia. She fell to her knees. Tia crouched down to be at the same level as her.

Then Lily was tiny, six years old, sucked backwards across her bedroom in a great blast of air to slam into the wall beneath her window, all wrapped in her duvet. She pushed herself to her feet, untangling herself, and turning stared out of the shattered ruin of the window at the great mass rising, the town lifting, eight miles of west Cheltenham, thirty metres deep of the concrete, roots, pipes, earth and stone beneath it all, lifted into the air like a cross–sectional diagram. All she could see was the nearest edge of it, a few houses perched on top. She could feel blood running out of her ears. She was screaming. As the wind rose to drown her out, she watched the dots rise against the clear morning sky, over forty thousand of them rising up from their houses, from the hospital, from GCHQ, out of doors and windows and roofs, some leaving a misty pink trail in the air behind them, dots just visible a mile away, and she knew what they were, and she knew her parents were among them.

To her horror the raised earth and town, hovering clean above the great gaping hole in the earth that it had left, began to shrink and crush in, and a stream of crushed matter rushed from the floating mass into the air above to form a tiny grey orb. The orb grew rapidly, more and more black matter pouring up into it, and the dots began to disappear inside it too. She could see, and she knew, that it was a honeycomb, layers upon layers, sucking up the debris from below and changing it and sucking the dot–people in from all around, until all that was left was a great globe, the outside layer still visible, riddled with grey orifices, each hole containing a single flailing human like a maggot in rotting skin.

Finally an outer layer of solid grey spread over the ball, covering the honeycomb, until the whole thing was an impossible solid grey orb. The sun was rising somewhere behind Lily’s house. The morning air smelled strangely fresh, despite the dust that was beginning to build.

Lily picked her duvet up, heavy in her small arms, and pressed it over the shards of glass on the bottom of the windowsill. She pushed herself up and swung a leg over the windowsill, because she knew she had to save them, they were up there, alone, trapped in featureless grey rooms with no light and nobody else, forever, and she had to save them, but already the wind was beginning to rise again. It blew against her and before long she was pushing with all her strength not to fall back into the room, half in, half out, eyes never leaving the great grey orb, which was just hovering in the sky, dust billowing up below it, as if it were a huge grey eyeball watching her.

She had almost gained the leverage to hurl herself out and down into the bushes below when the orb shot upwards, and she paused and watched it leave a twisting column of dust and white contrail in its wake, curving up into the blue sky, impossibly fast. Lily watched it until the wall of dust from its ascendance hit her house and blew her back across the room, hurling her against the hard edge of her bed.

Then Lily was in the honeycomb in a dark cell with no doors or windows. She was floating. She could see two people, a man and woman in adjacent cells, eyes closed, and she realised she knew them well, and emotions that she had felt constantly for the past eleven years, for most of her life, so much there and part of her psyche that she was no longer conscious of them at all, the constant pain, suddenly burst out of her. The man and the woman were her parents, still alive, trapped in the GSE, trapped in hell, utterly alone, trapped forever. She cried out for them and sobbed, because she knew that they thought only of her, above everything, even now in their misery and madness.

They disappeared. Tia was there in front of her again.

“No!” Lily cried. “Help them, help them escape!”

Then Tia spoke with Lily’s own voice, but a voice crackling like fire as well.

“Reality buckles,” she said. She sat down, crossing her legs over one another.

“What do you mean?” Lily said. “What does that mean?”

“I am a knife–edge balance,” Tia said.

Lily awoke at last, and she could hear birds crying distantly outside. It was dawn. She had slept the whole night. She felt rested for the first time in six months. Her mind milled. Her parents were still alive, or at least not yet fully dead. But Tia could not help them escape, not without risking destroying everything that existed. And Lily was still trapped, and the GSE was coming, and others, searching for her, wanting to control what was inside her. The grey woman and the man in the machine. They wanted to take Tia from her. And Brian wanted her most of all. And soon he would come with the long silver knife.

Amber lay in the long grass, staring
at the sky, rubbing her bandaged left arm.

“It hurt?” Emily said.

“You know it does,” Amber said quietly.

“Just making conversation,” Emily said. “It’s healing OK. The infection’s gone. We need food, though. Drink some water. There’s a farm half a mile to the north that looks promising.”

“Oh god. Can’t we just hold up a supermarket?” Amber said, sipping from her bottle.

“We could,” Emily said. “But as you’re aware, the drones would spot you at five hundred yards. ITSA would be on us before we got through the doors.”

Amber sighed. “We’ve covered this whole island,” she said. “We’ve been everywhere.”

“Not quite,” Emily said. “There are always more nooks and crannies. And we haven’t found her yet.”

“I don’t think we ever will,” Amber said. She looked up at the bright shape in the sky, the GSE, still many millions of miles away but huge in the sky, like a second moon, getting bigger each day.

“How long have we got?”

“Forty–eight hours.”

“Oh god. I should be with Rob,” Amber said.

“Probably,” Emily said.

“We’re all going to die,” Amber said. “I always knew we were. Ever since the GSE took off we’ve been on borrowed time. I’ve spent my final weeks wandering around this island for no reason at all. I’ve wasted my life.”

“Yes, probably. But what’s done is done. And I’d rather we don’t die before we absolutely have to,” Emily said. “Come on, on your feet.”

Amber sighed and pushed herself up with her good right arm. Her body cried out, despite the dampening Emily was putting on her nervous system.

“Oh
god
,” Amber said, staggering to her feet. She was in a field of grass and bracken on one of the foothills surrounding the small mountains in the centre of Arran. “I really, really wish we had that drone.”

“We agreed to get rid of it,” Emily said, a touch defensively.

“Yeah, well. I liked that drone. Not much of a conversationalist, but it got us here. It didn’t make me walk everywhere.”

“It was a miracle that we got across Europe on your clearance. Unbelievable that the Chinese didn’t shoot us down.”

“Yeah, lucky for us the whole world’s gone to shit,” Amber said, taking the first step, and then the second.

“Other way,” Emily said.

Amber turned and took the two steps all over again. She crossed the field slowly and entered the trees, trying to be quiet, breaking twigs and sticks anyway.

“I’m still terrible at this guerrilla stuff,” Amber said quietly. “Give me an urban environment, give me Kathmandu, give me cops and robbers, not deer and, and farmers.”

“You’re getting better,” Emily said.

“When did you learn to
lie
?” Amber said. “I’m starting to worry that you’re the one about to go singular.”

The implant didn’t respond to that. Amber passed into the trees.

“Slow down,” Emily said. “There should be a wall, the farm’s just on the other side. The most recent images I’ve got show a big vegetable patch.”

Amber clambered over the drystone, awkward with her weakened arm, knocking off a couple of big stones as she went over the top. She landed amid lettuce. She glanced around so Emily could see everything.

“OK,” Emily said, “There are some mature potato plants over there, grab some of them –”

There was someone there. Amber saw him at the same moment Emily did. He was wearing tweed and holding a big gun. He looked scared. The adrenaline rush was surprisingly decent; she was halfway back over the wall when the gun went off.

She felt the impact as a shockwave throughout her body. Her leg kicked out, but pain–wise there was only a slight stinging in her thigh. She landed on the other side of the wall in a heap, scrambled up and tried to run but found she could not move any faster than a limp. She could hear the farmer reloading his shotgun.

“Take the fucking dampening off!” Amber shouted.

The pain was sudden and intense, and although she had asked for it she was not prepared. She cried out and almost fell down. But she had full control over her limbs again and she could run properly, out through the trees, and by the time the gun boomed again she had put several thick trunks between them.

She ran until she could not run any more, and then a bit further.

She fell to the ground. After a minute she sat up.

“Implants?” she panted.

“I don’t think so,” Emily said. “None visible. I don’t think a farmer would have hidden ones. You’re bleeding a lot.”

Amber got her tweezers and the last bandage out of a pocket in her jacket and tried not to cry.