Mind Secrets: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 1) (24 page)

But Michael needed to act with stealth, not bravado.

He walked down the steps, off the platform, where a sign facing him revealed he was at Denham train station. Beside it was a ticket machine. Michael used it to buy a ticket to London, then made his way across to the other platform.

As he boarded the train going in the opposite direction, he allowed himself a smile. He hoped Cooper had assumed Michael would use public transport to get out of Ruislip. That he would have seen him on the CCTV at the train station buying a ticket at the booth. That he would interview the man there and discover Michael had bought a ticket to Princes Risborough. His men would then be dispatched to Princes Risborough station in order to catch Michael as he arrived. Except, he would never arrive. Because he never had any intention of going all the way to Princes Risborough. And no one was looking for a teenager in an oversize black jacket heading into London.

~

LONDON WAS A
big place. A very large haystack in which to search for Jennifer and Otis needles. Michael didn’t know where to start looking and ended up on a bus heading for the street where they used to live. It was foolish to think Jennifer and Otis would have gone back there. The likelihood was Cooper had known about it and searched it, but he had to check. He’d heard Otis say once, decent squats were like gold dust. As soon as one lot of squatters moved out, another lot moved in. Maybe that had happened in their old flat. Maybe the new tenants had information on where the old tenants had gone.

After perceiving no one was keeping watch on the flat, Michael arrived to find a group of workmen stripping it bare. He watched from across the road as the sofa he once slept on was manhandled out of the entrance of the block and thrown into a skip parked outside. It was only a bit of old, lumpy furniture, but it made him feel sad.

“What’s going on?” Michael asked one of the workmen.

“Bunch of squatters’ve been living in there. Place is bloody disgusting. Landlord’s doing it up to sell.”

If there’d been any clues in the flat as to where Otis and Jennifer had gone, they’d already been torn to shreds and thrown away.

~

BY THE END
of the day, Michael’s reservoir of money had dwindled. A combination of takeaway food plus train, tube and bus fares had eaten into it badly. He could spend more on a hotel overnight, but continue like that and he’d have nothing left to eat with.

So he opted for a park bench. He’d slept rough before, he could do it again.

He’d forgotten the cold and the damp. And, with winter closing in, the temperature dropped off sharply overnight. Then there was the fear. That he’d be attacked or mugged or found by one of Cooper’s men. So, although he lay down and closed his eyes, he didn’t sleep.

In the morning, he used some of his precious cash to buy a phone. He chose a second hand device which he recognised as the same model Jennifer used to have. He remembered the thing being easy to use, but without all her settings programmed into it, he struggled to get the information he wanted. He suspected he would have been good at that sort of thing before his memories were destroyed, but now he felt like a caveman trying to program a computer.

He wanted to get on the perceivers network. But it was, by its nature, a secretive group which not only had to stay ahead of the internet police trying to shut it down, but also was picky about who it let in. Add to that Michael’s ineptitude with the phone, and it equalled a lot of frustration.

In the end he gave up and used the phone to call Sian Jones, Jennifer’s reporter friend at
The Daily News
.
The Daily News
had a website with the main number on it, so he didn’t have to use much cunning to get put through to her desk. Within the hour, he was sitting in the same American-style diner where they had first met and using a fork to pick cubes of ice out of his Coke before dropping them into the empty serviette holder.

Sian arrived looking hassled. She spotted Michael and gave him a wave of acknowledgement before dashing over towards him, her bulbous handbag suspended from her elbow and bouncing off her hip as she walked.

She sat opposite him with a heavy sigh. She threw out her arm to a passing waitress – as if hailing a bus – and ordered tea.

Sian sighed a second time and sat back in her seat. “Glad you called. It’s mad at the office.”

“I didn’t pull you away from anything important, did I?” said Michael.

She waved away his concern. “Oh, only a meeting I wanted to get out of. So, what’s up?”

A lot of things. But only one that he’d come to talk to her about. “Jennifer.”

“Oh, how is she? I wondered how she was getting on.”

“I don’t know, that’s the thing.” Michael took a self-conscious sip of his Coke. “She’s gone missing.”

“If I remember correctly, wasn’t she already officially classed as missing?”

“Not a missing person. Jennifer …” Michael paused. “Jennifer … Well, a little while ago, Jennifer was cured and now I can’t find her.”

“Oh.” The waitress brought over Sian’s tea and placed it in front of her. Sian didn’t seem to notice. “You surprise me. Jennifer doesn’t strike me as the sort of girl who’d want to take the cure.”

“It wasn’t voluntary,” said Michael.

“I see.”

“I don’t know where else to look. I thought – you being a journalist and everything – you might have some ideas.”

Sian shrugged. “I know a few tricks.”

She reached into her bag and began rummaging. From the bottom she pulled out a tablet computer. She scrolled through a number of screens using the fingers of her right hand, while her left picked up a spoon and stirred her tea with the teabag still in it.

“Hmm,” she said, eventually.

“Hmm what?” said Michael.

“She’s not listed.”

Michael’s confusion must have shown on his face, because she turned the screen around and pushed it across the table for him to see.

It was a website detailing a list of missing persons. Name after name after name. Michael’s gaze drifted down them, not really reading, not really understanding.

“Just ’cos she’s not listed as missing, doesn’t mean she’s not missing,” he said.

“Ah, but it might.” Sian squeezed the teabag against the side of the mug and dropped it into the serviette holder where the steaming ball quickened the melting of Michael’s shrinking ice cubes.

“Look,” said Sian. “We already know Jennifer ran away from home, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I found out because her parents listed her as missing on this website.” Sian reached over and tapped the screen with her fingernail. She inadvertently hit one of the names on the list and the details of a missing teenager named Ed Gishtari filled the screen.

“But she’s not listed there anymore?”

“Right.”

Michael thought over what she said, trying to piece together the clues. “You think she’s gone back home?”

“That would be my guess,” said Sian. “If she ran away from home because of her perception, makes sense she might return home after being cured.”

“I suppose …”

It was hard to think of Jennifer at home with a family of her own. Michael pushed Sian’s tablet back across her side of the table. “Do you have her home address?”

“I should think so,” said Sian. She took a gulp of her tea and resumed pulling up webpages on the screen. By the time she lifted the mug to her lips again, Michael perceived a sense of triumph within her. “There, that was easy.”

“So, where is she?” Michael said.

“Hmm,” said Sian. “You know what I’m thinking?”

Michael did to a certain extent. He couldn’t hear her thoughts as such, like he had with the bus driver, but he perceived something devious going on in her mind. Sian had only agreed to their first meeting on condition she got information out of Jennifer. Michael got the feeling this time was going to be no different.

“I’m thinking this could be a story,” said Sian.

“Jennifer’s not a story,” said Michael, “she’s my friend.”

“My editor might be interested in a teenager who didn’t want the cure, but is now living with the consequences of being normal,” said Sian. “The media’s full of how fantastic this cure is and how it’s going to save the world, etc etc. It’s about time we put the other side of the story, don’t you think?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MICHAEL DIDN’T WANT
to go with the journalist. He wanted to see Jennifer alone. But the word ‘no’ was just another way of saying ‘yes’ in Sian Jones’s vocabulary and she wouldn’t listen to argument. So, half an hour after meeting her in the diner, he was sitting in the passenger seat of her car, taking a drive out to Hemel Hempstead where Jennifer’s parents lived.

They stopped in a residential street of terraced houses, romantically called Jupiter Drive, and parked outside a house with a little grass front garden and a neatly trimmed bush under the front window. He found it difficult to imagine Jennifer living inside. It was so different to the untidy squat he associated her with.

Sian turned off the engine and unclipped her seatbelt. “Ready?”

Suddenly he wasn’t ready at all.
What if Jennifer didn’t want to see him? What if Jennifer’s mother answered the door?

Sian was already out of the car and heading up the path. Michael unclipped his seatbelt and jumped after her. She’d rung the doorbell before Michael joined her at the head of the garden path. He stood up straight and tried to look presentable. He brushed down the stolen oversize jacket he still wore and hoped it was enough to create a good impression.

A woman, rubbing damp hands on a blue and white striped tea towel, teased open the door and stuck her head between the gap.

“Yes?”

The woman was old enough to be in her forties, with grey streaks through her brown hair.

“Mrs Price?” said Sian.

“Yes?” She opened the door a little further.

“My name’s Sian Jones. I’m from
The Daily News
. I don’t know if you remember, but Jennifer helped me out when she did work experience at the paper.”

“Oh yes,” said Mrs Price. The door opened fully. She relaxed.

“And this is Michael, a friend of Jennifer’s.”

Michael attempted a friendly smile. “Hi,” he said, somewhat pathetically.

“I wondered …” Sian continued talking, but Michael stopped hearing her words.

His mind perceived something familiar. A presence that he had never felt before, yet instantly knew. He peered beyond the woman into the darkness of her hallway. There, clutching onto the end of the banister at the bottom of the stairs like a shy five-year-old, was Jennifer. Her sleek, brown skin, black skirt and T-shirt camouflaged her against the shadows.

“Jennifer?” His words interrupted the women’s conversation. They turned to look at him.

Jennifer took a step further into the hall. A stream of light from the open doorway fell across her face. He perceived her hope and disbelief and, in that moment, knew it was her.

“Michael?” Her eyes brightened with recognition. Joy flooded out of her in such a rush it almost knocked him over.

She ran to the front door, squeezed herself through the gap between her mother and the doorframe and out onto the garden path. She flung her arms around him. “Michael, you’re alive! You’re alive!”

Her emotion was so powerful, Michael had to raise his blocks against her. Physically, she overwhelmed him with a hug incredibly strong for such a skinny teenager.

“Of course I’m alive.” He pulled her away from him and looked her in the face. Tears fell silently from her eyes, down her cheeks and to the corners of her smiling mouth. But beyond the emotion of the moment, she looked unwell. Her complexion had lost some of its natural iridescence and he could see the angle of her bones beneath the skin of her already-thin body.

“Why didn’t you call me?” said Jennifer.

“I didn’t have your number,” said Michael.

“But you found my house.”

“Sian found it, really.”

Jennifer turned to her mother. “Mum, can Michael come in?”

“I don’t see why not,” said her mother.

Jennifer took Michael’s hand and pulled him inside with child-like excitement. Behind them, he heard Mrs Price inviting Sian inside.

Jennifer led Michael through the hall and up the stairs. It was such a relief to see her. He’d been so worried. His body responded to being close to a beautiful girl he had liked for a long time. It was automatic, embarrassing, he couldn’t control it. He tried to hide his embarrassment as she took him into her bedroom.

The room had the essence of her. That same smell that filled his nostrils when she was close, that made him want to get even closer. A subtle scent that hung unobtrusively in the air. But, to look at it, the room was like a little girl’s bedroom.

It was bright, with early afternoon sun streaming through the window, past the pastel curtains with their pink rose pattern, and alighting on the painted yellow walls. A child-size desk with a computer, yellowed by age, sat on the top, along with a jumble of random things: a book wedged open by a pair of sunglasses, a hairbrush and a make-up bag with a mascara and lipstick sticking out of it. Her single bed, clothed also in yellow, stuck out in the middle of the room with the headboard pressed against the wall. Sitting on the pillow, with its legs splayed out in an unnatural position was a cuddly giraffe.

Once inside with the door shut, Jennifer opened out her hand. “Give me your phone.”

Michael passed it over.

Jennifer tapped something into the device and handed it back. “Now you have my number.”

“Thanks.”

She went over to the computer. “I want to show you what I’ve been doing.”

“Can’t that wait?” said Michael.

She tapped a couple of keys on the keyboard and the screen came to life. “I’ve been in touch with the network, we’re getting organised, we’re—”

“Jennifer …”

“—really taking a stand now. More and more people are getting in touch with us.”

“Jennifer, can you leave that for a moment?”

She turned back, blinking at him, uncomprehending.