It was wet, it was cold, and I was worried.
Misty rain was falling, too heavy for drizzle and too light to be a downpour. Where the yellow-white lights of the Olympic Park shone, you could see the raindrops slanting down against the darkness of the overcast sky. I was sheltering under a tree, and the wind was blowing gusts of rain in under the branches, sending cold droplets flying into my face.
It was a Saturday night in East London, and I was in Stratford, on a grassy bank above a road called Marshgate Lane. A small grove of trees grew next to a chain-link fence, and had there been any passers-by, they might have wondered what was so special about this particular grove that I was choosing to spend my Saturday night here in the cold and rain. The answer was simple: beneath one of these trees was a Well.
Wells are gathering points for essentia, the raw energy used in drucraft. I’d become pretty good at judging their strength over the past six months, and I estimated this one as on the low end of D+. Which meant that Linford’s, the corporation that I worked for, would pay me £700 for it. But they’d only pay me that £700 if it was still there, and when I found this Well there’d been someone loitering, a boy in a thick hooded anorak. He’d retreated at my approach, but he’d lingered just a little too long afterwards before disappearing. Which was why I was out here, getting rained on, making sure that when the corp extraction team arrived, there’d be a Well here to get paid for.
The wind shifted, sending another gust of rain into my eyes. I shivered and edged around the tree, though there wasn’t much point – my fleece and trousers were thoroughly damp by now. I checked the time to see that it was seventy minutes since I’d made the call. There’s no telling how long it’ll take a drucraft corp to respond to a Well alert; it can take hours, or days, and they won’t tell you which.
I wished I could just go home. That’s what I normally do when I call in a Well; corps don’t pay you to stick around, they pay you to send them the co-ordinates and then get lost. But something about that boy had set off alarm bells. In theory, once you’ve claimed a Well and logged the data with the Registry, it’s the property of whichever House or corporation you work for. But a certain significant fraction of Well hunters don’t care about the Registry, or other people’s property rights in general, and that was the reason I was lingering out here in the cold rain.
Still, it had been more than an hour, so maybe I was worrying over nothing. The Well was only a D+ . . . hardly enough to get a raider gang excited, especially not in this kind of horrible weather. None of the Ashfords would even get out of bed for something like this.
Thinking about the Ashfords was a mistake. It sent my thoughts back to what had happened this afternoon.
∞
Five hours earlier.
I spotted her as soon as she came into view. She was wearing a dark purple blazer over a slim dress and was towing a small suitcase, the heels of her shoes clicking on the polished floor. There was a huge billboard behind her, and for a moment, as she walked by, her shape was silhouetted against the stylised dragon on the ad, purple against gold.
I followed her past the end of the railing. She turned towards the terminal exit, still towing her carry-on, and caught a glimpse of me out of the corner of her eye. She turned with a slight frown.
“Hi, Mum,” I said.
My mother opened her mouth, still frowning, then recognition flashed in her eyes. She froze.
We stood there on the terminal concourse. People milled around us, greeting and embracing and chattering, then, once the talking was done, joining together in groups to flow out of the airport and go home. Only the two of us were still.
“What are you doing here?” my mother said at last. She looked shocked.
“I was waiting for you.”
My mother looked around. Somewhat confused, I did the same; the terminal floor was crowded, but no one was paying us any attention. “You can’t do this,” my mother said. “You can’t be here. If my father finds out—”
“He only told me to stay away from the house and not to try and murder Calhoun,” I said. “He didn’t say anything about seeing you.”
“. . . What?”
“He called me in for a talk after the raid,” I explained.
My mother stared.
I’d never seen my mother in person, at least not that I could remember. All I’d had to go on for finding her had been some old pictures, and when I’d first seen her walking down the Arrivals corridor, I’d felt no flash of recognition; she’d just looked like a pretty forty-year-old woman in a skirt suit. The longer I talked to her, though, the more something started to stir. The small movements she made, the way she turned her head . . . there was a strange echo there, of the glimpses I’d catch of myself in a mirror out of the corner of my eye.
“I could tell you what happened,” I offered when she still didn’t speak.
“Not here,” my mother said, seeming to come to a decision. She pulled out a card from an inside pocket, then hesitated, shook her head, took out a pen, and scribbled on the card. “Don’t talk to anyone else until we’ve met. Okay?”
“. . . Okay.”
“I have to go,” my mother said. Without waiting for an answer she grabbed the handle of her suitcase and strode away, heels clicking. After fifty feet or so she looked back. I waved; she gazed at me for a second, then disappeared into the crowd.
∞
The wind shifted, sending another gust of cold rain into my face and pulling me back to the present. I shook myself awake, huddling back under the tree and taking another glance around. The Olympic Park was just as empty as before.
Maybe it wasn’t just the Well I was worried about. I’d walked out of Heathrow this afternoon feeling – well, not happy, but as though I’d accomplished something. And when I’d decided to spend the evening hunting for Wells, I’d thought of it as a victory lap.
But as the rush had faded, and the hours had passed by, I’d started to feel . . . what? Bothered? Uneasy?
Dissatisfied. It had left me dissatisfied.
When you spend a really long time looking forward to meeting someone, you build it up. You rehearse it in your mind, spin out fantasies of how it’s going to play out. But when it actually happens, it never seems to go the way you’ve planned. Because of course, you’ve thought of all the things you’re going to say, but not the things that the other person’s going to say. And so it always goes in some direction you didn’t expect.
I hadn’t expected my mother to run at me and give me a hug. Still, I’d been hoping for something . . . well, more. I’d been replaying the conversation in my head, and the more I did, the more I couldn’t help noticing that there hadn’t really been any point at which my mother had seemed especially happy to see me. Or be around me at all.
The fact that she hadn’t remembered that it was my birthday hadn’t helped.
The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. You’d have thought the weather would have been a distraction – waiting around in freezing rain might be a crappy way to spend an evening, but if there’s one good thing you can say about it, it at least keeps you focused on the present – but it wasn’t doing as much as I’d hoped. I was starting to get the vague, unsettling feeling that by meeting my mother I’d disturbed something that might have been better left alone.
I shook my head and tried to push the whole thing out of my mind. One hour and twenty minutes since I’d registered the Well. Maybe I should just go home. It wasn’t as though there was any trace of . . .
. . . wait.
Between me and the stadium was a car park. Yellow-white lights reflected off the wet tarmac, and in their glow I could make out shadowy figures heading my way.
Instantly I was on full alert. I flexed my fingers, checking my sigl rings and reminding myself what was on each finger. Slam and Light sigls on my left hand, flash and haywire on my right. My strength sigl was tucked away under my T-shirt, hanging from a cord around my neck, and I sent a flow of essentia into it. Energy came flooding out, pouring into my chest and spreading through my muscles. Now that I’d channelled through it, it would keep drawing essentia without further concentration.
I took another look at the approaching figures.
There were four of them, all wearing hoodies. I couldn’t make out their faces, but from the combination of speed and swagger, I pegged them as late teens or early twenties, like me. Given that the only other things in this stretch of the Olympic Park were a construction site and a running track, I could think of exactly one reason why these four would be converging on this spot.
I focused on the four shapes ahead of me, opening my senses.
Ever since this April, I’d been able to see essentia. All drucrafters can sense it, but I can see it, currents and eddies appearing in my vision as swirls of colour. The reddish-brown glow of the Well behind dominated my vision, spilling out past my feet and down the hill. Even a weak Well like this had vastly more essentia than any human or sigl, but I was still able to look through it, focus on the shapes of the four boys and see . . . nothing. No active sigls of any kind.
Which was both good and bad. Good, because it meant these guys were probably small-time. Bad, because it meant my haywire sigl was useless. I’d designed it to sabotage enemy strength sigls, and in the battles last week it had been my trump card. But it did nothing against an enemy with no sigls of their own . . . and my ability to see essentia wasn’t going to do me much good, either.
The four boys crossed the road and came to a stop at the bottom of the grassy bank, not quite close enough to be threatening. They stared up at me. I stared back at them.
“Howzigoan?” one of the boys called out.
“Aright,” I said guardedly.
“Yawrigh?”
I made a noncommittal sort of noise.
There was a pause. Rain sheeted down.
“Gotturligh?” the boy asked.
“What?” I said. Living around my part of London, you get pretty used to weird pronunciation, but this guy had such a thick MLE accent that even I couldn’t make it out.
“Gotta light?”
I shook my head. The boy made a disappointed sound.
None of the other three had moved. Their whole manner was weirdly friendly. They weren’t acting as though they were here to—
Wait. Suspicion flashed through me. Why were they acting friendly?
I glanced over my shoulder.
The guy behind me had already started his rush and I jumped aside just in time. His outstretched arms clutched at my fleece, tugging me off balance before his momentum sent him sprawling down the slope. I whirled back to see that the guy who’d been keeping me talking had closed the distance; I extended my left arm and sent essentia leaping down through my muscles and into the sigl on my forefinger. The sigl erupted in a cone of brilliant blue-white light, and for a fraction of a second night became day. The boy and the one next to him yelled, clutching at their eyes. I triggered my slam sigl and sent two concussive blasts of air at his head; blinded and off balance, he went head over heels.
I felt a flare of satisfaction as I saw him go rolling down the bank, but as I looked around it faded quickly. There were more of these guys than I’d realised. Five, six—
Shadows closed in. I made a quick rush and hit one with my slam sigl; he staggered away, shielding his head, but before I could press my advantage I had to whirl to face a guy who’d been coming up behind me. He backpedalled but now I was surrounded. I backed up to the tree, trying to make it a little harder for them to get behind me. The circle had closed; blinking my eyes against the rain, I finally managed to get a count on them. Seven.
I stood with my back against the tree, rain still misting down. The guys surrounding me crowded in, confident enough to take the fight, wary enough to not want to be the first one in. A gust of cold wind cut through my clothes. Fear and adrenaline pumped through me, heightening my senses. Things had gone bad and they had the potential to get much, much worse. Deep down, a disbelieving part of me was thinking: all this for £700?
One of the boys called out to me, followed by another. I blocked out their words, not wanting to let them see how scared I was. Instead I narrowed my focus, not letting myself think about anything except the next few seconds. All my attention was on the question of who would move first. Would they come from the left or from the right?
The one on the left shouted an insult. I turned slightly towards him but kept an eye on the second guy to my right. There’s always one in a gang who’s a little meaner and more aggressive than the rest, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye, pretending I couldn’t see—
He rushed me.
I triggered my flash sigl. Blinding light caught him and two more, sending them stumbling back. A guy came in from the other side; I put a slam into his face and knocked him to the wet grass. Looking around, I felt a spark of hope – all were backing away. Wait, I could only see six; hadn’t there been—?
Arms grabbed me from behind.
I struggled frantically, but the boy behind was bigger than me and he heaved me off the ground, leaving my legs flailing in the air. The others rushed in; I kicked out and hit one, then they were on me. Fists slammed into my shoulders, my chest, my sides; one glanced off my head, sending a jolt of pain through my neck.
I twisted and thrashed. A blow hit my stomach, making me gasp; the guy behind me pulled me down and a flash of terror went through me as I realised he was trying to wrestle me to the ground. My feet touched the grass, giving me an instant of leverage.
With the strength of panic I wrenched an arm free and drove my elbow into the guy’s side; I heard a snap and a gasp and his grip loosened. Punches rained down; I managed to get my arms up enough to take most of the blows on my forearms and wrists, then I squeezed my eyes shut, triggering my flash sigl again and again.
Shouts and curses sounded and for an instant the punches stopped. I opened my eyes, saw a gap in the crowd, and lunged.
Hands clutched at me and then I was away, racing up the grassy bank at a dead run. I could hear yells but couldn’t tell if anyone was following. I dashed up and away from the Well until my feet hit the concrete path of the Greenway, then kept running. Only after I’d gone thirty or forty yards did I risk a glance back.
No one was chasing. As I slowed to a jog, I saw two or three shapes emerge out onto the Greenway, but they weren’t moving fast enough to catch up. One pointed in my direction and called to the others.
I gave the Well one last frustrated glance, then kept running.
∞
I slowed to a jog around Pudding Mill Lane, then to a walk as I reached the A11. Cars streamed up and down the road, their passage whipping the rain into spirals. I headed towards Stratford with the occasional glance over my shoulder, but the pavement behind was empty and when the turnoff disappeared behind a rise I knew I was safe.
As I walked the adrenaline from the fight began to fade, leaving me tired, in pain, and unhappy. I’ve had heavier beatings, but getting knocked around is one thing; getting knocked around and losing feels a lot worse.
What really smarted was that they hadn’t even been good raiders. Over the last six months I’d had a series of run-ins with some of the heavyweights of the drucraft world, from House security all the way up to corporate soldiers . . . not quite the drucraft equivalent of the Premier League, but close. And, okay, most of those encounters I hadn’t exactly won, but I’d held my own. With all that I’d been through, I’d been starting to feel pretty tough.
I should have known better. Getting cocky in a street fight is always a mistake. For all my sigls and training, I didn’t have much answer for a gang of thugs just rushing in and beating the crap out of me.
I ducked into the shelter of the doorway of one of the Stratford skyscrapers and called in the attack, but I knew it was a waste of time. The app that I use to register Wells doesn’t have a button for “attacked by raiders”. All I could do was call the Linford’s locator line, and, as usual, I got an automated response telling me to leave a message. I don’t know if anyone even listens to these things; in theory I’m supposed to have a supervisor, but I’ve never met them. Most likely, Linford’s would ignore my message, show up at the Well in a day or two, and find it drained, at which point I’d be blamed for calling them out for a Well that didn’t exist.
With a sigh I stepped out into the rain and turned my feet towards home. It was turning out to be a really crappy birthday.
∞
By the time I turned onto my road, the rain had lessened to a drizzle. Out of habit I scanned the street. No suspicious-looking cars, no groups of men, no one outside my door—
There was someone outside my door.
Instantly I was on guard, but as I took a second look I relaxed. The figure was on the short side and was sheltering under a white-and-blue golf umbrella almost as big as he was. I kind of recognised the silhouette and I definitely recognised the umbrella. “What are you doing here?” I called over.
“Waiting for you, what do you think?” the figure from under the umbrella shouted back.
I gave an inward sigh. I knew what he was here for.
Colin is a few months younger than me, with looks that are a mix of his Chinese father and English mother. We don’t see each other quite so often now that he’s at uni, but he’s still my closest friend, and when I’d run into trouble earlier in the year it had been him I’d turned to for help. Colin had come through in a big way, but I’d had to promise him that when it was over, I’d tell him the truth about what was going on. At the time it had felt like a pretty safe promise, since I’d done that several times already and he hadn’t believed me, but that had been before last Sunday night, when a corp assault team had raided an Ashford Well. Colin and I had been caught in the middle of the whole thing and I’d used my invisibility sigl to disappear right before Colin’s eyes.
It wasn’t a surprise that he wanted some answers.
“Look, I’ve had a really long day,” I tried. “Can we do this tomorrow, or—?”
“No,” Colin said, glaring at me from beneath his umbrella. “You’ve been putting me off all week. You promised you’ll tell me the truth and you’re going to do it or so help me I’m going to kick your arse until you do.”
“All right, all right. Just let me clean up, okay?”
I opened the door and we went in. My house on Foxden Road is small and cramped, and I share it with a bunch of Lithuanians. The TV was blaring from the ground-floor bedroom – like most of these houses, the living room has been turned into an extra bedroom in order to squeeze in the maximum number of renters. My room is on the first floor; I sent Colin in to wait, then grabbed some clothes and headed for the bathroom.
It was occupied. I knocked on the door, heard a man’s voice call back, then leaned against the banister and waited. The door opened a couple of minutes later to reveal Ignas, wearing a sleeveless vest and with a towel around his neck. He saw me and paused.
Ignas is the oldest of the Lithuanians, a tough heavily-built man with a few days’ growth of stubble and salt-and-pepper hair. I’d known him since I moved into Foxden Road and he’d been very friendly until last week, when a couple of Ashford armsmen abducted me and held the rest of the Lithuanians at gunpoint to make sure they didn’t interfere.
The other two Lithuanian men, Matis and Vlad, had taken it pretty well, all things considered. They were younger than Ignas and had been more inclined to see the whole thing as an adventure, at least after I’d managed to convince them that I wasn’t involved in drug dealing or human trafficking or anything like that. Ignas, though, had stayed quiet during the conversation, and ever since then he’d been giving me looks. I knew he had more to say.
Ignas squeezed past, then turned. “Last week,” he told me. “Those men. There going to be more trouble?”
“No,” I said again, shaking my head. “No more trouble.”
“Good,” Ignas said, and paused again.
We stood awkwardly for a moment.
“My wife, she’s out working,” Ignas said suddenly.
“I thought she worked during the day,” I said. I was slightly surprised; Ignas didn’t usually talk about his wife.
“She has two jobs,” Ignas said. “I tell her, not worth it, she should stay home, but . . .” He shrugged. “We want to have a child this year.”
“Oh,” I said. “Uh . . . congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Ignas said, then paused. “We do this . . . the house has to be safe.”
Oh, I thought, my heart sinking.
Ignas looked at me. “You understand?”
I nodded.
“No more men with guns,” Ignas said. “Okay?”
I wanted to say that I hadn’t been the one who’d done that, but I knew that Ignas was right. Those two armsmen had been there because of me. I hadn’t wanted them there, but if someone had pulled a trigger, that wouldn’t have mattered. “Okay,” I told him.
Ignas nodded and walked away. I went into the bathroom.
I’d wanted a hot shower but got a lukewarm one instead – the heating in this house has been on the blink since last winter and the landlord’s too cheap to get it fixed. As I shampooed my hair, though, my thoughts were less on the cold and more on Ignas.
I’m used to my mistakes getting me in trouble. But having them get other people in trouble was a new feeling, and one I didn’t like very much. The worst part was that I couldn’t see any easy way to stop it. I’d settled things with the Ashfords – more or less – but the simple fact was that at any time they or anyone else could send their goons back for a production of ‘Kidnap III: The Revenge’, and even if I could get away, that wouldn’t stop them from catching someone else in the crossfire by accident . . . or on purpose.
It all seemed really unfair. In movies the heroes get into fights and just walk away. They don’t have to stick around afterwards cleaning up the mess. Right now things were quiet, but if that changed, what could I do? Move out? I didn’t have the money to keep doing that, and it wouldn’t really solve anything, either . . .
I finished my shower, shivering as I towelled myself off, and pulled on my clothes with a wince. I could see the red marks from the punches I’d taken and knew that they were going to really hurt once they stiffened up. I wished my mending sigl could heal bruises. It’s designed to treat internal bleeding, which you’d think would apply to bruises, but apparently not. Then I towelled my hair some more until it was completely dry, at which point I’d run out of excuses to stall with.
I went back into my room.
Colin was sitting on the only chair with an expectant look. My room’s small even for me; with Colin in here as well, there wasn’t much space. Colin had already drawn the curtains. Outside, the sounds of the London night drifted over the rooftops, but in here it was just us.
“All right,” I said. I locked the door, then tossed my wet clothes into the laundry basket. “How do you want to do this?”
“Start at the beginning,” Colin told me.
I sat down on my bed and began.