Love Hurts, Page 22

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’

  We sat there, smoking.

  Everything was shitty and confusing.

  Robby felt terrible.

  I said, ‘I guess I would kiss you, Robby.’

  ‘Don’t feel like you have to.’

  ‘I don’t feel that way.’

  So Robby Brees, my best friend, and the guy who taught me how to dance so I could set into motion Shann Collins’s falling in love with me, scooted around with his shoulder turned toward mine.

  He was nervous.

  I was terrified.

  I watched him swallow a couple times.

  Then Robby placed his cigarette carefully down on the gravel beside his foot. He put his hand behind my neck and kissed me.

  He kissed me the way I kiss Shann, but it felt different, intense, scary.

  Robby’s tongue tasted like cigarettes when he slid it inside my mouth. I liked the taste, but it made me more confused. Our teeth bumped together. It made a sound like chimes in my head. I never bumped teeth with Shann when I kissed her.

  When we finished kissing, Robby pulled his face away and I watched him lick his lips and swallow.

  Robby’s eyes were wet, like he was going to cry or something.

  He looked away and wiped his eyes.

  Robby said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No. It’s okay. I said you could. I said let’s do it.’

  ‘Is it okay?’

  ‘I said so, Robby. It was weird. Really. Are you okay?’

  ‘I think that was the best moment of time in my entire life, Austin.’ Robby wiped his eyes and said, ‘Thank you. I’ve wanted to ask you to do that forever.’

  ‘You could have just asked me.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to hate me.’

  ‘How could I hate you?’

  ‘For wanting to do that to you.’

  ‘Oh. Well. I am sorry if it was clumsy. I didn’t know if I was supposed to act like the man or the woman.’

  Robby picked up his cigarette.

  ‘You weren’t supposed to act at all.’

  ‘Good. Because I’m pretty sure I was just being . . . um . . . Porcupine.’

  Robby puffed.

  ‘You know what, Robby?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you ever want to get shot in Ealing, do that in someone’s yard at night.’

  FROM

  ECHO BOY

  BY

  MATT HAIG

  I ran to Iago’s room.

  But he wasn’t there.

  Downstairs, I heard the smashing of glass. I ran to my room and went into my pod, and in the mind-reader I commanded Menu. There was an option called ‘House View’. I chose that, and then viewed the front garden. The part I couldn’t see from my window. East of the gravel driveway. About ten protestors, all wearing masks, were climbing over a side wall. Where the police were meant to be guarding the house.

  They carried small rocks and large sticks, and a few – more than a few, actually – had old guns. The kind that required bullets but could still kill. I needed a gun. There were guns in the house. Positrons. I needed a positron.

  I switched to inside the house; saw that some of the protestors were in the lobby.

  Three were engaged in a fist fight with an Echo. A tall dreadlocked Echo who was all muscle. I searched in other rooms, sometimes virtual running between them, sometimes by just mind-leaping.

  The kitchen, the downstairs office, three of the living rooms, the therapy room – where Uncle Alex was, being protected by five Echos, including the blond boy – the indoor swimming pool, the gymnasium full of metal robots in boxing gloves, the dining room. I eventually found Iago in a small room hardly bigger than a cupboard. He was there with two Echos, taking a positron from the wall.

  The weapons room.

  He may have been holding an advanced antimatter weapon and he may have had a look of gleeful murder in his eyes, but he was still a ten-year-old boy and he was my cousin; I had stayed in an immersion pod while members of my family were being killed once before, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again.

  So I got out of the pod and my bedroom and ran downstairs.

  I ran to the small room where the weapons were kept, but of course he had gone.

  ‘Iago!’ I shouted.

  No response. Or none that I could hear above the sound of shouting and fighting and the occasional shot of an old gun. New guns were being fired too. I saw an Echo shoot a protestor into nonexistence, his body disappearing before my eyes, but of course it was antimatter technology so it was unheard.

  I ran to the therapy room to tell Uncle Alex that I couldn’t find Iago.

  ‘Oh, Audrey, you are safe. Come in here, come in here, and close the door behind you. Before any of those bastards see you.’

  But I hesitated.

  And the reason I hesitated was because Daniel was staring at me in such a way that hesitation was the only response. His words echoed in my head. You are in danger here.

  I know it sounds irrational, but I was more scared of being shut up in a room with five Echos than I was of being out there with all those humans who had murder on their minds. Another of the Echos, the red-haired female, Madara, told me to come inside quickly. But she – unlike the blond Echo – was holding a gun. I remembered Uncle Alex telling me that she was designed for the army. To be a killer. I closed the door, and stayed on the other side of it.

  It was a big mistake.

  For the second after I had closed it, I felt something cold and hard press against my temple.

  A gun.

  An old twenty-first-century pistol, probably full of bullets.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man with a mask. The mask was the kind you would wear to a fancy dress party. He had come as a tiger. He was tall and smelled of tobacco gum.

  ‘Where is your dad?’ he asked me. His voice was harsh and rough and full of hate.

  ‘My dad is dead.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me. Your dad. Alex Castle. The self-appointed God himself . . . Where is he? Tell me, or I will kill you. I swear to you I will squeeze this trigger and you will be out of here.’ He did a quick mime to indicate my brains being blasted out of my skull.

  ‘He’s not my dad. My dad was killed three days ago. By an Echo.’

  There was a pause. His voice changed. ‘Your dad was Leo Castle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He put the gun down slowly.

  He seemed to be in shock.

  ‘Leo Castle! He was a hero to me. To most of us! I watched all the pieces he did for Tech Watch. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I wasn’t really going to kill you. I just need to find your uncle. He must be stopped. The Resurrection Zone is evil. Everything he has done is evil. Neanderthals should not be kept in captivity. He cares more about Echos than real living things!’

  ‘My dad didn’t agree with violence,’ I said, feeling a kind of defiance inside me. ‘And he loved his brother. He would have been appalled by what you lot are doing.’

  For a few moments I was just staring at the tiger mask. Maybe my words were getting through. Maybe he wasn’t going to do anything but leave, and tell the others who were rampaging around the house to leave as well. I would never know, for at that very moment he vanished into thin air and I saw Iago standing behind him holding his antimatter positron. A gun that was far too big for him (though seemingly as light as a feather, as it was far more aerogel than metal).

  Unbelievably, he was smiling.

  He had just killed a fellow human being and he was smiling. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile from genuine happiness.

  ‘You owe me one, cuz,’ he said, his voice jauntier than I’d known it.

  He wasn’t hanging around. He was heading past me, jogging through the unicorn holo-sculpture on his way to the lobby.

  ‘Iago, come back! It’s not safe!’ I started running after him, but almost instantly someone burst out of an intersecting hallway and flung me
to the floor. Another protester in a mask. This one wasn’t a tiger, but the mask of a Neanderthal, with human eyes gleaming through. He was heavy and I was terrified. I screamed.

  This one didn’t have a gun. He had a stone. A stone large enough to be called a rock. He held it up high. He was about to smash it down on my head. Death was two seconds away now, and so my body was exploding with terrified life. But at that moment I saw someone else.

  Daniel.

  He was out of the therapy room and throwing himself towards us.

  Daniel pushed the man with the Neanderthal mask to the floor. The man smashed the rock hard against Daniel’s face and cut him, but Daniel already had his hand around the man’s throat. He picked him up off the floor, holding him under his chin, his feet centimetres off the ground.

  ‘Please,’ the man wheezed, ‘you’ll kill me.’

  ‘No,’ Daniel said. ‘Only if you hurt her again.’ And then he threw the man far across the hallway, right through the holographic unicorn.

  He turned to me and grabbed my arm, hard.

  It was exactly where Alissa had grabbed me, and I automatically tried to resist. It was no use. He was even stronger than Alissa had been. He pulled me forward and started to run, and inevitably – being a human – I struggled to keep up. I could see the lobby, where the battle was still raging. A clock on the wall was hit; the face fractured, then instantly repaired itself. I could also see some of the protestors lying dead on the floor. The Echos – and Iago – clearly had the upper hand now.

  ‘Slow down! You’re hurting me!’

  A thin stream of blood trickled down Daniel’s cheek like a tear.

  He went into the living room where I had been taken on my first night. A female protester in a dolphin mask was in there, slicing through the Picasso painting with a knife. She roared and charged towards us with the knife, but Daniel held out his hand. The blade cut him, but he pulled the knife out of her hand easily, while still holding me with his other hand.

  He looked out of the window to see Iago now out on the driveway with some Echos; many of the remaining protestors were fleeing.

  The woman who’d had the knife ran out of the room. But we heard her scream a second later, a scream that ended too abruptly. And then we saw why. Madara was there with a gun, a gun she’d obviously just used, and she was running towards us.

  Daniel saw her and led me towards a doorway at the far end of the room. ‘Door open,’ he commanded. The doorway led to some stairs. At the top of the stairs we ran along a landing I hadn’t seen before.

  I was scared, I must admit.

  Beyond scared.

  After all, here was an Echo, evidently malfunctioning and holding a knife. My parents had died this way. Maybe I would too.

  Had he saved my life? Or did he want to kill me himself ?

  We reached a room with windows for walls. A room that showed the rear of the garden. I had been shown the garden before, the day I went to see Mrs Matsumoto, but then my senses had been dulled by the neuropads. Now, my mind hyper-sharp with adrenaline, I realized that it was an amazing garden, maybe the most amazing I had ever seen, the grass all shades and colours, the trees genetically perfect like something out of the wildest daydream. I saw the wall the protestors had climbed over. Madara was getting closer.

  ‘Open,’ Daniel called, and the window opened. And then, with troubling ease, he picked me up in his arms and jumped out onto turquoise grass. He landed awkwardly, but kept hold of me.

  What was he?

  Saviour, or monster?

  I didn’t even touch the ground.

  He ran, and kept running. Behind us, I could see Madara at the window aiming the gun at Daniel. But she didn’t fire it.

  ‘I’ve disobeyed Master’s order. Madara will have been sent to pursue me, but not to terminate me.’

  Disobeyed Master’s order.

  ‘Order?’

  ‘To stay with him. To protect his life at all costs.’

  We passed through a row of silver birches. I struggled, trying to free myself from his arms. Above, in the distance, I could see a police car come to a stop on the magrail, and a robotic officer (a traditional metallic Zeta-One) leaned out of the window and switched his voice setting to loudhailer mode as he stared down at the driveway on the other side of the house.

  ‘Trespassers, you have ten seconds to leave the property. Failure to comply will mean death.’

  The Zeta-One wasn’t talking to us, but Daniel was still running.

  ‘Let me go! Where are you taking me? Let me go!’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you.’

  Something about his voice made me almost believe him.

  As he ran, he looked anxiously around at the grass, as if hidden danger lurked there.

  ‘I heard your scream,’ he said. ‘I came to save you.’

  ‘I want to go back. Take me back to the house.’

  ‘No.’ He cut left, behind some high, dense goji bushes, then stopped running. ‘It’s not safe. There are still protestors on the grounds and in the house.’

  ‘The police are there now. Ten seconds has passed.’ I thought about screaming. If I screamed the word ‘police’, then the police would surely come. But if Daniel wanted to kill me, he would have time to do so between my scream and the rescue attempt. He had superhuman strength and was holding a knife.

  Daniel looked down at his bleeding hand. He winced, as though in pain, though I knew he couldn’t feel pain.

  ‘Listen, we probably don’t have long. Madara will be telling Master that we escaped out of the window. I just need to tell you something. I tried to tell you before. I tried to come up to your room.’

  I looked into his green eyes as if they were possible to read, which of course they weren’t. But I was here with him, at his mercy, so I could do nothing except go along with whatever weird Echo game he was playing.

  ‘What did you try and tell me?’

  ‘That I knew her.’

  ‘Who?’

  Blood dripped from his hand onto my cloth shoe, disappearing the moment it landed. Then he told me.

  ‘I knew Alissa.’

  Fear crept over my skin like an ice-cold blanket. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We had the same designer.’

  I struggled to absorb this.

  So was this what it was all about? Revenge? Was he going to kill me because I had terminated Alissa?

  I knew this was a paranoid thought. I mean, Echos didn’t feel loyalty to other Echos. They didn’t feel anything at all. And besides, I thought of something else. Something that proved this Echo didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘No. That’s impossible. Alissa was a Sempura product. You’re a Castle product.’

  ‘You are not safe here,’ he told me. ‘I tried to tell you. I was going to tell you that day in my room.’

  I looked at his face. His eyes were wrong. Yeah. I had vaguely noticed it before, but now there was no mistaking it. There was too much there. He seemed more human than Echo. ‘You’re malfunctioning,’ I told him. ‘And I think you’ve probably been malfunctioning since I got here.’

  He held up his right hand, his cut hand. ‘It is not meant to be possible for me to feel pain, and I feel pain. I feel all kinds of things. And I feel a duty to tell you what I have wanted to tell you for a long time, and would have just run up those stairs and done it if it hadn’t put you in danger.’

  ‘What? Tell me.’

  He took a breath. Came close. Whispered. ‘You have to get out of here. You have to escape. After I have done this, there is no hope for me. Master will punish me for my actions. I do not care. This was partly my fault. Your parents’ death. It was partly down to me. I had her in my arms. I held Alissa the way I just held you. I could have stopped it at the start, but I didn’t.’

  Again, he looked anxiously at the grass around us, waiting for something. Then he looked at the high perimeter wall.

  I didn’t trust him.

  There was no
way in the world I could trust him.

  Or at least, that’s what I tried to tell myself.

  Whatever silly weakness I had deep down inside me, a weakness that came of being alone and wanting someone to be there for me – well, I knew I shouldn’t let it get the better of me.

  That dream I’d had . . . that had just been a dream. He was an Echo, and a malfunctioning one. OK, so he had read Jane Eyre and he could feel pain, but what did that prove?

  But then he said it.

  He said something that sent a jolt through me and made me question everything else. He said: ‘Our designer’s name was Rosella.’

  Instantly Alissa’s voice echoed in my mind. Rosella.

  I looked into Daniel’s green eyes and felt another shock. A deeper one than any spoken words could have caused. Because as I looked into his eyes, I realized that I felt for him. There was something gleaming there. Something like fear, or courage, or determination, or honour, or a combination of all four. Yes, for that moment at least, it felt like I was looking at someone who could be cared for. Worried about. Loved.

  That is when the ground began to open up. Whole squares of blue and orange grass, tilting up and back like trapdoors all around us.

  ‘Here come the hounds,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Hounds?’ But even before Daniel explained, I remembered what Uncle Alex had told me.

  ‘Echo dogs.’

  Of course.

  And then they started to prowl out onto the grass. They looked very much like Dobermans, although their chests were plates of naked titanium and their eyes were bright red.

  ‘Step away from me,’ Daniel told me, shouting almost angrily. ‘Step well away from me and they won’t hurt you. They only want me. Trust me.’

  I stepped away from him, like he said.

  ‘So you wanted to kill me?’ I asked him, still uncertain what to think. ‘Was that your plan? Because of Alissa? She murdered my parents!’

  ‘No. No, she didn’t kill them. Not really.’

  The dogs circled Daniel. There were five of them. They were all giving the same synthetic growl. Madara must have told Uncle Alex about us by now. And so he’d set the dogs on us.

  ‘What are you talking about? I saw the footage. She was the only one there. She killed them.’