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  He flipped open the lid of his laptop computer, which was set on the dresser in front of him. “Good-bye, Cass,” he said briskly. “I have to get online, right now. This is big—way bigger than I’d thought. If I’m going into the Easy tomorrow, I need to find out all I can about what’s really going on there and about this mysterious Toploader Project. It’s time I consulted Twitter.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Moon woke on a canvas stretcher and wondered where he was. He seemed to be in some kind of tiny metal room that was spinning around him. Beyond his feet, a light glowed red above what might have been a door, revealing cream-painted walls cluttered with pipes and wires and valves and strange green tubes and metal boxes secured by buckles and straps. His throat ached, and when he closed his eyes, bad cannabis dreams slithered across his lids, forcing him to open them again and deal with the spinning. A line from a song that he hated was playing in a continuous loop in his head, whining through a jagged hole in his left temple, sawing back around behind his eyes and then emerging again on the right, slicing at his frontal lobe. Try as he might, he could not stop it. Deep in his stomach an ancient evil was stirring, impelled by the centrifugal force that whirled the little room. There was a heavy smell of diesel oil. “What is this place?” Moon asked himself aloud, and then had just enough time to turn his face sideways before the vomit erupted. Some of it pooled on the stretcher, but most vanished into the darkness, spilling, he guessed dully, to the floor. There wasn’t that much of it: he had eaten nothing that night except a Twix bar and a bag of chips he’d bought at the service station; he found himself regretting this as he twisted half off the stretcher to cope with the dry, racking heaves. A long time later he laid himself flat again, heedless of the rising stench around him. “Well,” he said to himself, speaking almost soberly, “that’s that, and I’m glad it’s over.” As he gave himself up to sleep he noticed that the room had at least stopped spinning. True, there was still a rhythmic thudding in his ears and his body was shaken and jarred by mysterious external jolts, but compared with what he’d already been through, this seemed little cause for worry.

  It was silence and darkness that woke Moon again, he could not say how much later. His head pulsed as he sat up and swung his feet to the ground. The metal floor of the compartment felt horribly slick and slimy. Despite the surging pain in his forehead, he could now make out the word “exit” printed on the red light that glowed by the hatch. He reached a hand out to touch the sign, then snatched it back as it gave to his touch. There was a whining noise, and the door split in two like a clamshell and slowly opened. Of course: a tank. He must have crawled into a tank’s cargo compartment—the space used to store extra ammunition and weapons or to transport stretcher cases or infantry dismounts—and passed out there.

  As he stepped down from the hull, his feet sank into loose sand. Beyond the loom of the tank, half remembered from the night before, he saw another line of metal shapes stretching off into the dark. Where, he wondered dully, had his new friends Lenny and Johnny gone? It wasn’t very kind of them to abandon him here in the tank park. They might at least have left him some water or told him how to get back to his billet.

  He took another uncertain step clear of the tank, peering about. There was a hot, fresh stink of diesel exhaust that almost made him gag again. And why was the tank’s engine ticking, as if cooling down? His eyes were just adapting to the night when a flashlight switched on in front of him, shining into his face just long enough to blind him again. A huge shape reared over him, seized him by the shirtfront, and slammed him back against the tank.

  “Where the fuck are you going, soldier?” the shape hissed, swatting Moon’s head around to face it. The light flicked on for another half second. “Were you asleep in your tank, you worthless jerk-off?” The giant snuffled at his face. “Have you been drinking?” The torch beam flickered toward the open hatch behind Moon’s shoulder. “Holy fuck, you’ve thrown up in the back of the tank! What the fuck is the matter with this crew? I warned the boss, I told him: ask an officer for his best men and he’ll always give you his worst.” The stranger began to shake Moon back and forth like a rag doll, and Moon decided he didn’t really care that much so long as he wasn’t sick again. Then a meaty hand came out of the darkness and slapped him hard across the mouth.

  “Listen, shitbucket,” hissed the stranger’s mouth, right by his ear, so close and so vicious that Moon was afraid it would bite him. “When we get back to the other side, me and Smith are going to do you for this in ways that you’ve never even heard of. But right now you’re going to do your fucking job and get out there with the other dismounts and watch our perimeter. Your place is over that way.” Moon saw a finger jab at the darkness, toward where he guessed the Slob must be. “Now go!”

  Moon dragged himself to his feet, too terrified and nauseous to say anything, and staggered off in what he thought was the indicated direction. He’d gone only a yard when he felt himself yanked back by the collar so hard that he crashed to the ground.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” the giant hissed at him. “You forgot to take your stuff!”

  Moon heard his assailant rummaging in the back of the tank. The ground was soft, and despite his terror Moon felt his eyelids steal together again. Then a boot crunched in the sand beside his ear, and Moon grunted and jerked upright in agony and shock as a jagged bundle of steel and fabric crashed onto his midriff.

  “Take that and fuck off!” hissed his assailant.

  Wriggling over onto his throbbing stomach, Moon dragged the parcel with him as he crawled off into the darkness. After what felt to him like a great distance his head bumped into something very hard, which turned out to be the wheel of a truck. Moon lay still for a while, listening to his breath as it steadied and slowed. There was no other sound apart from the hum of a drone a little way off and the scuffle of wind in the weeds. Of his attacker there was no sign. Then Moon noticed that the wheel he had struck was half buried in the ground and that under the truck, between its front wheels, drifted sand lay soft and clean as a newly made bed. He yawned convulsively. There would be time enough in the morning, he decided, to deal with this hangover and to find his way home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  As tired as she was, Flora did not think that she could sleep. The events of the day kept mobbing her. Instead of going to bed, she took off her shoes, keeping her coat on; she lit a candle and settled in a chair in the hallway to await her father’s return. She tried to calm herself by reading the flight manual Tony had left for her; she knew it could only have been him. But the candle was made from poorly rendered goat lard, and it guttered and danced in the drafts in the hallway until sometime later Flora realized that she was dreaming. It was her favorite dream, the clear, waking one where she could fly—not like an aircraft but like a bird, a lark or a swallow, one of those tiny, tumbling birds that seem to fly just for the joy of it. With an effort only of the will, Flora could now soar high into the air and then swoop vertiginously down again, almost grazing the rooftops. It was, as always, her own house that turned slowly below her, her own neighborhood, shrinking rapidly now as she rocketed up for hundreds and then thousands of feet. She could, she knew, go on forever, but the cold up here was beginning to sober her, and the winds of the jet stream wanted to sweep her away. She had no wings, she knew; only her illusion supported her, and there below her, so small that she could barely see it now, was all that was left that was real to her. Wet clouds were blowing past, thickening beneath her, trying to block her return. She would have to make her choice soon, as always, as the wind called with its wild frozen roar.

  There was something new in the dream this time, a dull rhythmic thud that began to rock her as she hung, poised, in midair, disrupting her balance and trim. The thudding grew louder, stalling her dream, plunging her back to wakefulness. That was a diesel engine, she thought, sitting up in her chair, cold and groggy and stiff—perhaps it was Tony, bringing her father home.
But when she checked outside, she saw that the street was dark and silent. She looked across to the alley where Cobra had lurked—where he might be lurking still—then went back into the apartment, bolting the front door behind her. The draft from the door had extinguished her candle, and she was trying to relight it when another strange noise stayed her hand. It came from the rear of the apartment, a faint, barely audible scraping.

  On her stocking feet, Flora walked silently down the hallway and into the kitchen. The noise sounded again, closer and louder now; it came from the locked back door. Her father, fearful of disturbing her, must be trying to sneak in though the backyard. Flora’s heart surged. But as she reached for the doorknob, it suddenly vanished in a spray of splinters flying out from under her hand as the door sprang open and smashed into her head. She was hurled backward, the room flashing off into white ringing silence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Captain Smith stepped through the wreckage of the door into a room lit by his own darting torch beam.

  “Your men can wait outside this time, Lieutenant,” he said, speaking over his shoulder. “I’m afraid this mission is extratop secret, ultra-hush-hush, and all that sort of thing. As for you, Daddy Jesus, you owe me twenty euros: I told you I could pick that lock!”

  Smith scratched his right ear with the muzzle of his unholstered pistol. Daddy Jesus followed him inside, a carbine dangling from one hand. “But you didn’t pick it, boss. I broke it with my shoulder!”

  “Not so, dear boy: it wouldn’t have given like that if I hadn’t already loosened the dead bolt.” Smith’s flashlight picked out something on the floor. “Oh, hello—who’s this?”

  Daddy Jesus bent over the body on the floor, which was groggily trying to raise itself, then flipped it over so they could see its face.

  “Ah,” said Smith. “The girl from the news report. I’ll keep an eye on her while you go and check the other rooms, Daddy Jesus. If the place is clear, go and look for the machine. The computer says that the professor’s workshop is in the front of the apartment; it should be through that door over there.”

  Captain Smith helped Flora to her feet and then, supporting her elbow, steered her down the hallway to the chair in which she had dozed. Smith pulled up another chair so that their knees were almost touching, his flashlight beam probing her face.

  “The place is clear, boss,” said Daddy Jesus as he clumped past them from the bedrooms. “No one else home. I’ll go and check the workshop.”

  Smith leaned forward and studied Flora’s face. She had a red mark on her right temple that, he knew, would soon turn into a bruise. She turned her face away from him.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “I’m sorry about your door. But it could have been much worse, you know: we usually use a shotgun slug for that sort of thing. And the commandos in my escort wanted to throw in a stun grenade—in the middle of the night!”

  She did not speak, keeping her face turned away from him. Smith recollected himself and swung the flashlight beam away.

  “Silly me! That light must be quite painful for you after that blow to your head.” He placed the flashlight on its end on the hallway credenza beside Flora’s dead candle so that its beam washed off the ceiling, bathing the hallway in soft yellow light. Smith saw the girl peep at him and gave her a reassuring smile.

  “We’ll just sit here together, shall we, while my friend takes care of business. Then we’ll go on our way, and we won’t bother you anymore.”

  Daddy Jesus reappeared in the hallway, shaking his head. Smith noticed the girl winding herself up in her chair, as if preparing to spring away from them.

  “It’s not there, boss,” said Daddy Jesus.

  Smith rocked back in his chair, staring up at him. “Are you sure?”

  “Most of the washing machines in there are old, and none of them was made by Maelstrom. And there isn’t any toploader.”

  “Oh, dear,” mused Smith. “Oh, dear. That does change things.” He turned sad eyes to Flora, who was pretending to ignore them both. “Well, my dear. Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “You know. What we came for.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The captain sighed. “Right. Have it your way, for now. Then can you tell me where your father is, please.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Daddy Jesus’s bulk stirred in the gloom. “We haven’t much time, boss. Let me take her into one of the bedrooms. I’ll soon get her talking.”

  “For shame, Daddy Jesus! I have a daughter her age! And don’t you prefer boys, anyway?”

  “She’s skinny enough. At night all cats are gray.”

  Smith noted that the girl, though still glowering, was also trembling.

  “Well, I’ll bear that in mind, Daddy Jesus. But let’s try explaining the situation to our young friend here—Flora, right?” She gave a start at the sound of her name. “Daddy Jesus, please go out to the APC and fetch my computer. And the bag too.”

  Smith waited until Daddy Jesus had disappeared down the hallway and then reached over and switched off his torch. The hallway instantly went black. He sat there, eyes closed, and listened to the girl as she tried not to breathe, to the little rustles of her clothes as she fought her rising terror, flinching away from all the groping hands and smashing blows that her blindness conjured from the dark. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, Smith consoled himself: it was this or a hood and all that other unpleasantness.

  A pale blue light appeared at the end of the corridor, the screen of a computer that Daddy Jesus bore before him. Smith switched his torch back on, and the girl gave a jump as he rematerialized: she had already lost her bearings in the darkness and was looking for him in entirely the wrong direction.

  “Set it down there, Daddy Jesus,” said the captain. “On that little credenza. Now, Flora, please give me your full attention.”

  Smith struck a key, and the blue screensaver was replaced by a clutter of lines and colors and tiny printed legends. Smith watched the girl as she struggled to make sense of the shapes on the computer, and then, when her face turned impassive, he began.

  “Now this, as you see, is a three-dimensional map of your neighborhood. And this”—he clicked to zoom in—“is your building, and this”—click again—“is your apartment. Now, if I just go up here and pull down this little tab, you’ll see . . . here, now . . . okay, there, your name and the name of your father, and your little brother, and also the names of your mother and older brother, although their names are in a gray font, because sadly they’re no longer with us.”

  Despite herself she was watching now.

  “Now, if you look beside your family’s names, you’ll see a figure, and you’ll notice that each one of you is listed as a number four. This is a scale which we in the security services use to designate how much of a terrorist any given terrorist is on a scale of one to five. For obvious reasons, everyone born in the Easy is automatically assigned level three, which means they are considered to be collaborators in terror. Level four”—he waved a hand at her—“means you are considered to be active in the support of terrorism. Level five indicates that you are an active terrorist who is possibly implicated in committing atrocities. Your late brother was of course a level five terrorist.”

  For the first time the girl spoke. “My brother was a resistance fighter,” she said coldly.

  Smith smiled politely. “Oh, I daresay he thought so too.”

  She leaned toward him, points of red on her cheeks. “None of the rest of us has ever done anything to you. Why are you calling us terrorists?”

  “You all became number fours on the day we killed your brother and your mother. The computer automatically promoted you. You see, once the army has killed any member of your family, even if they weren’t involved in anything, even if it was just an accident, then we have to assume that if the rest of the family ever gets the chance, they’ll seek revenge against our own people.
So we rate them as level fours, which are never allowed to leave the Easy, ever.” He shrugged. “Of course, what with all the trouble we’ve had through the years, by now just about everybody in the Embargoed Zone and in all of the other autonomous terrorist entities under our supervision is rated at four or above.”

  “So just because somebody might conceivably be able to attack you, you treat them as if they already have?”

  “I suppose it might seem a little unfair to some people, but what can we do? We can’t afford to take any risks with the well-being of our own people.”

  “And what about our well-being?”

  The captain tapped the screen sadly. “It says here that you’re all terrorists.”

  The girl was silent again, staring at the computer. Smith leaned forward, rotating the image on the screen.

  “Of course,” he said, “our computer model of the Easy is constantly being updated. Let me show you how that works.” He frowned at the screen, then brightened. “Ah! Now what would you say that is?” He pointed to a small hut in the backyard of Flora’s building.

  “It’s a chicken coop. It’s where we get our eggs from. Some of the children keep rabbits in it.”

  Smith clicked on the image, and a little tab popped up beside it. “Correct!” he said. “That’s what it says here too! Of course, if further information came to light, that description could easily be changed.” He began to type two-fingered. “Terrorist . . . structure . . . weapons . . . storage facility . . . There! Finished.” He clicked on the image again.