scared. They're watching me – those withered Injun women – but so what? They're talking to me, too, and their voices are pretty, and maybe I'm talking back or maybe I'm not, but either way: they're in here with me. Spying on my past.
Back to the start.
Back to London.
After I got the signal, in the comms room of the old MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross, where I'd whored myself to the SIS for years and years, I sliced up some people good. Clergy. I don't recall how many. I was too focused.
We'd all seen the planes. Every rat-human crawling in the filth of London knew they were there. Blue-painted, marked with the red 'O' of the Church, going up, coming down. Why? Who knew. Who cared.
I went to Heathrow. My mind was a needle. Too angry to speak. Too focused to negotiate.
PANDORA
PANDORA
PANDORA
Like a mantra, see?
Nothing would turn me. I'd impale anything that dared get in my way.
And I waited. Cut and slashed in the night. Hacked open necks. Cut off fingertips. Made grey robes run red.
Not because I hated the Clergy.
Not because they had anything to do with anything.
Not for any reason except they were convenient, and they had something I wanted.
Took me three days of torturing to work my way up to a Clergy-bastard of sufficient hierarchical power to be worth taking hostage. I think – I know – I stopped being me for a bit there. Let the animal thing take over too much. Let the rampage-instincts out of their box.
It was a weird time.
I made sure everything felt significant, everything felt like a step in the right direction, and by god's own piss it felt good. I let everyone I came across seem responsible, took it all out on them, mixed up the anger with the focus, just like they taught me in training:
Made it personal.
So what I did, back at the start, I strolled into the airport as bold as brass, with this pigshit priest under my knife, telling every gun-wielding arsehole who came near to back off or get splashed.
And this guy, this hostage, this high-up canon or whoever he was, he leaned down so the knife was pressed up against his neck… and he shook his head.
Slit-slat-slit.
Faith. That's what. Obvious really. Never take any wanker prisoner who's prepared to die for his beliefs.
So bang went my clever-clever attempt to hijack a plane alone, which is all I ever wanted out of those child- stealing sadistic delusional fucks. Bang went my momentum, bang went my anger, bang went the feeling of progress, of inertia-less drive. The juggernaut rolled to a halt.
Cue running away, hiding, rethinking.
Cue a realisation or two: doing it alone wasn't going to work. Focus wasn't enough.
Enter Bella.
I found her waiting outside the airport, just standing and staring. Like she was shellshocked, maybe, except it looked like she'd been that way for years. Watching every plane, mumbling to herself. Waiting for something to happen.
I happened.
Cut forwards in time.
Bella telling me she knew how to fly.
Recon of the airport.
Preparing. Arming-up.
Getting drunk one night and fucking, and not caring except to feel the guilt, and letting down the shields for five seconds and discovering – holy shit – I'm still human after all.
Telling myself I didn't care what her story was. Listening anyway.
They took her kid.
They took a thousand kids. Every week, another load. Off across the ocean. Off to be with the skeletal bastard Abbot off the TV. Off to a better life, or a worse one, or who knew what, except that it was OFF.
Scared. Crying. Can't you just imagine them?
(The faces in the clouds are watching and nodding, and saying yes we can, and wiping tears and telling me to get on with it.)
And then there was Bella, saying:
'Doesn't matter. Not your problem. But that's why I'm going.'
And then the time comes and we make our move, and con our way inside, and kill our way further, and gather guns and steal drugs, and then it's sprinting across tarmac, and guns opening fire, and pain in my shoulder, and Bella dragging me up the steps, and then And then away. Stateside-bound.
And then the story started.
And Bella died in fire and pain and chaos.
And Nate and the city and blah blah blah.
'Doesn't matter,' Bella told me, as we clung to each other in the dark. 'Not your problem.'
After everything she did for me. After she flew me and died for me. After she gave me back my humanity, and stuck a booster up my hope.
'Not your problem.'
And all the others. The people of London who bartered and fed me, and said hello every day, and didn't care that I didn't say hello back. The scavs of New York, who died and cried and followed me, despite my lies, into the jaws of hell. The Iroquois, who sent their scared little envoy to watch over me, then saved me themselves on the road.
All of them. Children stolen away. Tears long since run-out. Dead inside, but still fit to help. Still fit to see hope for a better tomorrow. Still fit to smile and think the best, and do something good.
And here's me. Here's me pursuing my own goal and forgetting the rest. Damn the world. Damn every motherfucker alive. Ignore it. Let it happen. Be selfish, why not?
Nothing to do with me.
'Not your problem,' she said.
Well shit.
About time I made it my problem.
They were coming. So said the Tadodaho.
(Or, rather, so said the Matriarchs, who whispered and sighed in dark corners then told the Chief what to say and do. It amounted to the same thing.)
I didn't bother asking how they knew. Scouts, surveillance, divine-bloody-intuition, I didn't know. Or care. I'd just taken a lazy stroll through the psychedelic bullshit of my own mind, and if the weirdest thing to greet me on my return was the rock-solid assertion that the Clergy were coming, here, en-masse, then frankly it was a taste of reassuring normality.
They were following me, I guessed. We'd got past their psychotic Collectors, but it didn't matter. Their base in NY was overrun and they'd came pelting out here in my wake. Why?
Revenge?
Maybe. But it sounded like a lot of hard work to go to, just to kick the arse of the guy who'd rattled them up. So why else? Unless…
Unless they were going to the same place as me.
'What's the plan?' Nate said, hours later, when my head stopped spinning from its heavy barrage of hallucinations and synaesthetic memories. We were still sat at the fire between the caravans, watching the evening roll-in, just the two of us. Nike was laid-up in one of the 'vans, dosed out of his skull, and Moto refused to leave his side. Tora… Tora's body had been found near where the Collectors caught-up with us. I didn't like to ask what state
