iBoy

'Are you still hanging around with them?'

'No.' He looked at me. 'You're not going to do anything, are you?'

'No,' I said. 'No, I'm not going to do anything.'

I was really angry when I left Lucy's flat. I wasn't sure what I was angry about — Ben's feebleness, the Crows' brutality, the whole stupid thing about not being able to do anything about anything ... or maybe it was just a mixed-up mixture of everything. Like I said, I wasn't sure what it was, but as I left the flat and walked down the corridor towards the lift, I could feel this pent-up anger seething away inside me, and I could feel my wound throbbing, my skin glowing, my head tingling ... and then, inside my head, I heard voices ...

Voices talking on mobiles.

There was a moment, an instant before the voices became clear to me, when they seemed to be part of a vast cloud of other voices, millions and millions of people, all talking at the same time, and then, somehow, two of those voices became detached from the huge swirl­ing cloud, like two single birds detaching themselves from a million-strong flock, and not only could I hear those two separate voices with absolute clarity, I knew who they were, and where they were coming from too.

Yeah, the Harvey kid, the first voice was saying. I think he knows her. He went up about an hour ago.

It was Jayden Carroll, the kid I'd seen in the lift earlier on. He was calling from the ground floor downstairs.

So? the second voice answered. She ain't gonna tell him nothing, is she?

And that was Eugene O'Neil. He was in a third-floor flat in Disraeli.

I was just letting you know, that's all, Jayden said. I thought you'd wanna —

Yeah, all right. Is he still in there?

Dunno —

Well, get up there and find out. If he's gone, get the brother ... what's his name?

Ben.

Yeah, right. Find out from him what Harvey wanted, and remind him again about keeping his mouth shut.

Who? Harvey?

No, fuck's sake, the brother. Just tell him what we told him before. OK?

Yeah.

Go on then. Right.

The call ended.

As I stood by the lift doors, waiting for Jayden Carroll to come up, I could feel the throbbing/tingling/shimmer­ing in my head beginning to spread. My face, my neck, my arms, my chest ... everywhere was starting to feel weird — kind of glowy, warm, buzzy.

Without thinking, I pulled up the hood of my jacket.

The lift was coming up now. I didn't know what I was going to do when it got here, but I knew I was going to do something.

As the floor numbers above the lift doors lit up — 20, 21,22 — I gazed at my reflection in the shiny steel of the doors. The steel was scratched, graffitied, dirty, so my reflection wasn't all that clear, but it was clear enough to see that the hooded figure I was looking at didn't look anything like me. It didn't look anything like anything. The face — my face — was pulsating, floating, radiating with colours, shapes, words, symbols ... my skin was alive. My face was a million different things all at once. It was still me — my face, my features, my skin — but everything was unrecognizable in the shimmering blur.

Before I had a chance to look any closer, the lift went ting, the doors opened, and Jayden started to come out. When he saw me standing there — a hooded figure with a nightmare face — he froze, shocked, scared to death. I reached out to push him back into the lift. I only intended to give him a shove, but when my hand touched his chest, my fingers flashed and I felt something jolt through my arm, and Jayden was suddenly flying backwards into the lift as if he'd been hit with a sledgehammer. As he slammed back against the lift wall and slumped to the floor with a weird kind of grunting sound, I stepped in after him and closed the doors.

There was a faint smell of electricity in the lift as I hit the button for the ground floor — a hot, crackly kind of smell — and for the first time I realized that the skin of my hands was shimmering too, just like my face. And the ends of my fingertips were glowing red.

The lift started to descend.

I looked down at Jayden. He was very pale, his face white and rigid, his hands shaking.

'You all right?' I asked him.

'Uh?'

'Are you all right?' I repeated.

He stared at me for a moment, then wiped his mouth and spat on the floor. 'What the fuck are you?'

I guessed that meant that he wasn't too badly hurt.

'I'm your worst nightmare,' I told him, moving closer.

'You what?'

I stood over him. 'If you go anywhere near Lucy or Ben Walker again, I'm going to make you wish you'd never been born.'

He tried to grin at me, to let me know that he wasn't scared, but his lips were too shaky for grinning. He spat again. 'I don't know who the fuck you are,' he said, 'or what the fuck you think you're doing —'

I wasn't in the mood for all this tough-guy talk, so I just reached down and touched him on the forehead with my finger. I felt the jolt in my arm again, only this time it was a little bit stronger, and Jayden let out a screech as his head jerked back and slammed against the wall.

'Fuck, man!' he screamed. 'What the —?'

'Do you want me to do it again?' I said, leaning down, reaching out for his head.

'No!' he yelled, cowering away from me. 'No ... don't ...'

The lift was approaching the ground floor now.

I leaned down again and whispered in Jayden's ear. 'This is nothing, all right? Compared to what I could do to you, this is nothing. Do you understand?'

He nodded. 'Yeah, yeah ... I understand.'

'You're going to stay away from Lucy and Ben, yeah?'

'Yeah.'

'Good. Because if you don't, the next time I see you, you won't be getting up off the floor. All right?'

'Yeah, yeah ...'

The lift tinged for the ground floor. The doors opened, I gave Jayden a final look, then stepped out. There was no one around. I quickly crossed over to the stairwell and started heading up the stairs.

I didn't want to think about what I'd just done. Was it right? Was it wrong? How the hell had I done it? No ... I couldn't let myself think about it. Not yet, anyway. I just had to concentrate on climbing the stairs, getting my skin back to normal, and getting back home.

I didn't consciously know how to get my skin back to normal, but by the time I'd reached the third floor, I could already feel it cooling down, and although there were no mirrors around to check my face, I could see that my hands looked like my hands again.

I thought about taking the lift the rest of the way, but I didn't know if Jayden would still be in there or not, and I didn't really want to see him again, so I just carried on up the stairs.