iBoy

at me, he lowered the gun and stepped back.

'Not now, OK?' Ellman said to him. 'I want him conscious for now ... I want him to know what's happening. All right?'

Hashim nodded.

'Afterwards,' Ellman said. 'You can do what you like ...' He turned to me. 'You know what's going to happen now, don't you? I mean, you know what I'm going to do.'

I didn't say anything, I just stared at him. But I wasn't actually looking at him. My eyes were open, but in my mind they were closed. I was digging deep inside myself now ... deep into my iBrain, my iSenses, my iPowers ... looking for something ... anything ... searching, search­ing, searching ...

There was still no signal, no reception, but I had to find something ... I had to. I had to be iBoy to stand any chance of saving Lucy.

Ellman had started taunting me about my mother again now — '... and I'll tell you something else about me and little Georgie, and this'll really give you some­thing to think about...' — but I wasn't listening to him. I couldn't listen. I was iBoy, and we weren't there. We were deep down inside ourselves, reaching out, stretching ... stretching ... stretching up into the sky ...

'... and I bet she thought about it too ... I mean, we did it a lot, me and Georgie, even when she was working the streets, she still wanted me all the time ... they always do ..

... and we knew it was there somewhere, we knew the signal was there ... maybe half a kilometre away, maybe less ... a few hundred metres ... just round the corner ... it was there, they were there. The radio waves from the nearest base station, the frequencies ... the cycles ... the pathways were there ... and the stray static electricity all around us, we both knew that that was there too ... and if we could somehow focus it back to our signal receptors ...

We closed our wide-open eyes and concentrated.

'... so, anyway,' Ellman continued, 'the thing is, when Georgie got knocked up back then, there's a pretty good chance it was me ... and if it was me ... well, fucking hell ...' He laughed. 'Do you see what I'm saying?'

... and now we were feeling something ... a boost, a rise, something in the air, something out there that was lifting us up ... out of our head ... taking our reach and pulling it up through the roof, into the night sky, up over the old buildings and factories ... and then ...

'I could be your fucking father.'

Then we had it.

'Hey! Are you listening to me?'

A connection. A solid connection.

'Say something, fucker! Fucking say something!'

We had a connection.

I opened my still-open eyes and saw Ellman's face, twisted with rage, staring into mine.

'If you were my father,' I said to him. 'I'd kill myself.'

Without saying a word, he raised the long silver knife in his hand, gently placed the needle-sharp tip against my forehead, and slowly drew the blade down my skin, deliberately not cutting too deeply, still wanting to keep me wide awake ...

And I could feel the pain, I could feel warm blood running down my face.

But it didn't change anything.

We were still connected.

'Fucking superhero,' Ellman sneered, taking the knife away and examining the bloodied tip. 'Looks like you bleed the same as every other fucker I've ever cut.' He looked at me. 'Now let's see how you beg.'

I could feel the power surging inside me as he turned away and began walking over to Lucy ... but what could I do with it? If I zapped Ellman and Hashim now, it wouldn't make any difference. I'd still be tied up. And the wire that was binding me to the girder was wound so tightly, and there was simply so much of it, that my chances of blasting it away or melting it with a burst of electricity were pretty slim. And even if I could zap my way out of the wire, taking out Ellman and Hashim at the same time ... well, O'Neil and the others would still be there. And although there was a chance, just a very slight chance, that once Ellman and Hashim were out of the picture, Gunner and Marek and Tweet might decide to cut their losses and run ... there was no way that O'Neil was going to back down.

He'd get to Lucy before I could get to him.

And I couldn't let that happen.

I couldn't let him get anywhere near her.

I was, as Hashim had so eloquently put it, completely fucked.

And so, with a wretched heart, I just stood there and watched as Howard Ellman strode through the dusty light towards Lucy.

11000

Knowledge is power.

Francis Bacon

Meditationes Sacrae. De Haeresibus (1597)

I'm still not sure if knowledge really is power, but as Ellman stood in front of Lucy with the knife in his hand, looking down at her with absolutely nothing in his eyes — no malevolence, no desire, no emotion at all ... well, at that moment, knowledge was all I had.

My iBrain knew things.

Facts, news, information ...

And I knew that I had to do something with it, because Ellman was leaning towards Lucy now, tearing the tape from her mouth, and I could see that she was crying ...

And I was too.

And crying wasn't going to help.

'Tom ...?' I heard Lucy sob.

Her voice was faint, weak with fear, and her face was pale and greyed with shock, but when our eyes met, I could see that she still had that hidden strength in her eyes ... and that, incredibly, she was trying to smile at me.

I smiled back.

And Ellman slapped her across the face.

'Don't fucking look at him,' he told her, his voice quite calm. 'Look at me. You hear me? You keep your fucking eyes on me.'

She stared up at him, her eyes cold with hatred.

Ellman casually raised the knife in his hand, holding it close to her face. 'You stay on your knees, you keep your eyes on me ... and I might not cut you. Understand?'

Lucy said nothing, just carried on staring at him, and I could tell by the look in her eyes that she had no inten­tion of giving up without a fight. . . and that meant that I had to act now, right now, before she got herself killed. I had to look deep inside myself and use everything I had — my iSenses, my iKnowledge, my iPowers, my self. . . I had to focus it all, all at once, all in a timeless moment, on my one and only hope.

I closed my eyes.