Skypoint

remains, but that stink was unmistakeable. More than once she had come across what was left of people that had been savaged by Weevils – they were messy killers but had the good sense to hide what they left behind. Generally, Weevils found a good hiding place and packed it with bodies until there was no room to pack any more. Torchwood would come across a mass grave of Weevil kills on average once every couple of months. But you only had to smell one to remember the stink.

But this was no Weevil kill. Toshiko stood on the stepladder, the flashlight in one hand, her gun in the other and regarded the stinking mess a few feet away from her. She didn’t know what had killed this poor bastard – or bastards.

What she saw was a shapeless gelatinous mess that looked mottled and grey in the light of the flashlight, streaked with veins and splotches of red-brown. Here and there, patches of hair clung to it like lichen.

And there was an eye.

Toshiko gasped and almost lost her footing on the stepladder.

The eye stared at her, a large black pupil in a fading blue iris. It had been a beautiful eye once. It was hard to imagine that it had once gazed from anything other than a beautiful face. Now it glinted in her torchlight, set in a mass of decomposing cellular matter.

Toshiko didn’t have the first idea what could have done this. She just thanked God that it didn’t seem to be around any more. It was time to get Owen. He was the medic; maybe he would have some clue as to what turned human beings into mush like that. She closed the hatch and put the ladder back where she had found it.

She was almost at the elevator doors when Besnik Lucca stepped out of the darkness.

ELEVEN

Owen was angry with himself over what had happened with Toshiko. She was a good friend. When it came down to it she was in fact the only good-looking female he had ever been friends with that he hadn’t screwed.

Maybe that was his problem. Owen had known for years that Toshiko wanted to go to bed with him, and for years he had taken an almost perverse delight in denying her. By the time he’d got over that he had actually started to feel too close to her – he hadn’t wanted to screw things up between them and almost inevitably that was what sex would have done. But things were different now with Toshiko, he knew.

She loved him.

He had heard her tell him that after Copley’s bullet had put a hole in his chest and after Jack used that frigging resurrection glove to bring him back for a few minutes – but before they realised Torchwood was going to be stuck with a walking corpse on the payroll.

I love you.

Not many women had said that to Owen, fewer still that meant it. And none that had known him as well as Toshiko did. Even the woman he had been going to marry hadn’t known him that well – after all, that had been a different Owen Harper; that had been before Torchwood.

And maybe that was what got Owen so angry.

Maybe he could have been happy with Toshiko. If he hadn’t been dead.

Life was shit. And so was death.

Ten minutes after she left the apartment Owen decided to go and look for her.

He took the elevator. And went up.

The twenty-fourth floor was something special. It wasn’t every apartment block that had its own high-rise park. At least, that was how SkyPoint’s designers had seen it. They called it SkyPark.

The elevator doors opened onto an open area that had been laid out with plants and trees growing in pots. They hadn’t gone so far as carpeting the floor in artificial turf – thank God – but there was a good-sized pond with koi flickering just below the surface. There was even a small kids’ play area and what Owen guessed was going to be a coffee stall (he thought they probably wouldn’t get the franchise sorted out until the building had rather more residents).

As he stepped out of the elevator he was pretty sure that Toshiko wasn’t there. There were a few hidden corners to SkyPark, isolated by walls of potted bushes, but his senses told him straight away that he was alone up there. After all, all but a few of the building’s apartments were still empty, and it was a nice day outside – the odds were all against a busy day on the twenty-fourth floor.

There was always something strange about a park when it was empty, he thought, as he crossed the floor towards one of the benches that had been set to look out across the city below. He guessed it was like any normally busy public place that you came across deserted. It felt eerie and wrong. Like Oxford Street or Times Square in some post-apocalypse movie. He passed through the play area and pushed the small roundabout. It made a quietly oiled sound that was somehow disappointing – he had wanted it to make a sound, to squeal like a banshee or something. Something to add to the surreal feeling of the place.

‘It won’t go very fast.’

The little voice in the empty park made Owen jump.

He saw the little girl from across the corridor on the thirteenth floor. She was peering at him from behind one of the big tree pots. Owen walked towards her. She was sitting with her back to the pot, a big book balanced on her drawn-up knees.

‘Alison. Right?’

‘Alison Lloyd,’ she corrected indignantly.

Owen smiled and wondered if the girl was playing him. He asked her what she was reading. If she told him it was a book, then she was playing him.

‘Fairy stories,’ she said.

Owen crouched down. Maybe it wouldn’t feel quite so strange talking to a kid in a playground if he was kind of the same height. Next to her on the floor was some kind of pixie doll, faded and worn. It looked like the kind of thing that kids sometimes inherited from their parents’ old toybox. It looked like it had had a hard life; it had lost one pointed ear and a bright green eye. But the little girl loved it; it looked like she had been reading to it before Owen disturbed her.

‘Which fairy story?’ he asked.

‘Rapunzel,’ she told him.

The story of a golden-haired girl locked in a high tower. She didn’t seem to see the irony of it. Why would she? Did kids get irony at six, or whatever she had said she was earlier.

‘Mr Pickle likes it.’

It looked like Mr Pickle was the doll. Pickle the Pixie. Why the hell not?

‘Do you play with the other kids up here?’ Owen asked, casting a glance around him, wondering where Alison’s mother was.

‘What other kids?’

‘There aren’t any other kids living here?’

‘Not yet. Mum says there will be one day.’

‘Must be a bit lonely.’

Alison shrugged.

‘Did you have plenty of friends where you lived before?’

Alison frowned. ‘Don’t remember.’

See, this is why you don’t get on with kids. Always playing bloody games. And what the hell are you doing squatting on the floor with her like this? When her mum shows up what sort of a pervert is she going to take you for?

Owen got to his feet, feeling the child’s eyes on him. He couldn’t make up his mind if they were suspicious – maybe she already had him down as a perv (kids these days grew up too quick; maybe they had to) – or somehow betrayed, like she didn’t want him to go.

‘What sort of accident did you have?’ she asked.

She was looking at his hand again.

‘I shut it in a door,’ he lied.