Skypoint

‘That was stupid.’

Not so stupid as breaking your own finger to prove a point. That was stupid when you were alive, when a walking corpse did it and the damage was never going to get fixed – now that was really stupid!

‘Yeah,’ he admitted.

‘I had an accident,’ she said.

‘Oh?’

‘A car hit me and Mummy, and I died.’

Owen felt oddly like the world had just shifted around him. Not by much, just a couple of disorienting degrees. Just for a moment. He knew the feeling, it had happened to him before. The first time had been when he saw the thing that had been living in his fiancee’s head: the alien parasite that had killed her, the thing that had led him to Torchwood. The last time he had felt it had been when Jack had brought him back from the dead and he had realised what he was. It was the feeling that the world was never going to be the same again.

She wasn’t dead like him, he understood that. She had been hit by a car and either paramedics had got her heart going again at the scene or she had died for a few seconds later in the operating theatre. Either way, she had been to the same place he had. She had seen the same thing he had, she had felt it. And if his tear ducts had worked he would have wept for her. Inside, he cried anyway.

‘What happened?’ he asked, his voice little more than a whisper, and he found that he was crouched down with her again.

Alison looked at him, and it didn’t feel like he was looking into the eyes of a child, yet her voice was without drama, matter-of-fact: ‘Do you mean the accident, or after?’

‘Oh, there you are! Alison, I’ve been looking all over the place for you!’

It was her mother. She was crossing the strange twenty-fourth-floor indoor park towards them.

Owen automatically got to his feet and smiled at Wendy Lloyd.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hello again,’ she said.

She smiled, but it wasn’t quite the same as before, when she had turned up on the doorstep. The smile was pulling against tension. Nothing strange in that, Owen thought: you find your daughter in a lonely park talking to a stranger (and some of the worst strangers can live just over the road from you). What mother wouldn’t be a little tense?

‘How many times have I told you to stay out of the tunnels, Alison. They’re not safe.’

Alison held up the pixie doll like it was his fault. ‘Mr Pickle says they’re pixie tunnels, and I’ll be safe with him.’

Owen was confused. ‘Tunnels?’

Wendy shook her head, despairing with her daughter. ‘The ventilation ducts. She just loves playing in them. I mean, it’s not like they’re that big or anything.’

She shifted her look from Owen to Alison as a warning. ‘I swear she’ll get stuck in there one day, and we’ll never get her out.’

She looked back at Owen, annoyed with her daughter but managing a smile. Compared to the dangers out in the big wide world, this they could really handle. ‘We keep taping the duct covers up, but she just peels it off and gets through.’

Owen smiled, and looked at Alison. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much, another six months or so and it probably won’t be a problem.’

Alison was going to grow out of her fascination pretty fast.

‘If I haven’t turned grey by then,’ Wendy said.

Alison folded her book under her arm and took her mother’s hand. ‘I was telling Owen about my accident.’

Owen saw the smile on Wendy’s face falter and die and she swung the child up into her arms. It was a protective motion, but Owen wasn’t sure that she was protecting Alison from him.

‘You know we don’t talk about that, Alison,’ she said to the child. Then she looked at Owen. ‘It’s a time in our lives we’d rather forget about.’

She and her husband had nearly lost their little girl – had lost her for however short a period – who wouldn’t want to put it behind them? Owen nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘One reason we moved to SkyPoint,’ Wendy said. ‘No cars running past the front door.’

‘Guess not,’ he agreed and looked around him at the area that had been designed for the SkyPoint community to relax in without fear. ‘It certainly is quiet.’

‘That’s the way we like it,’ said Wendy, and carried Alison away to the elevator with her.

Owen watched them go, and thought about Rapunzel.

TWELVE

Toshiko had slipped the gun back into her belt just before she reached the elevator in the basement. When Lucca moved out of the darkness there like a phantom she wasn’t sure if he had seen it, or if perhaps she should show it to him anyway – business-end first.

She knew who Lucca was; Gwen had pulled the villain’s files up in the Hub Boardroom and given them all a run-down on the guy who lived at the top of SkyPoint. There wasn’t much likelihood that he had anything to do with what had brought Torchwood to the apartment tower, but he was a nasty complication that Gwen believed Toshiko and Owen would do well to avoid.

So much for that.

Toshiko jumped as Lucca materialised out of the dark, his face lit up like a Halloween mask by her flashlight. He had been lucky, she realised, that she hadn’t pulled the gun on instinct and blown his head off there and then. From what Gwen had told her, he wouldn’t have been missed.

‘You made me jump!’ she gasped, at once recognising Lucca and making ready with some kind of story to cover being down there.

Lucca’s eyes glittered like diamonds in the torchlight. When he smiled his teeth shone, white and sharp.

The smile didn’t make Toshiko feel any more comfortable.

‘You’re not supposed to be down here,’ he said.

‘I was just looking for somewhere to smoke,’ she said, hoping she got the mix of apology, embarrassment and what’s-it-got-to-do-with-you just right. ‘My husband doesn’t like me lighting up in the apartment.’

‘You could have gone outside.’

‘And look like one of those sad people that they make hang around doorways these days? No thanks.’

She just hoped he didn’t get too close to her. She wouldn’t smell of tobacco.

Lucca pulled a pack from his leather jacket and flipped it open with his thumb, then took an unfiltered cigarette from it with his lips the way they did it in old movies. Maybe he thought it would impress her – he looked the type. They were foreign cigarettes – Toshiko thought she could relax on him sniffing out her lie; those things would have destroyed his nasal receptors.

‘We’re like a couple of kids behind the bike sheds, yes?’ he said, and lit the cigarette with a lighter. There was an accent, but it wasn’t strong. ‘I see you came prepared.’

He was talking about the flashlight.

‘Basements are the only place you can go these days. It was the same at our last building. And the locks to keep us out are never really any good. I work in security.’ She extended her hand. ‘Toshiko Harper.’

Lucca’s hand closed around hers like a rattlesnake.

‘Besnik Lucca. Your secret is safe with me, Toshiko.’

‘If you won’t tell anyone, neither will I,’ she said and turned towards the elevator, hoping that would signal an end to the conversation. The elevator doors parted at her touch of the button and she stepped into the light of the cabin.

But Lucca came after her, carelessly tossing his cigarette onto the concrete basement floor. His movement