28

I held my breath. I could see the gun was still in Jack’s hand, his finger on the trigger. Jack looked at me and I thought I saw a shadow of doubt flare in his eyes, or maybe it was just murderous intent. Without another word, he turned and marched to the rear of the car and popped the trunk. I heard footsteps behind me and glanced over my shoulder. The others had come to stand in a semicircle behind Demos. Ryder was back too, I noticed.

Alex pulled me closer. I gave him as reassuring a smile as I could muster. The line was back between his eyebrows. It seemed to be a permanent fixture whenever he was around me.

‘Get your hands off me!’

My stomach muscles clenched on hearing her voice.

‘You think you’ll get away with this?’ Rachel’s words faltered as she came into view and saw her welcoming committee.

She was wearing a white blouse and a knee-length black skirt and only one shoe, making her attempt to stand up straight to confront us look comical. Her hands were tied in front of her and her blonde hair was tousled and falling loose from the pins that had been holding it. She still looked beautiful, but like she’d been put through a tumble dryer.

When she saw me, she threw her head back and sneered, ‘Is she worth it, Alex?’

Alex laughed under his breath and stepped up to her. ‘Right now, you have two choices,’ he said, his voice as smooth and soft as velvet. ‘You can tell me and Jack the truth about the Unit. Or I’ll hand you over to Demos and you can tell him the truth.’ He leant forward a little and whispered in her ear, ‘And I don’t think he’s going to be as nice to you as I might be.’

He stepped back, letting her see Demos, who smiled at her in a way that sent chills even through me. I saw the fear start to gather in her eyes, though she kept her voice calm and almost flirtatious. I wanted to hand her straight over to Demos.

‘You know the truth, Alex. Whatever they’ve told you, it’s a lie. The Unit’s just trying to stop them – you know this.’ She looked at Jack. ‘He killed your mother, Jack, for chrissakes.’

‘No. He didn’t.’ I lunged towards her. ‘The Unit killed my mum. Your father’s company was behind it all. You’ve been lying to Jack and Alex the whole time. Admit it. Tell them what their precious Unit is really doing. Why you’re really chasing us. What’s the research for, Rachel?’

Rachel’s mouth opened in surprise. She closed it quickly. ‘Jack, she’s talking nonsense. She’s been brainwashed by them. Who knows what kind of mind-altering stuff they’ve done to her?’

‘They’ve done nothing to me, which is more than I can say for what you’re doing to us.’ I squared up to her and heard Alex suck in a breath before I realised that I’d let myself out of the bag, so to speak.

Rachel’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re one of them,’ she said. Her eyes flew to Jack. ‘That must have been a surprise, Jack.’ She sneered and Jack’s expression darkened.

It didn’t matter that she now knew about me. Ryder could remove that little piece of information later.

I took a step towards her. ‘Tell them what the Unit’s really doing.’ I saw a trace of fear wash across her face. ‘Tell them why they need the scientists, Rachel. Tell them why the Unit killed my mum for finding out what was going on.’

We all froze as a gun clicked. It was Jack. He was pointing it straight at Rachel’s head. I backed away instantly. Alex’s arm circled my waist, drawing me back even further against him.

‘Is it true?’ Jack spoke.

Rachel froze. So did the rest of us.

‘Is it true?’ Jack’s finger was pressing on the trigger. ‘You trained me, Rachel. You know that I’ll do it.’

For a hideous moment we all watched Rachel’s face as it transformed from her habitual iciness to a whitewash of fear. I looked at Jack, terrified at what he might be capable of.

Then Rachel spoke. ‘You’re right, Jack. I did train you. I made you what you are. Tell me, did it never cross your minds as to why you were both recruited? What made you two so special? Did you never ask yourselves why you were both made team leaders over all the others?’ She let out a high-pitched peal of laughter and I gripped Alex’s hand against my waist. ‘We wanted to keep you close – you fools.’ She threw her head back and laughed again.

I pressed myself against Alex’s body. He felt like rock, the muscles in his chest and arms locked. No one had time to react before Jack flew forward and pushed the gun against Rachel’s forehead. She stopped laughing abruptly and wobbled on her one shoe. I saw her eyes skitter around the group, looking for help. None was forthcoming.

Her blue eyes fell back on Jack, became calculating. ‘If you do it,’ she said quietly, ‘you’ll never know what happened to your mother.’

Suki gasped so loudly that I thought she’d been shot. ‘No. Oh my God.’ She bent over double, her hands on her knees.

‘What, what is it?’ Ryder had a hand on her shoulder.

‘She’s not dead.’ Suki looked up at me and Jack. Her face was pale, her eyes glowing gold. ‘She’s not dead.’

Jack dropped the gun from Rachel’s head and stared at Suki. ‘What?’

‘I saw. I mean, I heard it. Your mum’s alive. They’re keeping her. Like Thomas.’

There was a silence so profound I could almost hear the earth turning. Then a world of noise and emotion rushed in to fill the void. A growl erupted from my chest and I lashed out at Rachel. Alex caught me around the waist and held me back. I fought like a crazed animal. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do in that moment but I wanted her to tell me more. I wanted to get into her head like Suki could and find out everything she knew. My mother was alive. The energy drained from my limbs and I felt myself go limp in Alex’s arms. My mother was alive. I looked at Jack.

His arm was stretched out at a right angle to his body. The muzzle of his gun was flush with Rachel’s forehead.

‘Don’t—’ Demos’s voice rang out.

‘Jack!’ Alex yelled.

‘Demos! They’re coming!’

I stumbled round at the sound of Amber’s voice, trying to see her. She was clutching Ryder’s arm. ‘I can feel them.’

Demos turned immediately to Alicia. Her eyes went blank and unfocused, then suddenly opened up, startled. ‘Yes, I can hear something. Lots of people. Not far off.’

‘Damn,’ he shouted. ‘Let’s go. Get Rachel. Harvey, Bill – come on!’

Two shapes emerged from the shadows on either side of the car and started running towards us.

‘Rachel stays with us. I’m not finished with her.’ Jack didn’t let go of her arm and there was a silent stand-off between him and Ryder, who had hold of her other arm. Rachel looked between them, seeming unsure which fate would be worse.

‘You can have whatever time you need with her after this is over,’ Demos said, coming between them. ‘Right now, you need to let us take her. You follow.’

‘Come on, Jack, let her go,’ Alex said, tugging at his arm.

Jack let her go with obvious reluctance and Ryder dragged Rachel kicking and yelling over to the bus and hefted her inside.

Alex started running to the car, pulling me along behind him.

We had covered about ten metres when we heard Suki calling out.

‘We’re too late. There’s no time. They’re moving too fast.’

She was pointing at something in the distance. Headlights were dicing the night sky into pieces. I heard Alex swear under his breath. His fingers tightened around my waist and he started to move fast towards the car.

‘We have to stay and fight our way out.’ Demos’s voice pitched across the darkness towards us. He was standing still as one of the Joshua trees, his eyes calculating the shrinking distance between us and the bouncing lights on the horizon.

‘How many are there, Alicia?’

‘I can’t get a good read. Over a dozen. Maybe fifteen.’

Demos turned to his other side. ‘Suki?’

She closed her eyes for a couple of seconds. ‘Yes, about that. Two cars. They’ve got weapons.’

‘Let’s go – there’s still time,’ Ryder shouted to them from the door of the bus.

‘No,’ Demos replied. ‘We can’t outrun them. If not here, it’ll be somewhere else, a few miles down the road. Here we’ve the upper hand. We can fight them – slow them down enough so we can get away and they can’t follow us.’

Ryder jumped down from the bus. ‘Well, we need to stop them before they get close enough to hit us,’ he said.

Demos turned to Alicia, his voice urgent. ‘Alicia, tell me who’s got what weapons.’

‘Front passenger in both vehicles. Go for them.’ Alex spoke up. ‘They’ll be the ones with the weapons that can take you down.’

I cringed as I remembered the splicing pain in my head.

‘The others will be armed with guns.’

Demos turned to me. ‘Lila, give Ryder and Amber back their guns, please.’

I didn’t hesitate. I flew the clip towards Ryder and the gun towards Amber.

As soon as Amber caught it, Alex grabbed hold of me again and pushed me in Jack’s direction. ‘Jack, get Lila in the car. Get her out of here. We’ll hold them off.’

I reeled around. He was checking the chamber of his gun. ‘No. I’m staying. I can fight too.’

Jack interrupted. ‘No way. You’re coming with me. Let’s go.’

‘No.’ I skidded away from him. ‘I’m staying with them.’ I looked over at the others, huddling around Demos.

I turned to Alex, who was glaring at me. I could see his jaw pulsing angrily. I squared my shoulders and stared back defiantly. There was no way he was packing me off out of this. Especially if he was staying.

He glanced at the horizon where the lights were flashing. We had about thirty seconds before they were upon us. There wasn’t enough time for us to get clear. ‘Stay behind me,’ he growled. ‘Keep back.’

Jack spat a curse into the dirt.

‘Lila.’ I turned to see Demos standing at my side. ‘I need you to help Harvey and Bill. You need to take out the first car. Can you do that, do you think?’

Take out a car? What did he mean – flip it over? I glanced over at Harvey and Bill then swallowed hard. ‘I’ll try.’

‘Good. Alex, you and Jack focus on anyone who gets out, especially if they manage to use their weapons. We don’t have enough manpower or weapons to do anything else right now but try to stop them following us. Let’s take the cars out, stop as many of them as possible and then get the hell out of here.’

The headlights from the first car bounced over the ridge before we could agree or disagree with his tactics.

‘Demos – now!’ Alicia called out.

Demos spun to face the cars charging towards us. But they weren’t cars. They were tanks. Or close enough. Humvees – each one several heavy, brutal tonnes of metal.

Alex moved to stand in front of me and a part of me wanted to laugh at the pointlessness of the gesture. Nothing was going to stop that thing, not a bullet, not some unreliable mind power and certainly not a single person standing in the way. We had left it too late. Alex didn’t flinch a muscle, though. He stood there, in the blinding white light thrown out from the Humvee, his gun raised, his stance ice-cool. Then he fired once and I heard a bullet whip past and the sound of rubber bursting.

‘Come on, Lila, turn it.’ He spoke through gritted teeth as the Humvee shunted to the left before righting itself and bearing down on us even faster.

I focused harder than I’d ever focused on anything in my life. The car rounded a slight curve in the road about one hundred metres away. My eyes tracked the tyres. I visualised them lifting off the ground and toppling the Humvee over, spinning it onto its roof. Nothing happened. What were Bill and Harvey doing?

‘Come on!’ Alex fired again and the bullet ricocheted off metal like a staple gun firing into a brick wall.

I saw Jack out of the corner of my eye, blue flashes raining out of his gun as he shot repeatedly. I refocused through my panicking, stalling heart. As though it was made of nothing more than fibre-glass, the entire metal beast suddenly lifted clean off the ground and veered violently to the left. I could feel the line between me and it like a thin silvery chain. I looped it in my mind like a whip and then gave it a long, delicious flick. The Humvee bounced into the ground, skidded and then flew up, somersaulting over on itself a half-dozen times. It skimmed the roof of the second Humvee with a scream of torn metal, and impacted with the ground so loudly I had to cover my ears. A hail of dirt and stones and tree branches came raining down out of the sky, littering the ground around.

‘Oh. My. God.’

‘Jeeez.’ Alex was staring at me, open-mouthed.

I swallowed hard, staring in horror at the carnage – there was no movement from inside the deformed, twisted metal. Did I just do that?

‘Let’s go!’ Demos was calling out to us. ‘Get in the car, go, we’ll cover you.’

The second Humvee had spun off the road at a hundred-and-eighty-degree angle to us. The doors were flying open and men in black combats were rolling out onto the ground and starting to run towards us, guns in hand.

‘Get behind the car,’ Alex ordered. His hand was on the back of my neck and he was crouched low, pushing me towards the car. Jack was following.

My whole body was shaking with the adrenaline rush. I looked over my shoulder. Ryder was covering the others as they piled into the bus. Demos was standing on the road, like a human shield between us and the approaching men. I hoped to God he could stop them. I had no idea what the range of his power was or how many he could hold at a time.

Alex flung us to the ground behind the car and reached for the door handle. I peeked over the bonnet of the car and caught sight of one of the Unit running towards us with a gun the size of a bazooka in his hands. Without even thinking about it, I wrenched it from his arms, hurling it with as much force as I could into a Joshua tree nearby. The tree toppled over onto one branch and the man who’d been carrying the gun flattened himself into the ground.

A sudden scream made me turn my head. For a moment I couldn’t figure out what was happening.

Ryder was lying face down on the ground, several feet out. Demos was standing about ten metres away from him with his back turned. His gaze focused unstintingly ahead. He hadn’t even turned to see what had happened. I knelt and got ready to make a dash over to Ryder but couldn’t. Alex had me by the arm.

‘You can’t do anything,’ he said, before looking back over the top of the car and starting to fire.

I looked at Demos. He was still standing there, unmoving. Then I realised he wasn’t moving because he couldn’t. He was holding five men frozen in mid-run. He couldn’t break his concentration or turn to help Ryder. Now was the time for someone to run out there and take their guns off them and the car keys too. Why wasn’t anyone helping?

I looked over at the bus. Amber was screaming from the doorway and Harvey had his arms around her from behind, like he was saving her from drowning. He was dragging her backwards out of the way and she was clawing at him desperately.

Someone had to go and help. But before I could break free from Alex’s grip, Jack had gone.

‘Cover me,’ he called back over his shoulder.

Cover him? I turned back to Alex. He glanced at Jack, now scuttling over the darkened ground. He swore, then started firing a thick rain of bullets out into the darkness. Jack reached Ryder and rolled him over. His head lolled back into the dirt and a thin trickle of black blood spilt out down his chin. A sudden cold sickness leadened my stomach.

I turned my head back to see where Alex was firing. Four men were coming towards us, taking aim at Demos and Jack. As I counted them, one went down with a cry. Alex paused to reload. I focused on the man at the front. He fired in our direction and the windshield shattered over us.

Alex put his hand on my head and pushed me to the ground. ‘Stay down!’

He opened fire again, bullets cracking all around. I spun to look at Jack out in the open. They were going to get shot.

I poked my head over the bonnet and focused on the one in front, whipping the gun out of his hand just as he pulled the trigger.

The bullet whistled through the air and I heard the sound of it hitting mud. The earth was dry. As I realised what that sound meant, a wrenching, twisting pain flooded through me. Turning my head to look, I saw I was right.

Jack was standing still. But he was looking at me curiously. I felt a shrieking pain in my chest, like the bullet had hit my heart. His hand dropped to his stomach, pressing against his T-shirt. I looked down at his hand. Between his splayed fingers, a spreading dark was appearing.

‘Jack!’ I screamed and lurched out from behind the car towards him.

Alex grabbed my shoulder and hauled me back, seizing me around the waist and holding me so tight all I could do was struggle against him. He rocked backwards with me in his arms and I kicked out at the ground, watching with horror as Jack fell to his knees and then pitched forward, his arms flung out on either side of his body.

‘No, no, no!’ I was sobbing and kicking and trying to get free from Alex’s grasp.

‘Lila, stop, stop! You’ll get killed if you go out there.’

A bullet spun past my head, smacking into the ground by my ankle. Alex rolled over, pinning me with one leg to the ground as he knelt and continued firing over the bonnet of the car at the remaining two men. Tears were rolling down my face as I stared helplessly at Jack lying motionless on the ground. I could see a pool of blood seeping into the earth around him.

‘Damn it. There’s two still out there.’ Alex was yelling to Demos, trying to be heard over the haemorrhaging roar of an engine. ‘And there are more coming. We’ve got no chance.’

I turned my head to see. Another set of headlights had appeared in the distance.

‘Go. Get out of here,’ Demos yelled back. ‘I’ll hold them off as long as I can.’

‘No!’ I screamed again. ‘We’re not leaving Jack.’

Alex put his hand on my face, pulling me around so he could look me in the eye. ‘If we leave him, Lila, he has more chance of surviving. We can’t get to him without getting killed. And if we did get to him, there’s nothing I can do for him here. He’ll have more chance if they reach him.’

He glanced at Jack one more time then started firing again out into the darkness where the two remaining men had gone to ground.

I stared at Alex, not comprehending, then looked back at Jack. His eyes were open and he was looking straight at me. I felt relief but it was quickly swallowed by panic. I couldn’t leave him. Then he moved one arm, the hand holding his gun, and pulled it up so it was parallel to his head.

Still looking at me, he mouthed the word ‘go’, then raised himself onto his elbows and started to fire.

‘Open the door,’ Alex shouted over the noise.

‘What?’ I stammered, my eyes still on Jack.

‘Open the car door. I can’t reach.’

I opened it without even looking at it. Then I felt myself physically lifted off the ground as Alex hauled me like I was a sack around the car door and threw me onto the front seat.

‘Head down, move!’ he yelled.

I obeyed instinctively, curling up into a ball and flattening myself across into the passenger seat. Alex was in after me in the next second, revving the engine. A bullet whined and smacked into the side of the car as he spun it into reverse and roared out onto the road. I gripped the dashboard and looked back at the dark shape lying abandoned on the ground. That was my brother. That was Jack. I saw him drop his gun and rest his head back on the ground. Alex pushed me down into the seat well. I felt the tears pounding down my face in time with the smack and hiss of bullets.

We veered off the road, Alex killing the lights so we were hurtling through blackness. He swerved violently, the wheel spinning beneath his hands. He wrestled with it while I clambered onto the seat and looked over my shoulder. We were heading away from the park gates, in the opposite direction to the blazing headlights of the third Humvee that had just appeared over the ridge. I willed Demos to move. Then the bus started to roll forward and Demos jumped on board, the men he’d been holding frozen suddenly reanimating and firing in all directions. I watched as two of them raced over to Jack and rolled him over onto his back, kicking the gun out of his hand.

Alex grabbed my hand, lacing his fingers through mine. ‘Lila, look at me. Look at me,’ he shouted.

I forced my head to turn, to look at Alex. His eyes were burning into mine. ‘Don’t look back. Just keep looking at me. It’s going to be OK,’ he said. ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’