فصل ششم

CHAPTER SIX

The Choice

Now that everything had stopped, George’s legs began to shake for real. Once more he felt like crying; once more—but only just—he decided he wouldn’t. He felt very tired, the kind of tired that sucks you toward sleep like a dark undertow, the kind of tired you know you have to fight because the sleep it’s pulling you down into may not be a good sleep at all.

He looked around to see if the Gunner was still hunkered down next to him. He was, his eyes panning back across the traffic in front of them.

From high above came a keening whistle.

George looked up at the triumphal arch on the other side of the grass. A vast statue of a woman and a chariot pulled by plunging horses loomed overhead. The whistling came again, this time sharper, this time so high and urgent that it drilled into his ears and hurt.

The Gunner nipped the end of his cigarette, pocketed it, and stood up in one decisive movement.

“What is that?” asked George.

The Gunner’s eyes followed his look up to the frozen horses in the sky.

“That’s the Quadriga.”

“No—” said George.

The whistling came again, and now there was no mistaking its message.

“—that,” he finished.

“It’s a warning,” the Gunner said.

“What about?”

The Gunner scanned the rooftops over the road.

“This isn’t the time for questions, son. This is the time for a choice.” George opened his mouth. The Gunner rode right over to him.

“Choice is stay—-or go.”

Tiredness sucked at George so hard that he felt like stopping swimming and sinking into it instead. Closing his eyes seemed like such a good thing to do that he let them flutter before he shook his head and tried to think.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” he began.

“Yeah, you do. You’re choosing. Now. Go or stay? Live or die?” Suddenly and without knowing why, George got angry.

“That’s ridiculous. …”

The Gunner spat.

“’Course it is. Death’s always ridiculous. So what? Life’s a joke an’all. That’s why you might as well have a laugh and enjoy it while you’re ‘ere. But it’s your shout. Which way you gonna jump?” George’s leg shake turned to a disjointed yammering against the stone. When he spoke, it came out more like a whine than he meant it to.

“I really don’t know what’s happening.”

The whistling became staccato and even more intense. The Gunner grabbed George’s arms and lifted him until they were nose to nose.

“I do.”

George’s mind fused. He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t really think anything. The Gunner shrugged.

“Right. I’m getting back up on that plinth and I’ll watch what the thing that’s on the way here does to you, because if you’re too stupid to save yourself, you’re too stupid to bother about.” He dumped George back on his feet and turned. George grabbed his arm and clamped on.

“No. Help me.”

The black face looked back at him for a long beat. Something changed in the face, maybe the set of the jaw, maybe the eyes crinkled.

“God helps them what help themselves.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means hold my hand and run like a bastard.”

George let his hand be enfolded by the big, black hand. He had just enough time to wonder at the fact that the metal felt soft and pliable and not as cold as he’d expected, before his arm was almost yanked out of its socket as the Gunner headed for the underpass.

They skidded into the fluorescent-lit tunnel and clattered down the low ramp, heading north, beneath the traffic. Halfway down the underpass there was a busker strumming a guitar, singing an old Simon and Garfunkel song about being safe in a fortress deep and mighty, with more attack but less accuracy than the original.

His eyes watched George approach. He gave no sign of seeing the Gunner, or of hearing the hobnailed crash of his ammo boots on the concrete floor. He just watched George’s approach with boredom then disgust. He cut the song long enough to spit an ironic “Thank you” as George passed the open guitar case without adding to the spattering of coins in its scarlet interior.

George was still looking back as the Gunner dragged him up the steps into the darkening, tree-shrouded end of Hyde Park.

“He didn’t see you!”

The Gunner just kept running, weaving through the pedestrians heading home through the neon-enhanced gloom, heading away from the traffic, deeper into the park.

“None of them can see you!”

The Gunner tugged George’s arm just in time to make him look ahead and sidestep the tree trunk that loomed out of the orange-tinged darkness.

Which was a pity. Because if he’d kept looking back he might have noticed that he was wrong.

One pair of eyes had seen them. One pair of eyes stretched in something more intense than disbelief. The eyes stared out from beneath a long sweep of dark and shiny brown hair. They were wide-spaced eyes with hooded lids set in a creamy white face.

On the top floor of a red double-decker bus speeding west on the open bus lane, a girl of George’s age wrenched out of her seat and stumbled back through the standing passengers, eyes locked on something disappearing into the park, as the bus drew her farther and farther away.

She yanked the stop cord and serpentined down the stairs, oblivious to the complaints of the other passengers, ignoring the “Hoi!”s and the hands that plucked at her long sheepskin coat as she launched onto the rear platform of the bus, eyes raking back into the darkness, searching for something she could no longer see.

The conductor grabbed her.

“Oi, missy, simmer down.”

She didn’t even look back.

“I have to get off!”

The bus hammered down Rotten Row.

“Next stop in a minute,” said the conductor, not letting go.

The bus slowed for a taxi. The girl twisted her head like a snake and bit the conductor neatly between his thumb and forefinger.

As he yelped and let go in surprise, she leaped off the back of the slowing bus, stumbled, fell, got up, dodged another bus that braked hard, and ran off into the park. The girl—whose name was Edie—didn’t seem to mind the new graze on her knee any more than the honking and shouting behind her.

But then the other thing about the pale face beneath the shiny hair was that it was tough beyond its years, a toughness that came from having decided she wasn’t going to mind about little things ever again.

And it had the look of a face hard on the trail of something big.