Execution

  There was only light, only silence, only him.

  We were free.

  End

  At some point, the light began to fade.

  My head was ringing, a constant whine as if I had been standing too close to an explosion. My entire body was numb, so much so that I wondered if I had stepped right out of it, if maybe, somehow, I had gone with Donovan. The light had been so tempting – promising peace, rest, freedom – that the thought of not being there, of finding myself back inside my ravaged flesh, was terrifying. I prayed that the light would let me stay, that I wouldn’t be thrown back into the darkness, into life.

  Yet still it continued to fade, ebbing away like the last desperate gasps of twilight until all that remained was night. A noise began to emerge from the ringing, a faint pulse. It took me a while to recognise it as my own heart, and when I did I felt that heart sink. I was still alive, still wrapped in old muscle, gristle and skin. And the stranger’s blood still pumped through me.

  My eyelids were so heavy I didn’t think I would be able to open them, but after a few attempts I managed it, staring out of the crack in the shadows to find Zee and Lucy there. When they saw that I was still alive they broke into identical grins.

  ‘Jesus, Alex,’ said Zee. ‘Welcome back. We weren’t sure if you were gonna make it.’

  ‘We thought you were dead,’ said Lucy. ‘You weren’t breathing for, like, minutes, and you were freezing.’

  ‘What happened?’ I said. Zee nodded to the corner of the room and I followed his gaze to see the two wheezers slumped there, their limbs entwined like suicidal lovers. ‘Are they dead?’

  ‘They just collapsed,’ said Zee. ‘We haven’t checked for a pulse or anything, but they look pretty dead to me.’

  They were. I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened but it was clear that the spark of life no longer existed inside those motionless bodies. I concentrated, trying to extend my thoughts into the minds of the blacksuits, the berserkers, the rats, but there was nothing there any more, as if they had all simultaneously been switched off. I might have simply lost my powers, but deep down I knew it wasn’t that. There was nobody left to communicate with. All of my children were dead.

  ‘What happened to Simon?’ asked Zee. I just stared at the floor. I couldn’t meet his eyes. Simon was gone. I had killed him. The same way I had just killed hundreds, no thousands, of living, breathing things.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ said Lucy, obviously reading the grief in my expression. She looked at my neck, at the silver St Christopher medallion that hung there. ‘It was the only way.’

  ‘And he might be okay,’ said Zee. ‘He might still be okay.’

  I didn’t reply. The sensation was gradually returning to my body, the straps cutting into my skin, my muscles stiff from being so long in the same position. I looked down at my left hand, realised that it had completely changed. Those three fingers were now long and thin, too many knuckles and joints there, reminding me of Furnace’s hands. It made my flesh crawl just to look at it. I lifted the blade of my other arm, wondering whether I should try and cut myself down. But there were still needles and tubes lodged in my flesh and I didn’t know what would happen when they were taken out. The last thing I wanted after everything was to bleed out on the chamber floor.

  Or was it? Those same thoughts circled my head – Furnace’s creations might be dead, but the stranger was still imprisoned in my mind. It wouldn’t be long before he found a way to escape back into my thoughts, and then what would happen? I couldn’t keep him at bay for ever. It might take years, decades, maybe even centuries, but eventually I’d give in to him. He would force me to create another army, to declare war on the world once again. I knew this the same way I knew that my plan had worked, that my children were dead. The truth of it was undeniable.

  ‘What happens now?’ Lucy asked. ‘I don’t hear any gunfire or anything. You think it’s safe up there?’

  She was right. The muted roar from overhead had faded, the room eerily quiet.

  ‘You should go,’ I said. ‘Get off the island. It should be okay on the mainland now, just stay clear of the army. I bet they still want you.’

  ‘What about you?’ Zee asked. ‘You know I’m not leaving you here.’

  ‘I can’t go,’ I replied. ‘For all I know, this machine is what’s keeping me alive.’

  I could have told them about the stranger’s blood, the thing that lived inside me, but I chose not to. I didn’t even understand it myself.

  ‘I’m not leaving you,’ Zee said, firmer this time. And I could tell he meant every word of it. ‘You either let me cut you down, and you take your chances, or I’m moving in right here.’

  ‘Make that two of us,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Yeah, we’ll put some paintings up, get a nice sofa or something, there’s room for a bed.’

  ‘Two beds,’ she added, raising a stern eyebrow. Zee blushed.

  ‘Two beds,’ he said. ‘Three beds, really, when Simon turns up again. Either way, make your choice. We stay together, or we leave together, it’s up to you.’

  ‘How about you die together?’

  The voice came from the door, startling all of us. I looked up, seeing the figure silhouetted in the light from the corridor outside, the military cap, the camouflage, the emblem on her uniform reflecting the light with the same fierce glint as her eyes.

  Colonel Alice Panettierre.

  *

  She looked possessed. That was the first thing I noticed when she finally stepped into the chamber. Her eyes were wide and wild, never blinking. It seemed like she’d lost half her body weight since last time I’d seen her. Her face was gaunt, her cheekbones almost piercing her skin. And her thin lips were peeled back into a parody of a smile, one that seemed like it had been fixed there with pins.

  She was holding a pistol, and even from here I could see that it was cocked and ready to fire. Two more figures appeared in her wake, young men in camouflage and combat helmets. One looked like he’d been shot or clawed in the arm, his clothes drenched with blood, his face warped by pain. They were both carrying machine guns, and they lifted them towards me.

  ‘Did you think we wouldn’t find you?’ Panettierre said, strolling into the middle of the chamber. Zee and Lucy scampered out of her way but she didn’t spare them a glance, her gaze never leaving me. I knew that my eyes still resembled Furnace’s, those blazing pools of darkness, enough to strip the sanity from the sanest of people. But she didn’t flinch, she didn’t look away. She had lost her mind a long time ago.

  ‘Ma’am,’ said one of the men, the one without the injury, touching a radio receiver lodged in his ear. He couldn’t bring himself to look at me, his whole body trembling. ‘We’re getting more reports that the enemy has been neutralised.’

  Panettierre ignored him, taking step after step until she was standing right in front of me. I lifted my right arm, sweeping the blade towards her, but it didn’t quite reach. The straps of the machine held me tight, stopping me from launching another attack.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ I said, my raised voice seeming to emanate from every stone in the room. She fixed me with that frozen smile.

  ‘You thought wrong,’ she said, still not blinking. Her eyes bulged, lined with so many veins that they seemed to be filled with blood. ‘It was close, up there in the house, but three of us managed to hide from your pets. Did you honestly think you’d get away with this, Alex?’

  ‘It’s over,’ hissed Lucy. ‘He killed them all, those monsters. He saved us, all of us.’

  Panettierre’s head didn’t move but her swollen eyes swivelled slowly in their sockets like some grotesque puppet, peering at Lucy and Zee as if it was the first time she had noticed them.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Zee, pointing at the wheezers. ‘See? Take a look outside too, they’re all dead. It’s finished.’

  The colonel lifted her pistol, pointing it at Zee. Her arm was rock steady, not the slightest tremor, and her fi
nger was tight against the trigger.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. Panettierre looked back at me but the gun didn’t move.

  ‘You know how many soldiers I’ve lost?’ she asked, her voice strangely emotionless. ‘How many of my brave men and women have died? Thousands. Tens of thousands. You think I care about your little friends here? You think I won’t kill them right where they stand just to see the look on your face?’

  ‘Ma’am,’ the soldier repeated. ‘They’re right, there’s word coming in from every division, the enemy is falling, dying for no reason. I think it’s over.’

  ‘It’s not over,’ Panettierre spat back, and I could see the emotion now, bubbling fiercely beneath her mask like expression. Her eyes seemed to have grown even bigger, her pupils little more than pinpricks in an ocean of fire. ‘Not until I say it is.’

  She turned her attention to the machine, to the remains of Alfred Furnace beside me. Forgotten for now, her gun arm dropped to her side.

  ‘What is this thing?’ she asked. ‘Is this how you get your powers? How you control the nectar?’

  I kept my mouth shut. Even if I knew what the machine was and how it worked I wouldn’t have answered. She tilted her head back, talking to one of the soldiers.

  ‘Get over here, Bates; find out how this thing works.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ the wounded man replied. ‘Our orders were to leave it—’

  ‘The hell with our orders,’ she barked back. ‘Get over here, Sergeant, and do as I say.’

  The two men looked at each other, unsure, but they weren’t about to disobey. Bates walked nervously to the machine, giving my arm a wide berth, and began examining it. Blood from his wound pattered to the stone floor, making a sound like a ticking clock. I didn’t protest. An idea was starting to form in the back of my mind, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I struggled to find it but the roar of the stranger’s blood in my veins kept it hidden.

  ‘You know you’ve lost,’ said Panettierre. ‘But I can make you a deal. Tell me how it works, this machine, and I’ll let your friends live. That sound fair to you?’

  I turned to Zee and Lucy. Both of them were shaking their heads. They knew as well as I did that no good could come from Panettierre learning how to use the machine. As far as I knew, it had only been designed to keep Alfred Furnace alive when his body started to fall apart, piping the stranger’s blood through the areas where there were no more veins, no more flesh. That and the blood swap, the mechanism which drained my body of nectar before transferring Furnace’s blood – the stranger’s blood – to me.

  There was that idea again, a flash of light submerged beneath the ocean of darkness, gone as quickly as it appeared. Panettierre was talking again before I could make any sense of it.

  ‘I can make their deaths very painful. I can make it last for days, weeks. I can keep them alive just to feel pain, just to suffer. We have people for that, and they’re very, very good at what they do.’

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Alex,’ said Zee. He and Lucy clung to each other, afraid but defiant. They would choose to die here rather than give Panettierre what she wanted. I hoped they wouldn’t have to.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, not sure if I was lying or not. ‘This is the machine that lets you control the nectar.’

  ‘And that’s Furnace?’ she asked, nodding at the husk of desiccated skin and powdered bone hanging next to me.

  ‘The machine let him pass his powers to me,’ I said. She glanced at Bates, the soldier on his knees now, using a combat knife to pry at the exposed gears and pipes. He sensed her gaze, looking up.

  ‘Never seen anything like this before,’ he said. ‘But it looks like a giant pump, designed to keep something circulating.’ He paused, shrugging. ‘Could be a transfusion machine too. There’s bits and pieces here I recognise from the OR.’

  ‘Transfusion?’ Panettierre asked. Her eyes seemed to light up, and that did it, the idea emerging from the dark surface of my blood like a whale breaching the ocean. I knew what Panettierre wanted. It was the only thing she had ever wanted, even right back at the beginning when I’d first met her in the hospital. She wanted control.

  ‘The blood is power,’ I said. ‘It is blood, not the machine, which lets you manipulate the nectar and everything it touches.’

  ‘Alex, what are you doing?’ Zee said. ‘Don’t tell her anything.’

  But neither Panettierre nor I was listening. Our eyes were locked, both of us refusing to look away.

  ‘Your blood?’ she asked, her small tongue flicking over her lips, lizard-like.

  ‘It isn’t my blood,’ I replied. ‘It belongs to something else, something older than time, something evil.’

  ‘And you expect me to believe that?’ she said, her painted grin never slipping.

  ‘I don’t care if you believe it or not,’ I said, my voice pulsating. ‘It is the truth.’

  How could she deny it, after everything she’d seen? The entity she looked at now, that she talked to, was no boy, it was a god whose eyes were spinning portals, black holes in the fabric of space and time, whose voice echoed from every cell, every particle in the room. I could see the desire burning through her, her hunger for power.

  ‘It will kill you,’ I said, guessing the thoughts that ran through her mind. ‘The blood cannot survive in everyone, only in children.’

  I wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but the nectar worked only with kids, and the stranger had chosen Alfred Furnace – and me – when we were young. Panettierre shook her head, uttering a snort of laughter that sounded more animal than human.

  ‘Can you work it?’ It took me a moment to realise she was talking to the soldiers.

  ‘Colonel,’ said the one who wasn’t wounded. ‘This is a bad idea.’

  ‘Can you work it?’ she said again.

  ‘Ma’am, please—’ started Bates.

  Panettierre walked to him, punching the barrel of her pistol into his mouth. I heard the crack of broken teeth as his head crunched against the machine. Her finger tightened, and for a second I thought she was actually going to shoot him. Then she bent down and whispered into his ear.

  ‘Do as I say, soldier, or I will kill you. We’re at war, and disobeying a direct order is punishable by death, do you understand?’

  He nodded, his teeth clacking against the weapon.

  ‘Can you make it work?’ she asked, and he tilted his head forward then back again, as gently as possible. She paused a moment more, then pulled the gun free, wiping the blood and spit off on her trousers. Bates spun round, his face grey. He beckoned for the other man to help him, both soldiers looking like frightened children as they inspected the levers and dials built into the machine. Panettierre was back in front of me, her face so twisted by excitement and insanity that she reminded me of a lunatic Punch doll.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Zee asked, even though he must have already known.

  ‘I’m ending this war,’ Panettierre replied. ‘I’m taking control of enemy troops. Once I can command them, it will all be over.’

  ‘But they’re already—’ Lucy said. I flashed them a look, shaking my head, and Zee must have recognised it because he put a hand on Lucy’s arm, stopping her from finishing. Panettierre didn’t see the exchange, her attention on the straps beside me, the ones that held the remains of Furnace. She reached up, pulling chunks of him away, his body crumbling at the slightest touch, filling the air with powdered flesh.

  ‘It will kill you,’ I said again. But there was no stopping her. Every last shred of sanity that remained had been obliterated. There was only hunger.

  ‘It will kill you too,’ Zee said to me. I didn’t answer.

  Panettierre had pushed herself into the slot where Furnace had once been suspended, calling on one of the soldiers to fix her into place. The man didn’t argue, tightening the straps across her arms and legs, looping the belt around her waist and easing the cradle down over her head. The pulse of the machine seemed to speed up, as if
it could sense a fresh body in its grip.

  ‘Is it ready?’ she asked. Bates nodded, but his expression told a different story.

  ‘I think it’s just a case of pulling these levers,’ he said. ‘There’s a pretty simple transfusion system in place. But I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

  ‘I do,’ Panettierre said, her face wild.

  I could feel my blood begin to race, the stranger’s excitement at the possibility of a new host. I had failed him, I had refused to give in to his requests, I had imprisoned him inside my own thoughts. Now he faced his freedom, and the possibility of revenge. I thought about what had happened to Furnace when the blood had gone, his body turned to dust. I tried not to picture the same thing happening to me. If I had to risk sacrificing myself to kill the stranger, though, then I was willing to do it. It wasn’t like I had a lot to live for.

  I turned to Zee. I looked like a monster, and I didn’t want him to remember me this way, but the least I could give him after everything we’d been through was a smile.