The Millennium Wheel was wired for light. Each ellipsoidal car, wrapped in a smart plastic lamina, rippled with scarlet, indigo and white patterns, shining even in sunlight. The struts, braided with optic fibres, shimmered with a thousand colours, shifting in time to the music's beat – atop a tall pedestal stage on the Embankment proper, a band was playing, their instruments redfanging the lights: a visual kaleidoscope phaselocked to the beat.
"It's brilliant," said Richard.
"Yeah, watch now." Opal pointed. "That's Hammerfeld, from Norway, you want to talk about brilliant."
The grassy square next to the Wheel contained a complex arrangement of scaffolding towers, some with tough lightweight sheeting to form walls, plus ramps and outcrops of hard plastic with minimal padding. The competitors were doing their thing two at a time, partly because this was a friendly competition for little prize money, a demo showcasing the participants of next week's Xtreme Run championships. Most of the foreign competitors were already here in London.
Richard knew all this because Opal had explained it several times over. He even remembered some of the nicknames.
"That's Mjolnir, right? Aka the Hammer?"
"Not bad, Richie."
People were swirling all around them. Brian had gone off somewhere with some older guys his own age.
"What are the towers for? They're too smooth to climb up."
"Only for the freerunners. No gloves, no skates, see? This is the freerunning; the gekrunners come afterwards."
"And old Hammer up there is a freerunner."
"He does both, actually, unlike most of them. In competition, leastways."
Brand names and mottos of clothing and equipment companies scrolled down the ramps and slides and towers. Opal and the other squatters, gekrunners or not, despised the System, meaning banks and ordinary jobs and all the rest; but they accepted companies promoting their gek-gear, because otherwise there would be no events like this, no money to pay for people to come from abroad, or to hire in the massive stands, and whatever else it took.
Of them all, it seemed only Brian saw the contradictions in their views.
And me.
At least Brian had a place among them.
What can I do?
Athleticism was alien to him. If he were at home now, he'd be up his bedroom, reading a book on his widescreen, drinking a Diet Coke or milk, pretending not to hear Father downstairs swearing as he got deeper into the whisky, or the rows with the in-house staff, the screech of wheels if Father set off for a drunken, too-fast drive in his ElectroBentley X.
"Richie, did you see that?"
"Uh, what?"
"He went from like a Lache into… Never mind."
"Sorry."
"You all right?"
"Sure. Yeah."
There were smells of roasting food, nuts and cicadas and chicken, and the sweetness of candy floss; but the pain in his stomach was familiar now, a constant hard pressure. His lack of money was a reality. But Opal was with him.
She was focused on the freerunners cartwheeling and leaping around the competition stage: absorbed, lips apart and eyes alight, perhaps seeing herself up there one day, feeling how it would be to flip through the air like that, enjoy the attention of the crowd. At least, that was what he thought was happening in her head.
The music was a piece he knew, Everyone Runs From Something, and he would normally remember the name of the band but tonight it wasn't there in his mind. Despite the crowd all around and Opal beside him, he felt more lost than he had ever imagined he could be. People jostled and cheered the freerunners' performance, which to him was a montage of senseless movement and confusion.
None of this was right.
Josh followed the stream of people. At intervals, he checked his phone, then, after finding no search hits, he randomly accessed the footage his software agents were analysing. Around the Embankment and further east at South Bank and Waterloo, the flow of faces and bodies along the streets formed an organic river, so hard to dive inside for individuals, especially when they were kids, shorter than the throng of adults. If they were here at all.
More people passing meant a wealth of video data, more possibilities – counterbalanced by the difficulty of seeing someone clearly enough for recognition. All around was a press of individuals caught up in the tidal motion of the crowd, though each of those thousands was a self-aware individual, a human being with success and failures, loves and disappointments, a family past and an unknown future; while he himself could drift with his thoughts or come back to reality: a fourteen year-old boy needed to be found, for his own sake and Suzanne's.
Josh bought a pink candyfloss, so he looked like someone here for pure enjoyment, and held it in his right hand, keeping his fingers away from the wispy, sticky sugar-cloud.
On the grass area by the Eye, gekrunners were warming up. He moved closer, protective of his candyfloss, finding a place to stand. Ignoring the competition spectacle, he looked around the crowd, trying to spot a girl or lad matching the images in his mind. Meanwhile, his phone was in his sealed shirt pocket, ready to vibrate if one of his querybots found a hit.
Around him, some wore their phones velcroed to sleeves or on bands around wrist or biceps. Though the fabric would make a noise if pulled, this place was crowded and the music was loud – wearing phones that way invited theft. That was why Josh's was in his pocket.
A strange hand took hold of his knife hilt.
He reacted as trained, slapping his hand against the attacker's, pinning his grip and knife, dropping his weight as he spun, free hand hammering down, still with the candyfloss – impale the eyeball – but the attacker was small – pull back – eight or nine years old – Jesus Christ – and he diverted the strike in time. He twisted the trapped hand, and the kid went to his knees.
"I should snap every bone in your arm. If I sneeze it'll happen anyway."
"S-sorry."
"Get up." He unpinned the hand. "Come on."
"All right. You didn't have to hurt me."
"Sod off."
This was a child with a story as intricate and emotive as Richard Broomhall's; but no one could solve every problem in the world, and dragging the kid to the police would do nothing to achieve what he was here for. After a moment, the kid started to slide off through the crowd.
"No. Stop," said Josh.
The kid froze.
"Take this." Josh thrust the candyfloss at him. "Take it."
A shaking hand closed on the stick.
"Now sod off, and think how different things might have been."
The kid went.
Shit. Suzanne would've handled that better.
Maybe it was because he worked best with a single focus, a clear mission objective that "I saw you manhandling that boy."
"What?"
A tubby man, his convex belly straining his polo shirt, pointed a short finger and said: "You're a bully and a bad parent, and I've half a mind to report you to-"
Josh's hand whipped out, thumb hooked, the web of skin striking the idiot's throat.
"Chh-" The guy rocked in place, panicked and frozen.
Fuck it.
Josh walked away, knowing the idiot could not follow, would not be able to speak for a time. Swallowing food was going to be a bitch as well. Call it the Cumberland diet.
He didn't deserve that.
The voice inside his head was Maria's.
On the periphery of the crowd, freerunners were tumbling in a loose, lighthearted fashion. None of the competitors were up on the competition stand: some kind of break between events. They all looked to be in their teens. Josh wondered if he could match them, then realised he had no chance.
Good discipline.
It looked impromptu, and free format was obviously the name of the game, but they all had techniques in common and knew how to perform them. Josh might not be trained in what they did, but he understood how the body moved, and these guys simply flowed.
"Very nice," he said, as one of them jumped from the riverside railing, performed a vertical spinning crescent kick – at least that was how Josh thought of the move – and dropped to the ground, into a shoulder roll, and came up with a hands-free cartwheel to land in a crouch.
"Cheers, man," said the freerunner.
One of the others, a white guy with dreadlocks tied in a topknot, nodded.
"I hear you guys are doing a night run," said Josh.
"Yeah, we're part of that, all right."
"It's a bit crowded here."
"Not after dark," said Dreadlocks, "but we're not starting from here. Down at South Bank, outside the old theatre, then down the underpass ramps and up around the station."
"You're going to freerun through Waterloo?"
"Through it, under it, and over the top," said one of the others. "Gonna be good."
"I'll be watching," said Josh. "Take it easy."
"You, too."
He wandered away, heading east alongside the river, staring at the crowd and food vendors. Across the darkening waters, the stately turbines were slowly rotating, their vanes' leading edges rippling with electrophosphorescent red, glowing like blood on a blade.
Suzanne. I wish I'd invited you.
But she might be with a client now, and if she were free and came, his attention would be on her. He was here was to find Richard Broomhall, and everything else was secondary.
Reaching the South Bank complex, he stopped. There was a jumble of grey concrete blocks and ramps, the old theatre building with its balcony patio where the clientele were drinking wine spritzers, while down below some twenty young men and women were wandering among the people and the architecture, doing pretty much the same as Josh: taking in every aspect of the geometry, internalising a model of the surroundings in three-dimensional detail.
It felt strange to be among kindred spirits. But their goal was different from his, because they were mapping vectors of movement across a 3-D urban setting for the sheer flowing fun of it; while he was planning to snatch a kid – Richard, or else Opal, if only she appeared.
The incident with the idiot had made him realise that if Richard or Opal called for help, there would be dozens of athletic helpers all around. While he might be able to beat them in a straight run on barren land, in this cluttered city world, with a struggling kid in hand, he would have no chance of getting away.
Suzanne, if she were here, would find some way of explaining to the gekrunners that it was for Richard's benefit; but for Josh there was too much risk. And there was something else, because of the promise he had made to Viv, the woman at the shelter who had helped him – he would not drag Richard back to his father against his will. And that meant no police.
He circumnavigated the boxy building several times, then moved along the nightrunners' probable route, towards the Imax Ruin in Cardboard City, and up to the Victorian-looking sculpture of Waterloo station's entrance: stone flags and banners, memorials to former railway workers who fell during wartime, defending the country against an implacable enemy.
Had there been a single conflict since then that made as much moral sense?
Forget it. Look and concentrate.
In the station he drank coffee and ate a yoghurtcoated flapjack, used the facilities, then left via the pedestrian skyway over the EuroLev terminal – if Suzanne were here, they could be in Paris within the hour – and descended to ground level. He followed the streets and underpasses back to South Bank, made a final looping circuit of the theatre complex, and found a place to sit near the riverside railings.
Waiting was one of his best skills.
When it was dark, they began to congregate. All wore shirts that gleamed with light – some with blazing white backgrounds across which moving figures jumped and tumbled, while slogans scrolled down the garments, many reading: Le Mouvement, C'est Moi; others with shining kaleidoscopic patterns that lit up the night in a sea of shining colours.
It was terrific, a spectacle Josh had not expected. It was also horrific in terms of identifying a solitary kid. There were non-gekrunners among the throng, but at least two hundred wore the shining animated shirts, rendering the surroundings darker by contrast, as much a problem for the omnipresent cameras as for human vision.
French voices sounded among them. Gekrunning came from and coexisted with parkour, as created in the northern suburbs of Paris. Josh knew that, though the closest he had come to freerunning was swarming over endless assault courses.
Shit. Where's this Opal?
He was trying to zero in on the smaller figures among the gekrunners, but their relative shortness would mean they were hidden by the shining shirts and other gear. This was a nightmare of a mission that should have been straightforward: look for a kid and find him.
"Listen up, everybody." The speaker was a Frenchman, standing on one of the concrete blocks that served as seat or sculpture. "We start the main run in twenty minutes. For now, have fun around these structures" – he crouched down to slap concrete – "and in twenty minutes, we will meet our Waterloo!"
Two hundred people cheered, and even Josh laughed.
Then the night exploded into brilliance as movieimage garments shone and their wearers leaped in all directions, tumbling and spinning, performing running jumps, vaulting over seats and off railings, while others skated at high speed across the flagstones, boots set to near-zero friction, and some began to spider up the theatre's external walls, using gek-gloves.
All those moving images were an absolute Idiot.
– golden opportunity for anyone who thought of himself as a tech-head, a warrior-geek from the Regiment's Ghost Force, who ought to know better than to feel stymied when he was surrounded by technology that was waiting to be subverted. From his pocket he took out his rolled-up touchboard, unfurled it and clipped his phone on top, the tiny current causing his touchboard to snap into useful rigidity.
Come on, Cumberland. You can do it.
Well, of course he could, but the question was whether he could do it in time, because in twenty minutes – less now – these buggers would be gone, running over the buildings as well as past them. If it was hard enough to spot a missing kid now, it would be impossible when the night run was in full flow.
The time to have had this idea was an hour ago, maybe two, when he could have dawdled over his coffee and flapjack and worked the way an old coder knew best. But his fingers were already flowing across the touchpad.
Here we go.
This was the true Zen, the immersion in a task so total there was no bandwidth left for self-conscious thought. He went deep, very deep, out of necessity; so that when he finally sucked in a breath and came out of it, his task completed, there were runners all around getting ready for the off. Twenty minutes had passed. His opportunity was almost gone.
But in his display, several panes were blinking red, code was ready to be loosed, packages anxious to be broadcast. Compiled and zipped, loaded and ready to go.
"So, everybody" – it was the French guy standing on the same concrete block – "we count down, ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five…"
Sound disappeared from Josh's awareness as he focused on the display, letting the code fly. Then he brought himself back.
"…two… er, what is-? I mean, let's go!"
Every shirt blazed the exact same shade of pink, then mutated to a sapphire blue, while in the centre of each garment, front and back, a picture of Opal (retrieved by backtracking from her avatar) appeared. Beneath it scrolled a message in scarlet:
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?
No one could transmit to every shirt through the web at once, but Josh's phone redfanged to those nearest, and those shirts redfanged to their neighbours, and the whole cascade took place in under a second. Now, every shirt appeared synchronised as Opal faded out, and an image of Richard appeared.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY?
The runners' concentration was broken. Some faltered in their first manoeuvres; others simply turned inward, congregating with their nearest neighbours, all voicing some variation of "What the hell is this?", "Qu'est-ce qui se passe?" or "C'est merde!"
There was a ripple in the pattern of light, and that was all he needed. He redfanged the abort, and every shirt resumed its normal display.
"Everyone, come on!"
Freerunners and gekrunners flowed into motion, tumbling and running over obstacles, some of the gekrunners ascending the theatre walls like gymnastic spiders, their shirts pulsing with light, a beautiful spectacle for anyone with time to watch, but not Josh. He broke into a run, trying to catch the eye of the storm, the centre of the rough circle of disturbance: the reaction of people near Richard or Opal. From the way that centre had moved, he thought it must be the girl: someone capable of running with the rest.
In the gloomy dark no one paid much attention to a solitary runner wearing unlit clothes who chose to run along the ground without gymnastics. All around were vaulting, wheeling, flick-flacking urban athletes. For a moment, as he sprinted around the side of the theatre, he lost his target – light and movement, runners everywhere – and then he poured on the speed – there – and in a moment he had her.
Come on, run.
Her motion matched the gait of the figure in the surveillance logs, and she appeared to be doing the same as him: running without worry about spectacular moves, in her case because she was fleeing. Pointing his phone like a gun as he ran, he redfanged the target code – got her – and immediately the back of her shirt began to pulse pink like a strobing Barbie, a beacon impossible to miss.
Tumbling figures were all around and someone must have guessed what he was up to because – "Got him!" – there was a grip on his sleeve – no – and he slammed into the gekrunner instead of pulling away, twisting and using momentum, and then he was free – run hard – as another grabbed and Josh's kick scythed low – "Ah shit!" – taking out the knee, tipping Josh forward but he fell into a sprinting step and continued – faster – then he was pouring on the speed – push it – as his assailants fell behind.
The concrete ramp sloped into darkness, the pedestrian underpass leading to Cardboard City, its walls alight with gekrunners in sparkling shirts. Josh looked up – move – as one of them dropped like a hunting spider, arms clamping hard around him – roll out – so he dropped forward as if falling, clasping the gekrunner to go with him, managing to hook an ankle – got it – and they went over together, a combat sambo classic, concrete-nightsky-concrete filling his vision – move on – hearing the cry and soft crunch, then he was rolling up from the prostrate body, running once more, looking for his target.
Flashing pink, ahead.
Sprint now.
Still on the downslope with the girl further below, obstacles everywhere, dodging homeless folk and gekrunners, gaining on her now because this was fellrunning of a kind, the art of accelerating where other runners would slow to avoid injury, definitely gaining – getting close – and into the underpass, tearing past cardboard-box homes, faces open or blank with confusion at the blazing, lit-up gekrunners bounding and somersaulting all around. Then he was into the circular plaza that was below ground level, open to the night sky, dominated by the cracked and blackened cylinder of the Imax Ruin.
The girl jerked left, altering course.
Spotted me.
Possibly, but this area was more open, and by turning a right angle she opened up the possibility that he would follow the hypotenuse of the triangle, cutting her off, and perhaps she did not understand evasion, but she was a gekrunner and they had good instincts and – there he is – because the boy Richard was up ahead, and Opal had changed direction to draw pursuit away, but it wasn't going to work. He poured on the speed, reaching to grab the stumbling boy.
"I'm a fr-"
Something massive barrelled into him as he twisted, arcing back with his right elbow – a thud of impact – continuing the spin to slam a knee into the liver, then haul the head down to concrete – no, not to kill – and redirect the flow, spinning the attacker to ground as – another one coming – and the second gekrunner was fast, a woman, whipping a kick toward him – no – as he slammed his palm-heel into her spleen and spun her aside, leaping forward and hooking his hand to grab – got you – and then he had the boy, his target.
The gekrunners were not finished because three of them were making a spectacular run sideways along the curved wall – you have to be kidding – and he got ready for their hurtling approach as a foot slipped, a gek-gauntlet struck concrete at the wrong angle, and then the gekrunner was tumbling, arms flailing, striking another, arcing through the air and trying to twist out but too late as her head struck concrete with a crack of sound, stopping everything.
No.
Everything but the second gekrunner toppling, her balance thrown off, shirt pulsing pink as she dropped, hitting sideways and rolling to stillness.
Next to Josh, the boy was frozen, not running anywhere; and the third gekrunner, a male, had halted, clinging to the wall. Beyond, on the far side of the circular atrium, a beautiful flow of light continued: the majority of the gekrunners into their night run as planned, oblivious to the chase, the tragedy splayed upon concrete.
A dark puddle spread, slow and viscous, beneath the first gekrunner's head.
Blood looks black at night.
Then Josh's phone was out, and he was stabbing the emergency icon. "Ambulance, this location, now. One probable fatality, one possible. Gekrunners, made a long fall. There are others injured."
He disabled the normal misdirection, so they could read his coordinates in clear.
Shit. So stupid.
As the third gekrunner inched down to the ground, others drew closer, switching off their shirt displays, congregating around their fallen friends. All were silent. One knelt to check pulse and breathing, taking care not to shift the head. Beside Josh, Richard was trembling.
Within minutes sirens burped and whooped. Green strobing light preceded the arrival of a paramedic motorcycle, manoeuvring with care amid the makeshift cardboard homes, rolling down to the flat ground. Overhead, more lights reflected off the Ruin, as an ambulance circled the roundabout, looking for a way in.
Richard whispered: "Opal."
A gurney came rattling down a ramp, pushed by the ambulance crew. Their motorcycle colleague was already snapping support-braces around Opal, and spraying fast-foam to stabilise her. Then the ambulance guys slid a thin pallet beneath her, before raising her onto the gurney. As they turned, the back of their jumpsuits revealed a cheerful bulldog symbol and the slogan "Timmy Is Your Friend". From some children's hospital.
Richard gave a cry, then shuddered into stillness.
What the hell?
Josh kept his hand on the boy's shoulder.
The paramedics conferred. Then the ambulance guys pushed the gurney, now with Opal, back the way they had come. The motorcyclist returned to the other fallen body. After less than a minute, the siren whooped overhead as the ambulance sped into motion.
So the other gekrunner was dead.
Perhaps Richard made the connection, too, because he slumped, and Josh had to move fast to catch him. Then, carrying the fourteen year-old in his forearms, he backed away. Soon the police would arrive. Moving softly, he circled around the back of the Imax Ruin, took an exit ramp directly opposite the accident site, and went up to ground level, checking for spycams, his phone polling and disabling, getting him clear.
Finally, down a narrow street behind an ornate Victorian red brick building, he put Richard down, feet first. The lad swayed then stood there, like a window mannequin.
Josh thumbed his phone and raised it.
"Hi," said Suzanne's image. "How are y-?"
"I need you now."
She might have blinked.
"All right."