“We’re skipping school tomorrow,” Kami said. “We have to go to London and find Henry Thornton.”
PART IV
BECOMING REAL
Chapter Twenty-One
From Year to Year
“I can’t believe you wouldn’t take the bike,” said Jared.
“I’m sorry,” Kami told him. “I have this irrational fear of fatal road accidents. Anyway, getting here by public transport was perfectly simple.”
It had meant waiting an hour for the rattling bus out of Sorry-in-the-Vale, then switching to another bus, and finally catching a train at Moreton-in-the-Marsh. It would have been fine without some fool grumbling in her brain about the speed of his motorbike.
“Oh yes,” Jared said. “Perfectly simple.”
The redbrick walls and greenhouse ceiling of Waterloo Station gave Kami heart. She was acting at last, doing something to help. She grinned up at Jared, who was standing with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders braced. The feeling of discomfort she’d been getting from him since they got on the second bus (which she had put down to crankiness about his bike) niggled at her. She pushed at his defenses and Jared pushed back, not letting her in. He did smile back at her, though.
“Shall we be on our way?” he asked.
Henry Thornton’s apartment in South Ealing was more accessible by bus than by train, so they had another walk.
“And another bus,” Jared moaned.
“We have to work through your thing about public transport,” Kami said. “Did you ever take a bus on a school trip as a child? Was it a nice safe journey, driving at reasonable speed, being environmentally sound, and leading to an educational experience? I shudder to think.”
They walked over Waterloo Bridge. In the distance on either side bristled metallic buildings, like weapons in the hands of enemy forces. Kami realized whose mind that thought had come from and glanced up at Jared. The wind blew in from the river and ruffled his blond hair; his profile beneath was inscrutable.
“And here you’re supposed to be the glamorous city kid.”
“I just like Sorry-in-the-Vale,” Jared said.
“Sure, it’s nice,” said Kami. “But I like London too.”
Cars ran on either side of the river, every second one a black cab. Big posters stood against the sky, flickering from a picture of a bank to another picture of a woman laughing with parted scarlet lips. People went by, some with their heads down, some with their umbrellas pessimistically up despite the fact that there was no rain. There was an Indian man in a red turban, and two girls walked by talking in a Chinese dialect.
Her dad had attended only one year of college in London before he had to come back and marry her mother. The times she came to London with him were the times when Kami wondered if he regretted it. Here nobody knew who she was, that she talked to imaginary people or that she was the daughter of the son of that Japanese woman, one of theirs and not quite one of theirs. Nobody looked twice at her or Jared. It was just the two of them, passing unnoticed by the whole world.
Kami reached for Jared’s hand. She barely brushed skin with her fingertips, the contact sending a jolt through her, when Jared flinched automatically back. She felt his regret a second later, but by then she had snatched her hand away.
Kami, said Jared.
Kami pointed to a spot along the concrete-lined riverbank, where there were trees starving in little cages. Kami raised her eyebrows when that thought came to her: Jared really did not like London.
“Bus stop’s that way,” she said, and walked ahead of him.
Henry Thornton’s flat was in the middle of a residential area. They had to go past two schools, six corner shops, and innumerable houses squashed together before they found it.
Thirty-Two Cromwell Gardens did not have any gardens around it. It was an uninspiring gray block of flats, all the windows uniformly rectangular. There was a matching gray wall immediately before the building, with the gate standing ajar. Someone had grown climbing roses on the wall, but at this stage in autumn that only meant the stone was covered in dry brown twigs and thorns.
“What do we say when we press the button for Flat 16?” Jared asked, after they had stood looking at the building for a couple of minutes.
Kami looked at the way he was slumped against the wall and realized that she had been right at the train station. The closed-off feeling she’d been getting from him, with something rippling underneath it, wasn’t crankiness or anger. She did not usually look at Jared for long, stealing glances to match up with his thoughts in her mind. The reality of him always made her bite her lip and look away too soon. She studied him now; the shoulders she’d already noticed were braced, and the gleam of sweat at his hairline, darkening that already dark-blond hair.
“You’re sick,” she said, startled.
“I’m fine,” Jared said sharply.
“We can just go. We can go now.”
“We didn’t come all this way to run back because I’m feeling a little peaky,” Jared bit out. “Kami! Come on.” He didn’t say it, but that didn’t matter because she heard it in his mind anyway. I’ll be fine. Nicola won’t be.
“All right!” Kami said, pushing away the thought of what had happened to Nicola, because Jared was right: she’d come here with a mission. “We’ll talk to Henry Thornton. Then we’ll go home.”
“So, what are you going to say when we press the buzzer?” Jared asked.
“I’m not going to ring the buzzer,” Kami informed him.
Jared said, We’re breaking in? I’m so happy I never have to be bored again.
Kami slipped in through the open gate and waited, Jared beside her. She didn’t have to wait long, and her luck was better than she could have hoped for. A woman came out, pushing a pram. Kami held the door for her with a smile. The woman smiled back absently, and as she went out the gate, Kami and Jared slipped in through the door.
“Not looking like a delinquent is very helpful,” Kami told Jared serenely. “Which is why you should take a step back when I knock on Henry Thornton’s door. Once it’s open, if we have to, we’ll push our way in.”
Flat 16 was on the ground floor. Kami knocked on the green door and lifted her face to the level of the eyehole with a guileless smile.
The door opened.
“Hi,” Kami said warmly, and stopped, startled.
It was Henry Thornton. She recognized him from his Internet profile, dark curly hair above a thin serious face, but that was hardly a surprise. Henry’s profile had said he was twenty-four, but he looked younger just now. He also looked strangely helpless, his cheeks flushed and his eyes too bright.
Henry was sick too.
“If you’re here to ask me if I’ve accepted the love of our Savior into my heart,” Henry said, “I feel awful right now and I feel Jewish all the time, so—”
Kami laid her hand flat against the door, trying to maintain an ingratiating smile. Unfortunately, that made the door swing inward just a little too much.
Henry saw Jared. His eyes narrowed. He breathed, “Lynburn.” He didn’t shut the door; he bolted backward from it.
Kami hesitated, her palm still against the door, uncertain whether causing it to swing all the way open would be a mistake or not. Henry might be more inclined to talk if they didn’t seem too pushy.
She hesitated, but she only hesitated for an instant. Then Henry pulled the door wide open and came running through it, right at Jared. The back of Jared’s head hit the wall at the same time the side of his head caught a blow from the object in Henry’s hand.
Jared was on the ground, and Henry was standing over him with the gun trained on Jared’s face. “Did I not make myself clear?” Henry shouted. “I want nothing to do with it!”
Jared blinked slowly, about to lose consciousness. “What?” he asked in a thick voice.
“I don’t care what rewards you offer,” Henry said. “You disgust me. You and all those who follow you don’t deserve power. You deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth.”
Kami heard a little click, like a door closing. She knew what that was. It was the safety catch on the gun.
Kami ran in through Henry’s open door and right into his kitchen. She picked up the first thing she saw, which was a wooden stool. She charged back out, swinging it over her head and into Henry’s.
Henry stumbled and fell to his knees. The gun went flying. Kami hit Henry across his back with the stool again before she could lose her nerve. Then she dropped the stool, dashed down the corridor, and picked up the gun.
The metal slid in her sweaty hands. Kami swallowed the lump of panic in her throat and said to Henry Thornton, her voice emerging small and calm: “I wouldn’t move if I were you.”
Henry sagged on the carpet.
Kami didn’t understand why he’d done this, why he and Jared were both sick, but she wasn’t sticking around to ask him questions when Jared needed help. She decided that Henry was unlikely to be able to assault her with any success, fumbled at the catch on the gun, and shoved it in the pocket of her ruffled skirt. Then she stepped over Henry and knelt beside Jared.
“Hey,” she said, and when his eyelids did not even move, she barged into his mind. Hey, Jared. Come on.
Sick pain flooded through her, his pain. She wondered grimly how long he had been feeling this bad.
Jared! she shouted in his mind, blazing urgency everywhere. I’m right here. Jared, please!
Jared opened his eyes with a groan. They were unfocused and blurry, lashes trembling as if his eyes might close again any moment. Kami?
Come on, get up, Kami pleaded. Come on, try. We’re going home. It felt like she was pulling him up with mental as well as physical effort, dragging him out of unconsciousness as she hauled him to his feet. Jared grabbed at the wall and tried to stay upright, but he was leaning heavily on her.
“You don’t understand,” Henry mumbled from the floor. He looked as if he was fighting a losing battle against unconsciousness as well. “You don’t know what—what he is.”
“I know what I am,” said Kami. She started doggedly on her way down the corridor, fighting to keep Jared on his feet. “I’m on his side.”
She got a cab to the train station, where she cajoled and shoved Jared onto the train. She even got him onto the next bus, though as they were boarding, Jared’s eyes rolled to the back of his head. She had to take all his weight, and for a second she thought they would both go down.
Kami sat in the bus seat with Jared collapsed against her, his body limp though every breath was a low sob in her ear. She could feel the clammy sweat on his skin, rising hot and cooling fast on his cold face. He wasn’t having very many thoughts. There was just pain, and him still trying to hold on to her.
She knew she would never get him onto the last bus to Sorry-in-the-Vale. So she did the only thing she could think of at that point. She took out her phone with shaking hands and called her mother.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Happy in the Hour
Kami was sitting on the ground by the bus stop with Jared’s head in her lap when her mother’s car came around the corner, raising a cloud of pale yellow dust.
Mum did not bother with parking: she stopped the car in the middle of the street and threw herself out of it. “Kami!” she shouted, bronze hair flying like a flag. “How dare you run off without telling anyone, the day after a girl died!” She strode toward them, her face white with fury.
Kami sat on the ground, hunched her shoulders, and waited for the storm to break over her head. She felt too wretched and drained to do anything else. Mum stood over her, her shadow on Jared’s slack face, and was silent.
“I’m sorry,” Kami said quietly. “Please let me get him into the car.”
Mum sighed and knelt down. She was taller and stronger than Kami, so together they were able to wrestle Jared into the car. He tried to help, to please Kami, even though she could tell he wasn’t even aware her mother was there.