Against Gravity

Kendrick nodded. Holland was relatively tolerant about Labrats. "And?"

"I started seeing things just a little while after you did."

"Christ, Caroline, if you'd only told me-"

"I didn't want to tell you! I saw things, so many things, and Robert spoke to me-"

"Robert is dead."

The expression on her face was filled with such cold fury that Kendrick looked away immediately. "You don't need to remind me," she replied with icy bitterness. "But he spoke to me. He's still alive in some way."

"Caroline, some very fucked-up stuff is happening around me. Someone tried to blow up Malky's bar, and earlier today I saw someone – someone who claimed to be a friend of Buddy's – get killed right in front of me." He saw the shock on her face. "People are trying to tell me things, and I have to take notice of that. I have to start asking serious questions." He gestured down the street towards Hardenbrooke's clinic. "You see that place over there? Somebody told me that the guy who's being paid to save my life is in fact out to get me – why, I don't know. Now Erik Whitsett turns up and tells me. we're all – all of us – seeing the same damn things in our dreams."

Kendrick laughed, aware of the edge of panic in his voice. "But then, maybe we're not seeing the same things, so go figure! I have to get to the bottom of this. I don't have any idea where to find Buddy, or even if he's going to give me a reasonable explanation for what's going on, so in the meantime I'm just going to go in there and find some things out. Unless, Caroline, there's something you really need to tell me."

He looked at her expectantly. She was pale, trembling, not meeting his gaze. When the words came, she gave a good impression of having to force them. "When we were in the Maze…" He nodded encouragingly. "When they made us… I didn't know that you were down there with him, that you were the one who killed Robert. I didn't know you were the one that did it." Anger crept into her words. "I didn't know you'd killed my brother. And you didn't even, not ever, not during the whole time we were together, have the fucking grace to tell me, you miserable, pathetic, fucking bastard."

Kendrick nodded again, this time in understanding, and sat back. It had started raining, fat grey drops sliding in miniature rivers down the glass.

"Caroline, none of us had any choice. He would have killed me-"

"And don't I just wish he had!" she screamed, her face contorted with rage. She was weeping now. "He was my brother."

Kendrick fell silent, embarrassed and suddenly inarticulate, wondering just how she had found out. Buddy, perhaps? But he'd promised never to speak about that. Who else might have known?

Or had something that looked like Robert, spoke with Robert's voice and shared Robert's memories told her?

But at least he knew now why she'd thrown him out.

Kendrick rehearsed the lines in his head. I had another seizure – two again. I almost died. You have to help me. What would happen after that was anybody's guess, but he had to get in there and find out if McCowan's ghost had been as right about Hardenbrooke as it had been about the bomb.

He stepped up to the door of the clinic, which had no handle nor any other obvious means for people to exit or enter. On previous occasions he had been peripherally aware of hidden security equipment sca

This time, however, he had no appointment.

It was easy to speculate about who Hardenbrooke's other clients might be. Kendrick was far from being the only Labrat who'd washed up on these shores in dire need of medical assistance that he could never acquire legally.

Kendrick pushed against the door, but it remained locked. He stepped back and looked over to the nearest windows, rising behind tall railings. Below the railings the ground dropped away to a basement level.

He looked around to check if anyone was hanging around nearby. Caroline had long since driven off, abandoning him to his fate. He touched the door's surface again, feeling a tingle where his hand came into contact with it.

He closed his eyes, sensing the security devices built into the fabric of the door like intricate webs of invisible activity. He moved his hand across the door's width, letting his augments trace and follow the pulses of electrical energy there

Several seconds later Kendrick heard a loud clunk and the door opened a millimetre or two.

That wasn't me.

He couldn't understand or interpret the actions of his augmentations, but he could think about something, and if it had to do with infiltration, assassination or any of a hundred specifically military applications, his body could find a way to perform it. This was not something Kendrick was proud of or wanted. The price of it, after all, had been grievously high, and it rarely produced desirable results.

He touched the door once more and this time it swung open easily.

Someone was letting him in.

Kendrick gazed across the familiar hallway: stairs ascended and descended in a tight spiral at the far end. He stepped in and the door closed slowly behind him, shutting off all sounds of the street.

"Hello?" he called out. There was another door just ahead, on his right. He'd never been through it before. He stepped up to it and pushed. It opened smoothly.

Somewhere behind him he heard a faint tpp-tap sound. He glanced over his shoulder to see a security device of a kind he vaguely remembered from some technology-obsessed gridcha

Fine. So be it.

Kendrick walked back out and along to the stairwell, then called Hardenbrooke's name loudly. He waited for several seconds without hearing an answer, gazing down at the steps curving away below him.

Fuck it. He walked back to the door he'd opened earlier and entered to find himself in a room entirely devoid of furniture, equipment… anything.

Peeling wallpaper curled down from one corner of the ceiling, and a thin layer of dust coated the white-painted sashes of the windows overlooking the street.

A large empty packing crate stood over to one side, while a greyed-out eepsheet lay in the dust beside it, its internal power source long since dead.

Behind the crate he found a chair, its plastic grey and scarred, the fabric of the seat stained and torn.

This room clearly hadn't been used in a long time.

Tickety-tap, tickety-tap. The spider-device had somehow made its way all the way down from the hallway ceiling and around the door frame, following him into the room. Or was there more than one of them?

Kendrick peered up at it, noting a tiny metallic platform, with a range of minuscule equipment mounted on top, propelled by six cruel-looking jointed legs. It had the smooth metallic-organic appearance of vat-grown molecular technology. Tiny, perfectly machined gears and joints slithered in perfect accord, shifting to follow Kendrick as he stepped back out into the hallway.

He stood again at the top of the stairwell, watching with a certain degree of foreboding as the device negotiated its way back out of the empty room to continue watching him.

Then he heard it: the distant muffled sound of a smothered cough, inaudible to anyone with normal hearing. It had come from below, from the rooms where Hardenbrooke held his regular appointments with Kendrick.

He laid a hand on the black-painted banister and went down. "Hardenbrooke?"

Below, the clinic was wreathed in semi-darkness, the leather couch and the apparatus that surrounded it in the centre of the room resembling some esoteric hightech sculpture. Next to them stood the familiar wheeled tray of surgical instruments and sprays.