iBoy

10101

After I'd cleared away the picnic stuff from the roof and lugged it all back to the flat — and after Gram had virtu­ally forced me to tell her how it had all gone with Lucy — I went to my room and lay down in the dark and tried not to think about anything. I didn't want to think at all — I just wanted to feel what I was feeling ... and nothing else. I just wanted to lie there with Lucy.

The memory of her sunset eyes.

Her lips.

Her smile.

Her face.

Her kiss ...

It was all I'd ever wanted. All I'd ever needed.

I knew that now.

Nothing else mattered. Revenge, punishment, retribu­tion ... none of it mattered. My iPowers, my abilities, my knowing ... none of it was me. It was iBoy. And I wasn't iBoy — I was Tom Harvey, a perfectly normal sixteen-year-old kid, with no major problems, no secrets, no terrors ... no story to tell. Just a kid, that's all. With hopes and dreams ...

And a girl to think about... iBoy could never dream.

He could never make a wish come true.

But Tom Harvey could. iBoy had to go.

It was the only way I could get back to being Tom Harvey again, and being Tom Harvey was the only way I was ever going to be with Lucy. And that was my dream, and I needed it more than anything else.

Tomorrow, I decided.

I'd do it tomorrow.

First thing in the morning, I'd tell Gram everything — what had happened to me, what I could do, what I'd done, what I knew — and then, with her help, I'd tell everyone else who needed to know. The police, Mr Kirby, Lucy ...

It wasn't going to be easy, of course. The police were going to want to interview me about all the stuff I'd done, the damage I'd caused, the people I'd hurt, and how I'd hurt them ... and I was probably going to be arrested and charged ... if, that is, they actually believed me. Which was by no means guaranteed. But once I'd explained everything to Mr Kirby, and maybe proved to him and the police what I could do with my iBrain ... maybe then Mr Kirby could start working out how to get inside my head and get rid of whatever it was I needed to get rid of in order to get me back to normal again ...

Maybe.

And Lucy ...?

God, what was she going to think? I mean, even if she did already have a sneaking suspicion that I might have some connection with iBoy — and, after tonight, I was pretty sure that she suspected something — how was she going to react when she found out that it really was me who'd done all those things? And, even worse, that it was me she'd been talking to on MySpace ... me, pretending to be someone else. Lying to her. Betraying her trust. Using her ...

She'd hate me.

Wouldn't she?

She'd hate me, despise me, and I'd lose her ...

I'd lose her by trying to be true.

But the only way I was ever going to be with her was also by trying to be true.

Lucy was right, I thought to myself then. There are always two sides to everything.

I spent the next few hours just lying on my bed, thinking as hard as I could, racking my (ordinary) brain, trying to work out how to be true without losing everything ... and maybe if I'd had more time, I might just have come up with an answer.

But I didn't.

I never got the chance.

It was 02:12:16 when the doorbell rang. I was still lying on the bed, still fully dressed, still chasing circles inside my head, and I'd been lying there in the silent darkness for such a long time by then that some kind of inertia had set in. My head was dead. My body was ten thou­sand miles away. I wasn't really aware of myself any more. But when the doorbell rang, I was instantly wide awake.

Something was wrong.

It had to be.

The doorbell only rings at two o'clock in the morning when something is wrong.

With my iBrain already scanning for nearby phones, I jumped off the bed and ran out into the hallway. Gram was just coming out of her room, and it was obvious from her sleep-scrunched face and her messed-up hair that the doorbell had woken her up.

"Tommy?" she said sleepily, tightening the cord on her dressing gown. "What's going on?"

"I don't know ..."

The bell rang again.

Gram looked at me, slightly worried now. "Who could it be at this time of night?"

"I don't know."

She started moving towards the door. "Well, I suppose we'd better see —"

"Hold on, Gram," I said, moving ahead of her. "I'll deal with it."

"No, Tommy —" she started to say, but I was already at the door now. My iBrain had picked up the presence of four mobile phones in the corridor outside, all of them switched to silent.

"Who is it?" I called out.

There was a moment's silence, a muffled whisper, and then I heard Lucy's voice.

"Tom ...?"

She sounded desperate.

"Tom, don't — ummf. . ."

I didn't stop to think, I just grabbed the door handle, unlocked the door, and yanked it open ... and there they all were: Lucy, Eugene O'Neil, Yusef Hashim, a big black guy I'd never seen before ...

And Howard Ellman.

Lucy was barefoot, dressed only in a long white night­gown, so I guessed she'd just been dragged out of bed. Her face was streaked with tears, she had an ugly red cut just below her right eye, and her mouth was sealed with a strip of black tape. Yusef Hashim had a gun to her head. The gun, an automatic pistol, was taped to his hand and wrist with black insulation tape, and his hand and the pistol were tightly fixed to Lucy's head with more insulation tape. Hand, pistol, Lucy's head ... all taped together, like some kind of nightmare repair job.

I stared at Lucy, unable to move.

She was petrified.

And so was I.

"Hello, Thomas," Ellman said softly. "I hear you've been looking for me."

I stared at him, unable to speak.

"Just so you understand," he said, smiling calmly. "Hashim's finger is taped over the trigger of the gun, OK? So if you try zapping him, or me, or anyone else ... if you go anywhere near her, if you try calling the police ... if you do anything that I don't like, Hashim's going to pull the trigger and your girlfriend's brains are going to be splattered all over the place. Do you understand?"

"Yes," I said quietly. "I understand."

I saw his eyes glancing over my shoulder then, and as I turned to see what he was looking at, I saw Gram pick­ing up the phone in the hallway.

"No, Gram!" I shouted. "No ..."

Ellman pushed past me, shoving me into the wall, and strode over to where Gram was standing. Without a moment's thought, he snatched the phone from her hand, ripped out the cable, then cracked her across the head with the phone. She didn't make a sound, she just crumpled to the floor and lay still, her head streaming with blood.

"You fucking bastard," I spat, lunging at Ellman.

"Hash," he said quickly.

A muffled cry of pain stopped me in my tracks, and I turned round to see that Hashim had rammed Lucy's head against the wall and was digging the barrel of the gun into her head.

"I warned you," Ellman said to me. "You make another move, your bitch is dead."

As I turned to face him, breathing heavily, he just smiled at me.

I looked down at Gram. Her face was very pale, and she was breathing shallowly. Through gritted teeth, I said to Ellman, "She needs help."

He shrugged, "It's up to you — you can help her all you want ... as long as you don't mind having a girlfriend with no head."

I heard the flat door closing then, and I looked down the hallway to see Lucy being dragged into the front room by Hashim, with O'Neil and the black guy follow­ing them.

I gazed down at Gram again, then back at Ellman. "Can I at least get her into her room and make her comfortable?"

Ellman smiled, shaking his head. "You've only got yourself to blame, you know. If you'd left things alone, none of this would be happening."

I stared desperately at Gram. Her poor grey hair was matted with blood now, and she looked so small and weak ...

I'd never felt more helpless in my life.

"Get in there," Ellman told me, nodding his head towards the front room.

When I went into the front room, Hashim and Lucy were standing over by the window, and O'Neil and the black guy were just hanging around by the door.

Ellman told me to sit down.

I looked over at Lucy.

"I'm so sorry," I said to her.

She couldn't answer me.

"Don't worry —" I started to tell her.

"Sit down!" Ellman barked.

I sat down on the settee, and he sat in the armchair opposite me. He hadn't changed very much from the photograph I'd seen of him in his police record. He was about fifteen years older, of course, so his face wasn't quite so young-looking as before, but apart from that, he looked pretty much the same. The same shaved head, the same angular face, the same soulless eyes. His eyes — described in the police record as pale blue — were actu­ally so pale that they were almost transparent, like the blue of a distant sky. He was dressed in an expensive black suit, an equally expensive black T-shirt, and shiny black crocodile-skin shoes.

My iBrain told me that in the inside pocket of his suit jacket he had a BlackBerry Bold 9700.

"All right," he said calmly, lighting a cigarette. "This is how it's going to go. I ask you a question, you give me an answer. If you don't give me an answer, or if you lie to me, the bitch gets it. OK?"

"Yeah."

"Good." He puffed on his cigarette. "All right, first ques­tion. You're the kid who calls himself iBoy, right?"

"How do you know —?"

"Just answer the fucking question."

I glanced over at Lucy. Her eyes were on me, but I couldn't tell what she was thinking. I looked back at Ellman.

"Yeah," I told him.

"You're iBoy, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"And it's you that's been going round Crow Town fuck­ing things up?"

"Yeah."

"Stirring up all kinds of shit."

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"Why?"

"Yeah, why? I mean, what's in it for you?"

"Nothing."

He shook his head. "No one does anything for noth­ing."

"I'm just doing what I think is right," I told him.

He laughed. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

I nodded at O'Neil. "He raped Lucy. Him, Hashim, Adebajo ... the rest of them. They raped her, for Christ's sake. They fucking raped her."

Ellman shrugged. "And your point is?"

There was nothing in his eyes, nothing at all. No feel­ing, no sympathy, not a shred of humanity. This man was sick. There was no point in talking to him.

"Forget it," I sighed, looking away. "It doesn't matter ..."

"You want revenge, is that it? You want payback? Is that what this is all about?"

"Yeah, if you say so ..."

"Well, is it or not?"

I said nothing.

Ellman suddenly leaned forward and yelled into my face. "Fucking answer me ... NOW!"

"Yes," I said slowly, looking right at him. "Revenge ... that's what it's all about. Revenge, punishment, retribu­tion. You're just as much to blame for what happened to Lucy as the ones who actually did it —"

"Yeah? And how d'you work that one out?"

"You tempt people to ruin and destroy —"

"What?" he said, frowning at me.

"You ruin people, you and your world ... you ruin lives." I shrugged. "So, yeah, I've been going round the estate stirring up all kinds of shit, because I knew that'd piss you off, and that eventually you'd come looking for me ... and I guess it worked. Because here you are."

Ellman smiled. "And now what? You're going to kill me?"

"If I have to."

He laughed, looking over at O'Neil and the others. "You hear that? He says he's going to kill me if he has to." They laughed along with him, and then he turned back to me. "OK," he said. "Next question. This iBoy thing ... what's that all about?"

I shrugged again. "Nothing, really ..."

"Nothing?"

"It's just a bit of fun, you know ... dressing up like a superhero, wearing a costume and a mask so no one knows who I am."

"Where is it?"

"Where's what?"

"The costume, the mask. Where are they?"

"Why?"

"That's not an answer, that's a question." He nodded over at Hashim. Hashim jabbed the pistol into Lucy's head again. She winced, but didn't make a sound.

"All right," I said to Ellman, holding my hands up. "All right, please don't hurt her any more."

"Where's the costume and the mask?" he repeated.

"There isn't any costume," I sighed.

"What?"

"No costume, no mask. Honestly ... it's just me."

Ellman stared at me for a moment, then he looked over at O'Neil. "Check his room, Yo. And all the other rooms too. See if you can find any of this iBoy shit — costume, mask, Taser, any kind of tech stuff."

O'Neil went out, and Ellman turned back to me. "So, it's just you, yeah?"

I nodded.

Ellman smiled. "You want to show me what you mean by that?"

I didn't have any choice now — I had to show him the truth. If I didn't, if I tried to hide what I was, what I could do ... well, I didn't even want to think about what Ellman would do to Lucy.

I just couldn't risk it.

"Look," I said to Ellman, and I turned on my iSkin. As I felt it starting to glow and shimmer, I watched his reac­tion. He didn't move or say anything for a while, he just sat there in mute disbelief, staring open-mouthed at the shifting colours and shapes of my skin. Without saying anything, I showed him my hands, and then I lifted up my shirt and showed him my chest, letting him see that my iSkin was everywhere.

"Shit, man," he whispered eventually. "How the fuck do you do that?"

"It's a long story," I said.

"You see this, Tweet?" he said to the black guy without taking his eyes off me.

"Fucking right."

"Shit," said Hashim. "He's a fucking freak, man."

I couldn't bear to look at Lucy. I hadn't looked at her since admitting to Ellman that I was iBoy. And now ... well, Hashim was right. I was a freak. And who in their right mind wants anything to do with a freak?

I turned off my iSkin.

Ellman said, "You can turn it on and off, just like that?"

"Yeah."

"Fuck ..." He looked at me. "So how does it work?"

"I don't know ..."

I could hear O'Neil crashing around in my room now, emptying drawers, throwing stuff around ...

I said to Ellman, "He's not going to find anything."

"No? What about the Taser?"

I sighed. "There's no Taser."

"And the phone stuff, the computer stuff ... whatever it is you've been using to track and hack and all that shit?"

I tapped my head. "It's all in here."

He shook his head. "I don't get it."

I looked at him. "If I tell you everything, absolutely everything, will you let me check on my gran? I just want to make sure that she's OK, you know? Make her comfort­able."

Ellman thought about it for a moment, then nodded. "OK."

So I started telling him everything. How the iPhone that Davey Carr had thrown from Lucy's window had cracked open my skull and left bits of itself inside my brain, and how those bits had somehow become part of me, giving me all the powers of an iPhone and more ... but as I told Ellman all this, I wasn't looking at him or thinking of him ... I was just staring at the floor, thinking of Lucy. I was telling my story for her. I still couldn't physically look at her, but I was looking at her in my heart.

When I'd finished explaining everything, I finally looked up at Ellman. His icy-blue eyes were fixed on mine, his face emotionless.

"That's it?" he said.

"Yeah. I mean, I know you probably don't believe it, but —"

"Show me."

"What?"

"Show me what you can do."

"What about my gran? Can I go and check on her now?"

"No."

"But you said —"

"I was lying." He smiled. "Now, show me what you can do, or I'll go and get your gran and rip her fucking head off."

I stared at him for a moment, hating him, despising him, wanting to hurt him more than anything else in the world, but I knew he wasn't bluffing. I knew he had it in him to kill Gram without even thinking about it. So I just nodded at him, and I watched as he felt his phone vibrate.

"Answer it," I said.

He took his BlackBerry out of his pocket and opened the text I'd just sent him.

It read: your dead.

He looked at me, grinning, "I'm impressed."

"I sent you some pictures too," I said.

He opened up the photographs. One of them showed him hitting Gram with the phone, another one was of Hashim and Lucy ... others showed O'Neil and the guy called Tweet.

Ellman studied them all for a while, then looked at me. "And this is all in your head, yeah?"

I nodded.

He said, "You got WiFi?"

"I've got everything."

"So you could be calling anyone right now?"

"I could be, but I'm not."

"Good. Because you know what'll happen if I hear a siren, or if anyone comes anywhere near this flat, don't you?"

I nodded, "I'm not going to call anyone."

He leaned towards me. "It won't only be your bitch who gets it —"

"She's not my bitch," I said coldly.

"She'll just be the first," he continued, ignoring me. "Any trouble from you, anything at all, and I'm going to do the bitch first, then her family, then your old woman, and I'm going to make you watch me doing it ... and then I'll fucking do you." He smiled. "All right?"

"Yeah."

"OK, good." He lit a cigarette. "Now what about all this electric stuff I've heard about? Yoyo says you zapped him or something. Is that right?"

"Yeah."

"Show me how you do it."

I looked at him. "Who do you want me to zap? I can do it to you, if you want."

He grinned at me. "Come here, Tweet."

Tweet came over and stood in front of me. He was huge — big, strong, solid — and as he stood there staring down impassively at me, there was no trace of fear in his eyes. He wasn't frightened of pain.

Ellman said to me, "Can you do it without putting him in hospital?"

I nodded, looking up at Tweet. "I can hurt him as much or as little as you want."

Ellman smiled. "Do it."

I hesitated for a moment, considering my options. I knew that I could take out Ellman and Tweet with a big burst of power, but that still left Hashim and O'Neil. O'Neil was still searching my room — I could hear him crashing around — so it was possible I could get to him before he realized that anything was wrong.

But Hashim ...?

I glanced over and saw him watching me. His hand was so tightly taped to the gun, and the gun so tightly taped to Lucy's head, that even if I could have zapped him from here — and he was right over the other side of the room, so I was pretty sure that I couldn't — it only needed the slightest twitch of his finger for the pistol to go off. And I guessed that being electrocuted would more than likely make his finger twitch.

I glanced at Lucy.

Unbelievably, she winked at me.

God, it made me feel so good.

"What are you fucking waiting for?" Ellman said.

I looked at him, looked up at Tweet, then reached out and touched Tweet's knee. Like I said, he was a really huge guy. So, just to make sure that he felt it, I gave him a zap that was somewhere between not-too- bad and pretty-bad. And he felt it, all right. He yelped — in a surprisingly high-pitched, almost girly, kind of way — and as his knee flashed blue and his leg jerked out from under him, he toppled over and crashed to the floor.

"Shit, man!" he hissed, clutching at his knee. "Jesus!"

"Y'all right?" Ellman said to him.

"Yeah ..." he sighed, rubbing his whole leg. "Fuck, that hurts."

O'Neil came bursting into the front room then, alerted by the sound of Tweet falling over. "What's going on?" he said, looking at Tweet. "What's happening?"

"Nothing," Ellman said. "Everything's cool." He looked over at O'Neil. "You didn't find anything, did you?"

Still staring at Tweet, O'Neil shook his head. "Not yet ... but I haven't checked the other rooms yet."

"Don't bother," Ellman told him. "It's all sorted."

"What do you mean?"

Ellman ignored him, turning back to me. "Do you have to actually touch people to do that? I mean, can you do it from a distance?"

I hesitated for a moment, instinctively holding back.

Ellman said, "Don't fucking think about it, just answer me."

I sighed, realizing that there was no point in lying. If I told Ellman that I could zap from a distance, he'd want me to prove it. And I wouldn't be able to. And if I told him that I wasn't going to prove it, he'd hurt Lucy. So I had no choice but to tell him the truth.

"I can zap stuff from about a metre away," I said. "No more."

He nodded, watching as Tweet got to his feet.

"OK?" he asked him.

Tweet glared at me. "Yeah ... yeah, I'm all right."

Ellman grinned at him. "You don't look all right."

"I'm fine," Tweet growled.

Ellman turned to me. "Yo said he tried to stab you, but you did something to his knife."

I nodded, "It's the electricity ... it gives me some kind of force field."

"Yeah? So if Tweet wanted to smack you in the head for what you've just done to him, what'd happen?"

"He'd get hurt even more."

Ellman smiled. "You bulletproof too?"

"I don't know," I shrugged. "No one's tried to shoot me yet."

Ellman looked at me for a moment or two, his eyes seeming to gaze right through me, and then O'Neil called out, "She's waking up," and we both looked over at him. He was leaning round the doorway, peering down the hallway.

"The old woman," he said, turning back to Ellman. "She's coming round."

"Tie her up," Ellman said. "Get her out the way."

As O'Neil nodded and headed off down the hallway, I had to force myself not to say anything, not to do anything ... not to give in to the murder in my heart.

I looked at Ellman. He was just sitting there now, smoking a cigarette, staring at nothing, his face a mask of concentration ...

I glanced over at Lucy. Blood from the cut on her face had dripped onto her nightgown, and her face was pale and frightened, but as she looked back at me in the silence, I could see a hidden strength in her eyes, some kind of faith ... a belief that, despite everything that had happened — and everything that was happening and could possibly happen — we'd both get out of this in the end.

She truly believed it.

I smiled at her, trying to show her that I shared her belief.

Even though I didn't.

"It's a shame," Ellman said.

I looked at him. "What?"

He sighed. "You and me ... we could really have been something together. With your powers and my experience ... I mean, fuck Crow Town, we could have had anywhere we wanted. We could have made fucking millions ..." He looked disdainfully at me. "But you could never do it, could you? You're too fucking weak. Too fucking righteous." He shook his head. "No, I couldn't work with that. It'd drive me mad." He sighed. "Like I said, it's a shame ... but business is business." He smiled at me. "That's all it is, you know ... all this ... the old woman, the bitch over there ... you ... it's all just business."

I didn't even bother looking at him.

He sniffed. "Yeah, well ... we'd best get on with it." He stood up and called out, "Yo? You finished in there?"

O'Neil called back from Gram's room, "Yeah, just a minute ..."

"What you doing?"

"Nothing, just looking around ..."

"Leave it. We're going."

"There's some nice stuff in here. Laptops, jewellery —"

"I said fucking leave it!" Ellman barked. Then he turned to Tweet. "Call Gunner, make sure we're clear, then check the corridor."

Tweet pulled a phone from his pocket, hit a button, and went out into the hallway. I listened in to the call and tracked it to another mobile in the square down below, somewhere near the entrance to the tower. Yeah?

We're coming out. Everything all right?

Yeah, it's quiet.

"Get up," Ellman said to me.

I got up.

Tweet came back in. "It's all clear."

Ellman nodded. "You go first. Hash, you follow him." He turned to O'Neil, who was standing in the doorway. "You follow Hash, OK?"

O'Neil nodded.

Ellman said to me, "You follow Yo. Understand?"

"Yeah."

"I'll be right behind you. Hash?"

"Yeah?" Hashim said.

"How's it going with that gun?"

"My fucking hand hurts."

Ellman said to me, "You hear that? His hand hurts. It's been taped to the gun for about an hour now, so his finger's probably getting a bit numb. It won't take much for him to pull the trigger. And it'll be your fault if he does. You got that?"

"Yeah, I've got it."

"All right, let's go."