iBoy

10111

The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes and sta­ring across the interior of the warehouse at Lucy. My head was throbbing, my vision was blurred, my mouth was soured with the taste of blood ... and, after I'd struggled uselessly for a few moments, I realized that I could barely move. I was securely bound to an iron girder by tightly wound lengths of wire. My hands, my feet, even my neck ... everything was so firmly tied that the only thing I could move was my head.

But none of that mattered.

All that mattered was Lucy.

She was about twenty metres away from me, on the other side of the warehouse. She was on her knees, and Ellman was standing in front of her with a long silver knife in his hand. Her mouth was still taped up, but the gun had been removed from her head, and Hashim wasn't with her any more. Instead, he was standing right beside me. And now that he'd realized I was conscious again, he raised the pistol and levelled it at my head.

As Ellman sensed Hashim's movement and glanced over at me, the blade of his knife caught the pale yellow light of an electric lantern hanging from the wall, and just for a moment the reflected flash of light seemed to illuminate the whole warehouse. It was a fairly big place, with rust-ridden sheet-metal walls, a crumbling concrete floor, and dozens of frayed electric cables dangling from the ceiling. There wasn't much else to see: the blackened remains of old machinery, some cracked wooden crates, empty gas canisters, a couple of dilapidated chairs ...

"What do you think?" Ellman called out to me. "Do you like it?"

I didn't answer him, I was too busy checking out where the others were. Hashim, as I said, was right beside me; O'Neil was behind Ellman and Lucy, leaning on a windowsill; Tweet was sitting in one of the old chairs, calmly smoking a joint; and the two drivers, Gunner and Marek, were standing over to my left by a pair of wooden doors.

Six of them.

One of me.

And I didn't even have any iPowers.

"What's the matter, kid?" Ellman said. "You not talking to me any more?"

I looked up to see him crossing the warehouse towards me.

He grinned at me. "How's your head? I haven't broken anything in there, have I? You know, smashed a few circuits or something?" He stopped a few metres away from me. "Or can't you tell without a signal?" He reached into his pocket, brought out his BlackBerry, and studied the screen. "Nope," he said, shaking his head. "Still no bars." He looked at me, smiling. "How about you? You got any?"

I said nothing.

He put his phone back in his pocket. "I'm guessing," he said, "that without a signal, you're fucked." He looked at me. "Am I right?"

Again, I said nothing.

He carried on smiling at me. "No signal. No WiFi. No phone, no power." He nodded his head, miming the head­butt he'd given me. "No force field either." He glanced at Hashim. "What d'you say, Hash?"

Hashim grinned. "Yeah, I'd say he's completely fucked."

Ellman stepped closer, staring into my eyes. "Of course, you could be bluffing, couldn't you? You could be pretending to be powerless, lulling us all into a false sense of security, and then, when we least expect it — zap!" He clapped his hands together. "You fry us all." He grinned at me again. "But the only problem with that is that you can't fry us all, can you? I mean, right now, you could probably blast me and Hash, but the others are too far away. So even if you did take out the two of us, there'd still be Tweet over there, and Gunner and Marek, and don't forget Yoyo ... you see what I'm saying? You blast me and Hash, you're still going to be tied to this girder, and Yoyo's still going to get to play with your girly."

I looked over at Lucy. She was still kneeling there, her head bowed down, her eyes empty and still, shocked into nothing ...

I couldn't let anything happen to her.

Not again.

I had to do something.

"What do you reckon, Hash?" I heard Ellman say. "You think he's bluffing?"

"Like you said, it don't make no odds," Hashim said. "They're both going to get fucked anyway." He started laughing then, a curiously childish sound, which for some reason really irritated me. I ran my tongue round the inside of my mouth, turned my head, and spat a gob of blood into his face.

"Fuck!" he yelled, jerking away.

Ellman laughed as Hashim wiped the bloody spit from his face. I glanced over at Lucy again and saw that she hadn't moved. She was still just kneeling there, dead to the world.

"Luce!" I called out. "Lucy!"

She raised her head and slowly looked over at me.

"It's going to be all right!" I called out to her. "Don't worry, everything's going to be —

A crack of pain ripped into my face as Hashim hit me with the barrel of the gun. I tried not to cry out, but I couldn't help it. The pain was so raw, so ugly, it felt like my face had been torn apart. I turned my head towards Hashim, watching through tear-stung eyes as he raised the gun again, his eyes blazing with anger, and I braced myself for another blow ...

But then I heard Ellman's voice, "That's enough."

I saw Hashim hesitate, desperate to hurt me, but not quite desperate enough to disobey Ellman. Still glaring at me, he lowered the gun and stepped back.

"Not now, OK?" Ellman said to him. "I want him conscious for now ... I want him to know what's happening. All right?"

Hashim nodded.

"Afterwards," Ellman said. "You can do what you like ..." He turned to me. "You know what's going to happen now, don't you? I mean, you know what I'm going to do."

I didn't say anything, I just stared at him. But I wasn't actually looking at him. My eyes were open, but in my mind they were closed. I was digging deep inside myself now ... deep into my iBrain, my iSenses, my iPowers ... looking for something ... anything ... searching, search­ing, searching ...

There was still no signal, no reception, but I had to find something ... I had to. I had to be iBoy to stand any chance of saving Lucy.

Ellman had started taunting me about my mother again now — "... and I'll tell you something else about me and little Georgie, and this'll really give you some­thing to think about..." — but I wasn't listening to him. I couldn't listen. I was iBoy, and we weren't there. We were deep down inside ourselves, reaching out, stretching ... stretching ... stretching up into the sky ...

"... and I bet she thought about it too ... I mean, we did it a lot, me and Georgie, even when she was working the streets, she still wanted me all the time ... they always do ..

... and we knew it was there somewhere, we knew the signal was there ... maybe half a kilometre away, maybe less ... a few hundred metres ... just round the corner ... it was there, they were there. The radio waves from the nearest base station, the frequencies ... the cycles ... the pathways were there ... and the stray static electricity all around us, we both knew that that was there too ... and if we could somehow focus it back to our signal receptors ...

We closed our wide-open eyes and concentrated.

"... so, anyway," Ellman continued, "the thing is, when Georgie got knocked up back then, there's a pretty good chance it was me ... and if it was me ... well, fucking hell ..." He laughed. "Do you see what I'm saying?"

... and now we were feeling something ... a boost, a rise, something in the air, something out there that was lifting us up ... out of our head ... taking our reach and pulling it up through the roof, into the night sky, up over the old buildings and factories ... and then ...

"I could be your fucking father."

Then we had it.

"Hey! Are you listening to me?"

A connection. A solid connection.

"Say something, fucker! Fucking say something!"

We had a connection.

I opened my still-open eyes and saw Ellman's face, twisted with rage, staring into mine.

"If you were my father," I said to him. "I'd kill myself."

Without saying a word, he raised the long silver knife in his hand, gently placed the needle-sharp tip against my forehead, and slowly drew the blade down my skin, deliberately not cutting too deeply, still wanting to keep me wide awake ...

And I could feel the pain, I could feel warm blood running down my face.

But it didn't change anything.

We were still connected.

"Fucking superhero," Ellman sneered, taking the knife away and examining the bloodied tip. "Looks like you bleed the same as every other fucker I've ever cut." He looked at me. "Now let's see how you beg."

I could feel the power surging inside me as he turned away and began walking over to Lucy ... but what could I do with it? If I zapped Ellman and Hashim now, it wouldn't make any difference. I'd still be tied up. And the wire that was binding me to the girder was wound so tightly, and there was simply so much of it, that my chances of blasting it away or melting it with a burst of electricity were pretty slim. And even if I could zap my way out of the wire, taking out Ellman and Hashim at the same time ... well, O'Neil and the others would still be there. And although there was a chance, just a very slight chance, that once Ellman and Hashim were out of the picture, Gunner and Marek and Tweet might decide to cut their losses and run ... there was no way that O'Neil was going to back down.

He'd get to Lucy before I could get to him.

And I couldn't let that happen.

I couldn't let him get anywhere near her.

I was, as Hashim had so eloquently put it, completely fucked.

And so, with a wretched heart, I just stood there and watched as Howard Ellman strode through the dusty light towards Lucy.