Skypoint

TWENTY-EIGHT

Fifteen centimetres, Jack had always insisted, was not nearly enough, not even when it had been six inches. He had, however, found on numerous occasions that you could work with what you were given.

Right now, it was all that was keeping him from falling over sixty metres to what, for him, would still be a pretty messy and uncomfortable resurrection. For Gwen, who moved slowly alongside him on the slender concrete ledge that skirted the circumference of SkyPoint, it would be certain death.

They had come maybe six metres, and it had taken them the best part of fifteen minutes. At this rate, they were going to reach Lucca in time to catch him eating breakfast on the terrace.

The night wind tore at his hair as he stood with his back to the SkyPoint wall, his arms spread, hands plastered against the concrete, feeling for the slightest grip. He could sense the toes of his boots sticking over the edge of the ledge and, immortal or not, it wasn’t a comfortable place to be. He turned his head towards Gwen. She was half a metre away from him, stuck to the wall as he was by sheer will and the sweat of her palms.

‘You doing OK?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yeah. Brilliant. You can see my house from here.’

Jack smiled, and moved his left foot a little further along the ledge, edging his shoulder along as he did so, then gently brought his right foot after him, keeping his centre of gravity as close to the wall behind him as possible. Then he watched as Gwen repeated the same action.

He tried to bring to mind the schematics of the building, tried to remember just how far they had said it was from the SkyPark window to the lightning conductor.

Twenty-four metres?

They weren’t even halfway yet, and moving so slowly had never seemed so exhausting.

Distantly, he heard the sounds of cars in the city below. Night owls heading home, and shift workers making for the plant. He had travelled to a lot of worlds in his time, but that one seemed stranger than most, and so much more than just sixty metres away. A world of mortgage repayments, office jobs, pension plans and family. Not his world, and never would be.

He moved along the ledge a little more.

At least the air was good up here. It was coming straight in off the Bristol Channel and, beyond that, the Atlantic. There was no air on any planet quite as good as the air that came in off the Atlantic.

‘You keeping up?’ he called to Gwen.

He saw her nod. But she didn’t look at him now, she was keeping her eyes dead ahead. Concentrating. Feeling her way along the side of the building. Shifting sideways, moving one foot slowly along after the other.

Jack worried about her, but there was nothing he could do now. She had been determined to join him, and arguing with her would just have used up more time. Besides, she was right, six shells wasn’t a lot to take out a man like Lucca and however many heavies he might have shoring up his fortress defences. In his experience, guns were like heads, two were always better than one. Unless they were pointing your way, of course.

He continued to move along the ledge and found he was getting into a rhythm now; everything starting to fit into a pattern, his movement and his breathing – even the gusts of Atlantic air were coming at the right time. He felt that he was moving faster.

Then he saw the gulls.

There were six of them – big, grey-backed herring gulls-roosting on the ledge. As Jack inched ever closer, the first bird turned and looked at him, then looked away as if it thought it was seeing things, or maybe that the humans would fall off before they got much closer. Either way, the bird didn’t move.

‘Looks like we got company up here,’ Jack said to Gwen.

‘What?’ she demanded, as in, what the hell are you talking about?

‘You don’t have any mackerel or anything on you, do you?’

‘Jack, what is going on?’

From her position, she couldn’t see the gulls. Jack decided it wouldn’t be a problem, the birds would move. After all, people were bigger than birds, right?

But as Jack drew closer, the birds didn’t move. The closest one looked over at him again and stretched, beat its wings, and cried out into the night. That set off its companions, who took up the chorus. But they didn’t take off, as he’d expected.

‘Come on, guys, move along,’ Jack said, as he got within half a metre of the gulls.

Instead, the first gull edged towards him and stabbed at his boot with its beak.

‘Hey! You little freak!’

Jack kicked out at the bird and it hopped back in retreat, but as Jack took his next step the bird darted forward again and attacked his boot.

Jack lashed out with his foot. ‘Get out of it!’

And this time, the bird leaped into the night, and took its friends with it. Suddenly the air around Jack and Gwen was filled with the thunder of beating wings and crying gulls.

‘Oh my God, Jack!’

Jack reached out and grabbed Gwen’s hand.

‘Just stay calm,’ he said.

Right now the birds were just showboating, making a lot of noise, warning off the invaders to their territory, maybe still a little intimidated by their size. But these weren’t sparrows, and if they decided to swing in for an attack they were in trouble. Gulls had big, sharp beaks, and they were also the only ones up here that could fly.

It didn’t take much working out.

‘Hey, you lot, shut up!’

The voice came from above them. It was a thin voice, like it had come out of some sort of woodwind instrument played badly.

‘Noisy buggers, piss off!’

This second voice was deeper, more brass section.

Two men right above them in Besnik Lucca’s garden had been attracted by the commotion of the gulls. Jack and Gwen stopped breathing.

‘Here, now get off!’

It was Brass again, and as he spoke Jack saw a chunk of what looked like burger roll fly over the side of the building. As one, the gulls dived after it into the night below.

Jack felt himself take another breath.

Above him Woodwind was telling Brass how he hated those bloody things; one had swept down on him in Tenby when he was a kid and stolen his ice cream right out of his hand.

Maybe that was where his life had all gone wrong, thought Jack. An incident like that was going to screw a kid up – ice cream robbery: it was the kind of thing that would make a sociopath out of anybody.

He heard the voices of Lucca’s two men move away, and glanced back at Gwen. She looked exhausted, but he knew she was tough. She would make it.

Fifteen minutes later, Jack found the lightning conductor.

Turning around to climb up the conductor was always going to be tricky, and he had been rehearsing the move in his head as he edged towards it. With his back to the wall, he wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the rod and used them to brace himself as he reached over his shoulder with his other hand. With a little quick footwork he found himself facing the right way round and hauled himself nimbly up the wall, knowing that Gwen would work out the move for herself and follow him up.

After the age it had taken them to edge around the outside of SkyPoint, Jack found himself rolling over the balcony wall into Lucca’s verdant roof garden only ten seconds later. He dropped to the floor in a crouch and Gwen was beside him a moment later.

Jack drew the Webley from its holster.