Something Coming Through

29. The Reef

London | 10 July

‘Fahad and his friends knew what they were doing when they chose this place,’ Sandra Hamilton said. ‘Plenty of foot traffic, half a dozen public exit points and an unknown number through shops and workshops…And then there’s the composition of the coral itself, the way it grows. The place is a regular Swiss cheese. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to keep track if things go sideways.’

Henry Harris said, ‘What about other interested parties?’

‘My spotters haven’t seen any sign that anyone else is keeping watch. But I can’t rule anything out,’ Sandra said. ‘The police could have intercepted every message sent to Chloe’s phone. And they’ve had a presence in the Reef ever since people moved in. They’re embedded.’

They were in the back of a sweltering van in the ruined lorry park next to the Reef, studying views of its exterior and interior. One of Sandra’s young men was controlling drones that patrolled the perimeter; two more were keeping watch inside, transmitting images from their spex. Sandra was dressed in her white tracksuit; Henry had changed into cargo shorts and a long green shirt printed with parrots, an attempt to disguise himself as a sightseer.

He looked at Chloe and said, ‘As long as you stick to the plan you’ll be fine. We’ll keep watch and run interference. We’ll have your back at all times. All you have to do is sit tight and wait for Fahad to make contact. If everything works out, we’ll take things from there. If things look as if they’re about to go pear-shaped, I’ll tell you to walk away. And that’s exactly what’ll you’ll do. Walk and don’t look back.’

Sandra said, ‘We have just enough time to go over the script once more.’

‘Let’s just do it,’ Chloe said, but she felt far from ready as she walked towards the looming bulk of the Reef, a fluttering sense of precarious insecurity that reminded her of her first day in big school. She was wearing her spex, transmitting everything she saw to Sandra and her crew, and to Henry, who had gone on ahead of her, had already disappeared into the Reef’s maw.

Its swollen, thundercloud-coloured lobes bulged up five or six storeys high: an early experiment in growing flood defences with construction coral that had run wild and spread halfway across the Thames before the commensal organisms that fabricated it, several hundred types of alien bacterioforms, had been brought under control with hormone sprays developed by one of Ada Morange’s companies. Chloe crossed a kind of apron that had been bulldozed out of a tongue of coral and sealed with a translucent polymer that showed the complex three-dimensional web of stony branches beneath, their purple and indigo shades spreading across her camo jacket. There was a small bus station, a line of tour coaches. Before he’d left the van Henry had put on a name badge: Hi! I’m Henry from Springfield IL. Chloe was hoping that he wouldn’t try to make some kind of move on Fahad, attempt to snatch him.

She passed through the shadows of spiky buttresses, followed a wide passageway illuminated by shafts of sunlight that dropped through the latticework ceiling at irregular intervals. The circular openings to tunnels that led deeper into the Reef loomed ahead. There were entire buildings buried in there, penetrated and invaded and overtopped by the exuberant growth. There were workshops and factories, mazes of passageways, voids, and veins, and the homes of five thousand people. Climate refugees, plain old-fashioned illegal immigrants, and a variety of crews of tribes, biohackers and pirates who wanted to live off-grid in a self-declared semi-autonomous free zone. The authorities generally left them alone because the Reef was one of the places that the Jackaroo claimed to find very interesting, and no one knew how they would respond to an attempt to regulate it or shut it down.

Chloe hadn’t spent much time in the Reef after starting work with Disruption Theory, but the free market was the same as it ever was. It was housed in a small shopping mall that had been flooded by the river and then swallowed by the Reef. The coral’s growth held back the river’s flood now, and pumps kept the mall dry. Its retail units had been excavated and subdivided, and a bustling maze of tiny shops, tattoo and body-mod parlours, cafés, bars and food stalls had colonised the broad walkway and food court. Coral bulged overhead, strung with webs of fairy lights.

Henry’s voice buzzed in the earpiece of Chloe’s spex. ‘I see you. No, don’t look for me. We should assume that the kid and his friends are watching. Find a place to sit. Make yourself comfortable and be prepared for a long wait. These things never run to schedule.’

But Chloe had already seen the person she’d been looking for, turning away from her, walking unhurriedly across her line of sight towards the public toilets. ‘I have to pee — nerves, I guess,’ she told Henry, and switched off her spex and ducked inside the toilets, an egg-shaped space saturated with a hallucinogenic ultraviolet glow.

Gail Ann was standing at the sink, touching up her lipstick. She was dressed in a denim jacket and roomy shorts and big hiking boots. An antique People’s Liberation Army cap was tilted over one eye. Her gaze met Chloe’s in the mirror and she grinned and said, ‘I feel like a spy in a spy film.’

Chloe had made a quick call to her friend when she’d returned to her hotel room to collect her stuff. She said now, ‘This is going to sound insanely inadequate, but thanks for coming.’

‘I’m not going to miss an important chapter in my exclusive. Is it safe to talk?’

‘I’m with some people, but they won’t follow me in here.’ She described Sandra’s young men and Henry’s costume, and said, ‘I’m supposed to talk to Fahad, persuade him to come with me. While I’m doing that, you could try to get close to his friends. They probably know who you are, from the gym. Find out how they know Fahad, what they know about his situation…And you should tell them about me. Answer any questions they ask.’

Gail Ann capped her lipstick and blew a kiss at her reflection. She looked confident and unflappable, up for anything. ‘Make friends. I can do that.’

‘I told myself this was for Fahad,’ Chloe said. ‘That I can help him negotiate the best price for whatever it is that’s infected him and his little sister. Make sure that they’ll be given a chance to live a normal life afterwards. And I do want to help him, but I have to admit that I’m also scared that when this is over, when I’ve persuaded him to come in, that’ll be that as far as I’m concerned. So long and thanks for all the fish.’

‘Which wouldn’t be good, for the story.’

‘Anything you find out, I can use it to stay in the game. Also I want Fahad’s friends to know that it’s safe to get in contact with me again, if things go wrong.’

‘Do you expect this to go wrong?’

Gail Ann’s gaze was serious under the bill of her cap.

‘My friend does,’ Chloe said. ‘The police are looking for Fahad, and his father’s employers have an interest too, it turns out.’

‘If it helps, I brought Noah’s car. He thinks I’m helping a friend move. So if you need to get out of here in a hurry…’

‘Like in the films?’

‘It would make a great scene, wouldn’t it?’

‘If anything does happen, the police or whatever turn up, get out as quickly and quietly as possible. Walk away and don’t look back. My friend will take care of me.’

‘And if I happen to give one of Fahad’s friends a lift?’

‘Don’t even think about it. If they have any sense, they’ll have an escape route. Probably more than one.’

‘How are you holding up?’

‘I’m a bag of nerves, frankly.’

‘You don’t look nervous,’ Gail Ann said. ‘You look…eager.’

‘I really want this to work out.’

Gail Ann smiled. ‘He put a hook in you, didn’t he? Cute Pakistani boy, those soulful eyes they have, eyelashes to die for.’

‘Something put a hook in me all right,’ Chloe said.

She circled the free market, sat at the counter of a stall that sold churros and paper cones of muscular café au lait, Cuban style. She perched sideways on her stool, watching passers-by, trying and failing to spot Sandra’s operatives. Henry’s voice buzzed in the earpiece of her spex. She couldn’t see him, either, but she knew he was close by because he was commenting on people walking past her.

Saying, ‘How does that guy eat, with those fangs?’ Or, ‘That’s barely human.’ Or, ‘Is that supposed to be a!Cha tank she’s trundling along there? Because she clearly hasn’t ever seen a real one.’

Chloe raised the cone of coffee to her lips. ‘And you have.’

‘The Prof has one as a house guest,’ Henry said. ‘Damn thing calls itself Unlikely Worlds. It claims to be interested in the Prof. Says that she is a potential catalyst. You can imagine how much she loves that.’

‘I met it,’ Chloe said. ‘Him. All!Cha, the ones on Earth, are male. Ada Morange held a party after she bought a majority share in Disruption Theory.’

Henry said, ‘I was there.’

‘I don’t remember you.’

‘I was walking perimeter security. The idea being that you and the other guests didn’t see me.’

‘Is this your way of telling me that you aren’t really a freelance investigator?’

‘I do all kinds of work,’ Henry said.

‘That old Range Rover. Is that even yours?’

‘I like to use it for surveillance work. What would you have done if you were met by a couple of beefcakes in black suits, mirrorshades and curly-wire earpieces? No, I figured the down-at-heel junkyard look was the way to go.’

‘You played me.’

‘I tailored my look to your expectations.’

‘You profiled me and you played me.’

‘The Prof likes you, as much as she likes anyone. She’s interested in you, in a good way. I’m an expression of that interest.’

It was half past four.

‘They’re late,’ Chloe said.

‘They’re always late. They like to check the venue one last time, have to psych themselves up…Know what this reminds me of? Camden Market, back in the day.’

‘That’s for daytrippers and poseurs who like the alienist look but don’t want to live the life,’ Chloe said. ‘This is where people who live the life live the life.’

‘You have it too,’ Henry said. ‘The obsession with the alien and the weird. But you don’t have the look. No mods. Not even a tattoo that I can see.’

‘It affects different people in different ways,’ Chloe said.

She thought of Fahad and his little sister, Rana. Both of them responding to something. Both touched, infiltrated, possessed.

Henry said, ‘I used to hang out in Camden Market just about every weekend. Me and my mates. Like this, watching the world go by, the different tribes.’

‘Which tribe did you belong to?’

‘Indie rock, mostly. My little gang wore Fred Perry shirts and skinny jeans and Converse hi-tops, and Camden was our home, our turf. Everyone else in the market, no matter how hip they liked to think they were, they were just passing through. They were, like you said, daytrippers. So we have that in common at least. We’re both observers. We like to watch. We see things from the outside…Look sharp. I think we’re on.’

A young man ordered a coffee to go and pushed a sheet of paper across the counter to Chloe. One of Mr Archer’s flyers.

‘He sees only you,’ the young man said, looking straight ahead. He was eighteen or nineteen, tall and thin and jittery, dark skin and high cheekbones, dressed in an oversized T-shirt screen-printed with the Max Predator poster, black ribbed leggings. Turning now, slouching away with his paper cone of coffee.

‘Stay cool. Remember that I have your back,’ Henry said, and Chloe followed the kid around the pool and down one of the narrow passages between storefronts.

She felt an airy sense of excitement. Closing in on her prize, hyper-aware of passers-by, a woman working at a sewing machine in a narrow plate-glass window, a couple of men gossiping in a storefront that sold Jackaroo masks and Jackaroo sunglasses and Jackaroo bobbleheads, rows of them staring blankly as she went past. Remembering, with a shiver in her blood, the Jackaroo avatar wading out of the sea. Remembering its warning.

The young man stopped at a shop window where alien stones and minerals glittered on a ladder of transparent shelves, and told Chloe, ‘Wait here. If it’s all clear he’ll be with you.’

And then he was gone, leaving Chloe to study the stones. Lumps of red sandstone, chunks of marble, pebbles, a big geode like a broken egg with purplish crystals inside. Test tubes half-filled with sand, different colours. Sheets of slate each with a fossil or fragment of a fossil, like pages from some strange and deeply ancient book…She felt a sudden ache, like the nostalgia from looking at old family photographs, people and places in times before she was born, before the aliens came, before the Spasm. A yearning for a place she’d never seen.

‘There he is,’ Henry’s voice said in her ear, and Fahad was standing beside her, his reflection beside hers in the gleaming glass. Rana clutched his hand, peeking around him at Chloe, who smiled and asked how she was.

The little girl ducked her head away, looked back. Chloe had a sense, suddenly, of the watchful presence that had followed her out of the displaced-persons camp. It was right there, at her back. She had to fight the urge to look around.

‘You caused us a lot of trouble,’ Fahad said.

‘I know. And I’m sorry for it. But I came here because I want to help you. You and Rana.’

Rana tugged at her brother’s hand. ‘Tell her what Ugly Chicken says.’

Fahad said, ‘Not now, Rana.’

Rana said to Chloe, ‘He likes you.’

Chloe said, ‘Is he your special friend?’

The little girl nodded.

‘I think I can feel him watching me.’

‘He won’t hurt you.’

‘That’s good to know.’

Fahad said, ‘The place where you work got firebombed, and the police are looking for you. If you’re in so much trouble, how can you help me?’

‘The place where I work, Disruption Theory, is owned by Dr Ada Morange. She’s rich and smart. She has a lot of resources. She helped me, and she wants to help you too. You and Rana. But I bet you already know that. I bet that’s why you asked me to come here. You think she can help you, but you aren’t sure that you can trust her. You want me to tell you that you can.’

Henry said in her ear, ‘You better wind this up, Sandra’s picking up—’

His voice cut off with a little click. Chloe wondered what she was supposed to do, he hadn’t told her to walk…

Fahad was saying, ‘Her people came to the gym yesterday, asking about me. And then your friend turned up. How come, if you’re working for her?’

‘I wasn’t sure her people would ask the right questions.’

‘Meaning you don’t exactly trust her,’ Fahad said.

‘Dr Morange is interested in your drawings, Fahad. She wants to know why you draw them, what they mean to you. So do I. I came here because I really think she can help you. And if you come with me, right now, you’ll see—’

Shop doors slammed open on either side; police in uniform and plainclothes barged out, crowding the passageway. Fahad clutched Rana to him, glaring with fright and anger, and Chief Inspector Adam Nevers smiled down at Chloe. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think you should come with me.’

‘You’ve fallen in with some bad people,’ Nevers told Chloe, as they hustled down the grimy service corridor behind the shops. ‘And you’ve put yourself in serious danger. The kids too. But if you help me I think I can find a way of clearing all this up.’

His hand was on her shoulder, steering her. Unpainted plasterboard on one side, pipes and swags of cable running along a rough wall of dark purple coral on the other, widely spaced low-watt lights. He’d taken her spex, dropped them on the ground and stepped on them. Ahead, Fahad and Rana were sandwiched between two uniformed policewomen; two more police, burly young men in T-shirts and jeans, brought up the rear.

‘The kids were already in danger,’ Chloe said.

‘Did you really think that Ada Morange could help them?’

‘I thought I could help them.’

She was trying to stay calm. She was wondering where Henry and the others were. Wondering if they would challenge the police, if they’d been arrested.

‘You’re out of your depth,’ Nevers said. ‘Dr Morange was using you, Chloe. And she wants to use the kids, too. She isn’t interested in their welfare. She’s interested in whatever it is that’s infected them with peculiar ideas.’

‘And why are you interested in them, Chief Inspector? Is it pure charity on your part?’

Chloe felt peculiarly calm, but her mouth was dry and her heart was going like crazy.

‘The thing that’s infected these kids could be dangerous. As you well know. It has to be contained. Think carefully, Chloe. Think about which side you want to be on. And don’t expect any help from your friend Henry Harris. We have his surveillance team and pretty soon we’ll have him.’

They pushed through a narrow door into the free market. People staring, whistles and catcalls echoing under webs of fairy lights, no sign of Henry or Sandra’s young men. Down the wide passageway, out into sunlight and the fresh smell of rain, puddles shining everywhere on the translucent surface of the broad tongue of coral. Three Range Rovers with tinted windows were drawn up in front of the line of tour buses, light bars flashing. Knots of police in uniform and men and women in suits and skirt suits, pistols and tasers at their hips. A big drone with a blue and white chequered paint job tilted in the air, its amplified voice telling people to disperse. And beyond all this, beyond ragged rows of parked cars, on the far side of acres of weedy tarmac, Sandra’s surveillance van was on fire, tossing flames and billows of black smoke high into the air.

Rana began to struggle, trying to free herself from the grip of the policewoman who held her. The woman told her to be quiet, they were going for a ride in a police car, it would be a lot of fun. ‘I don’t want to,’ Rana wailed, upset beyond reason.

Fahad bucked between the two police holding his arms. ‘Leave her alone!’

‘Let’s keep moving,’ Nevers said, and the policewoman hoisted Rana up, the little girl kicking and screaming, and the awful thing happened.

Chloe was overwhelmed by a tidal surge of unreasoning panic, and something sharp and bright she couldn’t look at loomed overhead. She had the impression of the air splintering apart and raw sun-stuff lancing out, a seethe of activity boiling off it. The sense of a voracious inhuman intelligence turning its attention towards her, bigger and brighter than any eidolon she’d ever seen or heard about, pushing into her head.

And then there was a moment of sickening eversion, as if her mind was a glove that had been pulled inside out, and the world came back. The seething raw light was gone, but everyone around her was flinching away from some private horror show. Nevers had drawn his pistol and was pointing it in different directions, face twisted into a desperate grimace. The policewoman dropped Rana and fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around her head. A policeman doubled over and vomited. Another policeman screwed the heels of his hands into his eyes, his mouth stretched wide in a red scream. And Rana was running. Knees and elbows splayed, running past the police and the police vehicles. Chloe chased after the little girl as she dodged between parked cars. Behind her, Fahad was shouting something.

There was no sign of Rana. Chloe looked around, then dropped to her hands and knees, peered under the cars on either side.

The little girl was pressed against a wheel, knees tucked into her chest, arms wrapped around her shins.

‘It’s okay,’ Chloe said, trying her best to smile. ‘It’s okay now. You can come out.’

‘I don’t like the bad people.’

‘Nor do I. Let’s make sure they don’t catch us.’

‘Ugly Chicken doesn’t like them either,’ the little girl said.

‘I know.’

‘He made everyone see things. Were you scared?’

‘Very scared.’

Chloe remembered seeing, in some disaster-porn documentary, a robot sent in to inspect the burning heart of a nuclear reactor smashed open by an earthquake. She felt that she’d been given a glimpse of something like that: an elemental devouring light that could boil a person’s brain in her skull. And with a horrible lurch of association she thought of the Trafalgar Square bomb, the incandescent flare of her mother’s last moment, and wondered if that was what Ugly Chicken had tapped into.

Rana said, ‘It wasn’t meant for you. He mostly aimed it at the bad people.’

‘Can you scoot out, sweetheart?’ Chloe said. ‘We need to get going.’

Footsteps behind her: Fahad, breathless and sweating, squatting down to look at his sister. ‘You did good,’ he told her, and said to Chloe, ‘I don’t even know why I wanted to meet you. We can take care of ourselves.’

‘Let’s get out of here. Find somewhere to talk.’

Fahad picked up Rana and cradled her to his chest, and he and Chloe scurried across the lorry park. Chloe’s camo jacket flickered, trying to imitate the candy colours of cars, a stretch of weedy tarmac. Her heart was beating quick and high and she had only one thought in her head: get as far away from the Reef as possible.

They were close to the ragged hedge of buddleias at the edge of the lot when she heard the whine of an engine behind her. Fahad stopped and turned around, but she couldn’t look. If she did, she might see Ugly Chicken again, might turn into a pillar of salt. She grabbed Fahad’s arm, shook him, told him to keep going.

He said, ‘It isn’t the police.’

A tinny horn beeped, and a bright yellow runabout swerved towards them through crackling weed stalks, braked with a hard squeal. Its passenger door popped open and Gail Ann said, ‘Hey girlfriend. Need a lift?’