The Dark River

29

Maya was still carrying the snub-nosed revolver she had acquired back in New York. The weapon determined her choice of transportation. Avoiding airports, she used a rural bus, a ferryboat, and a train to travel from Ireland to London. She arrived at Victoria Station in the middle of the night without a clear idea of how to find Gabriel. Before he left Skellig Columba, he had promised to contact the Free Runners, so Maya decided to drop by Vine House on the South Bank. Perhaps Jugger and his friends would know if Gabriel was still in the city.

She crossed the Thames and walked up Langley Lane toward Bonnington Square. The streets were empty at this late hour, but she could see the glow of televisions in darkened rooms. Maya passed some renovated terrace houses and a redbrick school built in the Victorian era that had been transformed into an upscale apartment building. In such surroundings, the Vine House looked like a shabby old man surrounded by well-dressed bankers and barristers.

When Maya reached the six-foot-high stone wall that surrounded the garden at Vine House, she smelled a harsh odor that reminded her of a trash fire. The Harlequin stopped and peered around the corner of the house. No one was on the sidewalk or sitting in the little garden at the center of the square. The neighborhood seemed safe until she noticed two men sitting in a florist’s delivery van parked near the end of the block. Maya doubted that anyone had ordered a dozen red roses to be delivered at one o’clock in the morning.

There was no entrance to the back garden from Langley Lane, so she grabbed the top of the stone wall and pulled herself over. The burning smell grew stronger, but she still couldn’t see a fire. Light came from a streetlamp and the new moon glowing in the western sky. As quietly as possible, she moved down the garden pathway to the back of the house, found the door unlocked, and eased it open.

Smoke surged out of the open doorway and flowed around her like a flood of foul gray water. Maya stumbled backward, coughing and waving her hands. Vine House was on fire, and the eighteenth-century oak beams and floorboards gave off as much smoke as a coal pit burning underground.

Where were the Free Runners? Had they fled the house or were they dead? Falling on her hands and knees, Maya crawled into the ground-floor hallway. A door on the left led to the empty kitchen. A door on the right opened to a bedroom with a single electric lamp that gave off a feeble point of light within the darkness.

A man lay in the middle of the room-half on the floor and half on a mattress, as if he were too weary to find his way to bed. Maya grabbed the man’s arms and dragged him out the doorway and into the garden. She was coughing hard and her eyes were filled with tears, but she could see that the unconscious man was Gabriel’s friend Jugger. Straddling his body, she slapped him hard across the face. Jugger’s eyes fluttered open and he started coughing.

“Listen to me!” Maya said. “Is there anyone else in the house?”

“Roland. Sebastian…” Jugger began coughing again.

“What happened? Are they dead?”

“Two men came in a van. Guns. Put us on the floor. Gave us injections…”

She returned to the house, took a deep breath, and stepped back inside. Crawling like an animal, she moved down the hallway and headed up the narrow staircase. One part of her mind was clear while her lungs struggled to breathe. Killing the Free Runners with guns or knives would have attracted too much attention from the authorities. Instead the Tabula mercenaries had drugged the three men and set fire to the dilapidated house. Now they were watching the front door and the entrance to the garden to make sure no one escaped. The next morning, firemen would find what was left of the bodies in the smoldering ruins. The local council would sell the land to a speculator and the London papers would run the story in the back pages: Three Die in Illegal Dwelling.

Maya found Sebastian in an upstairs bedroom, grabbed his arms, and dragged him down the stairs to the garden. When she returned the third time, she could see flames flashing in the darkness, burning the floorboards beneath a parlor chair, reaching up the walls to touch the banisters. There was black smoke at the top of the stairs, and she was completely blind when she reached out and found Roland’s body in the garret bedroom. Pull and stop. Pull and stop again. Sight and sound disappeared and she became a small fragment of consciousness passing through the smoke.

Maya burst out the back door, let go of Roland’s body, and collapsed on the muddy soil of the garden. After several minutes of coughing and gasping for air, she sat up and rubbed her eyes. Jugger was still conscious, talking with slurred speech about the injections. Maya touched the chests of the two other Free Runners and felt them breathing. Still alive.

She was carrying the gun, but using it would be dangerous in this neighborhood. Hollis had once explained that there were so many handguns in Los Angeles that New Year’s Eve celebrations sounded like a firefight in a war zone. In London, the sound of a gun was an unusual occurrence. If she fired her revolver, half the people living around the square would hear it and immediately call the police.

The house continued to burn, and there was a flash of orange flame as the window curtains in Jugger’s bedroom caught fire. Standing up, Maya approached the back door and felt a wave of heat pushing through the cold night air. As her breathing returned to normal, she remembered overhearing a discussion between her father and Mother Blessing about silencers. Gun silencers were illegal in Europe, hard to find and awkward to carry. Sometimes it was easier to improvise a substitute.

Maya searched the backyard and found some overflowing rubbish bins near the wall. She rummaged through the garbage until she discovered an empty two-liter water bottle and a wad of pink rubbery material that looked like carpet padding. Maya stuffed bits of padding into the bottle, then inserted the gun barrel into the opening. An old roll of tape was on the steps near the back door, and she wound it tightly around the gun and the plastic bottle. Jugger was sitting up and staring at her from the other side of the yard.

“What…what are you doing?”

“Wake up your friends. We’re getting out of here.”

Clutching her improvised weapon, she climbed back over the wall, hurried down an alleyway, and approached the back of the delivery van. A side window was rolled halfway down to let out cigarette smoke, and she could hear the two men talking.

“How long do we have to wait?” the driver asked. “I’m getting hungry.”

The other man laughed. “Then go back into the house. Some meat cooking there…”

Maya stepped up to the driver’s window, raised the gun, and fired. The first bullet blew out the bottom of the plastic bottle and cracked through the glass. The gun made a sound like hands clapping-two quick shots, and then silence.