Mark nodded, and headed up the stairs. Ewan turned to McCormick, and whispered to him with eyes of sympathy and sorrow.
‘You know what else this means, don’t you?’
McCormick nodded, visibly saddened.
‘Tell them, Ewan.’
Ewan turned to the crowd, hesitating before giving his command.
‘The rest of you,’ he finished, ‘pack up your things. If those clones remembered the way to Lemsford, they’ll remember their way here. Take whatever food and weapons you can carry. When the strike team leaves tonight, you’re all leaving here too.’
‘But—’
‘No buts, Thomas. Tonight, we’re leaving Spitfire’s Rise.’
A solemn silence fell over the crowd. Moving house had been difficult enough in the old days, but his surviving friends were faced with the task of doing so with one day’s notice and nothing more than two handfuls of belongings.
Grow some guts, all of you, Ewan thought. We all did exactly thesame thing on Takeover Day.
‘Alex,’ he muttered with a hand on the wooden door, ‘come with me.’
*
Ewan took no pleasure in tying Alex to a chair, although a part of him felt like he should have done. Alex had served the Underdogs well over the past year, but if it weren’t for the urgency of the situation it would have been nice to see the overconfident show-off put in his place. Mark had sat himself down on the floorboards, poking his fingers through the soil and uprooting the occasional carrot. The farm would be useless in a matter of hours anyway.
‘Alex,’ Ewan began, drawing out the hunting knife from its sheath, ‘I hope you understand, but I won’t be apologising for this.’
‘You never were good at basic manners.’
Ewan smirked. Alex wasn’t wrong, to be fair.
‘Before we do this,’ he said, bending over just slightly to look Alex in the face, ‘I need you to be completely honest. And I mean completely honest. Put your pride behind you, for the sake of all of us.’
‘Yeah, cos I’m a compulsive liar.’
‘I mean it mate. Don’t try being defiant. You’re talking to the pathological king of defiance here, so it’s better not to compete. You couldn’t have been cloned without knowing anything about it.’
‘Ewan,’ Alex growled like a jaded schoolteacher towards the end of a bitter career, ‘for the last time – I’m not being defiant, I’m not being dishonest – I just literally do not know anything about how they could have cloned me. End of discussion.’
‘Well let’s not give up yet,’ said Ewan. He did his best to use McCormick’s approach to disagreements: discussing them rather than arguing over them. It was difficult when emotions were high, especially with his PDA-inspired need for control kicking in, but it was still the best way into Alex’s brain.
‘One way or another,’ Ewan continued, ‘the cloning happened. Let’s at least find out when it could have been.’
Alex closed his eyes. Perhaps he found it easier to be straightforward when he couldn’t see the people he was accountable to.
‘I’ve not been anywhere interesting in a year,’ he said, ‘except New London. Last time I was there we destroyed the clone factory. Well, you guys did – I saw the place, took a bullet to the shoulder and spent the next three days in a bungalow. Either way, my clones must have been grown there before you blew the place up.’
‘And when did you see New London before that?’
‘The day Ben Christie died. Months ago.’
‘OK,’ said Ewan, ‘so it must have happened when… on the clone factory mission.’
‘ When Charlie died ’ . I a lmost let that sentence slip out.
‘I was pretty crap, to be fair,’ said Alex with a bitter laugh. ‘Didn’t last an hour before getting shot. By the afternoon I was wrapping my shoulder in someone’s shirts, trying to stop the blood.’
Ewan couldn’t help but offer a well-humoured smile. Alex never talked about his failures, so it was only polite to avoid rubbing them in when he did.
‘The next three days were the most boring of my life,’ Alex continued. ‘Or they would have been, if I hadn’t spent them worrying about you guys.’
‘Flattery will get you nowhere,’ grunted Mark through a mouthful of carrot.
‘No, I actually mean it,’ said Alex. ‘That was the whole adventure for me, except for going upstairs with Kate, getting shot and going downstairs again.’
Kate was with him for the start of that day , and she never reported anything unusual…
Then h e was on his own. Cornered in the clone factory ’s alpha control room with no witnesses .
‘Alex… what happened once you were trapped in that control room?’
‘I got out and reached the bungalow.’
‘Take me step by step. How did it happen?’
‘I took a rifle from one of the dead clones, shot my way free, then got out and reached the bungalow.’
Ewan’s eyes widened. He looked over to Mark, who had also noticed the vagueness in his answer.
‘Step by step, Alex. Start from when you shot your way free.’
Alex opened his mouth, and nothing came out.
‘You got out from the control room, and…’
Nothing.
‘…Alex?’
‘I… I don’t remember.’
‘Bingo,’ said Mark.
Ewan watched Alex’s expression turn from puzzlement to fear to abject horror. It was a mood he had never seen in the man’s face before.
‘I mean, I literally have no memory,’ Alex continued, his eyes to the floor and his head shaking rapidly in disbelief. ‘I escaped the control room, and reached the bungalow. I don’t remember anything that happened in between. But I… I don’t even remember not remembering, you know? I didn’t even realise there was a gap in my memory until right now… it was like I’ve tried to avoid thinking about it, but not realised…’
More words came out of Alex’s mouth, but none of them helped Ewan understand him any better. All he knew was that there was a blind spot in Alex’s memory, during which Grant and his allies could have effectively done anything with no witnesses.
‘Ewan,’ said Mark, ‘the sooner you take his blood, the sooner we can end the experiment and evacuate. The sooner you can get some sleep too.’
Ewan clawed his fingers into his head, reluctant to admit Mark was right. Drawing a knife over Alex’s skin would have been unpleasant enough at the best of times, but somehow it was worse when the man was tied to a chair, vulnerable to the point of tears, and trying to imagine what the hell Nicholas Grant had done to him without him even remembering.
Nonetheless, Ewan raised his knife.
‘I’m sorry, Alex.’
‘You said you wouldn’t apologise…’
Ewan picked up the plate at the side of the chair, and leaned forward towards Alex’s cheek.
‘Wha-wait… the face? Seriously? You can’t take blood from my arm or somewhere?’
‘You didn’t tell him, Mark?’
‘Your show, not mine.’