Ewan did not offer a response. He looked to the floor and found that a bunch of odds and ends had fallen away from the pile before him. Some were everyday objects such as phones and watches, and others were half-kilogram weights made of different metals.
Ewan grabbed hold of the nearest weight, ignored the searing heat against his hand, and lobbed it as hard as he could towards Oliver Roth.
Roth did not look bothered. Not until the weight passed between the two stone pillars. He had not witnessed Ewan switching on the AME shield.
The weight detonated against the shield, causing violent red ripples and a fiery explosion that threw Roth from his feet. As the assassin fell against the wall, Ewan jumped upright, leaned around the pillars and shot him four times in the chest.
As satisfying as it would have been, Ewan did not hang around to watch Roth collapse to the hot ground. He leapt back through the empty window frame, took a running jump over the burning control panel, and tore off his gas mask as he landed in front of the open door. Wheezing, weakened, but alive, Ewan stumbled back into the Floor F corridor, slamming the door closed behind him just to be certain.
He shot his tired gaze down the corridor, and found himself to be safe. There were no clones waiting for him. Oliver Roth had acted alone, and lost.
There’s no way I should still be alive after all that.
It’s almost enough to make me believe in luck. Almost .
*
With surprisingly little guidance from Lorraine and Shannon, Kate had found the lower battlements of Floor L. The corridor looked different to anywhere else she had seen in New London.
Her corridor stretched in a straight line as far as her eyes could see: a mile or two, at the very least. Most Outer City corridors had turns at least once in a while, accounting for the different-shaped rooms they passed, but not this one. Kate was fairly sure she could fire a bullet each way down the corridor and hit both the eastern and western Citadel walls. Every hundred metres there lay a door on her left, unlabelled and cream-coloured. She picked one at random, took a deep breath, and swiped her latest stolen keycard.
There was no buzz. Snipers didn’t like to be distracted by sudden noises.
She opened the door, slowly and silently, and found what must have been the smallest type of room in the whole Citadel. There was enough space for a small man to lie down on its inbuilt mattress, but little more. At the front end, a square hole in the concrete wall pointed diagonally downward, through a widening tunnel to the cool air of the outside.
The floor was occupied by a sniper, who lay on his front with both hands wrapped around a rifle that had been fixed in position. When Kate looked at his short mattress, she discovered why Grant could afford to design the rooms so small.
She was looking at half a clone. Its body ended at its waist, with a perfectly formed head, shoulders and arms, and a torso large enough to contain its vital organs. Clearly, Nathaniel Pearce had decided not to waste resources on legs they would never use. The clone model was built for the specific purpose of sniper duty, and the design of their bodies – like the absence of vocal cords – must have made them easier for Grant and Pearce to control.
Kate used her childhood gymnastics experience to walk lightly on her toes, ensuring her approach was silent.
She almost felt sorry for the half-clone; she could only imagine how long the sniper had laid there, or how his attention span had coped with continuous, unrelenting sniper duty. But nonetheless, this clone would be as determined to kill her as any other. Kate slid her knife from its sheath, held her breath and bent over the clone on the mattress like a sinister tooth fairy.
‘Guys!’ Ewan’s voice yelled from her radio. ‘Good news!’
Kate leapt in horror. The clone on his mattress rolled over with panic across his face. He fumbled for the handgun on the belt around his stumped abdomen, but his vision was obscured after hours of having one eye closed and the other through a telescope. Kate fell to the mattress knife first, and stabbed it into the front of her victim’s neck.
‘Is this important?’ she whispered. ‘I’m… busy.’
The clone’s eyes rolled up towards his brain, and Kate watched his face for fading signs of life. She noticed how little she regretted her actions, or even felt anxious about killing a clone from inches away, given the urgency of the night’s mission. She was proud and alarmed in equal measure.
‘Two targets down, three to go!’ Ewan screamed, thankfully after Kate had turned the volume low. ‘I just destroyed the Experiment Chamber!’
‘Make that three targets down,’ answered McCormick’s voice. ‘The archive was closer than I thought.’
‘It’s gone already?’
‘Paper burns very quickly. There are no more written records of AME left in existence. Just the backup server to go now, then we can storm Marshall’s office and put an end to AME forever.’
‘Oh,’ said Ewan, ‘and just while we’re talking… I killed Oliver Roth.’
Kate froze in disbelief.
‘Oliver Roth?’ said Alex. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘Four bullets in the torso, then I locked him in a burning room. I’m pretty sure we can go home tonight and declare once and for all that he’s dead!’
Kate felt two stone lighter. Somehow, the absence of one teenage monster made the whole Citadel feel less frightening. She pushed the dead clone from beneath her, and took his spot on the bloodstained mattress.
‘Wonderful news,’ answered McCormick, albeit with a humane twinge of guilt, ‘but I’m afraid he’s only bonus points. If the shield goes up, we still lose. It’s twenty past nine—’
‘Leave it to me, sir,’ Kate interrupted. ‘Go as fast as you can, but don’t do anything stupid. You’ll have more time than you think.’
She focused one eye through the sniper’s scope. Through the lens of a telescopic sight, the whole world looked different. And not just because of the occasional tremble of focus, or the blur around the scope’s edges. Through a sniper rifle, every detail on the ground looked like something to be inspected rather than seen.
She was thankful the wall faced north. The glow of the sunset was on her left, rather than in her eye. Plenty of twilight remained – twenty past nine wasn’t so dark in May – but she didn’t have long before the awkward part of dusk when it was too dark for plain sights, but too bright for night-vision.
Her search began. She knew exactly what a border point looked like, having seen them up far too close at Oakenfold. A little part of her brain, which had been suffering from enormous anxiety at the moment the memory was made, remembered that each border point had its own miniature shield. Perhaps that meant that the loss of any single coordinate would bring down the whole network.
Now, without the shields raised, the border points would not be impervious to bullets. Or at least, Kate hoped not.
She found a landmine-shaped lump of metal in the grass within the first two minutes of her search. She fired a bullet straight into it, and in the dimmed light she saw a glimmer of metal somersaulting through the evening air like a tossed pancake.
Kate smiled. It had been her first smile since the day she and Raj had watched the missiles over New London. Maybe, just for tonight, she was going to be OK.