‘You’re Oliver Roth,’ he breathed.
The boy nodded.
‘Alive and well.’
Chapter 23
In one short radio conversation, Ewan had lost five years’ worth of behaviour management lessons. He screamed and swore at the top of his voice, not caring how many clones heard and came running, thrusting his assault rifle through every window he passed in the darkness. He hit the tears away from his face instead of wiping them, and kicked against the walls as if trying to tear New London to the ground piece by piece.
He had wasted his second-to-last clip of ammunition on a dead clone, who lay at his feet with eight handgun bullets to his chest.
‘What the hell just happened?’ shouted Alex through his radio.
‘What the hell do you think?’ Ewan spat in response. ‘McCormick took out the backup place and died anyway! He came to New London to babysit us and got himself bloody killed!’
The words sounded unbelievable, even though they came from his own mouth. The great Joseph McCormick, father of the Underdogs, the head of Britain’s last army, and Ewan’s surrogate grandfather, was almost certain to be dead.
If felt so wrong, the thought of outliving McCormick. He was supposed to survive the longest. He deserved to.
Out of the thousand thoughts that raced through Ewan’s head, there was one that made him inconsolably guilty: the hope that McCormick really had died rather than get himself captured. If Grant made McCormick talk, the war was over.
The corridor around him was pitch black. How McCormick had thought a power cut would help them reach Floor B, he would never know. He had been halfway to a stairwell up to Floor D when the lights had gone out and rendered the map in his head useless.
‘I shouldn’t have left him alone,’ Kate wailed through the radio, ‘it’s my fault! This all happened because of me!’
Ewan wanted to tell her she was right. He wanted Kate to blame herself, but he knew it would only be to reduce his own guilt. Besides, he only had three quarters of his team left. And one way or another, a computer still needed destroying.
‘Kate,’ he snarled reluctantly, ‘you left him so you could kill a border point and buy us more time. If you’d stayed with McCormick we’d have lost the war already.’
There was no response through the radio, except the faint crackle of sobbing.
‘I… I just wish we could push the reset button… go back to before he collapsed and do things differently…’
Ewan shivered. His mentor’s collapse at Spitfire’s Rise felt like a month ago.
‘We screwed up the whole week!’ Kate wailed. ‘Raj is dead, Alex has been cloned, Lorraine’s almost worked herself to death and now we’ve lost McCormick! And unless we get to Floor B, it’ll all be for nothing!’
‘All the more reason to get up there and finish this,’ came Alex’s voice, both through the radio and somewhere in the audible distance. He was close. ‘By all rights we should be dead by now. And if Raj were here, he’d say there’s a God-given reason we’re still alive. Let’s prove him right, OK?’
‘Alex,’ Ewan called out across the corridor. Stumbling noises came from a small distance away, and they spent the next thirty seconds ignoring Kate’s cries and bringing themselves towards each other, using their voices to navigate through the dark.
‘Good to see you again, mate,’ said Alex once he came close.
‘Alex, you can’t even see me.’
Alex dared to laugh, and tried to pat Ewan on the shoulder. Instead, he hit Ewan’s head.
‘Missing your helmet?’
‘Lost it in the Experiment Chamber. Traded it for a gas mask.’
‘Huh, well done. Whereabouts is K—’
Alex was interrupted by a message that echoed through every radio in the Citadel, including the bodies spread across their Floor E corridor.
‘Calling all soldiers,’ said Iain Marshall, ‘there is a special guard priority in place for the next fifteen minutes, along the stairwell from 58F to 58P. All nearby units must abandon their posts and guard all stairwell entrances and exits. That’s 58F to 58P. Do so now.’
Alex let out a delighted laugh.
‘McCormick’s alive!’
‘That’s a bloody quick conclusion to jump to.’
‘No, think about it. What’s so special about Floors F and P? The stairwells go up to F, and McCormick was captured on P!’
It sounded realistic enough. Ewan nodded, although Alex would not see it in the dark.
‘And if you don’t believe me,’ Alex finished, ‘call Lorraine and Shannon. I bet Stairwell 58 is right next to that place he was attacking! He’s being taken up to the big guns… probably because of Kate’s detonator.’
*
McCormick – helpless, unarmed, and exhausted after the long climb – was half a storey away from Floor F. His only consolation had been enjoyment at keeping Oliver Roth behind him like a car stuck behind a tractor.
At the top of the stairwell, waiting for the prisoner who had led a war against them for a year, wiped out every scrap of AME research and reduced New London to torchlight, stood Iain Marshall and Nathaniel Pearce. Their faces were difficult to read in the shallow light beams, but they weren’t happy.
Back in the days of television, McCormick had seen Marshall and Pearce on the news once or twice. Not quite as often as Nicholas Grant, but he still remembered what they had looked like with their posh suits and professional haircuts. The casual clothes and bitter scowls had not been part of their onscreen personas.
‘This is him?’ sneered Marshall.
‘Yeah,’ answered Roth. ‘Disappointing, right?’
McCormick wasn’t insulted. He knew what he looked like. But it was quite a compliment that they had expected him to be something more.
‘Don’t underestimate him,’ said Pearce. ‘Before he takes one more step towards Floor B, he’s getting a full search.’
‘Volunteering, are you?’
‘You’re performing the search, sunshine,’ Marshall growled towards Roth with fierce eyes, ‘because this is your fault. If you’d got to him three secondsearlier you’d have saved the Citadel’s power, and we could have just marched him through the X-ray on Floor D! Cover every millimetre from head to toe, because there’s no way he’s coming to my office without a full search for weapons.’
‘Your office?’ laughed Roth. ‘The one with the computer he’s trying to destroy?’
‘Trust me, there’s a plan. You know about the bomb, don’t you?’
Roth threw a glare towards his prisoner. McCormick could not see it in the darkness, but felt it.
‘Actually, yeah,’ Roth answered. ‘I believe it was me who called it in.’
McCormick held his firmest poker face, amused that he had been right. The people at the top of Grant’s empire really did hate each other. He had predicted as much: power-hungry people never truly liked their colleagues.
‘Good,’ finished Marshall. ‘Now McCormick, there’s a spare storage room over there. Would you kindly go inside and strip down?’
The exhausted McCormick ambled away towards the spare room, Roth’s assault rifle poking his back. He walked inside, and Roth closed the door behind him rather than follow.