What I found was interesting, and took a little map study to work out. The easiest path from Edinburgh to York actually went quite a bit east out of Edinburgh and then hooked south through Berwick-upon-Tweed (what a funny name), Newcastle upon Tyne, and so on, down to York. Travel time looked to be about two and a half hours, which wasn’t terrible if I could hide on top of a carriage during the whole trip.
When I checked the GPS, it said I was 1.4 miles walk from Waverly Station, which was the closest and the one the train from York departed from. I wondered if there was a closer station, but I couldn’t see it on my map, and the schedule I’d gotten for this one trip seemed to suggest there were no other local stops. Of course, the website wasn’t the most navigable I’d ever seen, especially for a Luddite like me, so that wasn’t a definite guarantee or anything. Still, 1.4 miles was nothing, really.
I picked up my pace, continuing to use the phone as cover even though I was no longer looking at the screen. Luckily for me, the fast food employee had charged the thing fairly recently, giving me a nice 95% charge to work with. The last thing I needed right now was for it to go dead on me when I might actually need it. I figured right about the time it died or around noon today, I’d need to chuck it, because my mark would get wise to its disappearance and either report it stolen or cancel the service. One of those was much worse than the other, assuming the police took time to investigate its usage. They probably wouldn’t, but when confronted with a city that seemed to be run by Rose and which promised horrible death should I be found…who would want to take the chance of being found out?
Keeping my head down and my eyes sweeping for trouble was an easy enough thing to do. The city air was chill and coming alive, the purple sky turning gradually more orange. My heart was hammering in my chest as I looked around surreptitiously. The traffic on the road steadily increased as time wore on, and I was stuck to a human walking speed to avoid making trouble by revealing myself as a meta by breaking into a car-speed sprint.
According to the map app, it was going to take me about thirty minutes to walk to Waverly, and I was going to get to pass by the Queen’s house. Yay, scenery. Hopefully they didn’t take their security too seriously, because getting caught out in front of Holyrood House would be embarrassing.
I stalked along Lower London Road, according to the map, which then said it turned into Kirkwood Place. I was passing four-story apartments now on my left, rows of cars parked in every single space. The city was starting to wake, and that was bad news for me, in a way. I might have looked a little more unusual skulking along in the dark, but there were fewer eyes to scrutinize and take notice of me. That would have been a plus, especially given how many people were looking for me right now.
Heading up the hill, I had to hang a slight right at the split of the road, passing a beige apartment building. This area looked to be in good repair overall, but was desperately quiet in a way I didn’t care for. The hum of cars in the distance made it seem like an aura of menace hung over the city. Trees rustled in the wind every now and again.
Someone spoke behind me, and a door slammed. My pulse spiked, and I looked back. Just a couple guys coming out of a flat, laughing and talking to one another. They didn’t seem like zombies working for Rose, but then, maybe they wouldn’t have. They went straight to a car and got it, driving past me without so much as a look a moment later.
My heart rate slowed. If I didn’t get out of Scotland with Reed, this was going to be the new normal. Always fearing the next corner, the next person I passed. Always worrying what was waiting for me just over the horizon, in the next five minutes, and the five after that.
That kind of certainty was a taste of fear I hadn’t known in a long time.
It had been slowly ratcheting up the last few months before I’d left America. It had hit what I thought was the fever pitch when President Harmon had sent the entire US law enforcement and military infrastructure after me, but then that had died down for a while after I’d beaten Harmon.
When it kicked into high gear again after the LA explosion…I’d left. I’d thought I’d found a way to take the heat off by coming to the UK.
Now I was in Scotland, disempowered, with the entire law enforcement apparatus after me, nary a friend in sight and scarcely in contact (Reed being the exception) and somehow things had, once again, gotten ever so much worse.
A car went by, and I thought I saw a face staring out at me. I looked, out of habit, and realized after one heart-stopping moment that it was a kid looking out a car’s back window. I sighed, the wind rushing through the trees to my right, and kept walking.
I checked my phone. Now I was on Abbeyhill. Road? Street? The app didn’t say, and I didn’t care. I was following the blue line and trying to ignore the fact that I was having to walk under a shadowy, forbidding underpass that lasted only twenty or so feet. That there was nowhere for a threat to hide beneath it mattered little. Somehow, walking in shadow was now cause for fresh worry.
But in fairness…almost everything was cause for fresh worry right now.
I walked a few minutes more, through some tight spaces, below an even darker underpass that caused my little heart to pitter-patter wildly. Once more, no harm came to me, though the sound of a bus shifting right as it went by would have caused me to explode in flame if I’d still had that power. As it was, it just almost caused me to lose bladder control. Which was kind of the opposite of fire, really.
It took me another few minutes of following Abbeyhill to reach Holyrood House and Scottish parliament. I recognized the latter from overflying it when I’d been in Edinburgh a few days earlier, and it still looked like a deconstructed and reconstructed pile of jangly, messed-up angles. I wasn’t sure who the architect was on it, but it felt like they might have taken a lot of inspiration from Pablo Picasso. And maybe some LSD, too.
I watched the guards and police outside the parliament building with a wary eye. The last thing I needed at this point was to get my ass snared in a normal security perimeter for a high security location like this. Talk about your avoidable acts of incompetence.
Taking the fork onto Calton Road, I got a slightly queasy feeling as I checked out the map. I hadn’t intended it this way, but my route was taking me past the Calton Heights Burial Ground, where Rose and I had enjoyed (or rather, she’d enjoyed and I’d gotten my ass kicked) our last climactic showdown before she’d done the metahuman version of spaying me.
The mere knowledge that I was approaching this place was bad enough, but the road I was taking to get there was making it so much worse. The segment of Calton Road I was walking along was surrounded on the right by a high stone wall that looked like it was a remnant from the 1700s or earlier, a product of old Edinburgh at its finest, an archaeological masterpiece from the days of yore.
It was also boxing me in on that side. Rows of flats were providing a similar service on my left, which was disquieting in that if Rose came thundering down on me out of the blue right now, I had nowhere to go but maybe into an apartment building in hopes of fleeing out a window or door out the back. Not the surest of escape routes, and when you’re fleeing for your life, any uncertainty save for that of capture is generally bad. Because it can lead to capture.
The surroundings added another tremble to my heart as I walked. This was the kind of worry I didn’t really need, the knowledge that not only was I in a hostile city, but my escape options were severely limited. If the cops pulled in front of me and behind right now, I was out of luck. Block the street over through the apartment buildings and I was even more high and dry.
None of this was good news, and it was the sort of thing that my brain liked to dwell on and imagine, doing me surprisingly few favors in the process.
Passing a black iron gate to my right, a little break in the wall, I was treated with a view of the Burial Ground.