The light shifted and he heard a muffled sound resembling horse’s hooves. Two horses? Then footsteps. They came straight towards him as if they knew exactly where he was. So much for any escape.
The voice, when it spoke, was even closer than he thought.
‘Hello. It’s a bit late to be letting people in, but I do like having my brothers owe me.’
The voice was male, the tone wry and the accent cut-glass posh. Yet something about it made Luke want to burrow into the earth itself rather than see its owner. He pressed his shoulder blades back against the tree trunk, which was slippery with hoarfrost, and tried to control his rising panic.
The guy was Skilled. Luke could feel it in the way he spoke, just as with the Equal in Millmoor. His words could do stuff. Make things happen.
‘Let’s have a look at you, then.’
A faint, cold brightness suffused the air, as if someone had turned up the starlight, and Luke found that he could see.
Cool fingers tipped up his chin. It was a proprietary gesture. Luke snarled and tossed his head, then glared at the freak who’d handled him.
He wasn’t what Luke was expecting.
He was young – maybe no older than Luke himself, although taller. His hair was a mess, which saved Luke from having to see too much of his face. Luke caught a flash of dark eyes that made him shudder. It was as if someone had poked two holes right through the guy’s head and the night was showing through on the other side.
Luke looked away as the Equal studied him intently. Who was this, and where were they?
‘Well, I was right about one thing,’ said the freak, smiling in a way that was the opposite of reassuring. ‘You’ve got potential. You’re also in a bit of a state, so, first things first.’
The guy reached out and ripped off the bandage around Luke’s head. He lightly cupped Luke’s skull right where Kessler’s baton had hit. For a fleeting moment it was awful, then it wasn’t. Luke’s scalp and face tingled. His head didn’t hurt any more. In fact, nothing hurt any more. He didn’t even feel tired. The aristo was watching him carefully, wiping his fingers fastidiously on his sleeve.
‘Better?’ the Equal asked. ‘You’re not going to like this next bit so much.’
He didn’t.
They’d all heard horror stories at school, or told them to one another late at night on camping trips when the adults were sleeping in another tent. The tales had always made Luke’s flesh creep. Stories of people who woke up in the middle of operations, but were too paralyzed to raise the alarm. Backpackers who went drinking in beach bars, then came to in a bath of ice minus some vital organs. Sicko scientists who’d experimented on living, conscious prisoners during wartime.
The violation felt that deep. Like those cool fingers were inside his body – inside his soul, the existence of which Luke had never given much thought to until now. They were carefully sorting through bits of him that no other person was ever meant to see or know. He was sure he was going to throw up. He probably wasn’t close enough to spatter the Equal’s boots, but he’d try.
‘Interesting,’ the freak said, in a way that even Luke could tell meant no good to anyone, least of all himself. ‘I wonder . . .’
The boy’s eyes closed. But before Luke could experience any relief at being spared that unnerving gaze, he felt himself somehow . . . come loose. It was as if he was an engine still assembled, but with every part unscrewed.
He felt the Equal reach in and take something out of him.
Or add something? Had a new part been placed deep inside, where he’d never been aware that anything was missing? Something so essential it was impossible he had functioned without it?
He couldn’t tell. And then the intrusion was gone and Luke curled into a ball on the hard-frozen ground. He gagged on his fear and let it spew all over the tree roots. The Equal just stood there watching.
‘Finished?’ the boy said, without a scrap of solicitude, when Luke was wiping his mouth with the back of his bound hands.
Luke wasn’t going to dignify that with a reply. He knew only that he hated this freak. Hated him with a passion. No one should be able to do whatever this boy had just done to him. It was obscene that such people existed.
‘Anyway,’ the Equal continued, as if they’d been talking about the cricket scores or last night’s telly. ‘My brother will be over in a minute for all the usual “Welcome to Kyneston” blah.’
Kyneston.
This wasn’t a Security detention facility. Not a lifer camp. It was the estate where his family lived.
The relief was so intense that Luke couldn’t hold back the tears. He ducked his head, not wanting the Equal to see, and scrubbed his cheeks with the sleeve of his boilersuit.
‘How am I here?’ he asked, when he’d pulled himself together.
The freak shrugged.
‘Thank your sister Daisy. Gavar’s taken a shine to her. When we heard there’d been more trouble in the slavetown and he was going back, she begged him to get you out. Gavar is my older brother,’ the boy clarified. ‘I think you were in the audience for his little performance in Millmoor.’