The anger I’d put on hold outside the hotel comes rushing through me now. ‘No way. All of this is your fault! You practically handed Teacake over to them. You as good as sold her.’
He winces. Allie pulls open the passenger door, but pauses before she gets inside. ‘Jaya’s right. Teacake won’t be able to trust you now. You’d just make things worse.’ She closes it and goes round to the driver’s side. ‘Get out, Calum.’
I usher Leah into the back seat and climb in beside her. Calum half chases after the car, even as Allie pulls out of the parking spot and starts off down the road. I watch as he grows smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, until we turn a corner and he disappears altogether.
It’s strange having Allie and Leah in the same place. They both look pale and tired, both clearly shaken up after what happened outside the hotel, and yet they’re so different: Leah sits in the back seat, her knees pulled to her chest, nervously grasping at her hair; Allie’s hands are steady on the steering wheel, and her expression is calm and determined as she drives us out of the city. My life in Edinburgh has collided with the one I was living a few weeks ago, and it’s just . . . surreal.
Awkward too. Allie is one of the most talkative people I’ve ever met, but even she doesn’t know what to say to someone who was contemplating throwing herself off a building just a few minutes ago. When I close my eyes, the scene repeats itself behind my eyes: the swarms of people, the noise, the crashing sound as the man’s body hit the earth. And Leah, ready to follow him.
Just remembering it makes my heart race and my eyes prickle. But now isn’t the time to talk about it.
‘Where are they staying?’ I ask her instead, as the car crawls through the Old Town. ‘Where’s the base?’
‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ She gives a sharp tug on her hair; several strands come away in her hands. ‘It’s an old power plant, maybe half an hour from the city, but I don’t know where. They didn’t tell us.’
Allie tilts her head up to meet Leah’s eyes in the rearview mirror. ‘Does it have two huge chimneys outside it? Near the sea?’
‘Yes! That’s it.’
‘I know where that is. It’s going to be demolished soon.’ She looks down at the dashboard. ‘It’s only ten miles or so, but it’ll take us an hour in this traffic.’
‘You need to tell me what’s going on,’ Leah says. Her hands are shaking so hard she’s still struggling to attach her seatbelt. ‘What are you looking for?’
This really isn’t the time for another shock – she’s just seen someone she knows throw himself off a rooftop, for Christ’s sake – but I don’t have a choice. I tell her everything, from finding Teacake to losing her. From the way Leah stares at me, you’d think I was describing being abducted by aliens. Her expression doesn’t change until I take out my phone and show her the videos that Rani and I took of Teacake flying around McEwan Hall.
‘So that’s what all the commotion was about.’ She falls back in her seat, shell-shocked. ‘We weren’t supposed to do a demonstration today, but a few hours ago Damien and Ross, the chapter leaders, rounded everyone up and ordered us out. The whole thing was a mess. Normally they spend weeks preparing. Telling us to go somewhere so public, with no planning . . . It’s not surprising there were so many arrests.’
The car edges on to South Bridge and through Newington. We eventually leave the traffic jam and move on to country roads, the atmosphere in the car thick with nerves. Allie puts the radio on to fill the silence: there’s a brief mention of the Standing Fallen on the news, but nothing about their discovering a Being. If we were to call the police now, they’d think it was a prank. We’re Teacake’s last hope.
Eventually the power station looms into view. It’s enormous – a characterless chunk of grey and black, stark against the pink tinge of the evening sky. Parts of the wall have been ripped away, revealing an inner skeleton of girders and pipes, and the land around the building is littered with scrap metal, rusted tools and disused machines.
‘You’ve really been living in here?’ Allie can’t keep the disgust out of her voice. ‘Jesus.’
One of the Standing Fallen’s vans is parked just outside the building, but there’s no sign of the other three yet. Allie parks behind a public toilet around the corner, a hundred metres or so from the car park. We’re at enough of a distance to avoid raising suspicion – if anyone notices the car going past, they’ll think it’s someone popping into the loos – but hopefully close enough to sneak in unnoticed.
‘So . . .’ I give a nervous cough. ‘What’s the plan?’
More silence. Allie rummages in the glove compartment, pulls out a crumpled brown bag and a Sharpie, and passes them to Leah.
‘Can you draw us a plan of the building?’
Her hands trembling, Leah flattens the paper and begins to sketch a rough outline of the power station. It’s more complicated than it looks from the outside, with open stairways and overlapping walkways making it easy to see from one side of the building to another.
Allie and I exchange a look. This isn’t going to be easy. The only things giving us a slight advantage are the lack of electricity in the building and the arrests made outside the hotel. Some of the members will be taken into custody and won’t be released until long after we arrive at the base. We just have no way of knowing how many, or if it’ll make any difference.
As Leah draws, the realization of what she’s being asked to do sinks in. She lets out a sob and curls in on herself, her face pressed into her knees.
‘I can’t do this! I can’t. I can’t.’ Her fingers grab at her matted hair. ‘They’ll take it out on my mum; they’ll go after my dad.’
‘They won’t,’ I say feebly, because I have no way of knowing that. I really don’t know what these people are capable of.
Leah shakes her head and reaches for the door handle. ‘No. No. I have to go back. If I go back now, maybe they won’t realize that I came with you—’
‘You just need to help us get in and find Teacake,’ Allie says. ‘How about this – if we get caught, you can say you have no idea who we are, and you were trying to stop us. We’ll back you up, I promise.’
Leah presses her lips together. I want her to say no, that she’d never hand me over like that. Instead she gives a small nod.
‘OK. I’ll try.’ She presses her hands between her knees to stop them shaking. ‘I’ll try.’
There’s a long silence as we look up at the building. I’m starting to feel like an extra on the set of an action movie, thrust into the role of the hero with no clue what the lines are.
‘OK.’ I take a deep breath and unclip my seatbelt. ‘Let’s go.’
My stomach keeps flipping and I feel like I might throw up, but somehow we make it across the yard and past the heap of scrap metal. Leah points to a rectangular hole in the wall where a door once stood. Before we can move, a few figures walk past the windows on the third floor. We wait until they’re out of sight, then slip inside.
The gap leads into the underbelly of the power station, a large, cold labyrinth of huge metal pipes and rusted equipment. There’s some rubbish graffiti spray-painted over the generators, and cigarette butts and broken bottles litter the ground, but the place clearly hasn’t been used for some months.
Though it’s warm outside, a shiver runs over my skin. I follow Leah’s quiet footsteps across the cement floor. At the end of the room is a stairway, a larger version of the outdoor staircases you see on buildings in New York or Montreal. When she points towards it, my stomach flips. It’s even more exposed than I’d imagined: should anyone leave the rooms upstairs, they’ll be able to see us instantly.