Edge. Part 32

"Yes. Take care."

He stared at the black display.

I'm an idiot.

Then he put the phone away, checked the knife on his hip, and got moving.

[ TWENTY-ONE ].

The Millennium Wheel was wired for light. Each ellipsoidal car, wrapped in a smart plastic lamina, rippled with scarlet, indigo and white patterns, shining even in sunlight. The struts, braided with optic fibres, shimmered with a thousand colours, shifting in time to the music's beat atop a tall pedestal stage on the Embankment proper, a band was playing, their instruments redfanging the lights: a visual kaleidoscope phaselocked to the beat.

"It's brilliant," said Richard.

"Yeah, watch now." Opal pointed. "That's Hammerfeld, from Norway, you want to talk about brilliant."

The gra.s.sy square next to the Wheel contained a complex arrangement of scaffolding towers, some with tough lightweight sheeting to form walls, plus ramps and outcrops of hard plastic with minimal padding. The compet.i.tors were doing their thing two at a time, partly because this was a friendly compet.i.tion for little prize money, a demo showcasing the partic.i.p.ants of next week's Xtreme Run championships. Most of the foreign compet.i.tors were already here in London.

Richard knew all this because Opal had explained it several times over. He even remembered some of the nicknames.

"That's Mjolnir, right? Aka the Hammer?"

"Not bad, Richie."

People were swirling all around them. Brian had gone off somewhere with some older guys his own age.

"What are the towers for? They're too smooth to climb up."

"Only for the freerunners. No gloves, no skates, see? This is the freerunning; the gekrunners come afterwards."

"And old Hammer up there is a freerunner."

"He does both, actually, unlike most of them. In compet.i.tion, leastways."

Brand names and mottos of clothing and equipment companies scrolled down the ramps and slides and towers. Opal and the other squatters, gekrunners or not, despised the System, meaning banks and ordinary jobs and all the rest; but they accepted companies promoting their gek-gear, because otherwise there would be no events like this, no money to pay for people to come from abroad, or to hire in the ma.s.sive stands, and whatever else it took.

Of them all, it seemed only Brian saw the contradictions in their views.

And me.

At least Brian had a place among them.

What can I do?

Athleticism was alien to him. If he were at home now, he'd be up his bedroom, reading a book on his widescreen, drinking a Diet c.o.ke or milk, pretending not to hear Father downstairs swearing as he got deeper into the whisky, or the rows with the in-house staff, the screech of wheels if Father set off for a

drunken, too-fast drive in his ElectroBentley X.

"Richie, did you see that?"

"Uh, what?"

"He went from like a Lache into... Never mind."

"Sorry."

"You all right?"

"Sure. Yeah."There were smells of roasting food, nuts and cicadas and chicken, and the sweetness of candy floss; but the pain in his stomach was familiar now, a constant hard pressure. His lack of money was a reality. But Opal was with him.

She was focused on the freerunners cartwheeling and leaping around the compet.i.tion stage: absorbed, lips apart and eyes alight, perhaps seeing herself up there one day, feeling how it would be to flip through the air like that, enjoy the attention of the crowd. At least, that was what he thought was happening in her head.

The music was a piece he knew, Everyone Runs From Something, and he would normally remember the name of the band but tonight it wasn't there in his mind. Despite the crowd all around and Opal beside him, he felt more lost than he had ever imagined he could be. People jostled and cheered the freerunners' performance, which to him was a montage of senseless movement and confusion.

None of this was right.

Josh followed the stream of people. At intervals, he checked his phone, then, after finding no search hits, he randomly accessed the footage his software agents were a.n.a.lysing. Around the Embankment and further east at South Bank and Waterloo, the flow of faces and bodies along the streets formed an organic river, so hard to dive inside for individuals, especially when they were kids, shorter than the throng of adults. If they were here at all.

More people pa.s.sing meant a wealth of video data, more possibilities counterbalanced by the difficulty of seeing someone clearly enough for recognition. All around was a press of individuals caught up in the tidal motion of the crowd, though each of those thousands was a self-aware individual, a human being with success and failures, loves and disappointments, a family past and an unknown future; while he himself could drift with his thoughts or come back to reality: a fourteen year-old boy needed to be found, for his own sake and Suzanne's.

Josh bought a pink candyfloss, so he looked like someone here for pure enjoyment, and held it in his right hand, keeping his fingers away from the wispy, sticky sugar-cloud.

On the gra.s.s area by the Eye, gekrunners were warming up. He moved closer, protective of his candyfloss, finding a place to stand. Ignoring the compet.i.tion spectacle, he looked around the crowd, trying to spot a girl or lad matching the images in his mind. Meanwhile, his phone was in his sealed shirt pocket, ready to vibrate if one of his querybots found a hit.

Around him, some wore their phones velcroed to sleeves or on bands around wrist or biceps. Though the fabric would make a noise if pulled, this place was crowded and the music was loud wearing phones that way invited theft. That was why Josh's was in his pocket.

A strange hand took hold of his knife hilt.

He reacted as trained, slapping his hand against the attacker's, pinning his grip and knife, dropping his weight as he spun, free hand hammering down, still with the candyfloss impale the eyeball but the attacker was small pull back pull back eight or nine years old eight or nine years old Jesus Christ Jesus Christ and he diverted the strike in time. He twisted the trapped hand, and the kid went to his knees. and he diverted the strike in time. He twisted the trapped hand, and the kid went to his knees.

"I should snap every bone in your arm. If I sneeze it'll happen anyway."

"S-sorry."

"Get up." He unpinned the hand. "Come on."

"All right. You didn't have to hurt me."

"Sod off."

This was a child with a story as intricate and emotive as Richard Broomhall's; but no one could solve every problem in the world, and dragging the kid to the police would do nothing to achieve what he was here for. After a moment, the kid started to slide off through the crowd.

"No. Stop," said Josh.

The kid froze.

"Take this." Josh thrust the candyfloss at him. "Take it."

A shaking hand closed on the stick.

"Now sod off, and think how different things might have been." sod off, and think how different things might have been."

The kid went.

s.h.i.t. Suzanne would've handled that better.

Maybe it was because he worked best with a single focus, a clear mission objective that "I saw you manhandling that boy."

"What?"

A tubby man, his convex belly straining his polo shirt, pointed a short finger and said: "You're a bully and a bad parent, and I've half a mind to report you to"

Josh's hand whipped out, thumb hooked, the web of skin striking the idiot's throat.

"Chh" The guy rocked in place, panicked and frozen.

f.u.c.k it.

Josh walked away, knowing the idiot could not follow, would not be able to speak for a time. Swallowing food was going to be a b.i.t.c.h as well. Call it the c.u.mberland diet.

He didn't deserve that.

The voice inside his head was Maria's.

On the periphery of the crowd, freerunners were tumbling in a loose, lighthearted fashion. None of the compet.i.tors were up on the compet.i.tion stand: some kind of break between events. They all looked to be in their teens. Josh wondered if he could match them, then realised he had no chance.

Good discipline.

It looked impromptu, and free format was obviously the name of the game, but they all had techniques in common and knew how to perform them. Josh might not be trained in what they did, but he understood how the body moved, and these guys simply flowed.

"Very nice," he said, as one of them jumped from the riverside railing, performed a vertical spinning crescent kick at least that was how Josh thought of the move and dropped to the ground, into a shoulder roll, and came up with a hands-free cartwheel to land in a crouch.

"Cheers, man," said the freerunner.

One of the others, a white guy with dreadlocks tied in a topknot, nodded.

"I hear you guys are doing a night run," said Josh.

"Yeah, we're part of that, all right."

"It's a bit crowded here.""Not after dark," said Dreadlocks, "but we're not starting from here. Down at South Bank, outside the old theatre, then down the underpa.s.s ramps and up around the station."

"You're going to freerun through Waterloo?"

"Through it, under it, and over the top," said one of the others. "Gonna be good."

"I'll be watching," said Josh. "Take it easy."

"You, too."

He wandered away, heading east alongside the river, staring at the crowd and food vendors. Across the darkening waters, the stately turbines were slowly rotating, their vanes' leading edges rippling with electrophosph.o.r.escent red, glowing like blood on a blade.

Suzanne. I wish I'd invited you.

But she might be with a client now, and if she were free and came, his attention would be on her. He was here was to find Richard Broomhall, and everything else was secondary.

Reaching the South Bank complex, he stopped. There was a jumble of grey concrete blocks and ramps, the old theatre building with its balcony patio where the clientele were drinking wine spritzers, while down below some twenty young men and women were wandering among the people and the architecture, doing pretty much the same as Josh: taking in every aspect of the geometry, internalising a model of the surroundings in three-dimensional detail.

It felt strange to be among kindred spirits. But their goal was different from his, because they were mapping vectors of movement across a 3-D urban setting for the sheer flowing fun of it; while he was planning to s.n.a.t.c.h a kid Richard, or else Opal, if only she appeared.

The incident with the idiot had made him realise that if Richard or Opal called for help, there would be dozens of athletic helpers all around. While he might be able to beat them in a straight run on barren land, in this cluttered city world, with a struggling kid in hand, he would have no chance of getting away.

Suzanne, if she were here, would find some way of explaining to the gekrunners that it was for Richard's benefit; but for Josh there was too much risk. And there was something else, because of the promise he had made to Viv, the woman at the shelter who had helped him he would not drag Richard back to his father against his will. And that meant no police.

He circ.u.mnavigated the boxy building several times, then moved along the nightrunners' probable route, towards the Imax Ruin in Cardboard City, and up to the Victorian-looking sculpture of Waterloo station's entrance: stone flags and banners, memorials to former railway workers who fell during wartime, defending the country against an implacable enemy.

Had there been a single conflict since then that made as much moral sense?

Forget it. Look and concentrate.

In the station he drank coffee and ate a yoghurtcoated flapjack, used the facilities, then left via the pedestrian skyway over the EuroLev terminal if Suzanne were here, they could be in Paris within the hour and descended to ground level. He followed the streets and underpa.s.ses back to South Bank, made a final looping circuit of the theatre complex, and found a place to sit near the riverside railings.

Waiting was one of his best skills.