Revenge: The Tube Riders, #3

By Chris Ward

Live together, die together …

Three years after the end of The Tube Riders: Exile, the Governor is preparing for war with Europe. Within Mega Britain's cities, pockets of rebels fight and die in the name of Marta Banks, brave leader of the surviving Tube Riders.

The Tube Riders themselves though, have disappeared. With their trail gone cold, the Governor and his deadly Huntsmen have no way to find them.

That is, until the day the Governor recovers a long lost treasure from his past, an ancient artifact that could crush the rebellion for good.

Marta Banks is about to lose everything.

The epic Tube Riders Trilogy concludes with The Tube Riders: Revenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AMMFA Publishing
• Release date: Nov 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519961358

Book preview

Revenge

Part I

The Wind Farm

1

Thing

The orderly seemed rather overawed to be in the presence of Maxim Cale, Lord Governor of Mega Britain. Every few seconds he glanced over his shoulder to check that the Governor was still following, as if the country’s leader might be playing some ridiculous game of hide and seek.

‘We’re nearly there,’ the man said, in a voice so high-pitched it was almost musical. ‘It’s just up ahead.’

The Governor said nothing. He had long since begun to filter out the man’s road commentary into a section of his mind reserved for the inane. He didn’t need to know where he was going because he could feel the pull. Like magnetism, it was the pull of a hundred years of waiting, of never giving up hope. It was the pull of success, and it was the pull of welcoming.

The thing was up ahead, in the unloading bay next to the landed spacecraft. After dozens of failures his scientists had at last got the specifications correct, and the craft had returned from orbit with his lost treasure. The Governor had wasted no time in authorizing Farrell Soars, the grim-faced Commander in Chief of the DCA, to divert all space program funds into the military and the research labs. The fuel would be used to launch long-grounded warplanes and the technology to arm what was left of his regular army. Perhaps the irritating rebellion could finally be put out of its misery.

Like a cherished lover returned from the grave, he could hear the thing calling him. The sound was sweet, like the wind in the trees in his garden at springtime, like the gurgle of a stream trickling over rocks. The thing knew he was coming. It had been waiting for him too.

‘Just around this corner,’ the orderly said again, almost jogging to keep ahead of the Governor’s huge strides. ‘We’re about there.’

He’s terrified, the Governor thought. He hears it, and it frightens him. It used to frighten so many, but never me. I was never afraid of it, and for that it loved me.

The orderly paused in front of a tall pair of double doors, and for a moment a memory flashed into the Governor’s mind of a room like this so many decades before, when he had stepped out of a bloody nightmare to begin his own journey of destiny.

It was almost complete.

‘Go,’ the Governor said, and the orderly turned and ran, not looking back.

At last. At long last.

He closed his eyes and pushed with his mind. When he opened them, the doors stood wide, welcoming him in.

The unloading bay was deserted, as he had instructed it to be. The orderly was the only other person in this wing of the complex. The directors of his space program had wanted to be here with him, had wanted to walk in circles around the thing, waving clipboards and telling him what they had begun to surmise from it … but he had waved their requests away. No one was to go near it. Farrell Soars was in the process of assembling every man and woman who had been on board the space mission or had been in contact with the thing since the ship’s return. They would all be dead before nightfall.

It stood in the middle of the room. More beautiful than he remembered, awash with glittering, shimmering colour, but much smaller than it had once seemed. Of course, he had been just a boy then.

He could feel its warmth from the doorway, like a summer breeze on his face. Images had begun to fill his mind too, nothing distinct, just flashes of colour and shape. As he moved closer they became stronger and more vivid, hallucinations and dream sequences, some he recognised as part of his own life, some that were totally alien: shapes and landscapes and faces that he had never known, that no human had ever known. He had seen men driven mad before they got within twenty feet of the thing, but they were fools. They hadn’t understood that it wasn’t designed to cause pain.

It was designed to heal.

He didn’t know what it was. He had never known, but he knew what it could do. It could turn an idiot into a genius or a broken man into a whole man again. It could make you strong, or grant you all of your desires if you only believed and gave yourself over to it in spiritual sacrifice. He had embraced it once when it had destroyed so many others, and it had protected him, loved him, turning a weak, lonely Algerian boy into the most powerful man on Earth.

He had believed, and he had been rewarded.

‘I still believe in you,’ he whispered. ‘I have searched for you so many years, and now you are finally returned to me.’

As he got within a few feet of it, the edges of the thing became less distinct. From a distance it resembled a block of water standing freely in the air, but up close it became more of a cloud, its edges blending into the air around it, sparking off little fingers of colour.

The scientists who would later take him from his family had dug it out of the snowy wastes of Siberia. Trapped in the ruins of something vast and decayed, it had been a beacon of life adrift amidst an ocean of death, and they had cut it out like a still-beating heart from a cold, frozen corpse.

He lifted a hand, reaching for it, and saw the nearest surface shimmer in response.

Hello, Massi.

He started. How many years since he had been called by that name?

I have missed you.

‘And I have missed you too,’ he said aloud. He had never known if the voices were real, or just his own mind playing tricks on him. It didn’t matter. Whatever they were, wherever they came from, they were back.

His fingers touched the edge of the thing, and a tingle of electrical current shivered through his body. There was a momentary resistance, like the surface tension on a pond, then his hand vanished into the gelatinous substance. As his arm entered up to his elbow the inside became translucent, and he saw his arm shimmering as if he were looking into part of one of his dreams. No longer dark brown as it had once been, or pure white as it had become, it was a multitude of colours shifting and moving, as if his very skin were a rainbow wrapped around bone.

What would you ask of me?

He smiled. ‘You haven’t changed at all, have you? Timeless, as always.’

What would you ask, Massi?

He took a deep breath. ‘As always, the same. To be strong, to control, to see.’

Then enter.

He did.

The world flowed around him, ribbons of colour wrapping him like an infinite birthday gift, every one of them seeping into his skin, dissolving into him until he was one with them, and they were complete. He saw the history of everything that had been and was yet to come flow through his mind in an instant like a gigantic, thundering train, heard the thoughts of ten billion people both dead and yet to live in a single instantaneous roar. He saw his own soul turned inside out, laid bare, pulled apart, and knitted back together again. He saw who he was, what he had been, what he wanted to be, and what he could have been, and every single thread of possible life blended together into one single flowing force, Massi’s force, Maxim’s force, the Governor’s force.

He saw himself. And he saw what wasn’t himself. The two were separate. And the two were one. He saw and he was seen and he was unseen; he was made and he was unmade and he was never made. He was everything. And he was nothing.

And when it became too much to bear, when he felt that his very fibres were beginning to unravel, he forced feeling into his feet and bid them move, hauling him out of that place. It felt like infinity, and it felt like no time at all.

He opened his eyes, but the light in the room hurt so he closed them again. His skin seemed to be tingling too, so he crawled to the wall and switched off the bright overhead lights, then sat with his back against the cold stone as he watched the thing, sitting as it did in the centre of the room and seeming to contain the entire night sky.

He remembered the scientists in that long ago place had tied ropes to the wrists and ankles of their test subjects because no one ever came out alive. He had been the first, the one they had called Maxim, the first to step inside the thing unaided and retain enough of his sanity to make his own way out.

His head spun, but his body felt powerful despite the soreness of his skin. And when he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could feel them, his people. At first he would only be able to feel the weak—the old, the destitute, and the very young, but over time his power would grow. Soon he would be able to see them all.

And if he could see them, he could control them.

And if he could control them, he could finally exact his revenge.

2

Windmills

Roberts always thought of it as a killing wind.

It was one of those days when the turbines spun so fast he thought the huge blades might just snap off the uprights and go dancing across the countryside, ripping up everything in their path like a plough tearing up a grassy field. It was unsafe to have them operating in such weather, when the wind was so strong it could strip the skin off your face. Roberts knew it, Millard knew it, and Darik knew it too. Of course, they had no say in the matter, they just made sure the right buttons got pressed at the right times.

‘Answer your fucking intercom, Darik,’ Roberts shouted into his own as he made his way out across the field towards the main gate half a mile distant. He could see the lights on in the gatehouse just outside the perimeter fence, the little room Darik thought of as his nest, alone with the dirty magazines and the poor quality videos he didn’t think Roberts or Millard knew about. They’d long ago found the compartment in the wall behind the shelving unit where he hid his stash, but what did it matter? Darik had no one waiting for him at home. Roberts and Millard turned a blind eye to his blatant fixing of the gatehouse duty roster so he could enjoy his few moments of fun, and they didn’t care so long as he answered his damn intercom on time.

Roberts bit his tongue, severing several insults before they could be spat out. All communication was recorded. The wind farm was so important that if the Department of Civil Affairs felt the maintenance crew was neglecting their duty they’d be shot, or worse, just disappear, maybe to show up somewhere else a few years down the line as something like that monster they kept chained up in the cellar.

‘If you’re just tossing off in there I’ll gut you, Darik,’ Roberts muttered, shoving his intercom back into his jacket pocket and hurrying off down the gentle slope. ‘And then Millard and me’ll make a damn fire out of your stash.’

He couldn’t help but look out across the field of wind turbines as he walked, hundreds upon hundreds of them lined up in irregular rows. They came in all shapes and sizes depending on how old they were. Some of the oldest were just fifty metres tall, but the largest was the second tallest free-standing structure in the country after the DCA Headquarters in London, just topping three hundred metres when the blades were at the highest point of their cycle. The thing was a dirty grey monstrosity, but each turn of those hundred metre-wide twin blades created enough juice to light a small town for a night. While during daylight hours Roberts was overawed by how the acres and acres of turbines had turned a beautiful Scottish moor into a metallic cesspit, at night, with the lights that shone from the ends of each turbine’s blades to warn off the planes that no longer flew through Mega Britain’s skies, the view was almost pretty.

Rather like a fairground, Roberts thought wryly, pulling the intercom back out of his pocket to give Darik one last chance.

‘Come on,’ he muttered. ‘If you’re having a joke on me, Darik, your ass is as good as whipped.’

Darik, his hands tied to the armrests of his chair, looked up into the eyes of the young girl with the knife. ‘Listen, you little whore,’ he growled. ‘You’re not going to kill me and I’m not going to tell you where the generator is. So go fuck yourself, or untie me and let me do it for you.’

Darik grunted as she backhanded him across the face. ‘Such kind words. I’m quite happy to torture the information out of you—’

‘Brete! There’s another one coming down the hill.’

The girl glanced up at her companion. Carl Weston was standing by the window that looked upslope towards the drab two-storey building they assumed was the command centre. He had a rucksack slung over his shoulder. Poking out of the top corner was a shiny black clawboard.

Brete looked back at the man, whose jacket identified him as Amir Darik, First Engineer, Clearance ID 3791AA4. She absorbed this information in a photographic second, then without a word she slammed the butt of her knife on to the back of his right hand, making his fingers flex outwards. She spun the knife in the air, caught it as it descended then stabbed the point down through the bone of his forefinger, pinning it to the chair.

Darik screamed.

‘I trust you’re right-handed? Gotta be a bit of a bitch to work with that. Next one…’ She jerked the knife free and slammed it down on to Darik’s middle finger. This time the angle of the blade sheared off the tip of his finger.

‘Holy crap, God damn it, I’ll tell you, I’ll … tell you…!’

‘Where’s the main generator?’

‘Warehouse fourteen … it’s beside the shift barracks, but the generator room is underground.’

‘Thanks.’

With a bored sigh the girl raked the knife across Darik’s throat and jumped back as blood made a fan down across his chest. She grinned, wiped the knife on the seat of a nearby chair, and slid it back into a sheath on her belt.

‘Did you have to do that?’ Carl said. ‘I mean, we could have just left him tied up.’

The girl cocked her head. ‘Carl, you’re far too soft to be a revolutionary.’

As he forced a smile the window behind him exploded, showering him with glass. He dived to the ground, rolling and sitting up against the wall beneath the window. Brete dropped down behind a chair.

‘Shit. We’ve been spotted. What now?’

‘You’re the Tube Rider, you tell me.’

A smile lit up his boyish face. With his fair hair, warm eyes and a rare kindness, Carl was easy to love. Brete, at times still starstruck in his presence—he was a Tube Rider, after all—had been building up to confessing her feelings for weeks. Tomorrow I’ll tell him, she thought. Just gotta make sure we don’t die today.

Carl reached into his bag and pulled out a small remote charge. He tapped a couple of buttons and pressed it to the wall below the window. ‘We have exactly a minute,’ he said, ‘before the fireworks start.’

Crouching low, he ran towards her, and together they hurried for the door. Darik, clearly not the brightest star in the night sky, had answered to a simple knock. A swing of Carl’s clawboard had done the rest.

Outside, the outer perimeter fence loomed, rising twenty metres in front of them. Fully electrified and three layers thick, it presented a considerable challenge to most would-be intruders. However, for Carl, getting inside wasn’t the problem; it was where to go once they were in there. Haste was everything; the wind farm seemed almost unguarded, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long. Their reports claimed it provided more than half of Mega Britain’s electrical power. A breach of security would bring every government man in a ten mile radius to the farm within minutes.

Through the fence she saw the man Carl had spotted drop out of sight. Carl’s hand closed over her wrist and jerked her down to the grass beside him.

‘You trying to give him target practice or something? He’s not likely to miss twice.’ He grinned, and she felt a little tremble in her chest. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get clear.’

Half crouched, half running, they headed for the nearest stand of trees.

Someone was inside the gatehouse, and it wasn’t Darik. Roberts reached for the gun on his belt and dropped to the ground, leaning his arms on a divot in front of him to take aim. Standing just outside the fence, the gatehouse was a single storey concrete bunker beside the entrance road, set so low to the ground it looked like it had sunk. Two windows were set into the back, and through them Roberts saw someone walking around. Darik was fat and short; this person was tall and thin.

The intercom was down, and the gatehouse was off limits to anyone except the three of them.

It was a breach.

A face appeared at the window, looking upslope towards him. Roberts, who had done some combat training earlier in his career and was still forced to sit through a yearly refresh, didn’t hesitate. He pointed the gun and fired.

He’d got slow and lazy and his aim was a fraction off. He hit the window but missed the intruder, who dived out of sight amid the shattering glass. He crawled forward a little further, dropped on to his belly again and squinted. Was that Darik tied to a chair? Why was his head slumped forward?

He lifted the intercom to his mouth and pressed the activation switch. ‘Millard. We’ve got a security breach. Code A fucking A. They’re in the gatehouse. Darik might be dead. You know what you have to do.’

The intercom crackled. ‘Are you serious?’

Roberts wished he wasn’t. He wished with all his heart that this was just a prank to liven up another dull evening. He took a deep breath. ‘Code AA. Release that thing and get to a safe location. As your superior officer that’s an order.’

There was a short pause. Roberts knew the thought of going down into that cellar was bad enough to make Millard consider mutiny, but then he heard a grunt of affirmation. ‘Yes, sir. As you say.’

It was a last resort, one they’d never needed to use. He’d always hoped it would never come to this, but the truth was the country had been in upheaval for some time. Perhaps it was inevitable.

He lifted his gun and looked back towards the gatehouse again, just as a huge whump followed a ball of fire into the air. He shielded his eyes against the glare of the burning building and ducked his head down into the comforting damp of the grass.

‘Wow, look at that!’ Carl shouted. ‘I didn’t realise they were so powerful.’

Brete frowned. ‘You must have missed the tests my dad did. Come on, let’s get inside and get this over with.’

Carl pulled the clawboard out of his backpack. ‘Right. Hang on.’ He pressed a button on the back and a wire shot out of a hole in the black casing. A tiny electromagnetic pad attached itself to the top of one of the fence support poles and the wire pulled taut. Brete wrapped her arms around Carl’s shoulders and squealed with excitement as he pressed another button and they were pulled up off the ground. Carl grinned. He often forgot she was just fifteen. She was younger than he had been when he first became a Tube Rider.

As the wire pulled them in against the support post, Carl kicked off from the top, pressing the wire release at the same time. In two jumps they had abseiled to the base of the pillar. Carl released the electromagnet, and the wire retracted into the casing with a sharp fizz. Carl pressed another button, and carbon fibre sheets slid out of the top and bottom edges of the clawboard to make a circular shield. As they dropped to the ground he heard something ping off the outer edge. ‘You bugger,’ he muttered, rolling so he faced upslope with the clawboard shield held out in front of them. Brete lay tucked into his side.

Another button caused a searing bright light to illuminate a section of the hillside above them. From further up the slope he heard an angry grunt.

‘I’ll take out the command centre,’ Brete said, nudging him in the ribs with her elbow. ‘Meet you at the generator building.’

Then she was gone, slipping away from him, taking the warmth of her body and leaving only the chill of the wind, disappearing into the night while the light still blinded the man entrenched further up the slope.

For a second Carl watched her go. ‘Be careful,’ he whispered. The girl was a hothead but one of the bravest people he’d ever met. She’d grown up in the shadow of the revolution, and considered her life expendable to the greater cause, something he really wished she didn’t. Brete meant—

Another bullet ricocheted off the outer casing of the clawboard shield. With Brete out of sight, Carl killed the light and rolled away downslope, back towards the gatehouse, hoping he could make it to the fence without being seen.

The explosion had knocked out the power generator in the gatehouse, and with it the fence’s electricity. As darkness returned, Carl scrambled away, heading along the base of the fence towards the nearest windmills. Among them he’d have cover.

Behind him he heard the sound of another bullet ricocheting off the outer wall of the gatehouse, and he knew he’d got away.

‘Asshole,’ Phil Millard muttered as he tapped in the keycode that would let him into the cellar under the command centre. ‘Commanding officer, my butthole. You’re a coward and an asshole, Roberts.’

Feeding the damn thing was bad enough, but letting it out…

They’d never had a Code AA before. It meant a man was down and that the security and continued safe operation of the wind farm had been compromised. It meant they had to take emergency measures, or as Millard called it, open up a can of really bad fucking news for whoever might have broken in.

The door swung open, and immediately the stench struck him. In his haste Millard had forgotten his mask, but it was too late to go back for it now. He descended a flight of stairs to a thick metal door. A hand sensor on the wall to the right gave the shift workers access, but Millard ignored it. Each shift worker was assigned a day according to their duty on the roster, and Millard’s day this week was Wednesday. Today was Tuesday. Instead, Millard flicked open a little panel on its lower side and began to input the long and complicated Code AA override. After two failed attempts the door beeped and hissed open.

As he stepped inside he glanced down at his intercom, wondering why this job had to fall to him. Besides Roberts and Darik there were two other men on their shift, McCarthy and Schules, who were currently out on patrol among the windmills. Neither had answered his call. Adam Schules, a computer engineer, was a hard worker, young and too good for this shithole, but Ben McCarthy, their hydraulics expert, was an old shark who had no doubt cajoled Schules into taking a quick detour into a hanger somewhere. Right now they were probably blissfully shooting the shit while smoking contraband cigarettes and drinking homebrewed Scotch whisky. Later they’d blame not answering on electrical interference from the windmills. It was something they all knew was bullshit, but the perks of the job were few and far between, so the men had developed their own. Millard had no real beef with either. They were good men, but what he was about to do might condemn both to a particularly violent death. Roberts had issued the Code AA, so he would have time to get to Darik and get them both to safety, but Schules and McCarthy were unaware, unless they’d heard the explosion over the relentless dub dub dub of the rotor blades.

At the end of a dank, oppressive corridor Millard came to another door. He reached up and slid a little window open, recoiling at the stench of feces, sweat, and rotting flesh that wafted through, almost thick enough to taste. He felt his eyes water, but he forced them open, peering into the gloom.

‘You all right in there?’

As his eyes adjusted, the gloom revealed a robed figure slumped in the corner of the filthy cell, its head leaning forward on its chest.

‘Come on, wake up. Time for a walk.’

A fold shifted in the robe’s hood and a dog’s snout appeared, grimy and spotted with sores. Millard grimaced. He could bear their mouths, but the eyes were what always did for him. He shivered as the creature’s head rose, the human eyes above the snout bloodshot and cloudy. Snaking over its bald, scarred head wires shifted, tensed and stretched, bathed silver in the light that fell from a trapdoor in the ceiling.

As Millard watched, its lips pulled back in a snarl to reveal blackened, rotting teeth. Drool dripped from its maw, and it watched Millard with undisguised hatred.

‘Got a little trouble we need you to sort out,’ Millard said. ‘Might be Tube Riders. You remember them, don’t you?’

This particular Huntsman Class A Model had never been in active service that Millard knew of. Its class was too unpredictable and had been withdrawn from active service a couple of years ago, replacing another that had died in these same chains. Still, the old models could be made use of, and one such way was as an emergency security system. The beast would hunt and kill as required, and once it was done a remote paralysis device implanted in its brain would allow Millard and the others to regain control.

The beasts didn’t always survive, but that didn’t matter. They were expendable.

At the mention of the words Tube Riders, the Huntsman began to growl. It sprang up off the ground and leapt forward, only to jerk at the end of a thick chain and fall to the floor.

‘Huh, huh,’ Millard grimaced. ‘Don’t know what you’re scowling at me for. Not me that pisses in your food, is it?’

The Huntsman snarled and spat. ‘Kill…’

‘Yeah, you’ll get your chance, you bastard. Don’t get excited now. It’s time for a little fresh air.’

He pressed a button on the wall and the creature’s shackles fell away. For a moment it looked down at its clawed hands as if seeing them for the first time, then it swung its head back towards Millard and snarled. It was a hideous sight, he had to admit. Ten years of working at the wind farm had desensitised him to the way the damn things looked, but even so, seeing it unshackled sent a shiver racing along his spine. The door between them was two inches thick, set in a steel frame and bolted shut, but suddenly it seemed so thin, so useless.

With a shaking hand Millard reached up and activated a second control. There was a hiss and a circular trapdoor in the ceiling of the Huntsman’s cell slid open. It led to the surface. For a second his finger hovered over the second button, the one that would open the sealed skylight at the top of the trapdoor tube. Millard gave no more of a shit about the government than he did the rebels, he just wished they’d all stop screwing around and just let him get on with his life, simple as it was.

‘Ah shit,’ he muttered, jabbing his finger down on the touch pad. Another hiss sounded from the ceiling above the Huntsman. It was only a short climb up a ladder from freedom. ‘Go on then, you ugly bastard. Have a bit of fun.’

The Huntsman bared its teeth. It glared at Millard, and one arm rose straight in small jerky movements like a clock hand moving backwards, a finger extending towards him, marking him. Millard felt something warm dribbling down his leg.

Then, with a howl that could have danced with the wind, it leapt up at the trapdoor exit and was gone.

Millard slid down the wall to the floor, clutching his stomach, as if trying to hold down his fear.

‘What have you made me do, Roberts?’ he whispered. ‘What the fuck have you made me do?’

While Brete despised the government with a bitter intensity, there were times she was thankful for her good genes. Whatever crap those evil scientists in their labs had pumped into her, they had given her a fleetness of foot unmatched by any human she had ever come across. Now, as she angled away from the burning gatehouse and back around towards the command centre, she gritted her teeth and let her feet fly over the ground, arms pumping to propel her up the steep slope.

As she flew across the grass, she pulled a knife from her belt and took a small explosive charge from a pouch on her hip. She would set the charge and blow off the door to the command centre. Then, while dust blinded those inside, she would kill anyone left alive and double back to finish off the man who had shot at them. By that time, she thought with a smile, Carl might have made it to the generator building.

The command centre building came up in front of her, a bland concrete square that poked two storeys out of the ground like a pus-filled sore, angular and out of place against the night sky. Lights illuminated several frosted glass windows on the bottom floor, and she spotted the door off to the left.

Then she stopped dead in her tracks, almost falling over herself.

Something was running down the hill towards her.

No: bounding. There was no other word for it. The figure was low to the ground, running on all fours like a dog.

Except it wasn’t a dog.

Brete cocked her head for a second, angling her ear towards the onrushing figure. Intermingled with the roar of the wind and the thrum of the rotor blades she picked up a high pitched wailing, almost a scream.

The memory of the night the Huntsmen had descended on her village in pursuit of the Tube Riders still haunted Brete. She would never forget the terror of a wave of Huntsmen rushing through the streets, cutting down everyone in their path.

And now another of those creatures was running towards her across the damp grass, teeth and wires glinting.

‘Carl!’ she screamed into the wind, for a moment forgetting about the radio attached to her waist. She had no time: if she stopped to retrieve it she would be dead. ‘Huntsman!’

She didn’t know if he would hear—of course he wouldn’t. He was too far away by now, too far away to help. She looked up to see the Huntsman bearing down on her, and knew that even her speed wouldn’t be enough to outrun it.

3

Dreams

The mirror had probably never been whole. It was simply a patchwork of other mirrors glued together to function as one. It was difficult to look into it without constantly shifting your head, searching for a fuller view, one that did not, could not exist.

Rather like my life, she thought. Comprised of fragments. Hundreds of fragments all glued together, pretending to be one.

With children, of course, it was easier to forget about everyone she had lost, to push their faces aside and bother herself with inane tasks of housekeeping and motherhood. It was easier to focus on the now, on the children she had to feed and clothe and entertain: Benjamin and Alice, her beautiful, beautiful babies.

They’ll always be there. Like the soil beneath the grass, their faces would always be looking up at her, whether she chose to look back or not. She could ignore them for a while, but sooner or later she would let them in because she had no choice, they would knock forever until she answered.

So many lost, so many gone. Her family, her friends. All dead, fallen along the tracks as they rode their trains of life towards their final stations.

Marta looked up from the needle she had pushed half through a fold in one of Benjamin’s t-shirts. For a moment, as the silhouette of a man appeared in the doorway with the setting sun behind him, she thought it might have been Simon, or Paul, or her brother Leo, even. It was a little too tall to be Arthur, or an older Owen, if he still lived.

And it was far too full around the chest to be Switch.

For a moment her heart heaved, and she swallowed the feeling down.

‘Are you all right?’ Ishael said. ‘You look a little pale.’

She smiled. ‘Just … you know. Thinking.’

He came inside, limping on his bad leg, and she looked away, holding in an urge to sigh. She couldn’t have known until the day she walked into the Free Folk’s village, heavily pregnant and weary from the journey across Britain whether she would find a man or a ghost. She had found both. Ishael still lived but the man she remembered, with his handsome face and kind eyes, was gone. She found a man obsessed with revolution, caught up in his own world of planning the downfall of the Governor and the restoration of democracy to Britain, so much so that she, Marta Banks, the face of the resistance whether she liked it or not, was merely a shadow at his side. She had forced herself to love him, thinking it was necessary for the sake of her children and her own sanity, and in a way he loved her in return. But there were times, when they lay together, when she would close her eyes and think of someone else.

‘Any word from Carl?’ she asked, pushing a hand through the braids of her hair.

‘None,’ he said. ‘But it’s early. They might not have made it inside the compound yet.’ He sat down at a table in the corner and unrolled a large, dog-eared map of Mega Britain. He sighed and leaned forward on to his elbows, his chin propped on his hands.

He looks so old, she thought. He was only in his early thirties, but the stress of trying to run a failing revolution from the forests of Cornwall was taking its toll. His looks had never recovered from his torture at the hands of the Department of Civil Affairs, but his youth was gone now, too.

‘Manchester-Liverpool has almost fallen,’ he said, stabbing a finger at the map. It’s in disarray, but with the uprisings in Bristol and Newcastle-Sunderland the government is stretched thin. We could take Manchester-Liverpool this week. That would give us a stronghold in the north.’

She nodded. ‘The children are sleeping,’ she said.

‘Good. You should go to bed too.’

She went to stand behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t react. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘We can win this, you know.’

She saw a brief smile turn up the corner of his mouth. ‘So people keep telling me. If only Europe would help us…’

She dropped her hand and went back into the kitchen, pretending to busy herself with cleaning, although she’d already washed the children’s things, and Ishael had eaten with Jin and the rest of the commanding group. She tried not to let his words get to her, but whether he had meant it or not she had felt a veiled accusation there. The same one, the same one as always.

That she had failed.

Benjamin was crying in his sleep again. He didn’t settle as easily as Alice did, often taking time to drop off while his twin sister could sleep through a thunderstorm. Marta sat on the edge of the bed and stroked his forehead while he tried to get comfortable. She whispered soothing words and shushed him when he started to speak through fear of waking his sister. Ishael was asleep in the adjacent room.

As Benjamin’s breathing began to even out, Marta glanced up and there was that mirror again, reflecting a dozen fragments of her face back at her. In the light of the exposed bulb that hung from the ceiling she saw shadows underneath her eyes, black pools that made her look tired, old.

If there was a front line to the scattered, disorganised rebellion, she was as far from it as she could get, hidden away in this ruined forest cottage inside a Free Folk safe zone while she raised her children. Yet, to the people dying she was its centrepiece, its focal point. Men screamed her name as they threw bombs and fired guns. The day she had set foot back on British soil she had expected nothing other than to go to ground, but her name and her face had risen up to become a standard for ragtag gangs of rebels all across the country.

She wasn’t sure quite how it happened, perhaps through a mixture of illegal Internet connections and rumours spreading through the underground. She was a Tube Rider, and the Tube Riders had enjoyed a semi-mythical status in London, back when all they did was hang off the side of trains in abandoned London Underground stations. Then, of course, they had surfaced, battling against the government, taking down dozens of Huntsmen and DCA agents and coming within a hair’s breadth of killing the Governor himself, so the rumours said. And if that wasn’t enough, they had escaped to France and broadcast a video of a government assassination all across Europe.

And Europe had done exactly nothing.

They had sat on the information for more than three years, made strong accusations and moved a few missiles to the coast. But in terms of real action, they’d been unmoved.

Not that it mattered. The Tube Riders and their leader, Marta Banks, had lifted a middle finger to the Governor and proved that the people couldn’t be suppressed any longer. Now the people had their talisman, and were prepared to die in its name.

She couldn’t help but feel that Ishael resented it. After all, while he’d orchestrated dozens of successful raids in the name of revolution, she’d done nothing but stay hidden away, caring for her children.

Benjamin stirred, rolling over on to his back. He muttered something that she couldn’t understand, so she leaned closer in case he said it again.

‘Bad man still watching?’ he said, not opening his eyes.

Marta’s head jerked up towards the window. A thick curtain was drawn across, one that kept out the light at night, just in case someone was watching. She had checked, and she knew the locks on the door were true, but even so she was paranoid. The Governor had a spike above the south gates of the London Greater Urban Area perimeter wall just waiting for her head to decorate it.

‘The bad man’s gone,’ she whispered, pulling the blanket up and tucking it in around his shoulders. ‘You’re safe from the bad man now.’

Benjamin muttered something she couldn’t understand, then relaxed against her hand, sleep welcoming him back.

Just a dream, she thought. She stood