Dan Abnett - Border Princes

‘This is stupid,’ he said out loud.

It was stupid. It was his hand, all right. Absolutely. There was nothing funny about it. It looked perfectly normal.

James realised he was breathing quite rapidly. The pain behind his eyes had grown a little sharper. He grabbed two bulbs of garlic, bagged them quickly, and dropped them into his basket. What else did he need? Apples. Apples? Apples. He picked up a packet of conference pears and put them in his basket with the garlic and the fish.

Why was that man looking at him?

Where had he seen that man before?

Ianto opened the box.

‘What’s that?’ asked Toshiko. She was very unsettled.

Ianto took the object out of the box.

‘It’s the side-arm Owen was carrying a week ago Thursday,’ said Jack, ‘the night we went after the Amok.’

‘It looks broken,’ said Toshiko. The weapon was buckled, as if it had been twisted in a vice.

‘You may recall,’ said Jack, ‘in all the hullabaloo, Owen ended up pointing it at James.’

‘To be fair, I wasn’t quite myself,’ said Owen.

‘No one saw what happened after that, but James managed to disarm Owen, grab the Amok, and get it contained.’

‘OK,’ said Toshiko. That agreed with her memory of events.

‘The gun got damaged in the struggle,’ said Jack.

‘It’s beyond repair,’ said Ianto. ‘I put it in the Armoury. I was intending to break it down and dispose of it.’

‘When I showed Ianto the mini-mart footage of James’s cart-tossing world record, he went to fetch it. It had been bugging him. Look at it close, Tosh. Real close.’

She took the broken weapon from Ianto and turned it over to examine it. ‘It’s been sheared around. Twisted. What could do that?’

‘What do those grooves suggest?’ asked Jack. ‘What do they look like to you?’

‘Well, fingermarks,’ said Toshiko, ‘but that’s just-’

Jack took the gun from her. He punched something else up on screen. ‘They’re fingermarks, all right. Fingers pressed into the steel so deep, they actually left prints in the metal. We got a match. Want to guess who with?’

‘Oh God, please don’t say James,’ Toshiko answered.

Despite the coffee, Gwen had nodded off for a bit. She woke up, and had to remind herself why she was on a train. She was going to Manchester, to see some bloke. That was it.

She felt like crap.

The doze hadn’t left her with a headache exactly, but she felt genuinely odd. It was a nagging, empty sensation, as if she’d lost something.

She looked around. Had she lost something? Had she mislaid something before she’d dropped off? A pen, her MP3, her magazines, her wallet, maybe that was it.

No. None of those things.

Then why did she feel quite so hollow? It felt for all the world like a sudden, plunging dip in blood sugar. She had a sort of craving, a yearning to get some unknown, unidentifiable substance back into her system. The simple lack of it was making her suffer withdrawal.

She was forty-five minutes out of Manchester Piccadilly. She decided to get a cookie or some chocolate from the buffet, maybe a tea as well.

She got up. She felt light-headed and empty-sick. The train was too hot, the two chattering women in the twinsets too loud, and the girl on the clam-shell too obnoxious.

The small boy, travelling with his mum, looked up from his toys at Gwen as she edged by.

‘All right?’ she fake-smiled at him.

She certainly wasn’t.

Why was that man looking at him? That oh-so-familiar man?

I’m just being paranoid , James thought. He’s just got one of those faces, and I’m in one of those moods .

He started heading to the Please Pay Here.

There was the man again. No, it was a different man. This one was dark haired, not blond, and was wearing jeans and a dark T-shirt instead of a suit. But he also looked uncannily familiar.

It’s just going to be one of those days , James told himself. Just face it.

The stab behind his eyes was back. Sounds all around him seemed boxier than ever. He looked down into his basket, to check he was done. It was full of stuff. He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d put most of it in his basket. Tippex? A globe artichoke? Cat treats? Really ?

He looked up in slight panic, wondering if anyone in the Saturday crowd could tell he was having a quiet breakdown in the middle of the shop. He saw the dark-haired man in the black jeans.

The man made eye contact with him.

James turned and headed for the exit. He was walking quite fast, on the very edge of actually trotting.

‘Excuse me? Sir?’ a shop assistant called out.

He realised the basket of unpaid-for goods was still swinging off his arm. He threw it aside and started to run in earnest. There was some commotion behind him at the disturbance. His basket landed on the floor, and spilled out his sea bass and his packet of geranium seeds and his block of marzipan and his hair-clips and his conference pears and all the other things he had collected.

‘So, what are we saying?’ asked Toshiko.

‘James is not James,’ said Jack. ‘James is in danger. We’re in danger. Something’s happened to the real James. This James is an impostor. This is the real James, but something seriously crazy is happening to him. This has something to do with the alarm. This has nothing to do with the alarm.’ He looked at the other three. ‘Take your pick. Any or all of the above.’

‘I checked James out,’ Owen insisted. ‘Full work-up. There was nothing-’

‘Nothing we can see,’ Jack corrected.

‘All right, all right,’ Owen replied, conceding.

‘What do we do about it?’ Toshiko asked.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

‘Whatever we can,’ said Jack. ‘Whatever we damn well can. And let’s hope part of that whatever is helping our friend out.’

‘Do we know where he is?’ asked Owen.

‘I could try his phone,’ offered Ianto.

‘Don’t,’ Jack said. ‘Try Gwen instead.’

A cookie hadn’t helped. She was feeling worse. The wretched sense of loss gnawed at her. She felt like bursting into tears.

But over what? It was hard to reconcile anything in her recent memory with these pangs that seemed to register on a scale with grief or bereavement. In fact, the more she tried, the more she realised her recent memory seemed downright patchy. What had she done yesterday? The day before? The robot thing in the allotments, in Cathays. Yeah. That had been pretty full-on. Maybe this was what post-traumatic shock felt like.

If she was actually ill, that would help to explain the way she felt. It would explain the emotional fragility, the sense of loss, the emptiness.

There was a void inside her, a big dark hole. Its presence gave her an appetite, a searing need to fill it up. She was hungry and thirsty, she was craving, but no amount of food or drink would do.

The train was just beginning its roll into Manchester Piccadilly. She knew why she’d made the trip — to visit this bloke — but it all seemed so pointless now she was arriving. She couldn’t reason out why she’d ever thought this trip worthwhile. She had no intention of doing anything except getting off this train and on the first one back to Cardiff. Screw this Brady guy. Sorry, but screw him.

She’d put her MP3 back in, but it kept playing her random tracks she didn’t know; annoying indie pop that she didn’t like at all. It sounded like Rhys’s stuff. Had he put them on there?

It made her really want to call him. She wanted to talk to Rhys more than just about anything she could think of. It was a gut feeling, as if talking to him would provide a fix that would soothe her cravings. Something, some dull feeling of restraint, stopped her from hitting his number on her phone list.