Dan Abnett - Border Princes

The music went on: more stuff she didn’t like or know. She pulled out her earphones, and stuffed the MP3 into her bag. Outside, grey platforms crawled past. She could see the mighty span of the station roof. The train rocked to a halt. There was a rifle salute of opening doors.

People were getting up, gathering their things.

She breathed hard, trying not to cry. She got up. She left her rubbish, her coffee cups, her food wrappers, her paper. She had some magazines too. One was folded back on a glossy article about what Jolene Blalock had been up to since Enterprise wound up. She’d saved that for Rhys, she remembered. She rolled the magazine up and put it in her bag. She dumped the rest.

She got up, and joined the queue filing down the aisle. The women in twinsets were still chattering. The young woman who thought a lot of herself was loudly telling her clam-shell she was just getting off the train.

The small boy and his mum were just in front of her. She stepped back to let them into the queue. The mum smiled a thank you. The boy toddled along, clutching his Spongebob Squarepants toy.

Gwen got off the train and walked out of the bustling disembarkation tide to the quiet side of the platform. She stood, breathing hard, hurting. The air was cold and tangy with fumes. Whistles and voices and door-bangs and the patter of footsteps barely filled the echoing vault. A Tannoy announcement rang out into space.

Unable to stop herself, she started to cry. Tears streamed down her face. She shuddered with each sob. The sense of loss was as overwhelming as it was incomprehensible.

Her phone rang. It rang for a while before she was able to answer it.

‘Gwen?’

‘Jack?’

‘Gwen, are you OK?’

‘Yeah. I… Yeah.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Manchester Piccadilly,’ she replied.

‘OK. Why?’

‘I… It’s complicated.’

‘Gwen,’ Jack’s voice said. ‘This is important. I need to talk to you about James.’

She swallowed. She sniffed. She thought about that.

She said, ‘Who?’

He left the food hall and ran along the upper landing of the shopping centre. It was busy. Hard sunlight shone down through the atrium’s glass roof onto hundreds of jostling people.

His mind was busy too. His heart was pounding. He-

He slowed down. He was being stupid.

James came to a halt, and slowly turned around, scanning the crowd. No one gave him so much as a passing look. Too many minds were focused on their Saturday shop, too many attentions were wrapped up in conversations with partners or friends or whining kids.

Sounds, too many sounds, all boxy and hollow. It was like being underwater in a busy public baths, and hearing the swell of voices in the air transmitted by the water alone.

His palms were tacky with sweat. He looked at his hands, holding them out in front of him. For one, quick, stomach-swooping moment, they weren’t his hands at all. They belonged to someone else.

Big Wooof. Big, big Wooof. Alienated and scared by parts of his own body, James reeled. Owen had been wrong. Some insane kind of transmutation was happening to him, right there, in broad daylight, in front of hundreds of people. Or Owen had been right, and he was simply going mad.

Someone was looking at him. James felt it, like a sixth sense, a hot tingle. He looked up, searching the crowd as it poured around him.

He saw the man, the lean blond man in the black suit. The man was standing twenty feet away, the crowd flowing around him too. The man was staring right at James.

James knew he’d met him before somewhere. Where, where, where ?

Why is he looking at me ?

James turned his head a few degrees to the right, very slowly. Ten yards to the blond man’s left, another figure was making a silent, still island in the stream of bodies. The dark-haired man in the black jeans.

He was staring at James too.

James froze. He had every intention of running, but his legs wouldn’t move and his body refused to turn. It was as if they had some hold on him, some hypnotic hold, just like that bloody replacement window con man hadn’t . This was how Jack and Gwen and all the poor suckers he touched must have felt: charmed and immobile.

This was what it was like to be a prey item locked in a predator’s gaze.

The blond man turned his head and looked through the crowd at the dark-haired man. The dark-haired man turned his head and looked back. Simultaneously, they started to walk towards James. They took strong, purposeful strides. They moved closer together until they were coming on, side by side, in step.

Two figures. Side by side.

Two shadows beside a phone box, in the middle of the night.

James remembered. The memory returned in a hot, dizzying hit, as if he’d been whacked between the eyes with a mallet. He bolted.

Oh, now people noticed him. They cried out and complained loudly as he shoved his way past them. Who did he think he was? Where did he think he was going? Couldn’t he show some bloody manners?

His spinning mind supplied answers as he ran. To the first two questions, he had no idea. To the third, no he bloody couldn’t.

He looked back. The men were coming after him. He slammed through the crowd to the head of a descending escalator, and pushed his way down it. A woman bellowed as he kicked over the shopping bags she’d set on the step beside her. A man cursed him as he elbowed past. A young guy riding beside his girlfriend tumbled down two steps and clung to the handrail as James barged him to one side.

He leapt off the escalator onto the middle level of the atrium. Above him, the two men were weaving down after him, single-file, switching back and forth to avoid people. They had to wait while the bellowing woman gathered up her spilled purchases with the help of other shoppers. Forced to a halt, the two men kept their eyes on James as they slid down the moving steps.

James started running immediately he was off the escalator. He crashed into an elderly man and knocked him flat. He stumbled as the elderly man fell, but didn’t stop. More people began to shout at him. He ran on.

The two men reached the bottom of the escalator, and started to sprint after him.

James crossed the landing space, looking left and right. He needed another down escalator to reach street level. He turned, and collided head-on with a young husband and wife. They had two kids with them, and the youngest tripped as he tangled with James’s legs. Bumping down hard, the kid started to cry immediately.

‘You stupid bastard!’ the wife yelled.

‘Look where you’re going, shithead,’ the husband roared. He was thick-set and hefty, a bloke used to responding with his fists. He swung an angry punch at James.

Instinctively, James raised a hand, just a warding hand.

The thuggish husband grunted and sailed backwards through the air. He actually left the ground. He flew ten yards and struck a retail barrow set up in the middle of the landing to sell Russian dolls and autographed photos of footballers. The barrow went over beneath him in a huge and noisy clatter. A general commotion began.

James ran to the escalator. People were getting out of his way.

The lower escalator was a long sweep. As soon as he got onto it, James found his progress blocked by shoppers. Some of them tried to shrink and cower away from him. Some of them cried out in alarm.

Penned in, James looked back up the sliding steps. The two men appeared at the top of the escalator and began to rush down after him, dodging around a few solo riders, who flinched from them. The two men were gaining.

James gripped the moving rail. He looked over at the drop, at the faces looking up to see what the fuss was about. The dark-haired man was four steps behind him, reaching out a hand.