Benedict Jacka - Taken

Inviting Anne in had been a weird thing to do and as I climbed the stairs I wondered why I’d done it. I remembered the last image, Anne climbing into the dark car while that hunched shape waited behind the wheel, and felt a stir of disquiet.

My street was dark and still again, and the shop was empty. The distant thump, thump, thump of club music drifted over the rooftops, but there was no movement outside. I stood flipping the sheathed dagger absentmindedly between my fingers, frowning at nothing. Outside my window, lights shone from the blocks of flats across the canal.

I felt uneasy. I live alone and I should be used to the quiet of my part of Camden after sunset. But tonight something about the silence had me on edge.

It wasn’t as if anything that had just happened was all that extraordinary. I do get invited to mage social events sometimes . Not often, but it happens. And sending an apprentice out to deliver invitations in person wasn’t unusual. . okay, it was unusual, but it wasn’t unheard of. It must have just felt strange to me because I’d been off the social circuit so long.

I told myself that, but the uneasy feeling didn’t go away.

I don’t get these feelings often and when I do I’ve learnt to pay attention to them. I did a scan of the immediate futures, looking for danger, and found nothing. I spread my search further, looking for anything that might threaten or attack me.

Still nothing.

I tried half a dozen more ways of looking for danger and came up blank every time. Finally I tried something different. I looked into the future to see what would happen if I sat in my bedroom and did absolutely nothing.

One uneventful hour, two uneventful hours, four uneventful hours-then activity. In the early hours of the morning people were going to come to my door. Not ordinary people-mages. They’d want to talk to me, and they were. .

I frowned. They were Council Keepers.

That was strange.

Keepers are the primary enforcement arm of the Council, kind of a mix between police and an internal affairs division. There are a lot of reasons for Keepers to come looking for a mage and very few of them are good. As I looked into the future the encounter didn’t look hostile, but it didn’t look friendly either. I wished I could see exactly what they were saying, but as I tried to focus on the distant strands the images blurred and shifted. It’s hard to predict something as fluid as conversation. I can do it easily if it’s only a few seconds ahead, but trying to do it a few hours ahead is almost impossible. I tried to focus on a single strand and pin it down.

The Keepers were asking me questions. They were suspicious. I tried to hear what the questions were about or why they were asking them, but couldn’t pick up any details.

I shifted my focus to the beginning of the conversation. That was better. Now the Keepers were saying the same things in each future with only minor differences, the things they’d decided to say before my answers took them in other directions. I suddenly realised what the scene reminded me of: two police officers interviewing a suspect.

I strained my mental lens to its limit, trying to get the exact words. By concentrating and piecing together bits from parallel futures, I was just able to make out fragments.

“-where were-”

“-did you do-”

“-any contact. . after-”

I shook my head in frustration. Useless. In every one of the futures, my future self seemed to ask the same questions. I focused on the answers the Keepers gave in return.

“-enquiries-”

“-was here-”

“-last. . see her alive-”

I stopped dead. The futures I’d traced so carefully shattered, fading into darkness.

I stood motionless for ten seconds, then ran for the door.

As I ran down the street I skimmed through futures and searched the traffic, then changed direction to cut left down an alley that led into Camden Road. I ran straight out between parked cars into the middle of the main road. Horns blared as cars screeched to a halt.

A man wound down his window behind me and started shouting. His accent was so thick I couldn’t actually understand what he was saying, but he didn’t sound happy. I pulled open the door of the black cab in front of me with the yellow TAXI light above its window. “Archway,” I said before the driver could open his mouth. “I’ll pay you double if you get us there in five minutes. Triple if you make it in less.”

“All right, mate,” the driver said comfortably. “Not a problem.”

The taxi pulled around the car in front of us, the angry driver still shouting from his window, and we accelerated away north.

* * *

No one knows the London streets better than a London cabbie. At this hour with the crowds and traffic it would have taken me at least ten minutes to make the drive from Camden to Archway. The cabbie did it in less than half that.

Archway is an odd place even by London standards. A network of concrete shops surround the Underground station, out of which rises the squat ugly brown shape of Archway Tower. Two roads fork away northwest: On one is the sprawl of the Whittington Hospital while the other passes under Suicide Bridge. “There you go, mate,” the cabbie said as we reached the station. “Which street?”

I stared out the window, concentrating. We were at the junction around the old Archway Tavern, the ancient building forming an island amidst the A-roads. I looked up the hill to see the high arch of Suicide Bridge, marking the boundary between inner and outer London. I pointed to the right of the bridge, northeast. “That way.”

As soon as we left the main road the streets narrowed and emptied. Cars were parked everywhere, making it hard for the cab to move, and minutes passed with agonising slowness as I scanned through futures, watching myself explore different directions in an expanding web.

A tangle of futures flashed; combat, danger. “Stop!” I opened the door before the taxi had stopped moving and shoved a handful of notes at the driver. “Keep the change.”

The taxi had brought me to a housing estate. A long three-storey block of flats loomed above, walkways running along the top two floors with doors at regular intervals. An old decayed children’s playground was laid out in the courtyard in front, the swings rusted and the animal figures vandalised. The base of the block of flats was shadowed, blending into a small cramped garden. High walls shut off the view to the street and only a handful of lights shone in the darkness. It wasn’t late but the place had a dead feel to it. I moved at a fast walk, heading farther in. Behind, I heard the rumble of the taxi’s engine fade away into the noise of the city.

From the shadows at the base of the flats ahead came a sharp metallic clack .

I broke into a run. The sound came again, twice, echoing around the brick walls: clack-clack . I passed under the building, reached the pillars that were blocking my view, and looked around the edge.

The housing estate was a big long construction of dark brick. There were two ways in: a pair of double doors leading into a stairwell, and a small lift. To one side was the car park; to the other was a fenced-off area of trees and grass. A single fluorescent light was mounted on the wall, casting a flickering glow over the scene in front of me.

Three men were standing near the wall. They wore dark clothes and ski masks and carried handguns fitted with the unmistakable long metal cylinders of sound suppressors. Two had their attention fixed on the person by the lift, while the third faced the other way, his gun pointed downwards in both hands as he scanned for movement. I was out of his line of sight, but not by much.