‘I want to help you.’
‘I don’t need help,’ she snaps
‘You can’t escape from them alone. They’re too well resourced.’
‘I’m not alone.’
He sighs. ‘I know who you are. I know that your name is Evelyn Davenport, and I know what you are.’
She stares at him coldly. ‘How?’
‘David made it rather obvious I’m afraid.’
‘He didn’t intend anything.’ She is trying to assess what it is safe to admit to, what this stranger might actually know.
‘I’ve been going to see him most lunchtimes and you were the first visitor he’s taken the tiniest jot of interest in.’ He sinks back into his chair and sips from his glass, gazing over the rim. A pleased-with-himself smile fills his face. Her reflection glints back from the lenses of his spectacles.
‘Also, you were on my newsfeed this morning.’
Evie breathes slowly, trying to retain an exterior calm, while inside her principal sensory and processing systems start shouting at one another. ‘What did they say about me?’
‘The facts – what happened in the apartment, that you are being hunted. That you are… dangerous and not to be handled or… damaged.’
‘I’m not dangerous!’ The unfairness smarts. She is kind and thoughtful, she was acting in self-defence. These particulars seem almost more important than anything else. She searches inside for Simon to come to her aid, but again he is not there when she needs him. It has been a trend, this act of disappearing when things get hot.
She returns her attention to the man, furious at herself for allowing any of this to be happening. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she demands, needing a focus for her anger and fear.
‘I’m sorry, it’s just…’ He shakes his head. ‘Evelyn, you should come with me. I can make sure you’re kept safe.’
‘I have somewhere safe to go already.’ His use of ‘Evelyn’ jars, but she would not have him call her Evie either. In all honesty, she should be using the opportunity to discover everything he knows, but she is too upset to act rationally.
‘Okay, so why don’t I take you there?’ His voice brightens. ‘Then if –’
‘I can go on my own,’ she replies quickly. ‘I have a ticket for the bus.’
Saying it, Evie realises how much she really wants to get home, now that this little adventure of hers (which is how she is dismissively viewing it) is over. She hasn’t thought of Daniels since arriving in Cambridge, there’s been too much else going on, but now that she does, she knows he’ll be worried sick. What if he has also seen the news? What if he comes looking for her and is caught himself ?
The man looks away, nodding resignedly. ‘I see I may not be able to convince you right away.’ He draws out his wallet and takes out a circle of plastic and slides it across the table. There are letters embossed on its surface, created by some sort of light effect because when she touches it, it is smooth.
‘Timothy Maplin,’ she reads. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes, this is my card. It has all the normal channels for contacting me – even a phone number, I still have the apparatus for calls. Take it… please.’
She wants to shove the disk right back at him but feels obliged to accept. She can discard it later.
‘Now let me walk you to the bus station,’ Maplin says. ‘Let me do that at least. Then I’ll know you’re away safely.’
It is gone six in the evening when Evie gets back to the cottage. She opens the yard gate and makes her way past the barn.
She only becomes aware of Daniels when she sees the embers glowing on the tip of his cigarette. He is smoking in the darkness, with his back to the doors.
They stare at one another, no more than six feet apart.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmurs, looking down. Although she would not have missed for anything the moment she had with David and is actually a little proud of herself for managing the trip into Cambridge without help, she is mortally ashamed as to how she has treated her friend and horribly embarrassed by the gamble she took.
‘Are you going to tell me where you’ve been?’ he asks, stubbing the cigarette against the wood behind.
Evie shrugs helplessly, glancing to the side, lips pursed. Then she moves quickly towards him and stands against him, pressing her cheek into his chest. He wraps his arms around her. If she could cry, this is when she would do it. Instead she is conscious of her blocked ducts bulging painfully.
Daniels sits beside her on the sofa. She has confessed everything. All the details, starting from when she used his newsplastic the night before without permission.
‘I was avoiding opening it, in case it gave away where we are,’ he says. ‘But no one has come for us, so perhaps no harm has been done.’ He is trying to stay composed, to be calm for her, but he is shaken rigid by the risks she has taken. It is clear in the hurried, nervous little gestures in his face.
He doesn’t like the sound of the man who followed her and examines the circle of plastic he gave her, touching its surface like she had, watching suspiciously the letters appear and disappear.
‘I don’t understand how he knew?’
‘David,’ she says. ‘He singled me out, everyone saw it. That is what gave me away. Maplin put it together with the picture he’d seen of me on the news.’
‘And he just let you go?’
‘He came with me to the bus station. I wanted to go on my own but he insisted. Besides, by taking me to the pub, he’d got me lost.’
‘Did he see which one you took?’
‘Probably, but he wouldn’t be able to know at which stop I got off. Anyway, despite everything, I think he was actually quite harmless.’
Daniels sighs. ‘Let’s hope.’ He casts the card irritably to the side. ‘I suppose we should check the news, find out the worst.’
‘But you said the location finder could give us away.’
‘That genie’s already out of its bottle, kiddo. Opening it again can’t do much additional harm. Besides, if they knew we were here, they’d have been for us already.’
He reaches across and takes the newsplastic from the top of the pack. He unfolds it and they wait nervously as it runs its start-up routine. Before he can take control, it jumps straight to local news, bulging gleefully with a video of Evie descending the museum stairs, glancing furtively over her shoulder as she leaves through the glass doors. Beneath it an account of her flight from London marches rapidly across in dramatic slanted letters.
They watch in stunned silence until Daniels activates the newsplastic’s audio and a tinny voice recites how she and an accomplice had stolen a top of the range Benz and fled north. It also briefly recaps the history of the Protective Acts brought in all the way back in 2101 in response to ‘a scourge of murderous AABs impractical to control and impossible to detect’.
The videopix cycles on a loop – Evie descending the stairs, feet clicking on the metal-edged steps, crossing the ticket hall, then a close up of her face as she turns to glance back, before shouldering apart the glass doors…
Daniels folds it closed. ‘Well,’ he says, breathing out. ‘That’s put the cat among the proverbials.’
She looks at him helplessly. ‘What do we do?’
‘Do? We need to leave right now.’
15
Evie follows Daniels out of the cottage into the yard and through the gate into the lane. She looks back over the flint wall towards the doors of the barn. Why aren’t we taking the hova? she thinks to herself, not wanting to appear that she is questioning Daniels’s plan when she has already done enough in bringing this catastrophe down on them.