“You think she betrayed you?”
“Like I said, she was meant to tell us whether we could survive out here. Without that knowledge, we had to stay inside, where we could live, where we could survive.”
“We weren’t the first to be chosen to go out,” she had said. “I don’t know how many went out before us and I don’t know what happened to them. They sent us out to see what the world was like. And we did. And when we returned, and we told them it was a place of wondrous abundance, they tried to kill us. They thought they had succeeded. But we didn’t die, because from that first moment we looked up and saw the stars, we knew what fate awaited us if we weren’t prepared.”
Ely gestured over his shoulder at the Tower. He didn’t look at it.
“The City of Britain. Was the name a joke too?”
“That’s what the place was called before I was born. I think that was what the people who built the Tower wanted it to become.”
“And you were born in the Tower,” Ely stated.
“I was,” Arthur answered.
“You didn’t know the world before.” Again it was a statement, but again the old man took it as a question.
“No, but it wasn’t always like this, Ely. The air was polluted. It was toxic. You couldn’t spend more than a few minutes outside without getting sick. When I was young, younger than you, there was a clock outside what’s now the Assemblies. It was counting down one hundred years. That was how long we had to wait. When I took power, I got rid of the clock. I had to. There are some things we need to remember, but many more that we need to forget.”
“So you destroyed the archives. All the old movies and books. There were millions of them, once.”
“She told you that, did she? It’s an exaggeration. There were a few thousand, no more than that. And yes, I erased a lot of them, but they were useless. They took up valuable storage space whilst giving people nothing but the wrong kind of ideas. I understood, you see, when no one else did. People couldn’t know the sacrifice they were making, not fully. For the part that they were aware of, they needed a reason. They needed an idea, one that could be turned and twisted into something useful when the time was right. I gave them a goal, a grand idea. They had the dream of achieving something their ancestors had failed at. Mars.”
“It was that easy?” Ely asked.
“Easy? You think it was easy? I’ve worked everyday for the betterment of my species. I’ve given up my life to ensure that humanity will continue stronger, purer, able to reconquer the world. It was never easy.”
“And now it’s over,” Ely said. “The Tower has failed. People will have to leave.”
“The explosions have brought that time forwards,” Arthur said. “But that time was coming, anyway. Yes, people will have to leave, and they will need to be led.”
“By you?”
“No, no. Not by me,” Arthur snapped. “Weren’t you listening, boy? If I’d just wanted power I could have had it long ago. This is about our species, about our future. No, I won’t lead. I’ll be the villain, the puppet-master who kept you all imprisoned these decades past. I will become the devil future generations will fear and revile. But I won’t care, because my job has been done.”
“Who then? Or are you expecting me to be their leader?”
“You? No, you’re a brawler. You’re good in a fight, but you’re not a thinker.”
“Then who?” he asked, again.
“Me, Ely.” Vauxhall stepped out from a doorway about twenty feet down the street from Arthur. Like the older man, she kept one of her hands behind her back.
“Hello Vox. I thought you’d be around here somewhere. So, why did you do it?” Ely asked.
“I found out twenty years ago. I was only ten, and I worked out how to hack into the system. I found out, and Arthur found me. He offered me a job. He taught me everything and then, together, we came up with the plan. It was the only way, Ely. The Tower was failing. More energy was being consumed than generated. We did our best to keep things going, but we knew it wouldn’t be long before we had to venture out into this wasteland. We had to prepare the people. More than that, we had to ensure we had the right people. It took us a generation, but we’re nearly ready. Most of the people in the Tower are of the right sort, the right mentality. There are just a few more to weed out.”
“You mean those forty-seven suspects. You were the one who left that note for Penrith?”
“It wasn’t her, it was me,” Arthur said.
“Which amounts to the same thing,” Ely said. “You planted the note as a test, to see who was loyal and who wasn’t?”
“The woman, Penrith, she told over four hundred people over the course of a year,” Vauxhall said. “Only forty-six of them proved unreliable. The others all reported it.”
“But not to me,” Ely said.
“Oh, some did,” Vauxhall said. “I intercepted their messages. I didn’t want you finding out before it was time. I won’t apologise for it, Ely. It was a necessary deception. There’s a time coming when we need to know upon whom we can rely.”
“I don’t imagine for a moment that you’re going to apologise for anything that you’ve done,” Ely said. “But when I asked you why you’d done it, I was talking about the murders.”
“We didn’t kill Gower or Bradford,” Arthur said. “That was your ghost.”
“Gabriel, yes. I know. You needed those two nurses. Who else was there to deal with people supposedly sent for transport to Tower-Thirteen? They were killers, real murderers.”
“That wasn’t murder,” Arthur said. “The Tower was failing. It grew inefficient. More energy was being consumed than created. The population had to be pruned. And who else should I have sacrificed, if not the subversives whose deviance imperilled the future of our species. It wasn’t murder. It was housekeeping.”
“It was murder. The deaths of Gower and Bradford weren’t. That was revenge. But I’m not talking about those deaths.” Ely gauged the distance between himself, Vauxhall and Arthur. He began to walk slowly up the street towards them.
“No,” he said, turning to look at Vauxhall once more, “I want to know why you murdered the Greenes.”
She said nothing.
“I knew something was wrong with the wounds,” Ely said. “Something was wrong with the timing, too. You tried to throw me off track. Both of you. You did a good job. I was concentrating so much on whether the crime took place at three a.m. that I forgot to consider how someone could sleep through the pod being opened and their spouse being murdered right next to them. Of course, I was tired. I suppose that’s why you picked that time for the murder.” He took another step forward. “But I might have worked it out earlier if you hadn’t destroyed most of the archives. If Gabriel hadn’t killed Gower and Bradford, if he’d not slit their throats in revenge, if the blood hadn’t sprayed out onto the walls, I may never have realised. But he did. And I did. Eventually.”
“I didn’t slit their throats,” Vauxhall said.
“No,” he agreed, “you didn’t. It was Arthur or Gower or Bradford. It doesn’t matter which, because they didn’t kill the Greenes. Their hearts had stopped beating long before the blade sliced through their throats. What was it you said? You control the pods and the air-filtration system? You just cut off their air supply. Tell me why.”
“When we came back,” the ghost had said, “we told them what we found. And they tried to kill us. They thought they had succeeded. But we couldn’t leave. The woman who died in that elevator shaft, Fern, she was Finnya Greene’s sister. She wouldn’t leave her family here. She wanted to help them escape. We had to stay close, but we couldn’t risk hiding outside. We hid in the only place we knew they wouldn’t look. The tunnels. You see, we discovered what they really were, how this city is honeycombed with them. We got access to The Foundations, and to the servers. We found out how to hack into the system and we learned to watch them, and we watched you. It took us years before we discovered how to alter the records and camera footage, and then we had to find clothes, and then, oh and then… It took so long. But we finally managed to make contact with Finnya.”