We dart round the corner and stop. I have to stop. I gasp and choke. My nose is broken and blood drools from where Jonah hit me.
Kevin is in the corridor. He knows we’re close.
“That wasn’t nice,” he complains loudly, his voice petulant and childlike. “That hurt.”
We listen to his footsteps coming closer. We’re trapped. Farah makes to run, but I know that if we run, he’ll hear us. We wouldn’t get as far as the next stairwell before he caught up to us.
He pauses outside one of the labs, presses his body against the door.
“Coming, ready or not!” he calls in a sing-song voice.
He bursts in, swinging the door open and raising his gun in one swift motion.
Nothing.
He used to practise this at home with a dart gun. When that stopped being enough of a thrill, he went to the wasteland behind his house with an air rifle and took potshots at the stray cats he found there. He liked it best when he wounded them, when they lay panting for breath and trying to bite him as they died.
He knows he has us. He’s just making the fun last longer.
“I’m going to shoot you in the stomach,” he calls. Anticipation trembles in his voice. “It’s supposed to take a really long time to die if you’re shot in the stomach.”
Another door. In and step around, gun raised. Like a movie.
He’s dreamed of doing this for real for as long as he can remember.
My head feels like a thunderstorm. My nose throbs and my breath scorches my throat. But it’s Kevin’s mind pressing against my own that hurts the most. All that bitterness and hatred. In the ordinary world he lies dying in the woods behind his house. Shot myself! he thinks. The thought comes back again and again, torments him. Stupid, stupid, stupid—
But it’s OK now, he thinks. This place is better. Especially now Jonah has found him.
Suddenly Kevin has a new idea. He slips his rucksack off his back and stoops to look inside. The backpack smells of excitement, control, payback. He finds what he’s looking for. Weighs it briefly in his hand and tosses it in our direction.
The object rattles to the ground next to us. I know what it is, even though I’ve only seen grenades in movies.
It bounces against the wall and spins a couple of times as it comes to rest. I feel it. A flash and a taste of death inside my head – the explosives and above the explosives a slower-burning material. The fuse. I see it sparking and sizzling in my mind, I feel Kevin’s own mind on it as well.
He’s learned that you have to imagine the burn or it won’t go off. In the first years after he died he spent many happy hours in his flat figuring out how to make the grenades explode.
Except this time, it doesn’t come because I feel it too.
The idea of the grenade passes from him to me and I reach forward with my mind in just the right way, like squeezing a candle between my thumb and forefinger…
I smother the idea of the grenade.
I feel Kevin’s fury as he realizes what I’m doing. I feel him bear down on the idea of the grenade exploding, pressing with his mind, willing the fuse to burn through.
But I’m stronger than he is and I hold on to the flame tightly. I step forward, scoop up the grenade and fling it back down the corridor towards him.
I catch a glimpse of him, kneeling, his gun ready for me. The grenade is in the air between us when he fires and I … let go…
THIRTY-NINE
I’m knocked back against the wall. Pain layered upon pain. Dying is only a bad thing if you don’t want to do it. That’s what the old lady on the bench told me. And right about now dying feels like it might be an OK option.
Farah is leaning over me, shouting, frantic. I can feel her hands on me, checking to see if I’m falling apart or spitting out woodlice. The world slides back into focus.
“I’m OK,” I groan.
“You’re shot,” she replies.
I look down and see that my arm is drenched with blood and I realize that there’s a chunk missing from my biceps where Kevin’s bullet must have grazed me.
Farah removes her belt and cinches it tight just below my shoulder. I scream in agony. She checks the wound.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she says.
“Oh, good,” I say. “Because it looks bloody awful.”
She smiles and presses her face against my cheek, kissing me. Even through the world of pain that I’m half drowning in, it feels good. “I thought you were dead,” she whispers. “God, oh god, I thought you were dead.”
I cough and she gives me some space. I can see down the length of the corridor for the first time now. I missed it, whatever happened to Kevin, there’s only a stain and a few blasted shreds of material in the corridor where he was kneeling.
“How did you do that?” Farah asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I just kind of … felt it.”
“Blindsight?”
