Proxy, page 2
She could die at any second, and the only thing that would happen to him was that he would suddenly find himself back here, inside his own body.
Stacy swore under her breath. That was the wrong thing to think about.
Proxy links, everyone knew, typically lasted anywhere from three to eight hours—although some of the new hopscotch beads she had heard about reputedly lasted far longer.
Whatever her kidnapper had planned for her, as soon as their proxy session ran out, her kidnapper would be back in his own skin. And that brought to mind another question: just how long she had been unconscious? Minutes? Or hours?
There was no way for her to know. She might have hours to live, or seconds.
And there was always a chance he had an accomplice. Tying oneself up was certainly possible, but far from easy. And he might have needed help to inject his proxy bead into his spine.
But if he’d acted alone, she thought, then he surely must have a way of getting himself free again once he was back in his own skin…
Use your brain, Stacy. Figure it out.
Stacy found she had just enough wiggle room to move her wrists from side to side, and slide them up and down the length of the pipe. There was nothing to prevent her standing upright, if she could get her feet under herself.
With some considerable effort and no small amount of cursing, Stacy scrunched her borrowed feet under her borrowed butt and pushed herself up into a half-crouch, carefully sliding her bound wrists along the length of the vertical pipe behind her.
Pins and needles erupted in her shoulders and legs. She swallowed back despair when something—perhaps a bracket holding the pipe to the wall—prevented her from standing fully upright. Her borrowed body, at least, was flexible and strong, and for that much she felt grateful. She wasn’t sure she could have managed even this much in her own body.
This is all your own damn fault, Stacy chided herself. She’d been the one who insisted on meeting Martin Wilber in the flesh, rather than safely proxying from Paris through a legally rented skin.
But she’d had other reasons for wanting to return to England in person, reasons to do with her father and the things she’d learned from him—secrets she wanted to share face-to-face with the journalist rather than risk an encrypted link which, given his nearly limitless technological resources, Raphael could surely hack with ease.
All of which made it depressingly easy for Stacy to guess why she’d been kidnapped. Clearly, Raphael would stop at nothing to silence her or anyone else who might discover the truth about him.
And if she didn’t find a way to free herself, he’d get away with it.
That thought filled her with a burst of determination sufficient to overcome, however briefly, the growing agony in her borrowed arms.
Still in a half-crouch, Stacy leaned forward, tugging hard in a desperate effort to yank the half-rusted pipe loose of the wall. The pain in her wrists was indescribable, and a thin, high wail found its way out from between her gritted teeth.
Strong her kidnapper might be, but the pipe didn’t budge. Worse, it felt like she was yanking her—his—arms out by their sockets, and the more pressure she applied, the more numb her hands became as the zip ties dug more deeply into the flesh.
She half-expected someone to come bursting in through the door to see what was going on, but no one did. Perhaps, she thought, he didn’t have an accomplice after all.
Stacy leaned back against the pipe, dizzy and exhausted from her efforts. Then she used her fingertips to further explore the pipe up and down the whole of its length.
What else could she do? Sitting and waiting wasn’t an option, and the fear of what might happen to her felt tangible and alive, like something that lurked in her belly, poisoning her thoughts with nightmare scenarios that all ended with her dead.
Then she felt the zip-ties catch on something.
She froze. Whatever it was, it was just beneath the bracket holding the pipe to the wall, and which in turn prevented her from standing fully upright.
She slowly pushed her wrists back up the pipe, exploring with her fingertips until they came into contact with something sharp around the back of the pipe. She yelped, feeling something into the skin.
Easy, she warned herself, her kidnapper’s heart hammering in his chest. Go slow.
Whatever it was poked out of something with a substantially different texture to the rest of the pipe, like thick tape wrapped around the bracket. She found herself picturing a piece of broken glass, perhaps, or a razor, duct-taped to the pipe just beneath the bracket.
Once he’d finished whatever he had planned for her, and once he was back in his own body, he could seesaw the zip ties back and forth across the blade, or whatever it was, and cut himself loose.
Working feverishly, Stacy scraped the plastic zip-ties back and forth across the sharpened edge to try and do just that.
It took concentration, and lots of it, to keep from missing the edge altogether. She was already breathing hard from standing in such an awkward and unnatural position.
The pipe soon felt slick with what she strongly suspected was blood. And even though she knew it wasn’t her own blood, but that of her kidnapper, a part of her was nonetheless convinced she was doing terrible damage to her own body.
She kept working, the pipe vibrating hollowly as she worked the zip ties back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The numbness in her wrists faded, giving way to a different and altogether worse kind of pain.
Still she worked, picturing her kidnapper walking her body into the sea, or stepping off an underground platform just as a train pulled in.
The pain grew yet worse, to the point she wasn’t sure she could bear it any more. She let out another scream, this one born more of pain and frustration than terror, echoing flatly from the bare walls around her—
Something gave.
Stacy stumbled forward, sprawling face-first onto the dusty concrete. She swallowed and coughed, her body wracked with a thousand aches. Then, with an almighty effort, she brought her borrowed wrists and hands around in front of her and saw the terrible damage she had done to them.
She saw plastic zip ties tightly cinched around each of her kidnapper’s wrists, while the jagged edges of a third poked out from each. It must, she thought, have been loose around the back of the pipe.
Stacy laughed, the sound half-hysterical and freighted with terrible pain—the pain of a body that was not hers.
She was free, but that wasn’t enough. To save her life, she now had to break the proxy link connecting her to her kidnapper, breaking his hold over her body.
She didn’t even try to dig the proxy bead out of the small of her back because she knew she couldn’t do it, at least not without help and not with her wrists so bloodied and ruined. And even if she did eventually find someone who could help remove it, it would be much too late.
That left her with two options: first, to call the police.
They were, after all, well-equipped to deal with most proxy crimes. But she’d have to find a bracelet in order to make that call.
She started to search through her kidnapper’s pockets. He didn’t have his jacket with him, and she—he—wore only jeans and a t-shirt.
She found nothing, certainly not a bracelet. Not that he’d have been dumb enough to make it quite so easy for her.
Which left her with a second, rather less pleasant choice: to kill her kidnapper first.
The moment his body died, the proxy link would be severed, and she’d be back in her own skin.
Either he died, or she did. It was a matter of simple survival.
Staggering upright, Stacy quickly found that the door was locked. However, a dozen or so adrenaline-fuelled kicks soon broke the flimsy lock and sent the door slamming open.
Murderous asshole or not, Stacy was grateful her body-jacker had spent as much time in the gym as he clearly had.
Past the door, Stacy found herself in an abandoned and empty flat. A quick search through a half-ruined kitchen with mould running up one wall turned up nothing she could use to kill the body she currently occupied—not even so much as a blunt dinner knife.
Then she found herself inside an equally decrepit bathroom, with an intact mirror above the sink. Stacy stared at her kidnapper’s reflection for a moment, then formed his right hand into a fist and punched the mirror as hard as she could.
The glass starred on the first impact and shattered on the second.
The pain was horrendous, certainly enough to make her let out another animal bellow. She clutched at her borrowed fingers, hissing through her teeth. Then she reached into the basin and carefully picked up the longest shard she could find and held its razor-sharp edge against her kidnapper’s throat.
The man’s reflection was clearly visible in the few fragments of mirror that remained attached to the wall. His skin was deathly pale, the hand clutching the shard trembling visibly.
Die, you miserable fucker.
But the hand remained where it was, the mouth twisting up in disgust until, with a howl of frustration, Stacy threw the shard back down.
I can’t do it.
Stacy fell onto her haunches, her balled hands pressed against her temples. She couldn’t do it. That it wasn’t her own throat she wanted to cut made no difference to her unconscious mind.
Then another idea occurred to her.
Peering out of the bathroom’s one tiny window, Stacy saw an empty moonlit street a few storeys below. The surrounding buildings, all of which prominently displayed demolition notices, were a uniform six storeys in height.
The front door of the flat was missing. Stacy hurried out of the flat and made her way along a corridor with stairwells at either end. She ran upwards, her kidnapper’s strong limbs carrying her with ease.
When she burst through a door and onto the rooftop, she saw London’s silver towers in the distance, and the warning lights of transport blimps blinking on and off far to the North. The edge of the roof—and a six-storey drop—was only a few steps away.
Nothing could be quicker or easier.
Borrowed blood thundered through borrowed ears.
Do it, she screamed inside her head. Do it now, before he—
Running forward with a yell, and still struggling to ignore the part of her mind convinced she was about to kill herself, Stacy very nearly faltered at the last moment.
Then she pushed off the edge of the roof with one foot, arms cartwheeling as she plummeted. A fresh scream ripped from her borrowed lungs in the last instant before the ground came rushing up and—
—she was somewhere else, suspended high above a chasm of air.
For one terrible moment, Stacy thought she had somehow returned to the rooftop of the same building from which she had leapt. But the place where she now crouched with her back to a concrete wall, a street visible far beneath her feet, was much, much higher than the six-storey block in which she had been trapped.
Cold wind whipped at her face—her real face, Stacy realized, with a mixture of terror and joy. She looked at one of her wrists and let out a sob when she saw the unblemished skin there.
It didn’t take too much work to piece together what had happened. Her kidnapper, it seems, had meant to kill her in precisely the same way she had in fact killed him—by throwing himself, inside her body, from a very great height.
And by the looks of it, she’d beat him by mere seconds. His body had hit the ground first, killing him and severing the proxy link between them.
It could so easily have been the other way around, in which case she’d most likely have been written off by the police as the unwitting victim of some anonymous suicide junkie—people who got a kick out of proxying with unwitting strangers and then killing them for the sheer rush of experiencing death without themselves dying.
People would have shrugged or shaken their heads and said it was inevitable, given her reputation as a rich kid who’d gone off the rails. That Stacy had left proxy-hooking far in her past would make little difference to them or anyone else.
Looking up and behind her, Stacy saw a domed roof with irregularly shaped edges rising high above the ledge on which she crouched. A freezing wind cut deep into her skin.
Her bracelet was long gone, so there’d be no help coming that way. The concrete beneath her fingers felt damp from recent rain.
She made the mistake of looking down again, and swallowed back a rush of sour vomit. The street looked impossibly far away from so far up.
Glancing to one side, Stacy caught sight of a scaffolding platform a little further along the ledge she was crouching on. This, she guessed, must be how her kidnapper had got up here. Which meant she could get back down by the same route.
Easiest thing in the world.
It took another minute for Stacy to even begin to summon up the necessary courage to slowly shuffle along the ledge towards the platform. The breath caught in her lungs with every gust of wind. The ledge seemed to sway beneath her, as if trying deliberately to tip her into oblivion.
Somehow she made it, sobbing with relief when she at last reached out to cling to the scaffolding. Rain touched her skin, but was immediately carried away by the wind.
A ladder led down through the scaffolding platform and terminated ten meters further down at a narrow balcony. She could see there was some kind of service door there, one that presumably led inside the building. Descending the ladder proved to be easy enough: within seconds she found herself standing on the balcony.
The door, however, was locked.
She kicked and punched it, but it remained steadfastly secure. Neither did yelling for someone to come help her bring any response.
Finally, Stacy slid down until she had her back against the door. She was alive, at least, while her kidnapper was very much dead. She could end up waiting all night before someone found her. Maybe even longer.
And maybe nobody would come. Some of the scaffolding looked rusted, like it had been there for a long time.
A sudden thought sent her searching through her pockets for a key, but that hope soon vanished. Even if her kidnapper had had a key for the door, he might well have tossed it away the moment he was outside on the roof in her body.
Leaning over the railing, Stacy caught sight of a second, much larger balcony directly below the one on which she now stood. Much of it was taken up by a carefully tended garden.
She realized, then, that the building on which she was stranded must be one of the new, self-contained arcologies that now dotted the capital, their floors arranged atop one another like untidy stacks of dishes. More balconies could be glimpsed further down, each one equally dense with carbon-absorbing greenery.
Decorative brickwork to one side of the balcony on which Stacy stood formed a kind of ladder leading down towards the uppermost garden balcony. And, judging by the light spilling across those bushes and wildflowers, someone was home.
Her guts roiled at the thought of trying to work her way down the brickwork like some freestyle mountaineer, but it was the only way she could see to ensure her survival. And there was still a risk her kidnapper had an accomplice, even now on his way to finish the job.
Plus, she had to contact Wilber and warn him things had become even more dangerous than she had thought they might.
Swallowing her terror as best she could, Stacy swung one leg over the railing, took a grip on part of the brickwork and soon found herself clinging to the side of the building high above the garden balcony.
Stacy took another glance downwards and immediately regretted it. Was it fifteen metres down to that garden balcony? Or twenty?
Or even more?
Either way, she’d surely die if she slipped and fell now.
She began working her way down, her eyes fixed on the brickwork just inches from her face. Her arms and legs soon ached from tension. Then she glanced down again and, to her shock, discovered she was nearly halfway there.
I’m going to make it, she thought, feeling something like hope almost for the first time since she had disembarked from the train.
Just then, light flickered from somewhere above her. Startled, Stacy glanced up, seeing the light of a torch shining down from the tiny maintenance balcony she had just departed.
She thought immediately of the kidnapper’s accomplice. They’ve found me.
“Hello?” a voice called down. “Who’s there?”
No, she realized—it was a maintenance worker, or a janitor. But she had allowed herself to be distracted too long; her fingers slipped on the rain-dampened brickwork, and she tumbled away from the side of the building.
She landed amidst bushes, hard enough it felt like the hammer of some angry war-god slamming into her chest. But she was alive, alive, alive, and she held on to that thought, that knowledge, even as she heard alarmed voices calling to one another, and the sound of a door close by slamming open.
CHAPTER
TWO
RAY
“Marky,” said Harry, his tone good-humoured, “for someone who’s supposed to be an expert at this stuff, you’re taking so long I’m getting worried.”
The garage smelled of machine oil and leather cleaner. Stacks of battery units covered most of one wall while half a dozen petroleum engines sat along another. The murmur of voices came down a stairwell from the floor above.
“Depends on the car.” The man whom Harry thought was Marky, but was, in fact, an entirely different man named Ray Thomas, tapped his way through a series of diagnostic menu items on the dashboard of a vintage cream-coloured Volkswagen. A laptop loaded with software purchased over the darknet for the precise purpose of circumventing encrypted automobile management routines sat on the seat next to him, connected to the dashboard by a cable.
Marky might be a real wizard when it came to making all kinds of illegal software modifications, but Ray definitely wasn’t. He felt an unreasonable degree of relief when the dashboard—really a single giant touchscreen—flashed orange, showing that it had accepted his software modifications.
