Falling Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  About the Author

  Introduction

  ONE: Club Andro, Midnight

  TWO: Geno Bond HQ, three weeks ago

  THREE: The Bankside, fifteen years ago

  FOUR: Morphotech Offices, three months ago

  FIVE: The Pigsty, eight years ago

  SIX: A Party…

  SEVEN: A Slip-road, date unknown

  EIGHT: Fitch’s Place, a few weeks ago

  NINE: Interlude

  TEN: The Past

  ELEVEN: Location Unknown

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN: Year Zero

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN: Adrift

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT HONNO

  COPYRIGHT

  FALLING

  by

  Debbie Moon

  HONNO MODERN FICTION

  Falling was longlisted for Wales Book of the Year

  Debbie Moon’s TV series Wolfblood won the RTS (Royal Television Society) award for best children's programme, and is nominated for 3 Children's BAFTAs in 2014.

  Debbie Moon is personally nominated for a 2014 Children's BAFTA for best writer.

  She was falling.

  Looking down from here, it must be eighty or ninety storeys to the ground. There was something wrong with her left arm, a weakness, a pain, perhaps broken, but she didn’t remember –

  Jude didn’t remember.

  For someone in her profession, that was unusual. She made a habit of not forgetting. Oh, she could remember her name, address, all the flotsam that would have gone in standard amnesia. But not how she’d got here.

  You’d have thought that falling to your death was pretty memorable.

  Her ears popped. She was cold; deep, biting cold, numbing her thoughts, sandpapering her bare arms. There was light, light from the windows, light from the sky, but no shapes. Just blurs that spilled from her vision before she could force them into recognisable shapes.

  Her limbs swam against the air rush, thrashing for traction, and she couldn’t stop them. She didn’t have time to try.

  She needed to concentrate.

  She’d ReTraced her way out of bad situations before: from in front of the barrel of a gun; back ten minutes to unsay the words that had led her there, or to take a different short-cut, a later train; remake a fatal decision with the benefit of hindsight. Tracing the different permutations of her tangled life to find the best course of action, like some kid on an arcade game, using her limitless lives to test out each option, each risk, until she understood the pattern.

  She was a ReTracer. That was what she did.

  Why should this be any different?

  Opening herself to the tangled skeins of time, Jude ReTraced.

  ONE

  Club Andro, Midnight

  And the party was in full swing.

  Jude liked Club Andro, though jumping straight in like this was a shock – straight into synthetic perfumes and sweat and the heartbeat thump of defiantly retro acoustic reggae-rock. The cold metal curve of the bar dug into her back; jostling her from the side, the generous rear end of a girl in leather, bent over a table to offer something illegal to a group of startled tourists who’d obviously misread the guidebook.

  The video headlines – NEW SEX SCANDAL ROCKS EURO-PARLIAMENT – didn’t offer any clues as to which garbled, dissolute night of the early 21st century she’d ReTraced her way back to. Neither did the homogenised fashion sense of the clientele; leather or fluorescent denim for the women, garish synthetics and heavy rouge on the men. Could have been any night in the past ten years.

  Well. No rush. She could spend as much time as she liked in her past, and she’d return to her present-time body at the instant she’d left it. In the present, time was standing still. And she was hot and thirsty and restless – that defocused hyperactivity that drives you out onto the streets after dark, just to breathe in the night and consider the city spread out before you, yours for the taking.

  And somewhere here, she’d find the key to her present-time dilemma, and change it, and everything would be fine.

  Extricating herself from the leather-clad girl, Jude edged along the bar a little and took a look around.

  It was tourist night. Big parties in from the army bases or the Hursts, to paddle in the shallows of big city decadence. They stood out a mile. Tourists wore Marilyns or Deans and thought they were fashionable. Tourists had popular catalogue partials – River Phoenix cheekbones or Van Damme pecs perched uneasily on their womb-bred bodies. She imagined them picking sections from the displays in the biotech clinics; one of these and one of those, and I must have what Eloise had, all the girls are talking about it…

  Tourists looked like Drossers. No style, no brain, no-hopers.

  Fumbling with the Tequila pump, Fitch, the gamine Korean barmaid, looked Jude over and grimaced. No way to tell what she was mouthing, not over the final chorus of My Baby Bought A New Face (And Left Me Feeling Blue), but Jude could guess.

  Something along the lines of, ‘How did you get in here dressed like that?’

  No, she wasn’t really androj enough for Club Andro, not even in her treasured reproduction velvet frockcoat. You dressed big for Club Andro; big, loud, and in direct opposition to whatever gender you were wearing that week. Or you broke the rules and hoped to be admitted as that night’s fashion casualty, there for the beautiful people to smirk at.

  Fitch shook her head, as disgusted by the doorman’s negligence as Jude’s lack of taste. In the warm yellow light behind the bar, she looked almost childlike, fragile and innocent. Jude blew her a kiss and for a moment, she almost looked like she was blushing.

  They were friends, then. A lot more than friends, of course; but looking back, friends was the important part. That set a minimum on how far she’d slipped back. Maybe if she could drag Fitch away from the bar for a moment, she could wheedle some solid information out of her.

  The leather-clad girl had finished frightening the tourists, who were casting longing looks towards the door. As Jude eased past, she spread a double handful of coloured injectors before her, smiling crookedly. ‘Wanna trip? Safest on the planet.’

  Turning away from a sudden flare of strobe light, Jude shook her head. ‘No thanks,’ she yelled above the thrash-metal intro for the night’s first act: bioengineered hermaphrodites, performing something that might loosely be considered dancing. ‘I’m not wired for it.’

  The girl studied her face for a moment, puzzled. ‘Wired’ was a throwback to an older and altogether cruder technology, but it was the standard term. More likely, the mere idea of someone frequenting Club Andro in their own unaltered birth body had shocked her into paralysis.

  And led her to one inescapable conclusion.

  ‘You’re a cop.’

  Jude shook her head. Heads were already turning. ‘I’m a ReTracer,’ she yelled, hoarse with dry ice and annoyance. ‘A ReTracer. Don’t you read the newspapers?’

  Someone screamed an inaudible introduction over the thrash and the static, and the leather-girl, finally understanding, wrinkled her nose in contempt and turned away. Government employees with bizarre time-travelling powers obviously didn’t rate highly in her world order, but at least they were better than cops.

  The crowd to her left parted and Jude seized her chance. With the slick expertise of the experienced clubber, she elbowed her way through an argument, around an amorous clinch, and out into what passed for a clear space.

  ‘Woah, Judey-baby,’ the female at the nearest table simpered, fluttering eyelashes that masked puppy-dog eyes green as grass. ‘Long time, no see, huh?’

  Jude studied the clubber’s long, fine-boned face in the treacherous light. There were familiar things: the last
traces of a heavier jaw line, the habitual slight sag at the corners of a new, perfect mouth. All the little clues you learned to look for, when a trip to the clinic was as routine as a new pair of shoes and even your dearest friends couldn’t be counted upon to look the same way twice.

  ‘Miyahara?’

  ‘The very same,’ the soft female mouth replied. The voice was perfect – pleasant register, trace of a Scandinavian accent, very fashionable. But underneath, a quick ear could still pick out the mannered politeness of garbled Japanese ancestry. ‘How do you like my latest?’

  Miyahara had always been overly fond of stereotypes and his latest incarnation was pure Fantasy Swedish Blond; golden curls to her waist, legs to her armpits, breasts that could have suckled an entire orphanage. It reminded her of the first bioteched porn stars; of furtive magazine reading under the bedclothes, as much amused as aroused.

  Always the same. Give them the chance to be anything, and they all want to look the same. It’s like the world being packed with dirt-cheap designer clothing and all anyone wants to wear are plastic sandals and pastel-blue jogging outfits.

  She still hadn’t answered his question. ‘It’s – extraordinary.’

  ‘You’re most kind. Won’t you join me?’

  She didn’t remember having met Miyahara in this modification before – and it was pretty memorable. They could have missed each other a dozen times, any night of the week, in the swirling currents of humanity that filled Club Andro. But tonight, they hadn’t.

  That felt significant, and significance was exactly what she was looking for.

  Jude eased herself into the chair opposite – bolted down and a tight fit, a reminder to the clientele that only the thin and the beautiful were welcome here – and signalled a passing waiterette. ‘Scotch and soda,’ she yelled and, to Miyahara, ‘You look taller.’

  ‘Eleven centimetres,’ Miyahara beamed, perfect teeth fluorescing in the insistent pulse of UV. ‘It cost. And it hurt.’

  The waiterette, bioteched to the five-foot South American tribal model that had become the club’s trademark, sniffed dismissively and flounced off through the crowd, using her elbows to clear a path while balancing a tray in each hand.

  ‘Cute.’ Miyahara watched her virtually naked buttocks vanish into the heaving ranks of leather and silk. ‘I’ve heard that the waiterettes are equipped both ways, you know.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Jude murmured, distracted by a scuffle at the door. Metal claws flashed in a pulse of green light; someone screamed and the security staff waded in, the crowd closing nonchalantly around them as they quietened the brawlers with heavily reinforced fists.

  ‘But then, who isn’t these days?’ Miyahara yawned, hiding his mouth with the back of one long-nailed hand. ‘You should really get with the action. Oh. Of course. You can’t.’

  Jude’s turn to yawn. They had this conversation every time they met. Miyahara had even given up allowing her time to rise to the bait before ploughing on. ‘ReTracers don’t get to change. Just in case they damage that wonderful genetic accident that –’

  ‘Button it, Miyahara. Some of us don’t actually want to look like a reject from the Keep It Up All Night Channel.’

  Miyahara spared her a smile that could have cut glass. ‘Bio-engineering’s not all it’s cracked up to be, you know. Keeping up with the neighbours. The pressure. And frankly, I’m growing a little jaded. There are only so many permutations, even in the black market clinics. Though animal-human hybrids are looking quite promising…’

  Images from old movies swam behind Jude’s eyelids; impractically dressed women fainting as slavering creatures pawed at the windows.

  ‘You want to be careful who you let loose on your genes, Miyahara. Some of the stories I’ve heard…’

  ‘Heard them,’ the female declared, with a dismissive wave of one hand. Ill-cut diamonds glittered across his knuckles. ‘And you shouldn’t believe everything you read. Trust me, I should know. I invent most of it.’

  The waiterette returned with the scotch, and Jude tucked a banknote into her synthetic snakeskin loincloth. The girl flashed a false smile, moaning and wriggling in affected arousal, the house style, then leant close to murmur, ‘Fitch wants to see you. Room Eight, half an hour.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  The thrash-metal had subsided into a gut-vibrating percussive thumping. Finding themselves largely ignored, the dance troupe were in retreat, pausing only to lap-dance the occasional customer drunk enough to tip for what most of the clientele would have done for free.

  ‘So,’ Miyahara said casually, leaning back in his seat, ‘how is the saving-the-world business these days?’

  ‘It pays the bills.’

  ‘Saved anyone famous recently? C’mon, just an off the record rumour, no one’s going to trace it to you.’

  Jude couldn’t quite repress a smile. ‘And what if I did? Let’s say I ReTrace to save the President of Outer Mongolia from an assassin, have the guy arrested as he enters the concert hall instead. By definition, there was no assassination attempt. And even your gutter press rag isn’t so desperate that it’ll report non-events.’

  ‘Okay.’ The female nodded, unfazed. ‘So, what about the inside story on bodyguarding the rich and famous? You have to follow them around, right? So you’ll be in the right place to jump back to if anything happens. You must have seen a few things in your time. Sex, drugs, all the usual – and the less usual. I heard Sandra Rose had her vocal chords reshaped to the same dimensions as Elvis’s, you got anything on that?’

  Jude downed her scotch. She was beginning to get the feeling that, whatever she’d come back here to fix, it had nothing to do with Miyahara.

  ‘If I spot any starlets with their pants down, I’ll give you a call. Right now, I have to visit the freshening room.’

  ‘I could come and, ah, give you a hand.’ Miyahara smiled up at her. ‘Don’t say you aren’t curious.’

  ‘It’s not that, Miya.’ A sudden influx of rowdy girls in short pants had started a crowd current, and she took advantage of it, letting the shifting patterns of movement carry them apart. ‘You should know by now. I never did go for blondes.’

  Any attempt to divide the freshening rooms into ladies and gents had long since been abandoned, and inside clubbers of every conceivable gender were fighting for mirror space. Posturing abandoned, they jostled and elbowed, leaning close to the badly-lit glass to powder and paint with fierce self-absorption.

  Jude sighed and headed for the cubicles.

  The things you had to do to hear reliable gossip these days.

  In a competitive market that catered for every taste, Club Andro thrived on its reputation for gossip. You wanted the latest scandal from New Hollywood, or good bets for your share portfolio, or just about anything else, this was the place to come.

  Rumour had it that Leonarda, the gone-to-seed porn actress who’d founded the place with her last libel award, paid industry insiders hard cash to break their rumours here first. Just to preserve the club’s reputation. You could spot her contacts, people maintained, by the overacted secrecy and the stage whispers. Now everyone who wanted to look important enough to be paid for their info sat hamming it up in corners, muttering just a little too loud and scowling at the tourists.

  It tended to make for an interesting evening.

  The facilities reeked of cheap perfume, and by the time she’d checked the hidden pockets of her coat – wads of various currencies, a fresh battery in the shock-net sewn into the velvet, painkillers and two trank darts, all present and correct – Jude was finding it hard to breathe.

  How anyone ever survived an assignation in here without asphyxiating, she’d never know. Maybe that explained some of the more interesting noises coming from adjacent cubicles.

  Buttoning the black cotton shirt defensively to the collar, Jude wrenched the cubicle door open and took two steps into the chaos.

  ‘We was beginning to think,’ a soft voice said into her ear, ‘that you ha
ve a weak bladder.’

  Turning her head just enough to look MultiLegion in the eye, Jude tried a thin smile.

  She knew exactly when she was now.

  And she was in deep shit.

  ‘MultiLegion –’

  Echoing the words inside her head, words she remembered speaking, when was it? Must have been early November last year, the streets had been sugared with frost when they went out to the alley…

  Not the alley. Don’t think about the alley, not yet. Concentrate on the present, on re-enacting everything just right, on looking for the one tiny thing to change.

  Staring into eyes the colour of blood, Jude croaked, ‘Whoever it is sent you, whatever they paid, GenoBond will pay you double.’

  Drawing himself up to his full seven-and-a-half feet, MultiLegion shook his huge, heavy head. Lank dreadlocks writhed across his copper-brown shoulders. Mock armour was in right now, but she got the feeling the overlapping metal snake-scales of his tunic weren’t designed just for appearances.

  ‘Can’t do that,’ he said, as if she’d asked him to overlook some minor offence, just this once. ‘Always do what I’m told. That’s the deal.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re well known for your honesty.’ Jude slid one hand casually across the hip of her coat. Just a few more inches to the seam of the outside pocket and the pressure point to activate the shock net. ‘You should consider breaking the rules once in a while. Keep your adversaries on their toes –’

  His vast hand closed on her elbow, forcing her arm flat against her side, into full contact with the hidden steel mesh, just as she hit the pressure point. Five thousand volts arced through the net and earthed, mainly through her. She felt the muscles of her throat contract into a yell that never happened. Then she was face down on the tiles, whining faintly, dim red pulses strobing behind her eyelids.

  MultiLegion, who must have taken a considerable amount of the discharge, looked down at her in some puzzlement, unable to work out what had just happened.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I’m doing just fine so far.’

  Sure you are, big guy. But then, I figure you weren’t exactly like the rest of us even before someone paid for you to go into a clinic and come out part-Superman and part-God-knows-what…