shed; the number two’s responsibility. The girls, some of them needed tempting a little, some of them needed a bit of gentle coercion; a little dope, just enough to set up an appetite, usually did the trick. But this . . . the stupid violent bastard looked like he’d been systematically beating the crap out of her.
‘Hey,’ he said to the girl.
She didn’t respond. He reached out, cupped her chin and lifted her face to get a better look at it. ‘What the fuck happened here?’
She stared silently at him.
‘They fight over you? That it?’
Her eyes locked on his. It could have been a defiant glare, it could have been that her mind was off elsewhere.
He turned to Deejay. ‘Are there any other girls this fucked up?’
‘No, Snoop. They all upstairs.’
It looked like this sorry thing had been a personal project.
‘Go get her some clothes from one of the other rooms, and then take her out to the infirmary. She’s all done here.’
Deejay disappeared.
He turned to look at her. ‘This ain’t right. The shit down here works on privileges,’ he said, studying the bruising on her face. Some of it looked a week or two old, some of it looked today-fresh. ‘That’s the fucking system. Not . . . not this.’
He could’ve sworn there was a faint flicker of reaction in her one good eye.
Deejay was back with a fistful of clothes.
‘Okay, clean her up, Deej, and dress her and get her out.’
He stood up and stepped back out of the room into the narrow hallway, relieved to breathe air less pungent. Now he had to figure out the mess with the dead boy. Like Maxwell said, if they were planning to approach those rigs as friendlies, they needed Nathan and Jacob to vouch for them.
Well one of them was fucking well dead, courtesy of that stupid asshole, Dizz-ee.
Great.
Chapter 60
10 years AC
O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London
Nathan stirred on his cot feeling like his head had been wedged in a metal worker’s vice overnight and something in his stomach was churning and flopping like a landed trout. Once upon a time, when he was eight, he’d gotten drunk slurping the slops out of glasses at a family wedding. He’d spent the night perched over a toilet bowl and the next day thinking he was going to die, his mum scolding him way too loudly, wagging a finger in his face; no sympathy whatsoever.
He’d felt very much then like he felt now.
He opened his eyes and saw the camouflage netting above him. It was a bright sunny morning outside, he could tell from the filtered light coming through the far-off canvas lid of their world.
The place was quieter than normal. Nothing more than the faint sounds of the workers outside the arena - the odd raised voice, the clatter of things being wheeled on trolleys, carried by the odd echoing acoustics of the dome.
With an unbelievable amount of effort he turned on his side to look out of the netting down at the stage below. By day, not a particularly impressive sight. Nothing more than a mess of black cabinets and a rats’ nest of snaking power cables. In amongst them he noticed a couple of the boys sprawled amongst the arcade cabinets, curled up like pale foetuses. Clearly far too hammered from last night to find a way back to their cots.
‘Oh, man,’ groaned Nathan.
He eased himself onto his back again, gazing through bleary eyes at the silhouetted pattern of webbing against the bland brightness beyond. He remembered the first couple of hours of the evening; supper, then the whole stage powering up spectacularly. Playing the games, both he and Jacob running from one cabinet to the next like children in an adventure playground.
Then the booze and the dope clouded things a bit.
He remembered the pair of them separating. To be honest, he was finding Jacob a bit clingy, uncomfortable with all the attention and preferring to shy away and stay on the periphery. Whereas Nathan wanted so badly to party, to make up for too many lost teenage years. To have a complete blast. He wanted to chat to the girls, to enjoy the celebrity-like status of being the new-lad-in-the-hood, being the centre of attention.
It was a sad fact but Jacob was turning out to be a bit of a drag. Here they were, having found something that was, in all honesty, even better than Nathan could have hoped for, but instead of enjoying it, Jacob seemed to