The yellow team is just Marco and Helen. If there were four on a side, the way we’d planned it, they’d have been able to really get into the teamwork – defence, sneak attacks, decoys, subterfuge, loads of great material. As it is, I’ve got visibility dropping by the second, as many crew as competitors. Once it’s layered with voiceover and moody music, maybe it’ll be passable. But what I’m looking at through the lens right now doesn’t look fun. It looks futile.
I follow them round the back of a row of houses where they search for somewhere to place their flag, and try to concentrate on what’s ahead of me. But after what I’ve just heard from Wolf, it’s hard to keep my mind focused. From the way Annabel looked at me when I came back with the mic, I’m certain she heard me talking to him. The connection had been glitching and the signal would have been weak. But she could have heard.
It’s bad enough her knowing about SyncHole. But if it gets out about Sophie too – about what I really did to Leo – that’s more than I can contain.
There’s a shout from behind me, Marco calling to his teammate, and I make myself do what I’m here to do. I have to walk backwards, keeping my back to the blowing snow so that I don’t have to constantly wipe the lens. Even with snowshoes gripping the icy earth, I’m unsteady on my feet, relying on my locked core to stop me overbalancing in the ever-shifting wind. Behind the houses, great ethereal drifts of snow are blowing upwards and away, like the ghosts of waves rising over the hills.
‘Here’s good,’ Marco calls, pointing to a pile of ropes, his voice loud and clear in my headphones. He brushes the worst of the snow off with a gloved hand and gestures for the flag from Helen.
‘The place back there was better!’ Helen shouts back over the wind. I can pick her up only vaguely on the onboard mic, but I’ll find a way to edit it. I start imagining whether this discussion will work with subtitles, but then Helen concedes. ‘Could we please get on with it? I don’t think we should be out here at all.’
I tighten up on their faces as they settle their flag – even with the eyewear she’s got on, the anxiety is clear to see.
They move off and I un-shoulder the camera and run into a different shot, looping around the back of where Helen’s standing guard. From here, I can frame the red dividing line and Helen at opposite sides of the same shot, with Marco and the sheet of ice behind.
But even in the minutes it takes me to reset, things have changed. The weather is accelerating. It’s got a noise all of its own now, a constant howl, as if it’s angry, or in pain. Both. The snow is coming in so fast and fat that it’s like watching the world through a filter. I try to keep the camera trained on Marco as he calls something back to Helen, but even with his radio mic in my headphones at maximum volume, I’m struggling to make him out now, let alone her.
Marco makes a bolt across the no-man’s land in the middle. Almost immediately I see Nish and Gaia – identifiable by their black vests – coming the other way. One of them stumbles, grabbing on to the other as they try to run into yellow’s territory. Marco sees them and sprints across to get in their way. I go closer to capture the action, but before I zoom in, my eye is drawn away.
To another shape, much further back.
I take my eye from the viewfinder and squint into the whitening distance. Visibility is dropping by the second. But even in flashes, it’s unmistakable: the vivid green of Wolf’s jacket.
He gets closer, lumbering across the ice, the weather bearing down on the space in between us like static. My heart thumps with deafening rapidity in my ears. Why is he here? How did he get out?
‘ … over there?’ I hear someone say. I turn, flip one of the headphones away from my ear and realise it’s Craig, calling me from the centre line. He’s only twenty, thirty feet away, but he’s almost inaudible through the fearsome wind.
‘What?’ I shout back.
‘I said we need to get out of here. Can you see Tori over there?’
A curtain of snow sweeps past me, so thick that I lose sight of him until he reappears by my side.
‘We need to get to shelter!’ he shouts, pulling on my sleeve, trying to drag me with him towards a building.
I shake him off and tuck the camera under my arm, pressing the earphones hard against my head. From Marco’s mic I can make out the sound of Wolf’s voice.
‘Where is she?’ he’s saying. But I still can’t see him.
There’s a huge roar of wind, and a bombardment of white comes at me like a solid mass. For half a second the snow clears enough for me to see Wolf, a blur of green, moving off. Fast, northwards, towards the other side of the village.
Then I’m running. I can hardly see where, but I have to catch him up. I try to keep him in my sights, not even thinking about the camera now, barely hearing Craig behind me, screaming.
I crouch by the side of a building, clutching the camera to my chest. It’s not only the snow, turned ballistic by a wind that must be beyond fifty miles an hour. It’s the debris – pieces of board, a torn sheet of corrugated iron, plastic stuff that flies past so fast I can’t even identify it. I try crying for help, but I can’t hear my own voice. Nothing but white noise in my ears. Eyes gripped shut against the onslaught of snow, muscles spasming with cold. Except this isn’t snow. Five minutes ago it was snow. This, now, is a risk to life.
A noise cuts through the howl of the storm, an irregular rumble. I open my eyes long enough to see something huge, blue, bouncing towards me. In the same second, I recognise what it is – a plastic barrel, easily as big as I am – and duck.
I’m not quick enough. Blinding, dense pain slams through my head and almost out the other side. And then, suddenly, everything is still.
And I’m outside Leo’s flat, back in Bath, six months ago.
I see him in the car, where he’d told me to meet him. I see it all, like a film. Street light fragmenting in the puddles by my feet. His face lit blue by the light of his phone.
I make that split-second decision about the camera in my bag, which I no longer want to be carrying. Something makes me reach in to turn it off, because what we have now is private. Not something I’m going to hand over for use in an edit suite. Not something to be broadcast. It’s our love affair. Me and him.
My hand falters on the remote to pause the recording, but then he looks up, sees me.
And I know there’s something wrong.
So although he doesn’t see the camera, I’m still rolling as I climb into the passenger seat next to him.
Still rolling as he shows me the email he got, telling him who I really am. From someone anonymous, tipping him off about SyncHole, the investigation – the fact that I have lied about everything.
Still rolling when he tells me I’m nothing to him. That he never wants to see my face again.
That I’ve ruined his life.
And even after I’ve finally done what he’s screaming at me to do and got out of his car, the camera is still rolling as he drives away, because I’ve left the bag behind.
‘Dee!’
A hand on my shoulder. My leg. Someone I know, yelling my name.
‘Jesus Christ, Dee!’ It’s Tori. ‘She’s here!’
‘Get her up!’ Another voice. A man. Craig. Marco. John.
No. Not John. I don’t know.
‘Dee, get up!’
Definitely Craig, and then Tori’s voice too. ‘Leave the camera, come on!’
I force myself to my feet, but my knees buckle.
‘Leave it!’ Tori implores.
But I can’t let go of it. And I can’t see – not a thing – but I let them lead me. I have to kick my boots to excavate them from what must be a drift of snow, fallen in what can only have been minutes. With someone’s guiding hand on my back, I feel my way along a wall with one free hand, utterly disorientated, the white-out so complete that when the solid surface ends and I come to empty space, I can hardly tell if it’s the corner of the building or a doorway into it.
‘In here!’
I’m pushed inside, and I drop to my knees as the deafening storm shakes the ground beneath us.