CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘Oh my God!’ Sam shouted, ‘they’ll be killed!’

Kieron stared desperately across the lake, towards the distant Learsa HQ building overhanging the freezing black waters. A fireball bloomed like a crimson and yellow flower to one side of the building, and then another one. He thought he could hear an engine revving desperately, but then the sound of the explosions, slower than the light of the flames, rolled like thunder across the headland where he and Sam had parked their driverless car.

He couldn’t tell what was going on or who was involved. Desperately, he tore the ARCC glasses from Sam’s face and jammed them on himself. ‘Let me see!’ he said, batting Sam’s hands away. ‘You’ve had them for ages. It’s my turn!’

It took him a few moments to work out what was going on. The drone was looking downwards, at a large field of snow. The snow couldn’t be that thick, because a blocky car – a Volvo, he thought – raced across the camera’s field of view, leaving dark parallel tracks behind it. A sudden explosion off to one side momentarily overloaded the glasses, but just before the picture whited out he saw the Volvo veer sideways.

‘Asrael are using their drones,’ Sam said urgently. ‘They’re targeting Bex and Bradley in the car.’

‘Can we ram our drone into theirs and disable them?’ Kieron asked, as the view in the glasses began to clear.

‘No chance,’ Sam replied. ‘They’ve got access to loads of drones, and we’ve only got one. It’s a suicide mission for the drone, and we’d only take one of theirs out at best.’

‘Then what can we do,’ Kieron snapped, ‘apart from just watch?’

‘I don’t know!’ Sam’s voice had an edge of desperation. ‘I’m out of ideas.’

‘You said they took a tablet from some woman?’

‘Yeah. I think that was Katrin, Eva and Hekla’s mum.’

‘What’s on the tablet?’

Kieron heard the huff as Sam breathed out heavily. ‘The woman indicated it was data about Asrael and what they’re doing with the drones.’

‘Could they use the tablet to give instructions to the drones – turn them off, make them land, or something?’

‘No Wi-Fi, and no other way of transmitting the data,’ Sam said, his voice close to breaking. ‘I tried hacking into it with the ARCC glasses, but it was no use. It’s just a flat tablet. No connectivity.’

‘But we’ve got connectivity here!’ Kieron pointed out urgently, watching as the Volvo suddenly braked and turned left.

‘Yeah, but the Asrael drones need a security code before they’ll accept any instructions. I’ve been trying, but I can’t get around that. It’s stupid – Bex and Bradley probably have the code on that tablet, but they can’t use it to get into the drones’ control functions. We can get into the drones’ control functions using the ARCC glasses, but we haven’t got the code!’

Again, as Kieron watched, Bex and Bradley’s car slowed down. It came to a halt unexpectedly, and then reversed. ‘What are they trying to do?’ he muttered.

‘Avoid the exploding drones obviously,’ Sam pointed out.

‘Yes, but nothing exploded. And if you’re trying to stop someone from predicting where you’re driving, you don’t come to an abrupt stop.’ A sudden realisation flashed across his mind, almost seeming to light his head up from the inside. ‘Of course!’

‘Of course what?’

‘Hang on.’ Kieron used his fingertips to access their drone’s controls on the virtual menu he could see in the ARCC glasses. He ordered it to rise higher, increase its altitude but still look down on what was going on.

‘What are you doing?’ Sam almost screamed.

Kieron felt a smile break out across his face.

From low down the erratic movements of the Volvo – the sudden stops, the sudden turns, the gradual loops – just looked like frantic attempts to avoid plummeting explosive drones, but from higher up it was clear that whoever was driving had a plan in mind.

Kieron instructed the drone to stay at the same height but rotate around its own axis. The picture he stared at suddenly and sickeningly turned through sixty degrees, but he needed to see what Bex was doing to make sure he was right.

‘Yes! She’s writing the code in the snow!’ he shouted triumphantly. ‘Bradley must have found it on the tablet, and she’s using the car to write it out for us! 1 … 3 … 5 … 2. It’s rough, but she’s doing a brilliant job.’

Sam’s fingers scratched Kieron’s face as he snatched the glasses back. ‘Let me have that!’ The abrupt sliding sideways and disappearance of the images he’d been watching made Kieron’s stomach lurch. By the time he’d recovered, Sam’s fingers were moving through empty air as he manipulated menus and entered instructions. ‘Right – I’ve got a blanket input into all of the drones. There’s – hell, there are fifteen of them left. Asrael are throwing everything at Bex and Bradley. Right – I’m typing the code in now so I can turn them all off. 1-3-5-2, right?’

‘Right,’ Kieron snapped, annoyed at the way his friend had taken over. He stared desperately through the windscreen and across the lake, trying to make out what was going on. An explosion suddenly flared, and then was gone.

‘It’s not working!’ Sam shouted. ‘The code’s not working! Are you sure you got it right?’

‘I’m sure,’ Kieron said firmly, but he wasn’t. Using a fast-moving car to clear snow away from dark concrete to leave numbers behind was an incredibly difficult – and approximate – thing to do. No matter how good a driver Bex was, there was room for error. Just the slightest drift or skid could change –

‘What about 1-8-5-2?’ he shouted. Bex hadn’t completely connected the loops up!

‘Trying that now,’ Sam said through teeth clenched together in worry and concentration. ‘Yes! I’m in! Ordering all drones to land now! Let me know if you see any more explosions.’

‘Nothing,’ Kieron said, and then, ‘still nothing. I think you did it.’

‘We did it. They’re all grounded now. That was two lots of clever thinking you did there.’ He sighed. ‘Let’s hope we’ve given Bex and Bradley enough scope to get out of the place.’

Something off to the right, across the dark water, caught Kieron’s attention. Lights, moving. Headlights, splashing across the tarmac of the road that ran around the edge of the lake.

‘I think someone’s coming,’ he said urgently. ‘One of the girls. Maybe all of them. And they’ll be armed.’

‘We need to hide.’ Sam glanced over at Kieron. ‘It’s going to be cold out there. You ready for this? I remember what you were like on those cross-country runs at school. You don’t like the cold.’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘Not really.

They exited the car, left and right. The sudden cold sent a spike of pain through Kieron’s head. Sam was right. He hated the cold.

He looked around. All the rocks he could see would hardly hide a tortoise, let alone a person. No bushes close by either. The parking area they’d chosen was clear of anywhere they could hide.

‘Actually –’ he said, breath turning to vapour as he spoke – ‘maybe this is a bad idea. Couldn’t we just drive away?’ He wrapped his arms around himself to try to conserve some warmth. He could feel the cold radiating in through the soles of his trainers and up into the soles of his feet. He knew that technically cold didn’t radiate anywhere, it was heat that did the moving, but it did nothing to quell the fact that his body heat was gradually bleeding away into the ground.

‘They’d follow us,’ Sam pointed out. He indicated the road around the lake, where the lights of the approaching car were getting closer. Cars plural. Kieron could see two sets of lights, maybe three.

‘How do they know where we are?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. Maybe they could track the signal I sent.’

The cars were only a minute or two away now. Kieron felt his heart pounding. The pain in his head had spread now, from a spike to a general throbbing.

‘The lake,’ he said suddenly.

‘What about it?’

‘We’re on the edge of a slope leading down to the water. It’s quite steep. Maybe we can climb down a little way and hide there.’

‘Worth a try.’

They moved gingerly towards the edge and scrabbled down until their feet were resting on a thin ledge and their heads were below the level of the ground. The sharp edges of the rocks cut into Kieron’s hands at the same time as they sapped the warmth from them. At least the numbness stopped the pain, but he knew, as he pressed himself against the sloping cliff-face, that he would get colder even faster now.

The roar of approaching car engines distracted him momentarily. They slowed, stopped, and then several car doors opened.

Footsteps on loose gravel.

‘We know you’re there,’ a girl’s voice said. Kieron’s heart sank. He was sure it was Katrin. Obviously it had to be Katrin. She was the one he’d liked the best. ‘You’re the boy from St Mark’s Square, aren’t you? It took a while, but we traced your friends’ movements back to when they arrived on the island, and we found they’d booked into the hotel with you.’ She paused. Kieron imagined her leaning her head to one side thoughtfully as she looked around. ‘Did you meet us by accident in the square, or was it deliberate? Was it all planned?’

He looked sideways, to where Sam was spreadeagled against the rock. Their eyes met. Sam made a small movement with his lips and shrugged slightly. Only Kieron, who had known him for as long as he could remember, could have interpreted the message: Hey, you really know how to choose them, don’t you?

Kieron raised an eyebrow and smiled. He knew that Sam would understand the reply: I’ll stick to fancying your sister in future!

More crunches of feet on gravel. The girls were separating; one moving left, one moving right while the third one stayed in the middle.

‘You’ve been very clever,’ Katrin said, ‘I’ll give you that. You and your older friends have caused us a lot of trouble. But look, we can be sensible about this. Show yourselves, and we can find a way out of this that makes us all happy.’

Sam caught Kieron’s eye and shook his head sharply, but Kieron had already realised that Katrin was lying. There was no easy way out of this for all of them. It was the girls or the two boys – a stark choice.

Bang! A sudden gunshot rang out, sending birds flapping in panic from hidden nests. Seconds later it echoed back from the other side of the lake.

‘Sorry.’ That was Hekla, apologetically. ‘I thought I saw something move. Probably a fox.’

‘I don’t think they are going to come out from wherever they are.’ That was Eva’s voice. ‘I mean, would you?’

‘Probably not.’

Eva’s voice was so close that Kieron felt like if he just looked up he would be staring at her as she stood on the edge of the cliff. ‘Keep looking. If we don’t find them in ten minutes we’ll set their car alight and leave them here. They won’t last more than an hour in these temperatures.’ She paused. ‘It is a shame; I would like to have punished them.’

‘What about Mother?’ Hekla asked.

‘Oh, she will be punished as well.’ Katrin’s voice had an edge of dark anger in it.

Kieron’s feet had become so numb that he couldn’t feel the ledge beneath them. Pins and needles had started up in his right thigh. He tried banging his leg with his clenched fist, but it didn’t do any good. He tried to shift the position of his right foot, but the numbness made him misjudge the movement. His foot went back too far, and slipped off the ledge. Pebbles clattered as they fell towards the water, ending in distant splashes. Sam looked urgently at him. Checking he was OK. He tried to smile back, but his face seemed frozen. He couldn’t move his cheek muscles or his lips properly.

‘I think they’re hiding over the edge,’ Eva said.

‘I think you’re right.’ That was Katrin. ‘Clever boys.’

‘Shall we just shoot them?’ Hekla.

‘If we’re close enough to fire down at them, we’re close enough that they could reach up and pull us over the edge. No, come over here. Grab some rocks, as heavy as you can manage. We’ll throw the rocks over the edge and knock the boys into the water, where they’ll freeze to death within a few minutes.’ Katrin giggled suddenly. ‘It’s like those games you see in the arcades, where you have to push coins over the edge of a moving plate so that when it goes back the coins push other coins over the next edge. I loved that game when I was a kid.’

Kieron glanced urgently to his right, along the face of the cliff. The ledge they were on petered out after a little way; no hope of escape there. Sam was busy checking to his left. He turned his head back and shook it. No escape that way either.

A rock the size of a football appeared over the edge and plunged past Kieron’s head. It hit the ledge and bounced, sailing out into the darkness. Moments later Kieron heard a louder splash from far below.

‘Nothing?’ Hekla sounded amused. ‘Let’s try another one. Just scream, boys, if it hits you.’

Kieron thought he heard a car in the distance. For a moment he thought it was random passing motorist, but then he realised that it was more likely to be Bex and Bradley. A warm feeling flashed through him as he realised they were coming to the rescue, but reality doused the warmth with a cold, sick realisation. The girls were armed. Bex and Bradley weren’t. It would be a massacre, over within seconds.

He had to do something. Anything.

What resources did they have? What tools in the toolbox?

Two freezing boys.

No, two freezing boys with a set of ARCC glasses.

A plan suddenly unfolded in his head, fully formed, as if it had just been waiting there for him to notice it.

He couldn’t communicate this to Sam using just his eyebrows. Instead he pointed at the glasses his friend was still wearing, and then to his own face. Sam frowned. Urgently, Kieron gestured to his friend to pass them over. After what seemed like an eternity, Sam got the message. Carefully, so he didn’t disrupt his own balance, he removed the glasses and handed them across.

Kieron put them on. He raised his right hand to access the menus, but there wasn’t enough space in front of him to move properly. If he tried, he would push himself off the cliff!

‘Put your guns behind your backs,’ Katrin ordered her sisters. ‘When they stop the car, Hekla, I want you to shoot out their tyres so they can’t escape, and you, Eva, are to shoot the man. I’ll take out the woman.’

He would have to turn around to give himself room to move his hands.

As quickly as he could, he shuffled around until his toes were hanging over empty space. He pressed his back as hard as he could against the rock. As he raised his hands to access the virtual menus he felt something press hard in the middle of his chest. He looked down. It was Sam’s hand. His friend had edged closer to him and was stopping him from slipping over.

The car engine was nearby now. Only seconds remained.

The driverless car was parked only around ten feet from the edge of the cliff, and from the way the key card locked it at a distance Kieron knew it had some kind of RFID or Bluetooth technology. That meant, with the technology of the ARCC glasses behind him, he should – should – be able to access it. Hack it. Drive it.

He heard Bex and Bradley’s car pull off the road and into the parking area with a spray of gravel.

‘Ready?’ Katrin said to her sisters.

New menus popped up as the ARCC glasses found the car’s electronic brain. Views from the sensor cameras around the car’s body appeared in front of him. He could see the three girls standing apparently innocently in front of it, and he could also see Bex and Bradley’s car skidding to a halt behind it. The girls had their hands behind their backs. Bex’s expression was furious.

Operating on instinct, Kieron tapped instructions into the cold, empty air.

The driverless car’s motor roared. The girls looked confused, then suddenly worried.

The car sprang to life, aiming straight for the girls, who dived out of the way gracelessly. Kieron got a sudden view from the side cameras of them sprawled on the ground, then the car was past them and over the edge of the cliff. Looking up Kieron saw the underside of the vehicle slide overhead like some massive alien spacecraft, before it was past him and beginning its downwards arc to the lake.

He turned around and scrambled up the sloping side of the cliff to level ground, Sam doing the same by his side. Bex had already subdued Hekla, kneeling on her back and twisting her arm up behind her back. Bradley had pulled Eva into a kneeling position and had her in a headlock.

But Katrin was on her feet, gun raised and aimed at Bex.

Kieron scooped the glasses from his face and threw them at the girl as hard as he could. They caught her on the cheek. Her head jerked sideways and her hand came up instinctively to protect herself. Her gun discharged harmlessly into the air.

Bradley saw exactly what was going on. He reached into his pocket and pulled out something rectangular and black. The tablet from their mother! He threw it underarm at Katrin. It spun through the air and caught her on the bridge of her perfect nose. Her head snapped back, she took two steps backwards and her feet hit one of the rocks that she and her sisters had collected to throw at Kieron and Sam. She began to topple backwards, over the edge of the cliff. Instinctively working together, Sam snatched her gun out of her hand while Kieron grabbed her shoulder and yanked her sideways. She fell on top of him, unconscious.

Kieron lay there for a few moments, breathing heavily and staring at the glittering stars in the night sky. He heard footsteps approaching, but he was too tired to turn over. He just lay there, with Katrin’s body sprawled across his chest.

‘Typical,’ Bex’s voice said. ‘We do all the hard work, and all the kids can think about is girls.’

‘This one’s not my type,’ Kieron wheezed. ‘Too violent. When we get home, there’s a red-headed barista in a coffee shop in Newcastle I want to ask out.’

‘Tell you what,’ Sam’s voice said from somewhere over to his left, ‘when she asks you what your name is so she can write it on your order, just say: “Your new boyfriend”.’

‘And that,’ Kieron said, pushing Katrin off him so he could get up, and grinning over at his friend, ‘is why you never get a girl.’