Sara ran up the stairs to the ground floor, along the corridor and then up the stairs to the next floor.
What Salt had told her created an overpowering urge to vomit. This anonymity which she had felt so suffocated by her whole life was in fact a gift from her mother, an act of maternal protection to keep Sara safe, from a predatory military machine, and from herself. She had tugged on an errant thread with such persistence that everything had come undone. She finally knew who Salt was, the puller of puppet strings that her mother had sacrificed everything to protect her from. And here Sara was, in his house, running for safety. She damped down her spinning mind. She had to run, her priority now was to not get caught.
Sara could hear the sounds of more vehicles arriving, thudding into place, at the front and back of the house.
They would storm the street-level doors first. There was only one option, which was up. If there was a way out it would be up through the roof.
She had reached the top floor, her lungs screaming for air.
Doors slammed open on the ground floor, and she could hear shouting and the sound of bodies filling the entrance.
She was on a short landing, a black metal door with a fire escape bar facing her. She launched herself at it, smashing into it at full speed, the momentum carrying her off-balance on to a tiny, tarred roof terrace wrapped in a black metal railing.
She channelled all the emotions that threatened to overwhelm her into her escape. All her anger – at herself, at Salt – all her grief – for the life she could have had, for growing up alone.
A high-decibel alert shrieked into the night, jarring her back to the present. The opening of the door had tripped an alarm.
‘She’s on the roof!’
The shout came from the street, followed by a voice she recognized. Salt.
‘I want her alive!’
The sounds of heavy boots came pounding up the stairs.
The roofs of the terrace of houses extended in either direction, a series of bare aerial plots each encircled by a metal railing. She was in an arid landscape of chimneys and satellite dishes, in the middle of a block that ended on either side with a last roof that formed a cliff edge into the night.
‘No live fire!’
The boots were almost upon her, and she began running, leaping over the balustrade nearest to her and landing in a light crouch on the next property. Sara ran across to the other side and vaulted over the fence.
She ran across the length of the roof and leaped over the railing, landing on the roof of the next house. The last roof of the terraced row was several houses away, and she ran across each roof, leaping over each balustrade, approaching the cliff-edge into darkness. Only two roofs away.
She was about to leap over the final barrier when a deafening noise erupted behind her, a series of firecracker explosions. At the same instant, a wave of projectiles flew through the air around her. The effect was startling, like being caught inside a flock of crows taking flight. They smacked into the fence and chimneys with loud cracks and flew over the edge of the roof, disappearing into the sickly yellow light cast by the streetlamps.
A white-heat pain stabbed her leg, like a horse had kicked her from behind. She screamed in agony and lost her balance, flop-rolling on to the last roof on the terrace, her arms loose and her body bumping over the shells of rubber bullets strewn on the floor.
Shouts came from behind her.
‘She’s hit!’
Boots were running.
‘Hold your fire!’
Sara stood up and tried to put weight on her leg but immediately cried out. She looked quickly behind her.
There were at least twenty of them, approaching in a slow sideways march: black fatigues and balaclavas, the zebra stripe line of the police combat colours across their chests, rifles raised and pressed into shoulders.
She hobbled to the edge of the roof and looked over. There was an alleyway forty feet below, cobblestoned, and on the other side, a row of garages. A quick calculation: the roof of the garage was twenty feet below the roof on which she was standing and about fifteen feet away.
There was no way she could make it.
She took four large strides backwards, her leg exploding with pain each time she put pressure on it.
‘Don’t do it. I can protect you!’
She didn’t need to turn around to know who was calling to her.
Sara began running, each other step like a dagger plunged into her thigh. The edge of the roof was approaching, only feet away now, the momentum of her run carrying her past the point of no return, speeding up for a leap into the abyss.
She blocked out every rational voice in her mind, a primeval chorus of screams to stop running, to live for another day. She ignored them and listened instead to the whisper, the barely heard murmur deep inside her head, telling her something quite different.
She leaped over the edge of the building, her back foot planting itself on the gutter and propelling her into space, her arms reaching out, her legs bicycling furiously as she step-stoned on air, bootstrapping her body into a parabola, willing herself to reach the other side.
But gravity tugged at her insidiously and even before she reached halfway she was falling, falling, the garage roof still too far and the cobblestones coming at her at the speed of an express train.