7

At first I tear through the streets, panting and wild-eyed, hoping to outpace my pursuers. I take turns randomly and dart across busy roads when I spot a gap in the traffic. But then I pause on the edge of a pavement, having just narrowly avoided being mown down by a black cab. The driver’s furious and honks on the horn as he drifts out of sight.

Clinging to a set of traffic lights, gasping for breath, I look back and spot the killers on the other side of the road, calmly waiting for the lights to turn. They haven’t broken a sweat, and when they spot me staring, they smile and wave.

Any hope I had of outrunning them disappears, and as I study the smirking assassins, I understand that they’re enjoying this. They want to watch me sweat and shiver and stumble through the streets, working myself into a blind panic, so they can sweep me up when I’m a weeping, broken wreck.

“No,” I whisper, controlling my breath and straightening my back. I won’t be taken that way.

The lights change and Orlan raises an eyebrow as he steps forward, expecting me to shudder and run. Instead I sniff and take another couple of deep breaths as they draw closer. That throws them and they share a bemused glance, smiles slipping. I take one more breath, then jog down the street, more relaxed than before.

“You’re trying to play it cool,” Orlan calls after me.

“But we can smell the fear inside you,” Argate shouts.

They’re right – my sense of terror hasn’t lessened – but I’m no longer a prisoner to that fear. My brain clicks in as I jog, and I start thinking of ways out of this mess. Like the killers, I’ve been patrolling these streets the past several months, but while they were looking for me, I was looking at locks.

Although I decided not to return to the Merge, I was thinking about it all the time, spotting locks and boreholes everywhere. Many were mysterious, and I would have had to explore them to find out where they led, but others were familiar. For instance, I could sense if a borehole led to Cornan or Sakkara, and one day I spotted one that I instinctively knew led to an island of stone pineapples.

I realised I could confirm a borehole’s destination if it connected to a place in the Merge where I’d been. I must have subconsciously soaked up impressions of the zones I passed through, and could now find my way back to them if I saw any connecting boreholes in the Born.

I had no idea if that ability was common to all the Merged, or if it was a Lox thing, but as I run, I find myself leaning towards the second probability, because if Orlan and Argate knew that I could escape to a place of my choosing, they wouldn’t be taking the chase so lightly.

I consider a borehole to Canadu. There’d be lots of armed guards in the palace, but I’m reluctant to lead Orlan and Argate there. They almost started a war with the guards the last time, and the impression I got was that the killers would have been the favourites in a battle to the death. I don’t want people to die for my sake.

I swing past a church, onto a dark, quiet street. As I pad along, I think about the church. I’ve passed it before. I don’t know its name, or even what this street is, but I know there’s a borehole in the door of an old building a couple of turns from here, leading to one of the first zones I ever visited in the Merge.

There’s no apparent reason for me to return there. It’s in Diamond, and like most of the zones in that doomed realm, it’s been abandoned. There’ll be nobody to help me escape the killers who are hot on my heels.

Despite all that, my gut urges me to head for the building, and since I’ve no better plan, I take the turn for the borehole.

I try to get everything straight in my head while I’m running. I think it’s a simple lock and will open swiftly to my touch. I hope I’m right, because Orlan and Argate will surely make a dash for me when they see what I’m doing.

If I get through the borehole in time, I’ll be able to close it behind me. That won’t stop the killers – the lock’s a simple thing, little more than a latch – but they won’t be able to open it as quickly as I can. I’m guessing I’ll have a minute or two to play with.

It might be enough. There are other boreholes in the zone. If I slip through one of those before the killers cross, they won’t know which way I’ve gone.

Orlan and Argate have started hissing and whistling, trying to unnerve me. They shouldn’t waste their breath. I’m already as unnerved as I could be.

I turn onto the street where the building with the borehole stands, hurry along and cross the road when I spot the door.

“He’s going to cry for help,” Argate laughs as I stop and raise my hand towards the knocker.

But I’m not reaching for the knocker, rather a spot below it, and when I touch that bit of the door, a shimmering blue panel reveals itself.

“A borehole,” Orlan snarls, and I bet I wouldn’t spot a hint of a smile on his face if I looked back now. But I don’t, because I hear their feet pounding on the pavement as they pick up speed. Ignoring the killers, my fingers fly inside the lock. It only takes six seconds to open – part of me counts with solemn detachment – but they’re the longest six seconds of my life, as I keep expecting a knife to slide between my ribs, or an axe to chop through my wrist.

Then the borehole opens, and with a scream of relief I hurl myself out of the Born and into the weird, welcome otherworld of the Merge.