Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(69)

‘No!’

The voice had come from up above, from the balcony, and there was only one person it could belong to. It made the Overseer’s threats and Grierson’s commands seem as inconsequential as a child trying to overrule its parents.

But there was no more time to analyse it. Luke doubled over with the pain that slammed into him, as heavy and terrifying as his workstation hoist. He howled, and heard a stricken animal yelping in his own voice. He tried to curl up to minimize the agony, but it was everywhere, in every cell of him.

He wanted just for an instant, fervently, to die so it would end.

Then the wave of torment rolled over him and he was beached on the other side. He lay there gasping, flat on his back with tears streaming from his eyes. His abdomen was heaving as if there was an alien inside about to burst out. He coughed and it sent excruciating ripples through every part of him. He needed to spit, and turned his head as carefully as if his neck was made of glass.

From his sideways viewpoint, he realized that everyone he could see was in the same state. The square was full of fallen, writhing, groaning people. The Security guards too, by the look of it, though his vision was too blurry to be certain.

So that was Skill, Luke thought, when he found himself able to think. The sexy, subtle magic from Abi’s books. The Skill with which smouldering Equals seduced women, wove exquisite illusions for them, and punished those who tried to hurt their girl.

In reality, an agony so excruciating you wished you were dead.

How could you fight against that? How could you win against people who could do that? Not people – monsters. It didn’t matter that there were hardly any of them. There didn’t need to be.

Jackson was going to have to come up with a better plan than today’s, that was for sure.

Luke let his head fall back onto the gritty ground. All around him he could hear people sobbing, swearing; a few throwing up.

Then in his peripheral vision – movement. A pair of black boots came to a halt by the side of his face. The toecap of one insinuated itself beneath his cheek and turned his head. He looked up into Kessler’s meaty face as the man bent over him.

‘Wishing you’d let me catch you earlier, Hadley?’

The tip of a long baton tapped the row of eyelets on Kessler’s boots – not impatiently. Slowly. As if he had all the time in the world.

‘Now here’s a funny thing,’ Kessler continued. ‘When we were trying out our stunners on a few troublemakers earlier, we found they weren’t having quite the usual effect. Seems some scallywag must have been messing with the settings. But don’t you worry. I can do this the old-fashioned way.’

Kessler grinned, his lips going thin like a dog’s. The baton stopped tapping. Luke saw the black length of it upraised above his head.

‘I’m going to miss you, E-1031. But they’ll take good care of you where you’re going.’

Luke closed his eyes before Kessler’s arm smashed down.

When he came round, his head felt twice its normal size. He couldn’t see. For a terrified moment he was convinced that Kessler’s blow had done awful damage, detached something in his head beyond repairing. Then he thought his eyes must be swollen shut.

It was only once his vision had adjusted that he realized he was in a cramped, windowless space.

And it was moving.





17



Luke



He was in the back of a vehicle. A small one. So it wasn’t one of Security’s prisoner transport wagons – but it wasn’t Angel’s stolen van either.

He was lying on what felt like folded tarpaulin, which protected his tenderized body from the vehicle’s hard shell, and a couple of blankets had been draped over him. He had a bandage around his head. So someone cared about the state he was in.

But was that only so he’d be able to bear interrogation upon his arrival?

Plus, his hands and ankles were securely tied. So whoever had him thought he might try to get away.

Luke’s other senses didn’t have much to contribute. The wheels whirred rather than rumbled on the road surface, which likely meant they were on a motorway. This was reinforced by the fact that the vehicle wasn’t making frequent changes of direction. He could hear one of the national radio stations faintly from the cab, meaning they were still in Britain. No conversation, so whoever was driving might be alone.

His nose told him nothing at all. The space around him smelled simply of van: that bloke-ish blend of metal, newspaper and oily rags. Corners of Dad’s garage had been just the same.

There was nothing more he could discover without getting free. Luke struggled with the ropes round his wrists, but the effort turned his head into a throbbing mess. He also didn’t want to alert the person in the cab to the fact that he was conscious. It might give him an element of surprise when the doors were opened.

Though what was he going to do, tied up as he was? Headbutt the driver, or aim a two-footed kick at his middle? Luke was pretty sure stunts like that only worked in the movies.

Best-case scenario: Kessler was somehow linked to the club and had broken Luke out of Millmoor for a reason. That would require the man’s taste for inflicting grievous bodily harm to be some sort of screwed-up deep cover, but it wasn’t completely impossible. He had, after all, been the reason Luke had met the Doc in the first place. And Luke’s quick recovery from their encounter in the storeroom showed that whatever he’d done that day had felt worse than it actually was. But still, that was unlikely.