Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City)(16)

“Huh?”

“The heat. Made me sweat.” Sparky tapped the door's handle. “Never know.”

Jack frowned, sensed inside for the power he had used on Sparky…and found it, as available to him as speech or thought. He pointed at the door's lock and concentrated, thinking the metal hot, thinking the catch orange and molten.

“Shit!” Sparky said, backing up to the ladder. “Mate, I can feel that heat. You could have melted the bollocks off me!”

“Could have,” Jack said, smiling.

Footsteps thundered up the stairs beyond the door, and Jack was about to shout a warning when he heard a scream. Someone had grasped the handle. They wouldn't do so again anytime soon. Jack felt a twinge of guilt, but then he pointed again and concentrated some more. It was a strange feeling, as if heat formed in his mind and left him untouched, flowing across the space between his hand and the door and super-heating the metal. He had the idea that he could melt the door if he really wanted. He could turn it to gas. The power was startling and frightening, but he felt fully in control of it. He could have melted the bollocks off Sparky…but he'd chosen not to.

“Yeah,” Jack breathed, flushed with the power.

“Come on!” Sparky whispered. “Jenna was right. You're gonna love this.”

“Sorry!” Jack shouted through the door, and then the banging began.

Up the ladder and out onto the rooftop, Jack slammed the hatch shut again before standing and joining his friends.

“You've gotta be kidding,” he said.

“Nope,” Jenna said.

Sparky seemed delighted. “Cool. Cool!”

There were three hang gliders on the roof. Two were folded and dismantled, but one appeared to be fully assembled, its wheels and wings tied down to prevent any errant breezes from stealing it away. A single seat was suspended beneath it. Twenty feet from its front wheel, a section of railing had been cut away to allow launch.

“Have you ever…?” Jack asked, but he didn't need to finish. He knew that neither of his friends had ever done anything like this. That didn't stop Sparky. He delved into Jenna's jeans pocket, blowing her a kiss as he probed for her penknife.

“Come on!” he said. “Got seconds. Come on!”

“Maybe we should…” Jenna said.

“Wait?” Jack asked. He could still hear banging from the plant room beneath them as they tried to break through the door and its super-heated catch. “There won't be another chance. They catch us, and Breezer will make sure we won't get away again.”

“Yeah, but this?” Jenna pointed at the aircraft Sparky was freeing. Four cuts from the sharp knife and he was wheeling it towards the roof's edge, looking back at them expectantly.

“Breezer wants me,” Jack said. “Jenna, I'm afraid what he might do to you two.”

“He's no monster. Not like…”

“Reaper? Dunno. We just don't know.”

Something changed below them. The banging ceased, and then a different sound came—the metal door swinging open and impacting the wall.

“Come on!” Sparky shouted. He was already jumping into the seat.

“For Mum,” Jack said. “For Emily.” He grabbed Jenna's arm and ran across the rooftop to the hang glider.

He'd once taken a trip to South Wales to visit relatives with his parents. It was soon after Emily was born, and he remembered eating an ice cream in a car park in Abergavenny and watching dark specks drifting down from a hilltop in the distance. They'd waited in that car park long enough to see the first giant winged shape grow larger and pass almost overhead, heading for a field by the river which was their favoured landing point. There had been one person strapped into the seat. Only one.

“This isn't a bloody passenger aircraft,” Jack said, but Jenna was already pushing. Sparky was braced in the seat, lifting himself up so that the straps that should have held him in splayed to either side.

“Close enough,” he said. He was breathing fast, excitement and fear, and Jack closed his eyes for a moment. Just a second, to gather himself.

He was terrified.

They were twenty floors above the ground. If he'd taken time to look he could have identified a handful of buildings and landmarks, but he felt sick to the pit of his stomach. They didn't have a clue what they were doing, whether this thing was air-worthy, whether three of them would be too heavy and it would plunge to the ground. Maybe Breezer was waiting at a window a few floors below even now, someone else with him ready to fold wings or snap struts with their mind.

If he can't have me, maybe he'd rather see me dead, Jack thought.

But then Sparky was dragging them the last few feet to the edge of the roof with his feet, and Jack and Jenna jumped onto fibreglass struts on either side of the bucket seat, wrapped their arms around framing, and grasped the loose straps.

“Bloody hell,” Sparky muttered as the front wheel dropped over the edge of the building.

“Yeah,” Jack said.

They fell.

Jack had never been so scared. The aircraft's frame shook and rattled, the canvas wing snapped and slapped, the wind blasted against his face and took his breath away and blurred his vision, and they were plummeting towards the ground, nose dipped down and the vehicle-strewn street rapidly approaching.