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  “So, we measure the things that we can’t detect with our senses, and that makes them real,” Alex agreed. “How about love?”

  “That’s one we feel.”

  “So, feelings are real? Jealousy? Rage? Embarrassment? They exist because we feel them?”

  “Of course.”

  “Some people feel like they’ve lived before in previous lives. Others feel that they’ve been abducted—sometimes, that they’ve been experimented on—by aliens. Some people feel that there’re ghosts in a room, or that their next-door neighbor’s dog is telling them to kill people. Are these feelings real?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “But people swear that those experiences are true. They feel them as powerfully as you or I feel love or anger. You can see what I’m saying, right?” Alex asked.

  “You’re saying that I imagined it,” Ani said, colder than she’d meant to. The truth was she didn’t like the way this was going.

  But Uncle Alex, as usual, surprised her. “Ani, Ani, Ani,” he said gently. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just trying to define our terms before we start. I’m saying that this label is not some hard and fast property of things that exist, but just one way we have of understanding the things around us.

  “Ideas exist—I know that for a fact, I’ve had some—but what makes my idea for a design for a rotating speaker stack for Iron Maiden any different from the one I once had for making mouse-flavored cat food? The point is that thinking something doesn’t make it real. It makes it a real thought, but not a real thing.

  “Now, your criteria for something being real seem to be all about the ways that we can interact with them. They become real when we can prove they are by measuring them, whether it’s with our senses, or with external apparatus. But how about things that our senses can’t detect and that we haven’t thought to measure yet? Aren’t they real?”

  “Such as …?”

  Alex smiled. “I don’t know, but we can’t be saying that our twenty-one senses are enough to say we know everything about this universe of ours… .”

  “Wait. Twenty-one senses?”

  “The notion that we have only five is so last year. We have a lot more than that. For example, we can sense the passage of time; we can sense temperature, pressure, hunger, thirst, and itchiness. We have a mild, maybe vestigial, magnetic sense; we can tell which way up we are, and how balanced we are; we can tell without looking where our body parts are; we sense pain, tension, and chemical imbalances in our own bodies. And sight is really two senses—color and brightness; and taste, well that’s five: salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami.”

  “I’m sorry?” Ani said. “I think I might have just stumbled into a parallel universe in which my uncle Alex is a science teacher.”

  Alex laughed. “Sound is physics and music is mathematics. So I read New Scientist and Scientific American rather than Sound on Sound and Mix. The point I’m trying to make is that we have this great selection of sensory equipment in our bodies, but they’re things that have evolved along with us, that offered us an advantage at some point in our history, but that are, by no means, a complete set. Yet we use them to construct our model of reality—let them determine what we decide is true or not.

  “But there are things we can’t sense. Does that make them any less real, just because our tool kit tells us so? What I’m saying, Ani, is that something happened to you just now. Something that I didn’t experience, but don’t think for a second that means it wasn’t real. I believe you. There is something … different about that sound file. Something dangerous. Something secret.”

  “Secret?”

  “The fact that armed men turned up at your home seems to support that.”

  Ani nodded. “So where did it come from?” she asked. “I mean, how can we find out?”

  “Way ahead of you there, kid.” There was a hint of a smile on his lips. “Care to come back to the lab?”

  Back in the cellar, Uncle Alex sat her down in front of the computer screen.

  “Have you heard of Shazam?” he asked.

  Ani nodded. “I have it on my phone. If there’s a song playing and you want to know what it is then you open it up and it tells you what it’s called and who it’s by.”

  Alex pointed at the screen.

  “Well, this is Shazam evolved. The next generation of sound identification. If I hum a few bars of a song, then this software will be able to tell you what song it is.”

  “And this helps us how?”

  “I just fed it your .wav file. And I got a lot of hits. Seems it appears in quite a few songs, although it’s buried beneath a lot of other noises, so you can’t actually hear it.

  “Have you ever heard of X-Core?”

  “Some kind of new music. I read a post about it. Uses encryption on its files, or something. Someone had cracked the code on a few tracks and was sharing them. I didn’t download them, sounded like some dumb gimmick.”

  Uncle Alex raised an eyebrow.

  “And here I was thinking that if something said encrypted file that was exactly the sort of thing you’d be downloading.”

  “So many encrypted files, so little time.”

  “Well, the songs my software found the sound in all belong to X-Core bands. The sound in X-Core songs matches the .wav file by eighty-five percent, but it’s too close to be a coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “They’re putting that sound in their tunes?” Ani said, horrified. “But that doesn’t make sense. Why would two people with guns be so keen on keeping it a secret if it’s available through tracks that people can download?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex admitted. “Maybe you can ask them. The main offenders, Precision Image, are playing a club in Brixton tomorrow night.” He showed her an ad for the gig.

  Ani studied the digital flyer and nodded. “I can’t go home until I find a way to clear myself of this mess and get some answers. Maybe Brixton is just the place to start looking for them.”

  Uncle Alex shrugged. “It’s not something that I would ordinarily advise,” he said. “I mean, we have absolutely no idea what we’re dealing with here. But I think it’s safe to say that going home is out of the question.”

  “The men waiting for me …”

  “Exactly.”

  Uncle Alex sighed. “Look,” he said after a few seconds. “I’ll square things with your father, explain as much as I can. And I’ll start on analyzing your .wav file, reach out to a few sound-tech friends, see if we can’t get some kind of a handle on just what this is.

  “Your friend, the one who downloaded this file …”

  “Jack.”

  “Where is he from?”

  “London.”

  “Handy. Might be worth seeing if you can track him down. But if something looks hinky, then get yourself away as fast as you can.”

  “Did you say hinky? Did you just use a Scooby-Doo word?”

  “That’s jinkies. I must be crazy. Aiding and abetting a fugitive. Encouraging you to play private investigator. Even financing the trip …”

  “Financing?”

  Uncle Alex reached into his jeans pocket and drew out a wallet, flipped it open, and pulled out a debit card. “For my favorite niece, I figure what the hey?”

  “Your only niece.”

  “Lucky I got a good one, no? Anyway, you can take three hundred pounds a day out of an ATM with this. You’ll definitely need some travel money. And you’ll also need to buy yourself a few new pay-as-you-go SIM cards, use them, swap them, and discard. I have a friend who lives in Islington and I’m sure she’ll put you up. I’ll scribble down her address. She’s good people. Just don’t get her involved. Keep quiet about the .wav, space worms, and men with sidearms.”

  He held out the card to Ani.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “That’s just an account that I sling a bit of spare money into. There’s a couple of grand in it, that’s all. You’re worth a whole lot more, kid. And this i
sn’t up for discussion.”

  Ani took the card. “Thank you doesn’t begin to cover it,” she said. “But it’s all I have at the moment. So thank you.”

  Uncle Alex blushed.

  “I have no idea if the people after you will be watching the train station. It seems unlikely, but I’m not sure I’m willing to take the risk. I’ll take you to the station, but that school uniform is kind of a giveaway. Claire leaves some clothes here for when her mother lets her visit, and they might fit. You know where her room is. Help yourself.”

  Ani felt overwhelmed with his generosity, could even feel tears of gratitude forming in her eyes.

  Uncle Alex just smiled.

  “It really is the least I can do. There’s hair stuff and makeup up there, too. I usually roll my eyes at Claire using them, so I can’t believe I’m telling you to. Try to make yourself look as different as you can. Don’t think of it as makeup, think of it as a disguise.”

  Ani took the stairs to Claire’s room two at a time.

  CHAPTER SIX: DOWNTIME

  Joe felt wired and tired in equal measures when he got back home, and he spent the first part of the evening trying to get the place back in some kind of order.

  Mission: impossible.

  Home was an open-plan loft on Mortimer Street, huge now that Andy was no longer around to share it.

  Actually, to be honest, it had been huge when he was around.

  Abernathy had paired them up a year ago and brought them to the apartment that was to be theirs. Both Joe and Andy had been stunned by the size of it.

  And by the size of the account that Abernathy had opened for them simply to deck the place out.

  It was furnished in teen chic, but the kind of teen chic probably reserved for kids whose parents were multi-millionaires.

  The first thing they’d bought had been two pinball machines—Game of Thrones and South Park—that stood in the darkest corner of the loft and had been the focus of a lot of their downtime. Then had come a home cinema projection kit, the latest game consoles, and computers. Finally, they’d bought the things ordinary people would have bought first: beds and kitchen stuff, sofas, chairs, and tables.

  Looking at it all now, Joe just felt sad.

  Everything here had history, and Andy was inextricably linked to every bit of that history. They had been two kids with a blank check, egging each other on to more and more extravagant purchases. Now it all seemed tawdry and useless.

  After clearing away most of the mess that had accumulated during his downward spiral following Andy’s death, Joe sat down on his bed and looked around.

  Everywhere reminded him of Andy.

  He thought about calling someone to try to pull himself out of his mood, but he couldn’t think of anyone to call, so he hit the punching bags and ran through fighting programs from his chipset until he settled upon Wing Chun and pounded the bags until he was exhausted.

  A vast library of fighting skills were kept on files within Joe’s chipset, and activating them served to encode moves, punches, kicks, and stances into muscle memories: the mental process that allowed people to become proficient at any physical activity, whether it was riding a bike, playing “All Along the Watchtower” on a guitar, or blazing through the levels of a video game. The eidetic reflexes software tricked the body into thinking it knew—and had practiced—physical actions, so that with minimal practice (and often, none) the physical action could be called out of the chip and used in the real world. They had been arranged in what Abernathy’s tech-heads, the Shuttleworth brothers, called context-specific action groups, which meant that it was the situation that dictated the most effective strategies and sent them to Joe’s muscles.

  It meant that Joe could fight like an Ultimate Fighter contestant with only the barest amount of training.

  But, although preprogrammed moves that faked muscle memory could get a man out of a close scrape, they also played havoc on a body that hadn’t earned the skills through practice, so Joe showered, toweled dry, rolled himself up in his duvet, and fell asleep almost instantly.

  Glenn Tavernier is grinning as he turns around with the gun in his hand; the endgame of four months of operational planning and establishing cover IDs coming down to that single moment of shock and horror.

  Joe tries to move, but his legs feel as though they’re stuck in concrete. He tries to shout out a warning to Andy, but his voice does not work. He’s helpless.

  Andy sees the gun and his eyes widen. Suddenly, the gun seems bigger. Huge. The hole in its barrel is dark and massive. There is a roar and it’s the loudest sound that Joe’s ever heard.

  Andy falls.

  Joe woke around dawn and knew that more sleep was out of the question. Dim light was angling in through the blinds and kept hitting his eyes and the dream—a simplified and, therefore, factually inaccurate restaging of Andy’s death—was so vivid that he got up, sat at a computer, and started a search for X-Core to take his mind off it.

  After an hour Joe had learned little that he hadn’t already known. For a new musical genre, X-Core left as small a digital footprint as it was possible to make on the multifarious paths of the internet.

  Which left two possibilities: either 1) it wasn’t a huge deal, or 2) someone was going to extraordinary lengths to keep mentions to a minimum.

  Joe scoured music blogs and message boards, following every tiny reference to X-Core, and got the sense that most people treated it as some kind of novelty, or worse, a joke. No X-Core followers ever waded in in defense of the music; no flame wars broke out; the threads never lasted long enough for anyone to bring up Hitler.

  It left him feeling a little baffled.

  Either no one was passionate enough to weigh in for X-Core, or idle internet chat was beneath its devotees.

  He gave up and opened another browser, the secured YETI network, and searched through his in-box. It was full of the mail he’d been avoiding for the last few weeks, and he scanned through it, allowing himself to grin at the number—and growing insistence—of Abernathy’s emails.

  Abernathy might have left him to grieve in the real world, but he had sent dozens of emails trying to tell Joe that nothing had been his fault, and that YETI wanted him back as soon as he could face it. He had been thoughtful enough to stop short of visiting the apartment, perhaps realizing that coming here would’ve been an intrusion on Joe’s grief.

  Other emails of condolence from support staff and Human Resources stayed unopened.

  His eye stopped at one that gave him a moment of shock:

  Joe read the email through, then closed the window and sat back in his chair. He hadn’t heard from his mother in months, and the fact that she had heard about Andy and felt the need to reach out to him made Joe feel a little better. His relationship with her was … complicated, to say the least. And her self-imposed exile from his life—and the outside world—was a mystery that he wished he could ask Abernathy to sign off on investigating.

  Except, of course, Abernathy knew exactly where she was and what she was doing there. It had been Abernathy who’d brought her to the UK in the first place, head-hunting one of the brightest operatives from the US intelligence community to front some top secret project in London. He’d made Joe aware that the information was so classified that all he could tell him was that she was safe and well.

  Joe hit the treadmill and set it for 6K, all the time thinking of a way to get through the gloom that threatened to envelop his mind every time he thought about Andy. Even a much-loved playlist of fast rock songs at high volume couldn’t wipe the memories away.

  Abernathy was right that it hadn’t been his fault. Andy had been killed by a bad guy, and not by a mistake that Joe himself had made. Unfortunately, that didn’t make it any easier. Because if it had been an error, then maybe Joe could correct it, ensure against it, make sure it never happened again. Knowing that there was no fault was like knowing that death was a natural part of the work they did, a risk they took that no amount of training,
guile, or cleverness could ever truly prevent.

  On a basic level, Joe had joined YETI to make a difference. To stop bad things from happening. To make the world a safer place for kids his age and for the rest of the ordinary people who just wanted to go about their lives without the threat of gangs, violence, and terrorism hanging over them like a cloud of doom.

  But there were a couple of other layers of motivation that sat beneath the desire to protect and serve.

  First up, his mother had raised him that way. From an early age, Lesley Dyson had taught her son to care about the world and the people around him. She had schooled him in military history and tactics, and in the workings of law enforcement and espionage organizations, portraying the self-sacrifice and determination they took as the purest of human achievements. It was almost as if YETI was a career path she had always envisioned for him. Which was crazy—the organization hadn’t even existed then.

  The second layer was by no means as credit-worthy.

  Joe had had problems with anger for as long as he could remember. There was a physiological reason for it—it was called Intermittent Explosive Disorder by a couple of specialists his mother had consulted before Abernathy had offered his hardware/software control system as a treatment. The anger had gotten Joe into a lot more trouble than he should ever have found himself in. He’d usually managed to direct it at bullies and thugs, but it had made his teachers think that he was out of control.

  YETI had offered him control.

  With a 6K run and hardly an exertion spike on the graph, he hit the showers. High pressure: very hot. Fluorescent shower gel with bits in it that the label said was meant to take off dead skin. Joe wondered how good it was at taking a friend’s blood off your hands, then squashed the thought before it could grow. He toweled himself dry instead, then dragged a razor across his chin to tidy away the few hairs that clung there.

  He took his time over his wardrobe selection, knowing that the day could go down a lot of different ways, so he tried to gauge an average outfit that would cover many possibilities.

  In the end, he went with something that was practical, reasonably put together, but would also fit in with the vaguely preppy look that X-Core seemed to favor in the few photographs he could find, just in case the day ended with him taking a trip to Brixton for the X-Core gig from Lennie’s flyer. Joe went for an Original Penguin button-down shirt in powder gray and royal blue, a pair of khaki trousers, a gray/blue striped seersucker jacket, and a pair of black loafers.