Kat imagined that some people, caught in the throes of youthful rebellion, would find themselves transformed into a rally driver as soon as they took control of a car, regardless of previous driving experience and the panic gnashing in their chest. They probably wouldn’t lose all sense of coordination and be forced to use the kerbs on either side of the road like children’s rails at a bowling alley.
‘Watch out for that post!’ shrieked Safa, and Kat wrenched the steering wheel, bumping up onto the pavement.
‘Rock, rock, rock!’
Some kind of malformed decorative stone loomed in the headlights and Kat managed to swerve around it with all the elegance of butter in a hot pan.
If video games had taught her anything (and as much as she loved them she really hoped they hadn’t) it was that driving recklessly should summon half the city’s police force into her rear-view mirror, send pedestrians swearing and screaming, and ultimately see the car catch fire for no apparent reason. Luckily the streets were largely quiet, the only onlookers a couple of guys safe on the opposite pavement who whipped around at the sound of groaning suspension, but hardly seemed to see the car at all.
Adrenaline surged through her veins, foxtrotted with the panic, a comingling that made her giddy. She could get used to this. Not driving a car – twenty or thirty more lessons were required there – but delivering vigilante justice, using the power of the fade to make the world a better place. Tomorrow, TrumourPixel would arrive at the garage and find it empty. Kat wished she could be there to see his face. Just the thought of it made her—
‘Red light!’
Kat snapped out of it in time to see the red traffic light and the rear lights of another car stopped there flare through the windscreen. She stamped on the brakes. Their wheels screeched, and Kat braced herself as the car skidded irrepressibly onward.
BANG.
The impact threw them forwards, seatbelts crushing their chests. Metal crumpled and glass broke, tinkling onto the tarmac.
‘Are you okay?’ said Kat.
Beside her, Safa was slouched back in her seat, hair plastered to her face. ‘I think I shit a lung.’
Ahead of them, the driver door of the other car was flung open.
‘Okay, now I definitely did.’
An older guy got out, glowering over the top of a heavy beard and rubbing his neck, before stomping to the back of his car.
‘Do you think he’s going to be angry?’ asked Safa.
The guy took one look at the car’s crumpled rear and threw his hands in the air.
Kat gulped. ‘I think there’s a very good chance.’
Finally he turned to them, face set with rage. He took one purposeful step closer, the advance of a one-man army. And all at once he forgot them. His anger softened into confusion, and he stopped short of his next stride, glass scraping under his feet. Their car – and most importantly the two terrified girls sitting inside it – had ceased to exist for him. He took out his phone and began making a call, turning away from them completely.
Safa cleared her throat. ‘Will it still go?’
When Kat tried the ignition it stuttered for a long moment, and they both looked up, expecting it to bring the wrath they deserved down upon their heads. The guy didn’t hear, and the engine caught, allowing her to reverse away from the crash. ‘We should—’
‘Get out of here? I couldn’t agree more.’
They gave the guy – now swearing explosively into his phone – as wide a berth as possible, and Kat guided them away at a crawl.
‘Ha!’ Safa slapped the dashboard. ‘We can actually do anything.’
Every molecule in her body was shaking, but Kat couldn’t keep the smile from her face. Oh, it would be so easy to get carried away, to lose herself to the powerful transience of the fade. And she wanted to, if only for the night.
She put her foot down, and sent them roaring away into town.
*
Wesley had always felt the simmering threat of violence with Luke and Justin, as if they might decide to turn on him if he made a single wrong move. Until now he’d thought of it as something to overcome, a challenge to be surmounted before they accepted him. Until now, it had never frightened him.
They smiled and, cornered against the shop shutter, he saw in their eyes how they wanted to hurt him.
‘Leave me alone,’ he said, for all the good it would do.
‘You made us look like idiots,’ said Luke.
‘You don’t understand the risk we were taking to introduce you like that. We were trying to do you a favour.’ He looked rattled. ‘You don’t know what he’s capable of.’
Even though they were just a few feet from McDonald’s there was nobody else around, and even if there were Wesley knew they probably wouldn’t help him anyway.
‘I didn’t mean anything by it,’ he said. Maybe he could flatter them, talk his way out of this. ‘It was just such a big step up that I needed to think about it.’
Luke kicked the shutter, sending metallic thunder rolling through Wesley’s bones, pain throbbing in his injured ribs. ‘Needed to think about it? This isn’t your university application, you do it because you believe it’s right.’
‘I’m not going to university,’ said Wesley. Not enough money. Not good enough grades.
Another kick of the shutter. ‘Don’t you want anything in your pathetic little life?’
‘The fight never stops,’ added Justin.
TrumourPixel’s words, coming out of his mouth. It was clear now that they believed it. Whether they always had, or whether prolonged exposure had drawn them deeper into the ideology behind the catchphrase than they knew, Wesley couldn’t tell.
‘He’s going to drive that car into a crowd of people just to get to her,’ he said.
‘You think that’s what he’s planning? Why would he need us for that?’
‘The car is so we can get her away—’ Justin was cut short by a sharp look from Luke.
‘I don’t want to hurt anybody,’ Wesley said, trying to get his back off the shutter.
Luke shoved him against it again. ‘You already did! It’s too late to act like you’re too good for us.’
‘I’m not, I—’
‘You’re a cuck,’ said Luke, as if the idea had just dawned on him. ‘You’ve been trying to hide it all this time, but you’re just like all the others.’
Again, Wesley tried to pull away, and Luke grabbed his arms, swinging him around and throwing him into the empty road. Wesley tripped and sprawled onto his front, pain jangling through his ribs. He curled himself into a protective ball, knowing he couldn’t fight, and waited for the blows to rain down.
‘Hey!’
Wesley looked up to find somebody striding towards them. It was enough to make Luke and Justin back away a step. He could hardly believe it when he saw his brother, marching across the street, a crust of dried blood on his eyebrow.
‘Get the fuck away from him,’ said Jordan, shoving Luke hard and sending him staggering backwards. At first they both looked shocked; as far as they knew Jordan had been gone for two years, and when he was angry he was like an avenging demon. Still, Wesley could see Luke weighing up their chances: two of them against Jordan, Wesley still on the ground and too pathetic to factor into the equation. They stood in the middle of the road, facing each other down.
‘He had it coming,’ said Justin.
Jordan brandished his fists. ‘Maybe you’ve got this coming.’
Somewhere close by, Wesley heard an engine roar, growing louder. It was quickly lost to the sound of scraping feet as Luke lunged and threw a punch. It missed, and Jordan caught him in a headlock. The two of them stumbled towards Justin, who stood paralysed, the reality of a fight apparently wholly less appealing.
Behind them, Wesley heard the engine again, louder than before. He sat up, but couldn’t see anything approaching from either direction.
Jordan let the headlock go and tried to throw a punch, but they ended up tangled again, turning circles in the road and spitting insults.
‘You stay away from my brother!’
‘Or you’ll what, run away again?’
The engine sounded like it was practically on top of them now. Wesley scrambled to his feet, wondering how nobody else had heard it. ‘Jordan.’
They broke apart, panting, and his brother was saying, ‘You’ll regret it, trust me on that.’
‘Jordan!’
Headlights flared suddenly, right on top of them, as if the car had appeared out of thin air. Jordan whipped around and saw it bearing down on him, too late to move. Wesley was already running. He knocked into Jordan’s back, sending them both stumbling out of the path of the car as it came tearing through, wheels screeching out of control. Luke and Justin fell into the gutter on the other side of the road.
Wesley heard the car judder onto the kerb and come to a stop further down the street, but when he had recovered enough to look there was no sign of it at all.
‘Where the hell did it go?’ he said.
Across the road, Justin cried out and held his leg. ‘Call an ambulance!’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Jordan pulled him to his feet. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Kat thought her body might shake itself into pieces. She brought her hands slowly away from the wheel, as if it might explode if she made too sudden a move.
‘I almost hit them,’ she said.
Safa was wide-eyed, pressed back in her seat. ‘I have no more lungs left to shit.’
‘What if I’d . . .’
‘Hey, you didn’t, it’s okay,’ she said, leaning closer. ‘You’ve gotta admit . . . it was kind of exciting.’
The car was half on the pavement, half off, and Kat could do nothing but stare at her skewed view on the world.
‘That wasn’t me,’ she said. ‘I would never be that reckless.’
Safa reached across and put a hand on her arm. ‘I told you, the fade is a chance to be somebody new.’
For the first time, Kat didn’t relish the touch. She saw how, even laid on top of each other, their hands made an absence. Maybe the fade could make her who she wanted to be, but tonight it had made her foolhardy. It was luring her – daring her – to follow its dark path. Safa might already have gone ahead.
‘I just want to get rid of the car and go home,’ she said, pulling her arm away. That’s what they should have done in the first place. ‘Do we need to burn it or something?’
‘This isn’t Hollyoaks,’ said Safa. ‘Leave it like this and the police will tow it away soon enough.’
It couldn’t be traced back to Tru – Kat had heard him say that – but at least they would lose their car for good. They wiped down the steering wheel and dashboard, unsure if anybody would be able to see their fingerprints, and then left the car behind. The people they had almost hit were already gone.
Wesley wasn’t usually one to look for silver linings in bad situations, but at least nobody had punched him in the face. It meant he wouldn’t have to explain anything to Mum or Evie. Even so, he felt like home was the last place he wanted to go.
‘Where are you staying, anyway?’
‘With a mate,’ said Jordan.
They had stopped a few streets from the flat, and neither of them quite seemed able to look at the other.
‘You’ll be all right, yeah?’
Wesley nodded. ‘Thanks for stepping in.’
Jordan nodded back, shuffling his feet. ‘I’m sorry.’
There was no indication of how far the apology extended, but Wesley was more grateful for it than his brother would ever know.
They parted ways and, as soon as Jordan was out of sight, Wesley turned away from home. There was somewhere else he needed to be.
Kat’s hands shook the entire way home. They walked in silence, until they reached the corner that would send them their separate ways.
‘It was pretty fun,’ ventured Safa, smiling tentatively.
She could put this right. She had caught herself pretending to be somebody she wasn’t, playacting at being herself. It was time to remember what really mattered to her. The fade could still be a chance to do the things she had always wanted, but had been too scared. ‘There’s a march in London tomorrow,’ she said. ‘A protest for women’s rights.’
‘Sounds boring.’
‘I want to go. But not alone.’
‘Oh.’ Safa shrugged her lip. ‘Okay, I’ll go.’
Kat smiled. ‘Are you sure?’
‘If it’s important to you.’
It was, especially since seeing Niko Denton’s tweet about it. Before, Kat would never have had the courage to go. If the fade could give her this, she couldn’t waste it.
‘Text me the deets,’ said Safa, starting away down the road.
‘I can’t believe you just said deets,’ Kat called after her.
Safa stuck up her middle finger, and Kat turned towards home.