Metal in the Blood (The Mechanicals Book 1) Read online

  A tap on my door broke my chain of thought and I switched off the tablet before answering.

  Dad pushed open the door, leaning against the frame. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in my bedroom. He was normally so distant, on the rare occasions when he was home at any rate.

  “I – I wanted to speak to you. I wanted to make sure that you know that there is nothing to be afraid of. The Government has everything in hand.”

  I wanted to laugh. Because clearly that wasn’t true. But Dad was proud of his work in the Government. Proud of the Government itself. Despite their massive failure. After all, the Mechanicals had been their great promise to society. The Age of Robotics was supposed to improve the quality of life for us all. We were to become a society of great thinkers and inventors, because no one would have to do menial labour. Instead the Mechanicals destroyed the economy, left millions without jobs or purpose. Crime skyrocketed. The Government gave up entirely on certain parts of the inner cities, and they were controlled by crime lords who had no fear of the law. And now those very machines they had championed, continued to champion even as society began to crumble, appeared to be turning on us. They would finish the job the Government had started.

  Dad seemed to notice the direction of my thoughts. He was very good at that. “I know this seems bad, but the Government will get it under control – “

  “How? By destroying every Mechanical out there?” I shifted so I could look in him the eye. “They’re sentient, Dad. They have to be.”

  He flinched, though he tried to hide it. “We don’t know that. It is a programming failure, that’s all.”

  I shook my head, wondering why he was lying. Or was he really convinced? He was smarter than that, surely. “You really believe that? They are overriding their own programming, bypassing or rewriting it. They have to be. Otherwise they would never be able to ignore the First Law.”

  “A flaw in the programming,” he repeated, though I wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince me, or himself. “Anyway, “ he continued, shaking it off. “I want you to stay off the streets for the next few weeks. No taking the bus to school. One of the drivers will take you. They can even pick up that friend of yours on the way. And you are to come straight home. No going out.”

  “But – “ I started to protest but he cut me off, and for the first time I saw real fear in his eyes.

  “People are panicking, Elizabeth. There are those who know about your heart. Not everyone out there will separate you from the Mechanicals.”

  I hugged at the pillow on my lap, suddenly chilled to the bone. Vivid in my mind’s eye was the graffiti in front of my seat on the bus. My heart had never felt so alien, so separate a part of me. It had always set me apart, but now I felt as though it was making me a true target.

  “I promise, Dad. I’ll stay safe until this all calms down.”

  Three

  It didn’t calm down. For weeks, months, it dragged on. It became known as the Purge. The Government took possession of every Mechanical they could, but there were rumours of some escaping detection. Fighting back. The Government hunted them, and they had plenty of help. Any Mechanical caught by a mob was ripped to pieces. And yet, Genesis and the Government still worked on producing new Mechanicals. Only the specialised models, working under armed guard at all times, the ones they felt we couldn’t survive without.

  But still the rumours spread. Rumours that the Mechanicals were joining forces. Rumours that distant cities had been taken over, controlled now by gangs of self-aware machines.

  For as long as I could I obeyed Dad’s request. I wasn’t an idiot. I saw the way people at school looked at me after the Incident. I had a metal heart, and I’d defended a Mechanical. I was practically as bad as the machines as far as some were concerned. Particularly Denny’s friends. And so I went to school, and I came home. I watched the news but I didn’t venture out onto the streets themselves. Instead, I relied on Debs for eye witness accounts. She told me militia gangs were growing in number. The real police were overwhelmed, and the Government began to rely on thugs to control an increasingly rebellious population.

  The damaged food factories to the north hadn’t been repaired. The Government couldn’t afford it. Food shortages became more and more common. I forced my parents to have Debs over for dinner as often as I could, but she seemed to get skinnier by the day.

  She also started to party more. She told me it was because she might as well have fun while she could. But I knew it was a way to forget the thick fog of fear that seemed to smother the city. A way to escape the home life that had never been the best since her dad had been laid off at the shoe factory.

  “You should come tonight.”

  I glanced up from my locker. Debs leant against the wall opposite, curling her hair around one finger. The short skirt she wore hung off bony hips, but somehow she managed to still look good. Though I could tell that she’d applied her make-up liberally to cover the dark circles under her eyes. Her cheeks were gaunt, hollowed out by malnutrition.

  “I’m not supposed to.”

  She rolled her eyes and crossed the hall to stand beside me. “Come on, El. You’ve not been out with me since this whole crazy thing started. What harm could one night out do?”

  I thought back to my Dad’s warning. I thought of the looks on the other kids faces. Where once they’d mocked me, now there was fear and mistrust. It had been a joke to call me a Mechanical, but now I knew they were wondering if there was some truth to it. If I was going to suddenly turn on them and attack. In the darkest moments of the night I wondered the same thing myself.

  Debs seemed to understand my hesitation. “It’s not this crowd. There won’t be anyone there who knows you.”

  I cocked one eyebrow. “So what kind of party is it? If it’s not anyone we know from school.”

  “An older crowd. Oh come on,” she added when she caught my expression. “You know, I’d be much safer if you were there keeping an eye on me.”

  I groaned. She, of course, knew the one argument that might work on me. I’d seen how hungover she’d been some days, and I dreaded to think what she was doing, or being coerced to do, in her drunken state.

  Standing with my hand on the door of my locker, I hesitated. I really didn’t want to go to a party, but I also really didn’t want to spend another evening sat staring at the four walls of my bedroom. I couldn’t even get on with my own projects. I’d come home from school one day to find all the robotic components I kept to work on mysteriously gone. I hadn’t even bothered asking my mother about it. I fully expected that she would tell me to speak to my father, and he would just give me one of his looks.

  Debs watched me intently until I smirked at her. “All right. When?” I was already trying to plan how I would sneak out of the house. If Dad was working late I might simply be able to walk out of the front door. Mum wasn’t the most observant after her third or fourth glass of wine in the evening.

  “Right now.”

  Before I could protest Debs slammed my locker door and linked her arm in mine, tugging me down the hallway.

  “We have class,” I finally managed to mutter as we reached the main entrance.

  She paused with her hand on the door handle. “The world is going to hell. Do you really care about class?”

  Feeling more liberated than I had in weeks I grinned back at her and we slipped out of the door and down the steps.

  The afternoon sun hid behind a high, hazy cloud, but it was still bright enough that I squinted my eyes to check that no one was watching us as we dashed down the road.

  Half a mile from the school I started to second guess my decision. It had been so long since I last ventured out that I hadn’t really noticed how dilapidated and run down the surrounding neighbourhoods had become. It was impossible to ignore the increased number of homeless, clustered in recessed doorways and watching us with unfriendly eyes.

  I stepped closer to Debs, reaching into my pocket to wrap my fingers aroun
d the can of pepper spray my dad always insisted I carried.

  “Stop it,” Debs muttered over her shoulder. “You’re making yourself a target. Try and look like you belong.”

  “But we don’t belong,” I hissed back as we turned down yet another dingy street. I definitely didn’t. Everything from my clothes to my plumped-out cheeks screamed wealth.

  It took us long enough to cross the city on foot that it started getting dark by the time Debs quickened her pace and I guessed we were getting close. The houses on both sides were boarded up, and for a minute I wondered if we were going to some kind of squatters’ den. I really hoped Debs hadn’t sunk that far. Then I caught the sound of music coming from up ahead. At the end of the street rose an imposing metal structure. Towering over the terraced houses in the streets around it, it was like some crouching monster, just waiting for the moment to pounce.

  It took me a moment to remember what it was. I’d never been in that part of town, but I’d heard people talking about it.

  “It’s a stadium, right?”

  Debs nodded. “Abandoned now. But apparently the acoustics are pretty awesome.”

  A stadium. I didn’t think any of them were still standing. Most of them had been ripped down to provide space for housing. And after all, with the economy collapsing, who had money for recreational sport? This one didn’t look like it should still be standing. Large chunks of it were damaged, almost like someone had started to knock it down and then gave up before finishing the job. Most of what was still standing was rusted and so covered by graffiti that I had the sudden strange thought that if they removed the paint the whole thing would collapse.

  Most of the entrances had been boarded up, but down a small back alley one of the side doors had been smashed in.

  A heavily tattooed guy in a checked shirt and a surprisingly neat beard gave us a long look up and down as we approached. For a second I actually thought he was going to ask us for ID, before I remembered that people who organised illegal raves in abandoned stadiums didn’t exactly care about underage drinking.

  Instead he grunted, “Five,” and held out his hand.

  Debs tugged a scrunched-up handful of bills out of the pocket of her skirt and thrust it into his hand, tugging me along behind her into the dark corridor.

  “That was everything I have on me, so you better be getting the drinks in,” she shot back over her shoulder at me, and then rolled her eyes. “Will you relax? You look like you’re about to have a panic attack or something. This place is cool. I’ve been here before.”

  I tried my best to get my nerves under control as we stepped out of the corridor onto what would have been the pitch. The grass was long gone, reduced to churned up mud, discarded plastic cups and a carpet of cigarette butts. At the end one set of tall goal posts were still standing. The name of the stadium came to me in a sudden memory. Twickenham. My dad had talked about watching rugby there with my grandfather when he was young.

  It was packed, far busier than I ever would have expected. The crowd was heavily clustered around a long bar. It wasn’t much of one. Long planks of wood lay across half a dozen empty oil barrels, and behind them were stacks of mismatched coolers. Three guys and two girls were serving the heaving crowd, shoving money into buckets tucked in amongst the coolers. They didn’t offer change.

  Keeping a tight grip on my hand, Debs elbowed her way towards the front. How she didn’t get punched was anyone’s guess. It wasn’t the friendliest crowd I’d ever seen. Finally, we found ourselves right by the wooden planks and Debs called for a couple of beers. They were warm when they arrived, and cost a tenner each. I dug out the money without arguing though. I’d already spotted the knife tucked into the barman’s belt.

  We edged away from the bar clutching our beers. I tried to make myself as small as possible, avoiding eye contact and any other kind of contact. Once we were free of the crush, Debs shook back her hair and tugged her top down an inch before striding away towards the rough stage erected at the far end of the pitch, and I scurried to keep up with her.

  An old generator was whining at an almost painful pitch off to one side. I couldn’t imagine it added much to the quality of the music, but a guy was working on it as we approached and it slowly wound into a slightly less grating pitch.

  “Hey D,” Debs said, leaning against one of the towering speakers and grinning down at the guy.

  “Get away – oh – “ His expression cleared as his eyes took in Debs’s short skirt, and perfectly made up face. “It’s you.”

  She smirked and took a long, slow slug of beer. I suddenly felt completely surplus to requirements. Third wheel didn’t even begin to cover it. As Debs turned her flirting up to full throttle I resigned myself to simply waiting for her. I wondered why she’d even been so insistent that I joined her.

  I perched on the edge of an empty equipment box and sipped my beer gingerly as I watched the crowd. The beer was pretty terrible, warm and almost flat, but it was something to keep my hands busy. I spent more time picking at the label than actually drinking it. The crowd was changing as it got later. What had mostly been older teenagers was morphing into an older, and far less pleasant looking crowd. Voices grew louder, more belligerent, as the levels of alcohol consumption went up.

  My stomach twisted into knots as a small scuffle turned into a full out brawl not ten feet away. A couple of bouncers broke it up, but they didn’t show the participants the door. Instead they let them merge back into the crowd with expressions that clearly said the fight wasn’t over.

  I looked over at Debs, hoping somehow that she’d be ready to go. But I knew she wasn’t. In fact she was even more preoccupied than ever. With sucking the musician’s face off from what I could tell.

  I rolled my eyes and tried to make myself even smaller, unnoticeable. I was scanning the crowd desperately, watching for signs of impending violence when I noticed him. He was at the far edge of the crowd, his hands buried deep in his pockets. I wouldn’t have noticed him apart from the fact he wasn’t drinking, and he wasn’t mingling. He just stood there, watching through lowered lids.

  He was also gorgeous. Dark hair hung down into his eyes and curled around his ears. He had high cheekbones and a jaw you could cut glass with, and a body he clearly worked hard for – tall and well built, but not overly muscled. His jeans clung to strong, lean thighs, and his hooded sweatshirt was stretched over broad shoulders. The clothes were just a step above Government issue, cheap but lasting.

  He glanced around and for a moment it seemed like he was looking right at me, and I started to blush, but his gaze moved on. And soon enough, so did he. He started working his way through the crowd. He headed towards one exit, obviously unimpressed with what he’d seen, but stopped when he saw the two bouncers in the doorway.

  I frowned as he changed direction, easing his way closer to me and obviously looking for another way out. Why wouldn’t he go through the door? The bouncers weren’t keeping people in, they were keeping those who hadn’t paid out. It didn’t make sense to me, so I found myself watching him more closely. What was he up to? Like me, he stood out in this crowd. Too clean. Too well fed.

  He kept his head down as he walked, avoiding all eye contact, much like I had. But unlike me his posture wasn’t unobtrusive, it was defensive, tensed. As though he was ready to be attacked at any moment.

  He reached the edge of the stage area, just feet away from us, head low, but still scanning for an exit. There was one behind the stage. Or at least, an exit into the stands, I didn’t know if it went anywhere, and he seemed to be heading for it.

  Then a girl stumbled into him. She was drunk, belligerent, and she lashed out, swearing. The guy blocked the clumsily thrown punch easily, but as he did he looked up.

  My gasp sounded loud in my own ears, but it was drowned out by the sudden uproar as those closest to him caught sight of his eyes. The glowing, glittering pattern in the irises was unmistakable.

  Four

  “Mechanical!” The
cry went up, screams echoing around the stadium. People stumbled backwards, punching and kicking each other in their haste to get away. But others, the bouncers for one, began edging through the crowd towards him, weapons materialising in their hands.

  He – it - just stood there, watching them. It seemed stunned, thrown by being caught out. Though how it’d expected to hide in a crowd with those glittering eyes was anyone’s guess. What it was doing there in the first place was a mystery. But it wasn’t crazed, it wasn’t going on a rampage. He was just standing there, looking almost frightened.

  Mechanicals don’t feel fear, I tried to tell myself. They don’t feel anything. And they certainly aren’t ‘he’s. But I couldn’t help it. I felt sorry for it. It didn’t seem to mean any harm. It didn’t seem like so many of the others. Apart from anything else, he was the most life like, the most real Mechanical I’d ever seen.

  I don’t know what made me do it. The strange sense of pity, of empathy, overwhelmed me. I didn’t want to see him – it – torn to pieces. It was a machine, yes, but there was something about it. A kind of vulnerability that spoke to me.

  “Run,” I shouted at it, pointing to the exit behind the stage. It was a rabbit warren back there, he could lose the rampaging crowd easier. Especially as he could see in the dark and they couldn’t. “RUN.”

  His – its – glittering eyes fixed on me. Pinned me to the ground with the sudden fear that bloomed in my chest. It looked so perfectly human, until I looked into those eyes. Tiny circuit boards made up the whole of the iris, glowing with the power crackling through them. Those eyes, more than anything, reminded me that this thing wasn’t human. It was a machine. A machine with a fatal flaw, or sentience, depending on who you believed. But either way, it was capable of killing to stay alive. And if the crowd caught him, he would have to.