Spoil the Kill

Chapter 2: The Watchers

Move-Easy's lair is an old underground bunker beneath a hospital. It's what's known as a Void – a space the law doesn't know about, a hidden gap in London's pervasive surveillance network. Easy is extremely careful to keep it that way. I grab my bag, join Manikin and FX, and we make our way through the Void's security checks to get outside. I can feel the weight of tension lift as I leave that nest of gangsters. I can breathe properly again. Like I said before, he doesn't let me work outside much, so I'm grateful for whatever fresh air the city can offer. It's Saturday too, so nobody'll be wondering why these three kids aren't in school.

I don't look the part of a gangster and I'm not as anonymous as a rat-runner should be. I'm the kind of oddball that people always notice, black but albino with my blonde hair bound in cornrows. I'm blind in my right eye too, but most people don't spot that.

We want to put some space between us and the hospital before we find a place to sit down and look over what we've got on Charlie "the Duke" Grodin and his son. We trot at an easy pace down alleys and grotty laneways and sneak through buildings to avoid the street cameras. We follow the rat-runs. Every now and then we stop when we come upon a camera or a surveillance post. Timing the pass of each scan-cam as it turns, we flit past like ghosts, unseen, unrecorded.

This is why criminals are so reliant on kids like us. Rat-runners can go where others can't. You have to be fast and agile – and being small enough to fit through narrow gaps helps too. We're nearly a kilometer from Easy's bunker when Manikin pulls up short. She's out in front, as usual, leading the way through this gloomy lane lined with wheelie bins. Waving to us to hold up, she holds two fingers against her forehead, just above her eyes. The sign for a Safe-Guard. Then she points the fingers away. It's not looking in our direction.

FX and I take a quick peek. Sure enough, there it is in the side street we were about to cross – a figure in a blue-grey cloak with a helmet that sits all the way down on its shoulders, fronted with a long, smoked-glass visor. There's a human being under there, but every effort has been made to make this figure as impersonal as possible. The helmet is bigger than it should need to be to fit over the person's head, because it is loaded with surveillance equipment. You won't see a face behind that dark visor – just camera lenses and sensors. The helmet's various cameras offer telescopic, x-ray and thermal vision, among others. It has sensitive microphones that can pick up the soft footsteps of rat-runners creeping past, or conversations a hundred meters away. It even has a chemical analyzer to detect suspicious smells.

I have a real urge to hide behind one of the wheelie bins, but the other two stay where they are, and I do the same. This thing can see through plastic. We'd just look suspicious if it turned around and saw us all hunkered down, trying to get out of sight. Even so, this is a funny spot for three kids to be hanging out.

But this is the one serious advantage of being under sixteen in a city like London, where WatchWorld and their infamous Safe-Guards are everywhere. Manikin walks straight out across the side street in full view of the peeper, and we follow her. It turns to bring its cameras to bear on us, but we keep walking. We're not doing anything wrong, after all – not yet, anyway. We just don't like people seeing where we're going, or where we've come from.

Being under sixteen means it can't stop us, question us, or follow us unless we're actually involved in a crime. Once we turn sixteen, all that will change. Then, it could follow us all day if it wanted. It could come into our homes and watch us eat or sleep or go to the toilet. When you turn sixteen in London, you surrender your privacy to the law, and they can watch you any way they like.

The peepers are trained to move smoothly, to glide like machines. We're supposed to think of them as walking surveillance posts, not humans. Its whole body swivels slowly as its cameras follow us across the street. A stray beam of sunlight glints off its visor, obscuring those unblinking eyes, the camera lenses that are the only things normally visible behind the glass.