MetaWars: Fight For The Future

Chapter 17

‘Could what?’

‘Damage you, Jonah. Permanently.’

Jonah recalled how eager Axel was to perform the

search and wondered if he wasn’t safer on his own after all.

‘Thanks for sticking up for me,’ Jonah said. ‘Against your dad.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ she said. Jonah smiled. ‘Ever.’

                                                                                        *

The farmhouse had been abandoned long ago. A few pieces of broken furniture were piled into a corner of the main room, beside a fireplace, and a fine layer of dust covered the hard wood floors. Jonah noticed there were no footprints in it.

‘You call this a safe house?’ Bradbury mocked.

‘This is more like a “wait house”,’ replied Axel. ‘You don’t go to Delphine. She comes to you.’

Bradbury shook his head and took up a position by the window, with his shotgun. ‘If you want to be useful,’ he said to Jonah, ‘keep an eye out back for the gendarmerie.’

Sam noticed Jonah’s confused look. ‘Military police,’ she explained.

‘We’re in France, kid,’ grunted Bradbury. ‘They still have some semblance of a real-world society here, at least on the ground.’

Axel concurred: ‘And you can bet your sweet life they’ll investigate an airship crash on their soil.’

Jonah cast his mind back to one of Mr Peng’s lessons. He recalled that, thanks to a trading alliance with Iran and Russia, France was one of the few western countries that still had plentiful access to oil. Consequently, its government was more stable than most. And the Guardians...

The Guardians were an illegal organisation in most countries. Should Jonah be caught with three of them like this, he would probably end up in prison.

No wonder Bradbury was being so cautious, he thought. For the first time, Jonah realised the awful truth: that the whole world really was out to get them!

They sat in silence, the four weary fugitives, and Jonah watched as the daylight dimmed through the back windows. Much to his surprise, he started drifting towards sleep. He was woken by his own stomach, growling with hunger.

Then another growl – of a vehicle pulling up in the farmyard outside. Jonah heard a car door opening and a woman’s voice called, ‘If you want not the trouble, you should come with me.’

He recognised that voice. It was the voice of the knight avatar from the castle.

‘Delphine!’ he told the others. He was racing for the back door, heedless of Bradbury’s whispered caution to him to wait.

Jonah stepped out of the farmhouse, and was blinded by a bright pair of headlights. He could just make out the shape of a dilapidated truck behind them, and a woman standing by the driver’s door. She didn’t look like Jonah had imagined she would. She was about nineteen years old, wore old-fashioned glasses, and had black hair that flowed gently down to her shoulders.

‘It is you, isn’t it?’ he said, uncertainly. ‘Delphine?’

‘And you must be the petit garçon who dresses up in his father’s clothing.’

Delphine fixed Jonah with a long and condescending stare. It felt like a stand-off. She looked even more mistrustful when his three friends emerged from the farmhouse behind him. Jonah noticed that Bradbury’s hand was inside his trench coat, no doubt on his shotgun.

‘Merci de nous rencontre,’ said Sam, surprising Jonah with her French.

‘You spoke of important information, inside this garçon’s head?’

‘The most important,’ said Axel, holding up four fingers.

‘Les quatre coins,’ she whispered. ‘We must go quickly. The gendarmerie, they are searching the countryside for you.’ She opened up the back of the khaki truck and ushered Sam and the two men inside, but not Jonah.

‘You to me do not look very dangerous. You can ride avec moi.’

Jonah didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult.

In contrast, there was no misunderstanding the warning look that Bradbury gave him: Don’t say too much!