Jonah felt a sickening surge in his head.
Images were flashing behind his eyelids, too fast for
him to make out what any of them might be. He had a giddy sensation of falling, and for an instant he feared he might fall out of the Metasphere altogether.
He tried to let go, but his hands clenched uncontrollably around the talons. The dragon depixelated from head to tail and a rush of red cascaded towards him. Each new pixel sliced into Jonah like a shard of glass.
The pain subsided and Jonah came to his senses in the secret cellar of the gift shop, on his knees, trembling and flushed, fighting down a tidal wave of nausea. In the body of the red dragon. His father’s body.
He could feel the dragon’s wings behind him, like an extra pair of arms. He flexed his shoulders, unfolded the wings, spread them out until their tips touched the cellar walls. He put his hands – his claws, he supposed he should call them now – to his face, felt around the shape of his snout and gingerly touched his sharp teeth.
He still felt sick, a little dizzy, and somehow the world seemed smaller to him – although of course Jonah knew it was he who had grown bigger.
Jonah couldn’t see his own avatar, his humatar, in front of him.
With a sense of trepidation, Jonah shuffled around to look behind him. He felt too big now, unable to turn his great, trunk-like neck, hardly able to move at all in this too-small space. His avatar wasn’t there. It had gone, disappeared.
Jonah began to panic.
How could he have been so stupid? Everyone knew the penalty for filtering, for taking another avatar as your own. Exile. Jonah’s DNA would be placed on a block list, forever denied access to the Metasphere. He would be forced to live out his life in the real world, never see his friends again because he didn’t know where to find them or even what they looked like.
It would be like dying. No, it would be worse than that. At least if I were dying, he thought, I could be Uploaded.
Jonah had to get out of there – out of the Metasphere – before anyone found out what he had done. He flew up out of the cellar, through the gift shop door, and back towards his Point of Origin. As he flew, his new wings gave him power and lift that he’d never experienced in humatar form. He soared towards his school, terrified that someone he knew – or worse, who had known his father – would see him.
His golden exit halo hovered in the Chang Academy grounds, where he had left it. It was only one of many, but it glowed at Jonah’s approach as if beckoning him towards it.
It still recognises me, he thought with relief. The halo was his only way out of the Metasphere, the only way to reconnect his conscious mind with his unconscious body. Without it, Jonah’s avatar would be trapped in the Metasphere forever, while his physical body slowly wasted away in the real world.
He dived through the ring of light.
Jonah was back on the bus, in the meta-pub. He was trapped once more in his awkward, real-world body – and, for once, he was thankful for this.
He was a little alarmed to find Mr Collins crouched beside him, frowning over a datapad. ‘Was everything all right for you in there, son?’ he asked.
Jonah didn’t dare answer him. He just nodded dumbly.
‘I think we must have a software glitch,’ Mr Collins explained. ‘For a while there, the system was showing two avatars registered to this terminal, which of course ain’t possible. I’ve reported the error, but I’m gonna have to run some scans. Can’t afford a virus on the loose.’
Mrs Collins click-clacked up to them in her high heels, concerned. She asked Jonah why he wasn’t in school, and he told her he wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t even a lie he realised as he said it. He had expected that, back here, his nausea might have subsided. No such luck.
Mrs Collins fussed over him. ‘Maybe you should ring your mother,’ she prodded.
‘There’s no need,’ he said quickly, ‘honestly. I just need to go upstairs and lie down for a bit. I’ll be fine.’
‘Sir, we’ve found him!’ cried the programmer. ‘Where?’ asked Granger.
‘London, sir.’ On the programmer’s screen, an aerial
image was zooming in on an area once known as Clapham Common, to a wire-fenced compound filled with red London buses. To one bus in particular.
‘Do we have agents near there?’ asked Granger.
The programmer nodded, her fingers a blur over her datapad. ‘Yes, sir. Sending them in now, sir. Do we have a description of Mr Delacroix to give them?’
‘He could have changed his appearance by now,’ said Granger. ‘We can’t afford to take any chances. I want everyone aboard that bus dead!’
As soon as Jonah closed his eyes, the flash-frame images came back: people and places he didn’t recognise, memories that weren’t his own. He wasn’t sure if he was asleep or awake – but he could hear a terrible growling sound, and slowly he came to realise that this at least was real. The growl was coming from somewhere nearby.
He climbed out of his hammock and looked out of the window. He couldn’t see anything at first, but the sound was growing louder and closer.
Then, two petrol-powered motorbikes – the first he had seen in years – shot into view, weaving between the surrounding buses. They skidded to a halt beneath Jonah’s window, outside his bus, and their riders dismounted. They were wearing combat fatigues, and helmets with mirrored visors that concealed their faces.
They were carrying guns.
Jonah stared, open-mouthed, as the two men shouldered their way into the bus through its open back doors. He heard a scream from somewhere below him, from the lower deck. It sounded like Mrs Collins.
Jonah made for the stairwell, but he was only two steps down when another louder sound froze him in his tracks: machine-gun fire.
It seemed to go on forever, that sound, building from a chatter to a thunderous roar before, abruptly, it ceased. A dreadful silence fell.
Jonah couldn’t believe it, couldn’t quite process what his senses were telling him. He knew he wasn’t dreaming. This was like playing an immersive game in the Metasphere, only it was really happening – and right here, of all places, in the bus-burb. In the real world.
Which meant, as Jonah now realised with a heart- freezing dread, that he wasn’t protected. Unlike his avatar, his real body could be hurt, even killed.
As carefully, as quietly, as he could, he backed up the stairs. He grabbed his rollerblades and pulled them on. He ripped away the rubber seal of the emergency exit window at the back of the bus, and he pushed out the glass. It smashed on the ground outside, and immediately Jonah heard footsteps below.
Someone was climbing the stairs after him.
He hoisted himself up and out of the window, rolling himself on top of the bus. He scrambled to his feet and skated as hard as he could across the roof.
A blast of bullets exploded through the metal roof behind him. There was no doubt about it now. The motorbike men were trying to kill him. They must already have killed Mr and Mrs Collins, and everyone else aboard their shared bus.
Most of their victims would have been plugged in. They wouldn’t even have seen it coming. And, less than an hour ago, Jonah would have been one of them.
He reached the front end of the bus, and launched himself across the gap to the neighbouring one. He landed hard, but kept going. He continued to jump from rooftop to rooftop, as fast as he could. He heard a roar from behind him, then another: a pair of motorbike engines, starting up. They were coming after him.
Jonah lost his footing on a slippery steel roof. He careened off the edge of the bus, and slammed into the vents of an adjacent bus. He hit the ground with a bone- jarring thud. Fortunately, he had managed to land on his feet.
But he could hear the roars of the two motorbikes, closing in on him.
He skated through the labyrinth of parked buses, no clear destination in mind, just desperate to shake off his pursuers. A few faces appeared at windows, drawn by the noise, but at this time of the day most people were plugged in, at work somewhere in the Metasphere, oblivious to the commotion of the real world. Nor did the motorbike men appear to be interested in these onlookers. It was Jonah they wanted. No matter how hard he pushed himself, how many twists and turns he made, he couldn’t seem to shake them off.
He rounded the back corner of a Number 23 bus, and froze in fright to find the motorbikes in front of him, bearing down upon him.
Jonah shot off to the right, turned left, right, left again in rapid succession. The motorbikes were faster than he was, but they couldn’t match his agility. He had begun to get the feel for his real-world legs again, to gain confidence. All that time he had spent practising on his blades... It might not have won him the night-time races, but it might yet save his life in a more immediate way.
Still, he couldn’t elude the motorbike men forever.
They had split up – he could hear the roars of their engines on each side of him now. They were trying to close him down – and, as long as Jonah remained hemmed in by the bus-burb walls, they would certainly succeed.
He came around another bus, saw the compound gate hanging open in front of him, and he made a split- second decision.
He made a break for it.