It turned out that I'd way overestimated the possible interestingness or otherwise of the journey. After their argument, Helen and Paul lapsed into silence. Helen drove on an extremely circuitous route around London's West End and eventually out towards Edgeware. We picked up the M1 and drove out as far as Northampton before Helen took us off the motorway and along a terrifying variety of B-roads in the dark of a countryside night.
If we'd driven direct the journey would only have taken four or five hours. Because Helen was trying to stay out of the way it took closer to nine. I dozed for a little of the journey but it generally seemed as if sleep did not want to be my playmate at this time.
I began to wonder whether I was getting animus withdrawal or experiencing some other kind of side effect from living an ancestor's life for days at a time.
Turned out that it was impossible, in any sensible way, for me to make that assessment. I was sleep deprived, probably, and way too deep down the rabbit hole to tell whether I was spinning into madness or just feeling a bit under the weather.
What was really odd was that the sound of the engine and pitch black, rain-streaked, badly lit night outside was less stimulating than the animus.
The animus stitches together days and nights, it passes from event to event with a holding pattern in between. All I had to do was follow the prompts inserted into the environment and I would tip into the next memory. As the simulation unwound my synchronisation with Yughi grew, I almost felt as if I knew the guy now, like I could expect to see him in a coffee shop.
On the other hand, lying out in the back seat of a saloon car driving along country roads in the night was a mundane kind of isolation tank experience. No minute was substantially different to any other, I wasn't synchronizing with anything.
Still, sleep would not take me. Some strange fugue state did get into my brain, however, seeping into my consciousness until I felt like I was some strange flesh and bone clock ticking with a heartbeat.
As soon as Helen switched off the engine of the car I was shocked back into full wakefulness from my dreamless non-sleep. I was cold and stiff, my body had spent the time in the car filling my muscles with pain and I felt that I could really benefit from a run.
"Where are we?", I asked.
"Edge of Edwinstowe, near the edge of modern-day Sherwood Forest," Helen said. "I hope you're right about the bleed of local knowledge about the area because otherwise, we're really out in the middle of nowhere."
"Sunrise is due in about ten minutes," Paul said. "There's really only one way to find out."
"Sure," I said, sitting up straight and pulling on the door handle. I was so grateful to be getting out of the car which, at present, represented nothing to me so much as an unwelcoming metal tomb.
Outside the car the air was cold and, if the saying was true, it was currently being darkest right before the dawn. I could almost taste the night surrounding me. We were on a small B-road somewhere in the reasonably anonymous countryside.
Helen had parked the car in a passing place, some of it still stuck out onto the thin strip of two-lane tarmac that wound its way around a long, meandering bend in one direction and rose up a hill in the other. To the side of the car was a low hedgerow that opened up onto some scrubby fields. Along the opposite side was a bank of grass that lead up to a dark and shadowy forest area.
"Anything ringing any bells?" Helen asked. "Or is this a complete waste of time?"
"Give it a rest," Paul said. "It's a borrowed memory from about 1000 years ago, it might need a little jog."
"Yeah," I said. Looking about me, searching for anything that might qualify as 'bearings'. "Just give me a moment."
Following what little instinct the place had activated in me I wandered across the road, climbed the bank and moved up into the treeline.
"Where are you going?" Helen called after me.
"Give me a minute," I shouted back.
Even as the trees surrounded me I felt something. It wasn't like memory, it was like I just knew where I was and where I could go from here. I spotted a tree nearby covered in small fissures and stubby branches, big enough for handholds.
I walked up to the tree and, without even consciously thinking about it, I pulled myself up. The first few feet were scaled easily, but I quickly learned the difference between my stamina and Yughi's. Even so, taking it slow and easy I climbed up into the canopy in under two minutes.
From there I found I could branch run quite easily. I was nowhere near as fast as Yughi but I had to keep up a jog in order to make the motion smooth. Laughing with delight I hopped from branch to branch through the forest, circling around until I was headed back to the tree line at the edge of the road. I was about thirty feet up in the air and it felt, in some bizarre way, like I had come home.
As I came back toward the edge of the wooded area I realised I hadn't quite made it all the way back to the same point. I was a little way up the road from the car, I had even, without thinking about it, come around the meandering bend in the road.
A car was driving along the road and would be at Helen and Paul's position in about twenty seconds. Something about the car knotted up a little tension in my gut. It was like Yughi's eagle sense was waking in me and this car, it was some sort of threat or target.
I did not descend from the canopy but, rather, ran along the branches to keep up with the car. It slowed as it reached the passing place where Paul and Helen still waited. The first grey, thin fingers of dawn could be seen, making the air grey and strange.
As the car stopped Helen rested herself against the bonnet with her hands tucked behind her back. Paul reached into the passenger side of the car and pulled out a map. From where I was I could see he had a gun as well.
The mysterious car's engine stopped. The driver's side door opened and a figure emerged from inside, another one climbed out of the passenger side.
I didn't recognise the man driving the car, he didn't seem very Abstergo, he was dressed casually, his hair cut short, but not in a military fashion. He was clean shaven and this served only to make him appear more intense.
"Car trouble folks?" The man asked Helen and Paul.
"No mate," Paul replied genially, "just consulting the old map. A little bit lost is all."
"Oh, where you headed? Maybe we can help," said the driver of the car. He was searching the back seat of our car as if he was looking for evidence of something, possibly me."
"It's fine, really," Paul said. "I think I know where we took a wrong turn. We were actually just about to head off."
"Where's Sam?" the driver of the car asked casually. The question was thrown out so calmly that it covered the exit of two more men from the back of his car. Both levelled guns at Paul and Helen, now the driver's passenger did the same.
"We don't know," Helen said. "He went into the woods ten minutes ago, he could be anywhere."
The driver looked at Helen and pursed his lips, making a judgement about how full of it she was likely to be. I knew that Helen was telling the truth, apparently so did the driver. He pulled out a gun of his own.
"You, you," he said pointing at the two goons who had emerged from the back of the car. "You're with me. Pinsent here will be watching the two of you, he's better trained than either of you, trust me."
With that, the three armed men stalked off into the forest to look for me. I followed, slowly, carefully, without the joyful abandon that had accompanied my initial exploration of the canopy.
They didn't get too far from the road before the driver decided they should split up. That was fine by me. I followed one of the goons without him even being aware that I was anywhere nearby. Once I judged he was far enough away from his companions I swung down off a branch and threw myself the fifteen feet or so to the ground using him as a cushion to break my fall.
The landing still hurt quite a bit but I didn't have time to pause. I rolled off the unconscious goon, I tried to deactivate his gun, or whatever you do with them, but automatic weapons were no more part of my world than they were Yughi's.
Failing at this I just pitched the gun as hard as I could into the forest, only thinking that a shot might set it off somewhere around the top of its arc.
As it happened, today I was lucky. I didn't press the matter, I climbed the nearest climbable tree and got back to the canopy.
It didn't take me very long to locate the other goon. I just headed in the opposite direction from the first one. A side effect of my waking eagle sense was that my sense of direction had suddenly become insanely good.
It was kind of scary to think that all this acrobatic, perceptive, lethal power had just lurked below the surface of my genetics all this time. It was even more frightening to think how quickly all of my potential was being realised. I had to wonder if there was some other kind of less pleasant side effect waiting to strike.
I didn't have time to think about that now. I used a similar swing and drop method that I had already employed to take out the second goon. My luck then promptly gave out as the voice of the driver, from right behind me, said:
"That's enough, Sammy."
I froze. I knew the guy had a gun on me, no one had ever had me dead in their sights at point-blank range before. There had been a firefight in Birmingham when Paul and Helen had evacuated me but that was just abstract noise, I never really got a good look at any weapons it was over so fast.
This was a completely new kind of terror, the feeling of knowing that another person held my life in their hands, completely. Knowing that this person didn't really appear to hold my life in such high regard was just added an extra frosting of dread onto the cupcake of my fear.
"What do you want?" I said. I managed to raise my hands into the air palms out. Before I had gone a mile in Yurghi's skin I think I might have lost all power over my speech and possibly control of my bladder. Now a muted, careful response came naturally, almost an instinct, and was I ever pleased for that.
"Your brother sent me," the man said. "He is sorry he couldn't come in person, but times are very challenging, I was sent to bring you to him. My name is Toby Drake."
"If you're from Zeke," I said, "then why are you holding a gun on me?"
"Because you just knocked out two highly trained mercenaries and neither of them heard you coming. If you had any quarter then I would not be conscious right now. I had to tell you who I was and why I was here."
"This isn't exactly what I imagined when I let that trace program run," I said. "I was expecting something a little more fraternal if I'm honest."
Drake shrugged: "Like I said, times are challenging."
"So, what now?" I asked.
"We go back to the roadside. We take the cars back to your brother, we join forces, we begin the job of wiping the Templars from the face of the earth."
"And how can I be sure you're not Templars?" I asked.
"Because if I were I would not need you alive," Drake replied. "Any viable sample of DNA would be all I would require. There's really only one faction that has any interest in keeping you alive and healthy and only one splinter group that also wants to keep you safe."
I shrugged. I didn't know what else to do so I let the man with the gun lead me back to the roadside.
"Pinsent," Drake said to his companion when we reached the cars. "Go and get Finch and Marston, they had a little run-in with Zeke's brother, they'll need waking up."
Silently Pinsent stowed his weapon and went into the forest. Drake looked in the direction of the sun rising, a weak orange ball of flame to the south-east.
"Looks like it's going to be a nice day at least," he said to no one in particular.
"Go fuck yourself," Helen spat from her place leaning against the bonnet of her car.
"We seriously do need to increase the peace around these parts, don't we?" Drake said. "Would it ease your mind at all to know that we are not Templars but Falconi?"
"Oh, great," Helen said. "Weekend warriors with pop guns. What do you want with us?"
"Our boss is Sam's brother," Drake said. "He has a plan."
"Colour me reassured," Helen said, her voice dripping sarcasm. "So now I'm the prisoner of a bunch of clowns who couldn't cut it in the Brotherhood."
"Philosophical differences is all," Drake said. "Even you must admit that the traditional Brotherhood has found itself, I don't know, mired in dogma, shall we say?"
"Say what you like, traitor," Helen said.
Further argument was cut short by the return of Pinsent and the two sheepish-looking goons: Finch and Marston.
"Finch, you'll go with me and Sam in their car. You two are going with Pinsent and Marston in this car."
"We're not going anywhere with you," Helen said.
"Which part of this did you mistake for a discussion?" Drake asked. "Come on, I really don't want to have to shoot anyone before my morning coffee. Leaves me cranky all day."