Sam and Consuelo's house again. Outside the Hole. My lairs in Italy, South Africa, India, Norway, Afghanistan. Outside Alejandra's house. The Lake District. The Empty Quarter, time and time again. Landing in a shower of water, gasping for air, only to be dragged back sobbing into the blackness again.
Time becomes meaningless. I have no idea how long I spend in my underwater hell, how many places I jump to. I've been drowning for hours, maybe days. Once in a while I come back to the glass box and it's empty. The last time they did that, I kicked and punched at the glass until my knuckles were bleeding and at least one toe felt as if it were broken.
"What the fuck do you want from me?" I scream into the dark.
There's no answer.
They leave me here for hours, throwing jolts of electricity at me every ten minutes or so, as if to just remind me that they're there. If it weren't for the fact that I'm tired and need to sleep, I'd welcome the pain. It reminds me what I needs to do, keeps my mind focussed. Get out. Get out get out get out. Sleep. Then go on an extended hunting trip. Open season on paladins. But right now my options seem rather limited and during the times when I can focus my thoughts sufficiently, I can't see an exit sign.
I can't give up, though. Roland is still out there, somewhere. Maybe only a few metres away, watching me through infrared cameras. Even if I did want to give up, the second I drift near to unconsciousness, my reflexes jump me away to the next place. The torture seems to have no end, and I can feel myself weakening, despite the anger and fear that's been driving me onwards. It's getting harder and harder to find my breath again, to cough up the water. The muscles are tired, I'm exhausted, and the only thing keeping me going is the knowledge that as soon as I get out of this shit, the sooner I can set about drowning the next fifty paladins I encounter. Preferably in a place where I can sit and watch them.
Oxford, England. I land in a field, lie in the wet grass, shivering and trying to find the energy to breathe. Eventually I roll over onto my back and stare up at the grey clouds. Rain falls but I can't feel it. Dying by degrees, I think, that's what this is. Sorry Mum, sorry Dad. I tried.
"Coward," I whisper. "You've been through worse."
Have I? Have I really? Cos this shit is pretty fucking deep.
"You do make a lot of noise," says a female voice from nearby. Foreign, slightly harsh accent.
I turn my head to see a girl, sitting on the gate at the entrance to the field. She hops down and walks over to me, crouches down, takes my hands in hers. "Time to give them something to think about," she says, and jumps.
I wake up on a bed, dry, under a thick pile of blankets. My chest hurts with every breath, and my head feels as if it might break in two at the slightest sound, but I am alive. I'm not in a glass box, drowning in the darkness. I hear a sound and slowly turn my head to look into the room.
The girl is sitting beside me, her feet tucked up underneath her on a chair. Her dark hair is tied up loosely in a high ponytail, the red shirt she's wearing is a man's but she wears it well, with the sleeves casually rolled up. She's maybe in her early twenties, if that. Easily younger. She's reading a motorbike manual, and all around the chair are piles of machinery. My gaze wanders further across the room, taking in the stripped Alpha Romeo with bits of its engine strewn across the floor, the gym equipment, racks of assorted weaponry, and the banks of computer screens across one wall. No windows, the only light comes from bare light bulbs overhead.
As I'm looking, something moves on the bed. I flinch, look down. At my feet, a small black cat is washing itself.
"His name's Orion," says the girl, without looking up from her book.
"And yours?" Speaking is difficult, my throat feels raw and even the movement of air takes more energy than I can manage comfortably.
"Anna Chernyakov. And you are Griffin O'Connor."
I nod.
"Would you like a drink?" Without waiting for another nod, she gets off her chair, walks away and comes back with a glass of water. "Drink this, it will make you feel better."
I sit up carefully and take the glass from her. The water tastes awful and I nearly spit it out. Anna laughs at my expression. "I put the antibiotics in the water. I thought you would find them easier to take that way, rather than the capsules. They are rather big, and I would imagine that your throat hurts after what they did."
Too many questions to ask. "Antibiotics?"
She sits back down on her chair, tucks her feet back up underneath her and leans back. "For your chest. You're very…open to infection right now. You need to keep warm and dry. Pneumonia would be bad."
No kidding. I keep swallowing the bitter water and then ask, "How did you find me?"
"You make a lot of noise. I just had to wait until you were back in the UK again. You'd been here twice, I figured the chances were high that you'd turn up again."
I takes a breath to speak, then cough, violently, so much so that I'm almost surprised not to bring up a lung. When I finally manage to catch my breath, eyes watering, I find that she's picked up her manual again and is flicking through the pages.
"But how…"
"How did I know?" She folds over the corner of the page and looks at me. "I can always feel jumpers, especially when they make a lot of noise. And you, you make a lot of noise. It's okay, you were under a lot of stress." She turns back to her book.
I sigh, painfully, and lie back down again. Orion shifts slightly, leans against my feet and starts to purr. Despite the ache in my chest – and my stomach muscles, I realise, like when you've been throwing up all night – and the nausea-inducing headache, I manage to close my eyes and go to sleep.
When I open them again, Anna is nowhere in sight. There's a glass of water on a chair by the bed, with a scrawled note, saying "Drink Me" next to it.
"What, no white rabbit?" I mutter to myself as I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed. Even though the room is warm, the relative chill that hits bare skin comes as a shock, and it's only then that I realise that my jeans are draped over the back of the chair. I glance down. The t-shirt I'm wearing isn't mine, because that too is with the trousers. The boxers, thankfully, are. I glance down at the t-shirt and try to read the upside down white writing. 'I'm only here to serve as a warning to others', it reads.
"Great. A fucking comedian." I know I should be grateful to her for showing up when she did, that her intervention has given me another chance to be back out there, fighting. But that would mean that I owed her, and that's not even an option. That would mean accepting that she's helped me, and I'm not ready to let anyone close enough to help yet. David was the last one who even approached that, and look where that ended up. Another lair found and burnt to the ground, another chance – a fucking good chance at that – to get that son of a bitch, Roland, and David had to go and fuck it up. And either Roland's caught up with David in the last four years, or the American kid has gone to ground like any normal jumper would, once they realise the paladins are on their tail. Maybe he took the girl with him; if he was bright he didn't, but that's unlikely. More likely they're both dead.
"Come on, shift your arse, O'Connor," I say, getting out of bed and putting on my own clothes. No shoes, but then I hadn't had those when I first woke up in the glass tank, so that's not surprising. I pick up the glass of water and walk over to the weapons rack, drinking slowly.
She's got good taste, I admit, examining the arsenal. A selection all the way from shotgun to semi-auto, with a few small pistols hanging up on the wall as well. Silencers, too. Nothing too flashy, it's all discrete, and any numbers have been filed off. The swords, though, they're in a different league. Beautiful – most of them Japanese katana, by the looks of the engravings and decoration on the sheaths. And a collection of throwing knives, all with a good weight and an even balance.
I slide out a drawer from the bottom half of the metal rack and am greeted with an astounding collection of torture devices – ranging from broken glass to intricate steel implements with teeth that point the wrong way. "Fuck me," I mutter.
"I'd rather not," Anna says, and I whirl round on the spot to find her standing only a few feet behind me.
I watch her walk over to the swords, pick one, unsheathe it, and hold out at arms length in front of her, straight up. "I didn't steal these, if that's what you're thinking," she says, not looking at me. "Nikolai did." She does a couple of moves from a kata, and pauses. "I think he loved them more than he loved me." Another few steps: brutal, direct, precise. The thin blade whistles as it cuts through the air. I move backwards, still holding the empty glass in my hand.
She swings the sword round in an arc over her head, spins, sweeps it low across the floor, then looks up at me from a crouching position, hair falling down across her face. "If you jump again, they'll catch you. They know your signature, they can track you all across the globe. It doesn't matter where you go."
"They use a tracking device," I say, already checking my clothes as I speak. "They must do."
"Do you really think I'm that stupid?" she asks, standing up and turning to put the sword back on its rack. "If they used tracking devices they could trace you to here and, charming as you are, I don't think you're worth giving up my home for. No, they track you. Your jump signature."
"That's not possible."
"That's what the last boy said. I never saw him alive again. He probably drowned in that fish tank of theirs." She shrugs. "Your funeral."
I drop the glass and jump, don't even hear the smash as it shatters into splinters on the floor.