to her knees, tore open one of the plastic pouches of blood, then drank hungrily, slurping the crimson liquid into her mouth.
The man watched her, a helpless look on his face, then suddenly seemed to notice that his arm was burning. He began to leap around the corner of the room, beating at the limb with his good hand. When the flames were out, he pulled a blood bag from one of the shelves, and devoured its contents. As Squad G-17 watched, the girl’s face and the man’s arm began to heal before their eyes, the muscle and tissue regrowing, the skin turning pink and knitting back together. When the injuries were healed, so completely that there was no evidence that they had been there at all, a process that took only a matter of seconds, the girl looked up at the man, and wailed.
“Daddy!” she cried, her mouth a wide oval of disappointment. “You said this would work! You promised!”
The man looked down at her with an expression of great sadness.
“I’m sorry, love,” he replied. “I thought it would.” He looked over at the three dark figures, which hadn’t moved. “How did you know she was turned? The poor thing sat in a bath of ice for an hour so she wouldn’t look hot to those helmets of yours. Her teeth only just stopped chattering.”
Beta reached up and lifted her helmet from her head. The face beneath it was a teenage girl’s: beautiful, pale and narrow, framed by dark hair that brushed her neck. She wore a wide smile, and her eyes glowed red under the bright lights of the blood bank.
“I can smell her,” Larissa Kinley replied.
The little girl hissed, her eyes flooding the same red as Larissa’s.
“So it’s true,” said her father. “Department 19 has a pet traitor. How can you hunt your own people? Don’t you have any shame?”
Larissa took half a step towards him, her smile fading.
“You are not my people,” she said, in a voice like ice. Alpha gently laid a hand on her arm, and she stepped back, without taking her eyes from the man in the corner of the room.
Gamma removed her helmet, and shook her head. Short blonde hair flew back and forth above a pretty, heart-shaped face, from which blue eyes stared out above a mouth that was set in a firm line.
“Was it you two who hit Lincoln General last month?” asked Kate Randall.
The man nodded, his eyes still nervously fixed on Larissa.
“And Nottingham Trent the month before that?”
He shook his head.
“Are you lying to me?” Kate asked.
“Why would I lie?” the man replied. He appeared to be on the verge of tears. “You’re going to stake us both anyway, so what would be the point?”
“That’s right,” said Larissa, a wicked smile on her face.
The little girl began to cry. The man placed his hands on her shoulders and whispered soothingly to her.
Alpha looked over at Larissa, who rolled her eyes. Then he reached up, and removed his helmet.
The boy beneath it was no more than sixteen or seventeen, but his face looked older, as though he had seen, and most likely done, things that had taken their toll. A jagged patch of pink scar tissue peeped above the collar of his uniform and climbed across the right side of his neck, stopping before it reached his jaw. His face was handsome, and possessed of a stillness more befitting an older man. His blue eyes were piercing, but he trained them tenderly on Larissa.
“Nobody is staking anyone tonight,” said Jamie Carpenter. “You know the new SOP. Pass me two restrainers, Kate. Lazarus can have these two. I don’t think they’re dangerous.”
The man began to cry along with his daughter.
“We were hungry,” he said. “I’m sorry. My name is Patrick Connors, and this is my daughter, Maggie. We were just so hungry. We didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
“It’s all right,” Jamie replied, taking the two restrainers from Kate’s hands and tossing them to the man and his daughter. “Put these on, under your armpits. Pull them tight.”
The restrainers were thick belts that looped over the shoulders and crossed in the middle; where they met was an explosive charge that sat over the heart of the person wearing it. Patrick and Maggie shrugged the belts over their shoulders, and tightened them as they had been told. When they were securely in place, Jamie pulled a black tube from his belt with a small dial on one side and a red trigger on the other; he twisted the dial two notches clockwise, and red lights on the explosive charges flickered into life.
Jamie looked at his squad.
“Larissa, you’re going to lead us out of here,” he said. “Sir, you’re going to follow her, then Kate, then you, little one, and I’ll go last. We walk straight out the way we came, we don’t stop, and we don’t talk to anyone. Oh – and normal eyes, please.”
He grinned as Larissa and Maggie’s eyes reverted to their usual colours. Larissa led them out of the blood bank, and strode along the corridor towards the exit, and the waiting van. The rest of Squad G-17 and their prisoners followed in the order that Jamie had instructed, and less than a minute later they marched past Sergeant Pearson and Constable Fleming, who averted their eyes as they passed, and slid the van’s rear door shut behind them.
The inside of the vehicle was silver metal and black plastic; four seats ran along each side of the wide space, between which were fixed a series of moulded stands, with half a dozen unusual spaces in them. A wide LCD screen lay flush against the ceiling, and a series of slots in the floor lay before each seat. Jamie told the man and his daughter to take the two seats closest to the front and strap themselves in. They did so silently; when they were in position, Kate pressed a button set into the wall. A barrier of ultraviolet light appeared from a wide bulb in the floor, cutting them off from the three black-clad teenagers, and both Patrick and Maggie cried out.
“Don’t worry,” said Jamie. “You’re perfectly safe.”
He began to unclip the weapons and devices from his belt, and slide them into the slots on the stand beside one of the seats. The brand-new T-21 pneumatic launcher, the Glock 17, the Heckler & Koch MP5, the torch and the short beam gun that Larissa had used inside the blood bank – all were placed into purpose-built compartments and clicked into place. The detonator he kept in his hand, resting it on his knee as he took his seat and announced that they were ready to go. Instantly, the powerful engine of the vehicle, which was in reality less a van and more a combination of a mobile command centre and an armoured personnel carrier, surged into life, and sped them away from the hospital, leaving Sergeant Pearson and Constable Fleming shivering on the pavement.
“What do we do—”
“Nothing,” interrupted Pearson, before his partner had a chance to finish his question. “We do nothing, and we say nothing, because nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Clear?”
Fleming looked at the older man for a long moment, taking in the pale colour of his face, the lines of worry around his eyes and the firm set of his jaw.
“Crystal, sir,” he replied. “Let’s go home.”
An hour later the black van
