-Chapter 24-

Stumbling blindly, I turn around and get another glance at the prone form of Olivia. I am hit by a terrible clawing feeling in the pit of my stomach, unable to look, unable to tear my eyes away thinking, no, no it isn’t true, this isn’t real. I wish that the world would just fade away into a dream, hating the solid feel of the earth beneath my feet, of the bricks that graze my hands and how vivid red and exact the blood falling onto the ground is. Behind me, the guards are watching, in front of me two more stand between the narrow passage and my exit. I’m boxed in, and the only option for me now is to flee sideways, over the fence.

The grunt that falls out of my mouth feels more like a sob and there are tears in my eyes as I pull myself over the fence. With my vision obscured by water, the dingy back London yards seem to have a soft focus haze to them and I might have been able to pretend that this was a dream I was about to wake up for at any moment if it weren’t for the lumbering motion of my body and the ache in my arms. She was so graceful. So competent and yet so staggeringly naïve. If anyone was supposed to come back from this mission alive, I would have put money on Olivia over me. The guilt is a poison chewing on the soft flesh of my insides.

I can’t leave them. I can’t leave her, left up there on the fence; stuck like a ragdoll pierced by a pin but once I hit the other side of the fence, my feet hardly notice the pain of impact and they just keep on moving. It’s as though I might run so fast I take flight, before falling to earth with one of those bone splintering kinds of crashes. I was always good at running. Especially the kind of running where you can’t afford to look back. Trick taught me that, and we filled his pockets full of stones and dumped his body in a canal. Olivia taught me that it doesn’t matter where you come from or how you were made- it’s what you do with the life you’ve been given that counts.

She was so happy when Harry let her paint his nails that ugly shade of purple. There might still be chipped polish on the nails of her corpse.

Clambering over another wall and into more yards, I hit a narrow line of streets and can’t hear the tell tale heavy footsteps of men chasing after me anymore. I keep on running though, until there is an explosion of pain inside of my lungs, my breath comes out in shallow rattling breaths, while a stitch slices down the side of my torso.

Unable to fight it, a small scream slips out of my throat while I push my palms against the wall, slapping the bricks until the soft fleshy skin on the inside of my hand is ripped and peeling and bleeding. Shutting my eyes, my hand closes into a fist, I hit the wall once and the anguish is replaced by pure and simple agony. I can deal with that though. It’s just bone and flesh. It’s just something physical as opposed to the way down deep feeling that’s brutal and indescribable. Sliding down the wall, I pull my knees into my chest and claw at my hair with my hands.

One minute she was there. The next she wasn’t. How the hell could it have happened like that? And I know what I’m supposed to do, what they’d do in the movies. I’m supposed to go back and liberate those girls to make sure her death means something. But the place will be crawling with security guards by now, as far as I know it could have already happened.

Olivia is dead. Melissa with the red hair and the braces on her teeth will never draw again- she’ll be too busy being empty of anything but fake bliss and obedience. They all will. I’ve failed, failed, failed. But then again, I always was a most spectacular champion fuck up extraordinaire.

Fumbling into my pocket for a cigarette, my fist closes once more around the little chewing gum camera. It could well have Olivia’s last moments on it, that final choked out sound that escaped her voice that could have been Niall or could have been just the noise that a soul makes as it escapes the body. If clones have souls… if anyone has souls…I wouldn’t know. But I doubt it.

Mum was never religious is the thing. She was brought up Church of England in the loosest sense of the word but never found that the church’s teachings had any pearls of wisdom for her children. When I asked about my dad, I don’t think she ever fudged up some ‘daddy is in heaven, sitting on a cloud’ kind of explanation. He was just dead. Just gone. Relegated to nothing more than my mother’s memory and the one grainy picture I’d found of him when he looked like Kurt Cobain. It never felt particularly tragic. He wanted to die.

Olivia didn’t. She wanted to live, not just be alive…L-I-V-E, live. She wanted to wear lip gloss and read fashion magazines and she didn’t think she’d ever be able to. I’ve been running so long, I don’t even know how to stand still anymore, that’s what she said. I hate old Tish more than I’ve ever done before for how bored she’d been of the kind of life that Olivia longed for.

I clutch tight to the camera and think about smashing it into pieces, or keeping it, so at least there will be something left of her captured on film. The sound of her voice, that giggle, the sight of her hair bobbing up and down. I don’t know how I’m going to explain to Niall and Valerie that she died and yet somehow, so improbably it seems, I’m still here.

All I can do though, is try to salvage some kind of evidence from the task. Just a little. So I force myself to slot the camera back into my jeans and try to remember the name of the street for the concert venue.

If anyone were ever to play the tape back, the only audible sound would be my choked sobs as a soundtrack to the grainy, shaky footage taken from a hiding place close to the concert venue as I capture their euphoric faces filing out of the large doors about an hour later. They had been chatting and laughing before, pushing and squealing some of them, all of them overwhelmed with excitement- but now they seem stiller, marching out in two by two, with all the discipline of any army only with identical expressions of euphoria.

It was what we were supposed to do, I suppose, but as I turn off the camera and lean back against the wall, the tears are still pouring out of my eyes.

***

The plan was that we would call the Palmer’s house from a phone booth once the job was done, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I can’t face someone asking me how it went and then having to explain over the phone just what happened to Olivia. It’s not something you can do if it isn’t face to face. So I swipe an Oyster card from a woman’s pocket at a bus stop and take the tube back to the Palmer’s leafy London suburb.

A kind of numbness has set in as I walk down the streets, though I am dimly aware of a shiver running through my body , my hands trembling, my muscles weak and twitching. I want to be with Harry, I want to have him wrap his arms around me while I clutch at the small scrub of bristle on his head. He’ll sing the song that privately I think of as ours since the day that he held onto my wrist as we watched Trick’s car sink to the bottom of the canal and I might be able to find some peace.

But I am also terrified of and dreading having to tell Niall and Valerie, sure that it will break him once and for all. Where the torture and the scars haven’t, I’m almost certain that this is going to be the final straw.

I keep picturing the scene in my head, running through scenarios in my head like a terrible movie stuck on repeat and I suppose that’s why I don’t notice at first that something isn’t right at the Palmer’s house. Even though the front gate is hanging off its hinges, all I can imagine is Valerie crying the way that my own mother would wail if she ever knew something bad had happened to me. I walk past the heavy mud track marks in the once neatly kept font lawn and wonder if Niall will howl and punch something, screaming no, no, no, no, over and over and over.

The window is smashed in, but I don’t notice it. Nor do I really pay attention to the fact that the front door remains open a slither, like the thin first strip of a new moon. I’m too busy thinking about the last look on Olivia’s face, about how shudderingly still she went as the spike pierced her neck.

Until I see the blood. Smeared on the walls and all over the floor of the Palmer’s cold and impersonal hallway. For a moment I think I’m seeing things, that I’m having visions of death like Lady Macbeth after seeing Olivia die. And then, all at once, reality hits me like a tonne of bricks and the air around me seems to be icy cold.

I don’t even care if whoever did this is still around, I’m screaming Harry’s name before I have time to think about hiding, or stealth or being aware. In the living room I find the source of some of the blood. At the sight of the figure of a boy, his face obscured with blood, I feel like I’m going to vomit, like the horrible clawing I felt-am still feeling- over Olivia’s death  is going to rip me in two.

Drawing closer though, I see a head of dark hair, far darker than Harry's. He's in clean clothes, his nails are clear, and though his face is mangled bloody something tells me it's a Zayn Malik clone. 

And around the other side of the sofa, with her hair fanned out in a halo, already all bled out of multiple bullet wounds, her hand on her stomach is Valerie. Stupidly, I bend over to take her pulse, but I don’t know what I’m doing and I know from the pallor of her face and the look of glazed over shock that she’s already dead. She’d died not knowing about the fate of her daughter. It’s not even a comfort to me.

What happened here?  I think wildly, when I can think at all. Most of my thoughts though seem primal and concerned with fight or flight. I have legs made to run, I have finger nails that want to claw and teeth that want to bite but I have no idea what has happened.

I have no idea what I’m going to find in the rest of the house. Whether from behind another door I will see my Harry or Niall or Liam or Theo sporting their own bullet wounds and I will be left completely alone in this.

Heading upstairs, I move through the house, calling from room to room. From the kitchen to the bathroom to the room and the bed where Harry and I had sex, but there's nothing. Nobody. The house is totally devoid of life, no whispers that anyone had been here at all but for the pools of blood, the stains sticking to the bottom of my shoes and leaving dark brown smudges in the carpeting.

They wouldn’t kill Harry, because the presence of a Zayn makes me certain that it was them. That they found out the Palmers were holding three of the originals somehow and they struck. They wouldn’t kill him, I tell myself firmly to still the pounding of my heart. They need him.

 But if he isn’t dead, and he isn’t here, then that means they must have taken him.

I don't know what to do now. So I sink onto the edge of the bed of the last room I check, holding my head in my hands. I have the footage now, but without Theo there's nothing to do with it. Olivia is dead, her mother too and as for Niall and Harry and Liam. God only knows. All I can see as I shut my eyes are rows and rows of Harrys calling out to me, frightened.

Got to keep moving. Got to do like the sharks do, that's what Niall said.

I should gather up what supplies I can, regroup my thoughts somehow. I can't stay here. But somehow my feet seem stuck to the floor, my body seems to weigh around two tonnes more than I ever remembered. Pulling fist into my mouth, biting down hard with what's left of my teeth I allow one moment to sob, head down, and bowed.

My moment is interrupted by a hand.

Bloody, shaking, it juts out from the darkness of under the bed to grasp around my ankle. My heart feels as if it has burst in a firework of sheer terror. Every instinct in my body erupts at once and I try to leap up, tripping over the hand and hitting the carpeting with a thud.

Harry? I hope wildly, but it is short lived. 

On the ground I am able to see who the hand belongs to a little clearer. It's dark but I can see a pair of blue eyes, a face with a twisting layer of burns over one side, a sickly pale sheen over the other. Niall coughs, saying "Tish" in a weak voice as I wrap my hand around his wrist and gingerly pull him out from under the bed.

A gash on his forehead is lined with a trickle of dried blood like the path of a tear drop, there's blood all over his clothes, flecked on his chin and around his mouth. A great dark spot blossoms at the epi-centre of a bullet wound on his shoulder and as I try to help him up, he grips heavily onto my shoulder, gritting his teeth, digging his nails into my skin as he grunts and sways with the effort of standing.

"They got them," he finally manages to say. "They fucking got them." And he doesn't growl it like usual, it doesn't fall out of his mouth like shards of ice. His voice seems higher, softer and younger.

I take a moment to let the news sink in. It isn't as much of a sickening shock as it was when I first saw the blood, and it was no more than I had already suspected, but it doesn't stop my jaw clenching and something inside of me withering.

It's fucked up then. It's completly hopeless. We've lost once and for all and now they have all of the originals save for one just days before the big, final, One Direction contest.

This is the closest I've been to Niall, and every one of my old instincts tells me to pull away, find my own personal space in a moment like this, I can't help but clutch tight onto the blood-damp material of his shirt. It's strange for him too, I'm sure of it- but he curls his hand around my elbow. "It'll be okay," he says quietly. "We'll regroup." His head darts up for a second though as he says, "Oh shit...Olivia....has she seen Valerie?"

Niall pulls away from he and lets out a small hiss as he presses his hand to his shoulder and starts to limp out of the room, fighting to get to Olivia and comfort her in her grief. Not knowing that she isn't downstairs. Not knowing that she won't be coming back at all.

I ball my hand into a fist over my heart as I lick my lips and force out the words, "Niall," on a wave of sadness. "Niall wait."

He turns around, I take a deep breath. Opening my mouth to speak, I find that the only thing that escapes my throat is another small whimper. I don't cry, I feel too numb for that, but my face hurts, there's a burn at the back of my mouth and a stinging in my head.

"No."

Niall takes a step towards me, tips his head as if I have just said something in a language that he doesn't understand while his chest heaves up and down wildly.

"Tish tell me she's downstairs. Tish please."

I open my mouth again, but I have to shut it, I have to shake my head. Niall leaps forwards and grabs my shoulders.

"She got captured? They managed to get her, they--" his hand goes over his mouth, but all I can hear is the muffled. "Don't...." He's always had remarkable eyes, a cool blue crystal color that fills up with tears. "She can't be... She fucking can't be."

"They found us, we were trying to get out but Olivia..." I can't tell him that she ended up lanced on the end of a spike. The image alone would be too much, I know that it's haunting me. "She didn't make it and I--" My story gets stopped short as Niall charges at me with a primal howl, his fist raised. I flinch for a second before Old Tish comes in and puts my body into a defiant posture, but Niall doesn't hit me, instead his fist falling into the wall of the room.

He bashes out his sobs. Until he's left with his head down and his shoulders shaking. Silence fills up the room for a short while, but for the sound of Niall’s laboured breaths and a bird in a tree somewhere in this leafy London suburb.

"What happened here," I have to finally whisper, looking around the room.

Niall looks down it his hands, “You know…I always thought it was strange how they kept sending Liams and Louises, you know? I got why there wouldn’t be many of me or Harry, but why no Zayn’s, you know? I’d hoped that maybe he was resisting but goddamnit, Tish…” he looks up at me, his eyes red and puffy. “There were three of them. But that’s all it took. Something went wrong….” He lets out a small sob, “And I thought I was crazy. But Zayn…he….” Niall holds up his bloody arm and the closer I look the more I wonder if his wounds are caused by teeth marks. “There wasn’t anything we could do. Harry, Liam, the old man and his mental wife. I guess all their hard wiring being off meant they didn’t think to look where I was hiding. Maybe they just don’t want me…”

His face crumples again, “Personal and professional failure, that’s what Wells said…only Olivia thought different….she understood…she was-” his voice breaks and he’s sobbing again. I try to put my hand on his shoulder but he snaps away from me, his grief like a deep rumbling earthquake coming from way down inside of him. Strong enough to move a mountain.

And then suddenly it stops. His face closes off, goes colder than I have ever seen it before and he whirls around.

All I can do is follow helplessly as he stalks downstairs, whispering his name though he doesn’t hear me. Maybe he has a plan, I think desperately, a way that we can get Harry back. He certainly seems to know what he wants, heading back into the living room and crouching down at the level of the one dead Zayn, opening the lapel of his jacket and finding a gun. He opens the chamber and counts the bullets before replacing them once again and draws his head up to look at me.

“You know, I didn’t give a shit about the brainwashing or any of it, right? I just wanted to be able to go home. But it was her…she was home in the end. The last fucking good thing left for me and they killed her. I don’t care what happens to me anymore.” For one horrified moment I’m terrified he’s going to put the gun in his mouth and splatter his brains on the wall.

“Niall,” I say quietly, taking a step towards him. But he ignores me.

 “I’m ending this,” he points the gun at me, and my heart stops for a moment.

“One, two, three, four, five bullets, right? One each for the imposters. Publically so they can't just stick some clones more in their place, while the media and the whole world is watching. No more One Direction. No more stupid brainwashing. None of it.”