-Chapter 26 -

It's night. I'm on the outside, looking in. Craning my neck to try and make anyone out. Joey smoking and spitting on the balcony, Chantalle bopping along to music videos playing on the television while my Mum meanders around in her tracksuit, humming something with a smile. The lights are on, though can't see anyone from this far away. I daren't get closer. I am sure the flat is being watched. By the people behind this, by the police who think I'm on the run for being a murderer. Doesn't stop me wishing with all my heart that I'd see them. That they'd see me.

Maybe for the last time ever.

"You done?" Niall asks gruffly. He's just trying to overcompensate for the softness around the edges of his voice, for the tremble of uncertainty in his jawline. I hold onto the cuff of my sleeve, chest feeling very tight as I look and look and look at my home and my family contained inside.

"Just this left," I hold a small envelope in my hands to be placed in a letter box somewhere round the corner. It's postmarked for our next- door nighbours but inside that is another envelope addressed to my Mum. I hope that's enough, that the neighbours will get it to Mum without the police taking it from her.

Or perhaps by the time it gets through the Royal Mail the world will be over and I'll be dead so no one will care anymore anyway. It doesn't matter- I just want my mum to see it. I want her to know.

"You could send a letter too, you know. To your family before..." I trail off, watching Niall as he struggles beside me, feeling just as bad as he looks.

He laughs bitterly at that, "And say what?" he shrugs his shoulders. "Got nothing to say to them. I mean, as far as they're concerned nothing's happened, I never went anywhere and in a few days time I'll give the performance of me life." He smiles in his twisted up way but I feel sick for him. It's one thing to know you're going to die and a whole other torture knowing that when you do you won't be missed. That the people who you loved will go on as if nothing has happened- because to them nothing has happened. Because you were nothing.

"I meant what I said before," he sniffs. "Olivia was the only family I had left."

At this, I whirl around to face him, "Not true, you've got-

"Don't say you and Harry and Joey," he mutters. "Dont you dare get corny on me, Tish Williams."

I smirk a little and nudge his shoulder, "Oh Niall. That's the thing about family. You don't get to choose us." He rolls his eyes at me but he looks lighter in the way he carries himself. It's good to see. And then I remember what's waiting for us, this little family I've named us. The letter, the look- those were my last requests and now there is nothing to distract me from what lies ahead.

***

Most nights I wake up missing Harry so much I can hardly bear it. Gasping, I find myself jerking my eyes open, drenched in cold sweat from dreams I can't remember. Because who cares about dreams? Reality is bad enough to begin with.

One night, after the third time these dreams jolt me back into reality, I shuffle in the sleeping bag on the floor of the parking garage and burrow down into it with my arms wrapped around myself. Niall isn't asleep; I can tell from measured breathing and the smallest glint of his pupils in the narrow light cast by the street lamps outside. I could talk to him if I wanted. But I don't.

Instead, I wrap my arms around myself and think about that first kiss after my teeth had been knocked out, how he'd threaded his hands through my hair and held me tight in that old woman's house. I thought about his body and my body intertwined that last time, before Olivia died and the whole world had gone to hell.

Saving the world, big speeches to friends- whatever. Right now I feel like I'm just just in this to see him again, hold him again. Or die trying.

**

And then the dawn rushes to meet me like waves crashing against the shore.

In three days, on Friday, the concert is going to happen. In three days it will be One Direction's big day.

And ours.

Leon and Kerry the rest haven't let me down, or more Trick's memory- I won't pretend what they're doing is about me in anyway. They gather up what we have into someone's dad's painting and decorating van. Checking on Zayn's body, wrapped up in tarpaulin is no pleasant task. He's getting less and less fresh with each minute, his skin starting to look pale and strange like your fingers after a very long very hot bath. We need him for Niall's plan to work. But I'm worried that he'll be at the-ah-sloppy stage of decay when time comes for us to actually put the plan into action

"You know, you could get really sick sleeping in here with him like this," Jay tells me as he waves his arms around the small lock up garage Niall and I are still hiding out in.

I laugh. A little hysterically. That really is the very least of my problems.

Actually, the guys are surprising me by how calm they seem to be. I am grateful for it; feel for a little while not nearly as shaky and terrified as I've been most nights. I know they've mostly all been in trouble before. Ran around for Trick, maybe, nicked some trainers from a shop and had to make a break from it when the security guards cottoned on (Little Trevor was always a raging klepto) Maybe they've been in fights, bad fights. Where big men and scared little boys pull out knives. It happens round our estates, no use pretending it doesn't and sometimes it ends up on the evening news and sometimes it doesn't.

It occurs to me, though, that they don't really know. Didn't watch Trick bleed out onto the backseat of a car, or brainwashed girls carving numbers into their arms, they don't know how wrong things can go- a house destroyed by clones or poor, sweet Olivia twitching on a spike. Maybe I should have made it clearer. Clearer to Clever Jay who wants to go to uni and Kerry who loves her little brother more than anything and Leon who'll end up running things on our estate one day, you watch.

If anything happens to them then that will be on me.

**********

We take our final recconnaisance mission to The Olympic Stadium that Wednesday. Niall, me, Leon and Kerry. It'll be easier to co-ordinate us as a smaller group. It's only to see the landscape we've studied in maps over and over in the flesh. To acess the weak points, familiarise ourselves with the way the guards operate.

And yet I can't stop shaking. Even now. Before we're even going to put our plans into action. I don't know how I'll cope on Friday,

From above, the stadium is a great ring slapped into the centre of Stratford, a little like a wide eye staring back at the sky. A couple of us have been to have a wander round when the Olympics were going on, had seen it on the television during the opening ceremony, Niall obviously not being one of them. It's early evening now as we drive to Stratford and we look like any other tourist or local come to see the bones of something.

I've borrowed my clothes from Kerry, changed out of the dirty One Direction t-shirt I wore the day Olivia died. It's just a little smeared with grime but I can't keep from imagining all of the blood on it. So now I'm in jeans and a jacket, my hair pulled back tightly and still blonde while the police photographs of me are all brunette. Hopefully it should see me into the Olympic Park for one day. After that it won't matter anyway, we'll be trespassing in the heart of danger. In trouble no matter what.

They have their objective and I have mine. Save the country and save a boy. Obviously, the two are not mutually exclusive right now. We already have our signals worked out for Friday; each of our numbers is programmed as a speed dial and each of us have a corresponding meaning. Mission successful. Danger, get out. Save me. Suicide Mission underway. For when there's obviously no chance of making it out alive.

I'm just ringing to say bye forever.

"Doesn't make sense to me, though," Leon comments as we talk through details of Friday's plan once again on the road into Stratford, closer towards the stadium that has been looming on the horizon for what feels like an eternity already. "Tish going in by herself while the rest of us go with you, Irish"

"I survived brainwashed teenaged girls trying to murder me by myself." I say shortly. End of the matter. From the beginning I've made it clear the rescue mission is mine. What Niall has planned is big and intricate while my idiotic fumbling in the dark for Harry like a needle in a haystack has to be smaller. Niall needs all the help he can get, I can't siphon them off.

Doesn't mean I don't think about asking. Clever Jay maybe or Leon to hide behind so he could be brave and I wouldn't have to. I think about Joey being with me, cracking jokes, being the same idiot he always is and my chest aches all over again.

We park the car a short walk away. It's a beautiful day, really, by all accounts. Seems set to continue this way for a little while with no chance of the concert being rained off then or cancelled due to snow and hurricanes on Friday. Fate isn't on our side, the weather isn't on our side. Honestly I have to wonder what is. And there are people already. More than sixty five hours before the concert and there are girls wandering in swarms across near the stadium. Stratford definitley doesn't look like this on your average weekday.

As we prepare to get swallowed up by a crowd, coming up from the Tescos down the road with shopping bags ready to camp out to get in line, I roll out my shoulders and stare from the twisted red spines of the sculpture in the Olympic Park to where the concert will be. 

First I try to picture what Friday will look like. Then I picture Harry, smiling at me, kissing at me. Looking frightened, in pain. Dying. 

It's too easy to imagine, I've already techniquely seen it; his clone bleeding out on top of me when I escaped from the facility seems altogether too prophetic.

Niall has seen me staring, frowning and twisting up my fingers nervously.

"He might not even be here,Tish," he warns in a low, grave voice. "They could be keeping the originals up North like before, they could be out of the country. If I was the Spindle I wouldn't put all my eggs in one Olympic Stadium sized basket."

"No. He's close by," I say firmly. Or at least I try to sound firm about it.

"What makes you so sure?" he titlts his head at me and I pull a face.

From the looks of him he's expecting me to go all wishy washy and be like 'I just feel it', because shagging him once and really fancying someone gives you some bullshit psychic connection with them or something. As if. And though he's not saying any of it- I'm still kind of offended he would think that I'd ever think that.

I only wish I could sense him. More than anything. Just get some inkling that he's close and whole and safe.

"First they make promises," I say, echoing Niall's words from what feels like a hundred years ago. "Wells was so convinced that he knows Harry and what he wants, remember? Reckons that he'll get him on their side with fame and girls and whatever. They'll want him to see the concert first hand."

"First they make promises, then they make threats, Tish. He could already be up North. With electrodes under his skin sending out shocks all through his brain, or in a cage with a million drugs being forced down his throat and inside his veins."

I shake my head violently because I can't let myself think about that."Then I'll go there," I say hotly with my fist clenched. "I'll go wherever. No matter what. l'll find him."

"Then I'll go with you. On Friday. To find Harry. Not all your friends are morons...just most of them. But they might not fuck up without me."

"You're kidding. This is all you. Taking them down, screwing up all their plans. You want it more than any of us."

"Yeah... but..." Niall looks at the ground and toes the dirt with the tip of his shoe. "Harry's family, isn't he?"

"And I'm gonna bring him home" I lean in close to him and lightly kiss the twisting burn scars on his cheek. The way Olivia would have done. He goes stiff momentarily but then relaxes a little. "You're the one to show those bastards what their personal and professional failure can really do"

***

Before we split up to cover more ground in the park, we run through the signal once again. Niall makes me, though I know it off by heart. And then we part ways. I've got my finger on five in my pockets, as a practice for Friday. The speed dial number that calls Leon's phone.

The one that means suicide.

There are people in yellow jackets everywhere already, with radios, watching and I pull my head down but try not to look shifty and suspicious. I'm just looking around, trying to find my friends, excited about the concert. Normal. Not frightened or twitchy. Not staring desperately in the crowd and at the barriers as if I expect to see Harry there, staring out at me.

And then I do see him.

Hundreds of him on posters and banners and T-shirts and its jarring and painful and I want to tell every person here to get out now, get away while they still can. It's worse than the bus full of girls from the North, there are so many people already. Three whole days before the concert. I can't even begin to imagine what it will be like on the day.

Hoping that Niall and Leon are having more luck than me, I feel like I'm staring at an impenetrable fortress. I need to focus, I tell myself firmly. I used to be good at this kind of thing, especially when it was picking out which car to rob and when. I pull out Kerry's old phone and snap a couple of pictures of a guard station close to me, making it look like I'm taking a selfie. It's a small box of a building, enough room for two people, a swivel chair and a desk no more. I wonder if they have passes in there, security codes, paper work. I get closer.

The guard in there is black and maybe in his early forties. He looks like a nightclub bouncer."Hi," I say affecting a breathlessly excited voice, "Mind if I take a picture with you? It's for my blog." My idea is stupid, I'm expecting him to look up stoically and tell me to piss off but he just gives me a bemused smirk.

"Hate to break it to you but I'm not in this band of yours. I know, I know hard to believe I aint a teen idol but it's true," he says and I laugh nervously. "What kind of blog?"

"I wanted to meet some of the people working at the concert is all," I mumble. The guard regards me for a minute and nods his head. Smiles.

"As long as you get my best side."

I get up close to the window and to the guard. Try to angle my camera to get whatever's behind me, but so it catches the sun and he can't see the image on the screen clearly too. I take a couple of close ups of the sheets of paper behind us before he cuts me off.

"You're not smiling! It'll look like I'm really boring you," he jokes. I must have been concentrating too hard, frowning as I tried to get a good shot. Pulling my head back, I shoot a couple with me smiling. Check back to see if this has him convinced.

It's quite the opposite actually.

His brows are furrowed as he stares at me. For a moment I'm perplexed but then it hits me.

My teeth.

They have to have been wondering if we'd try to stop the concert. I wonder immediately if the guards have all been told to look closely for a boy with burn scars and a girl missing her front teeth.

"Thank you," I say quickly, take my phone and try to walk casually away from the guard station. When I turn around again to look back he's talking on his radio, eyes still on me. I forget playing it cool and start running.

I hit two on the phone. Danger. And then drop the call. Trying to run through the crowds proves impossible and before I know what's happened, I'm being grabbed around the wrist and led away. A few girls waiting for the concert watch me, probably wondering what I've done to deserve such treatment probably. I start struggling, people stare. But they don't do anything.

Assuming that they are going to boot me out of the stadium and hand me over to the waiting police, ready to arrest me for all those murders I've apparently done- I twist and snarl and spit, trying to make myself as heavy as possible. I can't help Harry or Niall or anyone from inside of a jail cell. But I'm still only seventeen, a girl against a bunch of security guards. When they start to overpower me, bending my limbs in ways that hurt as they drag me away, I hear the crowd applaud the security guards.

But instead of outside of the park, I'm dragged into the bowels of the stadium. I'm sure the place has an internal security area, a lock-up of its own where criminal elements can be held. But after a little while walking, I don't think we're going there. The terrain had taken a descent, as if we have been going underground. 

I have visions of a broom closet, hands around my neck and my body finally, finally, disposed of in a ditch somewhere.

After miles of concrete walls and floors, synthetic lighting and copper pipes we reach a figure, leaning casually against the wall.

A young man in a suit. I recognize his rodenty face and dirty blond hair immediately from the first time I was arrested.

"Sup," he says cheerfully, as the security guards park me in front of him. He waves a red wrapper at me, "Want half a Kit-Kat?"

"Fuck you, Shit Face." My voice is weirdly level. I suppose it's because I've met him before. Better the devil you know than the one you don't and all that. But also I feel oddly calm because he's from the facility. If he's here, doesn't that make it more likely Harry will be too?

Maybe I'm too desperate to find any kind of bright side.

"You changed your hair. I don't like it."

"I don't like your face."

"Int she charming?" he says to one of the guards with a grin. He brings his hand down to the centre of my handcuffs and gives it a little tug. The guards turn one way and we turn another. "Bit of a reunion planned....Don't try to run this time. I re-ally do not recommend it."

At that, I kick him in the shin. Hard. Come on, he practically gave me an invitation to try and get away.

But before I can run far, he grabs me and pushes me into the wall. Pain explodes in my ribs. He grabs a handful of my hair and bashes my face against concrete. The world gets a little spinny, my hands push out in case he tries to do it again.

"Or you know, do," he hisses savagely close to my ear ."Been a long time since I saw a good mauling." Before I can ask just what he means by that, Shit Face turns around and whistles through his fingers, calling down the corridor. "Moving out now, kiddo."

I hear the sound of chains, echoing round the corridor as beside me Shit Face pulls a long metallic stick out of his pockets. A cattle prod. Bracing myself, I think it must be for me but it isn't. I hear Niall's words from a little while ago, when he was outlining the horror of the day Harry was taken.

Something went wrong....

.... I thought I was crazy, but him....

The only Zayn I've seen before now is the dead one going rotten wrapped up in tarpaulin back at the parking garage. But as this one lurches up the corridor I understand what Niall meant now.

"For some reason he's taken a real liking to ripping out hair," Shit Face whispers gleefully beside my ear. "Whole bits of it. Chunks of scalp still attached to the follicles. On himself, on anyone we let him get near."

His face is strangely placid. And undeniably good looking- among most of the girls I knew, they all ended up privately saying he was the sexy one- even girls who had no interest in One Direction whatsoever. But like Niall and his burn scars, a lot of this apparent attractiveness and good genes is marred. There are scratches on his face and neck, fresh ones. Some are still bleeding. His hair, so perfect on the tv is an utter mess, matted, missing in great patches. Revealing scalp, scabs, a mixture of wetly shimmering and dried up, desiccated flesh.

Even Shit Head looks a little nervous as he gets close to us. I notice how he holds the cattle prod out in front of him at all times.

Zayn stops in front of me. He looks calm, eyes intense and staring. But something about the rise and fall of his chest is wrong. Like he's breathing too fast. Like his heart is beating too fast. Like there's a storm raging inside his rib-cage. When reaches out to me with his left hand I see that there's dried blood caked underneath his fingernails.

I'm mortified by the whimper that falls out of my throat when he lunges at a large strand of my hair that has come loose in the struggle with the security guards. I'm even more mortified that it's Shit Face, moving swiftly with his cattle prod to tap Zayn on the hand, who saves me.

"Hup!" Shit Face says sternly to Zayn the same way you would with a badly behaved pony ."She's behaving. Not yet."

I consider it remarkable how far I've come since meeting Harry. A few short weeks ago I would have peed my pants at this short exchange for sure. But my underwear is dry ad they lead me on and on some more. I even someone enough courage to grit my teeth at Shit Face and ask "Where the fuck are you taking me?".

"Always so hostile, love. It's a surprise. You'll like it. Well, you might like parts of it."

I find that pretty doubtful.

There are more people now, walking around like they have places to go. Most of them not even flinching at the odd trio that we make. Shit Face leads me to a guarded door and stops outside of it,mumbling a few words to the guard who stands aside.

"Surprise," I mutter sarcastically under my breath.

Shit Face chuckles and opens the door. A wave of cold air hits me. Zayn gives me a less than gentle shove and I'm still weak and aching enough from tussling with security and being shoved into a wall that it knocks me to my knees. My hands sting against the freezing cold of the ground, shimmering with ice here and there.

It's a walk- In freezer. They're stuffing me into the freezer.

The word why comes to mind. I'm just about to ask Shit Face when the heavy door is slammed behind me.

Immediately, my teeth start to chatter. I pull the jacket around me tight, burying my reddening fingers up into the cuffs of the sleeves. With the door closed, with no windows, its dark, with only a few low red lights in strips along the walls. As I explore my surroundings, I see the breath curl out from my throat and when I draw my legs up into my chest to stay as small as possible, I disturb something beside me and it rustles

Plastic sheeting. Wrapped up around five figures lying on the ground.

I'm not alone in here.

I can feel my pulse in my fingertips as I get up onto my knees. Don't look, says something inside of me. As if ignoring them will make them go away. Or I can just pretend that it's ice cream and minced lamb and peas inside of the body bags- you know, normal freezer stuff.

Except I can't not look. And then I can't not see Because while every other body bag is zipped up shut one of them isn't. One is open- not much- but just enough to reveal a pale lifeless face and even in the darkness, in the cold, it's a face I recognise. God help me it is.

No, no, no....

My heart is in my throat, I can't help it as I let out a low guttural moan, staring and staring at the frozen corpse lying in front of me.