MetaWars: Fight For The Future

Chapter 2

The ground shook beneath Jonah’s blades, his ears were assailed by a blast of noise, and a wave of heat slammed his left side.

Jonah lost his balance. He tried to recover, but his body betrayed him. His arms and legs lashed out in an unco-ordinated flounder. His blades ran away with themselves, and sent him head over heels. Jonah landed on his back, struggling to breathe from the impact.

He looked up at the burning warehouse store, a thick plume of smoke billowing up to obscure the moon. The giant sign cracked and blistered until its words of encouragement were completely lost. A pulsating alarm pierced the night. Jonah didn’t know if the explosion was an accident or the work of terrorists, but right now he didn’t care.

A few other racers had been stopped in their tracks – the kid in the razor wire bled from where the debris had pushed his deadly decorations through his jacket – but the three leaders were surging ahead. Jonah clambered to his feet and pushed off again with all his strength. He couldn’t give up now.

Against the orange glow of the burning building, Jonah spied two fleeing silhouettes. They ran out into the street, directly in front of him.

He crisscrossed his blades to avoid a collision, but instead thumped into a muscular racer, who shoved him back into one of the silhouettes. A girl.

Jonah reached around her body, almost hugging her to keep himself upright. He noticed her short red hair and her green eyes, which widened with alarm. She was beautiful, he thought – but she was also in his way.

The second silhouette – a man in black coveralls – appeared and pulled the girl away. They dashed across the street and disappeared into darkness.

Jonah turned his attention back to the race, but it was too late. He could see the first of the other racers now, skating past the row of recycling machines that marked the finishing line. It was over. Jonah had lost. Again.

He skated up to the organisers – a cabal of four rough-looking teenagers, not much older than him – to protest. ‘Aren’t you going to call a rerun?’

But they shook their heads in dismissal. The winner, a hulking kid, who, judging by his sleek six-wheel skates, didn’t need the money, laughed at Jonah as he swiped his cash-card through the hand-held machine. It instantly transferred thousands of meta-dollars to his account.

‘But the explosion,’ he cried. ‘That wasn’t fair! I was... I could have won! If you knew how much I needed...’

His voice tailed off. No one was listening. Jonah’s cheeks burnt fiercely with the injustice of it all, but there was nothing he could do.

The racers were already dispersing, melting into the nocturnal shadows, and an older kid rolled up behind Jonah and suggested he do the same. ‘Probably another terrorist attack,’ said the kid, ‘so you know there are going to be police bikes and fire-bots here any minute. You should get home before they see you.’

He was right, of course. The last thing Jonah needed right now, on top of everything else, was to be caught breaking curfew.

Sam sprinted away from the frantic boy on wheels. She looked back just once to see if she was being followed, but the boy had gone. What if he could describe me to the police? she thought.

The explosion had been bigger than she had expected. They had used too much plastique. Sam had said as much, but Axel had insisted it was better too much than too little. The important thing was that the servers were completely destroyed.

In the mouth of an adjacent alleyway, they checked themselves for injuries. In the light of the flickering fire, Sam checked herself over, then her father, for cuts and scrapes. They were both unscathed – which was something of a miracle. Axel didn’t seem to care that they could have been hurt badly. More likely, he hadn’t even thought about it.

Sam tugged at his sleeve, anxiously. ‘The police will be on their way,’ she reminded him, ‘along with everybody else.’

Axel accepted the caution, and they raced for their bikes.

They had pedalled a good, safe ten blocks away before they heard the first sirens approaching.

‘We could have been killed tonight,’ said Sam, leading her father down a series of back streets that she had mapped out in advance. ‘Was it worth the risk?’

‘We hit the Millennials where it hurts,’ said Axel. ‘In the wallet. Those servers held the details of hundreds of thousands of their e-commerce operations.’

‘Even so,’ said Sam, ‘it’s just a drop in the ocean!’

‘You wait, kiddo,’ said Axel. ‘You wait and see. We’ve just cost the Millennials a few million meta-dollars, and that’s not even the important thing. The important thing is that the Metasphere will be buzzing with news of this tomorrow. We’ve made a statement tonight, struck a blow. For the Guardians. For freedom.’

‘I guess so,’ said Sam, although she wasn’t convinced. She knew that every time the Guardians destroyed Millennial property they also eroded goodwill and polarised public opinion. She often wondered, silently, if there was a better way to achieve their goals.

‘Don’t worry, kiddo,’ said Axel, sensing her anxiety, ‘we leave England the day after tomorrow. Once wefind those Four Corners, we’ll swing this whole war our way.’

Jonah’s mood sank even further as he rounded the last corner and saw the five hundred red buses huddled tightly together on what used to be called Clapham Common, but what Jonah now called home.

He had never imagined, growing up, that he would end up living somewhere like this. And now, it seemed that even this place – even a cramped bus-flat – might be more than he and his mum could afford.

The last few solar-powered lights were flickering, illuminating the bus-burb ahead of him. The wire mesh gate to the outside world hung open as it so often did, the padlock missing, no one bothering to replace it. His mum was always complaining about it. She said, one day, a burglar would march right through that gate, break into their bus and take everything they had. Jonah didn’t agree. Every Londoner knew that bus-burb residents had nothing worth stealing.

Jonah’s dad had told him once that, when he was a boy, this whole area had been grass and trees. He had come here to play football at the weekends. Jonah never quite knew if his father was kidding or not.

Of course, to hear Dad talk, everything had been different back then. Back before the world’s population hit the big ten. Back when petrol had been plentiful, water flowed freely, and global warming was just a disputed theory and not a daily reality. Back when schools and medical care had been available to everyone, not just to the privileged few.

As Jonah threaded his way through the labyrinth of red metal, avoiding pools of stagnant rainwater and broken glass, he thought to himself that his father’s childhood Britain sounded like it was out of a fairy tale. He still lost his way sometimes among the long-shuttered buses, but he could always find his bus by its number, 137, and by the name displayed in white lettering on its front: Marble Arch.

Dad was gone now. It was since he had died – since he had been killed three years ago – that everything had gone wrong for Jonah’s family. His mum had been unable to keep up the rental payments on their little flat in Brockley so she took Jonah to live in the Battersea Power Shelter for months before she found them an upper-deck flat in the Boris Bus.

Jonah’s bus was dark, both the upper and lower decks. He was relieved that his mum was asleep, and that his downstairs neighbours, Mr and Mrs Collins, who ran a meta-pub out of their flat, were too. He slipped off his blades, pried open the rear door to the bus and crept silently up the curved stairs. He was looking forward to getting a few hours of sleep before logging into school.

He quietly hid his skates under a dirty pile of laundry that his mum wouldn’t dare rummage through and reached for his hammock.

And that’s when he knew he’d been caught.

‘Jonah Benedict Delacroix,’ his mother’s voice rang.

When she used his full name, Jonah knew he was in for it.

<<Jonah's just been busted by his Mum for sneaking in late.  Ever happened to you?  J>>