LITMIR.BIZ

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when they created Neo-democracy, so Jimmy wondered what possible way there could be to protest about anything. The sound of a siren cut through his thoughts.

      “Just spread this message,” Jimmy pleaded. “Tell everyone.”

      He shut off the webcam. It took him less than a minute to post the clip of himself on as many video-sharing websites as he could think of. He knew Government censors would remove it as soon as they found it. They might even shut down the websites completely. He just had to hope that enough people would see it first, and that they’d even spread it themselves on to other sites.

      Next Jimmy found the newspaper’s publishing software and quickly set up some new headlines for the Gazette:

      FRENCH DIDN’T ATTACK.

      NO REASON FOR WAR WITH FRANCE. GOVERNMENT LYING.

      He knew they would never dare to publish anything like that, but Jimmy thought that if the staff saw them, maybe they could also spread the message.

      The wail of sirens was louder now and the whole office was filled with the flashing blue light. Jimmy jumped up from the computer and dashed towards the door, taking the half-scrunched newspaper with him. He could feel his brain counting off the seconds before the police came charging in. Every muscle urged him to race away to safety, but as his hand settled on the door handle one thought held him back: maybe somewhere in this news office would be information about what had happened to his family. Maybe he could even track them down and rebuild his life. A normal life.

      Jimmy could sense tiny vibrations in the floor. Somebody else had breached the building. He could feel the muscles in his thighs tightening to force him to run. Stay, he pleaded with himself. But Jimmy was fighting his own mind and body. Inside his skin were two beings interwoven. Only one was human.

      38 per cent of Jimmy’s DNA was identical to that of any other human being in the world. The rest was the template for something entirely new. An organic assassin. Not robot or machine, but even more deadly. A custom-designed being meant to kill for the British Government. His future had been programmed into his blood. It was his human side that constantly resisted that future. And that’s what had turned him from the Government’s finest weapon into their number one target.

      The assassin instincts in Jimmy were growing stronger by the day. He was designed to be fully operational at the age of eighteen, when his human feelings would be completely controlled by his assassin DNA. But extreme danger had kick-started his development early. He had no idea how long it would be before the assassin in him would take over completely, or what that would feel like. All he knew was that time was running out.

      Every second of his life he felt that tension inside him. Now it was as painful as ever. The assassin in him was efficiently marshalling his body as if he were on a mission. Escape. Survival. And rationally, Jimmy knew he should trust that instinct. Yet at the same time he could see the faces of his mother Helen, his sister Georgie and his best friend Felix. Were they still together? Were they still alive? He longed to comb the office, to study every memo, article and report. Somebody must have news of what had happened to them.

      BAM!

      He’d hesitated too long. The door jolted open. The wood smacked against Jimmy’s shoulder and the handle stabbed into his ribs. Before he could react, an enormous figure barrelled into the room. Another followed—two huge policemen, made even more bulky by the Hawk-801 body armour. Jimmy was knocked to the floor, but his powers were already working, fizzing through him.

      His fingers had locked around the door handle and as he fell he kicked out, jamming his heel into the lowest hinge. With a crack of splintering wood, the door came free from its frame and followed Jimmy down. Before the two policemen even had time to turn their heads, Jimmy jumped up, leaning his shoulder into the door. It battered the first policeman, then Jimmy kicked the bottom half of it up to crunch one edge into the second man.

      Through their grunts and moans, Jimmy picked out two noises. One was the crackle of a police radio. Backup was on the way. The second noise was the click of a Sig Sauer P229 sidearm.

      Jimmy didn’t want to wait to find out whether they’d really shoot a child. He couldn’t even be sure that they’d seen who it was in the room—that’s how fast Jimmy had moved. Instead he charged towards the empty doorway. If back-up was on the way, that meant there was probably nobody covering the corridor or the exterior of the building.

      Then came the shot. To Jimmy the sound of it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t even shocking. All human responses had shrunk away, swamped in an instant by his programmed instincts. The small explosion of the gun was almost pathetic compared to how Jimmy had anticipated it in his mind. And the anticipation of an assassin had yet again saved his life.

      Jimmy had already twisted the unhinged door to hold it behind his back. The bullet imbedded itself in the wood with a feeble thud. Another shot followed, but by then Jimmy had dropped the door and disappeared.

      While his limbs pumped with such power and speed, Jimmy felt supremely calm. It was as if his nerves were coated in something that numbed them to the fear, but still heightened his alertness. He raced out of the building, feeling almost as if he was flying. The drizzle on his face felt refreshing. The sirens in his ears were like hunting horns, driving him on faster and harder.

      Jimmy knew exactly where he was going. Hailsham was only a small town and his system had easily absorbed the layout of the streets. More than that, he was suddenly aware that his legs were powering him along a predetermined escape route. The assassin had already planned for this.

      He pounded away from the high street, cutting through the stillness, a bolt of heat in the rain. His steps reverberated louder as he left the sirens further behind. He wove along the residential streets of endless, identical houses, then cut through an industrial estate and vaulted the iron fence at the back in one huge leap.

      Now security lights gave way to darkness, but Jimmy had no doubt where he was. He’d found his way back to the playing field of All Saints School, where he’d arrived earlier that night. Despite the mud, his pace hardly dropped. In seconds he had crossed two football pitches and was climbing into the cockpit of a Tiger Hellfire IV helicopter, which was just where he’d left it.

      His chest heaved, but every breath of cold air seemed to pull in more strength to keep him going. Before he’d even strapped on his helmet, his hands were already darting over the controls and the chopper rose several metres off the turf. He carefully balanced the roll of the machine, but at the same time he reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled ball of newspaper he’d snatched at the office. There was one thing he had to find: a doctor.

      For a second Jimmy was mesmerised by his fingertips. A blue tint had bloomed across his nails and into the skin alongside. It seemed to glow in the faint light, reflecting the LED display on the chopper’s control panel. The sight made Jimmy feel sick. So far this was the only visible damage from the one thing that put him in more immediate danger than anything else. More than the police scouring the town for him, more than the British Secret Services, more yet than the assassin instincts inside him that were gradually overwhelming his human mind. As if all that wasn’t enough, he had radiation poisoning.

      The French Secret Service had tricked him and left his body damaged by massive over-exposure to uranium and actinium. A fully human body would have been destroyed by now, Jimmy was sure. But he had no idea how the radiation was affecting him. He just knew he had to find a doctor who could help him as soon as possible. He scrabbled through the pages of the newspaper. His eyes scanned the text with the processing speed of a computer, letting each sheet fly away into the night when he was finished with it. At last he came to a directory of local health services.

      By now he had brought the helicopter above the line of the buildings around the field. He hovered there. Where should he go? He studied the tiny print, his eyes’ natural night-vision enhancing the available light.

      Jimmy knew it would take luck to find a doctor who would examine him willingly. He was an enemy of the State, and anybody helping him would surely be found and punished. But he knew that out there were other people against the system of Neo-democracy.

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