Chapter One
Sixteen Days
Luther Tollsby got hit by a lorry on a Tuesday morning because he stepped into the road to let four strangers past.
It wasn’t even his shift. Someone at work had texted at half six asking him to cover, and Luther had said yes before he’d finished reading the message, because that was what he did. He said yes. He got out of the way. He’d been doing both for twenty-three years, and nobody had ever once noticed him doing either.
So he was walking down London Road in the rain, hood up, and four lads came the other way down the narrow bit by the bookies, walking side by side, and they didn’t move. People never moved for Luther. He stepped off the kerb to go round them.
He heard the horn after the lorry hit him, which is the wrong way round. He had time to think exactly that — that’s the wrong way round — and then the front of the lorry folded him up and the road came at him and something inside his right arm made a noise he’d never heard before. He saw the sky. He saw one of his shoes lying on the tarmac a long way from his foot.
Then nothing. For four minutes.
The room he woke up in wasn’t a hospital.
It was a waiting room. Plastic chairs in rows, a carpet nobody had chosen, a ticket machine on the wall with a red counter that didn’t say a number. It didn’t say anything. There were no doors. Luther was soaking wet and wearing one shoe, and somehow none of that felt strange.
There was a woman at the counter.
He would never be able to remember her face. He’d remember everything else — her voice, the way she smelled clean like a chemist’s, the way she turned the pages of the file in front of her. His file. His name was on it.
“Tollsby, Luther James,” she said. “Sit anywhere. There’s no queue.”
He sat. “Am I dead?”
“You’re between appointments.”
She read for a long time. Once she turned back a page and read something again, and stopped, and pressed her hand flat on the paper.
“I’ve read your file twice, Mr Tollsby,” she said. “I don’t read anything twice. Twenty-three years, and you’ve never once been first. Not for anything. Not at school, not at work, not in a queue. Nobody has ever moved for you.” She looked up at him.
That was the part he’d keep. People had looked near Luther his whole life — over his shoulder, past him at the clock. She looked straight at him, as if there were something there to see.
“You died on a wet pavement, getting out of the way of people who didn’t notice,” she said. “That is an embarrassment. I’m allowed to fix it. A gesture of goodwill, you’d call it.”
“Fix it how?”
“You’ll find out when you wake up.” She tied the file shut with string. “There’ll be terms. Nobody reads them.”
He felt the room starting to end, the way you feel the last page of a book coming.
“What do I call you?”
“Whatever helps.”
She’d looked at him like a teacher had once, years ago — the only adult who’d ever told him he was clever — and the word came out before he could stop it.
“Miss.”
Something almost happened at the edge of the face he couldn’t hold.
“Will I see you again?”
“That depends on you.”
The ticket machine clicked. The red counter flicked to 1.
He woke up sixteen days later to a nurse saying “Oh-ho,” like he was a cake that had risen when nobody expected it to.
Her name was Eunice. She worked nights. She’d clearly done this a thousand times and was going to do it properly anyway, and once the doctors had finished shining lights in his eyes and asking him the year, she gave him water on a little pink sponge, and it was the best thing he had ever tasted.
“Sixteen days,” she said, fitting the blood-pressure cuff. “Lorry. London Road. You were dead four minutes at the scene, so they say.”
“Sorry,” said Luther. It just came out. It always did.
Eunice looked at him over her glasses. “Sixteen days in a coma and the first thing he does is apologise.” She wrote something down. “Your mum’s been in. Twice. She rang tonight when we let the family know — she’ll be in Saturday, Friday’s her big shop.”
Fair enough, Luther thought, automatically. Sainsbury’s does get busy.
“Your brother came the once. Big lad. Took your games console home with him.” A small pause. “For safekeeping, he said.”
Luther nodded, because there wasn’t much else to do with that.
“Nobody from work?”
“No, love.”
Four years at Halcyon. He answered the phone all day to people who were furious at the company, and apologised to them on the company’s behalf, and he was good at it. He’d never had lunch with anyone there. He’d never been asked. He wasn’t disliked; he was just the shape of someone you didn’t notice, and he’d stopped minding so long ago he couldn’t remember minding. His phone had six contacts in it and two of them were takeaways.
“And then,” Eunice said, “there’s your two o’clock.”
She nodded at the windowsill. Six bottles of Lucozade were lined up on it, biggest to smallest, and next to them was a Tupperware box with a note taped to the lid in block capitals.
PROPER FOOD. NO RUSH GETTING UP. — W.
“Every day. Two o’clock on the dot. Sits in that chair and talks to you. Football, mostly. We had to tell him to stop bringing food, and he looked like we’d shot his dog.” She turned the light down. “It’s the driver, love. The one who hit you. Get some sleep.”
Luther lay in the dark and looked at the Lucozade for a long time.
The screen turned up at about three in the morning.
No noise. No flash. One blink it wasn’t there and the next it was — a black rectangle hanging in the air above his knees, like a phone screen with nobody holding it. White writing.
WORLD DOMINATION SYSTEM v1.0 USER: TOLLSBY, LUTHER J. LEVEL: 1 STR 31 | END 23 | AGI 38 | INT 71 | CHA 16 | WIL 29 [HUMAN LIMIT = 100] DOMINATION POINTS: 0 RANK: NONE — YOU DO NOT YET CONTROL YOURSELF
He read it four times.
The name was right. It even had the J in the middle. The numbers meant nothing until he saw the bit in brackets — a hundred was the most a human could be — and then they meant a lot. Fifty was probably normal. He was under fifty in almost everything. One seventy-one, for intelligence, sitting there like a good exam result in the wrong subject.
And a sixteen. For charisma.
He’d have taken thirty. Thirty would have been generous. Sixteen didn’t even feel like an insult; it felt like a bank statement. Somebody had actually counted.
“Right,” he whispered. “Head injury. They said the word. Contusion.”
He closed his eyes, counted to thirty, opened them. Still there. Not wobbling, not flickering. It looked more real than the ward did.
“What are you?”
The top line got very slightly brighter, the way a person taps their name badge.
“I’m hallucinating you.”
NO.
“That’s exactly what a hallucination would say.”
The screen didn’t bother answering that. Instead, a new line appeared underneath.
QUEST: STAND UP. REWARD: 10 DP
“I’ve been in a coma for sixteen days,” Luther said. “My legs are a rumour.”
THE QUEST IS TWO WORDS.
“And if I don’t?”
OR: REMAIN.
That was all. Just that one word. Luther looked at it, and then — without deciding to — at the vinyl armchair by the window, the hospital kind, made for visitors who don’t stay long.
He knew a man who’d stayed. He knew the chair, and the telly in front of it, and the view of both from the doorway where a boy had stood half his childhood, waiting for the back of his father’s head to turn round.
He looked at the quest a while longer.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “When there’s a witness.”
And he went to sleep, which he was fairly sure was the first decision he’d made in years.
Wes came at two o’clock, because Wes always came at two o’clock.
Luther was awake for it. He was propped up on pillows, watching the curtain, and he still wasn’t ready for the size of the man who came through it. Not gym big — work big. Shoulders like a wardrobe, hair going at the top, mid-forties, a folded-up hi-vis jacket under one arm. He was holding a bunch of petrol-station carnations upside down like someone had asked him to look after them.
And his face. Luther had only ever seen that face on dogs tied up outside shops.
“You’re awake,” Wes said, and then couldn’t find the next bit, and stood there while the carnations dripped.
“You’re the driver.”
“Yeah.” He put the flowers on the table. Moved them. Moved them back. “They’re rubbish. It was them or a balloon.” He sat down in the chair, which creaked, and rubbed his hands on his knees. “They wouldn’t tell me anything, because I’m not family. So I just kept coming. I know that’s weird.”
“You told my coma about the football.”
“Palace lost twice while you were under. You didn’t miss anything.”
He almost smiled, and then he didn’t, and he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor.
“I’ve gone over it a thousand times. They’d given me nine minutes to get from Purley Way to the depot. Nine minutes, half eight in the morning — it can’t be done, everybody says so, my union bloke, my sister, the insurance. Everybody’s got a chart.” He looked up. “But I looked down, mate. Two seconds. The tablet beeped and I looked at it, and you were there, and then you weren’t. That bit’s mine. I’m not giving that bit to a chart.”
Luther had listened to angry people for a living for four years. Nobody had ever sat down and handed him something like that — whole, no wrapping, just here. And when he looked for the anger he thought he should be feeling, he couldn’t find any. There was the horn, the wrong way round. And there was this bloke.
“I stepped into the road,” Luther said. “There were four of them on the pavement and I got out of their way. I’ve been getting out of people’s way my whole life. You’re just the first one it didn’t work on.”
Wes frowned at that like it was in a language he half knew. “You don’t have to—”
“I’m not letting you off. I’m telling you what happened.”
Wes thought about it. Nodded, slowly. And when he spoke again it was in a different voice — steadier, like he’d practised it in the van, which Luther suspected he had.
“I’m not a churchy bloke,” Wes said. “Never have been. But I stood in that ambulance bay while they were working on you, and I swore something. I didn’t decide to. It just got sworn.” He turned the folded jacket over in his hands. “Whatever you need. Lifts, moving house, someone to stand next to you. I don’t know what your life’s got in it. But whatever wants doing, I’m doing it, for as long as I’m around. That’s it. That’s what I came to say.”
The ward went on around them. Trolleys. Somebody’s phone.
Every instinct Luther had reached for the way out. That’s really kind, but there’s no need. Honestly, I’m fine. You don’t owe me anything. He’d been handing back every kindness before it was out of the wrapping for twenty-three years, because taking things meant believing you were the kind of person things were for.
And nobody had ever offered him anything like this. Nobody had ever offered him anything.
He looked at Wes, who’d come every single day, and who meant every word, and who would plainly be more hurt by a no than by anything else that had happened to him this month.
“Alright,” Luther said.
Wes blinked. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what I’ll need. Nobody’s ever—” He stopped that sentence. “But alright. Thank you.”
For a second neither of them knew where to look. Then Wes let out a breath that seemed to empty him by a third, said “Right. Good. Right,” and reached for the Tupperware like a man getting back on dry land. “Get that down you before the day nurse finds it. My sister’s lasagne.”
And above the lasagne, without any fuss, the screen wrote itself a new line.
HOLDINGS — FIRST ENTRY COBB, WESLEY R. — LOYALTY — 97% NOTE: VERIFY INSTRUMENT NOT DEFECTIVE +160 DP
Luther read it while Wes got the lid off. Ninety-seven per cent. He’d said one word and a man he’d known twenty minutes was in an account with his name on it. Something about that made him uneasy, and he decided, without quite putting it into words, that the screen could keep its books and he’d keep his own.
The lasagne was, in fairness, outstanding.
“Wes,” he said, when it was gone. “I’m going to stand up. I need you not to help.”
“Not help.”
“Just be there. In case.”
Wes took that like an order, got up, and stood at the foot of the bed with his arms half out, like a goalkeeper who’d been told not to save anything.
It took four tries. Rail down. Legs over the edge one at a time. The drip pulling at his hand and the floor a long way off and cold. He held the rail, counted to three, and pushed himself up — and the room tipped sideways, and he tipped with it, and held, on legs like wet rope, one hand welded to the rail, with the rain running down the window and Wes’s enormous hands hovering six inches off his elbows —
For four whole seconds.
He came down in a heap and sat there breathing like he’d carried a wardrobe upstairs, and looked up, and Wes was grinning like it was Christmas.
QUEST COMPLETE: STAND UP. +10 DP
“Four seconds,” Luther said.
“I counted five.”
“You’re rounding up.”
“I’m rounding up,” Wes agreed, and helped him back into bed anyway, because there was not-helping and there was not-helping.
At the curtain, cap on, he stopped. “Two o’clock tomorrow?”
“Two o’clock.”
When he’d gone, Luther lay looking at the screen. A hundred and seventy points, whatever they were for. LEVEL 2 AVAILABLE — 100 DP, whatever that meant. And that last line, still sitting where it had been all night.
RANK: NONE — YOU DO NOT YET CONTROL YOURSELF.
“Yeah,” Luther said, to the ceiling and the rectangle and whoever it was that handed out gestures of goodwill. “I’m working on it.”
The top line got one shade brighter.
He was almost sure it was pleased.