The Remnant Keeper (Tombs Rising Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Connect

  Dedication

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  Friday, 3 May 2115

  12:15 PM

  12:30 PM

  1:30 PM

  Lavinia Wei Remnant

  1:55 PM

  2:01 PM

  2:04 PM

  2:54 PM

  3:56 PM

  4:30 PM

  Saturday, 4 May 2115

  Lavina Wei Remnant

  2:15 AM

  10:05 AM

  8:15 PM

  10:14 PM

  Sunday, 5 May 2115

  9:00 AM

  10:00 AM

  10:30 AM

  1:00 PM

  6:32 PM

  Monday, 6 May 2115

  Falling

  12:32 AM

  12:57 AM

  4:23 AM

  10:15 AM

  12:19 PM

  3:54 PM

  4:44 PM

  9:32 PM

  9:48 PM

  Tuesday, 7 May 2115

  7:09 PM

  11:28 PM

  Friday, 10 May 2115

  11:36 AM

  What happens next?

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  Acknowledgements

  The Remnant Keeper

  Robert Scott-Norton

  The Remnant Keeper

  Copyright © 2015 Robert Scott-Norton

  ebook Edition, Licence Notes

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  Friday, 3 May 2115

  12:15 PM

  On the morning that was to be her last, Keeley Winston was dealing with a hangover and the shrapnel of guilt from the surprise she’d tried to pull on her husband. Later, if her head ever cleared, she hoped things would make sense. The surprise was to have been one of those moments they’d cling onto for the rest of their lives. Instead, she was heartbroken, empty, and alone.

  She’d woken with a headache like a group of workmen had got inside her skull and were pounding with pickaxes. The wine had been cheap, and she’d drunk it alone feeling worse as she swallowed every bitter mouthful. Jack didn’t drink anymore.

  The Fuse Media building cut against the blue sky like a jagged tooth. She hurried from her taxi, across the car park, preying that she wouldn’t bump into anyone.

  The row with Jack shouldn’t have gone on for so long—hell, it shouldn’t have happened at all. She swore at herself for being so stupid. Inside, she paused at the coffee machine and punched in her regular. Even fake coffee would be good for her head this morning.

  A hand patted her back. “You OK?”

  She threw on her smile. “Fine. So sorry I’m late. What’s new?”

  Ella flicked her hair from her shoulders; she looked fabulous. Six foot in heels with a slender shape in her forties that made women in their twenties envious. A figure-hugging azure dress clung to her curves and Keeley felt pangs of guilt over the junk food she’d had with the wine.

  “You’ve had another row?”

  The coffee machine finished dispensing her drink and beeped, urging her to take her cup. “I don’t—I haven’t really got time. I’m fine.”

  “You’re still drunk,” she hissed.

  Keeley raised a hand in supplication. “No. I’m not. I’m just delicate. I’ll be fine. I’ve had a pill. I’ll work late to make up for it. Jesus, Ella—” She broke off as the tears welled. Ella laid a hand on her shoulder and guided her away from her colleagues’ glances. Once safe in her office, Ella closed the door behind them and sat behind her desk. A tissue appeared from somewhere and Keeley accepted it gratefully. “God, that man can be so infuriating.” She laughed.

  “What has he done this time?” Ella smiled.

  “Before the diagnosis, things were simpler. We’d row and be done with it. But now, he takes things so personally.”

  “He’s been through a tough few years. It changes people.”

  “I knew that being married to a telepath wouldn’t be easy, but I didn’t have that choice. He wasn’t a telepath when we married. I never had that option to walk away and leave him. I mean, I wouldn’t, he’s Jack. But—”

  “He’s not the man you married.”

  She stared vacantly past Ella, to the skyline out of the windows behind her. The OsMiTech building was perfectly framed in the distance between two other buildings on the commercial complex, a giant crescent moon, turned on its side so its back pointed to the sky. To the telepaths in the UK, that building represented the hub of the telepath world, but to her it represented everything that had turned sour in her marriage. People called it the Vault.

  She sipped the coffee, but it tasted like watered-down mud so she put the cup down on the arm of the chair.

  “What was your row about?”

  “What it’s always about.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “You’ve got that ‘told you so’ face.”

  Ella leant back in her chair, a light flush creeping over her cheeks. “I don’t think he’s the parenting kind. I’m sorry.”

  Keeley stared at her friend and wished it were possible to forget that Ella and Jack had once dated. Their relationship lasted over a year but during their time together Jack had met Keeley. Ella and Jack split amicably—there’d been no cross-over, but there were moments when she wondered whether Ella believed that.

  Keeley scratched her earlobe. “I hoped once he’d become more settled, and with the new house—there’s always been something in the way, a valid reason I could recognise. At first it was the flat, and yeah, it was tiny and having a baby wouldn’t have been much fun there. Then the surgery.” An image of Jack being wheeled away to the operating theatre came unbidden to her mind. “That would have been bad timing. But, things are better now. We’ve got a plan. The obstacles have gone.”

  Ella shook her head so slowly Keeley wondered whether she even knew she was doing it. “There are always obstacles. It’s just some are there and you can’t see them. A man like Jack will always find a reason to justify his position.”

  His position? She made this sound like political manoeuvring. When she went home things would be back to normal. He’d come down from his office and have that look on his face that meant he knew he should apologise. Today, it didn’t matter that he probably wouldn’t.

  “Did you ever talk about having kids?”

  Ella shifted in her chair, hands on the desk in front of her, held together. Her whole posture was rigid, uncomfortable. “Yes. It came up occasionally, but he never seemed too keen on t
he idea.”

  “Do you think you might have persuaded him?”

  A wan smile. A gentle shake of the head. “In all honesty, I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but this is Jack we’re talking about.”

  Keeley had changed Jack’s mind often. He might not have gone through with the surgery if she hadn’t pushed him towards it, afraid of the repercussions of him going through the Diminishment Process. She’d spent a lot of time on the dark net, hanging out in chat rooms and stacks where avatars were happy to share their experiences of living with telepaths. A whole support network buried where the OsMiTech network couldn’t reach. She felt safe there, talking to so many people. She’d become well known, and she liked to imagine her experiences were unique. Few telepaths underwent the surgery to be remnant keepers. That experience gave her an insight into the telepaths’ lives that many others wanted to hear about. She was almost a celebrity. Except a celebrity wouldn’t have to hide their true identity behind layers of stack encryption. For now, it was enough. In those chat rooms, she’d encountered those telepaths and their families who’d undergone chemical treatments to kill their telepathic centres. Despite the propaganda to the contrary, it changed people.

  No, it killed them.

  The treatment swamped their brains and wiped out all those little things that made them who they were. If Jack had refused his gift and taken the reversal treatment, he’d have become a shell of the man she’d married. So, instead, she’d coerced him into listening to OsMiTech. He’d followed their instruction like an obedient telepath, and he’d had the remnant surgery.

  And they had changed him anyway.

  Keeley rubbed the back of her hand. “He’s a good man. He has his moments, but he’s doing good work. I didn’t think it would be like this. Sometimes, I see the way he looks at me and I know that he blames me.”

  “Blames you? For what? Living the good life at the taxpayer’s expense? It’s a tough world out there, babe. You’ve both seen it from the wrong side of the street and you’re both better off where you are now. He should thank you.”

  That would never happen. Jack had stopped seeing his talents as a gift a long time ago.

  “He hates it. He’s asked me to stay with him whilst he does it and I just can’t. I used to give him excuses but he’s stopped asking now. He knows what I’ll say.”

  “Jack needs no one to hold his hand. He’s a big boy. You’ve had a row. That’s all this is.” She stopped. “Go to your office. Shut the door and wait this one out. He’ll be in touch before the day’s out. No one could be mad at that beautiful red puffy face for long.” Ella smiled and reached her hand out. Keeley took it and they both squeezed.

  “Thank you.” She wiped away a tear and left the room.

  *

  It had been tempting to dive straight into the chat rooms and seek more shoulders to cry on, but Keeley stopped herself. Ella was right: Jack was hurting because she’d gone behind his back. She sniffed and adjusted the heating controls. The musty air in her office wasn’t helping her hangover. She needed fresh air.

  She sat and called up the current output streams from their node. Fuse Media was a large organisation with offices around the world, and each district in the UK had at least one data centre. Their office had been designated one of the coordinating hubs and over the last four years she’d contributed to building up their office’s reputation.

  Much of yesterday’s news clung to positions in the top charts, threatening to block out newer stories. With a few taps on her keyboard, she demoted most of them. Stories about the war in America were not good news and wouldn’t help boost the morale of her network users. Instead, she found feeds lingering near the bottom that looked interesting. One told the story of a local pastor who’d used contributions from his congregation to set up a mindfulness retreat in District 35. People liked feel-good stories. She pushed it higher than she’d intended and it went bold as readers promoted it in their own streams. She felt a kick of adrenaline and tapped her fingers against the desk in a half-remembered blocking pattern she’d learnt last month.

  Her actions had helped demote the off-brand topic, but she could do with something more. She crawled into the sub-stacks and caught herself getting dragged into newer user-posted stories about the growing violence of Volunteers on the streets. Not happy times. She demoted the story, and it vanished from her current feed and that of Fuse Media. Readers would find it hard to stumble across that story now that the Fuse algorithms were working against it. A grin formed as she read a headline that promised the secrets to a happier marriage and she refiled the article into one of the junk streams.

  This wasn’t essential as the Fuse Media algorithms managed thousands of news items a day. But, the human touch made the Fuse network a brand worth returning to.

  With a sigh, she leaned back in her chair and stretched out her toes. The pills had done their job, and although her mouth still felt like a small creature had curled up and died in there, at least she could think straight. Jack was being a prick. Nothing she’d done had been wrong. Sometimes it felt like she was a passenger in her own marriage and the one time she’d made a decision on her own, he’d come down on her like a bastard. Well, Jack could go to hell.

  A message pinged on her screen. She leaned forwards and opened the message. Rasputin. Not his real name, obviously. Informants liked to keep their anonymity. Those working in the police even more so. When he’d first contacted her—she’d always thought of him as a him, despite no evidence—she’d attempted to track him, but he was adept at using dark subnets to mask his identity.

  She scanned his message, then read it again. He’d included a snip of a feed and she traced through to the news article.

  Dr Fenton Hardwick arrested for misappropriating public funds

  The medical world was in shock today as the renowned surgeon, Dr Fenton Hardwick, ‘Consultant to the Stars’ was arrested on suspicion of running a hidden clinic funded by public funds.

  Hardwick had often been in the feeds giving celebrities the looks they’d always dreamed of. Never one to shy away from controversy, he’d often appear on netshows slagging off the work celebrities had received from other less famous surgeons. The man was a media whore and knowing he’d taken a fall gave Keeley a lift in her spirits. Perhaps the world wasn’t as hopeless as it seemed.

  The surgeon’s face appeared prominently in articles of his arrest. Drone footage, leaked to the networks, showed the police breaking down his door and flooding into his clinic. A balding man who’d taken less care in his own appearance than that of his clients, he looked old and tired, as he was dragged out of his Harley Street clinic and into the back of an unmarked car.

  The amount of police surprised her and added interest to the story. Readers were promoting the article faster than the Fuse algorithm could balance. But, Keeley didn’t know enough about the story to override its position—when in doubt, do nowt, her dad used to tell her. So, she watched as the story gained prominence, a small part of her revelling in the tragedy of such an eminent man having the rug pulled from under him.

  A second message from Rasputin flashed on her screen.

  Info for sale. Interested?

  Keeley hesitated. Buying information from personal sources wasn’t discouraged, but neither was it openly discussed at Fuse Media. Most of her colleagues used informants. Rasputin may well work for several of them, feeding out salacious drips to a hungry audience.

  She opened a chat box and typed:

  K_Historian: What info?

  Rasputin: re previous message

  K_Historian: I need more.

  Rasputin: then buy

  K_Historian: Don’t know what you’re selling.

  For a minute, nothing appeared in the message box. Her foot knocked against the floor and she fidgeted in her chair, glancing through the window into the open office area. Paul and Sanjay chatted by the water cooler. She wondered if either of them saw her coming in late or her tears leaving Ella’s office
. It shouldn’t upset her that they might have noticed cracks in her image, but it did. When she’d joined Fuse Media, Jack’s telepathy hadn’t yet emerged, and they’d both been humdrums. After his change and subsequent surgery to be a keeper, she might have remained a humdrum but her status elevated as far as office gossip went. They asked plenty of questions about what it’s like being married to a telepath; if only she’d had all the answers.

  K_Historian: U still there?

  Rasputin: delicate. Hardwick ran back-street surgery. Selling list of clients.

  Keeley nodded. Her hands trembled as she typed.

  K_Historian: How much?

  Rasputin: 5k

  K_Historian: 2k

  Rasputin: 5 or I sell somewhere else

  K_Historian: 2k or we’re through

  Rasputin: Talk dirty to me and I’ll consider

  K_Historian: 2k or I’ll sell you out you cockfucker

  She grinned.

  Rasputin: Wire me

  And that was that. Deal done. But at more than she could afford. Two thousand pounds would not go unnoticed for long, but Jack paid little attention to daily transactions, so it was an argument for another day.

  It took two minutes for the money to transfer and she sat watching the screen, biting at the side of her nail. When it came, a lightness lifted her chest: relief she hadn’t been ripped off. A few files came in the message package and she opened them all quickly, looking for the juiciest piece of gossip. And there it was—a list of clients as promised.

  The names on the list surprised her. A couple of backbench MPs with more money than sense; a sports personality who’d recently come out of a doping scandal badly; and a vid master who ran his own feed network, pimping out game clips to kids.

  Her eyes lingered on one name on the list, then continued scrolling through the rest until she stopped. A nagging sensation made her work back up through the list. She folded her hands over her stomach and sat back in her chair, hating this tingling in her chest. She wondered whether Rasputin had recognised that one name that was beginning to freak her out. There was a good possibility that no one would notice, at least not immediately, not unless they trawled through the same areas of the dark net she frequented. Keeley tapped the name with her finger, wanting to see more. A before and after photo appeared on her screen. Pre and post facial surgery. And the change was dramatic. Only a full face transplant could achieve such a transformation.