The Escape

Prologue

I ’m standing by my bed when voices echo in from the corridor outside. People come into where I live from time to time, and they’re different from the people who look after us. Their skin is pink, not gray, and they don’t have lines on their faces. They wear colorful clothes and speak funny words.

“Sit down!” Crina barks at me, and I do it, because otherwise she’ll cuff me around the ear.

Windows sit high up in the concrete walls above rows of beds and cots. They’re open, and icy air is swirling in, making clouds when I breathe. Sometimes I see other grownups when I go out to the yard to run around and play, and I ache for one of the big coats they wear because I’m always so cold. Sometimes they have a dog on a piece of rope, or a big bulging bag, and I know they have food.

The voices come closer. Two men and a woman are talking, and it’s the mean-eyed woman who tells everyone what to do. A tremor runs through me. She has a belt and thick fists.

Crina drags Anton out of his cot. His cheeks are pink and he starts crying, and she looks toward the door and scowls. Please don’t cry—she’ll be mean all day. My eyes meet Bog’s, and his are tight and worried. A man in a white coat said something about us all catching … some word I didn’t understand. When I look down, familiar blue-and-white tiles stretch in every direction, and I rearrange the triangles to make different patterns in my head to see how it would look.

There are other voices now, and I look at the door as something wild grips my chest. These are people from the outside, I know it. Sometimes they come into our room with our cots and our beds and look at the babies.

I stare at the door as the voices start to move off down the corridor. If I want food, I’ve got to go now. I shoot to my feet and dart to the door. When I wrench it open, a man and a woman are standing there, and I’ve never seen anyone like them before. They look like a king and queen in their soft bright clothes. I race straight across the floor, colliding into the woman’s leg, and her skin is warm and soft under my hands. I don’t know why I do it. But when I look up at her and she looks down, words won’t come out of my mouth. I don’t know why I can’t speak—they say something’s wrong with my brain—but her eyes are green and shine down at me like a promise.

Some words I don’t get tumble hesitantly out of her mouth. The man next to her squeezes her arm as he says something to her.

But I keep staring at her face, and she doesn’t move her eyes away, either. It’s like we’re talking without words. “Food,” my eyes say. “Can you bring us some?” But I’ve no idea what her eyes are saying back to me. They’re green like the grass, and her cheeks are pink like Anton’s. Her leg is so warm, I flatten my fingers against her skin to warm my icy hands and she looks down, not moving. And that’s odd: The grownups here never want us to touch them. What is she thinking? Suddenly, she grins at me, and I blink at her. Her whole face has changed, her teeth a blinding flash of white. I’ve never seen teeth that color. Then she closes one eye and not the other and my mouth drops open.

A noise comes from behind and I know it’s Crina come to get me, so I tighten my hands on her leg.

“What are you doing?” Crina says to me, but I know for some reason she can’t do anything because these people are here and doing something would make her look bad. We’ll all get punished later, but there’s a drumbeat in my chest as I look up at the woman in the colorful clothes.

Crina grabs hold of me and starts to lift me up, and I dig my fingers into the woman’s leg, holding on for as long as I can. My hands grasp and slip over warm skin as I'm pulled away. Crina says something to the woman in the strange words, and then she lifts me up and carries me back toward our room. I stare at the woman over her shoulder. I try and say things with my eyes. “Please, please find us some food. I’m so cold.” I try and close one eye like she did, but I don’t think I quite manage it. The woman’s lips part, and she presses a hand to her chest as she turns and says something to another man who’s standing farther up the corridor.

The man says something back to her and shakes his head, and all I can think is: What? What did she say to him?

Chapter 1

Aiden A tremor is running through my hands and into the pen I’m holding. I place it on the desk perpendicular to my keyboard, and put my palms flat on the glass surface, widening my fingers. The sun streaming through the windows of my office is making the stark white walls glow, but for a beat icy air whispers down my spine. You’re fine, Aiden. I peer at Nate over the glasses I use for my screen.

“How are you feeling about all this?” I say. My head of sales grins. “Pretty stoked.” He narrows his eyes on me, a half smile ghosting over his mouth. “You must be over the moon.”

“I’ve spent the last six months with lawyers. Not sure I’ve reached the over-the-moon stage yet, and I don’t even want to think about how much we’ve spent on fees.” Months of sleepless nights ripple over my shoulders.

Nate’s smile widens as he shifts in his chair on the other side of my desk and crosses one leg over his knee, flicking at something on his jeans.

“What it’s costing them, Aiden. Costing them. Not our company anymore, remember?”

“You’re staying on for a bit.”

“Yeah. A few weeks. I want to make sure Sam’s okay.”

I move the blue pen into the slot between the green and the purple pen.

Something’s been going on between Nate and Sam for a while, but whenever I try to encourage that conversation, he shuts it down.

He gets up from his seat and paces toward the black shelves full of books that sit along the wall by the door. Why do I keep books? Something about the permanence of physical things has a hold on me, and otherwise this office would be an empty white box with a bunch of computer screens. Nate moves to the windows behind my desk, peering out onto the hustle of downtown San Francisco.

“She’ll be a cracking head of sales, better than me.” His words are clipped. There’s a long pause while I try to work out how to respond, but before I can say anything, he says, “What do you think of the new guy?”

Tod Beringer: the guy who’s stepping into my shoes.

“I really like him. Good tech background, terrific people motivator. He’ll be a better CEO than me, that’s for sure.”

Laughing, Nate turns back toward me. “You always did underplay your hand.”

I shrug. “Things need to move on. I’m well aware of my weaknesses, and I don’t have a huge ego that makes me want to be the boss.” I wave my arm out. “This was all a mistake. I wrote an algorithm that I thought would be useful to somebody, and it ended up in this massive company processing electronic payments. I’m still bemused that it happened at all.”

He laughs like he doesn’t believe me, but it’s the truth.

I pick up another pen and study the tremor in my hand. “What the hell do I do now?” I say.

“I don’t know. You negotiated stepping down. If you said you didn’t want to go, then I’m sure they’d be all over that, Tod or no Tod.”

The big fight we had at the board drifts through my mind: the annoying personalities, the anger I had to keep tamping down when the finance people didn’t understand or didn’t see what I saw. It’s been going on for years … decades, even.

“God, no. I can’t do this anymore.”

“Yeah,” Nate mutters, moving away from the window. He pats me on the shoulder as he paces over the thick Persian rug. He never could sit still for more than five minutes. Meetings have always involved him wearing out the carpet, and a sharp pang runs through me. We’ve had a few exceptional sales guys like Nate, so different from the developers sitting outside my office. He was the first commercial guy I hired, and boy, did I get lucky. He is steel and gold all the way through.

“What a problem to have though, eh? Hundreds of millions of dollars and the freedom to do whatever the fuck you like. The parties, the women …”

That sounds so unappealing. When did I ever go to parties? “Yeah, all the wrong kinds of women.”

Nate paces back and stares out of the window again. He’s no stranger to partying. I haven’t gone out much with the sales team, but when I have, I’ve ducked out before the strip clubs and the debauchery starts. Nate has burned through three marriages in the time he’s worked here. He even jokes about turning over women every four years.

“Definitely the wrong kinds of women,” he says with a chuckle. “It’s got to be better than one of your arrangements, though.”

I have no idea how he found out about what he likes to call my “arrangements,” but he enjoys ribbing me about it. At least I’m straight with women. I look at him over my glasses again. “Are you saying there’s something bad about having an upfront agreement? At least it’s clear.”

He barks out a harsh laugh. “I am absolutely not the person to give any kind of relationship advice. That’s like asking someone who’s repeatedly crashed a plane how to land one.” He chuckles, turns around, and grabs my shoulder, giving me a little shake. “Buy a fucking yacht.”

Now I can’t stop the laughter. I can’t think of anything I’d like less.

“And a plane,” he adds.

“Where the fuck would I go?”

“Fly because you fucking want to. Go to parties in New York on your private jet. God, only you could be questioning what you’re going to do with that kind of money winging its way into your bank account.”

“I’m not really questioning it.”

I squint at the ceiling, then at the glass walls of the fancy-ass office refit where I can see my team and be part of it all, even if I no longer am now. Where am I even going to be sitting in a few days’ time? Will I be slumped in my apartment next week watching daytime television? I won’t be getting on the metro or walking to work or pushing my way through the doors of this building. I certainly won’t be lifting my hand at the tech guys out on the floor or being sucked into meetings to discuss a hundred interesting problems. My stomach bottoms out. We’ve been working on this deal and nothing else for nine months.

Nate glances at his watch. “Christ! I need to go and close the Crammond deal.”

How can he be so confident? The plague of thoughts about things not working, about some bit of code or kit failing, never leaves my head. I asked him about it once, and he said his job was all psychological manipulation and when you worked out how easy it was to manipulate people, you never looked back.

“Thanks, Nate. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, for this company.”

He grins at this. “Don’t go getting sentimental on me, Aiden; I have a certain image to maintain.” He flicks his fingers above his head as he walks toward the glass door. “Thank me later when I’ve closed this deal.”

I watch him walk across the floor, then look back at my screen. It’s a picture of those humpy-looking islands that are so common in Southeast Asia. A knock at my door brings my head up, and my PA, Kiet, has his head around the glass pane.

“You want anything, Aiden?”

I take off my glasses and lay them on the desk. “What am I going to do without you, Kiet? Who is going to turn up and offer me coffee or lunch when I need it?”

He steps inside and pushes the door shut. “We’re all going to miss you.”

I grin at him. Like hell. I’ve got a reputation in the office for appearing behind people silently as they’re working—or not working sometimes. I’ve embarrassed a lot of developers while they’ve been gaming.

“What? Miss me sneaking up on people, you mean?”

He laughs. “You’re going to have a lot more interesting things to do than creep up on your team.”

I lean back in my chair and link my hands behind my head. Like what? The picture of the humpy islands catches my eye. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?”

His eyes go round. “You’re thinking of going away?”

I sit forward and run my palms down my face. “I have no idea if I’m being honest.”

“I think that’s a great idea! My parents are from Thailand originally, and I’d love to go and see the place they’re from.”

And that idea of going back to where you came from … A shiver runs down my spine. “Whereabouts in Thailand are they from?”

“I don’t remember the exact name. Some small village down south close to the Malaysian border. They’ve mentioned a place called Trang to me. I could ask them about Thailand if you want?”

“No, don’t worry. And a coffee would be amazing, actually. I’m going to miss you, too, Kiet.”

He gives me a small, sad grin and turns toward the door. I’ve made it awkward. Damn. “Thanks for everything,” I add.

He turns back. “You, too. You gave me this job when I couldn’t find anything but barista jobs. Not that they’re bad; it’s just that not many people would have believed I could …” He waves a hand.

I nod. I’ve always liked people who don’t fit in. People who need a leg up. One day, he called in at the front desk in the lobby downstairs and I happened to be heading out of the building. He didn’t have great qualifications, but there was something about him … When I got the reference from the coffee shop he was working in, it was one of the most glowing references I’d ever seen: a hard worker, a delight to work with. We took him on doing admin, and he worked his way up to being my PA. He scuttles out, and I stare out at the office, swallowing down the huge lump in my throat.

Staff are milling around the open-plan space. Several groups of people are standing talking in the breakout space. Owen, our Chief Technical Officer, is leaning over a desk explaining something to someone. Given where I started in life, I should be proud, so fucking proud.

So why does it feel like my life is falling into a hole?