Touch by Claire North Read Free Book Online Page B

switched.
    Johannes in my hands, my heart in triple figures, Christ, my fingers wanted to strike, my muscles wanted to strike, every part of my body was buzzing with adrenaline and I thought – why the hell not?
    I dropped Johannes and turned, putting my entire body into the blow, knees and hips, shoulders and arms, twisting and rising to deliver a punch under the chin of my nearest companion. His jaw cracked, a tooth snapping as mandible hit cranium, and as he fell back I leaped on top of him, my knees into his chest, my face against his face, and pushed him down, screaming with a voice only freshly broken. I hit him, and hit him again, and felt blood on my knuckles though I wasn’t sure where it had come from until the third boy grabbed me by the throat, yelling a name which I guessed had to be mine. As he pulled me off the bleeding mess beneath my knees, I grabbed his arm where it lay across my neck
    I had an arm across the boy’s neck, but I made it better, putting my left forearm across my right to pull tighter as the boy, bewildered and confused, writhed and wheezed and wiggled in my grasp. I kicked his left knee, and as he dropped, I held on tighter, suspending him by skull alone until his eyes began to roll and his fighting grew less, at which point and at last
    I let him go.
    And turned, breathless, to Johannes.
    He sat, blood running from a wide cut across his face, palms dirty and scratched, staring at me with mouth open, eyes wide. I looked at the two boys on the ground, and saw that they weren’t going anywhere any time soon. I looked back at Johannes. His lips were twitching from side to side, unsure of which torrent of thought they should express. When he finally found something, it was not the sentiment I had expected. “Oh my God!” he whispered. “That was
incredible
!”

Chapter 18
     
    That was then.
    Belgrade, the body of a man who might or might not have been Nathan Coyle.
    I bought an hour of internet time in a café behind the dark-domed cathedral of St Sava, opened a packet of biscuits and a sweet fruity drink, and went online.
    I needed a hacker.
    Though when Johannes Schwarb went online, he did so in an altogether different guise.
     
Christina 636 – Hi, JS.
     
Spunkmaster13 – OMG! How are you?
     
Christina 636 – I need a favour.
     

Chapter 19
     
    More photos in the Kepler file.
    Faces and memories. Places seen, people travelled.
    I pulled one from the folder.
    Horst Gubler, US citizen. First contact with entity Kepler, 14 November 2009.
    Current residence – Dominico Hospice, Slovakia.
    Good on the Slovakians.
    No one else would have taken him in.
     
    It takes twelve hours to travel by train from Belgrade to Bratislava.
    By plane the journey is barely worth the taxi down the runway.
    Get stuck on a plane, however, and your options are far fewer than they are on a train of several hundred diverse weary travellers. As for getting a gun through an airport – a train seemed the easier option.
    I caught the 6.48 from Belgrade to Bratislava.
     
    Notes on the train from Belgrade:
    It is a mish-mash of carriages and compartments, some Serbian, some Slovakian, some Hungarian, most Czech. A surprisingly high number of seats are designed for disabled passengers, though none are to be seen. An entire carriage is assigned for passengers who have children under the age of ten on the wise assumption that twelve hours with a mewling infant in close proximity is enough to drive anyone to a criminal act. The restaurant car sells variations on a theme of sandwich, soup, tea, coffee, biscuit, cauliflower and cabbage, all carefully reheated in the microwave to your exacting desires. The train crosses three international borders, though passports are checked only once, and were it not for a slight variation in the spelling of “toilet” as you pull in and out of long platforms, you might not notice the transition at all.
    I turned my
    this body’s
    mobile phone on as we crossed from Serbia to