Read Dead Man Running for Free Online

the turbine would need oiling before it would spin, and the panels would be too dusty to pick up what little UV radiation still filtered through the smog.
    He would be coming home to a cold, dark house.
    When Six rounded the corner, he didn’t see it at first. It was so different from what he had expected – the lawn carefully trimmed, lights blazing in the windows – that he almost didn’t recognise it as his home.
    Someone’s been taking care of it for me, he thought. King? Ace?
    Then he got closer, and saw the people inside. Two women in their late thirties sat at opposite ends of a table, with two young children between them, a boy and a girl. A platter of sushi rolls and a wok filled with noodles rested on the centre of the table. One of the women was waving a soup ladle in the air as she told a story, and the little boy was laughing.
    They live here, Six realised. Where does that leave me?
    As he stepped onto the lawn, a motion-activated spotlight snapped on, turning his skin ghostly white. The four people inside turned to look out the window and Six fled, sprinting mindlessly into the darkness, no destination in his thoughts. Homeless.
    When he was fifteen, Six had started keeping a journal. Writing up reports had always helped him understand the missions he’d done, so he thought writing about his life might work the same way.
    It hadn’t. He’d stopped after just two weeks, having realised the journal was only reminding him of all the things that his life lacked.
    I wish I was normal , he’d written. I wish I had parents. I wish I’d been born in another time, with forests and voting and police. The distant past, or the future, though I can’t imagine the future being any better .
    He’d locked the journal in a drawer and forgotten about it. Now he was living in the future, and had been proved right – it was even worse than the world he remembered.
    An hour of running later, he found himself back at Stillbank, the apartment block that held the Deck’s safe houses and the remains of the time machine. He’d travelled more than thirty kliks.
    The pounding of his heart and the heaving of his lungs had suffocated his dark thoughts. I can stay here, he realised. This will do.
    He caught the lift up to the forty-eighth floor and wandered through the gloomy corridors until he found the Deck-owned apartment. He went to one of the doors and knocked on it, holding up his fake Triple C so it could be seen through the peep hole. The door opened to reveal a burly Deck agent in a bathrobe with a folded newspaper in one hand.
    â€˜Can I help you?’ he asked.
    Six eyed the newspaper, which probably contained a gun or a Taser. ‘I’m looking for Ms Canasta,’ he said.
    The agent stepped aside and Six entered, grateful that the password hadn’t changed.
    The designers had done an excellent job disguising the safe house as an ordinary apartment. It was spacious, but full of homely touches – oven mitts on the kitchen bench, a baseball cap hanging from a hook by the door, books piled on top of the stereo. Six walked over to the window and stared out into the murky twilight. The agent sat on the couch, picked up a paperback from among the cushions and started searching for his page.
    Six had been assigned to guard duty at Deck safe houses before. Guards were permitted to do whatever they wanted to pass the time, as long as they did it silently – they needed to be able to hear noises from out in the hallway, or the barely audible ringing of the phone. As someone who liked to read, Six had never minded this restriction. But he knew agents who’d gone mad, having the TV right in front of them but not being allowed to switch it on.
    â€˜Is there a bed?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t slept in four years.’
    The agent pointed to the door of the adjoining apartment without looking up from his book.
    Six went through into another apartment