Free Skypoint by Phil Ford Page B

voice in the empty park made Owen jump.
    He saw the little girl from across the corridor on the thirteenth floor. She was peering at him from behind one of the big tree pots. Owen walked towards her. She was sitting with her back to the pot, a big book balanced on her drawn-up knees.
    ‘Alison. Right?’
    ‘Alison Lloyd ,’ she corrected indignantly.
    Owen smiled and wondered if the girl was playing him. He asked her what she was reading. If she told him it was a book, then she was playing him.
    ‘Fairy stories,’ she said.
    Owen crouched down. Maybe it wouldn’t feel quite so strange talking to a kid in a playground if he was kind of the same height. Next to her on the floor was some kind of pixie doll, faded and worn. It looked like the kind of thing that kids sometimes inherited from their parents’ old toybox. It looked like it had had a hard life; it had lost one pointed ear and a bright green eye. But the little girl loved it; it looked like she had been reading to it before Owen disturbed her.
    ‘Which fairy story?’ he asked.
    ‘Rapunzel,’ she told him.
    The story of a golden-haired girl locked in a high tower. She didn’t seem to see the irony of it. Why would she? Did kids get irony at six, or whatever she had said she was earlier.
    ‘Mr Pickle likes it.’
    It looked like Mr Pickle was the doll. Pickle the Pixie. Why the hell not?
    ‘Do you play with the other kids up here?’ Owen asked, casting a glance around him, wondering where Alison’s mother was.
    ‘What other kids?’
    ‘There aren’t any other kids living here?’
    ‘Not yet. Mum says there will be one day.’
    ‘Must be a bit lonely.’
    Alison shrugged.
    ‘Did you have plenty of friends where you lived before?’
    Alison frowned. ‘Don’t remember.’
    See, this is why you don’t get on with kids. Always playing bloody games. And what the hell are you doing squatting on the floor with her like this? When her mum shows up what sort of a pervert is she going to take you for?
    Owen got to his feet, feeling the child’s eyes on him. He couldn’t make up his mind if they were suspicious – maybe she already had him down as a perv (kids these days grew up too quick; maybe they had to) – or somehow betrayed, like she didn’t want him to go.
    ‘What sort of accident did you have?’ she asked.
    She was looking at his hand again.
    ‘I shut it in a door,’ he lied.
    ‘That was stupid.’
    Not so stupid as breaking your own finger to prove a point. That was stupid when you were alive, when a walking corpse did it and the damage was never going to get fixed – now that was really stupid!
    ‘Yeah,’ he admitted.
    ‘I had an accident,’ she said.
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘A car hit me and Mummy, and I died.’
    Owen felt oddly like the world had just shifted around him. Not by much, just a couple of disorienting degrees. Just for a moment. He knew the feeling, it had happened to him before. The first time had been when he saw the thing that had been living in his fiancée’s head: the alien parasite that had killed her, the thing that had led him to Torchwood. The last time he had felt it had been when Jack had brought him back from the dead and he had realised what he was. It was the feeling that the world was never going to be the same again.
    She wasn’t dead like him, he understood that. She had been hit by a car and either paramedics had got her heart going again at the scene or she had died for a few seconds later in the operating theatre. Either way, she had been to the same place he had. She had seen the same thing he had, she had felt it. And if his tear ducts had worked he would have wept for her. Inside, he cried anyway.
    ‘What happened?’ he asked, his voice little more than a whisper, and he found that he was crouched down with her again.
    Alison looked at him, and it didn’t feel like he was looking into the eyes of a child, yet her voice was without drama, matter-of-fact: ‘Do you mean the accident, or