One Word Kill

'Reading “Red Sister” was like watching a Tarantino movie, (not the ones with the clever scripts, more like “Dawn til Dusk”) only without the humour, You find yourself spellbound by the action and repulsed by the people.'

In January 1986, fifteen-year-old boy-genius Nick Hayes discovers he’s dying. And it isn’t even the strangest thing to happen to him that week.

Nick and his Dungeons & Dragons-playing friends are used to living in their imaginations. But when a new girl, Mia, joins the group and reality becomes weirder than the fantasy world they visit in their weekly games, none of them are prepared for what comes next. A strange—yet curiously familiar—man is following Nick, with abilities that just shouldn’t exist. And this man bears a cryptic message: Mia’s in grave danger, though she doesn’t know it yet. She needs Nick’s help—now.

He finds himself in a race against time to unravel an impossible mystery and save the girl. And all that stands in his way is a probably terminal disease, a knife-wielding maniac and the laws of physics.

"They had us arranged by length in treatment so the ward looked rather like an assembly line, taking in healthy children at one end and spitting out corpses at the other.'

'If crisp white linen and no-nonsense smiles could cure cancer nobody would ever die of it.'

'She kept talking as I followed Mother out, as if the conversation were a rope and if she only kept it unbroken I would be held by it, unable to leave.'

'John’s one annoying habit was that he spoke his laughs. He didn’t laugh like a normal person . . . he said ‘hah’. It made me less willing to trust him. Laughter should be unguarded even if nothing else is.'

'John and Simon went to the same school as me, Maylert, a private school nestled up against the banks of the Thames. You didn’t have to be rich to go there, just not poor... ...Simon's parents weren't rich, a teacher and a university lecturer, but they stumped up the fees so that Simon would get beaten less viciously and by a better class of bully. Simon has "victim" written all over him: overweight, obsessive, and blessed with a set of social graces that made me look suave.'

‘Quantum mechanics.’ I held up the book.
‘Cool.’ Mia sat on the bed. Closer than friends normally sit next to friends. She smelled of patchouli oil. I liked it. ‘What’s that about then?’ ‘Well . . . it’s about everything, really. It’s the most accurate and complete description of the universe we’ve ever had. It’s also completely bonkers.’ I hesitated. I was pretty sure this wasn’t what you were supposed to talk about when girls came to visit. ‘More bonkers than general relativity?’ Mia took the book from the death grip I had it in. ‘The twins paradox is hard to beat.’ With a sigh, I relaxed. She was one of us! The magical power of D&D to draw together people who knew things. Who cared about questions that didn’t seem to matter.

Professor James had seemed rather surprised to see me at his door. He asked me if I were lost. I answered by asking him if he had considered the Ryberg Hypothesis in non-Euclidian manifolds above five dimensions, because it suddenly became provable, and that fact had powerful implications for high order knot theory. After that, he was all mine.

‘Of all the worlds, in all the universes, he walks into mine.’ Mia wrapped the Casablanca quote around Everett’s many-world interpretation and gained yet another level in my esteem.

‘creatures like Ian Rust were like the cancer cells among the crush of blood cells in my veins. Rare, but requiring only one to begin to pollute everything around them. Because ugliness multiplies, and hurt spills over into hurt, and sometimes good things are just the fuel for evil’s fire.’