Voidborn

Chapter Four

Eighteen Months Earlier

'Come on, Cody, time to get up.' Ellen Green rolled up the blind in her son's bedroom, filling the room with sunlight.

Cody groaned in protest, pulling the duvet over his head.

'It's Saturday,' he moaned. 'Can't I just stay in bed?'

'You promised me that you'd tidy your room this morning before going to the cinema with Ben. So, it's your choice – you can stay in bed if you want, but I'm not taking you to his house until you've got this room sorted.'

Cody lay in his bed, listening as his mother went back downstairs. He stuck his head out from under the duvet and looked around. Yesterday, it seemed like a pretty good deal, but now, in the cold light of day, it didn't feel quite such a reasonable arrangement. His bedroom looked as if a highly localised but extremely powerful tornado had passed through it. Video games were piled up, discs out of their cases, dirty clothes lay scattered on the floor, a pile of discarded comic books lay next to the bed and countless dirty mugs and glasses covered every flat surface. It was, even by his elevated standards, a spectacular mess.

'This is going to take hours,' he groaned to himself.

He climbed out of bed and staggered across the landing to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and stepped inside, the torrent of hot water washing away the last of his morning drowsiness. He ran his fingers through his wet hair and felt the five-centimetre-long scar that ran across the back of his skull. He had no memory of the surgery that the scar was a relic of but he understood its significance. Since he was little he'd suffered from epilepsy and the device that had been implanted in his skull was to control the neural electrical storms which caused it. He'd had no seizures since and, although the procedure was experimental at the time, it appeared to have been a remarkable success. He had to go for occasional check-ups, but otherwise he barely even knew it was there. His parents had told him about it just over a year ago and explained he'd been extremely lucky to be one of the first people to receive the implant. Everything had been fine up until recently when he'd started getting really bad headaches that seemed to always start around the same area as his scar. His parents had been very worried and they'd taken him for a scan, but it turned out everything was OK. He'd just needed to take some anti-inflammatory pills and the headaches faded away. He hadn't had a headache for a couple of weeks now, but that didn't stop his parents fussing over him.

Cody threw on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt before heading downstairs to get some breakfast. He passed his older sister coming up the stairs.

'Morning, midget!' she said with a grin. 'Are you actually getting slightly shorter every day or is it just me?'

'Very funny, Jess' Cody muttered, 'but still not as funny as you getting dumped by Greg.'

'He didn't dump me,' Jess snapped back. 'It was a mutual decision.'

'That's not what he's telling everyone,' Cody said, grinning to himself.

'What do you mean?'

'Oh, nothing,' Cody said over his shoulder as he walked into the kitchen. 'You might want to check Facebook though.' His grin widened as he heard his sister running up the stairs to her bedroom and slamming the door behind her, almost certainly heading straight for her laptop.

'Will you please stop tasting your sister?' Cody's mother said. 'She's really upset about Greg, you know.'

'She started it,' Cody said. 'It's not my fault she can't handle a joke.'

'Just leave her alone,' his mum replied, frowning.

'OK, OK,' he said as he took a carton of orange juice out of the fridge. 'Where's Dad?'