Blue Angel

by Phil Williams

  In the video, Barton crushed his can in one fist before tossing it towards the camera. The image jolted as Greivous ducked, then it started shaking up and down. The cameraman was laughing.

  Clueless fools. They’d blundered into something big enough to affect the whole city, and then sat around boozing and making home videos, while the doctor conducted brazenly unscientific experiments. No wonder the Blue Angel had taken advantage of them.

  Pax said, “How’d it work, then? You waited for a signal from the Blue Angel?”

  “No,” Barton said. “We usually only went to those blue screens for glo. The Angel gave a street name, where we looked for a hiding spot. If we found it on our own, fine. If not, the Invisible Proclaimer came.”

  “The prancing horse playing an invisible trumpet?” Holly asked.

  “The horse beat the drum,” Barton corrected. “The trumpet –” He stopped as Holly intensified her glare. “Essentially, yeah.”

  “A horse and trumpet that appears and disappears out of thin air.”

  “So did the glo. The weird thing –”

  “Not the horse with a drum or an invisible rider? That wasn’t the weird thing?”

  Barton’s eyes hardened, but he didn’t bite. “There were times that the glo appeared in spots we had already checked, even within minutes of returning to them.”

  “An invisible delivery man, too,” Pax said.

  “Something like that.”

  “Or a teleporter,” Grace mused, a hand tucked thoughtfully under her chin.

  The room went quiet, because there was no way to reject that suggestion without admitting there was no better one. Pax sensed they were missing something. She watched the projection as the camera twisted again, running over the writing on the wall. True enough, it was illegible in this low-lit, shaky recording. But Apothel had preserved ideas in that room, as he had in his book. What else was there?

  “The Ripton Chapel isn’t far from here,” Barton said, watching Pax’s face. “Relatively, at least. There was a blue screen near there, the laundromat one. I could try contacting the Blue Angel. It might not suspect me. At the least, it might give us more glo.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Holly intervened. “You’re not going anywhere, you’re practically disabled. And you’ve all been preaching about this Ministry – they’ll spot any one of us with facial recognition traffic cameras or something, won’t they?”

  “Actually,” the doctor ventured, “I’ve – well, my understanding is that they have the technology. Certainly. But. Well. They can’t monitor everything.”

  “What’s that mean?” Barton frowned. “We know what they’re capable of. Remember the Misty Cellar? A barman there heard noises behind the walls. Apothel found him when tracking a slather ghast and barely convinced him to share what he’d heard. The guy told no one else, he was scared he was going mad. The Ministry caught up to him all the same. Disappeared. No more Misty Cellar.”

  “Ah, yes.” Rimes smiled at the curiously dark memory. “Though they may have been tracking the slather ghast, don’t you think? Remember, they needed me because they don’t have much staff. I have – I don’t believe they can monitor everything.”

  “They certainly weren’t out in force last night,” Pax considered, recalling the two inept agents who had joined Casaria in his search for her.

  “Well, that’s just typical, isn’t it?” Holly turned this on Barton. “You always just assume, don’t you? We could be on a train to Manchester – we could be talking to –”

  “No we bloody couldn’t,” Barton snapped. “Even if they can’t watch the whole city, you think they won’t have eyes on major transport links? They’ll have the police looking out for us, at the least.”

  “Maybe...” Rimes started, but stopped.

  “Just say it, Mandy,” Barton grumbled.

  “They may be distracted. With the news this morning. You – you heard them, visiting, yes? They were more interested in the prael – the minotaur – than you. Now, I have my scooter – the scarf would hide your face.”

  “Look at him!” Holly cried. “He’s not going on a bloody scooter!”

  That silenced the doctor, but Pax’s mind was ticking. This cramped room was only going to get tenser, and she needed answers. She needed a sign that the answers were out there, at least. And if there was no way to get to Rufaizu, yet, then maybe she could bridge the gap between them with what his dead father knew. She sensed she might regret this, but what the hell, it hardly seemed safe here. “There might be a blue screen at that laundromat. And Apothel’s place, if it’s still there, might be unguarded. That’s good enough for me. I’ll go.”

  8

  After Rolarn didn’t answer her shouts, Letty started rummaging through his stash, searching for ammunition and food. His hiding place, in a human security safe, was a nice two-tier setup, with a lounge and living area on the shelf and stacks of weapons, supplies and treasures on the bottom. The safe sat behind the counter of an absurdly large human shop, long since closed down and abandoned, itself covering three empty floors; a vast open space that Letty had cautiously flown through, expecting all manner of traps. A couple of electric lanterns flooded the safe in yellow light, wastefully left on while Rolarn was out, but there was no other sign of life. If he was off raiding, it might be hours before he got back, days even.

  Letty wasn’t sure if she should be annoyed or not at Rolarn’s absence. She had little interest in connecting with a Fae activist; they tended to believe the war for control of the FTC had never ended, and that glory there – the overthrow of Valoria – would revive the fight with the humans. As they couldn’t get near the FTC, it typically resulted in violent infighting; Rolarn had forcibly taken this hideout in Broadplain from a gang called Vagnam’s Reds on the justification that it was of historical significance and belonged in the hands of a patriot. Really it was just bigger than the shoebox he’d been living out of. But it was an insanely big space for a single angry Fae.

  Letty had half-filled a bag with dried meat and bullets, and was moving towards the Fae dust, to give her fuel for the journey back to Pax, when a knock made her spin towards the open safe door. Her pistol was drawn, cocked at her hip, but the man had a shotgun on her, two fist-sized barrels, big enough that he held it in both hands. He was rotund, with a round, red-cheeked face and a comb-over of thin, straight hair that barely concealed his baldness. With his grease-stained beige suit and ruddy face, he looked like a failing shop manager who didn’t understand smiles.

  “You’ve put on weight, Rolarn,” Letty said.

  Ignoring the comment, he said, “This goes off, it takes the room with it.”

  “So lower it,” Letty said. “I come in peace.”

  “Doesn’t look like it.” Rolarn’s stare was unsettlingly steady, his beady eyes dark.

  “You heard what I’ve been through this weekend? I figured you’d sympathise.”

  “I heard,” Rolarn said levelly. “And I got warned you might come here. Seemed unlikely, since I also heard you got eaten by a human.”

  “Clearly, no damn human ate me.” She straightened up. “Not that they didn’t try.”

  “I’m glad,” he said, flatly. He nodded to her pistol and she nodded back. Together, they slowly lowered their guns. “There’s been all sorts of talk over you and your crew.”

  “That so?” Letty said. “Does that talk involve how the Ministry of Fucking Energy stole the Dispenser?”

  “No. The talk is that the Ministry took something inconsequential, which you and your boys were trying to flog.”

  “Sack of fucking lies. I recovered it – a marvel of Fae engineering, our best hope of taking back the Sunken City. Apparently Governor Val doesn’t want to take it back, though, sitting pretty as she is. I figured that’d be something you understood.”

  Rolarn kept staring with his dead eyes. “You lost a wing. How did that happen?”

  Letty scoffed, holstering her gun and turning back to his lair. T
he Fae dust was out in the open, a waist-high sack leaning against a stack of human coins. “I lost my wing trying to get help with the weapon. Trying to take back the place that’s rightfully ours.” Letty picked up a bag and started filling it without asking. It was only polite to share with a Fae in need. Rolarn didn’t react. Letty tied off the bag and shoved the takings into her backpack, then said, “My own boys came gunning for me last night. Val wants me dead. She wants the Dispenser buried.”

  “Val the Peacemaker?” Rolarn replied, with the clearest hint of sarcasm his dull tone allowed. “Promiser of everything the Fae can dream of?”

  “As long as everything is contained in the fake city she’s built,” Letty snarled. “Turns out she wants to preserve the FTC forever.”

  “So your eyes are finally open.”

  Letty curled her nose at him. Activists like Rolarn had a range of personal reasons to hate Val, but most of them stemmed from resentment that she was in charge and they, or their bloody-minded mates, weren’t. Still, she and Rolarn had common ground now. “How about you pass me a phone while you explain where we stand, then.”

  Rolarn hesitated, then gave a slight nod. He ambled to one side and rifled through a pile of small electronics, saying, “All this talk, it suggests you were working with the humans.” He held up a phone but kept it back. “Did you give them our tech yourself?”

  “Sound like something I’d do?” Letty said, struggling to keep her voice calm. “I spent nine years looking for that fucking weapon.” She snatched the phone. Rolarn let her.

  “You’re not co-operating with the Ministry,” he said, “but not eaten, either. My guess would be you’re friendly with someone useful, but lost our technology on account of incompetence.”

  “Try backstabbing and betrayal,” Letty snapped.

  “With the rumours circulating,” Rolarn continued, “I’ve seen a few old faces floating around Ordshaw. Unexpected ones. I’ve got a truce with the Tupsom Trawlers right now.”

  “Arnold’s lot?” Letty frowned at the name. The Trawlers were a low-rank street gang from the south of the city, the sort of thugs who slashed human tyres in the name of Fae supremacy. Gutter trash lacking Rolarn’s more idealistic politics.

  “A mutual benefactor brought us together,” Rolarn said. “Someone come back from abroad. As it happens, it’s someone who didn’t believe all this talk out of the FTC, either. Someone interested in meeting you.”

  “Fucking say the name already.”

  “No,” Rolarn said. “Not without a meeting.”

  Letty held back, sensing the gravity of his caginess. When you didn’t want to throw a Fae’s name around, it had to mean a very high price on their head. Valoria’s team of exile hunters, the Stabilisers, were expert at picking up on such names. So Rolarn had the ear of someone dangerous, who had both the funding and the charm to bring together the likes of Rolarn and the Trawlers. Maybe exactly what they needed, maybe the exact opposite. Letty said, “And what’s this someone gonna want from me?”

  “That depends on your connection,” Rolarn said, “to the human.”

  Letty hesitated, instinctively keen to keep Pax away from such a Fae. “This mythical human I’m friendly with? Responsible for losing our tech?”

  His face didn’t shift, stoic as a statue.

  “This feels like bullshit,” Letty said, shouldering her backpack over her artificial wing. Now she had two constricting straps on her chest. Great.

  Rolarn stepped out of her way, wordlessly inviting her to leave if she didn’t like it.

  “That’s it, you’re letting me walk?”

  “You’re the one that came here,” Rolarn said. Way too fucking sure of himself.

  “Say there was a human,” Letty said. “Say she helped me out. She’d be just about the only person who has. I wouldn’t be inclined to get her in trouble, would I?”

  It wasn’t something a Fae should admit to, in front of a Fae patriot, if she wanted to stay alive. Yet he said, “No.”

  “She’s good people,” Letty reaffirmed. “The sort we need.”

  “Then we’re on the same page,” Rolarn replied dryly. “You captured the FTC’s attention. Everyone’s remembering how dangerous the humans are, imagining how monstrous it was what happened to you. Presents an opportunity.”

  Letty could see where it would take them well enough. Use Pax as some kind of totem, get the Fae’s blood up. A great excuse to attack Val and her council. She said, “I’m not here to bring down the FTC. The Dispenser is the opportunity. We use it to take back the Sunken City, Val and her refugees can spin on it.”

  “Sure,” Rolarn said. “But one thing doesn’t exclude another. And you need protection.” He paused, reaching a particularly complex conclusion. “Bring the human here, and I’ll bring my chief. We’ll figure something out.”

  “Tell me who your chief is and I’ll think about it.”

  “That’s not my offer,” he said.

  Letty had an urge to smash in his unemotive eyes, make her own offer. Only he was right, even if her instincts warned her off. She’d come for help, and this place was big enough to hide the humans. “I don’t want to incite chaos. If that’s your idea, or your chief’s, you can fuck off right now. Understood?”

  Rolarn was frozen, like someone forgot to pay his meter.

  “Say something, you walking roulade.”

  “Bring the girl, talk with my chief.”

  “Give me your number,” Letty conceded, but repeated, “I’ll think about it.”

  9

  Sam found Casaria’s building porter housed near the bottom of a stairwell, in an office barely big enough to fit his chair and a mop and bucket. It was a stark contrast to the hallways she’d navigated to find Casaria’s apartment, with their waxed floors and leather-bound entrance doors, but it suited the building. The obnoxiously tall half-glass tower lorded its wealth in contrast to its surroundings, all looks over practicality. The soulless interior made Sam happy she’d never visited when Casaria invited her. She could still see his face, the smile when he tried to hide his disappointment at her rejections, and she disliked being there now.

  One of the few comments Landon had made on the way was to double-check that she was sure she wanted to see Casaria. Of course, she didn’t bear the man any ill will. It wasn’t personal when she reported him. Realistically, it could have helped his career if it set him straight. Though she couldn’t deny the slight relief that he hadn’t answered his door while she was alone. She hoped Landon would find a parking space and catch up to her before she caught up to Casaria.

  After a quick knock on the porter’s door, she said, “Apartment 1302. I need to get in there.”

  “Excuse me?” The porter looked up from a moisture-warped book. A smutty romance, by the cover. He had a face like a sick horse and an overlong neck, sticking out of a doorman’s suit two sizes too large.

  “I need to get into Cano Casaria’s apartment. Do you know him?” The man stared, so Sam prompted, “Handsome, wears a suit, looks Latino but he’s not.”

  “That’s about half the people that live here.”

  “Only comes out at night.”

  “Ah.” The man gave a one-sided smile. “Hunts undesirables for the government?”

  “He told you that?” Though they were strictly forbidden to mention the Sunken City to civilians, and trust was the foremost reason that the MEE didn’t hire more people, there weren’t specific rules about what agents should tell people. Mostly because it was bloody obvious they shouldn’t allude to the truth. This was hardly a surprise, though: for his faults, Casaria trumped most of the MEE with his enthusiasm. Sam had never had to wait for him to find a parking space, and it was pride in his work, after all, that had led to him engaging her after only a single drink. Which had led to a welcome career shift from Lyndale Finance, even if it had come with a misguided mentor.

  If only he could iron out the niggles, such as looking for trouble, Casaria could be a very effective
agent. That was what her report had meant to highlight. But there’d been no anger management classes or more conscientious partner pairing, only Casaria going back on patrol after a short reprimand. In the rare moments between night and day when their paths crossed in the office, his previously awkward small talk was replaced with silently malicious glares. She had, for some time, hoped to better explain how he might channel his potential. But that would’ve meant talking to him.

  “Fun guy,” the porter said. “We got to talking when I made a comment about his clothes, dressed like he’s going for a business meeting in the dead of night. He said I didn’t know what he did for this country.”

  “Okay. Did you see him come in this morning?”

  “Nah, but he often slips in while I’m doing the dawn rounds.”

  “Can you open up his apartment for me?”

  The porter rolled his mouth around uncomfortably, like he knew he should kick up a fuss. But he also knew Casaria and understood some things weren’t worth questioning. “I assume you’ve got some kind of credentials?”

  “You can assume that, yes.”

  “Always the ones that look tightest, isn’t it?” the porter commented, as he stood behind Sam in Casaria’s doorway. How the man would think Casaria, never seen without a hair out of place, was secretly filthy, was beyond her. This was clearly a crime scene.

  There were clothes all over the studio apartment, pots and pans out in the kitchen, paperwork scattered across the floor. The place had been searched, thoroughly and methodically, from the neatness of the papers. It was too tidy for a robbery; someone had been looking for something. Sam checked the documents. Utility bills, bank statements. Not much in his account, which was unsurprising considering the rent here.

  Had the Fae come and taken him, wanting their weapon back? If it really was their technology, their Dispenser, even, then it’d be hugely important to them. But if they were aware the Ministry had the Dispenser, they surely would have realised it was impounded in Greek Street. If they wanted to strong-arm Casaria into recovering it, why the search? And shouldn’t Casaria have had a Fae detector in the flat?