Paper Children (Phoebe Harkness Book 3)

by James Fahy

  The emerald light flickered and played over the walls and through the air all around us, bright and oddly insectile, before the arcing beams met the floor and covered up the wooden boards with electronic light and holographic painting, swallowing up Cloves’ entire lounge and feeding back into the cube itself.

  I blinked against the harsh, funhouse glare of the light, and when I opened my eyes again, for all intents and purposes, we were in Blue Lab One.

  Cloves’ apartment had disappeared and my lab was recreated around us, in greenish electronic lines painted onto a dark black background as inky as a night sky. It gave the impression of everything being in negative. Table tops, shelving, filing cabinets, even the walls, were all rendered in glowing green lines of code around us, perfectly three-dimensional and occasionally flickering. We were standing by the door to the ultraviolet corridor, the main entrance to my workplace, my violated sanctuary.

  “Well, we’re in the matrix, Trinity, now what?” I said. My voice was oddly echoey within the simulation. It was quite spooky simply being here, in this pretend, three-dimensional picture. I felt like a ghost in my own lab.

  “As usual, that goes right over my head.” Cloves had no time or interest in my pre-war geekiness. “No chatter. We’re not here to waste time. These holograms are registered on a central database at the Liver. Every time they’re accessed, it’s logged there. Bearing in mind I haven’t ‘officially’ got access to this simulation, and I’ve already been in here once, let’s keep it under five minutes. Less likely to flag to anyone who matters that way.”

  I looked around. My skin crawled. Although the lab around us didn’t look real, painted as it was in glowing phosphorene and dark blacks, it was just like being there, and it was in disarray. Datascreens smashed on the floor, desks overturned, papers everywhere. I dreaded, with a feeling like a cruel fist twisting around my stomach, seeing bodies.

  I’m not squeamish. I’ve been up to my elbows in plenty of corpses, it’s part of the job. But these were not strangers. They had been my team.

  Slumped over one of the desks, there was a blur. It had been heavily pixilated, floating in mid-air in my vision as nothing but a highly censored collection of cubes and planes, all moving slightly as I walked towards it. I made my way around the workbenches, fully aware that I could have just walked through them with nothing more than an electronic crackle. They weren’t really there after all. But your brain believes your eyes, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the shifting and inoffensive mass of angular light.

  “That’s Denison,” Clove’s told me. “He was slumped over the desk when security arrived. Neck broken cleanly, just as Coldwater told us.” She breathed down her nose, arriving at my side as we stood looking down at the body of Dee that neither of us could see. A blurred scramble of crashed coding.

  “I know it’s cold comfort, Harkness,” she said. “But I’ve examined this without the censoring. It was quick, just like they told us. You can’t see here, but he still has his hand on the mouse, it’s likely he didn’t even know what happened to him.”

  I nodded. My throat was very dry. I couldn’t see the mouse, or the keyboard for that matter. They were lost in the deliberately jumbled glitch of the illusionary body slumped over the table before us.

  “I’m sorry, Dee,” I said quietly. I sniffed and looked at Cloves. “We’re not here to mourn, right? You said we’re on a timer.”

  Cloves gave me a sharp nod and a look of almost grudging approval. She beckoned me to follow her, leading me around the desks, and into the back areas of the lab. Where the morgue slabs were. Not long ago, I had sat in conference here, discussing events with my team. Now half of us were dead.

  Another highly censored shape lay flickering on the floor here, spread out between an upturned table and a large smashed datascreen. It would be Griff.

  The datascreen lying beside the hidden body, flickering morbidly at my feet, was smashed to pieces. Much of it was as pixilated and censored at the body itself. Griff had been bludgeoned with it, I had been told, so I imagined parts of it were matted with gore. I was grateful for the PG13 rating of this particular recreation, but I still felt acid rising in my gut.

  “Is he still…” I trailed off.

  “They haven’t turned off his life support yet,” Cloves answered. “He’s still at the hospital, but the only thing keeping his heart beating are the machines. We’re working on tracking family. If no one comes forward to make the decision…”

  I nodded, understanding. “I’ll take responsibility,” I said hoarsely. I didn’t want to be the one to give the order to turn Griff off. But I sure as hell didn’t want it to be anyone else either.

  “This is what I found,” Cloves stepped around the green, glowing murder scene, making it flicker and spit in an electric hiss. “This is why I called you.” She pointed at something on the floor with her toe. “I can’t pick it up of course, it’s only made of light. But you can read it from here, mostly.”

  Curiously, I stepped, as respectfully as I could, around the electric ghost of Griff’s battered body, staring at the floor where Cloves indicated. It was some way from Griff’s body, I imagine flung from his hand across the floor when he was attacked.

  “It’s his phone,” I said. It was cracked and the screen was spiderwebbed, but in the hologram we currently haunted, Griff appeared to have been writing.

  “It looks to me like your assistant was in the process of sending a text, before they were attacked,” Cloves said. “Obviously when the violence happened, it happened fast, and he never got to send it. From what it says, maybe seeing him typing is what sparked the attack in the first place.”

  I had gotten down on my hands and knees, my face close to the flickering, imaginary screen. It was an odd sensation. My eyes were seeing my hands splayed out on Blue Lab’s crisp, cool tile floor, but I could feel the warm smooth wood of Cloves’ apartment, complete with underfloor heating. Being inside a hologram is a lot like hallucinating.

  “It’s damaged,” Cloves said, looking down at me. “But you can still make out some of it.”

  She was right. The mobile DataPad Griff used as his phone was an old model. Clearly with the impact, circuits were fried and damaged. The green lettering on the screen was broken and disjointed, some words flickering on and off, others missing entirely. I read aloud what I could make out.

  “Old war here… don’t tru… in bed… th paper, oc.”

  I looked up at Cloves. “Did Griff find something out?” I asked. “Something about the old war, when the wall went up?” I shivered. Was that the real reason he and Denison had been killed? And Chase Pargate conveniently framed for their deaths to stop his interference too.

  I glanced back at the flickering, hidden body of my teammate and friend, close to where I was kneeling. I still, mercifully, couldn’t make out any details, but something about the fragmented blur of his outstretched arm gave me pause.

  “Can you uncensor part of this?” I asked my supervisor.

  “Harkness,” Cloves said seriously. “Honestly, you don’t want to see this, believe me.”

  “Not all of him, just his hand,” I insisted. It looked as though he was making a fist. It was maddening that I couldn’t see it clearly.

  I felt Cloves shrug, and she walked off back through the glowing illusion of the lab towards where the hologram cube rested on a table top, continually feeding our current reality. A few seconds of tinkering and with a hiss, the polygon censor shield around Griff’s outstretched arm flickered and disappeared. I could see his shirtsleeve now, rolled to the elbow, and his hand, which was indeed clutched into a fist. He was holding something tightly. Scuttling closer on my hands and knees, I saw that it was a strip of barcoded plastic.

  “Cloves, this is the thing I found on the bridge,” I confessed. “At the scene where the second girl was taken. It’s a medical wristband. I gave it to Griff to look into.” I looked up at her, seeing that she remembered. I had stuffed it into my pocket at the ti
me. Coldwater had just been arriving on the scene and we hadn’t been sure what significance, if any, it had.

  “Where is it now?”

  “If it was on his body, as this hologram shows, it will be bagged and tagged at the hospital right now,” she said. “I’ll make a call and get it. You think it’s important?”

  I looked back to Griff’s hand, maddened that it wasn’t real and I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t just take the wristband here and now.

  “Griff certainly did,” I said.

  I reached out and made to put my hand over his, comfortingly. He was only made of light of course, and I passed right through him in a crackle of nothingness. He was the one dead, and I felt like the ghost.

  “Turn off the simulation please,” I said, thickly.

  Moments later we were back in Cloves’ apartment, the crime scene of my lab, in all its ghoulish green glow, dissipated around us like a vast cloud of dissolving fireflies. I blinked rapidly in the sudden gloom as I got up off my hands and knees, telling myself my eyes were stinging because of the light, and failing slightly.

  “The wristband is one thing,” Cloves said. “We’ll deal with the fact that you didn’t bother telling me you’d given that to a team member to investigate later. You’re supposed to keep me in the loop for these things. For now, I’m going to file that under ‘tear Harkness a new arsehole’, which let me tell you, is an ever-increasingly thick file.” She sighed. “But whatever your assistant was trying to type… it might be all we have to go on. Now, I’ve already run it through some random generator software, trying out variables to fill in the blanks, and-”

  “There’s no need,” I told her, cutting her off mid-stream. “I think I can guess what it said.” It had risen in me with a kind of sickening certainty. Griff had been left at the lab researching. He had made links, and then he had been interrupted. I was pretty certain the text had been intended for me. I repeated it aloud to her “Old war here… don’t tru… in bed… th paper, oc?”

  Cloves looked at me expectantly with pencil thin eyebrows raised.

  “If I had to guess,” I told her. “He would have been trying to send me this while we were all at the screening in Christchurch…when the Senior Director arrived at Blue Lab.” I sighed. “Coldwater here. Don’t trust her. In bed with PAPER, Doc.”

  Cloves blinked.

  “Coldwater has taken a pretty personal hands-on approach to these missing kids,” I said, hugging my own arms in Cloves’ quiet and dimly lit apartment. In the shadowy, private space, it made me feel like we were two conspirators. “Well, to be exact, she only really seems interested in the first girl to ‘officially’ go missing. Melodie Cunningham Bowls. Why would that be? And why so personally invested for a senior director?”

  “The Cunningham Bowls own PAPER,” Cloves nodded. “They’ve had a lot of contracts with Cabal over the years.” She looked suspicious. “This is your gut feeling, Harkness? Because let’s be fair, Coldwater has made some bad decisions in the past, that’s for sure, but-”

  “She secretly slush-funded Marlin Scott’s Genetic Other dirty bomb,” I reminded her dryly.

  “Without knowing what it was,” Cloves countered, even-handedly. “Scott pulled the wool over her eyes with that, told her he was creating a cure, not a final solution.”

  “Well, maybe she’s taken matters into her own hands this time,” I argued. I was grimly aware of the implications of what I was saying. To bring direct accusations against a Senior Cabal member of the board, with no proof? It was suicide of the highest order. But if I was even only half-right… If Coldwater was involved with what was going on, in any capacity, that would mean she hadn’t been fooled during the attack. That she had lied outright about Chase Pargate being the attacker. She may even have been the one to silence my team… to order the murder my friends, ensuring she was ‘caught up’ in the attack to ensure her story had credence. What price is a cure for the Pale virus? I reminded myself that we were talking about the woman who had ordered the entire city of Cambridge to be firebombed to dust as a containment ‘precaution’, without batting an eyelid or losing a wink of sleep.

  “We need more than your gut feeling on this, Harkness.” Cloves was deadly serious.

  “We need to get into Coldwater’s office, at Cabal HQ, at the Liver,” I said.

  Cloves scoffed. “You think you’re going to find a smoking gun sitting on her desk?”

  “I’m thinking there might be something! Some link to PAPER, to the bloody kids. Where is Coldwater now?”

  Cloves threw her hands up. “Knowing her, probably having an avocado facial somewhere while we run around in the dark trying to catch demons to save our jobs and our arses. I know she’s in meetings tomorrow afternoon. All of the senior director level are convening for last minute discussions of any city-wide safety concerns before the vampire parade at sundown, but-”

  “So she’ll be out of her office then,” I said.

  “Harkness, you’re talking about breaking and entering into a board member’s office. It’s more than my job’s worth!”

  “Is it more than those missing kids are worth?” I replied. “Not just the two on record, not the one holed up terrified at Oscar Scott’s, hiding from the bogeyman, but the thirty-plus children gone off the bloody streets? Is your job worth them? Or is it worth more bloodshed tomorrow night that we have absolutely no idea how to stop?”

  Cloves glowered at me.

  “You once told me,” I said. “That when the walls went up, and we were saving what we could of the world, that you would crawl over priceless art and broken glass to get one more person inside these walls. Now what? Once they’re in here, they fend for themselves? Or do you actually still give a damn about people?”

  “If you ever throw my own words back at me again,” Cloves said calmly and quietly, her hand playing around her choker thoughtfully, lips very thin. “I shall have you staked to a rock and disembowelled. Bear that in mind.”

  Her eyes met mine levelly. “Do you have any idea the level of security protecting her office? I’m high up enough in the food chain that if I wanted to, I could get us to the correct floor, right up to her door. But there’s no point. They are DNA sensored. We would need actual genetic proof that we are Felicity Coldwater to get in, and I don’t happen to have an eyeball or a hair strand about my person, right now, do you?”

  I thought hard for a moment, and then my gaze slid over to the coffee table and the discarded Styrofoam cups.

  “Is that your half-caf, no-fat two pumps vanilla choca-mocha-latte?” I asked, thoughtfully.

  Chapter 27

  Cabal HQ, a large, walled off complex in the heart of the city filled with several grim buildings in their own manicured and authoritarian grounds, was not my favourite place to be. It was high-security, fiercely monitored and foreboding as hell. Orwell would have had a field day in here. Some of the departments were only missing signs hung above the door saying ‘Ministry of Peace’. Jackbooted Cabal guards, one step up from the Ghosts, crawled all over the mini city-within-a-walled-city that was HQ, their uniforms designed with just enough of a subtle nod to the military to remind anyone that they were each authorised to shoot on site, in the event that any trespasser were deemed a ‘threat to the city’ of course. Cabal were all about serving the city, by whatever means they deemed justifiable.

  Past the security gates at the edge of the compound, along several angular and joyless governmental pathways, like a fat spider at the centre of a web, sat the Liver itself, central command for the biggest of bigwigs. The building wasn’t from Oxford, originally, but had been ‘saved’ from Liverpool by the Bonewalkers. It was a stunning building in its own right, but also hauntingly draconian, sleek lines, gothic severity, everything Cabal wanted the people to think of them as. Strong, unshakeable, steadfast. In my opinion it also looked a tiny wee bit like Sauron himself had designed a new wing of a certain wizard prison. I had to refrain in public from referring to it as Cabalzkaban.


  Cloves had gone up several greased and slippery rungs in the past couple of years, so her access levels got us further than I could ever have dreamed. Into the compound, into the Liver itself, and even to the appropriate floor where Coldwater kept her office. She seemed utterly unfazed by the militaristic and bleak surroundings, but I found them oppressive. Every corridor we walked was high-ceilinged and narrow, rendered in cold blues and greys, with thin carpet underfoot and harsh, unflattering lighting pooling overhead from shadow to shadow. There was the occasional potted palm here and there in a rather sad and ineffectual attempt to make this building look like a regular everyday office workspace. I was pretty sure they were plastic. It didn’t work anyway. It just reminded me of those nature documentaries where dangerous deep sea predators attempt to appear harmless by decorating themselves with little bits of coral.

  I stood next to Cloves as the elevator, mercifully empty of anyone but us, dinged forlornly and prepared to spit us out. I glanced at my watch. It was two in the afternoon on Halloween. Coldwater should be elsewhere, in her meeting right now. It had been a clear but freezing day as we’d driven over. I had no idea if the weather had changed since we entered the Liver. I hadn’t seen a single window since the main doors.

  “Will you stop fidgeting,” Cloves whispered out of the corner of her mouth. We were both wearing the most anonymous businesswear we could find, the better not to attract attention. For me, this had meant a knee length black skirt, white shirt and black blazer. I even had court shoes on, which I loathed, but at least I looked like every office drone who had ever had their soul sucked out and spent all week longing pitifully for ‘dress down Friday’. I would have been anonymous and instantly forgettable in any office environment.

  Cloves on the other hand was as understated as Cloves ever got. Yes, she was wearing a business suit. The cut was crisp, the lines so sharp you could have drawn blood on her lapel. But this was Veronica after all. The suit was sky blue, and made from some shimmering iridescent material which warped the colours slightly as she moved, giving the effect of an oil spill rainbow in a puddle beneath a sunny sky. She was dressed like David Bowie at a time we were meant to be inconspicuous.