Paper Children

by James Fahy

  She looked up, shaking off the memory, peering at me in the stale, antiseptic dungeon of this ward. “And then it was gone. Like it had never been there. My office was empty.”

  I heard soft crying behind me and glanced back. Chase was working on the last of the twelve girls now. At least two of them had woken up, one was trying to sit up weakly, sobbing, clearly scared and confused as to where she was. Chase was comforting her quietly.

  “Don’t you realise?” Coldwater said. “It was a message.” I looked back to her. “My son was lost, I know this, I’m not stupid. But the Bonewalkers? They saved us all at the end of the world, didn’t they? We wouldn’t have the wall without them. Without their powers to move things through space, we wouldn’t have half the things we saved from the old world, or even a third of the people. For goodness sake, if it wasn’t for them, this city would starve to death in a week.” She nodded. “So I listened. I knew what it was saying. It was telling me to look again. That this project could work. That we could reverse the damage and continue stronger. It had been brought to me as they had recognised someone who would be strong enough to carry it through.”

  She looked to Allesandro, as if, finding no understanding in my face, she might seek it out in his. “Cunningham Bowls turned his back on his life’s work to tend to his daughter. Father of the year award, but in doing so, wasn’t he dooming the rest of us? Think, just think, how many more lives could have been saved if Seraph was a success. His daughter’s life was worth more to him than a potential cure for the rest of the world.”

  “You wouldn’t have felt the same?” Allesandro sneered.

  “Big… picture,” Coldwater repeated sharply, biting off the words. “And that’s the difference between the two of us. I had already lost my family. I had nothing else to lose.”

  I was still trying to process all of this. PAPER’s dangerous and defunct Seraph project had been brought out of the darkness again by a Bonewalker and placed very deliberately in front of Coldwater, potentially the best candidate capable of rationalising horrific and immoral acts for the supposed benefit of mankind.

  It had been dangled in front of her like bait on a hook.

  “So the Bonewalkers wanted PAPER’s seraph project to resume. To be a success,” Allesandro said to me.

  Coldwater clearly believed they were benign, creepy as they may look, and trying to guide us toward an end to the Pale hordes. Was it true? I’d encountered Bonewalkers several times. One had rescued me from a deep pit beneath a tower where I was facing certain death after being bitten by the Pale, another had brought Oscar Scott to save me when I’d been being strangled to death by a faceless mutant girl and needed to get back to the city with only minutes to stop a dirty bomb.

  All in all, I seemed to run into them a lot, but I knew practically nothing about them. No one did, really.

  But the witches in the woods, Chase Pargate’s surrogate mothers, had called the ‘faceless ones’ the true enemy, that everything they did was orchestrated towards some terrible endgame.

  “I don’t trust them,” I told him. “Neither does Chase, and his… people. The last time met a Bonewalker, I killed someone on its command. That’s a scary ability they keep under their hats. What else don’t we know about them?”

  I looked back at Coldwater.

  “Why children, Felicity?” I demanded to know.

  “Don’t you think I didn’t attempt other subjects first,” she said, a little defensive but still resolutely unapologetic. “Cabal detention centres are just chock-full of criminals that no one would ever miss. But, beyond puberty…” She shook her head. “I found that no matter how healthy the specimen, the body rejected the Seraph process. They devolved, every one of them, into the Pale.” She nodded her head at the CCTV monitors streaming live feed of the facility behind her, several of which showed the holding cells in which dozens of grey, nosferatu-like Pale continued to tirelessly throw themselves around, slamming bodily into the doors, desperate to be freed as they clawed the walls.

  “Who do you think they are?” she sneered. “Failures. Cast offs. But younger subjects? I found pubescent and pre-pubescent females had the most promising results, the most acceptable accommodation of Seraph. I even achieved some partial success, with acceptable losses.”

  I turned back to Chase. He had freed all twelve of the children, all of whom were awake now, many of them crying or looking mute and shell-shocked, weak and pale faces with wide, dazed eyes. They gathered around him like a small choir of grey ghosts.

  “Chase, you need to get those kids out of here, right now,” I said, He nodded, crouching amongst the girls with his friendliest, most open face, clearly trying to calm them and put them at ease.

  I looked back to Coldwater. “I don’t care if I’m on the blacklist,” I told her. “You’re not harming a single one of those children, you absolute fucker. Acceptable losses?” Something occurred to me. “When I sent Lucy and Denison to the Slade to dig up your dirty work, they said there were something close to thirty missing. There’s a dozen here, where are the others? The other homeless you took off the streets?”

  Coldwater swallowed, her face set. Grim, but defiant. “All experiments have losses, Harkness. You’re a scientist, you should understand this. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

  I had lashed out before I’d even realised I was going to. I’ve never actually hit another human in the face before. I’m not, despite my current lifestyle, an inherently violent person. Punching Felicity Coldwater in the nose hurt more than I had expected. My hand practically vibrated and screamed at me as if I’d punched a wall. She collapsed to the floor, landing hard on her behind, clutching what was most certainly now a bloody and broken nose.

  She’d killed them. She’d turned them into… my eyes flicked up at the monitor footage of the Pale, thrashing in their cells. My face was burning… into those things.

  As Allesandro dragged Coldwater back to her feet roughly, hands under her armpits, I turned to Chase, to the dozen girls who hadn’t yet experienced Coldwater’s mission to serve the greater good.

  “Chase, now!” I said through gritted teeth, shaking my agonised hand. Jesus that had hurt. It had also been the most satisfying thing I’d done in a long time. “Get them out of here.”

  Chase, I saw, already had one young girl clinging to his back on a piggyback ride, another held in his arms like a limp and groggy doll, too weak to walk. The others all seemed well enough, awake enough, to walk unaided, though they were all still shaking and shell-shocked. Chase nodded without looking over at me. I could hear him talking to them in his chirpy, everything-will-be-okay voice. “Okay my little darlings, we’re going to make a crocodile, alright? Just like at school. Everyone needs to take someone else’s hands. Make a line. I’m going to take you out and up a couple flights of stairs, okay? Who wants to see fireworks?”

  One of the girls, maybe six or seven, was clinging to his leg, face buried in fright at this ghastly place around us.

  “It’s okay, kiddo,” Chase said as he began to lead the group out of this horrible ward. “You don’t ever have to come here again, okay?”

  I wondered, if any of them would ever really leave here, completely. I could see years of therapy ahead for all of them.

  But they were alive. No more experiments, no more death. We had stopped Coldwater. Everything she had done, ended here, tonight.

  “Why have you been working with Dove?” Allesandro demanded, as she wiped her bloodied nose and chin on her sleeve.

  “He came to me,” she said thickly, coughing. “In order to splice my subjects with Seraph, I needed human subjects, and I also needed Genetic Others. I already had a Tribal, some renegade moron who’d been locked up in a detention centre for years. I didn’t have a vampire.” She looked up at him with cold eyes. “Dove promised me a strong specimen, and he delivered quite nicely, for his own price.”

  I had no idea how Dove would know about Coldwater’s secret project in the
first place, enough to seek her out and offer an alliance, but I already knew what the price was.

  “You gave him an implant,” I confirmed with her. “That’s what he wanted from you, wasn’t it? In exchange for Allesandro. To enhance his own mental powers, to give him enough strength to de-throne the Duke of Sanctum and take his place. And in return, you could have the old king of the hill for your toy down here.”

  “You moron.” Allesandro sneered. “Vampires have mental strength that you can’t dream of to begin with. And you willingly weaponised him?”

  Dove had delivered my vampire to Coldwater’s hell-hole tied up in a big pretty ribbon. Everybody wins. An alliance forged in hell.

  “He told me he wanted to rule,” she scoffed, derisive. “What do I care which of you bloodsuckers is sitting on top of the heap? You’re all the same. So yes, I helped him, and in return, along with providing me with you, he acted as my collector. With that clever ghoul he made for himself, he was able to bring me subjects to test. I had to outsource somehow.” She looked at me again. “I have a lot of sway as director, but even I would raise eyebrows requesting a Cabal-approved team of-”

  “Child-catchers,” I nodded. “Poor you, right? You had no choice but to let a deeply unbalanced vampire grab kids off the streets for you. It must have been hard, working towards the greater good with such a messy henchman.”

  “If there is such a place as Hell, they’re saving a warm seat for you there,” Allesandro said to her unrepentant face. She glared at him.

  “Oh spare me your morality,” she replied. “There’s simply no room for it in the new world. Hand-wringing and good intentions will not save us all when the Pale come for us and everything crashes down around our ears. You might not have the spine to do what was needed, but I do.” She looked heavenwards, up at the concrete ceiling in the dark above our heads. “In fifty years’ time, when the Pale are a thing of the past and the world is ours again, thanks to my advances here, no one would even remember the names of these children.”

  “It’s a shame that you and Dove changed your tactics then,” I said, through gritted teeth. The urge to punch her unapologetic face again was almost overwhelming. “It’s one thing stealing invisible people from the slums if you’re trying to keep your little project off the radar, but the last three girls? Melodie Cunningham Bowls? Cora Winterbourne, and now the granddaughter of the Dean of Christchurch? Hardly keeping a low profile are you?”

  Coldwater looked annoyed. “Only the Cunningham Bowls girl has anything to do with me,” she snapped. “Dove has gone off the rails completely. I’ve no idea what he took those other two for.”

  I stared at her.

  “You see, even with all the resources and tools at my disposal, even with all the partial success I’d had, I still hadn’t achieved full symbiosis on any kind of stable level. None of the subjects were strong enough to endure the process. I needed someone… hardier.”

  Allesandro scowled in realisation. “So you took PAPER’s own child?” he said. “Melodie Cunningham Bowls.”

  “She was already modified,” Coldwater explained. “Her father had seen to that. He had made her healthier than any regular human, stronger, more resilient, tougher. She was the perfect specimen. It was the final job Dove ever did for me, taking her at her birthday party. I performed the Seraph procedure the same day.” Coldwater’s eyes were full of pride. “I don’t expect you to understand my happiness, but it was an unprecedented success.” She licked blood off her lip absently. “However there was a… complication.”

  “Where is she now, Coldwater?” I demanded. The director shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she told us. “That’s the complication, Harkness. Through Seraph, I was planning to attempt to give the Cunningham Bowls subject aspects of vampire and Tribal traits, but at the eleventh hour, a Bonewalker appeared again, here, in this facility.” She glared at me. “It offered its own genetic material, willingly. I’ve already told you, it was them who wanted this project to succeed, and now, when I had finally procured a specimen capable of hosting the Seraph process, they offered themselves up for its triumph.”

  My mind was reeling. “You… spliced that teenager… with a Bonewalker?”

  Coldwater lifted her chin with a smug little smile I’d seen on her face a hundred times. “I have created something more than human here. Something better than human.”

  “But you don’t know where it is?” Allesandro sneered. The three of us were alone in the room now. I could no longer hear Chase or the rescued girls. I prayed they were almost out of this pit altogether.

  “Bonewalkers, as you know, can move things through space,” Coldwater said in a condescending voice. “After Seraph… it turns out, so could she. She vanished. Took herself out of here.”

  “And you’ve been looking for her ever since haven’t you?” I realised. “That’s when you pulled Cloves and me onto the case. That’s when you steered all of Blue Lab’s efforts into recovering that girl.”

  It made sense to me now. Coldwater had been so insistent that the Cunningham Bowls girl be found when I had met her on the bridge. She had shown no real interest in that second disappearance. When I had met her later at the hospital following the attack on Griff and Denison, she had again reiterated the importance of finding PAPER’s young heiress, with only a side-thought for the others.

  “So what you’re telling me, is that Dove abducted the other two girls, Cora and Celeste, all on his own? Why?”

  “Ask him yourself!” she retorted. “He got what he wanted from me and he’s gone completely off plan. I don’t know why he would take those other girls. He certainly hasn’t brought them to me. We haven’t spoken since he brought me the Cunningham Bowls girl. All he’s doing is messing up my plans and drawing unwanted attention.”

  I folded my arms, my eyes roving over the CCTV monitors, watching the corridors and holding pens. Coldwater has misplaced her successful experiment. This Seraph-child was out there in the city, rogue. And her vampire bedfellow, for reasons of his own, had taken to abducting high-profile children instead. And then making sure everyone knew they were missing. Had Dove lost the plot completely?

  “I’ve seen her,” I told them.

  Both Allesandro and Coldwater peered at me.

  “I’ve seen the girl. She’s surfaced twice… at least. At the library, when I had my run in with Dove’s vampire ghoul, I saw a girl appear and disappear. I couldn’t make sense of it then. Humans can’t do that.”

  “Humans with a side order of Bonewalker genetics can,” Allesandro said. “Apparently. And the second time?”

  “At the bridge,” I remembered. “I didn’t see her there myself, but when Dove attempted to abduct his second girl, Cora Winterbottom, there was a witness. I heard his account from Cloves. He said a girl appeared out of thin air, all dressed in white, and snatched the child out of the demon’s arms.” I looked to Allesandro. “He thought it was an angel. I believe it was Melodie Cunningham Bowls, whatever she’s become. I think since escaping the clutches of this cold-hearted bitch here…” I nodded at Coldwater. “The escapee has been trying to protect others. She took the girl and popped out of existence. I don’t know where she took her, far from Dove’s ghoul, that’s for sure. I can’t blame her, after what she went through herself.”

  It was easy to see why people, myself included, might have thought she was a ghost or an angel. People don’t simply appear and disappear at will. And the way she was dressed, her angelic white robe. But I’d just seen twelve identical hospital robes leave this very room.

  “It was her medical bracelet that I found on the bridge which led us here,” I said. “She must have lost it in the struggle there with Dove’s smouldering ghoul.”

  I didn’t bother to ask Coldwater what had happened to the homeless man. She had been very insistent on taking him in for questioning personally. He’d obviously seen too much. Knowing what I did of this woman, and the lengths she would go to in order to keep her
nose clean, I had little doubt that he had been disposed of. He had probably been thrown in one of these holding pens and fed to the Pale.

  “Well,” I said to her. “Your plan to save the world has spiralled a little out of control, don’t you think, Felicity? Your partner in crime has gone rogue, snatching up whatever kids he feels like and causing just the kind of media-shitstorm you wanted to avoid. Your latest test subjects just walked right out of here and are going to completely expose every sordid thing you’ve done, every breach of human rights and every murder. And your one success, your volatile half-breed creation, has slipped your grip and gone running wild in New Oxford.”

  I glared at her. Blacklisted or not, whatever happened to me once we got up top, I was going to bring this bitch down with me. “Every shadowy thing you’ve done,” I said. “Every dark deed, I’m going to drag into the bright daylight.”

  As if in response to my words, the lights went out. All of them.

  Chapter 34

  Every bulb overhead flickered into blackness and the bank of monitors died. We were deep underground. There was no natural light here, we may as well have been blind. The blackness was sudden, absolute, and suffocating.

  In the momentary confusion, something barged my shoulder. I was knocked off balance and fell heavily to the floor, barely able to tell which way was up. Hands flailing, I had reached out to grab at anything I could to stop my fall, bringing one of the unseen hospital beds crashing and tumbling down on top of me.

  I heard Allesandro yell in the confusion, but his words were lost as a piercing, repetitive alarm began to sound, its deafening wail piercing the darkness like an air raid siren.

  As I struggled to push the bed aside and get up, light came back into the world, but it was dim and red, illuminating only enough for us to see the shadows.

  Emergency lighting.