Paper Children

by James Fahy

  Although the girl barely looked like a person.

  I glanced back up at the camera, then back to her. She was staring at me oddly, with a calm and utterly dispassionate expression. When last I’d seen her, her pupils had seemed too large, too black, obliterating her irises. Now that blackness filled almost all of her eyes. Only a thin crescent of white showed at the outer edge of each.

  Whatever the Seraph project had done to her, it was still doing. Evolving, mutating within her genetic makeup.

  “Don’t worry about the camera,” she said flatly. Even her voice sounded oddly inhuman. Almost like two people whispering at the same time. “I fixed that. It took me a long time to find you, Doctor Harkness.”

  “Are you… real?” I was more questioning myself than her. Her face looked odd. Too solemn and serious for a teenage girl. She looked too old for her own skin. “You’re really Melodie-”

  “I’m not her,” the girl said, her tone still devoid of any real emotion. “Not anymore. Melodie Cunningham Bowls is dead. At least… officially.” She shrugged. “A body was produced. Enough to convince her parents. Cabal does not like loose ends, and they wanted this whole embarrassment closed off as quickly as possible.”

  “But…” I frowned, coughing to clear my throat. “You’re not dead. You got away from Coldwater. You saved that second girl from the ghoul, you even saved me-”

  “The second girl?” she said, blinking at me. A tiny crease appeared between her eyebrows for a second, as though she were trying to remember. “Ah, yes. Cora Winterbourne. The authorities were very surprised to find her. They are still baffled as to how she came to be hidden away in the attic of Melodie’s old house.” She shrugged, her hands hanging limply by her sides. “I wasn’t going to let that monster take her like it took me. I had to hide her somewhere, until this was all over.”

  She levelled her head at me across the small space. There was something inscrutable and otherworldly about her. It was the exact sensation, the same unease, that I always got when I came face to face with the silent Bonewalkers. It made my skin crawl a little.

  “I was unable to stop it taking that other girl, Celeste,” she told me. “I didn’t know where she was, but you saved her, and now the monster is dead, so… it’s a satisfactory outcome.”

  Having gotten over the shock of this strange hybrid child’s sudden appearance, I took a hesitant step forward.

  “You’ve come to get me out,” I breathed. “You can move things… like they do. You got me out of the Seraph facility, you can take me out of here!”

  She stared at me with those cool, dispassionate black eyes. “And what good would that do?” she said after a moment. “Where could you go, Dr Harkness? You’re not like me. I’m hard to pin down. But you? They’d only find you and drag you back here. A blacklist is a blacklist for life.”

  I swallowed hard. At this point, I really didn’t care. I’d run to the woods, live like an animal in the shadows, try to find Chase’s witches again. Anything was better than this. Anywhere.

  “I don’t care,” I said urgently. “I’ll take my chances. Anything is better than rotting in this place. Listen, Melodie-”

  “Melodie is dead,” she repeated. The black-eyed girl looked down slowly at her own hands. I noticed how pale they were too. Her fingers looked oddly long, just slightly more than usual, enough to be noticeable, disconcertingly so. The Bonewalker aspects which had been melded to her being were still working at her own DNA, but they were clearly changing more than just her body. “It’s just Seraph now. I quite like the name.” She looked back up at me.

  “I’m not here to rescue you, Dr Harkness.”

  “Then why… why are you here?” I whispered. “Curiosity?” I was already planning to grab for her. If I grabbed her and didn’t let go, she’d have to take me with her, wouldn’t she? I didn’t care if she wanted to or not, I wasn’t being left here. Not if I had the slimmest chance of escape, and this had been the first. It may well be the last.

  “Courtesy,” she replied. The girl fished in her pocket and brought out a small DataPad. “I’m not taking you out of this place because there’s no need for me to. Just be patient. But you stopped that vampire from killing all the humans, so I owe you this at least.”

  She handed the DataPad to me. “They didn’t want him to do that. It wasn’t part of the design. They only wanted me to… become. You did a good job tidying up after I was achieved, stopped other things getting needlessly out of hand. All those loose ends.”

  I glanced at the DataPad from her, confused.

  “Who are you talking about? Who didn’t want Dove to have his vampire rebellion? What design?”

  “We have important roles to play, you and I,” Seraph said to me. “I know mine. It’s been revealed to me. Everything that happened here, happened because they wished it. My becoming strong enough through my former father’s expertise to become the perfect specimen. The foolish director being handed the Seraph files and encouraged to make it her own. Even the involvement of the vampire, they came to him too. Told him how he could dethrone his master, told him to go to Coldwater and become strong enough.” She cocked her head to one side, her large black eyes glinting. “They are not the oars and rudder steering the ship. They’re the current, invisible, pulling it along.”

  Seraph blinked at me under the harsh light. “All little pushes and nudges, here there and everywhere, to make…” she spread her hands, “…me.”

  “Bonewalkers,” I said, staring at her. “The faceless ones. Why are you important to their… design… or whatever? Why are you special?”

  “You’re special too, Doctor,” she replied quietly. “The virus in you, the way you control it with the vampire’s blood, with your own medication, and more. There are things you don’t even know about yourself yet. Secrets buried in you, waiting to be unlocked. Answers… to questions you haven’t even asked yet.”

  I had formed my own theories as to how I had been able to stop the Pale, even for only a moment, the way I had. I knew that the team who had originally created the Sentinel programme, ending the world, had included my father. That he, like his colleagues, had given their own genetic material, as well as that of the world’s strongest vampire, into making the sentinels.

  I shared my father’s DNA. So too, to some extent, did the Pale, every one of them. We were, in a horrible and twisted way, kin.

  “You have a role to play,” Seraph told me. “And you must fulfil it. You really think you can do that from in here?” She nodded at the DataPad. “I didn’t come to get you out. But I came to bring you up to speed. You’ll need to land running, you see.”

  The screen of the DataPad was lit up, a video, looking like a news report, was already set up. It was paused.

  I sat slowly on the bed, and pressed play.

  Poppy Merriweather, news anchor and oracle of New Oxford, sat behind her news desk, looking sombre and stern. Behind her, a large screen played out mid-air drone footage of Halloween night, soaring over the city. It looked like riot footage.

  “It’s now almost three weeks since what has been dubbed the Carnival Massacre shook our city,” Poppy intoned solemnly. “A dark night which will surely leave scars on New Oxford for many years to come, a night when our worst fears were realised, and murder came to our very streets. Now classified by Cabal as a terrorist attack, the cult of New Oxford vampires brutally executed seven civilians in the streets, with hundreds more injured.”

  Seven. I sighed. Seven dead. So many, but it could have been so many more. Would have been, if we hadn’t stopped him.

  “The vampires who attacked, without provocation, on that night, are believed to have been working under the persuasive orders of this man…” A close up of Dove appeared on screen, clearly lifted from one of the Fangfest promotional events. He looked every bit the cult leader. Charismatic and saint-like, smiling out at the camera with a glass of champagne in hand. “The vampire known as Dove, who himself was killed on the night in quest
ion by one of his own people.”

  The picture behind her news-desk changed again, the photo of Dove fading out to be replaced with what looked like a slightly blurred bystander snap, showing the theatre, two indistinct figures grappling on its roof, one a light smudge, the other darker.

  “While the identity of his killer is still unknown, speculation suggests it may have been someone within Dove’s terrorist cell, who had turned against the cult at the last moment, and who managed to bring down the attack before it spiralled into a full city-wide massacre.”

  Pictures rolled along behind Poppy as she clasped her hands before her. Aftermath photos. Daylight photos of a now deserted square. Ambulances and police cars. Cabal officers closing off streets with crime tape. And then flowers. Tributes for the dead being left at the theatre, candles lit along the wall of carved emperors.

  “It is now widely believed that the Carnival cult were responsible for the abduction of three girls who’s faces are carved forever into all our hearts and minds. The tragic death of Melodie Cunningham Bowls, and the kidnapping and attempted murders of Cora Winterbourne and Celeste Adamola, whose grandfather and only surviving family, the Dean of Christchurch college also lost his life.”

  “Cabal and other sources suggest all three girls may all have been intended as ritualistic sacrifices by the Carnival cult. While we may never fully understand what this influential and dangerous vampire was trying to achieve, his death, and the unanimous insistence by each of the apprehended Carnival cult vampires that they remember nothing of that night, have caused a flood of frustration and anger in a city that demands answers, and is getting none.”

  “The family of Melodie Cunningham Bowls have declined to comment and have asked that their privacy be respected as they mourn the loss of their daughter.”

  I looked up briefly to Seraph. She was watching me coldly, clearly unmoved.

  “Celeste Adamola, survivor of the Halloween attack, has so far issued no comment to the press, and is believed to have been taken in temporarily by none other than Oscar Scott. Neither has been seen in public since October, although both are understood to be cooperating fully with Cabal investigations.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief to myself. So Celeste was fine too. She had gotten down off the roof. We had looked after her.

  “The family of Cora Winterbourne however, staunch supporters of the Mankind Movement, have been especially vocal in their call for action,” Poppy said on the screen. “Demanding that steps are taken against the Genetic Others before such a tragedy can be allowed to happen again. Their daughter is now receiving extensive counselling, and the campaign to impound all vampires until such time as their true threat level can be determined, is gathering ground. The newly proposed Article Six, brought before Cabal only this week, will determine if all vampires are free to maintain their current business within the city, or if they will have citizen status revoked utterly, and if so… what then?”

  Again, overhead drone footage showed a large park, somewhere in the west of the city by the looks of it. There was a lot of construction going on.

  “One source informs us that Cabal, in anticipation of the near-unanimous approval of Article Six, has already begun construction on a holding compound, to which lawfully, all vampires currently in residence in New Oxford, will be required to go, there to await due processing. A move which Cabal have so far refused to officially comment on, and one which has drawn equal levels of support from MM supporters, and outrage from GO sympathisers, some of whom had gone as far as dubbing it a modern day concentration camp.”

  The video ended abruptly. I stared up at Seraph.

  “They’re saying it was a cult? Dove as a Jim Jones with fangs? And what about the vampires who attacked people… they really don’t remember anything?”

  The girl shook her head, staring at me with her cold, impassive face.

  There hadn’t been any mention of Coldwater, of the Seraph project or the mental-enhancement technology. Nothing about me either. Nothing. Just ‘evil vampires steal kids and kill people for shits and giggles’?

  “They’re trying to pass a law to imprison vampires,” I said to myself. I shook my head. “Even if it passes, do they think the vampires are going to go quietly? As if Allesandro would allow it, being rounded up and put in camps?”

  The Mankind Movement had a stronger argument than ever before, and I was betting, after the massacre and the horror of Halloween, there were a lot less Helsings than before, the number of GO supporters could only have dwindled. There’s nothing like having the gods you worship turn on you and try to rip your throat out to make you rethink your stance.

  “That news clip was a week ago,” Seraph told me. “Swipe right.”

  I flicked the screen. The next few images, sliding across the surface of the DataPad, were all stills. News headlines scanned from various newspapers and different media outlets. They all had the same subject.

  ‘Vampire District a Ghost Town’, I frowned and swiped again. ‘St Giles Deserted: Where Did They Go?’ The images slid across the screen, one after another. ‘Search Continues for New Oxford Fanged Community’. I glanced up at Seraph in disbelief. The still photographs accompanying the headlines all showed empty streets. Vampire nightclubs closed and dark. Eerily deserted roads. One photograph even captured a group of die-hard Helsings lighting candles and leaving roses on the steps of the Eagle and Child, under the title ‘A Silent Vigil’.

  “What… the… hell?” I whispered, scanning the words. They were all the same. Every newspaper. ‘Have the Vampires Left the City?’ And one particular tabloid, ‘LIKE BATS OUTTA HELL – THEY’RE GONE!’.

  Seraph gently took the DataPad from my hands as I stood. Could that be true?

  “The vampires are gone?” I asked, disbelieving. “Gone where? When?”

  “Silently, and overnight,” she replied. “The entire vampire district is abandoned. No one has seen a vampire in the last week. There have been none caught on camera by drones either. No-one knows where they went, or why.”

  The why was pretty obvious to me.

  “Well, clearly to avoid being put in a pen when this bloody law passes and the mob turns up at their doors with flaming torches!” I snapped. “Self-preservation… but where? Have they really done it? Left New Oxford?”

  My heart felt as though it had dropped into my stomach. Would the Mankind Movement be happy now? Had they got what they wanted, driven out the non-humans with their witch hunting? Or would they feel robbed of their chance to round them up in their vile internment camp. I couldn’t process it. I didn’t want to. Had Allesandro really left? Taken his people and put his back to New Oxford? To me?

  “I’ve done what I came to do,” Seraph said, taking a step back. “There’s still much to do, for both of us, before…”

  I stared at her. “Before the endgame?” I hazarded. She blinked at me, narrowing her too-black eyes.

  “Just remember this, to get to the end, Doctor,” she said. “You will need to go back to the beginning.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but just like that, she was gone.

  No puff of smoke, no ghostly fading away. She simply wasn’t there anymore.

  “No!” I yelled to the empty room. My voice bouncing off the white walls. “Don’t… leave me.”

  There was silence in the room.

  Why bother, I thought miserably to myself. Why come here to show me what was happening out in the city, if you weren’t going to help me escape? I was going to be here until either I died or the Pale finally overran the city out there and killed the lot of them. I’d only know the world had finally fallen when the meals stopped coming through the slot in my door.

  She hadn’t left the DataPad. I was left alone, terribly along again, with nothing other than the information that the vampires of my city had disappeared. Had they really left of their own volition? Or had they all been taken against their will, and this was another cover-up? For all I knew, they were all holed up in secret
cells somewhere, just like me.

  Chapter 41

  There was a sudden click, loud and metallic, and the noise of motor-driven bolts being pulled back. It startled me. I hadn’t heard any such noise since I’d been here. My eyes widened as the door to my cell slid open.

  A thin man in a Cabal Ghost suit stood in the doorway. He looked over me. I must have looked like a mad person, goggling at him. I had never expected that door to open. I was still trying to figure out if I’d imagined it happening. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t go mad. I was still sane, lucid. But then don’t all mad people believe that?

  “Doctor Phoebe Harkness,” he said in a bored and clipped tone, reading from a clipboard. “Former detainee 448. Follow me please.”

  “What?” I asked, suspiciously. “Wait. Former… what do you mean? Follow you where?”

  I had a horrible, paranoid image of being led to an electric chair or something similar. That Cabal had finally gotten bored of me, irritated that I hadn’t starved myself to death or tried to hang myself with knotted bedsheets yet.

  “Former detainee?” I stuttered, but he had already turned away and walked off, apparently not remotely interested in answering any of my questions.

  I rushed through the door, seized with a sudden absolute certainty that it was a cruel joke, and it was going to slam shut and lock me in again before I could get out.

  But it didn’t. The corridor beyond led only a short distance before coming to a door. I stared around at it, blinking, as I followed the suit. I had imagined this featureless grey corridor stretching off in both directions endlessly, with countless cells lining the wall in both directions, every one of them containing someone just like me, filed away neatly in their own personal hell. In truth, I saw to my surprise that there were only two other cells in the corridor, and as we passed them and I peeked through the small windows, I saw they were both empty and unoccupied.

  “Former?” I repeated with more force, resisting the urge to jab him in the middle of his thin back to elicit a response. He pressed a series of buttons on a keypad by the door. Presently it opened, and a stainless steel elevator lay before us. I followed him inside.