by Vic James
Cool fingers tipped up his chin. It was a proprietary gesture. Luke snarled and tossed his head, then glared at the freak who’d handled him.
He wasn’t what Luke was expecting.
He was young – maybe no older than Luke himself, although taller. His hair was a mess, which saved Luke from having to see too much of his face. Luke caught a flash of dark eyes that made him shudder. It was as if someone had poked two holes right through the guy’s head and the night was showing through on the other side.
Luke looked away as the Equal studied him intently. Who was this, and where were they?
‘Well, I was right about one thing,’ said the freak, smiling in a way that was the opposite of reassuring. ‘You’ve got potential. You’re also in a bit of a state, so, first things first.’
The guy reached out and ripped off the bandage around Luke’s head. He lightly cupped Luke’s skull right where Kessler’s baton had hit. For a fleeting moment it was awful, then it wasn’t. Luke’s scalp and face tingled. His head didn’t hurt any more. In fact, nothing hurt any more. He didn’t even feel tired. The aristo was watching him carefully, wiping his fingers fastidiously on his sleeve.
‘Better?’ the Equal asked. ‘You’re not going to like this next bit so much.’
He didn’t.
They’d all heard horror stories at school, or told them to one another late at night on camping trips when the adults were sleeping in another tent. The tales had always made Luke’s flesh creep. Stories of people who woke up in the middle of operations, but were too paralyzed to raise the alarm. Backpackers who went drinking in beach bars, then came to in a bath of ice minus some vital organs. Sicko scientists who’d experimented on living, conscious prisoners during wartime.
The violation felt that deep. Like those cool fingers were inside his body – inside his soul, the existence of which Luke had never given much thought to until now. They were carefully sorting through bits of him that no other person was ever meant to see or know. He was sure he was going to throw up. He probably wasn’t close enough to spatter the Equal’s boots, but he’d try.
‘Interesting,’ the freak said, in a way that even Luke could tell meant no good to anyone, least of all himself. ‘I wonder . . .’
The boy’s eyes closed. But before Luke could experience any relief at being spared that unnerving gaze, he felt himself somehow . . . come loose. It was as if he was an engine still assembled, but with every part unscrewed.
He felt the Equal reach in and take something out of him.
Or add something? Had a new part been placed deep inside, where he’d never been aware that anything was missing? Something so essential it was impossible he had functioned without it?
He couldn’t tell. And then the intrusion was gone and Luke curled into a ball on the hard-frozen ground. He gagged on his fear and let it spew all over the tree roots. The Equal just stood there watching.
‘Finished?’ the boy said, without a scrap of solicitude, when Luke was wiping his mouth with the back of his bound hands.
Luke wasn’t going to dignify that with a reply. He knew only that he hated this freak. Hated him with a passion. No one should be able to do whatever this boy had just done to him. It was obscene that such people existed.
‘Anyway,’ the Equal continued, as if they’d been talking about the cricket scores or last night’s telly. ‘My brother will be over in a minute for all the usual “Welcome to Kyneston” blah.’
Kyneston.
This wasn’t a Security detention facility. Not a lifer camp. It was the estate where his family lived.
The relief was so intense that Luke couldn’t hold back the tears. He ducked his head, not wanting the Equal to see, and scrubbed his cheeks with the sleeve of his boilersuit.
‘How am I here?’ he asked, when he’d pulled himself together.
The freak shrugged.
‘Thank your sister Daisy. Gavar’s taken a shine to her. When we heard there’d been more trouble in the slavetown and he was going back, she begged him to get you out. Gavar is my older brother,’ the boy clarified. ‘I think you were in the audience for his little performance in Millmoor.’
Gavar Jardine.
The Equal who’d blown up the prison after they’d freed Oz. Who had inflicted agony on hundreds of people like it was nothing at all. That same Gavar Jardine had spirited Luke out of Millmoor – because Daisy asked him to?
Luke shook his head, uncomprehending.
‘Looks like Gavar’s idea of a plan involved blunt force and a delivery van,’ the boy continued, smirking. ‘Seems about right. I’m sure Jenner will tell you all about it. I’m done here. For now.’
He walked off towards what Luke realized must be the estate gate. The light flared again and Luke heard the murmur of voices. Then one set of hooves faded away at a trot and the other came slowly towards him, accompanied by a beam of torchlight.
Normal torchlight, not freaky magical light.
‘You must be Luke Hadley,’ said another posh voice, which turned out to belong to a guy cursed with both red hair and superabundant freckles. He was leading a horse that snorted in the icy air. ‘I’m Jenner Jardine. I do apologize for all that. It’s not pleasant, but it is necessary. Welcome to Kyneston. I’ll take you to your family; they’re going to be so glad to see you.’
Jenner pulled out a penknife and sawed through Luke’s bonds, then passed him the blanket, which Luke wrapped round his shoulders like a poncho. The Equal led the way through a huge fancy gate, all twirls and swirls and lit up like a Christmas tree, which was set into a faintly glowing wall.
After that, they walked across what felt like mile after mile of countryside. A vast area of England hidden from the common people, who would never walk here or even see this place. It was theft, really, Luke thought. Theft of something that should belong to everyone, locked up for the enjoyment of a few.
They skirted the edge of a wood, and Luke ducked and swore as a bat flew straight at him. Jenner laughed, though not unkindly, and explained that the creatures used the treeline to navigate. From somewhere far off came a chilling shriek, which Jenner said was an owl. Things rustled among the trees. Foxes? Or maybe weasels? It seemed like everything here was busy hunting everything else: the animals with wings and claws going after the animals with neither.
How appropriate.
They eventually arrived at a row of small cottages, all built in stone and neatly whitewashed, bright in the moonlight. It was ridiculously twee. Mum must love it.
Jenner hammered on the door and after a few moments Dad opened it, a dressing gown hanging off his shoulders. Dad did a double-take and pulled Luke into his arms for a neck-cracking, back-thumping man-hug, then Mum and the girls crowded out the doorway. Briefly, brilliantly, Luke forgot that anything else existed apart from his family. They all seemed safe, well, and in bits to see him again.
The feeling was mutual.
The kitchen clock was showing nearly 1 a.m., but they talked for ages round the table. At some point a baby started crying and Daisy excused herself to soothe it. The child was Heir Gavar’s daughter, Dad said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have the kid of a magical psychopath asleep in a cot upstairs.
Luke recalled his first sight of the heir, striding through the corridor of the detention centre while he and the Doc dragged Oz to freedom. He remembered hoping that his little sister’s path never crossed with Gavar’s, and almost laughed at the irony.
But once his thoughts had veered hundreds of miles north to Jackson and Millmoor, then to the club and the rioters, Luke couldn’t quite get back on track with the family reunion.
Mum noticed him zoning out and ordered everyone to bed, saying that he must be exhausted. He wasn’t, of course. The Equal at the gate – Silyen Jardine, Abi said – had seen to that. But Luke didn’t let on.
He lay awake in the darkness, trying and failing to duck the thoughts that flapped about his head. What had happened in front of the MADhouse
after Kessler had coshed him? Where was the Doc? Were Renie, Asif and the others safe? Injured? Captured? What had Silyen Jardine done to him?
And the last thought before he drifted off: what would happen to him now?
Luke spent the weekend lying in, luxuriating in the soft bed and the privacy of a room all of his own, trying to adjust to his new circumstances. Mum clucked around, bringing up bowls of soup and sandwiches. Dad told him about Lord Jardine’s vintage car collection and a tricky carburettor problem he’d solved the previous week. Daisy carried in the baby to show him.
Luke wished she hadn’t. Sure, the little girl looked normal enough. Cute, even. But did she have Skill? That was a creepy thought. All that power inside something so small.
Except it seemed she didn’t, because the kid’s mother wasn’t an Equal, just a slavegirl. (And how had that happened, Luke thought darkly? Had Gavar Jardine seen something he liked and just taken it?)
‘So where is her mum?’ he asked, once the baby had been put back in its cot, out of earshot.
‘Dead,’ Daisy said flatly.
The scenario that Luke had already conjured around Libby Jardine’s origins darkened a shade further.
‘Wasn’t like that,’ said his sister. ‘Why is everyone so set against Gavar? He’s the reason you’re out of Millmoor, Luke.’
Daisy being so brilliant was the reason he was out of Millmoor, and Luke told her so before pulling her into a fierce cuddle. His little sis pummelled him for squeezing her too tightly, but he didn’t mind. He realized that for a while, in the slavetown and then in the van, he had genuinely believed he would never see his family again.
At breakfast on Monday, Jenner turned up and explained that Luke was going to be working as a groundsman. Abi walked into the kitchen while Jenner was there, but on seeing him she stopped short, turned and went back out. Which was peculiar, given that she worked with him.
So Abi’s relationship with Jenner joined Daisy’s friendship with Gavar on the long list of things Luke worried about as he laboured at his new job.
‘Groundsman’ meant that he was some sort of glorified woodcutter under the direction of a miserable old git named Albert. Albert didn’t talk much, which suited Luke just fine. The pair of them worked all over the estate, often miles away from the main house, which also suited Luke fine. It was cold and wet and tiring, and at the end of each day Luke was knackered, just as he had been in Millmoor. That was fine, too, because his body’s exhaustion was the only way of forcing his overloaded brain to shut down each night.
He’d been at Kyneston for nine days when his bag of possessions turned up at the cottage. Did that mean the Overbitch had rubber-stamped his unscheduled departure? Luke tore the bag apart searching for a note or message from the Doc or Renie. Something sewn into the lining, perhaps? Or rolled and stuffed into the handle? But there was nothing.
He looked at the bag’s pathetic contents laid out on his bed. Black socks and grey underpants, a toothbrush, a photo of himself with his classmates on the last day of term that already felt like ancient history. He had nothing to show for his half-year in the slavetown. The only things that mattered – the friendships, everything he’d done and dared, the person he’d become – had all been left behind.
‘How does the post work here?’ he asked Abi a few days later. ‘Could I get a letter to Millmoor?’
When she asked why, he said he wanted to send a ‘thank you’ to a doctor who’d patched him up after an accident.
‘Let him know that I’m doing okay.’
Abi frowned and told him she didn’t think that was a good idea, and besides, the post to Millmoor still wasn’t running.
His second week at Kyneston ended. Then a third. Weeks in which, although surrounded by his family, Luke felt lonelier than he ever had in his life.
Had Jackson and the club forgotten about him already? There’d be no shortage of angry new recruits in Millmoor, so Luke could easily be replaced. But he remembered the games they’d played together: break-ins with Jessica, keeping a lookout for Asif, dangling Renie off the roof. They’d all trusted each other with their lives. You didn’t simply forget about someone after sharing such things.
There were three possibilities, he decided. His friends had been arrested. Or they planned to contact him, but hadn’t been able to yet. Or they believed he was content at Kyneston with his family.
As he set about that morning’s task of chopping down a rotten cherry tree deep in the woods, Luke tested each hypothesis. The first didn’t stand up. If the club’s existence and its role in the riot had been discovered, Luke would have been pulled in for questioning too, whether or not he was at Kyneston. The second possibility was also unlikely. Jackson and Angel could break a man out of Millmoor, so they should have no problem getting a message to him – even here. That left only the third option: that the club now regarded him as out of the picture.
Which was so wrong Luke didn’t know where to start. There was so much he could contribute to the cause from Kyneston. The Jardines were the most powerful family in the land, and he was right in their midst. Several of them paid slaves no more heed than furniture, creating all sorts of opportunities for eavesdropping. His sister worked in the Family Office and had a key. The Third Debate – when the Abolition Proposal would be voted upon – would be happening right here.
Frustrated, Luke whacked his axe against the shattered tree trunk, causing it to rip up out of the ground and keel over. The roots were dry and dead, as if all the life had drained out of them. He turned the stump over and began hacking off the withered tendrils one by one. It was only minimally therapeutic.
Luke had once thought that Jackson intended him to go to Kyneston. ‘The plan is to get you to their estate,’ the Doc had said at that first meeting after they’d liberated Oz.
Well, here he was. Except that was Gavar Jardine’s doing, at Daisy’s request. Nothing to do with any scheme of Jackson’s at all.
Luke sheared the axe head down the side of the stump, swearing as the wood simply crumbled and fell to bits in his hand. He was missing something. What was it?
Here was a curious thing: Gavar Jardine had been instrumental in Oz’s escape, too. He had walked right past the three of them in the prison, when it seemed unthinkable that he wouldn’t have noticed them. And Jackson had doubled back towards the Equal, leaving Luke and Renie to get Oz to Angel. There’d been gunfire and a yell, but the Doc wasn’t hurt. Had the two of them staged everything?
Luke remembered Jackson’s shocking words on the day he told them about the Proposal. When he’d admitted that he had an ally among the Equals.
‘Someone close to power,’ the Doc had said. ‘He sees every shadow in the House of Light.’
Who was closer to power than Gavar Jardine? A parliamentarian. A member of the Justice Council. An heir who seemed destined for the Chancellorship himself one day.
Luke’s brain raced, snatching up more clues. The man had a common-born child. He had used his Skill to strike down everyone at the MADhouse, yes, but only after that maniac Grierson had ordered open fire on the crowd. Gavar Jardine might have caused anguish, but he had saved lives.
And while it was cute to think of Gavar busting Luke out of Millmoor at Daisy’s request, it wasn’t very plausible that a ten-year-old – even one as cool as his sister – would have come up with that idea herself. Had the heir planted the suggestion, knowing it’d be a good cover?
Luke wasn’t certain. But for now, it seemed to be the only scenario that explained everything.
Everything, except one crucial question.
What was he needed for here at Kyneston?
18
Abi
It was all going to work out, it really was. They’d have a quick ten years.
Abi had worried about Luke initially. He’d seemed spaced out during those first weeks here. And he’d not said a lot about his time at Millmoor, beyond the easily inferred facts. One, it hadn’t been much fun, and two, he didn
’t want to talk about it.
At least he’d arrived in one piece, despite all the rumours of unrest, and that stray mention of a doctor and an accident. More than that, Luke had done some serious growing up in Millmoor. On the awful day that he’d been torn from them, he’d displayed a strength of character she’d never suspected, and that seemed only to have deepened during their time apart. He’d filled out, too, in a way that made her glad her baby bro was safe from the clutches of her man-eating school friends.
All in all, she was one proud and relieved big sister. And now that Luke was with them, hopefully things would finally settle down and the Hadleys could get on with doing their days.
Except, Jenner was still acting coolly.
And Abi still had no clear recollection of what had happened that evening in the Great Solar.
What’s more, the dog-man still wouldn’t tell her what he had done to supposedly deserve his humiliation at the hands of Lady Hypatia. Wouldn’t, or couldn’t.
The way Kyneston’s other slaves seemed content to pretend the man didn’t exist was frankly disgusting.
‘You’ve got to forget about it, love,’ the housekeeper said, over a cup of tea one afternoon. ‘He’s no good, and no good will come of getting involved.’
When Abi demanded to know why, the answer was always the same: because he’d been punished by Lord Crovan, a fate reserved only for the most wicked. Couldn’t they see they had it all backwards? The severity of the man’s punishment was no proof that he deserved it.
‘Come with me,’ she told Luke one evening when they’d done the washing and wiping up. Daisy was upstairs reading as Libby settled, and Mum and Dad had gone to visit friends along the Row. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’
Luke had grinned, happy to humour her. Something inside him had relaxed, unwound, these past couple of weeks. At first he’d seemed agitated, almost like he’d missed Millmoor. She’d wondered if he’d met some girl in there and was pining for her, but he’d poured scorn on that idea. Maybe he’d just needed time to adjust.
