Shattered by Magic

by Rebecca Danese

  “Hey, Bon,” I say casually, making her jump. “Sorry to startle you. Everything okay?”

  “Curtis, sorry, I was in a world of my own there. The quick answer is no, everything isn’t okay, but I’m kind of busy right now.” She turns away and starts typing again.

  “So...if I just sit over there on one of the computers and do some work, you’d be okay with that?”

  “Do what you like.” She waves her hand over her shoulder, not even bothering to look at me. Marco gives me a wink, and we wander over to a desk in the far back corner. Then I notice the CCTV cameras. Every single one is trained on the screens and the staff in the room, I suppose so that the ATU can make sure their staff are behaving. Damn.

  I nod my head in the direction of the cameras, and Marco blanches, mouthing a swear word at me. I look to see if any of the computers are out of view but come up empty. Then an idea hits me.

  “Follow my lead,” I mouth back at him. He nods, and we saunter back over to Bonnie, while I concoct a last-minute plan.

  “Sorry to trouble you, Bon, but my login isn’t working,” I say, placing a hand on the back of her chair.

  “You’ll have to file a technical error report,” she says, barely pausing in her work.

  “That’s just the thing, everyone’s out, and I need to get a report to Angeles by the end of the day. There’s no chance you could help me, is there?”

  She looks at me and scowls.

  “I’m doing some seriously heavy-duty work for her myself right now, Curtis. What is it with you guys, thinking the world revolves around you?”

  I feign a look of hurt, and she seems to immediately regret those last words.

  “Sorry,” she mumbles. “This is the eighteenth hour of my shift. I’m at the end of my tether. We have ten agents en route to a house in the Lake District and six teams heading to the old Facility site, and Angeles wants satellite imagery from the last two months for both, which is easy in principle, but thermal, subterranean, and kinetic is much harder.”

  “Six teams? She thinks there’s something there, then?”

  “Potentially. The lab found traces of a mineral in that empty vial of Air the butler had, and we traced it back to a region of the midlands—a quarry about ten miles away from the abandoned Facility.”

  “That’s huge,” I say, rubbing my hand over my shaved head and giving Marco an alarmed look. If the Duke is operating out of the old Facility grounds, Ella will be freaking out. That’s where her parents were murdered, after all.

  Bonnie sighs. “So, I’m really sorry your login isn’t working, but I just can’t help that now. I’ll try and do something about it before the end of the night, okay?”

  That’s still not going to work for us. If Marvin can give us information relevant to the mission, Angeles will thank us in the end, right? Even if we have to break a few rules to get it…

  I think fast, moving so that my back is clearly blocking the view of her screen from the security camera, and take a leap of faith.

  “I see you like DC.” I pick up a figurine from the desk and examine it. “Don’t you think Marvel is better?”

  She rotates in her chair and fixes me with a glare.

  Bingo.

  “Have you ever read a comic book? Or are you just basing this on the movies?” As she dives into a torrent of arguments as to why my statement is ridiculous, Marco places Marvin’s device at the back of her computer. I watch as on-screen windows pop up and disappear, the piece of technology doing its job.

  “...And don’t even get me started about the New 52 versus the events that occurred after Civil War...” She goes on. I have only a vague idea of what she’s talking about, but I know enough from my school days to hold a decent conversation. Just when she tries to turn back to her desk, I panic. “But, ultimately, in a fight between Iron Man and Batman, you don’t think Iron Man would win?” It’s a stupid question, but it gets her attention enough for the device to finish its job. The light must have gone green, because Marco picks it up, puts it in his pocket, and gives me a thumbs up.

  “Remind me to lend you Crisis one of these days. But only if you promise to guard it with your life. It’s a collector’s item,” Bonnie says, poking me in the chest before snatching the action figure out of my hands and placing it back on the table.

  “Of course,” I reply, holding my hands up in surrender and giving her a smile. I try to wipe the look of relief and guilt off my face and promise to leave her in peace for now.

  “Who are you, and what have you done with Curtis?” Marco jokes when we reunite with Jer and Lou.

  “What do you mean?” I give him a confused look.

  “That was badass, in a ridiculously geeky way,” he says, sounding impressed. He recites the events of just now to them both, with an odd sort of pride in his voice. “I didn’t know you had it in you to improvise like that.”

  “You mean lie. I blatantly just lied to her face, and I feel horrible about it,” I admit, looking at Lou and Jer for the inevitable verbal beating, but neither says anything to make me feel worse.

  “Shall we get out of here and see if Marvin delivered on his promise?” Lou suggests, leading us away from the IT Lab and down into Archives, where we should have been all along. There are fewer cameras down here and no people, only shelves and filing cabinets filled with mouldy files from all the case studies, old missions, and previous iterations of the ATU, before Miss Banks took over and it became the beast it is today.

  We gather around a desk and pull up a seat each, wiping the dust with our sleeves. The place is deserted, and I get the idea we could stay here for hours and no one would notice—the perfect hiding place.

  I log into the email Marvin gave to me, using the password scribbled on my arm.

  “What do you know?” Jer says over my shoulder, sounding surprised.

  “Yes!” I fist-pump, seeing the inbox filled with notifications from someone called JU67_IN_T1M3, probably one of his aliases.

  “Maybe he was trying to be cute,” Lou suggests.

  “I doubt it. With Marvin, it’s probably some kind of warning.”

  I tap on the oldest message first, assuming this is the beginning of the information, and we begin to read, my phone placed between us all on a small metal table.

  After half an hour of sifting through data, one thing is very clear: If this information had gotten to the press at the same time as Munday’s file, the Duke would have been a wanted criminal too.

  Reams of documents about their experiments, his assistance in Munday’s original versions of Air, case reports of all the powers he absorbed and all the horrendous things they did together, none of it censored, all of it completely legible.

  “This is huge,” Jer mutters next to me.

  I want to say “I told you so,” since he and Lou continued to stick up for the Duke even after Munday was caught, but I bite my tongue. I glance at Lou, who’s gone an uncomfortable shade of white.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” she says. She’d just finished reading the report of a woman who was electroshocked for twelve hours before Munday sucked out her powers, with the Duke amplifying them at the same time. So much for Tilly being the one to fund the Facility. The evidence is clear enough that he lied about that; what else did he accuse her of to cover up his own evil?

  “I think we’ve seen enough,” I say, skimming through the rest of the horrors and willing my stomach not to empty itself onto the table. I catch a glimpse of something that stops me from putting my phone away. “Wait a sec. Guys, check this out.”

  I show the research document around the table. This is it: the thing that completes the puzzle of why the Duke has really been so obsessed with Ella.

  “We knew that Munday was trying to absorb her ability,” Jer says as he reads the report.

  “Yeah, but look at this,” Lou says breathlessly, pointing to the journal entry in Jonathan Clarence’s own hand.

  Dr. Munday wishes to absorb the Power Source ability
for himself, but I see far more potential for replicating the self-generating Augur power. If the subject’s genetic code can be replicated in the form of an enhancement drug, any and all Augurs would be able to self-generate energy for their abilities. The suppression of Augurs would finally be over, and the possibilities of our success would be potentially endless...

  “He knew she was at the Facility,” Lou growls, gripping Jer’s arm in an attempt to stop herself from hitting something.

  “Worse. He was responsible for her being there. They were researching her together,” Jer says.

  Now I really feel like I’m going to puke. If Ella’s parents hadn’t gotten to the Facility when they did, she could have been killed or worse. She was never anything more than another lab rat to him, and he pretended that he saved her, and all of them, from Munday.

  “You okay, Cur?” Marco whispers in my left ear.

  I shake my head, still unable to speak. Visions of what I’m going to do to him when I see him flood my mind, each one more gruesome than the last, until I think I’m making myself ill. “We have to get to her,” I finally manage to say, once I’ve gotten my stomach under control. “The Duke betraying me is one thing, but betraying you”—I look at Jer and Lou—“and Ella? This is too much.”

  Jer flicks through more documents, getting paler by the second. I don’t think I can read any more of the atrocities and instead concentrate on taking deep breaths and wiping my clammy palms on my jeans. Maybe Dr. Lindhurst should check my blood pressure next time I see her. My heart is thudding so hard I’m sure everyone else can hear it.

  “Oh hell,” Jer says, his eyes widening at something on the screen.

  “What now?” Lou asks, snatching the phone off him. “Jesus,” she says once she’s read it. “You’re going to want to see this.” She hands it over to Marco and me to see, and the feeling of sickness is immediately replaced by abject horror.

  In the drafts folder, just as Marvin had promised, is a few lines of email and an attachment.

  Thought you might find this helpful.

  £50,000 worth of lab equipment delivered to an unregistered building in Galdor Regis, twelve weeks ago.

  No big deal at first glance because it was bought through an offshore company. Took me a few mins but traced it to Clarence’s bank account eventually. No one except me would have been able to find this. You can thank me later.

  The attachment is a delivery note for centrifuges, microbiology equipment, vials, crates, and pretty much anything you might need if you were doing something diabolical, like creating a formula using the blood of an innocent girl to make an Augur-enhancing drug, for example.

  “You know what that means, don’t you?” I say, finally able to find my voice.

  “That we give this all to the press and let them do the job of killing any plans before the Duke kicks off? They’d kill his reputation, and anyone left who thinks he’s some kind of saviour would receive a severe reality adjustment,” Lou suggests.

  “Doing that would send a swarm of them directly into an active government investigation though,” Jer points out. “And Angeles would have our heads for that.”

  “Maybe we don’t send in any anonymous tips just yet, then,” I say, “but we certainly can once this blows over.”

  “So, what’s your idea?” she asks.

  I don’t immediately answer, but I know what we need to do now. I get that familiar feeling of clarity that only comes when I’ve made up my mind. I feel it in my very core.

  “You’re not going to like it,” I warn. The thread of a real plan sews its way into my head, and I look around the table eagerly.

  “We’re going, aren’t we?” Jer guesses, sounding less than enthusiastic about it.

  I nod. “We need to get to the lab site. If Angeles has sent a bunch of agents barking up the wrong tree, we need to tell her now and get everyone reassigned. That’s our best lead. The Duke, Munday, Ella… They’ll all be there.”

  “Nope. Nope, nope, nope,” Lou says emphatically. “I’m not one to back away from a fight, Curtis. You know that as much as anyone. But I can’t go back there.” The last few words are whispered.

  I’ve never seen Lou so terrified, and I can’t blame her, but I know this is what we need to do. “It isn’t the Facility, Lou,” I say gently.

  “No, but it might as well be. Labs, equipment, test subjects. Might as well call it FADE 2.0.”

  “All the more reason to save Ella,” I say hoarsely. “We can’t chicken out now.”

  “He’s right, Lou,” Jer says, backing me up. He puts an arm around her. “There’s no other way.”

  “And what about our current status as paper pushers?” Marco asks. “There’s no way that Angeles is going to sign off on a little side field mission in the middle of all this.”

  “With evidence like this, how can she say no?” I stand up and pocket my phone, hoping that Angeles is still in the building.

  “She’ll shut us down without a second thought, Cur,” Jer says, following me through the maze of shelves and cabinets, Marco and Lou trailing behind.

  “What else are we going to do, drive to the Midlands without telling anyone?” I look at him incredulously.

  “Well, yeah.” He shrugs.

  “What? No. You must be more mental than me if you think we’ll get away with that. Look, you guys stay here. I’ll try and find Angeles, and we’ll be on our way in no time.”

  Jer gives me a skeptical look, but I don’t wait to hear any more. I head off in the direction of Miss Banks’s old office, hoping that the Civil Defence Minister will be there.

  I walk past the bull pen, where Crossley and the others normally sit and peer in, but the place is deserted. I can only assume that everyone has been sent out on missions to try and track down the Duke and Munday. Maybe even Ella. Curiosity gets the better of me, and I enter, wandering through the empty room until I reach Crossley’s desk. Just as I was hoping, there’s a mission brief on the table—a manila folder with the drop-off point clearly marked on it, somewhere outside Leicester. Not far from Galdor Regis, but not the location of the lab, either. I read over the document, trying to commit as much of it to memory as I can. If nothing else, it will save time later, once I have Ms. Angeles’s permission to go.

  My first sign of trouble is the list of objectives: secure the Duke, Munday, Mulberry, Kai Chen, the chauffeur...and Ella.

  Maybe Crossley would go easy on her, but any other agent would shoot first and ask questions later. That feeling of nausea and anxiety that I’m becoming more and more familiar with rushes over me, but I plough on, not wanting to miss anything important.

  It’s only when I flip through the details that I clearly see the ATU are going on another wild goose chase. Nowhere on the locations list is the lab that Marvin discovered, and I can bet money on the fact that they’re all off on wild goose chases.

  I try to make a mental note of the drop-off points for agents, where teams are being sent to, and what weapons they’re carrying, and when my head feels too full of information, I snap the folder shut and spin around, almost bumping into the stern figure of Ms. Angeles.

  “Going somewhere, Mayes?” she asks.

  How the hell did she manage to sneak up on me like that?

  “Er, I was just coming to see you, ma’am,” I reply, trying not to sound too nervous.

  “And reading mission briefs that have nothing to do with you was…what? A detour?” She scrutinises me while I attempt (and fail) not to look guilty.

  “Something like that,” I mumble. “Ma’am, I have some serious intel that affects the mission—”

  “Come with me, Curtis,” she interrupts, then she marches away, not bothering to wait for me to catch up.

  I follow her down and around corridors until she disappears through a door, which I step into, realising we’ve come to the Situation Room. Three walls of big screens, enough computer hardware to fill a Microsoft store, and a dozen people stationed there 24/7. We spent a lo
t of time here when Ella was first taken, staring at satellite imagery all hours of the day, trying to get some sniff of where they’d gone. I haven’t been back for about a month though and can’t think why Angeles would lead me here, unless she’s found something.

  Ordinarily, the room is a hive of activity, geeks tapping at their keyboards, the supervisor barking orders when they spot something worth following up on. You normally think you’ve stepped into a Bourne movie when you walk in, but today there’s only myself, Angeles, and a frazzled-looking Bonnie.

  “Where were you between the hours of 10am and 2pm, Curtis?”

  Ms. Angeles asks. It sounds like an interrogation.

  “I was chasing a lead,” I answer, trying to find a tone of voice that doesn’t sound too defensive nor impudent.

  “And what did I tell you not to do, at 9:07am?”

  “Not to leave the building.”

  “Imagine my surprise when, immediately after I gave you that order, you disappeared.”

  I don’t reply. I try to remember everything that Crossley told me about getting in trouble with a senior. Don’t move, don’t speak, and certainly don’t lose your temper. Thinking about it now, maybe he made up those rules just for me.

  “Bonnie, pull up the footage.”

  Fear grips my chest like an ice-cold hand. If she knows that we’ve tampered with the ATU files, she’ll have me arrested here and now.

  My thoughts go to Jer, Lou, and Marco. If only I’d told them to wait for me outside, they could get away. If they’re still down in the archives now, then they’ll be sitting ducks. A trickle of sweat runs down my back as Bonnie hits the keys of the workstation.

  “You’ll be glad to know I asked Bonnie here to keep tabs on your phone, just in case.”

  “Great,” I reply enthusiastically, but even to me it sounds strained, particularly as I half choke on the word. Her right eyebrow raises slightly at my reply, like a built-in lie detector.