“Who is it?” David asked, searching the screens.
“Well, good news is, the Gospel have finally decided to give up and go away.”
“And the bad?”
“Argent’s sister has found us,” Terrian admitted exasperatedly. “My team cleaned up the flat, but when he didn’t answer the phone she called the police. She’s that kind of girl, apparently. Your kid can go down there and calm her down. We can put her in for therapy, have her talk to one of the counselors, who can show her that he died of a heart attack. That’s the line you should go with,” he said to Rose, not looking at her. “If she knows too much and starts getting too loud, you know what to do. Though I hope that doesn’t happen. We’d have to do a full mental rewrite. That’d take a lot of manpower, and I don’t want this spreading. We don’t need a panic.”
“Do we have any data on her?” Rose asked. She, as always, was trying very hard not to get annoyed with Terrian. This rarely worked, but it was good to put in the effort. It wasn’t the fact that she’d known him for years and he still didn’t refer to her by name, but that he treated her father as a rookie rather than the best agent in the Department.
James had a new data file on his computer. Rose hurried gratefully over to him.
“Sylvia Argent,” he said, reading off the screen. “Ashkind. Thirty-one years old. Boyfriend died about four months ago — road accident, non-suspicious, nothing we’d have on record. Pregnant, with his kid as far as we know. She worshipped her brother like a god, especially after he beat up her ex a couple of years ago. She’s not gonna give up easily on this.”
“Don’t worry,” said Rose grimly. “I’ve had practice. This is pretty much the only thing I can do here. There isn’t much for me to get wrong.”
James swiveled round in his chair to look at her. “Yeah . . .” he said thoughtfully. “You’ve got your Test tomorrow, haven’t you?”
Rose nodded, pulling on her coat.
“I can’t tell you what’s coming,” James said gently. “But I can tell you that you’re better at any of this than any pre-Test teenager I’ve ever met. And after your training — well, when you need a job, I’m definitely an unbiased source who’d be willing to give you a reference.”
Rose stared at him for a few seconds, searching his face for a joke, and then broke into a wide grin. “Thanks, James.”
“Thank me after I’ve done something. You’ve got to defuse this one first.” He nodded toward Sylvia Argent’s data file.
“Wish me luck.”
“You don’t need it.”
Rose gave her father a last glance — he was arguing earnestly with Terrian about something — and then walked out the door.
She took the stairs down to the staff entrance on the ground floor, on the other side of the building to the lobby. One of the people upstairs had remotely unlocked the door for her. Rose nodded in thanks to the security camera above it and walked through into the room beyond.
She was in the office that belonged to Emily and Pippa, the other secretary, who was on maternity leave. There were two computers, several coffee mugs and a glass panel in the door, through which Rose could see a tall, heavily pregnant woman with long auburn hair and gray eyes shouting furiously at Emily, tears running down her cheeks.
Rose bent down to one of the computers, opened up the messaging platform and typed in a short message to the computer in the lobby.
I’ve been sent down to neutralize her. Just go with it.
After a few seconds, she got an affirmation back. Rose straightened up and strode toward the door, slamming it open and genuinely making Emily jump.
“You’re off duty now,” Rose told her, straight-faced.
“But —”
“This place is watched, woman, haven’t you noticed? We saw how deliberately unhelpful you were being to this poor lady. You are off duty! Probably permanently! Get out!”
Emily jumped up, doing a slightly too convincing impression of fear, and scurried back through the door, closing it behind her. Rose knew she would probably use this as an excuse to take the rest of the day off.
Rose turned to Sylvia, who looked half-astonished, half-frightened.
“I’m so sorry. She’s been troublesome for a long time; this was just one step too far. I’m Rose. How can I help you?”
“I’m Sylvia,” the woman said, tearily. Rose noticed that she held one hand protectively over her enlarged midsection. “Sylvia Argent. Where’s my brother?”
“Who’s your brother?”
Sylvia, still crying, gave her all the information on Argent that Rose already knew. Rose stood there calmly and nodded at the right times, very glad that Sylvia was distraught enough not to wonder why a teenager was on staff at a major government department. When Sylvia appeared to have finished, Rose said gently, “When did you last see him?”
“Last week.” Sylvia sniffed. “We met up for lunch . . . and today, when he didn’t answer his phone, I went to his flat, and he wasn’t there and half his stuff was gone, and . . . and . . .” She burst into tears. Rose gave her a gentle hug, feeling the press of the baby against her ribs. Sylvia was a good two inches shorter than her.
“What happened?” Rose prompted. Sylvia tried to speak, and burst into tears again. Rose grimaced at the camera.
“. . . and there was blood on the carpet!” Sylvia managed.
Rose froze. She closed her eyes and opened them again. So much for Terrian’s cleanup operation.
“I’m sorry?” Rose pulled back from the hug to look into Sylvia’s red, tear-tracked face. She looked entirely serious. Not that she wouldn’t be, but the claim had taken Rose aback to such an extent that she had to check for alternatives.
“Blood! Tom’s blood, on the carpet!”
“Let me check this.” Rose hurried over to the computer. “This could be serious.”
Officially, this building was the center of London’s law and order, after Scotland Yard had been destroyed in the War. All deaths would be reported back to it. Therefore they should have Argent on file.
Rose sent James a message.
I hope you’re following this. I need a file on Argent that says he died of something non-suspicious that would produce blood. Quickly.
While waiting for the reply, she pretended to be typing, watching Sylvia covertly. The Ashkind woman was crying quietly in a corner, holding her stomach, trying to sing to her baby. Rose felt sorry for her. She’d lost her brother, and would probably never find out the truth.
She thought of Greenlow. Necessary evil.
The slight ping of the computer announced James’s message.
Can’t do that. Argent’s death is under investigation, any files on him can’t be created or changed. Sorry, you’re on your own.
Rose stared at the screen as if stricken — it didn’t take much acting — and then looked up apologetically at Sylvia, who had raised her head eagerly at the noise of the computer.
“Yes? What is it? Do you know what’s happened to Tom?”
“I’m sorry,” Rose said gently. “Your brother’s in hospital. He was in a fight; he has a severe head injury.”
“But . . . the girl before you checked in Chelsea and Westminster. He wasn’t there. She said.”
Mentally, Rose swore.
“She must have made a mistake,” she said calmly.
“But she showed me the file! The military personnel in the hospital! He wasn’t there!”
“I —”
“You’re lying to me!”
It was an accusatory shout, sure of itself, firm and angry. In her three or four years calming down distraught relatives for the Department, Rose had had this shouted at her many times. It was a proportionally small number, for which Rose was proud, but nevertheless, once someone was determined that you were lying to them, it never went well from there.
“Sylvia, please. I know you’re distressed, but you don’t need to jump to —”
“I knew it!” she shrieked. “I knew bad th
ings happened here! I warned him! Tom worked here once, and he . . . he said that . . . there were things that happened, things he’d done . . . that no one should ever know about . . . and he went and told someone — and now . . . you’ve done something to him . . . You killed him, you killed Tom —”
She collapsed into tears. Rose tried to move toward her, but Sylvia backed away, stumbled and fell onto the purple sofa next to the glass wall.
“Stay away from me!” she shouted, sobbing.
She was nearly lying down; that made it easier. Rose stepped up closer to her, one hand stretched out toward Sylvia in a gesture of peace, and in a sudden, smooth movement grabbed the woman’s wrist, flipped it over and slid the needle into her vein. The amount of practice she’d had over the years meant that she didn’t even have to look. Sylvia screamed, long and loud, and Rose pushed down the plunger with her thumb before letting the other woman wrench her hand away. Sylvia cried out, her eyes already dimming.
“What have you done to me? What have you done to me?”
“It’s just a mild sedative,” Rose told her, wishing it was as easy to inject reassurance into her voice as it was to put sleep into Sylvia’s veins. “It won’t harm your baby, don’t worry.”
“I —”
Sylvia fell back against the sofa. Easier, much easier. It made Rose anxious when they were standing up. Once, a man had sustained a concussion when the sedative had taken effect that way. Rose didn’t want any harm to come to Sylvia. This process was all for her own good.
Sylvia’s breathing slowed and she was silent. Rose stepped forward tentatively. Sylvia’s eyes were closed, her face was relaxed and she slept calmly. Rose checked her pulse, which seemed steady enough. Looking up, she saw her father, Terrian, and Laura — a motherly woman in her fifties who headed the Department’s memory-altering sessions — hurrying toward her.
“Dammit,” Laura muttered, kneeling by Sylvia and turning her head to examine her. “This one’ll take a lot of convincing.”
Rose was glaring at Terrian, shaking.
“Blood,” she whispered. To her surprise, she felt a tear on her cheek. She wiped it away furiously. “Blood on the carpet — how the hell could your team have missed that?”
Terrian stared at her, outraged.
“Rose,” David said warningly.
“That woman,” Rose said, ignoring him and pointing at Sylvia behind her, “is going to spend the next few weeks in the memory rewrite wards, and after that much suggestion therapy she won’t be able to think for herself for weeks. She’ll be apathetic. Emotionless. And she’s going to have a baby! What happens to her kid when she’s like that? You’ve just upped her chances of postnatal depression by about fifty percent — or if it doesn’t work, she’ll spend the rest of her life wondering what happened to her brother, and all because you and your incompetent mess of a cleanup team missed a massive bloodstain — a bloodstain — on the carpet!”
“How dare you,” Terrian growled. “I am a colonel of the British Government, and you haven’t even taken your Test yet, you are nobody — how dare you insult me —”
“It doesn’t matter how old I am,” Rose snapped angrily, her voice shaking. “It’s your competence that’s in question here —”
“Rose,” David said sharply. “Connor, she has a point. Rose, so does he. Don’t talk to an officer like that.”
Rose shut up. Beside them, Laura was whispering to the unconscious Sylvia. She took a capped syringe of thick, white memory serum from her pocket and slowly injected it into Sylvia’s arm. This would be enough to wipe the events of the last few hours from her mind and allow Laura’s team to implant suggestions there. They would tell her that her brother had been posted to a peacekeeping mission, somewhere far away. They would tell her not to come back here asking questions. They would tell her everything was going to be all right. And, Rose thought bitterly, they would be lying.
“She should be fine,” Laura said loudly before Terrian could shout anything at Rose. “We’ll do everything we can to minimize the eff —”
Pain expanded to fill Rose’s head and it was upon her, and suddenly her wits and her memory deserted her and she was left stranded in a small metal room with no windows, flailing and screaming, and something inside her head was growing and growling and pushing its way through into her mind, forcing her own thoughts down into compliance, and she was falling, falling, and she stumbled back. And then her hand found a wall that shouldn’t have been there and she was jerked back to the Department, breathing hard. She looked around. Everyone was staring at her.
She glanced down at her watch. That would be the forty-eight-hour mark.
“Are you okay?” Laura asked her anxiously.
“Yeah,” Rose muttered. “Headache.”
Her father caught her eye. The sight of him nearly triggered it again, but she bit her lip and focused.
“You need to get home,” David said to her quietly. “Get some rest. You’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
She nodded, but she didn’t meet his eyes.
The War that followed the Veilbreak was very long, and a lot of people died.
Those were the basic facts of the matter. Everything else about it, however, was disputed. When it came to the history of the War, opinion held far greater sway than objective reportage.
Stephen Greenlow and the Gospel thought that the Gifted should have wiped out the non-magical Ashkind completely, instead of merely defeating them and letting them live in relative peace and comfort.
The Ashkind themselves believed that the Great Truce that had finally ended the War should have been fairer to them. They held that they should have been allowed to occupy Government positions, and to work in the public sector.
Still others didn’t accept the Great Truce at all. They believed they were still fighting the War, that there were still battles to be won.
The rest of the world tended to laugh at these people.
By most accounts, though, the War had lasted six years — six years of hot, bitter, fiery killing — and, as one might expect from a war in which one side had the advantage of magic over the other, the Gifted had won decisively. The world that emerged from it was deeply changed. The electricity grids had to be rebuilt from scratch. There were no more elections; the Angels ruled from Parliament. The Internet was reconstructed, with built-in surveillance programs, but mobile phones — which were considered difficult to monitor and thus facilitators of that most dangerous of forces, political dissent — were left unresurrected. There were Tests for those with magic, Leeching for those who failed them, and the Department to maintain law and order. Those immediate, pressing issues — the ones that concerned actual living people — were so important that people tended to forget about the War now, or try to.
It was not easy.
Rose was not old enough to remember the details of the conflict, but even she knew some of the darker legends. One particular nightmare had survived so long that, even now, twelve years after the Great Truce had been signed, children still scared one another with tales of it. They were known as Hybrids, and they had been one of the great killers of the War.
You can’t see them, the children would say.
You don’t know who they are. They could be anyone.
I could be one.
Hybrids were ordinary people, most of the time. They walked and talked like normal people. They smiled and had friends and families and generally blended in well with the rest of society. The legend held that they were always Ashkind, but other, whispered stories spoke of Hybrids with bright, glowing green eyes, with magic on their fingertips.
But that was only when they were human.
They weren’t always human.
One night in every six weeks, they changed. They would shriek and scream and snarl and turn into monsters, and those monsters couldn’t be held back by wood or steel or stone. They would roam the streets during sleepy, starlit nights, and they would destroy everyone and everything in their path.<
br />
Actually, when it came to Hybrids, destroy was too gentle a word. For that matter, so were kill, evil, run, and terrifying.
You did not want to die at the clawed hands of a Hybrid. Burning to death was less painful.
And so on.
The stories continued in this vein at great length, though the specifics varied, but there was one thing upon which all the storytellers agreed: if you met a Hybrid in human form, if you knew their true identity, then you should kill them. You shouldn’t waste time; you shouldn’t give them a chance to escape. A bullet to the head was all it required. You wouldn’t be arrested for it. Oh, no. For killing a Hybrid, there was probably a medal in store for you.
But that didn’t matter. No Hybrids had been caught for years now. They had probably died out, faded back into horror stories where they belonged, and good riddance to them.
Of course, they hadn’t really gone.
Rose and her father were living proof of that.
And if anyone found that out — if anyone, Department or otherwise, ever harbored the slightest trace of a suspicion that they were monsters — then they would not be living at all for very much longer.
As for the rules of magic, they were simple.
You needed a source, an instructor, and a soul. Or, as the textbooks put it: a Source, an Instructor, and a Soul.
The Source was easy enough to come by: it was simply energy. The chemical energy stored in the human muscles was the usual source; the Ministry of Defense was investigating whether or not it was possible to use a battery, but for the moment, the vast majority of the Gifted who were allowed to retain their magical powers had to rely on their own bodies.
This meant that how well you had eaten, or slept, or how fit you were, all contributed to how much energy you could use — and therefore how much magic you could do — at any one time. There was no mechanism to stop you using too much, though, so if you were tired and hungry and tried to, say, destroy the foundations of a house, your body would work through excess energy and then start consuming itself. Simply put, if you overexerted yourself, you would spontaneously combust.
The Catalyst Page 3
