As a kid, Rose had always thought that was the coolest way to die. And of course, as a Department kid, she had always known exactly how many ways there were.
Standing in her garden, Rose stared at the piece of wood on the bench. She came to the conclusion that she would have been a terrible arsonist: no matter how much she tried, it wasn’t catching fire. This was because she wasn’t concentrating, and she wasn’t concentrating because she was nervous, and she really, really hated being nervous, so maybe if she got angry enough —
The wood burst into flames with a sound like exploding popcorn. It lay there, flickering, on the bench. She watched it dully.
The second thing you needed was an Instructor: something that could tell the magic what to do. The brain did this, for the most part, although — and this was, again, theoretical — it might be possible to use some kind of computer to replace it.
Rose maintained the anger in place of focus, shifting her weight from foot to foot, and the charred bench eventually toppled over. She threw a bucket of water onto the flames before anything more substantial could be damaged.
The last thing you needed — and this not even the MoD could simulate — was a Gifted soul. In the old days, the days before the Veilbreak, each person had possessed only one soul. Now they had two: an otherworldly soul and a human one, fused together. Your second soul was either Gifted and colored your eyes one of a million different shades of green; or it was non-magical, and just hung on you, uselessly, with only your ash-colored irises to prove it was even there.
Of course, even worse than being born Ashkind was being Leeched. The Leeched were born Gifted, but had failed their Test, and had had their powers taken from them afterward: strapped to a table, kept down, and forced to breathe Leeching Gas until their magic was gone. If you were Leeched, you would go to a non-magical school, enter into a relatively low-paid profession, and generally be consigned to the lower echelons of society for the rest of your life. Being Leeched did not physically make you Ashkind — it would leave you with your green eyes, albeit with bleached rings around the irises, like many of the Gospel members — but something worse. Being Ashkind was a matter of sheer luck, whereas being Leeched was one of personal fault. It meant you were too cowardly or stupid or selfish to keep your powers. You did not deserve your second soul.
“Which is why I’m not going to fail, am I?” she muttered to herself through gritted teeth.
The bush beside her burst into flames. She swore and pulled the bucket toward it.
“I’ll do it,” came a tired voice from behind her, and the flames dwindled and died. She turned, astonished.
“You never taught me how to do that!”
“No, I didn’t,” said David, sitting down on the other bench. “In retrospect, that should have been lesson one.”
Technically, parents weren’t supposed to teach Gifted children anything about magic before school except not to kill themselves with it, but David had gone beyond that mandate.
“How’s the practice going?”
“As well as can be expected.”
“Did your school tell you it was absolutely imperative to your revision that you destroy my garden?”
“I didn’t destroy anything.”
He nodded toward the blackened, smoking bush, putting his feet up on the table. “Those hydrangeas were almost blooming.”
“It’s February.”
“They would have done.”
“You wouldn’t have cared.”
The final rule of magic was very simple: you couldn’t violate the laws of physics. You could manipulate light and heat, even fly if you were clever enough with the air currents and your own weight, but there could be no conjuring matter out of thin air, no teleportation, nothing like that. That was not how the system worked.
Rose disliked the system.
“So how long have we got?”
His voice immediately went cold. “Don’t talk about that in the garden. Anyone can hear us.”
Rose folded her arms. “You see, it was fine before you said that. That made it suspicious.” He did not stop glaring at her. “Just tell me.”
He did not have to check his watch to know. He always knew. “Forty-seven hours.”
“I always love when I ask you that and it’s six weeks.”
“Well, for every time it’s six weeks, there has to be a time when it’s forty-seven hours.”
She sighed, and sat down in the doorway. “Did you file the paperwork for tomorrow?”
“Yep. They asked for your mother’s maiden name.”
Rose laughed. Not only was David unmarried, Rose, if you cared about technicalities — and the Government always cared — was not even his biological daughter: he had found her as a baby in a driveway near his flat when he was nineteen and, for reasons still unfathomable to many of his colleagues, had taken her in and raised her. If Rose’s mother had had a maiden name, they didn’t know it.
“How did you answer that one?”
He shrugged. “I was torn between making something up and leaving it blank.”
“Oh, tell me you just left it blank.”
“Of course I did. They would have hunted me down otherwise.”
He grinned. Rose went for the attack.
“Please take off the bomber jacket.”
“No. I like it.”
“God knows I know you like it. The entire office knows you like it. But please take it off. For me.”
“No.”
“Dad. Please. It’s green.”
He grinned wider. “Are you saying green is a bad color?”
“On a bomber jacket? Yes. Absolutely.”
He closed his eyes. “I’m a grown man. I can wear what I like.”
“Naturalistic fallacy.”
“What?”
“The assumption that because something does happen, it should. You can wear what you like; you have categorically proved that you shouldn’t. And don’t pretend you didn’t know that. You were just checking that I knew what it meant.”
He got up. It was starting to rain. “You know me too well.”
She held up her hands. “Self-defense.”
They didn’t talk after that. They just sat in the dark of the living room. Rose whispered fires into being on her palm and tried to pretend tomorrow wasn’t coming.
But it was. And she was nervous. And in a way, it was useful that she was nervous, because it meant that she could plausibly ascribe to overactive anxiety the sudden, prickling feeling that she was being watched. It haunted her the whole evening, pulling at her thoughts and the hairs on the back of her neck like static electricity.
It was paranoia, of course: totally irrational, completely idiotic paranoia.
But she and David, of all people, had good reason to be paranoid.
David led her out from the side street, and together they joined the tense crowd in front of the doors.
“This is it,” he said, grimly.
The Test building was unlike anything Rose had ever seen.
It had been a town hall, back in the days before the Veilbreak, when there were such things as councils and elections. According to her father, only two or three stories were actually dedicated to the Tests. The rest were occupied by admin teams and generators and technical backup and great, omniscient camera banks. Rose, however, standing in front of it, couldn’t help thinking that just outsourcing some of this would have made the building considerably less intimidating.
“You’ll be fine,” he told her reassuringly. The effect was lessened slightly in that he had to noticeably pause before the last word to stop his voice breaking. “Honestly, it’s all right. They don’t do this just to traumatize you, you know.”
“Easy for you to say,” Rose said darkly. “Anyway, isn’t this the bit when you tell me that I’m so grown up now and that it seems like I was a baby only yesterday?”
“Would you prefer that?”
“No, but it would be soothingly routine.”
David laughed shakily. Rose looked up at him and smiled.
“You’re as nervous about this as I am, aren’t you?”
“At least you’ll be able to see what’s going on.”
“True.”
She looked away from him, and for a second he saw the façade slip and her face fall into fear and anxiety. Then she pulled calm back into her expression again, and bit her lip. He took her hands and crouched down in front of her.
“Rosalyn,” he said.
She stared into the distance over his head.
“Rose, look at me.”
She lowered her gaze, waited.
“Rose, I want you to understand, I don’t care what happens now.”
“You do, though,” she whispered.
He grasped her hands more tightly. “I really don’t. It doesn’t matter to me whether you can do magic or not.”
“It does to me.”
To this he had no answer.
“What happens to us if we fail?”
He knew she wasn’t talking about the ordinary procedure used to remove magical powers. It was a sign of how nervous she was that she was daring to mention their secret — even in code, and even in an inconspicuous whisper among the hissing cacophony of anxious muttering around them.
“I honestly don’t know,” he told her. It was not the answer he wanted to give, but it was the truth.
“But if I can’t do magic, then I can’t transform.” New hope was lighting up Rose’s features. “Maybe if I was Leeched, I would be cured, and I could . . .” She paused, and her face fell as she looked at him. “You’ve thought of this, haven’t you.”
It was a statement, not a question. He nodded.
“Don’t tell me what would happen,” she said. “Please.”
He smiled sadly.
“Suffice it to say that it wouldn’t be beneficial to anyone if you failed.”
“I won’t fail, then.”
“Good idea.”
She crouched down in front of him. “So tell me again about the Test.”
“It will probably comprise a test of intelligence, a test of magical skill, and a test of courage. It’s different for every child.”
“So I’ve got to keep calm and think rationally.”
“Exactly.”
David stood up, and she followed him. He grasped her shoulders.
“One more time,” he said.
So important was the Test building that it had its own provision in the law: within a two hundred-yard radius of it, the no-magic-use-in-public rule did not apply. This was partly so that the candidates could practice, but mostly because the rule could not realistically be enforced here: everyone was so nervous that bricks were dislodging themselves and paving stones cracking around feet left and right. You couldn’t arrest teenagers for that kind of thing, not just before their Test. Nevertheless, it went against lifelong instinct to perform magic in public, and Rose looked around half anxiously before she did so.
David had not thought to wonder whether or not she could pass this. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, but he had simply been working from the assumption that yes, of course she could. She was his. He had trained her to fight almost since she could walk — what with their secret, and the nature of his work at the Department, their situation was too dangerous to leave her unable to defend herself. So of course, of course she could do this.
That was the logical position to take. It was certainly more reasonable than being nervous.
He hated being nervous.
The Test was not designed to find out whether you had magic, or how strong it was — that was clear from the eyes of the children around them, from Rose’s dark olive to emerald and grass and cyan and jade and even a bright, unnatural yellow-green in one girl that looked like it would more naturally be found in the irises of a hawk.
The purpose of the Test was to find out whether you deserved to be Gifted — and if you didn’t, well. You wouldn’t be Gifted for very much longer.
He tried to imagine Rose with those bleached-white rings round her eyes, and winced involuntarily.
There was one kind of Gifted that wasn’t invited to be Tested: the Angels. Angel children were the exceptionally powerfully Gifted, with eyes so deep green they defied color, and they never had their powers removed, simply because they were so rare the Government couldn’t afford to waste them. Being an Angel was not a matter of genetics, or training, or intelligence: it was pure luck, the same factor that determined whether you were Gifted or Ashkind, and as such Angels were highly prized. At a very young age, they were taken from their homes and trained and, when they became adults, they were given seats in Parliament.
He shuddered to think what six hundred Angels could do, if they put their minds to it. Move a planet, he suspected. Not that they ever tried. The Parliament of Angels didn’t exert themselves much, not these days. It was left to the Department to keep the peace in London.
And, with luck, a part of that responsibility would one day rest on his daughter’s shoulders. To see her as an official member of the Department would be wonderful. Of course, it would never happen if she failed her Test, because no one without magic could hold any kind of public office.
But that didn’t matter. That wasn’t the real reason he wanted her to pass the Test and keep her powers.
She needed to have magic because they were monsters.
Their secret was so deep and so dangerous, so frustratingly incurable, that he wanted every advantage for her. She would need it soon enough. It might take ten years, or twenty, or even fifty, but one day they would be discovered and if he was dead she would need to be able to last on her own. To run. To hide. To fight. To protect herself and carry on living at all costs, because if she died the world was worth nothing anymore.
His beautiful abomination of a child.
He was so proud of her. She was white-faced and obviously nervous, but she was holding herself together and she was maintaining some semblance of calm — which, he noted, was more than some of the others around her were doing. One blond boy with grass-green eyes was pleading with his mother to move the Test —“Mother, please, surely another few days of preparation wouldn’t hurt, Mother, come on”— and a girl with carefully styled plaits was having a loud and unashamed tantrum a few yards to their left, to the obvious embarrassment of her exhausted-looking parents.
“Jennifer, please, it’s okay.”
“No, Dad, no!” shrieked the girl, pulling away from her father. “I don’t want to do it! I don’t want to!”
Rose, too, had let her light go out and was watching them.
“Well, I hope that’s not the Testing standard,” she murmured.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “If it were, you’d have this in the bag.”
Rose smiled shakily.
“Dad,” she said, and he knew what she was going to ask and tried to stop her, but she carried on, adamant: “Dad, if they ask, if they find out —”
“They won’t.”
“But if they find out about me they’ll guess about you and —”
“Rose. It’s not going to happen.”
“But if it does — what do I do? Do I . . .” A hesitation. “Should I kill them, Dad?”
He went very still. Before he could answer, a horn blared across the square in front of the Test building. They turned to look, and a gray-haired man in a drab suit lowered his hands. The noise stopped. There was silence.
“Will all Test candidates please enter the building to be Tested,” he called hoarsely. “Will all Test candidates . . .”
Rose was looking very pale. Amid the sudden noise of murmurings and sobs and hurried good-lucks, she turned to him. “Dad . . .”
He grasped her shoulders. “Rose. Rose, good luck. I know you’ll be fine. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
The steady stream of nervous Gifted children was coalescing around the doors, flooding into the building. Rose w
as going to be swept away with it. His daughter was going to be taken away from him, and when she came out she would be different. More grown up. Less of a child who needed him.
He realized there were tears in his eyes.
“Rose,” he told her. “Rose, I love you.”
“I love you, too, Dad,” and then she was gone, lost to sight, and he was left behind with his hand stretched out toward her, and the last stragglers were pushed toward the darkness and the doors closed and there was silence.
He waited for a moment, numb. Then he let his arm drop.
Maria Rodriguez stood inside the Test lobby, staring at her shaking hands. Rose called to her.
“Maria! Are you all right?”
The look on her face was blank. Rose wondered whether you could go into shock before a traumatic experience.
Probably not.
“Maria! Do I have to hit you?”
“No,” said Maria immediately. “No, you don’t.”
“Do you want to get a seat?”
The chairs were being filled up quickly by the influx of candidates from outside. They were black and wooden and looked like they might collapse at any moment. Rose guided Maria over to the nearest one, and sat her down. Maria’s legs were trembling.
“How are you not nervous?” asked Maria incredulously.
“I am nervous. It’s just not stopping me from walking and talking at the same time.” Rose looked up at the room around them. “Classy, isn’t it?”
The space looked like a disused hotel lobby. The cement floor was painted to resemble marble, and the ceiling was soaring white stone. The Test invigilators sat in glass booths at five-yard intervals around the walls. When they called someone’s name, that person would come up, skin going almost as green as their eyes, exchange a few words with the proctors, and then step into the lift behind the booth. The metal doors would slide closed automatically. There was no screen above the lift to indicate where it was going.
A few seconds later the doors would reopen, revealing an empty compartment, and the process would begin again.
“And they never come back,” said Rose, mock-ominously.
“Don’t joke about it.”
The Catalyst Page 4
