“Oh come on. Humor is my only weapon against them.”
Maria glared at her, but Rose knew she didn’t mean it; Maria was perhaps her best friend in the world, except of course for Nate. She was a few months older than Rose, but they had been in the same class since they were four. Maria, being pretty and blond, could have abandoned the much less popular Rose for a wider group at any time during the eleven years they had been friends. Against all the odds, though, and frankly against logic, Maria had never shown the slightest sign of wanting to break off their relationship, leaving Rose with a lasting and unshakable loyalty to her. That was probably a bad idea. Loyalty to anyone you had to support, even if it was only with homework, made you a liability.
But that was a Department rule. And this was not her Department life. Rose had always tried to keep Maria ignorant of how her father earned a living; she did not want her school and her work ever to overlap. They were two incompatible worlds: one in which she was an adult, and the other in which she was a child.
“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” Rose told her, trying to sound reassuring. “I’ve seen complete idiots pass their Test.”
“Thanks, Rose.”
“No, really. I mean . . .”
The blond boy Rose had seen outside walked between Rose’s and Maria’s chairs. When Maria’s leg accidentally knocked into him, he acknowledged her apology with a disdainful sneer. Rose noticed his eyes seemed rather red.
“Like him,” said Rose, nodding.
Maria smiled, and Rose felt a swoop of relief. The boy had muttered — or more accurately, spat — something as he came past Maria, but, luckily, her friend had not heard. The word he had used was “Pretender.” It was a derogatory term for those with light eyes and weak Gifts, and while in Maria’s case this was accurate, it was exactly the kind of comment she didn’t need right now.
“Look!” said Maria suddenly. “What’s that?”
Rose turned and saw what Maria was looking at. A black screen had been set up just over the doorway, and it was currently flashing such gems of advice as
This is not a judgment. This is a measurement.
And
Please stay calm. You have nothing to fear.
And finally, with such false cheeriness that it made Rose want to shatter the screen,
Remember: you are privileged to be able to take this Test!
It was only then that it began, very slowly, to dawn on Rose the kind of system she was up against.
“Elmsworth, Rosalyn Daniela.”
The woman in the glass booth said it so matter-of-factly: presumably she didn’t see the way Rose went very still, a frozen computer, and pressed her head to her kneecaps; she didn’t hear Maria’s gasp, or the way everyone around them stared at Rose as if a bomb had just started ticking on her chest.
She got up.
“Good luck,” Maria whispered. She smiled tremulously. “I’ll pass mine if you pass yours.”
“Deal,” Rose said. She was concentrating on keeping her voice steady. Her legs were shaking and there was a thin sort of ringing in her ears. She smiled at Maria once and then turned away before she said anything stupid like “good-bye.” This was a Test, not the end. She wasn’t going to die.
This was very important to remember: she had been in situations more dangerous than this.
She was absolutely going to survive this.
Oh, pull yourself together.
The other candidates stared wide-eyed at her as she walked through the clusters of people. They drew back their legs as she passed, as though she were carrying some sort of contagious disease. Rose kept her eyes on the proctor who had called her name.
The woman watched dispassionately as Rose approached the desk.
“Do you have anything to say?”
Rose wanted to tell her that this was not usually how things worked — that usually people left notes — but perhaps her better judgment intervened, because all that came out was, “I’m ready.”
The woman nodded, and gestured to the lift.
Rose stared at the mirror on the back wall while the doors closed. She could just see Maria, white-faced and sympathetic, reflected in the glass, but it didn’t occur to her to turn until it was too late.
There was a ping.
She started sinking.
The body on the table was white, dark-veined, cold. The silhouette of a man stood frozen over it for a few seconds. The theater was submerged in blackness; it lent the silhouette a momentary peace before the woman came up behind him.
“David?”
She couldn’t find the light switch, so she held up her hand and a spark flared in the darkness, blossoming into a flame that hovered an inch above her palm. Blinking, Laura stepped forward toward where he stood motionless over the corpse.
“David? Who is it?”
He turned toward her: he was very pale in the near-ghostly light, and it was clear from the way it flickered off his glass-green eyes that he was not seeing her, but something else, somewhere else. He walked past her toward the wall, and, with an expression of perfect serenity, kicked it so hard the trolley rattled.
“David!” Laura said, shocked. “What’s wrong? Do we know them?”
He gestured to the table. She peered over; in the gloom it took her a moment to recognize the face, and she gasped.
There was a silence.
“Oh, Jesus,” Laura whispered, emotionless as wind. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
She knelt down beside the table, staring at the face. Somewhere inside her a deeper recognition sparked and caught: this woman had been in the care of her office, she had been in suggestion therapy, and though the disappearance of one solitary, half-mad Ashkind woman did not a scandal make, Laura knew that this was her own failing.
“Oh, Sylvia,” she whispered, stroking the corpse’s face. “Oh, darling girl. What happened to you?”
“Poison,” said David, still facing the wall. His voice was stronger; these were answers he could give. “Administered by injection, through the crook of the arm — there are marks.”
“Do you think it’s the same person who killed her brother?”
“That was clearly a revenge attack. Violent, brutal. This was professional. Relatively painless.”
“So we have two murderers on the loose.”
David laughed, long, low and hollow. “Oh, would that that were true.”
“Don’t be sarcastic with me, David Jonathan.”
“Don’t call me that,” he murmured, but moved to stand beside her. He had more control over himself now. He pulled a syringe from the trolley, removed the sheath from the needle, and took a blood sample from the corpse. His manner was quick, clinical. Laura watched him. She rarely saw him like this, over the bodies of civilians. Their remits touched on death, but never so directly: she convinced dazed loved ones that their relatives had died peacefully, while he tracked down murderers, and, more often than not, made quick-burning corpses out of them. Never this. Never serene, cold bodies in the crushing dark.
“You have medical training?”
“No training,” he said, examining the blackened blood in the syringe. “Just War history. I’ve done a lot of things.”
“So have we all.”
He smiled thinly, let the silence stretch before replying. “This poison was carefully chosen to display distinct physical symptoms, so it could be noticed and she would be taken to hospital. We’ll need a thorough autopsy to show exactly what it was, but we can be fairly sure it was used so the baby could be saved.”
“The baby? Oh, yes, God —”
“Emergency Caesarean before she died; he was unharmed. They told me when they called me over. He’s fine.”
“So why —”
“She gets taken into Department custody,” he said, holding the syringe up to the light and stepping away. “Someone gets wind of the news, decides that she can’t be allowed to talk to us under therapeutic drugs. They infiltrate the ward — let’s face it, it’s not that hard, they’re not
worried about people breaking in — and inject her with slow-acting poison. She dies. Her unborn child is saved. Professional.” He looked back at the corpse. “Admirably so.”
“That’s the scenario?”
“That’s the scenario.”
“So what did she know?”
“Ah, well,” he said, eyes still on the body, “that’s the question, isn’t —?”
Abruptly, he went very, very still.
He was looking at the corpse’s clenched fist, and as Laura, bewildered, traced his gaze, she saw him lift a hand to his face. It was shaking.
David Elmsworth’s hands were shaking.
He stepped forward, and then, abruptly, prized open the corpse’s fingers, pulled the scrap of paper roughly from its grasp, and spun away from the body as if it were a grenade. He stared at the handwriting on the paper. From where she stood, Laura couldn’t read it.
She knew she was going to regret it. She asked anyway.
“David,” she said evenly, “what’s —”
He wasn’t listening. He was running his fingers over the paper, wide-eyed, white-faced, whispering to himself. He held it up to the light. He went still again, and then he turned to Laura, lightning quick, slipping the paper into his pocket. He smiled unconvincingly.
“That,” he told her, “never happened.”
“David. That’s a vital piece of evidence, I’m not going to cover —”
“I am not asking you to. I’ll file it; I’ll run DNA tests. Leave it to me.”
She hesitated.
“Trust me, Laura.”
“David, what is this?”
“Please, just give me —”
“No. Come on. David, how long have we known each other? Fourteen years? Fifteen? I’m not taking this from you. Give me the truth.”
“It says ‘Behold the Interregnum,’” he said quietly.
She blinked. “What does that mean?”
Another long silence. She was just about to prompt him angrily again when he spoke. His eyes were flat, and his words seemed to burn him as they left him.
“If this note comes to the attention of the Department, they will go after whoever wrote it, yes?”
“Of course.”
“They can’t.”
“Why not?”
He glanced at the corpse. “Because if we try to attack these people — if we do anything more than leave them alone and hope they and their intentions just dissolve into nothing — we might very well restart the War.”
“What? Why? Who are they?”
He leaned very close to her, glancing around. For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to say anything.
“Regency,” he said. “That’s what they call themselves. Learn to fear that name, Laura. Let it show up in your nightmares. They are the last people we want to provoke.”
“How do you know about them?”
He said nothing. He put the cap back on the syringe, left lying on the table, and put it into his pocket. He walked down the corridor, and as he passed underneath each argon strip light, it flickered, a few exploding in a shower of sparks before dying. Then he stopped. He was quiet for a moment, and then he turned toward her.
“I used to fight for them,” he said.
The lift doors opened, and Rose stepped out.
The room was submerged in darkness. It was impossible to judge its size — the shadows stretched into an interminable blackness that Rose’s eyes could not penetrate. Two chairs stood maybe ten feet in front of Rose, each in a blinding spotlight.
The gray-haired Angel who had announced the Test sat in one of the chairs. He watched Rose gravely with those unfathomably green, unreadable eyes.
“Sit,” he said.
Rose sat. Her nerves were gone now, replaced by a kind of light-headedness that left her mind very clear and sharp, as if her thoughts had been magnified. Something rattled above her head.
“This is the first stage of your Test,” the man said. “You will need to remain calm.”
Rose raised her head slowly. An oxygen mask, as if from an ancient airplane, hung from a string, which stretched up into the impenetrable darkness.
“Place the mask over your mouth and nose,” the man said. Rose noticed that his face was remarkably smooth for a man with so many years apparent in the skin of his hands and eyes. She wanted to be given a second to close her eyes and gather her thoughts, but her pride would not allow her to show weakness, so she reached up with trembling hands and pulled the plastic over her mouth. Claustrophobia gripped her in a sweeping rush of terror. She clenched her wrist with the other hand until it went away.
A wheezing rumble, like a faraway ventilator, started up in the distance. Rose stared into the man’s dark, expressionless eyes. She noticed that the air she was breathing through the mask seemed suddenly very dense. The fear returned with a vengeance — was this the Leeching Gas? Were they removing her powers? Had she already failed? Was she —
“We need,” said the man slowly, “to know more about you. And for that we need to eliminate all possibility of deceit. What you are breathing now is a hallucinogen called Insanity Gas. It will make it easier to access your mind and to find the part that stores long-term memory. Do not worry: there will be no pain.”
Rose did not quite have time to panic before the darkness reared and swallowed her vision whole.
The first memory came from the year the War ended. Rose was three years old at the time. She could never remember the bombs falling, but she knew the day when they stopped: the air so clear, so quiet and empty, as if the only thing the sky had ever been for was to hold birds and clouds within its vast embrace. She and her father spent the day simply staring out the window, holding the silent air between their fingers. The smell of gunpowder was already fading.
The next memory was of the day he decided to tell her. She didn’t know what made him speak then, of all times. Perhaps, when peace had been fully established and the Department’s effort to keep the streets safe began to actually mean something, his ghosts started to retreat. He must have felt safer, now that the people who wanted to kill him — and they were still many, and growing — were civilian criminals, not soldiers.
He told her straight out, stern-faced.
“You’re not my daughter.”
Rose was then almost six. She was not exactly shrewd, not at that age, but she knew enough not to take statements like that at face value. She hesitated, wary, waiting for clarification. When none came, she went for denial.
“Yes I am.”
He sighed, rubbed his face. He was, by then, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six years old — young, though she had no context then for this, to have so many secrets.
“Not in the way you think.” He paused, and sighed again. “You know how babies are born?”
In a way, the revelations that followed should not have been so much of a surprise. Rose had always been aware, if only vaguely, that she was not her father’s daughter — or at least, not in the same way that other people were the children of their parents.
Rose had known this for a variety of reasons. The first and foremost was that other children looked like their parents, and Rose did not. No matter how long or hard she looked in the mirror, she could find nothing of him in her face or features. Her hair, though also brown, was darker than his; her face narrower; her build tall and lean where he was stocky and strong.
Also — and this should have been her first clue, really — she had no mother.
She had met other people’s mothers, and she was old enough to know that only women could bear children. But she took it for granted that their situation was different. How many times had that been proven over the years, after all? She and David were monsters, a secret no one else had; and he was a detective and worked for the Department and saved the world every other day, or so Rose believed, and anyway, they could do magic. He was her father and they were special. The laws of biology did not apply to him.
Nevertheless, with all thos
e clues, it should not really have been a surprise that day when he sat her down and began talking to her in what Rose immediately recognized as his Very Stern Voice. This was roughly the tone he used when telling her not to walk in front of cars.
“Do you know about DNA?”
She had heard the acronym. “Is that the . . . the little stringy things in your blood?”
“More or less. They determine whether you have pale skin or brown hair or any other trait you happen to be born with.”
“Yes.”
“And parents pass it on to their children.”
“Yes.”
He sighed. “Rose, you and I don’t have the same DNA.”
She stared at him uncomprehendingly. “But . . . that can’t be right.”
“Yes it can,” he told her. “It’s because you’re not my daughter.”
This was the story, woven together over the following years from a thousand bedtime retellings:
David is a nineteen-year-old soldier. His army has made him do bad things and he’s very, very tired of the War.
He’s walking home to his flat in the grip of some dark, rainy evening, trying to find a way out. There’s a noise in the garage next to him and he thinks it’s someone trying to hurt him and he nearly attacks.
But he doesn’t. It’s a shoe box, covered in cloth. And inside the shoe box is a baby.
He doesn’t want a baby. He’s never wanted a baby. But he takes the child inside anyway, because it’s cold and he doesn’t want it to die.
Then he finds out they share a secret. That very night, a monster twists the baby’s body into its own, and nearly hurts David. He has to change his mind — who else can raise a child like this? He keeps her.
She knows the rest.
She’d known Terrian since she was three years old. This had its downsides — he could remember her as a small child, something she saw almost daily in his condescending gaze — but what it also meant was that she could remember David coming home wearing his somber expression and, for the first time, realizing that it wasn’t because of a murder. She had only been seven, but he had told her the truth, as he always did: Terrian’s wife Malia had died, of cancer, and Terrian wouldn’t be coming in to work for a while.
The Catalyst Page 5
