Rose could remember very distinctly the day he did come back — which wasn’t great, as it meant the Tester could see it just as clearly. He had brought a boy with him: dark-skinned like his father, about her age, with long dreadlocks hanging down his back and bright turquoise eyes, which meant he was second-level Gifted, like her. The boy skulked behind his father’s knee. He had been crying, but the seven-year-old Rose refrained from judging him for that: she had never had a mother, but she supposed that if she had and the mother was dead she would be sad too. David and Terrian called the boy Nathaniel, but they were the only ones who ever did. He had been Nate, as she had been Rose, almost since he was born.
When their respective fathers were out of earshot, Rose and Nate gave it maybe a minute, and then they chased each other round the Department desks. It was the first time Rose heard him laugh: it stuck in her head like a record on replay, echoing through eight years and the speakers of some invisible studio on the floors above her.
This memory was brighter and clearer than the others. She was nearly fourteen, old enough to neutralize aggrieved relatives for the Department. And she knew who this man was. He was a Demon: the darkest-eyed, most dangerous type of Ashkind, historically the most violent and insidious and prone to political dissent, who had to be watched by the Department very carefully lest they rebel against the Government. And this one had done just that. He had broken into the army camp, kidnapped a soldier, dragged him to an unguarded interrogation room, and now half the Department was gathered around the one-way mirror, watching the rogue agent as he pulled the gun from the soldier’s holster, clicked the safety off and pressed it to the head of his prisoner.
The soldier himself was only a boy: a very young conscript, who had completed his compulsory year of post-Test school and elected to serve in the army for his two years of national service instead of studying for another year. Rose had read his file. His name was James Andreas. He was fifteen years old, he had red-gold hair and eyes the color of the sea in cloud-light, and right now he was very pale. His mouth was open as if on the verge of screaming, his eyes wide, but he made no sound. Rose’s fists were clenched so tight her knuckles had gone white.
“Okay,” someone said from Rose’s left. The snap-click sound of typing echoed like gunshots through the silence. “What are we going for, David? This wall is reinforced, and we’ve got the ammo capacity to blow this place wide open, if . . .”
The possibility hung in the air for a few seconds.
“We’re getting that boy out,” David said firmly. “Max, stay back here with the comms equipment. Protect Rose.”
“No,” Rose said immediately, looking at her father. “I’m going in with you.”
“No, you are not.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“Yes I can. Max?”
“I’ll keep her here, boss.”
Rose glared at Max, who shrugged helplessly.
“Right. Shields up, everyone.”
There was a crackling noise as half a dozen people put up magical shields around themselves. They drew their guns.
“Okay,” said David. “We’ve got him outnumbered and outgunned, so we should be all right.”
“We’ve got the element of surprise, too,” piped up an agent on David’s right, helpfully. “Don’t forget that.”
Rose never saw the look David gave them, but she could only assume it was up there with the most scathing in his arsenal.
“This man is insane,” he said. “You never, ever have the element of surprise against a madman. Trust me”— loading his gun —“how d’you think I’ve gone fifteen years without losing a fight?”
There was a murmur of uncertain laughter. As if he could hear them, the madman tilted his head. Rose knew madness but had never seen it in a human being before: it was odd, off.
“All right,” David said. “Three. Two. One and a half.”
He gave them all his most charming grin. Rose knew that grin. It never boded well.
“One.”
There was a hammering click of gunshots and the mirror exploded into fragments. One of them hit the madman and he fired at the soldier’s head, but his hand had slipped and the bullet sprayed red across the boy’s chest. He slipped off his chair without a cry.
The soldiers burst through the gap. Rose followed them, ignoring Max’s warning, and emptied her gun at the madman. She thought that at least one of her bullets hit, but nowhere vital: he was firing everywhere. Rose ducked, sprinted toward the boy, intending to defend him, but pain exploded in her foot and she collapsed. Her hand lay across the boy’s chest, slick with his blood. She heaved herself up and concentrated: magic shot in a white-hot spear toward the madman. It seared his shoulder, and he cried out. There was a flickering, buzzing noise and something else hit him, and then there was a second of utter terror spiraling through Rose’s mind — come on, hit him, come on now — and a snapcrack of bone shattering. The side of the madman’s head seemed to explode, and he fell to the ground. His eyes were level with Rose’s. They were open and staring, and Rose thought she could still see the madness gleaming within them.
She spent weeks in that hospital bed. The boy was next to her: she remembered what they said about him, that the bullet was lodged against his heart, and that to attempt to remove it would be to risk damaging major internal organs. They kept him heavily sedated throughout, which was a shame, as she would have liked to have someone to talk to.
They had knocked her out when they took the bullet from her ankle. Even within her sluggish, drug-slowed dreams, she felt the icy metal within her skin and she screamed.
Ah. This memory. She knew this one.
The small metal room. No windows, soundproofed, and six feet underground. Rose huddled in the corner, shivering. There was something next to her. She was about to turn, to pick it up . . .
No.
What?
The thoughts of the sleeping Rose, the one taking the Test, broke through into the memory of six weeks ago.
No. No. I have to wake up — they can’t see this, they can’t see this, they can’t see the secret —
And something within her responded. Magic surged through her, scouring the sedative from her blood, and she opened her eyes to the green ones of the old man leaning over her. She pulled the mask away from her face and scrambled to her feet, backing away, and found —
Behind him, whiteness. The mask and chair gone. She stumbled, disoriented.
They’d moved.
She stood in front of the Angel in a huge, empty, blindingly lit greenhouse. The sky outside the glass was gray-white. Her eyes wanted to close, adjust. She fought it. Stay alert. They’re trying to confuse you. Yes, I know what it looks like, and you’re wrong, because you can’t have teleported, can you, because that’s not bloody possible. It’s something cleverer than you. Focus. You will be all right. Never mind the laws of physics and all of that; it’ll be fine — the world isn’t changing.
“That memory,” said the Angel quietly. He tilted his head. His eyes glittered in the shattering light. “What is it about that memory? Why don’t you want me to see it?”
“It’s a nightmare,” said Rose. Her voice felt very small in the wide, white emptiness. She forced it louder. “Just one of my nightmares.”
“Nightmares weaken you. Why does that memory make you stronger? Why does it help you to fight back?”
A thousand truths and lies bubbled to the surface. She didn’t know how well she would be able to lie to his face in this state, wherever she was, whatever was happening, so she settled for an absolute.
“I am afraid,” she said.
The Angel’s face darkened, and he raised his hand. Something gathered there, a swirling translucence, like compressed wind. Rose didn’t think. She probably couldn’t have if she tried.
A well-worn instinct running at the back of her mind leaped to coherence.
This is an Angel, it told her calmly. He is probably a thousand times stronger than you. Yo
u know what he’s doing, right? You can see he’s going to attack you?
By Ichor, you are useless under pressure.
What good were all those years of training if you can’t do this? Strike first, you idiot. You remember what Dad said about this kind of thing. You know he’s going to start this fight, so strike.
STRIKE!
She acted with no skill or technique; she pulled energy roughly from her muscles and twisted the air around the Angel into a tight, hard bubble and pushed her hand forward, sending him sprawling across the floor. Air was much easier to move than people.
Something else her father had taught her.
All right, now run, said her instinct impatiently, run, now, you don’t have much time —
How serious is this fight, anyway? This is only a Test. It can’t be to the death, can it?
Have you failed? Is he trying to take your Gifts? Is this it?
Should you just let him?
No, thought Rose numbly. No.
She ran, away from the Angel, toward the glass door, maybe a hundred yards away. She could do a hundred yards in fourteen seconds. Ridiculously slow.
See? Useless.
Nine, ten, eleven —
She could feel the Angel behind her, getting up, readying his magic. She threw up a shield behind her, rudimentary, pathetic; it wasn’t going to hold —
His blow smashed into her. It was a cold wall of air, more powerful than hers a hundredfold, and it took her off her feet and tumbling through space, and suddenly there was glass against her shoulder. She had only time to hope it would break, but it did not give way, and the rest of her body slammed into it. The pain was dizzying, dazzling: there was something metal against her shoulder, it dug into the skin, something trickling down her forehead, and it took her a second to realize it was blood —
But something metal —
Door handle, you idiot!
She fumbled for it. It moved under her grip, and the door opened: she fell gracelessly through, and scrambled to close it again, used magic to find the locks and bar them. Panting, she stared through the glass at the Angel. He stood calmly on the other side, not even bruised from the blow she had given him. He was fast. Very fast. Too damn fast.
She stood, wiping the blood from her face.
They watched each other. Rose wondered why he didn’t just break the glass; maybe it wasn’t normal, maybe it was reinforced, maybe that was why it had held her weight. Either way, he stayed within the greenhouse, watching her with a mixture of anger and curiosity.
What do you do now?
With difficulty, she turned away from the Angel, aware of his eyes on her back, and saw the world outside the greenhouse. She stood on grass wet with dew; it stretched maybe six feet in front of her, and ended abruptly in a cliff of earth and gray stone. Trails of mist hung from the cloudy sky, above and below her. This was an airborne island.
Her mind stopped working.
“Reinforced plastic,” said a familiar voice behind her. She turned, saw her father kneeling beside the greenhouse, examining the glass. “I taught you about this, remember? It’s used in the structure of the door to our office.” He flicked it gently with a fingertip; it rang like crystal. “Astonishing material. Developed during the War. Necessity and invention, and all of that.”
He stood up. His eyes met the Angel’s. They examined each other, David with apprehension, the Angel with that same half-detached interest.
“That was quite possibly the worst you’ve ever performed in a fight,” he told her, without taking his eyes off the Angel.
“This is inside my head,” she said. “This whole thing.”
“I should hope so.”
The realization came slowly. “I’m still sedated. You can’t actually be here. I’m imagining you.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Oh my God, I’m talking to myself.” She stared at him. He was very lifelike: David in every detail, up to the half-mischievous grin he gave her. “No offense, but this is getting weird.”
He laughed, and moved to stand beside her. “I think that ship sailed a while ago.”
“True. Why are you here?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know any more than you.”
“You can try. Is this happening to everyone? Are they seeing their parents, their friends . . . ?”
“We can only presume so. This is designed to see how good you’d be as a soldier, among other things, so the fight is probably a set part of the Test. You’re still under sedation, and that does weird things to your brain. Possibly your subconscious is more clearly articulated than most people’s, or maybe this is a set part of the programming, and everyone’s seeing their subconscious in whatever form it takes.”
“You’re my subconscious?”
“I’m the form your subconscious takes to talk to you, yes.”
The Angel behind them tapped on the glass: once, slowly. The crystalline note it held was distinctly more menacing this time. David, or the part of her mind that looked like David, glanced back at him.
“I think we might want to hurry up.”
“Wake up, you mean?”
“Of course.” He looked up at the gray sky, the place where the grass dropped off abruptly into nothingness. “There’s not much we can do here, is there?”
“How?”
“Two possible methods. Firstly —” He turned to her, stared at her intently. “Wake up,” he intoned. “Wake up.”
Nothing. The Angel tapped the glass again.
“You just look stupid,” she told David.
“You’re only insulting yourself, you know.”
“I deserve it. What’s the other method?”
They looked again at the cliff edge. David bit his lip — that was one of her habits, she knew; the real David would never do that.
The Angel flicked the greenhouse wall so hard it rattled.
“We’re running out of time,” said her ghost-father. “Are you ready?”
She turned to the cliff edge. It looked very dangerous for something that wouldn’t kill her.
“Are you absolutely sure about this?” she asked nervously.
No reply. She turned. The shadow of David had vanished, traceless; not even his footsteps in the grass remained to comfort her. She felt suddenly, irrationally lonely.
The Angel stared at her, and bared his teeth.
Lean back.
He tapped the glass again. They stood facing each other across the wide expanse of grass. If Rose had to guess, she would imagine she was in someone’s garden. She wouldn’t think there was a cliff behind her. There shouldn’t, in any sane world, be a cliff behind her.
Lean back. It’ll be easy.
It took, it seemed, more effort to close her eyes than it had done to move the Angel.
Lean. Lean.
A cracking sound — breaking glass. The Angel’s muffled voice.
“I’m coming,” he whispered.
Another tap; a high, shimmering ring, and then, suddenly, a shattering. A step — a brush of unnatural wind on her skin —
She stepped back, and dropped.
Often she had dreamed of falling.
The wind was bright as ice against her face. She was out of control: twisted and flung, without coordination, through a white world without end.
In her dreams, she would stop before she hit the ground. Wake, gasping, in a cold sweat.
She fell, and the world turned dark.
Slowly, she opened her eyes. The insistent, settled pull of gravity disoriented her for a moment. She was still, sprawled in a chair, breathing clean, clear air through a mask over her nose and mouth.
Her heart was beating very fast.
Tentatively, and painfully aware of her encroaching headache, she pulled off the mask. She blinked against the sudden gloom. The darkened room. The Test room. The sound of the ventilator in the distance slowed, faded and stopped.
The Angel was there, and he was smiling.
The Testing Administrator was a solemn-looking woman in her early forties with dyed red hair and glossy turquoise eyes. She was sitting in one of two plastic classroom chairs when Rose entered the room. It was bare, with varnished wooden flooring and cracked paint, looking distinctly out of place in the context of an office block or a hotel or whatever the hell this was. Rose felt immediately claustrophobic. Perhaps this was what made her distrust the woman who sat in front of her before she even started speaking.
The Angel pushed her in gently when she hesitated in the doorway.
“Seven-oh-one-six,” he said, addressing the Administrator. “Just out of her Test.”
“Thank you, Mr. Forster,” she said gently. “Please, sit down, Rosalyn.”
The Angel gave Rose a final smile and wave and closed the door. Rose sat down in the other chair, watching the Administrator. When Forster’s footsteps had faded away, the Administrator spoke.
“I’ll be straight with you, Rosalyn. I’m here to give you a warning.”
Rose’s stomach immediately plunged. Her voice was hoarse. “Did I pass?”
The Administrator gave her a stern look, and Rose, to her shame, immediately felt stupid. Obviously it wasn’t going to be that easy to find out.
“I’m here to warn you about your father’s occupation.”
Rose stayed silent.
“You know too much,” said the Administrator bluntly. “You’re clever, Rosalyn, and you’re arrogant, so I won’t mess about with you. It is very, very bad practice to have a civilian, especially an underage civilian, know as much about our operations as your memories show you do. You are dangerous, the both of you, but we need him.”
She let it hang there, and Rose grudgingly finished the sentence for her.
“You don’t need me.”
“We want to need you. We want to welcome you, when you’re old enough. But we need to make sure you stay on the straight and narrow.”
“Is there any indication that I’m not?”
The Administrator sighed, and leaned back.
“You’re not the only one. There’s a boy taking his Test right now, in Islington, the child of a Department member, who has had much the same upbringing as you. Do you know him?”
The Catalyst Page 6
