Rose nodded slowly, pinching the inside of her wrist to stop herself from trembling.
“You know what he does for a living?”
Rose nodded slowly. The barrel of the gun was very close to her. She could almost feel how cold it was. She was shivering uncontrollably now.
“Then you know about the experimental wards in the Department building?”
“No.”
“I thought not. Well, when a person has done something to really offend the powers that be, they are put in the experimental wards. I was a lucky resident of one for two months. I remember little but the needles. There were a lot of needles.”
Rose was not quite sure where this was going, but she had her suspicions.
“I don’t think you really need to know the particulars, but my point is that I am now no longer in the experimental wards, and I was not released on any official authority.”
Rose said nothing. After a while it became apparent that he was waiting for her to speak.
“You escaped,” she said quietly. “From the Department.”
“Yes, if you want to put it that way.”
“So why . . . ?” She couldn’t speak properly; the instinct to run was too strong for coherent speech. Her mind — reliable even in her Test — was failing her now. “Why are you. . . ? Why . . . ?”
She gave up and pointed to the gun.
Arkwood smiled. She couldn’t help staring at his teeth; they were very white, and filed down to sharp points. “The Department does not know that I have escaped. Don’t ask me why. You couldn’t understand it if you tried. The result is that I now have no access to food, water or shelter, and you’re going to help me with that.”
Four beats of silence. Rose was gathering her courage to state the obvious. Fear shivered through her in hard beats of blood.
“I can’t help you,” she said, quietly. “I can’t work against my father.”
“Rosalyn, I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I don’t want you to hurt me either.”
Loren Arkwood, quite calmly, picked up the gun, clicked off the safety, and pointed it between Rose’s eyes.
That peaceful stillness again. It was almost unsettling. Rose’s powers of speech were returning to her.
“Mr. Arkwood, I don’t think you’re going to kill me.”
“Would you bet your life on that?”
“Yes.”
“Would you care to tell me why?”
Rose stopped, waiting for her fear not to show in her face. Then she took a deep, shaky breath.
“You don’t know how to use that gun. If you shot me in the head and sent an electric shock through my brain, you would kill me, and you don’t need an Icarus to do that. And even if you did want to kill me like that . . .” She shrugged. Adrenaline was destroying her motor controls, and it came out as a spasm. “You would have done.”
He seemed to be waiting for something.
And then she saw it.
No. Wait, no. Was that —
Was that even possible?
It was. It had to be. She spoke before she could stop herself.
“That isn’t even a real Icarus.”
He spoke too quickly. “What makes you think that?”
“There should be a blue light on the side, to say it’s charged up, and I can s —”
She stopped at the way he was looking at her. She tried not to make it obvious how much she wanted to cringe away from him.
There were another few beats of quiet, during which it occurred to her that he didn’t need an Icarus to lean forward and snap her neck.
“You’re better than I gave you credit for,” he said finally.
She wasn’t dead. He hadn’t killed her.
Speak, now, he’s expecting you to.
“That’s what people usually think.”
“Do they?” A smile. It was not kind. “They must have forgotten whose daughter you are.”
She said nothing to that.
“I knew your father of old.”
Angels, he’s not going to kill you; he wants help, not your death; he’s going to leave you alive. “He never mentioned you.”
“No. And has he ever told you what his real name is?”
Pause.
“No.”
“There you go then,” he said. “I assume you’re going to walk away now. Am I right?”
Slowly, not sure what the right answer was: “Yes.”
“Well, I can think of at least two reasons why you shouldn’t do that. The first is this.”
A book plucked itself from the bookshelf and hung suspended in midair. At a wave of his hand, it suddenly threw itself through the air faster than Rose’s eyes could follow and smashed itself into the door with enough force to snap the cover off and send pages flying everywhere.
Arkwood met Rose’s astonished gaze, and she tried not to flinch from his stare. His eyes were cold and hard and unfeeling; they looked straight through you as if every escape plan, every plot, every twinge of fear was open to his scrutiny. More importantly, however, they were pure yellow-green from the pupil to the edge of the iris, which meant his powers were intact — relatively weak, certainly, what some people would call a Pretender, but still there. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It was written on his bloody face. It was the first thing she should have looked for in an adversary. Her father had drummed this into her hundreds of times over the years. Why was she suddenly so idiotic?
“And the second,” Arkwood said, “well, the second . . .”
They stared at each other for a few moments. Arkwood tilted his head to the side, as if thoughtful.
“You know, Rosalyn,” he said softly, “there’s something about you that doesn’t seem quite . . . sane.”
A shivering kind of terror thrilled through her, locking her to the spot. Loren Arkwood smiled, and said, “Do you know about Hybrids, Rosalyn?”
The word stopped her cold. The world seemed to lift and swirl slightly.
“They’re a very particular type of Ashkind. That’s the Government line, anyway. The official position is that there are no Gifted Hybrids — but I think we both know that’s not true.”
He smiled. His teeth glittered.
“They are magic gone wrong. They are errors in the system. They are mistakes, mutations. Monsters. Even Demons are less feared and more respected than Hybrids. Demons at least are natural; Demons can be predicted, contained, reasoned with, even if they can’t be accepted, but Hybrids . . . no. Demons are Rottweilers, but Hybrids are wolves.”
His tone was flat, sardonic, and his smile was mirthless, but he must know what this was doing to her; he must be able to see her hands shaking, must understand that the roaring in her ears was the sound of her world collapsing. She was not brave anymore. He continued.
“Something went very badly off course with the magic of Hybrids, and as a result they live on borrowed time for the rest of their lives. Every six weeks their minds fade, or break, and their bodies twist and they become something . . . else. Something very dangerous. And you can never tell who these people are. You never know. It could be anyone, from the lowest convict . . .”
Silence dragged behind him, slowing time until the breeze might as well have been moving through oil.
“. . . to a major of the Department,” he whispered, and let it hang.
A long, dizzying darkness. Rose couldn’t breathe.
“Tell me, Rosalyn, do you know what happens to people who are interrogated by the Department?”
She made herself speak. It was not easy. “Yes.”
“Good. You’ve at least seen an interrogation, then?”
“Yes.”
“If I were caught,” said Arkwood, “and interrogated, I might be forced to tell the police something. Something about a girl and her father. A secret they’ve been keeping. A very old secret.”
A sick, swooping feeling crashed through Rose, forcing her to close her eyes and swallow.
Calm, she thought furiously. Ke
ep calm.
It did not work. She wanted to run, now. She wanted to kill this man in front of her, to shut him up, to kill their secret with him.
“Rosalyn,” said her captor. “I don’t want to have to say anything to anyone. But if I am caught, I will. Am I understood?”
Rose nodded. She couldn’t breathe.
“So it is in your best interests to keep me out of the Department’s line of sight.”
Rose did not respond. She heard Arkwood get up and push his chair back.
“There is a warehouse on Uxbridge Road,” Loren Arkwood said. “Do you know it?”
Rose managed a “yes.”
“Be there in two days with food and water. I will expect you. And, needless to say, if I read anything about myself in the newspapers, someone will get a little note on their desk about the Elmsworths. Am I clear?”
Rose nodded. She looked up at him. As he was about to leave, something inside her threw caution to the wind. Never mind. What did she have to lose now? How else could he hurt her?
“What were you in the Department cells for?”
Then he looked at her almost mockingly with his steely eyes, halfway out the door.
“Oh, please, Rosalyn. You don’t really think you need to commit a crime to end up out of favor with the Department, do you?”
Then he left. The door swung slowly shut behind him. Rose traced his footsteps out of hearing distance. Then she sank to her knees and sat, shaking, curled up against the wall.
The man who committed the greatest crime in human history was never punished for his actions.
Obviously the Government line was that Ichor brought the Angels into the world and as such he should probably be canonized, minimum — and people like Greenlow, who had been made Gifted by his actions, viewed him as nothing less than a messiah — but the fact remained that without Ichor there would have been no War, and without the War millions of people would still be alive and happy and oblivious to the realities of warfare and grief.
Those six years of war, when most people didn’t have access to electricity and pandemics blossomed in the wake of the sudden disappearance of basic sanitation, were down to him. Of course, magic was due to him as well, but then — and this was the issue closest to Rose’s heart — so were Hybrids, and it was questionable whether the one was worth the other. Rose herself, who had been found halfway through the War, would probably not have been born without Ichor’s crime; although, not knowing the identities of her parents or the circumstances of her conception, she had no way of being certain.
Maybe — and this was an idea she rarely contemplated, and only when she was angry at David — her parents had been happy and married and well-off, and had the War not happened she would have grown up safe, with a mother, and a father who didn’t have to risk his life to save a city every other weekend, and brothers and sisters; she would have gone to school and had friends whom she didn’t need to keep secrets from.
In the event, the powers that be never got the chance to decide how to deal with Ichor: he was never seen after the Veilbreak, nor was his body ever found. His name became a word used to bless or curse in almost equal measure. He disappeared into legend, and though David always said — in private, of course — that he hoped Ichor had died miserable and in pain and alone in a ditch somewhere for what he’d done, his fate had always served as the antithesis to Rose’s Department upbringing, and she cherished it now.
Just because you did something terrible, didn’t mean you had to burn for it.
The sound of glass shattering came to them as they were walking beside the river, on their way to the Department, and Rose had to stretch up on her tiptoes to watch the shop front collapse. The alarm went off almost immediately. The police converged; David moved forward. She didn’t know what he intended to do — help, maybe — but she put an arm out to stop him.
“This isn’t a Department matter,” she said. “This is for the civilian police, remember?”
“I still have authority.”
“They don’t need your authority. I think it’s a kid.”
It was indeed a child: maybe eight or nine years old, screaming, with bright, bloodshot green eyes. The mother watched fearfully as the policeman pulled her daughter away from the broken glass. Children that age were old enough to fear the penalties that came with illegal magical use, but not quite old enough to have full control of their powers, so incidents like this were relatively common.
“Legal age?” asked David, from behind her. He meant “of responsibility”: there had been a recent crackdown on magical use in public, and a few weeks ago the Department had dealt with an eleven-year-old who had been given a two-month custodial sentence in a young offender institution for setting a stack of papers on fire to impress his friends. It hadn’t been pleasant. The eleven-year-old had been extremely foul-mouthed.
“Nowhere near. Her parents will get a fine; she’ll be okay.”
“They should have taught her better.”
“I think they know that now.”
He made another move forward, but she stopped him again. “Dad. If you try to help you’ll just end up doing their admin.”
He sighed, and nodded reluctantly. Then he rubbed his hands. “Let’s get to work, shall we?”
He moved off toward the Department building. Rose paused before following him, letting the stab of guilt twist in her stomach, her heart sinking.
She had the terrible suspicion she was going to have to get used to that feeling.
Loren Arkwood was a murderer. This was the conclusion she had come to the previous night, and more than that, she knew the identity of his victim. The timing and details matched too well for it to be otherwise. Here was a recently escaped convict; Gifted, clearly dangerous, and appearing not three days after a suspicious magical death.
Loren Arkwood had murdered Thomas Argent.
She didn’t know why, but he had, and in order to prevent him from carrying out his threats — the thought of which had stopped her from sleeping — she had to prevent the Department from finding out what he had done.
She thought it best to start small.
“James.”
“Yeah?”
James was at his computer. He looked very tired and distracted. The perfect time to tell him.
“I don’t think Argent was murdered.”
“Rose, is this really — You what?”
He turned to her, and she spoke very quickly and quietly.
“I don’t think Argent was murdered. I think it was an accident, if his Leeching maybe went wrong, if it didn’t work properly — he had an argument with his partner the night he died, right? So if he got angry, and all the magic just — just exploded out of him . . .”
“Rose —” He looked astonished, half concentrating. “That might make sense, and Ichor knows we don’t want there to be a magical killer, but right now —”
“No.”
The whole office went very quiet, the stillness spreading outward like water, and when there was complete silence David was standing at its center, utterly oblivious to the reactions of the people around him. He was staring in what could only be fear at the small piece of paper in his hand. This was so uncharacteristic that it took Rose a full five seconds to realize that the whisper had come from him.
James, Terrian and Laura were on their feet.
“What is it? Is it an attack?”
Nate was on the other side of the room; he went immediately to Rose’s side. She gripped his hand briefly in thanks before running toward her father. James followed her.
“Is it an attack here?” he asked. “Are they trying to take the Department? Talk to me! David!”
David was frozen. It took Rose, snapping her fingers in front of his face, to bring him back.
“Yes,” he said. It was almost a breath, a release. He did not look at her. “Yes. Bomb attack. Croydon.” He went to the camera banks. “CR2 8YA.”
The machine heard his voice — hoarse, dark, b
reathless as it was — and immediately each of the sixteen screens filled with CCTV footage. Dense, redbrick buildings, gray windows; a glass shop front, through which empty tables could be glimpsed. A restaurant. It looked uninhabited, but the camera angle was too narrow to be sure. James hovered between Rose and David.
“They’re not coming here, then?” he asked, urgent. “It’s not an attack on us?”
David shook his head.
“We’ll need at least two police cars,” said Terrian, eyes on the screen. “Let’s say three squad teams, for safety —”
“No,” said David again.
James, Terrian and Laura stared at him. Rose had retreated beyond disbelief, beyond useless confusion: she was watching her father with her eyes narrowed, trying to read him and to understand. She stayed silent.
“What do you mean no?” said Terrian.
“No,” said David again, almost robotically, still scanning the screens. No, not scanning — scanning implied some kind of active involvement, but what David was doing was different. He watched the screens almost fearfully, his breathing fast enough that Rose knew he was running on adrenaline. He watched warily, but not guardedly. His gaze was that of a man who knew pain was coming, but who could not look away. He watched the screens as a slave watched the whip.
“We’re not meant to,” he said.
“What do you mean we’re not meant to? I don’t care what they bloody mean us to do! We don’t obey terrorists!”— this from Terrian, defaulting, as he often did with David, to a position of furious incredulity.
“It’s too late,” whispered David. He reached up to touch the screens, his hands shaking — another occurrence without precedent. “They wouldn’t have warned me if there were time.”
Laura, wide-eyed: “Ti — What on earth! Are there people in there?”
“I don’t know,” said David frantically. “I can’t see, they haven’t said —”
Terrian dived for the phone, and because he did, he missed the explosion. Two screens died immediately, as if the black-and-white footage had no means of translating what was happening and had simply given up. It took a while for the picture to come back, and it did so only on one screen, the other dissolving to static, its camera destroyed. The building was in flames, crumbling into the earth as if the subject of a single, targeted earthquake. David touched the screen with his fingertips, tracing it.
The Catalyst Page 8
