The Catalyst

by Helena Coggan

  They were discussing the benefits of Craftsmanship versus Physics — at least Rose and Maria were; Nate spent a lot of the time staring at Maria with a dreamy smile on his face, looking as if the merest of cognitive processes was far beyond him — when someone fired a gun directly behind them. Nate and Rose, being accustomed to this kind of thing due to David’s weaponry training, were the only ones who didn’t jump or scream.

  The man standing in the doorway clicked the safety back on and strode into the room. For the second time that day, Rose saw a man with steely eyes and the power to bring her life crashing down around her; and then the vision was gone, and instead she saw a short, twenty-something man with thick brown hair, watching the class with raised eyebrows.

  The teacher pointed to Rose and Nate. “You two. Come here.”

  The two of them looked at each other. Nate was alert now. Together, they walked forward.

  “Stand here,” the teacher said. He indicated two spots on crash mats either side of him. Nate and Rose took them.

  “Why didn’t you react?” he asked them.

  Nate opened and closed his mouth like a goldfish.

  Rose, feeling as if she had to say something, said, “We’ve already been trained in how to use a gun, sir, we’re . . . used to hearing gunshots.”

  “Sir,” said the man, tasting the word almost mockingly. “Yes, you must be.”

  There was a silence. The whole class stared at Nate, Rose and the teacher in bemused astonishment. Out of the corner of her eye, Rose could see Maria looking at her incredulously, mouthing Used to gunshots? Ah, well. It had to come out eventually.

  “And how have you come to be ‘used to gunshots’? Guns are illegal weapons.”

  “If you don’t have a license for them, yes,” Rose said.

  The teacher stared at her coldly for a few seconds.

  “Who trained you?”

  Nate answered first this time, seemingly eager to get a word in. “Our fathers work for the Department, sir.”

  “The Department?” The teacher looked between them in surprise. “Who?”

  “My father’s Connor Terrian, sir.”

  “Never heard of him.” Thank the Angels, the teacher knew better than to ask what he did. “And yours, girl?”

  Rose considered lying, but decided it was hopeless: it would be easy for a teacher to find out the truth using registry databases, so deceit would only get her punished.

  “David Elmsworth, sir.”

  The teacher stopped. He turned to Rose, giving her his full attention for the first time. His reaction sent the name David Elmsworth rippling back through the class. None of them knew what it meant, of course, but Rose could feel the name gathering sinister connotations with every repetition.

  She heard Maria whisper, shocked, “Your dad works for the Department? You never told me that!”

  “You’re David Elmsworth’s daughter?” the teacher asked. There was something in his voice — wariness, maybe — that Rose wasn’t quite sure she liked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you fight?”

  “Of course,” said Rose, almost incredulously. And then, before the teacher could react, she caught herself: “Sir.”

  He gave her a long, dark, searching look. Just when Rose thought she was going to have to tell her father that she’d earned herself a detention on her first day at school, he turned away from her, and pointed to a boy at the front of the crowd. “You, child. Swap with . . . what’s your first name?”

  “Nathaniel, sir.”

  “Swap with Nathaniel, then.”

  Nate retreated to Maria’s side with obvious relief. The other boy took his place on the crash mat. Trepidation showed on his face. Rose, who could see what was coming, sized him up mentally. She thought she could probably take him, even though a male of her age or older was never an ideal opponent: only the best combat training could overcome simple gender differences when the opponent was reasonably skilled, and David always said it was arrogant to assume he had given her that. The boy was not too strong, a couple of inches shorter than her, odds-on no hand-to-hand combat training. He was scared, too, which helped.

  “You two. Fight. No magic. First with a significant advantage wins.”

  The boy’s eyes widened in shock. He didn’t protest, though. All credit to him for that.

  Rose took him down in three moves. This was the first time her fighting skills had ever meant anything outside of the Department, and she couldn’t help reveling in it slightly. She tried to achieve a natural-looking balance between being impressive and showing off, but she wasn’t sure she managed it.

  The boy, whose name Rose remembered vaguely as Albert, moved first. Right hook to the head. Rose could have just caught the fist and pulled him into a half nelson, but she reckoned she should at least give him a chance, so she stepped back, waited until he swung off-balance, then kicked him in the stomach.

  The class gasped with him.

  Winded, Albert stumbled backward. Rose moved forward and hooked her foot round his ankles, sweeping his feet out from under him. As he fell, she put an arm to his back and another to his throat, pulling his head back. If she had had a knife, he would have been dead.

  The class stared at her. Nate, who had fought against her many times, muttered, half resentfully, half amusedly, “Show-off.” Maria’s mouth had fallen open.

  Rose looked at the teacher, who nodded. She stepped back, releasing Albert.

  A pause. Rose felt uncomfortably that she was being examined.

  “And your father taught you to do that, did he?” asked the teacher.

  “Mostly, yes. I credit myself with some initiative, though. Sir.” Another pause, and then, before she could be subjected to his stare again, she turned toward him.

  “I’m Rose,” she said. “To those who don’t hate me.”

  The teacher looked at her.

  “Okay,” he said thoughtfully. “Rose.”

  The Tube to Uxbridge Road was severely delayed, so Rose had to take the bus. At Shepherd’s Bush they changed drivers, and Rose, unable to stand the heat and the noise any longer, slipped out there and walked. It wasn’t far, anyway, and walking allowed her to think.

  After her introduction, the teacher had brought — or dragged, in some cases — other pairs onto the crash mats to fight. Rose had been able to tell from this that she was easily the best fighter in her class, at least non-magically. She was followed closely by Nate, of course, and then, surprisingly, by Tristan Greenlow, who fought with a skill and ease she would not have expected from someone who didn’t even know how to fire a gun. Even with her training, Rose could tell that she would struggle to beat him. But the tables might turn after they were allowed to use magic.

  Rose pressed her fingertips to her temples and leaned back against the fence for a moment. Then she forced herself to keep moving. She should probably be glad the Tube was down, anyway; it gave her an excuse for arriving home late.

  Today was the day she had to meet Loren Arkwood again.

  She didn’t think that he would physically hurt her. That would be pointless, after all. But still, she didn’t want to spend any more time around him than was absolutely necessary.

  The fact was that she was more scared of him than anyone or anything she had ever met. Not the madman who had shot James, not even the thing she became during her transformation. No: Loren Arkwood scared her more than any of them.

  And the reason? Well, that was obvious. Loren Arkwood wasn’t simply threatening her. He was threatening her father.

  The warehouse was tucked away at the end of a side street; a squat, hulking, squalid place that no one on the council had got round to demolishing yet. The main doors were padlocked, but the back door had been left very slightly ajar. Rose pushed it open, spreading a shaft of light along the wall. She closed it behind her, wincing at the encroaching shadows.

  The warehouse had been a DIY shop before the Veilbreak, but in the War years it had been converted into
an army stronghold for the Ashkind. It was actually a very good hideout. The place was laced with shelves, turning it into a maze that you could easily lose an enemy in. In the back corner was a forklift truck, the inside of which had been covered in blankets.

  Rose was about to move when she felt something cold and hard press against the back of her head. She froze.

  “Bag?” he asked. She gave it to him. Behind her, she felt him riffling through it. For a second, Rose deliberated over whether to attack him while he was distracted, but gave it up. Rule number one: Never start a fight you cannot win.

  She stepped away from him. Without looking at her, Arkwood dropped the aluminum can he had been pressing against her head and, after a short pause, threw her bag back at her. He sat down against the wall and started to eat. Rose noticed a long, white scar along the back of his left hand.

  “So,” he said through a mouthful of chicken leg, “you made the smart decision.”

  Rose waited for him to elaborate. She noticed, again, how abnormally sharp his teeth were.

  “Not to try to kill me,” he explained. She nodded. He looked cleaner, somehow younger than he had two days ago, and almost human with it. “Unless you’ve poisoned this.” He gestured to the food.

  “No,” she said, “I haven’t.” He looked tired and dirty, almost helpless. Or, at the very least, like someone in need of help. She didn’t like that, somehow.

  “Where have you come from?”

  “School.”

  “Your first day?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re very monosyllabic, aren’t you?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  He looked at her oddly, as if he were trying to see through her. “You weren’t the last time.”

  Rose said nothing to this. A few seconds’ silence. Friendly as he seemed, that did not change the fact that Rose did not want to be here. She had lied to herself: this place really did scare her.

  He looked up at her. “You can use magic against me, you know.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You have the advantage of magic,” he said, with a grin she didn’t like. “I’m weak. I’m practically a Pretender as it is”— no bitterness in his voice at all —“and even without that limitation, I don’t have the energy. Opening a tin would finish me off by this point. You could use magic and I wouldn’t see it coming at all.”

  There was no response to this. He got to his feet, brushing himself off.

  “Come on, you’re Elmsworth’s kid. What did he teach you about magic?”

  She answered warily. It was almost physically painful to tell this man anything valuable.

  “Magic is a weakness.”

  “Go on.”

  An even longer pause. What was this?

  “Magic is a double-edged sword. It gives you the ability to use energy from your own blood, your own bones. It’s an ability you don’t need, and you should never use it in a fight, except as a last resort. If you come to rely on it, you can overuse it, and you can kill yourself just as easily as your enemy. Guns are easier. Guns should be your first port of call.” She watched him apprehensively. “Is that enough?”

  His grin widened. “So why aren’t you using magic against me now? It wouldn’t take much to kill me.”

  She said nothing.

  “Is it because you’re not a killer? We both know that’s not true.”

  She flinched, physically flinched, and a hatred stronger than anything she had ever known — a hatred stronger than conscious love — welled up in her, and a window in the corner shattered, exploding outward into shards. He looked at it, raising his eyebrows. She fought not to bare her teeth at him.

  “Can I go now?” she asked softly.

  His expression changed, became more sober, as if he realized he’d crossed some sort of line. “Yes. Come back in two days with more food. And some water.”

  “Okay.”

  She was about to step out the door when a reckless part of her made her turn back. She said, “The Department thinks that Thomas Argent’s death was accidental.”

  “Do they?”

  He seemed almost uninterested, and perhaps it would have worked had his muscles not tightened slightly at the mention of Argent’s name.

  And she wasn’t sure whether that made it easier to hate him or harder.

  He said nothing else after that. After a few seconds Rose left, closing the door behind her.

  And, to her intense relief, that was it. This time.

  The next three months passed easily for Rose. School settled into a gentle ebb and flow, and her days acquired the pleasant familiarity that only routine could bring. Artistic Studies became her favorite lesson; she showed no skill with Healing at all, however, and when she slipped off into other worlds — usually the fifth floor of the Department — she had to rely on Maria to bring her up to date.

  Maria, for her part, never seemed to mind. There was no malice in her satisfaction, but nevertheless, Rose knew that she was pleased to have found a subject in which she surpassed Rose at every turn. It didn’t really matter, anyway, about how good she was at Healing; Maria was going to be a doctor for her national service, and as for Rose . . .

  She saw Serena Mitchell quite often now. Every time she was asked — and Mitchell asked her a lot — about her future career, she reiterated that she was not, repeat not, going to go into the army. But every time she gave the answer, it seemed to mean less and less. Combat lessons were progressing so well that she was beginning to doubt the matter would be left up to her. If Mitchell decided to take matters into her own hands, and it was beyond doubt that she could, Rose wouldn’t be able to stop her. This worried her. It worried David, too.

  But there was really nothing she could do now: her Combat teacher, having identified her as top of the class, continually used her for demonstrations. She had never lost a fight, not even against Tristan, whose resentment toward her was beginning to show outside of the classroom. He and Luke were often to be found in a corner muttering darkly and throwing nasty looks in Rose’s direction.

  As for Nate, his nervousness around Maria had settled into something approaching normality. He still stuttered more than normal when talking to her, but despite this, the same dreamy look that entered his eyes when he talked about her had begun to gleam in Maria’s when she spoke of him. And she spoke of him a lot. The fact that they were always each other’s favorite topic of conversation made Rose value what little time she had left for the Department even more; even when Nate was there, it was the one place where his conversation was, for the most part, Maria-free.

  The shock of Argent’s murder had died down now. Nearly everyone in the Department talked about it as an accidental death. Even the coroner admitted that the story was more probable than murder, which Rose took as a personal achievement. She began to suspect that her plan had only come off as well as it had by virtue of the fact that no one — not even her father — really wanted to think that there was a brutal Gifted murderer somewhere out there.

  She saw Loren Arkwood twice a week now. Their meetings only lasted five minutes or so, however long it took to give him the food and get out. Arkwood, however, seemed strangely talkative. He had never repeated his threat to tell the Department of her Hybrid status, which was a blessing, although she didn’t doubt he’d carry it out if he had to.

  It had become difficult to find food for him after a week or so without letting her father or the school become suspicious, so she had taken to intercepting food packages from the Department military canteen. The warehouse was technically under Government jurisdiction, so she’d 3-D-printed the keys off from the office database. The excuse she gave herself for all this was very simple: the Department was the reason she was being targeted in the first place, so she might as well use the advantages that came with it.

  She told herself that repeatedly.

  After a mere three weeks, she’d broken her pledge not to let his use of the name Rosalyn annoy her — an unforgive
able lapse.

  “Why?” he had asked. “What’s wrong with Rosalyn?”

  “It’s horrible,” she’d told him. “It sounds like an eighteenth-century countess. Dad’s only bad parenting decision.”

  And he had laughed. He had a deep, ringing, happy laugh; it was infectious. Even Rose had smiled. She thought he might be beginning to like her. He didn’t really have much choice in the matter — she was his only company, after all.

  Christ.

  “I know the feeling,” he had said. “My prison guards called me ‘Lauren’ for the first two weeks I was there. It was almost more humiliating than anything else.”

  That week, to try to cut the whole thing off at the knees, she decided to ask him.

  When she came with food, he was reading Firestarter, a pre-War novel that her dad had always liked. She put the plastic bags in a corner and then, hesitantly, stood in front of him, waiting.

  After a few seconds he looked up at her in mild surprise.

  “Rose. Hello.”

  Hearing that name in his voice was almost painful. She should never have told him. He went back to his book — this was the quietest he’d been in weeks — but when she didn’t move he looked back up at her, eyebrows raised.

  “Yes? Is there anything wrong?”

  “I wanted to ask you something.”

  Now he put the book down; now he was interested. He stood up.

  “Why? Usually you run away like I’m going to shoot you.”

  “I do always consider that a possibility.”

  That laugh again.

  “Did I make that bad a first impression?”

  “You made a pretty good threat.”

  “Then it was a better plan than I gave myself credit for. You said you had a question?”

  “I have two.”

  He breathed out, raising his eyebrows. “Blimey. I didn’t know you had it in you to be so curious.”

  She paused, looking at him.

  “Fire away,” he said.

  “How do you know my father?”