The Catalyst

by Helena Coggan

  He would be fine.

  She had bigger problems than him now.

  Rose stood and stared around at the abandoned flat, and then she headed back home.

  Loren, she thought, sitting on her bed. I didn’t choose to do this. I don’t want to do this. Please don’t hurt my father. You’ll understand what happened, won’t you?

  I swear to God this isn’t my fault.

  But if I didn’t choose it, why do I have to do it?

  What in the hell is the use of not choosing to do evil things if they make you do evil anyway?

  She woke up early the next morning. For a few wonderful seconds she forgot what had happened, and then it slid slowly back to her and she rolled over, staring at the ceiling of her room. She would not see it again for a very long time.

  Or she would never see it again.

  Don’t think that.

  Rose got up, put on her clothes and went to her father’s comms tablet to check her e-mails. They had sent her an automatic message. Rose skim-read most of it. The gist was that she had to be at the Military Induction Center at ten o’clock.

  Her father was up early too. Neither of them ate. For a while, they simply sat on the sofa together, trying to find something to say. David held Rose’s hand, and for the first time in weeks, she felt safe.

  It lasted a brief, fleeting moment, and then it was gone.

  When nine fifteen came, they put on their coats and set off for the induction center. They did not speak. The world around Rose seemed slightly blurred. She was going to be a soldier. She would not come home for a very long time.

  If she ever came home at all.

  There were no other candidates to be inducted that day. Later, when she examined her memories, she found that there were seven people in the yawning, cavernous, echoing room where she was inducted. Herself, her father, Serena, the Induction Administrator, two guards, and an official she could not name who watched her inscrutably throughout. It seemed very empty, and very frightening.

  When she arrived at the center, they gave her a uniform and showed her to the changing rooms. Rose hugged her father one last time. She did not need to say she loved him. She did not need to say that she already missed him. She did not need to describe how terrible she felt, or how afraid she was. He knew.

  She kissed him on the cheek and walked away. When she looked back, he was still standing there, watching her.

  She changed into the uniform. Khaki trousers and shirt, boots, thick socks, belt and holster, ammunition pouch, gun. It was a good gun, warm and steady in her hands. It would help her.

  She leaned against the wall and took five deep breaths.

  Rose walked out of the changing room into the hall. There was very little natural light here. The Induction Administrator gave her a single bullet and walked away. Rose loaded it into her gun. She did not wonder what she would need it for.

  That, in retrospect, was a mistake.

  She climbed the stairs into the wide-open hall. It felt almost like a wedding, if not for the distinctly funerary expressions of the spectators: the long walk down to the official on the platform, six pairs of sharp eyes locked on to her. Music started playing, tinny through the speakers in the corners of the room. She didn’t listen to it; she took strength from ignoring the trinkets and frills they added to the act of sending her off to die.

  She reached the end of the aisle without stumbling, and the music cut off. The Induction Administrator himself was there. He recited the vows to her in the disorienting silence, and she repeated them seamlessly.

  “I, Rosalyn Daniela Elmsworth, gladly give myself to the service of the Angels and to their Government. I rejoice in my choice and repent of all my sins. I give my life, should it need to be taken, to the service of all that is good and just. If this be untrue let me face the wrath of the Angels.”

  He nodded. Rose could feel her father’s eyes on the back of her head, but she did not dare look to him.

  “Do you swear your loyalty to the will of the Angels?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you promise to obey them gladly and willingly?”

  “I do.”

  “Will you always enact the orders of the Government, whatever the cost?”

  “I will.”

  “Then I command you to prove your loyalty with a steady hand in the execution of justice.”

  There was no cue. Rose heard the rumbling and creaking of wheels behind her, a crack and a small cry of pain. She did not look round.

  “I bring before you a convict, condemned for providing service to the enemy. As proof of your obedience, you must be the harbinger of order in the deliverance of his death.”

  Oh, she could have guessed. She could have guessed: the shiver down her spine, the flicker in the Administrator’s smile, the very small intake of breath from the space where she knew her father to be standing. She took the gun out of her holster and turned to face the man she had to kill, and her hand was halfway to the safety catch when she saw his face. He had been beaten up badly: his nose had been broken, one eye was black and he moved gingerly, as if with a cracked rib.

  It was Loren Arkwood.

  She registered it subconsciously first, and by the time it fully hit her she was sufficiently in control of her wits and motor functions not to drop the gun. She clicked the safety off and aimed squarely between his eyes.

  He saw her face, too, and managed just in time to control the shock in his expression. He had been hurt badly: they had had to tie him to a metal pole on wheels, and the glances he shot at the guards were full of a fear she had never seen in his eyes before. His face was drawn and gray. He looked tired, starved.

  How long had they had him? It had only been four days since she had seen him. And she had been to his flat only last night, and there had been . . . a broken vase on the floor, a tear in the sofa, something too dark to be water staining the tiles. They had taken him two, maybe three days ago. And she had been too unobservant to notice.

  His mouth formed her name. He hung his head.

  “Do it quickly.”

  His voice was hoarse and broken and painfully familiar. It echoed through the hall. David flinched at the sound of it.

  David would have known they had him. David had not told her.

  Rose’s hands were steady on the gun. Five seconds had passed since she had seen Loren’s face. The pause of any fifteen-year-old set the task of killing someone.

  One bullet in her gun.

  Rose breathed in, and then out again.

  Herself. Her father. The Induction Administrator. Serena, watching her victim with unrevealing eyes. Two guards standing around Loren. The quiet official, who had, unconsciously it seemed, started fiddling with her watch, twisting the frame around and around. It made a small clicking noise in the silence. Her face seemed slightly familiar.

  One bullet in Rose’s gun.

  Please forgive me.

  One bullet.

  Rose allowed the count to reach ten seconds, and then twisted and fired at the chain link holding Loren to the post. She had counted on at least two seconds of confusion before someone realized that Loren was not dead. She got three. She reached out with her magic, and the guns of Loren’s guards jammed and the bullets started to explode in their chambers, making the guards yelp and drop them on the floor. Loren stumbled forward, hissed in pain, realized he was free, and then the next thing Rose felt was his hands on her wrist, wrestling the gun from her.

  He was weakened, too weak to be able to use magic, but still stronger than her: he wrenched the gun from her, got her in a half nelson, and pressed the gun to her temple. He didn’t know the gun was useless now. Luckily, neither did anyone else bar the Induction Administrator, and he seemed to have temporarily lost the power of speech.

  “Drop your weapons,” he said, “or she dies.”

  David, the Induction Administrator and the quiet official all dropped their guns down and kicked them toward Loren.

  David’s gun spun slowl
y across the floor, and then suddenly snapped up into the air, the handle shooting toward Loren’s temple. Loren ducked, and David’s gun flew past him and slammed into the wall behind him. David narrowed his eyes, white-faced with anger, and the tiles around Loren’s feet began to break into small, sharp pieces, which lifted into the air and opened up cuts on Loren’s arms.

  Loren pressed the barrel harder into Rose’s temple. “I mean it,” he said loudly. “I’ll kill her.” The tiles hovered in the air for a moment, but perhaps the blood running down his arms gave the statement more weight. Slowly, they began to drop and shatter against the floor.

  David was giving Loren a glare of such utter murderous hatred as would make most people — including Rose — run very fast in the opposite direction, but Loren simply looked back at him with cold, calm yellow eyes.

  “You know I will,” he said softly.

  Rose was shaking. She closed her eyes as David and Loren stared each other down, trying to visualize what the people around her — currently wearing expressions of equal parts fear and bewilderment — would think they had seen when her gun went off. It would look like Rose’s hand had slipped, and that she had hit the chain link by a mere stroke of good fortune. Or bad fortune, depending on your perspective.

  Not David, though.

  Not David, who knew that her aim was nearly as good as his own. Not David, who knew that her hands never, ever shook. Not David, who even now would be calculating the amount of excess energy left in Loren’s body and coming to the conclusion that it was nowhere near enough to put two guns out of action.

  Not David.

  Rose began to feel the pieces start to come together in his mind.

  “I’m going to walk out of here,” Loren said, very slowly and clearly, “and if I hear anything even vaguely resembling footsteps behind me, the girl gets a bullet through her brain. Am I understood?”

  He was.

  Loren started walking, half dragging Rose with him. Rose could tell that he was making an effort not to show how badly injured he was. He still walked with a slight limp, his nose was bloody and at an angle, and there was definitely something wrong with his ribs. Belatedly, Rose realized that she should look a lot more terrified than she currently did. She attempted to haul a fearful expression onto her face, and failed.

  Never mind. Too late now.

  They walked through the deserted lobby and down the steps outside the building. As soon as they were sure no one could see them, Loren sank to his knees. Rose, all too aware of the ever-present CCTV, half helped, half pulled him round to the back of the building, where he sat, coughing, against the wall. Rose leaned against the brick, felt for the thrumming buzz of the wires within it, and then sent a shot of electricity into it that should — with luck — short out the entire camera system. It would have been far more efficient just to take out the cameras watching them, but that would be as obvious a giveaway as lighting a fire.

  Rose pulled back and looked down at Loren. He was trying to say something, and failing. After a few seconds of this, he simply reached for her hand, which she gave him uncertainly. His grip was disproportionately strong.

  There was an odd pulling sensation, as if something was draining slowly out of her. She looked at Loren. His bruises were fading, the light returning to his eyes. There was a series of cracks as his nose and ribs healed and a few things that were dislocated located themselves again. When Rose felt they were into the danger zone, she pulled her hand away. She ignored the sudden, dull beat of weariness, and put her ear to the wall again. Faintly, she could hear angry, terrified shouting. Her father, of course.

  Rose closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to the cold brick.

  Other voices joined his. Quieter and more soothing. Trying to calm him down, prevent him from running into whatever trap Loren had laid. Good luck with that.

  She could hear the words now.

  “That bastard has my daughter! Don’t you dare — don’t you dare try and stop me —”

  That one wasn’t going to work. Okay, Dad, play the Department card.

  “I am an officer of the Angelic Empire —”

  There you go.

  Loren was trying to speak again. This time, he managed it.

  “Okay,” he said hoarsely, “so why aren’t we running?”

  “— my daughter! Don’t you understand what that means, you bunch of heartless —”

  “Because not running,” Rose said, finally pulling herself away from the wall, “is perhaps the most stupid thing we could do in this situation.”

  Loren got to his feet, wincing. “And I suppose there’s logic behind this?”

  “Yes. Because Dad knows how I think. And he probably knows how you think. And this kind of decision is not, logically, one either of us would make.”

  Loren nodded. “All right.”

  “Only Dad is going to make a move. None of them will alert the police, because in this case, the Department is the police, and Dad is the Department. So Dad’s the only one we have to worry about.” There were tears in her eyes. She stood there calmly until the broken pieces of her settled back into place and her face was dry.

  Loren looked at her.

  “Why didn’t you kill me?”

  She sighed.

  “I chose not to,” she said, and her tone was sincere but also sardonic, because they both knew that killing him would have meant the end of a secret and made her life that much easier. He nodded, and looked away.

  “What do you think our chances are?”

  “Of escaping Dad?” She ran a hand through her hair. “Slightly under zero. Of escaping? Fairly high.”

  Loren’s head turned so fast he nearly cricked his neck. “You want to negotiate with him?”

  “It is possible, you know,” Rose said, in a voice that was edging toward breaking again. She swallowed. “He’s not a monster.”

  “No, not that,” Loren said softly. He pursed his lips. “You’re going to tell him?”

  Rose closed her eyes. Inside her head, she saw her father’s face. Oh, God. Hadn’t she had to break his heart once already in the last twenty-four hours? Wasn’t that enough?

  “You told me once that if I did that, there would be a little note on a Department desk.”

  “Rose, if you still thought I would do that I would be in that building right now with a bullet through my head.”

  There was a long, empty silence.

  And another few seconds before Rose realized what that silence meant.

  She leaned back against the wall and pressed her ear to the brick. Faintly, she could hear murmuring. They’d either subdued him or let him go. Or he’d forced them to let him go. Either way, their situation remained the same.

  “Loren,” she said softly, in a voice of forced calm, “get back against the wall.”

  He did so just in time. David came running down the steps, looking wild and almost crazed, with several guns in his belt, none of which were his. Rose closed her eyes.

  Come on, Dad, she prayed silently, run the other way, please, give me some time — you’ve got to give me a chance in this one, come on, please . . .

  David’s voice. An anguished yell. “Rose!”

  The echo came back loudest from a deserted alleyway across the other side of the empty street. Rose supposed it looked plausible, or at any rate David did, because he crossed the street without bothering to check for cars and sprinted down the alleyway. Rose did not breathe until his footsteps were out of earshot.

  Neither did Loren.

  He asked again, his voice tighter. “How long do you think we have until he works it out?”

  Rose backed away from the wall slowly, checking that no one else was going to emerge from the building.

  “Oh, he’s worked it out,” she said. “He just doesn’t want to accept it yet.”

  “What do we do if he finds us?” He paused, and corrected himself. “What will he do when he finds us? Come on, Rose, you of all people should know this.”
<
br />   Rose sank to her knees and pressed her eyes shut. He was right. She should know this. But nothing occurred to her.

  Come on . . . what would you do if Loren had Dad?

  This answer came quickly. I’d try to take Loren out without hurting Dad. But he’d be expecting that, so I’d try to put him off-guard. I’d have to make him think that I —

  There was something weird about Dad just now.

  Wasn’t there?

  Around him, it was like he was almost . . .

  Glowing.

  Oh Angels.

  Glowing green.

  Her eyes flew open. Loren looked at her, and then his eyes widened, staring at something over her shoulder.

  Slowly, very slowly, she stood up. She was shaking.

  “Dad,” she said to the empty air in front of her, “please listen to me —”

  “Turn round slowly and raise your hands to shoulder height,” said the voice coldly from behind her.

  Rose did. So did Loren. Her father was standing with his gun aimed squarely between Loren’s eyes. His face was blank and stony. He was beyond anger. He was beyond hurt, or distress. His eyes were dead, and Rose could see the monster flickering behind them. She wanted to run, but she knew, with cold certainty, that it would be terribly dangerous to move.

  “So,” Loren said calmly, “you’re good at optical illusions, I’ll give you that. Exactly how long have you been standing there?”

  “I followed you out,” David said. His voice was steady, but his left hand was clenched by his side. He opened it and flexed it and Rose saw that the third and fourth fingers of his hand were shaking. Inside his hand was a small metal ball, lined with thin green light: James’s hologram projector.

  Yes, she really, really should have seen that one coming.

  “So now I want you to tell me,” David said in a voice of dangerous quiet. “What. Have. You. Done. To. My. Daughter?”

  He said the last word so savagely that even his right hand shook with the force of it and the gun went off. The shot hit the wall behind Loren. He did not flinch at that, either.