The Catalyst

by Helena Coggan

  “You have until tomorrow morning to say your good-byes,” said Wood. “Don’t worry. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt,” Rose said.

  Wood stared at her for another few seconds, and then turned on her heel and left. The rest of them remained utterly motionless until they heard the door snap shut behind her.

  James was the first to move: he collapsed into his chair, like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly cut.

  “The bastards,” he said, in a tone that seemed more astonished and outraged than angry. “The absolute bastards.”

  “Insulting them won’t change what they’re doing, James.”

  “They’re not doing anything,” he said, with more firmness in his voice. “I won’t let them. I will not let them.”

  Terrian stood up very suddenly.

  “Come on, Nate,” he said. “We’re going home.”

  “What?” said Nate, outraged. “No! They’re taking Rose, Dad! I can’t leave now!”

  “Yes you bloody well can,” said Terrian grimly, looking around at the others, all of whom met his gaze with dark looks of their own. “If I know those two”— he gestured to David and Loren —“they’re going to come up with some plot to get her out of it, and when the Government finds out and it all hits the fan I want nothing to do with it.”

  Nate stared at his father.

  “No,” he said.

  Terrian seemed to inflate with anger.

  “You,” he said, “are coming with me. Do not argue.”

  “No,” Nate said again. “You can’t make me. Rose is my best friend. I’m staying here.”

  Terrian’s eyes bulged, apparently speechless with rage, and then he appeared to bow to the inevitable and stormed out of the room. Loren sat down in his chair in relief.

  “That’s got rid of him,” he said. “Does anyone have a plan?”

  No one answered.

  “David?” said Nate.

  “Yes?”

  “You know how we’re supposed to be professional detectives, and observant, and things like that?”

  “I think it was somewhere in my employment contract, yes.”

  “Rose is gone.”

  It took her twenty minutes to get home; accounting for how fast she had run and Tube delays, she reckoned she had maybe five minutes before David arrived home behind her. Her hands were shaking as she turned the key in the lock.

  She wasn’t going to put up with this anymore.

  She was so intent on getting to the basement that the fear that usually accompanied her trips down there could not touch her. She pushed open the door and stood there, breathing hard.

  Hybrids are wolves

  Don’t you dare talk to me about morality

  Having evil forced upon you, and accepting it, is entirely different

  She tried to push it away, but couldn’t. She pressed her forehead to the cold metal.

  Just one spilled secret, and none of this would matter. They wouldn’t try to do any of this to her.

  They would be too afraid.

  I am not human. I shouldn’t have to deal with this.

  She sent a pulse of flame into the wall. It blossomed into gold against the gray metal, blackened with scratches from inhuman hands, and curled smokelessly into the air.

  “You should treat your possessions with more care,” he said from the doorway. She jerked backward in automatic self-defense, and he raised his eyebrows. “I spent years saving up for these rooms.”

  “I thought I had longer,” was all she could say.

  “Yes,” said David mildly. “You did.”

  He stepped forward and pressed his hands to the wall, examining the soot that came away on his palm.

  “I think this may be my last chance to say in so many words that I don’t judge you for what you did concerning Arkwood, Rose.” He looked up at her. “I am many things, but I am no hypocrite. Not where it counts, anyway.”

  She swallowed. “That . . . that matters a lot. Thank you.”

  “If I didn’t think it would, I wouldn’t say it.”

  They didn’t say anything for a moment. They stood on opposite sides of a room with dark steel walls, carved deeply with claws that were both hers and not hers.

  “Dad, I don’t think I can do this.”

  “Of course you can. You can and you will, or they’ll come for the both of us and we know exactly how wrong that will go.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  “You survive like the rest of us.”

  She stared at him, angry and hurt, and then she saw the gleam in his eyes and she knew.

  “You have a plan, don’t you?”

  He took something from his pocket and threw it to her. It was the Department’s handbook on various types of criminal, designed by David when she was very small in order to help Department members spot various types of suspicious characters. When she was younger, Rose had had it read to her many times as a bedtime story.

  She caught it, and at a nod from him the pages fluttered open to the section on murderers. Rose stared at it.

  There was a drawing there, as there was on every page. The drawings were David’s own creations. On this page was the Department’s standard portrait of a killer.

  She looked at the lines David had traced, so many years ago, in faded pencil: the physique, the smile, the hair, the shaded eyes.

  Felix Callaway.

  David grinned.

  “Oh, Rose,” he said. “Of course I do.”

  The door slammed closed before Rose worked her blindfold off. For a second, she thought she had failed to do so — the air around her was so thick with oily darkness that it was almost impossible to distinguish it from the inside of her eyes. She crawled forward toward the door and ran her hands over it. There was a line where the smooth metal of the door became the cement of the wall, but the seam let in no light.

  Rose groaned, and pressed her head to the door.

  “My name is Lily Daniels, and I want to join your army.” That had been the easy part. The soldiers had grabbed her from behind, blindfolded her almost before she had started speaking, spun her round and shoved her against the wall.

  “How’d you get down here?”

  It had been easy, she’d explained, with all the patience she could muster: the square around the War Rooms was almost completely destroyed, and it was easy to slip past the cordon and jump down into the cavity beneath.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to join you. I want to fight with you.”

  James, Angels bless him, had fitted her with a hologram projector — under the skin, this time, so it couldn’t fall out or slip away from her. Thanks to that, her hair was a deeper black, the set of her cheekbones slightly sharper, and, most importantly, her eyes were deep gray.

  “Who did you say you were?”

  That was when the voice started to sound familiar, and the depth of her bad luck became clear. Her captor was female, and young, and — clearly — a new enough recruit to be sent to patrol the upper floors immediately after an attack. Cannon fodder.

  “Lily Daniels,” Rose had told her, but she was beginning to make the connections, and finally she got a name. Amelia. Amelia Rodriguez.

  Oh, for Ichor’s sake.

  Maria’s sister. Why on earth did the first Regency soldier she encountered have to be Maria’s sister? Why?

  “Do you know her?” another voice had asked. This one was even younger than Amelia, young enough to be a child: a boy in early adolescence, perhaps twelve or thirteen. What were Regency doing with child guards?

  “I don’t think so,” said Amelia, but she sounded uncertain.

  “Come on. If she wants to join we’ll have to put her in the Darkroom.”

  Amelia’s voice turned nasty. “I know procedure, Angelboy. Don’t talk down to your senior officer.”

  “Angelboy” was a pejorative term used by Ashkind children to describe any Gifted child, even the weakest Pretender, with t
he telltale green eyes: not knowing the actual definition, or power, of a true Angel, they automatically assumed that every Gifted was at the extreme end of the spectrum. It was a matter of childish fear more than anything else.

  But that would mean —

  The boy was Gifted? But this was an Ashkind army. Gifted were the enemy. Unless this boy was as invaluable and dedicated as David and Loren had been, which seemed unlikely, Rose couldn’t understand why he would possibly be tolerated here.

  They’d shoved her hands roughly behind her back and pulled her along unseen corridors. Rose had been constantly scraped along stone, and at least once she had felt blood trickle down her cheek. For some reason, the thought of leaving her blood on the walls of Regency’s compound put her strangely on edge.

  Suddenly, ahead of them, there was a terrible rumbling sound, amplified a thousand times — or at least that was how it seemed to the blindfolded Rose — by the fact that it came from above as well as below them, as if the sky had decided to join in with an earthquake.

  “Don’t worry,” said Amelia, sounding bored, “it’s just drilling work from the next street,” but not before Rose had stumbled backward into the wall in an instinctive attempt to get away from the shaking. The next thing she knew, she was on the ground, aching and definitely bleeding.

  There was a click in her ear.

  “Don’t move,” said the Angelboy, in a voice that, in fairness, he probably thought was menacing.

  Amelia sounded more shocked than Rose. “Oscar! You son of a bitch!”

  “Don’t call me that. If I tell my dad —”

  “I don’t care what you tell your father, you’re underage. You can’t have weapons.”

  “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”

  “Help,” said Rose weakly, from beneath them, partly because her head was aching, and partly because she owed it to Maria not to let her sister get attacked by a hormonal Gifted teenager. There was a silence, and then someone — Amelia, she thought — pulled her to her feet, the world spinning, and pushed her forward.

  “Come on,” she said, and Rose could tell by her voice that she was glaring at Oscar. “Let’s get you to the Darkroom.”

  After a while in the dark, she came to her senses enough to try to get to her feet. She used the door to steady herself, and then maneuvered herself into a crouching position, hands pressing against the cold, smooth floor.

  Slowly and carefully, she stood up and turned in a full circle.

  The doors let in no light. There was a word for that, wasn’t there . . . God, she was tired . . . Come on, think. Yes, there was a word for that: airtight. And if the doors were airtight, and there certainly weren’t any windows, there would have to be some kind of ventilator to prevent Rose from suffocating.

  Rose bent her head and listened.

  Yes — yes — there was something to her right, quite far away, but distinctly the whooshing hum of some kind of fan. Was it a fan? Yes, it would definitely have to be, wouldn’t it: they were underground. The air would still get stale, though. That was a point: where did Regency get its air?

  Rose put her face in her hands. All right. If she wasn’t getting out, she was at least going to find out more about the place she was trapped in. Length of the room would be good: it would allow her to estimate the angles she was being filmed from, assuming the cameras were in the corners. Come to think of it, how would the cameras be filming her? Regency had to have some way of monitoring their new recruits. Maybe they employed infrared technology. That would make sense. But where on earth would an underground terrorist group get infrared cameras from? Where would they get money from at all?

  Behold the Interregnum. Loren had told her what it meant to them: the Interregnum was how they referred to their war efforts. A time between kings, a brief interlude before the installation of a new absolute leader. And that leader would be Felix, of course. To Regency, Behold the Interregnum was less a warning than a preemptive declaration of victory.

  But they weren’t winning, of course. They couldn’t possibly. Not in a million years.

  Unless.

  Unless they were as deeply entrenched in the Ashkind community as the Gospel were among the Gifted.

  Unless they were getting donations. From Ashkind civilians. It would only take a little from each of them, and they could have thousands in weeks, if they had enough Gifted-hating Ashkind willing to —

  If, if, if . . .

  Yes. Fine. That’s all well and good. Now work out what you’re going to do about the immediate situation. Trapped, remember? In an airtight room?

  Thank you. Oh, now you’re concentrating.

  She took a couple of steps backward so her back was flat to the metal door, and walked forward with her hands outstretched through the darkness, making sure that the heel of each foot touched the toes of the last one.

  Before she reached a wall, however, she walked into something waist-height and metal. She stumbled back, winded, and took a moment to recover her balance. Then she crouched down, and ran her hands slowly over the unknown obstacle. It had ridges every few inches, and the metal was dented and thick. A barrel, maybe? She slid her hand up to the rim and reached over it. Her hand found cold liquid, water most likely, and lots of it — maybe ten gallons. Rose didn’t know much about poisons, but natural paranoia told her not to drink it, so she edged around the barrel and kept moving forward.

  She found the wall eventually. It was smooth and high, and she could find no edges or ridges in it. She followed it around the whole room, which turned out to be very large — forty paces by sixty. There was no light, no food, nothing but her and the barrel of water.

  She sat herself down in a corner and waited.

  She waited for a long, long time.

  Time passed with terrible slowness. Rose sat in her space by the wall, occasionally taking a walk round the room to ease the pain in her legs. The pain in her stomach, however, she could do nothing about. After a while, she gave in and drunk from the barrel, figuring that if Regency wanted to kill her, she would already be dead; but no amount of water would soothe her, and there was no point in wasting the little she had.

  God, she was hungry.

  There was no way of telling the time, but Rose estimated that she had been here about two days. She was not blind, at least she knew that: she could see little dancing spots of light whenever she closed her eyes.

  After a while, she stopped walking because it hurt to move.

  She slept a lot.

  When she was awake, she hummed. Humming was good, because if she arranged the beat of a tune so that there were two seconds to a bar she could tell how much time was passing. So she hummed every song she knew. Working through those took her another day or so.

  Then she went to sleep again.

  She woke slowly. Far too slowly.

  Alarm bells were ringing inside her head. She didn’t know why, not yet; it took her a long time to realize that she should care, and by that time it was too late.

  The air she was breathing seemed very dense.

  That was what was wrong, the density of the air. And there was something else, too, something — not wrong, not exactly, but not right, either. Her conscious mind was numb and sleepy, but her instincts were still running, and they were telling her one fact, over and over again:

  The air was too dense.

  The air was too bloody dense.

  “Here’s what you should be thinking about,” said her father, from beside her. “You should be worrying about your Test.”

  She tried to turn her head, but it was too much effort.

  “Insanity Gas,” she said blearily. She wasn’t sure whether she said it aloud. “I’m breathing Insanity Gas. It’s a hallucinogen. You’re not actually here.”

  “Yes, well, obviously, but that’s beside the point. The point is me. Why am I here?”

  “You’re my subconscious.”

  “I was in your Test, yes, but that was a long time ago.”

&nb
sp; She groaned. “Please go away.”

  “No,” said another, familiar voice from the other side of the room. She looked up at Loren, looking as old and disheveled as he had the first time she had met him, the deadened Icarus in his hand. There were broken-down computers flickering around him. “He won’t. You’ve failed him. You’ve failed all of us.”

  She groaned. She was too tired for this. “Not you, too.”

  “I’m not here. You’re just hallucinating me.”

  “I know that.”

  “I told you that you could be good if you chose to be good,” he said. “I was wrong. You can’t. I was too late.” He sounded terribly sad. “I was too late for you.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re too evil. You were evil from the moment you became a Hybrid. You were beyond redemption before I ever met you.”

  “Shut the hell up. That’s not true.”

  “It is. Or maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re not evil just because you’re a Hybrid. But you’ve done terrible things, whether you meant to or not, and that definitely makes you evil. Irretrievably, irrevocably, unspeakably evil.”

  Every word was heavy.

  “Shut up. Stop talking.”

  “No. It’s true.”

  “Leave me alone. Let me sleep.”

  “No,” said Loren. “Not for a million years. Not for eternity. We are your ghosts. We will never leave you.”

  “You don’t speak like that.”

  “No, because I’m not Loren Arkwood. I’m you.”

  “I hate you.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” said the woman at the other end of the darkness. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hands were folded protectively over her swollen belly. “Do you hate me?”

  In the computer room above, the monitors had started flashing. The soldier on duty brought up the infrared feed from the Darkroom.