“Look, guys,” he said. “She’s started talking.”
Rose knew she was speaking aloud because it felt like her throat was being torn up.
“No,” she said. “Please not you.”
“You understand what’s happening, don’t you?” said Sylvia Argent. “They’re giving you the Insanity Gas to try to drive you mad. Make you talk. Tell secrets while the cameras are watching. You’re so weak already, it’s easy.”
“So they’re not . . .”
“No. No one’s controlling this hallucination. This isn’t your Test. They give it to you straight, because it’s cheaper, and because they know that you can come up with nightmares more potent than they could dream of making.” She smiled. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, Sylvia’s smile. “And aren’t they right?”
“Please,” was all Rose could say, hoarsely. David and Loren were also staring at Sylvia now: blank-eyed, dead-eyed.
“Why?” said Sylvia, smiling wider. “Because you put me to sleep and put me and my child in your Department’s care? Because I died there?”
“You’re very clever, Rose,” said Loren, without inflection, tilting his head slightly. “And that’s going to kill you in the end, isn’t it?”
Rose tried to curl up, block it out, but she couldn’t move.
“I’m not going to die,” she said, defiantly. “I’m going to survive this.”
“That’s what they all think,” said her father beside her. “Don’t you think all the people I killed were clever? Clever doesn’t matter. Not against bullets.”
“Shut up. I’m imagining this.”
“You’re very repetitive,” said Nate, from behind her. She looked down at her elbow, and found that her scar was opening, leaking blood. The bullet was cold gray beneath the skin. “You always bored me like that.”
“And me,” said Maria, beside him. Her eyes were bleak. “I was the one who you lied to the most, didn’t you? And it’s as well you did. If I’d have known you were a monster, I would have called the police, would have made you go on the run, you and your father —”
Her features were changing, dripping, melting; Laura’s features began to emerge from the mess. Her face was open, bleeding from the wounds that had killed her.
“— you and your bastard father,” she hissed. “You’re monsters.”
“Don’t say that,” Rose told her, voice breaking. “We’re not —”
There were three security guards gathered around the screens now. The girl was crying white, night-vision tears. She was whispering to the darkness, breathing too fast.
“She’s close,” said the first guard, darkly.
“You always thought you were better than us,” said Nate. “That was who you thought you were, weren’t you? Our superior. You were wiser than other kids. You were stronger than them. Better than them.” He smiled Loren’s sharp-toothed smile. “And you never put that to the test, did you? Because you wouldn’t have liked the truth. You never like the truth, Rose. You’re a coward.”
I can’t do this, she thought desperately.
“Then what’s the point of you?” whispered Tabitha. “What is the point of you?”
“You’re a monster,” said Loren again, dispassionately. He looked at her with scalding objectivity.
I’m not.
“Oh, but Rose, you forget,” said Laura, smiling. It did horrible things to her wounded mouth. “We’re not real. We don’t have to convince you that you’re evil. You already know.”
The girl’s vital readings were skyrocketing. Her heartbeat was too fast. After this long in the Darkroom most recruits were on an IV drip. The guard on the controls knew all of this, and it still took him thirty minutes after the gas canisters had been opened in the ventilator shaft to glance at his colleagues, acknowledge their nods, and ask the operator to patch him through to High Command.
“Boss?”
The voice that came back was deep, rich, dark. The guards raised eyebrows at one another. The Commander himself was watching. This was unusual.
“Can you see her?” asked Felix Callaway.
“Yes, sir,” said the guard, “and I was wondering whether we should get her out.”
“Leave her in there for a bit longer,” came the reply. “This is interesting.”
Another worried glance.
“But sir,” said the guard, hesitantly, “with all due respect, she’s stopped talking.”
There was a very long, thoughtful pause, punctuated with hikes in static, and the sound of the girl’s breathing.
“Exactly,” said Felix.
I have control over this.
The darkness around her was beginning to blur. Clouds of whiteness were coalescing around her hallucination: they solidified and dissolved, so fast it was almost a flickering, into guns, faces, small balls of green-and-silver metal, a silver locket, a blue notebook with writing on the cover —
“You’re panicking,” said Nate, matter-of-factly.
“You can’t use magic,” said Laura. “It would kill you, by this point. The hologram projector they implanted in your wrist? The one that’s disguising your eyes? It’ll be running on battery now. What are you going to do? You’re drugged, Rose. They’ll discover you, and you’ll die.”
It sounded almost kind.
She focused, as hard as her exhausted mind was able, and the clouds latched on to her loved ones and started crawling over them, solidifying, encasing them. They watched without emotion as it crept up their limbs, freezing their legs and then their torsos into immobility; and then Loren reached out and touched the mist and it began to retreat from around them, releasing them.
“You can’t fight your own imagination,” said David quietly, still sitting next to her. “Anything you can think of, you can do to yourself. See, at the moment, you’re worried about this.”
The hallucinations stepped forward as one. Their hands were outstretched, their faces dead, expressionless.
“But nothing’s going to happen,” he said. “If you want, if you stop thinking about it, we’ll fade away. Look.”
The hallucinations started dissolving with the mist, separating into empty air. They did not fight. Rose and the figure of David watched them fade into the darkness, until they were alone, sitting together.
Rose was very cold.
Thank you, she thought.
“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I’m not real. I’ll go too, if you want.”
No —
“You’ve forgotten something,” he said. “We’re only as clever as you are, and there’s something that’s slipped your mind.”
I’m too tired for this.
“I know you are,” he said. “But I tell you the truth even when you don’t want to hear it. And this is the truth, Rose, pure as Gospel.”
He smiled white.
“All of this?” he said. “The Insanity Gas is meant to make you imagine horrible things. It traps you in nightmares and lets you do the rest of the work. But you’re strong, Rose, stronger than you know, and it hasn’t managed to touch your subconscious yet. Not really. I’m just your instincts. I’m the voice inside your head that stays calm when you’re panicking.”
Please —
“No,” he said. “I tell you the truth. Your pure, unfettered subconscious? The Insanity Gas hasn’t managed to touch that yet. You’re too strong, like I said. But now you’re broken. Now we’re at the edge, Rose. You’re worn out. You’re tired.”
I can’t —
His smile was cruel now.
“This is obvious, Rose,” he said. “Really, truly obvious. But you’ve lied to other people for so long, you’ve stopped questioning it when you lie to yourself.”
I can’t do this.
“I’m not your subconscious, Rose,” he said. “Let me introduce you to your subconscious.”
Metal started to spread over the walls, thicken, close in on her until the room was no more than five foot by seven. The hallucination of her father had fa
ded away; she could feel his going, though she could not see it. It was late at night, and she was at home.
She knew this, but she did not know how.
Silence in the empty room for a moment.
Then, suddenly, a girl stood in front of her in the thin, cold light. It took Rose a moment to recognize her own face.
You’re the ugliest girl in the year . . .
The hallucination was grim-faced, but there was no life in its eyes. It wore green khaki: a soldier’s uniform. It walked forward to the metal door and tried it. It did not open.
The door would not open.
And suddenly Rose knew what was going to happen.
“No,” she said suddenly. “No, please —”
The hallucination-Rose’s eyes widened. Its hand went to its throat. It couldn’t breathe. Rose saw its eyes drain to that animal white. She tried to start forward, to do anything, to run, but she couldn’t move.
“No,” she said again, weakly.
The hand at the hallucination’s throat was turning gray. Rose could see the smoke leaking through the cracks in its skin. It dropped to its knees.
“Don’t,” she said, plaintively.
She could hear the cracks of changing bone, the cold roar of darkening blood. Then the screaming. Rose heard her own voice screaming. She pressed her face to the metal wall and groaned.
No, no, no, no —
And she looked back, and too late, because there, in the faint dark, against the gray metal, was the monster.
The operator was tetchier the second time the guard asked her for High Command.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “You know how he is —”
He cut her off. “This is urgent.”
An affronted silence, then a click. The reply took a moment to come through. The other security guards were watching the screen with wary resignation: the girl was white, gaunt, flat against the wall, screaming without end at something the gas was showing her.
“Private Farrow?” came the soft voice at the other end.
“Yes, sir.” A hesitation, and the reckless decision to state the obvious: “We’ve broken her, sir.”
“Yes, I believe we have,” said the Commander. He sounded almost disappointed. “Call the medical bay, th —”
To say he gasped would have been somewhat insolent; all the guards heard was an intake of breath, sharp, on the other end of the line. They glanced at one another.
“Sir?” said one of them tentatively, but even the static had gone: he had disconnected.
“What do you think it was?” asked Farrow. No one seemed to have an answer. The girl’s screaming had risen to an irritating pitch, so he reached for the volume control. His colleague went for the intercom again, and had just managed to get the operator back when he looked back at Farrow, who was staring blankly, openmouthed, at the screen.
“What is it?” asked the third guard.
“Get the Commander back online,” said Farrow urgently. “I don’t care what the operator says, do it now.”
“Ryan —?”
“Do it.”
Bemused, the second guard went for the intercom, only to find that the operator was gone.
“Are you seeing this?” asked the Commander, from behind them. They gasped, and turned. He was in his full military uniform, and he was staring past them, at where the girl screamed on-screen.
“Yes, sir,” whispered Farrow. He swallowed. “Sir, what’s happening to her eyes?”
The monster reared, shrieking, and Rose watched it, mouth open, eyes wide.
It was fully seven feet tall, but that, of course, mattered little; it could have been half that size and still wreaked the same amount of damage on the human psyche. It was gray-skinned, corpse-skinned, seeping shadows, clawed, white-eyed. Its face and its features were Rose’s, her eyes, her mouth; and she was screaming, because it was coming for her, coming for her, just like she’d always known it would one day and then she wouldn’t be human anymore she would be monster forever and that would be the end of her and —
The air was thinner again. She could feel it as she screamed: it was thin, clean, cold. The Insanity Gas was being pumped out of the cellar. The monster’s screams began to fade, re-root themselves inside her head, so that it didn’t sound so real to her own ears, but —
But —
She hadn’t eaten for days. She should not have the energy for her hands to tremble. She should not feel strong. Her skin should look gaunter than this, even in the dar —
Even in the —
The dark.
How could she see in the dark?
The air was clean again, the world around her returned, but her heart was in her mouth and her fear had not left her.
How could she see in the dark?
The girl had begun to scream again. She should not be seeing anything unusual now, not unless the Insanity Gas had broken her irrevocably. The gray in her eyes had faded slightly — for a brief moment they looked almost green, olive-green, and suddenly the color vanished from them completely. Farrow leaned in closer. Those cameras were always acting up. Annoying that they should do so now, just when the Commander was here. Because of course her eyes could not possibly have gone white.
The Commander was at the computers, staring at the girl.
“She’s a monster,” he whispered. He said it wonderingly, like a naturalist discovering a new species of butterfly. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
The guards glanced at one another. They all knew about the Commander’s highly individual status; if the girl was like him that made her very dangerous, and very valuable. They might have just stumbled upon a promotion.
“Is she —?”
“Yes,” whispered Felix. “Yes.”
The girl was holding her hands in front of her bloodless face, her white eyes. They had begun to turn gray, seep a deeper darkness, a smoke-filled kind of shadow, into the air. The girl looked terrified.
“What did she say her name was?” asked Felix, eyes still fixed on her.
“Slythe’s boy brought her in, ask him.” A terrible pause. “Sir. I mean, I would — I would recommend that, as a course of action, sir. Commander.”
It didn’t matter. The Commander wasn’t listening. The girl’s screams were separating, into something human — high, reedy, fading — and something distinctly not. The guards were trying to look away. The girl’s face wasn’t human either.
Felix stood up.
“A Hybrid,” he whispered, as the girl on the screens lost all traces of humanity. The guards’ eyes were wide; they looked between the creature on-screen and their Commander with horror. Monster. They knew, of course, but they had never seen exactly what it meant before.
Felix Callaway turned and regarded them. He could clearly see the fear on their faces, but he did not react; he was staring beyond them, watching something else behind his eyes. Then, slowly, he walked to the doorway. The monster on-screen screamed at them.
“Go,” said the Commander to the guards, gesturing to the corridor outside. “You are relieved.”
They glanced at each other. Then, hesitantly, they walked out, filing past the Commander and trying not to cringe as they passed him. Inwardly, Farrow had already half forgotten about the girl; with the afternoon off, perhaps he could go to his wife and son, out in the civilian world. He had a few hours’ leave owed him.
“Wait,” said Felix suddenly, behind them. They turned. The Commander scrutinized them for a moment, opened his mouth to say something, but seemed to think better of it. Instead, he took out his revolver and shot all three of them in the head. Then he walked back into the control room.
He sat down at the screens and looked over the buttons. There was only one he was looking for, and there it was — big and blue, and with its function helpfully emblazoned next to it. He pressed it, and on-screen he saw the doors to the Darkroom open.
The monster roared, and lunged forward to freedom.
“Oh, my beautiful,” whispered the C
ommander. He sat back in his chair and smiled. “Go on. Go on.”
“Angels.”
No one who heard Loren could doubt that he said it as an expletive. In fairness, the list on the screen merited the obscenity; it stretched across three pages, in tiny print. Each entry was an address. Each had been recorded in the last two weeks.
“Angels,” he said again, hoarsely, running his finger down the list. “How many have there been?”
“Eighty-five in the last three days, and at least forty before that,” said James. “They’re all Regency, and they’re everywhere. Bomb attacks, most of them, but shootings and ambushes as well.”
“Concentrated in specific areas of the world though, am I right?”
James glanced at David. “Yeah. Shanghai, Aleppo, Seattle, Moscow, Belfast — all the cities that took the longest to settle after the War. Regency were still alive and kicking there.”
“And they haven’t died yet,” murmured Loren. “Oh, Ichor’s name . . . They’re really stepping it up, aren’t they?”
“They have worldwide support. More than we ever realized.”
“Destroy them,” said Nate, from the corner, as if it were obvious. Maria, looking tired and drawn, stared at him in shock, but he carried on. “Destroy them as quickly as possible and get Rose out of there before they can hurt her.”
“I’m with the boy,” said David, sitting down on a chair and staring up at the list. “Get their leadership and leave them disorganized and helpless. Then hunt them down.”
He appeared to relish this last idea.
“What happened to subtler methods?” asked Loren incredulously.
“Screw that. They have my daughter.”
“And she wouldn’t thank you for losing the ability to think clearly the moment she leaves. You do know what you mean by ‘get their leadership,’ right? These are people we knew, people we worked with, people whose lives we saved —”
“You don’t seriously still have any loyalties to them, do you?” asked James in heated disbelief. Loren glanced up at him as if he had forgotten he was standing there. He stepped away from David.
“No,” he said at last. “No, of course I don’t.”
The Catalyst Page 27
