“Wait,” said Amelia’s leader suddenly. She was staring out north, toward the houses. “Listen to that. Can you hear it?”
No, nothing at first. Then: gunfire. Sudden bursts. They overlapped like bird calls, and they spread across the city, slowly, dying out quickly to leave silence in their wake. The fires started to dim and go out.
Someone was trying to restore order. Someone with an army at their disposal. Was it the Department, wherever they were, or the Gospel?
Amelia looked up at the ceiling and prayed for High Command to be quick.
By the time Regency reached the fifth floor, there were only twenty of them, plus Felix and Rose. As per lockdown protocol, the door of the office had been entirely reinforced with imposing gray steel.
Rose’s hatred of Regency had peaked at around the first staircase. This was her home. These were the corridors she had grown up in. These were the walls that housed her memories. This place was private and intimate and Felix Callaway’s very presence here made her want to kill him.
The fact that his presence here was her fault made her want to do so even more.
Look, she wanted to snap at him. This is where Laura Gaskell worked. These are the corridors she walked. These are the lives she saved and the marks she left. And you killed her. For nothing. And you made me kill all those people, too, and what good did it ever do? Any of it?
He came up to the metal door and looked it up and down. His solution was fantastically stupid, but efficient.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose they’ll know we’re here anyway,” and he stepped back, pulling out his gun. Everyone else, including Rose, hastily scrambled round the corner, keen to avoid ricochets. The resulting noise sounded like a thunderstorm confined to an echo chamber, and it was followed by a huge, wrenching crash, which Rose could only assume was the tragic demise of the door.
They moved forward. Beyond the door was a yawning darkness, which Rose knew to be the office. Guns were cocked.
“Should we secure it, Commander?” asked one lieutenant.
Felix’s eyes had started focusing properly again, and they had acquired a sudden, determined glint.
“No,” he said, with abrupt certainty. “No. I’ll go in on my own. Wait behind until it’s over.”
“Sir, are you sure —?”
Felix turned to him, and the soldier recoiled: the monster was clear and bright in his eyes, and his expression was a snarl, and Rose knew without doubt why David feared this man.
“I will go alone,” said Felix softly, and the soldier said nothing more. “This is mine.”
He looked around at the cowering twenty, and then walked into the darkness, with a shuddering calm.
The twenty and Rose stared blindly after him for about a minute: hesitant, nervous, expectant. Then there was a thud and a cry and the lights came on. A few feet away from where Felix lay unconscious, David Elmsworth stood beside the computers, his legend stripped away, staring at the assembled fighters in astonishment and almost childlike fear.
In that moment, he did not look like Rose’s father in the least.
The one thing she remembered thinking afterward — in the thundering moments before her brain properly kicked into gear — was that he didn’t deserve what happened; he didn’t deserve it at all.
Rose saw the recoil; that was it. The lieutenant’s hand jerked back with the force of the shot, and of course by then there was nothing that Rose could do. The woman’s reflexes were admirably quick, it had to be admitted.
Nevertheless, her aim was terrible. The first bullet hit David in the stomach. The blood came immediately, spreading through his thin shirt like discolored shadow — deep red, crimson, browning maroon.
The effect was also immediate. Something about him seemed to fade: the irises of his eyes seemed to leak out of his eyeballs, leaving them white and empty. The skin of his hands began to blacken and smoke, and when he opened his mouth to cry out, his teeth were wolf-sharp.
That was as far as it was ever allowed to get, however, because the rest of the soldiers fired then, an unstoppable hurricane of bullets. Nearly all of them hit their mark, whatever that was. He jerked with countless impacts, a canvas of blossoming wounds, until he was more blood than skin.
He died, of course. At no point did he have time to speak.
The Department troops arrived ten minutes later, just too late for it to matter. They worked their way up the building slowly, arresting the Regency soldiers floor by floor, in slow, manageable clumps. Callaway had made it easy for them, really. Those they couldn’t arrest, they knocked out or killed. The killing was relatively infrequent. Arkwood had said he wanted them captured alive.
They reached the fifth floor in time to subdue the final twenty, who fought back viciously but in vain; they were, of course, vastly outnumbered. One of the more junior soldiers was sobbing hysterically, terrified, and they asked her — once they had her on the ground with her hands behind her head — where her Commander was. She told them he had been lying unconscious in a corner of the office. They looked toward the space she indicated. There was nothing there. Callaway had gone.
And then there was the girl, who stood unblinkingly still as her comrades were dragged away. The Department didn’t arrest her — Arkwood arrived at the fifth floor just in time to stop them — but they doubted it would have mattered to her, anyway.
She stepped toward her father’s bullet-riddled, half-monster body with a blank look on her face.
She knelt down beside him slowly, shaking with every movement, and stared at him and touched his hand, and when it came away bloody she stared at that, too. She said “Dad?” as if it signified nothing; as if she couldn’t understand what the word meant. The shaking of her body was uncontrollable, and she started crying dryly, for all the world as if she didn’t know what she was doing.
Arkwood looked bleakly at Elmsworth’s body. He thought about closing the eyes. Then he went to the window and looked out over London. The night was quietening now; the gunshots were fading from the air. The army and the police were sweeping through the streets, restoring order under cover of darkness. But without the Angels, no one knew what world they would find in the morning.
The Gospel were still just visible, clumps of white catching the streaks of illumination the streetlights provided. They swirled together like whirlpools, and then slowly diminished, folding in on themselves.
Going underground.
“Sir?”
Three in the morning. He didn’t know where Rose was. The soldier stood before him expectantly.
“We have the body down in the morgue, sir.”
The morgue beneath the cells. Ah, yes. He remembered that place.
“Do you want to . . . ?”
Did he want to take a look? He looked over at the space where Elmsworth’s body had lain, the blood that soaked the carpet. He thought of Tabitha, on the third floor now, trying to heal the soldiers with her magic, wincing whenever they flinched away from her eyes. He thought of Felix Callaway, wherever he had escaped to. He thought of the cells, overcrowded with Regency soldiers.
No, of course he didn’t want to take a look.
He stood. “Show me.”
They guided him down the stairs, deeper into the darkness. He trailed a hand along the walls. Greenlow and his sons might be deep in the earth as well by now, in some trailing, uncharted catacomb. It didn’t matter. He would find them. Whatever anarchy ensued tomorrow, when London’s criminal underworld digested the full truth of what had happened, it was ultimately the fault of the Greenlows, and they would be brought to justice.
“Here, sir.”
Loren opened the door of the morgue and nodded to the surgeons. They were gathered around the body, cold on its slab. He looked away, disgusted by their expressions. They weren’t hard to read: this investigation was clearly forbidden, but Hybrids were such fascinating creatures, and it would surely be a waste of such a specimen not to take a look . . . That was the line the surgeons
took, anyway, and he let them, because he highly doubted David would care.
But anyway: the Greenlows. Yes, he would find them — he would make sure they rotted in their own, specially created hells. Especially the older boy; he owed that to Rose, he thought darkly, at lea —
Wait, no.
No, hang on. This wasn’t right.
This wasn’t right at all.
The wounds on the body were wrong. Their positions were distorted. The skin had somehow lightened, and there was a newly healed scar on his wrist, and —
“Um,” said one of the surgeons.
The body was not David Elmsworth.
It was Felix Callaway.
“You have a plan, don’t you?”
“Oh, Rose. Of course I do.”
“This can be programmed, you see?”
James, wonderful James, explaining to her how the hologram projector worked.
“We sew it into your skin, and it’s programmed to change your hair and your eyes, even when you’re asleep, so you don’t have to think about it all the time.” He smiles, half proud, half sheepish. “I helped develop it,” he admits, and then he cuts open her wrist. It hurts like hell.
She finds a pile of them in a box in the corner. While her wound is healing, she sits beside it, trying to look innocent, and surreptitiously slips one into her pocket. Small green-and-silver spheres. They look like children’s toys. They look tiny. They don’t look like they should be able to harm anyone at all.
Her last night in the Department before leaving for Regency, and this is what she sees: her father sitting at the computer, typing furiously, and the stolen hologram projector in the small metal slot below the screens, absorbing its commands.
Then, when he’s done, he gives it to her, along with several syringes full of memory serum. Each will allow her to destroy about a quarter of an hour’s worth of recollections. When she acts, she must be fast.
“Keep them safe,” he says. “Stow them somewhere as soon as you get inside, because they will search you.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry I can’t tell you everything that’s going to happen. Just do what I’ve told you, all right? I have it under control.”
“I know.”
“You know where to meet me, when it’s over?”
“Of course I do.”
He kisses her on the forehead. There is nothing more to say, so she leaves.
Felix Callaway lies unconscious in the corridor. Rose’s little band of counter-revolutionaries — Katya, Jordan, Marlene and the corporals — lie very still, too, bloodied on the floor. She is fairly certain all of them are alive.
Clearly, they have not fought Gifted one-on-one before.
She takes out the syringes from her back pocket. She kneels beside each member of her team and injects just enough of Laura’s memory serum to wipe the memory of the attack completely from their minds and cast uncertainty over the hours before it.
She is very careful. Her hands do not shake.
She drags Felix’s body into his office again. There is a collection of knives on the wall — she tries desperately not to think about why — and she chooses the smallest and most delicate.
She wakes him with magic, firelight on her fingertips flickering open his eyes. She wants to kill him now, in revenge for those twenty-six deaths and all those that came before them, but David was clear not to do that: she would never escape Regency alive, and he cares above all things for her life.
The suggestion she gives him is very simple. She has watched Laura do this hundreds of times to bereaved relatives in memory rewrite therapy —“Stay calm, it’s all right, it was a heart attack, he’s buried at the cemetery near your flat, I can take you there . . .”
But never like this. Never under these circumstances. Never with a trembling voice and wavering resolve. Never without Laura here. Never like this.
“When you have the Department office under your control,” she says quietly to the monster on her table, “you must go in alone.”
He goes to sleep again. She takes the programmed hologram controller from her pocket, and cuts through his wrist. The silver ball glows green as it slides beneath his skin, and she passes her hand over it, concentrating until the cut heals. Now there is no mark; all that is left is a slight bulge, and she fervently hopes that the effects of the memory serum will prevent Felix from noticing that.
She trusts David’s programming. At the right time, in the right place, the hologram will be ready.
“James?” Nate pauses. “Maria?”
The Department is evacuating, but David Elmsworth is nowhere to be seen. On his desk is a copy of the Department’s handbook on how to spot a criminal. James rushes over.
“What is it? Is it Rose?”
“No,” Nate says slowly. “Look.”
Elmsworth has left the book open at the page on Hybrids. He has bookmarked it, oddly, with a printout of his yearly appraisal. Circled in red pen is a section that James himself had to write. The sentence Elmsworth has highlighted reads:
The appraisee is occasionally prone to minor episodes of ill-health; these occur on a fairly regular basis but have never as yet disrupted his work to any significant degree.
“What on earth . . . ?” murmurs Nate, and he looks up at James, but James seems not to be able to hear him: he has frozen, gripping the table so hard his hands have gone white, and the color is slowly draining from his face.
Nate follows James’s gaze. He is staring at the page in the handbook. Under the passage “Characteristics of the Criminal,” Elmsworth has underlined a section in green ink:
The Hybrid finds sanctuary in the complacency of others. He hides in homes, offices, open streets; he could be a friend, a colleague, even a family member. In human form he might seem friendly, even harmless. However, as his transformation approaches or recedes, he may seem pale —
Nate’s blood goes cold.
— he may seem pale, sick or stressed. This happens at such regular intervals that, if you do suspect, it is not difficult to determine a pattern.
At the very bottom of the page, in Biro, Elmsworth has written five words — five words alone, and yet it is enough to stop both their hearts.
And you called yourselves detectives.
At the shattered door to the office, with the utter darkness looming inside, Felix’s eyes suddenly acquire a determined glint.
“I will go in alone,” he says. “This is mine.”
In the office, Felix is blind, and he knows his troops are waiting behind him but he does not say anything. He knows without doubt, with an almost otherworldly certainty, that he must be alone.
There is a soft click from the corner, and he turns toward it. The screen of one of the computers has come on. It tells him, in soft green letters:
Activating hologram.
Something in his right wrist starts to burn. It is very quick, and excruciating, and then it is over.
A faint green glow issues from the darkness, out of sight of the doorway. He squints and sees the window, and then his faint reflection.
Except it is not his reflection.
It is David Elmsworth’s.
He looks down at himself and his body is David Elmsworth’s.
He makes the connection too late and scratches his wrist, finds something hard and metal there, in his wrist, David Elmsworth’s wrist, and draws blood but he is still Elmsworth, he still looks like Elmsworth —
He cries out in frustration and pain and fear — what magic is this?— and from behind him comes a thud of someone hitting a desk. The impact of skin on wood sounds like a punch to the skull. He whirls, and sees, through the darkness, the silhouette of Elmsworth, the real David Elmsworth, and from what Felix can see, he is smiling.
Elmsworth’s wrist jerks reflexively, and suddenly his silhouette flickers. He glows green and the hologram settles, and suddenly Felix is staring at himself across the darkened office — Elmsworth disguised as him, Elmsworth with his eyes
and his face and his body — and before Felix can do anything, he lies down, his face relaxing into a facade of unconsciousness.
A cry. A thud. A man who looks like Felix unconscious.
He begins to realize too late what this must look like, but by the time he does, the lights have come on and he is staring at his own soldiers.
They see David Elmsworth before them, and, of course, they shoot to kill.
“Rose!”
Loren ran out into the courtyard in front of the Department building. He looked furiously excited. He stared around wildly.
“Rose! Where is he? Where on earth is he? He’s not dead! He’s not dead!”
You know where to meet me, when it’s over?
Rose stood in front of their house in the darkness.
The door was just as it had always been: blue and wooden and solid. She put her hand on it and hitched the duffel bag with their money and passports over her shoulder. She looked up at their house.
She grinned broadly, and pushed open the door.
Somewhere on the other side of London, a girl guarded a body in the dark.
It was the body of her Commander. He was not dead, only unconscious: she had dragged him out of the wreckage and chaos when the green-eyed soldiers attacked. Now he lay flushed and cold on the paving stones beside the road. He looked very serene when he slept. The girl could not quite imagine this to be the same man who had screamed with them into blazing fury only that evening in the Command Hall; had led them into gunfire in countless battles; had called them brothers, sisters, comrades . . .
There was a swelling in his wrist. It had not colored like his other bruises; the skin was pale and white. The girl wondered who had caused that wound.
She looked back up at his face, and saw his eyes open and staring at her.
She gasped and edged away; surely being this close was impertinent. “I’m sorry, Commander . . .”
“Commander?” Felix Callaway laughed hoarsely. “No one has called me that in a long time.”
The Catalyst Page 31
