Tarnished City

by Vic James

  The woman stared ahead impassively. If she’d heard him, she gave no sign. Luke’s resentment flared, before he checked himself. It was fear of the Equals that cowed people like this. Jackson had taught him that.

  Jackson. Who was himself an Equal.

  Luke wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to forgive him.

  ‘Please,’ Luke begged the woman one more time, before ducking his head and getting into the car.

  The vehicle didn’t use its headlights; instead Silyen rode in front, casting a gentle glow of Skill-light. Luke craned his head to look back at the great house. Even in near darkness, Kyneston was majestic. Light glowed along the parapet and silhouetted the bell in the bright cupola. A few windows were still illuminated.

  But Luke’s eyes were irresistibly drawn to the golden light that writhed and pulsed along the ironwork skeleton of the vast East Wing. Luke had stood in it as it exploded, then just twelve hours later he had stood in it again for his trial. That impossible restoration had been Silyen Jardine’s handiwork.

  And the Equal’s words in the cellar came back to him. The ones Luke had pushed away and tried not to think about. I won’t let him break you. Not beyond repair. A promise, of sorts. But also a threat. Repair. But before it – breaking.

  Luke stole a look at the man next to him. Crovan was staring out of the window, seemingly indifferent to either Luke’s presence, or anything else.

  Luke was so tired of this. Of being used by the Equals. Just a pawn for Jackson. A thing for Crovan to break and for Silyen to put back together, each for their own unfathomable purposes.

  He would never be free – Britain would never be free – until there were no more Equals. Simply ending their rule wasn’t enough, because with power like that, even if they suffered setbacks, they would eventually win again. And again. And again.

  They’d never stop winning.

  He leaned against the car door, flexing his fists pointlessly. Despair wouldn’t help him now.

  Just as the car pulled to a halt, a dazzling brilliance flared in front, making the chauffeur swear and the vehicle swerve. It was Kyneston’s gate.

  ‘Out,’ said Crovan, swinging his legs out of the car door. He turned his head to look back at Luke. ‘Here’s where you become mine, boy.’

  And he smiled. He honest to goodness smiled, and it was the most awful thing Luke had ever seen. Luke’s legs barely obeyed him as he climbed out.

  Silyen was waiting by the gate, which fizzed with Skill-light as though made of the sparklers that Mum used to buy on Bonfire Night. What was it, this power? Where did it come from? What did it really do?

  ‘Time to say goodbye,’ said Silyen, his pale face luridly lit by the molten brightness. ‘For now. I’m breaking your binding to Kyneston. Try to resist the urge to punch me just because you can.’

  Inside Luke, something snapped. He almost heard it crack. He remembered the padlock on Dog’s cage in the kennels – how Silyen had simply plucked it off and let the shattered pieces fall to the floor.

  ‘You feel it?’ asked Silyen.

  He was looking at Luke intently, and Luke remembered the first time he had met this boy, after the nightmarish journey from Millmoor in the back of the Security van, when he’d had no idea where he was going. He’d dreaded a Security facility or a lifer camp. Instead he’d been brought to Kyneston. He’d been relieved, at the time.

  ‘You feel it?’ Silyen repeated.

  Then Luke felt it.

  Whatever Silyen had broken inside him – the slave binding to Kyneston – was insignificant compared to what still bound them. And Luke remembered what had happened at that first meeting. How the Equal had seemed to take him apart, like Dad working on an engine, then put him back together again with an extra piece added. How he’d felt his whole self trickling like soft sift through Silyen’s fingers.

  His gut heaved. What was this connection between them?

  He looked up and his gaze met Silyen’s. The Equal’s eyes were as black as that first night. However, they didn’t shine as they had then, with the brightness of stars, but with the reflected liquid gold of the gate. Would his great Skill burn him up from within, this boy? Would it burn Luke with him?

  A hand on Luke’s shoulder pulled him around.

  ‘Done?’ said Crovan, looking at Luke but speaking to Silyen. ‘Good. Let’s get going.’

  Beyond the gate, something thumped the air. Luke felt the whump of the chopper blades as a helicopter descended just the other side of Kyneston’s wall.

  So it wouldn’t be a car, then. And you couldn’t escape a helicopter. Luke might be desperate, but he wasn’t completely mad.

  In the split second between the gate opening and reaching the helicopter door, maybe? His eyes strained to see through the fiery gate. His few weeks as a groundsman told him they’d taken a route from Kyneston that led away from the road. Silyen had summoned the gate where the estate adjoined more parkland – better suited for a helicopter’s descent.

  ‘Pay attention.’

  The back of Crovan’s hand lightly smacked Luke’s cheek. It dropped lower, and the Equal traced a line across Luke’s throat as if miming slitting it. It was a surprisingly crude threat.

  But then Luke choked as something cinched there. His fingers came up, clawing, as it constricted his throat. But he could get no purchase. The thing was snug around his neck, and so flat and fine that it lay smooth against his skin.

  It was a golden collar.

  Luke’s panicked eyes darted up and met Silyen’s in mute appeal. But the Equal was smirking.

  Kyneston’s gate swung open.

  2

  Abi

  Jenner had delivered the unbearable news that Luke was already gone. Then the barely less awful fact that the rest of her family was to be split up: Daisy remaining at Kyneston, Abi and her parents going to Millmoor.

  What she needed to do had instantly become clear. Once the journey to Millmoor was underway, she had feigned travel sickness so the vehicle pulled over – and then she had run.

  That had been nearly a week ago. Now, she stood on a beach, as light from bars and restaurants spilled in bright slicks across the heaving sea. Abi inhaled the salt-sharp air. She was so close. Somewhere in the night was her goal: the island castle of Highwithel.

  It was the home of Heir Meilyr Tresco, the young Equal-turned-revolutionary who had betrayed her brother in an unspeakable way – hijacking his mind and body to kill Chancellor Zelston.

  Or had someone else yet unknown done that, and was Meilyr instead her brother’s friend and defender? If so, he had paid the highest price of all – his Skill – in an attempt to save Luke from the horror of Condemnation.

  Which was it? She was so close to finding out.

  Abi splashed into the sea and gasped at the cold. Water rushed into her trainers and saturated her jeans, making every step leaden. Coarse sand and fine pebbles shifted underfoot.

  She had to find out, because by coming here she had left behind everything that meant most to her in the world. Her little sister, at Kyneston, in the keeping of volatile Heir Gavar. Her parents, who by now would be in the Millmoor slavetown and distraught at being separated from all three of their children. The young man she might love, if she dared to – the Skilless second son of England’s most powerful family, Jenner Jardine.

  And though it seemed the smallest sacrifice in that awful tally, Abi had given up the future she’d always imagined. She was a fugitive from her slavedays. Outside the law. Whatever lay ahead for her now, it was unlikely to be the hospital job and neat terraced house filled with a husband and kids that she had once envisioned.

  This world was crueller than she had ever imagined when she submitted her family’s slavedays application to the Estates Office nearly a year ago. Discovering the truth of it had cost Abi, and those she loved, so much.

  She hauled herself up into a small boat, her long legs ungainly and the vessel rocking beneath her.

  Luke had to be rescued. And A
bi would make Heir Meilyr of Highwithel help.

  The motion of the shallow hull subsided. Her jeans were soaked to mid-thigh, but she wasn’t worried about catching cold. She’d bought a snug sailing jacket, and besides, her body would be busy oxidizing amino acids into an adrenaline rush to send blood pumping round her body.

  She remembered the pre-med textbook in which she’d learned that. Being a doctor would have been a rewarding way to help people.

  But Luke had dreamed bigger.

  He’d fought against the slavedays and the Equals. To think that Abi had worried about his safety during the disturbances in Millmoor, when he’d been one of those causing trouble. The next time she saw her little brother, he’d get a scolding.

  Because she refused to accept that there might not be a next time.

  Abi dug into her jeans for the key to the boat’s engine and fumbled to fit it into the outboard motor. Growing up with a mechanic dad didn’t help much with things like this. But her skill set was expanding by the minute. First theft and flight; now burglary. She had acquired the key only an hour earlier – by breaking into the seal-watching tours office, down on the jetty.

  The engine choked into life. Abi set her hand to the tiller and turned it experimentally. Satisfied, she sighted the red and green lights marking the exit of Ennor’s inner harbour and steered the craft towards them.

  This was her second attempt to reach Highwithel, Britain’s most remote Equal estate, nestled at the heart of the Scilly Islands off the southwest tip of England. It had been a long journey.

  After fleeing the car taking her and her parents to Millmoor, Abi had hitched a ride along the A-road to Exeter. Then she’d travelled by train to Penzance and by ferry to Ennor, the largest of the islands. There, she’d drawn a blank.

  Ennor was a popular tourist spot. As you couldn’t travel abroad until you’d completed your slavedays, the warm, windswept Scillies were as distant and exotic a holiday destination as Britain offered.

  So on her first day here, Abi had tried a clueless-tourist-who’d-love-to-see-the-castle routine. This had been politely rebuffed by the local water-taxis. Abi sensed that the islanders were fiercely loyal to their lords. The Tresco name was everywhere, painted along the sides of humble fishing boats, and on the swinging sign of a weather-beaten pub. The locals wouldn’t be sharing the estate’s secrets with outsiders.

  It would be down to her resourcefulness. The Scillies were an archipelago of 146 isles, but only 145 were shown on the map she’d stolen from the drawer in Kyneston’s Estate Office, and none of them was named Highwithel. She tracked down an aerial photograph in Ennor’s library, and compared them. They matched. So either the image was doctored as well as the map, or Highwithel didn’t show up on photographs.

  She’d tried to think laterally. The Equals would need supplies: food, and all the little luxuries an aristocratic family would want.

  Ennor was a cheerful place – would all of Britain be like this if the local lords were kind, and not cruel? And amid its bright shopfronts one stood out as especially smart. Abi slipped inside. It was a swanky grocery, and on its shelves were a few eye-wateringly expensive London brands that the Jardines used. The only commoners who could afford such items were those who had done their days early and gone on to prestigious careers. She’d bet the Trescos were supplied from here.

  There was no sign of an order book – the shop’s system was computerized. But slipping round the back Abi saw boxes being carried down to the harbour, for delivery by boat. Each carton was neatly marked with the customer’s name and destination island. Abi was sure her instincts were correct, so it would be a matter of watching the deliveries.

  She’d spent two days on a bench along the harbour slipway, her brain fruitlessly turning over other ideas as she waited. Should she simply write a letter? No. She needed to look Meilyr Tresco in the eye as she demanded answers about Luke. What about contacting Jenner? She bought an over-the-counter mobile phone with some of the money she’d swiped from Kyneston, and several times her fingers hovered over the numbers for its estate office. But Abi wasn’t sure how Jenner could help, and didn’t want to risk involving him.

  Then on the third day a large load had come down to the jetty, each box discreetly lettered ‘TRESCO/Highwithel’.

  Abi had sprinted away from the harbour and up to the island’s highest point, a chapel where fishermen’s families had once anxiously awaited their safe return during storms. She straightened up, ignoring the stitch in her side, briefly terrified that she had lost sight of the boat already. But no – there it was, far out in Ennor’s west channel.

  By the time it disappeared around a distant islet, she had a clear sense of its direction. Her map showed that the route led to three areas of seemingly open sea that she had identified as possible locations for the hidden island.

  Her first attempt, the previous night, had found nothing. So here she was again in a different ‘borrowed’ boat, heading for the second location.

  Looking back, one hand firmly on the throbbing outboard engine, Abi could no longer see the red and green harbour lights. The wind picked up as she nosed the vessel westward, raising wavelets on the sea surface as the boat began a choppy bounce.

  Would she capsize and drown? Or would this little craft smash onto rocks, breaking her with it? Perhaps a current would swing her out into the wide, wide ocean, where she would perish of exposure and thirst. Then she’d never rescue Luke. He might die in Crovan’s keeping, and that would kill her parents with grief, too. And then Daisy would be all alone.

  Stop it, she told herself, fiercely. Stop thinking like that.

  Abi touched the lifejacket clipped round her neck. She felt the plastic tube of the emergency flare in her pocket, and patted the tide chart and diagram of currents tucked inside her jacket. She’d caught herself doing this sort of thing several times, in the week since she’d run – small rituals of calming and reassurance. Abi recognized it as a distress response to the trauma of what had happened at Kyneston. It wasn’t healthy, she knew, but it was hard to stop – not least because it helped quiet the voices.

  Voices that insisted this was all her fault. She had told Mum and Dad that Luke and Daisy would agree to do their days if they did them together. She had suggested applying to an estate. She had failed to get Luke out of Millmoor quickly enough, before he’d ever become mixed up with Meilyr Tresco and his deluded plots.

  And yes, she knew these thoughts weren’t entirely rational. But even so, fixing everything felt like her responsibility. And she’d do whatever it took. Including piloting a boat barely bigger than a bathtub through the night to an invisible castle.

  She passed dozens of islands, their pale cliffs gleaming and rocky shores lost in the blackness beneath. The moon was waning and cloud trailed over its face. The light was thinner tonight than it had been yesterday. Tomorrow would be darker still.

  Here was the last inhabited island in this map-grid of sea. The windows of its solitary farmhouse were yellow rectangles hanging in the night, like golden portals to some world of Skill. Abi had made it this far yesterday before continuing west. Tonight, she would turn north.

  Her hand on the tiller was stiff with cold, but she pulled the engine round, spitting out strands of hair as the wind whipped her sandy plait into her face and eyes. She opened up the throttle and sent the boat forward as fast as she dared. It skipped like a stone across the surface of the sea. Luke had always been able to skip stones so well – eight or nine bounces.

  I’ll get you back, little bro, she promised him silently.

  Sea spray lashed her face. That was all the salt stinging her eyes was. That was what she could taste, trickling down her face to her wind-cracked lips.

  Then the wind stopped. The spray stopped.

  The engine stopped.

  The boat stopped.

  Had she broken the motor by pushing it too fast? How could she have been so stupid?

  Abi bent over the engine, turning the key
ineffectually. She took it out and tried again. Nothing. The sea slopped queasily beneath the little tender’s fragile hull.

  Then she fell against the engine as the boat began to move. She lay there, hands gripping the sides, as she realized what this meant.

  It was being drawn by Skill.

  All around, both sea and sky were black. She looked behind. The lights from the farmhouse were gone. She looked up.

  The moon was gone. The stars, gone. There was only a deep darkness . . .

  And then, before terror could consume her entirely, there was an island. Abi’s heart missed a beat. Missed two.

  Highwithel loomed, as lofty as its name suggested. The moon was visible again, and beneath its insubstantial light the island shone bone-white, mottled with shadow. Its flanks shifted eerily, like the sides of a living thing. Abi’s lurching heart slammed into frantic life as the cliffs shattered outward into a hundred fragments. Her memory reeled back to the horror of Kyneston’s exploding ballroom – until she realized it was seabirds. A mass of them, rising, wheeling and screaming.

  At the summit of the island was the castle. It rose seamlessly from the rock, one graceful pinnacle piled on another, buttressed by sturdy arches. There were no battlements, but turrets and towers rose along the walls – would they have been watchtowers once?

  Her craft moved at a steady, even speed. Abi had nothing to fear from the sea now.

  But what about the island? What sort of reception would broken Heir Meilyr give her?

  The shore was getting closer. Abi knelt upright in the boat, shielding her eyes from two lights burning ahead. One was a glowing golden ball that could only be Skill-light. The other was a high-wattage torch beam, white and harsh.

  She was looking at the end of a jetty. Three people stood there. One was a tall, slender woman; the Skill-light she cupped illuminated her white-blonde hair and elegant features. An Equal. Another, her face shadowed behind the dazzling torch, was a scrawny kid with wild corkscrew hair. Between them stood Heir Meilyr.