Bright Ruin

by Vic James

  Then Silyen grabbed Luke’s wrist and yanked him through. Behind them, Security bunched together to prevent any further incursion.

  ‘You okay?’ the Equal asked, once they were out of earshot.

  Luke tried to shake himself out of it. ‘Remind me to take you along next time I try to get into a nightclub.’

  Silyen smiled, but it was wan. ‘Gavar uses that “Do you know who I am?” line all the time, even though every doorman in London knows who he is and is desperate to let him in.’ The Equal looked down at the crumpled placards scattering the street, and kicked one viciously. ‘I’ve no idea how he’s going to talk his way out of this, though.’

  The wide thoroughfare was eerily empty. On both sides of the road stood the great departments of state – Treasury, Foreign Office, Home Office – that did the bidding of parliament. Luke imagined they were usually a hive of activity, but no one was going in or out today. The surface of the road was sticky with spilled drinks, dropped food, wrappers and rubbish. The news had said that hundreds of thousands had marched here, peacefully.

  How had it all gone so wrong?

  At Luke’s side, Silyen had stopped. His gaze was riveted on the House of Light.

  No. On where the house had stood. But not any more.

  In its place was a pulsing golden cloud – an incandescent fog. Silyen picked up his pace. When they reached Parliament Square, he didn’t look at the spot where his father would have died, nor at where his brother could have stood to shoot him. He had eyes only for the dazzling ruins of the House.

  Luke marvelled at the bronze dragons that lay speared and broken atop the railings. The reporter had described how the creatures had swooped through the House, tearing it to pieces – then turned on Midsummer and did the same to her. He shivered.

  ‘Oh, is that . . . ?’

  It was. Whittam Jardine had been laid out in state, as all Chancellors were, before being given an elaborate funeral. All except Zelston, because the body had been too much of a mess by the time Luke’s gun was through with it. And now that there was no House of Light any longer, the corpse had been laid on a low stretch of unbroken wall.

  But Silyen wasn’t looking at his father’s body. He was gripping the railings and staring intently through into the brightness.

  Here was the shining, golden power of the Equals. Luke’s skin would never not prickle at the sight of it. Bleeding from Jackson. Swirling around Silyen and King Rædwald. Had it spilled like blood in the death throes of the House of Light?

  Sil was gripping the railings so tightly his fingers were bone white, and when he turned, Luke recoiled. His eyes shone pure gold, like the owl-eyes of Rædwald.

  ‘Just what do you think you’re – oh!’

  A hand grabbed Luke and spun him around, revealing Silyen’s face as it did so. Whoever it was let go of Luke pretty damn fast. A Security man stood there, a gun strapped across his chest.

  ‘I am Lord Silyen Jardine of Far Carr, and I have come to pay my last respects to my father.’ Sil’s voice could have frozen the Thames.

  You could see the Security man practically shrink before him. ‘Ah, come with me. Yes. Your brother’s child came in only ten minutes ago. Very well-behaved little girl, a credit to her nanny, though she’s on the young side herself. Family summit, yes? My condolences.’

  Libby Jardine? Libby’s young nanny?

  Fear squeezed Luke’s heart with its cold fingers. Daisy was here. And suddenly the stakes rose again.

  They’d come to London simply to find the cause of Silyen’s Skillful pain. Now they’d found it – and had been thrust into the middle of a national crisis. The situation had escalated almost unimaginably. What had Sil been planning, those hours he’d spent brooding in the car? Luke had assumed that he was here to be some kind of voice of reason. To help secure his eldest brother’s release and to look after his mother.

  He’d always made a show of disinterest in politics – of laughing at Gavar’s paranoia that he’d manoeuvred himself into the House of Light to leapfrog him in their father’s favour. But this was turning deadly serious. Crovan was here. Libby Jardine was here. What was being planned?

  And did Silyen intend to bring peace – or seize power?

  Well, Luke had his sister to worry about now. And if he could do the right thing by Gavar – who had rescued Abi and kept Daisy safe while Britain melted down around them – he would, whatever Sil was up to.

  The Security man led the pair of them to the main gate.

  ‘It’s your sister-in-law’s office you’ll be heading for, right?’

  ‘Where they took my niece, yes.’

  ‘We’ll need to alert Heir Bouda’s staff,’ the Security man told his colleague, running a scanning wand over the pair of them to make sure they weren’t concealing any weapons. The other officer nodded and pressed her radio.

  ‘Calling for Chief Kessler, repeat, Kessler. We have Silyen Jardine plus one incoming for Heir Matravers’ office.’

  The radio rasped and crackled.

  Kessler.

  Well, bloody hell. It was going to be a complete reunion, wasn’t it?

  Luke looked at Silyen. Could he really trust him? Things had . . . changed between them in the past weeks. Changed in ways Luke couldn’t put his finger on. Silyen was the same brittle, brilliant and astoundingly selfish person he’d always been. But Luke thought he’d found some humanity beneath it all as well.

  He’d better hope so, because he might need this boy more than he’d ever needed Jackson or Renie or his friends in Millmoor.

  ‘Out of range? Okay. Well, someone from Public Safety, then,’ the Security woman said. There was more buzzing from the radio. ‘Right. We’re sending them in now.’

  ‘You know the way?’ the first officer said. ‘Staircase four on the Great Quad. They’re all in there. Someone from Heir Bouda’s staff will let you in, then Chief Kessler will take you through to where your family are.’

  Silyen nodded and strode ahead. Luke hurried after him.

  ‘My sister Daisy,’ he said.

  ‘I realized. And Kessler? He’s that bastard from Millmoor who . . . ?’

  Luke nodded.

  ‘And my brother,’ Silyen said. ‘What a mess.’ He ran his hands through his hair.

  ‘And Gavar’s little girl,’ Luke said. ‘I want them all safe. That’s what we’re going to do, right?’

  Silyen’s mouth twitched. His eerie golden eyes had thankfully faded to black, but they gleamed all the same with something nameless and terrifying.

  ‘Have you forgotten so quickly, Luke? You don’t get to save everybody.’

  A staffer met them at the staircase entrance and took them into the corridor. On the right, slightly ajar, was an elegant oak door which a shiny brass plaque proclaimed as the entrance to the Office of Public Safety. But the woman led them past it to a door at the far end.

  ‘They’re in Astrid Halfdan’s suite downstairs,’ she said, using a fob to buzz them into a small, sparsely furnished waiting area. The only other exit was a metal door on the far side, with a touch keypad beside it. ‘Heir Bouda’s head of Personal Security, Chief Kessler, escorts everyone through personally. Wait here and he’ll collect you. He’ll know you’re here.’

  She pointed up to a pair of CCTV cameras on either side of the room, then turned on her heel and left. It was only once the door shut behind her that Luke saw there was no means of opening it from the inside, no handle or lock, except the smooth square where the fob touched.

  ‘I don’t know about you,’ Silyen said, ‘but I get terribly bored just waiting around.’

  He went over to the keypad. Luke remembered how he had reached for the padlock on Dog’s cage in the Kyneston kennels and simply plucked it off, so he wasn’t remotely surprised when, just a few moments later, the door popped open with a series of clicks as the bolts drew back.

  Somewhere in there was his little sister and Gavar’s tiny daughter. What a nightmare. Luke pushed the door open and
recoiled as the stench of hot, fresh blood washed over him. The corridor was dimly illuminated by strips of emergency lighting. There was enough light, though, to make out the body on the floor.

  Luke squatted and rolled it over.

  27

  Abi

  What Abi had realized, the moment Gavar brought them over the threshold of Aston House, was that Daisy was here with Libby.

  She was overjoyed at the thought of being reunited with her little sis – but hard on its heels came a sick sorrow that she might have to break it to her that Dad was dead. Could Daisy cope with that, on top of everything else? Could Abi? It might be better simply to say nothing for a while.

  But once Gavar and his mother had left to go back to parliament, Abi went to find the nursery, and the look on Daisy’s face as she pushed open the door told her everything she needed to know. Her sister had heard about Fullthorpe. And as they cried and clung to each other, Abi could at least give assurances that yes, Mum was safe.

  And Luke? Neither of them had any news there.

  Abi took her sister and little Libby through to the salon, where those who Gavar had led from Parliament Square were gathered. Perhaps Layla could play with Libby, and that might distract the poor woman for a little while. Speaker Dawson was pacing up and down, a phone clutched tight in her hand. She’d been trying to call Jon.

  He hadn’t come with them, but had remained on the platform with Bouda as she said her piece. It was a terrible risk, but Abi saw the logic. Bouda was talking about listening to the common people. Perhaps Jon imagined that she would finally heed his words.

  And yet, even more than she worried for Jon, Abi feared for Gavar. She shouldn’t care what happened to him now. In fact, she should hate him. He’d helped compromise the Fullthorpe raid. Yet she didn’t believe he’d known her father would be a casualty – didn’t believe he’d known there would be casualties at all, until that conversation she’d overheard at Lindum. And she believed that his shooting of his father was at least partly an atonement for his own mistakes, and in revulsion at the man’s evil.

  Maybe Abi was foolish for wanting to think the best of him, after so much cruelty and compromise. But the day you lost the ability to hope that people were better than they seemed was the day your heart hardened to nothing more than a mechanical pump.

  It had been two hours since Gavar and his mother had left Aston House to go back to Westminster, and Abi was getting uneasy. The two Equals had believed that such a public display of propriety would be the best way to proceed, and they knew the ways of their world best. But Abi feared they were underestimating Bouda’s ruthlessness.

  When Renie sidled up and said that she’d just heard on the TV that Crovan was on his way, Abi knew she had to act.

  ‘I want to go and check on Gavar and Lady Thalia,’ she told the room. ‘I know we’ve all had reason to wonder about his loyalties, but what he did and said this morning was powerful. He’s not a good person, but he did the right thing. I’m worried about what Bouda intends. Who’ll help me?’

  Layla sat motionless, her eyes burning. But Dog came to Abi’s side, as did Renie and several others. They went up to the Aston House balcony, from where you could see the emptiness of Whitehall and Parliament Square, the blocked-off road entrances and vans of Security officers.

  ‘We’ll have to go in – as them,’ Dog said. ‘Security. We managed it this morning.’

  It would have to be something like that, Abi thought. With Security now crawling all over the place, there’d be no climbing over walls. Straight through the main gate, legitimately, was the only thing that would work.

  But how? Even if they had convincing ID and uniforms, the compound would be on maximum alert. They wouldn’t let in a random pair of officers for no reason.

  What would get them in – without question and without hesitation?

  When the answer came to her, Abi felt sick. But it would work.

  Libby Jardine.

  They would say they’d been instructed to bring her in, then take the little girl to find Gavar and Lady Thalia.

  If everything was fine, and Abi was just overreacting, they could safely leave Libby with her grandmother, and hopefully her father. This might even be a wonderful turning point in the little girl’s life. Gavar would no longer have to worry about Lord Whittam’s rages and threats towards his daughter.

  But if Abi’s worst fears were correct, and Gavar was being questioned or even detained, then she and Dog would be in the right place and able to work out a plan of action. If it was something that required Skill, then Lady Thalia could help.

  Renie mutinously accepted that she wasn’t old enough to pass for Security. But her larcenous skills were definitely required.

  ‘I’m going to need a uniform,’ Abi said. ‘The “plain clothes” excuse won’t work for this job, and we won’t be able to blag our way in. So, I need you and Dog to get the necessaries – that includes fresh ID for him, too. We won’t be able to use the one he has now because if it’s electronically scanned, it’ll flag as stolen several days ago. Be as quick as you can – and for goodness’ sake make sure he doesn’t actually kill anyone. A bit of strategic rendering-unconscious-and-gagging is what we’re talking about here.’

  Renie saluted. Then frowned.

  ‘You really think you gotta do this, don’t you? That Gavar’s in that much trouble?’ the kid asked. ‘I remember the first time I saw him, great big bastard in his leather coat, makin’ us all fall down screaming his Skill hurt so bad. I can’t imagine anyone getting the better of him.’

  ‘Fingers crossed we’ll find him taking tea and cucumber sandwiches on the terrace with his mother. But if not, yeah, maybe he is in that much trouble. Crovan is never a good sign, you know that.’

  The kid’s face darkened. She knew it.

  ‘You can’t use the front gate,’ Abi told the pair of them. ‘That’s controlled by Skill. But there are other entrances along the boundary: doors in the wall, and a garage-port for delivery vehicles. Use those and be as quick as you can.’ And they were quick. Abi had barely had time to hunch with Asif over the screen of an illegally networked laptop, to glance at maps of the parliamentary complex, before the pair were back – short of breath and triumphant. They burst into the salon and high-fived each other noisily. Abi thought, wonderingly, of the refugee kids hiding out in the railway arches, and wondered if Dog was weirdly good with children.

  Then she remembered his original crime – the murder of an entire Equal family, innocent children included – and winced. He was good, she decided, with people like himself. Those who the system should have broken, but hadn’t.

  ‘We pulled out all the stops with this one,’ said Renie, dumping a women’s Security uniform into her lap. ‘And no one’s even hurt. Well, not badly.’

  The kid showed her two sets of ID. In both cases the photographs on the cards were only a loose match: one fair-haired, young-ish woman; one brown-haired, thin-faced man. But Asif pulled out his laptop. Give him fifteen minutes, he promised, and he’d be able to alter the photos on the Security database to a morph of the original plus Abi or Dog. When the gate checkpoint scanned the IDs, the images that flashed up onscreen would look a lot more like them.

  ‘And that’s what they’ll look at,’ Renie said. ‘Jackson always told us that. People trust the tech more than they trust their own eyes, so you just gotta worry about foolin’ the tech.’

  Dog cocked his head, and Abi listened, too. Chopper blades. Dog bounded up to the balcony, while Abi changed into the uniform in a swanky bathroom. The trousers were too short and too wide, but she belted the jacket tight and hoped the boots concealed the leg length.

  ‘Crovan,’ Dog confirmed grimly when she got back.

  ‘Time to go, then. Libby, we’re going to see your daddy.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Daisy insisted, standing between her sister and her small charge. ‘She’ll be scared otherwise.’

  ‘I’m not taking you,’ Abi said. ‘For
goodness’ sake. It’s too—’

  ‘Too dangerous?’ Daisy said, and kept on talking when Abi protested that no, that wasn’t what she’d meant. ‘Coz if it’s too dangerous for me, then I’m surely not letting you take a two-year-old. No way.’

  ‘I was going to say “too complicated”,’ Abi said. ‘I can take Libby in and leave her in there if I have to, with her family. How can I leave you?’

  ‘If Gavar’s not in trouble, there’s no problem,’ said Daisy stubbornly. ‘If he is, someone’s gonna need to get her out of there while you do the rescuing. I’ll bring her straight back here.’

  There was no arguing with that, Abi supposed, her heart heavy. One more reason to hope she wasn’t making a terrible mistake. She watched as Daisy put a coat on Libby and hooked a toddler-size backpack containing a teddy and some books over her little arms.

  ‘We’re ready,’ Daisy said brightly, as if they were off on a picnic.

  Libby Jardine reached trustingly for Daisy’s hand and beamed.

  It all went flawlessly, though Abi’s heart was in her mouth the whole time.

  She and Dog escorted Libby and Daisy across from Aston House to the main entrance of Westminster. An officer came and greeted them, asked what they were there for, and was satisfied by Abi’s reply. He took their ID to his colleague in a booth, and the woman scanned them, looking up from the screen to check the identity of each of them. Satisfied, she motioned them forward and her colleague ran a scanning wand over Daisy and Libby.

  ‘I’ve got a magic wand like your daddy, eh?’ he said to Libby, making her giggle.

  And this, Abi thought, was why Midsummer had been so insistent on doing things peacefully. It wasn’t just her protesters she was looking out for. It was the men and women of Security, of the armed forces, who had signed up to protect their country and who never deserved to be collateral. Well, she’d do her utmost to honour that. First, do no harm.