by Lan Chan
“But she did kill them?”
Jenny nodded. My stomach turned over itself.
“Did you have a funeral?”
“No,” Dad said. “She never wanted one. Stated expressly in her will. We cremated her, and her ashes were thrown in the river.”
“I didn’t even get to say goodbye.” I dissolved into another fit of tears.
Around dinner time, Dad and Jenny bundled me off home. Dad turned on the radio in the car to fill the silence.
I had my head lolling on the back seat when something on the news bulletin pricked my curiosity. Without asking, I turned the dial up with my telepathy.
“Authorities are unsure how the truck managed to become wedged under the bridge, but it is suspected that another esper was involved. The identity of the victim can’t be revealed because she is a minor, but the Academy has issued a statement advising she is alive but in a critical condition. Her brother is appealing to anyone who can assist in the investigation. Please call-”
I turned the radio back down and sighed. She was alive. What condition she’d remain in was yet to be seen, but for now, that was the one ray of sunshine in my otherwise miserable day. I went straight to bed when I got home. I must have been in one sorry state because neither Dad nor Jenny bothered to punish me for skipping out the night before. Small mercies.
17
I gripped the strap of my backpack tightly and walked through the gates of the Academy. It had been six weeks since I found out about Mum, but Dad and Jenny were being super paranoid. They were tag-teaming to make sure I didn’t change my mind and decide to go on a Shadowman hunting spree.
They were smart to do it. Every morning I woke up and followed the same boring routine. At least three or four times a day, I’d be jolted by the realisation that Mum wasn’t just missing. She was dead. No amount of anger or guilt would bring her back.
As a result, I clung to her rules like they were a lifeline. I woke at five-thirty every morning and ran ten kilometres around the athletic track a couple of blocks from our house. On weekends, when I wasn’t visiting my grandmother or hanging out with Dad, I’d be at the Academy with Khan. He was Mum’s stand-in, teaching me close-quarter hand-to-hand combat. I needed to be stronger, faster, and more ruthless. One day, I would face the Shadowman again. When that day came, only one of us would walk away from the interaction.
Short of putting a shock collar on me, Dad and Jenny were making me hang out with them after school. This week, Jenny was going through evidence for a money-laundering case and was based at the Academy. It meant that all week, I’d have to catch the bus from school to the Academy and stay there until she was ready to go home.
It was still better than going to Dad’s work. I really should have been more interested in the stuff he worked on. Research into espers and their abilities. But what he did was so sterile, it just wasn’t my thing. At four in the afternoon, I checked in with Jenny in her office.
“I’m here, and nobody is dead,” I said. The two Academy officers with her grinned.
“Hi, love,” Jenny said. “We’re flat out. It might be a while.”
“Of course it will.” I blew out a breath. “I might go and see Khan.”
“Oh no you don’t. William told me you’ve got a biology assignment that’s due at the end of the week that you haven’t bothered to start.”
Now probably wasn’t the time to tell her it was a lost cause. The assignment was supposed to be an observation and assessment of a duckling. It was group work. I’d skipped out on so many of the classes that my assigned group wasn’t speaking to me, and I had no idea where our duck was. I was going to flunk out for sure.
Thankfully, I’d managed to intercept the letters and phone calls the school had been sending home. Eventually I’d pay for it. As long as it wasn’t right now. I realised this was the perfect opportunity for me to do some snooping. And I was in the perfect place to do it.
“Fine. I’m going to the computer lab.”
“Do you remember what the guest password is?”
A three-year-old could remember what the guest password was. The way these government passwords were set up was so generic. Not that it was really needed. As a guest, I had access to all of nothing. The internet was restricted by the Psi-Ops. I needed a level of clearance much higher than the nothing I was currently at to get to it.
But I didn’t need a password. Yet another reason why EK espers were so dangerous. There was no need to get on the internet anyway. What I wanted would be on the Academy servers.
“Hey, Willow,” Detective Benson said when I walked past. He was a smaller guy but built solid with a salt-and-pepper moustache. “Still on probation, huh?”
“Yep.”
“You ready to tell us why yet?” Benson and his partner Wiley laughed. My life was a joke to these people. It was bad enough that I had Gabe as a godfather. On the other side, my aunt knew too many Academy officers.
“Don’t you have some donuts to eat?”
“Oooh, them’s fightin’ words.” He punched me lightly on the arm. I swatted at him.
“Go away! I have homework to do.”
There was no need for either of them to press their lips together as though they were suppressing laughter.
“Couple more years, kid, and you’ll be looking at a career in law enforcement with us,” Wiley said. “Don’t hit the books too crazy.”
Benson nudged him. “Don’t let Jenny hear you say that.” They saluted me and then left me alone. Shaking my head at the idea of joining the Academy, I found a computer in the corner as far away from anyone else as possible. When I was logged in, I opened up a word processing document with pre-typed information and pretended like I was reading it. With no one else around me, I reached out and touched the port that connected to the server cable with my hand.
Once I was in contact, I let the telepathy free. Having thought about this a lot for the last two weeks, it didn’t take much time for the EK to tap into the surveillance drone streams. I pushed everything else out of my mind and commanded the server to produce any images it had of my mum anywhere near Silhouette Row on the night she died. The surveillance was sketchy. She was almost as good as I was at predicting the patterns of the drones. My throat locked thinking of her face when I’d told her what I could do.
“You’re sure?” she’d asked.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Teach me.”
It was the first and last thing I’d ever been better at. With so little material, the stupid camera feeds kept showing me things I didn’t want to see. Snippets of her walking around the park with Dad, her and Jenny in the car together driving to who knows where, an image of her and one of her best friends, Richard Nichol, right here in the training yard at the Academy. Her walking into the Rendezvous Hotel. Nothing on the night in question. I should have known better than to hope. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t scoured these servers before looking for any news of her.
A quick glance at the clock on the computer told me I’d been doing this for over an hour. Soon Jenny would be looking in on me even if she wasn’t ready to go home yet. I was about to give up when the split-second image of two women jumping away from a surveillance section caught my attention. Neither of them was Mum, but I’d been slipping in my fatigue, and the server had started showing me images of Jenny instead.
I commanded the server to replay the video. It was a two-second file, but I knew it was Jenny because she was wearing an eggshell blue, vintage, bespoke designer tweed suit. The drone hadn’t meant to take the video of the women. What it was after was a purse snatcher who was racing through the underpass near where they had been standing. I could tell it was somewhere up in Chancellor’s Hill because the bottom of the Psi-Ops crest in their headquarters was in the background.
When the other woman with Jenny figured out they were going to be taped, the woman snatched her arm and dragged her out of the way. For one tiny second, the other woman’s
face was caught in the frame. Her green eyes were startling. That one second was all I needed to recognise her.
The Enforcer who had killed Mum. As if that wasn’t bad enough, this video had only been taken three months ago, which begged a lot of questions. Not least of which was why my aunt was hanging around with the woman who had murdered my mother.
I was just sitting there, staring at the screen when Jenny tapped me on the shoulder. “Sorry it took so long,” she said. “Let’s get out of here. Your dad wants pizza for dinner, so we’ll pick one up on the way home. Are you all right?”
I only nodded as I shut down the computer, and we left. On the way to the parking lot, I fell into step behind her. She was taller than me by a few inches, slim and perfectly clean-cut.
Her suit was grey and tailored to fit her frame. Her heels were a sensible kitten-style that clicked on the pavement.
“You’re awfully quiet,” she said. Then she turned her head in surprise when she realised I wasn’t beside her. “What’s wrong?”
How to phrase it? Too many questions were running through my head. My mum was not a proponent of beating around the bush. Brutal honesty was more her style. As a result, tact wasn’t exactly a quality I possessed in abundance.
“Did you meet up with the woman who killed Mum?” I asked.
If she ever decided to quit her job as a public prosecutor and gamble for a living, the casino wouldn’t know what hit them. “Why in the world would I do that?”
“There’s surveillance footage of you with that Enforcer after Mum supposedly died.”
“Supposedly?” She raised a brow. “And what are you doing going through the drone videos? If you’re caught –”
“I won’t get caught.” Unlike hacking programs, my telepathy would leave no traces software could follow.
Her lips pursed. “That doesn’t give you the right to just go prying in there.” That was a load of bullshit. If I were ever to join the Academy, that would probably be the first thing they’d try to get me to do. Only they would direct me towards the classified information from another country.
“We’re getting off the topic,” I said. “Why were you with her?”
Jenny shook her head. “I’m not sure what you saw, love. But it wasn’t what you think it was.”
“So, I’m mistaken,” I said. Around us, other officers were leaving for their foot patrols. We reached the middle of the parking lot. Jenny turned to me.
“You must be.” She reached out and touched my cheek lightly. “I know it’s been hard, but you can’t keep torturing yourself going on these wild goose chases. Come on. Your dad’s waiting.”
As she drove, she glanced over at me. “How is your friend from the Slums?”
I stared out the window, unable to look at her right now. “She’s fine. Her mum’s got health care now. Gabe sorted out papers for her dad, and he’s looking for a proper job. Daisy started school again.”
It was all great news. But I couldn’t help thinking of the others. Where was their happy ending? And the Shadowman was just watching them, pulling at their strings while they struggled. I must have been grinding my teeth because at the next set of lights, Jenny laid her hand on my arm.
“You know I love you,” she said. “You’re the closest thing I’ve got to a daughter.”
Then why are you lying to me? Then I remembered this was a woman who wouldn’t steal plant cuttings from a nature strip but had lied to my principal so I wouldn’t be expelled that time I got into a fight at school. She wouldn’t do it unless there was a reason. Except this time, the reason wasn’t good enough. Not for me.
“I just want to know the truth,” I said. “Is she dead or alive?”
At the pizza place, she turned the engine off. Her grip on my arm was suddenly very tight. “You saw the video. She’s dead,” Jenny said. “She’s not coming back.”
When she looked at me, it was as if a stranger stared back through her eyes. No, not a stranger. My mum. She had that same unyielding coldness in her features as Mum did when she was trying to stare me down.
She clasped her hands on either side of my face. “She’s dead, Willow,” she said. “I’m sorry. You have to accept that. Do you understand? For your own safety. For the safety of everyone you care about. I’m getting out of the car now, and we’re never going to speak about this again.” She tried to let go, but I locked my hands around her wrist and pinned her there.
“I will find out,” I said.
“I know.” That surprised me. “You’re too much like Rose to do otherwise. I just want you to know that I’m not the enemy. For better or worse, you’re my responsibility now, and your life isn’t going to be one long stretch of violence. Not if I can help it.”
“I’m an esper. That’s part of the description.”
“We’ll see. Please stop looking at me like that. It’s unnerving.”
I sat up in bed that night until three in the morning. When it was clear that it would be impossible to sleep, I snuck downstairs and found her sitting at the kitchen table just staring at a piece of paper. The stupid step creaked when I tried to sneak back upstairs. She turned her head in my direction. Caught in a frozen pause, I looked really suspicious.
“I couldn’t sleep either,” she said.
“What are you looking at?”
She scrubbed at her brow but didn’t answer. Nor did she turn the paper for me to see when I sat down beside her. “What?” I said.
Finally, she pushed the thing in front of me. There was a queen of hearts paper clipped to the top. A red circle with a cross was drawn over her head. My heart palpitated. No guesses who the letter was from.
“It was taped to the front door the day after you were found on the rooftop,” Jenny said.
I cast my eye over the letter. There wasn’t much to it. Handwritten in terrible cursive that was almost impossible to read. When I finally figured out what it said, my stomach tied itself in knots. It read:
What happens to them depends on you.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“For the same reason we didn’t tell you about your mum,” she said. “We can’t win this one, Willow. The Psi-Ops have been trying to pin the Shadowman down for years, and they’ve failed. They’ve tried everything. He knows every undercover agent we try to place within his ranks. None of them come back out alive.”
“Is that why you met with that woman?”
“That never happened.”
“Of course.”
“Rose was an anomaly. Some of the things she could do scared the life out of me but in the end...” Jenny’s voice trailed off. A moment later she wiped away a tear. It really wigged me out that they were close. They were polar opposites but somehow they made it work. Their friendship was how Mum and Dad met.
“Promise me you won’t go after him.”
“I can’t –”
“Promise me.” Her voice was steel. “The Psi-Ops are doing everything they can. There’s no need for you to risk your life.”
What struck me the most in that moment was that I couldn’t tell if she was making this up. My mind opened of its own accord. It did that whenever I felt threatened. It reached out for her despite all of the evidence to the contrary. Her mind wasn’t shielded, but it was as though there was nothing there for me to grasp on to. I knew now from shadow boxing that I could attack a Void mind the same way I could any other, but gleaning her thoughts was impossible. I would never know if she lied to me. I would never know anything she was truly thinking. That scared the crap out of me. It made me feel vulnerable in a way that nothing else ever had. I’d always thought that my biggest threats would be other alphas –espers like me with other abilities who could outclass me. But I was wrong.
The true danger was the Voids. The ones I could never reach. And the most dangerous of them all lived in my house.
So I did the only thing I could. I lied. “All right,” I said. “I promise I won’t go after him.”
“You
’re a terrible liar,” she said, her mouth stretched into a wry smile.
My eyes narrowed. “And you’re a fantastic one. So where does that leave us?”
She reached out to me and took my hand. “I know Rose has always taught you that forming associations with people will make you weak,” she said. “But the Shadowman isn’t alone, and you are. One esper, even an esper like you, can never win.”
“Wow,” I said. “Is this really the time to try and encourage me to make friends?”
She grinned outright this time. “Your Psi-Q test is coming up in a few months. Maybe you’ll meet some like-minded people then. You should probably get back to bed. School tomorrow.”
I didn’t argue with her. Rather than go to bed, I sat at the end of it and stared at the City Square skyline that I could see from my window. I’d lived my life based on a set of rules my mum put in place. They were meant to keep me safe. Fat lot of good that did her.
Why did we come back here? Melbourne had the highest density of espers compared to any other place we’d ever lived. Maybe my parents thought with Gabe and the Academy, we would be safe. Or maybe they wanted me to hide in plain sight. Only problem was they wouldn’t tell me what we were hiding from. Was Mum really dead, or was it an elaborate lie to stop me looking for her anymore? It made me question everything I’d ever known until only two things remained absolutely true.
One: This city was dangerous. Two: To survive, I would have to become more than just a lone esper trying to fight a battle with a shadow.
Part Two
Sectra: Origin
18
Whoever invented the English language must have had something against students. Why else would they have made the first four letters of the alphabet so different, if not to stop kids easily changing bad report cards? Not that we didn’t try.
