Rufaizu sat back down, but his eyes didn’t stop moving.
The lights flickered again. The train slowed. Like when she’d brought Letty underground, when the horde had approached. Pax felt her heart beat faster.
She could sense them. Close and far, across the city. Tingling in her fingers, burning in her heart. So many creatures, writhing in the walls. And something else, lit in the blue. The memory flashed up from her dream. At least thirty. She put a hand to her head.
“What’s wrong?” Casaria asked.
Something sparked outside and she flinched, but she said nothing, trying to focus, to see or feel through the bricks. Imagining the tunnels beyond. Something was stirring in her. Not panic, not fear. She’d felt it in the Ministry building – something she could use.
A voice came on the tannoy, apologising for the delay. A signal problem.
“Pax? Are you okay?”
It was the pull again. As it had been in the Ministry office. As it had been under the chapel, when she knew she wasn’t alone. The same in Chaucer Crescent. Not the minotaur’s surge, but connected. Was it an indicator, or was she just losing her mind?
“Who is he?” Pax asked, not looking up. “The last one you mentioned, Theo More Hammers? He got close to the Angel?”
“Ah nah,” Rufaizu said. “He’s a was. Left a journal – at least an account – of his trials. Long, long ago – before Gardossa. Centuries before, centuries before everything. He spoke of seeing without help.”
“Seeing what?”
“What we see in the glo. The Bright Veins.”
Pax stopped and caught Casaria looking at her. She looked down at herself, half-afraid she’d see it again. Electric tracts, under her skin. Her grubby hands were solid, darker in dirt than her best tan. Definitely not glowing. But she had glowed. Casaria questioned it, at last: “What’s it mean?”
Pax asked her own questions, “Have you ever touched it? The minotaur? Has anyone?”
“Of course not,” Casaria said. “We’ve lost two or three agents that got too close, might as well jump on the tracks. What did it do to you?”
“You touched it?” Rufaizu’s jaw dropped open. “You are true. I knew it when I saw her in that bar, I said, she’s something special. Look at her now and say it wasn’t worth it.”
Pax gave him a sideways glance. “I’m not special. It was nothing to do with me, I didn’t want this – it was pure chance I got involved, and even luckier I didn’t die, okay?”
“That’s the beauty, right? Blue Angel has his plans, machinations, but I’d bet you a tooth he didn’t count on you.” Rufaizu grinned. “Pure luck is what we need.”
“Piss off,” Pax uttered, but knew he was right. With all the Blue Angel’s scheming, the fluke of her randomly bumbling in and connecting to it might tip the tide. Whatever it meant for her mind and body. She took a breath. “It affected me.” She looked at Casaria, confessing, “I’ve been getting a feeling when the minotaur acts. Pains. And more than that. It’s hard to explain. I’m sensing something, many things. Sensing when I’m getting closer to them, feeling it...” She tapped her chest. “Here.”
“I knew it, I told you, I knew it!” Rufaizu said, excitedly. “You’re what he never was, what never was in any of them – you can see it? You can see the Bright Veins?”
“No, I can’t see that,” Pax said, “but I did. When I tried that glo.”
“We should get you to a hospital,” Casaria decided.
“Piss off,” Pax snarled.
“Listen to yourself! Sensing something? Feeling something? It’s messed you up, there could be something seriously wrong with you. What are you feeling?”
“The energy, I don’t know! Something passing between it all – like, it’s in all these things, and moving. I get a feel for how many there are, how close, but I don’t know –”
“It’s the Bright,” Rufaizu said, “in the Veins. Murhaimer studied it and developed ways to see it – through his own eyes, no glo. Rik Greivous would’ve danced a jig if he’d known! But Murhaimer did it alone, never again, no explanation how.”
“This Murhaimer, from ancient history, is the opposite of useful.”
“But here you are – connected to the light that passes through all things!”
“You’re talking about novisan?” Casaria interrupted. Rufaizu paused questioningly. “The energy in people that the praelucente interacts with. It uses that energy, decreasing or increasing levels. You know how complicated it is for us to measure that? How do you know about it?”
“Clearly your systems aren’t the only ones,” Pax said. Her own connection with that energy, the Bright or novisan or whatever it was, had been corrupted when the minotaur caught her. She wasn’t mad, she wasn’t psychic – she’d become sensitive to a network they were all part of. An energy system that the Blue Angel was part of, too. It was abusing that energy to extremes that made the Angel more visible, too. Her dream flashed on her again. The lightning jumps, the nodes. At least thirty. “I can feel the energy that the minotaur and the Blue Angel have been collecting, or moving, or whatever they’re doing. It’s spread over the city. That’s why it’s so fucking confusing. When they use that energy, I feel it.”
Casaria stared at her blankly, completely at a loss.
She was feeling the blue screens in use, and the creatures affected by the shifts in novisan or whatever. That’s what she had felt in the MEE office; not the turnbold, some other force. She shot Casaria a look. “In your offices, that corridor where we were. What’s in the room at the end of the hall?”
Casaria frowned. “What room?”
“At the end of the hall!” Pax insisted. “The innocuous fucking cupboard near the fire exit.”
“Nothing,” he said. “Some stationery supplies, I think. No one uses it except the secretary, and that’s mostly to get faxes.”
“Faxes? What the fuck are you talking about, faxes?”
“You know, printed messages. Obviously we don’t use the fax machine ourselves, that’s why it’s down there, out of the way. The secretary gets –”
“Jesus Christ,” Pax huffed, “you’re talking about one of those old phone-email-printer things or whatever? Who the hell does use it?”
“London,” Casaria clarified. “It receives orders from the Raleigh Commission.”
Pax stared for a beat. “That sounds important.”
“Well.” Casaria twisted awkwardly, like he realised he’d said something stupid. “I suppose, if you care for them. The Raleigh Commission have a commanding say in Ministry matters, when they deign to get involved. One of the idiots on the board won’t go online; he only ever sends faxes. Sometimes direct orders, but mostly summaries of nonsense discussions in London.”
Pax kept staring. That was definitely important. She wasn’t sure how, but that was where the Blue Angel had their foot in the MEE. That was what she’d felt. As the train drew into Broadplain, she watched the platform, willing Letty to be ready to help her make sense of it.
12
The smell was horrendous. It seeped up from the fifth floor to pervade every inch of Floor 6. Sam couldn’t stop noticing it, a scent she’d associate with toxic waste. Agent Hail assured her it was only the turnbold’s pheromones, perfectly harmless. That didn’t help.
Hail, returned from the field, attempted to brush off everything with cold professionalism, from the moment he’d found Sam staring at the carnage from street level. He and his partner had taken two barbed zinc harpoons (as they called them) from their car and silenced the turnbold with a series of careful shots, fired from the building entrance towards where the broken creature was stuck in the lift shaft. Then Hail tried to take charge with instructions for Greek Street to be sealed off and a retaliatory strike to be mounted, without any immediate idea of the target. Of course, the Ministry historically only had one true opponent in Ordshaw. Even with a long-established peace, resentment against the Fae ran deep amongst Operations agents. They would blame the
fairies as a matter of instinct. As Pax and Casaria had suggested.
But Sam realised Pax had saved her. She’d heard the shout, over the ferocious charge of the turnbold – “Fucking do something!” – just before the gunshot. And Pax had insisted this wasn’t simple, that they all needed to stop and think before attacking the Fae.
Sam was the ranking officer in the building, again, and she pressed that on Hail as he began issuing orders. He tried to brush it off. “After what you’ve been through, you should take the day.”
“After what I’ve been through,” Sam replied, hearing the words as though someone else was saying them, “I’m ready to personally tackle the fallout. And the next time you answer me back, it’ll be your badge.”
In truth she wasn’t sure if the field agents even carried badges any more; she had a feeling that they’d been replaced by laminate warrant cards a few years ago. But, in front of two other agents, she held Hail’s gaze, without mentioning her doubts, and he silently backed down.
Sam issued the usual commands to keep the press quiet and keep the emergency services from the building. She quickly decided they’d call it an alligator attack, from the sewer, as too many people had heard and seen things that couldn’t be explained without mentioning some kind of animal. They could blame the alligator for the train crash and the movements under the building in New Thornton, while they were at it. The squat in Nothicker, the old library building that got flattened last night, would be more of a problem. Realistically, no natural creature could have caused all that damage, so it would have to be passed off as coincidence. Such an incident, in Nothicker, probably wouldn’t have made the news in other circumstances, and that detail would hopefully stop it from all seeming too convenient, adding credibility.
Alongside the media effort, the remaining staff started rallying back to work, even as the smoke-filled building was still being checked for structural damage. The field agents whispered about the Fae, questioning when they would strike back. They were whispering because Sam had already said no to such plans, but also because the place had an atmosphere like a wake. The lights kept blinking off, sometimes for minutes at a time. Half of the computers weren’t working. Everyone trod carefully, wincing at creaks from elsewhere in the building. There was a large crack in the floor near the reception and lift area.
Mathers and Devlin were the only reported casualties from their floor. Ryan from IS was unaccounted for, but Sam suspected he’d headed home in the chaos. Selfish, but understandable. It might have been a lot worse, if Pax and her people hadn’t interrupted the attack.
Sam knew the best medicine was to power through. She took a few staff off the job of securing the praelucente’s location and set them to searching the city for spikes of novisan during the times of the Monday surges. Against complaints, she told them it’d lead to the cause of this attack and they had no recourse to question that. She insisted she’d take care of the Fae herself, and went to Mathers’ office. She tried their FTC numbers and got no response. There were no emails coming in, not in her account or Mathers’, open on his computer.
That left her looking over the remnants of Mathers’ office. He was gone. Dead, before her eyes. Brutally. He’d left books on the shelves, never to be read, and a photo of a dog – who would take care of it now? She shook herself out of it.
Don’t think.
Don’t think.
The phone rang, and she answered, “Deputy Director Mathers’ office, this is Sam Ward, Head of –”
“Yes, quite,” Lord Tarrington said. “What the blazes is going on over there?”
The director of the Ministry. Interference she did not need. Sam swallowed, then described the events in as neutral a tone as she could muster. She started with the announcement that Deputy Director Mathers was dead. She moved straight on, ignoring Tarrington’s curses, to explain a turnbold had come up through five storeys of the building, until MEE field agents had managed to stop it. For all the damage it had done coming up, it had not reached the real seat of operations on the sixth floor, and they were now focused on the hard, fast pursuit of a potential force behind the attack. Only when she finished did she realise she’d said nothing about Casaria or Pax, and it seemed too late to mention it.
“Right you are, you’ll be our Acting Deputy Director, then,” Tarrington said. “Congratulations on the media cap – they’re lapping it up in London and no one would dare question such an absurd story after a tragedy. An alligator indeed.” For the briefest second Sam thought this would go smoothly. But he continued, “That’s you done. Pat yourselves on the back, pack up and get out.”
“Sir?” Sam frowned. Through the internal office window, she could see the bullpen, heads down, hard at work. “We’re on our way to some decisive results already.”
“Decisive nothing. You’ve lost the man in charge and the building – whatever you say – cannot possibly be deemed safe.”
“After what we’ve been through –”
“Everyone must be exhausted, traumatised, not at their best. Shut down the office, with statements that the MEE has suffered a blow, and we’ll form a plan from here.”
Sam slowly turned to look out of the office’s other window, down at the limited view of Central backstreets. How could anyone outside Ordshaw grasp what they were going through, let alone form a plan? “Respectfully, sir, I believe we’re in a unique position –”
“You are indeed,” Tarrington said. “You’ve been the target of a terrorist attack, Ward, do you understand that? You’re weakened but talking about retaliating, without knowing exactly who staged this little fiasco.”
“But we need to –”
“You need to give us a chance to get on the blower with them, see what they want.”
Sam froze. That was an admission, wasn’t it? The assumption of Fae guilt was there in the Raleigh Commission, too, and he was baldly telling her he had access to the FTC. “Sir, if you’re suggesting engaging with the Fae, then I think I should personally –”
“Rest assured,” Tarrington interrupted politely, “we know how to deal with the important stuff. Now be a good girl and shut down. If – and that’s a very tentative if – this is not simply a rogue element, your team will need to be rested.”
“It’s not a rogue element,” Sam rushed in. “It’s no coincidence that this is happening now – with the erratic surges across town, and these civilians’ unusual activities. I believe this is the result of an endemic problem, connected directly to the praelucente.”
Tarrington digested that. “Where is this coming from?”
“Sir…” Sam hesitated. How to explain it? “I don’t like to say before we have –”
“You just did say. Explain.”
Sam clamped her mouth shut. How could anyone hold a conversation with this man if he never listened to complete sentences? She started slowly, “I’ve been looking at novisan patterns. And...I’ve had contact with the compromised civilians – limited contact.”
“You’ve had what? And they’re still out there?”
Sam cleared her throat. “It wasn’t by design, sir, I wasn’t prepared –”
“Good God. I suspect you’re right, then, there’s no coincidence, Ward. What did you tell them? Anything they could pass on to their Fae contacts?”
Her face felt hot enough to melt the window. “Absolutely not, sir, this is –”
“This is exactly what I am talking about. You’re too close to this. The whole Ordshaw office is too close.” He wasn’t listening, he didn’t care. She felt it boiling up inside her, wanting to shake him through the phone. “Send everyone home, seal the building and await further instructions from us. You will –”
“Sir, I will not,” Sam said. “Two of our own are dead, including our leader. Our city is under attack, and we have done nothing but hide it. I have a way forward that I intend to follow. I intend to confront the source of the corruption in this city.”
Tarrington was quiet. Perhaps waiting to ex
plode. She had to say it, though. It was her turn. His voice came back warily. “Ward, I have given you clear instructions. You are experiencing an emotional response to an extreme event. Consider your position. Will you or will you not do as I request?”
Sam gritted her teeth and answered in as clear a staccato as she could. “Considering my position, as the Acting Deputy Director of the Ordshaw MEE, I will act in the way I believe best suits my city. That is what I intend to do.” She added, with an air of finality, “Sir.”
Tarrington was startled into quiet for a moment. “The rest of the Commission will hear about this, of course.”
“I’d be glad if they would give Ordshaw their full attention, sir.”
He muttered something that could have been a curt very well, then hung up.
Sam breathed a massive breath of relief. She turned and found she had an audience. Landon was back, with Hail at his shoulder.
“How much did you hear?” Sam asked.
“Enough,” Landon said. “Assistant Deputy Director. Where do you want us?”
13
Pax left the desolate Debenhams to lean against the railing over the empty shopping centre nook. Rufaizu and Casaria were waiting, the former slouched against the wall and the latter standing stiffly to attention. She wasn’t sure of the appropriate way to respond to discovering a group of murder victims when the bodies were so small. It was almost hard to take seriously; these two-inch thugs in miniature pools of blood were once living people. One of them had spoken with her, albeit in an unfriendly manner. Now he had a hole in his chest.
With no sign of Letty, or the Bartons, she assumed (hoped?) that Lightgate’s plan for them had backfired. Whatever it was.
“That’s that, then?” Casaria said, a little disappointed. He had responded to the scene with particular poise, moving through the shop with his gun out, as though the violence might resurrect itself.
“No, that’s not that,” Pax said. “What happened? Where did they all go?”
The Sunken City Trilogy Page 61