Blue Angel

by Phil Williams

  “But talk of a human eating a fairy –” Lightgate paused, something rising in her throat. She held up a hand for patience, the other hand over her mouth. Pax frowned, not sure if she was performing some sort of imitation, but the fairy swallowed and shuddered like a ghost ran through her. No, it was a drunken tremor or something. Lightgate continued like it hadn’t happened, but took her hip flask back out. “Some people in the FTC had a wake-up call, at least. Started asking if it wasn’t better to stand and fight. Some started questioning Valoria.”

  “Finally,” Rolarn said, a touch angry.

  “Yes.” Lightgate pointed a finger back at him. “Fortunately, there’s still exiles alive who never trusted her. When I made it back to Ordshaw, I found these good, honest men” – Pax noted the miserable faces that looked neither good nor honest – “itching for a plan. Alongside voices in the FTC who weren’t happy, either. Things were looking very interesting. Until last night. Then, the Fae media say Letty is alive, shooting up human neighbourhoods after a deal gone bad.”

  “She was known for doing bad deals with humans,” Arnold commented, as Pax imagined the Fae media. Tiny reporters in fedoras, punching at typewriters?

  “But we’ve seen the results,” Lightgate said, “with a tremor underground, and the berserker behaving strange. Like someone hurt it. The Fae media say it wasn’t the Dispenser. They claim Letty lost a useless bit of Fae tech, not this fabled weapon of old.”

  “It was the Dispenser,” Pax assured her. “I saw it.”

  Lightgate took another swig from her flask. “Val’s persuaded everyone that the MEE aren’t out to get them, that this weekend’s fear was a big misunderstanding caused by Letty, up to her old tricks. An easier story to digest.” Lightgate paused, looking at Pax’s navel. “No pun intended.”

  Pax covered her stomach defensively with her hands. “But the Ministry took your weapon. And hurt Letty. Get the Dispenser back and you can prove Val’s been lying.”

  Lightgate took one more swig from her flask, then beat her wings and flew off the counter. Pax drew her head back as the fairy came level with her face. Lightgate hovered from side to side, studying her, before grinning, a sinister expression in the limited light. “I had a feeling about you. With Letty causing havoc, reports of a psycho human, I knew I had to meet you. Maybe you’re a human that could actually be useful, with ideas like that. That’s much better.”

  “Why?” Pax frowned. “What was your idea?”

  “Sigh…” Lightgate actually said the word. She exhaled loudly, making Pax’s nostrils curl at the whiff of ethanol, potent even at this woman’s size. “It required help from the FTC Council, but they’ve lost their bottle. There are weapons at their disposal, still, despite Val’s promises to disarm them years ago. This situation was the perfect opportunity to use the turnbold.”

  “The what?” Pax vaguely recalled the name from Apothel’s catalogue of hideous beasts. It was not something she’d studied or, she felt, encountered.

  “The – turn – bold,” Lightgate raised her voice, speaking slower, as though talking to an idiot. “Before Val took over, Fae scouts lured this beast under the Ministry offices, ready to take them down at their source.”

  Pax stared dumbly back. “How? Fae can’t move under the city without drawing the minotaur’s horde to them, can they?”

  Lightgate took another drink. “It cost a few brave lives. But it got forgotten because it was such a low-tech, basic idea. A simple bit of monster-baiting and some old-fashioned explosive charges under the building. The idea being to blow a passage through the floor, into their filthy offices, and this beast climbs up and decimates the Ministry.” She pulled the corners of her mouth down. “Ministry gets unhappy. Understand?”

  Pax’s dumb stare hadn’t left her. It sounded like the sort of bluntly destructive plan she’d come to expect from the Fae.

  “It was audacious.” Lightgate apparently read her thoughts. “But it went against the principle of fighting without being seen to be fighting. Ordshaw Fae always want to stay hidden. Even before Val took charge, it looked unlikely anyone would go through with it. When she started her peace talks it was totally dismissed. Except” – the fairy held up a triumphant finger – “while most of our weapons were dismantled, in this case, it would’ve cost Fae lives to remove the explosive charges. So they’re still there. Ten years later. And the Council still has the codes to set them off.”

  Pax found herself shaking her head, “No – surely the Ministry –”

  Lightgate pre-empted the question. “They don’t know about the charges. The MEE know the turnbold’s there, but not that we put it there. Having it settled under Greek Street is good for them. A turnbold can stay put for many years at a time, waiting for food to come to it, keeping the area quiet. But given what the Ministry’s been up to, with this woman eating a Fae and the Dispenser locked up in their offices, I thought some of the Council might finally be persuaded to use those charge codes. Only now Val’s worked her magic. Leaving” – Lightgate screwed a thumb back towards Arnold – “his boys to sneak back into the FTC and find those codes themselves. No small task.”

  Whatever a turnbold was, this plan sounded like a great way to kill a lot of innocent people. Rufaizu included. Lightgate seemed like a relatively reasonable, intelligent fairy, so Pax chose to be honest with her: “It lacks finesse.”

  “It’s a wrecking ball.” Arnold chose to answer this. “And when the Ministry retaliate, the FTC will see what Val’s peace is worth.”

  Each word he said sounded angrier than the last. Lightgate grinned eerily at Pax, eager for her response. Clearly Pax had come at the right time to defuse this. “Do you guys still believe in the Sunken City? Settling back down there?”

  “That comes with time,” Rolarn said.

  “It’s something the FTC have forgotten,” Arnold grumbled. “They call themselves Fae, they’ve got no right.”

  “Yeah,” Pax said carefully. “But convincing your people humans are dangerous, and removing Val, doesn’t get you the Sunken City back. Listen, I want rid of those monsters. I want the Ministry to back off. But random monster attacks are only going to make things worse. There’s people in that building with answers. And the Dispenser is in there, too. You want to hear my take?”

  “Yeah,” Lightgate said. “I do.”

  Pax took a breath, not sure what she was going to say but sure she had to come up with something. She couldn’t exactly promise them the Dispenser, but it went hand-in-hand with getting Rufaizu back from the Ministry. She was about to say so when Rimes’ phone chimed in her pocket, a high-pitched note that rose and fell before tinkling into something like a Japanese folk song.

  Pax took out the phone as the fairies watched. The telegraph station’s number was on the screen. “Sorry – I’ve got to take this.”

  “Pax?” Holly’s voice, anxious. “I couldn’t get through –”

  “Can I call you back?” Pax said, not wanting to leave the Fae with any doubt about the madness of their plan. “I just need to –”

  “You were right. How did you know?”

  Pax’s stomach lifted in concern. “About what?”

  “A train crash. Well. Technically two train crashes. Four dead and at least twenty injured. So far. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? That monster down there, it did this?”

  Pax couldn’t speak, though she knew the answer. She’d experienced it, face-to-face with the blue screen. It had communicated it to her as it launched its assault. Possibly done it because of her?

  Meeting Lightgate’s eyes, looking for someone, anyone, to share the horror with, Pax knew more than ever that she had to get a handle on this. Her own body was being affected, and she was surrounded by war-mongering fairies. Whatever had happened, she had to cut through this bullshit.

  17

  Bristol Street station was barely visible through the thicket of smoke and the foggy lenses of Sam’s gas mask, the concrete pillars like sentinels in the torc
hlight. The volume of her filtered breathing partially blocked out the sounds of panic. When a shape shot out of the smoke, Sam jumped with a cry. Landon put a hand out, either to stop her or reassure her, as a fireman passed with a civilian draped over his shoulder.

  As the rescuer faded back into the smoke, Sam watched Landon continuing, his hand on the pistol under his jacket. There was nothing down there, the preliminary scans had already shown that. The myriad creatures never crossed into the Underground stations; it was like there was something in the walls of the Sunken City that confined them to its corridors. But then, the Fae were supposed to leave people alone and the praelucente wasn’t supposed to cause earthquakes. Everyone in the Ministry knew that: as it moved across the city, it caused residual fatigue in the Underground and in the city above, while also inspiring certain positive results. That was all. Otherwise, it roamed under Ordshaw without impact. But Pax had called that analysis ignorant.

  Something is using that energy, Pax had said. Moving it.

  Did the praelucente hide a threat the Ministry didn’t understand? These surges suggested so, even if they had somehow been caused by Pax and her cohorts. Such a secret would make it a ticking bomb.

  Passing into an open space, Landon waved a hand in an attempt to clear the smoke. It did nothing. Sam followed a trail of bloodstains with her torch. Cracked tiles. Shattered glass. Then the twisted, ghastly mess of the crumpled train. The shapes of a handful of firefighters moved around the wreckage.

  Landon nudged Sam and pointed to the side. Down the platform, away from the action. He continued without looking back, and she forced herself to do the same. Glass crunched under her shoes. Probably shredding the soles of her flats, which were not suited to this. Like her.

  At the end of the platform, the train carriage had risen off the track and wedged itself against the broken wall. Landon crouched and shone his torch through a gap.

  “You’re not going down there?” Sam asked, which came out as a plastic mumble.

  Landon nodded, then lowered himself onto the floor and wriggled through the hole. Sam came to his side, looking back to the firefighters. Did none of them care that some suited fat man was scrambling under the unstable ruins of this disaster? Apparently not.

  When she turned back, he was gone. Sam stared with concern. Should she follow? His hand shot back out and Sam jumped. The palm was flat. Telling her to stay put. She nodded, as if he could see it.

  As he made his way into an abyss, Sam watched two figures exiting the train, the limp form of a body draped between them. Small, frail, head lolling. An old woman? Sam wanted to look away but couldn’t. They all evaporated into the smoke.

  This was all wrong. None of the Ministry’s spreadsheets extolling the cost-benefit analysis of the praelucente factored in people dying. Not like this. Working in the office, Sam had distanced herself from the possibility that her organisation was shadily silencing serious security breaches, but assumed that meant dealing with opportunists who couldn’t be persuaded to keep quiet for the greater good. These were unassuming innocents.

  Sam closed her eyes. Why did she come down here? She was right to keep her distance from all this. Objectively, the figures would still make sense. If someone had meddled with the brakes of these trains, it would be no different: you wouldn’t blame the trains for moving too fast, you’d still support the concept of the Underground. The Sunken City was no different. Casualties happened.

  Something groaned in the middle distance and she opened her eyes again.

  Another noise, a whisper behind the chaos.

  Will you say it to me. Like it means something, like it can help make sense of this. Make it more than just an excuse to get out of the office. Grugulochs.

  Whatever it was, the groan was rendered inaudible by the painful creak of metal being forcibly separated.

  Their lights flashing over Letty’s face, the ambulances and fire trucks started to leave. The injured and the terrified had mostly been removed. That just left gawking bystanders, some police around the perimeter and a smattering of journalists. A bunch of Ministry shills deflected questions from all of them. Letty listened in on numbers of dead and injured, and accusations against the rail company, the station manager and the city council.

  The berserker had sucked out everything some of these saps had, Letty could see it in the colour of their skin. Like faded denim. She heard a Ministry goon whisper, “That was no heart attack.”

  The monster was preying, hard enough to wreck a train or two. Maybe it felt bitter about Pax getting away. Maybe she’d given it a taste for more direct feeding.

  “It’s as I’d expect.” Landon’s voice. Letty watched from a building’s moulding as he strode out with the square lady. “Nothing crossed into the station, so the train must’ve been affected before arriving. My guess, the driver lost his senses.”

  “You didn’t hear anything?” the woman asked.

  “Not your area, is it? All this, I mean.”

  The square turned on him, eyes level with his chest. “My area is wherever I’m needed. I want to know whatever sounds have been reported.”

  Landon didn’t look impressed, probably aware that the only way she could threaten him was if she jumped and rammed her head into his chin. “Protocol is to limit discussion. Discourage any thoughts of what these people might’ve seen or heard.”

  “You don’t think that might stop us from doing our job?”

  “We’ve got rules for a reason.”

  That aggravated the woman. “Yeah. So you don’t have to use any initiative.”

  Landon paced up to her, a nerve touched, too. “You hang on a second. I do plenty for this city. For this country.”

  She stared for an uncertain beat, then plucked up the courage to puff up her little chest and say, “I’m sure you do. You just don’t think for yourself.”

  “You know, for all the stink you made about him, you sure sound like Casaria.”

  Her face was aghast. “Exactly what do you mean by that?”

  “You think it’s any wonder they keep your hands tied when you keep stirring the pot? You’d give the game away, have these people cementing ideas of what they’ve seen. To say nothing of what you’d do talking to the Fae, whatever.”

  “What about doing a good job?” she said, voice getting loud and surprising herself. She lowered it again, overcompensating. “Opening more liberal communications channels with the Fae has always been the right move. Figuring out what these people saw and heard is the right move. Especially when it’s written on Apothel’s wall.”

  Letty cocked her head. A clue?

  Landon looked away to grumble something, the coward.

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing. You want to risk repeating this word all over the place. The last thing we need’s the media picking up on a pattern.”

  “The pattern’s already here, with things erupting underground! I need to know what that word, or sound, means – what Pax wants and knows, what Casaria saw, why he’s missing – I need you to help me, Landon!”

  “We ought to get back to the office –”

  “Don’t! Take a moment, please.”

  Landon bunched up his mouth like he’d just smelt shit.

  “Think. This noise, this word, it could explain something about the praelucente itself, and that’d explain their plans, and this threat. Where do we go with that?”

  “Back to the office,” Landon said. The woman was about to throw her knickers at him, but he held up a chunky hand. “You’re desperate to talk, try the kid.”

  The lady stared at him, blank.

  “Rufaizu.”

  “He’s not talking, is he?”

  “He spoke to Casaria, yesterday. Before everything got turned upside down.”

  She looked stunned again. “Has anyone else spoken to him?”

  Landon shrugged.

  “I don’t know if I should be shocked or pleased. Thank you.” The woman lift
ed a hand to pat him encouragingly on the chest but didn’t quite make it, seeming to remember they weren’t that close.

  Letty watched them climb in the car. She’d love to sit in on that conversation, but there was no way she was getting near the Ministry offices. And she had pretty well confirmed no one had caught up to Pax, not with this distraction and no better mention of her. Time to head back to Broadplain.

  18

  “Seven humans dead, now,” Lightgate reported, poring over her phone as she paced around near Pax’s feet. “Probably more by the time they’re done.”

  Her back against a pillar, sat on the floor, Pax had the same thoughts looping in her own head. I’m connected to it. I can’t be connected to it. I’m sick. I’m tired. This has to stop. She looked at her hands hanging over her knees, not sure if she could trust her own flesh. Did it work the other way, could the minotaur sense where she was? Worst of all, did she cause this?

  “Why,” Lightgate said, “are you so upset?” Pax frowned at her. The flamboyant drunk spread her arms in a questioning manner. “Excuse me, human? Are you unwell?”

  “No,” Pax said. “I ran into your berserker last night, it’s...” She stalled. The Fae hated the creatures of the Sunken City. She couldn’t explain to them that she might have formed a bond with the biggest, baddest thing down there. “The Dispenser made the minotaur unstable. That makes this my fault. I can’t take a moment over that?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Lightgate answered candidly. “I came back for a Fae-eating monster, or a human sticking it to the Ministry. Doing away with one of them, even. Yes.” She shook her head. “But this? Total lack of enthusiasm for the turnbold idea, legs going to jelly at the thought of humans dead? You’re a bit...” Lightgate searched for the best word. “Sad?”

  Pax opened her mouth to rebut her but paused, realising what Lightgate had just said. “Doing away with one of them? What are you talking about?”