The Rook: A Novel

by O'Malley, Daniel

  This estate’s very hush-hush reputation is likely the result of the weird things seen in the sky above it. Shapes coursing through the night, brilliant light bouncing off the clouds, and people ghosting along the lawns doing bizarre gymnastics routines. To the bored teens of the village, it’s like having the Cirque du Soleil and a jet stunt team living next door. To me, it sounds like home.

  Now, let me make this clear for you. There is only one Estate. It’s not a case of putting all your eggs in one basket; it’s a matter of keeping your valuables in a safe. All the genetic potential of the British Isles is there, a vast resource of wealth and power. And by putting them all in the same place, we ensure that they mesh. The Pawns of the Checquy work together so well because they all receive the same education in the same place.

  One time I watched a documentary about guns. The thing that really struck me was how big a deal it was when gun parts started being interchangeable. You could take the hammer out of one gun and put it in another, and it would work. It meant that no gun was unique, and that they all could be repaired easily. It’s the same with the Pawns. Most of them, despite their gigantic variety in terms of supernatural ability, can be slotted easily into a new team.

  Ironically, it’s generally the misfits who rise to the Court. None of us is standard Checquy. Even among the unusual, we’re strange.

  Anyway, the secret estate needed further investigation, and I wasn’t about to trust anyone else, so I was going to have to check it out. The kids assured me that guards would periodically come along on these “mega-cool four-wheeler things with lights,” but you could easily see them coming and hide. I wasn’t terribly impressed with the security arrangements of this school. On the real Estate, hiding in the woods wouldn’t protect you from the guards. For that matter, there wouldn’t be a quaint little village nearby either. Still, this place was on a budget (I should know), and its main protection was its secrecy.

  So that night, I put on the infiltration clothes I’d brought with me. Black everything, and a ski mask to boot, under which I was sweating like a goldfish in a wok. Most important were the gloves. I’d cut holes just big enough to reveal the very tips of my fingers.

  Stepping into those woods, I was petrified. I’d felt so calm camping the night before. Now, every little sound was enough to freak me out. There was hardly any light and I could easily imagine some great beast from the dawn of time burbling out of the forest and dragging me off to its secluded glen. It’s not that I have that great an imagination, it’s just that I know what’s out there. Thank God there was the gully to follow, or I would have gotten lost immediately. As it was, I had my eyes fixed on the gully so firmly that I actually walked into the fence. Luckily, this little enterprise lacked the funds for razor wire, or I’d be there still.

  My heart was pounding as I slid under the fence, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be. When I was little, and my teachers rousted us out of bed for those midnight games, I hated it. I was fit enough, but I couldn’t bear the knowledge that people I lived and studied with were going to reach out of the darkness and snatch me. I loathed the sudden shock when they swung out of a tree or leaped out of a pile of leaves and pinned me gleefully to the ground. I knew they weren’t spiteful. It was just part of the game. Still, inevitably I would be caught first. I simply couldn’t take the offensive.

  On the other side of the fence, the trees were fewer and farther apart. I saw no sign of the guards, so I made my way to the edge of the woods. I wanted to see what kind of facility I was dealing with.

  To begin with, it was ugly. Whoever set up this place had picked some prime real estate. But the site was so beautiful that it seemed a dreadful shame to have some no-account architect crap out the blocky structures that squatted on the lawns. One thing that caught my eye was the utter lack of windows in the buildings.

  Also, it was small. There were only three or four buildings, and their facilities were pitiful. There wasn’t even a cricket pitch. There were, however, several outdoor shooting ranges on this side of the installation.

  I waited for a long time at the edge of the trees and shrank back into the shrubbery when one of those guards came zooming by. I thought back to my Estate training and the teacher who’d instructed us in subtle outdoor movement. He’d been in the SAS and had crawled through every kind of terrain known to man. I’d always been a disappointment to him, but he’d concealed his contempt well. If he’d seen the way these guards checked their fence lines, he’d have had them flogged. Maybe they’d grown complacent, secure in their secrecy. Or maybe this place couldn’t afford the best.

  After the guard passed by, I scuttled carefully across the lawns toward one of the buildings. They didn’t even have floodlights! I blended in well in my black, but I wasn’t naive—I knew I wasn’t invisible. There were some fixed security cameras, but my rudimentary surveillance had turned them up with ease.

  I slipped between the cameras and pressed myself against the wall, where a bush had been permitted to grow. Crouching down, I was fairly well concealed. I took some long, deep breaths and tried to calm myself. My heart was about to climb out of my bottom, but I was secretly kind of thrilled. My plan was actually working. I was almost ready to check out the door to the nearest building when I heard a sound—and I froze.

  There was a metallic fnikt, and a light gleamed as a man lit a cigarette, not two meters from me.

  Oh. My. Holy. Fuck.

  Just thinking about it, I want to throw up. This guy, with a gun, had come out of the door for a smoke. And I had been about to walk around the corner and bump right into him. I wasn’t shaking. I was rooted to the ground, which makes what happened next even more unexpected.

  I reached my hand out, around the corner, and brushed my fingertips against his wrist. Electricity coursed between us, and, well, you know how it goes.

  In fact, you’re the only one who knows.

  It was just the slightest of touches, but I reached out from inside and didn’t let him feel me or see me. Did you know you can do that? Everybody’s eyes have blind spots, and I created a new one that encompassed me. In fact, it wasn’t just a blind spot. I cut myself entirely out of his perception. I could have stood in front of him and screamed, but as long as I kept contact with him, he wouldn’t know I was there. It took concentration, but I managed it.

  Now, I could have forced him to walk into the building, but it’s very, very hard to compel someone who’s conscious to do something without his knowing about it. And I didn’t want him to realize that anything strange was happening that night. So we stood there for several minutes while he smoked and I sweated.

  I took the opportunity to examine the guy. He was dressed in a green uniform with no insignia. He did, however, have a name tag that read GUSTAVSON. Finally, he flicked his cigarette butt away, turned, and went back inside. I, having carefully moved my hand from his wrist to the nape of his neck, followed him.

  We walked down a long, tedious hallway. The interior designers for this estate, apparently having graduated from the same school as the architect, had elected to go with cinder-block walls painted the color of bile. The walls gleamed nauseatingly under the humming fluorescent tubes, and it was kind of like walking down someone’s well-lit large intestine. Now, if you ever get a free moment and would like to set yourself a little challenge, try this. Find somebody who’s taller than you (shouldn’t be hard), put your fingers on the back of his neck, and then try to follow him as he walks around briskly. You can’t break contact with him, and it’s not a good idea to step on his heels. So I was trotting along after Gustavson, awkwardly nipping along on my tiptoes.

  We passed doorways, but fortunately we didn’t pass any other people. If we had, I would have had Gus shoot them and then abruptly reevaluated my plans. Instead, Gus walked into his office, which turned out to be some sort of security hub. There were some monitors, and for a horrible moment I worried that there might be an alarm going off, that I had missed a camera. But all t
he outdoor views on the monitors were ones I’d carefully avoided. No alarms were sounding. I was becoming less and less impressed with this place’s security. My guard settled back into his chair, spoke an authoritative “All clear” into his walkie-talkie, and peered without any real interest at the monitors. This was not terribly revealing. So I touched his mind and soothed him into a very deep sleep.

  Then I took a closer look around. On the monitors, I saw shooting ranges, a driveway, and a helipad. There were also some indoor views, and it was these I was most interested in. All of them had their lights on, which seemed like a shocking waste of electricity, but maybe this was because there were no windows. I saw a garage with some cars and trucks all painted an uninteresting brown. I saw a large room that seemed to be a distressingly cheap combination of dining hall and gymnasium.

  There were two changing / shower rooms that were clearly designed to afford the bathers no privacy whatsoever. No barriers, no cubicles, just a row of showerheads. And the fact that there were cameras in there gave me the absolute creeps. These were for the students? At the Estate we’d each only shared a bathroom with one roommate. It doesn’t pay to deprive adolescents of their privacy, especially the genetically variant types. And these chambers were completely spartan. No tiles, no paint, just cement. The closest they came to ornaments was a line of hooks along the wall. At least they kept the genders separate, unless it was a matter of kids with bizarre physical features in one room, and those without in the other.

  Then I found the dormitories. Two rooms, with six beds lined up in one and eight in the other. The lights were glaring down on them, but the occupants seemed to be sleeping relatively peacefully. There were no real amenities in these rooms either. No chests of drawers for their clothes, no curtains around the beds to give them any privacy. This was like a prison. I thanked God I hadn’t been sent here as a child.

  Now, this was all fairly informative, but I needed to know more. There had to be offices, classrooms. Apparently, only the students and the grounds were monitored, but the compound included several other buildings. They had to be keeping the records somewhere. There was a map panel up on the wall, with little glowing bulbs that I realized were cameras and alarm sensors. After a bit of basic orientation, I figured out that I was in what the map coyly referred to as Admin. The other buildings were, variously, Living Quarters, Instruction, and Physical Plant—but the biggest by far was Medical. Since I didn’t have the time to check out the other three, I went for a little walk around Admin. Plus, I’m a bureaucrat, so I’ll always head for the filing cabinets.

  My exploration yielded some storage rooms, a little kitchenette, and finally the offices. I was surprised to find that although their surveillance was primitive, they actually bothered to lock the doors. Maybe they worried that the students would wander around. Not that a locked door made a difference to me, since we’d all been rigorously trained in “the ladylike arts of breaking and entering,” as my teacher had insisted on referring to them. I peeled off my fingertipless woolen gloves and pulled on a pair of latex ones. Fingerprints, you know. A little twiddling with some picks, and I was in an office like any other. Computers, coffee machine, dying plants. I carefully locked the door behind me—I didn’t want one of Gus’s friends wandering in.

  Some memoranda on one of the desks identified this installation as Camp Caius, which to me sounded simultaneously military and recreational. Like a place you might send a fat Roman legionary for his summer holidays. The filing cabinets looked like they had the greatest potential for yielding useful information. Computers are all very well, but I can’t pick their locks as easily as I can those on doors. So I let my gloved fingers do some walking. And I came up with quite a few interesting facts, although they seemed to be limited to the topics of finances and the students. The rest of the information must be kept in the archives or in a different office.

  The earliest records I could find for this Camp Caius dated back twenty years. I skimmed the financial statements. All I was really looking for was confirmation that this was where those missing funds were going. And it was. I only had to look for those damn account numbers (which I’d memorized by that point, I’d looked over the records so often). I was also curious to see what they were spending their money on, since it was clearly not going toward any luxuries. It turned out that a sizable portion of the funds was being blown on training fees and surgical facilities. I don’t know who they were hiring as teachers at Camp Caius, but they were paying them more than the staff at the true Estate makes, and we get the best. The surgeons were making even more. I jotted down some names of instructors and doctors and then checked my watch.

  I figured I had another half hour before I needed to get out.

  What next? I turned to the students’ files. This school seemed to hold on to its kids for a while longer than the Estate. Students didn’t leave until they were twenty-three, and then they all seemed to be forwarded on to some place called Albion. The only problem was that I couldn’t find any information on what or where Albion might be. Still, wherever it was, it wasn’t heavily populated. Camp Caius had only produced something like fifteen graduates in five years. Which made no sense. I mean, if they had fourteen students right now… Then I found out how many students died here. Quite a few. As in, more often than not—some in training exercises, most under the knife.

  The really frustrating thing, however, was that there was no mention of any members of the Court. I couldn’t imagine an operation like this opening without one of the elite overseeing it. Only we eight possess the control needed to set it up. The financial access. The procurement of the children. Nobody else in the Checquy wields the necessary power in so many fields. I skimmed through pages and pages, but found no mention of any of us. All reports were forwarded to the Founder, but no explanation was given as to who the Founder was.

  I was actually quite interested in the current students. Who were they? How were they obtained? The answers might give me some clues in tracking down the mastermind. I eyed the photocopier in the corner, then decided to risk it. Gus wouldn’t be waking up anytime soon, and if I just Xeroxed the front page of each file, I’d have the basic details. I bustled over and tentatively fired up the machine. It was noisy, but it sucked in the papers I fed it and spat out the duplicates. I had just finished putting the last files away in their drawers when someone tried the door. I froze.

  Don’t panic, I told myself. It’s one of Gus’s buddies doing his rounds. But did that mean he’d found Gus and tried to wake him? Or was he on his way back to the command center, checking the doors as he went? There were no alarms I could hear. All of these thoughts flashed through my brain before I heard the sound of a key in the lock.

  Absolute terror jump-started my thoughts, and those thoughts carried my body three quick steps behind the door. It swung open, and one of the guards came in. He took a cursory look around. It wasn’t Gus; I knew it couldn’t have been, but I was relieved. This guard was taller and younger. His gun wasn’t in his hand, which reassured me a little. He was just beginning to turn away when the photocopier beeped. He spun around, his hand going for his gun, but I tore one of my gloves off, reached out, and made the connection.

  I silenced his voice.

  I stilled his body.

  I poured sensation into his spine.

  He never even saw me as I overloaded his system. He dropped to his knees, twitching, mute. I hadn’t hit anybody like that since my earliest times in the Estate, before I learned to control my powers. His senses were completely overwhelmed. The London Symphony Orchestra could have been playing in the room. The entire Playboy Bunny Corps could have been doing the cancan right in front of him, and he wouldn’t have known.

  Then I knocked him out completely. He buckled and sprawled on the floor, and I knelt down and shut his eyes. He would wake in an hour or so with a terrible headache. And soiled trousers. There would be no proof of my coming or going. At least, aside from this poor schmo’s being on the floor
. Maybe he’d put it down to some sort of seizure. Hurriedly, I shut off the photocopier, taking care to use my gloved hand, and then I left. I risked a look in the office and found Gus sprawled in his chair, just as I’d left him. I paused for a moment, and then went in. It would look rather suspicious, I decided, if two guards were found unaccountably unconscious.

  I laid my fingers carefully on Gus’s temples and reached in with my powers, rousing and wakening. He sighed and his eyes opened briefly, but his brain was still not taking in any information. He was no longer submerged in the trance I’d put him in, just in a normal drowsy state, so light that he would come out of it without ever being aware that he’d napped. I backed out of the office quietly.

  Getting out was just as easy as getting in. When I finally got into the car, Wolfgang looked at me strangely, but I was too busy driving us the hell away to spend any time soothing him. It wasn’t until we had gone seventy miles and I had to pull off to the side of the road to go to the toilet that I realized I was grinning like a loon, and humming the 1812 Overture.

  So much to think about!

  Love,

  Me

  19

  Myfanwy knocked hesitantly on the guest room door, carefully carrying two cups of tea. She and Bronwyn had agreed the previous night that, since they’d both had quite a bit to drink and it was so late, her sister would stay over.

  “Bronwyn?” There were the sounds of someone waking up with tremendous difficulty and getting struck by a hangover. “I have tea for you.” She heard a mumbling that she interpreted as “come in,” so she did. Her sister was lost in the thick covers of a large bed, but a mass of blond hair helped Myfanwy pinpoint her whereabouts.

  She sat carefully on the edge. An arm emerged and gingerly took the tea. Finally, Bronwyn managed to get herself sat up, her hands wrapped around the cup.