by Abbey, Kit
“Oh,” said William. Not that skilled at tracking down people though, otherwise he and Rowan wouldn’t be busting their asses all over town looking for the mysterious Gwendoline Shannon. He kept this thought to himself.
“Don’t tell anyone about the Bouncer, and don’t try it again.” Jones crossed the room with remarkable sped to stand in front William, who tried to step back but discovered the kitchen island blocking his path. “Or I will kill you. There, you see? That was a threat.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone,” insisted William, “alright? Ok? It’s like it never even happened. Bouncer? What Bouncer?
“I’ll know if you do.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
Jones nodded, satisfied that he’d gotten his point across. He turned and left the room without another word.
Chapter 20.
To William’s relief things began to settle down, and over the next few weeks nothing out of the ordinary occurred. (Funny, how quickly Illuding stopped seeming out of the ordinary). His headaches were slowly fading, which was good. And he had only seen Jones once, from a distance, which was even better.
Most days he would meet Rowan in the entrance room, or Albert’s room as everyone called it, and she would drive them all over the city and its surrounds. William Illuded things until they solidified, or changed appearance or function, or whatever was necessary. Rowan would make some kind of negative comment, (although William suspected he was starting to grow on her. She hadn’t threatened to cut anything off in a while, and he could’ve sworn he’d almost made her smile the other day), and they would get back in the car and drive to the next place. Sometimes they would return to the Grey Building while the sun was still high, sometimes it wouldn’t be until it was beginning to rise again over the eastern hills.
Once a week or so he headed down underwater with Lucy and David for more lessons with Madeline. Lucy and David did not like him. Not at all. But it wasn’t William’s fault that he found the exercises Madeline set easy, while David and Lucy struggled. They also didn’t like that William hung out with Chris. Apparently, as an Illuder, he was too good for the likes of Chris. Whatever. William wasn’t losing sleep over it.
It was during his third lesson with Madeline that William asked a stupid question.
“Is it possible,” he asked, “to Illude inside someone’s head?”
Madeline stopped wrinkling her nose at Lucy’s poorly Illuded peas and looked at him intently. “What do you mean?”
“Uh, well.” Already William was wishing he hadn’t said anything. “Like instead of Illuding an object so it changes, you could just Illude inside a person’s head and change what they see.”
Madeline stared at him, and then stood up. “Come with me.” She led him through a door at the back of the room, into a small office. Most of the space was taken up by the desk. It was not cluttered; a neat row of books, a selection of fancy pens, a leather-bound journal and a lone framed photo. The photo was filled with a dam wall. A thin layer of water ran like lace down the expanse of concrete, descending into chaos as it crashed into the river at the bottom. Rocks, black, shiny and worn smooth by the water rose gracefully from the churning white rapids. And on one of these rocks perched two small figures. William leaned forward to get a closer look at them. A young woman and a young man, who had to have been twins. Matching dimples and green eyes, even the way they titled their heads to the left as they grinned was the same. She had a stylish sixties bob, (which alone would have confirmed the decade this picture was from, if the psychedelic patterns on his jacket or the cut of her miniskirt hadn’t) and his hair was long and curling at his collar. They clung to each other for balance on the slippery surface, oozing youth and happiness.
It was pretty obvious that the young woman was Madeline. It had never occurred to William that Madeline might have been young once, let alone happy.
“Have you tried it?” asked wrinkled and white haired Madeline from across the desk.
William looked away from the photo. “Tried what?”
“Illuding inside someone’s head, as you put it.”
“No,” he said quickly. Too quickly? “No I haven’t. I was just wondering, that’s all. It was a stupid question.”
She tapped the desk with one hand and her chin with the other. “Are you lying?”
“No.” William forced his foot to stop madly tapping.
“You won’t get in trouble, if you have. If you could do that, I dare say Mr. Grey would see you amply rewarded.”
Rewards did not appeal to William as much not being killed by Jones did. “I’ve never tried it, honestly. I was just wondering, is all.”
“Alright.” Madeline leant back. “Don’t try and attempt it. Messing around with minds can get messy fast for the unskilled.”
“It can?”
She nodded. “Madness, visions, excessive blood loss. It’s not something to mess around with boy, do you understand me.”
William desperately wanted to ask what she meant by visions, because he hadn’t forgotten his episode in the elevator, but he couldn’t think of how to ask without arousing more suspicion. “I won’t,” was all he said.
Everything about her demeanour suggested she didn’t believe him, but she let the matter drop.
Chapter 21.
When he wasn’t out with Rowan or asking Madeline questions better left unasked, William explored the Grey Building. A lot of the higher floors were access restricted, and the same went for the basements levels. (William had no idea how deep into the ground the Grey Building actually stretched, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if the bottommost floor was hot to touch because of molten lava bubbling directly underneath). But even with the bottom and top levels beyond his reach, there was still a whole lot of stuff to investigate in the middle.
Five floors were devoted to housing employees, the main Company library spanned one level (there were smaller libraries scattered about the place too, with tables and comfy chairs and fireplaces), and a gym took up another. The level William liked the most was the 27th floor. The fun floor. A cinema, a pool, and (this was the part William really loved) a bar. Better yet, a bar where ID wasn’t necessary and everything was cheap.
He regularly met Chris and his crew there for drinks. His “crew” consisted of six other men and one woman, all of them collectors.
“We can’t all be fancy pants Illuders like you and Lady Rowan,” Chris had explained the first night William had met them there, “the rest of us have to settle for other, less prestigious, tasks. It takes cogs of all sizes to keep the Grey Corp machine moving.”
“So you guys can’t Illude at all?” asked William.
Jacob, a sallow young man, took a long drink and said, “most everyone here has a drop of Illuding power in them. It’s just very small.”
Clarissa, the lone girl, tall and with long black hair gave a mock shudder. “I hate Illuding. I can barely make the outline of an illusion, and that alone gives me a headache that lasts all week!”
The others all nodded and agreed that illusion making was hard and altogether rather painful.
“It’s not really,” said William, “I mean, it hurt my head a little at first but not anymore.”
“That’s because you’re swimming in power, Will,” said Chris, “which, as I was saying, is why you do what you do, and we do what we do.”
“And what exactly do you do, then?”
Clarissa muttered something he didn’t catch, and the others laughed. “A bit of everything,” said Chris. “Collection work.”
“Collection work?”
“Yeah. Like, Mr. Grey wants something that’s over there, and so we go and fetch it from over there and bring it over here.”
“I used to cart fish from the docks to the fish and chip shops down at the harbour,” said William. “I hope for your sakes your collection work doesn’t involve fish and the hot sun, because that was nasty.”
Judg
ing by all the snickering, Chris and his crew found this comment funny. “We don’t really encounter a lot of fish,” said Jacob. For some reason everyone found this comment hysterical.
“Ok,” said William, a little confused. He did the only thing an outsider can do when faced with an inside joke, and changed the subject. “So, Grey Corp hires people who can’t Illude then?”
“It would be pretty stupid if they didn’t,” said Jacob, “there’s a few hundred people working for Grey Corp. How many do you think can properly Illude?”
“I don’t know,” said William, who did not want to look stupid in front of his new friends, “Jones said that it’s become less common in the last few years.”
The group stilled instantly, bottles frozen midway between table and mouths. Clarissa broke the silence, “you’ve… You’ve spoken to Jones?”
“We’ve shared an elevator,” said William. “Words were exchanged.”
“God,” said a softly spoken young man, William was pretty sure his name was Jeff, “I’ve been here four years, I’ve seen the guy once!”
“He passed me in the hall,” said Jacob, “gave me fucking chills. Dude’s scary.”
“I heard,” said Chris, “this one time, a researcher accidentally spilt coffee on him, and he gutted him with a letter opener, right there on the table.”
“I heard that the old mayor was trying to shut Grey Corp down and they sent Jones to her office he killed the whole staff with his bare hands,” offered Jacob.
A short punk looking guy named Paul spoke up. “I heard, that if you mess up bad enough, Grey Corp locks you up with Jones for a night and you’re never heard from again.”
“I heard,” said Barry, “that even Rowan is afraid of him.”
This last statement proved too ludicrous, and was met with snorts of derision from around the table. “I feel bad for you man,” said Jeff, “having to work with her.”
“Well,” said William, “she certainly takes some gett-“
“Forget about that,” interrupted Clarissa, “you’ve actually spoken to Caspien Jones! What did you talk about?”
“Well, I couldn’t figure out how the elevat- Wait,” said William, “Caspien?”
“That’s his name,” said Chris.
“Caspien?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t recommend calling him that though. I heard he ripped the tongue out of the last person who did.”
“And then he made the guy eat it,” added Paul.
“But, seriously, Caspien?”
Chris shrugged, “it’s no weirder than Moondance.”
A sullen guy, who’d been introduced to William as Danny, threw an empty bottle at Chris’ head, “don’t call me that!”
“You shouldn’t be so ashamed of the name your mother gave you!” said Chris, and the two descended into semi-good natured bickering.
Clarissa got up and moved around the table, shoving Chris aside to sit next to William, “so what’s he like?”
“Clarissa,” said Jeff, from William’s other side, “has lust in her heart for Jones.”
“I do not!” snapped Clarissa. Then she giggled, “well, maybe a little. He’s just so sexy!”
“No.” said William, quite appalled. “He’s not.”
“Oh he so is! He has those scars, and he’s so dangerous! His eyes! His hair!”
Jeff rolled his eyes, and William suspected Clarissa went off on this tangent quite often. He lent over to William and spoke in undertone while Clarissa continued rattling off all the features of Jones that she found appealing.
“So tell me, what’d you think of Albert?”
Chapter 22.
The Mustang was parked in front of a McDonalds in a bad neighbourhood. Rowan sat on the bonnet, perfecting her already perfect bored expression. William sat on the curb, trying to Illude his watch into a watch that worked, with limited success. He had no idea what they were doing there, and he knew from experience that any attempts to get Rowan to tell him would fail. She may have softened towards him ever so slightly, but not that much. And so he fiddled with his watch, and waited.
After an hour or so of this a familiar blue Jaguar flew around the corner and slid into the car park. The overly confident Chinese guy jumped out with a couple of friends, and they headed, laughing and joking, into the restaurant. Rowan hopped off the bonnet and walked over the Jaguar. William didn’t need to be told to follow.
“Turn it back,” she said.
“But Madeline hasn’t taught us how to undo illusions yet.”
Rowan shrugged. “It’s the same as putting one on, but backwards.”
Armed with that very helpful advice, William focused on the vehicle in front of him. After long minutes of concentration, it started to flicker from Jaguar to Commodore and back again. Before he could get any further in this, angry shouts started up behind him. He turned around, and saw the Chinese guy advancing on them, followed by three friends. He was waving a caramel Sunday about angrily.
“What the fuck are you doing to my car!” he was backed by a chorus of ‘yeahs!’ and manly grunts from his friends.
Rowan sighed. “Mr. Lin, you didn’t uphold your end of the agreement.”
“The fuck I didn’t! I told you where the girl was!”
“Grey Corp employees watched the address you gave us for weeks, without a single sign of Gwendoline Shannon.”
“She was there!”
“The deal was to tell us where she is, not where she was Mr. Lin.”
Mr. Lin did not appear to have an argument for that, so he settled on making some aggressive noises. His friends did the same. William thought they sounded like an avant-garde choir.
“You should be thankful, Mr. Lin, that on account of all the good service you’ve provided Grey Corp we are not taking more… Extreme measures.”
“Look, alright, alright, fine. Fine! Give me another week, I'll find where she is now. It looked like she had some dental work done, I’ll track her down through her dentist.”
Rowan looked at him like he was an idiot, and spoke slowly. “I'm afraid we've lost faith in your ability to find the girl. Deal's off.”
He scowled. “The hell it is! You better not mess with my car!”
Rowan didn’t even have to look at the car, it was simply a Jaguar one minute, and the next it was returned permanently to its state of Commodoreness. This was first time William had seen Rowan display her Illuding abilities, and he was a little put out by the ease in which she wielded them.
Mr. Lin felt only outrage.
“You bitch! You fucking cunt of a bitch!”
William could not imagine anyone being stupid enough to talk to Rowan like that. But Mr. Lin clearly had more depths of stupidity yet to plum, because then he pulled out a gun.
“Oh you can not be seri-“
Rowan did not finish the sentence. Mr. Lin fired the gun three times in quick succession, and all of the bullets took her in the chest. She was thrown back into the car with a heavy smack, and she slid slowly down to the bitumen, leaving a trail of red behind her.
Images flooded William’s mind at the site of her broken body; of his Mother lying bleeding, the broken window, glass...
“Holy fucking mother of God!” shouted one of Mr. Lin’s friends, dragging William back to the present, “she was Grey Corp!”
“Are you insane?” shrieked another.
“Just shut up!” Mr. Lin covered his mouth like he might vomit, then said, “just shut the fuck up and kill the kid! Shoot the fucker! Do it!”
William realised that ‘the kid,’ was him, and that three idiots were doing what Mr. Lin said and aiming their weapons his way. He reacted without hesitation, without fully comprehending what it was he was doing. Mind still full of memories of his dying mother, he looked at the four men, and every cell inside him screamed for them to die.
And they died. They damn well exploded. Blood, flesh, brain and a heap of other grey and pink and
red and blue things sprayed the car park in a surprisingly large radius. Somewhere nearby car tyres screeched, and a woman screamed.
William paid these things no mind. He wiped the bits of men from his eyes, and crouched at Rowan’s side. She was still breathing. He did not need to check her pulse to determine this. He could see her breathing. He could see the illusions that made up the air that she was breathing, and the illusions that made up Rowan, and the illusions that made up everything. He could see the hateful bullets lodged inside of her, and they were illusions too. And it was easy, so easy, to dispel them.
Blood rushed and filled the cavities inside of her where the bullets had squatted, and she was dying faster. This was no matter. Her encroaching death was an illusion. Everything was an illusion. This was so startlingly obvious to him now; he marvelled that he had not grasped the concept sooner.
Health was an illusion, and so was illness. How easy it was to replace one with the other. The sinister holes in Rowan’s chest disappeared, and she was whole and well again.
“You’re ok now,” said William. “It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s...”
Consciousness left him suddenly, and he fell to the black bitumen beside her.
Chapter 23.
William slowly opened his eyes, and then immediately wished he hadn’t. The walls were white and filled with glare, and a loud voice that was to his ears what the walls were to his eyes said, “he’s awake!”
William squinted in the direction of the affronting voice, and saw it belonged to an excitable looking girl holding a very big needle. William jerked back involuntarily at the site of it and fell out of bed. He landed on cold tiles in a tangle of sheets and wires and IV drips and learned that falling out of bed in such a manner whilst wearing a hospital gown is not a move conductive to modesty.
“Mr. Black,” said a voice that was all too familiar. “How good to see you up and about.”