by Laure Eve
‘You were dancing an Intentional, Rue.’
‘So? So what’s that?’
Lea giggled. ‘You don’t know much, do you?’ she said.
Lufe was smiling in his predictably superior fashion.
‘Oh, Grad suck your bones,’ said Rue, in high temper. Her pulse was still racing, and White had disappeared. What was she supposed to think about all this?
‘Well, there’s no need to be so rude. I want another drink, anyway. This is boring now. Lufe, get one for me, will you?’
‘I’ve got you three already. Find another boy to be your garçon.’
Rue turned away as they started to argue. Marches had wandered off, and Tulsent stood to the side, looking awkwardly at Lea and Lufe.
They’ll end up getting married for sure, Rue thought wearily.
She needed to get out of here.
She searched the corridors leading off the halls until she found a room thick with quiet and only a small, dim lamp for company. She sank down into a stuffed armchair, curling her legs under her, and stared at the paintings on the wall opposite until her eyes ached.
If only he would come in right now, as if he had been searching for her in every room. Then she could ask him what had happened. She could pin him down, alone, and demand that he tell her why he had done that. Why he behaved the way he did. Why and why.
Then, of course, he would kiss her.
She closed her eyes.
CHAPTER 22
THE CASTLE
Frith
When Frith opened his eyes, he saw a stone wall.
Stone walls only ever meant one thing.
Oh no, his heart whispered, and sank miserably, hiding itself away.
He levered himself up from the floor. The air was freezing. His skin furred protectively. The ground slabs were hard and cold against his palms.
As usual, there was no door to the room. Just four blank and bare walls.
This is a dream, said his mind. Remember?
I know that. But.
No. Listen. You’ve just been to a Castle meet. You always get these dreams after a Castle meet. You know this.
But it didn’t matter that he knew. The stone room was diseased, infecting him with fear.
‘Frith,’ came a familiar voice.
He looked around.
Ghost Girl stood a few feet away, her hands clasped primly before her.
This was strange. She wasn’t usually in this dream. The only other time she had been was in the first one he’d ever had. The one that had convinced him to work for her. The one he had carefully locked away in a part of his mind that he never wanted to visit, ever again.
‘We need to talk,’ she said. ‘Away from a meet.’
It was so hard to keep control in this place. He felt like a child again, swallowed up in the dark, waiting to be eaten.
‘Do we have to talk here?’ he said. The whine in his voice dismayed him.
‘Yes. This is the Castle. This is the only place we can meet outside of Life.’
Silence.
‘All right,’ he managed.
The girl stretched out a hand, her little fingers stroking the wall. She stroked as she talked, as if it helped her think.
‘When we first came to you,’ she said, ‘we showed you what was going to happen to you. What was coming. We asked you to help us. You said yes.’
Frith’s heart was pounding. God, it was so difficult to think straight in here.
‘I did.’
‘It’s been a while now. Your programme is going well.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Yours is a small nation compared to World. We know this. Despite your disadvantages, yours is the programme we are currently the most interested in.’
‘You flatter me.’
‘It’s because of White, Frith.’
Frith felt an icy thrill run gently along his skin.
‘He’s –’
He stopped. Tried again.
‘He’s doing well. He’s progressing each student I send to him at an extraordinary rate.’
‘I know. We’ve been watching him,’ said Ghost Girl.
He couldn’t stop a sudden dark wave surfacing on his face. ‘You’ve been …’
‘Watching him.’
Ghost Girl’s black holes for eyes were fixed on his face.
‘Are you keeping him close?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because you didn’t keep Wren close. You lost him.’
That was too far, even for her. ‘I didn’t lose him. World has him now. Snearing has him. He’s still in the programme, then, isn’t he? Besides, you told me to let him go!’
‘No. I just said not to stop him if he wanted to leave.’
God, she had a politician’s love of carefully chosen words. Frith remembered the conversation with her very well, just after Wren had had his tantrum and gone to World. She’d all but ordered him to stop trying to find Wren. At the time, he’d thought she was trying to smooth the situation over and stamp out any potential retribution between agents.
But occasionally, he wondered if she’d had a different motive. He wished he knew what it was. He wished he knew all her secrets. He was so powerless.
‘It’s different with White,’ he said. ‘He has nowhere else to go.’
Her little frame rippled. ‘Yes he does. All that’s stopping him is fear. You must give him good reasons to stay here, Frith. Don’t drive him away.’
‘I’m not going to!’
Silence.
Frith gathered his courage around him, as if it could protect him from the cold and the fear like a cloak.
‘You don’t tell me why I have to keep him close,’ he said. ‘All you say is that he’s powerful. He’s dangerous. But you tell me nothing more about him.’
She lowered her hand, watching him.
‘He’s the key,’ she said at last. ‘The key to what’s coming. That’s all you need to know.’
‘I realise that. When I found him, I could see how import--ant he was to you. You think your avatar is so anonymous, but you might as well have screamed it out loud. He’s what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t he? Why? Because of what he can do?’
She stood by the wall like a statue.
‘If you don’t want the assignment,’ she said quietly, ‘I could have him taken away from you and given to someone else.’
Frith felt his heart skip in fright. He fought from showing it.
‘I won’t let you do that,’ he said.
‘Why not? It’s all the same, surely. And if you don’t feel you can handle him …’
‘I didn’t say that –’
‘Then I’ll give him to World.’
‘They’ll kill him!’ Frith shouted.
Silence.
‘Do you care for him, Frith?’ came her little voice.
It shouldn’t have unbalanced him, her needling. But here, where everything was a hundred times itself, he was a spinning top, unwinding, wobbling wildly.
‘You owe me,’ he said. ‘I do your work for you, in the dark, stumbling blindly towards something I’m not even sure of. You don’t tell us who you are and how you know the things you know. Are you Talented? Where are you from? Are you all Worlders? Another nation? Which one? China?’
But she said nothing at all.
He spread his hands. ‘Is any of this even real?’
‘Yes. In a sense,’ she said. ‘Not in a sense you’d understand.’
‘Try me!’
‘You’re wasting time.’
‘How the hell should I know that? Sometimes you say It’s coming in the next few years. Sometimes you say it could be as long as twenty. Tell me. Make me understand!’
Outside the room, there came an ominous, deep-bellied, rolling boom.
The sound of buildings falling. Felt, rather than heard.
Frith’s insides squeezed.
‘Don’t bring It here,’ he pleaded, whispery. ‘Why are you bringing It here? To scare me?�
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‘We don’t have control over It, Frith. It roams the Castle, looking for a way in. We can’t let It find a way in!’
Another boom. Closer.
Oh god. Oh no.
He didn’t want to see It again. Once had been enough.
Another boom.
He sank to the floor, clenching every muscle he had to stop himself from leaping into full-blown panic.
You can’t frighten me into doing what you want!
‘We don’t have the luxury of playing nice, Frith,’ said Ghost Girl, as if he had spoken out loud. ‘Everyone will die. You know this!’
The walls of the room actually shuddered.
Frith felt a moan trickle out of his throat.
‘Stop this,’ he said. ‘Stop.’
She was still talking, but her words were getting lost, sucked into the gaping roar of sound outside.
‘Tell me the truth about White!’ he shouted. ‘Stop tricking me!’
No, you don’t.
No one controls me.
But she did. She did it with fear.
She had moved closer, bending down to his crouched figure, her thin, bony arms resting on her knees.
The booming was closer, and impossibly loud. His ears tried to shut down.
‘It isn’t real!’ he screamed. ‘None of it is! It’s just a dream!’
‘If you believe that,’ came her tickling voice in his ear, ‘then we’re all dead.’
He didn’t believe it. He knew it was real.
In his soul, he knew.
But they couldn’t keep playing him like a harp, and they couldn’t play with White’s life like this, and they couldn’t threaten things. Not any more.
He’d never had anyone of his own, and White was his.
Outside the room came a wet, bone-crunching roar.
‘Frith, listen to me,’ said Ghost Girl. He thought he could hear something in her voice. Urgency. Fear?
Wake up now, Frith. Wake up. God, wake up.
‘Frith, listen to me!’
He buried his head on his knees.
Wake up wake up.
WAKE UP WAKE UP!
WAKE
The roar had gone, cut off mid-fury.
It was dark.
It was warm.
It was his room.
He had curled in a ball in the midst of his bed. He unclenched.
His body was shaking. He stopped it.
They couldn’t be angry with him. He was doing what they wanted, after all. He would continue to keep White close. He would watch. He would know what White did before he did it. And whatever plan they had for White, Frith would make sure he was there to protect him from it.
He sat, clutching his bed blanket, thinking madly.
He had to find out everything he could about them. He had to know what they didn’t want him to know. So he hadn’t had much luck gaining information so far, but then he hadn’t even spoken to the only people who knew anything about them – the other agents they had recruited.
Which meant that now he had to try like hell to forge some sort of alliance with World, and with that awful bastard Snearing, to see what they knew. For now, they were his only source of information.
And if the Castle brought him more nightmares, trying to screw him into his place with terror, well, then.
He just wouldn’t sleep.
That was all.
CHAPTER 23
ANGLE TAR
White
It had been a long, tiresome day.
Lufe had been especially troublesome in his lesson. He had been moody and snappish, thoughtlessly rude, as if White had done something to offend him. It didn’t help that Lufe knew he was progressing much more rapidly than the rest of the group.
White sighed. He would go to bed early tonight. He would make sure his reports were ready. He would plan the rest of the week. When everything was done, then and only then would he allow himself to think about her, and the night of the ball, and the feel of her underneath his hands for the first time.
It was a stupid thing to have done, certainly, asking Rue to dance. But explicable. Within the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. When he wondered what Rue’s reaction to it had been, he found himself sliding anxiously away from pursuing that line of thought, as if he didn’t have the courage to contemplate any possible outcome. All of them, good and bad, scared him.
He set out from his classroom, locking it behind him. He would take the long route back to his rooms. It would give him time to think. He would eat in his rooms tonight, instead of the tutor’s dining hall; that meant sending through on the messaging service as soon as he got back, to get something in time from the kitchens for later.
The night air was frosted and thick. White liked the university about this time. The streets were quiet – students were elsewhere in the town, drinking or gambling or temple-visiting. Some of them might even be in their rooms studying. There was a low-level hum of life, of people moving about and lights shining through windows. He liked it. Liked to enjoy it from a distance.
It was at moments like these where this life he had chosen came into its own. There were other moments that made him think about just leaving. Not to go back to World, of course, but to find somewhere else new and accepting. Then he would shake off the illusion and see it for what it was. A life was a life, wherever he would be. And if he was honest, he didn’t have the courage to start all over again.
He didn’t miss the technology of World. He didn’t miss the stagnation of a culture that thought a lot of itself and consequently had decided that change was bad. Anything new startled them senseless, made them fear.
But Angle Tar was a place annoyed by its own backwardness, brash, needing to prove itself. It was ignorant, entrenched in history, origin, old ways and habits. It was also exciting and vibrant, embracing anything it could get its hands on. It was a patchwork place, made up of other cultures and influences, but it was proud of the fact, not ashamed of it, and claimed the result as its own; as ‘Angle Tarain’. Despite everything, the invasions and the con--querors of the last few hundred years, the reins of rule that had held it back and in a way continued to do so, it still struggled against the leash, snapping its jaws. He found it comforting, that such a small, inconsequential place had that spirit.
He reached his door, unlocking it and stepping inside, feeling his shoulders relax. They were not much, his rooms, but they had become a home to him. They were filled with his possessions, his and his alone, and inside them he could be himself, just be, without eyes on him and without judgement.
With this thought in his mind, he came to realise that someone was here, sitting in his chair by the fireplace.
‘Good evening,’ said Frith. He rose to his feet and bowed.
White said nothing.
Frith had never been in his rooms uninvited before. Not once. It was a violation and he knew it. He knew it would upset White. Something was wrong. Frith must be angry over something White had done wrong, and he would punish him for it by reminding him of his place here.
‘Good evening,’ said White eventually, hoping his voice had come out indifferent. It was a small rebellion, but it was there.
‘I’m sorry to come into your rooms unannounced. I had assumed you’d be back by now. So I thought I would wait.’
‘It is not a problem,’ said White. He hung up his great-coat. A maid had been in earlier and lit the fire, and it was beautifully warm. ‘Have you eaten? I was going to send a message now to the kitchens.’
‘In fact, I have. But please carry on. I don’t want to interrupt your routine.’
Frith sat back down. White crossed to the messaging plate and wrote his order, then took the chair opposite Frith and met his gaze.
‘Would you care for a drink?’ said White.
‘Certainly. I’ll get it, though, no need for you to get up again. Whiskie?’
‘Yes. It is on the bottom shelf.’
White watched Frith retrieve the bo
ttle and select two glasses from the top cabinet with deft hands.
‘You are back from World earlier than you expected,’ said White. Whatever Frith wanted, he was determined to take his time about it, and White was not going to let it hang like a cloud over the table.
‘Yes,’ said Frith. ‘It went quite well, this time.’
‘I suppose you cannot talk about what you were doing there.’
Frith gave him a sidelong glance.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really. But you may want to know that I happened to see Wren there.’
White was silent. Inside his chest, his heart skipped, nervous.
‘Why?’ he managed, after a moment to steady himself.
‘No one gets to defect to another country for free, White. He works for their Talented programme. I heard tell he’s their little test rabbit. They prod and poke him to see if they can quantify what he is and how he can do what he does. You know, with science.’
Frith said the last word with a kind of mild amusement, that for him seemed to translate as downright derision.
‘How is he?’ said White quietly.
‘Oh, quite ridiculous-looking. He’s had his whole body changed, in the way Worlders love to do. He’s all slim and narrow, and has silver-coloured eyes, of all things. God knows what purpose they serve. I suppose he’s just trying to fit in.’
White watched Frith dip a lemon sugar cube in his whiskie glass and soak the liquid up before putting it into his mouth. He had the sweetest tooth White had ever come across.
They sat in silence for a moment. Frith selected another cube and dipped it into his glass. ‘How did the ball go?’ he said.
It was actually impressive, really it was. Every time it was impressive. There was no hint whatsoever that this was what Frith was angry about; but it could only be this.
‘It was odd,’ said White. ‘But interesting.’
‘You’ve said that about every social occasion I’ve sent you to,’ Frith said, with a smile.
‘I enjoy the formality of it,’ said White. ‘Everything has a rule that should be obeyed. I enjoy the structure of the evening, and when each dance comes I understand what is happening. It is the talking and drinking I do not enjoy.’