by Kara Silver
He tried, she had to give him that, launching into a long description of earth and its composition, about protoliths, about igneous and sedimentary and metamorphic rocks, and the minerals they were made from, and so it was just a question of breaking them down, into their particles and then into their atoms, and these into—
“All right! Please! Just, start with smaller pebbles, yeah?” came Kennedy’s plea, one she regretted a second later when one hit her. And a second after that, when another one did the same. And two seconds after that, when the third—
“Again.” Aeth was implacable. “Just feel. Search, then find.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one being pelted with things that hurt!” Kennedy fumed.
“And you wouldn’t be, either, if you’d just focus!” he yelled back. “Look. I’m sorry—”
“Thank you.”
“That this isn’t working. We should stop.”
“No. Again.” She could be just as hard. “And you know what? I think those are too small. Let’s soup this up to medium.” And stubborn.
“Fine.” His voice said it was anything but as something the size of a small boulder bloomed in his hand, coursing fire through every one of her veins.
“Aeth!” The big stone hurtled toward Kennedy, but that wasn’t why she was half-screaming. No, that was because a force, sudden, swift and strong, was dragging her away from the projectile, was shoving her backward with unstoppable strength, sending her sprawling. “Please! Help me!” she cried.
Because she couldn’t halt her skid-slide and was already on the other edge of the roof, banging crazily against chimneys and statues as she was hurled over the side, feet first, into empty space.
17
With an inhuman screech, one of the hermai there turned, and Kennedy made a desperate, last-ditch hail-Mary grab for it, and got an arm around it. In a second, her other arm looped it, too, and she hung, suspended in nothingness, over the ground far below. She kicked out, once, twice, and again until she had enough momentum to swing her feet up onto the roof’s edge. The herma twisted back into its original position, pulling her with it, and she collapsed over it, just for a second, before rolling off.
“Thank you. Oh, thank you!” she gasped, patting it in gratitude. Where was Aeth? Still where she’d left him, looking…was that scared? “Aeth?” she called.
“You idiot!” he stormed. “See what you almost did? You could have killed yourself, or hurt someone!”
“That…was me?” She’d felt something surge through her, but—
“See why you need to train? Again,” he shouted, her only warning before a rock headed her way.
And then…something shifted. Not quite the tectonic plates moving apart she’d perhaps expected, but like a screen between her and the world around her thinned, and the hard missile coming towards her was in sharp focus, delineated so it shone, yet at the same time was like a shadow, because she was hyper-there, sharp and still and silent. And then, as she breathed out…it was gone. The stone that had been heading for her was gone and a small dust debris tail, like that of a comet, trailed where it had been, before that sprinkled to the ground.
Kennedy didn’t dare blink as she examined the specks for the second she had before they blended into the stone of the roof. She pointed at them and raised wide eyes to Aeth. “What… Was that…me? I did that? Holy cow, I smithereened!”
“You do know that ‘smithereen’ isn’t actually a verb?” Aeth observed. “And this that you’re doing now, this running up and down on the spot and punching the air, would be…what?”
“It’s a victory dance, you ignoramus!” A triumphant Kennedy reached for him, to pull him in by both arms and force him to jump up and down with her. “Oh, no, your hair—it’s no longer perfect!” She held a hand over her mouth in mock horror.
“If you could see yours—”
He stopped at the chime Kennedy associated with the end of her shift, tolled by that annoying bell, thin and smug in the near distance, and followed by the other sign of midnight, the heavy knock on the museum’s door. The thuds carried easily up to the roof.
Kennedy dashed to the edge to make sure it was the security guard who took over from her. Damn! She was supposed to have the main door open and ready for him. “Do you think he’ll—” she began, but Aeth had gone. Pity she couldn’t do his vanishing trick yet and had to take the stairs. And pity Aeth had poofed off, when she had a dozen questions lighting up in her head, here, there, and everywhere, like the spots in a dance pad.
Her brain was the only part of her wanting to skitter about. Every muscle she had ached, if not from the mental stress of yesterday morning’s tutorial and practical, which already seemed a week ago, along with the series of shocks she’d received, then the physical exertion of mad-dash cycling around half the city to a sports field and the police station. Not to mention the training.
“I said not to mention the training,” she muttered, trying to lighten the mood while she dragged herself up the staircase to her room. And she didn’t want to think about the training, not the cross-country-club puke-fest or the let’s-pelt-Kennedy-with-rocks roof party.
Stoned, was her thought on waking up a few hours later, still, she was convinced, in the same position in which she’d fallen asleep. Yeah, she felt stoned, as in, the hangover after the buzz, heavy and dopey after the high—literally—of the roof and what she’d managed to accomplish. But that was the question. What had she, in fact, been doing? She’d been breaking rocks, like a prisoner on a chain gang. More precisely, she’d been learning to defend herself against having rocks thrown at her—protecting herself from being stoned! Wasn’t that what they did to witches? Was it true for demons, too? And that was the fate Aeth foresaw for her? Or was dodging missiles hurled at her just a general training, a warm-up, like stretches or jogging on the spot?
All she knew was the sooner she solved this and devoted herself to her demon lessons, for want of a better term, the easier things should be. Kennedy gave a regretful look at her textbooks and class notes, then pulled out the printed sheet PC Chris, as she thought of him, had given her yesterday, booted up her laptop and dived in.
A howl escaped her gritted teeth. The constable had printed her a complete list of open-case missing persons, not just girls. She stared. Had guys gone missing too? She didn’t think so, somehow. And the majority of the list was girls. Groaning, she made two spreadsheets, one male and one female. Several of the female names she already had, from her earlier research, so she started with those, in chronological order and added the remainder after. She could always remove them. Pity the address field was blanked out in the page she’d been given, leaving just the city. She would have liked to know where the girls came from.
Remembering the success she’d had with Janey, Kennedy trawled Facebook, finding Nia Ambro easily enough, her name being unusual. Nia hadn’t had the easiest of childhoods or adolescent years. She’d been placed in a secure children’s home, and had run away a few times. Comments left about her after her disappearance were along the, ‘what did you expect?’ lines. Eyes narrowed, Kennedy added another column to her spreadsheet, this one titled BACKGROUND.
After an hour, she’d filled in that column for three more of the names, the stories similar. The ones she couldn’t complete the section for were for foreign girls, whose languages she didn’t understand enough of. And Kennedy created another column, one she’d been trying not to think about. The column was headed COLLEGE…and every square bore the name Heylel. She hadn’t studied maths beyond the basics, and had never delved deep into statistics, but this must surely be…anomalous? Or, was it a correlation—because Heylel offered more scholarships, there were more scholarships students, so if someone from that college was in the news, they were likely to be a scholarship student? Did that make sense?
“Not exactly that, but I know what I mean!” she railed at her screen. “Why couldn’t it be a social science question, not maths?” Or maybe it was s
ocial science? Something like, were the type of students who came to this university via an assisted place more likely not to complete their course than students who paid the full fees? Except…the scraps didn’t just leave, or drop out. They…vanished. “Oh crap! My brain hurts!” Kennedy moaned. “If this is someone’s way of telling me I should be studying maths, I’ll…”
Oh. Nodding, Kennedy added another column to her form. SUBJECT. Janey was easy, Anthropology like Kennedy. Nia…History. Oh. Kennedy sat back, not knowing what she’d expected. Filling this in would take time, and she didn’t have any just at the moment. She had a nine o’clock lecture. While most students with that timetable chose to forego breakfast in the dining hall, making do with cereal and tea in their rooms or standing in the tiny kitchens on their floors, Kennedy, thinking about money she didn’t have, was determined to eat for free. Even if that meant queuing up for when the dining hall opened at eight-fifteen and being prepared to bolt her food down.
As she might have expected, the hall wasn’t very crowded. What she hadn’t expected was that the breakfast would smell so good! How appetising it smelled related to degree of hunger, she knew, and she was starving. She slid the firmest-looking egg and the crispest-looking bacon onto her plate, adding a hash brown for good luck and two bits of fruit for after. Her mouth was watering…until she came to the till.
“Sorry, it won’t go through.” The assistant tried it again, getting the same red light and same der-berp noise. “The card must be damaged. Have you done something to it? Or the chip?” She held the rectangle of plastic up to the light.
About to beg the woman to try a third time, ignoring the tutting and shuffling of feet behind her, Kennedy remembered how she’d tried to force the card to work yesterday at dinner when the system was shutting down. “Ah. Could you re-set it?” She made huge eyes.
“I can’t, no. You’ll have to see the bursar. Next?”
“But…” Kennedy eyed her heaped plate. “Can I just…” She set her tray down with a sigh when the custodian walked over, his tread firm and deliberate.
“Just get it sorted and come back after. It’s not rocket science,” scorned someone behind her, pushing past her.
“Neither are you,” Kennedy retorted, aware she wasn’t making any sense. “Your shoelace is undone.” And while he looked down, she flicked the apple from his tray into her sweatshirt pocket before walking off.
“Bursar’s office, bursar’s office…” she muttered in between bites of fruit, wishing she’d swiped his yoghurt too. She vaguely knew where the admin offices were, but hadn’t known they didn’t open until nine. Damn and double damn! She had to sort it out or she’d get no lunch either. She sprang on a small woman walking up to the doorway.
“Excuse me! I know you don’t open yet, but could you please help me?” She gave the smile that had gotten her out of more trouble than was fair, growing up in Holden House, and launched into her tale of woe.
The motherly woman, a Home Bursar, she informed Kennedy, clucked over her and took her inside the homey-looking offices. “Let me get started,” she said, logging in. “So, you missed breakfast? Poor thing! I’m just about to make tea while the system wakes up, as I call it. Would you like a cup?”
“Oh, yes, please!”
The woman smiled and patted Kennedy as she went into a smaller room, presumably a kitchen. Kennedy felt terrible, because she intended to abuse the woman’s trust and snoop, probably breaking several laws, into the college software. She shot behind the woman’s desk, making the appropriate—she hoped—responses to comments and enquires that drifted her way and typed the first name she remembered into the query box, then watched Janey’s information come up. Name, home address, college address, subject, tutors, moral tutor…
She’d typed in Nia Ambro when a ringtone sounded from the anteroom and the woman answered her phone. Sparing a quick glance over her shoulder, Kennedy yanked out her phone and took a photo of the screen. She managed to look up three more names before the woman said her goodbyes and came bustling out, rattling off apologies and explanations about her son and his inability to organise himself.
“Now, drink that, have your biscuit and let’s see what we can do about this naughty card of yours,” said the woman with a smile, her kindness twisting the knife further into Kennedy’s gut. “Oh,” continued the woman, looking up from her task to Kennedy, eyes narrowed.
Flop sweat drenched Kennedy in an instant and she almost chocked on her biscuit. Shit! She hadn’t cleared the screen after her last search and—
“Is this yours?” The woman plucked Kennedy’s phone from her desk and held it up.
“Oh, thanks! I’m always playing with it, putting it down, tapping it around if I’m not on it,” Kennedy babbled, hoping her screen had switched off and nothing incriminating was visible. She snatched the mobile from the woman’s hand. “Isn’t it a terrible habit?” She tossed the phone from hand to hand a couple of times. like the world’s lamest juggler, to add credence to her pathetic words, then, with an in for a penny, in for a pound attitude, batted it back and forth between her hands on the desk, humming the most circus-like tune she could think of on the spur of the moment.
“Yesss?” The woman returned to her task, and within a few minutes, Kennedy was out of there. She bolted for a huge ornamental stone vase and squeezed behind it, needing privacy to scroll through the pictures she’d just snapped. Because in all the names she’d had time to look up, there’d been something unexpected winding right through it. “There.” It was. Just two words, but something—someone—the girls had had in common.
What did it mean? Anything? She shifted, squashed behind the stone— Stone. Feeling foolish, Kennedy gave a slight cough, then pressed her mouth to the huge plant pot. “Aeth?” she whispered. “Can you hear me?” She jammed her ear to the surface, but, of course, heard nothing. A clock struck and she cursed. Her lecture! She didn’t want to go, would much rather have continued with her quest, but she was a scholarship student, a scrap, and so needed a spotless record, with attendance a part of it.
She glared at the boy who gaped at her when she squeezed free from behind the oversized urn, and ran as fast as she could along the streets to the department, not trusting she was aware and alert enough for cycling on the road, even in the bike lane.
Having arrived late and slinked into the back of the lecture room, Kennedy tried to look lively, tried to make notes, but was unable to take much of the talk in. Her mind buzzed with questions, and as soon as the lecture finished, she shook her head at Maja, trying to beckon her over to the others and rushed off. All the way back to college she was trying to think of what to say, how to couch her questions and what pretext she could invent to cover her request to speak privately.
Crap! What if he’s not here? That thought only occurred to her when she ascended the stairs to his door. But she knocked anyway and pushed the door open at the, “Enter,” which answered her knock. Swallowing, wiping her damp hair from her face and forehead with her forearm, she did and stopped short.
Professor Berkley stood, tall, black-gowned and imposing, in the middle of his room, his back to the door. His leonine head turned before the rest of him did, slowly, to fix her with a hard yellowy-brown-eyed stare. “Ah. Miss Smith. I wondered when you’d be in to see me, but you’re quicker off the mark than I expected. Do come in.”
18
“You were expecting me?” was all she could think of to say.
“At some point, yes.”
He looked slightly bored. Or pained? Kennedy couldn’t decide. What he didn’t look was guilty or shifty. Not yet. I’ll have to put the screws on him. Wait? What screws? And what would they do? Attach a cork board to him? She took a breath, fighting nerves. When I should be fighting crime. “Erm…” She’d get better at it, she vowed.
“Are you going to come in?” he asked, as if he didn’t care either way, gesturing where she still stood, just inside the door. “It’s considered traditional to close th
e door for privacy.”
“Yes. Right.” Buying time, Kennedy slipped her bag and jacket off. “I’ve been rushing,” she explained, fanning her face a little.
“I see.”
Languid, she suddenly decided. That was his thing. And sarcasm. “I came from a lecture,” she added, to fill the gap.
“Indeed. And have you been suitably introduced?”
“I’m sorry?”
He finished replacing books from his table onto their shelves. “To anthropological theory. That would have been the subject, no?”
“No. I mean, yes.” Kennedy sat and blew some wayward layers of hair from her face. She ferreted in her bag. “Yes. Look, can we start again?”
“Ah. The eternal question.” He sat in his big leather chair, opposite her. It felt weird, in a tutorial room with no other students, just three empty chairs surrounding her. “You’re young enough to believe that possible. Youth. It’s both a blessing and a curse. Which again is—”
“Yeah, I didn’t come here for a chat about philosophy, Professor?” Kennedy took back the reins. She knew better than to let someone else set the agenda. Especially someone so gabby. He’d be on about his health problems next, and how no doctor at the practice understood them, and that they were scared the NetDoctor was doing their job for them, putting them out of business, like old man Boyd back home. Although Berkley had Boyd beaten hands-down for world-weary.
“Very well.” Berkley sat forward, slapping his hands down on the desk with loud cracks. “Down to brass tacks. How much of an extension do you need, what for, and under what grounds?”
“Do what now?”
“How much—”
“No, I heard. There’s no need to say it all again, louder.” She glared. “I don’t understand.”