The Phoenix Law

by Cate Dermody

  “Like twins taking different paths in life,” Reichart said abstractedly. “What’s wrong with that?”

  Brandon’s lip curled again, his expression so tense Alisha couldn’t decipher whether it was frustration or disdain. “Except the second twin has embarrassingly limited mental capacity compared to the first, and the first one falls behind in emotional development compared to the second. She’s a new life form. She needs to be cared for until she’s adult enough to make decisions regarding procreation.”

  “Procreation?” Alisha’s voice shot up in astonishment.

  Brandon transferred the hard look to her. “What would you call it?”

  Alisha sat back, dumbfounded. “I don’t know. I never thought about it. Does that make you a grandfather?”

  Pain lanced through his features so sharply Alisha looked away. “Sorry. Trying to be funny.” She took a few seconds to concentrate on breathing, as much to give herself time to think as to let Brandon calm down before she asked, “Does the integration have to happen right away? I mean, if we get the laptop back in three days and she’s been running off some other server in the meantime, the two versions can just combine their personal experiences and move forward, can’t they?”

  “I don’t know, Ali. Three days is a massive amount of time to someone with Lilith’s processing power. The personalities could diverge sufficiently in that time as to become incompatible with one another.”

  “None of which matters,” Reichart said, “unless we’ve got somewhere to run Lilith Version One from. Do we?”

  Brandon sank into the cab’s seat, defeat washing through his posture. “No.”

  “So we move forward on our own. We have information we didn’t before. We know where the data we need is being kept. Having Lilith’s help to retrieve it would be useful, but it’s no longer an option. We’ll discuss how to proceed once we reach the safe house.”

  Brandon flicked his gaze to Alisha, examining her to see how she took Reichart’s sudden seizure of command. She moved her fingers, a small motion to indicate her acceptance, then twitched her eyebrows and gave the scientist a faint smile. It’s all right, the body language said. At least for now. Brandon’s mouth thinned, but he nodded before turning his gaze away.

  “Whose safe house?” Alisha asked quietly.

  Reichart kicked his duffel bag out of the way and stretched his legs. “It belongs—belonged—to my mother. The Infitialis use it from time to time, when I clear it.”

  “Are you sure it’s safe?”

  Reichart nodded, streetlight shadows making his cheekbones gaunt in the light. “Nobody’s been there in four or five years. I keep an eye on it.”

  “All right.” Alisha, feeling the ache of combat start to settle into her bones, sighed. “I hope there’s a tub.”

  An unlikely family, Alisha thought as they climbed out of the cab. Reichart, duffel slung over his shoulder, went ahead to key in the security codes while Alisha paid the driver. Brandon, still set-jawed and sullen, lingered at the cab waiting for Alisha. “We’ve got to get her back, Ali.”

  “We will.” The promise was hollow, but all Alisha could offer. “I just wish I knew who’d hired the fake cops. No guns isn’t anybody’s style that I know of. Unless…” She gave Brandon a thoughtful look as they followed Reichart up to the house. It was Victorian, one of a row that spread down the street in both directions. As circumspect and ordinary a home as one could have. Overlooking, anyway, that if it had been Reichart’s mother’s, it must have gone empty for the better part of twenty years, and in a real estate market as tight as London’s, a house kept up but unoccupied must have caught at least a few people’s attention.

  “Unless what?” Brandon demanded. Reichart, just ahead of them, pushed the door open cautiously, then lifted a hand in sharp warning. Alisha slipped to the side, pressing herself against the wall outside the door. Brandon did the same opposite her, so they both flanked Reichart, who breathed, “Someone’s been here.”

  So much for safety. Alisha went for a gun she didn’t have, then mouthed a curse in the pre-dawn darkness. Reichart slipped inside the door, gesturing for the others to follow. Alisha pointed two fingers upstairs and ran up them lightly, keeping to the shadows as she began to explore. Three bedrooms upstairs, and a bathroom. A dark open space in the ceiling where a ladder led up to the attic. Alisha pressed forward, pushing the closest door open.

  One shadow separated from another in a silent attack, falling from above, her only warning a change in the light. Alisha twisted too late, borne to the floor by dead weight, feeling the wall give way as her shoulder crunched into it. A fast right came at her face and she twitched to the side, the hit missing so narrowly it pinned her hair against the wall for an instant. Alisha slammed an elbow back toward her assailant’s head, using being pinned against the wall as a source of strength. The blow hit with a satisfying crunch and a woman’s low cry of pain.

  The second bedroom door flew open to a shriek of, “You stay away from my mother!” A flurry of blows fell, mostly smashing into the wall as Alisha yelled and crab-walked backward, scrambling away from a teenage girl bearing a field hockey stick and a grudge.

  The first assailant shouted, “Mazie! Get out of here!” and Alisha flung herself down the steps, half trying to escape and half in sheer astonishment.

  For the second time that evening Reichart vaulted her on his way up a set of stairs. “Mazie? Emma? Mazie! It’s all right! Mazie! Mazie, sweetheart, it’s okay, it’s all right, it’s just me, it’s Frank—” His words were accompanied by a clatter as the hockey stick was abandoned over the stair railing, crashing onto Alisha as she tried to protect her head from its fall.

  “Frank?” Mazie’s furious shrieks changed to excitement and glee. Alisha looked up in time to see the girl who’d just been beating her fling herself at Reichart, who staggered back as he caught her. “Frank, where’ve you been? It’s been months! Like almost a year! Mum! Mum, it’s Frank!”

  “So I see.” Emma appeared at the top of the stairs, looking over the railing at Alisha, who still cowered with her hands over her head, too surprised to move. “Alisha?”

  “What’s left of her,” Alisha said after a moment. “Nice drop you got on me there. Literally. Ow.”

  “Sorry. Frank,” Emma added, as Reichart extracted himself from Mazie’s hugs. “What’re you doing here?” She stood on her toes to kiss his cheek as she asked the question.

  Reichart chuckled. “Hiding. What about you?”

  “Hiding,” Emma agreed.

  Mazie pushed her way past Reichart to peer down the steps at Alisha and Brandon behind her. She was slim with youth and had her mother’s large eyes. Her hair, lighter brown than Emma’s, was drawn back in a long thin tail.

  “Hi. I’m Mazie. I hope I didn’t hurt you too much.”

  “I think most of the damage came from earlier.” Alisha got to her feet cautiously, stretching kinks out. “Though twice in one night is more than I’m used to taking a dive down stairs. I hope there’s aspirin here.”

  “I thought you wanted a tub,” Brandon said.

  “I’ll take what I can get,” Alisha said. “Nice to meet you, Mazie. You’ve grown up a lot since last time I saw you.”

  Mazie frowned, glancing at her mother. “I don’t remember meeting you.”

  “You didn’t.” Alisha gave her a wan smile. “I was spying on you. Well, on him.” She nodded toward Reichart, then made her way down the stairs to sit on the bottom step with a groan. “I don’t suppose you have any floor plans for a host of secret rooms beneath Parliament, Emma.”

  “Sure,” Mazie said. “They’re online as part of London Underground.”

  Alisha twisted herself on the bottom step, staring up at Mazie in astonishment. The other adults turned to the girl as well, open curiosity and disbelief obvious in their expressions. Mazie hunched her shoulders. “Not really floor plans, I mean. But there’s lots of talk about how you’d get beneath Westminster through the Tube and
all kinds of ideas of what you’d find there. A while ago a lad who ran one of the sites was served with a, what do you call it?” She glanced at her mother. “An order to take down the information?”

  “An injunction,” Brandon said.

  Mazie looked back at him, eyes bright. “That’s it, then. Scared the piss out of him, so he did it, but I don’t know how many people copied it out of Google’s cache. Last time I read about it was off somebody’s site in Singapore. That’s the brilliant thing about the Internet.” Her smile lit up momentarily. “Once something’s on it you can’t get it off again.”

  “Like pee in a pool,” Alisha heard herself mutter.

  Mazie grinned, then looked back and forth between the adults, obviously torn between embarrassment and delight. “There’s no reason to make him take it down if he wasn’t on to something, right?”

  “The kid might be right,” Reichart said, reluctantly. “I thought you were going to get some straitlaced job, Maze. None of this intelligence networking garbage.”

  “Right.” Mazie tossed her hair. “Because all my role models are pointing me toward a normal boring life being a bank teller. I can’t help it if I’m smarter than you.”

  Alisha tried to keep her face straight as she looked up at Mazie, then Emma. “Mind if I use your computer, Emma?”

  “Oh, come on. You’re not sending me back to bed like a little kid,” Mazie protested. “I’ll show you the sites.” She turned to her mother, making winsome eyes. “Please, Mum?”

  Emma sighed. “If I thought saying no would do any good, I’d say no.” She stepped back, gesturing for Alisha to come up the stairs. Mazie squealed in delight, hugged Emma, and ran into her bedroom.

  Emma caught Alisha’s arm as she rounded the corner at the top of the steps. “Obviously she knows what we do,” she said in a low voice. “But I don’t want her involved in this, Alisha. Make it clear her role ends with the Net connections.”

  “Don’t worry.” Alisha put a hand on Emma’s shoulder, squeezing. “I don’t want to see her hurt, either.”

  Emma nodded and Alisha stepped past her, hearing Reichart’s sigh as she entered Mazie’s room. “I wish that was the only problem we had, Em. This is going to take coffee. Come on downstairs.” Voices faded as they moved away, and Alisha turned her attention to the eager teen at the computer.

  “You heard your mom?”

  Mazie rolled her eyes. “Yeah. She worries too much. Wow,” she added, getting a better look at Alisha. “Did I do that?”

  Alisha touched the bruising on her cheekbone, wincing at her swollen lip. “No. And this kind of thing is what makes your mom worry.”

  “Did you lose a fight?”

  “This is what it looks like when you win.”

  Some of the color bleached from Mazie’s cheeks, her eyes widening. “Oh.” She turned back to the computer, hunching her shoulders and turtling her head out. “Okay. There are bunches of London Underground sites. The official one’s no use. Some of them are really cool, though. They talk about old stations that aren’t in use anymore, and about the bomb shelters that got built into like eighty stations. The public only got to use about half of them. Isn’t that awful?” She charged on, clicking through to Web sites and ignoring Alisha’s drawn breath to answer. “One of the bomb shelters was beneath Westminster, but it was like a, what do you call it? You know, they do them in medical studies. A blind study? Westminster’s not one of the lost stations, but the shelter was never publicly talked about. So it’s a blind shelter.”

  “Double blind,” Alisha murmured. “It means neither the doctors nor the patients know who’s involved in the study, or who’s getting the real treatments.”

  “Right. Westminster shelter was like that. Everybody knew about Waterloo.” She pulled up a map of the Underground and planted her finger on Waterloo station, across the river from Westminster. “That was the public one. When Parliament got damaged during the war, a bunch of stuff was evacuated beneath it, into the shelter. Well, that’s what they say, anyway. There are supposed to be entrances still there, off the Jubilee line. Every time anybody tries going down there—anybody on the link, anyway,” she amended, tapping the screen again, “they get stopped by security. I know the Tube’s dangerous, but if there’s always security there, maybe it means there’s something to protect.” She glanced over, hopeful.

  Alisha sat back, looking at the young woman in a mix of admiration and amusement. “What got you so interested in all this? One day you just woke up and thought, hey, today I’ll figure out the whole history of the London Underground?”

  Pink crept along Mazie’s cheekbones and colored her ears. “Nah. Lots of people’ve done this before me. It was this TV show I watched, about what if all the abandoned stations and everything beneath the city were part of this kind of magical fantasy world that homeless people were a part of. They mentioned all kinds of stations I’d never heard of, so I got interested in it.” She squinted, another look of anticipation. “Is it helpful?”

  Alisha looked back at the screen, shaking her head. Mazie’s expression fell, and Alisha straightened in apology. “No, no, I didn’t mean it wasn’t helpful. I was just thinking how much we still had to cover.” And how much Lilith hacking into the systems would’ve helped, she thought, and found herself shaking her head again. She made herself stop, turning a serious-eyed smile toward Mazie instead. “It’s very helpful. Thank you, Mazie. You’ve given us a place to start.”

  Chapter 22

  “Alisha.” Brandon’s voice came out of the darkness, a murmur beneath the distant rattle of trains. Alisha was too well-schooled to let herself flinch in the midst of sneaking around, but her stomach tightened, sending a burp of unpleasantness into her throat. The wide tunnels beneath London’s streets took some, but not all, of the pressure of being underground away. There was room enough to breathe, but not to be genuinely comfortable.

  Alisha turned her head toward Brandon’s voice, relying on occasional subway tunnel lights and night-vision goggles rather than flashlights. His form was dark in the green brightness brought on by the goggles, and like her, he was clad in black, a snug-fitting backpack clipped at waist and shoulder. Alisha’s own pack added no more than a few pounds, but was loaded with tools borrowed from Reichart’s stash.

  “You said something this morning about the cops who took Lilith.” The words were pitched to carry no farther than Alisha, too quiet for echoes in the tunnel to bring them back to Reichart. “No weapons,” Brandon went on. “You said it didn’t make sense, unless. Unless what?”

  “You only wonder about this now?” Alisha breathed. “It couldn’t have come up while we were at Reichart’s place?” The air beneath the city was cool and tasted faintly of ozone, the flavor clinging to the back of Alisha’s throat. Brandon’s question helped, at least, to distract her from her location.

  “You were busy,” Brandon said through his teeth.

  Alisha slipped into a carved-away spot in the tunnel wall, a tilt of her eyebrows conceding his point. They’d all gone to sleep with sunrise and had been up again six hours later, a house full of quiet, intent activity. Guns were uncovered from hiding holes, cleaned, checked, double-checked. Subway maps were studied and memorized. Mazie, her thin brown hair up in a ponytail, had been everywhere at once, getting food and drinks for the adults without being asked. She’d spent her down time leaning against Reichart with wide-eyed adoration, the look of hero worship. Alisha had caught Emma watching the two of them more than once, a faint smile of regret curving her mouth. Remembering that sent a pang through Alisha’s chest, as if she was responsible for the loss Emma felt.

  No one had spoken much over the course of the day. There was a mission at hand, and their focus was on it, nothing else. Even Brandon had turned his attention to their immediate goals, appearing to put Lilith out of his mind.

  “Unless they were under specific orders to keep somebody alive,” she answered. “In anybody’s book, Reichart and I were expendable. Y
ou’re the man with the intellect. You’re the one who built Lilith. Guns might have brought too much risk to the situation, if they wanted to be sure to keep you alive.” She stopped speaking and pointed down the tunnel, a quick double-fingered tap against the air. Brandon nodded and they both glanced backward to check for trains, as if they were crossing a street. Reichart, several yards away and bringing up the rear, did the same, the habit so ingrained in them all as to be instinctive. It brought a smile to Alisha’s lips as she broke into a run.

  Emma followed their path from above, she and Mazie safe in Reichart’s house. Communications had dropped away as they’d gone farther underground, leaving them essentially on their own, but tracking devices assured that at least their bodies could be recovered, Alisha thought dryly.

  The men ran behind her, held at Alisha’s pace not through discussion, but by Reichart’s statement earlier in the day she should take the lead. Brandon had been satisfied with that, chafing as he’d been under Reichart’s assumption of command, but Alisha knew the reason Reichart had put her in the lead. Her feet flashed over the ties, each step eating two of them, the number of strides whispered in the back of her mind: forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one, all without conscious effort. The distance from the nook they’d stepped into to the patrolled entrance to the Westminster bomb shelter was an easy three hundred running strides. Reichart knew Alisha wouldn’t lose count.

  At two seventy, she slowed and moved to the side again, keeping her breathing quiet so she could hear Brandon and Reichart behind her. “Ninety feet,” she whispered when they came up to flank her. “I say we wait and see if they’ve got hourly check-ins. It’s four minutes to the hour.” That, too, had been timed carefully, Alisha feeling like her hurried heartbeat kept the seconds passing.

  Reichart, a moving wall of shadow in the darkness, nodded. “It’ll give us any passwords or specific phrases they use,” he agreed. “One of us will have to stay behind to play guard if we’re going to need to check in regularly.”