It is early afternoon, and she checks the countdown on her tablet. Five minutes to go. Time to get into position.
Back in the utility closet and suddenly paranoid, she wonders why she imagines there is the slightest chance of this working. Surely they know all about it. Surely at any moment the door will be pulled open to reveal guards with stingers drawn. Owen will appear behind them, hands clapping sarcastically, eyes grave and disappointed. Surely, surely, after all these years, after an entire lifetime, it cannot finally be about to end.
She pulls the grey blanket she has hidden here earlier up over her head, hugs it tight around her shoulders and nervously twitching, utterly useless wings, and clamps her jaw tight on her own uncertainties. It will end, and end today, because she will not have it otherwise. Her resolve floods back and wraps her even tighter than the blanket: a potent thing, and deadly.
The blast is louder than she expected. The shockwave rips along the corridor, sending her staggering into the wall. Something pungent is knocked over and begins to pool along the floor. She peers out, into a corridor filled with smoke, screams, confusion. Trousered legs charge past. She can hear the shouts, people urged to assemble, cries that some are trapped behind the fire.
Those will mostly be service staff, gathering in the old canteen further down the corridor as they always do at the end of the lunch break, to spend a few minutes exchanging reports and gossip from up above and down below. Most of the guards, most of the others. They can only get out if they force the fire door that will have sealed them in, and if they do that the rush of air will feed the fire. Either way, they are out of the way.
Everyone else will be gathered in the safe room close to the lifts and stairwell, ready to evacuate, or to seal themselves off if the fire prevents it. She wonders if they will notice that she is not among them. She wonders if they will care. She is out of the closet now, and running.
Owen sees her through the clear panel on the heavy blast door, and shouts, arm raised in fury. She cannot hear him, not least for the roar of hungry flame behind her, although the backdraught’s shockwave slams her forward and into it. She hears shrieks, of pain this time as well as panic.
The fools did try to force their way through.
She meets Owen’s eyes through the panel as her hand slams down on the emergency switch. With the fire safety system activated it moves easily, and she hears the hiss as the door seals, and sees his face change as he finally understands. She is already turning away, without a pause or a look back. What she seeks is in front of her.
The main entrance, the one that opens onto lobby and lifts and stairs, stands as she has never seen it: wide open and unattended. She is through it like a ghost, and gone.
26
He found her on the roof.
She was waiting for him under the arching sprays of the apple trees, just beginning to bend with the weight of swelling fruit. Her seat was one of the many bits and pieces of waste material that the people of the Squats had recycled to new purpose, sparking a wave of retro-industrial chic: an old piece of metal ventilation tubing, capped and upended into a stubby cylinder. Normally it served as a stool for stepping up to harvest from the higher branches, or sitting beneath them to rest. Now it formed a plinth for the still life she made, leaning forward with elbows on knees and chin cupped in fists, wingtips skimming the ground as though some great artist of a bygone age had chosen an angel’s form to personify deep meditation, or perhaps the desolation of grief.
She brushed a hand across her face, and for a moment he thought that she was weeping.
His footsteps crunched on the gravel path. When she turned to face him her eyes were dry, but her expression told him there was no need to disguise his own upset.
He stopped five feet away, full of discovery and remonstration, and found he did not know how to begin. ‘Aryel.’
She smiled faintly, tiredly, with a sadness that tore at his heart. ‘Eli.’
‘Why,’ he began, then stopped, swallowed, started again. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Do you think this is a conversation I wanted to have any sooner than necessary?’
‘It’s me.’ The hurt was welling up in him now. ‘You could have told me. You didn’t have to leave me to find … to find …’
Hands up and over her face again, pushing back her hair. It was loose for once, a heavy dark fall that hung still in the oppressive heat under the trees. ‘I was hoping against hope that you wouldn’t find anything else.’
Calm as always, but instead of calming him in turn he felt his frustration start to rise, and his voice along with it.
‘No. No. I told you it was about Phoenix, and you pretended not to know—’ He stopped. She hadn’t, not really. She had done what she always did, changed the subject, misdirected. ‘You knew I knew enough, then, to tell me the truth. And you knew I was going back to look for more. You even said …’
He remembered what she’d said, and trailed off again.
She might have hoped otherwise, but she had known that, ultimately, they would end up here.
‘I never thought I would hear the words “Phoenix Project” again,’ she said. Her hands were spread now, pleading, trying to explain. ‘I know you think I’m never surprised by anything, Eli, but you’re wrong. I was … I was shocked that it had surfaced, that there were any records at all, and … and I was sick to think you would learn about what happened there. I knew I couldn’t – shouldn’t – prevent it, but I couldn’t bear to be the one to—’
She straightened up on the stool abruptly, shaking her head and her wings back, as though something unpleasant was descending upon her and she wished to be rid of it. Eli stayed quiet, leaning against the espaliered tangle of twigs and leaves, and watched her over folded arms.
‘And what you told me about KAG not knowing about Phoenix, not being in control of it, I didn’t know that part. I truly didn’t. And it’s important, really important. It explains so much that I could never work out.’
‘What did they have to do with anything? What happened at the lab was before their time.’
‘Nothing was before their time, not really, that’s what you told me this morning. Jarek Klist set the whole thing up. But that’s not what I mean, I meant Rhys and Gwen and … and the others. I couldn’t be certain, until now, what it was they were trying to do. Or why they … we … why any of us were possible.’
‘But you knew about the research, that they were on to something extraordinary. You must have done, you were the proof of it.’
‘I thought I understood. I thought I knew exactly what was at stake, I thought I had it all worked out, but I knew nothing. Gods and monsters, Eli,’ she spat, in a sudden rage that he recognised as self-recrimination, ‘if I had known what could happen, if I had understood the consequences, do you really think I would have? My own people, my own—’
‘But it – I— What did happen, Aryel?’
He caught the flickering sideways glance that told him she had herself under control and was thinking through her answer, framing a clever response. He found himself moving from disbelief to a slow-burning anger of his own.
‘No, you know what, that’s what I want to know, and I want to hear it from you. Now. Don’t try to divert this, don’t you dare. Don’t ask me what I read in the memos, or to tell you what I think I know first. You tell me. Tell me what happened.’
She looked up at him then, more than a little startled, he thought, and full of a kind of quiet despair. And she told him.
*
Afterwards he found himself sitting on the ground, his back against one of the long troughs that held the trees of the apple orchard, facing her across dappled shade. Sweat trickled down his back and he felt exhausted, as though he had run a long, long way. She looked just as weary: drawn, and worn, and tiny. Even her wings seemed shorn of their grandeur. The silence stretched out between them, while he tried to digest it all.
That was what happened, she had said at the end. And
I was responsible for all of it.
He knew it for the truth, but perhaps a truth more harshly felt than was necessary. She had been born into captivity, after all, her awareness limited and her sensitivities cauterised; and in the single-minded pursuit of her goal to wrest control of her life she had managed to acquire just enough knowledge to be truly dangerous.
‘So you couldn’t have known,’ he said finally. ‘How it was going to turn out, what all the risks were. And at least Rhys and Gwen survived …’
‘Yes, they survived. Is that my saving grace, that I accidentally managed not to get everybody killed?’
He let that one go unchallenged, although the words dropped like acid into the drowsy air. Instinct told him it was best to let their force spin out, dissipate against the lazy buzzing backdrop of bees heedless among the wildflower tubs, rather than try to take her on in this mood.
She was being hard on herself, very hard, and for once he could understand why.
‘Do they know?’ he said finally. ‘Rhys and Gwen. They don’t, do they?’
‘No. They don’t. When they were little it was for their – our – protection. And then they grew up and there seemed no reason to revisit it.’ She sighed, and tried to shake herself free again. ‘The truth is, I haven’t had the courage. It – it’s not how they think of me, any more than it’s how you thought of me, and I haven’t—’ She stopped, looked him straight in the eye for a moment, then shrugged, looked away, bit her lip. ‘Can you blame me for that? Not wanting them to know there was ever a different Aryel from the one they grew up with?’
‘No, I guess I can’t. But I don’t think you’re being fair to yourself. The Aryel they grew up with is the same Aryel who had the wit and courage and strength to break out – just a bit older and sadder, I reckon. Wiser. And they wouldn’t have grown up free and safe and loved if you hadn’t. What happened there was a tragedy, and you were one of its victims.’
‘I don’t feel like a victim. I walked away. I ran away.’
‘Thank heavens for that. Or you wouldn’t be sitting here now, under an apple tree, in the middle of a city full of gems who are only free and equal citizens because of you.’
That seemed to bring her closer to tears than any of the horrors she had related, or anything else he had said. She looked down at her lap, muttering, ‘And you.’
‘And Jeremy Temple, and Gabriel, and Gaela … we could make a list. The point is, you go through what you go through to get to where you are. I understand that this is a terrible thing to live with, but it’s not what you intended to happen. That matters, Aryel. And what you’ve accomplished since then – it makes up for it. It more than makes up for it.’
‘I don’t know if anything can ever make up for it.’ A muscle worked along the side of her jaw. ‘I don’t think the rest of world would be as … as generous about it as you’re being.’
‘I’m just trying to be fair. And we live in a fairer world than we used to. People might surprise you, if you give them a chance.’
She shook her head, eyes still fixed on the hands clasped in her lap. She needed something else to focus on, he realised. Some action she could take, something outside herself.
‘What are you going to do about that part?’
‘I don’t know.’ She drew a deep breath and finally shot him a crooked smile. ‘I’d like to say that it depends on you, but it doesn’t entirely. After it was all over KAG came in and swept everything up and Phoenix was never heard of again. Reginald and I always assumed either that KAG was behind Phoenix all along, or that it was a business transaction – KAG knew Phoenix had something valuable, so they bought up the datastream and whatever other assets were left from whoever did own it. Either way we thought they were going to build on Phoenix’s work, maybe pretend it was all their own – revive the legacy of Jarek Klist and all that – but then KAG itself disappeared, for reasons still unknown.’ She rubbed a weary hand across her brow. ‘Until you found those trashed messages in the archive. I told Rhys this morning – I had to, his life might depend on it.’
‘I didn’t see any other kinds of file, certainly nothing that looked like genetypes, but I’m no expert. He must be desperate to get at it.’
‘Yes. Things are complicated because the breakthrough he’s made in the EGA case potentially implicates Bel’Natur. So we have to let that play out a little longer, which he’s not happy about. I suppose the only upside is it gives me a bit of breathing space before I have to tell them what else is in the files. And my worry there – it’s not just about me, about what it’ll do to our relationship. Rhys shouldn’t get upset or angry. It exacerbates his illness. And this is going to make him very upset, and very angry.’
‘I see.’ He didn’t really, but before he could ask what she meant she started and reached a hand up to her earset; then hesitated, glancing at him.
‘I have to answer this, it’s Sharon. She might have some news.’
He nodded, and she flicked to receive. On another day he would have gestured to ask if she wanted him to step out of earshot, or simply have done so anyway; but not today. He had felt the buffering mass of secrets between them unravel as she spoke, stripped away until it seemed to him that for the first time there were no barriers between them. That emptiness was desolate now, filled with the echoes of her sorrow and regret, but it was lighter too, uncluttered; a clear space in which something new might be built. He had no mind to let it fill up again.
She was frowning as she listened. ‘That’s odd. I left him downstairs – no, I’m up in the garden with Eli. I suppose he might be asleep, although I thought he was too wound up. What’s happened?’
More from Sharon, and he became aware of a different kind of tension in Aryel: knotted hands and hunched shoulders mirroring clipped, one-word questions and a deepening line between her brows. The stillness of intense concentration. Her eyes flicked up and caught his for a moment. They were full of alarm.
It was infectious. He found he had shifted into a crouch, and the sweat on his back had gone cold.
‘He’s going to do what? Hang on. Hang on.’
She was on her feet now, and he came up with her, feeling the ache in his own shoulders as he saw how her wings had gone rigid with stress. ‘Have you both gone mad? Why—?’ And she listened again, and listened, and finally nodded reluctantly, although her lips were compressed into a white line and there was no hint of relief in her glance.
She flicked off at last and met his eyes. ‘We have a serious, serious problem. We need to find Rhys.’
*
Rhys had descended four floors below ground level before he found the door he was looking for. The dim stairwell illumination had ceased two storeys above, and it was only night vision that let him negotiate the rest of the route safely. There were no cams here, not down in the dark; instead infrareds were cleverly positioned at the midpoint of each flight, requiring further acrobatics on his part. He cleared the last of them with a high, arching backflip, coming lightly to rest on the final landing. Blank walls faced him on three sides. He turned to the fourth, and contemplated the door.
It was heavy, with no transparent panel to peek through, and rough with the dust and grime of years of disuse. But it had a lock that would have done a bank vault proud: a mostly mechanical contraption with massive cylinders inset into the jamb itself, fronted by an old-fashioned alphanumeric keypad. His instinctive calculus told him that the potential combinations ran into millions. And next to the input panel a fingerprint identipad, and above that a retscanner. Security in triplicate.
It took him no more than a few moments’ work with his tablet to confirm that, as Herran had predicted, the lock was completely isolated; no hint of a signal, wired or streamed, extended beyond the device’s own impregnable shell. His fingers searched along its edges and found an input slot on the lower rim, no larger than one of Da’s ancient darning needles. Not a standard memtab port, not at all, but he had come prepared. His fingers worked through the kit of
parts tucked away in his jumper and found a matching connector, then danced across the surface of his tablet again, dropping the right apps onto the right memtab. He pulled the memtab loose and attached the connector to it, slid it into the lock, and he was in.
Uploading his own biometrics was easy, as easy as it had been on the day they first arrived in London and he had, at Gwen’s insistence, broken into the Festival’s concert hall. With no central server command there were no alarms here to worry about tripping, but neither was there a conduit by which Herran might hack in and sort the third problem, the alphanumeric code.
I shouldn’t need him for that. But it took a little longer than expected, and he felt himself twitching with anxiety as he watched the combinations spin past.
Then the app started to find matches, and as each character was identified and locked into place he realised he was shaking his head in recognition, and rueful disbelief. He reached out finally, stilling the spinning icon and tapping in the final entry.
Ph03nix2.
The lock turned with a soft thunk. He put his shoulder against the door and pushed it open a fraction, listening intently. Faint light showed through the crack, but there was no sound at all; no murmur of voices or hum of equipment, nothing that made his sit-sense prickle. He pushed the door wider, and slipped silently inside.
*
He was in another lobby that fronted the lifts, its layout not that different to the one just below street level where he had first entered; but he knew from Herran that this floor and the one above it appeared nowhere on the lift’s control panel. No reason for any visitors – even the regular staff – to suspect it’s here, and no access unless you have special keys or control codes. But there must be some workers who had been around long enough to know, to remember. He thought about conversations with Callan and Ari, the way the old guard seemed to have been almost entirely replaced, and another piece of the puzzle slid into place.
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