‘Eli.’ The pale grey eyes were enormous. ‘Server link gone. Broke.’
‘The link from Rhys’ tablet? It’s gone down?’
‘Gone down.’
‘That’s good, right? He must have collected it, they must be on their way up.’ But there was something in Herran’s demeanour, the agitated rock-nodding and staring eyes, that told him this was not the news he hoped for.
‘Not Rhys. Not disconnected. Broke. Wrong password, then broke.’
Eli felt his mouth go dry. ‘Okay, Herran. This is what we need to do.’
*
Higher still in the tower, Zavcka Klist swivelled into yet another sharp turn before the glass sculpture on her office wall, and stopped abruptly. This was ridiculous. She was wearing a hole in the carpet, not to mention her shoes. Dunmore had messaged from maintenance with the news that all looked to be in order; there was no record of a lift being taken to the lower floor since he himself had done so to slip the staff offsite during the lunchtime crush. He was going down to double-check, and would report back.
She was seized by a sudden unease at the thought of him, alone down there with the girl. What if he tripped over a tube, or touched the life-support settings? What if he touched her? How much did she really know about Dunmore anyway, save that nothing appeared to be beyond or beneath him? And even if the surrogate was perfectly safe as far as he was concerned, was it really a good idea to have left her, unconscious and alone, hooked up to a machine that had no way of alerting anyone if something went wrong?
*
Khan jumped in surprise as she came through the door at speed, blowing past him without a sideways glance; then recovered and was on his feet, hurrying after her.
‘Ms Klist?’
‘Stay here, Khan, I don’t need you.’
‘You’ve that conference in—’
‘Cancel the conference.’ She strode past the startled receptionist without a look or a word. ‘I need to check on something below stairs. I might be a while.’ She stepped into the lift. Khan could see a tiny metal key in her hand. He stopped, staring, as she stabbed the button for the basement level as though it were an enemy. Her eyes were like black stones in a face gone hard as marble.
The doors slid closed and she was gone.
*
Rhys looked close to tears when Callan finally took the tablet gently away from him and slipped it back into his pocket.
‘That’s it, that’s enough. You’ve done all you can. It’s okay.’ Rhys’ head was down and he was shaking it as though in defeat. His whole body was shaking, hands tight up against his chest again, and his breathing came in short, sharp gasps of pain. Callan went to wrap an arm around him, and felt him flinch.
‘She’s going to be all right, we just need to—’
And then Rhys was rearing back in alarm, away from Callan and the door, a look of horror and profound shock on his face, and Callan, startled, recoiled as well.
Into a small hard roundness, pressed into the small of his back. This time the voice was one he did not know.
‘Don’t move. Put your hands on your head. If you make a sound I will shoot you.’ And over his shoulder, to Rhys, ‘You too. Hands on your head. Who else is here? How many?’
*
Zavcka Klist enjoyed no moment of false confidence as she stepped out of the lift. Though she could not make out the words, there was no mistaking Dunmore’s voice. The shouting was coming from the direction of the medical unit. And now a second voice shouting back, one that she thought she recognised. She had an inkling, then, of how her security might have been breached; and cursed herself for a fool as she ran.
*
‘He can’t!’ Callan yelled. Dunmore had shoved him further into the room, staying close to the door and covering them both with the gun. It was a blunt, ugly, deadly thing and he felt his guts quail at the sight of it. Right now it was pointed at Rhys, who stood swaying, ash grey and drenched with sweat, his hands still curled into fists and pressed up against his collarbone. Callan’s own hands were clamped on top of his head as ordered, but Rhys seemed unable to comply. ‘He can’t,’ Callan said again, trying to inject some calm into his voice, into the situation, even as the room seemed to spin slowly around him. There was a hiss followed by a hollowness in his ears. He wondered if he was about to pass out.
You had better fucking not.
‘He’s ill, can’t you see? He’s … finding her, finding her like this, it’s sent him into shock … he’s no threat to you. He’s no threat!’ And he found himself stepping in front of Rhys as the gun was raised and steadied.
‘If he can’t talk he’s no fucking use to me, but you might be. Get out of the way.’
Callan looked at the big man, heard the death in his voice, saw it in the small black cavity of the barrel and knew he was in a place he had been before. It washed over him for a moment: the certainty of his own destruction, the memory of pain and terror and utter helplessness, the roaring, screaming horror of it.
He felt Rhys’ warmth at his back and heard himself say, ‘No.’
And as Dunmore stared at him in amazement, heard something else – heels clicking along the corridor outside, moving fast, coming closer. Dunmore swung round, gun coming to rest on the doorway as Zavcka Klist appeared in it. Callan, his muscles tensing to try something, anything, froze as though paralysed.
It was partly the look on her face that stopped him, ice-hard and implacable, and the black fury in her eyes. They widened in surprise for the merest instant at the sight of Rhys, and then she was all arrogant, aristocratic command.
‘Dunmore, do not point that thing at me. Point it at them. What’s the situation?’
‘Found them in here, with her. And a tablet, downloading data from the server.’
‘You have that?’
‘Yes, ma’am. Right here.’ He tapped at the chest of his jacket and she nodded briskly, stepping into the room beside him.
‘Are there others?’
‘Don’t think so, ma’am. They’d have turned up by now if there were.’
The black gaze fixed on Callan. ‘Is it just the two of you?’
He considered for a moment whether it would be better to lie, try to convince her that the shadowy recesses of SubBasement Four were swarming with infiltrators. It was an attractive prospect, but not one that would stand up to much scrutiny. On the other hand if he told her that he and Rhys were alone she would see no reason not to have them shot immediately.
‘Yes,’ he replied, and added, ‘For now. More are on their way. They’ll be here in a few minutes.’
‘I very much doubt that. I assume Herran got you in here somehow, but he’s hardly going to be charging to your rescue.’
‘He might surprise you.’
‘Not again, he won’t. There’s no stream access down here. You know that; that’s why you were trying to copy the datastream to your tablet. All Herran, or Eli Walker, or anyone else who’s in on this adventure of yours will know is that you disappeared. We’ll cooperate fully with the search, but all anyone will find is a vacant floor that hasn’t been used for years. If they pull out, so be it. We’ve got what we need from him.’
He opened his mouth to reply, but she forestalled him by stepping a little to the side to peer around him at Rhys, and the still, silent girl on the bed. ‘Rhys, I take it? I expected something more impressive, after everything we’ve heard. What’s wrong with him? Why isn’t he talking?’
‘He’s ill. He has a – condition.’
‘Not for long. Get away from her!’ Snapping, as Rhys’ swaying shuffle took him a halfstep closer to the girl. ‘What were you doing in here? If you’ve hurt her …’
‘If we’ve hurt her?’ Callan was incredulous. ‘We’re not the ones who burned her, or who have her locked up and unconscious, in a dungeon, being used as a surrogate. It’s not us who’s hurt her, Ms Klist. That’s on you.’
She cast a sideways glance at him, looking oddly, bitterly amused. ‘The
burns have nothing to do with me.’
Dunmore shifted deliberately in the doorway and she nodded and stepped back, closer to him, further away from the two captives. Callan saw that in the distraction of her arrival he and Rhys had become separated. Rhys stood across the room now, two long strides away, and his heart sank.
‘How do you want to handle this, ma’am?’
‘You seemed to have matters in hand when I arrived, Dunmore. What were you going to do?’ The bitter amusement had seeped into her voice as well.
‘I was going to question this one, shoot them both, get rid of the bodies and then come and report to you.’
‘I see no reason to change any part of that plan except the last bit.’
Callan, watching Rhys and thinking hard, imagined that he saw the younger man’s hands flex for a moment before the import of her instruction dragged him back. ‘You won’t have time,’ he said, keeping his voice deliberately light. Maybe it would give them pause, make them wonder. ‘The others are too close. You don’t have time to kill us and dispose of our bodies before they get here. So you need to consider whether that’s the kind of evidence you want to be found with.’
Zavcka shook her head. ‘Nice try, but you haven’t been down here long enough for anyone to—’
And then Rhys moved.
Although Callan was looking at him as it began, looking with the intensity of a man who wishes his last sight to be of the thing he cares for most, he could not afterwards say exactly how it started, or what he did, or in what order. One instant he was standing there, arms just starting to come down to his sides, head just starting to come up; then there was no more than a blurred streak of skin and clothing with a smeared ruby shimmer at the top. Dunmore gave a strangled shout as he was borne over backwards.
Then came a series of images, strobe flashes on his consciousness: Dunmore’s arm yanked straight, the hand with the gun still in it pointing up at the ceiling, and another, crushing hand wrapped around the wrist. The report of the weapon, shockingly loud within the enclosed space, and the thud and skitter as it fell and skated away somewhere. Rhys on top of Dunmore, the dead man’s hand with its shattered wrist flopping away, Rhys’ other fist slammed into a throat gone strangely flat. Dunmore’s eyes popped halfway out of their sockets, his mouth open in a half-finished scream.
Callan had barely begun to take his own hands down from his head before it was all over.
Rhys slumped back against the wall, staring at his hands as though in disbelief, face stunned and racked with pain. For a moment his eyes met Callan’s. ‘Cal,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean—’
The spasm took him, arching his body from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, twisting him away from the wall to fall hard to the floor. Callan was by him in an instant, trying to grab the flailing limbs and hold them still, then simply to cradle and protect Rhys’ head as it beat out a tattoo on the cement. He felt the skin on his own knuckles crack and break. It could have been no more than a few seconds, but it felt as if hours had ticked by before the convulsions subsided enough for him to bring his own weight to bear and hold Rhys down. It still felt like he could be thrown off at any moment.
A metallic clink against the hard floor, and the sinking cold in his belly again. He twisted his head around. Zavcka Klist was straightening up, the gun in her hand. He could see the shock on her face transmuting into fury and a hard, merciless hatred.
‘If anyone’s planning to show up,’ he said aloud, ‘now would be a fucking good time.’
30
Even in the swirling chaos of the moment, Zavcka Klist thought it was a strange kind of humour that would make a young man struggling to contain a foaming, thrashing lunatic, who had just witnessed one death and was seconds away from his own, speak sarcastically to the aether as though spirits might step out of it and come to his aid.
She thought that an instant before she was hit from behind, the impact sending her staggering forward, the gun ripped from her hand. She caught herself against the edge of the hospital bed and spun round.
The girl, the one from the concert, the beautiful girl with polished brown skin and curling, glowing, dark red hair, and dark blue eyes sparking a fury to match her own. Droplets spinning off the hem of a raincoat as she moved, almost too fast for the eye to follow. The gun shredding in her hands, not just pulling the magazine out, breaking it out, the trigger spinning merrily away through the air under the snapping force of her fingers. The mangled weapon was tossed into the furthest corner and the ammunition tucked safely into a pocket as she moved with the same blurring speed to where her brother lay beneath Callan on the floor.
Behind her, wings filled the doorway. Aryel Morningstar stepped over Dunmore’s body, and into the room.
She took in the scene in an instant, periwinkle-bright eyes scanning every inch in a way Zavcka knew would miss nothing. Her dark hair was also damp, and beads of water dotted the surface of her wings.
‘Move away from the bed, Ms Klist. Over against that wall, please. Now.’
And Zavcka felt herself obey, too stunned to argue, because hanging back in the corridor, retching at the sight of Dunmore’s lolling tongue and displaced eyeballs, was Arthur Khan. The only words she could find were for him.
‘You bastard.’
‘On the contrary, Mr Khan is here precisely because he is not a bastard. And we would have got in without his help anyway, but he did save us time.’ Aryel crossed to the bed, but her attention was on the trio on the floor. ‘Gwen?’
Gwen was lying half on top of Rhys, helping Callan to hold him, her greater strength containing the worst of his convulsions. She held his jerking head under the crook of her jaw and was muttering to him, baby talk it sounded like, soothing, pleading. His eyelids fluttered over eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed.
‘He needs help, Ari, he needs a sedative … something … it’s not … stopping …’
‘She has medicine,’ Khan said hoarsely. ‘Pills in … in her pocket. She gets fits sometimes … she didn’t think I noticed … but not so bad as him, not nearly so bad … I don’t know if it would help?’
‘Thank you, Arthur, I think it might help a great deal. Zavcka, your pills, please.’
‘Piss off.’
Aryel frowned and Gwen looked up, but it was Callan who was on his feet and slamming her back into the wall with his left hand, his right feeling along her jacket. He found a pocket, dipped into it, came out with a little bioplastic tube half the length of his finger.
‘This?’
Khan swallowed. ‘Yes.’
Callan let go and turned back to Rhys without another look or word. Gwen had rolled him round and was sitting braced against the opposite wall, holding him from behind. Her arms were wrapped tight around his, hands gripping her own wrists to hold them in place as he twitched and spasmed, with her legs crossed over his thighs. That was less effective, and Callan had to rest his own weight on Rhys’ shins as he knelt, to keep him from kicking himself free. He grabbed Rhys’ chin with one hand and popped the tube open with the other.
‘How many?’
‘At least two, I imagine. Zavcka, how many do you take for an attack?’
She stayed furiously silent and Aryel rounded on her, wings arched and eyes blazing. Her voice was like the crack of a whip. ‘Zavcka! Do you think watching him suffer instead of helping is going to help you? HOW MANY?’
For the first time, Zavcka Klist flinched. ‘One if it’s just coming on, two if I don’t catch it in time. They said I could take up to three if it got really bad.’
‘Callan, give him four.’
He looked up, startled. ‘You sure?’
‘He’s heavier than she is, and this is worse than bad.’
He nodded, and then they had to watch while he tried to wrestle Rhys’ clenched jaw open.
‘Squeeze,’ Gwen said. ‘Hard. Harder.’
‘But I’ll hurt him.’
The look she gave him spoke volumes.
<
br /> He clenched his own teeth and ground thumb and fingers into Rhys’ face until his mouth opened enough to pitch four of the tiny pills inside; then held his jaw closed and tipped his head back, massaging his throat until he swallowed convulsively.
‘How long?’ Aryel asked quietly. She was still standing by the bed, a hand resting on the blanket. ‘Before they take effect?’ She raised an enquiring eyebrow at Zavcka.
‘A minute or two.’ She resisted the urge to spit curses or rub her bruised shoulder and instead pressed both hands flat against the wall behind her, trying to still the trembling. Her brain felt sluggish, caught in a loop of shock and rage that was making it hard to think; and she needed to think, needed to try to work a way out of this. Refusing to volunteer the pills had been a mistake. There was nothing to be gained by antagonising them as long as they held the balance of power. She needed to reverse that. What did she know, and how could she use it?
Khan was with them. Had he always been? Was it just him, plus the two upstairs? If so that made it – she calculated rapidly – seven people she had to try and contain. What levers did she have, what kinds of pressure could she bring to bear? And if it went beyond them who else would they have brought into the loop, what could she …
Across the room, Aryel Morningstar had stooped to retrieve the plastic tube from Callan and was walking towards her with it, shaking it over her palm.
‘You could use this yourself, I see,’ she said quietly, and held out a tiny white pill at arm’s length. Zavcka stared in astonishment, as behind her Callan growled a protest. Aryel’s eyes never moved from Zavcka’s face as she replied. ‘No point letting her go downhill as well, Cal. Sharon’s going to need her to answer a lot of questions.’
She waited until Zavcka had reached out hesitantly, taken the tablet and gulped it down before saying pleasantly, ‘You can also save yourself the trouble of coming up with an offer – or a threat – to try to prevent that. Detective Inspector Varsi and half a dozen officers are currently in the lobby, all trying to pile into the lifts along with a paramedic team. Another ambulance and goodness knows how many more police are on their way— Oh, they’re here now? Just arriving. Thank you, Eli. Sharon, note that Ms Klist has just taken a dose of her medication.’
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