‘Good,’ she whispered.
‘Now I have a question for you. Have you spoken to Lyriam?’
‘What on earth do I say to him, Ari?’
‘Having dropped him in the pot,’ rumbled Reginald, ‘you might want to let him know whether you’ll be leaving him there to stew on his own.’
‘Da.’
‘Or fishing him out, or joining him. Extra spice never went amiss.’
‘Da!’
‘What? It’s only what everyone else is saying.’ Grins, guilty snickers and meaningful glances shot around the dim room. ‘Don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice lad. I like him. But it’s a shame there’s only one Callan.’
*
Eli had been perplexed to discover, when they were finally able to make their way to the hospital, that the crowd of newstream journalists and socialstream commentators ranked outside was not only several times larger than it had been at police headquarters, but also far less interested in them. They were there for Gwen, who rumour declared to be at her sick brother’s bedside. Or not. He heard one hack excitedly reporting a piece of half-heard gossip, to the effect that it was Lyriam over whom she watched, laid low by the violent hysterics of his newly ex-girlfriend.
As he and Mikal made their way in with Herran trotting along between them, microphones and vidcams were thrust at them from every direction; but the scandal they were being asked to comment on had nothing to do with Bel’Natur, Zavcka Klist or Aryel Morningstar.
‘What on earth,’ he said, as they finally made it through the scrum and into the hospital’s foyer, ‘is going on? Something’s happened to Lyriam?’
‘Oh, a great deal has happened to Lyriam,’ said Mikal, ‘and I hope he has his head on straight enough to handle it. You haven’t heard? No, I suppose you wouldn’t have. You either, Herr? I thought you always kept an eye on the streams, no matter what.’
The little gem’s head, shoulders and torso swayed precisely forward and back in his signature emphatic rocking nod.
‘Streams say Gwen did a bad thing. Also Lyriam. Also Bethany. Also Lyriam did a good thing, and Gwen, and Bethany.’
‘It’s very confused,’ Mikal sighed, as they took the stairs up to the next floor, having all apparently decided, by mutual and unspoken agreement, to avoid the lifts wherever they could. ‘I haven’t quite worked out the details …’
‘Lyriam playing with Gwen, Bethany not know. Aryel calls Gwen, come quick quick for Rhys. Gwen goes quick quick. So quick people at music place find out. Tell Bethany, tell streams.’
‘People at music place find out what?’ Eli asked, thinking that even after two weeks of being almost constantly in his company, decrypting Herran’s tortured syntax was as difficult as any other mystery he had had to unravel.
‘Gwen and Lyriam playing.’
‘But they would have known they were playing together.’
‘He doesn’t mean,’ said Mikal, waiting for them from where his longer legs had carried him, half a flight further up, ‘that kind of playing.’
‘What kind—? Oh.’
‘Oh indeed. As far as I can make out they were in some kind of break room, and when Aryel told Gwen what was going on at Bel’Natur she got out of there so fast she left poor Lyriam with his pants down. Literally.’
‘Oh god.’ Eli could picture it, and had to fight back the urge to dissolve in hysterical laughter.
‘Banged out past a bunch of musicians, who would probably have kept their mouths shut, and a gaggle of studio flunkeys who unfortunately didn’t. By the time she got to where I was waiting in the alley, it was all over the streams. Rude jokes from the studio techs, histrionics from Bethany, you can imagine. But then Lyriam went onstream to say he and Bethany had split up a couple of days after the concert in the park, he hadn’t made an announcement because it’s a personal matter and he wanted to be as sensitive to her as possible, give her time to make the adjustment and tell people in her own way. Pointed out that they haven’t been seen together since then, and the people close to them all knew. It had been on the cards for some time, long before he met Gwen. So on and so forth. His friends are piling in to confirm that this is true, hers to say it’s not.’
‘Bloody hell. Where does this leave Gwen, then?’
‘Everywhere from cold-hearted home-wrecker to innocent caught in the crossfire. And I do mean everywhere.’ He jerked a pair of thumbs over his shoulder, vaguely in the direction from which they had come. ‘Witness the media mêlée.’
‘Oh well, it’s not like this family has anything else to deal with just now. Does Aryel know?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t see how she’d have found the time, but she always manages to know a bit more than seems reasonable, doesn’t she?’
It was said without a hint of rancour, a simple statement of fact that Eli knew for truth. And indeed there she was when they finally found their way to the waiting room on the critical care wing, her straight flight from the station having brought her here more swiftly: standing at the window with an arm around Gwen, her voice a soft murmur of reassurance as they gazed down at the cluster of uplink vans and milling journalists in front of the hospital. She must know that their attentions would turn to her soon enough, and his heart ached at the thought.
Herran spent an hour with the genmed team, walking them through the Phoenix genealogy Rhys had constructed, and the genetype data that he had found and matched to it. They were as unused to him as he to them, and the conference would have been impossible without help from Callan. Nothing less than the possibility of finding a cure would have enticed him away from Rhys’ side.
‘It’s the Syndrome,’ he said quietly, when they were wrapping up. ‘It is, isn’t it?’
The doctors and geneticists glanced at each other. ‘It’s very close,’ one of them said eventually. ‘Not identical. A variant.’
‘But you can fix him. You know enough now.’
‘We should be able to design a treatment. That epigenetic suppressant he was given is a good start; if we can get access to the development work on that it’ll save us a lot of time.’
‘It was private research,’ said Aryel evenly. ‘Bel’Natur’s pharmaceutical division. I’ll have it to you by lunchtime tomorrow.’
‘You can do that? I mean … I understand the company is in some turmoil at the moment. They probably won’t release anything until the lawyers …’
‘Herran?’
‘They don’t give, I get.’
‘Quite.’
Rhys was stable, heavily sedated, and would not be waking up any time before the middle of the morning. They were all urged to go home, get some sleep and come back then. Callan point-blank refused.
‘I might sleep a little here, I won’t there. And I don’t want to know anything more about anything right now. I just want to be with him.’
Reginald blinked hard, sniffed and clapped him on the shoulder, and Gwen hugged him tight, and they left him sitting in the glow of his hair and the winking lights of the monitors, Rhys’ hand clasped between both of his own, murmuring sonnets to him in French.
*
Now Gwen chucked the pillow across the room at Reginald, sighed and departed, tablet in hand, while Aryel shook her head reproachfully at him.
‘That’s being a bit hard on her, don’t you think?’
‘She can take it. You know full well she could’ve moved just as fast but with a lot more finesse if she’d wanted to. At some level she’d decided it was time to get things out in the open. She let Rhys be the excuse, and now she’s feeling bad about it. And so she should.’
Aryel opened her mouth for a rebuttal, considered, and closed it again. Reginald gave a little snort of triumph. ‘Tell me about the girl, their sister. Ellyn. Apart from the burns – and the belly – is she all right?’
‘No she’s not. Severe brain damage.’ Aryel rubbed a hand across her brow. ‘Zavcka took great pleasure in telling us that she has a mental age of around four.’
Eli co
uld remember cases like it, too many, from his studies of the gemtechs. ‘That’s why they put her in a coma.’
‘Yep. Hard to tell a rambunctious, immensely powerful toddler that she’s seven months pregnant and she needs to take it easy.’
‘She’s due in about two weeks,’ Mikal said. ‘I’ve been talking to the doctors. They’re in a quandary, because normally the ethical thing to do would obviously be to bring her out of it. But the reason Zavcka had her sedated in the first place is – I hate to say it – it’s a real reason. She’ll be confused and traumatised, she might hurt herself or the baby. They’ll deliver her surgically either way, but they’re thinking it would just compound the atrocity of what’s been done to her to wake her up now. I tend to agree.’
There were murmurs of reluctant assent from Reginald and Aryel, and Eli himself. Herran blinked. ‘The choices that have been left to us,’ he said in an oddly formal, stilted tone, as though quoting, and then in his normal voice said, ‘bad.’
Aryel smiled tiredly across the room at him. ‘Yes, Herr, it’s another one of those.’
‘And the baby is really Zavcka?’ asked Reginald.
‘The baby is a baby,’ Aryel said firmly. ‘She isn’t anybody yet, and she’ll get to keep her own mind now. She’ll grow up to be herself. How much of the old Zavcka will come through in her, we have no way of knowing.’
‘That’s a hell of a thing to be saddled with, though,’ Eli mused, head tipped back against the cushions again. ‘It’ll be a matter of public record, it’ll be … huge. People will know she’s going to grow up, but not grow old. She’ll need protecting.’
‘The burden of being a Zavcka is going to be no joke,’ Mikal agreed. ‘Even for a Zavcka.’
‘She’ll be fine if she’s raised right,’ Reginald grunted. ‘What d’you think, Ari?’
‘I might have an idea,’ she said meditatively. ‘Maybe a solution … a way to keep her safe, from the world and herself …’ She stifled a yawn. ‘Don’t know yet. Need to think it through.’
‘Something else I’ve been trying to think through,’ Eli said, keeping his voice as uninflected as he could, ‘is how I found those messages. I checked my searchbot. Nothing special about it, and the search terms I used had nothing to do with KAG or Phoenix. There’s no way it should have been able to find, much less resurrect, much less reconstruct them.’ He stole a glance across the room at Herran and caught Aryel doing the same thing. The little gem’s face was as expressionless as ever.
‘I’ve been wondering about that myself,’ Aryel said, and waited. Herran did not react. Mikal had caught their focus and was looking from Eli to Aryel to Herran with puzzled interest, while Reginald grinned and nodded to himself with an air of quiet satisfaction.
‘Herran,’ said Aryel. ‘You gave Eli’s searchbot a bit of help, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. Searchbot stupid. Couldn’t find.’
‘Why’d you do it like that?’ Eli asked, perplexed. ‘Why make it look like something I’d stumbled over by accident, instead of just telling me?’
‘Couldn’t. Promised.’ He blinked solemnly at Aryel.
‘You promised—’ Eli broke off, thinking, pulling the pieces together. ‘You were poking around in the archive for a reason and you’d promised not to tell anyone but Aryel what you’d found.’
‘Yes. Breaking rules. Not supposed to tell.’
‘But you told … no, you didn’t tell me anyway. You altered the base code of the searchbot so it could find what you’d found, and you let it tell me.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll be damned,’ Mikal muttered. He was sitting upright now, and his look of mild surprise had given way to full-on amazement.
‘Why, Herran?’ asked Aryel. She sounded as baffled as Eli had ever heard her, and a little hurt. ‘You knew the messages were about me, you knew there were bad things in them. Why send them to Eli at all? Why didn’t you just let me know what you’d found?’
Herran regarded her steadily. ‘You tell Eli?’
‘I … no, I wouldn’t have told Eli.’ She stared at Herran staring back at her, face blank, long lashes blinking hugely. ‘You … you knew that, didn’t you? And you decided he ought to know?’
‘Better for you.’
Aryel, Eli and Mikal sat in stunned silence. Reginald’s grin had turned into a rumbling, delighted chuckle. ‘That’s the truth if ever I heard it. Good on you, Herran. Well played.’ He took in Aryel’s astonished expression, and shook with mirth. ‘Very well played indeed.’
‘But you can’t do that,’ said Eli, feeling as though the world had tilted once again, and hearing as he said it just how wrong he was. ‘Since when can you do that?’
‘Better for Aryel. Better for you too. I do.’
‘Well, well.’ Mikal was back to his own amused, amazed, double-lidded blink. ‘That’s very … decisive of you, Herran. I don’t think I can remember a day quite so full of miracles and wonders as this one. I hope there aren’t going to be any more before morning, I’m not sure I could take it.’
He could have been speaking for Eli, but despite his weariness there were puzzles implied by this latest revelation that his brain could not help picking at.
‘What were you looking for in the archive, Herran? When you found the messages?’
‘Genetype for Rhys.’ Herran was matter-of-fact. ‘Aryel said look, maybe find.’
Eli turned bodily on the sofa to glare at her. ‘So you already knew KAG had become part of Bel’Natur.’
‘No, I didn’t.’ She had recovered her equanimity somewhat. ‘But I had begun to suspect, because when I was in Zavcka’s office I noticed something. There’s a framed plaque on the wall, a formal group photograph with the Bel’Natur logo at the top and then a bunch of smaller logos studded beneath. One of them looked like KAG, and there was a woman in the group who looked a lot like Zavcka. I couldn’t see what the plaque was commemorating – it could just have been a piece of family memorabilia she’d brought with her. But I thought it could also have come with the office, been a snapshot of Bel’Natur acquisitions. So I asked Herran, if he decided to go in and work with them, to check if there was a KAG sub-directory or any other sign of their genetype files. It only took him a couple of days to be able to tell me there wasn’t, which of course,’ she arched a thoughtful eyebrow in Herran’s direction, ‘was entirely true.’
‘No more tonight,’ Herran announced, standing up abruptly. ‘Sleepy. I go to bed.’
They all regarded him for a second, and then Mikal hauled himself to his feet. ‘That sounds like an excellent idea,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk you down and see if my wife is anywhere close to being able to come home yet.’
They said their goodnights, and after a while Reginald too drifted off in the direction of the bedrooms, and it was only Eli and Aryel left alone in the vast room, with the first traces of a midsummer dawn beginning to turn the windows pale.
‘Aryel,’ he said, staring at the ceiling, ‘are you really upset with Herran for sending those messages my way?’
She gazed out of the window at the lightening sky, shook her head and laughed softly. ‘No. He was right. You needed to know and I needed to not carry it around any more. I’m just struggling to come to terms with the fact that he worked that out when I couldn’t.’
He took this in, feeling it spread warmth throughout his tired body and brain.
‘Rhys must have asked him the same question, mustn’t he? About looking for his genetype in the archive. And got the same answer, but also been pointed towards the black hole in the basement.’
‘Yes. Before tonight I would have assumed that Rhys just asked better questions than me, but now …’ she trailed off, musing, or maybe too weary to think her way through the enormity of what Herran had done; and what it meant for him, as well as for Rhys and Eli and herself. The little gem had understood his friends, had known what they needed, and had taken the initiative on their behalf – to a far greater degree than any of them c
ould ever have imagined possible.
‘You going to try and get some sleep?’ he asked her quietly, watching her profile against the light.
‘I couldn’t. Think I’ll go up to the garden, watch the sun come up. You?’
‘No chance. Want some company?’
‘Yes, please.’
They gathered up blankets and made their way along the perimeter walkways to the door. As they let themselves quietly into the corridor, Eli said, ‘You never finished telling me, you know.’
‘Telling you what?’
‘The rest of what happened. After you got out.’
‘Ah.’ She looked up at him, smiling. ‘Well, this is the right place for the rest of that story.’
She held out a hand and he took it, sliding her slender fingers between his own; and thought, as he walked with her through the sleeping building and up the stairs, that it felt as much like an ending as a beginning.
PHOENIX
There are lights amongst the trees, first one and then another; not the harsh searchlights of the retrieval teams but gentler, faint and flickering. She crouches behind the outcrop that conceals her, fifty feet up the side of a cliff once blasted into being by miners many centuries dead. Maybe the same miners who blasted the tunnels and chambers where she has spent her life until this night, the tunnels and chambers she in turn had to blast her way out of.
Screams echo faintly in her inner ear and she shudders, clings tighter to the rock behind which she hides, focuses harder on the lights. It is barely a ledge upon which she has alighted, no more than a few scant toe-and finger-holds against which she can rest her weight. Her hands and feet tremble with fatigue, along with her newly tried wings, held open and stiff for balance. The sudden, cell-deep certainty that came to her on the mountainside, that let her trust them and led her here, feels as ephemeral as a fading dream. She is cold and hungry and afraid, and more tired than she has ever been. And there are lights in the forest below her.
Could these be the ones she seeks? They were to have met at the waterfall at sunset, but she is miles downstream of it now and the sun is long gone. Or are they a new troupe of hunters, less well equipped – or clever enough to appear so – but no less deadly in their intent? Her flight strength is gone; if she moves she must come to earth, show herself and risk all. She dares not. But she cannot hang here forever.
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