All of this knowledge flashed through Kirra’s mind when she was high-kicked onto her arse by a woman. She could have sat there for another twenty-four hours trying to figure out how that could be possible, but her body was already kicking, blocking and striking, even as she hit the ground and bounced back to her feet.
Her opponent kept up, then ramped it up, and Kirra suddenly wanted to laugh, to rejoice in what she realised was going to be a rare – and maybe never again experienced – battle.
‘Who trained you?’ she managed through gritted teeth.
‘Kimi,’ said the woman, escaping Kirra’s hold and striking her to the kidneys. ‘She who is without equal.’
‘Liar!’ hissed Kirra, ignoring the pain. ‘Kimi Kana has been buried for a thousand years.’ And I am her equal.
She twisted out of a hold and into a back-arch, smacking into her enemy’s jaw with each foot as she flipped back up onto her feet.
As they battled, she tried to ascertain the whereabouts of the rest of her crew. She knew that Dagger’s Breath would appropriate the targets, but she could not see Golden Tiger or Tanabe Yukio.
Suddenly she sensed that something was very wrong. From the corner of her eye, she saw her number one – her beloved – Dagger’s Breath – staggering in through the doorway of this cursed room past her towards the wardrobe. Dagger’s Breath would not stagger, would not stumble, she thought, still blocking blows instinctively, unless he was mortally wounded, or maybe bewitched.
Then Dagger’s Breath raised his sword.
Her opponent froze at the precise moment Kirra did.
They both spun on the spot and screamed, ‘No!’
Too close! The thought flashed through Kirra’s mind. You are too close to the target, Dagger’s Breath! We have orders to bring him in alive! She readied herself to spring over to the wardrobe. But a heartbeat after the first child fell, the male target launched himself at Dragon’s Breath, and they both crashed to the floor.
Two seconds later, Kirra Kiyota was fairly certain she would not live to see another day. But if she managed to, she was prepared, right then and there, to bet her ancestors’ souls that she would never forget this one. Because when the male target fell, reality fractured.
As Kirra stared, some Thing ripped a hole right through the middle of realness and bludgeoned its way into the bedroom. Kirra fell to her knees as the shrieking she-daemon raised itself up to ceiling height. But even as it towered terrifyingly over them all, red eyes blazing behind whipping Medusa locks, Kirra found herself thinking: Why would a powerful devil wear a frilly red skirt and black-and-white tights? She would never be seen like that.
And then, four things happened.
One, the woman she had been battling gaped in horror at the terrifying creature and shouted at the top of her lungs, ‘Morgan Moreau!’
Next, the seven-foot nightmare flicked a massive hand towards the two boys sprawled in front of the wardrobe, bleeding-out on the carpet (beyond help, in Kirra’s considerable experience), and an iridescent blue light shot from her fingers, cloaking them entirely.
Thirdly, and most disturbingly to Kirra, the Thing reached up to her giant face and ripped a piece of silver jewellery from her nose, hurtling it down onto the carpet where it immediately began to double, quadruple, mushroom monstrously, clanking and grinding from the size of a coin to that of a toy truck, then a dog, and finally to a horrible, terrible, snarling metal dragon-thing that couldn’t, and shouldn’t, be described.
The fourth thing that happened would require many years for Kirra to mentally and emotionally process.
It involved the metal-dog-dragon thing.
It involved her only-love, Dagger’s Breath.
And it involved a lot of blood.
Kirra had seen some things in her twenty-one years. She’d heard many other things over breakfast that had made grown men cry or vomit. But she had never seen anything like this.
She knew that this seven-foot chick and her mutant dragon were not of this world.
She also knew that when a battle was done, it was done, and that leaving right now was not shameful, merely prudent.
But her heart bled for what her beloved had just suffered. So she took a moment, just a fraction of a moment, to weld forever the pain of his death to the karate-liar in khaki, to the cursed gypsy and her brother, and to the bitch-daemon with no dress sense. She vowed that she would see them all again, if not in hell, then before. And she ran to the window.
Ripping the white wooden blinds from the frame as though pulling a tissue from a box, Kirra Kiyota took one last look around that damned supernatural room and at what remained of her beloved, and then, using an elbow sheathed in Kevlar catsuit, she smashed the glass and cartwheeled out, dropping silently down into the wet Sydney night.
As she ran for the shadows, Kirra wondered if there was anywhere in the world she was safe to go.
She had no crew.
She’d failed another mission.
Would the Chairman comfort or kill her?
As she dodged vehicles to find the darkest corners of the city, an image flashed up before her: Dagger’s Breath with his throat in the jaws of that metal thing.
She banished the image and replaced it with another: a twenty-first birthday cake, candles blazing. She heard the rumble of a train and headed for it, keeping the imaginary candles burning bright.
When she’d tucked herself into a corner seat in the bottom carriage of a train heading to Sydney’s Central Station, two dark-haired youths looking for trouble spotted her and made their way over.
She raised her eyebrows, doing her best to tone down her rage. They hesitated and she lifted her lip in a snarl. They moved away quickly.
‘Yeah, get!’ she yelled after them, almost disappointed.
She closed her eyes, watched the pretty candles, and blew them out.
Then Kirra Kiyota made her twenty-first birthday wish.
She’d never tell a soul what she wished for.
Because then it wouldn’t come true.
Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, Australia
July 2, 7.40 p.m.
‘Luke! Get everyone into the cupboard. Now!’ screamed Seraphina.
Luke wasn’t sure how he was supposed to do that when he was dead.
Except he wasn’t.
Even though his shirt was saturated in blood, he felt pretty great, actually. He sat up.
Zac didn’t look so good, but he was breathing. And Seraphina looked to be pretty busy.
‘The Witch healed you,’ yelled Seraphina.
Georgia – a witch?
Now that was definitely not Georgia.
Luke gazed in awe at the Goth girl he’d eaten dinner with the last two nights. Except then she hadn’t been seven foot tall, and she hadn’t been jetting red lasers from her fingers.
‘Georgia is Morgan Moreau,’ coughed Zac, pale and panting, pushing himself up on one elbow. ‘We have to get out of here. Sera won’t be able to hold her off forever.’
‘My mother?’ said Luke, his senses threatening to pack up and leave again.
He watched Seraphina face the monster, green light streaming from her fingers and rippling through the air like flame before meeting Georgia’s blood-red lasers in a deluge of sparks and lightning-like flares.
Samantha seemed to be frozen to the spot, staring with fixed concentration at the fireworks.
‘Samantha, I’m fine,’ Seraphina yelled. Luke didn’t think fine was quite the right word. ‘Please, Sam, you don’t have to help me. Save your energy. Help the boys. Luke – get into that cupboard now!’
Samantha was helping Seraphina? How? Luke stood, swaying a little on his feet. He knew that he had died – he’d felt the sword puncture his lungs, pierce his heart. And the pain. He had never felt anything like it. He had no idea how these things could be happening, but right now he was thankful for the total numbness that overtook him whenever things were out of control. He squinted in the glare of the flame-battle. Yep, t
his would definitely meet that category.
The giant-Georgia countered a laser of light hurled by Seraphina; the energies met in an explosion of brilliance.
The mutant metal dragon thing sat on its hideous haunches, watching the lightshow. From its malformed mouth hung a clump of blood-matted hair left over from the mess of the swordsman on the ground. After one glance downwards, Luke kept his eyes above floor-level. That dude didn’t have a scar any more. He didn’t have a face, either. He wondered why Georgia-Morgan didn’t sick her freak mutt onto Seraphina to end the battle once and for all.
Right then Zac tugged desperately at his arm and Luke turned towards the wardrobe. He’d rather be in there than out here if the doggie-dragon did decide it was up for seconds.
‘Locked,’ said Zac weakly, trying to stay upright. ‘You have to use your tools. You’re the only one who can do it. It all makes sense now.’
‘Oh yeah. It all makes perfect sense, Nguyen,’ Luke said. ‘This is all completely understandable.’
Luke picked the lock in three seconds flat, grabbed Samantha’s hand, and stepped through the door.
Status: Logged in User: Intellice
Are you there?
Oh my God. None of us can believe this has happened! And that Morgan Moreau is alive and kicking. I’m still in shock.
The battle’s over. My source says Morgan vanished when the kids portalled out of there. And Seraphina’s okay.
Morgan set that whole meeting up – we know that for certain. She wanted to bring the kids together. I mean, it’s not as though my source could have that part wrong. Although I’m betting Kirra’s appearance was a bit of a nasty surprise. And Seraphina probably wasn’t part of the plan either.
What is Moreau up to?
At least we know now that she doesn’t want the twins dead. She could have compelled her dragon-daemon to take them all out. But she protected them, healed Luke, and it looks as though Zac might have been lucky enough to catch some of that magic too.
Whatever you do, though, don’t go thinking that Morgan’s found religion or something. She brought those kids into being for a purpose, and I promise you that it’s not to play happy families one day.
Something big is coming. And Morgan’s had centuries to plan for it.
Hell, there are so many spybots in here; this place is crawling with them. I’ve gotta go down low. If I can’t reach you again for a while, keep your ears open, for Gaia’s sake.
Out.
Clarens, Lake Geneva, Switzerland
July 2, 11.30 A.M.
On his twenty-third lap of the twenty-metre swimming pool, Jake Grey decided that he was definitely not going to enrol in his PhD this year. Nor maybe the next.
For the next five laps, he tried to figure out how the hell he was going to explain this to his uncle.
His decision had nothing to do with the fact that he’d only just completed his Masters degree in Neuroinformatics. He wasn’t the slightest bit fatigued by all the study. The program at the Institute of Technology in Zurich had been great, and his dissertation concentrating upon the development of a computational model to map human emotions was fascinating.
And even though his uncle would assume it was all because of George, that wasn’t it either. Sure, he was sick of having that big ape following him everywhere around campus, but he knew that the university would never have allowed him to board there if he hadn’t been chaperoned. Even with his uncle guaranteeing that George would be constantly by his side, it had been difficult to persuade the Dean that he was emotionally mature enough at age eleven to begin his first degree at the university. Now, at age fourteen, he and the Dean were firm friends, and he could probably have convinced him over a chess game that he no longer needed a bodyguard.
The Dean was another person who would not take this news well. Dean Bachmann would definitely feel the loss of their weekly game over dinner in his private dining room, but Jake was under no pretence that what he would miss more was the funding and study grants that Jake’s research attracted.
As he climbed out of the pool after his fiftieth lap, he felt more certain than ever about his decision. He towel-dried his dark-blond hair, and slicked his too-long fringe back out of his blue eyes.
He was beginning to conclude that formal academia was just too one-dimensional and constrained. When he’d put the very basics of his idea for his next project to two of his professors, they’d laughed. When they’d realised he was serious, they’d wasted the next hour of his life trying to tell him how unattainable his plans were. During their three thousand and eighty-eight words, he’d counted the term ‘impossible’ seventeen times.
And that was the very hour when this ridiculous notion arose. That Jake Grey would not enrol in his doctoral studies upon immediately attaining his Masters was unthinkable. He’d completed primary school by age seven, high school at ten, and had his undergraduate degree in neuroscience under his belt by twelve-and-a-half.
But when he’d begun unwittingly counting the number of words his professors spoke, he knew that he was bored. It happened whenever his mind was under-stimulated – it would just begin recording things of its own accord: the licence plate of every car in a carpark, the number of acorns on a tree, the chapters of the book he was speed-reading.
He climbed onto the ancient sandstone wall behind the pool and stared down the wooded hillside out to Lake Geneva. Even though this view was permanently etched into his brain, he never tired of looking at it. Today, in the middle of summer, the lake, bordered by the Swiss Alps, was a seamless, shimmering mirror, its blue brilliance reflecting endlessly the flawless, cloudless sky.
Suddenly starving, he headed back up to the house.
In his uncle’s family for six hundred years, the house could be best described as a mansion, although with its multiple sandstone wings and turreted roofs and spires, many people mistook it for a castle. Some tourist websites, promoting the region, took advantage of this and advertised it as such, but Jake stuck to the literal definition of a castle. He’d traced the building’s history and it had never been used by royalty, nor had it served for protection of the realm.
But he never forgot how lucky he was to call it home. If his uncle hadn’t taken him in when his parents had died in a car accident, who knew where he’d be right now. Maybe in an orphanage. His uncle wouldn’t speak to him of his brother, Jake’s father, telling him only that his parents had had a brief relationship before they’d both been killed in the collision.
He stepped into the ultramodern kitchen and leaned into the huge stainless steel fridge. As great as the house was, he kinda wished his uncle hadn’t ordered the multi-million-dollar refurbishment of the interior. He’d loved the stone walls, the intricate moulded cornices, the original, sweeping ballroom. But when his uncle had dug into the hillside to create his three-level underground laboratory, he’d hired a decorator and ordered the builders to completely gut the place. Jake had come home during semester break to what felt like an entirely new house.
Except for his room. After weeks of pleading, his uncle had agreed to leave Jake’s room just as it was. Jake didn’t know what he would have done if he hadn’t been able to persuade him. His room was his muse – the place where most of his ideas came to him. It was his heart, his home. When he was away during semester he pined for it as though for a pet, a best friend, a sibling.
‘May I assist you, Master Jake?’
Adelheid appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, a crystal goblet in one hand, a polishing cloth in the other. Adelheid was something else Jake missed like crazy when he was away. He kicked the fridge door closed with his foot, balancing jars, a plate, and storage containers. He dumped them all onto a vast steel benchtop and rushed over to her. Taller than Adelheid for the first time, he gripped her around her slim, aproned waist and twirled her around like a ballerina in a jewellery box.
She slapped him across his bare shoulder, hard enough for the sound to echo off the shiny surfaces and to leave
a crimson mark.
He grinned.
She frowned fearsomely, steel-grey hair scraped back from her face and imprisoned in a bun. But when she bustled by him into the kitchen, he glimpsed the tiniest upward tilt to her full lips. As usual, all of Adelheid’s attempts to appear formidable were undermined by the ageless beauty of her face.
She carefully placed the goblet up against a wall. Adelheid was another non-fan of the mega-renovation. She treasured the heirlooms now buried in glossy, handle-free cupboards, and whenever the Master was away she found them all and tended to them just as she always had.
‘Sandwich?’ said Jake. ‘I’m making one. Roast beef.’
‘Please, allow me,’ she said, moving towards the Tupperware. ‘And you know I’m a vegetarian.’
‘Uh uh,’ he said, moving in close to her. He knew that would do it. He was right; she stepped away from the bench.
Adelheid hated to be touched. That made him inexpressibly sad, because he remembered when he still wore nappies and she would smother his face in kisses and squeeze and hold him close every chance she got.
Jake knew that these memories really shouldn’t exist. Science told him that he couldn’t have these memories – that until the age of at least three he should have no verbal-pictorial recall of what had happened to him. The brain was simply not sufficiently developed to store such data. But Jake remembered many things, some seen from between the bars of his cot, and every one of his memories featuring Adelheid was well-worn and treasured.
As soon as he’d learned to walk and talk, however, the hugs had ceased. He missed them still; their absence was like a constant, faint toothache.
‘Let me make you a sandwich,’ he said. ‘It’s lunchtime.’
‘That’s my job,’ she growled.
‘I don’t care,’ he said.
Jake knew that Adelheid’s work in this house was more important to her than anything in the world, but he wanted to do something for her, for once.
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