by Louise Cole
“Spit it out, Callie. What’s really eating you?”
I thought of all my unanswered questions. I saw Amber’s wide eyes as she whispered, “What if they can’t save you?” I tried to speak. Some words were harder to get out than others. They fought through layers of convention and childhood teaching. But I couldn’t lie now, however politely—not when I had demanded the truth.
“I don’t trust you.” I forced myself to look up. Ella said nothing, so I stumbled on. “You want me to lay myself open, but you tell me nothing about yourself. You can feel everything we feel, yet I’m frightened you are the coldest, hardest person I’ve met. That doesn’t seem right. An empath should be more . . .”
“More sensitive?” She deflated suddenly, slumping back into her armchair. “More able to connect? More human?”
I shrugged helplessly.
“I could tell you I don’t have time to mollycoddle you, Callie. I could tell you the world is on the brink of all out disaster, and it’s my job to stop that in just three days. I could say I have to be hard to do this job.” She looked up and caught my gaze with her steel-blue eyes. “It wouldn’t be true. At least, it is true, all of it, but that’s not why I don’t give myself away.” She gestured to the other chair with her head. “Sit down.”
I perched on the edge of the chair.
“You have no reason to trust me,” she whispered, as much to herself as to me. “So,” she said louder, “how about I tell you something about me? Why I don’t put the same faith in truth as you do?”
I sat transfixed.
“I’m never going to have the kind of life you could. I’m almost certainly never going to marry, have kids, or find one person I can be close to for evermore.” She squirmed backward in the seat, her hand shielding her cheek as she spoke.
I fought an impulse to take it back, to say it was OK, she didn’t have to tell me anything. She held her hand up, fingers spread, asking for time, and I subsided in silence.
“A few years back, I loved a man. I was young, barely twenty-one, and we were happy. Anyway, sometimes people do stupid things for stupid reasons.” She gave a small, sad smile. “I did a stupid thing. And it ended our relationship.”
“He didn’t forgive you?” I whispered. No way was I going to ask what she’d done. My palms were sweating, and I felt dirty, like I had blackmailed her into this confession. Like I had pushed where I had no right to be.
“No, he did forgive me. He loved me. He wanted to forgive me.” Her lips twisted together, and her eyes filled like little pools. “But every time something reminded us of it, there would be this flash, this anger, this . . . resentment. I would feel it. Like a knife, every time. He would say he was sorry and that he was getting past it. He meant it.” She stared at me. “I know that. He really did love me, but what people feel is always messy and complicated—what they feel and what they want aren’t always the same thing.” She gave a flat, bitter laugh. “You think being an empath would give me insight, make my relationships better? If I was like you, I’d still be with him. I’d be happy and in love with a man who loved me. In fact, because I’m me, I felt that hurt every time, his hurt. I felt what I had done to him every time it came up. He couldn’t hide it from me, however much he wanted it to go away. And for me to stay.”
She put her hands flat on her thighs and breathed out heavily. “The truth doesn’t always fix things, Callie. It can tear you apart.”
I waited in silence. I had no clue what to say to that. After a moment, Ella straightened and went to brew coffee. I tried to marshal my thoughts. Did I trust her? I had worked my way into a corner, challenging her for something personal. Now it was my turn.
“So how do I do this then?” I asked when she came back.
“Do what?”
“Read. Share myself. Because, you know, you just made it look like such fun.” It was a stupid joke but the best I could do to ease the tension.
“Do you have a boyfriend, Callie?”
I wriggled in my chair. “Not at the moment.”
“So tell me about your last boyfriend. When you first met him.”
I started to say that I hadn’t ever had a boyfriend, but the thought of Alec’s lips, his easy laugh, the memory of closing my eyes while he traced grass stalks over my face and neck, flooded me. For one brief flash, I remembered how I felt when he kissed me, when his deep gray eyes studied my face as though I was the most precious thing he’d ever seen. I’d felt for one moment like I shone as brightly as he did.
“You see, you know what I’m talking about.” Ella leaned in close to me. “It doesn’t matter whether he’s really your boyfriend or not. It’s not about truth, it’s about belief. We’re reminding people of what they believe in, Callie. When you believe something good, it transforms your world. Like I believe this is the right thing to do.”
“You do?” I sounded like a six-year-old.
Her big blue eyes were solemn. “I do. Learn to trust, Callie. Share yourself, and you can transform the world.” She smiled at my skeptical expression. “Take a leap of faith,” she said.
***
The Seer shifted miserably on the ground. He held his head in both hands as though afraid it would fall away from his shoulders if he released it.
“Glimpses and shadows, glimpses and shadows,” he crooned. “So tired.”
“We are all tired. Tired of this miserable existence.” Cyrus kicked an oil drum, and the sound reverberated around the old farmhouse like the drums of war.
“Then maybe we can relieve you of the burden.” The newcomer stood in the doorway, a tall, imposing figure. His face was etched with a thousand lines which wound random patterns around his eyes and across his cheeks. It was impossible to say whether they were scars from battles long since forgotten or simply the engravings of age.
“And you are?”
“Most call me Scarman.”
“I run this troupe. Numbers are welcome, but we don’t need another leader.”
Wulf hunched in the corner, watching in silence as Scarman walked to the fire and breathed deeply for a moment before putting a single finger against a burning log. His face twitched and then relaxed.
“Yet,” he said slowly, watching his blistered finger in wonder, “you have failed repeatedly to kill this girl. The Reader is still out there. Several of my band have heard her.”
“We will.” Cyrus kicked the Seer.
“You’re running out of time,” said Scarman. “Sailor, tell them.”
A small, stocky creature stepped toward the fire, his arms and chest covered in tattoos.
“Another who has lost his name?” asked Cyrus.
“Sailor serves,” said the tattooed Cadaveri. “After all, what’s in a name?” He gave a lizard’s smile, thin, tongue flicking.
“Tell them,” repeated Scarman.
“On the way here, we heard the music running freely. Even when the girl’s not reading, it pours through her mind. Her connection with it is so strong she won’t wait long before she reads. The pressure will become too much for her to bear.”
“So we have no time to lose,” said Scarman. “There can be no waiting for her to be alone or to focus on the book. We must go wherever she is, and finish this.”
“Finally,” muttered Wulf.
“A suicide run,” said Cyrus.
“So what if it is?” cried Scarman. “Do we really have so much to live for?” He strode over to a thin creature who was running a razor blade gently down his forearms, making a tiny lattice of cuts. “You, brother. Have you never thought of letting the blade sink deep? Two strong, swift moves, and let it all ebb away?”
The razor blade paused in midair. “All the time.”
“What stops you? Why not seek the peace you crave?”
There was a pause, and the blade floated down to caress a wrist. “I no longer believe in peace.”
Scarman’s hands closed over the blade. “Then take your pain and make it anger. Rage is our fuel.” He spread h
is arms and turned to the hundred or more Cadaveri who packed the dilapidated building. “How many of us are left? A few hundred throughout the world, perhaps? I don’t regret that. The last Reader’s music poured through my veins like acid. Since then, I have lived on my anger. I will not give up this pitiful life without bringing them down.”
A swell of voices broke like a frothing wave. The weaker among them fell moaning against the walls as the cloud of memories swirled up like mud in a stirred pond.
“You all remember, too,” said Scarman softly. He prowled among them. “However much we try to forget and try to block the pain, pain is all we are made of. They saw to that with their infernal prayers, their devil’s poetry. We stink of it, and the loss and grief and hatred clots around us like blood from a slaughterhouse.”
“I had a child,” whispered one. A small woman scuttled to the front of the crowd on hands and knees like a beetle. “He smelled of yeast and milk. He was playing in the garden when a van took him away. No one saw him again. Everyone looked, but eventually they stopped. They whispered. It was my fault. What kind of mother leaves her child unattended? What kind of mother let him out of her sight? And they were right.”
She crouched over her cupped palm as though it held treasure. Her rasping voice was no louder than birdsong, yet it echoed around the stone walls. “I took pills. I took pills to get me through the days and then more pills to get through the nights. When I first heard the music, I thought it was him. He was crying to come home. Crying for me. I followed it, running through the streets, the pavement ripping my bare feet, leaving a trail of blood wherever I fell. I didn’t even feel the burning until I realized he was gone. He was really gone. And everything had left with him.”
She fell silent, forehead on her knees, her shoulders shaking with every hoarse breath.
“You.” Scarman towered over Cyrus. “Do you not remember how they robbed you? Is the memory not strong enough to send you to your death?”
Cyrus looked away. He could still taste the woman’s pathos, her despair, in his throat. It was thick and pungent, impossible to swallow, like rancid meat.
“No,” he snarled. “I do not remember the day I was made.” He closed his eyes and ignored the mess of metal and muscle in his mind’s eye. The blue gleam of his severed thigh. The thin line of blood trickling off her forehead.
“Whatever,” said Scarman. “The point is, we cannot fail. We are the ones who bore this burden and did not crawl into alleys to die. We are the only ones who can say, ‘Never again.’”
“We can still take the book,” protested Cyrus. He knew he had lost. However it played out now was beyond his control.
“Oh for God’s sake!” Wulf cried. “The Reader is harder for them to replace than the book. Taking the book is harder for us than killing a teenage girl. Kill the girl, and we can take it from her cooling corpse.”
“True,” said Sailor. “She’s not going to just hand it over. The Crone talked to the last Reader, and look how that turned out.”
“Then let us do what we must. No more creeping in the shadows,” said Scarman. “Scavenge and steal. Take what weapons you can find.”
“That’s madness. We are not trained fighters!” yelled Cyrus.
“We don’t need to be,” replied Scarman in a whisper that seemed to echo from the bricks like the rustle of autumn leaves, soft but invasive. “Our greatest weapon is chaos. Their troops will fall on each other before us. Let us stop avoiding the crowds and the busy places—chaos is our advantage. We can rip their cities apart. Stop fearing those who have already taken everything but our breath.”
He turned to his comrades who were still huddled in the doorway. “Sailor, join our pitiful friend here by the fire. The next time the Reader steps out into the open, we strike.”
He turned to the crowd, arms open, his white eyes glowing like twin moons. His voice boomed and echoed like a rock slide. “Harvest your rage, your hatred, your grief, my friends. For today, we go to war.”
Chapter 11
The room, hidden in the bowels of Downing Street, was hot and stuffy. It wasn’t surprising that an intelligence briefing wouldn’t welcome windows, but Foreign Secretary Mick Sanders wished desperately that they would install air conditioning.
He greeted the Home Secretary and nodded to the heads of MI5 and MI6. He didn’t even know who the other six people were, and, frankly, didn’t much care.
The portly head of MI5 kicked off with the security protocols for the peace talks. “The talks will be held in Canada House. All our people will be inside and on rooftops,” he said. “The perimeter will be ringed with soldiers, and the press corps is being restricted to one narrow strip by the south entrance. They will all be prevetted and ring-fenced.”
The Foreign Secretary found it hard to concentrate. None of this concerned him—he would be inside, chairing the talks with his Canadian counterpart. If terrorists got through the door, well, it would be a little late for him by then.
He thought again about his son, David. David was just eighteen and in his first year of an engineering degree. Sanders had found him a place at Marlon Engineering, one of the biggest defense contractors. No one could say the boy wouldn’t have been contributing to the war effort, and crucially, he would have had essential worker status.
David had refused. “You can’t have a son who’s a draft dodger. You’d never be reelected.”
“For Christ’s sake, David, do you think I care about my career more than you? Please take this job. Until everything settles down, at least.”
However, the son proved as stubborn as the father. “You’ve always said we have to live by what we believe, Dad. If all my friends are going and you think that’s right, then why shouldn’t I go?” His boy had looked so young, yet his words were those of a much older man. “How would I live with myself if I hid away in some factory while they had to fight?”
Mick Sanders had never been prouder of his son. So proud his chest tightened and burned. Yet he would rather have been ashamed of him and known he was safe.
“These gangs? Do they have any affiliation?”
The Foreign Secretary tuned back in.
The MI5 chief shook his head. “Not that we know of. Ragged bunches of homeless, the disaffected. People who’ve fallen through the cracks. Reports are isolated, and they aren’t anything the Home Guard can’t handle.”
“Right then.” The Home Secretary gathered his papers with a flourish. “If there’s nothing else, it just falls to me to say all our hopes are pinned on you, Mick. For God’s sake, man, don’t let those talks fail.”
The Foreign Secretary was spared having to make a civil response as the MI6 guy, whippet-lean and thin-faced, coughed nervously. “There is one possible intervention I should mention. Purely for the sake of completeness, you understand.”
The Home Secretary looked up sharply. “Yes, Mr. Stark?”
“There’s some chatter about a group called the Order of Sumer.”
The MI5 chief started to laugh behind his hand.
“Is something funny, Mr. Hendricks?”
The portly man chuckled, his shoulders heaving. “The Order of Sumer is the intelligence communities’ Loch Ness Monster, Home Secretary. Once in a generation someone swears they saw something, but no one can ever prove who, what, or why. I wouldn’t lose sleep over such rumors.”
“Nonetheless, there are rumblings from the Middle East that these people might interfere in the talks. The Saudis have noted their operatives entering the country. It is the kind of thing the churches get hot and bothered about, as well. We should not dismiss any such claim at the moment.” The whippet Stark opened his hands as if to show he had nothing else.
“The churches? Why should they care?” Sanders asked.
Stark flushed. “Rumor has it the Order uses spells—some would call them prayers—to influence events, Mr. Foreign Secretary.”
The Home Secretary barked out a laugh. “Good God, so does my mother.” He clapped S
anders on the shoulder. “Shouldn’t worry, old chap. I think we need all the prayers we can get.”
Sanders sat for a moment as the others filed out of the room, staring intently at his glass of water. The Home Secretary paused at the door.
“Everything all right, Mick?”
“I’ve been stitched up, Andy,” he said. “The Prime Minister could be doing this himself, but he won’t.”
The Home Secretary closed the door softly.
“No. He won’t. For the same reason we’re not holding these talks in one of our bloody buildings. We might have to host them in London, but our dear PM intends to make damn sure he doesn’t go down as the man who failed to stop World War III.”
“How the hell did I get to be scapegoat?” Sanders gave a mirthless laugh. “I feel like the man who didn’t stand back quickly enough when they asked for volunteers. Well, if it all goes wrong, I probably won’t have long to mourn my reputation.”
“You’re not a scapegoat,” the Home Secretary said, squeezing his friend’s shoulder. “I prefer to think of you as our last hope.”
***
After lunch Ella marched me into the garden. “We’re going to connect you to the source of your power,” she said.
“The source of my power,” I repeated blankly.
“The deepest part of you. The source of your inspiration.”
“Hang on. You said before that I need to project like the Cadaveri. I don’t want to be like them.”
“You won’t be. They leak bad stuff like body odor. You will be a conduit for good energy. Transformative energy. You need to learn how to push it out into the world.”
I flopped down on the grass, deceptively relaxed, but I wasn’t going to let Ella slip by this again. “Tell me about them. The Cadaveri.”
Ella’s shoulders tightened. “What difference does it make? They’re the bad guys.”
“Of course it makes a difference. If the book is good and powerful, if the book can bring peace, why would anyone stand in the way of that?”
Ella laughed. “I’m sorry, I forget how young you are,” she replied, sweet as a strawberry.