by Louise Cole
“It doesn’t matter. You’re not going to.”
“What?”
“We’re taking the book back to Ella, and then I’m going to take you away somewhere. I’ll keep you safe.” He spoke as though it were a fait accompli.
“No. What makes you think you can do that? Decide like that?”
“I’ve promised your father I’ll keep you safe. I promised you. I intend to keep both.”
“You also promised that you would protect the Reader—not run away with her.”
“Yes. Those promises I’m prepared to break.” He seemed stupidly, implacably calm, like a cow chewing cud in a burning barn.
“I gave Ella my word, Jace. You rescue my dad, I do the reading. That was the deal.”
“So what? You think the Order keeps all its promises?”
“That’s not the point.” I struggled to find the words. It was as if . . . if I backed out I was saying my father wasn’t worth it. Like I had saved him with trickery at no cost to me. I knew that made no practical sense at all. More to the point, if I ran, I couldn’t keep them safe. Any of them. Ella’s threat played in my mind. I couldn’t risk it.
“Why are you so determined that I shouldn’t read?” I asked in a small voice. “Because you think I’m a child? Because you think I’ll be like my mother and wind up dead before I can succeed?” I clenched my jaw, my anger ebbing and flowing with each new thought. “Have you so little faith in me?”
“Callie, your mother probably ran and hoped they wouldn’t find her.” He spoke quietly, but his words filled my head as though he’d screamed them.
“No. No,” I stumbled. “Because if she’d read, if she’d restored the balance then—”
“It would have killed her.” Jace locked his eyes on mine. “If the reading works, the energies required are far greater than a single mind can withstand. That’s the price. That’s what no one’s told you. No one has survived it. Ever.”
Chapter 22
It had been a long day. Foreign Secretary Mick Sanders glanced at his counterpart and raised an eyebrow. The big Canadian, Dan Brewer, nodded very slightly. His hand inched toward his neck again as though he couldn’t wait to loosen his tie.
“Gentlemen, I propose we break for tonight,” said Sanders, cutting across the heated exchange between the Indian Defense Secretary and the Pakistani Foreign Secretary. The other officials on either side looked strained and tired. “I’d like to thank you all for your commitment and hard work today.” That was a bloody lie. It had been a disaster. He wanted nothing more than to bang their sorry heads together.
There was a general murmuring as papers shuffled and seats slid back.
“Before we reconvene, though, I would ask you to think on one thing. We have heard a lot today about historical events, old conflicts, and who used to own what land. I would ask you to think hard about putting yesterday—all our yesterdays—aside. These talks are about today, and that’s what we need to focus on.”
Brewer shook his hand. “Nice try,” he said.
The Indian Foreign Secretary waited by the table as the others filed out of the room.
“What you must understand, Mr. Sanders,” he said, “is that who we were yesterday determines who we are today.” He shook his head. “Do not make the mistake of patronizing us. We are serious men, and these are serious matters.”
Sanders sat back down. “I’m genuinely sorry if that’s how it came across, Mr. Chahal. I know you are good men and competent leaders. Yet somehow we aren’t communicating.”
“You aren’t leading,” Chahal replied. “That is your role, yes? To lead the talks?”
Sanders swallowed bile. It tasted of failure, acid on his tongue.
“So what’s stopping you?” Chahal asked.
“I’m scared,” Sanders whispered.
The gray-haired Asian man patted his shoulder. “We’re all scared, Mick.”
***
“Readers die, Callie. Why do you think no one ever reads twice?”
I sheered away from him, my back against the door. “May I have the courage to do what is right,” my mother had written. She didn’t want to die. I suddenly understood what Dad meant about victims. They were sacrificial lambs.
“Were you going to tell me?”
Jace looked away. “I believe most Readers are told. You were so much younger than the others. Ella didn’t think you’d handle it.”
“You were ordered not to tell me I was on a suicide mission.” Anger blazed, but I banked it behind a wall of ice.
“I wanted to, but Ella insisted you were too fragile. Personally, I didn’t think we should be asking you to do this at all. We’ve rowed about it repeatedly.”
Jace’s words from the day before came back to me—“She’s too young. This isn’t right. If you don’t know that, then you should.”
I blew out my breath softly. “I thought you didn’t like me much. Jeez. I sometimes wonder if I get anything right.”
“That’s why we’re leaving. Tonight.” He tilted my chin upward. “And you were very wrong. I do like you. So much more than I should.” He brought his face close to mine, searching my eyes, but I was too stunned by what I’d heard to respond.
I’d once seen a rabbit in a trap. It hadn’t thrashed or tugged or tried to escape. It stayed completely still, silent, shocked beyond action. I now knew exactly how it felt.
I had no will to move. I barely noticed when Jace pulled back. When I did notice, I barely cared. I turned away.
“You should drive,” I said. “I need to think.” I sat in silence all the way back to the safe house.
***
I could hear Jace and Ella talking urgently, but I didn’t care.
“She can’t read like this anyway. Who knows if it would work?” Jace said.
“The peace talks are faltering after one day. We have no more options. Without a reading, there will be all out war. My mission is to stop that.”
“It’s immoral.”
“Less moral than war?”
“And it’s irresponsible. The Reader is meant to bring balance. How balanced is she? Have you any idea what she’s feeling?” Jace’s voice was like a saw edge.
There was the smallest pause. “I can’t feel anything from her right now. I think she’s in shock. She will come out of it. People do. Let her sleep. She’ll be fine.”
Ha, I thought. Ella can’t read me anymore. But there was no triumph in it. I sat by the fire and turned their voices to static like an untuned TV.
I’d never imagined my future. I wondered now if that was because I’d always known I didn’t have one.
Amber had predicted she would be a vet at eight, an actress at eleven. By the age of thirteen she had promoted herself to Hollywood producer. At fifteen, she was debating the various merits of law and medicine, based largely, I think, on the available numbers of rich young men either might yield. Now she was intent on a career in PR and advertising.
I’d never seen anything when I looked ahead—nothing but myself in a cottage with a pile of books. Now it was one book.
Would it be very hard to die? I wondered suddenly. Had I ever really been so attached to this life in the first place? The pain, the betrayal, the loss. My mother’s body swinging gently, my father’s broken face. Would it be so bad to let go of it, to simply sleep it all away?
My father’s face stayed with me as I rocked gently in the chair by the fire, a steady rhythm which replaced my now still heart. He believed in me. His belief in me had protected him, and I’d keep that promise. I would protect him again. I wouldn’t let the Order hurt him or hurt Amber. If I could, I’d protect them all from this war. I’d find a way somehow. Better to die for something than nothing.
So I made my decision.
And I felt nothing at all.
“We’ll do it tomorrow,” I announced to them. “While the talks are in session.”
“Ella, this is madness. She can’t read,” Jace protested. “She’s not rational.”
“I’m sitting right here,” I said.
“Yesterday, you didn’t think she was capable of reading,” Jace said, ignoring me. “What about ‘this goddamn wall’ you talked about?”
“She knows the book. She’ll have to make a decision to open herself up and get on with it.” Ella was icy calm against Jace’s increasingly desperate arguments.
“What if she can’t project? She hasn’t even tried.”
Ella paced the kitchen. “Maybe she doesn’t need to project. Not far, anyway.”
“I thought that was the whole point of a Reader,” said Jace. “Powerful enough to change the world.”
“We don’t need to change the world. We only need to change the peace talks.” She stopped walking abruptly and pulled out a chair. “This could work. The talks are at the Canada House, Trafalgar Square. If we do it there, she could pull it off.”
I let their noise wash over me. I didn’t really care. All that mattered now was that I didn’t surface from this still, cool pool insulating my mind.
“I’m going to bed,” I said.
Jace followed me upstairs. I suspect he talked to me the whole way, but nothing he said penetrated the depths of my newfound peace, and I didn’t answer. When I reached my room, I shut the door and sat down in the darkness.
***
I sat alone with the book late into the night. I was exhausted beyond the need for sleep. Jace prowled out there somewhere, but he didn’t come to my room. I looked at the images again by the light of the bedside lamp. Eve filled one margin, holding out the apple; on another page the same voluptuous woman called down lightning into her hands. She looked triumphant, ecstatic, and the snake curled dead at her feet.
I turned the page slowly. Chimps hung from trees and dropped to the ground, morphing slowly into hairy men. I knew it made no sense. There was no way someone in Sumeria a thousand years ago got the jump on Darwin.
The text wasn’t all equally old I was sure. I’d found traces of writers who hadn’t been alive two thousand years ago—or even fifty.
It didn’t matter. How it worked, who made it, I didn’t care anymore. I would read it. And I would be done.
***
“Can you drive me to school?” I asked Jace the next morning. “For a few minutes. I have people to see.”
“This isn’t the time.”
“It’s the only time I’ll get,” I replied.
“It’s dangerous. Or have you learned nothing?”
I didn’t rise to the bait. I just looked at him, knowing there was no way in hell I was going off to die without telling Amber. My dad . . . well, I couldn’t tell him. There were words which could kill. I was sure of it. Goodbye was one of them.
***
Jace parked at the doors. No one could have known we were headed here and Jace assured me we weren’t followed. “Five minutes,” he said, as I walked away from the car.
It was strange going back for the last time. I’d always assumed this was the start of my life.
Stranger still now the doors were festooned in yellow police tape, thin and twisted in the wind. It was locked—of course it would be locked—and there would be no one inside, and yet the parking lot was full. I walked around the outside of the hall, skirting the damp patch of ground near the Dumpsters, and saw them. It looked like the whole of Lifley—students, teachers, villagers, parents—standing in silent ranks on the grass as though in vigil. Was it for those who’d died in the attack? A flush of shame warmed me, cooled by a flutter of panic that I was risking these people again just by being here.
Then I saw the bus.
I picked my way through the crowd, sidestepping and weaving. Murmured voices rustled like dry pages. Few of the spectators even acknowledged me with a sideways shift of their eyes, so intent was their focus.
At first glance, it looked like any other school trip. Students, bulging rucksacks, parents standing in groups. Until I saw the kids’ dark-green uniforms and the soldiers ticking off names on a sheet and the parents’ faces. A few had tears streaking down their cheeks, but the worst thing, the thing that sank claws deep into my heart, were the attempts at bravery. The dads who grasped their sons’ hands and drew daughters into bone-crushing hugs, chins thrust forward as though if they could just hold it together for everyone they would still see the way out. They looked emptied, as though they had woken up that morning and discovered they were not at all who they had thought themselves to be.
Voices were muted, everything said for one person alone, a symphony of private messages.
One slight, chocolate-haired woman hung back, her eyes roving endlessly over the crowd as though looking for someone who should be there and wasn’t. Wide-eyed, Gavin’s mother looked like she had lost her soul, her abandoned body groping after it in a world which no longer made sense. She studied every face, her brow slightly furrowed, as though she was waiting for one dark-cropped boy to turn and, by some miracle, be her son.
No one went near her, either too lost in their own families or scared that her loss would perhaps be contagious. I wanted to speak to her, to comfort her, but I had no words.
Mrs. Wentworth clung to Joe while Amber hung back, looking down, as though she had already said goodbye. Eventually Joe extricated himself with such tenderness, leaning his mum against his father, whose arm shot around his wife so firmly I wondered if it was comfort or restraint.
One by one, the students boarded the bus, muffled sobbing picking up like a spring breeze from parents who turned away so their kids wouldn’t see them cry, or stood ramrod straight, determined to look at their child’s face until it vanished from view.
I hung back to give the families space.
“God, it’s just too awful,” said a voice nearby, carrying easily across the muted field. “I’m so glad we don’t have to go, Alec.”
I turned on reflex and wished I hadn’t. Alec blushed crimson and edged away from Jessica as people around him flashed filthy looks and muttered to one another. No one said anything directly to them—except for Amber.
Her tear-stained eyes furious, she rounded on Jessica like a harpy. “Tell me, Jessica, which of you is the greater loss to our forces? The coward who’s only dating you to get out of the draft, or the dim bint who’s letting him?”
Jess’s eyes grew wide. “That’s not true. I’m sorry for you Amber, I really am, but Alec loves me.”
“Then why did he tell Callie that if he didn’t need you and your daddy, he’d choose her instead?” Amber clearly realized she’d dropped me in it as the words left her mouth, but I think she was too angry to take it back even if she could. “Stupid cow,” she muttered as she turned away.
Jess turned to me, her face pale and empty. I expected anger, but instead her eyes were huge and limpid, like a little girl’s. “Is that true?” she asked me.
A thousand answers danced to my lips. I had despised Jessica for so long, and suddenly I wondered why. She was only a girl. A trusting, vulnerable girl. Probably a nicer person than I was, if truth be told. And she was asking me for honesty. She was asking me to save her.
Ella’s voice cut through my thoughts, sarcastic and bitter: “The truth doesn’t set you free Callie. It just makes life harder.”
It’s all we have, Ella, I thought sadly. “Yes,” I said to Jess. “I’m sorry.”
Alec whispered furiously to Jessica, but she waved him off like an annoying fly and ran toward the gates. Alec aimed one furious, hate-filled look at me before sprinting after her.
I edged over to Amber. “Oops,” she said.
I shrugged. “Forget it. I have to go.”
“No. No.” She held me tight.
“I have to. I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Callie, no. Do you see this?”
“I found out the price,” I said against her neck. “It’s OK. Really, it’s OK.”
“Callie, none of this is OK. Please. Don’t do this.” She let go and cupped my cheeks in her hands. “Joe’s gone. I can’t lose
you, too.”
I detached myself gently, kissed her forehead, and walked away. I knew she was still standing there, watching me. I could feel her. But I wouldn’t look back.
Jace was standing by the car. He didn’t move when he saw me, but his eyes locked on to my face. Even with my eyes averted, I could still feel the heat of his gaze as he drove me away.
***
“She’s in the open. We must leave,” said Cyrus. His small army was down by about twenty, but it didn’t matter. Cadaveri had swarmed in like rats in a port. The image pleased him. “We will follow the Reader,” he continued. “Others are hitting the cities. We will finish this if we have to bring this country to its knees. We think she’s headed for London, for the peace talks. Once there, it is every man for himself.” He shrugged. He had tried to contain this, but maybe after all, nothing mattered. “There is more than one way to victory. Do your worst.”
***
Within twenty minutes, we were on the motorway. The train would be faster, but Jace couldn’t bear the thought of being trapped if the sniper was still following me. Besides, the security procedures at train stations were too tight to get a penknife through, let alone Jace’s sword.
“How the hell did you get it into the country?” asked Ella.
“It went in the hold as an antique. It has papers and everything.” He had stroked the case as though it were a family pet.
There had been a brief argument between Ella and Jace. He felt she should stay behind. “The place will be crawling with Cadaveri within minutes of the reading starting—if they’re not following us already. I can’t protect you both.”
“It’s not your job to protect us both, J. It’s your job to protect her. If she’s going to come around enough to make this work, you’re going to need me.” She looked skeptical. To be honest, so was I. I’d read the damn thing, but there was no way I would tolerate any psychic invasion of my privacy ever again.
Their conversation had continued fierce and intense for the first forty miles, but it was irrelevant to me. Ella could come if she wanted. I believed she was doing what she thought was right. I was doing what I thought was right. On this, we coincided. It was the only shared ground we had.