The Catalyst

by Helena Coggan

  Prologue: The Veilbreak

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Acknowledgments

  Extract from The Reaction, the thrilling sequel to The Catalyst

  The first they knew of it was the crack in the sky.

  It stretched across the sun, cutting swathes of light from the city streets — a great, black, jagged mouth, from the eastern horizon to the westernmost clouds. Through it came darkness, spilling shadows into the streetlights. It was only just twilight on the Meridian. In more easterly parts of the world, darker and deeper into night, it was as if a thousand stars had suddenly gone out.

  In London, drowsily turning from the early touches of nightfall, a few seconds passed before it was felt. Streams of traffic slowed, clogging the arteries of the city. People got out of their cars; they were astonished, frightened, confused. The crack in the sky loomed above them, captured in a million grainy phone-shoots. London sparkled with camera flashes.

  That was when the storm began.

  Paul Folbright, assistant electrician in the Ichor labs, was one of the first on the balcony in their godforsaken corner of North London. He had been one of the opportunists: he’d managed to prize a promotion off Richard Ichor before the old man retired from the project, leaving it to his son. Andrew Ichor was a genius, certainly, and arrogant enough with it, especially for a sixteen-year-old. A lot of people who worked with him, including Folbright, found him deeply creepy. He was always one step ahead of you in your own thought processes, and, partly because of this, he always got what he wanted — apart from, recently, project funding: the powers that be had been disappointed with the lack of results from the Veilbreak initiative. And disappointment wasn’t a moneymaker.

  Andrew Ichor, however, had something big planned.

  The whole department had been waiting for this day for four years. In those four years, there had been exactly seventeen failed launches. Of those launches, fourteen had taken place under Richard Ichor. Andrew was more careful, slower. That was what unnerved his colleagues most. Andrew was dedicated to — you could even say obsessed with — the Veilbreak project. And when someone that clever was that focused on anything, as one of Folbright’s retired colleagues used to say, you were only biding your time until a lot of you-know-what hit the fan.

  That evening, many of the staff in the Ichor labs had taken the day off. Of those who’d stayed, Folbright and his superior Davina Anthony were two of the most senior. This, they knew, was their last chance. If this launch went wrong, then they could kiss their careers good-bye. Folbright hadn’t slept in days.

  It went wrong, all right, but not in a way anyone expected.

  Andrew Ichor rushed onto the balcony, pushing people out of the way to get to the very edge. He leaned over, staring up at the sky, and then pulled back in shock, his eyes wide. Then he turned to his astonished and scared staff, and started to jump up and down like a child, punching the air.

  “I told you!” he screamed; he was ecstatic, triumphant. “I told them I could do it!”

  Behind him, out of nowhere, a hundred thousand lightning bolts suddenly stood, bright white, blind-white, against the soft purple of the thickening night. London reeled from the shock of it as buildings and trees exploded into flame, buses and cars were hit where they stood, and black scorch marks were etched into the landscape as if an angry five-year-old had slashed a pencil mark across a drawing. Almost immediately came the thunder — a hard, deafening wall of sound that rolled across the city, smashing windows and glasses, drowning out the screaming. Folbright was on his knees with his hands over his ears. Andrew Ichor had his hands pressed to his face, staring through his fingers at the sky and laughing with joy.

  The noise receded. Invisible to the naked eye, but still very much there, a huge wave of energy had seeped through the dimensional break, creating a cloudless storm.

  And then.

  Although no one in the Ichor labs knew it at the time, the energy generated by the break caused every single electronic device around the world to immediately short out. Smartphones died in an explosion of sparks in people’s hands. The electrified rails on city metros were suddenly dead, sending transportation grinding to an abrupt halt. London, New York, Shanghai were plunged into sudden darkness. In it, the explosions of the Ichor labs’ computers were a blinding fireworks display.

  Folbright stared, aghast, as four years of his life went up in flames.

  Andrew Ichor wasn’t looking at the computers. He was staring down at London, darkened and dead but for the small patches of fire glittering here and there among the buildings. He was paler now; the laughter had slid off his face. He had one hand on the railing of the balcony to hold himself steady. His knuckles were white and the hand was shaking.

  “What the —” he whispered.

  There was silence, but for the sound of distant screaming.

  Then it came.

  It was as if the sky rippled, like a heat mirage, or the air over a fire. The still evening air twisted into a strong breeze, pulling papers off desks and sending them sweeping over the floor. People stood up shakily, looking around to see what was happening.

  Then, with a shock like a gunshot, someone on their balcony started to scream.

  Folbright whirled. Davina was on her knees with her hands over her ears, shrieking as if in agony. Everyone looked around for the cause, but there was nothing.

  “Get it off!” she screamed. “Get it off me, get it out of my head!”

  A couple of people took out their phones and tried to dial 999 on useless bits of plastic before remembering that was what they were. Even if the phones had worked, of course, the emergency services would be in little better shape than they were.

  “Help me!” Davina shrieked. “Help me, help —”

  Her voice choked off and she doubled over. Behind her, someone else fell to their knees, coughing hard. People began to drop. A few screamed, like Davina had done.

  Folbright looked desperately to Andrew, but he was merely standing, frozen in panic, watching as his department fell.

  Then, suddenly, Davina opened her mouth.

  She said nothing, but from inside her shone a beam of bright light, as if she’d swallowed a torch. The light came from under her skin, her eyelids, from her nostrils, under her fingernails. It grew brighter and brighter, until she was a huddle of light, far too bright to look at. One
by one, each person who’d dropped began to shine as if they were burning from the inside. Folbright stumbled back, cringing, staring through his fingers, not daring to blink.

  There was a pause, during which the rest of them stood, stunned and terrified, and then six of them dropped at once. Visible, almost tangible blackness reached from them, swallowed them; they became hulks of shadow.

  And then suddenly, everything stopped. The strange internal lights went out; the shadows receded. Folbright exhaled shakily, not sure whether or not to be relieved. He knelt beside Davina.

  “Come on, Davina. It’s okay now, you’re fine. You can . . . can get . . .”

  His voice, faint as it had been, trailed off. Davina gave one, last, trembling sigh, rolled over, and did not move again. Folbright stared at her.

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  People began to get to their feet around him. Some, however, remained lying on the floor like Davina, quite clearly dead. Those on their feet seemed unsteady, unsure of their motor functions. Their jaws hung open in confusion. Their irises were an unnaturally bright, cold green, varying in strength and depth from person to person.

  That was terrifying enough, but it wasn’t what Folbright was most afraid of. The few that had dropped with the darkness, standing now, had irises stained black. They seemed even less steady on their feet than the green-eyed ones; they stared blankly around, stumbling blindly, grasping at empty air. Everything about them seemed wrong, and, from the looks on their slack faces, they knew it.

  Folbright took a step back.

  One green-eyed woman, whom Folbright had worked with on the funding portfolio, stuck out her hand toward a stack of papers on her own desk. They exploded into the air as if they had been hit with a child’s toy vacuum gun.

  “What the hell?” Andrew Ichor whispered.

  All around the room, objects were flying, moving, exploding into flame, without anyone going anywhere near them. Folbright stared.

  But this isn’t real, he thought dimly. I mean, this can’t seriously be —

  It hit him from behind, grabbing his mind and locking his thoughts into place. For a second he forgot his own name and who he was and the world he lived in and reality dissolved into confusion and the image of a cold desert wasteland and the thought of the crack in a deep red, starless sky, and being sucked toward it and the enveloping, crushing darkness and a wind rushing him toward a tiny, shattering city and this man, shining with life . . .

  But the Angels, he thought, and the thoughts were both alien and completely his own. The Angels. Where are they? Where am I? I have to fight —

  But he was trapped inside a strange body in a world that was not his own and he was kneeling on the floor with his body burning and confused, flickering thoughts of a war inside his head. The memories mixed, jarred together, fixed into a single person with a single soul in a single body and he stood up.

  He was Paul Taylor Folbright. He had an ex-wife and a girlfriend and a five-year-old son. He had a steady job and a midlife crisis. He was also a . . . a something from the world that Andrew Ichor had just opened up. He had a vague image of a battlefield, but nothing else anymore.

  Except the knowledge that he must fight.

  Fight? He wasn’t a fighter. Who was he supposed to fight?

  The memories were draining away from him.

  Someone touched him on the shoulder. He tried to throw them off without moving, to move them back with his new black eyes, but nothing happened and their grip intensified and he moved with sudden strength and his fist made contact with something hard and someone cried out and the grip was gone.

  He turned, and blinked. He could see them now. Tiny shreds of light and darkness plunged through the sky like meteorites, targeting people with unerring accuracy. Where they hit, the people were consumed with blinding light or shivering, curling darkness as the two souls fused. When all of the people were taken, the few otherworldly souls remaining hung in the air, frustrated.

  Then, as one, they turned to Andrew Ichor, standing cold and terrified against the balcony railing.

  Behind him, London burned.

  There is no scale on which one can measure the First War of Angels.

  It allows for no true comparison, because against it all previous wars are reduced to scuffles and street fights. No casualty figures can truly encompass the level of devastation it caused. The human mind cannot comprehend numbers so unnaturally, astronomically, obscenely large.

  Statistics, then, are useless, but then so too are case studies — because however bad any one person had it, you can be fairly sure that someone, somewhere, had it worse.

  The only scale by which it can really be understood is when one puts it beside the Second War of Angels; but even that is flawed. The outbreak of the Second War was more devastating than the First if only because, for twelve long years before it, the world had enjoyed what seemed like unbroken and unbreakable peace.

  No one quite knows why, late in the Eighteenth Year of Angels, that peace was shattered so spectacularly. The origins of that conflict may forever remain hidden in the mists of time.

  Well, not entirely. There is one person still living who knows the whole story of how the Second War began — but, unfortunately, she isn’t talking.

  Not to your correspondent, anyway.

  — From the introduction to A History of the Angelic Wars, by Amy Terrian (published in the Fifty-First Year of Angels)

  It was a chilly evening in February, and a girl was walking alone beside the river.

  She did not appear, in and of herself, to be a particularly remarkable girl. She was a few weeks past her fifteenth birthday, and the usual trappings of twenty-first-century adolescence seemed to have passed her by. She had no piercings or highlights or designer clothing. She wore jeans and a T-shirt that did not cover the scar in the crook of her elbow where she had once been shot, and her dark hair was tied up into a ponytail that brushed the small of her back. She had a narrow face and a long, sharp nose, which, when compounded by her gangly height and slim frame, gave the impression of extreme thinness; her skin seemed almost unnaturally pale, and her olive-green eyes darted from one crowded city shop to another as if scanning for danger.

  If you were really looking, and no one was, you might have noticed that her back was oddly straight and her steps strangely clipped: she had the gait and the posture of a soldier, although she was far too young to have served in the last War. Apart from that, though, there were only two remotely unusual things about this girl. One was her name, Rosalyn Elmsworth, although the significance of that had yet to become common knowledge on the streets. And the other was where she was going.

  Her destination, like her, looked deceptively innocent to passersby. Rain-streaked and shiny, the building huddled in a side street off the newly completed high road by Westminster station. Dwarfed by the skyline, its windows were tinted and the only person visible from the street was a bored-looking receptionist with a computer that looked like it dated back to the reconstruction of the Internet. The only thing that might have distinguished it as out of the ordinary was the black seal of Government, standing out bleakly on the whitewashed wall.

  On a normal day, this being the heart of London, the building would not have attracted any undue attention.

  The picketers were the first sign Rose got that this was not going to be a normal day.

  There were only about fifty of them. Had they been troublesome or violent, the Department would have been able to remove them with ease and without any casualties. As it stood, though, mere bigotry was not adequate excuse for arrest, so the Department remained stubbornly silent behind its tinted windows. Stubborn silence, however, was not the method the protesters had chosen to voice their grievances. Rose stopped just round the corner, out of sight, to listen. A high, reedy male voice rose above the roar of the crowd. They had started up a basic call-and-response chant.

  “What do we want?” cried the reedy voice.

  “Ashkin
d out of our schools!”

  “When do we want it?”

  “Now!”

  And round again. Rose sighed and leaned her head against the wall. She knew who these people were. This was not going to be a fun ten minutes.

  She took a deep breath, and stepped out from round the corner into the street.

  For a second, she almost thought they hadn’t noticed her. They carried on chanting, oblivious of the solitary, dark-haired girl watching them from the corner, waving their signs. Many of them bore the winged-door logo of the Gospel campaign group, and the rather unimaginative slogan Stop corrupting our children. Like Rose, they all had green eyes, some ringed with an unhealthy, bleached-looking white — the unmistakable sign of Test failures, the Leeched, whose Gifts had been forcibly removed. Minimal danger, then. Rose took a tentative step toward them.

  The reedy-voiced man, who was standing on a makeshift podium, yelling his chant, turned to the part of the crowd that he had not been facing and saw her. His voice trailed off. Everyone else followed his eyes. Within ten seconds, Rose had the attention of what she was quite prepared to believe was the entirety of the Gospel.

  She sighed.

  “Hello, Mr. Greenlow,” she said. “Would you at all mind letting me through?”

  Stephen Greenlow jumped off his podium and started walking toward her, hands outstretched. Rose stood her ground.

  “Rosalyn, Rosalyn!” he said, in what sounded for all the world like a friendly tone of voice. “How are you? How’s your schoolwork going?”

  “I have a few days off before my Test, sir.”

  “Oh, call me Stephen, please,” he said warmly. He reached out to shake her hand, but she snatched hers back quickly. His eyes narrowed.

  “Let me through, please, sir,” she said quietly.

  He ignored her and turned to the crowd. “This, my friends, is no less than David Elmsworth’s daughter!”

  The crowd, unsure what was expected of them, made a hesitant sort of noise; not quite a cheer, but not a heckle either. Even — indeed, especially — in these circles, the name of David Elmsworth was well known.

  “Tell me, Rosalyn,” he said, “what do you think about the practice of contaminating spaces for pure Gifted children with Ashkind presence?”