“Yes. Nathaniel Terrian.”
“You’re friends?”
Rose nodded warily.
“So why am I here? Why am I not over in Islington now, talking to Nathaniel? Why you over him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re very interesting, Rosalyn,” said the Administrator. She smiled; it looked very unnatural. “You can fight, as you just proved. You’re logical. You consistently score highly in IQ tests, and your intelligence was notable even under the Insanity Gas. You’re powerfully Gifted, and your subconscious takes the form of a genius. But do you know what makes you most interesting? What sets you apart, even from your friend Nathaniel? I’ll give you a hint. It’s one of your faults.”
She was smiling broadly now, but it did not reach anywhere near her eyes.
“I have no doubt they are many and varied,” said Rose, with as much dignity as she could muster.
The Administrator sat forward again, setting her papers down on the floor, and leaned in close. “One thing we picked up on,” she said. “One memory. The attack on James Andreas, two years ago — you wanted to fight, am I right?”
“Of course.”
“There was an adrenaline surge in your blood. But when you fired — when that man got near your father — you were thirteen years old, and you shot to kill. You were very young to even think of using such deadly force.”
Rose raised her eyebrows.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “I was Tested by an Angel, and I’m being interviewed by the Testing Administrator, because I’m David Elmsworth’s daughter and you think I might be a psychopath.”
“‘Dangerous’ is a strong word. We know you could be a threat if you fell into the wrong hands, so we’re keeping you in ours.”
Rose seethed at that — who were they to treat her as a possession to be safeguarded? Another heavy silence. The Administrator got up.
“My name is Serena Mitchell,” she said. “You’re going to be seeing a lot of me over the next few months. I’m sure it will be an . . . enjoyable experience.”
Her lip curled.
“I assume you know what you were being Tested for?”
“I have a rudimentary idea.”
The smile faded slightly. “Your memories showed absolute loyalty to the Department and its members. Your hallucinations proved your fighting ability —”
“I lost that fight.”
“It’s not designed for you to win it. You’re supposed to survive, not emerge victorious. Your jump showed bravery, and as for your subconscious — well, it’s remarkably coherent, at the very least. You are . . . interesting, Rosalyn.”
That word again.
“You may leave,” Mitchell told Rose. “You are of course aware of the conditions under which you are allowed to keep your powers. You may only use them in your own home, in the homes of others with their permission, and in specially licensed workplaces. You may not use them to any extent or purpose that would pose a risk of harm to yourself or to others, and of course you may not use them in public at all. To do so is to break Government law and will result in a custodial sentence.”
A silence, a heartbeat-racing silence; Rose let it stretch before daring to tempt fate by speaking. She was drunk on success and the incredible fact that they still didn’t know. They suspected nothing. Her secret was still safe, thank Ichor.
Finally, she dared to ask the question, because she desperately needed to hear it said aloud.
“I’m keeping my powers, then? I passed?”
A thin, mirthless smile.
“Oh, Rosalyn,” said Mitchell. “We wouldn’t dream of wasting you.”
On her way out, she walked past a one-way mirror.
It caught her eye because she had so rarely seen one outside the Department. No one stood watching it, though. Through it she could see a struggling young woman being strapped to a chair. Gas-masked figures stood over her, holding her down, fastening the straps. Rose stopped, staring in fascination. A Test failure. She must have been screaming, because her mouth was open and her eyes were wide, but the mirror was soundproofed and Rose couldn’t hear it.
When the girl was strapped down, the gas-masked figures stepped away. She was green-eyed, light-moss-green Pretender-eyed, and she was wasting the last of her magic. Burns were appearing in the masked figures’ clothing; the wheels of the trolley she was being strapped onto burst into flames, and scorch marks dragged themselves across the wall. The girl was not very powerful at all; after ten seconds or so of this, she looked thin, weak, pale, cold, and she collapsed, exhausted, onto the trolley again.
One of the gas-masked figures raised his hand, and the fire on the wheels went out.
The girl began to cry.
There was a hissing sound that Rose could hear even through the mirror; she jumped away, looking around for any white gas, but she couldn’t see any, except that which began to billow into the room on the other side. The girl was screaming again, sobbing, pleading, but even Rose knew it was too late.
The girl was already breathing it.
The cloud of white gas moved forward inexorably. The Test failure struggled, trying to move away from it, but the Leeching Gas enveloped her: her feet first, then her legs, her waist, and her torso were inside it, and finally her face, and she was gone.
The gas made the mirror opaque, and Rose watched it, immobile with horror.
The Leeching Gas began to move back, peeling off the glass. The gas-masked figures stood over the girl. She was not unconscious; she was not even sobbing, but in shock, lying with her chest rising and falling too quickly. She turned to stare at the mirror, and Rose knew she was trying to break the glass, but nothing happened. The laws of physics refused to obey her. She was not Gifted anymore. Her irises were ringed with the unclean, bleached white that marked the Leeched.
The gas-masked captors began to unstrap the girl, but she didn’t move. Rose felt sorry for her; it must be a terrible thing to have your Gifts removed. By way of parting condolence, she leaned forward, and said to the glass, though she knew no one behind it could hear her: “You should have tried to block the air vents.”
The train pulled into Earl’s Court, and Rose and David got out.
“Don’t start any arguments,” he warned her as they passed through the ticket barriers. “Not on your last day of school.”
“Surely my last day is the one day I can start an argument. I can start as many arguments as I want, because I won’t be seeing most of them ever again. We’ll be going to post-Test schools now, remember? So I can do what I like.”
“Yes, but you don’t want them to remember you badly, do you?”
“Dad,” Rose told him as they crossed the street, “right now, they think of me as the weirdo Gifted girl who’s probably only friends with Maria Rodriguez because of bribery or kidnapping or whatever crime they think me capable of. I may as well let them remember me as the weirdo Gifted girl with the astonishing vocabulary who destroyed their arguments both convincingly and wittily.”
He looked at her.
“All right, I won’t start any arguments,” Rose said reluctantly. “But the way I see it, I don’t really start arguments. The arguments sort of . . . start themselves.”
“Don’t push it, Rose. If you’re so willing to fight with them, you shouldn’t care what they think of you.”
“Yes, Dad, I know I shouldn’t. I’ve spent most of my life trying not to, but apparently it’s harder than it looks.”
He grinned. “Ah, the unsolvable conundrums of adolescence.”
“I hate you so much.”
They approached the Earl’s Court Elementary School. There were Year Threes, seven or eight years old — with every color eyes, as Gifted and Ashkind children weren’t separated until after the Test — waiting by the double doors with little glasses of orange juice and champagne.
Rose and David arranged their smiles and slid into the hall. It was very crowded. Rose tried to peer through the fore
st of students and parents to find Maria, but quickly gave up. There was little point.
“Oh,” said a familiar voice from behind them. “You’re here.”
Rose turned reluctantly. Tristan Greenlow — son of the leader of the Gospel, the anti-Ashkind group who had harassed Rose on the day of the Argent murder — stood behind them, looking as though he had encountered something that came off the bottom of a shoe. Tristan, Rose knew, did not like the Elmsworths. He did not like many things. He was short, blond and irritable, and had been born — so far as Rose was aware — with an unshakably contemptuous expression on his face, and it was with this that he surveyed her and her father, who had turned with Rose to see whom she was looking at.
“Ah,” David said. Rose thought he let the ensuing silence stretch on slightly longer than necessary. “You’ll be Stephen’s youngest, then?”
“Yes,” said Tristan, looking him up and down. “Are you Rosalyn’s father?”
David and Rose exchanged a look. She and Tristan had spent nearly six years in the same class.
“More or less,” said David slowly.
“You don’t look much like her,” said Tristan. “Though”— glancing at Rose again, lip curling —“I suppose you should probably count yourself lucky. Is her mother very ugly?”
He said it matter-of-factly, and Rose, who was used to this, did not rise, though she could see David beside her calculating the odds of being able to punch a fifteen-year-old boy in a crowded hallway and keep his job. From his expression, they were not good.
“Are you looking for your father, then?” Rose asked Tristan, as politely as she could, before David could do anything stupid.
“Yes, as it happens,” said Tristan, rising onto his tiptoes slightly to look. David, unconsciously she thought, drew himself up to his full height. “Have you seen him?”
“We haven’t had the pleasure, no,” said Rose. She had long since discovered that Tristan didn’t understand sarcasm, and so she could make as many gibes at him as she liked in the company of those who did, without fear of retaliation.
Tristan looked at David again. “He doesn’t like you.”
“Oh, good,” said David, before Rose could stop him. “I must be doing something right.”
“You’re some kind of jumped-up policeman, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am. I’m the man in charge of arresting people like your father.”
“My father says people like you should be shot.”
“Oh, I’d love him to try.”
“Anyway,” said Rose quickly, before Tristan lost a fight he didn’t realize he’d started, “he’s over there, see?”
She pointed to the corner of the hall, thanking the Angels for Tristan’s limited height. He peered around. “Oh, right,” he said vaguely, and walked off.
David stared after him, narrow-eyed.
“I don’t like him,” he said.
“Well, you did a very good job of hiding it.”
“Did I?”
Rose rolled her eyes.
“Have you heard about the Greenlows? The rest of them, I mean?” she asked him, as they wove their way through the crowd.
“Ah, yes,” he said. He raised his voice slightly, so as to be heard over all of the chatter. “High-level Gifteds. The elder son’s quite powerful, very academic. His mother’s very proud of him. She wants him to follow her into Government — she’s quite high up in the MoD. In fact . . .” They ducked a small fiery bird as it flew dangerously low over their heads. “In fact, I’ve heard that Aaron Greenlow’s very popular among girls in general.”
“You are such a gossip,” Rose told him, trying and failing not to go red.
David grinned.
“Well, I’ve got to pay attention to which respectable young men are going, now that my daughter is of an eligible age. And speaking of eligible young men . . . Hello, Nathaniel.”
Nate Terrian drew up to them. He had his dreadlocks tied back and he was wearing a second-hand suit, looking very proud of himself.
“I passed!” he said excitedly before either of them could speak. “What about you, Rose? How did you do? On your Test, I mean,” he added hastily, in case anyone was in any doubt at all about what he meant.
“Yeah, I passed too, Nate!” Rose said, smiling. “Which school have they assigned you to?”
“West London Higher Training.”
“Great!” Rose said, casting a sideways glance at her father to see how he was taking the news that he and Connor Terrian would be fellow class-parents for at least another year, if not two. His smile seemed slightly more fixed than it would normally have done, but he shook Nathaniel’s hand in congratulations all the same. After all, as he said, you couldn’t judge people on their parents. Or, he would add slightly more dryly, their children.
“So, what do they teach us in Higher Training School?”
“Well, I think we carry on with mathematics and the sciences,” Rose said, “and then we get choices of stuff like Artistic Studies, Magical Skills, Craftsmanship, Angelic Studies and so on. Math, Magical Skills and Combat are compulsory. And maybe War History. I’m not sure about much after that.”
“What do you think you’ll be good at?”
“I really don’t know anymore,” Rose said wearily. She glanced at her father again. “Is your dad here?”
“No,” Nathaniel said, “he said he couldn’t face it. He’s not really good with . . .” He looked around. “People,” he admitted finally. “He doesn’t like people all that much.”
“He’s not the only one,” Rose muttered, glaring at her father. “Look, Nate, have you seen Maria?”
“No, not yet.”
“Hi!” David said suddenly to someone over Nate’s shoulder. “How are you? Sorry, Nathaniel, you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve just seen . . .” He paused, considering. “A friend.”
“I —”
“Wonderful,” David said, and slipped away into the crowd. Rose glared at his retreating back, and saw his shoulders shaking with laughter.
“Someone’s looking for you,” said Nate in a low voice, when David was out of earshot.
“Who?”
Wordlessly, he held out a folded piece of paper to her. Her full name was written on the outside of it, and only four words on the inside.
Room Fourteen, it said. Help. Now.
“Are you —?”
Rose stopped abruptly in the doorway of Room Fourteen and stared at the silhouette against the whiteboard at the end of the room.
It was not anyone from the Department.
Rose had spent her life there, and she knew the outlines of everyone who worked in the fifth-floor office. This man was not one of them. He was broad-shouldered, tall, and brutally thin. When he stepped into the light, Rose could see his face, hollow and gaunt, his eyes cold and steely, his mouth hard and unsmiling. His hair was white-blond, fair enough to camouflage any gray hairs. He had a seemingly ageless face — Rose would have put him anywhere between twenty and forty — and he wore a small silver locket round his neck. What really caught Rose’s attention about him, though, was his weapon. It was a small handheld gun known as an Icarus. Rose knew Icari; they were part of any Department squad team’s arsenal. The Icarus was not a gun designed to kill or maim. It was designed to traumatize. The bullet would not penetrate the skin, but instead attach itself to the victim, and send periodic electric shocks through the body, on signals from the owner of the gun.
The unknown man was pointing his squarely between Rose’s eyes.
Rose couldn’t feel. Her emotions drained away to nothing: no surprise, no anger, no fear. Her entire being seemed to narrow into the space between her and that gun. She did not know whether this was brave, or clever. In that moment she did not know anything at all.
“Close the door,” the man said. His voice was low and surprisingly mellifluous, not at all hoarse. Rose closed the door and locked it.
“Now,” the man said. Rose noticed his hand was perfectly steady on
the gun. Just her luck to be targeted by someone who actually knew how to use lethal weaponry. “I think you will agree it is in both of our best interests that I do not have to fire this. With that in mind, please sit down and don’t move. We are going to talk.”
The classroom was one of the larger ones: clear of desks but dense with crowded bookshelves, computers thick by the back wall. There were no windows. Rose pulled up a chair and sat down.
“Away from the door,” he said.
Rose moved the chair. She did not say anything.
The man drew up another chair in front of her. He placed the gun in his lap. Rose briefly considered trying to grab it, but then realized she knew exactly what he would do: grab her wrist and most likely break it. This would achieve nothing.
“Rosalyn Elmsworth?”
She nodded.
“My name is Loren Arkwood. Your life from here on in would have been a lot easier for not meeting me. And I’m sorry about that.”
Rose put the gun and the unusual name together and began to realize that she was up against a War vet. Many soldiers had changed their names during that time to avoid any lasting grudges or pre-Veilbreak criminal records. Rose knew her father had. This man pronounced his name oddly: Law-renn. It sounded like it should be the name of a small bird, or some kind of forest herb.
“What do you want from me?” she asked, trying for dignity’s sake to keep her voice steady. What might it feel like to be electrocuted? Magic was one thing, that soft hum of energy coalescing in your hands, but electricity, hard and sharp and unforgiving and . . . painful. Yes. It would be painful. Rose kept her eyes on the Icarus.
Loren Arkwood looked at it ruefully. “Yes,” he said. “Not exactly my weapon of choice, but necessary in these circumstances, I’m afraid. Well, I don’t want to keep you, so I’ll get to the point. Rosalyn, I need your help.”
“What kind of help?” Angry, don’t sound angry; be afraid, that’s what he wants, isn’t it?
Arkwood looked at her, tilting his head slightly. “You are the daughter of David Elmsworth?”
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