The Catalyst

by Helena Coggan

“Ask him.”

  “Oh, come on. That’s not an answer.”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to hear the answer. It doesn’t paint either of us in a very flattering light.”

  Rose hesitated. There was a sarcastic remark on her lips in the wake of this comment — something about the extremely unflattering light in which his actions had already caused him to be painted — and she came so unnervingly, stupidly close to actually saying it that she moved on quickly.

  “Fine. How did you end up in prison?”

  “Too long a story.”

  “Okay. Did you —”

  “No.” Arkwood held up a finger, smiling. “Two questions, you said.”

  “You haven’t answered either of them!”

  Arkwood raised an eyebrow. Rose deeply resented the way this made her feel like a teacher was threatening her with detention, but did not push it. When nothing else was said, he sat down again and went back to his book. Rose took this as a sign that the conversation was over.

  But something rebellious and reckless in her thought: No. No. I am at least going to get a grip on this situation.

  Halfway to the door, she turned.

  “Who did the Department kill?”

  Arkwood looked up at her.

  “What do you mean?”

  The reply was too sharp, too quick: verification, and he knew it.

  He opened his mouth, and then closed it again. Abruptly he reached round to the back of his neck, fumbled with something, and then threw a silvery gleam in her direction. She caught it, taken aback. It was a locket; not elaborate, but beautiful in its mere simplicity.

  “The only thing your Department team didn’t take off me,” he said gruffly. Rose didn’t like the way he said “your”; it was sardonic, almost accusatory. “Open it.”

  Rose did. Inside was a tiny picture of two people, sitting on a bench in a park in spring. One was a tall, dark-haired woman in her late twenties or early thirties, with a warm smile and steely gray-black eyes. Sitting on her lap was a little girl, maybe four or five years old, no more. She had hair like her mother’s, wavy and cut at the chin, Demon-black eyes, and a look about her pale face that suggested a happy kind of innocence. Rose could see Arkwood in the shape of her eyes and her smile. Rose looked up at him. He was watching her as if not quite sure what to expect.

  “Your wife?” she asked.

  “My sister. And her daughter. Rayna went abroad after the War; she needed to get away from it all. She was happy there for a few years, but then she fell in love and got pregnant and the father, piece of scum that he was, ran away as soon as he found out. So she came to my flat in London, with no money and a baby on the way. Of course, I took her in. She got a job as a teacher and we raised the child together. I’ve always been a father to her, always been there for her . . . I suppose David would have taught you the same things.”

  “What things?”

  “You know,” he said tiredly. “That blood doesn’t matter. That just because he’s not technically related to you doesn’t mean he’s not your fa — Oh, hell.” He looked up at her in horror. “You do know you’re adopted, don’t you? I haven’t just —”

  She nearly smiled. “No, it’s all right. I know.”

  “How long?”

  “Since I was five. But don’t try to change the subject — this is your story, not mine.”

  He sighed. Rose waited. Somewhere outside, an ambulance sped, wailing, past them.

  “Tabitha was like you,” he said, “a forbidden thing. She was a magical Demon. She was Ashkind, she had the dark eyes and everything — but she had magic.”

  “That’s impossible,” Rose said automatically, and then fell silent at the look he gave her.

  “You’re telling me,” he said. “I used to teach her, at home, as she got older and her powers started to show. Instilled something of a complex in her. Taught her never to let anyone know what she could do, not ever . . . I knew if I showed her I was Gifted, did magic in front of her, it would encourage her. The day I broke out of that cell was the first time I’d used magic in five years.”

  His voice trembled slightly. It was unnerving.

  “That picture,” he said, without looking at her, “is two or three years out of date, but it’s the best one I have. Five months ago, they stormed our house. Someone must have found out about Tabitha. I don’t know how. Your Department attacked us,” he said, and this time there was definite accusation in his tone. “Squad team of six. Outnumbered us three to one. We never stood a chance. I fought; they knocked me out before I could do much damage. They had to go through Rayna to get to Tabitha, though. They shot her in the chest. I was awake to see her die.”

  Rose closed her eyes and snapped the locket shut. She’d never been on a search-and-requisition before; she had no idea the Department targeted children. Naïve, she thought angrily. You’re a Department kid. You shouldn’t be shocked by now. These things have to be done.

  But still a part of her thought, An eight-year-old girl . . .

  “I don’t know where she’s kept now,” Arkwood said. “They’ll be trying to get her into psychotherapy, I expect, to find out what she is, how she can do what she can do.”

  Rose asked quietly, “How did you escape?”

  For a second she thought he wasn’t going to answer.

  “After a while in the experimental ward,” he said, “I had just enough magic to stop my own heart. They thought I was dead, put me in the morgue, and I had enough residual electricity to magically restart my heart. They still haven’t realized there’s no body, apparently.”

  Rose did not bother telling him it was impossible to trick the sensors like that. Loren seemed to be in the middle of some kind of internal collapse: he said “She —,” as a choke, and then stopped. There was a long moment where the story hung there, like darkness, like a gathering storm, and suddenly he was on his feet.

  “How do you live with yourselves?”

  “What?”

  He stepped closer to her, teeth bared, fury in his face. “You in your offices, with your computers and your soldiers, ordering people’s deaths! The lot of you. How do you live with yourselves?”

  Rose stood her ground, shaking. “We do what we have to do.”

  “Don’t you dare!” His rage was searing. “Rayna is dead!” The words seemed to rip from him, leaving him raw and wounded, but his momentum pulled him onward. “Was she for your greater good? Was she worth it?”

  Rose stepped back.

  “The people we fight are worse.”

  He looked at her blindly. Then, slowly, he walked away from her and sat down again.

  “You disgust me,” he said flatly. She said nothing, and then, in a spurt of idiotic, spiteful courage:

  “You were a soldier, weren’t you? In the War? You’ve done worse than I have. At least we’re not vigilantes.”

  “That doesn’t make you good.”

  A pause. He left her in silence, and after a while she walked to the door as calmly as she could.

  She broke into a sprint once she was out of sight.

  Hypothesis one: The Department were the good guys.

  Obviously true. Of course it was true. It had to be. Not everything they did would be considered moral, or any of that, but sometimes you had to fight fire with fire, and the blaze they were up against would burn down the city in an instant if they only stuck to methods that would be unanimously passed by a civilian ethics committee.

  Hypothesis two: Loren Arkwood was a bad guy.

  That felt wrong, somehow. Sinister and insensitive though he was, and even knowing about Rose what he knew, he was fighting for a loved one.

  Hypothesis three: Tabitha Arkwood was a magical Demon.

  A different Rose — a pre-Arkwood Rose — would have said it was clearly false: by their very definition, Ashkind, even the untrustworthy, black-eyed Demons, could not do magic.

  But, of course, civilized, intelligent Hybrids were impossible as well, and it was comp
letely beyond the realms of credulity to suggest that one could work for the Department unnoticed for fifteen years.

  So it came down to whether she believed Loren or not.

  And she did. His story made sense, in a twisted kind of way. It explained him: his presence, and his actions. It explained why he came after Rose, the daughter of the Department’s most famous agent. And if Argent was part of the team that killed Rayna, it would explain Argent’s death.

  And the anguish in his eyes had not been feigned. He was telling the truth. A terrible truth. An impossible truth.

  But truth nonetheless.

  Hypothesis four: The Department was secretly requisitioning magical Demons, even children, and taking them into indefinite custody.

  Tabitha couldn’t possibly be the only one. There had to be more. Statistically. And so, logically, the Department must be requisitioning them. Obviously they would. Their objective was to keep the peace, and what could be more damaging to the peace than finding out the laws of magic had been suddenly and irrevocably broken? It would be like finding places where gravity suddenly didn’t work.

  So yes, it would make logical sense for the Department to be taking magical Demons. But there was one thing standing in the way of logic.

  If the Department were taking children, David would have to have authorized it.

  Which was impossible.

  That Saturday Rose’s father didn’t go into the office. It was the weekend, after all, and he was exhausted. She ignored his protestations that he could cope on his own, and that she should get out of the house and go somewhere with Maria “or something.”

  “Dad,” she told him firmly, the fifth or sixth time he did this, “please, save your breath. I am staying here. I’ve got math homework I need to do anyway.”

  This was a lie, but the idea that she actually needed to be here, and that he was not the one tying her down, shut him up.

  James called in at about eight o’clock. David had wired up their TV to act as an emergency video interface, and they were halfway through the news when James’s face flickered onto the screen. He looked desperate. David and Rose immediately sat up, alert.

  “David, what’s up with you? I e-mailed you half a dozen times already. We need you in here.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said David wearily, sitting up. “It’s Saturday.”

  “Not anymore,” James said grimly. “We’ve had a breakthrough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  James was tapping his leg restlessly against the ground; she could tell from the way the camera trembled. “They were due to burn a load of preserved bodies today,” he said. “They were being cremated, you know, and protocol dictates you have to tally up the bodies with the list of the dead-in-custody to make sure they match, and today a name came up that shouldn’t have.”

  “Sylvia Argent was buried, not cremated.”

  “It wasn’t her.”

  Rose looked between them. “Buried? But . . . why would Sylvia Argent come up on a list of the dead-in-custody?”

  David put his head in his hands.

  “Dad,” Rose said, tersely, “what haven’t you told me?”

  David looked at her. “Sylvia Argent died in rewrite therapy three months ago,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry, Rose.”

  “Why? How did she die?”

  “Poison,” said James. “Professional job. She must have had criminal connections.”

  “She must have,” David said darkly.

  Rose remembered something and turned to her father in horror. “But she was going to have a kid —”

  “They got the baby out by Caesarean just before Sylvia stopped breathing. He’s been adopted by a foster family; we check up on him regularly.”

  Rose put her hands over her face and breathed in. “And you didn’t tell me because . . .”

  “She died on the day of your Test,” David said. “We thought it was probably more than you needed.” He turned back to James. “Presumably, though, there was another name.”

  It hit Rose a fraction of a second before James spoke.

  “Loren Arkwood.”

  David stood up suddenly. Rose just managed to keep her face clear of emotion and so her reaction was realized as a wave of sickening, tearing shock that crashed through her body.

  “Who’s Loren Arkwood?” she asked, trying not to sound too forced.

  “I knew him from the War,” David said, still staring at James. “For a while, I even thought we were friends . . . The Department took him into custody on criminal grounds.”

  Criminal grounds. What criminal grounds? Rose thought angrily. On charges of fighting for his niece, is that it? On being there when you killed his sister?

  She stopped, and had to remind herself irritably whose side she was on.

  “I looked at the records,” James continued. “He showed negative life signs, no heartbeat, flat brainwaves . . . He must have managed to fake his own death somehow. I have no idea how. But he’s not on the records of cremation. The body is gone. And a few days after he escaped, we find Argent dead, and it turns out Argent was on the team that took him in . . . You were wrong, Rose. Thomas Argent was murdered. And what’s more, he must have an accomplice.”

  James leaned back in his chair. It occurred to Rose how tired he looked. He took a deep breath.

  “We think someone in the Department is helping him,” he said.

  Thank the Angels that Rose had David’s shock reactions: she stayed very still, absolutely motionless, until the foundations of her world settled themselves again.

  David said, “No.” No emotion, not yet.

  “I’m sorry, but it has to be true. I can’t see any other way. It all fits, all of it. There’s been food stolen, keys . . .”

  You, Rose told herself, are the most careless, idiotic, clumsy, pathetic moron ever to walk the earth.

  “You’ve notified Parliament?” David asked, very quietly.

  “Terrian did. They’ve told us to keep it quiet from the press. There’s going to have to be checkups on all of us, David, even you and Rose. And if it turns out there is a mole, under our noses —”

  “I will kill them,” said David, and Rose had to pinch the inside of her wrist very hard to keep herself straight-faced and unreactive.

  James raised his eyebrows.

  “We’re coming,” David said.

  “No, Dad, please,” Rose said quietly. “Not on this one. I can’t . . . I can’t show my face in the office again for a while. I told them Argent’s death was accidental, remember. I messed this one up.”

  David looked at her searchingly for a few seconds, then nodded. “Okay. You can look after yourself for an evening, then? I probably won’t be back until late.”

  “Yeah,” Rose said shortly. “Good luck.”

  It was near quarter to nine by the time Rose got to Uxbridge Road, and even in the thickening clutches of late spring, it was dark. Rose let herself into the warehouse near-silently. She almost couldn’t bear to hold the key, the bloody traitorous idiotic —

  I’m sorry, who’s being idiotic here?

  She hesitated before she whispered into the darkness. “Loren . . .”

  There was an immediate rustle and a bleary, surprised “Rose?”

  “Get your stuff,” she said. “You’re not coming back here. Please, just do what I say, this once. Five minutes, outside.”

  She ran before he could ask questions. He was out in two minutes with bags containing the remaining food, the clothes and the book.

  “What is it?”

  She ducked into an alleyway. He followed.

  “Rose,” he said urgently. “I need answers here.”

  She asked him straight. “Did you or did you not kill Sylvia?”

  “I don’t even know who that is.”

  “No, please. She was the sister of Thomas Argent. Did you kill her?”

  “What? No! Come on, Rose, give me some credit. Please, just tell me what’s going on!”


  Rose took a deep breath. “They know you’re alive. They think you killed Thomas and Sylvia Argent, which is a reasonable assumption, and —”

  “How —”

  “No, please, let me speak. Loren, I want you to know this wasn’t me. I didn’t tell them. And they know —” She swallowed. “They know you’re working with someone in the Department. It’s . . . I won’t say a matter of time, but . . . They’re looking for traitors, in the Department, and they’ll come to our house and — Anyway. This was not me.”

  Loren looked at her in amazement. “I believe you,” he said softly. He swallowed. “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know!” whispered Rose, desperately. “I didn’t see this coming, did I?”

  He looked up at the sky suddenly, and Rose saw something dark enter his eyes.

  “I know,” he said.

  “What?” said Rose warily. She’d been around him too long not to step away.

  “I know where we should go,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her, but deep into the darkness. Without warning, he slipped backward, into the shadows.

  Rose waited.

  He stepped back again, impatient. “Come on.”

  “I’m sorry, who on earth do you think I am? I’m not just going to follow you blindly through London. You tell me what crap you have planned and I decide whether I want to put up with it.”

  He stood straighter. “I don’t mean that. If you don’t come with me I will make you.”

  “Oh will you?” She was sick of this. She should have stood up for herself months ago. “With your fighting and your soldier’s training that you haven’t used since the end of the War?”

  “You think I’m harmless?” He was snarling. “I killed one of your precious Department soldiers. I killed Thomas Argent. I made him scream as he died.”

  “He was off-guard and he was stupid. You try to get any closer to me than you are now and I’ll use magic to keep you back, and then the alarms will go off and the police will come here, and then you’ll be in trouble.”

  He was sneering. “You think you’re so clever, don’t you?”

  “You set low standards.”

  He moved forward suddenly. Rose didn’t know what he was going to do — hit her? Surely not — and she never found out, because his bag jerked forward with his movement and two large, metal, rattling things spilled out onto the pavement between them: revolvers.