The Catalyst

by Helena Coggan

  “I know, I know. It was unforgivable.”

  “Damn right it was unforgivable. You said — as if I were some kind of animal, a monster — as if I was a killer even when I was human, as if I wanted this to happen to me, you bastard, you unfeeling ignorant bastard —”

  “I know,” he said hastily, stepping away from her again. “I know.”

  For a moment they were quiet. He took his hand away from his face, checked for blood. Rose snorted.

  “And yet,” he said quietly, “you came back.”

  “Of course I bloody came back!” Now, if possible, she was even angrier. “You have the power of life and death over me! One word from you and they’d come to our house and they’d drag us away and pump God knows what into us until we died emaciated and screaming! You can do that to us with a note to them! A word! Of course I came back!”

  His eyes widened. They stood speechless for a minute, fast breathing; the secret hung between them, a knotted rope, heavy and inescapable. He said:

  “So that’s what they do to you.”

  “No. That’s what they do to civilian Hybrids. I don’t want to think about what they do to ones who have worked for them undetected for more than a decade.”

  He was silent. Then, “I want you to help me rescue Tabitha.”

  “Loren, if she’s kept down in the cells, not even I could get her out.”

  “You said, one word —”

  She stepped away from him. “You would do that?”

  His eyes went very cold. “If that’s what I have to do to get her back.”

  They looked at each other.

  “So will you help?”

  She pressed her fingers to her temples. “Loren . . . I don’t know.”

  “Rose, don’t make me say —”

  “Loren.” She glared at him. “If I do this, you don’t want me to be reluctant. I might get you killed.”

  He sighed. “Then what can I do?”

  “What, as an exchange?”

  “That’s the idea, yes. Although you’re going to have to think hard — I am currently living in a dank basement and mugging passing strangers for food.” He looked ruefully down at the dark entrance. “With less-than-lucrative results, I might add.”

  Rose leaned against the wall. It was nearing midnight; her father would be home soon. She was exhausted and hungry and her mental faculties were not at their best.

  And then the obvious came to her: the voice in the Department, and David’s wide smile.

  “All right,” she said. “What can you tell me about my father and Regency?”

  “I met David when I was sixteen. It was three months after the Veilbreak and I was roaming London with Rayna, alone: I was just learning how to use my Gifts, and I was arrogant and powerful and clever, and I’m sure things would have gone even more wrong than they did if I hadn’t met him. He was our age, or thereabouts, but he looked — spoke — older; acted and seemed more adult. There was a heaviness to his words that I didn’t recognize then, but I would later — everyone sounds like that after they’ve killed. He has — or at least he had then — a hell of a conscience.

  “Our area of London was taken by the Gifted very quickly. They started rounding up all the Ashkind, and we never saw where they took them, but we’d paid attention in history lessons, we knew it wasn’t anywhere good.

  “They tried to take Rayna, and David and I beat up the bastards pretty well, nearly killed them I think, and after that we knew we had to do something, because who else would? Rayna, of course, was the key factor there. I couldn’t see the Ashkind as the enemy if it meant turning against my own sister.

  “We started evacuating the rest of the Ashkind in the borough. Some of them had Gifted children; they were afraid the Ashkind would take them away. We gathered them into this one warehouse, and guarded it, but of course we had nowhere to take them, nowhere permanent. So we asked for help from the nearest Ashkind army.

  “That was Regency. They were quite small at the time, only a few hundred of them, but they had guns and ex-soldiers. They didn’t have enough that they could afford to waste potential fighters, though, so they took the refugees in. It was good PR for them, anyway. All the Ashkind who could fight were eventually pressured or brainwashed into taking up arms. All the Gifted among us, the adults . . . I don’t know whether Regency bullied them into it or they just couldn’t take being around so many Ashkind, but eventually they decided it would be best if they left, and they didn’t come back.

  “But not us. Not me and David. Felix — Felix Callaway, he was the leader of Regency. He’ll be in his mid-forties now, but back then he was young and strong and authoritative and people just accepted him as their leader without him even needing to ask. I doubt he’s lost any of that even now, so much the worse for us. And it wasn’t undeserved. He was clever, not in David’s league but getting there, and he could command crowds with his voice and his words and he knew just how to use people’s skills to get what he wanted. He was a Demon, too — he had those black eyes . . . they almost didn’t seem human. The Government only really thought Demons were dangerous after they learned about him.

  “That’s one of the many things I hate him for. Long after people forgot his name and Regency’s, they hated Demons. Tabitha — people crossed the street to avoid her even when she was an infant; kids used to shout insults at her in the playground, because she was a Demon . . . They were afraid of her because, long ago, they had been afraid of him.

  “Felix is a Hybrid, as well, the first legend and the only. People think Hybrids are sadistic killers in part because of him. He came up with the idea of deploying them as weapons on the battlefield. It was the way he killed his enemies: personally, and brutally, and . . . anyway. I didn’t know it at the time, and presumably David didn’t either. I’m not sure whether even Felix understood what was happening to him, and by the time he did, Hybrids were everyone’s nightmares.

  “So he took us in. David was Head of Security almost immediately. For a start, no one else in the army could do the job, and also he was just . . . radiantly brilliant. Felix knew he was clever enough to kill in huge numbers and young enough to be pressured into doing so. Your father did terrible things, Rose, and if he’s forgotten that, he deserves to be called a monster; but I won’t pretend it was entirely his fault.

  “He sat in that control room — they’d started to get the electricity back up by then — and pressed the buttons, and it took him months to realize what he was actually doing, the horror of the stuff they’d told him to do in the name of strategy. By the time he knew, it was too late, he didn’t feel it anymore.

  “I was worse. I won’t say otherwise. I was even worse than him, because I started off as a foot soldier and I tried, I tried to work my way up the ranks. And Felix and Ariadne — she was his right-hand woman — saw what I could do, and they put me in charge of the cameras. I was very, very good at that, Rose. I could read people’s slightest intentions, their very doubts, through a screen, and I saw the ones who were going to dissent and I ordered their executions because it was the War and these things had to be done.

  “Rayna knew. She knew what we were doing and becoming and she tried to stop me, but it didn’t work, I was too into the ideology and the Interregnum and the cause, the cause, the cause.

  “And David was dissenting. Not actively, and not loudly, but I could see in his face that he wanted out, that he wasn’t loyal anymore. We were about eighteen at the time, a couple of years into the War, and it was doing something unhealthy to him — and to Rayna, too, though I didn’t see it at the time.

  “I warned Felix about David, told him it would be best if we curbed his privileges, kept him where we could see him. But Felix said no, because David was essential to the war effort and making him unhappy could lose us several hundred men. He didn’t see David’s intentions. I’ll give David credit for that: he made sure Felix never really knew him.

  “A couple of months after that, David tried to run. I caug
ht him, and I caught him pretty easily, because I was tasked with internal security and at the time he was the biggest threat I knew of. I put him in the cells and I told Felix we should kill him, and we probably should have killed him, but Felix said no, again, we needed to keep him alive if we wanted to make any headway against the Gifted armies and the Angels.

  “So David lived and worked again, and by then he hated me, and he still hates me, for stopping him. I don’t blame him.

  “It took a year for him to act again, and then it was because of you. He disappeared for two days, but he came back before I could track him down. He returned with a baby in the crook of his arm, and he was very pale and very quiet.

  “I knew what he was, then, Rose. I’d guessed, but I hadn’t told Felix. I know your father thinks I told him, but I didn’t. That’s not to say that no one else guessed, or that Felix never worked it out on his own, but if he did, he never said anything to me.

  “I knew what your father was because I knew what Felix was — he often boasted about being a Hybrid — and I’d watched them both, and I spotted the patterns. I never said anything because . . . well, that would have been crossing a line even I had never come to. And I’m not saying I was bound by any sense of honor, but I . . .

  “I knew what Hybrids were supposed to be like. I knew what Felix was like, how he’d embraced it, how he’d become part of the monster. And then I looked at David. He was a terribly old man in those days, Rose, and perhaps he’s younger now, but I remember him ancient and dying in the body of a teenager — a skinny, silent kid with too many thoughts. And I imagined, if that was what he was, if that monster was under his skin . . . it must be eating him from the inside, what he does when he’s like that.

  “Eating him from the inside . . .

  “So I never told Felix.

  “David came back and he came back with you, a quiet, green-eyed baby, and that was when I began to guess about you, too. David at nineteen was the least likely parent imaginable — you’d agree with me if you’d known him then — and I thought there’s only one reason he would willingly raise a kid himself: if you were like him.

  “He went into Felix’s office, the two of them, with you, alone. I never knew what David told him, but when they came out, Felix was white as a sheet, and he told us not to shoot, just to let David walk away.

  “I didn’t see him again until after the end of the War. After we lost David, defeat was almost inevitable. We fought hard and we fought valiantly, but remember, we were fighting the Gifted and Angels, and David’s innovation and technology had been our only real advantage against their magic. It took us three years, but we lost the War, and they marched us up and made us sign the Great Truce.

  “We — Regency — didn’t disappear, though, hard as they tried. By ‘they,’ incidentally, I mean the Department — your father was working for them by then. Its leader was this woman called Malia Terrian — she’s long dead now, but I think her husband is still there. The Department picked us off, soldier by soldier. They ground us down until we could almost taste the dust.

  “We got smaller and smaller. We weren’t an army anymore, more of a ragtag militia. Only our hardcore inner circle wanted to keep fighting. The rest of us had just been soldiers too long, and didn’t know how to be civilians. Felix never accepted defeat, and his slide into full-on, raging insanity — which I admit started years before, but I hadn’t really noticed it then, I was too blinded — started to take effect. He didn’t trust anyone, not even me. Two years after we lost the War, he decided that I was plotting to kill him, and set his inner guard on me. But of course their hearts weren’t really in it — the guards were my men, really, not his — so I fought my way out, hid somewhere in London.

  “I hid, but I had nowhere to hide in. I was twenty-four, then; I’d spent a third of my life in Regency. I had no money, and no one to spend it on. Rayna had gone to America the year before, to help the Ashkind resistance there, but she couldn’t get in contact with me for fear of Government interception. I kept subscribing to the BBC reports of the battles, what little they published. I hoped, or feared, that I would read about her.

  “I almost went to David once, I was so desperate for information about Rayna, and he was Government now, I thought he might know . . . I found your house. I saw you through the window. You were maybe four, five years old, and he was teaching you how to use magic, or how not to use it, or whatever.

  “I saw you. You were smiling, and you were sending blue flames toward the ceiling higher and higher, and he was encouraging you, and I hated him so much, Rose, for having the person he loved there in front of him and safe, for having a family, having a life.

  “But I survived. And Rayna returned two years later, pregnant, and then I had my sister back; and even with what Tabitha was, the problems we had to face, I was happy.

  “Then you came for us. You and your Department.

  “I’m sorry, it wasn’t your fault, but they did. They came. And I saw Rayna die in front of me; Rayna who had been my family and confidante and sister for thirty-four years, dying as collateral damage, just because . . . and they took Tabitha, who I had promised to protect always, against anything, and they put her where I couldn’t reach her. Can’t reach her.

  “I was in the cells for two months. I counted every day. They put needles in me and I don’t know what they did to me but I felt weak, always weak. They had me on an IV drip and one day I had just enough magic to stop my heart, and I . . . I considered it, Rose, I considered dying, just letting go, but obviously I thought of Tabitha and that stopped me.

  “I lived and I ran, and then I was alone in London with my family far away, like I had been ten years ago.

  “And right next to my heart, next to my love for Tabitha, was my hatred for your father. He who led the organization that had killed my sister; whose cowardice had lost me the War; who kept my niece under guard and away from me.

  “I needed supplies. I needed leverage. I needed to get revenge on him.

  “I thought of you.”

  “So, I take it the Department is not in fantastic shape these days?”

  Loren handed her the cracked mug of coffee over the back of the chair. It was three days since she had returned to him. This flat was on the Department list of witness-protection accommodation; during criminal trials where the defendant was alleged to have violent allies, those giving evidence were hidden here until everything was over.

  It was dilapidated, but it had a bed and running water and decent central heating, and he could just about survive here if she carried on bringing him food.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They can’t be happy about Regency.”

  Rose closed her eyes. “It’s Regency that’s getting to Dad, I think, but what’s really annoying them is the inspections. The ACC are all over us because of me.”

  She didn’t bother keeping the accusation out of her voice, and as such he ignored it.

  “Don’t they see how suspiciously your father’s been acting? How much knowledge of Regency he suddenly seems to have?”

  “God, no. He’d have to kill a colleague for a Department member to report him to the Supergrass. It would be like you when you were in Regency, ratting someone out to the Angels.”

  “You hate each other that much?”

  “The ACC think they have authority over us.”

  “They do.”

  “They think they do.”

  He left it. “What are the ACC inspections like?”

  Rose shrugged. “They bring you into their dungeons and they ask you about whoever they think is the weakest person you love. Then they come to your house, and look into your life and go and file it with their bureaucratic Angels, and they never find anything suspicious but sometimes they come back, just to be sure.” She looked at him. “They enjoy torturing you, even when they know you’re innocent.”

  He took another sip of coffee. “I wonder who that sounds like.”

  She glared at
him. “We never use enhanced interrogation unless the suspect is guilty.”

  “If you know the suspect is guilty, you don’t need to use ‘enhanced interrogation.’”

  She got up and tossed the remains of the coffee in the sink, angry.

  “Rose.”

  She turned. He was watching her with detached curiosity.

  “Does it not bother you at all? What you are?”

  Rose struggled for a moment with her response. “No,” she said eventually, “because it’s not our fault. We just have to live with it.”

  “I see,” he said. “So having evil forced upon you, and accepting it, is entirely different from choosing evil.”

  “Yes!” said Rose furiously. “Because we didn’t . . . we weren’t normal and just went out looking for it, we didn’t choose it freely —”

  Now when he looked at her, it was with contempt.

  “Oh, Rose,” he said. “You think anyone does?”

  She was silent.

  “You killed Thomas Argent,” she said, somewhat childishly.

  “He killed my sister. I couldn’t leave scum like that walking the earth.”

  “So revenge is okay, then, in your book?”

  He got up and put his cup in the sink. “That wasn’t revenge,” he said. “That was pest control.”

  There was a long pause; she could hear the wind outside.

  “Have you thought any more about what I asked you?”

  She said nothing.

  “I don’t need to remind you,” he said, with an edge to his voice, “what I will do if you don’t cooperate.”

  Rose put her face in her hands.

  “Oh, bloody hell,” she said. “Fine. I’ll help you rescue Tabitha.”

  It happened in an Art lesson, when she was distracted, as accidents always did. To be fair, on that day of all days she had plenty to be distracted over. They had put up the posters of Loren on the school walls that Monday: he stared, with those cold, steely yellow-green eyes, from out-of-reach windows as they passed. The Department, as always reluctant to admit mistakes, had at last told the public that a prisoner had managed to escape from their cells. It had only been through David’s stubbornness, forceful argument and utter refusal to accept the words “lost cause” as an accurate description, that the public had been informed at all. The Regency note seemed to have shaken him; he was determined, now, to capture Loren — and Felix, too — as quickly as possible, and to end all of this. And, to cap it all, Tristan’s photographs of her seemed to have become their year’s favorite subject of conversation, and Rose had to try very hard to ignore the pointing and whispers that followed her through the corridors.