The Catalyst

by Helena Coggan

  Maria spoke up. “I agree with Loren. We shouldn’t just kill them.”

  Loren sighed. “Thank you for your input. David. We can’t do this. Rose is in there, and I hate that almost as much as you do, but it means we have an opportunity to take them down from the inside.”

  “And Rose can do that on her own, can she?”

  Loren began to grow angry. “No, of course she can’t. But you’re saying we should kill Felix, and if we do that —”

  “Regency will collapse.”

  “I don’t care about its collapse. I care about what it takes with it. It might go down, yes, but it’ll go down fighting, and there’ll be bomb attacks and street fights and they will destroy law and order —”

  “Not if we destroy their commanders first,” David said. His eyes were bright. “When their leaders are killed they’ll be too weak to act. We’ll have a crackdown, take them from the streets —”

  “And if you get innocents? If there are too many of them to arrest? David, you know this man. Don’t pretend you don’t. You know what he inspires in people. If he dies, you will make him a martyr. Don’t you remember what we used to think of him? If Felix Callaway is anything, he is a catalyst — he starts revolutions and then stands back while they happen. He isn’t changed by wars or wounds or even peacetime. He just is: he is a figurehead and an icon, and if you kill him you will start a war in his name.”

  “A war against whom? Us?” David stood. “A war of the people against Government? Gifted against Ashkind? Peaceniks against revolutionaries?”

  “Everyone — anyone and everyone. You know what that kind of hell looks like, David, you’ve seen it before.” Loren stepped forward so he was in David’s face, staring him down. “You want to be the one to start it again?”

  David started to say something, and then closed his mouth. He stepped away and went to the screen.

  “One hundred and twenty-five attacks,” he said softly. He stood there for a moment, considering. Then he turned to Loren.

  “Felix Callaway is going to die,” he said. “If I have it my way, he will die, screaming and in pain. If not, it might be quick, which is more than he deserves. Either way, he will die, Arkwood, no matter what you say about it.”

  “You think I can’t stop you?”

  “I don’t think you have a hope in hell of even trying. I might have held back for the girl’s sake, but you, Arkwood —” The look in his eyes could not honestly be said to be one of disdain, not even at the most positive of stretches: it was icy, murderous hatred, and Loren bore it resignedly. “I will not hesitate to kill you if you try to stand against me.”

  Loren gave the tiniest of nods toward Nate and Maria, who were looking terrified. David turned and glanced at them, the terrible light still there in his eyes, and then strode over to his chair and pulled on his coat.

  “Don’t try,” he told Loren, and then he left.

  Afterward there was a silence.

  “There is something really, really wrong with him,” said Maria, quietly.

  Loren laughed, long and low and dark.

  “Oh,” he said, looking around at them all, “oh, you do not know the half of it.”

  Amelia Rodriguez was in the training room when it happened. The guns Regency used were mostly secondhand, and the targets had been shot to pieces years ago. They used plastic training bullets; ammunition was precious.

  Amelia emptied her gun at the target, mostly missing it, and walked over to Aaron. His aim was near-perfect: he fired again and again at the center of the target until it collapsed. He threw his gun to the ground in frustration and kicked it. It spun over the smooth wooden floor until it came to rest at the foot of the downed target.

  “Your brother?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Liam said he was in the park yesterday. I’m not allowed out at all, after Westfield.”

  “You’re under punishment orders?”

  “They caught me on CCTV.”

  Amelia winced. “You’re going to be down here for a long time for that.”

  “I know.” He turned to her, pushing his hair out of his eyes. “How’s Maria?”

  “No idea,” she said, slightly too quickly. “No one’s allowed outside contact now. People are saying that’s your fault, that the Department tracked you here.”

  “People?” He smiled, putting an arm round her waist. “Who cares about people when I’ve got you?”

  He kissed her. She let him for a few seconds, and then disentangled herself.

  “Sorry,” she said, picking up her gun and fitting it into her holster. “Duty calls. I should have been on patrol ten minutes ago.”

  “Don’t be long,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

  “I know you will.”

  She grinned at him and turned to the door. It wouldn’t open. She pulled at the handle as hard as she could, but it refused to give.

  “Aaron,” she said, “what’s wrong with the door?”

  There were quite a few things wrong with the door. The first thing, in this case, was that it was soundproofed to prevent the noise of firearms deafening anyone who walked past.

  Unfortunately, this also meant that Aaron and Amelia had not been able to hear the screaming of the guards mere feet from the door.

  And the second was that its lock had been smashed in.

  Aaron tried the door handle. His brows contracted, and after a few seconds he picked up his gun again.

  “Do you have to do that?” Amelia said. “They’ll kill us.”

  Aaron didn’t reply, but destroyed the door in three concentrated bursts of fire. When it was reduced to splinters he kicked down what remained and stepped over the rubble into the corridor.

  He froze.

  “What is it?” Amelia asked.

  He did not answer.

  “What’s wrong, Aaron?”

  When he still said nothing, she pushed past him impatiently into the corridor.

  There was a two-second burst of total silence, and then she started screaming. Aaron clamped his hand over her mouth.

  “Shut up,” he said harshly. “You’re a soldier. Get used to it.”

  Amelia did not get used to it, but stared at the bodies in horror.

  “Who did this?” she whispered.

  “No idea,” Aaron said. “Come on. We need to get to Command, now.”

  Getting to Command was rather a tricky proposition, given the suddenly large number of obstacles littering the corridor. There were at least five or six bodies in here alone. They decided against taking the stairs, but reconsidered when they saw what was in the lift.

  Command was on the bottom floor of the Regency complex, so it was a long stair journey. A steady flow of shocked new recruits and grim-looking veterans streamed through the stairwell. No one was panicking. A dark-skinned boy with a tattoo on his arm and buzz-cut hair, wearing the uniform of a lieutenant, fell into step beside Aaron.

  “Liam,” Aaron said in relief. “What’s happening?”

  Liam looked solemn. “We have a body count,” he said. “Twenty-six dead.”

  “Did anyone survive being attacked?”

  He shook his head. “They think it’s most likely a Department attack,” he said, “but after the explosions . . . Well, just look at how open we are. It could have been anyone.”

  They were almost crushed in the push to get through the doors into the central Command room. This was big enough to fit two thousand people, and far enough underground that not even Government sensors could see it.

  The army was lining up as it had done in drills, assembling into their respective divisions. Aaron and Amelia were in Fourth Division and Liam in Sixth, so they separated and stood with their cohorts in neat lines in front of the speaker’s podium. Gaps were forming in the lines; those who were meant to fill them lay dead in the corridors around the complex. Amelia shivered.

  The Commander stood on the stage, flanked by his two senior advisers: Head of Security Anthony Slythe, father of Oscar,
and Isabel Vinyara, head of the sharpshooters. The captains stood, stony-faced, at the heads of their divisions. The Commander’s expression was calm, almost placid.

  This boded ill.

  “Comrades,” he said quietly, into the microphone, and the hall fell instantly silent. The last stragglers shifted into place as quietly as they could. “We have been dealt a heavy blow tonight.”

  There were people outside in the hall. The sound of shuffling. They were removing the bodies.

  Amelia shuddered.

  “We have lost brothers,” said Felix. He did not need to raise his voice “Brothers in blood, for some of us; for the rest, brothers in spirit, brothers in arms.”

  A pause.

  “Regency has been struck to its very heart,” said the Commander. “It is our duty as soldiers, as loved ones, as keepers of the revolution, to find and destroy those who harm us. In this case, we do not have far to look.”

  A low, angry, sustained murmuring had begun near the stage; it was spreading slowly, growing in strength as the Commander continued. He did not try to stop it.

  “The Department,” he said, and it surged, spilled over into outbursts of furious shouting, loud enough to almost drown him out. He spoke over it. “The Department has attacked us tonight, attacked us with monsters — sent one of their operatives down here, alone, one of their Gifted”— he spat the word as one might an obscenity —“soldiers, and sent them after our beloved brothers and sisters. What are we to do about this, my friends?”

  The response that came was loud, but staggered and incoherent. He made it easier for them.

  “Shall we allow this murder of our comrades to go unpunished?”

  Much clearer this time. “No!”

  Vinyara, beside him, looked upon the clamoring soldiers with distaste; but, as Amelia knew, that was the way Vinyara looked at most things. Slythe’s greasy, pallid face was twisted into an expression of savage bloodthirstiness. It was common knowledge that he hated the Department more than most, even when that “most” was Regency; rumor had it that Felix still held it against him that he did not have the genius of his predecessor, Elmsworth. No matter how brilliant Elmsworth had been, it was still quite a feat to be considered worse than a traitorous green-eyed bastard like that.

  The Commander was still talking.

  “Shall we let our fallen die unavenged?”

  “NO!”

  He was shouting now. “Shall we take our revenge on those who harm us?”

  “YES!”

  He stepped back, satisfied, and let the shout disintegrate into a chant as the rumbling outside grew louder. Slowly, and with an infectious solemnity, the medical staff — there were five of them now; Dr. Yates had been killed last year in a kidnapping attempt on a Government official — began to roll in the trolleys. The shouting faded, collapsed into muttering, and then silence. The bodies kept coming. They were covered in what looked like green tarpaulin. Bare white hands and feet hung, swinging gently, from off the trolleys. Sometimes threads of red would stretch and drop from their fingertips. And still they came.

  Twenty-six dead.

  Softly, collectively, Regency stopped breathing.

  They had not suffered losses like this since the days of the War. They’d lose one officer, maybe, in an attack, two or three if they were especially unlucky, but the recent flood of recruits prompted by the growth of the Gospel had more than made up for that. Never twenty-six. Not in an army of seven hundred.

  Twenty-six lives to the Department.

  “No.”

  Everyone looked up to see where it had come from. Slythe, on the stage, was staring at a forearm that hung from the last trolley. He said it with no expression, nothing but blank disbelief. He said it again.

  “Not you.”

  And then he said, in that spiraling moment before grief, in the last dim instant of hope, and almost in the plaintive hope of a reply:

  “Oscar?”

  “Lily?”

  There was something hard and cold under the skin of her arm.

  Hologram projector.

  It had survived.

  Huh.

  “Lily?”

  She had been wounded, too. Someone had tried and failed to shoot her. It left a burning gap like a picked scab on the skin of her neck; not dangerous, with any luck, but irritating.

  Maybe that would end when she worked out where she was.

  Why she had been sleeping.

  Why there was a needle in her arm.

  Whose voice it was.

  So many bloody questions.

  “Lily?”

  The voice — persistent, gentle, deep, rich — aroused a certain, instinctive kind of fear in her. That was annoying, because she had wanted to ask it what was going on.

  Who was Lily?

  Who was —?

  What was —?

  Where —?

  Oh.

  Oh.

  Regency. She was in Regency. With the hallucinations, and Amelia, and the —

  She had transformed.

  She’d transformed in self-defense. She’d never done that before.

  It had been just as unpleasant as she’d feared.

  No, shut up. Don’t think about that. Had everyone been safe?

  Panic began to rise. Had people been hurt?

  Had she been able to fight her way out on her own?

  No. No. She couldn’t think that. She couldn’t even consider that for a moment — the implications were so apocalyptically terrible as to be unendurable.

  No. Everyone must have been safe.

  She must have been shot at some other way.

  Where was she?

  “Lily?”

  That voice. She’d heard it before. It had boomed over the Department office. I claim your death as my own.

  She opened her eyes.

  She lay in a hospital bed, in a darkened, artificially lit room. It had all the warmth and atmosphere of a prison cell. The man who sat on the end of her bed was smiling at her with black eyes. She knew him: he had been in a hologram, back in the Department, and in a notebook from years ago, crafted from her father’s memories.

  This Demon made her want to run. His very proximity, his smile made her want to flee, as fast as she could, fly if she had to, back to safety.

  Wherever that was.

  She needed his name. Come on. Stupid bloody malfunctioning traitorous brain.

  Felix, that was it.

  Felix Callaway.

  He could see she was awake. His smile broadened. It made her cringe inwardly.

  “Hello, Lily.”

  The name she had given Amelia was Lily. Lily Daniels.

  “How are you feeling?”

  She would need to speak. She opened her mouth, and found her throat cracked and hoarse.

  “Well, thank you.”

  She was posing as a Regency soldier. She must have passed whatever test the Darkroom had been, because, if she had failed, they would have killed her by now.

  Therefore, he was her commanding officer.

  “Well, thank you, sir.”

  He nodded. “Very good. You’ve seen me before, then?”

  Oh, bloody hell.

  “I’ve heard you described, sir.” A pause. No, that wasn’t convincing at all. “You’re hard to mistake, sir.”

  It was beginning to dawn on her now. Slowly, and with the impact of a bullet: she had transformed, and been taken here, and all of that must have been done by someone, and all of the possible someones who could have done it reported to this man.

  So he knew.

  He knew her secret.

  She was going to panic, wasn’t she?

  “You’re a very unusual girl, aren’t you, Lily?” There was no obvious response to this but to clench her hands under the bedclothes to stop them from shaking. “How old are you, then?”

  Aim upward. “Sixteen, sir.”

  Ah, but she was forgetting — he didn’t know who she was. He knew Lily Daniels’s secret. He
didn’t know Rose Elmsworth’s. He would make no links with David. Her father would be safe.

  She missed David so much.

  Please tell me what to do I’m out of my depth here I can’t . . .

  What did I do?

  I don’t remember anything what did I do?

  “And why,” asked Felix Callaway, deep black Demon eyes still fixed on her, “do you want to join us, Lily?”

  She swallowed. Use the truth. “My condition, sir.”

  “Your condition?” It was almost a whisper. “Who taught you it was a condition? What we are, Lily, what we are is a blessing.”

  He had not once taken those black eyes off her, not once, his deep black eyes, and suddenly Rose realized: this was why the Government was afraid of Hybrids and Demons: this man, here, was what they feared, this man who had killed his ex-girlfriend while he wasn’t human and who had tried to kill David and Loren and who talked of monsterhood in an almost reverential tone. This was what the Parliament of Angels existed to fight.

  This was what the Department existed to fight.

  David must have hated him.

  Felix rose from her bed. Rose caught herself releasing a deep, shaky breath.

  “What did your family think of your . . . condition?”

  The way he said it indicated that he considered the answer self-evident, so she played along. “They thought me a monster, sir.”

  “A monster,” he said quietly.

  Silence.

  “Are you strong enough to hold a weapon, Private Daniels?”

  Her new title made her smile slightly. David would be proud. “Yes, sir.”

  IV drips were calorie-filled; she should easily be strong enough, in theory. She pulled the needle out of the back of her hand as gently as she could, and ripped off the tape. It was excrutiatingly painful.

  Three short breaths and she pulled herself out of the bed. She had to hold on to the stand until the world stopped spinning.

  “Do you know why you transformed?” asked Felix.

  She had to focus to answer. “No, sir.”

  “Really?” He raised his eyebrows. “There are two ways of triggering a transformation like ours, Lily.”

  His use of the first-person plural made her want to hit him.

  “The first is every six weeks, when we reach the deadline.”