She knew that, obviously.
She was breathing too fast.
“The second is if we feel our lives are in danger. It’s a last resort. A built-in defense mechanism.” He turned away from her. “Why did you think you were going to die, Lily?”
It took her a second to respond: she had just realized that someone had re-dressed her, in a T-shirt and jeans, while she was asleep. They must have undressed her to do it. The nausea and disgust prompted by the thought rendered her silent for a moment.
“I saw . . .” She swallowed. “I saw horrible things.”
Lily Daniels was not Gifted. Lily Daniels had not taken the Test. Lily Daniels would not know what Insanity Gas was.
Felix nodded. “There’s something interesting about your story, Lily. How did you become a Hybrid? Do you know?”
Rose thought of Loren. She thought of her father.
“I . . . don’t know, sir.”
“Curious,” he said. “Were you attacked as a baby, then? That’s one of the ways you can get it. Infection changes your DNA. Those who survive Hybrid attacks are always Hybrids themselves.” He paused. “Not many survive, though.”
There was relish in his voice.
“I don’t know. My parents never told me I was. They just said . . .” She swallowed, trying to stand straight and get her breath back. “Keep quiet.”
“Keep quiet,” repeated Felix. It washed over her again how intensely physical this man was, how his very presence made you reconsider your spatial awareness, work out how far there was to run from him.
“What do you think of the Department, Lily?”
A moment of fleeting panic. No, he couldn’t possibly know.
But how to answer that question.
“I don’t think they should be underestimated, sir.”
He smiled. Run from those eyes.
“You know of David Elmsworth?”
She considered.
“Vaguely, sir.”
“You should fear him,” Felix told Rose. “He is our most dangerous enemy, Lily Daniels. Do not forget that. Turn your back on him for a moment and he will betray you; he will weave death traps for you from air.”
Damn right he will, you bastard.
“And yet,” said Felix after a moment, “he can be outwitted.”
Not by you.
“We can breach his defenses. A few months ago one of our food suppliers was taken into custody by his soldiers, a woman called Argent. One of our soldiers broke through into that very building — his lair, Lily — and silenced her before she could reveal anything. We left a warning, though — we frightened him. He can be frightened.”
He spoke as though he considered this a miracle. Rose, for her part, could not speak for the lump in her throat. Sylvia, poor Sylvia . . . Her hatred of the man before her, if possible, intensified.
He walked forward. She did not run.
He pressed something into her hand. She resisted the urge to flinch, and found that it was a gun handle.
“Welcome to the fold, Private Daniels,” he said. He was uncomfortably close to her. “I have a feeling you’re going to be very valuable to us.”
A terrible moment where she thought she might break — was she strong enough to kill him? No, not with magic, not yet, but this gun, he’d given her a gun, was it loaded?— and he stepped away.
“There’s going to be an event tonight,” he said, “quite an important event, actually, which I thought you might want to take part in. Your first blood.” He smiled again. His smile was like Loren’s: all shark teeth, no mirth or mercy.
“I’d be honored, sir.”
“Good,” he said.
He walked over and opened the door, allowing her to slip into the corridor. He looked at her, the open door between them.
“Privates and medics are on the deepest floor,” he said. “Find yourself a bedroom and get ready.”
Then the door closed. He never stopped looking at her.
Slowly, when he was gone, Rose sank to her knees. She hugged herself and pressed her head to her legs. Everything about her seemed to be shaking.
She found herself a bedroom on the bottom floor of the complex, as far as she could from Command. The loneliness of it was almost comforting: four white walls, a creaky bed set against the far wall. A wardrobe with a mirror.
Enough to survive, no more.
There was a communal toilet at the end of the corridor. There were about twenty other bedrooms, most of them unoccupied; while Regency was large for a militia, there were still nowhere near enough of them. This level was for the newest recruits. Anyone with any kind of potential would have been promoted by now.
Rose looked up and down the corridor and went back inside the bedroom.
She hung the gun Felix had given her on a hook on the back of the door. It was an SA80. Basic. Not as good as her Department one.
She stood there, looking at it.
Then she went back into the corridor.
She looked up at the ceiling. It was curved, painted a messy white. If she reached up, stretching her body and her arms and standing on her toes, she could just about touch it. Above that ceiling would be the Corporals’ floor, and then the Lieutenants,’ and then the Sergeants,’ and then the Majors’; and above that the second floor, with the assembly hall and the canteen; and then the actual War Rooms, the old War Rooms, where Felix lived, and where the Darkroom was; and above that earth, and finally the open air.
Sunlight and wind and open air.
After that, she started to get very bored, and very angry.
“So why did you join?”
Rose’s neighbors were teenagers. Older than Rose, true, but that had never counted for much. They looked to be about eighteen or nineteen; one a dark-haired, leather-jacketed girl with an earnest face, and the other her boyfriend, who had about five piercings in one ear and an expression of uninterested disdain. Needless to say, they were both Ashkind.
“I don’t know,” said the girl. Her name was Katya. “I couldn’t get a job, because of my eyes, you know?” They were dust-white-gray, the Ashkind equivalent of a Pretender. Darker-eyed Ashkind looked down on the almost-human.
“The Angels got my brother,” said the boy. “Those Department bastards came and got him for armed robbery.”
“You’re saying he was innocent?”
The boy sat up from where he lay on the bed, glaring at Rose fiercely. “It didn’t matter! They only got him ’cause he was a Demon!”
Rose said nothing.
“Calm down, Jordan,” said the girl, alarmed. She turned to Rose. “You missed the assembly this morning, didn’t you? Did you know they’re saying the Department attacked us today?”
Rose blinked. “No.”
Katya nodded earnestly. “They killed twenty-six people. How could someone do that?”
Rose looked down at herself, and the floor quietly fell away.
Oh no.
Oh, God, no.
She hadn’t. No. No. She couldn’t possibly have. She couldn’t possibly have killed —
No, no, please, Angels, please, no. No.
All those years trying not to — All those —
No, but the Darkroom —
No.
She looked at her hands. They were shaking. There was no blood on them.
How could there be no blood on them?
“Lily?” Katya’s hand on her shoulder, her anxious voice. “Are you all right?”
A stronger thread of thought broke through the horror — Speak, don’t give yourself away. “Yes,” she heard herself say, “just . . . I need a minute.”
No. No. No. She was breathing very hard. No, no, twenty-six, no, all those lives, it couldn’t possibly be, no, Jesus Christ, no —
She pressed her hands to her face.
Try to remember. The metal room, seeing the metal room in front of her, and the girl, and —
The monster rears above her and the fear —
Yes, yes. We know tha
t bit. Move on.
The pain breaks through her, breaks her, and the human girl falls away, like ill-fitting clothes, and the creature beneath —
Yes. And after that?
The room, the dark room, and the creature roaring at it, waves of magic crashing against the walls, and the door slides open, and the light, the people outside, the way they —
The way they bleed . . .
No. Stop. Stop remembering. No, no, please —
Not this, not —
Oh, hang on.
How did the door open?
. . . the door slides open . . .
Beneath the shaking, shivering, looming horror of what she had done, redemption could be glimpsed, like a silver coin in a compost heap.
Regency had opened the door.
It started to come together. Felix, or someone else in High Command, had opened the door and let her kill his soldiers. Then he called it a Department attack, which meant the thing tonight, which he had called her first blood . . .
Rose looked up at Katya and Jordan again. With great effort, she envisioned, as clearly as she could, the twenty-six people whose lives she had taken — no matter that it was with another creature’s body and mind, and with someone else’s intent — and she shouldered for a moment the full, crushing horror and guilt of the blame she bore. When it grew too much to bear, she put it quietly away, to weigh on a different part of her mind. She would deal with the guilt. But not right now.
Now — revenge.
Katya was still speaking. “How could they do that?”
“I don’t know,” said Rose calmly. She looked at the boy, who was turning his gun over and over in his hands. “You like being soldiers, then?”
They glanced at each other. “Actually,” said Katya, “we’ve never been in an attack before.”
“Ah,” said Rose. “You think you can survive it?”
They stared at her. “What do you mean?” asked Katya, tremulously.
“You do know we’re attacking the Government, right?”
“Yeah,” said the boy. “I’ll get my brother back.”
“That’s if we win.”
Another glance.
“What are you saying?” asked Jordan suspiciously.
“Well,” said Rose, shifting in her seat at the end of the bed, “it’s not the only way, is it? I think the Government would be willing to negotiate. I mean”— at their looks —“I’m not saying we should. But the bomb attacks have been pissing them off, and we could carry on with those. We have professionals for that kind of thing. Just not a full-scale attack, you know what I mean?”
They looked suspicious. “We should hit them where it hurts,” said Jordan.
“Yeah, but we don’t know it will hurt. I mean, look at us. There are fewer than seven hundred of us, right? And the army, the civilian police, the Department — just counting the ones in London — will be four thousand, at least.”
Their expressions were blank. Rose started to get annoyed.
“We’ll be slaughtered,” she said, emphatically.
Katya and Jordan looked at each other.
“Slaughtered?” whispered Katya.
There were six of them by that afternoon: Rose, Katya and Jordan, a girl from farther down their corridor called Marlene, and two corporals by the names of Dunstan and Amory. The corporals had been a stroke of luck: they’d heard Katya and Marlene’s whispered conversation and, instead of immediately reporting them to the High Command, had sympathized.
They, at least, had military training. Apart from them, Rose’s comrades were all young, inexperienced, pale-eyed, and low-ranking. She had not been lying to them: they really would be the cannon fodder.
“All right,” said Amory, low-voiced. “Do we go up together, or on our own?”
They stood in front of the lift. Katya and Jordan, who only now seemed to be realizing what they were doing, were staring at it in trepidation.
“Together,” said Rose in a whisper. She had no idea where the cameras were, but with the amount of arms they were carrying, she could only assume that the absence of soldiers swarming them right now meant they hadn’t been seen. “You, me and Dunstan stand in front, in case they ambush us.”
Dunstan, for her part, looked wary.
“How come you get to be in charge?” she asked Rose. “How old are you, sixteen?”
“It was my idea,” Rose told her. “I’m the one who started this. If they come for us, do you want to take the credit?”
The doors of the lift opened. Katya, Marlene and Jordan shuffled in. Rose and the corporals followed, cocking their guns.
“Why are you doing this?” asked Dunstan.
“I don’t want other people to die,” said Rose. “I’m one of the good guys.”
The doors closed and they started moving upward.
“Our Commander,” she added, “is not.”
When the doors opened on the first floor, there were two guards standing outside the lift. They took one look at the six of them and did the stupid thing: ran at them, instead of firing their weapons, or sounding the alarm. Then again, Dunstan and Amory didn’t fire either — no wasted lives, as Rose had ordered — but waited until the guards were right up against them before putting them down with two vicious kicks. They stepped out of the lift, and the others — Marlene and Jordan stony-faced, Katya terrified — followed.
“Marlene?” asked Rose. The girl nodded, and took out her knife. The cameras were positioned visibly above the door; Marlene cut them down, sawing at the wire with a serrated blade, and when they finally fell to the floor Marlene and Rose crushed them under their boots.
They were taking no chances with being seen.
While they did this, Jordan, Dunstan and Amory worked on the door to Felix’s office. Amory pushed against it, grunting.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We might have to shoot it down.”
“We can’t,” said Rose automatically. “Absolutely not. He’ll hear us, if he’s inside.”
“Kat,” said Jordan, staring intently at the lock, “you got a hairpin?”
Katya pulled one uncertainly from her hair and handed it to him. Jordan straightened it and slid it into the lock. Within a few seconds there was a click, and the door swung open.
Jordan looked around at the others.
“What?” he said, trying to put the uninterested expression back into place again. “I’ve got skills,” and then he realized what they were all staring at.
The office was empty.
“Dammit,” whispered Dunstan. “What are we going —”
“Excuse me,” came a voice from around the corner, “what on earth do you think you are doing?”
Felix Callaway walked round the corner, astonished, edging toward terrible fury, and Rose did not hesitate.
Her power exploded from her hands and smashed him back into the wall. Blood smeared the path of his head as he slumped to the floor. The others wrenched their gazes from Felix and looked around in terror for the source of the attack.
“Oh no!” said Rose in mock surprise, then stepped forward to kick Felix in the head. He was too strong to be knocked out by that, though, and stared up at her through a fog of pain. There was actual hurt in his eyes.
“That was for Laura Gaskell,” she told him.
“Lily?” he whispered. He looked bemused. This only infuriated her further.
“No, actually,” she told him. “My name is Rose.”
She pulled the syringe of thick, white memory serum out of her back pocket, and turned to the others. She held up the liquid.
“Don’t worry,” she said to them, and held out her hands so they could see the fire that sparked from nothing on her fingertips. “Don’t be afraid. In a minute or so, you won’t remember any of this.”
“I mean, it’s not like we think Gifted are inhuman. We know that.”
Katya sat with Jordan on her bed in their room on the bottom floor. They both looked slightly dazed, their gazes shifting
into blankness and voices trailing off at random intervals.
“We just want equality,” she said earnestly to Rose. “Some of the rest of these people”— she waved a vague hand at the complex in general, which Rose took to mean “Regency”—“want, like, Gifted to be second-class citizens, like we are now, but I think . . .”
She stared into the distance for a little while.
“I don’t remember,” she said softly.
“Bomb the bastards,” said Jordan, vehemently. “I don’t care about equality. Just kill them, and take away their bloody Gifts, and we can have an Ashkind Parliament, and there won’t be magic, just us . . .”
“Yeah,” said Katya. “Yeah. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with magic in general, is there? But when, like, luck gives it to some people, and not to others, then you get, like, inequality, and it’s not fair on us . . .”
“Bomb the bastards,” said Jordan, again.
Rose nodded, and tried to make her smile reassuring. Katya reached up to scratch her ear. A drop of blood had dried around the injection point on her wrist.
“Yeah,” said Rose. “Definitely. Bomb the bastards.”
“Are you ready to take the fight to them?”
They stood in the Command Hall, roaring to Felix’s words, armed to the teeth and already high on adrenaline. Rose watched Felix carefully. He looked pale, but he was still smiling that shark-tooth, merciless smile, and he did not look at her. The attack had been wiped from his memory. He did not suspect anything at all.
“Are you ready to raze the institutions of magic to the ground? Are you ready to eliminate Gifts, and all who possess them? Are you ready to take back this society for those who deserve it?”
Another roar. Felix, it seemed, was definitely on the “bomb the bastards” side of things. He saw no way to negotiate with the Parliament of Angels, or indeed with the Gifted in general; so he had decided to destroy them. So far, so good.
“Private Daniels?”
It took her a second to realize the voice was addressing her, and then she turned. A dark-haired Ashkind stood beside her, clearly not part of the rank and file. He looked somewhat frightened. Rose immediately christened him “the Minion.”
The Catalyst Page 29