Bright Ruin

by Vic James

  Except no, dammit. This wasn’t on her, or Luke. This was on no one except the Equals – and specifically on Bouda Matravers and Whittam Jardine.

  ‘That’s them,’ she croaked, and Tilda’s arm went around her shoulders and squeezed.

  ‘You’ll have ’em back soon enough,’ the woman promised. ‘And look, here’s Oz and Jess with the rest that got taken at Riverhead.’

  She pulled up another two pictures, and there was Oz, still bulky in his prison uniform, his dark face an unreadable blur in a line of prisoners in the grainy image. By the time Abi turned to Jess’s picture, she was incapable of recognizing anyone at all, given how her eyes blurred with tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, mortified, as she realized several had fallen onto the computer keyboard.

  ‘Not long now, lassie,’ said Tilda. ‘Don’t you worry. We’ll get you all in, and get you and them safe back out again.’

  There was a shared supper that evening, followed by a minute-by-minute briefing led by Renie’s uncle Wes and Midsummer. The twins had set up a projector inside Lindum’s massive rotunda and photos of the compound, superimposed blueprints, plans of the surveillance camera locations and, almost unbearably, the CCTV images Abi had been shown were all thrown onto the faded Roman brickwork. Gavar sat at the front throughout, his face tight with attention. Occasionally he’d lean forward to object or challenge, sweeping that long coat over one knee impatiently. His comments were always blunt and to the point.

  Midsummer had given him a crucial role. It was a massive – and public – vote of confidence. Abi didn’t think it was misplaced.

  She barely slept that night, tossing and turning beneath the blankets in a cool guest room. She climbed out of bed – Renie a dead-to-the-world lump beside her – and padded across to the window. The terracotta floor tiling was warm beneath her feet as she stood looking out, the curtain billowing in the breeze. Across Lindum’s grounds, statuary gleamed in the moonlight. Then Abi glimpsed the gleam of white wings, and Alba the owl swooped around where Midsummer stood almost invisibly in the night, a smaller figure leaning into her. As the two women kissed, Abi stepped back and pulled the curtain. Hers wasn’t the only family with everything on the line tomorrow.

  The morning would bring another rehearsal of the plans, carefully timed. When she woke a second time, Abi felt too nauseous for breakfast, but knew she’d have to eat something, so went for a jog around the grounds to try and work up an appetite. Dew flecked her ankles, and birds sang and shrilled as she passed. There was no one out here but her.

  Until she saw a familiar figure off by himself, pacing in circles around a tree. It was Gavar, a phone pressed to his ear and evidently agitated. Abi slowed and reconsidered her route – she didn’t want to disturb him – when he burst out furiously, ‘. . . totally unnecessary . . . Absolutely not.’

  Abi’s chest tightened, and despite being puffed from her run, she held her breath. What was this? When the heir stabbed his phone to end the call, she had to slide hastily behind a tree as he strode back towards the house.

  Thinking quickly, Abi calculated another route, via an old ice house, that would give the impression of having come from a different direction altogether. Then she took off at a run. Who had Gavar been talking to? And what about?

  Her looping route brought her to the back door and into the kitchen at the same time Gavar stepped in from the opposite end, having come through the interior. Midsummer looked up from the long table, where she sat with Layla, Renie, Wesley and the rest.

  ‘We’re almost done,’ she said, ‘but there’s some scrambled egg on the stove. Where have you both been?’

  ‘Went for a run,’ Abi said, wiping her sweaty face.

  ‘Calling my daughter,’ Gavar said, showing the phone in his hand. ‘I make sure she hears her daddy’s voice every day, and we’re all going to be busy later.’

  But his face was grim as he scraped the cast-iron skillet almost empty and took a seat at the bench.

  Unease prickled through Abi. What she’d heard had plainly not been a conversation with Libby. Perhaps some sort of disagreement with Griff, or even Daisy? But she’d seen how Gavar was with them, and couldn’t imagine him using that furious tone. His other family, then – Whittam or Bouda, or even Jenner? What could it all mean?

  If Abi voiced her fears to Midsummer, she might abort the rescue. If she challenged Gavar, he might storm out, and he had a crucial role to play in the plan they’d devised. In fact, Abi couldn’t imagine how they’d ever thought it might be possible without him.

  But if she said nothing . . . ? What if Gavar had betrayed every detail of the plan, and when they arrived at the prison, there were detachments of Security waiting for them. Gavar might turn on Midsummer, and not only would there be no rescue, but two dozen more prisoners for the Jardine regime. And with Midsummer gone, the network she had drawn tight around her would fall apart.

  Stop it, she told herself firmly. Stop catastrophizing and imagining the worst. This is like before your exams – you convinced yourself you’d failed them all, then got top grades for every one.

  But the stakes were too high to do nothing. She went to find the twins and Asif.

  ‘Have you noticed anything odd at Fullthorpe,’ she said. ‘Unusual comings and goings? Comings in particular.’

  ‘Like what, love?’ Hilda asked.

  ‘Reinforcements. Extra Security, that sort of thing. I mean, I know Midsummer runs a tight ship here, but all it would take would be one person to betray us.’

  ‘There’s no one here that hasn’t suffered a loss at the hands of these bastards, Abi. No one will have said a word.’

  ‘But to answer your question,’ said Asif, leaning over – and Abi blessed his logic and detachment – ‘it’s hard to determine “unusual” when we’ve not observed the whole routine. That said, we’ve seen nothing that looks alarming. One small van coming out this morning, and nothing going in. Certainly nothing either way that looks like Security. But it’s on our to-flag list from the minute you all leave here. We’ll let Midsummer and Wes know immediately of anything that looks irregular.’

  Abi’s airways opened up a little, and the terrible pressure on her chest eased. ‘Right. Of course. Thank you.’

  ‘Time for the final run-through,’ Tilda said, grinning. ‘Would you go grab those nice strong gardeners to help a couple of girls with their gear?’

  This briefing was timed. The rotunda had been emptied of all furniture, and as a graphic time-lapse of the rescue plans was animated over the aerial CCTV view, those going into Fullthorpe moved around the space in their groups. A clock counting up from zero was projected onto the far wall. Abi watched the two small dots denoting herself and her companion. Apart from the beginning and the end, they were alone, and Abi followed the rest of the rescue unfold. Her stomach lurched as Gavar led his team into the centre of the rotunda, a stand-in for the secure wing where some of the prisoners, her dad included, were being kept under twenty-three-hour lockdown.

  ‘Fourteen minutes,’ Midsummer said, pointing to the clock on the wall. ‘That’s calculated from the time we estimate it’ll take from the detection of our intrusion – we’ll be pretty noticeable – to full lock-down being complete. There’s a free-fire protocol that the guards are supposed to stick to, but once we’re in, I doubt any of them will wait for orders. We’ve got eighty people to get out, and to give them the best chance of getting away, we need to ensure we can’t be followed. That means we’ll be blocking the compound’s main gate, and resealing our entry points at the walls. Any questions?’

  Abi raised her hand. ‘What if . . .’ she asked, trying very hard not to look at Gavar as she spoke. ‘I know we’re all tight on this, but what if somehow they’ve found out about our plans, and battalions of Security roll up, either before we arrive, or during the raid?’

  Midsummer’s face was as hard as one of her marble creatures.

  ‘We abort. But I’m confident that surprise is on
our side. I trust everyone in this room’ – and was Abi imagining it, or did the Equal’s eyes seek out Gavar across the echoing rotunda? ‘We are planning to get our friends and family out of there, not to leave them behind. But I’m not going to risk adding more to their number. If our observation team spots anything untoward, they’ll immediately report their best assessment to me, and I’ll decide if we continue or go. But the thing we do not do is fight. This is not an attack – it’s a liberation.’

  Abi nodded. You could feel it fill the whole vast space: admiration for this woman, and the shared belief in what they were about to do.

  She was ready, too.

  Who knew that a marble gryphon’s back would be so comfortable – though Abi suspected her thighs would ache chronically tomorrow. Beneath her, supple marble muscles moved as the creature ran, and her fingers were wound into the beast’s scruff where cold feathers met cool fur. It was disconcerting to be faced constantly with one of the three fierce heads, either Tom or Harry, constantly scouting backwards.

  Up in front flew Alba. Midsummer led them, on the powerful shoulders of Leto, as the wolf made speed in silence. Renie was atop the sphinx – which was the size of a small pony – as though she’d been riding one all her life. Plainly a street childhood in Millmoor had made her adaptable to any circumstance.

  The sphinx’s paws thudded on the ground, but the real earthshaker was the giant, jogging at their side. Abi guessed he was a figure of Hercules, clad in a lion skin, but in place of his marble club he’d been equipped with two twenty-pound sledgehammers, with which he periodically whacked at branches, as if practising for what would come next. Weaving in and out of the trees, barely visible, was a gargantuan snake-bodied creature, whose upper torso was a beautiful woman. Abi was happy for it to keep its distance. The humanoid animations, even (perhaps especially) Renie’s human-headed sphinx, were eerie.

  Both Abi’s and Renie’s mounts responded to simple commands from their riders, but the larger monsters were Midsummer’s to control, so their first task was to get the Equal into the highest perimeter watchtower, which was also the closest to the residential blocks. From there she would be able to direct them.

  They kept up a pace, marble limbs never tiring, as they closed in on Fullthorpe. Once the message had come through that Gavar’s team was moving into position, the garden centre vans had driven to a quiet country road a few miles from the jail. With supermax prisoners not being in high demand as neighbours, Fullthorpe was mostly surrounded by agricultural land, an unexpectedly bright patchwork of yellows and greens on Hilda’s images. But the closer they came, the more the tree cover thinned. It finally dwindled to a mere perimeter screen to hide the prison from passers-by – and which also, just about, concealed their unnatural menagerie.

  There was a faint buzz of traffic noise from the roads. Half a kilometre away was a light industrial estate, where vehicles were ready for the getaway. The three of them and the beasts halted in place, listening through their earpieces. Renie was checking her watch with military precision. And if it was weird having their movements co-ordinated by a kid barely in her teens, well, Renie had been doing this longer than any of them. Knowing when a patrol passed, or a storeroom door might be open, was what had kept her alive and free in Millmoor for all those years.

  But this would be bigger than anything she’d attempted before. Midsummer’s face was sheened with sweat that was probably down to exertion from controlling the creatures – they’d brought six rather than seven, so she wasn’t permanently stretched to her limits – but it was doubtless also anxiety. Abi’s hands were slippery and her heart was lodged in her throat. Every movement or rustle in the woods sent her nerves jarring, yet adrenaline coursed through her.

  ‘Any unusual movement to report?’ Midsummer asked into her mouthpiece. ‘Arrivals? Departures? Signs of Security being ready inside the compound? Over.’

  Please let Gavar not be a traitor, Abi pleaded inwardly. Please let the conversation she’d heard that morning be merely him keeping up appearances with someone back in London. Perhaps his mother, or Silyen.

  And where was Silyen Jardine in all of this? Abi had always had a sense of him being on the edge of things. Present, but unnoticed until his grand entrance, as when Kyneston’s ballroom blew. But she hadn’t seen him at the Blood Fair. Hadn’t heard word of him for weeks.

  The crackle in her earpiece brought her back to the present. It was Hilda’s calm voice.

  ‘Nothing to report. All clear to proceed. Repeat, all clear to proceed. Over.’

  Abi’s fingers gripped the feathered neck of Tom – or was it Harry? – while the beast’s other two heads strained forward.

  Other voices came over the headpieces, one after the other, confirming that they were in position and ready. Abi’s heart rate cranked upwards. She felt it throb in her earlobes, the tips of her fingers, the tensed crook of her ankle.

  Hang on, she told her mum and dad silently. We’re coming.

  Then Midsummer, clear and strong: ‘Let’s go, on three . . . two . . . one . . .’

  And Abi was out of time for either fear or hesitation.

  The giant hurtled from the treeline faster than seemed possible, his arm windmilling the massive hammers. Behind him slithered the serpent-woman, her thick tails propelling her with unnatural speed. Alba spread her wings and soared into the sky, heading for the central CCTV camera post. When that was destroyed, she’d move on to the others one by one, Tilda counting them off into each team’s earpiece as the screens went dead.

  The giant had already battered a hole in the perimeter wall and ran to the next position, on the north side. Records showed that thirty of the prisoners they were after should be here, in one of the textile workshops. In the fifty-foot wall, the hole he left behind didn’t look large, but it was enough for a giant snake, a wolf and a sphinx to squeeze through. Not a gryphon, though.

  Abi felt the shoulders of Tom, Dick and Harry flex beneath her as the creature unfolded mighty wings and crouched low on its leonine haunches. Distantly, an explosion blasted from the opposite side of the compound, which could only have been Gavar Jadine taking down the front gates. While the noise echoed, Abi’s stomach lurched as her beast leapt into the air.

  And this was madness, surely, because Abi felt the wind against her face and knew that she was flying. How did the marble gryphon not simply drop out of the air? Then she remembered that Midsummer had set a metal dragon circling over the Thames. This was Skill incarnate.

  She dug her fingers deep into the gryphon’s scruff, and between wingbeats tried to make out what was happening below. The giant serpent’s coils had flattened the mesh fence around the watchtower, where Midsummer was dismounting, and the creature was sliding towards its next target, the internal double wall around the residential blocks. This was where the majority of the prisoners they were after were held. That was where Gavar Jardine was heading, accompanied by only a few men – the fewer the better, so the Equal could focus on clearing a path in, rather than protecting his companions. There, they would need to break people out of blocks A and D.

  The last sounds Abi caught before the gryphon rose too high for hearing were the snarling of Leto, as it bounded into the watchtower ahead of Midsummer, and shots that Abi hoped desperately were for the wolf and not its mistress. She could only imagine the screams of the men who ran from the tower to be confronted by a rearing sphinx with a child on its shoulders.

  Midsummer believed they could do this without casualties, not only among their band of rescuers, but among the prison officers and Security. Abi wasn’t so sure.

  She caught a glimpse of the giant and the small team of men pounding along beside it towards the workshop complex. Then the gryphon banked and dipped and Abi was heading towards her own target.

  Few walls could resist the combined onslaught of marble monsters and Gavar’s incendiary Skill. Which meant that the true challenge wasn’t getting the Riverhead prisoners out of the Fullthorpe compound,
it was getting them away from the site altogether. Abi knew that the Highwithel chopper, with Meilyr’s sister at the controls, had been timed to take off from its refuelling spot ten minutes before Midsummer gave the signal. She couldn’t spot it just yet, but it would be here shortly. The obstacle was that the exercise field was criss-crossed with steel cables, to prevent exactly such an airborne escape route.

  The prison’s designers hadn’t reckoned on a gryphon, though – an oversight for which Abi felt they could be forgiven. She reached into her backpack and pulled out a hydraulic bolt cutter, acquired from the same industrial suppliers as the giant’s outsize hammers. It would cut steel rope up to two centimetres thick. Construction specifications that Hilda had unearthed revealed that the wires across the exercise field were a few millimetres thinner. They were concreted into the top of the yard wall, which stood five metres high and just wide enough for a gryphon to settle all four feet on.

  Abi slid off Tom, Dick and Harry’s back, and hefted the cutters. Her wrist had recovered from her fall in Gorregan Square, and she’d spent time practising her technique. She snapped on a pair of gloves to prevent the handles slipping through her fear-greased palms. The cables were tethered in clusters at the four corners of the yard, forming a web as they radiated out. The first corner of cables cut, Abi clambered back onto the gryphon which flew to the next – Midsummer must be safely in the tower, watching over everything, co-ordinating her creature’s movements.

  As she was sweating on the third corner, Abi heard the whump of the chopper and saw it rising over the treeline. Louder than its rotors, though, was the din of shouting, gunfire, explosions and mayhem that was now erupting all around. Smoke rose in several places, and masonry dust clogged the air. Somewhere down there were her parents. Please, was all she could think. Please, please, please.