Bright Ruin

by Vic James

  Stopped.

  Midsummer rocked back on her haunches, utterly spent.

  ‘Help me get her in the front,’ Renie instructed the driver, and the pair of them hauled Midsummer into the car. Abi and Jess lifted Mum and carefully laid her onto the back seat.

  ‘Leto,’ Midsummer murmured groggily, her head lolling against her seat.

  But the Equal had barely any strength left, and so the faithful wolf had turned back to stone, frozen by the roadside and too heavy to lift. As Abi slipped in to rest Mum’s head on her lap, and Jess and Renie squashed in the other side beneath her legs, only Alba’s white wings flew down the road ahead of them.

  The journey was terrifying as the driver twisted and turned across the moor at speeds that belonged on a racetrack. And yet it was the slowest hour of Abi’s life. As with their first arrival at Lindum, she was terrified that the estate would be ringed with Security. But they had travelled the fastest, and she remembered that Lady Flora, Midsummer’s mother, was protecting the great house. Only an Equal would be able to get close. If Whittam Jardine or Bouda Matravers wanted Midsummer, they would have to come for her themselves.

  The gate flew open before them, and people were already running from the front door. Layla went to Midsummer’s side, supporting her inside. The Equal waved her mother towards Abi, and Lady Flora commanded two of the staff to carry Mum to the room Abi had been sharing with Renie. They stretched her out on the bed, and it wasn’t long before more people were arriving with clean cloths, bowls of steaming water, and a green plastic First Aid box that Abi tore through.

  She undressed Mum and washed her, almost crying with relief to feel her mother’s skin warm beneath her touch. There was colour in her face again. Lady Flora came back, and volunteered her own services as healer, but Abi’s inspection told her that whatever Midsummer had done had been enough. The skin was still raw and puckered, and there was black bruising beneath it where infinitesimal blood vessels had ruptured, but the wound had already drawn together. What Mum needed now was rest.

  And so, it seemed, did Abi. The lack of sleep, the adrenaline that had washed through her body non-stop for hours, the strain and the fear took their toll. And though she’d only intended to lie down on top of the coverlet next to Mum for a few moments, to comfort her with her presence, the next thing she knew, she was blinking awake into darkness.

  On the pillow beside her, her mother’s breathing was deep and even. And everything that had happened came back to Abi in a rush.

  Horrifying and nightmarish though it had been, one strange upside of Mum’s rescue had been that Abi had seen her. Been able to hold her. When they’d thrashed out the plans for getting each prisoner safely away, she had asked for Mum and Dad to be taken straight across the country to Liverpool, and from there, over the water to Ulaidh.

  Abi had seen the helicopter lift off and away. Dad should be in a safe house in Liverpool by now. Maybe someone there would have a phone. How good it would be to hear his voice and know that he was okay, too.

  She swung her legs off the bed, and winced at a sharp pain. Of course. She’d been hit herself, by the whizzing marble shrapnel from the gryphon’s flank. She hadn’t even noticed it, in the adrenaline rush of everything that had happened.

  ‘Abi,’ a quiet voice said.

  She peered into the darkness.

  ‘Jess?’

  The woman made a small, tight sound.

  ‘Were you keeping an eye on us? Thank you.’

  ‘I was.’ Jessica sounded exhausted. Why was she not also asleep? ‘You seemed the right company. Even if you were unconscious.’

  Jessica’s voice trembled and broke a little, and Abi tried to force down panic, even as sharp talons of fear closed around her heart. There was nothing more to fear. They’d done it. Everyone was safe.

  ‘The right company? Jess, what is it – is Oz okay?’

  ‘Do you know why your mum was in the hospital wing, Abi?’

  Abi didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. Whatever Jessica was about to say would be nothing good. Abi wanted to press her hands to her ears so she wouldn’t hear it. To lie back down next to Mum and sleep until whatever Jess was about to say didn’t matter any more.

  ‘She was beaten by the guards when she tried to stop them taking your Dad away this morning. They came for him at breakfast time. They took Oz, too, and some others. They put them in a van and drove them away.’

  Abi’s heart imploded. It did whatever black holes did when they were too heavy and just collapsed beneath their own mass. Dad hadn’t been rescued?

  Wait.

  Breakfast time. A van.

  Abi remembered Gavar Jardine’s mysterious phone call. Asif reassuring her about what they’d seen at Fullthorpe: Nothing that looks alarming. One small vehicle coming out this morning.

  Had Gavar tipped off his family that the raid was about to happen, so they’d removed a few prisoners? But why only a few? And if the Jardines knew about the rescue, then why hadn’t they tried to stop it?

  No, this wasn’t making sense. None of it made sense.

  ‘So, they took Oz and my Dad,’ she told Jess. ‘Well, wherever they are, we’ll get them. It can’t be harder than what we just did.’

  ‘Oh, Abi . . .’

  Jess broke down, burying her face in her hands. It was raw, animal sobbing.

  Abi couldn’t bear to hear it. She headed for the door. One of the others would have answers about where Dad was being held.

  Downstairs, Lindum’s wide brick corridors and tiled floors were eerily empty. Abi hurried towards the rotunda, which had become the hub of Midsummer’s team. The furniture cleared out for the drill that morning was back in place, and more than a dozen people were gathered around a television whose flickering images cast blue light up onto the dome.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked the room. ‘What are they saying about what happened?’

  Heads turned. She saw Renie reach for the remote and mute the sound.

  A figure in the middle of the group got to her feet.

  ‘This will be the last thing they do,’ she said. And if Jessica had sounded broken, Midsummer sounded blazingly, incandescently furious. ‘Abi, I’m so sorry.’

  All the breath left Abi’s chest in that instant. The very last of it came out as words.

  ‘What have they done?’

  One by one, those sitting around the screen moved away. The image on the screen was nothing Abi could understand. As if hypnotized, she walked towards it, willing it to become clearer.

  Because it looked like . . .

  It looked like . . .

  Horror slammed like an iron bar into Abi’s midriff and she doubled over. Her scream echoed around Lindum’s great brick dome, spiralling out into the empty night.

  16

  Bouda

  The film crew had done a good job, Bouda thought, though there was really no need for the camera to linger on the bodies like that.

  ‘While a small number of prisoners escaped,’ the reporter could be heard saying, ‘they are not believed to represent a danger to the public and a recapture mission is underway. However, these men, identified as the ringleaders, exchanged gunfire with Security during the shocking events that unfolded this afternoon at Fullthorpe secure unit. Eyewitnesses told us that the marksmen who took down these individuals saved many more lives from being lost.’

  The gunshot wounds on each man were indeed the work of snipers, though they’d been inflicted from closer quarters and under calmer circumstances than those suggested by the reporter. In a field a few miles distant from Fullthorpe, to be precise, when the handcuffed men had been let out of the van and told to run. The bodies had later been driven back to the wrecked jail, and laid out amid the rubble before the news cameras arrived.

  Bouda glanced at the others in the room with her. Astrid wore a thin smile and Whittam’s satisfaction was evident. This set-up had been his idea. And if Bouda found it distasteful the way the pair of them reached
for death at every opportunity – at the Blood Fair, and now Fullthorpe – well, she had to admit it worked.

  When a close-up was shown of one wound, though, Bouda had to look away. Such a tiny injury, yet enough to destroy a man. Or woman.

  Dina’s death from a sniper’s bullet on the Tyne Bridge had been a terrible accident. But it was these rebels and their perverted ideas that had put her in harm’s way, and Bouda would never forgive them. They had killed her sister, and now they were trying to tear apart the nation. They deserved everything they got.

  ‘Authorities have named them as Oswald Walcott, forty-four, with a history of violent sedition at both Millmoor slavetown and Riverhead . . .’

  The photo that flashed up was the one they’d inspected all that time ago in the Justice Council, when Gavar had first been dispatched to Millmoor. The man’s brutish appearance spoke for itself. Walcott had got away from them once, thanks to Meilyr’s meddling. But not a second time.

  ‘Steven Hadley, forty-nine, is the father of Luke Hadley, the young man Condemned earlier this year for the shocking murder of former Chancellor Zelston.’

  Whittam grunted with approval that they’d remembered the ‘former’, even though Zelston had been out of office mere hours at the time of his demise. It had been difficult to find a suitably criminal photograph of Hadley. In the end, they’d used the one taken when he was processed upon arrival at Millmoor. The man had been so red-eyed and wild you could easily believe he was high on drugs.

  ‘Hadley’s involvement makes it all the more extraordinary that this devastating assault on a detention facility appears to have been masterminded from Lindum, the Zelston estate. Sources say this throws new light onto precisely how the current titleholder, Lady Flora, and in particular her daughter, Heir Midsummer, attained their positions.

  ‘Chancellor Winterbourne Zelston’s death came on the same day as he appeared in public for the first time with his betrothed, Euterpe Parva. The motives surrounding the slaying have previously been unclear, with experts believing that Luke Hadley was a lone-wolf terrorist, indoctrinated with classist beliefs in Millmoor slavetown. However, given the Hadley family’s involvement with the woman who stood to benefit most from her uncle’s untimely demise’ – and that picture of Midsummer, fist raised and ranting at some student protest two years ago was just perfection, Bouda thought – ‘those links are now being re-examined.’

  Jenner appeared on screen, offering condemnation and comforting platitudes. He was good at this. He’d won the nation’s hearts with his soppy address at his aunt’s funeral, and his bravery when the bag containing Ragnarr Vernay’s head was lobbed at the grieving family. It helped that he had puppy eyes and was romantically unattached. Even his Skillessness, which Bouda had always considered an insuperable defect, appealed to swathes of commoner women who both pitied him and entertained fantasies that it made him more attainable.

  No, Jenner – just like Faiers – would have his uses when Bouda was Chancellor. She would restore the heyday that followed the Revolution, when both Equals and commoners knew their place and worked together for the glory of the nation. The two men, a Skilless Equal and an Equal-sired commoner, would symbolize the new compact between rulers and ruled.

  She’d have to make sure Jenner didn’t get too much screen time, though. He couldn’t eclipse Bouda herself. It was so much easier for men, given respect and authority like it was their birthright, while women who sought the same thing were branded ambitious and unnatural. Well, by the time all this was over, Bouda would have both respect and admiration.

  Then she could work on winning the country’s love.

  At the far end of the couch, Whittam grunted and turned off the television.

  ‘Thank you all. Excellently managed. That Zelston bitch looks like a violent seditionist who conspired to bump off her useless uncle to boot. That’s worth losing a few prisoners for.’ He turned those bloodshot blue eyes onto Bouda. ‘The CCTV cameras were destroyed in the raid, correct? There’s nothing showing Gavar’s involvement?’

  There was. Midsummer had used some kind of owl to take out the jail’s surveillance cameras, but not before one of them had caught Gavar blasting the perimeter wall through which two dozen prisoners had promptly escaped. Bouda had ordered a copy made, then had the original recording erased.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Good. And it ends here, right?’ a voice said from the doorway. They all twisted round as Gavar strode into the room. ‘The investigation finds “unanswered questions” about Midsummer’s role in her uncle’s death and she’s stripped of her title. Job done.’

  ‘It’s only just beginning, I’m afraid,’ Bouda said. ‘The people need to see her fail. And they need to see us showing our strength.’

  More to the point, they needed to see Bouda working miracles. Glorious and powerful.

  ‘Showing our strength? Just have another bloody parade or something. I’ll stand on the balcony and wave till my hand falls off. She can’t come back from this. You’ve done enough.’

  ‘We’ve only got started,’ Whittam growled, in that way that still made Bouda’s scalp prickle.

  ‘Well, I’m not being your go-between any more. You assured me no one would die, then you killed the Hadley dad for crying out loud. How the fuck am I meant to explain that to Daisy?’

  Gavar threw himself into an armchair, raking his fingers through that thick copper hair. Bouda watched his tantrum in disbelief. How could his priorities have become so twisted up that he was upset at having to tell a commoner girl – a murderer’s sister – that her seditionist father had been dealt justice? No, Daisy Hadley’s presence at the heart of the Jardine household would have to be addressed. How one lowborn family had become so mixed up in the affairs of the nation Bouda couldn’t comprehend.

  ‘I suggest you pull yourself together,’ she said. ‘And not undo the credit you’ve earned with your father. Fullthorpe achieved exactly what we wanted: congratulations. Now your part is finished and Faiers takes over from here.’

  Gavar looked up as Jon moved to Bouda’s side.

  ‘That weasel? If you call Midsummer a class traitor, then he’s the pinnacle of treachery. You know his mother is part of Midsummer’s inner circle. Can you even trust him?’

  Jon looked like he had a retort ready, but Bouda laid a hand on his arm. A row would achieve nothing.

  ‘I trust him. And I’m grateful to you. We all are.’

  She smiled around the room. Nobody smiled back.

  ‘Has it occurred to you,’ Gavar said, ‘that maybe Midsummer’s right? That we don’t have to be such utter shits all the time. That our Skill would win us all the devotion we could ever want, if we only stopped grinding people’s faces into the dirt and let them look up to see us.’

  ‘You speak foolishly, Gavar,’ said Whittam. ‘And tread dangerously.’

  ‘If you’ve become so fond of her, why don’t you go back and join her?’

  That was Jenner. Bouda looked up in surprise. There was venom in his voice.

  ‘Do you stop for even a minute to think of all the advantages you have – your position, your power?’ It was as though he couldn’t even bring himself to say ‘Skill’. ‘And yet you do nothing with it. Nothing at all. You don’t deserve any of it.’

  And right at that moment, Bouda knew that if she ever needed a weapon against Gavar, she would have one in Jenner. He was hardening with each decision he made. Betraying the girl they’d all thought he was sweet on had been the first step. He would betray his brother, too.

  She despised him.

  ‘We all have our part to play, Jenner. Gavar performed his, and you performed yours, and everything went according to plan. Gavar, I understand if you’re feeling conflicted and don’t want to be here for what we’re discussing next. It’s been quite a day. Why don’t you go spend the evening with Libby?’

  ‘Are you giving me permission to spend time with my own daughter? Fuck you, Bouda. Whatever you all do now, you c
an count me out of it.’

  He slammed the door so hard the rows of Chancellors’ portraits on the wall rattled, as though generation after generation of Jardines were expressing their disapproval of him.

  ‘Thank goodness,’ Astrid drawled. ‘Maybe now the adults can have a grown-up conversation.’

  Bouda pressed her lips together. She might think such things, but she didn’t like hearing others say them. Not even her own allies.

  And yet . . . there could only be one Chancellor. And if it was to be her, it couldn’t be Gavar.

  ‘Thanks to Gavar, we know that there’s a day of protest planned,’ she said. ‘Banners, marching, all the usual nonsense. But that’s not enough for our purposes. We need some act of violence that will enable us to crush her publicly. And we need it to happen soon, while Fullthorpe is still fresh in people’s minds.

  ‘Hopefully today’s events will have left her furious. Ready to lash out. We know that Midsummer’s people have no problem with the destruction of public and private property – remember the arson at the Queen’s Chapel, and the stores they firebombed on Mountford Street? We want more of the same. Bigger targets.

  ‘Now, I’ve drawn up a list of high-visibility targets. And Faiers will put them in front of her. He is uniquely well placed to penetrate Midsummer’s circle, thanks to his mother’s former position as Speaker. The plan is for Faiers to contact his mother, saying that after Fullthorpe he’s not prepared to risk working with me any longer, and to go to them with documents and information. Nothing truly useful, of course. He’ll tell them that we are divided and quarrelling, split over the actions at Fullthorpe, and that the time to strike is now. He’ll suggest these locations.’

  She tapped the slender file that peeped from her handbag.

  ‘He’ll also confirm that Gavar’s supposed defection to their camp was done on your orders, Whittam. Even if my husband does have a moment of madness and go to her – though I give him more credit than that – Midsummer will never take him back.’

  She waited for Whittam’s applause. It didn’t come, of course. It never did. She and her husband had that in common, at least.