Riff tilted his head. ‘Hang on, that doesn’t sound right … Aren’t disguises supposed to “differentiate you from your usual persona”?’
‘Yep,’ Phoenix said. ‘It’s the second principle of concealment, I believe.’
‘Ah, there you go!’ Riff nodded sagely and poked me in the arm. ‘So, an idiot pretending to be an idiot doesn’t count. Better luck next time.’
When I returned his poke, Riff pretended to fall over, crying out as if my finger had mortally wounded him. As he fell, he threw himself into a perfect midair somersault and ended up about three feet above the ground, floating with a cocky grin and his hands outstretched in expectation of applause.
Phoenix rolled her eyes. ‘Show off.’
Strangely enough, their teasing made me feel a bit better. At least my friends didn’t expect my Witness ability to transform me into an uber-talented super-spy overnight. They knew full well that I was still a rookie.
Around them, I could simply be myself.
Yet even now, this easy camaraderie left an odd sting in my chest. This wasn’t the first time I’d felt a strong bond of friendship. Throughout my years in Hollingvale, my closest friend had been a girl called Billie. We had grown up together, in a way. Two outsiders, drawn together by shared experience: a new life, in a new town.
And then Billie had betrayed me.
All that time, she had belonged to a family of Inductors. She had been sent to Hollingvale to spy on me, and to report back. Thanks to her, a pair of Inductors had invaded my house on the night I had learnt of my sorcerous heritage.
She had lied to me.
This is different, I told myself. Phoenix, Riff and Orbit were HELIX cadets, and we stood for the same principles. We fought the same enemy. They had risked their lives for me in London, hadn’t they? Logically, I knew I was being paranoid. Yet still I felt the faint presence of an invisible wall between us – a barrier I had begun to erect in the weeks after learning of Billie’s betrayal.
And so I laughed along, and I let them tease me, and I teased them back. And I fought to suppress the ache in my gut that still murmured never to trust anyone entirely, never to make myself vulnerable again … no matter how much I wanted to.
The ache that insisted I was safer alone.
We heard no news from Dragon. No word of Nephrite, or Mariner, or the mysterious ‘vials’ he had been concealing.
It was as if nothing had happened at all.
As the days rolled on, the cadets at HQ began to bustle with fresh excitement, looking forward to our Wilderness Camp. The cohort buzzed with rumours of our secret destination. Button was loudly predicting a trip to the Gold Coast, complete with glorious sunshine and sandy beaches. Considering Dragon’s brand of humour, I figured she was far more likely to send us to Mount Disappointment.
‘So, where do you reckon we’re going?’ Riff said. ‘Personally, I’m hoping for Liechtenstein.’
I put down my book. ‘Why, what’s there?’
‘No idea, but it’s fun to say, isn’t it? Liechtenstein. Licktenstein. Oh Lick-ten-stein, oh Lick-ten–’
‘It’ll be in Australia, like always,’ Phoenix interrupted, mercifully cutting off Riff as he began to add a melody. ‘There’ll be wooden cabins, and a ropes course or something. Maybe a flying fox, if we’re lucky, or marshmallows to toast over a campfire.’
‘Oh yeah, sounds awesome!’ Riff rubbed his hands together in glee. ‘In that case, I don’t even care if they send us to Antarctica. If there’s marshmallows, I’m there.’
My brain provided a mental image of Riff zooming above Antarctica, teasing the penguins about their inability to fly. Clearly the stress of our Disguises exam had caused me to lose my grip on reality.
On Monday, we hoped to receive our exam results – but instead, we sat through a normal Disguises briefing, dedicated to the Ghost Army of World War II. Apparently, soldiers with a knack for artwork had used a collection of fake tanks, radio transmissions and general gumption to create the charade of troops in false locations.
It might have been an interesting subject, if I weren’t distracted by other concerns. All this talk of falsehood and disguise made me think of Nephrite, prowling through the darkness with a Spectral Mask to hide her face. What did she know? What had she told Dragon in secret?
Could we be teetering on the brink of war once more?
The idea made my insides lurch – not just with nerves, but with an odd twinge of adrenaline. Life at HQ had settled into a quiet equilibrium, and I was starting to grow restless. Even the prospect of our upcoming Wilderness Camp wasn’t enough to salve the growing itch inside my belly.
I’d never been good at sitting still.
I racked my brain for an excuse to visit Dragon, to see if Nephrite was still in Melbourne. I hadn’t spotted the Kiwi agent since the night we’d met, but that didn’t mean much. As cadets, we were forbidden from entering the truly secretive nooks and crannies of the skyscraper. Perhaps Nephrite and Dragon were formulating a plan to retrieve the vials, and to derail the Inductors’ schemes …
But I had no excuse to visit Dragon, and no way to find out the truth. And in the meantime, my friends had given up on the case.
‘Just let it go, Nomad,’ Phoenix said, exasperated. ‘If Dragon needed a Witness to help out, she would’ve already asked you, wouldn’t she?’
I wasn’t so sure. I remembered the look on Dragon’s face when she ordered us out of her office, and the protective glare in her eyes when we had mentioned the London mission. You almost got yourselves killed. She had watched us handle a protean bomb, and had almost watched us die. We were still cadets, and Dragon would not risk our lives again.
Not unless there was no other option.
That night, we sat in the cadet lounge. We were too lazy to cook, so we ate baked beans on toast for dinner, washed down with a jug of lemon cordial.
As we ate, I balanced my art pad on my knees and worked on a large pencil sketch of the lounge. I’d been drawing it for several weeks now, adding a skerrick here or there in my spare time. I wasn’t happy with it yet, but perhaps a few more details would help to bring the scene to life.
Today I was sketching the lounge’s newest addition: a row of treadmills against the far wall. They had been installed after Fox, our Combat and Weaponry tutor, had decided our physical fitness wasn’t up to scratch.
‘You’re the laziest bunch of cadets I’ve seen,’ he said, looking vexed. ‘I could yank ten random sows out of a piggery and they’d outrun the lot of you.’
As such, Fox had asked the gadgeteers to install a row of treadmills in the cadet lounge. Unfortunately, true to form, the gadgeteers had added a few … unusual … touches. If you jogged too slowly, the handlebars would vibrate and send up mild electric shocks. If you tried to quit early, the machine would pipe out an inspirational song like ‘Eye of the Tiger’ in mechanical bleeps.
And every hour or so, apparently at random, an explosion of light and noise would blow one of the joggers comically backwards – often into the outstretched arms of Archibald the plastic skeleton, who had been designated ‘goalkeeper’ for the treadmills’ victims.
‘He shoots to score!’ Riff hollered excitedly, as Button went careening across the lounge. ‘Oh, no, he’s gonna hit the … oh, excellent save, Archie, old chap!’
Phoenix scowled at him. ‘It wouldn’t hurt you to have a go, you know. It could save your life to keep up your fitness.’
Riff leaned back in his chair. ‘Or it could save my life to keep off those treadmills.’ He turned to Orbit with a grin. ‘You’re trying to kill us all, right? It’s a secret gadgeteer plan to knock us all off and take over HQ?’
‘Oh, the explosive function was an accident,’ Orbit said. ‘But it was rather a stroke of luck, don’t you think? My tutor says it will teach cadets to be quick on their feet, and to deal with unexpected dangers in the course of mundane activity.’
‘I’ll give you an unexpected danger,’ Button mutte
red.
Eventually, in response to Phoenix’s coaxing, Riff agreed to try his luck on one of these monstrosities. He cranked the speed up to twenty kilometres per hour and grinned proudly at Phoenix, who looked almost impressed as she read the display screen.
‘Well done!’ she said, taken aback by his sprinting prowess. ‘Twenty’s pretty damn fast! If you keep that up, you might …’
She trailed off, staring down at Riff’s feet. They hovered in the air, several centimetres above the treadmill’s conveyer belt.
Phoenix sighed. ‘God, you’re such a child.’
‘Because I’m charmingly sweet and filled with youthful verve and energy?’ Riff said hopefully.
‘Because you’ve got the brains of a toddler, and the honesty of a six-year-old with his hand stuffed in the lolly jar.’
‘Hang on … we’ve got a lolly jar?’ Riff said, delighted. ‘Where is it? Is it in the kitchen?’
Having apparently written off Riff as a lost cause, Phoenix turned to me instead. ‘What about you, Nomad? If you won’t join my boxing training, you could at least try some jogging after dinner.’
I stared at the nearest treadmill dubiously. ‘Um … no offence, but this couch is a bit comfier. And less likely to send me flying across the room.’
Phoenix met my gaze, her expression serious. ‘Your fitness isn’t a joke, Nomad. Not in this job. Don’t you remember Traitor’s Gate?’
Her words jolted me. I thought of a dark castle in London, of stone walls and the cold iron weight of a bomb in my hands. I remembered sprinting through the darkness, my lungs ragged and my limbs shaking as I fought to outrun the timer on the bomb.
If I’d run a few seconds slower that night, I would have died. As it was, I’d drained my quintessence and lost consciousness in the darkness of the water. If only I’d run a few seconds faster, I might have survived that horrific sprint unscathed …
Phoenix gave me a knowing look.
With a sigh, I put down my sketchpad and headed for the nearest treadmill. Perhaps working on my fitness wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
At HQ, cadets were divided according to their age at the start of the year. There were four main classes: the Fifteens, the Sixteens, the Seventeens and the Eighteens. Orbit was in the Sixteens, but the rest of my friends and I belonged to the Fifteens. Until now, our workload had been fairly light as an ‘introduction’ to life as a cadet.
Apparently, this was no longer the case.
Since early April, a smattering of new classes had been added to our timetable. Most notably, we were now required to study at least two foreign languages. As international spies, our career options would be fairly limited if we didn’t have a few languages up our sleeves.
Luckily, I was already fluent in Indonesian and French, due to long stints in both countries with my mum as a kid. I was also passable in a few other languages, with random chunks of vocab from around the world.
I’d decided to study Italian as a vague nod to my heritage. My paternal grandparents had been Italian, although I’d never met them. For my second language, I chose Vietnamese. My formal reason was that an important Clandestine Zone was hidden in the Mekong Delta, so it seemed like a smart career move. The real reason was that Riff was taking it, and I wanted a friend in the class.
‘Yeah, I should probably brush up a bit,’ Riff said. ‘Mum and Dad taught us when we were little, and my sister got pretty fluent, but I never really applied myself. Spark was always brighter than me … I reckon that’s why she got her first preference for the exchange program.’
I wasn’t sure what to say. With Riff, family was a touchy subject. His parents were abroad on a long-term mission, and they had taken his sister, Spark, with them. For security reasons, Riff couldn’t contact his family while they were on an active mission. He hadn’t spoken to his parents, or his sister, for months. They hadn’t even been informed of our adventures in London. According to Dragon, we couldn’t ‘distract’ them with such news while their own lives were under threat.
And so Riff had been left here alone. He spent his spare time playing his guitar, collecting tacky memorabilia, and listening to the classic rock bands his parents loved.
‘Your folks’ll be impressed when they get back,’ I said, ‘and they find out you’re suddenly fluent in Vietnamese.’
Riff, who was floating lazily in the air, tilted his head to look at me. ‘Hey, you’re right! Maybe I’ll even be better than Spark at something.’ With a sudden laugh, he flipped upside down. ‘And then I’ll show ’em those Beatles pictures we took in London!’
‘To make them jealous?’ I asked.
‘Nah, not exactly.’ Riff hung there like a bat, hair dangling from his scalp, and offered me an upside-down grin. ‘They’ll be so impressed by my Paul McCartney impersonation, I reckon they’ll have to re-evaluate who their favourite child is.’
On Tuesday, we reported for our Enemy Tactics briefing. It was a good chance to surreptitiously sneak a doze while our tutor, a bespectacled woman called Solitaire, rattled on about a boring case study from the 1960s.
I was nodding off over my notebook, pen in hand, when Riff elbowed me sharply in the gut. I glanced up, startled, just as the room exploded into whispers.
A new cadet swaggered into the room. He was tall and muscular, and every inch of him exuded confidence. A quiet smirk, an artfully arranged quiff of brown hair, and a set of biceps that could throttle a bison. Sapphire, the girl in front of me, sat up a little straighter and subconsciously tucked back a strand of her hair.
Riff let out a quiet groan.
It wasn’t hard to guess what the problem was. This newcomer was handsome, and he knew it. There was an arrogant glint in his pale green eyes – as if the boy knew the effect he had on people, and he wasn’t afraid to make the most of it.
Still, a small part of me was glad to see him. Not because he resembled a Mills & Boon cover model, but because he was clearly a new recruit. Finally, someone else could absorb a bit of my classmates’ unwanted attention.
As the cadets around us broke into mutters, I turned to Riff with a grin. ‘Guess I’m not the newest rookie anymore.’
Riff shook his head slowly. ‘Nah, he’s no rookie.’
‘Huh?’
‘His codename’s Steel,’ Riff whispered. ‘He was in the Fifteens last year, but then he went away on an overseas exchange and he fell behind on his coursework. Guess that’s why he’s with us now, instead of the Sixteens. I was hoping he’d stay away for good, but I guess you can’t have it all …’
He was cut off as Solitaire called for attention, berating us back into silence. Steel smirked, clearly pleased to have caused such a stir, and strolled to a desk in the middle of the room. He slid into his chair, folded his arms and regarded the tutor with a slightly raised eyebrow.
Solitaire cleared her throat. ‘Welcome back, Cadet Steel. Glad to have you with us once more. As I was saying, the Inductors’ attempts to provoke a coup within the Italian branch of HELIX commenced in August of 1963, just two days after the failed attempt to ratify the Venice Treaty on …’
She rambled on, but she had lost our attention. By the time the bell rang at the end of the briefing, I was willing to bet twenty bucks that half my classmates had learnt more about the curve of Steel’s biceps than the unsuccessful Inductor coup of 1963.
We bustled down the corkscrew, grabbing torches from the wall as we followed our horde of classmates. Steel had taken the lead already, and he descended the staircase with an arrogant swagger as our peers bumbled after him, throwing out excited questions to snare a moment of his attention.
I frowned. ‘Why’s everyone so keen on him?’
‘He’s famous, that’s why.’
‘Wait, seriously?’
‘Yeah, afraid so,’ Riff said. ‘Most popular cadet in the Aussie branch, I reckon, before he left. Survived an Inductor attack on his family, you see – the Inductors tried to push him off a cliff, but he got away and phoned for h
elp. Steel was the only survivor, and he was only ten when it happened, so he’s a bit of a hero around here.’
I watched the other cadets, bobbing after Steel like a pack of obedient puppy dogs. ‘A bit?’
‘All right, a lot,’ Riff admitted. ‘He’s been milking it for years, and most of the tutors eat it up. Everyone reckons he’s a hero, and a future leader of HELIX. He’s the best at hand-to-hand combat, and I’ve watched him beat cadets twice his size into a pulp. Oh, and he’s a Noctilucent too.’
‘I see.’
Noctilucent sorcerers were rare, although not as rare as Witnesses. They had the power to manipulate shadows, dappling light and darkness like watercolour paints.
‘Bit of a wanker, really,’ Riff said. ‘Whenever there’s mention of an Inductor attack, Steel starts bragging about how he got away on that clifftop. I swear, the details of his story change every time he tells it …’
I glanced at Phoenix, who was staring down into the dark stairwell with a grim expression. She too had survived an Inductor attack as a child. It had been during her birthday party, out at sea, and her entire family had died when their boat exploded. Phoenix had spent a traumatic night adrift, clinging to a chunk of smouldering wreckage. I could never imagine her bragging about it.
‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘Basically, he’s famous because he managed not to fall off a cliff one time?’
‘Yeah, pretty much,’ Riff said. ‘Bit overrated, really, when you think about it. I mean, I manage to not fall off cliffs almost every day, but do you see anyone calling me a hero for it?’
‘Almost every day?’
‘Well, there was this time we went hiking in the Grampians …’
The cluster of cadets parted, somewhat abruptly, and Riff trailed off. Steel was striding back up the corkscrew towards us, chin uplifted, with no regard for the natural ebb and flow of the crowd. The other cadets were quick to scurry out of his path.
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