‘I’m sorry.’
Marnie turned from dabbing her patient’s head, her lips pursed, but when she saw Amanda’s face, she sighed. ‘It’s OK. That sounded like quite the conversation.’
Three weeks. Three weeks to get herself transferred (and not hanged) and to figure out a way to get to this woman and kill her.
Feeling pressed by her lack of options, Amanda told Marnie the full extent of what had been discussed, only just beginning to process it herself. ‘I’m going to need to do some magic. Something that gets me into Coldwater, rather than hanged.’ She turned to Jonsey, but the woman had passed out.
‘She’ll be out for the rest of the day,’ said Marnie. ‘Maybe even the week. Held it for too long. Who is it? This woman you’re meant to kill?’
‘I don’t know. Never heard of her. Karina Khurana.’
Marnie raised her eyebrows, surprised.
‘You’ve heard of her?’
‘I’d say. She’s a politician. Or she was. Or she still is. You don’t watch the news?’
Amanda sniffed. ‘Not recently.’ After getting back from Russia, she hadn’t been able to re-engage with the world, and since arriving at Blue Meadow, she’d had no reason to try.
‘Then maybe you need to start. She’s only Coldwater’s biggest irony. She’s the Pro-Magic politician who fought so hard to get it set up in the first place. She was all over the papers. She got the government to concede and build the place, made all these big speeches about justice and progress then, not a year later, there’s this big scandal. They raid her house and find all these illegal instruments and contraband. Practically a laboratory. And they find these plans, dangerous plans. The kind of things she said her movement wasn’t about. She cops to the lot of it, but, of course, the Prime Minster, he doesn’t want her dangling body all over the front pages…’
‘So they sent her to Coldwater.’
‘One of their first inmates,’ Marnie confirmed. ‘Papers almost broke their arms jerking off about it. The woman who practically invented Coldwater being the first on the boat there.’
‘Except someone doesn’t think that’s enough.’
‘Guess not. Could be anyone I suppose. Government. Whatever people she was working with to get all that equipment. They give you a clue?’
‘Doesn’t matter. If it keeps my little girl safe, I’ll do what it takes. Unless there’s a way you can trace the call, find out where the other end of the signal was coming from?’
Marnie was already shaking her head. ‘None, I’m afraid. The clients value discretion. Our conduit on the outside, she has to put a bag on her head. It’s a whole thing. Even if I could… this is a whole revenue stream. But that’s not to say I won’t help. Don’t think I’ve ever broken someone into a prison before, but I’m sure there are ways.’
‘Shouldn’t we be asking her?’ Jonsey was lying motionless on the bed, the only sign of life the rise and fall of her chest.
‘Like I said, you rode her pretty hard. She could be like that for a week, now.’
‘I can’t wait that long. If there’s – and I feel like a shit, believe me – but if there’s any way you can prop her up, give her something to help her recover…’
‘We won’t have to worry about her.’
‘But if she’s the one with the power…’ Amanda’s words died and she frowned, something in Marnie’s calm expression getting through to her. ‘You don’t work for Jonsey. She works for you.’
The woman smiled. ‘It’s easier this way. You’re not the only one who finds some security in appearing less than they are. There are always people like her in places like this. She provides me with a service and I make sure she’s more comfortable than she would have been otherwise. It’s not ideal, but tell me what is. At some point, she’ll be gone, but there’ll be another like her soon enough. I have a long sentence ahead of me. We all do what we can to survive.’
‘Why help me?’
‘I don’t know. Probably because I think I can. I don’t agree with killing. But I do agree with helping someone save their daughter. And you’re here and this Karina woman is…’ Marnie fluttered her fingers towards the window. ‘Come back tomorrow. Hopefully by then one of us will have a plan.’
‘I’ll have a plan,’ Amanda frowned. ‘You’d better believe I’ll have a plan.’
Chapter Three
‘No! No! No!’
Michaela flinched as the plastic bottle ricocheted off the floor. Crashing against the wall, it sprayed liquid emotion in all directions.
‘This is unacceptable,’ Pearce bellowed, shuffling from side to side like a rhinoceros with nowhere to charge. ‘Just unacceptable. I said “pure”. Understand what that means? This shit is nowhere near. Do you want me to…’ He was reaching into his coat pocket, grunting with frustration that whatever was inside wouldn’t come free, snagging on a corner. ‘Do you want me to… Ah!’ He pulled out the thick sheaf of folded notepaper, already curled and creased at the corners. He waved it in her face. ‘Do you want me to send this? Because I can. Right now. Just head out and…’
‘No,’ Michaela held up her hands, placating, ‘no, of course I don’t.’ She wanted to grab the wad of notes from his hand, rip them, burn them, eat them.
Getting her to write a confession had been the first thing that Pearce had done once he’d convinced her she had been beaten weeks before she’d even known she was fighting. She’d sat, hands trembling, trying not to be sick, as he’d dictated to her, anything to get him out of her flat.
She’d been in shock, she’d realised after. Too exhausted and ambushed to fight. Now she regretted every word and wondered just how much he really had on her. But she couldn’t very well ask him to show her his evidence again. He had all he needed now.
‘Then fix it. Last chance. I want this as pure as possible. We’re already behind schedule. I don’t want to have to waste more time refining and distilling it than we have to.’
He gave her a small smile. Like the outburst hadn’t even happened, the man pulled his coat tight around him, slipped off his shoes and took his place in the chair.
Michaela fought another wave of fatigue. She couldn’t remember when she’d last slept more than a handful of hours in the three weeks since Pearce had confronted her.
The morning after he’d broken into her flat, she’d reported to the address he’d given her, strung out and dreading what was in store.
He’d been waiting for her, outside a small run-down market shop near Aldgate East. Down a dank alleyway, he’d led her through a door and up the narrow stairs to this pair of rooms. She’d looked around at the peeling walls, bare bulbs, empty cupboards and naked wires, apprehensive and cold. There were bits of litter here and there on the floor, old receipts and collapsed boxes. The kind of stuff that got left over at the end of moving out when the leavers were just too tired to finish off.
There was a small, ratty kitchen, the distillation equipment she’d need packed in boxes on the scuffed wooden table. In the middle of the office space was the chair. It had been taken from a dentist’s practice. With a hand on its worn leather, Pearce had told her what he’d wanted of her.
She hadn’t stopped working since, living a strange half-life, days and weeks losing their meaning. She hadn’t seen a single other person.
Aldgate East was a strange medley, the old buildings, half held up by failing magic, muscled out of the way by new edifices of glass, steel and polished stone. The starved skeletons of local pubs and corner shops were shuttered away. They’d been defeated by the supermarkets and trendy eateries built to service the affluent new residents of the concierged, brand-marketed flats.
But despite the influx of money, the whole place had taken on an eerie feel, like aliens had copied down what a gentrified area was meant to look like but hadn’t quite got the atmosphere right. Even when it was busy, the whole area still seemed half deserted, like a shopping mall after the doors had been locked.
The shop below was open b
ut quiet, nothing but the faint sounds of the radio coming up through the floor. She’d seen the owners a couple of times, a family doing what they could to push back against the weight of the world. They didn’t seem much interested in what she was up to. Either too busy looking to their own lives to care or sensing that talking to her would only bring more trouble down on their heads.
Pearce had never brought up her mother again after she’d explained where she was. Like the confession, she felt weak for having told him. Wondering what he was doing with that information felt like a sword hanging over her head. If she didn’t do as he asked, would he tell the authorities about her mother’s real identity? She shuddered just thinking about it.
It didn’t help that she knew so little about him. She was certain Pearce wasn’t his name. There had been times when he hadn’t responded to it. She’d managed to go through his coat pockets once but found nothing useful. He kept his phone on him at all times.
Settling himself into the leather of the dentist’s chair, the man who called himself Pearce watched her, expectant.
Picking up her tools again, Michaela got back to work.
Every inch of the leather had been painted with symbols, even the armrests. Around it, she had installed over half a dozen adjustable arms, each of which ended in either a mirror or a slate, the latter also chalked with symbols. Around the headrest, she had installed more plates, but these were engraved metal, just like the ones that Michaela had had in her bag the night Pearce caught her. These were a better quality than anything she could have afforded; the metal, she was told, a precise alloy for magical conductivity.
Working on it had been a challenge. Pearce and his endless demands for purity and more efficient filtering had pushed her to her limits, the dark rings under her eyes a testament to the late nights she had spent researching and experimenting. But the results were beginning to tell. All the reading she’d done on ward theory was paying off. Not only had she carried out the work Pearce insisted upon, but she had improved on it too.
She set once again to repositioning the plates, checking her work against her scribbled notes and diagrams. Chalk squeaked as she reworked the symbols on the slate, experimenting with a few new iterations she’d found online during her last research session.
Tears welled as she worked, and she had to try hard to keep them from her vision, wiping them on the back of her wrist. Something inside her was withering, leaving her an empty shell until all she wanted to do was curl up and die.
It was the spilled emotion in the corner – the fumes starting to affect her.
She’d long since discarded the filter masks. They made little difference at these quantities and, terrible as it was, she was getting used to the pain and the grief.
The first time she had caught a trace of the emotion she was refining, she had cried for hours – for her poor dead family, her sister, Emily, her father, her brother, Darren. It had been a hurt she carried every day, the kind that never stopped aching but could simply be deferred by the everyday tasks of living. But this stuff brought it all geysering back to the surface. She’d cried at her predicament, looking around at the sad little kitchen, at the grey, depressed street outside, and mourned her old life. She’d cried for herself, at having been kidnapped three years ago by a gangster, tied to a chair and left to wonder if those bare brick walls were going to be the last thing she ever saw. She had cried for her mother and for the woman who had returned – so full of pain that she didn’t know how to earth it, so it spilled out in all directions.
But now she gritted her teeth and kept on adding the new runes, ignoring the itching behind her eyes and the despair that wailed through her.
‘Well? What’s the hold-up?’ he demanded.
‘Nothing’s the hold-up. I’ve just learned a few new things. You want it purer, I’m not going to do the exact same thing again, am I? These changes should hopefully make all the difference.’
‘And why didn’t you use them before?’
‘Because I only just read about them. If you’d given me more time to research in the first place—’
‘Fine,’ he cut her off. ‘Just get on with it.’ He made a show of checking his watch, grimaced and set his arm back down.
She went to checking the tubes. There wasn’t much she could do there without completely replacing them. If he wasn’t happy with these ones, then she’d suggest a fresh batch next.
It was when she was swapping out the filters that her phone began to buzz. Ignoring it, she carried on with her work, feeling Pearce’s anger rise with each ring.
‘Who is that?’ he demanded.
‘I don’t know,’ she lied. ‘Want me to check?’
The leather protested as he wrestled with the decision. ‘Leave it,’ he decided. ‘Don’t pick it up.’
They let the phone ring, Michaela’s spirits dropping lower with each buzz. It would be Jared again, still looking for that product she’d promised him. She’d listened to all the voicemails, heard him get more and more frantic, swinging from worry to anger and back to worry. But she never replied. Pearce had told her not to, and despite everything that was happening, she didn’t want Jared involved. This was something she felt she had to handle on her own.
The buzzing stopped, eventually, and she let out an inward sigh of relief.
‘Right,’ she said, straightening up. ‘I think we’re ready.’
‘You think?’
This time she did sigh. ‘We’re ready. This is going to be the purest it’s ever been.’
Pearce checked his watch again. Grimaced again. ‘Fine. Get started. And clean up that spill. It’ll attract attention.’
Biting her tongue, she set the plates around the man.
Trying not to cry, unsure if the tears were from her own exhaustion or the fumes, she walked around the chair several times to make sure that everything was positioned just so. Working on the same principle as what had almost ruined her job back at the gig, she had created an echo chamber. The person’s own emotion wouldn’t just be captured and bottled, any leakage would be channelled back to them in a feedback loop that wouldn’t end until they left the seat.
Satisfied, she juiced the set-up with a bit of power.
The scent of magic mercifully overpowered the emotion in the corner, allowing her to think more clearly. There was no run-off, she noted with a hint of pride, the thing was performing better than ever.
With a final set of his jaw, Pearce settled back into the chair and closed his eyes, dismissing her.
She flipped him off and went to find something to soak up the last batch he’d spilled in his tantrum.
As she rooted around the kitchen for a cloth, she began to hear the drip of a filling bottle from the other room.
Suppressing another yawn, she screwed up her fists and let out a voiceless, frustrated scream. Wrung out, she collapsed into a chair and held her head in her hands, the tears that flowed very much her own.
How long would he keep her doing this? There had to be a way out.
She only allowed herself a minute. Pearce would notice if she took too long.
Pulling herself together, she picked up a cloth and headed back into the main room.
Pearce still had his eyes closed, concentrating on filling those bottles with his emotion.
Michaela set to work on cleaning up, fighting the errant feeling coming from the fumes.
Whoever was buying this stuff off him was a very niche collector, she guessed. Who in their right mind would want to buy bottle after bottle of such pure, heart-wrenching grief?
Pearce’s fingertips whitened as he clutched the armrests, the feeling that he produced not showing on his face, except for a thin tear down his cheek. He never talked about himself and she was not inclined to ask, so she had no idea what was inspiring such strong loss from him. But the idea of monetising mourning made her feel dirty.
‘I don’t hear cleaning,’ he said, his voice choked up.
Michaela redoubled her effor
ts, making them as loud as possible, and went back to thinking on how she was going to beat this bastard.
Chapter Four
It was lunch in the canteen, two days after Amanda had talked with the blackmailer.
The smell of women and bleach had for an hour been ousted by the equally soul-destroying aroma of granulated coffee and overcooked food. Cutlery rattled, people shouted and the rain outside did its best to get in through the window.
Anyone watching Marnie shuffle her way around the canteen would have thought she was looking for a place to sit. Whenever she found one, people squeezing to make room, she would shake her head, muttering under her breath, and move on. With each turn through the tables, she drew closer to Anderson.
The folded note dropped beside Anderson’s plate, coming to rest against her water cup. Her own name stared up at her, written in thick, red letters.
Fork halfway to her mouth, the woman paused. Turning in her seat, she watched as Marnie hurried away, finally spotting a space that fulfilled her mysterious criteria.
Except for Amanda, watching from across the room, no one else had noticed. Not even those sitting alongside Anderson, their heads down, gobbling their food like they had somewhere else to be.
Anderson plucked up the note and began to unpick the message.
It was blunt and it was not, this was important, in Amanda’s handwriting.
Amanda had already finished eating. Ever since her husband and children had died, food had become a strictly mechanical process. She couldn’t remember the last meal she had savoured, the last drink she’d sipped to make it last. Nerves, melancholy and nausea couldn’t make a dent in her already non-existent appetite.
Hands hidden under the table, she worked her way through the motions, mind fixed on the plan with a familiar dark thrill. She’d drilled with Marnie over and over again, but discretion prevented them from practising in full. She didn’t know if she could do it, she’d never done anything like it, never dared do anything like it. She’d long sworn she would never get involved. But what other choice did she have?
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