Chosen

Chapter 7

I opened my eyes.

I was standing in my bedroom, and I was alone. White light streamed through the windows, mixing with the ambient glow of the walls and ceiling and floor. There were no shadows; everything was bright and clear. Through the windows I could see the buildings and towers of a great empty city. There were hints of London in the architecture but it was different, vaster, the streets wider and the buildings huge and open. Beyond the buildings was empty sky.

I walked through my flat, down the stairs, and out of the shop. My front door opened out into a long avenue stretching off into the distance, torches mounted along either side burning with yellow flames, and I began walking forward. Without looking I knew the route back to my flat would have disappeared. It didn’t matter; here in Elsewhere, one place was as good as another.

I turned off the avenue and into one of the buildings, passing through the hallway and out onto a narrower street. Elsewhere felt different from the last time I’d been here. In the past the city had always been silent, empty of movement and growth. This time as I walked I kept noticing life: trees planted in rows and growing in gardens, birds gliding overhead. As I turned one corner I saw a fox trotting quickly across the road ahead of me. It stopped and looked at me, then kept going, disappearing into an alleyway. I could hear a very faint murmur of sound at the edge of my hearing, not the hum of a real city, but what might have been an echo of one. The street I was on ended in a medium-sized square, buildings on three sides and an arcade on the fourth marking the boundary with a wide plaza. I found a stone bench under a tree and sat down.

I’ve never really understood how Elsewhere works. In my early visits I tried to figure out the rules, and every time I ended up making things worse. Intuition seems to work better than reason here; the more times I’ve come the more I’ve learnt to trust my instincts. Right now my instincts told me that if I stayed here long enough, the person I needed would find me. So I sat, and waited.

I heard her before I saw her: footsteps echoing off the stone from the direction of the plaza. Looking up I saw her walking through the columns of the arcade, small and athletic, short dark-red hair and a quick smile. “Hey, Alex,” Shireen said. “Wondered when you’d come.”

Shireen looked different from how I’d seen her in the dream. Physically she was almost the same, but her manner was easier—back when we’d both been apprentices Shireen had always been full of energy but there’d been a tension there, a temper. Now she seemed relaxed. “Hey,” I said.

“So.” Shireen dropped down on the bench next to me. “How’s things?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said. “But before we get started on this, there’s something I’d like to know. What exactly are you?”

Shireen didn’t look insulted—more like amused. “What do you think I am?”

“You look like Shireen and you sound like Shireen,” I said. “But Shireen died ten years ago. It’s like you’re a picture of how she was the last time I saw her. How are you still here?”

Shireen’s smile faded, and she studied me for a moment. “I’m an afterimage,” she said at last. “A picture when the original is gone. But I can see and I can feel and I can remember. I know what you’re looking for.”

“Catherine,” I said.

Shireen nodded. “I can show you what happened to her.”

“Any chance you can skip ahead and give me the short version?”

“No.” Shireen sounded quite definite. “I’ve helped you before and I’ll help you now, but this time I want something back. I’ll show you what happened to Catherine and where she is, but only if you see the whole story.”

“Which story?”

“Rachel’s,” Shireen said. “What happened to Catherine, how Richard disappeared, why I’m talking to you now. It all comes back to her and it’s time you understood why. Don’t forget—if it wasn’t for me you would have been lost last year. You owe me.”

I looked at Shireen for a moment. “That’s all you want?” I said at last. “For me to know the story?”

“That’s part of it,” Shireen said. “There’s one more thing, but I won’t ask until you’ve seen what really happened ten years ago. The parts you weren’t there for.”

“I can’t promise I’ll say yes to that. Not without knowing what it is.”

“I understand.”

I stood in silence for a little while. “How are you going to show me this?”

“Rachel’s memories,” Shireen said. “You’ll see what she saw.”

I frowned at that. I’ve walked through my own memories in Elsewhere, watching the events unfold as if they were happening all over again, but never someone else’s. No one knows much about Elsewhere, but if there’s one thing they agree on, it’s that you shape it yourself. “How can you do that?”

“You’ll know once you’ve seen it,” Shireen said. “I know I keep saying that, but it’s true.” She grinned suddenly. “Come on. Aren’t you curious?”

I gave Shireen a narrow look, then looked away, out through the arcade to the white stone of the plaza. Around us the city was quiet, waiting. I turned back. “Let’s do it.”

Shireen nodded and held out her hand, palm up. “Hold on tight.”

I took her hand, and—

I was standing on a grassy slope, green trees scattered around and rhododendrons flowering to either side. I was in what was either quite a small park or a very large garden, and it looked well kept and tended. I could see glimpses of a wall surrounding the greenery, and just visible over the trees behind was a big white-painted house. The sky was overcast but light, the sun glowing through the clouds. It looked almost natural, but something about it was just slightly off.

At the bottom of the slope was a pond. There was a willow tree leaning over it, and under the willow was a girl, fifteen or sixteen years old and dressed neatly in blue and white. She was sitting cross-legged by the pond, looking down at the water with her face set in concentration. I was standing in plain view, but she didn’t seem to notice me. Hesitantly I moved, then when she didn’t react I came closer.

The girl was Rachel, but it took me a moment before I was sure that it was really her; she looked very different from the woman she would grow into. In Richard’s mansion Rachel had been pretty but elusive, rarely showing what she was thinking. When I’d met her again last year, that ambivalence had hardened into a diamond mask that showed nothing of what might be behind it. But here, as she stared down at the water, there was an openness which I’d only seen hints of when we’d first met, something soft and unformed.

Rachel’s eyes were still fixed on the pond, and as she stared at it the surface rippled. She extended a hand, soft blue light starting to flicker at her palm, and as she did a droplet of water rose from the pond’s surface to hover at her fingertips. The light brightened and another droplet rose, then another, a thin stream of water flowing upwards to gather in a floating orb. Carefully Rachel raised her hand and the orb rose with it, wobbling as it did, droplets breaking off to hover for a few moments before melding together again. Rachel’s movements were slow and careful, and there was a strange dreamlike look to her eyes, as though she were seeing something wonderful and far away.

There was a rustle of leaves. Rachel started, the light winked out, and the orb of water fell back into the pond with a splash. She scrambled to to her feet.

The girl who’d just brushed her way through the willow fronds was a younger version of Shireen. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, scuffed and dirty, and she was looking at Rachel with satisfaction. “So it was you,” she said.

Rachel took a step back. “How did you get in here?”

“Climbed over the wall,” Shireen said. “Come on, I just want to talk.”

“How long were you watching?”

“Long enough.” Rachel drew back and Shireen raised a hand. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Hey, you want to see something?”

Orange light flared at Shireen’s hand and a flame caught in the air above her fingers, clearer and brighter than Rachel’s spell. Rachel had been backing away, but as she saw the magic she halted, staring. “Cool, huh?” Shireen said.

Slowly Rachel came closer, until the two of them stood face to face under the willow tree. “How do you . . . ?” she asked, gazing at the light as if fascinated.

“Do it?” Shireen said. “Same as you.”

“How do you make it so strong?” Rachel said. She hadn’t taken her eyes away.

Shireen shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s always been like that.” She closed her hand and the spell winked out. “Do your parents know?”

Rachel hesitated, then shook her head. “I’m keeping it secret from mine,” Shireen said.

“What is this?” Rachel asked. “How can we use it? What are we?”

“Don’t know,” Shireen said again. She grinned. “But it’ll be fun finding out, right?”

Rachel looked back at Shireen, then gave a little smile. “I’m Shireen,” Shireen said. “You?”

“Rachel.”

The scene blurred and shifted. I had a last glimpse of the two of them standing together by the water’s edge, then—

We were indoors, in a roomy bedroom with a high ceiling. The furnishings were new and well kept but anonymous, the sort you’d get at a good boarding school or hotel. Tall windows let in lots of light, giving a view out onto a row of houses. In the distance the hum of cars rose and fell.

Rachel was lying on the bed reading. She was wearing what looked like a uniform—white blouse with a dark green skirt—and there was a green pullover slung over the back of a chair. She was older now, close to the age she’d been when we’d first met, and she looked more sure of herself, her movements more confident. Muffled footsteps sounded on the carpet outside and the door swung open. Rachel spoke in annoyance, not raising her eyes. “You’re supposed to knock.”

Shireen shut the door behind her. “Nice to see you too.”

Rachel looked in surprise and her face lit up. “You’re here! Wait, how did—?”

“Caught an early train.” Shireen wasn’t wearing a uniform and compared to Rachel she looked scruffy, but she moved with the same energy she’d always had. She dropped into a chair, glancing around. “Wow, you get nice rooms.”

“This is the best one,” Rachel said. “Haven’t you got school?”

“Forget about that—this is important. You remember what we were talking about back in the summer?”

Rachel sat up, alert. “You’ve found a teacher?”

“He found me,” Shireen said. “His name’s Richard Drakh and he’s looking for apprentices. I wasn’t sure at first but I did some asking around and this guy’s the real deal. He’s really powerful. People are careful around him.”

“So what does he want?”

“Heh,” Shireen said. “He asked me something like that. He’s offering me an apprenticeship. And he’s got more than one place.” Shireen raised her eyebrows. “Interested?”

“He’s offering me one too?”

“Well, kind of.”

Rachel sat back with a frown. “I just said that I knew someone else who’d be interested and asked whether he had other places,” Shireen said. “He said yes. I think he wants you.”

“If he wants me, why didn’t he ask me?”

“Maybe he doesn’t know about you yet. Come on, Rach, who cares who was first?”

I’d been looking between the two girls as they talked. As Shireen spoke I turned back to Rachel—and jerked back, throat constricting as I tried to scream. Something was standing behind her: a spindly shape, tall and slender and utterly inhuman, its features a blur of shadow. Its head reached nearly to the ceiling and it was holding still.

And just as suddenly it was gone. I stood in the centre of the room, looking wildly from side to side, heart hammering. The room was empty except for me and the two girls.

“. . . going to be a full-time gig,” Shireen was saying. Neither she nor Rachel had shown any reaction; they were talking as though nothing had happened. “He’s going to show me his place on Saturday. If I say yes—if we say yes—we’re going to move in. It’s going to be magic lessons, introductions, the whole thing. Everything we need.”

“What about school?”

“Who cares about school?”

“The university applications—”

“Forget that. This is like getting an offer from Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard all at once. It’s our big chance.”

Rachel got up and walked to the window, the book still hanging from one hand, and I followed her to peer out. Nothing. There was no trace of whatever that thing had been, but my heart was still pounding. I knew I’d seen it. “What’s wrong?” Shireen asked.

Rachel turned back with a frown. “I don’t want to leave.”

Shireen looked at her in surprise. “Why not?”

“Because things are good here,” Rachel said. “The other girls do what I want.”

Shireen rolled her eyes. “That’s because they’re scared of you. You’re a big fish in a small pond.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?”

“Look, what you’re doing here is kid stuff,” Shireen said. “Okay, so you’re queen of your dorm—”

“House.”

Shireen waved a hand. “Whatever. It doesn’t get you anything. And next year you’re going to uni and things are going to change. It’s not going to be so easy to push people around.”

Rachel shrugged. “What are they going to do about it?”

“It’s not what they’ll do,” Shireen said. “It’s who might notice.”

“What do you mean?”

Shireen glanced at the window. “Look, the more I learn about this stuff, the more I get the feeling we’re not that safe. If Richard Drakh could find us, someone else could too.”

An uneasy expression flickered across Rachel’s face. “Like who?”

“I don’t know,” Shireen said. “But I’ve heard stories. Sometimes magic-users around our age just . . . go missing. And no one seems that keen on talking about where.”

Shireen and Rachel stayed silent for a moment. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the light on the houses outside was muted. “Look,” Shireen said. “You’ve been wanting your magic to be stronger, right? This guy can teach us.”

Rachel sighed. “Fine, I’ll listen to him. But he’s going to have to be really convincing.”

The shift was quicker this time, and in only an instant I was in another bedroom, this one expensive-looking and cluttered with clothes. I recognised it as being like my room in Richard’s mansion but the layout was different, and it took me a moment to realise that it was one of the girls’ rooms, either Shireen’s or Rachel’s.

The door slammed open and Shireen stormed through in midsentence. “—self-righteous assholes!” The door banged off the wall and Shireen kicked it before turning on Rachel, who’d been following behind. “Can you believe this? What century do these guys think they’re in?”

Rachel shrugged and shut the door. “They act like we’re pretty little dolls on a shelf,” Shireen said, pacing up and down. “And they expect us to be grateful. ‘Oh yes, sir, I’m a good little girl.’ Never any respect. We just don’t matter.”

“I told you,” Rachel said. “Back home we were special. Now we’re just two more apprentices.”

Shireen flung herself into a chair, brooding. “I bet they’d act different if we were boys. They pay attention to Tobruk.”

“Do you think—” Rachel began.

There was a tentative knock on the door. “What?” Shireen shouted.

The door cracked open and a nervous-looking face appeared in the gap. “Get us something to eat,” Shireen said.

The face hesitated. I vaguely remembered him: Zander, one of the easily forgotten, often-changing servant population of Richard’s mansion. “Uh—” Zander said.

“Did I stutter?” Shireen said. “You want me to tell Richard you’re not doing your job?”

Zander paled and vanished. The door clicked shut and the sound of his hurrying footsteps faded away. Shireen shook her head. “Even the servants are taking the piss now.”

Rachel hadn’t paid attention to Zander; she was looking thoughtful. “Do you think this was what Richard meant?”

“The whole power thing?” Shireen said. She drummed her fingers. “Maybe he’s right. It’s the only way we’re ever going to change anything, isn’t it?”

“It’s the only way they’re ever going to respect us.”

“Fine,” Shireen said. “Let’s teach them some respect.”

As she spoke the words Shireen faded, and so did Rachel. The clothes vanished and the windows darkened, layers of dust covering the furniture and bed. I was alone in an empty room.

A hand tapped me on the shoulder and I spun with a yelp. Shireen gave me a quizzical look. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t scare me like that,” I muttered. The room around us looked decayed and abandoned, as though it had been deserted for years.

“Who did you think I was?”

“A minute ago,” I said. “I thought I saw . . .”

“Saw what?”

“Never mind.” I looked at Shireen. “So that was the way it happened? Richard came to you and you went to Rachel?”

“I could always talk Rachel into things.” Shireen walked over to inspect the chair where her younger self had been sitting. It was worn and faded now, with holes in the fabric. “She’d argue but she’d go along with it in the end.”

“You were stupid.”

“We were teenagers,” Shireen said. “Anyway, it’s not like you can talk.”

“Oh, I haven’t got anything to be proud of either,” I said with a sigh. “My reasons for signing up were much dumber than yours . . . What were you talking about at the end?”

“When?”

“About respect. Changing things.”

“We always figured we were going to do something special with our magic,” Shireen said. “Like in the movies, when the heroine gets her powers, you know? She always ends up fighting a bunch of bad guys and saving the world.”

“Saving the world?”

“I’m not saying we went out to do charity work,” Shireen said. “But we saw a lot of mage society while we were with Richard and we didn’t much like the way it treated women. Too many apprentice girls getting stepped on and way too many female slaves.”

I looked at Shireen for a moment. “If you had a problem with slaves,” I said at last, “maybe you should have tried doing something about the ones in your basement.”

Shireen didn’t meet my eyes and there was an awkward silence. “Sorry,” she said at last.

I kept gazing at Shireen. For a moment I felt the old rage starting to rise, then with an effort of will I shook it off. “Forget it.”

“You said something like that to me back then,” Shireen said at last. “That time I came to your cell. Remember?”

I looked at her curiously. “So you were listening? I was never sure . . .”

“I didn’t want to,” Shireen said. “I went upstairs and tried to forget about it. But it was like . . . a seed, I guess. All the next few weeks I’d be in the middle of doing something and I’d start thinking about you and Catherine. It wouldn’t stop bugging me.”

“Well, I’m sorry if thinking about what was happening to the two of us was making your life less convenient.”

“You can really be a dick sometimes,” Shireen said. “But you know what? That was kind of why it worked. I didn’t like you and you didn’t like me, and so you were the one person who told me the truth.”

I looked at the empty space where Rachel had stood. “Do you think this is how it works for all Dark mages? Just drifting, going a little further each day? Then one day you look around and realise what you’re turning into . . .”

“It was for me,” Shireen said simply.

“What happened when you went back to the mansion, Shireen?”

Shireen went still.

“The last I saw you, it was at the abandoned block,” I said. “You said you were going back to find Rachel and Catherine, and I watched you walk away and I never saw you again. What happened after that?”

Shireen was silent for a moment. “When I left the mansion I was looking for you,” she said at last. “But I didn’t know what I was going to do when I found you. I didn’t know if I wanted to fight you or talk to you or bring you back or . . . The one thing I was sure of was that we were out of time. Either it was going to be Tobruk, or . . .” She stopped, frowning.

“Or what?”

“You have to go.” Shireen turned on me. “Now!”

I looked around in confusion. The room was empty. “Go where?”

“Out of Elsewhere. You’re in danger. You have to wake up.” The lines of the room around us began to blur and dissolve, the colours fading into each other. Shireen advanced until she was right in front of me, staring up at me. “Wake up!” The colours blurred into grey and we were falling, my stomach lurching as we dropped. I couldn’t see Shireen or anything else but I could hear her voice shouting at me. “Wake up! Wake—!”

“—up! Alex, wake up!”

I came awake with a start. My room was dark and a slim figure was leaning over me, shaking me. “Huh?” I sat up, shaking my head. “What?”

“Will’s friends, the adepts, they’re back.” Anne’s voice was low and urgent. “They’re here.”

My precognition was nagging at me, warning of danger. The clock by my bed said 3:17 and the city outside was quiet. From the direction of the living room I could hear movement; Luna and Variam were up. I was still disoriented from waking and couldn’t process it all. “Where?”

“I don’t know—” Anne looked back over her shoulder. “They’ve gone.”

“Gone where?” The warning of danger was getting louder and louder. Something was coming for us but I couldn’t see what. Nobody was going to come through the door, but . . .

“I can’t see, they’re out of my range. They came onto the roof and they were doing something, then they started running.”

“On the—?” Suddenly the visions of the future ahead snapped into focus and my eyes went wide. “Oh shit.” I lunged off the bed, grabbing Anne. She made a startled noise as I dived for the side of the room, shoving her under the desk before rolling in myself.

There was a roar and what felt like a blow to every part of my body at once. The floor bucked and settled, and a vibration went through the building as what felt like a landslide hit all around us with a thundering crash. Dust filled the air.

I tried to roll back out from under the desk and scraped against something jagged; there was rubble piled across the floor. I scrambled out on my hands and knees and felt a breeze: looking up, I saw sky. Half the roof of my flat was gone.

It had been some kind of explosive, and from the mess it must have gone off right above my bed. Where my bed and table had been was a pile of rubble, forming a slope up to the hole in the roof. The wall onto the street had survived but half the interior wall was gone, including the door through to the living room. Anne struggled out from underneath the desk, coughing, and I helped her up. “Can you move?”

Anne shook her head; she hadn’t had the second’s warning I had and she looked dazed. “I’m okay.”

I looked around to see that the doorway to my living room was a pile of shattered bricks and plaster. We were sitting ducks in here, and the only way out was up. I started climbing. “Come on.”

The rubble was unstable and the jagged edges hurt my skin, but at least barefoot I could climb well. “Can you spot Luna and Vari?” I called down to Anne as I reached up for a handhold. I was about to grab a piece of the ceiling but saw that it would start a landslide and reached for a broken beam instead.

“They’re okay but there’s someone coming!” Anne called up. “Ahead and to your left.”

I took one look into the futures, saw the flicker of combat, and put on a burst of speed, scraping my elbow as I scrambled up onto the half-destroyed roof. Where the front of my roof had been was now a pit, dust still swirling in the night air. I could hear shouts and noise from the buildings around.

A figure came jogging out of the shadows ahead. He was only a silhouette in the darkness, but I knew who it was—Jaime Cordeiro, aka Ja-Ja, aka the life-drinker, the one Caldera had warned me about and the last person on Will’s team I wanted to get close to. He swerved towards me, his palm coming up.

I reached into my pocket for a weapon and my fingers closed on nothing: my items were buried under the rubble ten feet below. Ja-Ja lunged and I dived, rolling and coming back to my feet to turn and face him. Ja-Ja managed to brake before going over the edge and started back towards me. I danced back, the roof cool under my bare feet, not taking my eyes off Ja-Ja’s hands. One touch and I’d be dead or crippled. Ja-Ja lunged again and I dodged behind a chimney. He moved left, then right; I matched him, keeping the brickwork between us.

Ja-Ja crouched, tensed. From the faint glow of the city lights I could see he was wearing clear plastic goggles; Will’s lot were learning from experience. Bad sign. I heard a crash from the direction of my flat, followed by a surge of fire magic, and I knew that more were coming in from below but I couldn’t take my eyes off Ja-Ja. I had to take him down, but I didn’t have a weapon and I couldn’t risk coming within reach—

A hand touched Ja-Ja from behind, and he spun to face Anne. She was standing close, her arm extended and the fingers of her left hand resting lightly against his chest. Ja-Ja looked at her face to face and his expression was ugly. “Back off or I hurt you, bitch.”

Anne met Ja-Ja’s gaze, her eyes steady. “Don’t.”

Ja-Ja didn’t ask twice. His right hand came up fast and he slapped it into Anne between her breasts. Green-black light flickered around his arm and I had an instant to see the attack in my mage’s sight: focused and lethal, designed to rip the life from Anne’s body. One hit from that spell would kill most people. Two hits would kill anyone. Before I could move the spell flashed through Ja-Ja’s palm and into Anne.

Nothing happened. The green-black light vanished. Anne looked at Ja-Ja.

Ja-Ja looked taken aback. He looked down at his palm, then up at Anne, then tried again. Again the lethal green-black light flickered from his hand and into Anne’s body. Again nothing happened.

“Please stop doing that,” Anne said.

“That should have worked,” Ja-Ja muttered. He was still standing with his hand against Anne. All of a sudden instead of looking threatening he looked faintly ridiculous.

“It’s okay,” I said brightly. “It happens to a lot of guys.”

“Shut up,” Ja-Ja snapped.

“I’m sure it doesn’t happen to you usually. Maybe you can take a rest and try again in a few minutes.”

Ja-Ja snarled. “I said shut up!” He drew back for a punch.

Anne’s fingers hadn’t left Ja-Ja, and as he started to swing, leaf-green light flickered from her hand into his body. He crumpled instantly, unconscious before he hit the floor. Anne glanced at me. “Maybe you should stop taunting them.”

No one else had come; we were alone on the roof. Ja-Ja was out but I could still sense fire magic and there was danger ahead. “What’s going on down there?” I said. “Are Vari and Luna okay?”

“They’re not hurt,” Anne said, looking down through the roof. “They’re at the top of the stairs; Will and the others didn’t—” She cut off, frowning. “That’s strange. They’re pulling back.”

The futures of danger suddenly multiplied, branching, and as I looked at them my heart sank. “Oh crap.” I started running the way Ja-Ja had come, across the rooftops. “Come on!”

Anne looked from me to my flat, startled. “Luna and Vari—”

“They’re not coming for Luna and Vari!” I called back. “They’re coming for us!”

I heard a sharp breath and then Anne was running after me. “How?” she called.

“Gater!” I’d already looked into the future and seen the oval portal appearing above my flat and Will’s group pouring through it. Given the trend I was guessing it was from a gate adept, and that was bad news. As long as Will’s group had access to gate magic we couldn’t outrun them—they’d just gate ahead to cut us off. The only way to lose them would be to get away from their gater’s known locations.

I dodged between chimneys and scrambled over roofs, trying to get to the end of the street. Anne can’t see in the dark but she’s quick and fit and she was keeping up well. Behind I felt the flicker of gate magic and knew Will and the rest were on the rooftops too. Sirens were starting to sound in the distance, but I knew that by the time they got here it would be too late, and Will’s adepts were more than a match for the police anyway. Running barefoot on the bricks and tarmac I felt vulnerable. I was wearing only my T-shirt and trousers, and the only item I was carrying was the two discs of my forcewall, left forgotten in my pocket after my meeting with Cinder and Deleo. Maybe if I used them to block the roof behind us . . .

I felt the flicker of gate magic again and skidded to a halt. “Shit,” I said into the darkness.

Anne dropped down behind me. “What’s wrong?”

“They’ve split,” I said. “Half in front, half behind.” They were in two groups of three now. Looking into the futures in which we kept running, I saw all of them turn into a flurry of chaos and battle. If we kept going as we were we’d be caught in minutes.

Anne looked around. “The house below’s empty—”

“We’d be fish in a barrel,” I said. Going across the rooftops was out. To our left was the street, but that would just get us boxed in. The safest direction was through the back lots to the right, but then we’d run into the railway line . . .

. . . Oh.

That could work.

I turned and headed for the edge of the roof. “This way. Fire escape over the edge.”

The fire escape was painted black and almost invisible in the darkness. I dropped and heard the metal clang beneath my feet, then kept going down until the fire escape levelled out. Ahead was a fenced area leading into the building’s car park and to our left was the brick wall of the building itself. To the right was a sheer drop onto railway lines.

I led Anne across until the second set of lines were right beneath us. They emerged from a tunnel under the building and continued for about a hundred feet before disappearing beneath the next street over. “Jump over and hang on to the other side,” I told Anne, pointing at the railings.

Anne hesitated for an instant then obeyed, swinging her legs over to stand on the walkway on the other side of the railings. “You know what you’re doing, right?”

“There’s a freight train coming in two minutes,” I said. “We’re going to hitch a lift. I’ll time it for both of us but you’re going to have to let go exactly when I tell you.”

Anne looked down. It was more than a twenty-foot drop to the wood and steel of the railway tracks. She looked back up at me. “Just so you know, there are really few people whom I’d trust if they told me to jump onto railway lines.”

“I know.”

“Please make sure you get this right.” There was a trace of nerves in Anne’s voice.

“I will,” I said. “Can you see Will’s gang?”

Anne nodded up and over my right shoulder. “They’re coming.”

A rumbling sound echoed through the tunnel and I felt the walkway beginning to tremble beneath my feet. “I’ll count you down,” I said. “When you hit, drop and stay low.”

Anne took a breath and then slid her hands down the railings, swinging down to a crouch. The rumbling grew louder, rising to a roar. “Get ready,” I called over the noise of the train. I heard a clang from above and knew Will was close, but I didn’t take my eyes off Anne. She looked back at me through the railings, silent and tense. “On zero,” I called. “Three . . . two . . . one . . . zero!”

As I said one, the rails below us brightened and the engine roared past in a sudden rush of wind and metal and noise. Anne dropped exactly as I said zero, twisting as she fell. She landed catlike on hands and feet in the centre of the first freight carriage, and I vaulted the railing and dropped after her.

There was one sickening moment of free-fall where everything hung suspended, then I crashed into the metal of the carriage with a painful thump, bruising my feet and shoulder as I rolled. I came up just in time to see the roof of the next tunnel heading towards me and I went flat.

The train went into the tunnel and the world became pitch-darkness and deafening noise. The tops of the freight cars were flat metal and there was nothing to hold on to, so all I could do was lie flat and hope. I could feel the steady vibration of the wheels through the car, the carriage going cha-chunk cha-chunk . . . cha-chunk cha-chunk again and again. The time in the tunnel felt like an age, but looking back I don’t think it could have been more than a minute. Finally with a whoosh we were out in the open and I rose to a crouch, looking around.

The train had come out onto a stretch of open track. To one side houses and gardens slid by, while behind us the tunnel mouth receded away, one freight car after another emerging into the fuzzy darkness of the summer night. Cables and girders slid by above as the train rolled along at a steady twenty-five miles per hour. The freight carriages were rectangular and dark-blue; the metal gave good footing but there was no cover unless you wanted to get down into the gap between the cars. Anne was at the front of the train on the first carriage, but behind us the cars were still appearing from the tunnel and I looked into the future, searching for movement. Nothing . . . nothing . . . crap.

I heard a clang from behind me and didn’t look around. Anne stepped up next to me, peering back through the darkness. “Anything?”

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

Anne sighed. “Bad.”

“We’ve got three of them still on our tail,” I said, pointing down to where the end of the train faded into darkness. “Will, the Chinese kid, and Captain America.”

“What’s the good news?”

“The good news is I think we’ve lost the others.”

Anne shook her head. “You’ve got a funny definition of good news.” She touched my shoulder and I felt a soft warmth spread through me as the ache from the bruises I’d picked up went away.

“Thanks.” I walked to the middle of the carriage, taking the gold discs out of my pocket.

“I guess this is a problem with trains as an escape plan,” Anne said, looking around. The rush of wind was steady, but not loud enough to drown out voices. “Once you’re on it’s kind of hard to get off.”

“Does tend to be.” I placed the discs at either edge of the car, checking to make sure the vibration of the train wouldn’t bump them off. The timing on this was going to be tight. Will’s group was advancing up the train; we had no more than a minute.

“Is that another forcewall?”

“Yep.” I squinted down the line of where the forcewall would activate, then looked around. We were on the train’s fourth carriage: behind us were the third, second, and first carriages, followed by the engine. “Okay. When I tell you to go, I need you to get back off this carriage to the next one up.”

Anne raised her eyebrows. “While you stay behind?”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be right after you,” I said. “I don’t want to get any closer to this than I have to.” Movement caught my eye from down the train, and I stepped back. “Here they come.”

Will and the other two adepts came out of the darkness like flitting shadows, leaping from car to car as the train rumbled through the night. As they saw us waiting for them they slowed, Will letting the other two catch up, then they made the jump onto the fourth carriage where we were standing and stopped about twenty feet away. Will stood in the centre with Captain America backing him up; both wore what looked like light ballistic vests and Will was holding a shortsword in his left hand that I was pretty sure was the same one that he’d stabbed me with back in the casino. The Chinese kid hung a little farther back. Unlike the other two he didn’t have any visible weapons or armour. The five of us stared at each other in the darkness.

“So,” I said at last. “I’m guessing I should take this as a ‘no’ on the truce offer?”

Will’s eyes stayed locked on me. “End of the line.”

“You wish,” I said. Will didn’t look away, and neither did I. The seconds stretched out, violence hanging in the air.

“You know,” Will said suddenly, “before we do this, there’s something I want to know.” He stood facing me in the darkness, easily keeping his balance on the rocking train. “Why us? You could have picked any adept in England. What was so important about my family that you had to destroy our lives?”

I looked at Will for a moment, then sighed. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.” Will’s voice was flat.

“Richard told us to get Catherine. He never told us why.”

Will studied me. “Just following orders, huh?”

“I’d like to say it was something better than that,” I said. “But yeah. That pretty much sums it up. I tried to undo it, but by then it was too late.”

“Wow. Guess you’ve had a tough life.”

I looked at Will silently.

“Good thing it’s over.” In a blur of motion Will levelled a handgun at my chest and pulled the trigger.

Before the gun fired I said the command word. To normal eyes nothing happened. In my sight the two gold discs flared to life and a forcewall flicked into existence on top of the train, forming a vertical barrier separating the adepts from me and Anne. An instant later I saw the flash of the gun.

Forcewalls work by transferring momentum; any body impacting the wall from either side has its momentum transferred into the object the forcewall is anchored to. Force mages can anchor their walls as they choose but for one-shot items like this, which work on command and only for a limited time, the anchor target has to be built in. In the case of my gold-disc walls, the anchor is set to whatever the discs rest on—in this case, the freight car.

The bullet from Will’s gun left the barrel at a little over twelve hundred feet per second and travelled the distance to the forcewall in much, much less time than it took me to flinch. As it struck the forcewall its momentum was transferred through the gold discs down into the body of the freight car. The bullet was fast, but momentum is a function of both velocity and mass, and the bullet had a mass of only about a quarter of an ounce. The freight car had a mass of somewhere north of sixty thousand pounds, not counting its cargo. The freight car didn’t even quiver.

Will emptied his gun at me, the steady bang bang bang muffled through the forcewall. The rest of the shots accomplished about as much as the first. At last the gun clicked empty and he lowered it, staring.

The squashed bullets were lying at the foot of the wall on Will’s side, vibrating slightly with the movement of the train. It was hard to tell in the darkness but it looked like Will had been using hollow-point ammunition, designed to expand upon hitting its target. It’s not much good at getting through armour or shields but leaves very nasty wounds in a living body, making it the kind of bullet you use for shooting someone whom you don’t expect to be well protected and whom you really aren’t interested in taking alive. “Are you done?” I asked.

Will pulled out a clip and began reloading. As he did he spoke sideways to Captain America. “Got anything that’ll blow through that?”

Captain America gave Will a disbelieving look. “On a train?”

“Wait,” Anne said. “You’re the one who set that bomb?”

“Uh . . .”

“How could you do that?” Anne demanded. “You could have killed everyone in the flat!”

“It wasn’t aimed at the room you were in,” Captain America said, but he sounded defensive.

“Not aimed—! You dropped the roof on my head! If Alex hadn’t gotten me out of the way it would have crushed me!”

“Wait,” the Chinese kid said uneasily. “You were in the living room.”

“I moved!” Anne was nearly shouting, which was quite something from her. “Don’t any of you realise what you’re doing? You can’t just play around with this! People are going to die!”

“That’s the idea,” Will said curtly. “Get out of the way and you won’t be one of them.”

“How can you still think you’re the good guys when you do things like this?” Anne demanded. “You’re going to—”

Will had put away his handgun and shortsword. Now he held his hand out to Captain America, who reached into what looked like thin air. I felt the flicker of space magic as Captain America pulled two full-sized submachine guns out of a portal so faint as to be almost invisible, handing one to Will and keeping the other for himself. Dimensional storage, I thought. So that’s where they keep getting those weapons from.

Will cocked the gun and levelled it at Anne. “I’m not asking,” he said in a flat voice. “Verus murdered my sister and I’m going to kill him for it. Get in the way and I’ll do the same to you.”

Anne hesitated, her eyes flicking between the guns, and I knew what she was thinking. Life magic is powerful, but it has two weaknesses: it’s touch range only, and it doesn’t have any defences against direct physical attack. Anne is very good at healing, but both she and her patient have to be alive for her to do any healing, and bullets do damage much faster than she can heal it. The last time she’d run up against men with guns it hadn’t gone well for her. “Let me ask you something,” I said to Will. “Say you actually manage to pull this off. What then?”

Will had moved up to the wall of force and now he kicked at it, keeping his gun trained on me. “Not your problem, is it?”

“Is that the only thing you care about?” I said. “Killing me?”

Will shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you? This isn’t about you. This is about every adept who’s ever been fucked over by a mage who wanted something. You’re not the only mage we’re going after. You’re just one more name on the list.”

“And this is how you’re planning to work your way down it? Killing everyone one by one?”

Will shrugged. “It’s all you mages listen to, right? Anyway, it works.”

“No, it doesn’t! Using violence to solve all your problems just means you end up with bigger problems that’ll multiply faster than you can deal with them. Let me put this in terms you’ll understand. You will run out of bullets”—I pointed down at the spent ammo at Will’s feet—“and out of people”—I pointed at Captain America and the Chinese kid—“before you run out of problems.”

Will didn’t even look at me. “I figured you’d say something like that.”

“Rachel’s the next one on your list, isn’t she?”

Captain America glanced at Will. Will stepped back from the wall without answering. “You’ll lose,” I said.

“We beat you,” Will said.

I pointed at the Chinese kid. “You. Your name’s Lee, right?”

The Chinese kid—Lee—drew back a little. He’d been standing well back and looked like he’d been trying to avoid attention. “Uh . . .”

“You found me for Will, right?” I said. “So I guess he’ll be using you to keep looking for me, and then for Rachel too. Well, Rachel is stronger than me. Much stronger, and that’s not counting the guy she hangs out with. If you’re having this much trouble with me, how the hell do you think you can beat her?”

Lee looked around. Captain America gave him a nod. “We’ll be stronger by then,” Lee said. “We’ll have had more practice.”

I threw up my hands. “Jesus Christ, you think you’re playing a computer game! Killing someone does not make you level up! All it gets you is nightmares for the rest of your life and the never-ending hatred of everybody who ever cared about the person you murdered!”

My voice had risen to a shout, and both Lee and Captain America stood staring at me; without looking I knew Anne had turned to do the same. I stood balancing on the train, the wheels rumbling beneath my feet. The futures of Lee and Captain America flickered, shifting. Will’s didn’t, and his eyes stayed steady. “They said you were good at talking your way out of things,” he said. “Not going to work this time.”

I felt Lee and Captain America’s futures waver and then fall into line to match Will’s. I wanted to swear, wanted to keep shouting, but my precognition was starting to sound a warning and I knew we were out of time. “Anne,” I said. “Go. Get down.”

Anne turned and ran, crossing the gap from the fourth to the third carriage with a running jump. I gave Will’s group a last glance and followed, putting a little extra speed into the leap to make sure I cleared it. Up ahead I could see a dark wall with streetlights running along the top of it, and the tracks ran into a black circle. We’d had a long run in the open but London’s a built-up place, and every railway line in the city goes underground sooner or later. In this case sooner or later meant now. As soon as I’d made it onto the third car I dropped and craned my neck back to look.

Will, Lee, and Captain America were staring at us through the forcewall, watching the tunnel entrance draw nearer. I wasn’t close enough to see their expressions but I saw the jolt go through Captain America as he figured it out, and as the tunnel mouth swept over us he yelled a warning and turned to run. Lee followed; Will stayed a little too long and had only just started to sprint away as the fourth carriage passed into the tunnel, and through the shrinking window of the tunnel mouth I had one last glimpse of their backs before the forcewall hit the top of the tunnel and physics took over.

I didn’t get much of a view of what happened next. It was all very fast and my attention was focused on hanging on. Looking back on it with the benefit of hindsight and having read the accident reports, what I think happened was this.

The forcewall hit the brickwork at the top of the tunnel and, just as it had with the bullets, the forcewall tried to transfer the momentum of the impact down into the freight car. The forcewalls I use are powerful by one-shot standards but there’s a certain maximum amount of momentum they can transfer. This doesn’t matter in normal situations because there’s no way a normal human can break the wall’s limits. The momentum in the sixty-thousand-pound freight car fell well outside the wall’s limits. The wall resisted for a fraction of a second, then vanished as the energy stored in the discs ran out.

But in that fraction of a second the wall transferred enough momentum to put a major dent in the freight car’s velocity, and all of a sudden the fourth car was moving at a different speed from the rest of the train. The freight car wasn’t harmed, at least not directly—the discs spread the momentum through a large enough volume that the car got away with only minor buckling. The coupling between the third and fourth cars didn’t do so well. It had been designed to withstand gradual stress, not instant stress, and it snapped, separating the first three cars and the engine from the rest of the train and sending a massive jolt through the metal.

The coupling between the fourth and fifth cars had a different problem: instead of being stretched, it was suddenly and violently compressed. The buffers absorbed some of the impact but the rest was transferred into the cars. Something had to give, and the back wheels of the fourth carriage went off the track, followed by the front wheels of the fifth carriage as the two freight cars jack-knifed into the side and mouth of the tunnel.

The rest of the train ploughed into the now-derailed carriages at full speed.

From my point of view I just heard a massive grinding, booming crash, something like a gigantic set of dinner plates being thrown down a staircase, and I felt a shudder through the wheels and metal of the train. Dust and debris went flying, along with shattered bricks from the tunnel mouth. And then just that quickly it was over, and the carriages kept rolling, carrying us away down the tunnel. Anne and I were left in the darkness, riding the back end of the suddenly much shorter train.

With the roar of the train there was no way to talk, and the tunnel made it too risky to move, so I lay flat and waited for the train to stop. After only a couple of minutes I felt the pressure as the train engaged its brakes and began decelerating, slower and slower. It came to a halt with a final screech of metal and a moment later I heard the engine door open up ahead. I knew the driver would be coming down on the right and I reached up to touch Anne, signalling for her to descend on the left. We climbed down the carriage, slipped by the driver as he hurried past on the other side, and started walking towards the fuzzy grey patch that marked the end of the tunnel ahead.

By the time we came out into the open we could hear distant sirens, but the section of track we were on was empty. We walked along the lines until we found an exit and climbed up and out to street level. No one followed.