The Butterfly Assassin, page 10
Toni nods. ‘Why don’t you sit down, Bella? You look tired.’
‘I’m dying,’ snaps Isabel. ‘Of course I look tired.’ She sees the shock on Emma’s face and moderates her tone. ‘I’m sorry. It’s been—’
‘A long day,’ Toni finishes. She’s managed to make her expression sympathetic, pasting on the ‘concerned mother’ mask as though she thinks Isabel can’t see the truth. ‘Emma told me you weren’t very well.’
What else did Emma tell her? Not enough for her to work out who ‘Bella’ was, at least: her surprise at seeing Isabel was genuine. The fact that her pseudonym hasn’t yet reached the entire guild should be a comfort, but somehow it’s not.
She takes a seat at the kitchen table, the furthest from Toni, and wraps her fingers around the mug Emma pushes towards her. Why did she come? I don’t think I want to be alone. Pathetic. All Toni can offer her is a noose to tie around her own neck.
Isabel looks at Emma and says the only thing she can think to say: ‘I didn’t know you were adopted.’
‘Fostered,’ Emma corrects, an edge to her voice. ‘My parents left Espera when I was seven.’
People don’t just leave Espera. You need a visa, permission from the guilds and, most of all, you need somewhere to go. Smugglers can help you circumvent the first two issues, but it’s harder once you’re out – if you get that far.
‘They abandoned you?’
Emma shrugs, staring at the table. ‘Maybe they thought a child would give them away,’ she says. Her voice is the flat monotone of suppressed feelings. ‘I don’t know how they got out. I don’t even know if they did. Sometimes I imagine them living happily in some other city, other times I imagine them shot by the border patrol before they made it past the wall. Makes no difference to me. I was fostered half a dozen times; ended up in an orphanage in Hunmanby. Then Mum took me in.’ She glances up at Toni and smiles. ‘She was the only one willing to make the effort to turn a feral creature like me into a person again.’
‘You weren’t that bad,’ her mother protests.
Emma raises an eyebrow at Isabel. ‘I was a “problem child”,’ she says, making the inverted commas with her fingers. ‘I had “behavioural issues”.’
‘Well, those do tend to be the labels institutions use when they’ve decided not to bother any more,’ says Toni. Isabel doesn’t miss the quick glance the woman shoots in her direction. Whatever issues Emma had must have seemed trivial after dealing with Isabel and Cocoon.
‘And now you can’t get rid of me.’ Emma grins. ‘Luckily, I’m an absolute delight.’
Seeing the fond look Toni gives her daughter feels like barbed wire against Isabel’s skin. How can the woman who helped train her be allowed this? This normality, this love, this child who isn’t irredeemably fucked up?
‘And the others?’ she asks, swallowing her bitterness.
‘I had Leo and Jean since they were babies,’ says Toni. ‘I’d never planned to add a third, but when I met Emma… I changed my mind.’
Emma raises her hands as though to say, It’s true, I’m irresistible, and then gets to her feet. ‘I need the loo. Back in a minute.’
The kitchen door swings shut behind her, and Isabel and Toni are alone. Silence falls, a stand-off without weapons, but it’s Isabel who strikes first. ‘Fuck you, Toni.’
‘Isabel, I’m…’
‘You’re what?’ she says. ‘Sorry?’
‘If I’d known it was you that Emma had befriended, I’d have done this differently. Planned it better.’
‘If I’d known,’ says Isabel, ‘I wouldn’t have come.’ Her next words are forced out through gritted teeth. ‘You can’t tell my parents I’m here.’
‘If they care, they already know. I’m retired, Isabel. I’ve got nothing to gain from selling you out. Besides, last I heard, Ian and Judith were MIA.’
Retired. It seems funny that you can retire from ruining people’s lives. ‘So now you live here, in your sweet little house, with your sweet little fake children, and you pretend to be a civilian?’
‘I am a civilian, and they are my children.’
‘Fostered,’ counters Isabel. ‘Not even adopted.’
‘Adoption would have given them Comma affiliation, whether they wanted it or not, and I didn’t want them anywhere near the guild.’ Toni sips her tea. ‘I was trying to keep them safe.’
Isabel spits her response. ‘I didn’t think protecting children was a priority of yours.’
She waits for Toni to shout, or threaten her, but she only sighs and braces her forehead against her fingers. She looks old and tired and sad. ‘It doesn’t matter what I say, because you won’t believe me, but I was against Cocoon from the start.’
‘Right. So against it that you volunteered to help out.’
‘They should never have been training minors. I told them that. They wouldn’t back down, so I proposed safeguards: a minimum age, the consent of the children and the opportunity to leave if they chose. Comma didn’t listen. They didn’t want me meddling, but I thought if I were part of it, I could stop things from getting too bad.’
‘Are you trying to justify it to yourself, or to me?’ says Isabel coldly. ‘Because a sob story doesn’t change shit.’
‘I made so many mistakes.’ Toni closes her eyes. ‘You were so young. I couldn’t have done anything, but I should have tried. I should have done something.’
Isabel swirls her tea around her mug. ‘So when you fostered Emma, was that you trying to prove to yourself that you weren’t a complete fuck-up?’
‘I was trying to save her,’ says Toni. ‘Not many loving parents are keen to give their children to the guild for training, it turns out, and with Cocoon being top secret they could hardly recruit openly. So they took kids nobody cared about, which meant kids from orphanages. They sent me to Hunmanby, and there she was: ten years old, severe abandonment issues, prone to panic attacks and bursts of rage. And, crucially, no attachments. No family to care whether she lived or died. She was exactly what Cocoon was looking for.’ Toni looks up, eyes moist with tears she doesn’t deserve to cry. ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘she reminded me a little of you.’
Isabel has nothing to say to that. She doesn’t want to think about her younger self reflected in Emma’s pain. But Toni’s still talking.
‘I was too much of a coward to save you, Isabel, so I saved her instead. I fostered her before Comma got their hands on her file, and I convinced myself I’d done something noble when they took a couple of older kids instead.’
‘But you didn’t leave.’ Because this is where Toni’s saintly tale falls apart. ‘You stayed,’ Isabel points out, ‘right to the end. You’re the reason I nearly died.’
‘I know.’ Toni swallows. ‘I thought I was helping, but that was when I realised I couldn’t make Cocoon anything other than completely evil.’
Her confession requires something from Isabel: understanding, forgiveness, absolution. But how can she let go of the fact that Toni saw what Comma were doing and didn’t save her?
‘Did they know?’ she asks. ‘Leo and Jean?’
‘Leo found out when he was sixteen. He didn’t take it well, and I still don’t think he’s forgiven me. Jean never knew, and by the time Emma was old enough to understand, I’d retired. I’ve promised Leo I’ll tell her eventually, but I haven’t been brave enough yet.’ Toni downs the rest of her tea and wipes her mouth, placing the mug firmly on the table in front of her. ‘I made a lot of mistakes, Isabel. My children were my chance to do better, and time after time I’ve come so close to screwing that up too.’ She reaches out and takes Isabel’s hand. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m deeply sorry for how completely I failed you.’
Isabel jerks her hand free. There’s a rock in her throat, heavy and immovable no matter how hard she swallows. All she can think about is Toni saying, She reminded me a little of you. And yet Emma is this: colour and sunshine and mischief and an outstretched hand and that broad, dimpling grin, hope in human form. And Isabel is this: broken glass and barbed wire and a knife clutched in bloody fingers, nothing but a weapon or a wraith. She has never, until now, thought there was anything else she could have become.
Her left hand curls easily into a fist, damaged and defensive. She stares down at it and tries not to think about a world where it’s whole, where she’s whole, where somebody saved her and she didn’t have to drag herself out of hell alone.
‘I’m glad,’ she says with difficulty, ‘that you saved Emma, at least.’ Then she stands and walks to the kitchen door.
‘Isabel—’ Toni begins.
‘You were right about one thing. You are a coward.’
Toni has the wisdom not to argue. She doesn’t stop Isabel as she flings open the door, but she comes to a halt anyway. There on the other side is Emma, eyes wide and lower lip trembling. Her expression is terrified, furious, disbelieving, as she stares from Isabel to her mother.
She heard. How long was she standing there? How much does she know? Isabel opens her mouth to speak, but no words will glue together the shattered lies strewn between them now.
‘Mum?’ Emma’s voice cracks. ‘Mum, is it…?’
Is it true? The words die on her lips, her voice failing her, and Isabel’s frozen to the spot, unable to fix yet another life she’s destroyed.
‘Emma, I’m sorry…’ Toni begins, but that’s confirmation enough. Emma’s choked sob is just about audible as she turns and runs up the stairs. A door slams.
Isabel wants to go after her. She can’t undo what’s said, but she can… she can explain, can’t she? Say something useful when Emma’s entire world is crumbling? At the very least, she could apologise for being the reason her friend found out this way, because she didn’t know. She wouldn’t have come if she’d known.
‘Don’t,’ says Toni, before she’s taken a step towards the stairs. Isabel looks back at her. Her expression is bleak. ‘She won’t want to see you, Isabel. I think you should go.’
‘But—’
‘This is my mess to clean up.’
But she was meant to be my friend. But this was meant to be safe, and new, and normal. But, but, but—
‘Good luck with that,’ says Isabel, and she lets herself out of their house.
13 REKUNIĜO (REUNION)
Isabel’s shitty evening gets worse when she reaches the tram stop and finds they’re running emergency maintenance on the line, forcing her to take a bus home. It crawls through the Espera dusk, bookended by the lights of other vehicles making the same interminable journey, the roads packed and slow. Halfway home, she starts to cry, tears rolling down her cheeks faster than she can wipe them away. She staggers down the aisle, ignoring the curious looks of other passengers. The weight of her school bag throws her off-balance, and she has to clutch the rail beside the driver’s window.
‘Can you let me off?’
‘Not till the next stop,’ he answers, without even looking at her.
She slaps the window. ‘Open the fucking doors before I hit the emergency button and do it myself.’
He swears at her, but opens the doors. Isabel flips him off as she disembarks into the chilly evening. She’s not sure where that attitude came from. Maybe it’s a side effect of dying.
The cold air dries her tears, but she can’t stop sobbing. The anger and betrayal are choking her: Emma’s friendship was meant to be new, and good, and instead it’s exactly as shit as everything before. Seeing Toni Rolleston has made her afraid again, like no time has passed and she’s still a terrified twelve-year-old.
Her first kill. She was twelve. Isabel swears and kicks the metal barrier separating her from the traffic, again and again until a sharp pain suggests she’s broken a toe. A few cars slow as they pass her, drivers probably wondering if she’s drunk. When somebody calls out, ‘You okay?’ she swears at them too.
Hoarse from screaming, she stumbles the last half-mile back to her flat and drags herself up the stairs, ready to collapse into bed and stay there until everything stops being so fucking awful.
And then she stops dead.
Her front door’s ajar, which means there’s somebody in her flat. Not Ronan; he’d never leave the door open. So: somebody else. Isabel’s unarmed, reluctant to test the Fraser’s anti-violence policy by taking a knife to school, but she readies herself to fight, tension coiling in her body. She pads towards the door and nudges it open, wincing when the hinges squeak, and slips inside.
There’s a young man sitting on the settee, a dirty rucksack by his feet. His head is propped on his hand, his eyes bruised with fatigue. When he hears her come in, he scrambles to his feet.
‘Isabel,’ he says. ‘Finally. I was beginning to think I’d got the wrong flat and I didn’t know how much longer I could wait before they found—’
‘Michael,’ says Isabel. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
She’s conscious that she’s a mess, her face blotchy with tears. Her toe throbs, begging for attention, but her focus is on the young man in front of her. Michael Griffiths.
When Isabel was nine, she became the youngest member of the newly founded Cocoon, Comma’s highly secret and controversial minors’ training programme. It was completely illegal but that, like the fundamental inhumanity of turning children into murderers before they’d had a chance to be anything else, didn’t stop the guild. At first, for Isabel, it was an after-school club – a chance to hone the skills she’d learned from her parents almost as soon as she could walk, a place where she got stronger and faster and cleverer and forgot what it meant to be a child. Over time, it became something more, consuming her life: it made lies of her friendships and filled her school record with absences. But at least she wasn’t the only one. At least she wasn’t alone any more.
She was twelve when they recruited Michael, then fifteen and a recently orphaned ward of the guild. They might never have had much to do with each other, except that, eighteen months ago, they were both sent on a job neither of them was ready for. Michael was responsible for fumbling the shot that got Isabel stabbed, but he also saved her life by keeping pressure on the wound until the extraction team arrived. His quick thinking is why the Ryans’ family took him in after Cocoon was shut down. Her parents’ protégé.
And when Ian and Judith disappeared, so, they’d all thought, did he.
The sight of him brings a wave of memories. Michael’s hands on her bleeding stomach, his desperate face: ‘Is she going to live?’ Michael teaching her card games at the kitchen table – then teaching her to cheat. Michael bandaging her hand even while saying, ‘No, you must have got it wrong. Ian wouldn’t…’ when she was finally coming to terms with the idea that Ian would.
And then: Michael standing between her and the back door as she clutched the holdall containing everything she dared take when she ran. ‘Where are you going?’ The fear, the certainty that he’d raise the alarm and give her away, and her lie: ‘For a walk. I’ll be back soon.’ The way he stepped aside as though he believed her, when he couldn’t have done.
He didn’t help her. But he didn’t stop her either.
And now he’s here, in her flat.
‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ he says. ‘Your parents—’
‘How long do we have?’ There’s a bag by the front door, always packed. Even allowing for her toe, she could be gone from here in two minutes flat. Fat lot of good that does her when she has nowhere else to run.
‘What?’
‘How long till they get here?’
‘No, they’re not… they’re not coming. I left, Isabel, like you did. I needed to warn you, I—’
She cuts him off. ‘Stay here.’ They’re not coming. She doesn’t have to run. But she can’t have this conversation right now, not like this, so she ducks into the bathroom, the only place she can hide from him.
She won’t think about what Toni Rolleston said. She won’t think about the look on Emma’s face. She splashes her face with water, clips back her overlong fringe and regards herself in the mirror. She looks like she’s dying, but at least it’s no longer obvious that she’s been sobbing by the side of the road. Good enough to fool Michael? Maybe not. He knows her better than anyone – well enough to see straight through her.
It’ll have to do. Retrieving the first aid kit from under the sink, she squares her shoulders and goes to face Michael and the memory of her parents.
He’s moved from the settee to the kitchen table, his back to her. He’s lost weight, his wristwatch sliding halfway up his forearm, clothes loose on his bony frame. His hair’s clipped short, but she can still make out the white streak behind his ear where a small scar robs it of pigment. The auburn looks redder when it’s short like this. He turns as she approaches, and she sees that his nose is crooked in profile. Broken again, she thinks, and this time she wasn’t there to wrench it straight for him before it healed. It must be recent.
They punished him? Stupid question. Of course they did.
Isabel takes a seat, propping her injured foot on one of the remaining chairs and peeling off her sock. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she says. ‘You have two minutes to tell me why you came.’
‘What happens in two minutes?’ he asks with a slight smile.
Isabel doesn’t smile back. ‘I decide whether I’m going to kill you.’
His smile fades. She can tell he’s weighing his words with care and she half expects him to blurt out a speech, but all he says is, ‘Your parents have defected.’
Is that meant to be news? ‘To Hummingbird?’ she asks mildly, examining the mangled mess of her toenail and reaching into the first aid kit for an antiseptic wipe. The toe is swollen and angled strangely; definitely broken.
‘No, they…’ Michael chews his thumbnail for a moment. ‘They’ve set up their own guild. It was your father’s idea.’
Their own guild. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t that. ‘I see,’ she says, mind racing. There’s no way this won’t end in blood when the other guilds find out.
‘Ian backed out of a Comma deal and undercut them.’ Michael sounds a little desperate now, like he thinks she can’t tell how serious this is. ‘He made the sale himself and kept the money to fund his own organisation with contacts from outside. And he… he poisoned you and drugged you so you’d forget.’
‘I’m dying,’ snaps Isabel. ‘Of course I look tired.’ She sees the shock on Emma’s face and moderates her tone. ‘I’m sorry. It’s been—’
‘A long day,’ Toni finishes. She’s managed to make her expression sympathetic, pasting on the ‘concerned mother’ mask as though she thinks Isabel can’t see the truth. ‘Emma told me you weren’t very well.’
What else did Emma tell her? Not enough for her to work out who ‘Bella’ was, at least: her surprise at seeing Isabel was genuine. The fact that her pseudonym hasn’t yet reached the entire guild should be a comfort, but somehow it’s not.
She takes a seat at the kitchen table, the furthest from Toni, and wraps her fingers around the mug Emma pushes towards her. Why did she come? I don’t think I want to be alone. Pathetic. All Toni can offer her is a noose to tie around her own neck.
Isabel looks at Emma and says the only thing she can think to say: ‘I didn’t know you were adopted.’
‘Fostered,’ Emma corrects, an edge to her voice. ‘My parents left Espera when I was seven.’
People don’t just leave Espera. You need a visa, permission from the guilds and, most of all, you need somewhere to go. Smugglers can help you circumvent the first two issues, but it’s harder once you’re out – if you get that far.
‘They abandoned you?’
Emma shrugs, staring at the table. ‘Maybe they thought a child would give them away,’ she says. Her voice is the flat monotone of suppressed feelings. ‘I don’t know how they got out. I don’t even know if they did. Sometimes I imagine them living happily in some other city, other times I imagine them shot by the border patrol before they made it past the wall. Makes no difference to me. I was fostered half a dozen times; ended up in an orphanage in Hunmanby. Then Mum took me in.’ She glances up at Toni and smiles. ‘She was the only one willing to make the effort to turn a feral creature like me into a person again.’
‘You weren’t that bad,’ her mother protests.
Emma raises an eyebrow at Isabel. ‘I was a “problem child”,’ she says, making the inverted commas with her fingers. ‘I had “behavioural issues”.’
‘Well, those do tend to be the labels institutions use when they’ve decided not to bother any more,’ says Toni. Isabel doesn’t miss the quick glance the woman shoots in her direction. Whatever issues Emma had must have seemed trivial after dealing with Isabel and Cocoon.
‘And now you can’t get rid of me.’ Emma grins. ‘Luckily, I’m an absolute delight.’
Seeing the fond look Toni gives her daughter feels like barbed wire against Isabel’s skin. How can the woman who helped train her be allowed this? This normality, this love, this child who isn’t irredeemably fucked up?
‘And the others?’ she asks, swallowing her bitterness.
‘I had Leo and Jean since they were babies,’ says Toni. ‘I’d never planned to add a third, but when I met Emma… I changed my mind.’
Emma raises her hands as though to say, It’s true, I’m irresistible, and then gets to her feet. ‘I need the loo. Back in a minute.’
The kitchen door swings shut behind her, and Isabel and Toni are alone. Silence falls, a stand-off without weapons, but it’s Isabel who strikes first. ‘Fuck you, Toni.’
‘Isabel, I’m…’
‘You’re what?’ she says. ‘Sorry?’
‘If I’d known it was you that Emma had befriended, I’d have done this differently. Planned it better.’
‘If I’d known,’ says Isabel, ‘I wouldn’t have come.’ Her next words are forced out through gritted teeth. ‘You can’t tell my parents I’m here.’
‘If they care, they already know. I’m retired, Isabel. I’ve got nothing to gain from selling you out. Besides, last I heard, Ian and Judith were MIA.’
Retired. It seems funny that you can retire from ruining people’s lives. ‘So now you live here, in your sweet little house, with your sweet little fake children, and you pretend to be a civilian?’
‘I am a civilian, and they are my children.’
‘Fostered,’ counters Isabel. ‘Not even adopted.’
‘Adoption would have given them Comma affiliation, whether they wanted it or not, and I didn’t want them anywhere near the guild.’ Toni sips her tea. ‘I was trying to keep them safe.’
Isabel spits her response. ‘I didn’t think protecting children was a priority of yours.’
She waits for Toni to shout, or threaten her, but she only sighs and braces her forehead against her fingers. She looks old and tired and sad. ‘It doesn’t matter what I say, because you won’t believe me, but I was against Cocoon from the start.’
‘Right. So against it that you volunteered to help out.’
‘They should never have been training minors. I told them that. They wouldn’t back down, so I proposed safeguards: a minimum age, the consent of the children and the opportunity to leave if they chose. Comma didn’t listen. They didn’t want me meddling, but I thought if I were part of it, I could stop things from getting too bad.’
‘Are you trying to justify it to yourself, or to me?’ says Isabel coldly. ‘Because a sob story doesn’t change shit.’
‘I made so many mistakes.’ Toni closes her eyes. ‘You were so young. I couldn’t have done anything, but I should have tried. I should have done something.’
Isabel swirls her tea around her mug. ‘So when you fostered Emma, was that you trying to prove to yourself that you weren’t a complete fuck-up?’
‘I was trying to save her,’ says Toni. ‘Not many loving parents are keen to give their children to the guild for training, it turns out, and with Cocoon being top secret they could hardly recruit openly. So they took kids nobody cared about, which meant kids from orphanages. They sent me to Hunmanby, and there she was: ten years old, severe abandonment issues, prone to panic attacks and bursts of rage. And, crucially, no attachments. No family to care whether she lived or died. She was exactly what Cocoon was looking for.’ Toni looks up, eyes moist with tears she doesn’t deserve to cry. ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘she reminded me a little of you.’
Isabel has nothing to say to that. She doesn’t want to think about her younger self reflected in Emma’s pain. But Toni’s still talking.
‘I was too much of a coward to save you, Isabel, so I saved her instead. I fostered her before Comma got their hands on her file, and I convinced myself I’d done something noble when they took a couple of older kids instead.’
‘But you didn’t leave.’ Because this is where Toni’s saintly tale falls apart. ‘You stayed,’ Isabel points out, ‘right to the end. You’re the reason I nearly died.’
‘I know.’ Toni swallows. ‘I thought I was helping, but that was when I realised I couldn’t make Cocoon anything other than completely evil.’
Her confession requires something from Isabel: understanding, forgiveness, absolution. But how can she let go of the fact that Toni saw what Comma were doing and didn’t save her?
‘Did they know?’ she asks. ‘Leo and Jean?’
‘Leo found out when he was sixteen. He didn’t take it well, and I still don’t think he’s forgiven me. Jean never knew, and by the time Emma was old enough to understand, I’d retired. I’ve promised Leo I’ll tell her eventually, but I haven’t been brave enough yet.’ Toni downs the rest of her tea and wipes her mouth, placing the mug firmly on the table in front of her. ‘I made a lot of mistakes, Isabel. My children were my chance to do better, and time after time I’ve come so close to screwing that up too.’ She reaches out and takes Isabel’s hand. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m deeply sorry for how completely I failed you.’
Isabel jerks her hand free. There’s a rock in her throat, heavy and immovable no matter how hard she swallows. All she can think about is Toni saying, She reminded me a little of you. And yet Emma is this: colour and sunshine and mischief and an outstretched hand and that broad, dimpling grin, hope in human form. And Isabel is this: broken glass and barbed wire and a knife clutched in bloody fingers, nothing but a weapon or a wraith. She has never, until now, thought there was anything else she could have become.
Her left hand curls easily into a fist, damaged and defensive. She stares down at it and tries not to think about a world where it’s whole, where she’s whole, where somebody saved her and she didn’t have to drag herself out of hell alone.
‘I’m glad,’ she says with difficulty, ‘that you saved Emma, at least.’ Then she stands and walks to the kitchen door.
‘Isabel—’ Toni begins.
‘You were right about one thing. You are a coward.’
Toni has the wisdom not to argue. She doesn’t stop Isabel as she flings open the door, but she comes to a halt anyway. There on the other side is Emma, eyes wide and lower lip trembling. Her expression is terrified, furious, disbelieving, as she stares from Isabel to her mother.
She heard. How long was she standing there? How much does she know? Isabel opens her mouth to speak, but no words will glue together the shattered lies strewn between them now.
‘Mum?’ Emma’s voice cracks. ‘Mum, is it…?’
Is it true? The words die on her lips, her voice failing her, and Isabel’s frozen to the spot, unable to fix yet another life she’s destroyed.
‘Emma, I’m sorry…’ Toni begins, but that’s confirmation enough. Emma’s choked sob is just about audible as she turns and runs up the stairs. A door slams.
Isabel wants to go after her. She can’t undo what’s said, but she can… she can explain, can’t she? Say something useful when Emma’s entire world is crumbling? At the very least, she could apologise for being the reason her friend found out this way, because she didn’t know. She wouldn’t have come if she’d known.
‘Don’t,’ says Toni, before she’s taken a step towards the stairs. Isabel looks back at her. Her expression is bleak. ‘She won’t want to see you, Isabel. I think you should go.’
‘But—’
‘This is my mess to clean up.’
But she was meant to be my friend. But this was meant to be safe, and new, and normal. But, but, but—
‘Good luck with that,’ says Isabel, and she lets herself out of their house.
13 REKUNIĜO (REUNION)
Isabel’s shitty evening gets worse when she reaches the tram stop and finds they’re running emergency maintenance on the line, forcing her to take a bus home. It crawls through the Espera dusk, bookended by the lights of other vehicles making the same interminable journey, the roads packed and slow. Halfway home, she starts to cry, tears rolling down her cheeks faster than she can wipe them away. She staggers down the aisle, ignoring the curious looks of other passengers. The weight of her school bag throws her off-balance, and she has to clutch the rail beside the driver’s window.
‘Can you let me off?’
‘Not till the next stop,’ he answers, without even looking at her.
She slaps the window. ‘Open the fucking doors before I hit the emergency button and do it myself.’
He swears at her, but opens the doors. Isabel flips him off as she disembarks into the chilly evening. She’s not sure where that attitude came from. Maybe it’s a side effect of dying.
The cold air dries her tears, but she can’t stop sobbing. The anger and betrayal are choking her: Emma’s friendship was meant to be new, and good, and instead it’s exactly as shit as everything before. Seeing Toni Rolleston has made her afraid again, like no time has passed and she’s still a terrified twelve-year-old.
Her first kill. She was twelve. Isabel swears and kicks the metal barrier separating her from the traffic, again and again until a sharp pain suggests she’s broken a toe. A few cars slow as they pass her, drivers probably wondering if she’s drunk. When somebody calls out, ‘You okay?’ she swears at them too.
Hoarse from screaming, she stumbles the last half-mile back to her flat and drags herself up the stairs, ready to collapse into bed and stay there until everything stops being so fucking awful.
And then she stops dead.
Her front door’s ajar, which means there’s somebody in her flat. Not Ronan; he’d never leave the door open. So: somebody else. Isabel’s unarmed, reluctant to test the Fraser’s anti-violence policy by taking a knife to school, but she readies herself to fight, tension coiling in her body. She pads towards the door and nudges it open, wincing when the hinges squeak, and slips inside.
There’s a young man sitting on the settee, a dirty rucksack by his feet. His head is propped on his hand, his eyes bruised with fatigue. When he hears her come in, he scrambles to his feet.
‘Isabel,’ he says. ‘Finally. I was beginning to think I’d got the wrong flat and I didn’t know how much longer I could wait before they found—’
‘Michael,’ says Isabel. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
She’s conscious that she’s a mess, her face blotchy with tears. Her toe throbs, begging for attention, but her focus is on the young man in front of her. Michael Griffiths.
When Isabel was nine, she became the youngest member of the newly founded Cocoon, Comma’s highly secret and controversial minors’ training programme. It was completely illegal but that, like the fundamental inhumanity of turning children into murderers before they’d had a chance to be anything else, didn’t stop the guild. At first, for Isabel, it was an after-school club – a chance to hone the skills she’d learned from her parents almost as soon as she could walk, a place where she got stronger and faster and cleverer and forgot what it meant to be a child. Over time, it became something more, consuming her life: it made lies of her friendships and filled her school record with absences. But at least she wasn’t the only one. At least she wasn’t alone any more.
She was twelve when they recruited Michael, then fifteen and a recently orphaned ward of the guild. They might never have had much to do with each other, except that, eighteen months ago, they were both sent on a job neither of them was ready for. Michael was responsible for fumbling the shot that got Isabel stabbed, but he also saved her life by keeping pressure on the wound until the extraction team arrived. His quick thinking is why the Ryans’ family took him in after Cocoon was shut down. Her parents’ protégé.
And when Ian and Judith disappeared, so, they’d all thought, did he.
The sight of him brings a wave of memories. Michael’s hands on her bleeding stomach, his desperate face: ‘Is she going to live?’ Michael teaching her card games at the kitchen table – then teaching her to cheat. Michael bandaging her hand even while saying, ‘No, you must have got it wrong. Ian wouldn’t…’ when she was finally coming to terms with the idea that Ian would.
And then: Michael standing between her and the back door as she clutched the holdall containing everything she dared take when she ran. ‘Where are you going?’ The fear, the certainty that he’d raise the alarm and give her away, and her lie: ‘For a walk. I’ll be back soon.’ The way he stepped aside as though he believed her, when he couldn’t have done.
He didn’t help her. But he didn’t stop her either.
And now he’s here, in her flat.
‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ he says. ‘Your parents—’
‘How long do we have?’ There’s a bag by the front door, always packed. Even allowing for her toe, she could be gone from here in two minutes flat. Fat lot of good that does her when she has nowhere else to run.
‘What?’
‘How long till they get here?’
‘No, they’re not… they’re not coming. I left, Isabel, like you did. I needed to warn you, I—’
She cuts him off. ‘Stay here.’ They’re not coming. She doesn’t have to run. But she can’t have this conversation right now, not like this, so she ducks into the bathroom, the only place she can hide from him.
She won’t think about what Toni Rolleston said. She won’t think about the look on Emma’s face. She splashes her face with water, clips back her overlong fringe and regards herself in the mirror. She looks like she’s dying, but at least it’s no longer obvious that she’s been sobbing by the side of the road. Good enough to fool Michael? Maybe not. He knows her better than anyone – well enough to see straight through her.
It’ll have to do. Retrieving the first aid kit from under the sink, she squares her shoulders and goes to face Michael and the memory of her parents.
He’s moved from the settee to the kitchen table, his back to her. He’s lost weight, his wristwatch sliding halfway up his forearm, clothes loose on his bony frame. His hair’s clipped short, but she can still make out the white streak behind his ear where a small scar robs it of pigment. The auburn looks redder when it’s short like this. He turns as she approaches, and she sees that his nose is crooked in profile. Broken again, she thinks, and this time she wasn’t there to wrench it straight for him before it healed. It must be recent.
They punished him? Stupid question. Of course they did.
Isabel takes a seat, propping her injured foot on one of the remaining chairs and peeling off her sock. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she says. ‘You have two minutes to tell me why you came.’
‘What happens in two minutes?’ he asks with a slight smile.
Isabel doesn’t smile back. ‘I decide whether I’m going to kill you.’
His smile fades. She can tell he’s weighing his words with care and she half expects him to blurt out a speech, but all he says is, ‘Your parents have defected.’
Is that meant to be news? ‘To Hummingbird?’ she asks mildly, examining the mangled mess of her toenail and reaching into the first aid kit for an antiseptic wipe. The toe is swollen and angled strangely; definitely broken.
‘No, they…’ Michael chews his thumbnail for a moment. ‘They’ve set up their own guild. It was your father’s idea.’
Their own guild. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t that. ‘I see,’ she says, mind racing. There’s no way this won’t end in blood when the other guilds find out.
‘Ian backed out of a Comma deal and undercut them.’ Michael sounds a little desperate now, like he thinks she can’t tell how serious this is. ‘He made the sale himself and kept the money to fund his own organisation with contacts from outside. And he… he poisoned you and drugged you so you’d forget.’
