The Butterfly Assassin, page 12
It’s late; she should eat something, get some rest. But she has no appetite, and she can’t ignore the sense of possibility and dread that seeps from the pile of documents on the kitchen table. Knowing her luck, they’re nothing but a record of all the worst moments of her life. But maybe, if the universe is kind, these notes can save her…
She takes the top sheet from the stack and sits staring at it for a long moment.
Ian Ryans’ codes aren’t that complicated. Not on an encryption level. If anything, they’re less secure than the codes Comma uses for internal comms, which are designed to be used once only and are nearly unbreakable as long as that rule is kept. Her father prefers codes based on memorised phrases, which means decoding one can often provide the key to another. That weakness is exactly why they were phased out under guild policy, but Ian has never given a shit about their policy.
Now, of course, Isabel’s beginning to see why he might not have wanted Comma reading his files.
Insecure code or not, his notes are a nightmare to decrypt, largely because they’re all written in a minimum of three languages and two alphabets. He’ll use Esperanto transliterated into Cyrillic characters, or render Russian into the Latin alphabet, and jumble both up with German, English, French… It makes identifying the key phrases virtually impossible, and even if you manage that, the resulting text is incomprehensible without strong language skills, which few Esperans have. It used to drive Isabel to tears when he ‘forgot’ to decode the recipes he gave her to work from, guaranteeing hours of slow, frustrating work before she could embark on a task.
No doubt that was the idea. But the result is that Isabel has a knowledge of his coding style that she doubts anyone else in the guild can match, a solid basis in every language he spoke, and a dogged determination that would make Comma’s most dedicated codebreakers look like shirkers.
Thanks, Dad, thinks Isabel grimly, and tears a sheet of squared paper from her maths book to start drawing up the charts that will help her break this.
The night is surrendering to the early hours before she identifies one of his code phrases, but once she has that, the first few pages unravel easily. She decodes fragments from each page, searching for anything that will tell her whether these are the notes she needs before she bothers to solve the rest. But none of them offers her formulae and explanations. Instead:
At home in the lab… quite the little scientist… perhaps combat isn’t her strength… no memory of the experiment… doesn’t suspect anything.
This report is about her.
Isabel tastes bile and swallows hard. Whoever printed the files – Comma, presumably – included the dates and filenames in plain text in the top margin, but she doesn’t have to try to match the dates to know this is one of the occasions she doesn’t recall. Ian must have drugged her over and over again. Maybe it made it easier for him if she didn’t remember her pain. She wouldn’t know to be afraid of the lab, or what he might do to her there.
Her heart breaks for her younger self – a girl who didn’t know, who couldn’t have saved herself even if she did. Someone should have got her out. Someone should have seen it, and got her out.
The next page is more of the same:
She was very weak by the time we gave her the antidote; the dose may have been too high. I always forget she’s small for her age.
Twelve.
She used to like working in the lab. It was a chance to escape the training room, learn something new. She doesn’t remember when it became as painful as the rest of her training, or when she became aware that he was testing on her, but these notes suggest it’s earlier than she ever knew.
How long did she spend doubting herself? Her mother encouraged it, told her stories that clung to her memories and warped them until she hardly knew what was real. Part of her brain still says her parents never wanted to hurt her, that the punishments were because she needed to learn, that she was responsible for her own pain.
These files tell her it was real. Concrete, objective evidence that they hurt her. Maybe somewhere in this pile there’s a record of the day her father pressed her hand in acid. Will there be a description of the way she screamed, or just a cursory note?
She’d still been recovering from her stomach wound and the subsequent surgery. She wasn’t fit enough for physical training, so she spent her time in the lab, but the medication gave her hand tremors, and the acid spilled, and her father—
And she realised she could spend her entire life doing exactly what he wanted, and it would never keep her safe.
She wonders if he knows that that’s the day she started planning her escape.
On the next page, his code phrase has changed. She starts again with the laborious process of searching for patterns, for clues, for anything recognisable as a word that might be the string that, once pulled, will unravel the rest. It’s dawn by the time it resolves into words – a list this time, straightforward enough, if that’s an appropriate term for an account of the various substances with which he poisoned her and how she reacted. Some he tested on himself and some he tested on both of them, comparing how their age and physical make-up affected the symptoms.
Some of them she remembers. Others are holes the shape of a memory, slowly filled in by his words. She’s buried them deep, but bones come to light eventually.
Isabel keeps reading, until this code phrase, too, has no further secrets to offer. The words and formulae amalgamate in her head, and she grabs a pen and a scrap of paper, scribbling whatever she remembers. Some of it’s gibberish, and some of it resembles the formulae in her father’s notes. Her handwriting becomes erratic, the letters tangled and overlapping, but she can’t stop, can’t slow down, can’t let these memories slip away, even though her heart’s pounding hard enough to crack a rib, because what if one of them is the answer? She can save herself, can get this out, can fix the bloody destruction her father has wrought in her body. She just has to remember – has to make it make sense – has to break through the fog clouding her mind and remember remember remember remember…
She pushes the papers away and breathes. Five things she can see: nib on the pen, lines on the page, grain of the table, ink on her finger, ripped corner of her maths book. No. She squeezes her eyes tightly closed and then opens them again, trying to shake her tunnelling vision. Five things: her school bag, the empty chair opposite, the clock on the oven, yesterday’s washing-up, the morning light coming through the window. Better. Five things she can hear: her ragged breath, the dripping tap, the humming fridge, the bell of a passing tram, footsteps in the flat upstairs.
She’s in her flat. Just her flat. Alone. As safe as she’ll ever be.
Calmer now, she goes back through the pages she’s decoded, looking for dates and detail. It’s clear that none of these mentions the poison in her body, only other, older cruelties, long since sold to world governments or used by the guild. It’s not that she expected it to be that easy, but she still feels a moment of shattering defeat when she sees how many pages of code remain unbroken. The answer could be in any or none of them.
Maybe this time, her father has actually managed to kill her.
15 VERECO (TRUTH)
The weekend passes in a mess of naps and codes and pain, time blurring until it’s as incomprehensible as the jumble of letters Isabel’s slowly untangling. The thought of Toni Rolleston and the awful look on Emma’s face is replaced by single-minded focus on the problem at hand, but it gets her nowhere: none of the pages she’s able to make sense of tells her anything that might save her.
So on Monday, Isabel races through her paper round and goes in search of Grace Whittock before school starts. She doesn’t want to: asking a freelancer for help is risky at the best of times, and asking a freelancer who works in her school is a clear sign of her desperation. But the pain’s getting worse every day, and she needs all the help she can get.
She’s almost at the library when the door opens, and she finds herself face to face with Emma.
The other girl won’t meet her eyes, and seems content to let the encounter pass without remark. Isabel grabs her arm, forcing her to stop. ‘Emma—’
Emma wrenches her arm free. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘I wanted to check you were okay.’ Pathetic. Truth be told, she’s been so preoccupied that she hadn’t even thought about what she’d say if she ran into Emma.
‘Why would you care?’ asks Emma. ‘You’ve been lying to me since we met.’
And Isabel really can’t argue with that. ‘How much…’
‘How much did I hear? Enough to know that you’re Comma.’ Emma’s tone is low but vicious. Isabel glances around; there’s nobody nearby, but that doesn’t mean a school corridor is a safe place for this conversation. ‘I made Mum fill in the gaps afterwards.’
‘I left, Emma,’ says Isabel. ‘I’m not… I don’t…’
‘Doesn’t change the fact that you’ve killed people, though, does it?’ Emma pushes past her. ‘So unless you want the whole school to know you’re a murderer, I’d think twice about talking to me again, Bella.’
And she’s gone. Isabel stares after her bleakly, the threat meaningless compared to the heaviness that settled on her chest when she saw the disgust on Emma’s face.
When she finally makes it inside the library, Grace is at her desk, repairing a battered paperback. Isabel glances around to check they’re alone, then says, ‘I need your help.’
‘Sure, what is it?’
‘I need an antidote.’
Grace puts down the glue. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Who told you?’
‘Daragh Vernant.’
The door opens and a student wanders past, nodding at Grace before heading towards the shelves. ‘Let’s go into my office,’ says the librarian, and leads the way.
Inside, with the door firmly closed, Isabel hesitates. How much should she say? How much can she say? But there’s no time to worry about whether she can trust Grace – to be helped, she has to be known, no matter the risk.
‘We haven’t identified the poison, but we know it’s bad.’ She finds herself speaking quickly, before she loses her nerve. ‘It was inserted intramuscularly, coated with something that delayed its effects. Daragh’s removed it, but without the antidote the damage will continue. I don’t have the formula, but I do have the pellet itself and printouts of my blood test results, if that helps.’
Isabel waits. Grace blinks a few times. ‘Bella,’ she says. ‘This is…’
‘If it’s too complex, I understand.’
‘Complexity isn’t the issue here.’ The librarian takes off her glasses and cleans them on her jumper. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just… You’ve been poisoned? Are you sure?’
Her surprise is understandable, but they don’t have time for this. ‘I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.’
‘I… right, of course.’ Grace puts her glasses back on. ‘Do you know who by?’
She’s probably only expecting a guild name, but, instead, Isabel throws her a test: ‘Daragh thinks it’s Parnassiinae work. Does that mean anything to you?’
It’s clear from Grace’s wide eyes that it does. ‘Every poisoner worth a damn knows the Parnassiinae lab,’ she says. ‘Their poisons are…’
‘Legendary?’
‘I was going to say horrifying. Why would Comma be coming after you with this?’
The fact Grace is clued up on the big players suggests that she isn’t completely useless as a freelancer, so Isabel gives her another nugget of information. ‘I don’t think it’s Comma. I think it’s personal.’ Then she adds, ‘Parnassiinae is my father’s lab.’
The librarian takes a moment to absorb this. ‘Your name’s not Bella Nicholls, is it?’ she asks, after a pause.
It’s a relief to let go of the lies. ‘No. I’m Isabel Ryans.’
She nods. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Isabel. You said you had test results?’
Isabel passes them over. ‘Daragh’s included his analysis at the end, and I’ve added the compounds I’ve managed to identify. This,’ she continues, pointing to a highlighted section, ‘looks like traces of a memory inhibitor. I have it on reliable authority that my father drugged me, and this is as close as I’ve got to identifying what he might have used.’
Grace looks from Isabel to the paper and back again. ‘You’re probably right,’ she says faintly. She’s clearly finding it hard to reconcile her idea of Isabel with the girl standing in front of her, but she flips back and forth through the rest of the pages, occasionally pulling a face. At last she says, ‘This is the work of a sadist.’
‘You’d be right there.’
‘I’ll be honest, I don’t know how much I can do for you. The memory inhibitor I can counteract, but depending how long it’s been in your system, the antidote may not have much effect. As for the rest… a poison this complex is way beyond me. I’m not sure it even technically qualifies as a poison – it’s not so much doing damage as tricking your body into damaging itself.’
‘So you can’t fix it?’
‘There isn’t a freelancer in this city who could counteract this kind of biological weapon.’ Grace drops the test results onto the desk. ‘I want to help you, but Parnassiinae work… it’s in a league of its own. If you really think this isn’t a Comma hit, you’re best off throwing yourself at the mercy of the guild. Nobody else has the skills and knowledge to undo this kind of violence to your system.’
‘What about somebody they trained?’
‘Well, perhaps. But where we might find…’ Grace looks up slowly and meets Isabel’s eyes. ‘Oh. But you—’
‘I spent years working in my father’s lab. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps.’ How much of it she can remember is a different matter; she’s still trying to get to grips with what he stole from her. ‘And I have a solid theoretical background too.’
‘I heard rumours that Comma were training kids,’ says Grace cautiously. ‘I didn’t believe they were true.’
Isabel shrugs. ‘They’ve stopped now.’ It’s funny how her near-death experience scared them into shutting the programme down, when they’d known all along that it was putting children at risk. ‘Look, if I could do this alone, I would never have asked you, but I can’t. With your skills and my knowledge, maybe there’s a chance.’
‘Bella,’ begins Grace, then corrects herself: ‘Isabel. I don’t want to give you false hope. This is way above my pay grade. I don’t know if I can do anything for you.’
‘But you’ll try?’
The librarian regards her for a moment, then sighs. ‘I’ll try. That’s as much as I can promise.’
‘Thank you. That’s all I’m asking for.’
Grace looks at the pages again, at Daragh and Isabel’s handwriting in the margins. ‘You worked in your father’s lab,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘What did that entail?’
‘Well, a lot of the time he was experimenting on me,’ says Isabel. She momentarily regrets her blithe tone when she sees the horror on the librarian’s face. Right, because that’s fucked up and not something she’s supposed to throw around casually. She remembers Mortimer calling her ‘obviously traumatised’ and wonders whether it’s always been obvious to everyone except herself – whether she should have pieced together sooner that what was happening to her wasn’t right. ‘I mean…’
‘Did you ever help make the poisons?’ asks Grace, interrupting her before she has to figure out how to mitigate the awfulness of this revelation.
Isabel pauses before answering. ‘Yeah, sometimes. Older inventions, simpler things. Nothing recent that I remember, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.’
‘Right.’ Grace taps her pen against the formula in the margin. ‘This memory suppressant… it’s already broken down a lot, but the fact that there are still traces of it in your system means counteracting it might recover some memories. Do you think that would include anything about this poison?’
‘What, like I’ll magically remember the formula? I doubt it.’ More likely all it’ll give her is the memory of her father poisoning her in the first place, if that. It’s been a month since she left – the damage is probably already done.
‘I agree – it’s a long shot,’ the librarian admits. ‘But it’s our best chance. Isabel, I specialise in non-lethals – stuff people use to spike their co-workers’ food so they spend two days in the bathroom, that kind of thing. It’s not classy, but the way I see it, diarrhoea’s a more fitting revenge than the death the guilds would deal. It saves a few lives every year, and it pays the bills, so it’s what I do. Not poison like this.’
Her meaning’s clear: however much she wants to help, all she can offer is a stay of execution. If Isabel wants to live, she needs to go to the guild.
She can’t. She won’t. Maybe Grace is right, and the formula’s hiding in her own brain. Maybe Michael’s telling the truth, and only her father knows it. Either way, there has to be a solution that doesn’t involve going to Ronan Atwood and paying whatever price he asks.
‘One thing at a time,’ Isabel says, a little unsteadily. ‘We tackle the memory suppressant first. The rest comes later.’
Grace nods. ‘Okay. I’ll try to have it for you tomorrow.’
It’s the illusion of control, at least, the tempting placebo effect of feeling like she’s taking action. She leaves the printouts with Grace and heads to class, trying to push it all from her mind, which is easier said than done when she’s fatigued and in pain.
It doesn’t help that she has Woodwork today. Ever since she overheard Mortimer’s argument with Grace, she’s been bracing herself for confrontation, but he was mysteriously absent from last Wednesday’s class. She doubts he’ll be off again, and she’s tempted to hide in the nurse’s office until the end of the period.
She doesn’t. Sure enough, Mortimer’s back, although she’s spared his safety exam because he wants the whole class to watch today’s demo. Isabel lurks at the back and manages to avoid eye contact until the last five minutes of the lesson, when he asks her to fetch some printouts from Reprographics for him.
