The Butterfly Assassin, page 16
As she turns on the tap to wash her hands, Grace passes the next of the test tubes to Michael – no more accidents – and looks back at the results from the chromatography. ‘That’s weird,’ says the poisoner, highlighting a section and looking closer at it. ‘What is that – some kind of protein?’
‘A protein?’ echoes Michael. ‘What do you mean?’
Isabel scrubs her hands at the sink, as though she might rub away the skin and her scars. The poison’s gone. It doesn’t feel gone. She doesn’t feel safe.
‘I’d have to break it down before I can analyse it further,’ says Grace. ‘But at a guess, it’s some kind of spider venom.’
Fucking spiders.
The sound of the running tap is like white noise, static, impossibly loud and meaningless at the same. She’s forgotten how to turn it off. She’s forgotten how to move, paralysed by the fear trickling through her, turning her blood into acid that burns and sears like hate. Some kind of spider venom. Of course it is. Of course it is. She should have known from the moment she discovered it was her father’s work. And now…
Isabel stares at the pale hands in front of her, trembling as though they might shake themselves to pieces and leave small bones littered across the grey counter. Only the burn scar on the left tells her they’re hers. She’s untethered, sliced loose by the memories, and then sensation returns in the form of panic clawing at the inside of her throat, and she becomes embodied again. Incarnate and terrified.
‘Issy?’ Her father steps towards her and she retreats from his raised hand, but she’s backed up against the counter. She fumbles for a weapon, but there’s nothing within reach, no scalpel or syringe she could use to fight back, and—
‘Bella,’ says a voice. A woman’s voice. Grace Whittock, because it’s Grace’s lab, it’s Grace’s house. She squeezes her eyes shut and opens them again, and it’s not her father in front of her, it’s Michael, his hands now loose at his sides. He wasn’t… he wasn’t going… he never meant…
She takes a long, shuddering breath, and begins to sob.
19 HEREDO (INHERITANCE)
Isabel curls up on the settee in Grace’s living room, a mug of tea warming her hands and a blanket around her shoulders. She’s chilled to the bone, hollowed out from crying and unable to stop shaking.
‘Should’ve seen this coming,’ she says, with a shaky smile. ‘Went into this trying to trigger a flashback. It was never going to be much fun.’ Though maybe ‘flashback’ is the wrong word for half a dozen memories piled on top of each other in an inchoate mess of panic. ‘I thought…’ She looks at Michael, perched awkwardly in an armchair. ‘I thought you were my father. I… lost myself.’ No, that’s the wrong phrase. It’s more that the lab stripped away all the artifice, leaving behind the core: Isabel Ryans, her father’s daughter.
She will never stop being afraid, and she will never be anything other than his.
‘It’s okay,’ says Michael, though it clearly isn’t. Outside the lab, he’s unthreatening, nothing like her father, and it’s hard to see how she could ever have confused them.
‘In your place, I don’t think I’d have had the courage to set foot in a lab again,’ says Grace. ‘The fact that you dared tells me you’re brave.’
Not brave. Just an echo of her father, running the same tracks over and over again, tracks that lead to the same dead end.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says, staring dully into her mug. ‘It’s hopeless.’
‘It’s not hopeless,’ says Grace. ‘The missing ingredient is a setback, but the rest—’
‘And the spider venom?’ Isabel interrupts. ‘Even if we knew what species, you know how hard it is to get antivenom without a guild licence, and smugglers are slow. And that’s only one ingredient. Fuck knows how hard the rest of them are to counteract.’
Maybe if she had the formula, she’d know how much of a chance she has, how central a role the spider venom’s playing. But all she remembered was fear, and that won’t help her decode the notes she’s sure will give her the answer.
‘Well…’ Grace begins, but gives up, unable to think of anything comforting to say. She knows Isabel’s right. ‘What now?’ she asks instead.
‘Honestly?’ says Isabel. ‘I have no idea.’ And she’s so fucking tired. So ready to close her eyes and never open them again. Why does it have to be up to her to fix this? Why does she always have to save herself?
‘Then we find your father,’ says Michael, yet again. ‘He’ll know how to fix it. He might even have antidotes left over from testing.’
‘No.’ It sounds like a sob. ‘You know we can’t. Once he has me back, he’ll never let me go again. How can you not see that?’
‘You never needed him to let you go before.’
‘We don’t even know where he is!’ She slumps down on the settee, the outburst robbing her of her remaining strength. ‘How are we supposed to negotiate with a ghost?’
‘We can find him,’ says Michael stubbornly. ‘No one can hide a whole guild for long.’
‘Comma haven’t found it.’
‘Comma don’t have us.’
Grace looks at the two of them – Isabel huddled and hunched under the blanket, Michael declarative, gesticulating wildly – and says, ‘Michael, can you give us a moment?’
‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ he begins. ‘I don’t even—’
‘Fuck’s sake, Michael,’ Isabel interrupts. Even to her own ears, her voice sounds pathetically thin and weak. ‘Give us a minute, would you?’
He scowls, but leaves the room. The door slams behind him.
‘You didn’t tell me your father was missing,’ says Grace carefully, when he’s gone. ‘And what Michael said, about hiding a guild—’
‘He’s defected. That’s what I meant when I said this wasn’t Comma’s doing. Parnassiinae’s gone rogue.’
The librarian sucks in her breath. ‘I can’t imagine Comma’s very pleased about that.’
Isabel shakes her head. ‘They’re not.’
‘So if this wasn’t done on Comma orders, do you think they’d be open to negotiation?’
She pictures Ronan’s face, the implacable violence of his bargains. ‘They’ve already tried. I turned them down.’ She doesn’t mention that by decoding so many of her father’s papers, she’s a considerable way towards fulfilling the conditions of Ronan’s second deal. She doesn’t want his help and everything that comes with it – and the longer she can keep these vicious formulae out of guild hands, the better. ‘Look, Grace, I don’t know if I can do this any more. Any of this. I’m so tired.’
‘I know.’ Grace puts her mug down and sits next to Isabel. ‘Nobody would blame you for giving up.’
‘You’re saying I should?’ asks Isabel unsteadily.
‘No.’ Grace takes Isabel’s hand and squeezes it, running her thumb along the backs of Isabel’s fingers. ‘I think you have so much more to offer than what you’ve been given the chance to do so far.’
‘Do I, though?’ She has to force herself not to pull free of Grace’s grip. ‘In that lab, I…’
‘You realised how much you’ve inherited from your father, and that scared you.’
Isabel turns to look at her. ‘How did you know?’ she whispers.
There’s a moment of silence, and then Grace says, ‘My mother was Hummingbird.’ It tells Isabel everything she needs to know. Then she adds, ‘You won’t always be afraid, Isabel.’
I don’t remember how to be anything else. ‘I made this poison,’ she says. It’s the first time she’s said it aloud, and her voice shakes. ‘Me. Not him. I’m the reason this is happening – I’m exactly as bad as he is.’
‘You are not exactly as bad as he is, Isabel Ryans,’ Grace tells her. ‘You were a child, and he shaped and abused and manipulated you until you became the person you are today. And that girl still has enough humanity left in her to know she wants to be something more. The person your father tried to create is only part of who you are and only a fraction of what you’re capable of becoming.’
Isabel pulls her hand free, hugging her knees close to her chest inside the blanket. She does want to be something more, but the fight’s taking more from her than she’s got to give. ‘At least if I died, it would mean not going back to my father,’ she says.
Grace looks hard at her. ‘Do you really believe that?’ she says. ‘That dying is better than going back to him?’
There has to be another way. These can’t be her only two options. But right now, with the threat of begging Ian for help hanging over her, she’s struggling to remember why she wants to live. ‘Can you blame me?’ she says. ‘After what he did?’
‘I’m not blaming you for anything,’ says Grace. ‘I just needed to know. And if that’s truly how you feel, then I’ll respect your decision.’
‘I want…’ begins Isabel, but she has no idea how to finish that sentence. I don’t want to die. It feels more and more like a lie. Survival takes energy. Survival requires her to want it. Isabel doesn’t know how to want anything any more, except for this to be over.
Total organ failure. That part, at least, should be quick.
Grace says, ‘I can keep analysing the samples. See what else I can identify, make antidotes. If that would help.’
Partial cures, partial treatments, enough to take the edge off the blade that’s killing her, but not enough to remove it. Is that enough? No. But it’s something. ‘You’d do that?’
‘I can try.’
Isabel leans her head back against the settee. It’s so heavy; it feels like her neck will snap with the weight of it. ‘Then let’s do that,’ she says, and closes her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so tired.’
Grace tucks the blanket more closely around her. ‘Then sleep,’ she says. ‘I’ll talk to Michael, and I’m going to phone Emma.’
Isabel opens her eyes with some difficulty. ‘Why?’
‘She makes you feel better.’
The truth has always seemed like a complicated thing to Isabel, but Grace’s words are so simple. ‘Oh,’ she says, and closes her eyes again. Maybe when she wakes up, Emma will be there and everything will be okay.
* * *
Michael’s gone before Emma arrives, muttering some excuse about needing groceries. Isabel doesn’t push it. She can tell he’s prickly around Grace, uneasy about trusting a freelancer with their secrets and frustrated by his own helplessness. She can’t blame him for either.
Emma holds her hand while Grace gives her a cocktail of incomplete antidotes based on the few ingredients they’ve identified so far. It’s a fragmentary salvation that’s not enough to offset the cumulative symptoms of the fact that she’s dying, but two hours later when Grace drives her home, she’s able to stagger up the stairs, so maybe something in there worked.
She sleeps through Sunday, but on Monday, despite all logic suggesting she should stay in bed, she ignores Ashvin’s protests and the drizzling rain to limp through her paper round and drag herself to school.
Double Physics passes in a meaningless blur, equations shattering against the wall of her pain. At break, she can’t manage the stairs to the library; can hardly make it to her locker, and stands there staring into its depths like it might help her remember that she wants to live.
‘Bella,’ says a voice. Emma’s voice. She turns to see her friend, soaked to the skin. The drizzle must have given way to the downpour that was threatening. ‘Can we talk?’
Isabel glances up and down the corridor. ‘Here?’
Emma shakes her head. Her expression’s shell-shocked, her eyes bloodshot and sore, as though she’s been crying. Whatever brought her here, it’s something awful. ‘Somewhere private,’ she says, voice cracking. ‘Please?’
There’s a classroom across the hall that’s rarely used and always unlocked; Isabel’s taken illicit free-period naps in there once or twice. Inside, it’s dim with grey light, rain lashing against the windows. She closes the door and waits for Emma to speak, but her friend seems unable to find the words.
As gently as she can, Isabel asks, ‘What happened, Emma?’
And Emma says, ‘Grace Whittock’s dead.’
20 MALGAJNO (LOSS)
The world goes quiet. Numb. A little emptier than before.
Isabel leans on a desk, looking out of the window at the sodden courtyard. The rain thunders on the concrete, grey on grey like the static in her head. Water blurs the outlines of the world, smudges real and unreal until everything is stripped of meaning. Grace Whittock’s dead.
She stares at the rain until her words come back and then says, ‘What?’
‘Grace is dead.’ Emma’s boots are coated in mud, her clothes drenched. She tries to wipe her glasses on her T-shirt, but it’s too wet to make a difference. Isabel watches her with blank incomprehension, unable to fathom the steps necessary to offer help.
‘She can’t be.’
‘I saw her body, Bel.’ Emma’s voice is hoarse. She pushes her sodden hair out of her face. ‘It’s definitely her. She was… she was shot. Right through her heart.’
‘But…’ Isabel swallows her worthless objections. It doesn’t matter that it’s not fair. ‘How did you find out?’
Emma stares out at the rain too. The lights of classrooms in the building opposite aren’t enough to brighten the overcast day, the heavy charcoal clouds drawing night over the late-morning sky.
‘I was meant to be helping her transport the second year reading scheme materials. I messaged her asking if she needed help getting them to the car or if I should just meet her here, but she never answered. Grace always answers my messages,’ she adds fiercely. ‘Always. So I went over this morning and when I got there…’ She swallows. ‘Her body was on the front steps. I think they rang the doorbell and killed her when she answered.’
If Isabel was a good person, a normal person, she’d ask Emma how she is. Hug her. Hold her as she trembles, braced against a desk like it’s the only thing keeping her upright. But all Isabel can say is: ‘Who?’ Please not Comma, please not Comma, please not Comma. As if it makes a difference.
‘There was… they had…’ Emma takes out her phone and opens her camera roll, averting her eyes as she passes it to Isabel. ‘I didn’t want to take a picture, but somebody had to, somebody had to tell someone, and…’
Isabel’s seen a lot, but none of it’s prepared her for the sight of Grace’s lifeless body with a spider carved into it. It’s grotesque, the spider’s bulbous body a bloody mess on her cheek, its legs extending across her face. The bell shrills overhead and they both ignore it, the cacophony of the crowded corridors meaningless background noise to the horror of Grace’s death.
A third guild, claiming the mark of a spider. Isabel looks at the image for as long as she can, then powers off the screen. ‘Shit,’ she says. ‘My parents.’
A third guild means a power struggle. It means Comma and Hummingbird moving to eliminate the threat, regardless of the collateral damage. Michael told her it was happening, but it didn’t feel real until now. And if she had any doubt that this was her father’s idea, the spider dispels it.
Emma takes back the phone. Her hand is shaking. ‘You know,’ she says, her wavering voice undermining the light tone she’s aiming for, ‘the more I learn about your parents, the more I understand why you are the way you are.’
A killer. Her father’s monster. Just as bad as they are. ‘Well, they do say that about apples and trees.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ But Emma doesn’t clarify. She sinks down onto the floor, leaning against the wall, and hugs her knees to her chest as though trying to hold herself together.
Isabel hesitates, then sits down next to her. The words come finally, years too late. ‘Are you okay?’
Emma scrapes at the mud on her left boot with the toe of her right. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, I’m not.’
No, she’s not. Isabel feels the crushing weight of her own inadequacy and guilt. Grace was helping her and now she’s dead, and she can’t fix that. She wants to sit here on the floor until it stops being her fault.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘You didn’t do this.’
‘Somebody must have told them she was helping me. This is because of me.’
‘It isn’t.’ Emma’s voice is small but firm. ‘It’s because they’re bastards. This is on them, not you. And I hate them.’ She repeats this, louder. ‘I hate them!’
Her voice echoes in the empty classroom. Soon someone will come and find them not in lessons, and Isabel will have to tell them that Grace Whittock is dead. Which isn’t fair, because Grace Whittock shouldn’t be dead, and those shouldn’t be words she has to say.
Isabel says, ‘We should go somewhere else. Somewhere… safe.’
Emma turns to look at her, and Isabel knows what she’s seeing. She saw it herself in the mirror this morning: her too-pale face, lips sore and swollen, eyes bruised with exhaustion. She couldn’t be bothered to try to disguise it with make-up. She can hardly eat now, her throat closing up when she swallows as though every food is an enemy, but her body’s too close to shutting down to remember how to feel hunger.
Nowhere is safe from this.
‘Okay,’ says Emma. ‘Where?’
Her flat isn’t safe; Ronan found it, Michael found it, her parents could find it. Emma’s house means Toni. And school is this: Grace Whittock is dead.
‘Mortimer,’ she says.
‘Mortimer?’ repeats Emma. ‘The Woodwork teacher?’
Isabel nods. She doesn’t know what made her say it, but she doesn’t have a better idea. It’s not that she trusts Mortimer, but at least she knows for sure he isn’t guild. He’ll know what to do – who to tell about things like this, what forms to fill in so that someone can fix it. And someone can fix it, can’t they? They can fix the fact that Emma’s been crying, that she walked through a storm to get here, that she used to have Grace and now she doesn’t.
