The Butterfly Assassin, page 28
‘There is nobody else in this city like you,’ says Ian. ‘And you’d throw that away.’
‘I’d do it again.’
He watches her for a few more seconds, until she can’t bear the weight of his gaze and has to avert her eyes. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I believe that.’
And then he steps back, and the door slams shut behind him, sealing Isabel in the cell.
35 ESKAPO (ESCAPE)
It’s impossible to know how much time has passed. Isabel lies curled up on the hard bed, trying not to think about how terrified Emma must have been, not knowing if or when anyone would come for her. She doesn’t want to think about whether Michael’s managed to get her out, in case he hasn’t.
She can’t stop thinking about that room with the scarlet door.
She suspected that her father was training children, but actually seeing them was another thing entirely. Until then, part of her didn’t know how to care, a part that was bitter and hardened and said, If I survived, why shouldn’t they? And then she locked eyes with that redheaded girl and saw, finally, what Mortimer and Daragh and Emma saw when they looked at her: a child. Nothing less, nothing more. It didn’t matter what she’d done. She deserved better.
But she can’t help anyone locked in this cell.
Isabel takes off her jacket and the stab vest underneath, then unhooks her bra, slipping it out from under her T-shirt and tugging at the seams until the underwire punches through. She rips both sides open. The wires are plastic and thicker than she’d like, but it’s better than nothing.
No noise from upstairs tells her what’s happening: whether Emma’s safe, whether the guild has arrived. She can’t tell if she’s been waiting an hour or a day, but it doesn’t matter. She saved herself the first time around. She can do it again.
The underwires make poor lockpicks. She tries not to let desperation get to her as she fumbles with the lock, until at last the final tumbler clicks into place and she twists. An alarm blares in the corridor when she kicks the door open and edges out into the hallway. She’d forgotten about the guard outside – startled out of her novel by the breach, the woman hardly has time to look up before Isabel wrenches her forward, headlong into a wall and unconsciousness.
She searches the guard for weapons, but only finds a small baton. The twist dial on the bottom suggests it’s electrified, and Isabel shoves it gratefully into her belt. It’s not a knife, but it’s better than nothing.
She thought she remembered the route they took to the cell, but the corridor twists and turns so often she begins to doubt herself. She takes any option that leads her up, and as she nears the surface, she can hear the distant sound of fighting. So Comma came, after all. Maybe she should have trusted they’d want Katipo eliminated, if she couldn’t manage trusting them to rescue her, but even that felt like a step too far without proof.
There’s a set of doors in front of her, locked fast. Either the lock’s harder than the one on her cell or her makeshift lockpicks are too mangled to be useful, because it won’t budge. Isabel kicks the door. ‘Just – fucking – open!’
‘Isabel?’ At first she thinks she’s imagining the voice on the other side of the door. ‘Isabel, is that you?’
It’s Mortimer. She feels a sob rising in her throat, threatening to choke her, and realises she never actually believed he’d come for her. She called him because she had to do something, had to know she’d tried, but the sound of his voice is as unexpected as it is welcome.
‘Yeah, it’s me,’ she says. ‘It’s Isabel.’
‘Stand back. We’ll get the door open.’
She does as she’s told, still not certain she isn’t hallucinating, and the door shudders with the impact of bullets into the hinges and lock. Her teacher pushes it open with the sound of splintering wood, a trembling torch in his hand shedding a feeble beam of light across Isabel. And behind him is Emma.
‘What are you doing here?’ Isabel demands at the sight of her. ‘Michael was supposed to get you out. You were supposed to be safe.’
‘He did,’ says Emma. ‘He got me to the medics before the guild mobilised, but then he went back to fight, and they told me Mum was with them, and I—’ She breaks off. ‘I had to do something. I said I wasn’t leaving you and I meant it.’
‘I couldn’t stop her,’ says Mortimer, shoving the gun back into his belt. She wonders where he got a gun. Where he learned to shoot. ‘Believe me, I tried.’
‘Yeah, tried to go rushing blindly in without knowing about the other entrance or where to find Isabel.’ Emma reaches out a hand. ‘Come on.’
Isabel takes it, but she still doesn’t understand what’s happening. ‘But you…’ she begins, looking at Mortimer. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Because you called me,’ he says, as if it’s simple. Maybe for him, it is. ‘And when Emma told me you were still in here, I thought you might like some help.’
Emma says, ‘There’s fighting upstairs, but if we’re quick, we can make it out the way we came in. All the attention is on the front door; nobody’s guarding the other entrance.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Isabel—’
‘You should… you should get out. Both of you. There’s something I have to do first.’
‘No fucking way,’ says Emma. ‘We came here for you.’ Now Isabel sees that she’s armed too, a sheathed knife in her belt, half hidden by her jacket. She can’t imagine Emma using it. She doesn’t want to. ‘We’re getting out of here, all of us.’
They don’t understand. This isn’t about her, this is bigger than her. She can’t walk away. ‘There are children upstairs,’ she says, voice cracking. ‘My father’s training children.’
Emma swears, but Mortimer freezes. ‘Children,’ he says, in a flat voice.
‘I can’t leave them behind. I don’t trust the guild with them.’ Ronan won’t let them go free, with whatever knowledge Katipo has put inside their heads. He’ll see them as a risk, take them into custody – at least until he knows what they’re capable of. And she won’t let him. She’s not leaving those children behind the way she was left behind.
‘Obviously not,’ says Emma. ‘But you’re not going up there alone.’
‘I wanted you safe,’ she says. ‘If I know that you’re safe, I’ll be able to—’
‘Take stupid risks and get yourself killed,’ her friend finishes. ‘I know. Which is why I’m not going anywhere.’
‘She’s right,’ says Mortimer. ‘We’re not leaving you alone, and we’re not leaving them behind. Do you know the way?’
Only if she can get back to the main staircase, and from the sound of it, that’s where the fighting is. ‘We have to get upstairs. There’ll be a back way, a fire escape or something.’
‘We passed some stairs on the way in,’ says Emma. ‘We took the door they brought me in – it’s in the next house over, but the corridors join up.’
‘Then let’s go.’
Isabel goes first, Emma close behind. Mortimer takes the rear, one hand resting on his gun. She can tell he doesn’t want to use it, which only adds to her questions about where it came from. They take several wrong turns through the labyrinthine corridors of the converted terrace, some leading to dead ends and stairs that go nowhere, others where the sound of fighting is louder and they have to double back before they end up stumbling into the violence.
Finally, they reach the second floor corridor, and the scarlet door.
Isabel was afraid it would be locked, but when she tries the handle, it gives easily. She peers inside, one hand out to keep Emma and Mortimer behind her. The room is far larger than she’d realised before, the main space branching off into at least three other rooms. It’s practically a self-contained complex, and she wonders how long it’s been since the children left this suite. There’s no sign of them now. The main hall is dimly lit by a few windows of clouded glass, and in the gloom she can make out the clutter of hastily abandoned tasks. Isabel’s heart sinks. Combined with the open door, it looks a lot like the children have been taken already.
Or maybe they’re doing as they’ve been told and keeping out of sight.
She takes a few steps forward, Emma and Mortimer close on her heels. ‘The other rooms,’ she whispers. ‘We need to search them.’
Mortimer nods, moving towards the left-hand door. Emma shivers and moves closer to Isabel. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’
It gives Isabel the creeps too. It’s unsettling how closely it resembles some of the Cocoon facilities, to the point where reality threatens to merge into flashback. Only Emma at her side tells her for sure that this is now, not then.
It’s too quiet, she thinks. The room must be soundproofed, because she can’t hear the fighting at all. Unless it’s over already, and they’ve won. They’re going to win, right? The combined forces of Comma and Hummingbird should be enough to defeat a tiny upstart guild who didn’t know they were coming.
Unless they did. Just like they knew Isabel survived, or that she would go to Gauntlet Drive, or that Grace was helping her.
Maybe Katipo has been one step ahead all along.
But if that’s the case, it ends now. She catches Emma’s eye and indicates for her to take the right-hand door, then focuses her attention on the middle door. Like the others, it isn’t locked. Inside is a dormitory lined with sturdy bunks, with a desk and small locker for each pair of beds. On the far side of the room are two doors that must lead to toilet facilities. For completeness’ sake, Isabel checks them, but the cubicles are empty.
She emerges into the main room just as Mortimer does. ‘Anything?’ she asks, gesturing towards the room he came from. He shakes his head, and they both look at the right-hand door, from which Emma has yet to emerge.
Isabel loosens the baton in her belt, and they move towards the final room.
It’s a laboratory.
The only natural light struggles through a small, high window covered with a grille, but even in the gloom Isabel’s breath catches at the sight of the rows of workbenches. They’re littered with abandoned experiments, beakers still half full and notes unfiled, like they’ve interrupted a training exercise. The glass vials glint in the half-light.
And she knows this room. She’s walked it a thousand times in her nightmares. It’s a perfect copy of her father’s lab, which means there’ll be a whiteboard on the far wall…
There it is, complete with the remnants of a formula scrawled in childish handwriting. But Isabel has eyes only for what’s in front of it.
Emma. She’s hunched on a plastic chair, and behind her, half concealed by the poor light, is a figure in dark clothes, a gun in their hands, its barrel pressed against the back of her head.
No.
Isabel’s feet have taken root in the grey linoleum, like this really is another nightmare. She can’t move, can’t speak, powerless in the face of Emma’s wide, terrified eyes. This wasn’t meant to happen. It wasn’t meant to end like this.
The figure with the gun might as well be a shadow, until they speak.
‘I told Ian you’d come back for the children, given the chance,’ he says. ‘You’re very predictable sometimes.’
She would recognise his voice anywhere.
Not a shadow, not a stranger.
Michael.
36 MALESPERO (DESPAIR)
Understanding comes only slowly, Isabel’s brain refusing to join the dots between Michael and his words and the gun to Emma’s head. She takes an involuntary step forward, as though it’ll make sense if she can see him clearly.
He presses the gun into Emma’s scalp hard enough to make her gasp. ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, little Moth. Stay right where you are.’
‘Michael,’ she says stupidly. ‘Why are you…’
And finally it clicks.
He was never really on her side. He wasn’t abandoned – he was her parents’ creature all along. That’s how they knew she survived, not because of Oliver. That’s how they knew she’d be at Gauntlet Drive that day. And that’s how they knew where to find—
Grace. A numbness is spreading through her chest.
‘You killed Grace,’ she says, and sees Emma flinch. ‘Didn’t you?’
Michael steps around Emma’s chair, keeping his gun trained on her. It brings him out of the darkest shadows, and she sees new bruises blossoming down one side of his face. All trace of sympathy in his eyes has been replaced with steely resolve.
‘Yes.’ He doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed. He killed Grace. Killed her and then had the nerve to pretend it mattered to him, to encourage Isabel’s desire for revenge. Weeks of play-acting, twisting the knife a little deeper into her back.
She should have known he didn’t have it in him to run, but she’d wanted to believe he was on her side. Maybe because she needed her parents not to have corrupted him – needed to know they could get out, both of them. Fellow survivors.
But it was a lie. All of it. The way he fed her mashed potato when she was dying, their games of cards, all his concern for Emma – lies on lies on lies, from the moment he turned up at her door.
And now he has a gun to her best friend’s head.
Isabel stays very still, trying not to provoke him. ‘Where are the children?’
Michael jerks his head towards a door in the corner. ‘Out of the way.’
In her father’s lab, that was the storeroom. No reason to assume it’s any different here. She can’t get past Michael to get to them, nor can Mortimer, so she says, ‘Okay. Let’s talk about this. Please put the gun down.’
His mouth twists. ‘Give me one good reason.’
‘Because if you fire that in here, the whole place could go up.’ Fuck knows what manner of chemicals are in these cupboards and what damage they’d do if a gunshot went astray. The gas supply alone could blow them all into oblivion.
Michael wavers, but doesn’t lower the weapon. ‘I said a good reason.’
Her words have deserted her, right when she needs them most. She swallows. Looks at Emma. Looks back at Michael, and says, ‘Because I’m your friend.’
‘Grow up, Isabel,’ he says. ‘People like us don’t have friends.’
But if that was true, he wouldn’t be standing here with a gun to Emma’s head, because Emma wouldn’t have come back for her. ‘That doesn’t have to be the case.’
‘Really? You think Nick Larrington would agree?’
In a voice taut with fear, Emma asks, ‘What happened to Nick?’
Michael’s laugh is hollow. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘you don’t know.’ He looks at Isabel as though expecting her to beg him not to say anything, but she doesn’t. She won’t tell him to lie to them. Not about this, not after everything. So with a vicious kind of triumph in his voice, he says, ‘Isabel killed him.’ He leans close to Emma as he speaks, and she flinches away. ‘Along with a sixteen-year-old boy. But at least they were paying her for that one.’
Isabel feels Mortimer stiffen beside her, sees the pain in Emma’s face. ‘No,’ says her friend. ‘No, she wouldn’t do—’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Isabel. It might as well be a confession.
Michael’s smile widens. ‘Still think she’s going to save you?’ he says to Emma, tracing her cheekbone with his gun. ‘Still believe your life matters to her?’
Isabel can’t look at Emma’s face crumpling. She meets Michael’s gaze instead. ‘I always thought we were alike,’ she says, and has the tiniest satisfaction of seeing his surprise.
‘Alike?’
‘My father’s using you, and he doesn’t give a shit if you get hurt in the process. Just like me.’ She eyes the bruises on his face. ‘Let me guess. Gauntlet Drive?’ He’s silent, but his expression tightens just enough that she knows she’s right. ‘Yeah, I can’t imagine he was thrilled you got his agents shot, even before you handed me back to Comma. I assume that part was unintentional.’
‘Judith told me to keep you alive,’ he spits. ‘You wouldn’t have made it here. The Sunshine Project was the only option.’ He adds, resentfully, ‘I didn’t know about Daragh.’
‘Oh, so you’re taking orders from Judith too?’ Of course he is. ‘Well, I’m glad somebody gave a shit whether I survived. But you really did sell out to—’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he interrupts. ‘Don’t you get it? None of that matters.’
It does. It matters because Michael’s pointing a gun at Emma and she has to believe she can convince him to put it down. ‘We deserved better, Michael,’ she says. ‘Both of us. What Cocoon did to us, what my parents did to us, was fucked up.’
He huffs a wry laugh. ‘You think I need you to tell me that?’
‘But you’ll let my father do it all again?’ She gestures to the door in the corner. ‘Those kids deserve better too. All of them.’
His finger tightens on the trigger and Emma squeezes her eyes shut, but he doesn’t shoot. ‘If you’re trying to appeal to my better nature, you should know that I don’t have one.’
‘I know.’ Keep him talking. It’s barely half a plan, but it’s all she’s got. ‘Only a bastard cheats at cards the way you do.’
This time his laugh is real, pulled from him by surprise more than humour. ‘I don’t need to cheat to win against you, Isabel, but I guess you never could accept when you’re beaten.’
‘No,’ says Isabel. ‘I can’t.’
Their gazes lock. His grey eyes are as emotive as pebbles as they hold hers, and she hardly dares blink in case he takes it as a victory.
And in those few seconds when his attention is on Isabel, Emma moves. She kicks away the chair, ducks below the barrel of Michael’s gun, and thrusts her knife into his thigh, messy and untrained and painful as fuck.
Isabel sees her chance. She yanks the baton from her belt and twists the dial up as high as it can go before slamming it against Michael’s side. He screams and drops the gun.
‘Go!’ she yells at Mortimer; Emma’s already stumbling towards the door in the corner, despite her bloodied hands and look of shock. ‘Get the children out, get them…’
