Splintered Life (Shattered World Book 2), page 18
That time, he had been performing for anyone who might recognise that Viv wasn’t the usual sort of person to be brought into the Asylum. Now, Viv was rather certain, he was performing for the Forex men—whom, she had to presume, he didn’t wish to know anything she would be likely to tell him regarding Cora’s case.
“All right,” she said cheerfully. She said to Jasper, with the cold, clear certainty that it would be good to know how the Forex men reacted, “Things are getting pretty messy out at the Pillars: I think they might end up calling the wedding off. I’ll see what I can do to put out the fires there after lunch, but I think the um, human part of the group is getting cold feet.”
She might as well have held roadkill within reach of a dog: both of the Forex men’s eyes were immediately on her, and she could have sworn their noses were trembling. One of them opened his mouth to speak—to ask a question, she supposed—but Viv pretended that she didn’t see it.
“I’ll take Luca out with me,” she said, before anyone else could say anything.
Jasper’s eyes met hers again, and this time they were very slightly narrower in what Viv was fairly sure was either amusement or appreciation. “He’s ready to go,” he said.
When Viv turned around to approach Luca, he was already watching her closely, his eyes bright and wild and full of glee. She narrowed her own at him to warn him against being too noisy in his understanding, but he only threw her another gleeful look and rolled himself up to sit at the edge of the camp bed.
“I need lunch first,” he said.
“All right,” Viv said. She would have to find a way to get Jasper away from the Forex men—or perhaps the Forex men away from Jasper—to really get to the questions she wanted to ask him.
She could, of course, take Jasper’s words as permission to request whichever car wasn’t inclined to dodge Between at a moment’s notice on a trip out to the Pillars with Luca, as well as ask a number of other pertinent questions of Tech Support—who could, if SooAh was to be believed, be counted on to get her the answers she needed.
She was beginning to get the idea that the Forex men weren’t going to leave until the case, or the wedding, was over—and that was something that felt as though it was important to the entire business. Someone was trying to cause trouble before the wedding, and although it could just be the groom’s mother, it could equally well be a mysterious friend who didn’t appear to be connected to anyone online—or a company who had reasons to want to keep their behindkind employees away from human influences.
Luca was gleeful all the way down to the lunch room, but he didn’t seem inclined to say anything much, incriminating or otherwise, even when they got to the third floor. Viv could only think that it was a surprisingly appropriate good sense in him.
Having temporarily given up trying to order any kind of food other than what the lunch lady thought it good to serve her, Viv immediately sat down at one of the tables, leaving Luca to take a seat on the opposite side, and opened her email to write a new message to Tech Support.
What can you tell me about Forex? Specifically, where Cora is in the operation, what she does for the company, and how important she is to them? Also anything that a human who doesn’t know anything about behindkind wouldn’t know about Forex. Can you get that information? As quickly as possible? Thanks.
She had barely set her tablet down when a brief reply flashed up in the inbox. It said, Anything for a Tea House employee who says Thank You.
“Charming the computer room, are you?” Luca said, leaning his chin on his hand to read the message upside down.
The lunch lady brought them two plates at that moment, and Viv used the screen to dismiss her email inbox before Luca could see more than was good for him—or convenient for her.
“Don’t read my emails,” she said.
She didn’t think Luca heard her, because lunch was, bizarrely, French toast with flowers and caramelised orange slices. Luca gazed at his artfully lopsided pile of toast and flowers, then turned a limpid gaze on the lunch lady and said, “You’re being very nice today. Are you going to poison us?”
The lunch lady, her ruddy face as impassive as ever, reached into her pocket and produced a handful of the same tiny yellow flowers. To Luca’s evident delight, she sprinkled the handful over the top of his French toast and then left without another word.
“She’s definitely trying to poison me,” he said, pinching one of the flowers from the top of the pile and eating them. His eyes had brightened even more, which was worrying.
“What are they?” Viv asked absently, tapping her finger on the table beside the tablet to stop herself opening her email again. “I don’t recognise them.”
Luca flicked one of them in her direction, and it made a tiny trail of maple syrup across her tablet. “They’re not from around here. What were you typing about? Why did Jasper let me out?”
“Jasper wanted to give me permission to take you out to the Pillars without letting the Forex men hear too much of what’s going on.”
Luca cut a giant section of French toast and shoved it all in his mouth. Somehow, he still managed to say through that mouthful, “I know that. What is going on?”
“Sy—the friend of the bride,” began Viv. She hesitated, but Luca was too busy eating French toast to be as voluble as he might have been. “Didn’t she introduce him as—no, you weren’t there. She introduced him to Jasper as a family friend. But Tech Support looked into him for me, and said that there’s no trace of him in her personal circles except for in some of the photos from the wedding party. He’s not on social media at all—not even the kind that’s friendly to behindkind.”
“Suspicious,” agreed Luca. “That’s how I find most of my targets.”
“Pardon?”
“Even behindkind are silly about social media,” Luca said. “You’d be surprised how many Behindkind let their location slip because they wanted to make a pretty post. I can always find out a lot about my target by looking at their social media—and if they don’t have any, that tells me something, too.”
“When you say target–”
“The behindkind I kill,” agreed Luca happily. “Sometimes it’s humans, but only under very specific circumstances.”
Unpleasantly reminded of exactly why she didn’t like it when Luca began to talk more, Viv went back to her tablet and rather mechanically opened her email app again. Luca seemed happy to keep talking, but she tipped it up so that he would see only glare if he tried to see what she was looking at, and turned the sound all the way down anyway. Then she opened the video attachment that was linked to her earlier email from Tech Support.
It took her far too long to understand exactly what she was looking at, but when she did finally understand what was happening in the darkness, it gave her an even more unpleasant shock than she had had from Luca’s cheerful explanation of how he found the people he killed.
Because on the screen she could see herself and Luca, him with a knife to her throat, and herself, white and large-eyed, with a tear rolling down her cheek. Her mouth opened on the screen, and a flutter of something clear but very nearly solid seemed to form around her in an instant, thrusting Luca away from her. Viv, watching with her breath held as though she was the one about to be submerged in water, saw much more clearly than she had at the time it was happening. She saw her own mouth open again, and Luca tipping helplessly over into the bathtub and then suspended over it, something equally clear but substantial holding him up.
A small flower with one petal coated in syrup plopped down on the tablet; Viv picked it off the screen and put it on the table, then wiped her fingers on the folded napkin by her plate.
“You’re being sneaky, Viv,” said Luca, flicking another flower at her. “What are you looking at? Why won’t you let me see it?”
It hadn’t been a barrier, Viv realised, dragging the play bar back and gazing at the screen as the whole thing happened again. It had been a bubble. First around herself, and then around Luca. How had Tech Support found this video? Had Jasper seen Viv and Luca’s latest meeting in Luca’s apartment? Why had Tech Support sent her the video? Why were her words making a bubble around anyone?
A flower hit her in the nose and she absently picked it up and ate it; it tasted faintly sweet, and faintly of honeyed cashews. That reminded her that she hadn’t eaten her lunch, so Viv roused herself enough to flip the cover back over her tablet and spent the next few minutes concentrating on her French toast. She did so with such success that she was finishing just before Luca had done so, and even had a little bit of time to slip her tablet back into her pocket while he was still eating.
“You’re being sneaky,” Luca said again, reproachfully, as she did so. He tipped his plate up to drink the remaining syrup on his plate, and Viv wondered suddenly if she was going to have to deal with a sugar crash later.
“No, I’m not,” she said firmly, and stood up. She had too many questions that she couldn’t answer, and she certainly wasn’t going to expose them to Luca’s wide, disturbing gaze. “I’m just not telling you everything. There’s a lot I don’t tell you.”
“Are we going?” Luca’s face lit up again, and he stood at the other side of the table. “Wait, is there a lot you don’t tell Jasper?”
“Yes—and yes,” Viv told him. “But I’m beginning to get the feeling that he knows most of it anyway. We’d better get going—and we’re not taking Jasper’s car today.”
She would have been prepared to swear that Jasper’s car looked despondent when she and Luca walked past it to one of the other Tea House cars, but she couldn’t have said exactly how it managed to do so. Regardless, the small blue Suzuki that they drove to the Pillars got them there in just a little under an hour and a half—“You were speeding, Viv,” said Luca piously, glancing at the small digital clock in the dashboard—and it also got them there without any unplanned and unpleasant detours.
Luca, moreover, was in a very good mood, and while Viv wasn’t sure that she trusted him entirely—it would be stupid, of course, to do so—she found that she didn’t have that same underpinning of dread while in his company that she had had until last night. Somehow, inasmuch as someone as fundamentally unsteady as Luca could be, she was sure he really was sorry—and she believed that he at least thought he would not try to harm her again.
Nobody was at the Mallorca when they arrived, and a quick text to Cora gained them the information that everyone had gone down to the Pillars to swim.
“Off we go again!” said Luca happily.
He was probably, thought Viv suspiciously as she turned the car around and drove back through the orange orchard, still on a sugar high. By the time they arrived at the Pillars, however, when the car had begun to heat up surprisingly on the inside with the influx of warm, almost summer sunshine that made Viv uncomfortable in her thick cardigan, he was looking more solemn.
“I didn’t expect this,” Viv said, peeling off her cardigan and tossing it onto the car seat. She had to roll up the sleeves of her long-sleeved brown shirt, too. “Is this because they’re here? It’s going a lot deeper than it has been the last couple of days at the Mallorca.”
“This is what they do,” Luca said. He was sitting on the bonnet of the car, and there was a seriousness to his voice that nearly threw Viv off. He wasn’t looking at her; he was gazing down at the sea. “They change the natural course of things without thinking about how it’s going to affect everything else around them that isn’t able to deal with magic and sudden changes. It’s just the weather. It’s just a sunshiny day. It’s just a fresh breeze or a bit of snow or a breath of wind to sweep away the dust.”
This Luca seemed almost connected with the world in a way that Viv hadn’t seen before. She settled herself against the bonnet to gaze out at the beautiful day, and thought that the sea sparkled in a way that could only be summer. If she had the power to do it, she thought that she might make a sunshiny day here and there, too.
“It doesn’t feel any different from a normal sunny day,” she said. Even the scent of the air was as it should be—if it were summer. “Wouldn’t you do it, if you could?”
Luca’s eyes flicked over to her, almost a pale yellow in the brightness. “Maybe I can,” he said. “Maybe I just don’t. It looks pretty and it’s nice to be warm, but before you know what’s happening someone’s got a personal thunderstorm over their little patch of town because hot is pushing up against cold in one spot. Lightning can kill a person, did you know? Sometimes it doesn’t kill them, too, but it can. But they’re not to blame because all they did was meddle with the weather because they wanted a sunny day. They didn’t kill someone. The weather did it. And that’s when they’re not actively trying to cause trouble.”
“I didn’t think about that,” Viv said.
“You don’t have to,” Luca told her. “You’re not the one changing the weather because you want sunshine.”
“No,” said Viv slowly, but when Luca got up and headed closer to the edge of the cliff nearest, she took a little longer to follow.
She, too, had access to a certain amount of power, even if she currently didn’t know what to do with it or how to make it work. Luca’s words had solidified a nameless, formless, but not entirely weightless worry that had been nibbling at her mind for the last few days. She hadn’t known she could do what she had done to Luca with her voice, but now that she knew, what responsibility was laid on her?
Was it, as Jasper tried to tell her, that she should be working as hard as she could to excel in it so that she could call on it at a moment’s notice? Or was it something that was still formless and worryingly hard to grasp, that whispered to Viv that perhaps her first responsibility was to do no harm with it?
From the cliff’s edge, bare of any kind of fencing or warning, Viv heard, faintly, the sound of happy screams and people calling to one another. She narrowed her eyes against the glitter of the summery sun on the water, and thought she saw figures in the water far away, and more of them leaping from another cliff’s edge to the water far below.
“That’ll be them,” Luca said, shoving his hands into his pockets.
Viv, who was a very good swimmer and used to swim a great deal, felt as though it would be very nice to be able to swim on a day like today, even if the summer was borrowed. As they walked along the cliffside toward the distant one ahead, she couldn’t quite help the lightness of foot that came over her, or the way her cares seemed to melt away in the sun.
By the time they had drawn nearer to the cliff at which the wedding party was swimming and diving, most of the party had returned to the cliff-top for another series of dives, soaked and panting and laughing, with a few still lingering on the lower rocks on their way up. Only Sascha seemed to be dry, and it seemed as though he wouldn’t be completely dry for much longer, as a green bikini-clad Cora danced up to him and kissed him.
As they approached, Cora abandoned her fiancé and ran lightly toward the edge of the cliff once again. She dived—a golden, glittering streak of light from grassy green cliff to foamy teal sea—and disappeared into the waves far below. Shouts and a scuffle broke out nearby, and a single figure broke away from the group, sprinting back toward the cars. Sascha, it seemed, was not planning on either diving or swimming—his friends, it would seem, were equally determined that he should both dive and swim, whether or not he wanted to.
“Water behindkind,” said Luca, in a disparaging sort of way, despite the fact that by Viv’s reckoning, most of the young men who had grabbed Sascha by the arms and legs and were now carrying him back to the edge of the cliff, were his human groomsmen.
“I hope he can swim,” she said, as the groomsmen, swinging a laughing, pleading Sascha back and forth energetically by his arms and legs, heaved him out over the cliff’s edge and let him go.
“If he can’t, she can,” Luca said laconically. “Look Viv: there’s Sy. Are you going to question him? I’ll come along with you and threaten to bite him to see if he can be intimidated.”
“Is that what you usually do?” Viv asked him, amused against her own will.
“I don’t investigate things,” Luca said. “I come in after all of that’s done. I’m only useful to Jasper because of my expertise when it comes to bodies and the way things die.”
“At least we shouldn’t have to worry about anyone else dying,” Viv said.
She regretted saying so immediately: someone from the wedding party on the rocks below screamed. It was a short, warning scream, wordless. They were close enough to the wedding party now for some of the humans to have turned around and greeted them, but at the scream, everyone ran toward the edge of the cliff and craned to see what was happening.
The water by the edges of the rocky shore close by the bottom of the cliff seemed to have retreated slightly, as though the deep had drawn back from the rocks in a grimace, and a little way out, where Cora’s golden head of hair showed up, darkened by the water, the sea had begun to circle, then properly revolve—then dimpled and drew into a funnel that disappeared into darker water. Cora had already been caught up in it, but she was swimming strongly—toward Sascha, who was at the edge of it, and being towed hopelessly into orbit as well.
“Whirlpool!” said someone, sharply.
“Where are the water peeps?” asked someone else.
“Gone for ice cream!”
The water behindkind, thought Viv, taking several long steps back from the edge of the cliff and measuring the distance with her eyes, were likely to be too late. She took two more steps away for good measure, hoping that the rate of water pulling away from the shore wouldn’t prove greater than she’d assessed it at, and tossed her phone down on the ground.
She untucked her shirt and pulled it swiftly over her head, then kicked off her shoes beside her phone and took several light, running steps toward the edge of the cliff. She heard Luca’s startled, “Viv!” as she dived, and then there was the flash of blue and foam and perhaps the slither of a tentacle, and she was cleaving the water.
