Fearsome Dreamer (13 page)

The meeting with the Castle had started off so beautifully this time.

This time, Frith could not wait for Ghost Girl to get around the table to him. He sat twitching impatiently at each agent's report, until her eyes had finally shifted to his face.

‘Frith,' came her faded voice. ‘Your turn. I think you have something interesting for us.'

Yes. Of course they knew, didn't they. The day he found out how they knew would be a happy, happy day.

‘Yes, I do,' he said. ‘Good for me. Less so for my esteemed World colleagues, I think.'

He could swear he felt shoulders go stiff around the table, though no one moved an inch. He swallowed a shark grin.

‘I've found a new student. He's been training with us for about six weeks, and shows an unprecedented level of Talent. More than Wren, or anyone else involved in the programme. He can do things I didn't even think were possible.'

A resounding, crashing silence, which told him acres more than noise.

He looked around the table and couldn't resist. ‘Your loss, my gain,' he said.

‘Oh shut up,' Snearing hissed. ‘You gloat like a child.'

‘You were the ones who let him get away from you. I can hardly be blamed for it.'

‘What's this?' said another agent. ‘Explain.'

Snearing opened his mouth.

‘He calls himself White,' said Frith. ‘He's from World. URCI, I believe. The local secret police got wind of his abil-ities and arrested him. They tortured him for weeks, clinging to their rather silly belief that the Talented are joining forces with your Technophobe terrorists and gathering into some sort of anti-government army. You might want to do something about that, by the way,' he remarked to Snearing.

Who looked about ready to pop. God, it was easy.

‘They let him go when they couldn't find anything concrete to connect him to the Technophobes. And then they let him escape,' said Frith.

‘
Let
him, you prick?'

‘Well. You did try to get him back, so points for that. Luckily for me your police can't even manage to stop an eighteen-year-old from dancing off into the sunset.'

‘Why didn't you prevent this?' said someone else, to Snearing.

‘Oh … come
on
,' he snorted. ‘Those provincial URCI idiots wouldn't bother to tell central government if the country was on fire. I had no idea they'd arrested a Talented! By the time I found out, they had already screwed it up!'

‘Enough,' said Ghost Girl. ‘Frith. You said this boy's Talent is unprecedented.'

God, yes. You have no idea how unprecedented. And he's the only one who even understands a tenth of how it works. He's a damned goldmine. He's
my
goldmine.

‘Yes,' Frith said out loud. ‘He needs to be controlled and studied. Carefully handled.'

‘All the more reason you should give him back to us,' Snearing said. ‘You don't even have the facilities to deal with something like him!'

‘Frith is capable,' said Ghost Girl. ‘We wouldn't have chosen him otherwise. In fact, it sounds like his programme is accelerating a lot more quickly than yours.'

Snearing actually shrank in his chair.

‘Diplomatic issues,' he muttered. ‘But I have people in place everywhere now. I'm getting it approved. I'm very close to getting it approved!'

‘It must be approved in every World country by the next time we meet,' said Ghost Girl, looking around the table. ‘You're all wasting time.'

Frith watched Snearing squirm. A sublime memory – one that would sustain him for a while to come. In truth, Ghost Girl's support of him had come as a surprise. He didn't like to be surprised.

It had been a while wrapping up, this time. Some agents had moderate success stories to supply, but in the end, he had come out on top. Ghost Girl dismissed each agent by name, and one by one they disappeared. Snearing glowered at Frith as he left.

Eventually, Frith was left alone with her.

She watched him. He could practically sense her prowling around him, weighing him up.

‘What do you think of him?' she said, at last. ‘This … White.'

Frith thought. There was something in him curiously reluctant to say anything definitive about White. Anything that might increase his chances of being taken away from Frith, just when he had found him.

‘I don't know,' he said, at last. ‘He seems extraordinary. And the other students are in awe of him. He charms them, in his own strange way. And they're a little afraid of him.'

‘But what do you think of him?' Ghost Girl repeated. ‘What is he like?'

Frith cocked his head. Strange question, coming from her. She had never shown that kind of interest in his recruits before.

‘He's … lonely,' he said. ‘Closed off. Understandable, really, from what I've been able to gather of his life so far.'

She appeared to think for a moment.

‘You must keep him,' she said. ‘You must keep him within arm's reach at all times. You mustn't let him get away from you. Don't give him any kind of way out from you.'

He wanted to ask why. But he knew she wouldn't answer. He did it anyway.

‘Why is he important?' he said.

‘If he's as powerful as you say, then he is certainly important. We need him.'

Even through the mask of her black avatar eyes, he could swear she was holding something back. Not lying, exactly. Just not giving him everything. But then, that was nothing new. She never answered questions about herself, and neither did any of the other avatars. She never told him more than she had decided he needed to know.

It was beginning to grate on him.

‘We need the powerful ones,' she said finally. ‘Because It's coming. It's coming and they can stop it.'

She watched him a moment more.

He felt a gentle thrill of fear. He hated her for being able to do that to him. He hated her for bringing him this knowledge, the heart-freezing certainty that somewhere, in a stone building that seemed to represent all worlds and all things and life and matter and everything that ever was, something was trying to break free. Something that meant death.

Because It's coming.

He couldn't deny the power those words had over him. Over everyone who attended those meetings. Even now, after a predictably dull two-day journey back to Angle Tar, they still slithered in his brain at odd moments.

He was tired. He was always tired after these trips, wallowing helplessly in the repetitive nightmares that plagued him after a Castle meet. He wondered if the other agents went through the same thing.

The nightmares were always in the same place. In them he woke to find himself in a cold, gloomy stone room with four blank walls. A room in the Castle.

It had no door. No window. No way out. A horrible, urgent need to do something saturated him until he felt like he was drowning. A need to stop whatever it was prowling outside the room from getting in. Desperately scrabbling around for help, for a clue. Always nothing.

Then the despair, sliding up his back and across his shoulders and clutching at his heart.

They were hard to shake, these dreams. He would wake up, his skin dry and prickling, convinced he was still trapped there in the stone room. It took a disturbingly long time to clear the fog in his head and forcibly shift himself back to the real.

So preoccupied, he finished the last leg of his journey home, stepping down from the university coach and opening the front door to Red House.

And then he felt it.

It was early evening. Classes had finished for the day. The place should have been swarming with them: opening and shutting doors, bellowing at each other. He should have heard the echoes of raucous laughter. There were twenty so far this year – a good number. They made a lot of noise.

But as he walked through the front door, he felt it descend on him like a fog.

He made his way through the foyer, down the hallway.

Past the bedrooms, every door closed. Not a sound.

Into the dining room. Nothing.

Off to the side, into the communal study.

There, by the fireplace, sat Mussyer Tigh. In the opposite chair was a girl, hunched and still.

Tigh looked up. His face was serious.

‘Frith,' he said. ‘We've been waiting for you. They said you'd be back this afternoon.'

‘Train delays. Where is everyone?'

Silence.

‘Frith,' said Tigh again, awkwardly. ‘Something's happened.'

‘I'm aware of that,' said Frith. ‘Why don't you explain exactly what it is?'

‘It's really … I mean. It was really unexpected, I mean. If we'd known about it, of course we would have done something. It was always –'

‘
You
tell me,' Frith interrupted, pointing to the girl. It was Areline, one of this year's Talented group. The beautiful one. The shining star of the class. The one the boys loved and the girls wanted to be. Some of her loveliness had been shocked out of her now, though. Her face was puffy and blotched.

For a moment, she wouldn't speak. He could hear Tigh's intake of breath, a preparation to bluster his way through. No patience for that. Frith's anger was rising and he fought to hold it back, choking it grimly on its leash.

‘Areline,' he said, his voice soft and warm. ‘Take your time. Tell me what happened.'

‘It's Wren,' she said, her voice blurred. ‘He's gone. I think it's my fault.'

‘No, no. Don't blame yourself, child,' said Tigh. His eyes blinked to Frith mid-sentence. Frith hoped that the expression on his face was enough.

It was.

Tigh fell silent.

‘Where has he gone?' said Frith.

‘He. He left. He said he was never coming back. He took his bag and he left.'

Frith looked at Tigh.

It took a moment. His stupidity was maddening. He lumbered awkwardly out of the chair and stood to the side as Frith took it and sat down.

Frith leaned forward, his hands clasped loosely between his legs.

‘Tell me the story,' he said to Areline. Slow and soft was the way; even at the same time as a voice inside told him to shake it out of her. He ignored the voice.

‘He and White. You see. They've … they started fighting.'

Surprise. The two most Talented boys in the class. Competitive, naturally.

‘We were friends, in the beginning, the three of us. Wren really liked him. I mean … I think he did. It's because … before White, Wren was the best, I mean he could already Jump. I can't even do that. Only Wren could Jump. But then White came. And White can do things I've never even heard of. None of us have. And he's … secretive, you know?'

Frith resisted the temptation to sigh.

He knew where this was going. He could hear it in her voice every time White's name came out of her lovely, swollen little mouth.

‘Wren didn't like him, even though he pretended he did. It's obvious, really. He was jealous. And Wren and I …'

She stopped.

‘You were seeing each other,' said Frith. The kindness had gone out of his voice.

‘Yes. Well, I mean sort of. I mean, we'd gone out to dinner a few times.'

She fidgeted.

‘But then White came, and I …'

‘… wanted White more than Wren.'

‘You don't have to say it like that,' she muttered.

‘Mussyer Tigh, would you be so good as to fetch White for me? Doubtless you know where he is.'

Tigh left without a word. Frith kept his eyes on Areline, watched her gaze track Tigh to the door.

‘Areline.'

She looked back at him with an effort. ‘Um. In class today, they fought. I think Wren tried to pull him into a Jump or something. I'm not sure. It was bad. They both sort of half disappeared. It looked really odd.'

She stopped, and gulped. Her expression rippled, like she was about to vomit.

‘Really odd,' she said. ‘Gods, it was. Like they turned inside out for a moment.

And then they came back. White seemed fine. Just shocked. But Wren … he had blood all over his mouth. I think his nose had bled. White said he didn't hit him. He screamed. He
screamed
at White. He called him some things I've never even … Then he said that we were all pathetic and that he was wasting his time here, and he was going. I tried to stop him, but … he pushed me. He actually pushed me away from him.'

Her hand went to her chest. She looked close to tears.

‘We looked for him,' she said. ‘But he's gone. He used to disappear sometimes, in the evenings. He said he knew about the city's secret places. I think he's gone.'

The door opened, and Tigh walked back in, White shadowing him.

Frith stood.

‘Thank you, Areline. Tigh, be so good as to take Areline back to her room, will you?'

‘I think I should stay.'

‘There's really no need,' said Frith pleasantly.

White was watching him, his body tense. He never once looked at Areline, even when she stopped next to him on her way past and put her fingers timidly on his arm.

Once they were alone, Frith smiled at White.

‘Are you seeing Areline?' he asked.

‘No!' said White, shocked. ‘She is with Wren!'

Frith took a step forwards. White moved back. He looked ready to bolt. His eyes were dark, wary.

‘Calm down,' said Frith. ‘I'm not going to hurt you. I just want to know what happened.' Sometimes, the boy was so hard to read. He fascinated Frith because of that, like an exotic bird.

‘Areline told you, did she not?'

‘I want to hear you tell it.'

White stared at the carpet.

‘Wren doesn't like me,' he said, at last.

‘Why?'

‘Because of Areline.'

‘That's not the only reason, is it?'

White glanced at him.

‘Why else, White?' said Frith. Now we would see how self-aware the prodigy was.