The Illusionists (21 page)

Everything is everything,
he thought, incoherent.
I am everything.

It's all over.

The last thing he thought of was White's face.

His long, shining hair.

They sat in a circle in Rue's bedroom.

Livie was there. Cho said she trusted her with anything. Hackers traded in secrets, secrets were currency, and they were making Livie rich. Livie, rather than feel annoyed at all this disruption to her life, seemed eager.

White sat quietly, his hair pulled back into its customary plait. Rue was painfully aware of him. Every shift his body made, the sounds of him up close.

She paused a moment, trying to ignore their eyes on her face, trying to order her thoughts. For a while, she'd thought about how much to tell them. How much to explain and how much to keep to herself. Not lie – she couldn't do that. Just not say everything.

But that was all wrong, wasn't it? Truth was their only way out now. If people just told the truth from the beginning, things might be so different. If they thought her mad, then that was something she would have to deal with. But she had to try first. She had to give them that.

Rue looked up.

‘I'm going to say something that will make you think I'm insane,' she began, picking her way slowly across the words. ‘Some things for you, Cho and Livie, that might make you wonder what's wrong with me. But there are some things that even
you
will have trouble believing.' On the
you
she looked at White. He was gazing at her steadily.

‘Livie's a gullible jack, she'll believe anything,' said Cho, and laughed. Livie shoved her. They were nervous. It showed in their shoulders, the way they set their mouths.

You should be
, she thought.

‘There's a place we call the Castle,' she said out loud.

Her eyes flickered to White. He nodded.

‘White and I, we've both been there. But I think you can get there even if you're not Talented. You just need to be pulled there by someone who is.' She glanced at Livie.

‘S'okay,' said Cho. ‘She knows about the Talent.'

‘I have a cousin  … ' said Livie, trailing off.

Good. It had just become a little easier.

‘Think of the Castle', said Rue, ‘like a Life building. A Life building only exists in Life, right? Well, the Castle is like that. It exists somewhere, somehow – but maybe not in a way we conventionally understand. When you go there, you know that you're not in a place that behaves like normal places. It's filled with rooms. Rooms that show you your past. You could go into a room and it could be from your childhood, and you see your own memories unfold before you. Or you could go into another room and it shows you  …  it shows you the future. A future you, an older you, doing something you never remember doing before. And this place is endless, endlessly amazing. You could wander it for days, only days don't pass there the way they do in the real world. You could get lost in it. Think of all the incredible things you could see.

But you can't. Because there's something else in the Castle with you. They live there. It's their home, the in-between place of all realities. And they are enormous. And they are terrifying. And what they like absolutely best of all is eating you.'

She saw White's outline twitch in the corner of her eye. He had closed his eyes for a moment, and his face had that strange sharp, shadowed outline when someone felt sick. Cho was looking at him curiously.

‘So you run. You have to avoid them, but it's like they can smell you and they just keep coming after you. But it's okay because you can leave the Castle if you want, and they can't. You can wake up. But what if someone wanted to
open
the Castle?'

‘What does that mean?' said Livie, who looked enthralled, as if Rue were telling a particularly good story.

‘I don't really know,' said Rue, honestly. ‘All I know is that it lets them out into the real world. She wouldn't tell me much more. Just that there were hardly any humans left. That it was awful.'

‘Who wouldn't tell you?' said Cho.

Here was the really tricky part.

‘A girl from the future,' said Rue. She tried to make it sound as bland as possible, as if she were talking about some girl they all knew. In a sense, she was. But she couldn't tell them who the girl was, not yet. She just couldn't. In this airy, bright room, with the sleek trappings of technology all around them. In this kind of world, it sounded like a silly fairy tale.

‘Oh,' said Cho, amused. ‘Right.'

Livie tutted at her. ‘Hush.'

‘You're not saying you believe this, are you?' Cho rolled her eyes.

Rue watched them anxiously. It was falling down, so soon.

‘Think of it like this,' she cut in. ‘When I first learned of World, I thought it was magical. No, listen, Cho. Listen to exactly what I'm saying. I couldn't understand food units, or Life, or implants. I still don't, not really. But in the beginning all I saw was a magic box that gave me food from nothing. When I first went into Life, I saw walls come alive, and things so real I swore I could touch them, even though they're
not
real. They're just trickery projected into my brain. But I didn't know that. If you don't know how something works, if it's beyond you, you'll call it magic. D'you see?

‘I think the Castle is like that. I think the Talented are like that. They're beyond our understanding right now. So all we can see is magic. But if we knew more, we'd just call it clever technology. We'd look at a Talented's make-up  …  the things, the things they're made from  … ' She faltered and looked desperately at White.

‘Genetics,' he said.

‘Genetics. We'd look at them and point to a spot and say “there”. That's what makes someone Talented. And then everyone would know, and it wouldn't look like magic any more.'

‘Yes, all right,' said Cho. ‘I mean, I'm not saying I  …  But I understand what you mean. Just keep going.'

‘So,' Rue continued, feeling a small surge of relief. ‘This is where it gets to the part you might have trouble with.' She forced herself to look directly at White.

‘Tell me.'

‘You've met her before, the girl from the future. It's the girl who looks like a ghost.'

His face cleared, and for a moment he looked shocked.

‘Yes,' he said, fast.

‘Let me just get this all out. In the future, in her future, she says that you stay friends with Wren.'

She couldn't help it – she watched his eyes for a reaction. It was there – a flash – and then it was gone. Pain, or something. Anger.

‘You and he are great friends,' Rue said. ‘And you both want to open the Castle. I don't know why. Maybe you know, though.'

He was silent.

‘Maybe you don't know what will happen, not really. But when you open it, that's it. That's the turning point. Everything goes wrong from there. And she's trying to stop it from ever going wrong.'

Silence. All eyes were on White.

‘How?' he said.

‘She separated you. She said that only you and he together were strong enough to open the Castle.'

‘Separated us how?' he said urgently.

Rue knew what he was feeling. She knew because she'd felt it herself.

My life might not be my own. My mistakes might not be my own.

‘She helped Wren leave Angle Tar,' she said. ‘She changed the past to stop the future.'

‘So  …  it worked,' said Cho. ‘Rue, you're away from this Wren guy now. And so are you, Jacob. So you're separated.'

‘As long as you never try to open the Castle together,' Livie put in.

White's face dropped. ‘That will never happen. Never.' For a moment he looked ugly with anger. Then it faded. An uncomfortable silence followed.

Rue took a deep breath. Get it out.

‘It's not enough,' she said into the quiet.

They looked at her.

‘She said the future hasn't changed. The Castle is still open. So we haven't stopped it.'

‘So it's someone else.'

‘No,' said Rue. ‘White and Wren are the only two Talented powerful enough to open it.'

‘What if there's another one you don't know about?'

‘If there is,' said Rue, ‘we're screwed. So let's say there's not. Let's say –'

‘It's Wren,' said White abruptly.

Rue looked at him, and he glanced back at her.

‘It might be,' she said. ‘If he somehow finds a way to do it on his own.'

‘We can't take the chance. We have to find him.'

‘And talk to him,' Rue replied, firm. ‘Just talk. We have to tell him all this. We'll change his mind.'

‘You don't know him like I do. He wants to change the world. He'll do anything to get what he wants.'

‘I know him better now,' said Rue quietly.

White stared at the floor, his jaw tight.

Cho cleared her throat. ‘Look. This is a great story, but, you know, time travel? It's been disproven countless times. None of what you're talking about is possible.'

‘Possible?' said White. ‘Let's by all means talk about what's possible. What are the current Life theories on teleportation? Or dream spying? What do they say about this, Cho?'

And he disappeared.

Rue sighed.

White reappeared crouched next to Livie, who gave a whole body flinch and a breathless, strangled squeal.

Cho was on her feet. ‘Don't do that!' she shouted. ‘Don't show off just because I'm sceptical about time travel, okay? One bloody impossible thing at a time, please!'

‘White,' said Rue, her voice quiet. The effect was immediate, she was surprised to see. He looked at her, and his body relaxed.

‘Just listen,' she said to Cho, who was still prickling. ‘We just need your help, that's all. You don't have to believe in it. I'm not asking you to believe. But we can't do what we want to do on our own. We need you.'

‘For what?' said Cho.

‘We need to get to Wren. And we need to do it without anyone getting caught.'

Rue locked eyes with her, pleading.

For your brother
, she thought.
I know you love him as much as you hate him.

‘We can help you,' said Livie. She was still clutching her chest, and she looked shaken. But her eyes danced.

‘We can help.'

‘What's the matter?' said Fernie.

Frith bit into the apple she'd given him from her own tree in the back garden. The juice ran down his throat, sweet and clear-tasting.

‘Nothing,' he said, when he'd finished chewing. He had begun to learn that if Fernie wanted the answer to something, she merely waited until you gave it to her – which you inevitably did, even if you thought you'd successfully avoided it.

‘You young types have no patience,' she groused, flying around the kitchen. She was hardly ever still, either, so when she was, and her focus was on you, it was unnerving. ‘Memories are tricksy things.'

‘It's not that,' said Frith, though it partly was. He was trying not to stuff the entire apple down his throat at once. The food was so good here. He had a feeling that he'd never cared about food too much in his before-life. It certainly seemed to be making an impression on him now he had time, nothing but time, to enjoy it.

‘Then what?' said Fernie. She wiped her hands on a dish rag, watching him.

Might as well take it out and show her. She probably already knew about it. It was that kind of village. Mail, from the Capital, with the university seal on it, and for him, the exciting, tragic stranger with memory loss? He supposed everyone knew. So he fished it out of his coat pocket and waved it towards her.

‘I ain't going to read it,' she said. ‘It's your business. Tell me what you want to tell me out of it.'

Frith shrugged, placing it on the kitchen table. ‘From them,' he said simply. ‘Ordering me back to Capital. I've had enough time to sort it all out, apparently. So back to the doctors I go. Back to my old life.'

‘Is that so bad?' she said, and he glanced at her sharply. ‘P'raps you should give 'em a chance. They are doctors, after all.'

‘You were my key.'

‘Did you think coming here would just unlock it all?'

‘Why else would I remember your name, Penhallow, and the riverbank, so clearly?'

Fernie pressed her lips together. ‘It's not only me that had that name, is it?'

Frith was silent. She'd told him the bare bones of what had happened between him and Oaker, her son. She'd said it in careful tones, as if telling him might break something open, and suddenly the old him would come rearing out of his current shell, alive and snarling.

But nothing. The behaviour she'd described embarrassed him, but not much more. He couldn't remember it, so couldn't connect himself to it. The young him had sounded like an insufferable sod.

‘Well,' he said. ‘We tried telling me about that. And him. But it didn't work.' He regarded her. ‘We've tried a lot of things.'

‘And we'll keep trying,' said Fernie, firmly.

Frith merely raised a brow, cynical.

He still had holes inside him, gaping black wells that were now beginning to fill with new material, new life. There was precious little memory material to rebuild himself from, so he was using what was around him. And he was starting to feel like more than a shadow. It was a good feeling. He wasn't ready to let go of it.

‘While you're draping yerself miserably over my chairs, you could do a bit of work for me,' said Fernie.

Frith faked a put-upon look. The entire time he'd been here, in between treatments, she'd never let him rest. He was up on the roof, fixing a broken tile or two. Mending the chicken house where something had tried to get in and tangled up the wire meshing. Digging over her vegetable garden in preparation for spring planting. A hundred little things that it just hadn't occurred to him needed to happen when you owned your own things and weren't, as she put it, swaddled by servants your entire life.

She'd mocked him severely when he'd said that he had no idea how to bake bread, and sent him off to Til the baker one evening to learn. Three of the old salts from The Four Cocks who liked to occupy the downstairs bar of an evening had taken him out at the crack of dawn last weekend to go fishing in the river. Their Bretagnine accents were so thick he could barely understand them, but that was all right because they didn't talk much. He'd caught three trout, and the men had clapped him on the back and announced to the world at The Four Cocks that evening that he was ‘not bad for a poshie', which seemed to be high praise indeed. He'd got drunk with Til that night, who turned out to be a surprisingly sharp and funny sort when he let go.

It was all Fernie. He knew it. It was her ham-fisted and painfully obvious way of drawing him in slowly, tangling him up in her web like a benevolent spider, filling the emptiness until he began to forget the shape of it. What was irritating him the most was that at times he'd caught himself enjoying it.

‘I've got a visitor coming,' said Fernie. ‘The spare room needs cleaning out.'

Frith sighed. ‘Cleaning? Oh, joyful day. My absolute favourite.'

She raised a brow. ‘Get on it, and mebbe I'll make you a cake.'

‘I only clean for the lemon one. All others pale in comparison.'

‘Done.'

He stood, stretching out his back. ‘Who's coming?'

‘Oh, just a family member,' she said vaguely. ‘I ain't seen him in a while.'

‘Does this family member have a name?'

‘His name's Jason.'

She had a funny cast to her voice as she said it. He wondered what it meant. Was this Jason a bit of a black sheep? He supposed he would soon find out.

He whiled away the afternoon sweeping and scrubbing. He was aware that his contemporaries back in Capital would be horrified at how he was spending his days. He knew he should be, too. There was no intellectual fulfilment, no changing of the world. There was just the application of his body to repetitious movements while his mind did nothing much. Maybe he was supposed to feel anxious about how time slipped out from under him while he did nothing of use with it. But he couldn't. It ran away from him, a river of seconds and minutes and hours, and he sat on its banks and watched it go.

It was well into the evening when Fernie's visitor turned up. Frith heard the front door open. He'd been stretched out on the plump little couch in what he would call the parlour but Fernie referred to dismissively as the ‘sitting-about room'. She had a decent collection of books for a country woman – they weren't cheap, and some of them had rather odd bindings. His favourite was a weighty tome on the history of Bretagnine, which he had to prop open on a table to read, holding the thick-coated pages down flat with both hands.

Frith looked up from a particularly fascinating section on the noble art of deliberately wrecking ships on the coastal line to plunder their cargo – not practised any more, of course – and wondered if he should go and say hello.

He heard a man's voice in the hallway.

He gave them another twenty minutes and then decided that politeness would no longer stand for it. Marking his place carefully with the book's velvet tassel, he got up and made his way to the kitchen.

They both looked up from their seats at the table. There was a strange tension in the air – perhaps he'd been right earlier, and this Jason was a bit of a troublemaker. Fernie's expression was grave. Jason was surprisingly dressed in city fashion, with his chestnut hair cut in the latest style to rest curling on top of his collar. Perhaps he came from a well-to-do part of the family.

He was also alarmingly handsome. He had something gently exotic about him, around his dark eyes and high cheekbones.

Frith stopped short, waiting for Fernie to introduce him. But she sat silent, looking at Jason. The man stood, hesitated, shifted on his feet.

He was nervous. Which was odd.

Frith bowed to him. It seemed a silly thing to do in Fernie's kitchen – bowing was considered hilariously formal out here, as he'd found out to his cost on first arriving. But from one rich man to another, he thought.

The silence stretched on.

Frith gave a small smile. ‘My apologies,' he said. ‘I didn't mean to intrude. But I thought it ruder not to come and introduce myself.'

Jason's eyes were flickering over him, raking him from head to toe. ‘You were right,' he said at last. ‘His line is  …  shattered. It's all over the place. Although it's started to solidify again recently.'

‘Well, that's good news at least,' Fernie commented, sounding pleased. ‘I thought if we couldn't bring it back, we'd at least try to start repairing it.'

‘Excuse me?' said Frith.

Jason canted his head. ‘My apologies,' he said. ‘I was talking about your head line. Have you told him about head lines?'

‘No,' said Fernie.

‘Well, why not?' Jason said, impatience creeping into his voice. ‘You have to explain things to him, at least.'

‘Everything in its own time.'

‘Gods, Mother, I wondered how soon you'd get your favourite phrase out. I had a secret bet with myself, and I bet about two hours. It's been twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes
.' He sounded triumphant.

‘Then you lost your bet, din't you?' said Fernie.

Jason raised his eyes heavenwards.

‘Sorry,' said Frith. ‘This is your son? You never told me you had more than one.'

Fernie clasped her hands together in her lap. She looked young, suddenly – young and uncertain.

‘I didn't,' she conceded. ‘Because I only ever had one son. This is him.'

The nervousness had crept back into Jason's body. He stood stiff and fidgety, watching Frith.

‘The one that died?' said Frith. His voice was sharp. What kind of new, ridiculous treatment was this? Shock therapy?

‘The one that died,' said Fernie. ‘Only he didn't. He moved up North and took a new name. That was his choice. We thought it best to let people think he'd died.'

‘And why on earth would you do that?'

Fernie exchanged a glance with Jason.

Jason clasped his hands behind his back. He gave a short, panting kind of sigh. And then he disappeared.

Frith stared at the air where he'd been.

It wasn't like he didn't know about that. The Talent trick. It was just that the room had started to tilt on him, which was odd.

His memories were coming back.

It was the most curious sensation he'd ever felt. They sluiced through his veins, trickling into the fibres of himself. There was a rolling heaviness in his head, as if the memories had weight and he was full of their soup.

He remembered that day with Oaker at the riverbank. He remembered the exact moment when he had vanished, the golden hair on his arms curiously stiff in the hot sunlight. He remembered what he did afterwards in the village square.

He remembered meeting what he knew was a Talented girl in his university military history class, a few years later. Pretending to like her so he could get close and confirm it. Seska, her name had been. She'd thought, towards the end, that they might marry.

He'd had Oaker in his mind the day he'd gone to the Spymaster and pitched the Talented programme to him. And he remembered recruiting the first student for it.

Some things were still missing. The recent past was especially murky. There was something about a stone room, and a boy with long, black hair.

But it all seemed to be coming back. Whether he wanted it to or not.

He wasn't alone. He felt it in his shoulders.

‘I'm fairly sure I'm not usually the fainting type,' he said to the wall.

‘It was the shock of the memories coming back, I expect,' came Jason's quiet voice. ‘I can already see fewer holes in your head line.'

Frith was silent.

Jason cleared his throat. ‘You seem angry.'

‘Well, I
was
told you were dead, Oaker.' Frith turned and sat up slowly. His head pounded.

Jason was hunched on the dressing chair a few feet away. He held up a hand. ‘I go by Jason now, please. I haven't been Oaker for a long time.'

‘As you wish.'

‘Did you care?'

Frith glanced at him. ‘What?'

‘Did you care?' said Jason. ‘When you heard I was dead.'

‘I don't know how to answer that. What do you want me to say?'

‘The truth. That's all.'

‘The truth is that I don't remember how I felt. I don't remember feeling anything.'

Jason was silent.

Frith watched his profile. ‘Why did you want to be dead?' he said.

But he got no reply.

‘I suppose the silence means that it was because of me.'

‘You set up the Talented programme. It's your project, your life. Everyone knows how obsessed you are with the Talent.' Jason paused. ‘And I know I was the catalyst.'

‘Are you really trying to tell me that because you're Talented, you decided I was
so
dangerous that it was best for you to die?'

‘You'd have come back for me, as soon as you had the power to. Mama didn't want that for me.
I
did, though. I was a stupid brat. And I hated you for what you'd done. You made life unbearable for me down here, did you know that? Everyone whispering about me everywhere I went. People wouldn't serve me in shops any more. Filthy looks. I lost all my friends. Do you understand what that's like, in a place like this? Your life is over.'

‘Then I apologise,' said Frith, stiffly. ‘That's what you want, isn't it?'

And is that all you want? Or do you want to punish me?

Jason just smiled. ‘It's really strange to see you like this. You're as open as the sky. You've never been like that before. I can read people so easily. It's part of my Talent. I can see their head lines, their pasts. Sometimes what they're thinking about.' He caught Frith's stare. ‘Oh yes. Just sometimes. Are you beginning to see how valuable I would have been to you? What kind of a life would I have had if we'd kept my name alive? Even if I'd moved out of Kernow, you'd have found me eventually, with the resources you have. So the name had to die. I had to die.'