The Illusionists (24 page)

‘You'll never find it on your own,' said White. ‘You need us to track it down.'

‘Work with me, then.'

‘No.'

It was Greta's turn to snap. ‘You don't have a choice! Or are you going to leave here without your sister?'

‘You can't detain me,' said Cho. Rue was gratified to hear some of the old fire back in her voice. ‘I haven't done anything wrong. None of us has.'

Greta laughed. ‘You really want to go there? It would be the easiest thing in the world to have you arrested, Cho. Do you know how thick my file is on you? Did you think you could have secret meetings and hang around with Technophobes and display an astonishing proficiency for hacking without
someone
taking notice?'

‘So you'll arrest her anyway,' said White. ‘It sounds like you have enough evidence to do it. In which case it doesn't matter what I do, does it? Come on, Rue, let's go.'

‘Wait.'

Greta paused. She sounded tired.

She doesn't know how to deal with this,
Rue realised.
She doesn't know what to do.

‘Propose your terms,' she said. ‘Come on, hurry up before I change my mind.'

‘You let us go,' said White. ‘All four of us. We walk out of here. You send Cho a Life message if you need to talk to us. We're going to go and clean up your mess.'

‘
My
mess?'

White's whole body was stiff. He was angry.

Very, very angry.

Rue felt her fear trickle back into her, filling her up.

‘Yes,' said White. ‘Your mess. Wren didn't open the Castle on his own. He
couldn't.
So you did something, didn't you? Something to accelerate his Talent. You just couldn't stop fucking tinkering, could you? Always picking us apart, trying to know. Trying to control. And due to the fact that I've mentioned it twice now and you haven't even blinked, I'm guessing you know all about the Castle. And that means you know what's inside Wren's body. What you helped let loose.'

Silence from the wall panel.

‘Fine,' said Greta. ‘You can leave. But if you want to disappear on me, Jacob, please remember that I can have your sister picked up any time I like. And if you would rather she didn't go to prison, then when this is finished, you'll come back.'

‘I understand.'

‘I'm sure you do. I'll be in touch. Let's see who finds Wren first.'

‘This isn't a game,' said Rue, disgusted.

‘No, it isn't,' said Greta, and her voice had regained its hard edge. ‘Wait for the police. They'll take you home.'

Silence.

It all went past in a blur.

The police came. Everyone came. Greta instructed. Her security clearance was obviously sky high – everyone obeyed her without question.

There was no panic. There should have been panic. People milled, talking, ordering, organising. The four of them were taken into the corridor and made to sit on the chairs there. Questions were asked. Rue couldn't even remember what was said. How much had she told them? The woman questioning her kept giving her careful eyes, the kind of eyes you made when you thought the person in front of you was brittle, breakable. Crazy, or traumatised, or maybe both.

It was loose inside Wren. It was loose in the world. It could be anywhere.

Questions crowded in her head, blotting out everything around her. What was it doing? What did it want?

How?

How?

How
had it happened?

The sound of a snapping neck kept echoing in her head.

Eventually, they were taken outside and bundled into a police transport. It should have been exciting – Rue had never ridden in such a thing before. The vehicle hummed along, whipping the grey scenery past her window. All four of them huddled into the back together.

She hadn't even noticed how silent they all were until Livie spoke. Her voice was hoarse, like she'd been talking, or crying, a lot. Probably both.

‘Can you all do that? What he did?'

‘No,' said White. ‘He was being pushed to the extreme. The thing inside him. Pushing his strength. I'd be surprised if it could keep that up. It's still got to work inside a body, after all. Bodies have limits.'

‘You're talking as if  …  as if he wasn't a he. That was a human being. That was a guy. Your friend. Your friend, you said.'

It was
friend
that did it. It was too much. Rue burst into tears. Great, painful tears that squeezed out of her eyes like rocks and hurt her chest.

Wren,
she wailed in her head.

‘I'm sorry,' she heard Livie say, astonished. ‘I didn't mean to  … '

‘He's  …  dead  …  isn't he?' she managed, in between hiccuping sobs. ‘We can't  …  get him back. It  …  killed him.'

White didn't reply. She looked up. She didn't want anyone seeing her with these horrible scrunched-up eyes, this red face – especially not White. But she had to know if he thought so too. If he thought so too, then it was true.

Her heart quailed. White had bowed his head, and his eyes were hidden from her. She could see tears slipping down his nose.

He nodded. He couldn't trust himself to speak.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Wren. I shouldn't have run away. I should have stayed and made you tell me everything you thought, everything inside you that made you look at the world and want to punish it like that. I should have tried. I left you all alone.

As soon as she thought it, she knew it was true. And she knew that White was thinking the same thing.

‘I thought you hated him,' said Cho, in a cautious, frightened murmur. Rue wondered if she'd ever seen her brother cry before.

‘I failed him,' White muttered. His voice was tight, wavery.

‘We failed him,' Rue said.

White held out his hand, head still bowed. Rue took it in hers, and they rode the rest of the journey in silence.

It was too late to turn back. Jason had heard him approach, feet snapping over twigs.

His head turned, showing Frith his profile, hair curls shifting against his collar. The sky was moody, but the clouds hadn't broken. Not yet.

Frith paused.

The riverbank looked different every time he came back here. It was less familiar, too. The picture he'd carried in his head of a riverbank from years ago had faded, replaced by the shifting nature of the real version, the smell and sight and sound of it.

‘I thought maybe you'd gone back to Capital already,' said Jason, over his shoulder.

It had been two days since the night he'd stormed out of Fernie's cottage. No one had come for him. He'd sat in the inn, brooding, picking over the ceaseless flow of memories that now trickled into his head. Writing letters of his return to the Spymaster, and then throwing them away, unsent. Eating alone. He'd packed all his belongings up, twice nearly sending for a carriage to take him to the train station.

He didn't quite know what stopped him. Only that he couldn't let go of this place. Nor could he let go of the curiosity that was Jason. Not quite yet. He needed to know what Jason wanted from him. There had to be an agenda there. Everyone had an agenda.

Frith hadn't really expected for him just to be there at the riverbank. A part of him had hoped, perhaps.

Yet here he was.

Frith approached, stepping carefully down to where Jason sat with his arms on his knees and settling a few feet away.

‘How long have you been here?' he said.

Jason shrugged. ‘Since yesterday morning. I stayed until it started to get dark. Then I came back this morning, just after breakfast. Until now.'

‘Why on earth would you do that?'

‘I made you wait for me here, for hours, once. It seemed only fitting that I wait for you.'

What an insanely illogical thing to do. It made his heart kick.

‘This isn't a poem, Jason,' said Frith.

‘I know. It's not as neat. You might still leave.'

What was he doing? Why was he so raw all the time, pushing his soul forward in Frith's face as if to say, ‘here, read me'?

Frith threw his hands up. ‘I don't understand what you want from me.'

‘I just  …  I just want to help you.'

‘Why?
Why?
I made you pretend you were dead. But instead of staying away and having whatever kind of life you wanted, you come to Capital. You deliberately pursue a career that brings you within my line of sight. Why?'

Jason didn't answer. He was infuriating.

They sat in silence for a moment. The sound of the river came back to Frith. For some reason he couldn't fathom, the noise put him on edge. He felt danger, but a quiet danger that he didn't know how to fight.

‘How are the memories?' said Jason, suddenly.

Frith rubbed his face. He'd barely slept last night. ‘Still coming. With or without my consent.'

‘What are you so afraid of?'

Frith's first instinct was to lie, but he fought against it. Had that always been his first instinct? Who was the real him?

‘That I'll be who I used to be,' he said. ‘And I have no control over that.'

‘That's just not possible.'

‘So you've met someone in my situation before?' said Frith, drily.

‘Do you really believe that you're simply the sum of what you remember?'

Frith looked out across the water. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘How can you not be? Experiences make a person. Take those experiences away and you're left with just a shell. I know this. I've
been
this.'

‘Well, you just said it yourself – experiences shape you. So now you're getting your memories back, you'd be those  … 
plus
what you are now. You'll be a different person to before, Frith.'

It was a really odd sensation to hear his name on Jason's tongue. That Bretagnine accent he'd obviously tried so hard to shed  …  and it sounded like he'd succeeded until coming back here. Surrounded by the trappings of his old life, it came out every so often, soft and rounded. Old lives were hard to shake.

But not impossible, maybe.

‘Shall I tell you what I saw in your head line that first night?' Jason said, stealing a glance at him. He had a serious look on his face. Frith still had no idea what a head line was, but he shrugged acquiescence.

‘I saw a big hole where I used to be. And smaller holes, dotted throughout. Any connection to me, or to Talent, I think. It was all wiped, like a chain reaction that started off with the memory of that day, here, between us.'

‘Can you see what happened to me to cause it?'

‘No. I only see the absence. If you don't remember, I can't see it. But you may, in time. Or you may not. Trauma does funny things to people.'

Frith sighed, releasing a weight he hadn't realised he'd been holding. Maybe it would come back in the dead of some awful night, springing into him fully formed. He had no idea whether he really wanted to know what had happened.

‘It was a giant hole,' said Jason. ‘Where I used to be in your head line. It really surprised me when I first saw it.'

‘Why?'

‘I thought you'd forgotten all about me. That I was just some dim, distant childhood memory you were barely even conscious of. But apparently not.'

Frith looked away. His heart thrummed.

‘If you could see my head line,' said Jason, staring out across the river, ‘you'd see a big weight around that memory. And you'd see my life arranged around it, everything pulled towards it. I didn't want it to be like that at first. I just wanted to forget you. But I couldn't. So then I thought I'd find you again, as an adult, just have a look. And maybe that would remove all the mystery, the way I'd built you up in my head. I'd see you as just some man, and then I could dismiss you, and everything would be fine.'

Frith stared at the grass as hard as he could. The problem with Jason was that he kept telling Frith things that he both did and didn't want to hear. It was like being pulled apart.

Jason picked up a little stone and turned it over in his hands. His skin had a pale gold cast to it, fingers long and nimble.

‘But it wasn't fine,' he said. ‘I found out how powerful you were. Still. I found out that you'd become obsessed with Talented. I wondered if it was anything to do with me. I just  …  See, I think we're linked, whether we like it or not. I started something that day, here. And now I have to finish it. For both our sakes.'

‘What does that mean, Jason?' said Frith, wary.

Jason looked away. ‘You don't trust me,' he said.

‘I don't trust any Talented. Anyone with that much power is inherently mistrustful.'

‘Then we're equal again. By your logic I should be at least as mistrustful of you.'

Fernie's words flashed into Frith's mind: ‘I just gave you my son's biggest secret. I'm trusting you.'

‘Perhaps you should be,' he said, looking squarely into Jason's face. ‘If there's one thing I understand about myself now, it's that I'm not a nice person, Jason. I never have been.'

He expected Jason to respond with optimism. Something tedious like, ‘Oh, you are, you just don't know it yet.'

But instead Jason replied, simply, ‘Neither am I.'

Frith felt a chill walk down his spine.

It was not altogether unpleasant.

And then the latest in a long line of ‘odd things that Jason does' happened, because he saw Jason's eyes flick down to his mouth.

They stopped there too long.

Then Jason looked away, across the river.

‘Neither am I,' he repeated, as if to himself. ‘Come on.' He stood, brushing his trousers off.

‘Where?'

‘I'm hungry. It's time for lunch.'

Frith watched him walk away. There was a choice now. There was always a choice. Which one was the right one?

‘Are you coming?' said Jason, as he turned amid the trees.

Frith didn't think. He got up and followed.