“Can’t we just rule out all the adults?” Jake said, taking hold of the piece of paper as it was passed to him.
“I’m not ruling out anything at this point. I want you to split the names between you and investigate them all. If any of their names pop, I want a Spotter on their case straight away. Speaking of which, where’s Jones?”
Sir Richard looked to me. I kept my face as straight as possible. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Well, find her and get her in here. She’s the best Spotter we’ve got. The rest of you, you know what you have to do, get to it. Oh, and Tyler. My office. Now.”
I was handed a sheet of paper as I traipsed after Sir Richard. I scanned the list of guests at the ball. And sure enough, Francesca Goodwin was there.
“Sir,” I said, following Sir Richard into his office. “Sir, I know who did this!”
“Oh yes, and who is that?”
“Francesca Goodwin AKA Frankie Anderson – the last member of Ganymede. She was at the ball two nights ago.”
“Actually, it was Mrs Goodwin that I wanted to speak to you about.”
“She’s a Forcer, Sir.”
“And what, pray, is a Forcer?” Sir Richard said, stroking his moustache.
“Someone who can make other people do what they want.”
“Really? And yet wasn’t it you who tried so hard to convince me such a power didn’t exist?” he said, with a smug twitch of his mouth.
“I was wrong. I was wrong about everything,” I said.
“Well, I’m not doubting that. And I would also like to add that you are most certainly wrong about Mrs Goodwin. I met Frankie yesterday and she struck me as a most… impressive woman. I know she was involved in Dr Lawrence’s schemes, but as your own evaluation shows,” he pointed at a file on his desk, in which I could see the report I’d emailed in, “Frankie was innocent of all knowledge of the truth behind the project and she has gone on to live a life defined by charity and philanthropy. You say yourself she’s a remarkable woman showing an excess of ‘warmth and compassion’. Are these not your words?”
“They are, sir, but–”
“But nothing. There is no way she would be involved in Ken-ze death’s or anyone else’s death for that matter. Look at her!” He held up a picture of Frankie cut out from a newspaper, shaking hands with the Prime Minister. “Does she look like a killer to you?” He threw the clipping at me and I plucked it out of the air. I straightened it out and looked at her face more clearly. That incredible smile that everyone fell for. Even me.
“But it’s her. She killed Ken-ze and I think she may have been responsible for the attack on the President. Or… or she made her children do it.”
“Ridiculous. Frankie has dedicated her life to protecting children. She’s hardly going to send us into a state of war now, is she?” He slammed over the file and threw it in the bin next to him. “If I hear that you’ve so much as looked at Frankie Goodwin you’re fired. You’re not to go anywhere near that woman or any of her children, do you understand me?” He was clutching the edge of the table so hard his knuckles had gone white. A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead and got lost in his moustache.
“I understand you perfectly.” I pulled off my Bluecoat and threw it at him. “I quit.”
“You can’t quit. I forbid it,” he bellowed as I stormed out of his office.
“Tough.”
“Well, don’t you come crawling back to us, do you understand me? And don’t expect to get a licence for Shifting. You’re on your own now, Scott Tyler.”
“Fine by me.”
I stomped to my desk, ignoring the curious looks from over the cubicles as I pounded past. I retrieved my laptop from my desk, yanking it away from the cables so hard I knocked my cup of pens over, and shoving it into my bag. The pens went rolling across the table and fell to the floor one by one.
I had some of the pieces. I just needed to fit them all together and find a way to stop Frankie. Maybe once I’d stopped her, and freed myself of her hold on me, I’d be able to undo all this crap. It was all I had to work with.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I didn’t want to go home as I was certain that would mean another lecture from Mum. I needed to be alone. And if Aubrey wasn’t going to use her place, I might as well.
I let myself in and headed straight for her living room where I knew the projector was. I’d not taken it home yet. Sometimes, when my head was a mess, it helped to look at things in a new way.
I took the poster of the fifty foot woman down off the wall and leant it against the sofa, fired up my laptop and plugged it into the projector. After a few minutes of whirring the thing came to life and an image started to form on the wall. I twisted the dial so I could see it more clearly. The picture of Charlotte Vine standing next to Ella.
There was no doubting it. It was her: the same frizzy hair in front of her face; the same frail, skeletal arms.
I returned to my computer and dragged the image to one side, then ran a new search, this time on suspicious deaths of politicians and their children. A few names of minor MPs popped up and I saved the files into a folder. I broadened the search to include business people and people of power, not really knowing what I was looking for. More names appeared. Drug overdoses, car accidents. I added them to the file. I then started looking for accidents involving famous people and their children. I had ten more names. Nothing struck me as unusual, as in Shifter unusual. And why would it? If a Shifter had been involved there would be no trace at all. The old reality would be wiped away with a single thought.
ARES could trace the presence of Shifts with the quantum sensors, down to a location and time. But they still hadn’t found a way of working out what that Shift had been or who had done it. All we had was a time stamp and a map reference on the log. There was no way Lottie or Lane would help me out, not after my dramatic exit today. If only I had access to the sensors myself.
“Hang on,” I said out loud.
I punched the address for the sensor log into the search bar. It was supposed to only be accessed by the Regulators, but bypassing the security was going to be easy. Jake had taught me a few tricks about Shifting your way around passwords.
I let my mind clear and started typing, letting all the variants just flow out of me. It didn’t take long before I was in. I made a note to tell Carl, our IT Director, to change his password. CARLSEXGOD was a bit too obvious. Once I had access, I cross-referenced the dates and times of the accidents and deaths with the sensor log. I got three matches.
A rock musician’s son had broken his leg. An MP’s niece had died when she choked on a chicken bone. And the MD of a multi-national corporation had been in a car crash with his son and daughter: only he and his daughter had survived. I then cross-checked the date Charlotte Vine had her accident. There was no registered Shift, but that wasn’t surprising. The decision to kill her had only been unmade a few days ago. I added it to the folder anyway.
I discarded all the others and focused on those four accidents, arranging the files on my screen in a patchwork pattern. The faces of smiling children placed next to images of car crashes and emergency vehicles. I launched the internet again and found a news report from that day on Ken-ze’s death and added that into the mix.
I used the mouse to move the images around on the screen, and watched as they floated across the wall in front of me. At the top was the picture of Charlotte Vine. Where it had all started. She was smiling, her arm wrapped around Ella’s shoulder. I wanted to reach out and push Ella’s hair out of her face just to prove to myself that I wasn’t going mad. But I was certain it was her. So she had killed Charlotte Vine and then Shifted her decision only a few days ago. Maybe that had been her last decision before entropy finally took over, which might explain the delay. Perhaps, when facing the thought of living with that girl’s death for the rest of her life, Ella had done the right thing? Is that why Frankie had stopped taking her to her balls? Had she been disappointed in her?
Next to Charlotte I dragged the picture of Ken-ze in his Little Guard’s uniform. I stood up and walked closer to the images. I had sensed there was a connection and now I was determined to prove it. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the strip of newspaper Sir Richard had thrown at me. In the picture Frankie had one hand resting on Kushi’s head, while the other reached out to shake the hand of the man giving her the award. Her eyes bored into mine even through the grainy black and white print. I held it up to the wall, placing it in the centre of my spider’s web of events. My arm broke the beam of the projector and the images of the children danced across my skin like glowing tattoos.
I needed something to hold the newspaper clipping in place while I thought. I looked around and saw a ball of Aubrey’s nicotine gum pressed into an otherwise empty ashtray. I grabbed it, pressed it against the back of the picture and pushed it against the wall. Then I took a step back, watching the motes of dust floating through the projector beam.
Frankie. She was the centre of all of this. Somehow. But why? And how?
Why kill people if you were only going to undo it? I looked at Frankie’s smiling face in the photograph, and of the other people around her, their hands pressed together mid-clap, like they were praying for her. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe everyone else was right and Frankie wasn’t the bad guy here. Was she really just going around saving people and I was way off the mark?
I ran my palm across the hair at the back of my neck. Whatever Frankie was doing, it felt wrong.
I remembered the look on Ella’s face when she was lying on the ground after she’d kissed me.
“I’m sorry,”
Ella had said.
“She made me do it.”
How many other things had Frankie made her kids do?
I looked back at the picture and focused on Kushi. A girl who had grown up fighting off monsters in tunnels and who was now living with a woman she thought was a queen. But maybe little Kushi was still in the clutches of a monster after all.
I looked closer at the picture, at something she was holding in her hand. It was hard to make out. At first I’d thought it was the doll she was never without. But now I could see it was a stuffed toy. A rabbit, maybe? Just like the one that had been handed to President Tsing by the little girl in the rabbit mask.
I shivered, as if someone had run an ice cube along my spine. Maybe Frankie wasn’t doing any of this herself? Maybe she was controlling her children and making them do it, in the same way she’d controlled me.
I looked at the other three events I’d found, searching for any sign that one of Frankie’s children had been there. Nothing that I could see. But that didn’t mean they hadn’t been involved. When the CEO had crashed, it had been to avoid a boy on a bike. That boy could have been one of Frankie’s kids.
She’d been running the orphanage for ten years; over two hundred kids had passed through her doors. How many Shifts had she manipulated that I would never know about? How many lives had she altered?
I squatted back down on the floor next to my laptop and started flicking through the images again, staring up at the wall as they appeared and disappeared. Near misses. Recoveries in hospital. And these were the stories that had reached the newspapers. How about all the ones that had simply been wiped clean? Erased from history?
I heard laughter from the stairwell outside and I ran to the door and opened it, hoping that Aubrey had decided to come home after all. I leaned over the railings and looked down at the floors below. It was only the man from downstairs bringing yet another woman home.
“What you staring at?” he shouted up at me.
I straightened up and went back inside, closing the door heavily behind me.
I had to forget about Aubrey. It was breaking my heart, but this was bigger than us. I needed to follow my own way now. And that meant finding out what Frankie was really up to. I had to look her in the eye and say I knew what she was doing.
I thought about going back to Pandora. But that place was like a fortress and I’d be stopped before I even got down the drive. I needed to head her off somewhere neutral. And to find that, I needed some help.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
This time I managed to block Rosalie’s slap.
“Look, I’m a pig and Aubrey’s not here and even if she was you wouldn’t tell me. We’ve been through it all before.”
“What are you on about? This is the first time I’ve seen you since Aubrey told me what you did. But you’re right about one thing. You are a pig.”
I sighed. There was no way I was going to convince her otherwise. “I need to speak to Jake.”
“Oh, come here on official ARES business, have you? I have a right mind to pull him out of the agency.”
“But I’m not with ARES any more.”
“What?” Rosalie looked genuinely shocked.
“I quit. Now, can I speak to Jake? It’s really serious. Bigger than me and Aubrey even.”
Rosalie tilted her head and considered me. “OK. He’s been punching me in the leg ever since you came in anyway.”
Rosalie stepped aside and let Jake crawl out from under the bar.
“Seriously, Sis, you’re mental,” he said, rubbing his knees clean of dust.
“Hey, Jake,” I said, his cheerful optimism infecting me a little.
He returned the smile with his usual grin. “Hey, Scott. Some show you put on today.”
“You saw that then?” I said.
“Well, heard it mostly. I think half of London heard it,” he laughed, but it was an uneasy, unsettled laugh. “You didn’t mean it, did you? About quitting?”
“I’m afraid so. If Sir Richard is just going to stand in my way, I don’t have any other choice.”
Jake chewed on the inside of his cheek. “ARES won’t be the same without you.”
“Thanks, Jake,” I said, ruffling his hair.
Rosalie slapped my hand away and flattened Jake’s hair back down. “Well,” she said. “Are you going to get to what you came here for?”