“What happened?” I ask. “Are we still near the base? What about Jack?”
I don’t care if this helicopter is a different one to the one we were in before, we can still turn it around to save Jack just as easily.
Grayson shakes his head. “It’s too late to think about him, Celes. You’ve been unconscious for hours.”
“Hours?” That one word feels like a hammer blow. If it has been hours, then it is too late. Far too late. Jack is… no, I won’t believe that he’s dead. I won’t. Not even when the certainty of it is pressing down on me like a lead weight. He’ll have found a way to survive. He has to.
Though I can’t think how he could have.
“Where are we?” I demand. “How could you just drag me away like that, Grayson?”
“I did it to keep you safe.”
I don’t want to have that argument again. Instead, I look out of the window of the helicopter, trying to get some sense of our location. The desert is gone. Instead, we seem to be travelling over countryside, interspersed with small villages and networks of twisting roads. It seems very… different, somehow.
“Where are we?” I ask again. I have to know.
“You know how you’ve always wanted to go on vacation to England?” Grayson says, and I look at him.
“You’re not serious.”
He nods. “We took a plane out here, then transferred to another helicopter for the last leg of the journey.”
“And you got an unconscious girl through customs?” I ask.
The pilot answers that one. “We have access to private airfields, ma’am. Please prepare yourself for landing; we will be at the specified coordinates soon.”
I look down, and I can’t see anything like the base the Underground has out in the desert. What I can see is some kind of private estate, with a manor house in the middle of it. It looks kind of quaint and old fashioned, except that as we get lower, I see that there are a whole bunch of aerials and satellite dishes on the roof, hidden out of sight of casual view.
Looking around, I can see that the manor house’s gardens are huge. From this high up, I can spot the small town nearby, but there are rows of trees in the way so that the whole place has a cut off look to it. There are outbuildings arranged around the main wings of the house, and I wonder if they will hide as many secrets as the hangar in the desert. It’s the kind of place that manages to be both convenient and totally secret at the same time. And yes, there’s a helicopter pad at the rear of the house, which currently stands empty, obviously awaiting our arrival.
“This is where we’re going?” I ask. It seems impossible. Far too much to spend on a secret base. But then, the one back home wouldn’t have been cheap.
Grayson nods. “This is where we’re going,” he agrees. “Celes, welcome to Location Two.”
FIVE
T
he helicopter touches down, the rotors slowing to an eventual halt while I stare at them. Their whirling is almost like a meditation, giving me something to distract my thoughts from what has happened to Jack just for a moment. They come to a halt, and the pilot moves round to open the door, letting us out onto the helipad in the middle of the grand estate we saw from above.
I get out and breathe in. The air has a different feel to it here. It’s not dry, like in the desert, and it doesn’t have the perpetual fumes that you find with a big city like New York. Instead, the air in this place is clean, and clear, with the scents of flowering plants carried on the breeze. The light’s different too. It’s gentler somehow, not harsh and glaring like it was back at the Underground’s base. Behind us, the manor stands imposingly, looking far larger from ground level, its façade perfectly preserved despite the ivy growing up one side of it. My main impression is of glass, thanks to the rows of windows on every level. Even the ground floor has French windows arranged in a line to let more light in.
It’s from one of those sets that an older man walks, leaning on a cane. As he gets closer, I see that he is probably Sebastian Cook’s age, but he looks older from a distance, thanks to the combination of the stick and his shock of white hair, which sticks up at odd angles as though he has forgotten to comb it for a few days. Even so, his posture is ramrod straight, and he’s wearing tweed, which makes him look a little like the lord of the manor, out for a stroll.
When he gets closer, he stares at me, looking me up and down with obvious recognition. But then, he would have been told I was coming. “So it is true. Sebastian has succeeded in locating you. I hadn’t thought he would be able to.”
His voice sounds almost like an exaggeration. Jack’s British accent is faint and delicious, but this man’s sounds like simply too much. It’s like the kind of accent you might hear from one of the characters in an old war movie, or something.
“You do not know how many years we have waited for this,” He says, looking around as though he expects more than just the two of us. “Where is Dr. Cook?”
It isn’t Sebastian I’m thinking of right then, but that’s a reminder that there are more people than just Jack in danger. “He’s still back at the Underground,” I say, not trusting myself to put it more directly than that. “He… couldn’t make it with us.”
“And Jack? I would have expected him to be here on such an important occasion.”
It’s all I can do to keep from crying at that moment. I manage to shake my head. Grayson seems to sense the downturn in my mood, and puts a hand on my arm.
The white-haired man seems to pick up on it too, and I get the sense that this is someone who won’t miss anything. “I shouldn’t worry about Jack too much, young lady. I trained him very well, and he was a good student. He always had the drive for work as a Fader, not to mention a knack for guessing what was going to happen. He should be well equipped to deal with any situation that crops up.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, not wanting to lose control like this in front of a stranger.
“It’s quite all right,” the man replies, and then sticks out a hand. “Now we should probably be properly introduced. I am… well, my full name is Dr. Major Sir Lionel Lancaster, and then there are enough letters to play scrabble with after that,” he smiled. “Please call me Lionel.”
“Celes,” I say, taking his hand. “Dr. Major Sir?”
“I am glad to say I have led an eventful life.”
“He worked as a British military liaison with the memory fading project,” Grayson supplies, “and then he helped to apply principles from it to create accelerated training methods for the Royal Marine Commandos, Parachute Regiment, Special Air Service, and Special Boat Service. Now he trains top Faders.”
I look over at Grayson. He comes out with the information as though it’s nothing. Something he has known all his life, yet there’s no way he should have known it.
Lionel smiles, taking Grayson’s hand. “That would make you Grayson, I assume. I received a message from Sebastian about you. His people obviously did a good job with your memories. But then, Sebastian always was a genius. It made those of us who got to observe the project simply because we happened to have a background in the sciences, feel quite jealous. And of course, he has always been a man with his heart in the right place. Unlike some.”
I wince. “The Others got him,” I say. “I’m not sure if he will be-”
“Oh, Sebastian will be fine for now,” Lionel says dismissively. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if his capture were one of the major objects of their raid.”
“So they weren’t going after me?” I ask.
“I am sure they were,” Lionel says, “but a good planner will always try to achieve a lot with a little. You are valuable, of course, but Sebastian? His wealth of knowledge is priceless. He knows the details of constructing the memory fading machine, for example, along with so many other secrets that the Others will simply
have
to keep him alive.”
I feel the faintest ray of hope then. Not just for Sebastian, but for Jack as well. “So the Others…won’t kill him?”
“Not if he is of use to them. And he will be. The Underground is no longer extant in that location, and they do not know where the machine went. Sebastian will be needed to either locate it or rebuild it.”
I have to ask. “What about Jack? What if they capture him?”
Lionel looks grave for a moment. “That is a much more difficult situation, young lady, though hopefully, Jack would not allow it to come to that.”
I can’t bring myself to say that Jack appeared to be on the verge of capture when we left. Not now. “What would happen?”
“If the Others know what he is…” he looks over at me, and it’s clear that the middle-aged Englishman knows exactly what I am “…then I’m afraid they would probably kill him out of hand.”
“And if they don’t?” I ask, trying to cling onto any scrap of hope.
“Then Jack is still a potential threat, who has killed many of their people over the years. I’m sorry to say that they might well still execute him.”
I let out a breath, and feel Grayson’s arm slip around me protectively. I know what he feels about Jack. I know he won’t care about that news, but he’s there for me. He’s there to make sure that I can still stand, even though it doesn’t feel like there’s anything left in the world for me.
“Let’s get you inside,” Lionel says. “You’re here, and you should have the chance to get your bearings before anything else happens.”
He leads the way, and I follow, not knowing what else to do. The inside of the manor house is odd. There are rooms there that don’t feel like they’ve been touched for a hundred years, while others have a very modern look to them, with plenty of glass and brushed steel mixed in with the rest of the furniture. It reminds me a lot of the apartment Jack had to blow up shortly after meeting me.
“This is an interesting place you have here,” I manage to say.
“Oh, I do my best with it,” Lionel returns. “I have to keep some of the older stuff for the look of an old English manor house, but it isn’t really to my taste.”
No, it’s Jack’s, and it’s hard to understand until I remember the comment about Lionel training him. Jack has obviously picked up a lot from the man who was once his mentor, even down to his taste in decorating.
Grayson and I follow Lionel as he shows us around the various rooms on the ground floor. They are fairly typical of what I would have expected from a manor house like this. There’s a library, a large kitchen, a gallery. It’s only when Lionel leads us down a flight of stairs that I start to realize there’s more to the place.
“This used to be a wine cellar, until we made a few alterations and… well, extended things a bit.”
That’s an understatement. The stairs lead down to a corridor almost identical to those back at the Underground’s main base. There are doors leading off it, and Lionel pushes them open as we pass. In the first, there are people working, huddled over screens as they tap away at keyboards. The second door features what appears to be a shooting range, where a couple of people are practicing with pistols. A third features a large, matted area, where a couple of Faders are going back and forth, exchanging blows and trying to throw one another. Lionel pauses there, going over to correct one of the combatants, and tripping him casually when he isn’t expecting it.
“There. Maybe now you’ll remember that this isn’t a game, young man.” He comes back and apologizes. “Sorry about that. People these days never seem to understand that there aren’t any rules in a real fight until you demonstrate it to them first hand.”
Lionel seems satisfied enough to move on then, taking us into an elevator, which leads us down to a lower floor. There, he spends several seconds getting us through voice print and retinal scan based locks, which let us into what appears to be a control room, where we are surrounded by screens. Those screens show all kinds of things, from news feeds to satellite imagery of distant locations. There are pictures of people, along with information about them, as well as graphs that make no sense without being told what they are about. There is even some footage that looks like it is being taken directly from security cameras and overhead drones.