“Are you sure it’s this way?” Jake spoke for the first time since we’d left the room. There was something about the way she held herself that was like hearing steel scraped down stone. Something that shivered my insides, made me want to shove my hands over my ears and at the same time hold her, pull her back from the brink she was clearly on.
I restrained myself and double-checked. The tingle was back, stronger than ever, not so much a tingle as a pulse, an aching throb. I was sure it was because we were getting nearer the source, but it was getting difficult to think. The call was getting stronger. Just sink in, it said, just lie back, twist a finger and all will be well. Fuck that, I said back. My hand was screwed enough as it was, and if I did that Amarie would end her days down here. It didn’t matter why Azama had taken her, only that he had. Now this thing had gone beyond responding because I thought I should, because of guilt, because of what I’d promised Ma about looking after Perak. This was about a little girl who might become like all those girls in the hole, like Erlat, like Jake, if I didn’t hurry up.
“Yes, I’m sure.” I’d never been more sure of anything in my life. The tingle was a thrum, a buzz in my head. I barely even needed to ask: it was a red-hot brand in my mind. “Left at the next turning.”
I knew why Jake was asking though. The path led us away from the front of the main keep, from the fancy parts where the Ministry would be holed up. We’d caught glimpses of velvet and marble and whiffs of the rich, slightly bloody hint of cooking steak. But our path led us along narrow stairways meant for servants, through cobwebs, dust and piles of dirt, past skittering rats and the debris of decades, centuries even. Away from opulence and decadence into must and disrepair. Our path led to the rear of the keep.
The throb got worse; it ran through me like Lise’s electric booby trap. I held out a hand to the wall, and received a jolt of power strong enough to send me to my knees. Strong enough to make me crave the black, make it the loudest voice in my head. Sweat popped out on my forehead and ran down my face in streams, in rivers. I wasn’t strong enough to resist the call.
An open-handed slap across the jaw rocked my head to one side and brought me back to the blurry now.
“Don’t you dare.”
I blinked up at Jake and was shocked by the hate that radiated from her.
“Don’t you dare. Not now, not when we’re this close. I need your help, and I’m getting it if I have to kick you the whole fucking way.”
I staggered to my feet and tried to will it back, to concentrate on Amarie. She was close, so close. She was depending on me. I could sink as far as I liked, just as soon as I got her back to her father. I managed a nod to Jake and we went on.
It was odd. We hadn’t met anyone on the way here, caught only brief, far-off glimpses of people scurrying about in the main halls. They knew we were coming, they must do. Azama would know I could track, from Pasha. We were close enough that I could almost touch Amarie, and yet there was no one here, no one stopping us. Even the black tide of magic that had stopped me tracking her before had vanished, dissolved like smoke. My brain was too mangled to think on it before, but now it was obvious. Azama wanted me here.
“Jake,” I whispered. “Don’t you think—”
She ignored me and took the left turn. A short corridor ended in a door with a shut grille in it.
“Jake, will you listen?” I grabbed at her arm as she went to open the door. I instantly regretted it when her elbow smacked my cheek into the wall. Namrat’s balls, she was stubborn.
“I told you not to touch me.”
“Fine, all right, just walk in there with who-knows-what waiting for us. They know we’re coming. They’re waiting for us, sure as I’m a bastard. And if they’ve got pain-mages, then just hurting them won’t work. You’ll only end up fuelling them. We have to think this through.”
I got closer to her, blocking her path and making her back up against the wall as she tried to avoid touching me. Her eyes were wild; the last part of her shell had dissolved and under it I could see nothing more than shrinking, abject fear. Maybe that was what it was about her – the fear we shared. I’ve always been afraid, every day, since I was ten and my father left me to watch Ma die.
She shoved at me, but I dug in my heels and stayed where I was. We needed to get in and get Amarie. It wouldn’t help her if we died two seconds later because Jake had lost any semblance of self-control.
“I’m done thinking,” Jake whispered. “I’ve been thinking about this too long. It’s all I ever think about. I don’t care what happens after, I don’t care if I fuel his mages. I don’t care if he blows this whole place up and me with it. Just so long as he’ll never do this again, not him and not any of his cronies. It stops. Today.” The edge of her sword appeared by my throat. “Now get the fuck out of my way.”
I didn’t move. Not an inch, not a muscle. I am not a brave man, I think we’ve established that. But this I could not allow. “No, I won’t; because I do care. I won’t let you kill yourself, and me with you, and Amarie and who knows how many girls. And Pasha, don’t you care what happens to him?”
Her eyes filled with sudden tears that she struggled not to shed. The sword slid along my skin and the first trickle of blood ran into my collar. “No. Not any more. He – no. He can rot with Namrat and I hope he does. For him I’d make an exception. Him I’d kill.”
She made to kick at my knee, but I was ready for that and swivelled out of the way, getting my neck away from the sword at the same time. It was all I could do not to draw on the magic that was pulsing through me, do something desperate. And stupid. She tried to push past me again, using her swords as a barrier to keep me away, but I wasn’t having it. Not now.
I shoved her back against the wall and leaned in, making good use of my extra height and weight. I hated myself for doing it, thinking I knew what it would do to her, but I needed her help. Above all I needed someone with a clear head because mine was full of clouds, black and tempting. Her mind might be full of remembered pain and newer anger, but she was all I had. She cringed back from me, and now the fear was because of me, and that cut me to the quick. It didn’t matter. I had to do what was necessary, no matter the cost, and at that moment I really was the bastard I always pretended to be.
“Jake, you have to listen. I need you to help me. I need you to be sensible. To be – well, the Jake you were, when I met you. In control. The last thing I need is you going off half cocked and getting us all killed. They’re waiting for us, don’t you see that? They know we’re coming, they know what we’re after, and maybe they want us to come even, and that gives them every kind of advantage. They don’t have to come looking for us any more because they know we’re coming and they want us to, so we need to be devious or we’re dead. I don’t care if you want to be dead or not, but I don’t. Pasha didn’t want that prisoner to kill you, because he loves you. So he did the only thing he could other than watch you die, and you sent him away. And I—”
I clamped my mouth shut out of instinct. These were words I hadn’t uttered to a living soul since Ma died. Part of me sneered at myself for even wanting to say them. “And I love you. I love you, fuck only knows why, and I know that you want your revenge on Azama, and I know why, and I understand. I want you to get that revenge, for it to make you happy. But I won’t let that blind me to the fact that if you go in there like this, Amarie is dead. All those girls, the ones you say you’ll do anything to help, they’ll be dead too. You may want to be dead, but they don’t, so you will pull yourself together, and you will help me.”
She shrank back, her eyes wide and searching mine for long heartbeats. I stood away, ashamed now for using her fear against her, no matter how necessary it was. But then she stood straight, pulled herself together. Her hands still trembled, but she had a solid grip on her swords – her last, only, shred of her wall – and on herself. I have never admired anyone more.
“So what are we going to do?” she asked and her voice was cool again, controlled.
I really wished I didn’t have to say this. “We’re doing nothing. I’m going to try something. You are going to stay there and make sure no one kills me while I’m gone. All right?”
Her nod was terse but determined. “All right.”
It wasn’t going to take much – power was all but dripping down the walls. The call was too strong, and I couldn’t be sure if I was trying this because it was sensible, or because I was too weak to resist. I leaned back against the wall and tried to close my poor swollen hand, and that was enough.
Amarie wasn’t alone, not any more, and they weren’t protecting her with magic either. They wanted me to know where she was, to try to get her, and they had done all along. Now they’d moved her, and she had company. Dwarf lay in a corner of the room, both his legs twisted unnaturally, his ugly-attractive face a bruised and battered mess. Lise was there too, holding Amarie on her lap and crooning a lullaby. That was a comfort to more than Amarie. So was the look on Lise’s face when she saw me.
Amarie should never have been able to see me, know I was there even, but she had, the first time I looked for her. Each time, she saw me, she heard me when I spoke. Each time, she tried to grab my hand. The first had met nothing but air, but that last time – I’d felt her touch, soft as silk. That last time, I’d thought if I could just push hard enough, stretch far enough… It shouldn’t be possible. It shouldn’t but maybe it was. I was in uncharted territory now, at least for me. Maybe Dendal would have understood what was happening with me, with my magic, but I sure as shit didn’t. Yet it didn’t matter whether I understood it, as long as I could use it. Except, of course, it could send me mad or kill me. Sometimes you just have to say screw the ever-present fear and do it, or lose every hidden particle of self-respect.
Lise stared at me as though I was a ghost, and when I looked down I could see the faint outline of my hands. I was here, almost. Here and elsewhere too, because a tiny part of my brain was back in a corridor with Jake watching me, pacing up and down, muttering to herself and holding her swords like they were the only things that were keeping her this side of sane.
I could push it, I could go deeper, I could be here with Amarie and then do it all in reverse and take her away. If I did, I’d be lost. The black was calling now, a sweet song of temptation, a blaze of lust. I wanted it like I’d never wanted anything before. I could taste it on my tongue. Maybe Amarie was the excuse. It didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that I had the power to do something, to save her, like Pasha had saved Jake, and I’d not had the guts to help. Then Lise was on her feet, her arms clasping Amarie to her, looking over my shoulder and shouting something, words I couldn’t make out. I tried to turn, but the lust, the wanting made me clumsy.
I turned straight into a smack in the face, a face that shouldn’t have felt a damn thing because it was only half there.
When I woke up, I was numb. Not just bits of me – not being able to feel the mess of my hand was a relief – but all of me. I fumbled my fingers over my cheeks and couldn’t feel them, or indeed my fingers. I tried to sit up into the blank darkness. Finally I managed it, but it was no better. I couldn’t feel what I was sitting on, not even the pressure of backside against wood. No tingle in my arms, no sensation of magic in the air. I’ve never been quite so terrified in my life. With the numbness came powerlessness. No pain, no gain. I was ordinary, I was useless. Funny how you loathe it till it’s gone and then you miss it.
The door to wherever I was banged open, letting in flickering light and two shadows in the shape of men. One of them hurried towards me, and I caught a glimpse of his face. The good Doctor Whelar, patcher-up of Perak in the Sacred Goddess Hospital and cutter-up of pigs, now with a big syringe glinting in his hand.
“Experiments worked, then,” I said. Or tried to. Not being able to feel your tongue or lips makes it hard. He seemed to get the gist though, because he blushed as he pushed the syringe in.
The other shadow came in. Pasha, looking kind of lost and dishevelled, his normally pin-neat clothes awry, his shirt buttoned up wrong, his brands clear at his wrists where he’d shoved up the sleeves, like he didn’t care who knew any more. His hair was no longer rumpled round his face but stuck out in clumps and his eyes seemed blurred, as though he looked out on a different reality. I was pretty sure I knew what he was seeing, and feeling, and it was black. “Come on.” Even his voice was distorted, muzzed at the edges. “Something to show you.”
He turned away, his feet stumbling over themselves so he didn’t so much walk as stutter with his legs, like they belonged to someone else. Whelar got his hand under my arm and helped me up. Surprising how hard it is to walk like that – my feet couldn’t work out when they’d hit the floor. When I got through the door, I forgot about numbness, forgot about magic or the call of the black and how I missed it, wanted it, craved it.
The room was vast, towering high above me, receding off into a far distance. Not into shadow though, because the place was lit up like the sun. Glow tubes, everywhere, from tiny things the size of my pinkie to great tubes five times the size of a man. Every one of them glowed with the bright, pinkish-yellow light that Upside had come to rely on. Glow powered everything Upside, from lights to carriages to the great factories of Trade. Glow had saved us from synth, from a long, slow death.
Glow was pain magic stored, and it was only now I saw, now that Glow covered every available surface in a great, shining sea of fizzing tubes, that I really believed it, and believed that mages were farming Downsiders for pain, for Glow.
I could hear them, far across the room, out of sight. A faint shout, a weak scream, and each time another tube glowed brighter, fizzed with energy, with pain. The air vibrated with it, a constant hum in the bones that even my numbness could sense. This room held enough pain to fill the world. I couldn’t seem to get my head round it.
“Pasha, what—”
“He promised me.” Pasha swayed next to me, twitching at each new scream. His voice was a low moan stretching into words. “Azama promised me he wouldn’t hurt Jake, not if I helped him. He promised. I can’t let her hurt any more. Not any more. I can hear them, in my head. All of them. He promised. They scream in my head. They pray, that this time is the last, that the Goddess will forgive them. I – I –” He blinked and his mouth opened and closed, but nothing else came out. It was enough.
He staggered away, swaying so hard I thought he had to fall, but he managed to keep upright. I wanted to be sick, to fall to my knees and throw up everything, the whole black mess inside of me. I’d been a party to this all along, everyone had, whether they knew it or not. We’d moaned about the price of Glow, that it made the older machines clunky, that Glow globes for light didn’t last long, and a hundred other things. Done what people always did, and complained when things weren’t perfect. It had never occurred to anyone just how imperfect, how sickening it was, just as long as our carriages ran, our homes were light and warm, our food was on the table. We were blind because we wanted to be, and now I couldn’t be blind any more, not with that light swarming over me.
Whelar pushed me after Pasha, out of the Glow room, away from the screams, into what looked like an office, of sorts. A desk, chairs, paperwork scattered all over. Some piping ran up one wall, making the occasional hissing grunt of badly maintained heating. Pictures on the wall: a faded one of a dark-haired man very much like Whelar grinning in his laboratory, other people, doctors or alchemists by their lab coats, patting him on the back as he held up a crude version of a Glow tube. A nicely done oil of a young woman, dark-eyed and with a hopeful look, as though all her life were spread out in front of her. Sunlight framed her face, made her ethereal and delicate, and hauntingly familiar.
“So here he is at last.” A new voice that made me look away. Azama. Still creepingly familiar, he looked different now, not the arrogant bully intent on finding his wayward daughter. The daughter who sat hunched in a chair beside him. Lise looked at me from behind a tangled fall of hair and mouthed, “I’m sorry. He made me.”
Azama smiled and nodded for all the world like this was a social occasion. I half expected him to say, “Pleased to meet you,” or something. Instead he said, “It’s been quite an effort to get you here. Didn’t expect you to go missing once you got Downside, though that brought its own little benefits. But you’re here now. The question is, what will you do?”
Jake had been right; his mouth did twist like I tasted bad. And where was Jake? I stole a glance at Pasha – no help there. Poor bastard was lost in it, and I envied him that, the expanse of my black where there is no fear, because I was full of it. Pasha’s eyes were blank and far away, a faint twitching smile on his lips as he wrenched his fingers. He didn’t seem to realise he was doing it, dislocating them, shoving them back in. New scars tangled round his hands and wrists, red scabby vines twining over his skin.
“It’s a shame about Pasha,” Azama said, and I faced him again rather than watch Pasha in his torment. “I had high hopes for him. The magic is strong, but the mind, the spirit… Weak men are little use to me. I can use him to channel into the tubes for a little while, I suppose, until his mind goes completely. Then there will be other uses for him. You don’t need much of a mind to feel pain.” He shrugged, an offhand gesture that dismissed Pasha as beneath notice. Disposable.
I didn’t like the way this was going and mangled a few words out. “Where’s Amarie?”
Azama beamed and stretched his hands expansively to encompass the Glow room outside, proud of himself. “Safe, and she’ll stay safe as long as you cooperate. Really, it’s taken far too long to get you here. You were supposed to stay in the hotel until I came. That girl should have kept you there long enough. But there, an added bonus that you helped us see that it was Jake and Pasha stealing my girls. I’ve been searching for you for quite some time, especially since Perak came to my notice again, and watching you since I found you in that office with Dendal. Oh, the Ministry knows all about him,” he said when I opened my mouth to speak. “He’s no good for us. Too soft in the head, like Pasha here. Now you, Rojan, are a very different prospect from Pasha.”
It was all too much of a whirl to process properly. “I am?”
“Oh, you are. Stronger in the head than young Pasha. Too clever to use your magic much, but powerful, very powerful; I knew that as soon as you caught Lise. That’s when I knew I had to get you down here: the strength you showed then, the power of your magic.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that wasn’t me, that power was the pulse pistol, but I clamped down on the words just in time. No sense telling him I was weaker than he thought. He’d find out soon enough, it looked like.
He seemed to misconstrue my lack of answer. “Afraid of it perhaps? I think so, but a wise man bewares what can destroy him, and that care will save him. It feels good though, doesn’t it? The flow of it in the air? The call of it in your bones?” His voice took on an odd timbre, somehow hypnotic.
The way Azama shut his eyes, the almost sexual purse of his lips, made me want to puke. The more so because he was right. It did feel good, more than good, and I wanted it back. He knew it too, because he came and stood right in front of me, eye to eye, like we were co-conspirators. The only two people who could know this thing, feel it. I still wanted to puke. Preferably on his shoes.
“We need it, Rojan. Not you and me, the city needs it, and there are so few of us capable of this. Without the Glow, what would happen? No machines, no factories, no trade. Without trade we’d starve. Almost every last ounce of food we eat comes in payment for what we make. We have little land left to farm, little way of producing our own. We grew too big on synth, trapped by the mountains that made us. The Glow is a necessary evil, I’m sure you can see that, the lesser of two terrible things. Without the Glow, it’s starve – or back to the synth. Thousands dying a cruel and needless death. And you don’t want that, do you?”
I stared at him in horror. He made it sound so necessary, so normal, when it was anything but. “So you kidnapped my niece to get me to help you?”
“How else would we have got you to come of your own free will? Besides, I wanted to see my only grandchild.”
“Your what?”
Only then I saw it, because he let me. The nose shortened, the cheeks hollowed, the voice… the voice I’d remembered long after I’d forgotten his face, etching itself into my head, showing me pictures. The face that was now, piece by piece, becoming his own again, with the talent that he’d given me. The only thing I had of him, my Minor, my talent for disguising myself. I looked up at the picture of the woman on the wall – hopeful, and I hadn’t seen her that way for decades. My mother, before she got sick, before she withered away in front of me.
I looked back again at Azama, and knew him now, and wished I didn’t. My father.
I thought back barely minutes, to when I’d used my presence to scare the crap out of Jake, used her fear against her to make her do what I wanted, because I had to. A necessary evil. Puking was becoming a real possibility. I wasn’t like him, I wouldn’t be like him. Would I?
“You had Perak shot.” It was all I could think of to say – he’d had his own son shot, for this, but at least now I knew how they’d known Perak was my brother.
“I did it all for you, Roji,” he said and I winced at the pet name, which I only remembered Ma calling me. “I did it because now you don’t need to hide any more. You can get out of that shitty little place of Dendal’s, doing shitty work for no money. You can be here with me, like you were always meant to. Perak being shot – that was a mistake, but it didn’t matter. It’s you I needed, you who were always so much like me. I knew you’d have the magic. I always knew it would be you.”
He moved forward and I had to work at not flinching back, no matter my watery muscles. He was pleading now, needing me to see, but all I could see was the sickness in his head.
“I made the Glow for you, for your mother, so no one else would die of the synth. I did it for you, Roji. And it is your free will, your choice. To help us, or not. Only if you don’t…” his gaze slid towards the poor wretched figure of Pasha, whimpering with every crack of his joints, “you might find it not so enjoyable. I’ll leave you to decide, but I know my boy. I know that you’re a part of me, that you’re strong enough in the head to know what needs to be done, what’s necessary.”
I wanted to leap up and strangle him, throttle the life out of the smug bastard, but I could barely stand up on my own. So Azama – my father, for fuck’s sake – left without me killing him, Pasha trailing behind like a slack-jawed ghost.
Lise scurried to follow, but she stopped for a bare moment to say, “He made me, he made us all. I’m sorry. I keep trying to tell him about—” Her – my, our – father’s abrupt call cut her off and she ran after him. I couldn’t help but notice the brands on her wrists, the fresh bruises on her face. Even his own daughter wasn’t safe.
No one was safe.
They left me on my own for a while, stirring it all in my head. Alone except for Whelar, who prodded at me every so often and jabbed me with the syringe when he thought his whatever-it-was had begun to wear off. I was starting to develop a serious dislike for Whelar, but was too numb to do anything about it. In fact I was pretty sure that if I tried to stand up I’d land flat on my face, the only consolation being that it wouldn’t hurt. So I thought, because that was all I had left.
None of it made much sense. My father had brought me here to help him. All those goons looking for me hadn’t been trying to kill me, but to find me. Lise had apologised, but I wasn’t sure for what. I’d caught her with the pistol, and then Amarie had been kidnapped, by my father, to bring me here. I couldn’t see how that was connected, except maybe Lise was scoping me out, maybe told him how I’d caught her and how much magic the pulse pistol shoved out. And what was Dwarf doing here, and Dench? My father, Namrat’s balls, my father. And just where the fuck was Jake?
That last question was answered by a commotion outside the door. A man screamed, briefly, before the sound cut off into a gurgle, making Whelar leap to his feet in alarm. A loud bang followed and something, a bullet perhaps, smashed into the door and ripped part of the flimsy wood away. Then a sound I knew: the buzzing throb of my pulse pistol. A body hit the door and slid down.
When the door opened, Dench was holding the pulse pistol at Jake’s head, but he didn’t need it. She was spark-out, flopped on the floor like a raggedy doll. With a word to the guards outside – “I’ll take it from here, off you go” – Dench shoved the pistol in his pocket, grabbed her swords, threw them back into the Glow room, and pulled Jake into the office, quickly cuffing her hands behind her back. Wise man – she was going to be pissed as hell when she woke up.
“Nice weapon,” Dench said when he straightened up. He dabbed at the cut along his thumb with a grubby cloth. “Bit flashy, but does the job. Dwarf’s a sodding genius.”
“You’re a pain-mage too?” I’d never even had so much as a hint of it from him.
He shrugged, offhand and casual. Not the usual Dench.
“Little bit. Not like you. Just a little something that helps me through my day. Like all the Specials.”
All this time I’d known him – damn, been friends with him, gone drinking and womanising with him – and I’d never known. Not even a sniff. I wasn’t sure what was worse – that he was a mage too and I’d not noticed, or that he was a Special. It was a hard thing to believe, especially of someone like him, who’d always seemed so dedicated to helping the victims of the crimes he investigated, who always seemed to care. One of the good guys in a world full of arseholes. Now he was just another bastard.
It was getting to the point that if the Goddess turned up in a blaze of light and glory, I wouldn’t have been too surprised.
On the floor, Jake blinked her groggy way back to consciousness. Her first action was to wriggle on to her back and aim a sodding great kick at Dench’s arse, sending him sprawling to the floor. I’d anticipated that – well, anticipated she’d be pissed off and likely to hit the closest target anyway – and used it. Whelar watched open-mouthed as Dench hit the floor and I staggered to my feet and knocked the doctor down. I’d like to say it was with a fantastic punch, but I still couldn’t feel anything, and when I stood up I fell into him. The effect was much the same – I was a fair bit bigger than him and I squashed him nicely, getting particular pleasure from the squeak he made as my elbow landed in his groin with all my weight behind it.
When I looked up, Jake had managed to get her handcuffed hands in front of her and was intent on hitting Dench with a double-fisted punch, right to the face. Dench wasn’t out yet though – he blocked the blow with one arm. The other hand scrabbled in his pocket where he’d stowed the pulse pistol.
I managed to scramble to my knees, left Dr Whelar wheezing and dry-heaving behind me, and crawled towards them. Dench threw an elbow into Jake’s face that sent her reeling on to her back, and in a heartbeat he was on her, pinning her with ease, no matter her frantic struggles. He dragged the pulse pistol out of his pocket and aimed.
My stumble unbalanced him, just for a moment but it was enough to knock him off Jake. The pulse pistol skittered across the floor, out of my reach, but Jake saw what it was and leapt after it. Not quite fast enough – Dench almost flattened her, but she got her hand round it and slid it across the floor to me. My fingers were clumsy on the handle. I almost dropped it twice, as Dench forgot about Jake and came for me, hands outstretched for the pistol.
He needn’t have worried. I pulled the trigger and all I got was a dry click. No pain, no magic, no pulse. Fuck. Then Dench was on me, his fist pounding into my face with a precise finesse I would never have believed. Of course, he’d forgotten what I had forgotten. I never felt a damn thing, but I did manage to pull off one rough, wildly inaccurate punch that got me my only bit of luck that day. He pulled away from me, avoiding the blow, straight into the path of the chair Jake was bringing down over his back.
The silence was beautiful. All that broke it was breathing – my panting, Jake’s harsh breath, Dench’s battered snore, Whelar’s almost inaudible squeak.
“The pistol,” I said when I got my breath back. “Put it in Dench’s hand.”
Jake’s frown showed a deep distrust of what I was saying, but she did it.
“Now point it at Whelar’s head.”
She grinned at that, a wild, heartbreakingly free smile that lit her up like a Glow tube. The buzz of the pistol was loud in the quiet, and Whelar slumped unconscious.
Jake rifled through Dench’s pockets and came up with the key to her cuffs. I dropped the damned thing three times trying to get them unlocked but finally we had it. So had Dench and Whelar, because we handcuffed them to the heating pipe in the corner, locking one man on each side.
Jake sat back on her haunches and gave me a thoughtful stare. “So, now what? What happened to you? You were there one minute and not the next.”
“Now what is, we’re pretty screwed. And I’m not sure. I just knew how to be somewhere else? I was going to grab Amarie and bring her back, if I could. It was worth a try. Probably would have worked too, but I think I may have gone the teensiest bit mad in the process.”
Her mouth hooked into a smile. “Then you can get us where we need to be, and no need to worry about being seen on the way.”
“There’s a slight hitch to that. Would you, um, mind helping me up?”
She only made a slight moue of disgust when she pulled on my arm, and finally I was back on my feet. A bit wobbly, because I couldn’t feel my toes for balance, but the wall helped.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“Long story. Short version: no magic. We need to get out of here, quick as we can before my father gets back. I may need you to help me walk.”
She took a shaky step back, her hand groping for a sword, a reassurance that wasn’t there any more. “Your father?”
I swore under my breath – why had I let that out? Because the very fact that it was him was still stunning my brain, I don’t doubt, but it had been a stupid thing to do. “I had no idea, I swe—”
“You bastard. I believed you, I trusted you.” Jake kept stepping back towards the door, her hands grasping uselessly at air. “You were working with him the whole time – I should have known. Not the first Upsider to try to get us, oh no, but Pasha said, he said you really believed that your niece had been kidnapped.”
“She was, I swear it.” I stumbled forward, and fell to one knee. Fuck Whelar’s experiment and my numb legs, I needed to get up, needed to stop her before she did anything stupid. “I didn’t know who by.”
“But you led him straight to us just the same. I believed you, and now you’ve killed us both, Pasha and me, and all the girls we could have got out. And Pasha, what you did to him… I – no, we – we believed you. We thought you’d help, not kill us.”
It was that last that cut me the hardest, the cruellest words I’d ever heard said to me, in a hush of a whisper, barely heard. I tried to say it wasn’t true, tried to say I wanted him dead as much as she did, but my numb lips couldn’t form the words. For once I couldn’t lie. Because, meaning to or not, I had led my father to her and Pasha, the same as if I’d pointed a big arrow over the top of them and shouted, “Hey, over here,” and he’d maybe known I’d do it. All I could say, pathetic as it was, was this. “I’m sorry. I believed me too, and I should know better.”
She staggered back into the door and fumbled it open. The look she gave me will stay with me for ever. I’d taken what little life she had left, the smallest things that meant everything to her, taken them and smashed them at her feet. Smashed her whole world, and left her reeling. Nice job, Rojan, very nice. Kiss of Death, my arse, more like Angel of Death, Namrat’s bastard love-child.
Then she was gone, out of the door and lost in the brightness of the Glow, leaving me alone. Alone and ashamed, and scared out of my wits at what was waiting for me when Azama got back.
Not half as alone as she was, not half as dead as she’d be once Azama or his goons got hold of her, and she hadn’t a hope of escaping them, not on her own. Especially as she wasn’t thinking clearly, I’d seen that.
I stumbled to the door, squinted out into light brighter than any sun, and followed her.