The apartment had an overwhelming smell of something. A mix of cleaning solution and something else, something that struck her as bodily. Vomit, maybe, or urine. Something animalistic, like there had always been a herd of cats living here alone.
It hadn’t been emptied yet, not entirely. There were two large piles of books that looked both unreadable and unsellable; if there were valuables here at any point, they’d already been removed. The unit itself had been paid for, said the chatty real estate agent (made chattier, of course, at Parisa’s behest), by an unknown source, in cash, every month without fail.
Until recently.
Parisa walked through the living room, noticing the broken blinds, the dust from an attempted renovation on the sills. The windows looked sealed shut. The grime on the walls looked like someone had tried to remove it and then given up, deciding to strip the wallpaper before getting called away to some other task—the kitchen, most likely. Parisa meandered through trash bags full of unknowable contents. Not food, but when she nudged one with her foot, she heard glass. Bottles. Dozens of them.
“Bit of a lush, the old tenant,” said the agent’s harried voice behind her, an attempted humor to the sound of his panic. “But the property’s lovely and the floors are original Victorian, just in need of a little shine, that’s all—”
Architecturally, the building was almost unnoticeable; residential flats above a series of little one-stall ethnic markets, a pawn shop, a pharmacy, a new and effortfully trendy gastropub. There were older townhouses nearby, the area not completely outside the realm of desirable; not too busy, with the walk from the closest Tube stop nothing too oppressive. If it had been cheap in the 1970s, it probably wasn’t now, or wouldn’t be for long. The building had been bought in recent years by a property management company with several other holdings scattered north of the Thames.
“How long ago did the tenant vacate?” asked Parisa, using the agent’s choice of words. He looked flushed and grateful when she turned over her shoulder.
“About a month ago now, maybe two. It—” His complexion went rosier still. “It took a bit for us to … to know that she’d, you know.” He looked flustered.
“A month?” Parisa echoed. The last time Tristan had willingly spoken to her, he’d explained Atlas Blakely’s absence with some sardonic triteness about summer holidays. November—or October, as it would have been then—was well beyond any reasonable summer holiday, even if Atlas Blakely were the leisurely type. Libby, meanwhile, had not explained Atlas’s absence at all, though perhaps that was Parisa’s blunder, in failing to ask. Perhaps not.
The agent mistook her tone of surprise for concern about how little had been done. “We had to wait, you know, for next of kin,” he rushed to assure her, “so we did as much as we could, but when the bloke finally got here he only took the good stuff, the old books and whatnot, one or two valuables. The rest is—”
“Bloke?”
“Yeah, big guy, bald.” Parisa’s ears told her one thing, her magic another. It was not Atlas Blakely in the estate agent’s head, but someone much older. Old enough, in fact, to be Atlas’s father. “Rich by the looks of it. Sad, when you think of it. Only came to pick over her things.”
Parisa returned her attention to the cabinets, opening one and half expecting something to crawl out of it while the estate agent went on about what the man had taken—family heirlooms, a picture. He hadn’t given his name, but there was a prestigious university logo on his briefcase, nice shoes on his feet, an air of gentility, and (this a bit of telepathic skullduggery on Parisa’s part) the picture had clearly been a younger version of himself. Thus, Parisa’s agile mind became acquainted with Atlas Blakely’s nonmagical father, which, while privately intriguing, did not sound as if it did anything to help her find him.
Hitting a dead end, she chose to expedite things. Tell me about the woman’s family, she instructed the estate agent, leaning into the command with slightly more force than necessary—something she hoped she wouldn’t come to regret in her state of increasingly depleting exigency.
Helpfully, though, the agent explained that the previous pub owner from downstairs (before it had been trendy and been, instead, old) had reached out after hearing the news and informed them that the woman had a son. A posh professor-type as well, but a good lad, who tipped generously and always stopped by for a cup of tea, like it was some kind of personal ritual. The pub owner had wanted to pay his respects, as he’d said on the phone, but there had been no news of a funeral. The pub owner seemed astonished to discover that there hadn’t been one. Such a good lad, he insisted, a good lad, messed up a bit here and there when he was younger but he’d done well, he’d tried, he wouldn’t just leave her like that, alone like that, he wasn’t that kind of man, he must not know, had they reached out to him?
“But we can’t seem to find him either,” concluded the real estate agent, before frowning at Parisa like he hadn’t been aware he was talking. “Sorry, what was the question? I seem to have lost my train of thought—”
“Price per square meter,” Parisa prompted.
“For this neighborhood? Abysmal,” the real estate agent supplied, a bit too cheerfully in the wake of Parisa’s alterations to his capacity for truth.
So, there was Atlas Blakely’s life, Parisa thought in silence as the agent babbled on about the exorbitant nature of London’s rent. Sick mother wasting away, absent hypocrite of a father. Had Parisa known any of that for certain while they’d both still lived in the same house she would have had a field day with it, and it occurred to her that Callum’s exuberance over knowing what made their Caretaker who he was must have been well-founded in the monotony of it all; the textbookery of his psychological trauma.
Libby Rhodes wouldn’t have laughed of course, or at least not the Libby Rhodes that had once existed. Though, perhaps the newer model of Libby Rhodes was the more relevant concern? She was, after all, one of only two people still aware of Atlas’s comings and goings, the other of which was Tristan, who did not seem adequately informed. Something was definitely off with Libby, which continued to be troubling.
Or—if Parisa stopped looking at who Libby Rhodes had once been and started understanding who she’d become—then troublingly helpful, perhaps.
A week ago, Parisa had sat in a blinding white office in Paris, fixing her attention on the view outside the window when the door finally opened.
She registered thoughts of surprise at her presence, which were to be expected, followed by the precipice of a decision that she trusted to reveal how the rest of the meeting would go. Either the owner of the office would call for assistance in dispatching the wanted medeian currently sitting in his chair, or he would weigh his options, gauging the possibility of advantage. If he was calculating enough to consider her value, then she could certainly work with that. Barring such convenience, she could kill him. Considering that she had already avoided one such threat to her life that morning (as she had nearly every morning since she’d left the Society manor house, like a new step in her beauty routine), she was in the mood to bargain. But not to play.
“Parisa Kamali,” said the man at the door.
“Nothazai,” she replied. “Is that a first name? Surname?”
“Neither.” He shut the door quietly behind him. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
He was a little older than Atlas and significantly easier to read.
“Let me put this to you simply,” Parisa replied, letting her head fall back against the office chair and its respective lumbar charms. “I’m growing tired of running for my life. Truthfully, I’m finding your part in that to be something of an inconvenience.”
His gaze flicked to the distance between them. “I’m not under the impression that your survival has been much of an effort,” Nothazai said. He lingered near the door as if to say I’m listening, but not indefinitely.
“Just because I make it look easy doesn’t mean it is,” replied Parisa. She gestured to his desktop computer, watching a spark of apprehension alight in his eyes. “It seems that your computer network has been hit with a security threat. You’ll be unable to access your company server for a while.”
She felt Nothazai scanning her for something. Defect, most likely. Something he could leverage, which was a calculation that by necessity she understood. “Some of the best technomancers work for us,” he said. “The network will be restored shortly.”
“A week, probably,” Parisa agreed. “But still, call it an even trade.”
He smiled thinly, good-humoredly. “An inconvenience for an inconvenience?”
“I felt it appropriate, to say the least.” Parisa sat upright, resting her elbows on his desk and peering at him for a moment.
“Has Atlas Blakely sent you?” Nothazai asked with a sense of wariness.
Interesting. Parisa noted his unease before filing it away, choosing not to deny the presence of an assumption that was so obviously advantageous to her cause.
“So,” she demurred instead. “What will it take, then?”
He considered her for a moment. A respectable amount of time before saying, as she’d known he would, “You belong to a tyrannical organization.” Nothazai folded his arms across his chest. “Your archives contain knowledge that was—and continues to be—stolen. The Forum wishes only to distribute that which belongs t—”
“I said,” she repeated with a sigh. “What will it take?”
He quieted.
Then, “We will begin by publishing the truth about the Society’s recruitment practices. The blood that we know you and your cohort of initiates have spilled. We will release the names of all those members who have benefitted, economically or politically, from the database of confidential tracking systems which the Society has failed to disclose. Should the dismantling of your members’ influence prove insufficiently persuasive, we will disseminate the contents of the archives of your library ourselves, beginning with those civilizations most grievously defiled throughout the annals of time. Tell Atlas Blakely,” Nothazai invited with a tight smile, “that we shall have to see if that does not drive the rest of the world to mutiny, and whether that kind of revolution is the sort your Society is prepared to survive.”
Parisa wasn’t listening. She had heard all she needed to hear, none of which Nothazai had the indignity to confess aloud.
Good. The more certain he appeared in his agenda, the better this would work out for her.
Rising to her feet, she advised, “Counteroffer. None of that comes to pass.” She waited for him to argue, but he was at least clever enough to wait for the other shoe to drop. “You call off the hits on myself and my associates. In return, I arrange for you to take over as Caretaker of the Alexandrian Society’s archives.”
“Did you not hear me?” Nothazai said, and to his credit, he spluttered only slightly. “The purpose of the Forum and its aims are perfectly clear. We are defenders of the forum of humanity, the free exchange of ideas without submission t—”
“You,” Parisa corrected, “are not a we. You,” she informed him, “are a man hiding a lifetime’s worth of envy behind a shield of performative morality, but luckily for you, I have neither the time nor the interest to judge the quality of your personal ethics. You’ve made your offer, I’ve made mine, and I think you understand that we should not discuss this particular ‘exchange of ideas’ with anyone outside this room.” She sat back down, adjusting the charms on the chair. Making herself comfortable. “After all,” she said. “Think of the headache when the rest of your office discovers the server is down.”
By the time he left the room again, vacating his people from the offices entirely—upon her directive; she was expecting Reina, after all, and had a penchant for theatrical entrances, relishing the idea of Reina being both outsmarted and made to wait—Parisa had observed two things from Nothazai’s mind.
One: Nothazai’s biomancy clearly extended beyond diagnostics. If he had wanted her dead or comatose or degenerative in some way, he could have made it happen the moment he walked in the door, unlike most of the subpar assassins he’d sent thus far to do his dirty work for him.
Two: he had seen her body and thought of it just like that, a body. Not the way a surgeon looks at a gaping wound. More like how a mortician would look at a corpse. He hid it well, even admirably, but she knew—as Atlas Blakely would have known—that to Nothazai, Parisa was neither a danger nor a threat, not even a person. To him, she was merely a future death.
Which was, ironically, a philosophy she knew immediately she could work with.
If Atlas was gone—absconded, perhaps, or hunting down the person who’d initially taken Libby Rhodes—a person that Atlas was very likely intent on apprehending, considering the pathological savior complex that made a great deal of sense to Parisa now that she knew the truth about his origins—then all of this would be much easier. It wasn’t very difficult to rile up a mob. Parisa was lost in rumination as she left the estate agent behind to recollect his thoughts, having been forcefully persuaded to part with details better left unsaid. (Not her wisest of attempts, using more magic than she’d needed to use, considering some people turned out to be leaky faucets. The whole thing had been set to blow with one clever wrench, but control was a skill like any other, and she was tired. She hadn’t slept well since she’d left Paris, or perhaps even earlier than that.)
She stepped into the street, contemplating her options. Where to next? Rhodes perhaps, to answer a few questions, though that was likely pointless. Possibly a phone call to Sharon—yes, that was certainly an option, Parisa realized with a moment of epiphany. If some people were leaky faucets, others were ticking clocks. It wouldn’t take much to determine how far some people were willing to go.
Unfortunately, Dalton had her phone along with everything else she’d left behind in their Paris flat, and none of her communications would be safe now. She certainly didn’t have Nico’s energy (or hyperactivity) to craft a new technomancy network all on her own. Parisa was about to step into the pub below Atlas’s mother’s apartment instead, determining that the quickest way to a secure phone call would be to find any idiot boy with a phone, when something chilled her slightly. Not the weather, of course, because it was infernally hot, even worse here than in Paris. There was something else, something missing, and she paused to listen.
Which was when she realized that she could hear nothing at all.
She felt something jam in the small of her back. A hint of fragrance reached her nose. She knew that perfume.
She wore it.
“Parisa Kamali,” came a feminine voice. “I so hoped you’d set foot in London soon.”
With a flick of a glance over her shoulder, Parisa clocked long blond hair, designer dress. A distant familiarity.
“Eden Wessex,” Parisa guessed aloud.
The heiress in the Louboutins slid a hand familiarly around Parisa’s waist, the pistol snaking up Parisa’s spine and below her hair to press itself into the base of her scalp. To any passersby they would have looked like girlfriends, or perhaps lovers. A pretty set of trinkets of no consequential use to anyone walking by.
Everywhere Parisa looked was blankness. Deadness. No thoughts but her own raced by.
“Funny,” remarked Eden. “I thought you’d be taller.”
Parisa had never had to search around for power. Telepathy came more than naturally, it came oppressively, like a punishment she couldn’t avoid. Eden may have blocked her thoughts from Parisa, but this was different, this was absence, hollowness. Emptiness. A void where her magic should have been.
She tried to summon anger and felt nothing beyond the usual. It was always there, actually. The razor-edge of a precipice she routinely walked. The one that was both a chasm and a question. The one that looked and felt like the ledge of a manor house roof.
She remembered her gray hair, her impending invisibility. How much mortality was she capable of, exactly? How many times and how silently could a woman actually die? Girlhood was shot down early, followed inevitably by credibility and relevance and desire. She’d always thought beauty would go last, but maybe it was power. Or maybe, in what was Parisa’s only true unspoken fear, beauty and power were synonymous for her. Or worse, symbiotic.
But then she remembered the archives, their collective broken promise. We are beholden to the archives as they are beholden to us. It had been exactly six months to the day from the moment she left the house.
Right, thought Parisa grimly. So my time’s up, then.
Fuck.
“Are we taking a walk?” she asked her captor calmly. The barrel of Eden’s weapon secured itself in the nape of Parisa’s graceful neck, the placement sensual with promise.
“Do you think I’m stupid? No,” said Eden Wessex with a girlish laugh, which Parisa couldn’t help but admire, or at the very least respect. “Believe me, we’re ending this here and now.”