Chapter 14

 

Rain beaded on the rims of the woman’s mirrored sunglasses as the tug took her across town, up Lautrec Avenue and down the far side of Bester Hill, into the badlands of Rustwood. The dying suburbs where industry had withered and left the citizens to starve. The forgotten places, the rotten places.

She knew what she was looking for. The asylum was a beacon - not just the biggest ruin in the district but the loudest. It screamed, reverberating through the asphalt, sowing misery beneath the earth. Even the humans could feel it. They passed the Shunt Memorial Hospital with their heads down, hunched against the chill, wondering why they suddenly felt so small, so temporary.

In the 1880s it’d been a madhouse. In the 20s, a lunatic asylum. Political correctness fixed that years before the woman in sunglasses was born, but it served the same purpose - a prison for suffering. Defunct now, had been for over twenty years, but the stain of all that insanity still leached out into the streets.

She smiled as she turned the final corner and stood before the gates. The old, timid Queen kept to her holes at the heart of the world. Meanwhile, the New Queen claimed fresh territory, planting her flag in the ruins of Rustwood. Today, the asylum. Tomorrow, who knew?

Fitch had been the same: a fighter, an engine of destruction. Pushing himself to the ragged limit, planting his own sorry flag in an attempt to keep the madness away. One of the reasons she respected him, even if it was all futile.

She knew the truth. The Queen had showed her, in a flash of revelation. Madness wasn’t something you could lock behind heavy doors. It was a natural process. It was in the air, in the water. It came to all things in time.

Sanity was the real disease. Letting go was the cure.

The front doors of the asylum had sticky hinges, but she forced her way through. Footprints circled in the thick layer of dust coating the floorboards. She bent low, trailed a finger along the floor and licked it clean. Rubber. Dirt. Sweat. Possibly fear. Something else, too. A musk that reminded her of the Queen’s loving arms.

She still didn’t know yet why the Queen had summoned her. A reprimand, for converting half the police department? Or a commendation? She’d worked so hard, done all the Queen asked of her. Only right that she should be honoured in private.

Something about the smell of her master didn’t sit right in her stomach. It was sour. Old.

Still, she couldn’t turn back, not when she was so close to her reward. The tug led her up the stairs at the rear of the asylum, all the way to the trash-choked corridors of the fourth floor, past wheelchairs knitted over with spiderwebs and needles lying broken and blood-stained in the dust. Horror-movie chic. Not enough to scare her off.

The tug grew stronger, more insistent. Not quite what she expected from the Queen. Too... desperate. Almost like her master was calling for help. Or was that her imagination?

Just in case, she let her blades slide free. Her wrists itched as bone met air. The carpet gave way to cold tiled floors, and she slipped off her shoes to pad barefoot through the detritus. Silent, cat-like. The predator she was made to be.

The door on the fourth floor was unlocked. She pressed one hand against the wood, feeling for the hot, tickling presence of sentience on the far side. Yes, something human waited there, and something inhuman. The Queen and a servant, perhaps. Preparing her reward.

She allowed herself a smile. Finally, she was being recognised. Elevated.

She strode through into an old dormitory, the boards stripped of varnish and old metal-frame cots stacked against one wall, spiderwebbed and eaten through to the core with rust. She could still feel the bad dreams soaked into the walls, the muffled cries of inmates drowning their tears in their pillows at night.

Now it was abandoned apart from the two figures standing against the rear wall with something the size of a bowling ball set at their feet.

The first was a woman, waves of blond hair rilling over the shoulders of a baggy sports jacket. The second, a slim man with a neat moustache, dressed all in grey, hands in his pockets. The woman’s mouth hung open in shock or terror, while the man...

Not running, not screaming. Quietly confident. His feet were planted like he was making his final stand.

She hesitated in the doorway. Two humans? She must have gotten confused when sensing through the door. Unless he was another emissary, a black shape cloaked in flesh, here to deliver a message. “Did the Queen send you? Who’s the girl?” She squinted. “Is that... Archer?”

The man in the grey suit didn’t speak. Just pointed to what he’d left on the ground. Not a bowling ball at all, she realised. A human skull? It had the shape, the shadows of fallen eyesockets, but something was wrong. Its eyes were plastered over with what looked like burlap, or ink-stained skin.

A tone rose in her head, a dog-whistle shriek that ricocheted back and forth until she was almost screaming herself. Like the severed head was drawing her in, and now her feet were moving, one shuffling step after another, inching closer, closer still...

The blonde woman said, “That’s the Queen?”

“We’ll see.”

“But-”

“Soon.”

She couldn’t speak out, couldn’t correct them. A hook through her sternum drew her closer. It was Mrs Archer standing beside the grey suited man, she was sure of it, but she couldn’t look up to confirm it. Everything was fixed on the head. Yes, the mouth sewn over, cheeks dried across sharp bone. She knew that face. One of the beasts in the convent, the seekers that opened doors and dragged new citizens into Rustwood’s loving arms. How could she not have recognised it?

And still, she walked.

“Can it hurt us?”

“Maybe. Be ready to run.”

There was something familiar about the man in the suit. Someone she’d bumped in to? Fought, fucked? It was the part of her that was locked away, and dragging it back set off fireworks in her skull. All she could do was walk, follow the lure, even though she understood now what they’d done, how they’d turned the head of a seeker into a lighthouse beacon...

She stepped across a line of splintered floorboard that marked the middle of the dormitory and froze.

A giant hand materialised around her skull and squeezed. The pain was immense, all-swallowing. She fell to her knees, clutching at her neck, her chest, her heart. Her veins were flooded with fire.

Her fists drummed uselessly against the floor as the Archer woman and the suited man circled. She could see the barrier between them now, the wall she’d stepped through. They’d built a line of power, and now it was tearing her apart from the inside.

She whispered words she never thought she’d say. “Please... I can’t... Mercy, please...”

The pain rose and rose until it blotted out her screams.

 

* * *

 

Kimberly waited for the drumming in her ears to fade. Her nails had pressed half-moon imprints into her palms. Sweat ran down her back and beaded on the nape of her neck.

There was no line drawn on the floor of the old dormitory to mark where they’d spattered the blood-circle two floors below, but it wasn’t hard to tell where the wall of power rose up. The thing they’d trapped hurled herself against it, rebounding like it’d slammed into invisible brick.

She was a slim woman, bleached platinum blond with huge aviator sunglasses hiding her eyes. Her nails were the red of police lights and her teeth were oddly pointed, digging deep into her lower lip as she smashed against the barrier. She moved... oddly. Like she was being tugged to and fro by strings, a marionette of bone.

Mister Gull adjusted his cufflinks as he circled the monster. “Nasty one, isn’t she? Not quite what we were hoping for, but we can work with this.”

The woman howled as she threw herself against the border of the blood circle. She clutched her head, fingernails digging into the flesh of her temples. “Please! Let me out, let me-”

Gull clenched one hand into a tight fist and the woman’s screams dimmed, like he’d turned down the volume knob on her slice of the world. “Don’t you worry about her. There’s nothing human there any more. Only an imitation.”

Kimberly inched closer to the blood circle. Proximity made the hairs on the back of her arms stand up, sent weird itches running up and down her legs. It felt like tiny insects were skittering inside her shirt. Inside the circle, the woman tore at her hair. Spots of blood, so dark they were almost black, bloomed on her scalp. “This isn’t a Queen, then.”

“Seems not. Only one of her servants, although she’s high-caste. The circle and the foci did what they were supposed to, but my tuning was a little off. I apologise, but we can always try again.”

Was that sincerity in Gull’s voice, or only a veneer? It was getting harder to tell. It felt to Kimberly like Gull was disguising a smile, like there was no misalignment in his voodoo priest bullshit. That this was what he’d aimed for all along. “Is she really hurting?”

“As much as a butterfly feels pain. She’s intricate, yes. Some... not me, but some... would call her beautiful. But paintings are beautiful. Clocks and gemstones are beautiful. They don’t feel.”

The woman fell to her knees. When Kimberly looked down she saw herself reflected in the woman’s bulging sunglasses, the black lenses turned to hideous mirrors.

Fake or not, it ached to watch another woman in agony. The way she keened and thrashed on the floor, the furrows she dragged through her cheeks, the soundless cries caught inside the circle...

If she really was just a thing, she was damn good manufacture. “I think she’s trying to say something.”

“Of course she is. She’ll beg until her final moments. But we can’t let her go, not now. She’ll alert her master, Old Queen or New, and then we’ll have nothing. No, we’ll just have to finish her off. Shame to destroy something so complex, but...”

Kimberly knelt beside the circle and watched the woman’s lips. She wasn’t just screaming. They were forming words, distorted by the bubble of Gull’s silence, so dim it was like trying to track a conversation on the other side of a concrete slab. “She’s saying...”

Ice settled into the pit of her stomach as she made out the shape of the words.

Archer. Archer.

I’m going to kill you.