Existentially Challenged, page 14
“I saw that as well,” said Nita, straightening up and spinning on her heel to address the room. “And I don’t know why, but I immediately had the funny feeling that the authorities would be doing everything in their power to take this flagrant hate crime against a marginalized group and find a way to blame the victims for it.”
She glared at Elizabeth, which was, as ever, like attempting to mace a concrete barricade, and then Danvers, who told her everything she needed to know by immediately breaking eye contact.
“So, I assume we’re discussing how to track down the terrorists that attacked an alternative religion’s private worship and injured poor Alison here?” said Nita, striding back and forth.
“That isn’t our remit,” pointed out Danvers.
“Oh!” said Nita, with sarcastic surprise. “But we have made sure to file a police report, in that case?”
“Alison is perfectly entitled to do so at her leisure,” said Elizabeth. “This briefing is to discuss a separate matter that does fit our remit.”
“A body turned up right after the event,” explained Adam, who had been feeling left out. “Killed by a vampire.”
That threw Nita for a moment. She looked around at the others, eyebrows high and lips tight, before saying, “And I suppose we’re going to blame Modern Miracle for that as well?”
“Their message board does seem to attract a radical element,” said Danvers.
Nita did that thing she sometimes did that was halfway between a scoff and click of the tongue. “It’s the internet, Richard. There are a lot of layers of irony at work. You wouldn’t understand. Why isn’t it just as likely that those terrorists did the killing?”
“Christian vampires?” said Elizabeth dryly.
“Well, it seems no one else is taking our obligation to represent the extradimensional community seriously,” said Nita, folding her arms. “So you can either keep sitting around muttering about scary vampires or get with the march of progress, because I’m going to reach out to Modern Miracle and find out what I can do to support them. Alison, what did they say to you about that?”
Alison didn’t see much point in lying, as it seemed likely that at least one of the streamers at the party would have captured her conversation with Miracle Dad, and Nita had the wide-eyed look of someone who had been doing a lot of Googling tonight. “They said they just want acknowledgment.”
The floor began shaking to herald another new arrival, but the moment Sean Anderson stomped into the room and opened his mouth to bellow, he was frozen by Nita thrusting out a hand in a “stop” gesture. She didn’t break fierce eye contact with Alison throughout. “What kind of acknowledgment?”
Alison glanced worriedly at Anderson’s face and its deepening shade of crimson. The individual hairs of his crewcut bristled like an encroaching forest fire. “Um . . . they just want to be taken seriously, I think. Like all the other religions.”
“Pardon me,” barked Anderson. “But why are we talking about bigging up a bunch of weirdos who just completely humiliated—”
“shut up, sean,” barked Nita straight back, with such venom that actual fear registered briefly in his eyes, and everyone else present felt their eyebrows involuntarily leap to the tops of their heads. “This is bigger than you! This is bigger than whether it made the government look bad! Do you understand that?! This is about harmony between humanity and the Ancients! And why the hell shouldn’t they be treated like every other religion? Why is their mother goddess any more ridiculous than water getting turned into wine by yet another mediocre white man?”
Anderson held up his hands mollifyingly. They looked like a pair of bulwarks made from salted ham. “Okay, Nita. Calm down.”
Nita leaned even further into his personal space. “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Calm down, little people. Go back to sleep. Big Daddy Government will make sure everything stays nice and peaceful.” She made to storm out, with Anderson only just managing to hop out of the way in time, then stopped and spun around at the doorway. “It won’t go back to bed so easily this time! We . . . drank too much fizzy pop tonight!”
The others watched her go, stomping away down the corridor like a trotting show pony, until the sound of traumatized carpet and hoarse breathing faded into silence.
“Right,” said Anderson uncertainly. “So . . . what were we talking about?”
“I think we were about to call this meeting adjourned,” said Elizabeth.
“Hey!” Anderson glowered, pointing a meaty finger. “I’m the one who says that!”
“Then be my guest.”
Anderson took in the four expectant faces of the people that remained, then sniffed self-consciously and bowed his head. “Uh. Meeting adjourned.”
“Thank you,” said Elizabeth, rising. “Alison, I’ll give you a ride home.”
“Oh!” said Alison, caught off guard. “You don’t have to . . . I can just . . .”
Elizabeth caught her eye. “Alison,” she repeated, not changing her tone of voice in the slightest.
“I mean, thank you, I’d really appreciate it.”
Adam watched them until they had drifted out of both visual and audible range, then stepped close to Danvers’s desk. “Mr. Danvers, you know if I went to one of these Modern Miracle services, I could tell you exactly how they’re doing the healing trick. It might help . . .”
Danvers was rubbing his forehead. “Yes, all right, Adam, given the circumstances, I’m not against it.” He gave Adam a piercing look that pinned him to the floor as he made to leave. “But you and I will have a meeting with Sumner in the morning to have a full and frank exchange of notes.”
“Okay, thank you, Mr. Danvers,” said Adam, rushing out the sentence as a single unbroken stream of syllables and then making for the door before anyone could have a chance to change their mind. He made brief eye contact with Anderson on the way and spent the rest of the trip to the door with his head dropped low and his face parallel to the floor.
Anderson, for his part, took one look at Danvers’s tired but politely expectant expression, and what energy he had left visibly drained from his muscles. “I suppose . . . all of this can wait till tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll, er, I’ll see you later.” He began to leave, sheepishly trying to minimize his footstep sound.
“Anderson, small question,” said Danvers softly. “It’s past ten o’clock. How did you know we were having a meeting?”
Anderson’s nostrils flared. “Oh, come on. Like I’m the only person who watches live security footage when they can’t sleep.”
23
Alison hadn’t seen Elizabeth’s car before. Somehow she had imagined that Elizabeth would drive some kind of terrifyingly large black utility vehicle, something that would reflect the vastness of the thinking and history behind her deceptively small form, but as could have been predicted from a small amount of thought, this was not the case. Elizabeth drove a car as seemingly unassuming as her: a simple family sedan, of a color that couldn’t quite decide if it was gray or blue.
Nonetheless, Alison felt like a tiny child in the passenger seat as Elizabeth drove in the slow, contemplative way that went easy on her bad knee. It hadn’t escaped Alison’s notice that the interior was clear of all the usual debris that cluttered cars. Even Diablerie was guilty of having a couple of old receipts in his coffin-shaped drinks holders.
“Do you know where Diablerie went?” asked Elizabeth as she stared at a red light waiting for the change.
“N-no,” admitted Alison. “I haven’t seen him since I got hit by that Bible.” She had called Danvers after the discovery of David Callum’s corpse and had been forced to drive Diablerie’s car back alone to make the emergency briefing.
“He disappears, and a body turns up,” thought Elizabeth aloud.
“Well, he did send me a text thirty-two minutes ago,” said Alison, commencing the ever-awkward dance of removing a phone from a hip pocket while sitting in a car seat, “saying the cost of his train ticket will be extracted from my soul one sin at a time.” She hesitated when she noticed the frown Elizabeth was directing at the bumper of the car in front. “You think he might have been . . .”
“No, I think we learned our lesson the last time we accused him of murder,” sighed Elizabeth. “He’s not the killer. That would be far too straightforward. But . . .”
As Elizabeth’s pause lengthened, Alison realized she was being prompted. “But he knows something. He knew something about Modern Miracle ahead of time. That’s why he warned me.”
Elizabeth nodded slowly in approval. “Either he knows something or Rajesh Chahal knows something about Modern Miracle’s agenda. But we may gain the advantage if Ms. Pavani can get closer to the source.”
Alison thought of the furious expression on Nita Pavani’s face as she had been ruining the office carpet with her heels. “You really think she’ll agree to be an informant?”
“No,” said Elizabeth bluntly. “But the best informant is one that does not realize they are an informant.”
Alison nodded slowly, unconsciously mimicking the action Elizabeth had made a moment ago. “Do you think there’s any chance that Modern Miracle could be on the level? About Mir—about that girl being a life elemental, and dual consciousness, and El-Yetch wanting to help humanity . . . ?” She let the question trail off when she saw Elizabeth’s knuckles turning white around the steering wheel.
“A couple of points give me pause,” said Elizabeth measuredly, tapping the tips of her index fingers once, twice, three times. “First, of all the people who could have been wounded tonight, it was the one person who would be the most useful if converted. The one with government connections and the most open mind.”
Alison was almost certain that open-mindedness was generally considered a virtue, but she wasn’t getting that vibe from Elizabeth’s tone. “You think it might have been set up?”
“Second, from the direct encounters with Ancients I have had, I find it hard to believe that an Ancient could even comprehend the idea of benevolence toward us.”
Alison didn’t reply but drooped in her seat, feeling faintly ashamed, like an unsavvy internet user finally accepting that the deal being offered by the Nigerian prince in her email inbox might not be as sweet as it first appeared.
Elizabeth sighed so gradually that it was barely audible. “Where were we on the story?”
“Story?”
“The Shadow Crisis.”
“Oh!” Alison perked up, then tried to perk back down again when she saw the dark clouds gathering in Elizabeth’s expression as she made to recall the memories. “Mr. Spoon died. The Ancient took over Mr. Sugarbowl, and Mr. Teapot killed him. Then Mr. Teapot made the government issue a shutdown order.”
“Right,” said Elizabeth. “Teapot was certain that Sugarbowl had come under the Ancient’s influence and murdered Spoon. The trouble was, Sugarbowl had been passing for normal up until his death. Which raised the possibility that there may have been others who were influenced and passing for normal. So Teapot ordered the entire Ministry bunker quarantined. No one in, no one out.
“No members of the Hand of Merlin were there. They only ever came to the bunker for their ‘meetings.’ It was only the administrative team and a division of the Brotherhood of Merlin. You remember the monks?”
Alison remembered the Brotherhood of Merlin all too well: an ancient monastic sect that had a deal to work alongside the government to suppress magic and the magically infused, until they had been deemed politically toxic at the onset of the current era. Alison had no idea where they had gone since then, but a bald man with hauntingly familiar tattoos had glowered at her and Diablerie across the counter of a petrol station several months ago.
“At first, the atmosphere was civil, if tense,” continued Elizabeth. “But disagreements began to rise. Some thought we should stay in large groups to keep each other under surveillance. Some thought we should avoid each other entirely. No one could agree on how to distribute the food stores in the cafeteria to be certain that no tampering occurred.
“On the second day, someone in the Scroll physically transformed and wounded a colleague. Either they’d grown impatient or the Ancient had. There was no obvious connection between them and Mr. Sugarbowl, or the possessed prisoner. Nobody knew how the influence was transmitted. Nobody knew who was already taken. In response, Mr. Teapot announced that he wasn’t prepared to risk trusting anyone but himself. He shut himself in his office to coordinate the network of freelance operatives by phone. Barricaded the door. Even to me, his assistant.”
“He abandoned you?” said Alison, horrified.
“He was correct to,” said Elizabeth, with a hint of admonishment. “It was the most rational course of action from his perspective. I found that hard to understand at the time. And without leadership, everything went to chaos in the rest of the bunker. There was a faction of hard-liners—mostly monks, but with a few administrators mixed in—who took it upon themselves to enforce the quarantine. Beating up anyone who left their offices. It was that group that decided they couldn’t trust whatever Mr. Teapot was doing to end the crisis. After all, he could have been possessed as well.”
“What did they do?” asked Alison, fidgeting with her seat belt strap.
Elizabeth took another infuriatingly long sigh before answering. “They stormed the dungeon and killed the prisoner. It was a reasonable-enough assumption. Destroy the Ancient’s original access point, remove their influence from the world.”
“It didn’t work?” deduced Alison.
Elizabeth’s face hardened even further. “Either it only made the Ancient desperate or widened their access point. The rate of transformations rose. More people died.”
“How did you get through all of this?”
“My office was in the antechamber that led to Teapot’s office,” said Elizabeth, with a small measure of guilt. “The facilities were good. A large storage cupboard in which to hide when I heard footsteps in the hall. It also meant I could talk to Teapot through the barricade on his office door.
“He made it clear he would never let me in, of course, but there were long hours when there was nothing to be done but pass the time with conversation, and it kept us both sane. In that time, he and I gained an understanding that went beyond friendship. There are parts of yourself you can only truly share when in the face of death . . .”
Her eyes flicked to a red stop sign at the next junction, and as she pumped the brakes to obey, a shudder ran through her, breaking her out of the brief reverie she had indulged. “The extremists became all the more irrational after their failure. Suspicion of Teapot’s actions became hysteria. I’m certain some of them were possessed by then. There was talk of storming his office. So I passed him a warning, and he took measures to defend himself.
“He was still coordinating his network of field agents over the phone. There was one man who had been in a remote part of Scotland when the crisis began, and so was the least likely to be under the Ancient’s influence. His name was Nicholas Fisk. Ex-military. Discharged after some questionable activity in the Middle East, picked up by the Ministry to act as a freelance troubleshooter when extreme force was required.
“I don’t know what Mr. Teapot told him to do. I suspect the orders were vague, or misheard. I don’t believe he was ordered to storm the Ministry bunker with a group of armed mercenaries and use deadly force on anything that tried to stop them, which is what Nicholas Fisk did. He seemed to think his mission was to extract Mr. Teapot at all costs, regardless of any protest or order he made at the time, in case he was being influenced.” She swallowed a throatful of dry disapproval. “They barged their way through the bunker in combat gear and gas masks, wielding assault rifles and shotguns. Burst straight through my antechamber and through the barricade. I heard Mr. Teapot talking to them. He was telling them to extract me as well. Saying he’d take responsibility if I was possessed.
“That didn’t sit well with Fisk’s interpretation of his task. The next thing I knew, Teapot was being dragged past me by three men, protesting all the way.
“So, I followed them all the way back through the carnage they had left to the car they had waiting just outside the entrance. And then I stood in front of the driver’s-side door and refused to move unless they took me with them.”
“So what did they do?” asked Alison, rapt.
Elizabeth glanced up. “This is your building, isn’t it?”
Alison hadn’t even registered that the car had stopped, but there they were, parked in front of the narrow block of apartments where she lived, with Elizabeth staring at her expectantly and the moment growing more awkward with every second Alison stared back. “Oh . . .”
“Is something wrong?”
Alison’s index finger stroked the door release. “No, I just . . .”
“Be honest, Alison.”
As always, she couldn’t resist a direct order. “I just want to know the next thing that happened.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Fisk ordered me to move. Teapot was saying that perhaps this was for the best, that where they were going would be too dangerous. I didn’t move. I told them that I knew I was not possessed and there was nothing on Earth that would make me go back into that bunker to wait for death.”
“You said that?”
She glanced up, apparently at the rearview mirror. “Teapot once said to me that, in times of chaos, if you can stand unmoving in the middle of it and let it all wash past you, then you will realize just how powerful you can be. In that moment, I understood what he meant.”
“So they took you with them?”
Elizabeth’s gaze dropped. “No, Fisk shot me in the kneecap.”
THE NEXT MORNING
24
