Chapter Thirteen: York, Now
Norris felt … weirdly disconnected from the world around him.
It was an odd sensation, as if he truly didn’t belong. The concrete estate seemed strange now, as well as hostile. He couldn’t keep himself from glancing back, time and time again, to check that Gatehouse was still there, still looming over York. It felt as if he had been on holiday, and immersed himself in a very different country, only to come back home and discover the old world no longer felt right. But then, it never had. The estate had been a prison, not a home. He told himself he should turn around, go straight back to Gatehouse, and take his punishment like a man. There was nothing to be gained from visiting the estate one final time.
The wind shifted, carrying with it the stench of burning hydrocarbons, uncollected rubbish and the faint, but unmistakable tang of magic. The last few days had been rough for everyone, he’d been told; the barricades had been removed, but many of the evacuated people had refused to return to the estate, even when they’d been told their government-provided housing would be shut down shortly. Norris didn’t blame them, not one little bit. The estate had been a nightmare, a prison for everyone save for the ones who really
should be in jail, and there was no way in hell he’d go back to the estate if there was any other choice. And yet …
He wondered, numbly, why the mind-healer had insisted Norris at least
try to speak to his mother. She had been an indifferent mother at best, showing none of the protectiveness he’d thought he deserved because he’d been her son … Norris hadn’t wanted to talk about her, even to the healer, and he’d been surprised that so much had come pouring out of him, once he’d started to talk. Perhaps it had been magic, or perhaps it had been the simple fact he’d bottled it up for so long that he’d been unable to contain it any longer. He didn’t really want to think about it.
The air shifted again as he turned onto the street, the sense of disconnection growing stronger as he walked. Some homes looked surprisingly normal, with clear signs their occupants had returned home; others looked deserted, their doors locked and their windows barred. A handful had clearly been looted at some point, the windows smashed … he wondered, sourly, which of the estate’s bad boys was responsible for the deed. It would be easier to come up with a list of young men who
wouldn’t do it, if only because the list would be a great deal shorter. The only reason there wasn’t
more theft on the estate was because there was little worth stealing.
He stopped outside his house – his old house – and looked up at the blank door. The flimsy plywood offered no sense of safety, although – as far as he knew – the house had never actually been robbed. It was a bit of a surprise, he reflected tiredly. A thief might break and enter in hopes of finding something he could sell, but a bully would break into a house just to remind his target that there was no safety anywhere, not even in the supposed privacy of his own home. He gritted his teeth, then raised his hand to tap on the door. There was no answer.
Of course not, he thought.
She’s not at home.
His key was long-gone, probably with Lord Burghley and his staff. Norris pressed his hand against the lock and muttered a brief spell, one that would be absolutely useless – worse than useless – against a magical lock, but effective against a lock designed by someone who didn’t know magic existed. The lock clicked, allowing him to open the door. The air inside was hot and dry, as if the radiators had been left on when the building had been evacuated … Norris’s eyes narrowed. His mother had been very sensitive about spending money, not without reason. She made so little that the slightest unexpected expenditure could send her spiralling into a debt trap, one she’d never escape. And yet …
He took a moment to let his eyes get accustomed to the gloom, then inched inside. The tiny living room was a mess, the handful of pieces of cheap and crappy furniture smashed and broken. The school photograph he’d brought home ten years ago lay on the ground, ripped and torn. He picked it up, his eyes seeking faces he knew … it was hard, impossibly hard, to pick out Janet, or Colin. His own face had been defaced … he wondered, numbly, how the intruders had known it was him. He’d changed a lot, in ten years.
A nasty thought ran through his mind and he threw caution to the winds, running into the kitchen. It had been searched thoroughly, with no regard for putting everything back in place afterwards. The floor was littered with cheap and nasty food – cereal, instant noodles, spices that were supposed to add a little favour – and the fridge was open, the contents strewn over the floor. They’d been lucky, he noted, that there’d been no fresh produce, no eggs or meat or even milk. But then, they couldn’t afford it.
Norris hesitated, then ran up the creaky stairs, nearly tripping over carpet that had been old and frayed when he’d been a toddler. His room was a mess, books thrown everywhere and his computer smashed beyond repair; his heart skipped a beat as he stared at the mess, remembering how he’d put the computer together from discarded components, trying to force them to merge into a single machine. It had worked – poorly, he admitted, but it had worked.
He turned and walked to his mother’s room, after a brief internal struggle with himself. His mother’s room had been
hers, and he’d never liked entering even when he’d been fairly sure she’d been alone. The men she’d brought back to the house … he felt his heart twist painfully, wondering if the taunt that he was a whore’s son had been more true than he wanted to admit. Colin
had insisted he’d fucked Norris’s mother … the asshole had been lying. He had to have been lying.
The door opened. Norris gasped. His mother was lying on the bed, very clearly dead. Her wrists were cut, blood staining the carpet below his feet … he stepped forward, unwilling to actually touch the body. How long did it take, he asked himself, for blood from a dying or dead body to clot? He didn’t know. Days? Weeks? His mother could have been lying there dead from the moment he’d been recruited by Lord Burghley, or she could have been killed only a few short days ago. Norris took a breath and tasted death in the air, a stench that made him retch. He stumbled backwards, choking heavily. His mother …
His mother was dead.
Norris closed his eyes for a long moment, unwilling to look at the corpse for any longer than necessary. Her wrists were slit … suicide? Or had someone wanted to
make it look like a suicide? Norris didn’t know … how could he? He was no detective … not, he suspected, that any detective would give much of a damn about his mother, certainly if there was no reason to suspect foul play. She had been on the bottom of society, barely keeping herself afloat … Norris hated to admit it, but he knew why she’d had so little time for him. She’d had very little time for herself. Guilt stabbed through his mind, driven by a sense of relief … and the awareness he damn well
should feel guilty. His mother was dead.
“I’m sorry,” he said. There were spells that could summon someone from the land of the dead … or so he’d heard. The lone book he’d read on the topic had been surprisingly fanciful and carefully avoided discussing how the spells actually worked. He had no idea how to cast the spell, and the book had gone into the dangers in such detail that he’d been
sure the writer had wanted to discourage anyone from following in his footsteps. “I’m truly sorry.”
He turned and walked away, unsure what to do. Call the police? They wouldn’t care. Call the hospital? Why bother? His mother was dead. He walked back into his own room and picked up a handful of books, stowing them in his bag, then checked the hidden compartment under his desk. Someone had found the hard drive he’d concealed there and smashed it beyond all hope of recovery. Norris hoped they hadn’t tried to crack his password and access the files first. The porn he’d collected was tame, compared to some of the filth he’d seen shared at school, but it would still be dead embarrassing if someone else saw it.
The fuse box felt warm to the touch, when he opened it and flipped off the switches. There was no point in drawing power from the network now, and he’d probably get the bill if someone noticed his mother was no longer in a position to pay it. He knew people who had had their power cut off and it wasn’t pleasant … he shook his head and stepped outside, taking a deep breath. The air still stank, but it was cleaner than the air inside. His mother couldn’t have been dead for long, he thought, or her body would have started to decompose.
A voice cut into his musings. “All right, freak. You know the drill.”
Norris looked up and cringed. Gammon and Pike, James and Peter … friends of Colin, insofar as that monster in human form had had friends. They lived just down the road from him, and … it had only been a few months ago that they’d been charging him for the prilivage of walking home without being beaten up, then often beating him up anyway. He was surprised they’d returned to the estate, then realised it probably wasn’t a surprise. They might have been welcomed, at first, but that wouldn’t last. The police had probably been ordered to send them home, the moment the barricade had been removed …
“You killed Colin,” Pike said. “You’re going to pay …”
Norris
thought it was Pike, at least. The four youths might have been attractive, once upon a time, but they’d pieced their skin with metal and dyed their hair and tattooed themselves with swastikas they swore blind were ancient symbols … it said a lot about the world, Norris had often thought, that people who claimed to care about violence in video games overlooked genuine outright far right bullshit, as long as the assholes were too tough to fight. Three of the four were practically interchangeable … the fourth, Peter, was a black kid. Norris had often wondered how he’d fallen in with the racist thugs, then decided it didn’t matter. If there was one universal rule, it was that only the weak were punished for their crimes.
Pike started forward. Norris gritted his teeth, fear and shame rushing through him … followed by a wave of raw magic. It didn’t need direction as it burst out of him, picking up the four louts and throwing them over the nearest lampposts. It would be hard for them to get down without help. If they fell … it was at least five metres, perhaps more, to the ground. He didn’t
think they could clamber down the posts themselves.
“If you ever come near me again,” he said, with all the power he could muster. “I’ll kill you on the spot.”
And he turned and walked home.
***
Janet didn’t relax, not completely, until she was back at Gatehouse.
The talks had been long and tedious, broken only by brief breaks and private sessions between her and a handful of government agents. It hadn’t been easy to answer their questions – in some ways, they’d reminded her of her own ignorance – and some had been insulting, often in ways that she didn’t quite realise until it was long afterwards, leaving her feeling slow and stupid. She knew what they were trying to do – get an understanding of what sort of people they were dealing with – but it was still annoying. If they’d wanted to ask questions of a spy, they should have asked Norris.
Helen caught her arm, before she could hurry back to her room for a shower and a nap. “Can we talk?”
Janet hesitated, then nodded. “If we must.”
Helen walked beside her as she led the way up to her room. Janet wasn’t sure how she felt about inviting Helen inside, but … she shook her head and motioned for Helen to sit on the bed, feeling a twinge of amusement at the distaste on the older girl’s face. She wasn’t sure which of them was actually older, coming to think of it … Helen had acted like a spoilt brat at first, yet she’d grown up a lot even before remaining behind on OldeWorld. But did it actually matter?
“I need a favour,” Helen said. She sounded as if she would sooner have done something unspeakably awful than ask anyone for a favour. “Can I ask for your help … rather, your advice?”
“You can ask,” Janet said. She told herself that Helen was not about to ask if she could steal Janet’s homework. No matter how she looked at it, Helen had had far more years of magical education than her. “What can I do for you?”
Helen met her eyes, evenly. “I am interested in courting your brother,” she said. “How do I broach the subject with him?”
Janet blinked, honestly surprised. She had known Steve was attracted to Helen – there was no accounting for taste; Helen really
was gorgeous, and smart too – but she hadn’t known Helen felt the same way too. The sheer bluntness blew her away. Some girls giggled and blushed, dancing around the subject as if silliness would keep the discussion from becoming too real; some girls were simply not allowed to have anything to do with boys, not even to discuss them with their peers. Helen … she reminded herself, sharply, that Helen was from a very different society. She’d been betrothed to Brains … hadn’t she?
She found herself unsure what to say. “I don’t know,” she mumbled. It crossed her mind to suggest Helen simply kissed Steve, but she swallowed that thought before it could emerge from her lips. “What are you doing with Brains?”
Helen’s lips thinned. “We were betrothed, because my family and his believed our match would be good for us,” she said. “It was expected that we would … cooperate … to produce children, and after that … we could go our own way. No one would be surprised if we took lovers, as long as the children were ours. But …”
She paused. “The idea of doing that no longer appeals. I want … someone I can actually talk to.”
There was another pause. “My family won’t be pleased if I break the betrothal,” she added, slowly. “But if I can offer them someone in exchange …”
“My brother is not a pawn,” Janet said, hastily. She’d heard of one boy who’d agreed to a marriage to save a friend from a much
worse marriage, but it hadn’t worked out very well. “If you treat him so, he won’t be very pleased himself.”
She found it hard to speak. “Why don’t you just talk to him?”
Helen shot her a sharp look. Janet understood. It was dangerous to let a boy know you were interested in him, if it turned out he wasn’t the knight in shining armour you thought he was. It might be worse for Helen, if she got her family – and his - involved before discovering the truth. If Steve hadn’t been interested in her … Janet had no idea if they’d have to go ahead with the match anyway, once the two families came to an agreement. The entire system stuck her as absurd, no matter how effective it might be in breeding stronger children, but … it was a fact of life. And now she – and Steve – were part of Helen’s world.
“I think you should have a talk with him,” she said, finally. She didn’t know if Steve had
had any girlfriends. It wasn’t something they’d ever discussed. The idea of asking her brother if he was a virgin … she shook her head. Absurd. “I think he likes you” – she hoped to God that was true, now she’d spoken the words out loud – “but you need to be careful. His idea of a relationship will be very different to yours. You can’t even assume the words mean the same things.”
Helen grimaced. “I’ll try,” she said. “It would have been easier …”
“I suppose.” Janet had seen a few arranged marriages. Some had worked reasonably well. Some had had rough beginnings, then settled down. And some had been utterly disastrous. It would be nice, in some ways, if her mother found her a man, yet … how could she have been sure the man would actually be good for her. “He’s just as nervous as you.”
“Really?” Helen gave her a sharp look. “How can you tell?”
“I know him,” Janet said. “And I know how hard it is for a man to ask a woman out.”
Helen smiled. “How long did it take Richard to ask
you out?”
“Too long, and not long enough,” Janet said. She felt a twinge of guilt. She hadn’t made anything like enough time for Richard, over the last few days. She promised herself she’d make it up to him as soon as possible. “And Steve has it even worse.”
She paused. “He knows
nothing about your society,” she added. “If he gets into trouble through ignorance …”
“He won’t,” Helen assured her. “I won’t let him.”