The Illusionists (6 page)

‘They cannot do that!'

‘Yes, they can,' said Frith. ‘This is politics. We hurt them, they hurt us. We won't do as they say, so they try to screw us. That's the game.'

‘So this is just  …  the end of it, then?'

‘I'm protecting you. Just as I always have. That's all you need to know.'

Frith's voice had an edge.

It was useless for White to argue. It got him nowhere. He'd get a sunny smile, hiding the ‘don't push it' darkness underneath. Then Frith would shut down, and leave.

And what could White do in the face of that?

A big fat nothing, that was what.

A big, fat, useless nothing.

If he were determined, courageous, reckless, and all those other words that heroes were made up of, he would just leave, wouldn't he?

He'd go find Wren, somehow, with no real idea of where he was, just that he was somewhere in the world, an insistent tangy yellow ache in the back of White's head. He'd find a way, though, because that was what determined heroes did.

He'd find Wren, and they would face off with each other. They would fight.

It would be brutal. Nasty. Near misses and crunching bone. Maybe they'd fight with their minds, forcing each other into the nothing blackness that existed between Jumps. They would fight there in the empty places, alone and desperate. It wouldn't even echo with their shouts. The energy and noise and flesh colour they painted onto it with their presence would be sucked away. Because everything there was sucked away.

They would fight an exhausted, raging fight. White would win but be left battered and bloody. He would crawl out of the nothing and fall to Rue, who would hold him in her arms and tell him how incredibly brave he had been. He would bring her back here.

She would be here.

If he were a hero.

But the idea was ridiculous and embarrassingly stupid and never made it out past his daydreams. So he stayed here, and told himself she wanted Wren, and that she hated him. He stayed and he let Frith in a little more, because Frith gave him a purpose. The purpose made him feel better about his life, as if he had a right and a reason to be here, and didn't just exist for existing's sake. It made him forget all his shame. All the stupid things he had done that taunted him now and had led him here. So he would content himself with childish fantasies, and he would play Frith's games and jump through Frith's hoops, because in the end he would be allowed to be part of something.

And there's one more reason,
a small voice inside reminded him.

You have nowhere else to go.

Rue was dreaming.

She was back at the party the other night, sat on a little couch watching dim shapes dance and laugh before her, a mass of humanity that she was no part of.

She felt alone, but not. One person in a string of people, going all the way backwards and forwards to forever. She felt like she could travel along her own line, move backwards to a past she had forgotten, move forwards to a future her with grey hair and wrinkled skin. Move further forward to a future without her in it.

She was thinking about this, and how natural it all felt. How she should be scared by it but could only be calm about it. About how it would be to sit like this forever, in the dark and the nothing. She was thinking all this when she felt someone by her side and turned, assuming it would be Wren.

But it wasn't.

It was White.

Rue felt herself go stiff and prickling.

Her heart started to pound, pound, pound against her ribs.

He was sat next to her, looking bewildered. She'd never seen him look bewildered.

Yes, you have,
said a voice in her mind's ear.
The last time you spoke to each other. He looked pretty damn bewildered when you told him –

Rue gave the voice an angry shove. It stopped.

‘Where's this?' said White. He was gazing around the dark.

‘Some party,' she said. ‘What are you doing here?'

He didn't reply.

White. It was White. So it was only a dream, but it felt real enough.

He was prettier than she remembered. Not so imposing. Slim and compact and hesitant. But then this was her ideal dream version of him, she supposed, not him as he really was.

He glanced at her.

‘You look good,' he said, awkwardly. ‘I guess World suits you.'

Rue frowned. ‘Your Angle Tarain is a lot better. You used to have more of an accent.'

‘We're speaking in World.'

‘Oh. I didn't even notice.'

‘How did you learn it so fast?' said White.

‘Data stick.'

He looked surprised. ‘Those things are expensive.'

Rue shrugged, unwilling to say how she got it, and that she was beholden to someone.

Silence, then.

White sighed, leaning forward, resting his arms on his thighs. She noticed how his back strained underneath his shirt. He was past pretty and well into beautiful, she realised. Odd looking. But maybe that was what made him beautiful.

It was funny how much simpler everything felt in a dream. Around him in real life, she had never been able to think clearly. She could only dance around what she had wanted to say.

She could feel the warmth of his thigh against hers. He shifted away from her slightly, and their legs lost contact. She was heartbroken.

‘I don't know what to say to you,' White said, staring out across the darkness. ‘I've thought about it often enough. Even in a dream, nothing comes out the way it should.'

‘I don't know what you should say, either,' said Rue. ‘But you don't have to say anything.'

White seemed to take this to heart, and they sat together for a while.

‘How's the rest of the group?' said Rue, trying not to sound forced.

‘They progress. Some more than most.'

‘Let me guess. Lufe is the best, Lea the worst. He's fiercely proud of himself, she doesn't care too much. Marches would be better if he wasn't so lazy, and Tulsent is too afraid to try harder.'

White laughed. Rue was delighted with the sound. Would he laugh like that in reality, or had she made that sound up?

‘You know them so well,' he said.

‘I suppose,' said Rue. ‘I miss them. Even though sometimes I hated them. I think we all knew each other well, even after the first week or two. It's strange, right?'

‘I wouldn't know. I've never felt that close with anyone.' He opened his mouth as if to say more, but then fell silent.

Rue saw, for the first time, the edge of an opening into him. The word ‘prison' flashed through her mind. ‘Not even when you were younger?' she said.

White leaned back. His shoulder brushed her own briefly, before he re-positioned himself. They were sat extremely close together. He didn't move further up the seat from her, but neither did he seem to want to touch her. It was just these sorts of confusing messages, thought Rue, that had made her so nervous around him in the first place.

‘I was lonely as a child,' he said. ‘There was no Talent programme I could join. No others that could help me understand why I was so different to everyone else. Only my mother. But even she never knew all the things I could do. And we had to be careful. You weren't allowed to talk about Talent back then.'

‘Why?' said Rue.

White smiled a hard smile. ‘They were afraid of us.'

He talked. Rue listened, passionately caught. She wanted every word he could give her about himself, every little thing that made up every piece of him. Nothing he could say would be too small, too strange or too dull.

She watched his mouth move as he spoke.

She wanted to run her fingers over his mouth, and him to let her.

I'm sorry
, she wanted to say.
I'll make it better
.
I'll take it from you
.

White stopped.

‘I've upset you,' he said.

‘No, no.'

‘I didn't mean to speak about those things to you. I never meant to tell anyone. I don't want –' He stopped, took a breath. ‘This is not about self-pity.'

‘No,' Rue said firmly. ‘Why would you think that?'

‘I'll leave you alone.'

He stood up. She did the unthinkable, then – reached her hand up, stretching it far enough to lift herself off the seat, taking his arm, clutching onto his sleeve.

‘Stop,' she said. ‘Sit down.'

He did, meek as a child. She smiled, enjoying her version of him – enjoying the pretence of it. She could make him do things the real him never would, and wasn't it fun?

‘Sit with me,' she said. ‘And tell me more.'

He looked at her.

There was something, then.

There was that moment when someone is close enough to kiss.

You watch the thought pass across each other's eyes, and wonder if either of you will lean forward. You wonder as the seconds peel off, and then it's been too long, and it's too late, and that's it.

It was like that, except the thing that broke it was not him dropping his eyes, but someone else calling her name.

‘Rue. Rue!'

It was Wren.

Rue woke to find him crouched next to her bed, one hand on her arm.

‘You spoiled my dream,' she said crossly.

‘I came to check on you, and you were completely out,' Wren exclaimed. ‘I didn't know if you were all right.'

‘Why wouldn't I be?' she muttered, rubbing her eyes.

‘My dear, it's past lunchtime.'

Rue sat up. ‘What?'

Wren sat back on his heels, looking amused. ‘Tired, were we?' he said.

White woke, reluctantly.

Rue was all around him, beside him and hanging in the air like a scent. The dream had been sweet, and too short.

They had been in a place he didn't know, a dark room filled with the feel of other people, but with Rue he'd made an island in the midst of the crowd. It had been just him and her sat together, close like lovers, talking. She'd looked at him in a way that lit his skin on fire.

He wondered briefly what it meant, and then dismissed it. It meant that he was still obsessed with her. That was all.

It was easier to forget about it during the day, buried amongst a thousand distractions – smells and people and buildings, talking and concentration and teaching and eating. But it was much harder here in the velveteen darkness, all alone with hushed silence and that night-time feeling of delicious strangeness, a feeling that anything could happen, that you could look outside your window and see centaurs roaming the streets under a sky lit by three moons. The night was a different world he used to love to visit, but not any more.

He sat up in bed, resigned to spending the next hour or two awake and feeling sorry for himself. As he moved, he heard something hiss sharply beside his ear, and then came a small, dull thunk.

He froze.

As a multitude of things marched briefly across his mind –
some sort of rat. Something fell. The bed collapsed. I imagined it. I'm still dreaming
– he saw a dark shape drop soundlessly from his ceiling.

Open-mouthed, he watched it come towards him.

A cat. A dog. An animal. Some kind of bird. Very big bird.

‘Hello?' he said, his voice blurred with sleep. The word swam into the silence of his room and was swallowed up whole.

‘Is anyone there?'

The shape had melted into the gloom.

For a long, agonising moment he sat, straining, flickering silently between assuring himself he'd been imagining it and shouting that there was still something there. It went on so long that he had almost decided on the former, but trying to sleep now without being sure was unthinkable.

Just when he was about to force himself to reach over to his bedside table and light the lamp, just to be safe, there was a little something.

A sheen of a whisper out of the dark. And then the dark moved.

He really should just get up.

He really should just get out of bed.

He should do something. Don't just sit there –
do something
.

Then there was a click from his bedroom door, as if it had been opened. A second of nothing. The shape gliding towards him was pushed sharply off course, crumpling downwards. He could hear scuffling. His bed shook suddenly – something had smacked the side of it and set the whole frame trembling.

A low groan from the floor.

The scuffling stopped.

‘White,' said a voice. ‘Put a lamp on.'

He reached over unthinkingly, fingers outstretched, feeling for a match from the dish on his bedside table and setting his hands to work. Warm, thick light rolled out from the table lamp and he slid out of bed, peering towards the end of it.

There was a man lying on the floor, and there was Frith crouched over him. He looked up as light flooded across his face.

‘It's fine,' said Frith, his voice cheery. ‘He's just out, not dead. He was sneaking around your room with a blow dart.'

White looked down at the motionless shape. He could just see the side of the man's face, pale and unmarked. His eyes were closed.

‘He is Angle Tarain,' said White, his voice steady. Perhaps hysteria would come later, when he was alone and could show it.

‘It appears so. But he'll have been recruited by World.'

‘To do what?' said White, though he already knew.

Frith didn't bother answering but finished his inspection and stood up.

‘Are you all right?' he said.

White shrugged, heart pounding. ‘Perfectly fine. I just – Yes. Fine.'

‘Sit down,' said Frith. ‘Please. Sit.'

White did so, perching on the side of the bed.

‘Why now?' he said.

‘Things are moving faster. They know how important you are to our Talent programme. I suppose they decided now was a good time.'

After a moment, he felt the bed sink down as Frith sat next to him.

‘Are you sure you're all right? You look a little sick.'

‘I am fine,' snapped White. ‘For a very nearly dead man.'

‘He was a poor shot, I'll grant you. But I don't think they want to kill you, White. I think we'll find his dart was dipped in some sort of knockout drug. They probably planned to kidnap you, drag you back to World.'

White remembered the hiss and the thunk. The dart had missed him by inches.

‘I sat up,' he said, realising. ‘I sat up because I woke, and so he missed.'

Frith was quiet. The bed creaked as he shifted.

It dawned on White how closely they were sat together and he tried surreptitiously to move away.

‘What are you going to do with him?' he said. He looked down at the man by Frith's feet. He tried not to start imagining that the man was only pretending to be unconscious. That in a moment he would be up, the surprise knocking Frith off balance. Giving him time to slit Frith's throat with a handily concealed knife. Turning to White. Plunging the knife into his chest like slicing butter – that gentle resistance. White feeling the man's breath on his face as he died.

‘Oh, just ask him some questions. I don't need to know who sent him. But I imagine, shortly, the rest of his team will know he's been caught and will decide to quietly disperse. I'd quite like to talk to all of them,' said Frith.

White watched Frith poke his foot carefully into the man's side.

‘Where were you?' said White.

Frith glanced at him.

‘Where were you?' White repeated. ‘You stopped him. How did you know he was here?'

Frith was silent for a second. When his voice came, it was contemptuously amused. ‘White, you didn't expect me to leave you alone and unguarded while all this is going on, did you? I said, when you first came to me, that I had ways and means of protecting you. I didn't tell you what those ways were. I'm not going to tell you now.'

It was good. It was very good, in fact. Just the right amount of impatience and disappointment, as if White should be cleverer than that. As if he should have worked that out by himself.

But something was off. It was categorically impossible that Frith could have known that there was someone in this room and then arrived in time to stop it.

There could only be two explanations.

One. Frith had Talent, had somehow seen the danger and Jumped into White's bedroom in time to prevent it. This meant that Frith had been lying to him all this time.

It was wildly unlikely. White knew that he would have felt it if Frith was Talented – especially as ridiculously Talented as to be able to do
that.
There would have been signs, even from someone as hard to read as him. It was an extremely difficult thing to hide.

So that left two. Two was that Frith had been somewhere nearby; somewhere so nearby that it might very well be next door. And that he had the means to watch the inside of White's rooms whenever he chose.

No. Frith was Frith, but that was just ridiculous. He couldn't camp out next door every night just in case something happened, and he couldn't watch White for hours on end in secret, invading his privacy in such a horrible way.

Could he?

A suspicion began to twitch its legs.

It was stupid, the suspicion, and ridiculous, and a million other things. But it was also awfully, awfully possible. In the deepest, darkest part of White's heart, there was that something that he had begun to suspect of Frith but never thought could really, absolutely be true.

He could feel Frith's eyes on him. The room's thick silence buzzed heavily in his ears. If he said it out loud. If he just confronted him.

‘How did you know he was here? How could you possibly have known?' he said again.

Frith tutted. ‘I'm not going to tell you, White, so this is the last time you should ask.'

He sounded annoyed. But his gaze was steady on White's face. Steady and calm.

He wants me to know. He wants me to work it out.

White looked away.

‘I hate this game,' he muttered, out loud and barely conscious of it.

‘It's nearly over,' said Frith. ‘One way or another.'

White's heart spiked in fear.

An image of a golden-skinned boy, dappled by sunlight and laughing as he disappeared, flashed into his mind.

More scenes came to him from Frith's drunken confession that night a few months ago. A crowd of children, a young Frith in the middle, small and sweet-looking, gazing at the golden boy's proud face. Ruining his life, and doing it because he couldn't get what he wanted. Because of love.

A knock came from outside the bedroom door. After a moment, Frith got up from the bed.

‘Come in,' he called.

The door opened inwards and an older face peered around the edge of it.

‘Syer?'

‘Take this, would you?' said Frith, pointing at the man crumpled on the floor. ‘See that he's secure. I'd like to talk to him when he wakes up.'

Two men came in. They must have been well trained – neither of them showed the slightest hint of surprise at the man. They took hold of him and dragged him out. He still hadn't woken, or moved. Whatever Frith did in those short seconds had been effective.

And just how had Frith called them in, anyway? White hadn't seen him do it. They had simply shown up.

‘Well,' said Frith brightly, when they had left the room. ‘I think your sleep has been disturbed enough for one night. I'm going to go and see what we can find out from him. I'll come and find you between classes in the morning. Try not to worry. It won't happen again, I can assure you.'

White nodded. He felt like a child, and a pet, and a prisoner, and something else darker that he couldn't even name.

He watched Frith leave, and then waited as long as he dared.

He had to be sure, even if there was a chance they were still watching.

He started with the bed. He ran his fingers across every surface of it, checking the headboard, and the sides, and underneath the mattress. He stood on it, skirting over the lamp bracket on the wall above his head.

He moved to the bedside table, feeling its smooth insides.

He checked every wall for bumps and holes, sketching his fingers lightly across the wallpaper.

He started to think that he had been completely, utterly and embarrassingly wrong, when he found it. Nestled in the wooden bracket of a wall lamp and about as big as a fingernail. It looked fairly innocuous. Even in daylight it could be mistaken for an imperfection in the wood. But buried in the hole at the edge that pointed towards his bed and the rest of his room was a tiny, tiny lens.

Frith had a camera in his bedroom.

Frith had a
camera
.

In his bedroom.

Frith could see everything. Frith watched him. He watched him in his own private space. He might sit there for hours, watching him sleep. Who knew what he did in his sleep?

Frith had been watching him sleep tonight.

World technology in Angle Tar. It utterly failed to surprise him that Angle Tar would possess such a thing at the same time as it was illegal to even know about technology like that. It would be bought on the black market, but only those little things that would aid the government in protecting its citizens. Of course. Cameras would fit in nicely with that.

He sat on the edge of his bed, his hands clasped tightly together on his lap. His stomach rolled, and for a moment he thought he would be sick on the rug, right there. The urge passed, but the nausea remained.

He felt very small, and very alone.

Are you going to do something about this, finally?

His thoughts turned fierce and snapping, like a cornered dog, but just as quickly they fled. They came occasionally, these angry waves of rebellion, and he had no choice but to let them pass. They didn't help him.

He remembered Frith's words. ‘It's nearly over, one way or another.'

He was afraid. Truly and completely.