Brigid checked a few of the tapes, finding stories concerning food deliveries, recycling and one about the declining radiation levels. It was the kind of information she had regularly processed as a junior archivist in Cobaltville, before she had been given more important responsibilities in the Historical Division.
Archived news reports. Of course, without power she had no way to play them.
Brigid pushed the tapes back onto their shelves, returning them to their correct places with the ingrained meticulousness of an archivist. The shelving units were split in the center to reveal a door that Brigid guessed led into an editing suite or similar. She strolled over, tested the handle and let herself in.
There, Brigid found herself staring straight down the barrel of a gun pointed right between her eyes.
Chapter 17
Automatically, Brigid skipped back, dodging out of the firing line with a movement born of honed reflex. The shining revolver did not fire but simply remained there, pointed at the door.
It was dark in the room, the only light spilling in from the office outside, where Brigid had left the door open. The blaster was held in a bone hand that was attached to a skeleton draped in stained clothes. The skeleton was balanced in a swivel chair that had been placed between two tight shelving units filled with videotapes. There was barely enough room for the chair, though its long-dead occupant scarcely cared now. The room itself was windowless.
The first thing Brigid did was disarm the skeleton and check over the revolver in the office outside, where the light was better. It was a .38 with five bullets still in the chamber and the safety off. She flipped the safety on and shoved the weapon in her waistband at the small of her back.
“Don’t think you’ll be needing it anymore, friend,” she told her grisly discovery.
After that, Brigid returned to the room, reached for the light switch on the wall and flipped it once, twice, only proving what she had already suspected—that it didn’t work. There was no power; nothing worked here any longer. When night fell, she and Kane would likely see the whole city plunged into darkness.
Swiftly she pushed the swivel chair and its gruesome occupant out of the storeroom before returning. Then, leaving the door open behind her, Brigid checked the room. If there was a communications device, she might be able to use an emergency backup generator to get it running. But she needed to find both, and here seemed as good a place to start looking as any. Things like that ended up forgotten in dusty storerooms like this.
There was no comm array. Little more than a storeroom, the tiny office featured a reinforced metal door—the one Brigid had entered by—twelve shelves containing video tapes, two further shelves that contained a dismantled editing box designed for editing in the field and a one-man desk at the far end on which there was a lamp that no longer worked, a television and a bulky, handheld video camera. Brigid looked at the camera for a moment, turning it over in her hands as she thought. The camera ran on battery power and could take a full-size videocassette. She flipped open the side-mounted screen and watched as, to her surprise, it illuminated with life.
“Batteries still working,” she said. Standing behind her, the shadowy figure of Daryl Morganstern smiled at Brigid’s discovery, his silhouette visible in the reflection of the dark television screen. Brigid ignored him, knowing he couldn’t be real.
With the camera’s video player and power, she could watch the tapes, at least until the battery ran down. Brigid took a minute to familiarize herself with the camera’s operation, bringing up a user’s menu on-screen. The camera had two hours and eighteen minutes of battery power left.
Brigid scanned the shelves. “So, what are we going to watch?” she muttered.
* * *
K
ANE
RAN
THROUGH
the ghost streets of Quocruft, his arms pumping at his sides, feet splashing into the puddles that littered the broken tarmac. Behind him, the imposing figure of the Magistrate sidestepped as he followed, weapon raised, trying to get a bead on his zigzagging prey.
Kane flinched as a clutch of bullets came howling toward him, cutting the air with their ghastly shrieks. Kane’s pursuer shrieked, too, his strained voice echoing through the empty buildings like a whale song. All around Kane, the Magistrate’s screaming bullets clipped into the ground and the charred street furniture, whipping into it with an abrupt curtailment of their screams.
Kane needed to finish this, and quickly. The noise of gunfire, the screaming call of the Dark Magistrate, even his own running footsteps on the hard ground—all of this would attract others, he felt certain. Kane leaped as more bullets clipped the road at his feet, spitting up chunks of broken tarmac.
There was a car up ahead, a burned-out wreck, its tires flattened husks that clung to the road like the tendrils of a creeping plant. As more of the Mag’s screaming bullets blistered the air all around him, Kane leaped onto the hood of the parked car with a loud thump, rolling across it in a second before dropping below, out of sight of those vicious bullets.
Crouched down in the puddles behind the automobile, Kane checked his right hand. He could bring his own Sin Eater into play, either execute this Magistrate or wound him. But he needed to find a way to catch the man so that he could question him, perhaps even reason with him.
Kane scanned the area, searching the immediate vicinity with his eyes as his opponent stalked closer. There was water here, pooled on the cracking road surface, shimmering silver as it reflected the cloud cover from overhead. Kane’s eyes were drawn to that water as ripples ran across its surface where the breeze brushed against it.
Vaughn.
Her face was there, the face of the schoolgirl who had died on his watch. Her blond hair swirled about her face, cutting across her eyes for a moment, tangling around her narrow stem of a neck.
Helena Vaughn.
Kane looked at the face in the water, the clouds overhead drifting past her. She looked beautiful in her innocence, a beauty that he knew had been stolen away by Pellerito and his drugs. He should have saved her. But how could he? He had only been called to the scene once the girl had died; he could not possibly have—
Something exploded close to Kane, a shriek of terror as the bullet cut the air and struck the side of the burned-out automobile. Kane jumped, instinct driving his body, pumping him with adrenaline. He was away from the car even before he quite realized, charging across the street toward an open concrete quadrangle framed by the jutting struts of an office block. The concrete had been pounded by some great force, dark, cracked lines running across it as if an earthquake had struck. In the center, a statue stood atop a plinth, mother and child captured in embrace, the woman’s head crumbled away with damage.
Kane ran at the statue, still seeing the innocent face of Helena Vaughn in his mind’s eye, still smelling her girl perfume, pencil shavings, hairspray. Behind him, the Dark Magistrate tracked his prey, screaming bullets blasting from his hand cannon, his fixed expression stern behind the cracked mask of his visor.
His mind whirling, Kane tripped, the toe of his boot catching on one of the ruined paving slabs. Suddenly he was falling headfirst at the ground as another burst of bullets lunged through the air toward him.
* * *
T
HERE
WAS
NO
CHOICE
,
not for an archivist like Brigid. Most of the tapes in the store cupboard were labelled with dates and identifier numbers, but Brigid didn’t pay that much attention. She simply looked around the room until she found the lowest number, took that tape from the shelf and pushed it into the open tray of the camera. Then, sitting on the floor of the storeroom with the video camera between her knees and its flip screen open, she pressed Play.
The screen lit up immediately, coming in midway through a news report. A dour-faced man in a raincoat stared into the lens as a parade marched past behind him, the familiar lines of the ville buildings to his rear. He was speaking to the viewer in that mock-urgent tone reserved for television news reports.
“...with this, Baron Trevelyan promises a new era of prosperity, tapping the sun’s resources to provide a near-infinite stream of power into our residences.”
The image cut to the marching figures as the report continued in voice-over. A marching band of uniformed schoolchildren passed the camera, alternately grinning and concentrating hard, followed by the grim figures of Magistrates walking five abreast, their expressions hidden beneath their helmets.
“The process has been over a decade in development, we are told, with last summer’s prototype launch conducted in secret. Now the baron feels ready to share his triumph with his grateful people.”
The scene changed once more, cutting to a pale-faced figure flanked by two Magistrates standing on a balcony, a vivid red banner draped beneath it in a long vertical that continued past the bottom of the screen. Brigid gasped as she saw the figure, recognized what it was: a hybrid, one of the quasi-human monsters who had ruled the nine villes until they finally revealed themselves to be the major players in a millennia-long alien conspiracy to subjugate and conquer humankind.
The hybrid baron spoke in an effeminate, weaselly voice, an echo coming from the speakers set up around him. “My people, today is a proud day. With the launch of our first sun shield, we are now able to tap the energy of the sun itself, utilising solar power to achieve our dreams. With this near-infinite power source, we are able to dream bigger than we ever have before. The world is ours.”
Brigid swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry, as the reporter wrapped up the news story. A sun shield that could provide infinite power? Into what world had the mat-trans unit thrown them?
* * *
K
ANE
WAS
SPRAWLED
BY
the statue, his jaw throbbing, head spinning. He pulled himself back from semiconsciousness, rolling his body back to a sitting position.
Across the street, the Magistrate moved like a wraith, the dark lines of his uniform weaving between the burned-out automobiles and ruined benches like a beetle’s glistening shell as he strode toward Kane in the quadrangle.
I’m trapped, Kane realized.
There were walls on all sides, holding him in a pincer between the office blocks. Tucked behind the mother-and-child statue, Kane raised his right arm—his gun arm—and thought about the Sin Eater, about what it would cost him to shoot this Magistrate. No, he decided. There had to be some other way. Killing the patrolman would achieve nothing. He needed a witness, someone to interrogate, so he could figure out what was going on and where they had materialized.
Kane’s eyes flashed around the area where he found himself trapped, searching the pooling water and the broken office furniture that had found its way to this enclosed concrete square. The furniture gave Kane an idea.
Behind him, the Dark Magistrate loomed closer, seeking his prey amid the ruins of the sprawling avenue. He called, mouth wide, a shriek like nails down a chalkboard bursting forth, becoming louder with each ululation. Abruptly the sound stopped, cut off in midstream when the Magistrate closed his lips. His prey had gone, was no longer hidden behind the statue.
The Magistrate turned, searching the area with his hidden eyes. And as he turned, Kane ran at him from his hiding place under a pockmarked desk, wielding the broken leg of a chair like a baseball bat.
* * *
“M
Y
NAME
IS
B
RYAN
B
AUBIER
,
and I’m a journalist,” the man on the videotape said without preamble.
This recording looked washed-out, the colors muted, and there was a fuzzy white blur at the top of the screen where the playback head needed cleaning, but Brigid watched without complaint. The man was sitting in what looked like this very storeroom, the wall visible right behind him with a shelf full of videotapes. The room was so small there was barely enough room to set up the camera, lending almost a fish-eye effect to his face. He looked young, still in his twenties, a mop of curly blond hair hanging partway over his eyes. In a different set of circumstances, Brigid might have described him as cute. He spoke in a whisper, his eyes furtive throughout the brief recording.
“This isn’t going on the record,” Baubier said. “They won’t let it.
“There was a protest in the town square today,” he continued, his eyes darting back and forth, “and it turned ugly. The people are rioting over food because so much has been reassigned for the baron’s grand project. Without any freight vehicles available, food’s no longer reaching the ville, and even the black market is struggling now where once it flourished.
“They sent Magistrates to quell the rioters. They were the new breed of Magistrates, ones I had heard about but not seen before. They walk like men but there is something wrong with them. They smell like they don’t wash, and they never speak. They simply lash out, attacking anyone who comes within arm’s reach. I saw a woman shot in cold blood as she tried to get free. She had been there to protest about the lack of food—she hadn’t been a part of the riot. She had been trying to calm everyone down when the Magistrates shot her in the head.”
Despite the low quality of the recording, Brigid could hear the fear in the man’s trembling tone, see it in his eyes.
“People are starving, but all the baron does is command his Magistrates to shoot them,” the man concluded. “One less mouth to feed. Or to complain.”
Brigid watched as Bryan Baubier leaned forward and switched off the camera, at which point the recording cut to static.
Brigid’s eyes returned to the shelf of video recordings, scanning their spines. The tapes to the left had dates on them, but as she got farther across the shelf she saw the dates turn to day numbers, and then tapes with simple blank labels where no one had taken the time to fill them in. She picked one of the undated ones, identified as Day 461, and slapped it in the video player.
* * *
K
ANE
SWUNG
THE
HUNK
of wood like a bat, driving it into the back of the Magistrate’s helmet with a loud crack. The wood struck so hard that it snapped, breaking along its central line, one half flipping over before crashing into the street.
The Magistrate fell, too, tumbling forward as the wood struck his helmet. The Magistrate’s helmet toppled from his head, rolling three feet across the sidewalk as he sagged to the ground. Kane stood behind him, the hunk of wood still clutched in his hand, watching for any sign of consciousness. He hadn’t killed him; he was sure of that. He just wanted the Magistrate unconscious so he could drag him somewhere secure to interrogate him.