The The Name of the Star (35 page)

Stephen was trying to keep himself together, but he had to sit down on the steps. Callum too was struggling, but the things Newman was saying . . . I knew they resonated with him.

“Then one day a man came up to me in the street and asked me if I'd like to put my abilities to good use. I still don't know who he was—someone quite high up in the Met or in MI5, I suppose. It turns out they had started reviewing files at psychiatric institutions to see if anyone was reporting a very specific set of delusions—reporting that they could see ghosts after a near-death experience. A brilliant way of recruiting, really.

“I was taken to Whitehall, to a small office, and the Shades were explained to me. They knew what I was. They liked that I had worked in the prison system. They liked everything about me. They gave me the one thing I had wanted since my accident—a weapon. Something to protect me against these things I was seeing. They gave me some control over my life. The day I became a Shade, I was truly happy for the first time since I was seventeen. I'll bet it was the same for you.

“I knew we were doing the jobs of bin men, cleaning ghosts off Tube platforms and out of old houses, but I didn't care. For the first time in my life, I was happy. But I couldn't help my nature. The others—they were drawn from ordinary police stock. I was an academic. I was a doctor. A scientist.

“There used to be a form of treatment for schizophrenics called insulin shock therapy. The patients would be brought in over the course of several weeks and regularly put into insulin shock, going deeper and deeper each time. Eventually, they'd be put into daily comas and brought out again after an hour or so. Not a very pleasant process, and the results were debatable. But I saw another use for the procedure. I devised a series of experiments to test different areas of the brain, to try to determine which one caused people to develop the sight. But to do this, I needed to re-create the conditions under which the sight develops. Namely, I had to bring the body into a state that mimicked the onset of death. Insulin shock therapy did just that. Paranormal neuropsychiatry, and I was the only person in the world qualified to practice it.

“My status as a Shade gave me unrestricted access, and they already knew me as a doctor. So I went back to the places I had worked before. My idea was simple. I would take the young people I'd met who had the sight, and I would say I was giving them experimental therapy. Getting insulin isn't difficult, nor is the process of putting someone into a diabetic coma. It's a bit of a risky procedure, but done carefully it causes no lasting harm. And I would be working on youths in the prison system, people already considered irredeemable. I performed my work for two years, taking the same subjects down about a dozen times each. I also conducted physical and psychological examinations.

“No one knew about this research of mine,” he continued. “I had planned on revealing it only when I had a clear result, at which point I would certainly have been given a proper lab and resources to continue. Finding out what controls the ability to see the dead? That's a valuable asset. So I still did all of my normal duties—removing ghosts from buildings, getting trains working, all the mundane things they had us do. In my spare time, I did my real work. I had just located a fifth subject, a young girl. I began the process with her. To this day, I'm not sure what went wrong. I took her down—and she didn't come back up. That's when the powers that be discovered the work I'd been doing. They should have thanked me, despite the mistake. They didn't.”

I was convinced now that Newman was telling us the truth. He may have been a murderer, and evil, but he was also honest. At least he was right now.

“The trouble with joining a secret government agency is that they can't really fire you. And they couldn't exactly put me on trial either. No . . . the whole thing had to be very quiet. I was removed from this station, my powers stripped, and my terminus was taken away. I came down here that day to talk to my fellow Shades, and to take a terminus. I needed it. I couldn't go back to the way it was before, having nothing to protect me. I brought the gun because . . . I had to get them to see sense, to give me one. But they wouldn't. They just wouldn't cooperate. I suppose they didn't think I'd shoot . . .”

“Callum!” Stephen said weakly.

“You can let him die,” Newman said, “or you can save him, right now.”

“Let me see it,” Callum said. “Let me see the syringe.”

“I can't do that,” Newman said. “Not until you each set your terminus down and kick it over to me.”

“You could be lying.”

“But you know my history now. You know why I killed. You know what I want. I
want
you to save him. I want to protect those with the sight. I just also want to protect myself. There is absolutely no reason we can't all walk away from this.”

Then he looked right at me.

“Aurora,” he said. “You've been exceptionally brave, and you're not even on the squad. You've risked your life to save others. I swear to you—if you set that down and kick it to me, I will be as good as my word. Give it to me.”

Stephen put his head down. I think he knew what I was about to do and he couldn't watch. I couldn't watch him die. I slowly put the terminus on the filthy floor and gave it a kick. It landed more or less by Newman.

Now that I'd surrendered, the entire burden was on Callum. He looked as sick as Stephen. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, as if preparing to make a dash. His body was ready, but his mind was not.

“Now you, son,” Newman said.

“Don't call me
son
! Don't you
speak
to me.”

Newman closed his mouth and raised his arms to the side, making himself a wide and open target.

“You decide,” he said. “I accept my fate. If you can live with the death of your friend, I can accept my end here. It's been a noble fight for all concerned.”

Stephen could no longer plead. He had slumped against the wall and his eyes were half closed. Callum raised himself up on the balls of his feet, knees flexed. He was going to do it. I was sure of it.

And then he just opened his hands and let the terminus go.

“Kick it here,” Newman said quietly.

Callum delivered a perfect side-of-the-foot kick, sending it right to Newman. I'd never seen anyone that agonized. He rubbed his hands over his face and held them there in a prayer formation.

“Give us the medicine,” he said.

“When I get the third one,” Newman said.

His demeanor had changed also. His eyes had widened and there was an energy about him—he looked alive.

“The third one isn't here,” Callum replied.

“Liar!”

It was a piercing yell, with an echo.

“It's not here,” Callum said again, pulling his hands away from his face and sighing. “But if you save him, I'll take you to it.”

“Oh no,” Newman said. He began to pace. “He will die, do you understand? And it will be
your fault.
Do you hear me?
Your fault!
”

Newman was yelling to the third person he still believed was crouching in the darkness—maybe in the stairs, maybe in the tunnels. He snatched up the two termini at his feet and began to pace, looking through the archways, looking up the steps, searching for the last Shade. Stephen was going to die for nothing unless . . .

Unless someone could talk Newman down, someone he could believe. Someone who held no threat. Someone he'd talked to before. Someone like me.

“I'll take you,” I said.

35

T
HERE WAS A SOUND FROM THE STEPS, ONE SMALL groan from Stephen as he heard me say these words. Newman stopped pacing and stared at me, a wild look in his eye. He went back to the ticket counter and smacked both of the termini down, hard, then cracked open their cheap casing like two plastic Easter eggs. He ripped out the wiry innards, plucking the diamonds from each one, and pushed the empty, broken phones to the floor. Once this was done, he retrieved his knife, which was sitting there on the counter. He crossed the room in a few long strides and came right up to my face.

“Are you lying to me?” he asked, digging the point into my chin.

“No,” I said through clenched teeth. It was hard to talk. Newman pressed the knife even harder, forcing my mouth closed. I felt the tip of the blade slip into my flesh, digging a small hole. Up close, he had a rotten smell that burned the inside of my nose. He no longer looked completely in control of himself.

He twisted the knife once, then grabbed me by the hair and dragged me across the room toward the ticket booth.

“Reach in there,” he said, pointing the knife at some old boards that sealed off the old ticket window.

The boards gave when I pushed at them, and I was able to get my hand into the opening, though I couldn't see what I was reaching for. What I felt mostly was grime and cobwebs, and I was certain I was thrusting my hand into a place that had long been a nest for rats and mice. I felt what seemed like pencils, and some little rock-like things that were probably petrified rodent turds, but then I hit something smooth and thin and plasticky. I carefully pulled this out of the opening. It was a syringe, capped and pristine, and full of something.

“Take the cap off and inject him,” Newman said.

“Where?”

“In the upper arm.”

I approached Stephen, who looked up at me with a sweatslicked face.

“Don't do this,” he said. “Don't let him have it.”

I pulled the cap off the needle end and jammed it into Stephen's arm. It took a lot of force to get it through the sweater and the shirt and his skin. It didn't go in all the way on the first try, so I had to keep pressing down to get into the muscle.

“Sorry,” I said.

The plunger was equally hard to depress, but I eventually got it down, and whatever was in the syringe was now in Stephen. As I pulled it out, Newman put me in a choke hold and held the knife up to my eye.

“Stay exactly where you are,” he said to Callum. “If I so much as
think
I hear you following, I'll slice her open.”

I had been alone with the Ripper before, but he had never
had
me before. When Jo touched you, it felt like a gentle breeze. The Ripper felt like he had the contained wind strength of a hurricane—or at least a pretty serious storm, one that could rip off a roof or pull up a tree. He dragged me backward up the steps until we reached the spiral section, then pushed me ahead of him.

“If I don't get my terminus, I won't hold myself back,” he said. “The girl with the long hair, your friend in the window? The boy with the curly hair? They'll be scrubbing the walls for weeks, trying to get the blood off. And what I will do to you will be even worse. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. I was crying a little, but I wiped my face and started the climb. I stumbled frequently as we went up, and I'd feel the knife tap the middle of my back. Once we got to the basement, he locked the access door, sealing Stephen and Callum inside. He allowed me to walk on my own, knowing that his threat kept me tethered.

“Where is it?” he snapped as we got into the elevator.

“It's at Wexford,” I said.

“I will lead, and you will follow.”

It was eerily quiet outside. No cars. No sirens. No people. Just the Ripper and me, stepping out into the dark. He turned sharply when we stepped out of the building and headed toward the river. The building was very close to the Thames, and King William Street continued straight on to London Bridge—one continuous sidewalk. Newman walked to the middle of the bridge, and I stayed with him, fighting every impulse to start running and never, ever stop.

The Thames was well illuminated, lined with buildings and landmarks. This was the main alley of London, and all the lights were on tonight.

“Hypnos,” he said, holding up one of the diamonds. “It has a faint gray hint to the flaw.”

He held up the other for comparison.

“And this is Thanatos. A similar color, but slightly more greenish if you look at it. Persephone's flaw is distinctly more blue.”

I could barely see the diamonds at all. The wind was blowing in my face, and I was much too frightened to process anything that detailed.

“They're all slightly different in their effect,” he explained. “Hypnos is the fastest to take effect. Thanatos is a bit slower to take action, not by much. And Persephone, the one we will go and get now . . .”

He palmed the two diamonds and closed his fist around them.

“. . . was the one I carried. Quite powerful. That's why I preferred her. Plus, it's a lovely name—Persephone. The goddess of the Underworld. Dragged down to hell, then dragged right up again.”

Newman shook the two diamonds in his fist like they were dice, and then he drew his arm back and threw them. They vanished in midair before dropping into the river below.

“Two gone,” he said. “One to go. Come along, Aurora.”

He turned back and walked exactly the way we had just come, back down King William Street. East London is old and confusing, full of tiny streets and bends and turns, but his stride was purposeful and sure and quick. We walked right through the center of the London financial district, past the disappointed remains of Ripper parties, all waiting for that one last body. We wove through crowds of people, one living person and one dead person. In the dark, no one noticed the knife making its way along the city streets, held by no one. Or if they did, they would put it down to a trick of the eye, or a reflection, or too much beer.

I almost had to run to keep up with Newman, and my thoughts were going even faster. Callum would try to follow us, but he would have to get out first, and he would make sure to get Stephen to safety. So he was way behind me. Boo would be awake and on alert, and Jo was still on the lookout somewhere in the building. But Boo was also in a wheelchair. I was taking the Ripper into my home, and the only person who could fight him off was helpless.