The butterfly assassin, p.2
The Butterfly Assassin, page 2
The extra year also buys her time, putting off the moment she has to figure out what’s next. The University of Central Espera is theoretically neutral, but it’s a pie the guilds have their fingers in, and it’s not like she could afford the civilian fees. And if there’s a job out there that would let her stay hidden, she hasn’t found it yet. School is the safest place for her – the longer she can stay here, the better.
Her teachers have been told that Bella Nicholls was homeschooled due to poor health, which isn’t entirely a lie. This non-specific tragic backstory does double duty as an easy explanation for why she sometimes has to duck into an empty classroom when the chaos and noise of the crowded school corridors become overwhelming, and why she’s not up-to-date on all the pop culture references that pepper her classmates’ conversations. But blending in is about more than what’s on paper, and every day Isabel is confronted by the differences between herself and her classmates.
At Linnaeus Secondary, the highly selective Comma-funded school she used to attend, her path was clear. Top grades in the sciences would have earned her a place in the specialist track for pupils the guild was interested in sponsoring for training. Her academic classes would have been supplemented by specialised vocational courses designed to pave the way for future study: classes in poisons, weapons development, codebreaking… But those options are limited to spons – guild-sponsored schools – which means she won’t find them at the Fraser, even if she wanted (or needed) them. Here, the required vocational electives are geared towards civilian jobs. Woodwork. Textiles. Food Science. Training for a life Isabel was never expected to lead.
Her late transfer left her with limited options, of which Woodwork was the least objectionable. Mortimer Sark, the teacher, is known to staff and students alike by his first name and rewards exceptional homework with biscuits from a bright orange tin he keeps on his desk. She’d hoped that meant he was a soft touch, but so far he’s anything but.
‘Everyone else in this class,’ he told ‘Bella’ in their first lesson, ‘took Level Two Woodwork with me. That means they’ve sat through my lectures and demonstrations on workshop safety. They’re bored to tears of the topic, but at least I know they won’t saw off their own fingers. You, on the other hand…’
‘I’m not going to saw off my fingers.’
‘So you say, but I have no proof that it’s true.’ He placed a thick lever-arch file on the workbench in front of her. ‘I understand that your old school didn’t offer Woodwork, which is fine. Well, no, it’s tragic, but it’s not an insurmountable issue. However, since we don’t have time to cover everything you’ve missed, I’m going to need you to work through this by yourself. When you’re done, I’ll test you. If you pass, you get to use sharp things.’ He gave her a wry smile. ‘Yippee.’
Isabel eyed the folder. ‘Is this really necessary?’
‘You’d be amazed at the variety and quantity of accidents students managed to have before I rewrote the safety documentation. So, yes, it’s necessary. And,’ he added, ‘you’re staying on this bench where I can see you.’
It’s like he knew Isabel had been planning to find the darkest corner of the room to crawl into. ‘Anything else?’
He gave her a placid, disarming smile. ‘Not yet. I’m sure I’ll think of something.’
Two and a half weeks of diligently working through the folder later, she’s still barely a third of the way through and, as such, Mortimer has yet to let her touch anything more lethal than sandpaper in his classroom. Sometimes she’s sure he’s deliberately testing her patience, though it’s difficult to hate him when it’s clear he’s motivated by genuine concern for his students.
Today, slowed by exhaustion, Isabel’s the last to leave, and he catches her. ‘Bella, if you need any help with the safety documentation, I’m happy to go over it with you in a free period. I know it’s a lot to work through alone.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ she responds non-committally.
She expects him to try harder to convince her, but all he says is, ‘I’m not holding you back to be difficult, you know.’
‘I know that.’
They’re alone in the classroom, and Mortimer is between Isabel and the door. She tries not to notice things like that, but old instincts die hard.
‘I was sorry to hear about your poor health,’ he says, apparently sincerely. ‘But your Level Two scores were excellent. I’m sure you’ll catch up quickly.’
Her Level Two scores are a lie. ‘Thanks,’ she says awkwardly. ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘I do wonder, though,’ he says, ‘why you would move from Fordon to Lutton to attend an underfunded civ without the resources to support you properly.’
And there it is. It’s possible Mortimer’s remarks are innocent – anyone might question why she’d leave a guild borough and its opportunities behind for a civilian school like the Fraser. But the fact that he’s paying attention at all is dangerous. It means he’s looking at the joins where Isabel Ryans becomes Bella Nicholls, the places where truth and lie intersect. And she has no good answers for him. Her Level Two grades may be fake, but they’re not implausible: the teachers at Linnaeus honed her younger self to academic sharpness and, if she’d stayed, she could have continued along that trajectory. Few people would move to a civilian borough if they had the choice, since guild jobs have better pay and better benefits; fewer still would make the change before they’d even finished school. Mortimer probably assumes that either she’s an abolitionist, or she got expelled.
‘I’m not trying to pry,’ he says, clearly reading into her silence. ‘But I’m concerned that the Fraser can’t give you all the support you need, especially with your background.’
‘My background?’ She scrubbed her record of anything suspicious, anything too close to the guilds. And unless he knows about last night…
He doesn’t know about last night. Nobody knows about last night.
‘Your health issues,’ Mortimer clarifies.
‘I’m fine,’ says Isabel. ‘I was ill for a while, and now I’m not.’ The damage has been done. All that’s left are the scars, and her medical exemption from PE means nobody here will ever see those.
‘Okay,’ says Mortimer, sounding unconvinced.
She swings her rucksack onto her shoulder. ‘I’m late for Chemistry,’ she informs him, and leaves before he can ask any more questions.
She’s good at Chemistry. It’s one of the few subjects where she has to pretend to know less than she does, although little of what she learned in her father’s lab is on the syllabus. And Dr Garner is the kind of teacher Isabel can deal with: impersonal, straightforward, efficient. She’s strict enough that some of the other students dislike her, but Isabel appreciates it. At least she always knows where she stands.
Today, though, it’s hard to focus. She killed someone. A burglar, a civilian, an innocent. She dumped the body, but they’ll find it eventually, and they’ll trace it back to her. Maybe they already know. If they’re watching her – they must be watching her – they’ll have seen everything.
Eighteen days of freedom. She thought she was afraid before, but now it’s like she can feel the blade hanging over her head, waiting to fall.
Lack of sleep isn’t helping, and her notes grow messier as the textbook blurs. The words are a jumble of elements and properties, swimming on the paper. Isabel closes her eyes, and the voices of her fellow students fade. She feels only the cold resin of the table under her fingertips, her feet resting on the bar of her stool. It could be any lab.
No. Not any lab.
The fear is as instant as it is irrational, her left hand curling instinctively into a fist that couldn’t protect her then and won’t protect her now. She can’t feel her nails digging into her scarred palm, but she can feel her knuckles burning as she tries to remember how to loosen her grip.
‘Are you sleeping in my class, Bella?’ asks Dr Garner.
Isabel’s eyes snap open. Her panic-frozen muscles relax as the colourful classroom displays come into focus. She’s at school. She escaped, and she’s at school, and – and Dr Garner looks distinctly pissed off.
It takes every ounce of her willpower not to flinch. ‘Sorry,’ she mutters, staring down at the desk. ‘I was… thinking.’
Silence. She waits for punishment, but when she dares look up at her teacher, Dr Garner only frowns a little and says, ‘About covalent bonding, I hope.’
Is that what they’re studying? Isabel hasn’t taken in a word. ‘Yeah,’ she says vaguely. ‘Sorry.’
Dr Garner leaves it at that, but it’s a long time before Isabel can unclench her fist. She fights to stay present for the rest of the lesson, pressing the tip of her pen into her palm every time she feels herself drifting back into a flashback. By the time the bell rings, there’s a constellation of dots adorning the damaged skin.
Nick, inevitably, catches her at the tram stop after school. ‘Bad day?’
Is it that obvious? She doesn’t know how Nick reads her so easily – what signals she’s giving out, or how to stop them. ‘Feels like this week has lasted a month already,’ she admits.
‘It’s Tuesday.’
‘Well, then, kill me now and put me out of my misery.’ Isabel dredges up a smile and pretends she’s joking. Talking to Nick is at least better than staying stuck inside her own head, running through the potential consequences she might face for what happened last night. ‘Never get a paper round,’ she tells him. ‘Getting up at five isn’t worth it.’
Like that’s her biggest problem right now.
‘Wasn’t planning on it, but thanks for the tip. Is that why you always look so tired?’
Isabel scowls at him. ‘Wow, flattering.’
He pulls a face. ‘Sorry. That came out wrong. Obviously, I meant that the city of Espera is grateful for your noble sacrifice.’
She laughs despite herself, adopting a heroic expression. ‘Come rain or shine, brave newsies of the city are there, delivering the Echo to your door. Now for the low, low price of three shillings a week, you too could have the latest headlines with your breakfast.’
Nick snorts. ‘And by “latest headlines”, you mean death, death, and… oh! More death.’
Isabel drops the pose. ‘That’s a little unfair to the Echo,’ she says. ‘Last week they had a fascinating exposé on Lutton Borough Council’s mismanagement of local recycling services.’
‘Scintillating journalism,’ he agrees. ‘I apologise for maligning your employer.’
‘And it could be worse,’ she points out. ‘It could be the Times. They put their kill column on the second page, as though you might somehow miss it. At least the Echo keeps the obits at the back, and misses out the lurid details.’
‘There’s always the Bulletin,’ says Nick, and Isabel’s smile fades. He catches sight of her expression and gives an awkward shrug, hunched and nowhere near as casual as he wants it to be. ‘What? I didn’t say I read it. I’m just saying it’s out there.’
The Weekly Bulletin of the Free Press – known widely as the Bulletin – is the illegal newssheet of the abolitionists, the people who want the guilds disbanded. Nobody’s ever identified the leaders of the Free Press, if it’s even a single organisation and not a convenient smokescreen for a dozen radical factions, but the guilds have certainly tried. Isabel knew Nick was soft-hearted, but there’s a difference between squeamishness and revolutionary politics. ‘Didn’t peg you for a radical,’ she says.
‘I’m not,’ he says, immediately defensive. ‘But, you know, not every paper has to follow the guilds’ agenda.’
Which is as good as saying he sympathises.
‘Somehow,’ she says, carefully pasting humour over her discomfort, ‘I don’t think the Free Press is recruiting kids for paper rounds.’ It makes Nick laugh, and they change the subject.
But the whole way home, all Isabel can think about is what Nick would do if he knew she was one of them. If she told him the things she’s done. That would be one way to make him leave her alone, to ensure her journey to school is undisturbed by any attempt at friendship. He’d be afraid of her.
Maybe he should be.
Maybe they all should be.
3 MEMOROJ (MEMORIES)
Her hands are barely large enough to grip the gun. She strains to reach the trigger, feeling the pull in her fingers. This gun wasn’t designed with children in mind.
That’s because it isn’t her gun. She wasn’t meant to need one. This isn’t how today was supposed to go.
When she looks up, he’s still got his back to her, radio in hand. If he calls for help, it’s already too late. Her mother’s voice urges her to fire, to get it over with.
And she always obeys her mother.
The discordant screech of her alarm wakes Isabel with a start. Five a.m. The fact she slept through the night is more surprising than the nightmare, though she’d thought she was past the night terrors. She’d also believed she wasn’t going to kill the first person to threaten her precious freedom, so she doesn’t know herself as well as she thought.
Isabel sighs and sits up, steadying her breathing. I’m alive. I got out, and I’m alive. At some point in the night, she threw her blanket halfway across the room, but better the blanket than the knife under her pillow. She tilts her head, listening to her neck crack after another night on the settee, and tries to ground herself. In the weird pre-dawn light, the flat hardly seems real.
Maybe it isn’t. There’s something dreamlike about the silence as she hunts for coffee. Where are the sirens, the click of guns being cocked, the steady breathing of a Comma agent waiting to take her out? The tap water thunders into the kettle, deafening in the absence of other sounds.
Who will notice the body first – the guild or her parents?
Ashvin’s on the phone when she gets to his shop, but her bag of papers is waiting for her. She grabs it and sets off, shoving the Echo through letterboxes without looking at what she’s doing. Twitchy with nervous energy and walking faster than usual, she’s covered half her route by the time she slows down enough to read the headline screaming from the front page.
UNCLAIMED KILL IN LUTTON
Isabel stops dead, midway up somebody’s garden path. Her world narrows to the thick, black letters on the page, proclaiming her mistake to everyone in the city. They found the body. They found the body, and with a headline like this, the guilds will know too. She’s surprised they haven’t sent somebody for her already. She wonders how much longer she’s got.
Muscles rigid with the effort of keeping calm, she folds the paper and pushes it through the house’s narrow letterbox. A dog barks inside as the Echo hits the doormat, and Isabel walks steadily down the path, through the gate and around the corner. There, out of sight, she sinks to the floor, back against a lamppost, and tries to breathe.
Unclaimed kill.
She could read the report. Find out what they know, guess how long it’ll be before they join the dots. But it’s not worth it. It’s safest to assume they’re already a step ahead, and that all the newspaper can offer is sensationalist speculation.
Get up, she tells herself. Somebody will notice. Get up. She knows how to follow orders, even from herself. Some defensive instinct forces her to her feet and back to her task, mechanical and efficient. When the final paper has been pushed through its letterbox, Isabel tucks the empty bag close to her body and begins to run: first a steady jog, then faster. The air is crisp and autumnal, but the pavement beneath her feet is dry.
It should feel like freedom. But the thunder of her pulse in her ears can’t drown out the memories following her like spectres: her mother in the training hall, giving orders; her father and his lab, full of cruelties; a woman with moss-green eyes and a much-broken nose, signing the order that almost killed her. They chase her through the safe civilian streets of Lutton, inescapable as dread.
The headline is a reminder that there are some things she can’t outrun.
She gets back to her flat with enough time for a shower and a rest before school, but her blood’s static with anxiety and she can’t sit still. She ends up leaving early, catching a tram before the morning rush. In a just world, this would mean a morning without Nick, but the city of Espera is anything but just: there he is at the tram stop, bleary-eyed and clutching a thermos of tea.
‘You’re early today,’ he says.
‘Ashvin’s trialling a new stimulant on his minions,’ she tells him, her tongue sharpened by exhaustion and resisting efforts at sincerity. ‘We’re all seeing double, but, on the plus side, we’re moving twice as fast.’ The joke is a friendlier lie than anything else she might have offered, but Nick’s eyeing her warily, so she adds, ‘I’m kidding. Though I wouldn’t say no to some caffeine right now. What’s dragged you here so early?’
‘Homework.’ He shrugs. ‘The library seemed like the most reliable way to escape my brothers long enough to finish it.’
Isabel has yet to set foot in the library. The rows of shelves and the hushed atmosphere intimidate her, like the books know she doesn’t belong. ‘How many brothers do you have?’ she asks. It’s possibly the first time she’s shown an interest in Nick’s life.
‘Four, and a sister. So it’s pretty hard to hear myself think sometimes, as you can imagine.’
She can’t, but she nods vaguely anyway, and the rest of the journey passes in silence. Tiredness makes Nick quiet – and clumsy too, stumbling as they disembark outside the Fraser. His bag falls open, vomiting books and pens across the pavement. He swears, crouching to gather them up, and Isabel darts forward to save a pen from disappearing down a drain.
