The hummingbird killer, p.22
The Hummingbird Killer, page 22
‘They’re murderers,’ Isabel points out. ‘Their whole thing is killing people. What’s legal is hardly a priority.’ Her laughter fizzles out, her smile fading as fear creeps back in. ‘Look, I messed up, and I’m in some deep shit with Comma. I—’
‘Because you’re friends with Free Press people?’ asks Laura.
‘Partly.’ She’s not going to talk about Kieran. ‘The fact is, they have me on the ropes, and I’ve got to do what they say, whether I get anything out of it or not. It’s not fun, and maybe it is illegal, but I have no choice. The safest thing you can do is stay well out of all of it.’
Her flatmate looks at her for a long moment, assessing her. ‘All right,’ she says at last. ‘I’ll go back to pretending I don’t know, if that’ll make you feel better.’
Isabel heaves herself off the settee and takes her dinner plate into the kitchen to wash. ‘I just wanted something normal, Laura,’ she says. ‘Something that felt real.’
‘It’s not real if you’re lying to me.’
And it’s never been normal, because Isabel was never going to make a convincing civilian. ‘Please,’ she says, not even sure what she’s asking for.
‘I won’t tell anyone,’ Laura promises. ‘But I… thought you should know. That I know.’
Isabel slots her plate into the draining rack. It takes several attempts to get it right, her soap-slick hands determined to disobey her. ‘It’s been a long day,’ she tells Laura, when it finally stays upright. ‘I’m going to bed.’
‘Okay. But—’
She doesn’t have the emotional capacity to continue this conversation tonight. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. I need… I need to sleep, okay? I need to process this.’
At least with her bedroom door closed, she can’t see her flatmate’s face, the way she watches her, unafraid and curious, even though Isabel’s putting her in danger. At least alone in the small space, she can pretend everything’s fine.
But it’s not fine. Ronan wants her dead, and she basically declared war on Hummingbird, and her mother is alive.
Isabel Ryans is deep in a mess of her own making, and she has no way out.
27 REGI (TO CONTROL)
Isabel calls Abbie three times the following morning, but the smuggler doesn’t pick up. She knows their business is concluded now that she’s handed over the files, but Abbie could have taken five minutes to confirm that Leo and the others made it out of the city.
So she goes to the library instead, because they can’t actually keep her out, even if no one wants her there. Beth’s on the front desk, looking unusually sober in navy and dark green, and they give Isabel a cold look. ‘What is it this time?’
‘Did they get out?’ she asks. ‘Abbie’s not answering her phone. I just want to know whether Leo’s safe.’
Beth says, ‘Abbie’s dead.’
Isabel actually takes a step back. ‘Oh.’
‘Honestly, we kind of assumed it was you.’
She shakes her head numbly. ‘No. No, I haven’t seen her since… since yesterday morning. Are the others okay?’
‘They got out,’ says Beth. ‘Abbie messaged us at about six p.m. saying they’d left. At eight, Rae called to tell us she was dead.’ They fold their arms. ‘That everything?’
Isabel’s relief feels bitter. Leo, Ant and Sam are safe – one less thing to worry about. But Abbie’s dead. She should have known Comma wouldn’t leave that loose end hanging, and they must have realised she would never finish the job. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I was trying… I wanted…’
‘That everything?’ repeats Beth. ‘Because this is a library, so if you’re not here to check out a book, you can leave.’
It’s not that she expected thanks for saving their Free Press colleagues, but she thought… she hoped…
Well, it doesn’t matter what she thought. Beth doesn’t want her here, and Jem made her feelings clear, too, so the sooner she accepts it, the sooner she can start getting over it. She’s lucky they haven’t already published her identity in the Bulletin; she suspects an exclusive would pay well.
Isabel leaves the library, but she doesn’t go home. She doesn’t want to sit there alone, waiting for Laura to get in from work. Before the library job, she filled her time with training, and she could do that again, but it feels empty. Yesterday proved she’s lost none of her combat skills.
So she wanders aimlessly along the street until she gets to the cemetery, and goes to sit by Emma’s grave. Normally she talks, but today she lets the silence say everything she doesn’t have the words for. She wishes Emma were here, with her endless advice and hopefulness, even if her best friend probably couldn’t have counselled her out of a fuck-up of this scale.
Death never really gets any easier.
Eventually she stands. ‘Leo didn’t want to leave you, you know,’ she tells the grave. ‘But this way he’ll live. I think you’d have wanted that.’
She hesitates a moment longer, then turns to go. There’s nothing else to say.
Two streets from home, an electric car draws up silently beside her. She barely glances at it until the passenger window rolls down and somebody looks out at her. Ronan.
‘Get in, Isabel.’
Shit. Her bruised ribs throb beneath her shirt, and she feels the itch of the healing cut on her neck like a threat and a reminder, but running will only make this worse. Isabel opens the back door and climbs into the dark interior of the car.
‘What do you want?’ she manages, as the vehicle pulls away from the kerb.
‘Having a nice walk?’
Fuck him and that smarmy tone in his voice. ‘Did you kill Abbie Miner?’
‘Yes,’ he says frankly. ‘The Project Emerald files were quite enlightening. I can see why she wanted them.’
‘She said it’s the project that killed her brother.’
‘It is,’ says Ronan. ‘It’s a training programme for minors. Her brother was fourteen when his family agreed to let him join, and he didn’t make it to graduation.’
In the back seat, Isabel is frozen. ‘It’s what?’
‘It began nearly two and a half years ago. The timing is no coincidence. Judith’s defection brought Hummingbird knowledge of Cocoon and Katipo’s attempts to replicate it; they must have decided they were missing out on all the fun.’
He disapproves. Doesn’t he? His voice is very calm and even, but the only time she’s ever seen Ronan convincingly pretend to care about her welfare, it was in relation to the abuse she suffered as a child. Surely, no matter what other evil he’s capable of, Project Emerald crosses a line.
But he killed Abbie Miner to retrieve that intel, so maybe Ronan Atwood is done with caring.
‘Is that why I’m here?’ she says. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Yes, and to the gym.’ She sees him glance at her in the wing mirror. ‘You haven’t been training much recently. I’d like to assess your progress.’
It’s not what she expected, but it still comes down to Ronan pushing her around like a toy. She considers pointing out that she’s not dressed for training, but it seems distinctly unlikely that he’ll allow a detour via her flat to pick up her gear, and after their last meeting, she’s wary of pissing him off. She contents herself with glaring at the back of his head and wishing a variety of creative ills upon him.
‘Sulking won’t help you,’ he says mildly, as though he can read her mutinous thoughts. ‘Or have you forgotten that you’re Comma’s to use as we see fit?’
How can she forget, when they never fucking stop using her? ‘I got you those files,’ she says. ‘Doesn’t that count for something? You wouldn’t know about Project Emerald without me.’
‘No,’ he acknowledges tightly. ‘But Hummingbird wouldn’t be demanding to know who killed twenty-one of their employees and abducted another. And if they escalate the situation, this whole city will suffer from the fallout. Was that your plan?’
Will it really go that far – will Hummingbird start a war because of what she did? It’s not as hard to imagine as she’d like it to be. ‘If my mother hadn’t raised the alarm—’ she begins.
‘I’m aware of Judith’s part in the whole fiasco,’ says Ronan, cutting her off. ‘The fact remains that I am, once again, cleaning up your mess. Don’t pretend you did us a favour.’
Yeah, Isabel’s sure her mother gave him a full and unbiased account of the proceedings. She eyes the door handle, trying to calculate her chances of injury if she throws herself out while they’re moving. She’ll have serious friction burns along every inch of exposed skin, but maybe it would be worth it…
‘The doors are locked,’ says Ronan, without looking round. She’s predictable, apparently.
‘Should’ve guessed.’ Isabel hunches back in her seat and spends the rest of the journey mentally devising a complete range of torments and annoyances she’ll never have the chance to inflict upon Ronan, until they pull up outside a squat, anonymous building where the chauffeur unlocks the doors and grabs her by the arm like he expects her to run for it.
‘Cool it,’ she says, pulling away. ‘I’m not going to run. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.’ Though she’d train twice as long if she could do it away from Ronan’s glower.
Ronan gestures to the building. ‘After you, Isabel, please.’
Ten minutes later, she’s dressed in a pair of shorts so oversized she’s forced to pull the drawstring tight to hold them up, and a T-shirt almost as large. Wherever they dredged these clothes up from, they have the musty smell of abandoned sports gear, although at least they seem to have been washed.
Isabel takes a throwing knife from the rack and feels its weight. It’s not as comfortable in her grip as her own knives, ill suited to her small hands, but with Ronan watching, she can’t afford to be fussy. Agents should be able to work with any weapon, whether or not it’s their own – a lesson she learned hard as a child.
‘Do you get off on pushing me around?’ she asks Ronan, altering her grip to compensate for the shape of the knife. ‘Is that what this is about?’
‘Obviously,’ he says drily. ‘That’s exactly why I’m here, and not because you’ve been outside Comma’s control too long and it’s making you reckless.’
Bastard, thinks Isabel. ‘Doesn’t the Director have better things to do than watch me train?’ She pauses, aims, and throws. It’s not exactly in the middle of the target, but no mark would survive that wound. She doesn’t need to ask to know it’s not good enough for Ronan. ‘I feel sure there’s paperwork you could be doing instead.’
‘There is,’ he says, unamused. ‘Especially as we’re trying to negotiate with Hummingbird. But fortunately for you, I can multitask.’
‘So you’ve got free rein for whatever nefarious torments you have in mind for me.’
‘All I’m doing is assessing your physical fitness,’ he says, all silky-smooth plausible deniability. ‘Nothing to worry about, as long as you haven’t let things slip too much.’
Isabel may not have kept up with her target practice, but she’s far from unfit. She wonders if Ronan knows how much time she spent hauling books around the library. ‘I’ll be sure to squeeze in more training around all the unemployment and self-loathing filling up my schedule.’
‘I hope you’ve made allowances for family time,’ he responds. Her flinch means the next knife barely grazes the edge of the target, and he smiles with poisonous satisfaction. ‘Your mother’s been asking about you.’
‘Keep her away from me.’
‘But mummy dearest wants her little girl.’
Isabel picks up another knife. ‘Mummy dearest will get her other kneecap blown out if you try to put me in a room with her.’
‘Remember what I said about unauthorised kills?’ says Ronan. ‘That still applies.’
Isabel throws the knife. ‘So what does any of this have to do with Project Emerald?’
He picks up a blue folder from the bench. ‘This,’ he says. ‘I have an assignment for you.’
‘Do I get a choice?’
‘No.’ He holds the file slightly out of her reach. ‘It’s fitting to send you, since you’re the reason we have this intel in the first place, but I do think you’re the best girl for the job. Congratulations. The mark’s twelve, by the way.’
For a second, she thinks she’s misheard him. ‘The mark is what?’
‘Twelve. She’s twelve years old. That won’t be a problem, will it?’
Isabel walks over to the target and yanks out the knives. It lets her turn her back on Ronan, hiding her face, and gives her something to do with her hands while she processes his words, something as violent as the swirl of emotions inside her. She killed a sixteen-year-old when she was still new to the game, but that was… different. This could be Sam. This could have been her, when Comma first made her into this. ‘So your solution to Hummingbird training children is to kill them?’ she says. ‘What kind of a solution is that?’
They could save her. They could take her out of training and put her in school and give her a childhood. They could send Isabel after the people who decided it was ever okay to shape a child into a knife.
But instead, he’s assigning her to kill her own mirror image, Hummingbird’s answer to Cocoon. Their answer to Isabel Ryans.
‘If you’re trying to defuse the situation with Hummingbird,’ she says, because Ronan won’t listen to feelings, but he might listen to strategy, ‘this won’t help.’ Killing a trainee won’t avert a war, only provoke it.
‘Politics is my job, not yours,’ he says, which means he knows that and he doesn’t care. ‘Your job is to go where I send you.’
And she always has, before, but this… this isn’t like the other jobs, when she could kid herself it was justified, because nothing can justify this. ‘What if I don’t?’ she asks.
A lazy smile spreads across Ronan’s face. ‘There are a lot of people in this city who have a score to settle with the Moth,’ he says. ‘I’d hate to deprive them of their chance.’
He can’t mean what she thinks he means. ‘You wouldn’t.’
‘It would be a waste to kill you myself, no matter how much I relish the thought. Especially with Hummingbird so very keen for someone to face some consequences…’
It’s a neat trick. Hand her over to defuse the conflict between the guilds. Let Hummingbird tear her apart, a public warning not to fuck with them, ridding Ronan of two problems at the same time. ‘You can’t,’ she says. ‘You can’t do that to me.’
‘Can’t I?’ He gestures to the file. It lies there like a dead thing, rotting and wrong. ‘This is your job, Isabel, remember?’
She doesn’t have to open the file to know there’ll be no commission for this one. It’s not a job. It’s a debt. And Ronan’s going to bleed Isabel dry.
He waves a hand elegantly towards the treadmill. ‘You’ve yet to prove to me you’re maintaining adequate fitness.’
It gives Isabel a reason to delay looking at the file. Twelve. Twelve’s not just a minor, twelve’s a child. And there’s something about that age – because it’s Sam, because it was her, because it’s so very childlike – that stabs straight through Isabel’s shield of numbness.
She killed twenty-one Hummingbird agents in an afternoon, but she can’t kill a child.
Can she?
She didn’t think there were any lines in the sand she hadn’t crossed yet, but every part of her recoils from the idea of this job, despite Ronan’s threats and the knowledge that he means them wholeheartedly. But what’s the alternative – to sacrifice herself, and die a messy, public death?
Ronan watches her for another half-hour, then stands to leave. ‘Stay a while,’ he says. ‘You’ve got work to do. I’ll expect you here at nine tomorrow.’
‘Nine?’
‘You need some structure in your life, now that you’re unemployed.’ Before she can protest, he adds, ‘I’ll send a car for you in the morning to make sure you’re on time.’
And then he’s gone, and she’s alone in the training room with enough weapons to kill the world and none that will let her fight her way out of this.
28 KONSILI (TO ADVISE)
‘I was told you were here.’
Isabel had ignored the sound of the door opening, but when she hears Daragh’s voice, she turns. ‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ she asks.
‘Afternoon off. Ronan said you’d be here, and I thought you might like the company.’
If he’s here because Ronan sent him, she doesn’t want to talk to him. ‘I’m training. You can stay if you want.’ She weighs another throwing knife in her hand. It’s a discipline she enjoys for the single-minded violence required, and the way she can imagine Ronan’s face on the target every time she throws.
‘Are you okay?’ asks Daragh, three knives in. ‘You seem…’
‘Pissed off?’ Isabel suggests. ‘Not having the best day, that’s for sure. Why are you here?’
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘I killed your cousin.’ She throws another knife. ‘Ronan won’t let me forget it, so I find it hard to believe you’d let it slide. And apparently, I basically started a war with Hummingbird, which nobody wants.’ And it feels like you’ve given up on me and it’s not that I liked it when you made me talk about my feelings but at least it meant you thought there was still a chance it’d help.
He sits down on the bench, watching her. ‘You’re tense in your left shoulder,’ he says finally, as though she didn’t say anything. ‘It’s throwing off your balance.’
‘Since when were you an expert?’
‘I know what you look like when you’re doing it right.’
Corrections don’t improve her mood, but after collecting the knives, she takes his advice and tries to relax. This time she achieves a closer group in the middle of the target.
‘Ronan’s being a bastard. All that emotional manipulation shit. If he told you to come—’ she starts.
‘He didn’t. He told me where to find you when I asked, but Mortimer is the one who asked me to talk to you.’
