The hummingbird killer, p.31
The Hummingbird Killer, page 31
‘Did you?’ says Laura, taking a sip of water. ‘Or did the cage just get bigger?’
When did you stop running, Isabel? The guild has never been a safe place to rest. It’s just a prison she recognises. ‘I can get you out,’ she says again, needy, insistent, not even really believing herself. ‘I can help you.’
‘It’s too late for that,’ says her flatmate. ‘You should have let me die. This…’ She shakes her head. ‘Neither of us was built for second chances. Call me a coward if you like, but I know who I am, and it’s not someone who could survive out there.’
Laura’s not a coward. She’s a girl used by her guild, used by Judith Ryans, taught to hide so far behind a mask she no longer knows how to take it off – a girl who has been told for years that her life is worth only what she can offer the guild. They’re so much more alike than Isabel realised, but she wants to live, and Laura… Laura doesn’t, does she? Not with the same all-consuming desperation that Isabel does. Not enough to risk anything.
‘Please,’ she says. ‘I need you.’
‘No, you don’t,’ says Laura, and coughs. A spatter of blood on the white bedspread, a smear across her hand.
Isabel stares at the shocking red for a moment, and then, finally, she takes Laura’s hand, wiping away the blood with a damp tissue, deliberately thorough. Easier to focus on removing every trace than to look at her flatmate’s face. ‘I thought you were going to be okay,’ she says, not knowing how to phrase that as a question.
‘I’m fine. I swallowed some blood earlier.’
‘Are you lying to me again?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Laura, please, I—’
Isabel’s cut off by an alarm, shrill and urgent and head-splittingly loud. Before she can do more than look around wildly, trying to identify the danger, Daragh bursts through the door and begins unhooking Laura’s monitors. ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ he says, gathering up the IV and hunting around for a stand.
‘What’s happening?’ Isabel hurries to help him, switching off the machines.
‘We’re under attack. Hummingbird, by the looks of things. They must know we’ve got Laura and Judith, and they’re here to reclaim them. I can get you both out through the back door, and my car’s outside, but…’
‘How did they know to come here?’ She gathers up blankets and begins wrapping them around Laura, who is only wearing a hospital gown.
‘It’s a hospital; it’s hardly the most secret of locations.’ Daragh goes to the window, looks out. Blanches and turns back. ‘It wouldn’t have been too hard to figure out.’
But it’s not guesswork, is it? ‘My mother,’ says Isabel, and looks across at Daragh. ‘Is there any chance she could have communicated with them?’
‘What?’ he says, distracted. ‘No, I don’t think so, but—’ Her words finally register, and he stops what he’s doing. ‘Shit. Maybe.’
‘If this is her doing, then we’ve really got to go. Fuck knows what she’s told them.’
Daragh swears again, and begins gathering Laura into his arms. ‘Come on. They’ve already taken the front door, and the whole building will be surrounded if we don’t move soon.’
‘You’ll move faster without me,’ says Laura.
‘We are not leaving you,’ Isabel tells her.
‘You’ve got more chance of getting out alive if you do.’ Laura coughs again, and there’s more blood this time. Daragh’s look of horror means there’s no nice safe explanation for why that’s happening, and that means it’s bad. ‘I’m dying anyway, let’s face it.’
‘I’m not going to leave you,’ insists Isabel. ‘You’re not dying, and I’m not going to leave. I don’t—’
‘If it’s Judith, she won’t kill me,’ says Laura. ‘I’m Daphne, remember? You should go.’
The sound of heavy footsteps distracts all of them. Daragh releases Laura from his grip and pulls Isabel to face the door. ‘Too late to run,’ he says. ‘They’re coming this way. Are you armed?’
‘Only a knife.’ Isabel’s never been this scared about a fight before.
‘Take this.’ Daragh passes her a long, notched blade with a vicious hook on one end. Where he got it, she doesn’t like to think: it looks best suited to disembowelling someone. She takes it anyway, because she feels safer with something heavy in her hands. ‘Cut down as many of them as you can. I’ll grab Laura, and if we can get to the back stairs, we’ve got a decent chance of making it out of here.’
But Laura doesn’t have time to tell them not to bother before the attackers are on them.
This isn’t like the Hummingbird building, where the agents were admin officers, half trained. This is more like being back at Katipo, enemies on every side, nothing but death between Isabel and the door. The hospital room isn’t big enough for a fight, but she drives them back into the corridor, slashing at their throats with her inelegant weapon and using her left hand to jam her knife into their ribs. She fells three or four before glancing back at Daragh, who is fighting off a few assailants of his own, a short, curved blade in one hand.
She catches one of his attackers in the back of the neck, and Daragh looks up in gratitude. ‘There are too many of them, we don’t have the weapons…’
‘We’re getting out,’ she insists. ‘Get Laura.’
From one of the fallen agents, she snatches up a long, thin blade. It feels comfortable in her grip, an extension of her arm, and as a second wave of attackers comes upon her, she dispatches them with swift, elegant movements, taking a moment to catch her breath before retrieving a couple of pistols from their bodies. Hummingbird weaponry. It’s almost identical to her own.
‘Daragh, let’s go.’ He doesn’t answer. ‘Daragh?’
Very slowly, Isabel turns.
She must have come through the back door of the hospital room, the sound of the chair’s wheels drowned out by the incessant shrilling of the alarm. Judith Ryans may not be able to stand, but she has a gun pressed against Daragh’s side, and a wicked grin on her face.
‘Issy,’ she says, and gestures with her free hand to the room behind her. ‘I see you found my Daphne.’
‘Let him go,’ she says, steel in her voice.
‘Why should I?’
‘Because I’ll kill you.’ She should have done it the moment she saw Judith in Hummingbird. Or when she was helpless in her hospital bed. Put her down, the way she got rid of her father, because they never loved her and never would, and all they’ve ever done is cause her pain.
‘I feel fairly sure you’re going to do that anyway,’ says Judith. She presses the gun a little harder, and Daragh winces as it digs into his ribs. He’s trying to tell Isabel something, his facial expressions urgent, but she can’t read his face, doesn’t want to, because that means looking at how helpless he is, and she’d rather keep her gaze fixed on her mother and her rage and her willingness to do whatever it takes.
‘Let him go,’ Isabel repeats, taking a step towards them.
‘But if I wait just a moment…’ begins Judith, looking past her, at something over her shoulder. Isabel takes the bait and turns her head for a second to see the locked stairwell door at the far end of the corridor shudder and buckle, threatening to give way to the intruders on the other side, and then the ear-shattering thunder of a gunshot snaps her attention back to the stand-off.
Except it isn’t a stand-off any more. Daragh is crumpled on the floor, chest a gory mess of blood and bone and bullet, and Judith is lowering her gun. He reaches out his hand – trembling, like he’s afraid – and then it falls, and is still.
The alarm, abruptly, goes silent, and there is a moment of perfect quiet.
Isabel’s vision goes black, and then red. ‘No.’
‘Tediously wholesome man, really,’ says her mother. ‘He kept trying to save you, didn’t he? It must have got so boring. We both know there’s nothing in you worth saving.’
Isabel raises one of the Hummingbird pistols. ‘I guess I get that from you,’ she says, and shoots her mother unerringly through the heart. Judith gasps and falls back, slumping like a broken doll in the hospital wheelchair. It seems to take very little, when it comes to it, to slay the giant of her nightmares. A single bullet.
Kicking the wheelchair back, away, her mother’s body a dead weight, she crouches by Daragh’s side. He’s not breathing. It would have been quick, a shot like that. He might hardly have felt it before it ripped his heart into pieces. She hopes so. She hopes he didn’t suffer.
His hand is still stretched out in front of him, and there’s something clenched tightly in his grip. Carefully, she peels back his fingers. His car keys.
He’s giving her a way out.
Isabel takes the keys and stands, stepping into Laura’s room. The other girl is still sitting in bed, the covers pulled up close around her body.
‘Is he dead?’ she asks, genuine fear in her voice.
Isabel’s brain is screaming, fracturing, a kaleidoscope of grief, but she’s already throwing up walls, locking it away. There’ll be time to deal with this when it’s over. When she’s safe. When they’re both safe. Mortimer’s dead. Daragh’s dead. Laura’s here and alive and there’s still a chance. That chance forces her to push back the collapse. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We’ve got to go.’
Laura shakes her head. ‘Go without me. I’ll slow you down.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘It’s Hummingbird. They won’t stop until they’ve found me.’
‘And if they want to hurt you?’ Isabel’s voice cracks, but she can’t let it, she can’t go to pieces now. ‘Maybe they’re not here to help. There’s no way you can fight back right now, and I’m not abandoning you here when you’re powerless. I’ve lost everyone else, Laura, don’t make me lose you too.’
‘Give me the gun,’ says Laura. Numbly, Isabel hands it over. Laura checks the ammo, looks it over, tests it in her grip, and settles it on the bedcovers in front of her. Then she looks up at Isabel. ‘Now I can fight if I need to. Go.’
‘I—’
‘It’s the only way you’ll live, Bel, you’ve got to go. This is your only chance to run.’
Isabel puts down her other weapons long enough to hold her flatmate’s hand for a moment and say, ‘It wasn’t meant to end like this,’ before she snatches up the knives and gun and runs and hates herself for every foot away from Laura’s bed, until she’s too far away to be able to hate herself any more.
The intruders have made it through the door by now, an endless stream of enemies pouring into the corridor. She’ll never be able to keep them away from Laura’s room, but she tries, fighting like a wild thing, slicing and hacking and shooting until she’s coated in their blood. They never stop coming, no matter how many bones she breaks. She clears herself a path, at least, skidding along the bloody floor to stumble down the back stairs, leaving a trail of blood along the handrails. There’s a fire escape at the bottom and she throws herself against it, serenaded by alarms as she staggers out into the open air.
Somehow, it’s daytime. After all that, the sun is still shining outside, distant and comfortless.
Daragh’s car is parked in the corner of the car park. She unlocks it, leaving a smear of gore on the handle, and fumbles the key into the ignition. It takes her a moment to remember how to drive, how to ease her way out of the space. Where is she going? She can’t go back to her flat. Hummingbird will have gone there first. But she needs weapons. If she’s armed, maybe she can hold them off, fight back, come back for Laura and get her out of here.
There are weapons at Mortimer’s flat. She always kept a cache there, in case she was ever trapped in Lutton. He didn’t know. He’d have been furious if he did.
Isabel drives. She’s a good driver, always checks her mirrors to see if any Hummingbird agents are following her. Halfway to Lutton she’s struck by the memory of Daragh reminding her to check for pedestrians, and it hits her that he’s dead, that she’s alone in this car because he isn’t coming back. She has to pull over because she’s crying too hard to see and she can’t breathe and she wants to stay there and cover her eyes and ears until she can forget the city exists. She wants to let the car sit here until it rusts and she rots and her bones are ground into the dust.
Daragh can’t be dead. Not him. He’s all she’s got left and he can’t be dead. Her last rock, crumbling away under her fingers. Mortimer gone. Laura dying in hospital, an agent of Hummingbird, and who’s to say they won’t kill her if they think she’s turned traitor, being treated by Comma? And Daragh dead, heart blown apart on the floor. Dead, dead, dead. Hopelessly, inescapably dead.
She killed her mother and it didn’t fix anything. Didn’t unmake her. Didn’t wipe anything clean.
Didn’t bring any of them back and they’re all still fucking dead.
Isabel wipes her tears away and keeps driving. When she reaches Mortimer’s shop, she abandons the car outside the back door without bothering to lock it and heads upstairs, tipping the settee onto its back to reveal the hole in the lining and the weapons taped to the inside. She arms herself mechanically: one gun. Two guns. A half-dozen throwing knives. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do next. There’s nothing left for her here in this city, no hope of normality or peace. Maybe she should go to Abbie’s tunnel and down under the earth and let herself decompose beneath the city that’s spent so many years trying to bury her.
But she still wants to live.
She goes out through the shop, and for the first time sees the damage that was done. They tore this place to pieces. She doesn’t want to think about how bad Mortimer’s injuries must have been. She doesn’t have anything left in her to grieve for him again.
She steps outside and stops dead at the sight of a waiting crowd. She doesn’t know them. Does she? She scans their faces, but they’re meaningless. She’s already reaching for her guns when she sees that they’re holding… flowers.
They’re laying flowers at Mortimer’s door.
They’re not here for her. They’re here for him. These are the abolitionists he wrote for, the civilians he lived beside, the people who knew and loved him. They came because they heard he was dead and they wanted to mourn, but here at their shrine is a blood-soaked Isabel Ryans, running from the deaths in her wake.
At the sight of her, one of them says, ‘It’s you,’ and she sees in their hands a copy of the Bulletin, and she sees her face on the front page, and she knows that it’s over: she will never be safe in this city again.
The word spreads quickly among the crowd. The anger spreads faster. Here she is: the Moth, the child-killer, the city’s scapegoat and most hated killer, fresh from another massacre and standing armed on the doorstep of a man they loved. For all they know, she killed him. For all they know, she came here to gloat.
Is this a dream? It has the same bloody iridescence as Isabel’s nightmares, wavering bright and unreal, and she’s crumbling, shattering, her rage and agony making broken glass and twisted metal of her.
She raises her eyes to look at the crowd, letting them take in the sight of her: bloodied, exhausted, armed. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘I’m not here to hurt you.’
But nobody believes the Moth when she begs.
37 FUĜI (TO FLEE)
Isabel doesn’t want to kill them.
She doesn’t want to hurt them, either. She just wants to be gone from here, away from her own face glaring at her from the front page of the Bulletin. She’ll get Laura out and they’ll start again, both of them, somewhere safe.
Except nowhere’s safe any more.
And this crowd won’t let her walk away. Not with the bounty on her head and the blood on her hands – not when she’s the killer of their husbands, wives, siblings, friends, lovers.
She doesn’t want to hurt them. But when they rush at her, desperate to be the first to land a blow, her training kicks in, instinct overriding reason. She can’t stop herself grabbing the arm of a man who gets too close and flipping him to the ground. Somebody pulls a knife and that’s a mistake, because she deliberately didn’t reach for her weapons, but now they’re in her space with a blade, clumsy but determined, and there’s no safe way to disarm them, not with the crowd pressing in on her, her back up against the wall, and she’s already covered in so much blood—
Isabel lashes out, desperate, trapped in a nightmarish spiral of memories. This is Katipo and Hummingbird and Chadwick Green. This is grief and rage, made manifest by her panic. This is Grace Whittock dead on her front steps, Toni Rolleston with a bullet in her throat, Emma bleeding in Katipo’s lab. It’s Mortimer unmade by his own furniture. Daragh broken on the floor at the hands of her mother. This is her life and everyone she’s ever loved, dead and gone in the blood that coats her like a second skin, and she wants it to stop.
She needs it to stop.
She doesn’t want to hurt them. Didn’t mean to do it. But the guy with the knife is bleeding now and the crowd surges forward in rage and hurt, and it’s going terribly, horribly wrong.
Somebody wrenches the man’s knife from her hand and tries to trap her other wrist, but Isabel’s been broken too many times to let the city take her like this. She tears herself free, a wild thing furious and bitter and devastated, and takes out her gun, firing a shot into the air. They flinch backwards at the noise, and that gives her space to lower her arm, aim the gun with a wavering hand.
‘I don’t want this,’ she says. ‘Please. Mortimer was my friend. I didn’t come here to hurt you.’
Their anger drowns out her words. Hard to blame them when Mortimer’s dead, when she’s failed, again, because the only thing Isabel Ryans knows how to do is get people killed. She thinks she might be crying.
‘Let me go,’ she begs them, but she doesn’t even know where she’s going. The Bulletin shouted her name to the whole fucking city, and they’ll never stop coming for her. She’ll never be safe.
She fires the gun again – above their heads, close enough for them to duck and flinch from the noise and look around to see if anyone’s hurt. Then she runs, shoving her way through the mass of people, dodging the blows they rain down on her, until she emerges bruised and bleeding into the open road. Her feet leave bloody footprints on the solar panels as she legs it, and she’s five streets away by the time she realises where she’s going. The only chance she has left.
