The hummingbird killer, p.9
The Hummingbird Killer, page 9
‘Your little library job,’ he interrupts, ‘is not more important than the work you do for us.’
‘My little library job,’ says Isabel, ‘matters to me.’
Kieran doesn’t even look up from his computer screen. ‘I don’t care. Neither does Ronan.’
No, they’ve never cared what’s important to Isabel.
She pushes away from the counter and goes in search of Ronan’s office. He has one in most of the Comma buildings, but this one’s his main base, and, as such, it has a few meagre touches of personalisation: an unbothered cactus on the windowsill, a neat jar of pens in the corner of the desk, a small picture frame that Isabel has only ever seen the back of. She secretly believes the frame is empty, but doubts she’ll ever find out.
In the centre of the desk is a thin black file.
‘Take a seat, Isabel,’ he says.
She does, eyeing the folder. ‘My assignments are usually blue.’
‘I know.’ He pushes it towards her. ‘This one’s special.’
It must be, if Ronan’s bothering with all this ceremony instead of assigning it in the usual way. Isabel reaches out to take the file, but before she can open it, he says, ‘I’m sending you eastside.’
For a second, she thinks she’s misheard him. ‘You’re what?’
‘Sending you eastside. We’ve got a runner, no visa.’
She stares at the file. Ronan has never sent her out of the city before. The guild hires out their agents when somebody in the outside world wants a quick, quiet death with fewer political ramifications and is prepared to pay for it, but the pool of trusted operatives doesn’t include Isabel. She’s too young, hasn’t had time to prove herself, and doesn’t have enough tying her to the city. The guild only sends people they know will come back.
‘Surely that’s a job for the border patrols,’ she says, recovering her voice; there are armed guards to prevent this situation from ever occurring.
‘Not when he’s already got out.’ Ronan gestures to the folder. ‘Details are in there. Read it quickly. You leave in ten minutes.’
Isabel hesitates, still not touching the file. ‘If it’s this urgent, why didn’t you call me in earlier? And why me, anyway?’
His expression is unreadable, his voice silky. ‘You’ve never done a border job. I’d like to see how you do.’
So this is a test. ‘You want to see if I’ll come back.’
‘I think we both know you will.’ This was never a choice, after all, simply a game he’s playing with her, trying to see how far he’ll have to push her before she jumps. ‘But leaving the city, even as far as the sea… some people find it frightening.’
Not a test, an audition. Does this mean he’s considering adding her to the roster of external operatives? She may be the best-known assassin in Espera, but out there in the world is where the real challenges are. Where the real money is, too.
Isabel feels a thrill of excitement. ‘I’m not scared of leaving Espera,’ she tells Ronan.
‘Good, because your car is on its way.’ He adds, ‘I know Daragh’s been teaching you to drive, but I think it’s better not to send you alone on this one, don’t you?’
She had thought Daragh was teaching her to drive so that they could spend time together and he could keep an eye on her. Ronan’s tone, however, suggests he put his cousin up to it. Of course he did, if he’s planning to send her on external contracts – she’ll need to know how to drive, might need a getaway the way she doesn’t inside the city. And if Ronan didn’t want her to realise she was being trained, Daragh’s the perfect choice of teacher.
So much for bonding time.
‘No time to read the file, then,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to give me the concise version.’
Ronan opens the folder and hands her the photo of the mark. ‘Bring him back inside the walls before you kill him. Less paperwork that way.’
So it’s not a real outside job, then – just retrieval. Isabel’s unused to taking prisoners, but perhaps that’s part of the test. She glances at the picture and notes that the mark isn’t particularly young, which is unusual for a runner. He must have decided he couldn’t stand another moment living in Espera.
‘He was declined an exit visa about three months ago,’ says Ronan, answering the question Isabel didn’t ask. ‘It took him this long to come up with an alternative plan. Use whatever weapons you like. You can change on the way.’
She doesn’t need to change; Isabel never wears anything she can’t run and fight in. But she helps herself to weapons from the building’s armoury, her mind full of questions: will the runner even still be there? How do they know he doesn’t have a boat waiting for him, that he’s not halfway across the sea?
She keeps the questions to herself. All she’s got to do is get the job done. Prove her worth. And then, maybe, she’s in with a chance of snagging an external contract – a route to a world she thought she’d never see.
Ronan escorts her to a waiting vehicle. It’s the first time she’s needed transport to an assignment.
‘I thought moving to Central Espera meant a shorter commute,’ she says, and is rewarded by the slightest twitch of amusement playing around his lips.
Practically a hysterical peal of laughter, coming from Ronan. She’ll take that as a victory.
12 ELEKTI (TO CHOOSE)
Technically speaking there are multiple gates in and out of Espera, but the eastern gate is the only one most people ever see, if they can afford an eastside visa and a trip to the sea. The punishment for failing to return is severe, and Isabel’s often thought a glimpse of freedom must only make things harder. She wonders how many agents are dispatched on similar missions because somebody decided not to come home after their little jaunt, and how the guilds decide which of them will send someone to deal with it.
Sometimes schools, particularly the wealthy spons, will take their students out on an eastside trip, and there’s a coach returning now. It blocks the road temporarily, and Isabel’s driver leans on his horn until the other vehicles get out of his way. One glance at the one-way tinted windows of this car and they know it’s guild affiliated, earning them a path through the traffic.
Isabel tries not to hold her breath as they pass through the gate, but she still tenses as the car crosses the border. One moment they’re in Espera, under the power of the guilds, and the next…
‘Ronan told me to remind you not to kill him on this side of the wall,’ says the driver, as if Isabel will have forgotten already. ‘You’re not cleared for external jobs.’
‘I know.’ Funny how much paperwork can be involved in murder.
The car’s moving fast enough to make her nauseous, and the tarmac road gives way to a bumpy track that turns into a sandy, badly maintained path. The driver pulls up next to a grassy verge and says, ‘You’re on foot from here.’
‘What if he’s miles away?’
‘He won’t be.’
If she’d had time to read the file, maybe she’d know why they’re so confident that she’ll find the runner. As it is, she opens the car door and steps gingerly into the outside world.
Outside Espera.
The verge slopes steeply upwards, and Isabel climbs the hill. As she crests the summit, she sees it: a broad expanse of sand, and beyond it, the sea. It glitters and dances in the grey light, as vast and uncaring as the guilds. For a moment, she can only stare. She knew it was big. The books said that much. In fact, they said it so emphatically that she was determined not to be taken by surprise. And yet…
It’s not only that the sea is big. It’s that everything is: the beach and the grass and the water, the horizon so distant it sends a swooping feeling through her stomach. There’s not a building in sight except a squat brick pavilion by the side of the road – toilets, presumably, for the visitors. She knows in the distance there’ll be barbed wire demarcating this stretch of sand as Esperan territory to deter unwary visitors, and she’s aware that the city walls aren’t so far away. But in this moment, she could be the only thing under the sky.
In Espera, the closest thing to open spaces are the parks and cemeteries. Some are big enough to forget that you’re surrounded by roads and buildings, but the noise never really fades away. Not like here, where the only sound is the breaking of the waves on the beach.
Isabel’s so dumbfounded by the reality of the other side of the wall that she almost forgets about her mission, but a muffled groan reminds her. Turning, she’s at a loss to identify the source of the noise, until she spots a huddled shape twenty feet down the beach.
Scrambling down the hill – dune? Is this a sand dune? She always imagined them differently – she reaches the sand, and realises that this is a surface she was never trained for. It’s nothing like walking on pavement or grass, and her reflexes are substantially impaired. It takes her longer than expected to reach the figure, and then she sees why the others didn’t think he’d escape: he’s been shot.
Also, he only has one leg, but his prosthetic looks robust and he has a cane with him, just in case; it’s clear the bullet wound in his other leg is a bigger problem. He’s cinched his belt around it as a makeshift tourniquet, but he’s losing a lot of blood.
The hard part won’t be the job, it’ll be not letting him die until they’ve crossed the border.
He looks up as Isabel approaches and his face, already ashen, turns greyer. ‘You’re from the city, aren’t you?’ he says.
‘I am,’ Isabel replies, crouching down beside him. ‘I heard you tried to leave without a visa.’
The mark presses down on his wound as though he can push the blood back into his body, and says, ‘Can’t you leave me to bleed out with a view of the sea?’
He must have been shot by a border patrol, but he kept running anyway. It’s a long way to come with one prosthetic and one bullet wound, and Isabel’s impressed despite herself. ‘You’re dying anyway,’ she points out.
‘So leave me be,’ he begs.
‘You know I can’t do that.’ No mercy, no hesitation. At least out here, there are definitely no witnesses.
‘Then let me die free,’ he says; he’s pleading with her now. ‘Let me die knowing I got out.’
She can’t do that either. This beach belongs to Espera because of a treaty, a technicality, but it’s not subject to the same rules as the city. A death here is an outside job, even if the mark is Esperan.
‘Come quietly, and I’ll make it quick,’ she says. ‘And you can die on familiar soil knowing that at least you tried.’
Her hand is on his arm, but he pushes it away and heaves himself to his feet with the last of his strength, like he plans to run. But he’s lost too much blood. He sways, and Isabel seizes the chance to bind his hands with a zip tie and jab a sedative into his arm. It doesn’t take much to knock him out, and now she’s only faced with dragging him back to the waiting car.
She reaches down to grab his arm, and hesitates.
If Ronan hadn’t sent her here, the mark would have died anyway. No foul play. Nobody for the authorities out here to prosecute. He’d die with his gaze fixed on the ocean and the big open sky.
Would that be so bad? If she were to die today, Isabel thinks that wouldn’t be such a terrible way to go, under these vast grey clouds. Everybody would get what they wanted, without any further violence, and the mark would be dead.
It occurs to Isabel that this might be exactly the thought process Ronan expects from her. Is that what he’s testing? Not whether she’ll leave the city or whether she’ll return, but whether she’ll take pity on someone who gave their life to get out? She can’t help reading this as a warning as well as a test: a reminder that the guilds always have control, in the end, and trying to escape is futile.
Isabel puts the mark’s arm over her shoulders and hauls his limp body upright. He’s heavy, and she makes slow progress across the sand, giving her ample time to second-guess her decision.
She could have let him die here.
She could have run.
She could have taken this chance to leave Espera and go – where? She doesn’t know. Do the towns around her require visas? Do they have walls? Who controls them, decides who can come in? How far is it to the next city? Would her clothes match theirs, her accent, her habits?
Not for the first time, Isabel wonders how the rest of the world views Espera, and what they think when they see its impenetrable walls on the horizon. Do they know what it’s like inside, or is it a mystery to be left alone to its cycle of death and destruction?
Even if the guild didn’t come after her – and they would; there’s a driver just the other side of that dune, for fuck’s sake – there’s so much more to running away than deciding to leave. You need somewhere to go, too.
And what about Laura? And Mortimer, and Daragh, and the library staff…?
I think we both know you’ll come back. She hates it when Ronan’s right.
Isabel reaches the car. Opens the back door, shoves the mark inside, using the seatbelt to hold him approximately upright, and gets into the passenger seat without saying a word to the driver. But she hesitates to close the door. Just one more breath of the air – salt and sand and freedom – before they go back to the city. One more. One more.
She shuts the door. ‘Let’s go.’
And inside the city, she finishes the job.
The walls near the gate have been painted, the way all the border walls have, and here the artists have painted the sea, and the beach. Have they seen it? Maybe they climbed to the top floor of the nearest east-facing building and looked out over the wall at the world they’re not allowed to visit. Maybe they drew it based only on stories.
She leans the body carefully against one of the murals. It’s not the same as dying beside the real thing. But it’s the closest she can give him.
13 INCITI (TO INCITE)
‘You did well,’ says Ronan, when she signs off on the job.
Isabel waits for more – some explanation of why he was testing her, or a sign that he’s considering her for external contracts. It doesn’t come, and she heads for home and the normality of her library job, the sound of the sea echoing in her ears.
Every night that week, she dreams of the vast, implacable ocean, feels it passing judgement on her. If her colleagues notice her distraction, they don’t comment, but Laura does, and all she can do is brush it off with an excuse about sleeping badly, because there’s no way she can say, ‘The world is big,’ and not sound like she’s lost it. Not without telling the truth.
Her schedule reasserts itself without further interference from Ronan: the library, the lying, the passing days. By the following Wednesday, the eastside job has almost slipped to the back of her mind – but not quite.
It’s a quiet shift, with no school visits or groups using the library. Ideal for practising her cataloguing, but today there are no new books waiting, so Isabel is weeding the non-fiction. She’s halfway through the tiny geology section when the door slams open.
Not the front door – the one that leads to the staffroom and the back entrance. Leo staggers in, clutching his upper arm, hand covered in blood. ‘Keys, Jem?’ he says.
Jem, on the front desk, is already on her feet. ‘What happened? Are you okay?’
He looks back over his shoulder, as though he’s expecting to have been followed. ‘No time. I need the keys to the basement. Before they realise I came here.’
Clearly, he hasn’t regained his key privileges after taking Isabel down there without permission. The librarian swears under her breath. ‘We have a delivery coming, I’ve got to be here, I—’ She looks at Isabel. ‘Are you first aid trained?’
‘Yes?’ says Isabel uncertainly. She’s not sure Comma’s emergency medicine certification transfers over to civilian qualifications, but it’s got to be close enough.
Jem swears again, and passes Isabel her keys. ‘Get Leo downstairs and cleaned up. I’ll be with you once the delivery’s here.’
Isabel does as she’s told, fumbling with the locks, helping Leo down the stairs to the basement. ‘I can walk,’ he says, but he’s shaky on his feet and can’t grip the railing, so she’s not sure that’s true. Once they’re through the secret door, he takes the lead, weaving a path through the shelves until he reaches the open space and sinks into a chair. There’s no sign of Ant or Sam.
‘What happened?’ Isabel asks him, prising his fingers away from the cut on his arm. It’s not as bad as she feared – a messy injury, but shallow underneath the blood. ‘Who attacked you?’
‘Hummingbird,’ he says. ‘First aid kit’s under Ant’s desk.’
Isabel retrieves the box, takes out an antiseptic wipe and dabs at the injury. He hisses in pain. ‘You’re sure it was Hummingbird?’ she asks.
‘Pretty sure.’ Leo glances down at his arm and winces. ‘Two of them. They came for me when I stepped out of my flat.’
‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ she tells him, using sterile strips to close the wound. ‘How did you get away?’
‘Tricked one of them into shooting the other. Not fatally,’ he adds. ‘At least, I don’t think so. Then I legged it when they stopped to call for med evac. One of them threw a knife. It got my arm but nothing else. I don’t think they followed me here, but I can’t be sure.’
If they were hurt badly enough to need medical evacuation, they probably didn’t have a chance to send anyone after Leo. It’s rare for civilians to escape guild hits alive, but it happens occasionally, when an agent fucks up. It usually doesn’t go down too well with their guild. Two agents, though – that probably means one of them was a trainee, which might also explain Leo’s escape. Graduation jobs have a rep for going wrong, because newbies get nervous, and Isabel has the scars to prove the truth of that. It doesn’t, however, explain the motivation for the hit.
It could be nothing dramatic – a paid hit commissioned by someone who hates Leo. But she doesn’t think so. For a start, Leo’s not the kind of person who makes enemies, so this is probably a guild grudge. ‘Why do you think they’re targeting you?’
