Favours

  Copyright Page

  First edition published by Benedict Jacka, 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Benedict Jacka

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover art by Lucy Zini: view her portfolio at https://lucyzinii.ArtStation.com.

  For further information on the Alex Verus series, visit www.benedictjacka.co.uk.

  Introduction

  This is a novella set during the events of the Alex Verus series, written from the perspective of the time mage Sonder. It takes place between books #6 and #7, one month after the end of Veiled and eight months before the beginning of Burned. Alex has joined the Keepers as an auxiliary, Morden has been raised to the Council, and Sonder has just returned from Washington. For those who’d like a fuller recap, a short timeline of the events most relevant to this story is included below.

  My novels usually come in British versions (published in the U.K. and everywhere else that isn’t North America) and American versions (published in the U.S. and Canada). The American version uses Americanised spelling and changes some of the more British vocabulary to its American equivalent. Since this novella is only being published in its British version, I’ve included a short glossary for those less familiar with London and with British phrasing.

  Glossary

  • Balaclava – Ski mask.

  • M4 – The main motorway (highway) feeding into West London.

  • Met – The Metropolitan Police, London’s police force.

  • Novotel – A hotel chain, found mainly in Europe.

  • PC – Can mean either a personal computer or a police constable (ie a uniformed police officer). Yes, British people use the same acronym for both.

  • Savile Row – A street in London known for high-end men’s clothing. A suit from there will cost you several thousand pounds.

  • Secondment – The detachment of a person from their regular post to a temporary one somewhere else. Usually used in the context of military personnel.

  Timeline

  2012

  August: Events of Alex Verus #4, Chosen. A group of adepts known as the Nightstalkers badly injure Alex and are subsequently destroyed. Anne moves out of Alex’s flat and into a Council property in Honor Oak.

  2013

  April: Events of Alex Verus #5, Hidden. Anne is kidnapped, and Sonder and Caldera join forces with Luna and Alex to search for her. Sonder discovers the identity of Anne’s attackers, but does not reveal this to Alex and Caldera since the attackers are people Caldera has no authority to pursue. Caldera quickly discovers the deception and abandons the case.

  June: Sonder is seconded to Washington D.C.

  2014

  January: Beginning of Alex Verus #6, Veiled. Alex joins the Keeper auxiliaries on probationary status.

  February: Main events of Veiled. Alex and Caldera work together on a case that puts them on the trail of White Rose, a powerful slaving organisation that maintains its position by holding significant blackmail material on high-up members of the British Council. White Rose is destroyed, and two members of the Council resign in the aftermath. Alex becomes a Keeper auxiliary.

  March: Epilogue of Veiled. Morden is raised to the Junior Council.

  April: Sonder returns to London. This story begins.

  Favours

  The front hall feels smaller than I remember. I used to think it looked pretty average – actually, once I started with the Keepers, I was in and out of the station so much that I stopped seeing it at all – but now that I’m back from the U.S., I’m suddenly noticing how cramped it is. The ugly paint and the cheap linoleum are just like Washington, though. Maybe these government buildings all use the same decorator.

  The man at reception gives me a glance as I walk up, then does a double take and squints at me through the bulletproof glass. “Sonder?”

  I hold back a sigh. Other mages get called ‘Mage’ or ‘Keeper’. With me it’s always ‘Sonder’. “Hi.”

  “Sonder! It is you!” The man grins at me. “Didn’t recognise you for a sec. Been living it up in the States?”

  “I haven’t exactly been living it up,” I say defensively. I know I’ve put on a bit of weight. “The allowance they give you is—”

  “Ah, just a sec.” The man checks something on his desk, then presses a button. “Sonder’s here,” he says into his microphone, listens to the answer, then looks up. “They’ll be down in a bit.”

  “How long’s a bit?”

  The man shrugs and I feel a twinge of annoyance. I’m not even supposed to be back – my secondment to Washington doesn’t officially end until Friday and I’m not on the roster until next week. When I gated back to London last night I thought I was going to have the weekend to get over the jet lag and have a bit of a break. Instead they wake me up with a 6 A.M. phonecall. The least they could do is have someone waiting.

  But the man’s already turning to another guy who was waiting behind me and I don’t feel comfortable butting into their conversation, so I back off and stand against the wall. A few other people are sitting on chairs; one man’s got his legs stretched out and his arms folded and looks asleep. A car growls past outside, the sound of its engine blending in with the London traffic. It all feels very sleepy compared to D.C.

  I’ve got nothing better to do, so I glance back with my timesight. It’s shrouded – all Council buildings are – and I study the shroud to figure out how hard it’d be to pierce it. The answer’s ‘not very’, which isn’t much of a surprise. Normally the big advantage of a fixed shroud is strength – you can get a lot more power than you can with something hand-held, because you aren’t limited by having to keep it small enough to make it portable. But no matter how much space you have to play with, if you want to make a really powerful shroud, it’s still going to cost you, and the Council keeps cheaping out and going with the lowest bidder. This one’s not bad – it’d probably stop most time mages, but I’m not most time mages. Just from a quick look, I know that anytime I like, I can see everything that happened in this hall over the past month or so.

  Knowing I’ve got that card up my sleeve makes me feel better. I yawn, lean against the wall and wait.

  It’s only a couple of minutes later that someone comes striding around the reception area. I can tell it’s a Keeper from the way they walk, and I’m just opening my mouth to say ‘hello’ when I see who it is. Caldera.

  I stop, but Caldera doesn’t seem to notice. “You ready?” she says and then turns away again before I can answer. “Let’s go.”

  I hurry after Caldera, catching her up just as she leaves the hall. “Um . . .”

  “Not here,” Caldera says curtly as she pushes the door open to the stairwell.

  As we climb the stairs, I eye Caldera, trying not to make it too obvious. She looks scruffier than I remember – I suppose now that I think about it she’s always dressed like that, but in Washington everyone’s always really well-presented and I’ve gotten used to it. She seems like she’s lost weight, too, but not in a good way – she looks a bit drawn, like she’s been in hospital.

  But it’s not really her appearance I’m thinking about. I knew I’d be paired with a Keeper – time mages always are �
� but Rain hadn’t told me it’d be Caldera. If he had, I probably wouldn’t have taken the job. It’s not that I dislike her or anything, but the last time we were working together was when Anne got kidnapped, and, well, things didn’t go so great.

  It’s not like it was my fault. Okay, so there were a couple of things I didn’t tell her, but I wasn’t doing it to be selfish. If I’d told Caldera what I thought I’d seen, she’d have stopped the investigation and Anne would have been on her own. I was trying to help, and that’s what Keepers are for, isn’t it? Or at least what they say they’re for. But from the way Caldera strides up the stairs without looking at me, I’m getting the feeling she’s still holding a grudge, and that makes me a bit resentful because I still don’t think I really did anything wrong. I know I didn’t tell her everything, but no time mage ever does. When you’re on the clock and doing a timesight scan, then anything you say is admissible as evidence, and that means you don’t say anything to a Keeper unless you’re ready to swear to it in court. Because sooner or later, you’ll have to.

  I’m so caught up in my thoughts it takes me a minute to notice that we’ve turned off the stairs onto the second floor corridor. I’m breathing a little heavily; Caldera isn’t. “It’s pretty quiet,” I venture.

  “Looks busy enough to me,” Caldera says.

  Okay, I’m just going to stop talking to her.

  The door to Rain’s office is half open; Caldera knocks twice and walks straight in. The office is cramped, with a desk that’s crowded with papers and mugs, as well as an antique but well-cared-for PC. Rain is standing at the back of the room, silhouetted against his office windows, and behind him I can see Victoria Street and the London skyline, bright in the daylight.

  “Sonder, good,” Rain says in his deep voice. “Shut the door.”

  I do as he says, feeling the tingle of the anti-eavesdropping wards. “Before we start, thanks for coming in on such short notice,” Rain says. “I know you’re not supposed to be on the roster yet.”

  I’m still not exactly happy, but that mollifies me a bit. I give Rain a nod and wait for him to tell me what I’m doing here.

  “There was a break-in last night at the Southampton facility,” Rain says. “I want you to look into it.”

  “A break-in?” I ask. Is this guy serious? He’s really called me in for . . . ?

  But Rain seems to know what I’m thinking. “Yes, it’s important,” he tells me. “First, this wasn’t some outbuilding, it was in the Southampton facility. And second, the only items that were stolen were the contents of an evidence locker from the raid two nights ago on the Dark mage Yearning.”

  “Yearning was one of Marannis’s assistants,” Caldera says.

  “Okay?” I say. I still don’t see what makes this so important.

  “And Marannis,” Rain says, “was the head of White Rose.”

  Okay, now I’m starting to see what the fuss is about.

  I don’t know much about White Rose – it’s one of those topics you’re kind of not supposed to bring up in polite conversation. I’ve heard the name, though: I think most Light mages have. Some sort of high-class brothel for mages and rich normals. If it gets mentioned it’s as the punchline for a joke, you know, suggesting that some Council mage might have ‘special’ tastes. I never thought it was anything important.

  Except that while I was in Washington, White Rose got broken up by the Keepers, and all of a sudden it seemed like, yes, actually, it was important. Two members of the Council resigned for ‘health reasons’ and there was a feeding frenzy for their seats. Actually, come to think of it, didn’t Caldera have something to do with all that? Maybe I should have been paying more attention to this stuff.

  All this goes through my head quickly. “Is this something to do with the open Council seats?” I ask Rain.

  Rain nods. “With two seats up for grabs we’ve been chasing one job after another all month. Everyone on the Council wants their rivals checked out and their preferred candidate left alone.” A twist to his mouth says what he thinks about that. “Well, as of last week the nominations are finally done, and we’ve just been starting to get a handle on things. And now this happens.”

  “Okay . . .” I say slowly. “I still don’t see why . . .”

  Caldera speaks up. “We found out a few days ago that Yearning had a second home up in Leeds. I put together a team and we gave it a spin. Yearning was long gone – probably legged it right after the raid on White Rose – but turned out he’d been sitting on a little nest egg.”

  “Records,” Rain explains. “An insurance policy in case Marannis or Vihaela ever decided to replace him. They were encoded, but we have reason to believe that they might contain information about White Rose’s clients. Caldera brought the records to the Southampton facility and I put in a request for a codebreaker. He was due to look at them today.”

  “And they were stolen last night,” I say. It’s starting to make sense now.

  “After the raid on White Rose, the Council spent weeks tearing itself apart over these rumours about a client list,” Rain says. “It’s finally died down, and the nominees for the Council positions are in the clear. Or they were in the clear. If it gets out that there’s a new batch of evidence, and worse, that it’s been stolen, the whole damn thing is going to start all over again and every single faction is going to be calling for our heads.” He looks between me and Caldera. “I want this settled. Quietly, but most of all, quickly. When this gets out – and it will get out – I want to be able to say one of two things. Either: yes, those documents were stolen, but they have been recovered. Or: the records have unfortunately been destroyed, and the information in them is lost for good. Those are the only two answers I want you to bring me. Clear?”

  Rain’s dark eyes bore into me. He can look pretty intimidating when he wants to. “Clear, sir,” Caldera says.

  “Got it,” I say.

  Rain nods. “Get to work.”

  ∞

  Caldera closes the door as we leave. “Have we got any leads?” I ask as we set off down the corridor.

  “No,” Caldera says curtly. She takes big strides as she walks and I have to hurry to catch up. My legs are longer than Caldera’s but you wouldn’t know it from how much distance she gets.

  “But if you were already looking into—”

  “Rain didn’t call you in to make guesses. He called you in for a timesight scan, and that’s what you’re going to do. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I say defensively. God, she’s in a bad mood. The thing with Anne was a year ago! She should have gotten over it by now!

  But as I look at the set of her face and the way she’s stomping down the corridor, it kind of feels like she’s focused on something else. Now that I think about it, Caldera was probably expecting to make a big splash with this case. If she’d handed in those documents and they’d turned out to contain something important, she’d have gotten the credit. Now they’ve been stolen from under her nose and she’s having to call in help to get them back. It’s not a good look.

  I still wish she’d stop taking it out on me.

  ∞

  The Southampton facility is an old sprawling building. It used to be the main base for Keeper operations in the South, but all of that stuff got reassigned to London in the 70s, and ever since then this place has been a bit of a backwater. I’ve visited a few times, usually to pull something out of storage or put something into storage, and every time I’ve been here, I’ve gated in and out without ever going outside. I don’t even know what the city looks like.

  “God, the security here is shit,” Caldera says. We’re in a small side room on the north side of the facility, bare and grey. There’s a single window with a view out towards the perimeter wall, and Caldera’s crouched next to it, pointing at the sill. “Look at this.”

  I squint at where she’s pointing and don’t see anything except for some wires under the sill. I’m guessing this was where the break-in happened.

  �
��We’ve been telling them for years this place isn’t secure,” Caldera says. “And they say, oh, that’s fine, it’s not supposed to be high security, if you have anything important store it in Keeper HQ.” She turns to glare at me. “Except every time we do, they tell us it’s bloody full! So we have to use this place with an alarm system made out of tin cans and rusted wiring!”

  “Um,” I say. “Can I . . . ?”

  Caldera waves her hand at me. “Yeah, do your thing. Not like I’m going to get anything from this piece of junk.”

  I nod, focus, and look into the past.

  Everyone knows time mages can use timesight, but not many understand how it works. I’ve tried to explain it a few times, and I always kind of struggle. What I can never get across is the sense of possibility. You can just see so much more when the past’s open to you.

  To me, it feels like being in a darkened room. There are veils in the room, hanging like gauze, and if you move them aside then you can walk back in time, watching the past unroll before you. The veils aren’t all the same; some blow away at just a touch, and others cling and stretch and you have to be careful or you’ll tear them and damage what you’re trying to see. The more you practise, the better you get, until you can almost glide, leaving hardly a trace.

  But some veils – the kind you get from wards – aren’t like gauze at all. They’re like solid barriers, and if you try to walk through them, they stop you dead. It actually hurts if you’re not expecting it, but I am expecting it, and as soon as I see that I’m about to run into one, I stop and circle ‘around’ the ward, studying it from different angles.

  When you see a ward like this, it means that the person you’re watching is carrying a personal shroud, a portable focus used by mages who don’t want to be spied on. It’s not surprising that the burglars had a shroud – like I said, everyone knows time mages can see into the past, which means that anyone planning on committing crimes on Council property is going to take precautions against timesight unless they’re really stupid. What is surprising is that it’s a Council shroud. I’ve seen a lot of shrouds over the years, and this one is a particular design used by the British Council – it has this lattice pattern that was developed back in the 80s. The Americans don’t use it, the French and Germans don’t use it; it’s very specific to Britain, and a handful of other places like Canada and Australia.