Veiled Read online

  “With what?”

  “A knife.”

  Caldera shrugged.

  “Yeah, I know, not exactly a threat to you. I think it’s a panic attack, not something calculated. He’s scared, and if he’s cornered, he’s going to fight.”

  “Can we talk him down?”

  “Not sure. But I don’t think he can hurt you, so it’s not like we lose anything for trying.”

  Caldera nodded. “Okay, let’s do it. Stay behind me.”

  We turned the corner and walked down the street, passing a scattering of parked cars. Out of habit, my eyes went left and right, checking the terrain. Electrical substation on the corner, leading to a small park and a council estate. Not much cover apart from that—nothing but rows of houses. Number 34 was a detached house with no car in the driveway and no lights in the windows. Streetlights cast it in a dim orange glow. Caldera walked up to the door and knocked.

  Silence.

  Caldera knocked again.

  “He’s not going to answer,” I said.

  Caldera looked at the route around to the back of the building. “He going to do a runner?”

  I shook my head.

  “All right.” Caldera took out a focus and channelled her magic into it. I watched with interest. After a second, the door rattled open and I followed Caldera in.

  The inside of the house was dark and silent. I tapped Caldera on the shoulder and pointed upstairs. She nodded and we climbed to the top floor. The stairwell was cramped, a little too low for me and a little too narrow for Caldera.

  There were three rooms on the top floor, and the house’s other occupant was hidden behind the middle one. I started to signal to Caldera but she was already moving in that direction; she’d probably sensed him through vibration. “Hello?” Caldera said, stopping in the doorway. “Anybody there?”

  Silence.

  “I’m Keeper Caldera of the Order of the Star. I’m with the Council. I’m not going to hurt you or arrest you. I just want to talk.”

  More silence.

  “Look, I know you’re in there. You don’t have to come out if you don’t want to. How about you tell me your name?”

  The futures shifted, started building. “He’s going to make a break,” I murmured.

  “Okay, how about you tell me what you’d like to do?” Caldera said. I saw her shift position slightly. Through the open doorway I could see a desk and the window. The boy was just on the other side of the door, only a few feet away. “We can just stay here if you want. You can—”

  A shape bolted for the window, trying to pull it open. Caldera was on him in two strides. The shape turned on her, there was the flash of light off a blade, then they were struggling. I held back: if I went in, I’d only be in Caldera’s way. I heard a thud, fast breathing, then a clank and a pause. More struggling. Silence.

  Caldera spoke. “Get the light.”

  I flipped the switch. Yellow light flooded the room and I shielded my eyes.

  As my eyes adjusted, I saw that Caldera was holding on to a boy dressed in ragged jeans and a sweater. He was young, no more than ten or eleven, and small and thin to the point of looking actively malnourished. His chest rose and fell with rapid breathing, and his eyes flicked back and forth, trapped. A knife lay on the carpet in front of him; I stepped forward and picked it up.

  “Like I said, I’m not going to hurt you,” Caldera said. She was holding the boy by his wrists, and compared to him she looked like a giant. Even without her magic, she could probably have picked him up one-handed. “If I let you go, you going to stop trying to stab me?”

  A pause, then the boy nodded.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Yeah,” the boy said in a high voice.

  “You going to tell me your name?”

  “. . . Leo.”

  Caldera let the boy go. He stepped back, watching us silently, rubbing his wrists. Futures in which he made another dash for it flickered and disappeared. Caldera pointed to the bed. “Sit down.”

  It was an order, not a request, and the boy sat instantly. “There anyone else around?” Caldera asked.

  The boy shook his head.

  “You hurt? Hungry?”

  Another head shake. He was watching the two of us very closely.

  “Go check out the house,” Caldera told me.

  I nodded and left the room. Behind me, I heard Caldera start questioning the kid.

  The house was small: an open-plan living room and kitchen on the ground floor, a bedroom, spare room, and bathroom upstairs. There were basic furnishings, but no posters or paintings on the walls and no books or DVDs on the shelves. I hadn’t seen any personal items in the bedroom either. It was the sort of look a house has if it’s just been rented or sold.

  I took a closer look at the knife I’d taken from the boy. Kitchen knife, black-handled. No blood on the blade. I opened one of the kitchen drawers and . . . yep, this was where it had come from. The kid had taken the knife upstairs. What had he been scared of?

  Checking the cupboards, I found canned and long-life food. Judging by the date stamps, all had been here for some time. I used my magesight to study the wards and found a similar story. This place hadn’t been used in a while.

  I went back upstairs to find Caldera and the boy talking quietly. To my surprise, Caldera wasn’t pressuring the kid—she was firm, but her voice was gentler than usual and she wasn’t pushing him too hard. I guess after seeing how Caldera had dealt with Anne and Xiaofan, I’d been expecting her to play the threatening cop, but she wasn’t, and the kid seemed to be responding. “No,” he said. “No one.”

  “No family you could go to?” Caldera asked.

  Leo shook his head.

  “You were at Pudding Mill Lane station two nights ago, weren’t you?” Caldera asked.

  Leo hesitated, then nodded.

  “Did you go there alone?”

  Another nod.

  “What happened when you got there?”

  Leo’s eyes flickered from me to Caldera. He hunched his shoulders. He’s scared, I thought. Scared of what?

  “It’s all right,” Caldera said, and her voice was reassuring. “I’m not going to get angry.”

  Leo didn’t answer. Caldera kept trying to talk to him, and I searched through the futures, trying different lines of questioning. Most petered out in silence, others led to nothing. One approach caught my attention. “Leo?” I said. “Where did you stay before?”

  Caldera shot me a warning look. “At Phil’s,” Leo said.

  “But that was connected to a group, wasn’t it?” I said. “An organisation. What’s their name?”

  Leo was silent. “It’s okay,” Caldera said. “You can tell him.”

  Leo looked down at the floor. “White Rose.”

  I felt Caldera go still. Leo didn’t meet our eyes. “You mean the ones here in London?” Caldera asked. “Around Leicester Square?”

  Leo nodded.

  Caldera got to her feet. “I’ll be back in a second, okay?”

  “How did—?” I started to ask Leo.

  Caldera walked past me, grabbed my arm, and towed me out the door. “Come with me a sec.”

  Once we were out in the hall, Caldera let go. “You could have asked,” I said. She hadn’t been trying to crush me, but my arm still hurt. Earth and force mages tend to forget their own strength.

  “We might be in over our head,” Caldera said quietly.

  I blinked at that. “Wait. Who are these White Rose people?”

  “Independent group based out of London,” Caldera said. “Did you check this place out?”

  “I think it’s a safe house. Supplies, gate wards, shroud wards. No one lives here.”

  Caldera frowned. “That woman, the one you said divined this address. She tell anyone else?”
>
  “She didn’t divine it—” I saw Caldera’s expression and decided this wasn’t the time to get into technicalities. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Caldera shook her head. “I’m calling for backup.”

  “Wait.” I caught Caldera’s shoulder as she started to move past. “Why? Who are these guys?”

  “They’re a brothel.”

  “You’re scared of a brothel?”

  “I’m not scared of them, and if you knew more you wouldn’t be arguing. These people are bad news.”

  I looked towards the room where we’d left Leo. He hadn’t moved. “So he’s . . .”

  “The kid’s a sex slave.”

  I stared at Caldera. “How did—?”

  “If he’s with White Rose, that’s what they use him for,” Caldera said. “Look at the way he sits and the way he answers. He’s used to adults telling him to do a lot worse than that.”

  I looked towards the room again. Now that Caldera had said it, it fit in an unpleasant way. “I didn’t spot that,” I admitted.

  “You run a shop,” Caldera said. “If you were an expert on sexually abused ten-year-olds I’d be a bit worried.” She shook her head. “But I’m not an expert either. I’ll try and get someone from the psych unit.”

  “I don’t like this.”

  “You’re not supposed to.”

  “Not just that.” I gestured around to the house. “This. The kid’s been here for two days. Okay, what you said, if he’s a slave . . . why hasn’t someone from White Rose come to get their property back?”

  “It’s warded. They can’t find him.”

  I was silent. “What’s getting to you?” Caldera said.

  “Something about this feels wrong.”

  “Wrong how?”

  “I don’t know. Just . . . out of place. Do you ever get the feeling you’re being set up?”

  “You looked for danger?”

  “As far as I could. Nothing I could see.”

  Caldera didn’t answer. “You think I’m being paranoid?” I asked.

  “No, I was getting the same feeling.”

  I looked at her in surprise. “If you got this address, other people might have got it, too,” Caldera said. “Besides . . . it’s White Rose. There is a lot of shit going on with that group. I’ll feel a lot better when we have some support.”

  I nodded. “I’ll watch him. You make the call.”

  Caldera disappeared downstairs and I heard her start talking into her communicator. I hesitated, glancing through the futures again, but with Caldera talking they were too unpredictable to search far ahead. That’s the problem with divination—it doesn’t handle free will well. If I’m on my own somewhere deserted, I can look ahead hours, maybe even a day or more. But when you have people talking to each other, making decisions, then the futures keep changing and fuzzing, like clouds in a strong wind. You can see the shape, but they change so quickly.

  I went back into the bedroom. Leo was still sitting there, tense. He hadn’t relaxed, and now that I knew what to look for, I could see the signs. His expression was blank, but his eyes didn’t move away from me, always watching. He was looking for any signs of a change in my mood. I wanted him to trust me, but I knew that would be almost impossible. The best I could hope would be that he would answer my questions.

  “You remember two nights ago?” I said, sitting down. “When you went to the station at Pudding Mill Lane?”

  Nod.

  “You had something with you, didn’t you?” I said. I was careful to make my voice normal, unthreatening. “A little green marble.”

  Leo hesitated, but I already knew the answer was yes. It’s one of the tricks of divination: by looking ahead to catch glimpses of replies, you can see all the possible answers that someone might give. Very revealing when someone’s deciding whether to lie. More experienced mages know to guard their reactions, making it harder, but Leo was too young. “Yeah.”

  I looked to see what would be the best path to take. I wanted to find out who’d given him the focus, but that line of questioning would make him freeze up. I’d have to go the other way. “Were you supposed to take it to someone? Give it to someone?”

  Another nod.

  “Who were you supposed to give it to?”

  “Dunno.”

  “But you know what he looks like,” I said. I was trying to sound reassuring, though I wasn’t sure how good a job I was doing at it. I wished Anne were here—she’s good with kids. “Don’t you?”

  Another nod, this one reluctant.

  “Could you describe him to me?”

  “I dunno.”

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs and Caldera walked back in. “They’re on their way,” she said. “Should only be a few minutes.”

  I nodded and turned back to Leo. “But it was a man?”

  Leo nodded.

  “Tall? Short?”

  I kept asking, drawing information out piece by piece. Leo answered reluctantly, but he still answered—he was probably afraid of what we’d do if he said no. I didn’t much like that, but it didn’t seem the time to push it. The person Leo had met at Pudding Mill Lane had been a mage. Male, brown hair, tallish but not too tall, suit, light skin . . . “How old was he?” I asked.

  “Old.”

  “Forty? Fifty?”

  “Twenty-five or something.”

  Caldera didn’t smile. She pulled out her phone, tapped at the screen, then held it out to him. “Was this the guy?”

  I looked at Caldera curiously. There was an edge to her voice that hadn’t been there before, and Leo seemed to sense it. He shrank back. “I dunno.”

  “Leo,” Caldera said. “I need you to look at this picture. Was this the man you saw on Thursday night?”

  Unwillingly, Leo looked at the phone, stared at it for a few seconds, then nodded.

  Caldera didn’t take her eyes off Leo. “Are you sure?”

  “I guess.”

  Caldera swore under her breath and got to her feet. “Find out what happened at the station. Fast. I need to call this in.” She disappeared downstairs again.

  I frowned after her. What was that about? “So you took the green marble to Pudding Mill Lane,” I said to Leo. “And you met that man there.”

  Nod.

  “Were you supposed to give it to him?”

  “I guess.”

  “You were supposed to give it to him, if . . . ?”

  “If he said the right thing.”

  Code phrase, I thought. Leo was getting uncomfortable again. The subject he didn’t want to talk about seemed to be the person who’d sent him to the station. I was getting the strong feeling that was who he was scared of. “What happened at the station?”

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “We know it’s not your fault.”

  “They’ll say it was.” I realised suddenly that Leo was trembling. He wasn’t scared—he was terrified. “I was supposed to give it to the man in the suit.”

  I tried different lines of questioning. Not that one, not that one . . . ah. “But someone else came,” I said. “A man with a beard, wearing sunglasses.”

  Leo nodded.

  “And there was a fight, so you ran away.”

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “I know.” So Leo had been there to meet the mage at the station when Chamois had attacked. “Did you see anyone get hurt?”

  Leo shook his head. He’s leaving something out . . . “There was something you were supposed to do,” I said. “Wasn’t there?”

  Leo nodded.

  Say something? No. Take something? “Was the man in the suit supposed to give you something, too?”

  “I was supposed to take it back,” Leo said. He’d started trembling again.

  “It’s not your fault,”
I said again. “You did what you could.”

  “He was supposed to give me another one back,” Leo said. He hunched up defensively. “She’s going to be . . .”

  “She’s going to be what?” I kept my voice calm. I was right on the edge of getting him to talk. I tried out different routes through the futures, probing delicately. I just needed to find the right thing to say.

  There was a clumping from the stairs and Caldera appeared again. “We might have to move him.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off Leo. “Can this wait a sec?”

  “Leo,” Caldera said. “Who sent you to Pudding Mill Lane? Can you tell us?”

  Leo looked back at Caldera with wide eyes and hunched over on the bed. All the futures in which he spoke to us vanished.

  I sighed and got up. “Let’s talk outside.”

  We went back into the hall. “Wrong question to ask,” I said once we were out of earshot.

  “Priorities just changed,” Caldera said. “That guy in the picture? That was Rayfield.”

  “Who?”

  “You remember the guy Haken and the others were looking for? Nirvathis’s apprentice? That guy.” Caldera shook her head. “This is getting too big too fast. I’m trying to get the station but I can’t raise them. If the guys don’t show up we might have to take him there ourselves.”

  “If they’re coming here we— Wait. You can’t raise them?”

  “Com disc’s dead.”

  I frowned. “Just now?”

  “What did you manage to get out of him?”

  “Leo? Uh . . . yeah, he saw Chamois. That was why he ran . . .” Something was bugging me. “Wait. Your communicator focus isn’t working?”

  “Yeah, let me try it again.” Caldera pulled out a serrated blue-purple disc and focused on it. The design was similar to mine, though slightly more streamlined.

  I waited. Thirty seconds went by, a minute. “Anything?”

  “Worthless piece of crap,” Caldera muttered. “‘Work every time,’ my arse. We could just use radios but no, they’re not secure enough . . .”