Last to Rise(68)

Perak jerked me out of it when he came in, looking wearier than I’d ever seen him. I opened my mouth to ask him something, something important perhaps, I can’t recall, but I didn’t get the chance. A buzzing zap, familiar but ten times, a hundred times louder than I’d ever heard it before. A burst of something arced past the window, split, pulsed, arrowed down towards the gates.



I knew what it was. Lise’s infernal machine. Like my pulse pistol, she’d said, only bigger, stronger, more sustained. Only… only…



I was out of the room, through a startled gaggle of magelets and banging on the locked door of the machine room before anyone else had even moved. No sound from the other side. Allit and some of the other kids came up behind me. I panicked then, because I thought I knew what I was going to see in there, and I didn’t want them seeing it. Bad enough that I had to, and I had to get in there and know for sure just how stupid Pasha had been. So I did something pretty stupid myself – gave in to that voice, clenched my hand and let a bit of juice in. Not much, enough to rearrange the lock so I could open the door. Enough that my vision went all black, that my heart stopped in terror as I wondered if this was it, this was the thing that was going to take me once and for all.



For a while, it looked like it was. I floundered in the dark of my head, wanting to sink in, give up, fall back, but knowing I couldn’t. Not yet, not until I’d seen, until I knew.



I don’t know how long I was in there, maybe only heartbeats but it felt as long as the rest of my life. I’d probably still be there now, and none of the rest would have happened the way it did, except for something that felt like it smacked my brain out of my head and brought me back to the here and now. Sitting propped up against the door, which it seemed I’d rearranged behind me. I may have overdone it, because the lock appeared to have melted and then hardened again, and no one was going to be coming in without some very specialised cutting gear.



So I was on my own, except for the machine and what lay on it.



Weird, sometimes, the things you see when you don’t want to see anything else, to admit what is right in front of you. That machine is now burned into my brain. I can recall every rivet, every twist of cable, every demented cog and gear. The shine of oil across the top, the little slick underneath where Lise had dropped the oilcan and no one had mopped it up. The faint smell of tangy metal to the air. How everything was lit by the pale swirl of moonlight on falling snow that came through the window and picked out shapes in silver light and black shadow. How those shadows seemed to morph into the shape of a stalking, drool-toothed tiger. The shattered glass of the syringe where it had fallen from Pasha’s hand with a few drops of Lise’s concoction, the one that amplified magic, still clinging to the pieces. The random thought of He must have stolen it from her drawer. I can recall it all, every last detail, because I stared at it rather than at Pasha.



It should have been me on that chair. Would have been, if I’d had half his guts or passion. Then perhaps I’d have been lying there, smoke still drifting from my hair, blood dripping from my hand where I’d brought out my juice, the drips getting slower and slower until finally they stopped. Until I stopped. Lying pale but serene, my eyes half shut and looking… triumphant.



I must have sat there for an age, maybe two, just staring at him, but almost all I can remember thinking was, How can death be triumphant? How? After a time the room became blurred, colours swam in front of my eyes and the black slipped back in for good. It had never really gone away, but now, with this in front of me, proof if it was ever needed of my own lily-liveredness, its voice had fangs that drove deep.



Chickenshit, it said, and it didn’t need to say anything else, but it did. Oh yes. Chickenshit. If you had any bollocks at all you could have ended this. Gone down to those gates and blown all those Storad sky-fucking-high. Got on that machine and zapped the crap out of anyone you felt like.



You still can. Then we’ll be together. Best friends for ever.





Chapter Eighteen





I think it was Dendal who got me on my feet, patted my back like I was a two-year-old who’d just had a bad dream and said, “There, there.” Perak came too; I know that because I heard him say a blessing over Pasha. Not the Ministry-approved bland crap either. A proper blessing, one of the old ones, full of brimstone and anger. I think Pasha would have liked that.



My recollections get a bit hazy after that – just odd sights and sounds. Dendal got me along to the office and I sat on the lumpy sofa and stared at Griswald as though he had any answers. Allit crying, his face all blotchy. Erlat looking frazzled and tearful, cracks in her gemstone façade. Lise swearing, sobbing as we passed through her workshop, rattling her toolbox in frustration and guilt, ripping up the plans for the machine. Snow falling past the window, soft and silent in the dark. Dendal reading some scripture in his dry, papery voice which had a hitch in it now. A cramp in my chest, the sound of the black laughing at me, calling me chickenshit.