Shattered by Magic Page 8

  “I’ve never seen you before,” he says coldly.

  “Look harder. I’ve cut my hair. I look a bit different, but my name is Curtis Mayes. I have the knife you used to ID me before and one of the USB sticks in my pocket, if you’ll let me show you them?” I sound calm somehow, but I don’t at all feel it. He nods, and I slowly ease my hand into my pocket, pulling out both objects and holding them out in my outstretched palm. Instant recognition flits across his face, and he looks at me harder.

  “And who are this lot?” he asks me. He’s not shouting anymore, and his gun is slightly lowered, which is a good sign.

  “They’re friends.” I say it so definitively that he doesn’t seem to question it any further. He nods again, his piggy eyes taking each of them in.

  “Augurs?”

  “Not me,” I reply calmly, “but they are, so I suggest you cooperate.”

  “You can start by putting the gun down, mate. If we wanted to hurt you, we would’ve done it already,” Jer says, sounding far too relaxed for someone who could be shot at any second.

  Marvin must see the sense in that, because he flings the gun onto a table and brushes the dirt off his clothes, acquiescing at last.

  “You broke my door,” he says to Lou irritably.

  “Sorry about that,” she replies, not sounding sorry at all. She gives a brief and insincere smile, but that’s about as good an apology as he’s going to get, and I think he realises it.

  “What do you want, then?” he asks, not bothering with any further introductions. This is how I remember him: abrupt, untrusting, and so direct it’s considered rude.

  The chair he collapses into groans, protesting at the weight as he wheels himself in front of one of the many computers dotted around the room. Trestle tables filled with equipment line the walls, and a large desk in the middle holds at least three desktops, a couple of laptops, and several screens. He doesn’t seem bothered about the chips of wood and dust on every surface.

  “I want you to decrypt the USB stick you gave to Ella.” I put it in front of him, and he sneers.

  “She did well to keep it hidden this entire time. Where is she, anyway?”

  Something in the way he asks, so flippantly and casual, angers me to the point that the urge to hit him over the head like I did with Mulberry yesterday returns. “Kidnapped, by the Duke.”

  “That sucks. She was pretty, too.”

  My hand twitches, but Jer takes a step towards me and holds my arm, preventing me from lashing out.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where the Duke is, now, would you?” Marco asks, distracting him from my twitching hands.

  “No idea. I tried tracing him a few months ago, but wherever he is, there’s no phone service and no computers, so he might as well be invisible to me.” He shrugs.

  I don’t bother to ask why he tried to track the Duke down. What this guy does on his own time for fun is of no interest to me, and the more he talks, the more my hand itches to punch him.

  “Can you decrypt the stick?” Jer speaks for me while I try to control myself.

  “Of course I can. For a price.”

  “How about we don’t break all your fingers?” Lou suggests from across the room. Marvin blanches, but his face quickly turns into a scowl.

  “Why don’t I call the police and tell them that unlicensed Augurs just used their powers to break into my apartment?”

  “Marvin, we don’t want any trouble,” Jer says, giving Lou a poignant look. “Let me do the talking,” he mouths at her. She rolls her eyes and goes back to crossing her arms and looking annoyed. “What do you want in exchange for decrypting the stick?”

  “Probably nothing you can give me,” he replies haughtily.

  “Come on, man, we came all this way,” Marco pleads, “What is it you want? Money?”

  “Immunity,” he snaps in reply.

  “Immunity from what?” I frown, wondering how on earth we could give him that.

  “Look, you guys work for the government, right?”

  “How’d you figure that?”

  “Your phones all have the same software that the government use for their agents. My little black box here told me that the minute you walked in my door,” he says, patting a metal rectangle the size of a safety deposit box on the table next to him.

  “I can’t say I’m not alarmed by that, but yes, we have ties to the government. We don’t have any authority to give you any immunity though,” I say, finding that I can speak levelly again without wanting to hit him—just yet.

  “Listen, Chris, was it?”

  “Curtis.”

  “Right, Curtis. You work for the government. The Duke stole your girlfriend, and you want to find her. I can guarantee you that the files on this USB stick are worth your while if you give me what I want, and all you’ve got to do is go back to work and place a little device on any government computer. Easy peasy.”

  “Ha ha,” Lou laughs sarcastically. “If you think that we can do that, then you’re dumber than you look.”

  Marvin narrows his eyes at her and strokes the gun on the table next to him, which is a disturbing sight in itself. I’m not sure whether to be worried or to laugh. After what we’ve all been through, an overweight nerd, with a weapon he probably doesn't know how to use, can’t scare us.

  “You guys came to me, so you obviously need this. How long has she been gone for?” he asks me.

  “Two months.”

  “Two months! And you’re coming to me now?”

  “I only found the stick last night. Look, you say that whatever is on here is worth our while, but if we help you, how do we know we can trust you not to stab us in the back?”

  Instead of replying, he inserts the stick into one of the computers, and his fingers hit the keyboard in an avalanche of keystrokes. He hums tunelessly while a little bar on the screen goes from zero to one hundred percent, and then he drags half of the data off the stick before removing it and handing it back to me.

  “Here. Half now. The other half will be emailed to you, using an email address that I will create for this unique purpose, once you hold up your end of the bargain.”

  I stare at the oblong silver stick in his podgy fingers and hesitate. Could this be what we need to find the Duke? My hand reaches out to take it from him, but Jer tugs on my sleeve.

  “Curtis, a word?”

  I look up to see Marvin staring at me intently. Underneath his sweaty, greasy exterior, there’s a greed in his eyes, hoping that I’ll be able to give him what he needs.

  I nod at Jer and step out into the corridor with him, leaving Marvin under the watchful eyes of Lou and Marco.

  “Dude, this is a bad idea. We can’t trust him,” Jer whispers at me fiercely.

  “I know, I know. But what else am I going to do, Jer? This is the one breadcrumb, the one thing left that might lead us to them.”

  “Is it worth selling your soul for though?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “Cur, there’s no coming back from this if we get caught. We could get arrested.”

  “Yeah, if we get caught,” I retort.

  Jer shakes his head, trying to be the voice of reason.

  “Look, we’ve been sitting behind desks with England’s finest for eight weeks. Eight weeks, Jer. What if the documents on that drive tell us where the Duke is carrying out his Air research? What if we pass up this chance and it turns out he’s the source of all the Air in the city?” I argue desperately.

  He stares at me with a mix of concern and surprise. “This isn’t just about finding Ella, is it?” he says quietly.

  I don’t know why him working that out surprises me, but it does. I don’t know what my best friend will think about me when he finds out the truth. “No,” I reply quietly, anger swelling inside me. “It’s about ending him.”

  “The Duke,” Jer states.

  I nod reluctantly. I know it sounds petty, vengeful even, but I just want all of this to be over. The only way for t
hat to happen is if the Duke is gone, whether behind bars or in a coffin. I honestly don’t care which. “He and Munday have been responsible for so much pain. Not just my own, but yours and Lou’s too. Think about the Magic Circle, about Air, about the Facility…”

  He winces when I say the last word. “That was all Munday, though,” Jer points out. I shake my head adamantly.

  “I can’t believe that the Duke is innocent. He kidnapped Ella and broke Munday out of jail for something, and it wasn’t for a friendly reunion,” I say fiercely. I can feel the anger bubble in my veins again whenever I talk about him. I hate that I can’t keep my emotions under control like I’ve been taught.

  I look at Jer while he thinks, pinching the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes. I’ll do this by myself if I need to, but I’d rather not.

  “Fine,” he says eventually. “Dammit, Mayes, you make a convincing argument.” He gives me a small smile and a slap on the back. I grin back at him, glad to have his support, no matter how stupidly risky this might be.

  “I’ll find out exactly what it entails before I take the deal, I promise.”

  I march back into the room, Jer trailing behind me looking like a nervous wreck.

  “How do we get you immunity?” I ask Marvin, whose eyes light up at the mention of it.

  He wheels himself over to a set of metal drawers and scrabbles around in them until he comes up with a small metal disk, slightly larger and thicker than a fifty-pence coin.

  “This is a remote access transmitting device. All you need to do is pop it next to a computer that is logged in to the government network, and it will do the rest for you.”

  “But what’s it actually doing? I’m not about to let you run rampant in the ATU servers.”

  “Oh, no, it won’t do anything like that. All it’s programmed to do is find any trace of my name, or any of my aliases, and delete them off the government databases so that I can be left in peace. It’ll send me a notification when it’s done, so as long as you wait for the light to go green, it will be fine.”

  “Whoa,” Marco says, sounding both impressed and worried.

  “Whoa indeed. That’s about a grand’s worth of technology, so be careful with it,” he adds, placing both his device and the stick in my palm. “Now let me just fix you up with a unique email address for the second half of the data.” He drags the reluctant office chair across the floor, kicking takeaway containers and empty pizza boxes out of his way, and wakes up another computer, cracking his knuckles for dramatic effect.

  “Seems like you’ve got the whole house to yourself. Why stay here?” Lou asks him, trying to find a clean surface to sit on that isn’t riddled with coffee cups and pieces of computer equipment.

  “I had to buy out the other residents and keep a low profile. Too many police and reporters sniffing around.”

  “Reporters?” I ask, thinking I know who he might mean.

  “Yeah, some guy called Avers. He’s an independent columnist, writes for the big papers on all things Augur related.”

  I haven’t heard from Avers for months—and good riddance. I’ve read pretty much all his articles since he tricked me into giving him info, more out of curiosity than anything else, but I can never tell if he’s for or against Augur legalisation.

  “He’s the one I gave that stick to last year. The first one you gave me.” Right before I got kidnapped by the ATU and beaten to a pulp, I don’t add.

  “Huh. Figures,” Marvin says, scribbling an email address down on a piece of paper.

  “Why does it figure?” Jer asks.

  “Well, Avers is obsessed with Augurs. I mean, I did some digging myself when he came round snooping, and he’s infatuated with the whole thing. They call people like him Augurites.”

  “Like the opposite of an Augurist?” Marco asks, intrigued.

  “Exactly.”

  “Avers is an unknown quantity,” I reply, glancing at my friends guiltily. “You’re right not to trust him.”

  “Well, I don’t trust anyone. Not even you lot. But I like a challenge, and I think you’ll find what’s on here essential to getting rid of the Duke. Enough people suffered to get it,” he says.

  “You’ve read it all?” I ask.

  “Most of it. There’s a lot about the research that he and Munday were doing as young scientists. Plenty of crap that would incriminate the Duke if the press ever got hold of it.”

  “That’s why you split the data up?”

  “Of course. The guy didn’t pay me to get him in trouble, only to dish the dirt on Munday.”

  “Will it help us find him?” I ask the key question.

  “It should do. It has all the locations of their labs, both past and present, for starters.”

  My heart rate kicks up a notch. This really could be it.

  He turns to me and pulls out a pen. “Gimme your arm.” He takes my hand in his clammy fingers, pushes up the sleeve and writes something on my inside wrist in permanent ink.

  “Hey!” I protest, but it’s too late. A scribble of characters run from right to left, indelible, at least for now.

  “Password for the email account. If I can find anything else that’ll help you, I’ll put it in the same place and save it in the drafts folder. Any dirt that might be useful.”

  “You’d do that?” I look at him, surprised. My eyes dart over to Jer, suspicion written all over his face.

  “As a one-off,” he says blandly.

  “Why would you help us? You already said you don’t trust us, so what’s in it for you?” Lou asks, narrowing her eyes at him. I feel like telling her to be quiet before he changes his mind, but he simply shrugs.

  “I’ve seen you lot on the news. It took me a while to work it out, but I recognise you all from that big blackout outside Parliament at Christmas, and the hospital earthquake back in February. I don’t take sides, but I think you’re trying to do something right. Munday and Clarence certainly aren’t.” He shrugs again and gives the first genuine smile I’ve seen. It’s kind of scary, like his face muscles aren’t used to moving that way.

  I want to thank him, even though we haven’t held up our part of the bargain yet, but I realise the sentiment will be lost on him, so I don’t bother. Instead, I apologise for the state of his door and usher everyone out, leaving him to tidy up the mess, which, let’s face it, he probably won’t bother with.

  “I still don’t like this,” Jer says as we pile back into the car, the small device Marvin gave me zipped up in my jacket pocket.

  “None of us do, Jer,” Marco says, “but as Curtis said, what choice do we have? You wanna sit around, reading dusty files all day?”

  “No,” Jer grumbles, crossing his arms and looking out the window.

  “Babe,” Lou puts a hand on his knee affectionately.

  “Yeah?”

  “Stop whining like a little bitch.”

  Marco and I snort and fail to hide our laughter. Lou cackles as we wend our way back through the busy London streets, and even Jer cracks a smile eventually. The tension in the car eases.

  “Apparently, madness is a prerequisite for hanging out with you lot,” he jibes, shaking his head and trying not to laugh himself.

  “Yeah, but you wouldn’t have it any other way.” Cruising through the traffic like an expert taxi driver, she winks at him.

  A giddy sensation rushes up through my head, and I’m not sure whether to attribute it to all the laughter, the imminent thought of breaking the law, or perhaps lack of sleep. Then it hits me: For the first time in weeks, I’m genuinely happy. Now I have to see how long it lasts.

  CHAPTER 7

  By the time we reach the ATU, it’s mid-afternoon, and the car park is deserted. I wonder briefly if everyone has been sent out on missions, or if it was ‘don’t bring your car to work’ day.

  “What’s the plan?” Lou says as she parks in the middle of the empty lot.

  “We just need to find a computer that’s logged in, right? It looks like almost everyo
ne is out, so our best bet is the IT lab. I’ll log in, plonk Marvin’s thingamajig on the computer, and then we’ll have all the intel we need within the hour.”

  “You make it sound so simple,” Jer says, the doubt and worry returning to his face. I wish that I could tell him everything will be alright, a job normally reserved for him, but I don’t know if I believe it.

  “I can make it easier for you; don’t come with me.”

  “What?” they all say in unison.

  “Listen.” I hold up my hands to quieten them. “I’ve been thinking; there’s no need for you all to take the fall if everything goes south.”

  “I thought you said ‘if’ earlier like you wouldn’t get caught.”

  “Jer, mate, Angeles told me to stay at my desk until further notice. If she gets even a whiff of betrayal, she’ll kick me out faster than you can say ‘you’re under arrest.’”

  “At least let me come and help you make a quick escape if you need to,” Marco says, unbuckling his seatbelt and making like he’s about to get out of the car.

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  “Stop trying to be such a hero, Curtis,” Lou says irritatedly. “We’re coming, and that’s final. Jer and I will play lookout, Marco will stay with you so that, if anyone walks in, you can make a quick escape through the nearest wall, and we’ll regroup down in Archives so that if anyone looks for us, it’ll be like we never left.”

  There’s no use arguing with her when she has her mind made up, so I give her a smile and a nod of agreement.

  Much like the car park, the ATU complex is nearly deserted. There are a couple of clerical staff dashing around with paper in their hands, and a couple of the secretaries of the executives, none of whom pay us any attention. Lou and Jer loiter in the corridor and give us a nod as we enter the IT lab. My stomach drops when I spot our first problem. Bonnie sits in her usual booth, surrounded by movie posters and collectible figurines, interrupting the pitter-patter of her keyboard only to take a slurp of coffee from a cartoon mug. She doesn’t pay any attention to us until we’re practically sitting on her desk. I thrust Marvin’s button device into Marco’s hand and give him a signal to let me do the talking. Moving a figurine of a cartoon superhero out of my way, I perch on the edge of the desk, hoping I can distract her for long enough.