Bound

I just stared at Morden. “Of course,” I said at last when I could speak. “Why not? So is Richard going to be coming along too, just to make it a party?”

“There’s really no point in having subordinates if you do everything yourself,” Morden said. “Vihaela will be in tactical command. If you have no further questions, I suggest you go prepare.”

I stopped walking again, and this time Morden didn’t pause to let me catch up. He disappeared around a corner ahead, leaving me alone.

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The first thing I did was to tell Luna and Vari. Anne was in the Hollow and out of contact, so Luna went to relay the news. Which left me free to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.

I was staying in the Hollow at the moment—we were in the process of putting together a more permanent set of living arrangements, but it was taking time—but for some reason, I didn’t want to go back there. The Hollow is peaceful, but I don’t find it so good for thinking. I wanted to stay in London. And so I wandered, letting my feet find their own path while my mind searched for a way out.

In the end, the place my feet took me to was Suicide Bridge, the high red arch at the very peak of the hill that rises between Archway and Highgate. As you’d guess from the name, the bridge is a favourite spot for those intending to take a hands-on approach to the question of their life expectancy, and with an eighty-foot drop to the dual carriageway below, it does the job pretty well. Successive local governments have increased the height of the fence and put up anti-climbing spikes, but if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that someone who’s sufficiently dedicated to getting themselves killed will find a way to do it.

Looking at those railings sent my thoughts back to last January, and my own suicide attempt. Oh, I hadn’t thought of it that way at the time, but if I was being honest, that was what it had been; a way to escape my problems. It hadn’t worked. If anything, it had . . . well, I suppose it hadn’t exactly made things worse, but God knows it hadn’t made things any better. And now I was back in London, and back with another impossible problem to solve.

I rested my elbows on the railing, staring out over the city. The view from Suicide Bridge is impressive, particularly to the south—it’s downhill all the way to the river, meaning that you can look out over all of London. The sun was sinking to the west, painting the sky in purple and violet, and its light glinted off the skyscrapers in the distance, reflecting off the windows of the towers of Liverpool Street and the cluster of Canary Wharf and the Shard. Directly below, the lights of cars shone in the dusk, red on the left side and pale white on the right, two bus lanes and four car lanes carrying a steady stream of traffic up and down the hill. Each of those cars and buses was filled with people, each with their own life and struggles and hopes, and probably not a single one was paying the slightest attention to the tall, stooping figure leaning on the fence above. The city’s a busy place, and if you wait for people to notice your problems, you’ll be waiting a long time. You want to fix your life, you have to do it yourself.

What was I going to do?

A few years ago—maybe as recently as one year ago—my solution to this problem would have been to run. Get as far away from Richard and Morden and the Council as I could, and wait for things all to blow over. The events of this January had shown me the drawbacks with that plan. Running and hiding only works if you don’t have anything you’re willing to fight for. Or in my case, anyone.

Obeying Morden and taking part in the attack sounded like an equally terrible idea. Everything about Morden’s plan screamed trap. I didn’t know whether it was Morden’s trap, the Council’s trap, or both, but if I just marched off to attack the War Rooms, I’d be a mouse between two grinding gears. The only question was which would crush me first.

So what if I turned on Morden before he could do the same to me? I had Talisid’s communicator in my pocket. I could be in touch with him in five minutes. This was exactly the kind of tip-off he’d been hoping for—in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the whole reason he’d cultivated a relationship with me in the first place. If I did that, what would happen?

Well, the first thing that would happen would be that Morden’s attack would fail. I mean, based off all the evidence I could see, it would almost certainly fail anyway, but my intervention would push the chances from slim down to none. At least this way I’d get something out of it. The Dark mages would either have to abort their attack, or be killed or captured.

But Richard and Morden wouldn’t be killed or captured. They wouldn’t be there. And once they figured out that they’d been betrayed . . .

I shivered at the thought of what would happen then. Morden and Richard would have to know that it was me, and even if they didn’t, the first thing they’d do would be to get the information out of me, one way or another. If I was lucky, they’d have a mind mage pull it out of my skull. If I was unlucky they’d just hand me over to Vihaela, in which case I was pretty sure I’d tell them everything they wanted to know in short order. I had no illusions about my ability to resist the kind of torture Vihaela could administer.

But if I didn’t tip anyone off, then the Council would be after me instead. I could claim that I hadn’t known about the attack, but the Council wouldn’t care. A direct attack on the War Rooms would rouse the Council into a fury and the first thing they’d do would be to find targets to vent their rage on, which would probably mean arresting Morden and every one of his associates. After which point, the consequences for Anne and me would be pretty much the same, only with a slightly lower chance of torture and a significantly higher chance of being mentally violated, which would continue until they confirmed that yes, I’d known about the attack in advance, whereupon I’d promptly be executed for treason.

Both choices sucked. I needed a third option.

Maybe I was looking at this the wrong way. What if Morden was lying from start to finish? He hadn’t made the slightest effort to reassure me—in fact, looking back on it, he’d practically dared me to resist. Maybe there was no attack, and the whole thing was a test. I’d go tip off Talisid, the Council would go onto high alert, and tomorrow evening would come and the War Rooms would be left completely alone. I’d be discredited, the Crusaders and Guardians would be seen as overreacting to a phantom threat, and the Council as a whole would be that much more likely to ignore any future warnings. Meanwhile, I’d wake up the next morning to Morden and Vihaela politely inquiring if I had any idea why the Council had suddenly gone on red alert last night.

Looked at from that angle, it all sounded horribly plausible. But was I really that important to Morden that it was worth going to so much trouble just to trap me? And why would he even need to trap me? Morden already knew I was working against my will; if he wanted to have me imprisoned and tortured, he didn’t need an excuse.

Or then again, maybe this was all a test, and he was waiting to see what I was going to do. In which case there was probably someone watching me right now . . .

I hissed out a breath and paced along the bridge. The sun had set, the light was fading from the sky, and as far as I could tell I was alone. I felt as though I was guessing in the dark, and if I guessed wrong then the consequences would be awful, except there was no way to know which was right and which was wrong. Maybe I could try path-walking, looking to see what would happen if I waited until tomorrow night and did nothing. But that could take hours: any information I got would be fragmentary, and it would eat into my window for tipping Talisid off. Still, it was the best plan I could think of.