The door cracked open and a nervous-looking face appeared in the gap. “Get us something to eat,” Shireen said.
The face hesitated. I vaguely remembered him: Zander, one of the easily forgotten, often-changing servant population of Richard’s mansion. “Uh—” Zander said.
“Did I stutter?” Shireen said. “You want me to tell Richard you’re not doing your job?”
Zander paled and vanished. The door clicked shut and the sound of his hurrying footsteps faded away. Shireen shook her head. “Even the servants are taking the piss now.”
Rachel hadn’t paid attention to Zander; she was looking thoughtful. “Do you think this was what Richard meant?”
“The whole power thing?” Shireen said. She drummed her fingers. “Maybe he’s right. It’s the only way we’re ever going to change anything, isn’t it?”
“It’s the only way they’re ever going to respect us.”
“Fine,” Shireen said. “Let’s teach them some respect.”
As she spoke the words Shireen faded, and so did Rachel. The clothes vanished and the windows darkened, layers of dust covering the furniture and bed. I was alone in an empty room.
A hand tapped me on the shoulder and I spun with a yelp. Shireen gave me a quizzical look. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t scare me like that,” I muttered. The room around us looked decayed and abandoned, as though it had been deserted for years.
“Who did you think I was?”
“A minute ago,” I said. “I thought I saw . . .”
“Saw what?”
“Never mind.” I looked at Shireen. “So that was the way it happened? Richard came to you and you went to Rachel?”
“I could always talk Rachel into things.” Shireen walked over to inspect the chair where her younger self had been sitting. It was worn and faded now, with holes in the fabric. “She’d argue but she’d go along with it in the end.”
“You were stupid.”
“We were teenagers,” Shireen said. “Anyway, it’s not like you can talk.”
“Oh, I haven’t got anything to be proud of either,” I said with a sigh. “My reasons for signing up were much dumber than yours . . . What were you talking about at the end?”
“When?”
“About respect. Changing things.”
“We always figured we were going to do something special with our magic,” Shireen said. “Like in the movies, when the heroine gets her powers, you know? She always ends up fighting a bunch of bad guys and saving the world.”
“Saving the world?”
“I’m not saying we went out to do charity work,” Shireen said. “But we saw a lot of mage society while we were with Richard and we didn’t much like the way it treated women. Too many apprentice girls getting stepped on and way too many female slaves.”
I looked at Shireen for a moment. “If you had a problem with slaves,” I said at last, “maybe you should have tried doing something about the ones in your basement.”
Shireen didn’t meet my eyes and there was an awkward silence. “Sorry,” she said at last.
I kept gazing at Shireen. For a moment I felt the old rage starting to rise, then with an effort of will I shook it off. “Forget it.”
“You said something like that to me back then,” Shireen said at last. “That time I came to your cell. Remember?”
I looked at her curiously. “So you were listening? I was never sure . . .”
“I didn’t want to,” Shireen said. “I went upstairs and tried to forget about it. But it was like . . . a seed, I guess. All the next few weeks I’d be in the middle of doing something and I’d start thinking about you and Catherine. It wouldn’t stop bugging me.”
“Well, I’m sorry if thinking about what was happening to the two of us was making your life less convenient.”
“You can really be a dick sometimes,” Shireen said. “But you know what? That was kind of why it worked. I didn’t like you and you didn’t like me, and so you were the one person who told me the truth.”
I looked at the empty space where Rachel had stood. “Do you think this is how it works for all Dark mages? Just drifting, going a little further each day? Then one day you look around and realise what you’re turning into . . .”
“It was for me,” Shireen said simply.
“What happened when you went back to the mansion, Shireen?”
Shireen went still.
“The last I saw you, it was at the abandoned block,” I said. “You said you were going back to find Rachel and Catherine, and I watched you walk away and I never saw you again. What happened after that?”
Shireen was silent for a moment. “When I left the mansion I was looking for you,” she said at last. “But I didn’t know what I was going to do when I found you. I didn’t know if I wanted to fight you or talk to you or bring you back or . . . The one thing I was sure of was that we were out of time. Either it was going to be Tobruk, or . . .” She stopped, frowning.
“Or what?”
“You have to go.” Shireen turned on me. “Now!”
I looked around in confusion. The room was empty. “Go where?”
“Out of Elsewhere. You’re in danger. You have to wake up.” The lines of the room around us began to blur and dissolve, the colours fading into each other. Shireen advanced until she was right in front of me, staring up at me. “Wake up!” The colours blurred into grey and we were falling, my stomach lurching as we dropped. I couldn’t see Shireen or anything else but I could hear her voice shouting at me. “Wake up! Wake—!”
“—up! Alex, wake up!”
I came awake with a start. My room was dark and a slim figure was leaning over me, shaking me. “Huh?” I sat up, shaking my head. “What?”
“Will’s friends, the adepts, they’re back.” Anne’s voice was low and urgent. “They’re here.”
My precognition was nagging at me, warning of danger. The clock by my bed said 3:17 and the city outside was quiet. From the direction of the living room I could hear movement; Luna and Variam were up. I was still disoriented from waking and couldn’t process it all. “Where?”
“I don’t know—” Anne looked back over her shoulder. “They’ve gone.”
“Gone where?” The warning of danger was getting louder and louder. Something was coming for us but I couldn’t see what. Nobody was going to come through the door, but . . .
“I can’t see, they’re out of my range. They came onto the roof and they were doing something, then they started running.”
“On the—?” Suddenly the visions of the future ahead snapped into focus and my eyes went wide. “Oh shit.” I lunged off the bed, grabbing Anne. She made a startled noise as I dived for the side of the room, shoving her under the desk before rolling in myself.
There was a roar and what felt like a blow to every part of my body at once. The floor bucked and settled, and a vibration went through the building as what felt like a landslide hit all around us with a thundering crash. Dust filled the air.
I tried to roll back out from under the desk and scraped against something jagged; there was rubble piled across the floor. I scrambled out on my hands and knees and felt a breeze: looking up, I saw sky. Half the roof of my flat was gone.
It had been some kind of explosive, and from the mess it must have gone off right above my bed. Where my bed and table had been was a pile of rubble, forming a slope up to the hole in the roof. The wall onto the street had survived but half the interior wall was gone, including the door through to the living room. Anne struggled out from underneath the desk, coughing, and I helped her up. “Can you move?”
Anne shook her head; she hadn’t had the second’s warning I had and she looked dazed. “I’m okay.”
I looked around to see that the doorway to my living room was a pile of shattered bricks and plaster. We were sitting ducks in here, and the only way out was up. I started climbing. “Come on.”
The rubble was unstable and the jagged edges hurt my skin, but at least barefoot I could climb well. “Can you spot Luna and Vari?” I called down to Anne as I reached up for a handhold. I was about to grab a piece of the ceiling but saw that it would start a landslide and reached for a broken beam instead.