“I’m ready,” I said. “I want to do this. You know I’m the only one who can.”
“I can’t say I’m glad you’re right,” Seline said, “I just wish there was another way.”
“There isn’t, and all of you know it. Tell me what I have to do, I want to make sure it’s the first thing I remember.”
Seline nodded. “There are two parts to this mission… both require you to take a life. The second part, Calder will explain a little more in detail in person. For the first part…” she winced, shutting her eyes. Assassination wasn’t exactly her favorite topic of discussion. “Your mission is to hunt down and kill Randall Jensen. He’s a guard at Harrowgate prison. Intelligence tells us he’s slain as many as two dozen Outsiders, surveillance confirms it. Tonight, you’ll find him, kill him, and be thrown into Harrowgate for it. They won’t kill you outright.”
“They won’t?”
“No. They’ll want to bring you in so they can make you miserable for the rest of your life for having killed one of their own. Six… they’ll try to break your bones, and your mind. They’ll call you fiend, most of them because they don’t know any better, others because they want to hurt you. Just remember. You aren’t a fiend. You’re Serakon, you’re a fighter—one of the best—and I couldn’t be prouder the woman you’ve become.”
“I won’t let you down,” I said. “I promise.”
Click.
CHAPTER SIX
I was back in that dull, grey office, but something was different. I blinked hard, my heart hammering inside of my chest. My breathing came in fast and ragged, my chest tightening, my feet and hands curling.
“Can you hear me, Six?” Calder asked.
I stared at him sharply, panting, breathing so hard now I thought I was going to pass out. I swallowed. “Holy shit…” I said, my eyes wide. “Did that just happen?”
“Yeah,” he paused, “I can probably help you relax with a little magic, if you want me to.”
I stretched my hand toward him and shook my head. “No magic. Let me just… I just need to calm down.”
Calder fell silent, giving me enough room to breathe, to think, to piece together all the memories falling into place like bits of a jigsaw puzzle. Some of the pieces were missing, others were a little warped, a little unrecognizable, but they were there. Together they painted a picture of a woman, me, who’d been found in a squat somewhere in New York living like an animal—if you could call it living.
“I remember…” I said, on the back of a sigh.
My name… is Six.
I remembered the day Seline came for me. I remembered the Black Fortress. The fight on the rooftop of that crumbling old building I’d been found in with the fiend who’d kept me in chains. No, not fiend… Serakon. That’s what we were called. My kind, my people. Serakon. Fiend was a word used by others to put us down—to remind us that we were little more than savage brutes to the rest of the world.
“How much do you remember?” Calder asked.
“It’s hard to say,” I said, looking at him now with what felt like fresh eyes. I’d seen him before. Many times. He visited the Black Fortress often, he and others of his kind who were sympathetic to our cause. Mages. “I don’t hate you.”
Calder half-laughed. “Christ, I should hope not.”
“My memories are still messy. I feel like I should know way more than I do.”
“It’ll come to you, and it’ll come to you quickly. I think by the time we’re done in this room, you should be mostly back to your old self. We don’t have a lot of time, though, so we should get started.”
“Started?”
“They think I’m in here to try and find out what you know about the killing.”
Blood. So much blood. The memory came back, not with images and light, but with the stench of all that blood, the taste of it in my mouth. My stomach turned upside down. “I killed a man…” I said.
Calder nodded, then he quickly put his hands up. “I don’t say this lightly as I believe death should only be used to punish the worst of us but. He deserved it.” He ruffled through a couple of pages and handed one over. It had a polaroid snapshot of a man whose face brought more memories pouring into my brain. The flash of magic, a blood-curdling scream, the feel of my claws tearing through the soft of his throat.
His name was Jensen. Officer Randall Jensen.
“He was a Hunter,” I said, reading the words on the page in front of me. “He went out looking for Outsiders to snatch up and bring in. He enjoyed beating them…” I glanced up at Calder. “One of the guards last night said the man I’d killed was a good man. Why would he do that if this Jensen guy was clearly a psychopath?”
“That should tell you something about the kind of people that run this place. They hate your kind, but it goes deeper than the Native, Outsider thing. The Coalition thinks its people are better than everyone, like they’re a master race.”
“But I saw them drag a mage down the corridor. Why would they imprison their own people?”
“Like I said. Everyone.”
I took a deep breath, making peace with the idea that I’d killed a man who deserved to die last night. “I have questions. So many questions.”
“I know. We discussed some of what we’re going to go through here as we prepared for this mission, but we couldn’t go through it all, not without risking the success of my memory suppression technique. It would’ve been a lot easier to wrap you up in a spell, but that wouldn’t have worked here. Not since the prison came under new management, anyway.
“Why not?”
“A few years ago, Harrowgate was attacked by a group of mages who staged a prison break. The Coalition, the people who run it, weren’t happy about it, so they brought in new people to increase its security and amplify its stranglehold on the area around it.”
He handed me another file with a document inside it titled “The Harrowgate Break.” It talked about a mage by the name of Hugo West who was broken out by a group of mages masquerading as other inmates. Official records weren’t filed with the Magistrate—the governing body of mages in New York City—so the identities of the mages responsible isn’t known.
But the Coalition sure had a lot to say about it.
“The old magic wards around the prison were stripped down and replaced with far more sophisticated defensive measures,” Calder continued, “The kind that nullify all active spells the moment a person gets near the compound, but they didn’t stop there. Psionics scan the brains of every inmate coming into the prison for signs that they’re gonna be trouble for the Coalition. Most of the staff get scanned, too.”
“Even you?”
“Trust me, suppressing my own memories without the use of magic, day in, day out, is a lot harder than it sounds.” He paused. “Can you tell me what you remember about your interrogation?”
I set the Harrowgate Break down and looked at Calder, who took another sip of his coffee. “I didn’t remember anything,” I said. “I had flashes of… something. Memories, I guess. Like they were trying to come up, but couldn’t. The guards tried to dig them out of me. I think one of them tried to rip them from my mind, but he wasn’t strong enough.”