Jodie never flinched. A life of pain and hardship had forged that into her. She could stare down the barrel of a gun and terrify whoever held it. I wasn’t Jodie, and so every time I dug the needle into her back, I had to stop myself recoiling in sympathetic pain. I started at her shoulder, right behind where her neck met the clavicle. When my fingers brushed her I felt her pulse, unwavering. From there I made my way downwards, amid lesser wounds and patches of old, wrinkled burn, cresting the three ridges of scar tissue crossing her right shoulder blade and carrying on downwards to the small of her back, leaving stitches as I went. The final one landed just over her hip, in a field of condensed scarring, the marks of shrapnel from long ago. Her back reunited, Jodie turned to me. I blinked the knowledge of how to suture back into my subconscious and dropped the paperclip into the bath with the uzi, now empty. Wordlessly, she took the second needle from the edge and started work on my arm. It hurt every bit as bad as I thought it would, and I chastised myself for choosing the most painful place I could to have carved the rune but tried not to show it as she worked, silently.
I thought back to the night before. To Matthias and the people. I’d done it. I’d killed people. Intentionally, willingly, directly. I tried to conjure up the same feelings from when I'd broken that man’s neck, the same horror and disgust, but I couldn’t. I’d needed to do it, to save myself. To save Jodie. Jodie, who I’d found surrounded by bodies, bleeding out on the ground, who I'd carried out, in the early morning, to the address she whispered into my mind.
“Hey, hurry up in there.” Francis knocked on the bathroom door.
“Still working on her,” Jodie said, not breaking focus. Once Francis had left I leaned into Jodie,
“Who is this woman anyway?”
“Magic user. Owes Sid a favour from a while back, I’m calling it in on her behalf.”
“And can we trust her?”
“She’s on the RWHS hit list just like us, can’t give us up without compromising herself too.”
I glanced at the door. “You sure?” Jodie hesitated a moment, then tied off the last thread.
“No. But we can’t get back to the hideout without her.”
“Alright, the RWHS don’t have any chopper access and since your entire breakout only took about fifteen minutes they didn’t have time to get the drones online. Compared to what you could be in, things aren’t terrible.” Francis picked a roll of bandaging out of the cradle of her right arm and handed it to Jodie. “That said, you’re basically fucked the moment you step outside. They may not have chopper access but they can break into computers like nothing. And now they have detailed facial scans of you to compare their footage against working on a three-mile radius.”
“So we wear masks,” Jodie said, beckoning me over to her, “just like we do on jobs.”
“Nope.” Francis pointed the stump of her right arm at a wall of monitors, all flickering through hundreds of camera feeds. “That there’s a peek into their software, Anvil, they call it. Cutting edge shit, recognises when something’s out of place and reports back to human operators. Full masks are a no, and it can track you through facemasks. And since everyone has a camera on them at any given time, you can’t just wear a hoodie and hope for the best.”
“So we crash Anvil,” I said, while Jodie bound my arm, “Hobble them, so they can’t watch us.”
“And in doing so bring the entire country to my place, brilliant idea, cub scout. Christ, where did she find this one, Jo?” I flushed red. Everything about Francis, from her hair to her clothes, said that she was fed up.
“Don’t talk about her like that.” Jodie interrupted whatever her next sentence was going to be, tying off the bandaging. “And you obviously have a solution, so spit it out.”
Francis hesitated, gauging how much longer she could run her spiel, and then put a sleeve over her stump, embedded with a copper circle. She went over to a drawer and pulled two necklaces out floating in the space where her right hand would have been.
“I owe these to an art dealer, they’re very expensive and very hard to come by. Relics, from back when magic wasn’t so hidden. Put them on, charge them up, and they’ll change how you look.” The medallions were dense, detailed things. I couldn’t trace whatever circuit was there with my eyes, they just looked like crescent moons.
“When things have calmed down I want those back. This was supposed to be a big payday.”
“You’re getting a bigger one,” Jodie took the necklaces and handed one to me, her gaze lingering on the monitor, “You don’t owe Sid anything anymore.” Francis breathed a sigh of relief, but hardened quickly. “Good. Tell her the next time she comes asking for help I’ll phone her in to the RWHS. at least they’d only kill me.” I couldn’t tell if she was joking.
On the way down the stairs, the necklaces picking pre-installed disguises as well-dressed Asian businesswomen, Jodie pulled me in and whispered. “As soon as we get out of the building, go for the grey Audi across the street. If I call it, break for it and run”
“What?” I felt myself say the words more than I heard them, but Jodie heard.
“They let us go.”
“They let us go?”
“It was too easy, they had to.” She looked up and down the stairs. “a group of them disguised as civvies in a car I saw on the cams, room for a second, chances are they’re on every corner that Anvil is covering. If they clock us, we run, get out of the city. If I don’t make it, there’s someone who can help you get far away from London, out of the country if you need it here.” She tapped my temple and a place in Yorkshire appeared in my mind.
“They want us back at my flat.” I said, “if they have Anvil then they know our identities, but the man interrogating me called my Dotty’s name. It’s a trap.”
“Then we go to the hideout”
I shook my head. They had Dotty, I was sure of it. If we didn’t go, they’d use her against us.
“No. We need to go anyway.” I said, and Jodie nodded.
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“Wait.” I caught her arm, as she turned “Before we almost die again, will you be my girlfriend?” She looked at me, stunned, and I was glad for the glamour I was wearing that stopped her from seeing my cheeks flush. “I’m sorry that’s a stupid thing to ask right now.”
She kissed me, and I shut up. “Yes.”
The moment we got out of the building I got what Jodie was talking about. A hundred tiny warnings, impossible to see unless you knew to look. Three people in a car, barely visible behind the tint and moving too much to be waiting. A pair in another car on the corner, pretending not to scan the streets looking for us. Francis hadn’t given us any guns, but the knife strapped under my shirt dug into me, begging me to cut and run. One of them looked at us and said something into her watch, Jodie and I walked, pretending not to notice them, to the car. She took out a set of keys and swore in an accent like she was presenting on the BBC. She picked them up and with a quick gesture as she pretended to slide them in, the car was unlocked. In the corner of my eye, as I got in, I saw one of them tap the other and point at us. My breath stopped in my throat and the knife itched against my seatbelt. I let it go, in case I needed to get out quickly. Jodie waved her hand over the radio, pressing a few buttons for effect, and the car crackled to life under her command. We were just about to pull away when one of them got out of their car and started waving us down.
He looked like he was trying to maintain some kind of cover, I readied a cover story.
“We’re on our way to work, at the HSBC, that’s the-” Jodie floored it, pushing open the door to clip the man as he walked to the car, and spun the wheel counter-clockwise. We took off down the street, “Can you change the disguises?” she asked after the third turn, onto a larger street, her voice the steely calm she got under this much pressure. I touched my necklace. I couldn’t see the circuit but I felt it. Memory. Perception.
“Yes.”
“Good, brace yourself and change quick, split up and get to the hideout, don’t draw attention, i’ll get to yours.” she said. Jodie snapped her fingers and my door opened. “Cover your head.” She pushed me out of the car and swerved it into a crossroads. I rolled to a stop amid a crowd of people, who were quickly knocked over with me when the car hit another, turning both into a ball of fire. Duly, but with only half a present mind, I changed the necklace, to the first person I could think of, strangely enough, to Dotty.
I walked to the hideout. My clavicle was worse than ever and I could feel the bruise on my thigh in all its sickly shades of purple and yellow begging me to let up on it, but Jodie said not to attract attention, so I walked. People passed me by, normal people. RWHS operatives. I couldn’t tell, but neither could they, fortunately. They would still be focused on Jodie. How did she get out? I knew she had, she had to, she was Jodie, armies had failed to kill her, it was beyond a car’s capabilities. The hideout was in Camden. I was south of the Thames. Sit down a minute. The bruise said, Take the tube. I kept walking. It was another five kilometres, or so, back to Camden, but only three to my flat. I needed to find Dotty. What had happened to Francis? Captured, probably, they would have sent people in when we’d left. Or dead. They were the same thing, really, one just meant she couldn’t tell them about us. I took stock of the body count of the last eighteen hours. Three in the tunnels, though one of them didn’t really count, pushing him into gunfire wasn’t like actually shooting him. Though maybe I had shot that other man, the one I’d taken the gun from. Three and a little bit. Whatever people had been caught in the crash, an explosion like that would have had casualties, and Francis. It had been hours since we’d split up, Jodie’s count could be well into the hundreds, but mine was three. Three and a few half measures. Did that man from the club, the one in the black muscle shirt, know how valuable he was? Three people dead, because of him. More. What would he be doing now? Nursing a hangover probably, bragging to his friends about some girl he bought a drink for. He was the luckiest man in London. One man for three and a few. It was a reasonable calculation. People died no matter what, our work was to minimise how many people did die. Cut off the head of the dragon, and save it from eating the village. That’s what they thought of us, wasn’t it? A small genocide, to protect the masses. My stomach churned to the same rhythm as my mind, and I kept walking.
It was approaching noon when I reached the building, and the air was thick with the twin heats of magic and fire. Three trucks, openly military, were out front. Windows shattered from heat and fire licked out of the holes. For a moment I saw Jodie, leaping behind three windows, and a scream. I rang Sid’s number, fingers gliding over the screen as if I'd done it a thousand times before.
“Lyd-”
“Yellow Banana. My flat, three vans of them, and Jodie.”
Cursing, shouts, and replies. Then Sid, again on the phone. “We can be there in ten minutes, do not engage, Stray, Guthrie can-”
I hung up.
One of the magic grenades had gone off in the lobby, viscera roughly amounting to a person lay amid resolidified plastic plants, black-clad dead compatriots splattered with a sacrifice that would have meant something if magic grenades weren’t orders of magnitude more powerful than standard ones. The stairs were blocked, the ceiling had fallen inwards from the blast, but the door to the basement, usually keyed shut, was ajar. I dropped the necklace disguise and picked a pistol off the most complete looking corpse. My left arm could barely move, so I could only hold it in one hand as I stuck myself to the wall, inching down. Each step threatened to creak under my weight.
“Stay calm, it’s not on a timer.” A voice, a woman’s voice.
“But this fucking thing doesn’t have any interface! Shit, okay, start pulling out wires.”
“No, wait we don’t know if there’s-” a scream, the person talking to the woman and ignoring her warning, then a body hitting the ground.
“-a failsafe. Shit” one down, that was all I needed, I jumped the last few steps and landed, gun trained to the middle of her back, ”Don’t move.”
Gunfire rattled the building as we stood there, me pointing the gun at her, her not moving. The other person, unconscious on the ground, lay next to a metal canister with dials and straps bolted to it. It was a bomb, almost cartoonishly obvious, they were going to level the building, with all of us inside.
“Ma’am you need to get out of here right-”
“Shut up, witch hunter. Turn around.” She did, with her hands raised.
“Chloe Nash, I presume?”
“Defuse your bomb.” She laughed, one single laugh, we were in a hurry.
“Our bomb? This was one of your lot’s. Grabowski’s.”
I holstered my gun and pushed the woman out of the way. For once, she didn’t resist and let me at the contraption. It was a similar design to the grenades but scaled up. Four times the size, sixty-four times as powerful. I connected with it to get a sense of the thing, it was just as intense as it looked, a well of magic, all programmed with kinetic and heat force. It would disintegrate the ground floor, the rest of the building would collapse in on itself.
“Can you fix it?” she asked. I could. Katrine and I had the same design philosophies, Sid’s apparent secret project abided by the same rules. I found the vigilem almost by instinct. Disarm the bomb, save the lives of whoever was inside. And then what? An army of RWHS walked free. Each of them, marking two, three, more deaths. I ran the numbers, twenty or more of the hunters, in one place. Sixty people, saved.
But Dotty.
Dotty was smart. I trusted her. She wouldn’t be on the inside. She couldn’t be.
“I need my ring. It’s gold, heavy.”
“Will it help you defuse the bomb?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Matthias thought so. Here.” she reached into a pouch on her armoured vest and tossed me a bag, heavy with rings. I pulled mine out and slipped it on my shaking left hand.
Then I connected to the circuit again, and gave it one command, twisting the air like a doorknob while I did.
Explode.