Copyright Page

First edition published by Benedict Jacka, 2021

Copyright © 2021 by Benedict Jacka

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. 

Cover art by Lucy Zini:  view her portfolio at https://lucyzinii.ArtStation.com.

For further information on the Alex Verus series, visit www.benedictjacka.co.uk. 

Introduction

This is a novella set during the events of the Alex Verus series, written from the perspective of the time mage Sonder.  It takes place between books #6 and #7, one month after the end of Veiled and eight months before the beginning of Burned.  Alex has joined the Keepers as an auxiliary, Morden has been raised to the Council, and Sonder has just returned from Washington.  For those who’d like a fuller recap, a short timeline of the events most relevant to this story is included below. 

My novels usually come in British versions (published in the U.K. and everywhere else that isn’t North America) and American versions (published in the U.S. and Canada).  The American version uses Americanised spelling and changes some of the more British vocabulary to its American equivalent.  Since this novella is only being published in its British version, I’ve included a short glossary for those less familiar with London and with British phrasing. 

Glossary

• Balaclava – Ski mask.

• M4 – The main motorway (highway) feeding into West London.

• Met – The Metropolitan Police, London’s police force.

• Novotel – A hotel chain, found mainly in Europe.

• PC – Can mean either a personal computer or a police constable (ie a uniformed police officer).  Yes, British people use the same acronym for both.

• Savile Row – A street in London known for high-end men’s clothing.  A suit from there will cost you several thousand pounds. 

• Secondment – The detachment of a person from their regular post to a temporary one somewhere else.  Usually used in the context of military personnel.

Timeline

2012

August:  Events of Alex Verus #4, Chosen.  A group of adepts known as the Nightstalkers badly injure Alex and are subsequently destroyed.  Anne moves out of Alex’s flat and into a Council property in Honor Oak. 

2013

April:  Events of Alex Verus #5, Hidden.  Anne is kidnapped, and Sonder and Caldera join forces with Luna and Alex to search for her.  Sonder discovers the identity of Anne’s attackers, but does not reveal this to Alex and Caldera since the attackers are people Caldera has no authority to pursue.  Caldera quickly discovers the deception and abandons the case.

June:  Sonder is seconded to Washington D.C.

2014

January:  Beginning of Alex Verus #6, Veiled.  Alex joins the Keeper auxiliaries on probationary status. 

February:  Main events of Veiled.  Alex and Caldera work together on a case that puts them on the trail of White Rose, a powerful slaving organisation that maintains its position by holding significant blackmail material on high-up members of the British Council.  White Rose is destroyed, and two members of the Council resign in the aftermath.  Alex becomes a Keeper auxiliary. 

March:  Epilogue of Veiled.  Morden is raised to the Junior Council.

April:  Sonder returns to London.  This story begins.

Favours

The front hall feels smaller than I remember.  I used to think it looked pretty average – actually, once I started with the Keepers, I was in and out of the station so much that I stopped seeing it at all – but now that I’m back from the U.S., I’m suddenly noticing how cramped it is.  The ugly paint and the cheap linoleum are just like Washington, though.  Maybe these government buildings all use the same decorator.

The man at reception gives me a glance as I walk up, then does a double take and squints at me through the bulletproof glass.  “Sonder?”

I hold back a sigh.  Other mages get called ‘Mage’ or ‘Keeper’.  With me it’s always ‘Sonder’.  “Hi.” 

“Sonder!  It is you!”  The man grins at me.  “Didn’t recognise you for a sec.  Been living it up in the States?”

“I haven’t exactly been living it up,” I say defensively.  I know I’ve put on a bit of weight.  “The allowance they give you is—”

“Ah, just a sec.”  The man checks something on his desk, then presses a button.  “Sonder’s here,” he says into his microphone, listens to the answer, then looks up.  “They’ll be down in a bit.”

“How long’s a bit?”

The man shrugs and I feel a twinge of annoyance.  I’m not even supposed to be back – my secondment to Washington doesn’t officially end until Friday and I’m not on the roster until next week.  When I gated back to London last night I thought I was going to have the weekend to get over the jet lag and have a bit of a break.  Instead they wake me up with a 6 A.M. phonecall.  The least they could do is have someone waiting. 

But the man’s already turning to another guy who was waiting behind me and I don’t feel comfortable butting into their conversation, so I back off and stand against the wall.  A few other people are sitting on chairs;  one man’s got his legs stretched out and his arms folded and looks asleep.  A car growls past outside, the sound of its engine blending in with the London traffic.  It all feels very sleepy compared to D.C. 

I’ve got nothing better to do, so I glance back with my timesight.  It’s shrouded – all Council buildings are – and I study the shroud to figure out how hard it’d be to pierce it.  The answer’s ‘not very’, which isn’t much of a surprise.  Normally the big advantage of a fixed shroud is strength – you can get a lot more power than you can with something hand-held, because you aren’t limited by having to keep it small enough to make it portable.  But no matter how much space you have to play with, if you want to make a really powerful shroud, it’s still going to cost you, and the Council keeps cheaping out and going with the lowest bidder.  This one’s not bad – it’d probably stop most time mages, but I’m not most time mages.  Just from a quick look, I know that anytime I like, I can see everything that happened in this hall over the past month or so. 

Knowing I’ve got that card up my sleeve makes me feel better.  I yawn, lean against the wall and wait. 

It’s only a couple of minutes later that someone comes striding around the reception area.  I can tell it’s a Keeper from the way they walk, and I’m just opening my mouth to say ‘hello’ when I see who it is.  Caldera. 

I stop, but Caldera doesn’t seem to notice.  “You ready?” she says and then turns away again before I can answer.  “Let’s go.”

I hurry after Caldera, catching her up just as she leaves the hall.  “Um . . .”

“Not here,” Caldera says curtly as she pushes the door open to the stairwell. 

As we climb the stairs, I eye Caldera, trying not to make it too obvious.  She looks scruffier than I remember – I suppose now that I think about it she’s always dressed like that, but in Washington everyone’s always really well-presented and I’ve gotten used to it.  She seems like she’s lost weight, too, but not in a good way – she looks a bit drawn, like she’s been in hospital. 

But it’s not really her appearance I’m thinking about.  I knew I’d be paired with a Keeper – time mages always are – but Rain hadn’t told me it’d be Caldera.  If he had, I probably wouldn’t have taken the job.  It’s not that I dislike her or anything, but the last time we were working together was when Anne got kidnapped, and, well, things didn’t go so great. 

It’s not like it was my fault.  Okay, so there were a couple of things I didn’t tell her, but I wasn’t doing it to be selfish.  If I’d told Caldera what I thought I’d seen, she’d have stopped the investigation and Anne would have been on her own.  I was trying to help, and that’s what Keepers are for, isn’t it?  Or at least what they say they’re for.  But from the way Caldera strides up the stairs without looking at me, I’m getting the feeling she’s still holding a grudge, and that makes me a bit resentful because I still don’t think I really did anything wrong.  I know I didn’t tell her everything, but no time mage ever does.  When you’re on the clock and doing a timesight scan, then anything you say is admissible as evidence, and that means you don’t say anything to a Keeper unless you’re ready to swear to it in court.  Because sooner or later, you’ll have to. 

I’m so caught up in my thoughts it takes me a minute to notice that we’ve turned off the stairs onto the second floor corridor.  I’m breathing a little heavily;  Caldera isn’t.  “It’s pretty quiet,” I venture.

“Looks busy enough to me,” Caldera says. 

Okay, I’m just going to stop talking to her.  

The door to Rain’s office is half open;  Caldera knocks twice and walks straight in.  The office is cramped, with a desk that’s crowded with papers and mugs, as well as an antique but well-cared-for PC.  Rain is standing at the back of the room, silhouetted against his office windows, and behind him I can see Victoria Street and the London skyline, bright in the daylight. 

“Sonder, good,” Rain says in his deep voice.  “Shut the door.”

I do as he says, feeling the tingle of the anti-eavesdropping wards.  “Before we start, thanks for coming in on such short notice,” Rain says.  “I know you’re not supposed to be on the roster yet.”

I’m still not exactly happy, but that mollifies me a bit.  I give Rain a nod and wait for him to tell me what I’m doing here. 

“There was a break-in last night at the Southampton facility,” Rain says.  “I want you to look into it.”

“A break-in?” I ask.  Is this guy serious?  He’s really called me in for . . . ?

But Rain seems to know what I’m thinking.  “Yes, it’s important,” he tells me.  “First, this wasn’t some outbuilding, it was in the Southampton facility.  And second, the only items that were stolen were the contents of an evidence locker from the raid two nights ago on the Dark mage Yearning.”

“Yearning was one of Marannis’s assistants,” Caldera says. 

“Okay?” I say.  I still don’t see what makes this so important. 

“And Marannis,” Rain says, “was the head of White Rose.”

Okay, now I’m starting to see what the fuss is about. 

I don’t know much about White Rose – it’s one of those topics you’re kind of not supposed to bring up in polite conversation.  I’ve heard the name, though:  I think most Light mages have.  Some sort of high-class brothel for mages and rich normals.  If it gets mentioned it’s as the punchline for a joke, you know, suggesting that some Council mage might have ‘special’ tastes.  I never thought it was anything important. 

Except that while I was in Washington, White Rose got broken up by the Keepers, and all of a sudden it seemed like, yes, actually, it was important.  Two members of the Council resigned for ‘health reasons’ and there was a feeding frenzy for their seats.  Actually, come to think of it, didn’t Caldera have something to do with all that?  Maybe I should have been paying more attention to this stuff.

All this goes through my head quickly.  “Is this something to do with the open Council seats?” I ask Rain. 

Rain nods.  “With two seats up for grabs we’ve been chasing one job after another all month.  Everyone on the Council wants their rivals checked out and their preferred candidate left alone.”  A twist to his mouth says what he thinks about that.  “Well, as of last week the nominations are finally done, and we’ve just been starting to get a handle on things.  And now this happens.”

“Okay . . .” I say slowly.  “I still don’t see why . . .”

Caldera speaks up.  “We found out a few days ago that Yearning had a second home up in Leeds.  I put together a team and we gave it a spin.  Yearning was long gone – probably legged it right after the raid on White Rose – but turned out he’d been sitting on a little nest egg.”

“Records,” Rain explains.  “An insurance policy in case Marannis or Vihaela ever decided to replace him.  They were encoded, but we have reason to believe that they might contain information about White Rose’s clients.  Caldera brought the records to the Southampton facility and I put in a request for a codebreaker.  He was due to look at them today.”

“And they were stolen last night,” I say.  It’s starting to make sense now.

“After the raid on White Rose, the Council spent weeks tearing itself apart over these rumours about a client list,” Rain says.  “It’s finally died down, and the nominees for the Council positions are in the clear.  Or they were in the clear.  If it gets out that there’s a new batch of evidence, and worse, that it’s been stolen, the whole damn thing is going to start all over again and every single faction is going to be calling for our heads.”  He looks between me and Caldera.  “I want this settled.  Quietly, but most of all, quickly.  When this gets out – and it will get out – I want to be able to say one of two things.  Either:  yes, those documents were stolen, but they have been recovered.  Or:  the records have unfortunately been destroyed, and the information in them is lost for good.  Those are the only two answers I want you to bring me.  Clear?”

Rain’s dark eyes bore into me.  He can look pretty intimidating when he wants to.  “Clear, sir,” Caldera says. 

“Got it,” I say. 

Rain nods.  “Get to work.”

∞

Caldera closes the door as we leave.  “Have we got any leads?” I ask as we set off down the corridor. 

“No,” Caldera says curtly.  She takes big strides as she walks and I have to hurry to catch up.  My legs are longer than Caldera’s but you wouldn’t know it from how much distance she gets. 

“But if you were already looking into—”

“Rain didn’t call you in to make guesses.  He called you in for a timesight scan, and that’s what you’re going to do.  Okay?”

“Okay,” I say defensively.  God, she’s in a bad mood.  The thing with Anne was a year ago!  She should have gotten over it by now!

But as I look at the set of her face and the way she’s stomping down the corridor, it kind of feels like she’s focused on something else.  Now that I think about it, Caldera was probably expecting to make a big splash with this case.  If she’d handed in those documents and they’d turned out to contain something important, she’d have gotten the credit.  Now they’ve been stolen from under her nose and she’s having to call in help to get them back.  It’s not a good look. 

I still wish she’d stop taking it out on me.

∞

The Southampton facility is an old sprawling building.  It used to be the main base for Keeper operations in the South, but all of that stuff got reassigned to London in the 70s, and ever since then this place has been a bit of a backwater.  I’ve visited a few times, usually to pull something out of storage or put something into storage, and every time I’ve been here, I’ve gated in and out without ever going outside.  I don’t even know what the city looks like.

“God, the security here is shit,” Caldera says.  We’re in a small side room on the north side of the facility, bare and grey.  There’s a single window with a view out towards the perimeter wall, and Caldera’s crouched next to it, pointing at the sill. “Look at this.”

I squint at where she’s pointing and don’t see anything except for some wires under the sill.  I’m guessing this was where the break-in happened. 

“We’ve been telling them for years this place isn’t secure,” Caldera says.  “And they say, oh, that’s fine, it’s not supposed to be high security, if you have anything important store it in Keeper HQ.”  She turns to glare at me.  “Except every time we do, they tell us it’s bloody full!  So we have to use this place with an alarm system made out of tin cans and rusted wiring!”

“Um,” I say.  “Can I . . . ?”

Caldera waves her hand at me.  “Yeah, do your thing.  Not like I’m going to get anything from this piece of junk.”

I nod, focus, and look into the past. 

Everyone knows time mages can use timesight, but not many understand how it works.  I’ve tried to explain it a few times, and I always kind of struggle.  What I can never get across is the sense of possibility.  You can just see so much more when the past’s open to you.

To me, it feels like being in a darkened room.  There are veils in the room, hanging like gauze, and if you move them aside then you can walk back in time, watching the past unroll before you.  The veils aren’t all the same;  some blow away at just a touch, and others cling and stretch and you have to be careful or you’ll tear them and damage what you’re trying to see.  The more you practise, the better you get, until you can almost glide, leaving hardly a trace.  

But some veils – the kind you get from wards – aren’t like gauze at all.  They’re like solid barriers, and if you try to walk through them, they stop you dead.  It actually hurts if you’re not expecting it, but I am expecting it, and as soon as I see that I’m about to run into one, I stop and circle ‘around’ the ward, studying it from different angles. 

When you see a ward like this, it means that the person you’re watching is carrying a personal shroud, a portable focus used by mages who don’t want to be spied on.  It’s not surprising that the burglars had a shroud – like I said, everyone knows time mages can see into the past, which means that anyone planning on committing crimes on Council property is going to take precautions against timesight unless they’re really stupid.  What is surprising is that it’s a Council shroud.  I’ve seen a lot of shrouds over the years, and this one is a particular design used by the British Council – it has this lattice pattern that was developed back in the 80s.  The Americans don’t use it, the French and Germans don’t use it;  it’s very specific to Britain, and a handful of other places like Canada and Australia. 

Now why would burglars have a Council shroud? 

I file that thought away for later.  Right now, the important thing is that I know how these shrouds work and how to break them.  The lines of the lattice are strong, but if you focus you can punch through the holes and get little glimpses.  Keep circling, keep viewing from different angles, and you can piece those glimpses together into a picture.  It’s a bit distorted, but you can make out enough. 

“Got them,” I tell Caldera. 

“Them?”

I nod.  I don’t see Caldera at all, not now – all of my sight’s focused on the murky past, watching as it gets clearer piece by piece.  “Two of them.  Both men, I think . . . yeah, both men.  One was holding the shroud.  The other one disabled the alarm.”  I can see his shape, shadowed in the darkness of last night, operating some kind of tool. 

“Can you see their faces?” Caldera asks. 

“No, they’re wearing masks.”  The shroud-bearer’s using a balaclava that covers his head completely.  The other one’s mask leaves his lower face clear, but that’s not enough for me to recognise him. 

“All right, keep going.”

I speed up my time-walk.  The figures seem to blur in fast forward, finishing their break-in and speeding into the facility.  I follow in their footsteps, heading down a corridor towards the evidence storage.  I’m blind to the present while I do this, and all I can do is hope that no-one’s going to get in my way.

The storage room has rows of metal lockers lined up like bookshelves.  One of the burglars takes up position on the door, keeping a lookout, while the other heads straight for a locker on the far wall.  He doesn’t hesitate or look around;  he checks the number on the locker then gets to work.  He leans in close and—

There!  Magic.  It’s only a flash, but I recognise the type.  I watch the man pull the locker open and loot the contents, then once I’ve seen everything I need I let the effect drop. 

The veils and darkness fade away, and I’m back in the present.  I’m standing in a brightly lit room full of evidence lockers.  There’s a Keeper admin just outside, keeping anyone else from coming in, and right in front of me is a locker hanging open and empty with a small blackened hole burnt through its door. 

“Anything?” Caldera asks.  She’s standing right next to me. 

“They came straight here,” I say.  “And they didn’t search around.  They knew what they were looking for.”

“No shit.”

I reach up to point at the locker door.  The locking mechanism’s been obliterated by heat.  “Then they burnt through the door with—”

“With a heat lance, yeah.  We figured that out from the giant melted hole.”

“Are you going to let me finish?”

Caldera lets out a breath.  “Go on.”

I wait and look at her, but she doesn’t say anything.  “A heat lance is a focus, right?” I say once it seems like she might actually listen. 

Caldera nods.

“It wasn’t a heat lance.”

Caldera frowns.

“It’s the same spell, but it wasn’t generated by a focus,” I explain.  “It was cast natively.”

“A fire mage?”

“Or an adept.  But if he did the gate too, then yeah, almost certainly a mage.  Narrows it down, doesn’t it?”

Caldera’s silent for a second.  “You get a look at his aura?”

“Not enough to identify him,” I say.  “But I mean, that’s pretty good, right?”

Caldera doesn’t answer and I give her a curious look.  Fire mages might be common – actually, they’re the most common magic type out there – but still, ‘male fire mage or adept’ rules out, what, ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the UK?  That’s pretty good going!

“Try and get more identification,” Caldera says at last.  “Narrow it down as much as you can.”

There’s something she’s not telling me.  I don’t think I’d have noticed, once, but I’m starting to pick up on these things nowadays.  “All right.”

∞

I track the fire mage in and out of the facility, but there are no more lucky breaks.  He doesn’t cast any more spells, and he doesn’t talk, at least not loudly enough for me to hear.  I’m hoping he might push up his balaclava to scratch his nose or something, but he’s too careful for that. 

The alarm-breaker isn’t so careful. 

“Got him,” I tell Caldera.  We’re standing out in a narrow, rubbish-strewn alleyway two streets over from the facility.  It’s the first time I’ve been out in the open in Southampton;  the air smells of salt. 

“This was where they gated out?” Caldera asks.

“This was where they gated in, too,” I say.  I can see the paths of the two men, like a very long and narrow four-dimensional V.  I point at the middle of the alley.  “They formed the portal right here.  And the second guy was still pulling on his mask when he stepped through.”

“The fire mage?”

“No, the other one,” I say.  I try not to show it, but I’m pretty pleased with myself.

I love timesight.  Not all time mages do.  There are some who focus on acceleration:  mostly they specialise in personal haste effects, always trying to figure out how to go faster than everybody else.  Others are more interested in effects that can move a person or a bubble of space in or out of the timestream.  Some even focus on the really out-there stuff, like time travel, which has always seemed insane to me – that sort of thing makes combat magic look safe.  But what those kinds of mages all have in common is that for them, timesight is just a way to pay the bills.  They’ll work for the Keepers, but once they’ve got enough money in the bank, they’ll get back to what they actually care about. 

For me, though, timesight is what I care about.  Back when I was an apprentice, I had these dreams of becoming a historian.  Timesight gets harder the further back you go, which makes it pretty useless for any history except the very recent kind, but there have been a few time mages who’ve claimed it should be theoretically possible to develop techniques of really long-range timesight that could look back decades or centuries.  I used to think I’d get a placement with the Council’s research division, pick some time period I especially liked, then spend years and years writing the best account of that historical period ever. 

Things didn’t work out that way – turns out there’s a lot more demand for Keeper auxiliaries than there is for research historians – but this is still timesight, and I still enjoy it.  There’s something so satisfying about seeing the past and getting it right, figuring out exactly where and when and how something happened.  I think it’s the certainty that I really like.  I can’t always understand what’s going on in the present and I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but the past . . . that, I can do.

And I’m good at it.  Most time mages probably wouldn’t have been able to see through this shroud at all, and even if they could, it’d have taken them the best part of a day to spot the one half-second in that whole break-in where the burglar had his face uncovered.  It’s taken me less than an hour.  So as I look at Caldera, I’m kind of expecting her to be impressed.

But Caldera just stares at the air as if she’s expecting it to tell her something. 

“Okay.”  I spread my hands.  “What is going on here?”

Caldera’s still staring, and she takes a few seconds to answer.  “I’ll tell you at the station,” she finally says.  “You recognise the guy?”

“No, funnily enough, I don’t know the face of every random burglar in England.”

“Figures.  All right, let’s get back so you can get us an ID.”

A little appreciation would be nice, I think.  But Caldera’s already turned away to start making her gate. 

∞

Getting a look at someone’s face doesn’t tell you their name, but that’s a problem Keepers have had for a long time, and they’re used to dealing with it.  The official solution is a system called Silhouette where you have a mind mage do a (consensual) scan of the time mage’s thoughts.  Trouble is, there are never enough mind mages who are qualified on it, so most of the time we end up doing it the old-fashioned way. 

“Male, mid-twenties,” I tell Caldera.  “Call it twenty-two to twenty-eight.”

We’re in Caldera’s office, with Caldera bent over her computer.  She types in the parameters slowly, her thick fingers clumsy on the keyboard.  “Okay.”

“Brown hair, brown eyes,” I say.  “Caucasian.”

“No-one says ‘Caucasian’ here, Sonder.”

“They do in the States.”

“We’re not in the States.”  Caldera raises her head and speaks into her earpiece.  “Caldera, receiving,” she says.  She listens for a second, then gives a short nod.  “Got it.  Caldera out.”  She looks at me.  “Features?”

“Low forehead,” I say.  “Eyes were narrow . . . okay, not that narrow.  Eyebrows . . .”

A computer-generated face slowly takes shape on the screen.  The software’s pretty old – the Council got it from the Metropolitan Police God knows how long ago, and it was out of date even then – but it does the job.  Caldera takes ages to input the data and I have to fight the urge to lean over her shoulder and do it myself.

“Nose was a little longer,” I tell Caldera. 

Caldera slides a bar with her mouse.  The nose on the screen stretches out to look like Pinocchio. 

“I said a nose, not a banana,” I tell her, trying not to laugh. 

Caldera mutters something and fiddles with the settings.  I take a glance around.  Caldera’s office is sized for two, but while her side’s cluttered, the other desk is mostly bare, with a lot of old stains and a powered-down PC.  Discoloured A4-sized rectangles on the walls mark where sheets of paper had been stuck up with Blu-Tack.  It looks like it was cleared out just a little while ago, although there are a few new binders stacked neatly to one side.

Caldera adjusts the face for a few minutes more, then once I tell her that it looks close enough to what I remember, she clicks ‘Search for Matches’ and the computer starts chugging as it goes through the Keeper database.  “Now are you going to tell me what’s going on?” I ask.

“About what?”

“You didn’t ask me where those two men gated to,” I point out. 

“Yeah, ‘cause it’s a waste of time.  It’ll just be a staging point.”

“Sure.  But you’re supposed to look it up, just in case, right? It’s procedure.”

Caldera doesn’t answer.

“Is this something to do with that fire mage?” I ask. 

Caldera lets out a long breath, and her chair squeaks as she leans back.  “All right,” she says.  She glances back to check that the door’s closed.  “You remember I used to have a partner?”

“Haken, right?” I say.  He’d been a tall Keeper with blond hair.  I remember him being friendlier than usual for the Order of the Star.  I haven’t seen him since I got back. 

“We used to share this office,” Caldera says.  “He’s on personal leave.  The mandatory kind.”

I give her a puzzled look. 

“A lot of things came out after the White Rose raid,” Caldera says.  “Turns out that Haken – my ‘partner’ – was on friendly terms with Councillor Levistus.  ‘Friendly’, as in, ‘feeding him information behind our backs’ friendly.  I got a sword through the ribs and lost my key witness.”

“Was he . . . wait, how did anyone manage to stick a sword through you?”

“Not in the mood for a play-by-play, Sonder.”

“Oh.”  I’m still curious – earth mages are kind of famous for how weapons just bounce off them – but I don’t push it.  “Haken wasn’t the one who . . . ?”

“No, he didn’t do it himself,” Caldera says.  “Some mages sent a bunch of constructs into the house we were holed up in.  Haken wasn’t there, he didn’t give the order.  But he was the one who told them where to find us.  And he was the one who made sure our backup didn’t get there until it was too late.  Maybe he didn’t know what they were going to do.”  Caldera’s silent for a few seconds.  “Then again, maybe he did.”

“Oh.”  I’m not sure what to say. 

The silence stretches out.  Caldera’s staring out the window.  She doesn’t seem to want to talk. 

“Are you getting a new partner?” I suggest.

“Alex’s using that desk for now,” Caldera says absently.

I blink.  When did Alex start working with the Keepers?

Actually, come to think of it, when did Caldera start calling him ‘Alex’?

“Anyway.” Caldera turns to me, seeming to come back to the present.  “If you’re wondering what all this has got to do with our case, the answer is:  Haken’s a fire mage.”

I start to answer, then I suddenly realise what Caldera’s saying.  My eyebrows go up.  “Wait, you think . . . ?”

Caldera sighs and scrubs a hand over her eyes.  “I don’t know.  I don’t know, okay?  It doesn’t add up.  Okay, yeah, Haken’s on suspension, but we’ve got nothing we can charge him with.  Or at least nothing we can charge him with without bringing in Levistus’s name, and Rain’s made it pretty damn clear that’s not happening.  Haken has to know by now that he’s in the clear.  All he has to do is wait it out, keep his head down, and he’ll be back on the roster in a few months. Why would he do something like this?”

“He’s still working for Levistus?” I guess. 

“Maybe,” Caldera says.  She drums her fingers on the desk:  thud-thud-thud-thud, thud-thud-thud-thud.  “I mean, that was the whole reason Levistus was involved, he was trying to hush up the White Rose case for some reason.  Maybe these papers are more of the same?  He got wind of it and was worried enough to set up a break-in?”

“I mean . . . that does make sense,” I say.  I lower my voice a little:  it’s not a good idea to be too loud about this stuff.  Still, I find myself getting interested.  “Could anything from there tie back to him?”

“I don’t know.” Caldera shakes her head.  “I hate this political shit.”

“We’re the Order of the Star,” I point out.  “We deal with crimes involving adepts and mages.  That kind of involves politics by definition.”

“Yeah, well, it shouldn’t.”

That doesn’t make much sense to me, but I have the feeling it’s better not to argue. 

“Haken and I were apprentices together,” Caldera says.  “I’ve known him fifteen, twenty years.  If he was the one who did it . . .”  Caldera trails off and shakes her head again.  “I hope to God he didn’t.”

“So . . . are we going to go talk to him?”  I venture. 

Caldera sighs, then straightens up and seems to focus.  “They’re already bringing him in.”

I look at her in surprise. 

“I gave the order soon as we got back,” Caldera says.  “That message I got?  That was Avenor telling me they’ll have him here in fifteen minutes.”

I give Caldera an odd look. 

“What?” Caldera asks.

“Um . . .” I say.  “Weren’t you just saying you’ve known him since . . . ?”

“And?”

“You still had him arrested?”

“You said the suspect was a fire mage,” Caldera says.  “Haken’s a fire mage.  You said the suspects used a Council shroud.  Haken would have access to a Council shroud.  On top of that, he’s connected to the White Rose case already.  Any way you look at it, he’s the prime suspect.”

I’m not sure what to say. 

But Caldera seems to know what I’m thinking.  “There’s no room for feelings in this job, Sonder,” Caldera says.  “You follow the evidence.  End of story.”

The computer beeps.  “Finally,” Caldera says and turns back to the screen.  “All right, I’ll print out the matches and you can look them over while I talk to Haken.  Let me know if you recognise the guy from last night.”

Caldera gets to typing again and I watch her from across the desk.  She acts like she’s put it right out of her mind, and an uneasy thought comes to me.  If she turned up something against me, would she arrest me, too? 

Yes.  Yes, she would.

∞

I wait in the observation booth, and watch the interview through the one-way mirror. 

Caldera and Haken are sitting in the interview room.  The room’s fairly bare, with a table, three chairs, and nothing else.  I can see the two of them talking, but there’s no sound.  There’s a microphone and speaker setup, but it’s switched off. 

Haken looks pretty relaxed for someone who’s about two steps away from getting sent to San Vittore.  He’s wearing faded jeans and a Danger Mouse T-shirt;  you’d never think to look at him that he was a Council Keeper.  Caldera looks tense.  She’s asking short, sharp questions, her hands clasped tightly as if she wants to squeeze something.  Haken’s body language is more relaxed, but none of the things he says seem to make Caldera any happier. 

At last Caldera shoves back her chair and strides for the door.  I head out to meet her, taking a glance back at Haken as I do.  He’s looking casually at the one-way mirror, as if he knows he’s being watched and doesn’t care. 

I meet Caldera out in the corridor.  “He’s stonewalling,” Caldera says, biting off the words. 

“So he’s denying it?” 

“Course he’s bloody denying it.”  Caldera looks around angrily.  A couple of people are in sight, but no-one’s close enough to overhear.  “Point is, he’s hiding something.  Fuck.  I really wanted him to be . . .”

“Innocent?” I guess.

“At least of this.”  Caldera shakes her head.  “Forget it.  You look over those printouts?”

I nod, handing over the binder.  Caldera opens it and I lean over to flip through the pages.  Each page has got a headshot and a profile, with biographical data underneath.  Keeper criminal records.  I don’t know why the Keepers still print everything out when digital is so much faster, but given the kind of mood Caldera’s in I’m not going to bring it up. 

“Him,” I say, tapping a page. 

Caldera looks down at it.  “You sure?”

I hesitate for just a second.  Are you sure? is the big question when you’re working for the Keepers, and every time I hear it I feel this little thrill of worry.  I’m not just being nervous – very bad things can happen to you if you answer that question wrong.  There are time mages who’ve tanked their careers and had their reputations ruined for the rest of their lives for saying ‘yes’.

But saying ‘no’ too many times can hurt you almost as badly.  This moment – doing these timesight scans and making an identification – is what the Council pays you for.  They want you to put your reputation on the line, and get it right. 

And I’m good at being right.

“I’m sure,” I tell her. 

“David Freeman,” Caldera says to herself, and nods.  “Not a big surprise.”

“You know him?”

“Adept with some low-level stealth ability,” Caldera says.  “I’ve pulled him in for burglary before.  Warned him to go straight but he likes the easy money too much.  Hadn’t heard from him for a while, thought he might have finally listened.  Guess not.”  She walks away a few steps, speaks into her comm for a minute, then comes back.  “All right, word’s out.  Now comes the hard part.”

“Waiting?” I ask.

Caldera snorts.  “That’s the easy part.  No.  Someone wants to talk to us.”

I frown.  “About what?”

“Wrong question,” Caldera says as she turns away.  “Should have asked who.”

∞

I like the feel of the War Rooms better than Keeper HQ.  The floors are polished, everything’s clean . . . it just generally feels nice, instead of like a dump.  I never understood how the Keepers are supposed to be the most important part of the Council, yet they work out of such a crappy place.  Even the air here smells nicer. 

We pass a group of mages laughing and talking in the middle of the Belfry.  Caldera doesn’t break stride as we go by, but from the snatches of conversation it sounds like something’s going on in the Cathedral;  they’re talking about a duel they just watched. 

The duel makes me think of Luna.  We haven’t talked for nearly a year;  we had that big fight last April, and I tried to get in touch a couple of times afterwards, but the conversations were always kind of uncomfortable and then I got distracted by the trip and once I got to Washington I always seemed to be busy with something.  Though I still kept thinking about her from time to time.  Which got really awkward after I started going out with Joanna . . .

I wonder if Luna’s still with Alex?  She said she wasn’t interested in finding a new master, but she might have changed her mind.  Now that I look back on it, I wish I’d fixed things up with her before leaving.  It’s been long enough now that it’d feel awkward approaching her.  Maybe I could go through someone else . . . ?

While I’ve been thinking, we’ve passed through the second set of security gates and into the inner chambers.  We turn a couple of corners, then the air starts to become fresher and the sound of running water echoes from ahead, growing louder and louder until the corridor opens out into an underground conservatory filled with colour. 

The conservatory smells of greenery and flowers.  Water splashes and bubbles from a fountain, and branches reach out from the planters to half-hide the walls.  Standing in front of the pool is a smallish man with neat brown hair wearing a suit that looks like it came from Savile Row.  “Keeper Caldera,” Barrayar says with a nod.  “Mage Sonder.  Thank you for coming.”

I’ve seen Barrayar a few times, but I think this is the first time we’ve talked.  He’s personal aide to Councillor Levistus.  Council aides are a big deal – people sometimes act like they’re just glorified secretaries, but they’re really not.  Most of the time, when an aide tells you something, they’re acting as their boss’s mouthpiece:  it’s the closest you’ll get to a Councillor giving you a direct order.  There’s no-one else in the conservatory.  We passed a security man on the way in, and I’ve got the feeling he might have had orders to not let anyone else by.

“Mage Barrayar,” Caldera says curtly.  “I hope this is important.”

“I wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t,” Barrayar says, then glances at me.  “Sonder, good to see you again.  I hear you impressed quite a few people in Washington.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“You going to tell us why you dragged us away from work?” Caldera asks.

“This does concern your work.”  Barrayar turns away and inspects the leaves on one of the small trees by the pool.  “I understand you’re engaged in some follow-up concerning White Rose.”

“Maybe.”

Barrayar nods.  “Certain quarters would appreciate it if you could delay this investigation.”

“Which quarters?”

Barrayar acts as if he hadn’t heard.  “I would be happy to do anything feasible to help you and your department if it could help us in coming to an arrangement.”

“You offering me a reward for co-operation?” Caldera’s voice doesn’t change, but there’s a sudden hardness in her eyes.  “Is that it?”

Barrayar shakes his head.  “I’m not trying to bribe you, Caldera.  I’m appealing to your sense of duty.”

“Duty to what?” Caldera asks.  “Because the way it looks to me, the only one benefiting here is you.”

Barrayar sighs and starts to stroll down the conservatory path.  “Walk with me, please.”

I step forward to follow him;  Caldera shoots me a look but follows.  We fall in at Barrayar’s right side as he moves slowly through the garden, weaving from left to right to avoid brushing any of the branches. 

“The Council has been seriously disrupted as a result of the events of this past month,” Barrayar says as we walk.  “The fallout from the White Rose affair brought down two Councillors, as well as many more in lower-ranking positions.  Given your involvement in the case, I’m sure you’re well aware of the chaos that followed.”

“Maybe they shouldn’t have been buying sex from a bunch of slavers,” Caldera tells him.

“I’m not blaming you, Caldera.  You did your job.”

Neither Caldera nor Barrayar are paying me any attention, and I figure that if I’m being ignored, I might as well take the opportunity to have a look around.  I scan backwards with my timesight, searching for any trace of Barrayar in the past.  If he’s meeting us here, then he might have met other people as well.  Eavesdropping on a Council aide sounds awfully interesting . . .

But I hit a wall straightaway.  Barrayar’s got a personal shroud, too, and it’s much better than the one I broke this morning.  It’s not a lattice, it’s like a wall of solid rock that I can’t look through and which doesn’t budge.  I work at it for a few minutes, getting increasingly frustrated, then give up. 

Barrayar’s still talking.  “. . . the effect of this being that Morden was raised to the Junior Council unopposed,” he’s saying.  “Now, there’s nothing we can do to get rid of him right at the moment.  Not without cause.  There is, however, a broad agreement that we should be taking action to limit his influence.  Several Council members from across the political spectrum have privately expressed their concerns to me on the subject.”

“Yeah, look, this is all very interesting—” Caldera begins.

“However, to limit Morden’s influence, the Council needs to be focused.  It needs to be unified.  What it does not need is for the White Rose case to be reopened.”  Barrayar looks at us.  “Do you understand?”

Caldera studies Barrayar for a second.  “Levistus is hoping to get raised to that vacant seat on the Senior Council, right?”

I look from Caldera to Barrayar.  Barrayar looks back at Caldera without expression. 

“What, you thought I didn’t know?” Caldera tells him.  “I might not get the inside scoop, but I’m not a bloody idiot.  You want us not to rock the boat until the election’s over.  That about describe it?”

“It would be appreciated.”

“Right,” Caldera says.  “I’m still missing the part where this is my problem.”

Barrayar is starting to look a lot less friendly.  “Do you want Morden gaining influence on the Council?  I promise you, he’s done far worse than anything White Rose ever did.”

“Just doing my job.”

“Your job is to serve the Council’s interests,” Barrayar says.  “Don’t give me that letter-of-the-law stuff, Caldera.  The Council spends a lot of resources staffing and funding your organisation.  You work for us.”

Caldera smiles at Barrayar.  It’s not a nice smile.  “Then give me an order.  You know, all official-like, with a paper trail.  Us Keepers aren’t so smart, you know, we need stuff written down.”

Barrayar doesn’t answer.

“No, you don’t want that, do you?”  The smile slides off Caldera’s face.  “You want it all off the record.”

“For—” Barrayar checks himself.  For the first time, he’s starting to look genuinely frustrated.  “Why are you acting like this?  I’m not asking you to stop your investigation.  I’m just asking you to let us put out the fire before you throw petrol on it.  I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing,” Caldera says.  “No-one ever does.  It’s their first time.  It was just a little bit.  They’re sorry.  They didn’t mean it.  They did mean it, but not like that.  Every excuse in the world.”  We’ve walked almost to the corner of the conservatory, and Caldera strides in front of Barrayar and blocks his path, forcing him to stop.  “You know what I don’t like about you, Barrayar?  People like you, you want it both ways.  You want all the awkward little rules smoothed away whenever they’re inconvenient, but you also want to play innocent and pretend you stand for the Council and law and order.  Well, that’s a bit more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow, so no.  Fuck you.  That clear enough?”

Barrayar stares at Caldera, and his expression is very blank.  “I see,” he says at last, and looks at me.  “Sonder?  Do you agree?”

Caldera turns to look at me as well, and suddenly I wish I was anywhere else.  “Um . . .” I can’t think of anything to say.  Seconds stretch out. 

“Well,” Barrayar says at last.  “I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”  He turns and leaves. 

Caldera and I watch him go. 

∞

Caldera and I leave the War Rooms the way we came in.  “Never leave me hanging like that,” Caldera says once we’re through the security gates. 

“I’m sorry!  He put me on the spot!”

We head out into Westminster, noise and chatter and car exhausts.  A blustery wind is blowing, whipping at my hair and clothes, and I have to raise my voice for Caldera to hear me.  “Don’t you think that was a bad idea?” 

“You’re not worth shit as a Keeper if you can be pushed around.”

“I’m not talking about that,” I say.  Though I guess I am kind of talking about that.  The British Council isn’t like some places, you don’t get fired just for doing your job, but there are still some people that you really don’t want to have as enemies.  Someone like Barrayar can cause you a lot of trouble if he wants to. 

I know Caldera isn’t going to want to hear that, though, so I say the other thing that’s on my mind.  “Don’t you think he’s got a point?  There hasn’t been a Dark mage on the Council for hundreds of years.”

The wind whips at Caldera but doesn’t slow her down.  “So?” she says.

“So what if Barrayar’s right?  What if Morden’s just the thin end of the wedge and he’s trying to open things up for someone worse?  Like Drakh, or Iram, or Vihaela?”

“So what if he is?”

“Well, if he is, and if these documents cause enough trouble to let him do it, then I don’t think saying we were just doing our jobs is going to impress anyone very much!”

Caldera trudges along a few more steps before replying.  “Is Levistus getting raised to the Senior Council?”

“What?”

Caldera looks at me. 

“Um . . . probably?”  The change of subject catches me off guard and I have to think.  “I mean, it’s not definite or anything.  But when I left Washington, the mages there were all talking as though it was going to be him.”

Caldera shakes her head.  “Figures.”

“So what about what I was just saying?”

“Barrayar’s talking through his arse,” Caldera says.  “You haven’t spent long enough around these guys.  Whatever they want, they’ll always tell you that it’s all for the good of the Council.”

“But what if he’s right?”

Caldera shrugs.

“Don’t you care?”

“Go home, Sonder.”

I stop walking, frustration boiling over.  I am this close to shouting at her. 

If Caldera notices, she doesn’t seem to care.  “If we find David Freeman, we’ll need you for a scan,” she tells me.  “Keep your phone on.”  She walks away, leaving me standing in the middle of the pavement. 

∞

I gate home to my flat in St. John’s Wood.  The noise and wind cut out as the gate closes behind me, leaving everything quiet and peaceful.  I toss my phone and gate stone onto the desk and flop down on the bed with a sigh.  

It’s nice to be home.  The apartment the U.S. Council gave me in D.C. was decent, but it’s not the same.  Some people on these kinds of placements actually never move at all – they just live in their home country and gate in to work every day.  I met one Scottish guy who’d told me he’d been commuting in from Edinburgh every morning and evening for sixteen years, but the few times I’ve tried it, it’s messed up my body clock like you wouldn’t believe.  Besides, people take you more seriously if you’re living in the same city.

But being in my flat brings back memories, too, and again I find myself thinking about Luna.  This was where we had our big fight.  Back when it happened, I spent weeks afterwards going over it and wondering what I should have done differently.  I really hadn’t expected her to get that upset. 

I think part of the reason it caught me so off guard was that back then it felt like we were on the same team.  During the year or two that I hung out with Alex and Luna and Anne, it seemed like we were constantly getting into these crazy adventures.  Okay, usually I’d only be involved because Alex had asked me for help, but still.  Now that I look back at it, it’s kind of insane how dangerous it all was, but I guess I didn’t really notice because they all treated it as normal.  And Luna was always there, and she always seemed really happy to talk to me.  I started to like her and it felt as though she liked me too. 

There was her curse, of course, and obviously that was an issue, but she was working on controlling it and after she joined the apprentice programme she started learning fast.  Only, the thing was, the more she learned and the more involved she got with duelling and classes and other apprentices, the less interested she seemed to get in spending time with me.

I guess I should have just found someone else.  And I did, I suppose, but it wasn’t the same.  I liked the way things used to be with Luna, and all those adventures we’d had, even the ones that scared the hell out of me at the time.  It gives you a kind of . . . connection, I guess?  I never felt anything like that with Joanna. 

Come to think of it, Joanna sent me an email last night.  I ought to reply to that. 

I don’t, though.  The jet lag is really doing a number on me – my eyes feel gritty and my mind keeps wandering.  I want to sleep but I know it’s a bad idea.  It’s not even four o’clock and if I drop off it’ll wreck my sleep pattern. 

You know what, maybe I’ll just get some help. 

∞

I take a taxi south of the river.  At times like this it’s really annoying not being able to cast the gate spell – sure, there are gate stones, but you can’t exactly keep one of them around for everywhere, and the more of them you have, the harder it gets to keep track of where they all go.  Elemental mages don’t have to worry about that, they just pick a place and gate to it.  It’s really unfair. 

I clamber out of the taxi, duck my head against the wind as I hurry into the front garden, and press the bell for the second-floor flat.  I shift my feet, shivering as I wait, then when I’m buzzed in I climb the stairs. 

Anne opens the door to me with a smile.  “Sonder!  How long’s it been, a year?”

“Ten months,” I say.  Anne gives me a quick hug, then an up-and-down glance, and I find myself sucking in my stomach and standing up straight.  I’m still shorter than her, which is kind of embarrassing, and I eye Anne as we’re saying our hellos.  She hasn’t put on any weight.  Actually, she looks prettier if anything. 

We chat a bit as we go through into Anne’s little kitchen.  “Did you say you needed help with something?”  Anne asks as she clicks on the kettle.

“Oh,” I say with an embarrassed laugh.  “Just jet lag.  London’s five hours ahead of D.C., and I hardly slept last night.  If you could . . . ?”

Anne reaches out to touch my chest.  Green light glows around her hand, flowing into me, and all of a sudden I’m wide awake.  The colours of Anne’s kitchen seem brighter and even the air’s fresher.  “There you go.”

“Oh, wow.”  My eyes aren’t itchy any more and I can think clearly again – the dragging fatigue that’s been following me around all day is completely gone.  “Did you . . . ?”

“I reset your circadian rhythm,” Anne says.  “You’ll be wide awake for the next three or four hours, then you’ll start getting tired.  Go to bed by eight, get a full twelve hours sleep, and by tomorrow you’ll be fine.”

“Wow,” I say again.  “The guys on the U.S. Council would love you.  They’re always trying to get more hours in a day.”

Anne smiles and shakes her head.  The kettle is starting to hiss, and she takes some tea down from the cupboard as she talks over her shoulder.  “It doesn’t work like that.  I can’t take away your body’s fatigue, not really.  I just stop you from feeling it for a while.  I know right now you feel as though you’ve had a full night’s rest, but you haven’t, you’ve still got the same sleep debt and you do need to pay it off.  You don’t get something for nothing.”

“You do sometimes,” I say with a laugh. 

We take our tea through into the living room.  It’s small but comfortable, with houseplants on the windowsill and a view out onto a tiny little nature reserve behind the building, right in the middle of the city.  Anne’s flat isn’t big, but it’s nice. 

I’m the reason that Anne’s living here.  Back when she moved out of Alex’s place, she didn’t have anywhere to go, and she came to me for help.  I knew a couple of people who worked in Council admin, and I’d noticed that a lot of Council properties seemed to stand empty most of the time, so I tried to see if I could set her up in one of their flats.  And it turned out to be way easier than I’d expected.  They didn’t make any trouble at all. 

It was only much later that I started to figure out that part of the reason the Council keeps so many properties is because it wants to use them for things like this.  The more mages the Council has living in its buildings, the more favours it can call in.  The market price for this place would be . . . what, three or four hundred thousand?  No way Anne could afford that on her own.  As long as she’s here rent-free, she’s not going to want to cause trouble.  And if I ask for help, well, she’s going to make time.  That wasn’t why I did it – I was just helping out.  But it’s kind of cool having a life mage on private retainer. 

“So how does it feel to be back?” Anne says once we’re settled. 

“Eh,” I say.  I’m in the armchair, a wisp of steam rising from my cup of tea, while Anne’s curled up catlike on the sofa.  The way she’s sitting shows off the lines of her legs and hips.  I’d forgotten how good her figure is.  “It’s been a rough first day.”

“Do they not trust you any more?”

“No, nothing like that.  It’s just . . . They don’t really take me seriously, you know?  I mean, I could understand if it was the Order of the Shield, they’re the battle-magic specialists.  But the Order of the Star lives off timesight.  They’re the biggest employer of time mages in all of Britain!  You’d think they’d give us a bit more appreciation.”

“I know what you mean.”

“It’s like they think I’m a little kid,” I say.  “Even the guys at reception don’t take me seriously, and they’re not even mages.  And Caldera . . . She acts like she’s the big-shot detective and I’m just there to carry her bags.  If it wasn’t for me, she’d have gotten nowhere today, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she talks.  Honestly, the only guy today who showed me any respect was . . .”

I trail off.  “Was?” Anne asks curiously. 

“Never mind,” I say.  “I’ve been a Keeper auxiliary for years, but they still act like I’m an apprentice.  You know what that’s like?”

“They do still think I’m an apprentice.”

“Oh, right.”  I’d forgotten about that.  Anne never graduated from the apprentice programme, so technically she’s still an apprentice, even though she’s the same age I am.  It’s silly, but those are the rules. 

“Did they treat you better in America?” Anne asks. 

“Much,” I say.  “They actually appreciated me, you know?  They’re always short on time mages and they treat you really well.”  They pay well, too.  I wasn’t exactly broke when I went to Washington, but my bank account’s a lot healthier now. 

“What were you doing?”

“Military intelligence, mostly.”  I settle back into the armchair.  “They’re gearing up for some operations in Syria and Iraq and they wanted scans of their targets.  They’d pair me up with a space mage – he’d scry the place, I’d use timesight, find out what they wanted to know.  Not as good as actually being there, but it’s a lot safer.  And you still get to see what matters.  There was some guy they’d been looking for for months, they were turning the country upside down trying to find him.  I managed to confirm that he’d been killed in a drone strike last Christmas.  Made a lot of people really happy.”

Anne looks a bit repulsed and I remember belatedly that she doesn’t like fighting.  Maybe I should talk about something else.  “So . . . do you still see Luna much?”

“All the time.”

I try to act casual.  “Does she know I’m back?”

“I’m . . . not sure.  I don’t think she’s mentioned it.”

I don’t say anything, but Anne seems to know what I’m thinking.  “She might not have remembered the exact day,” she explains.  “But she’s coming around this evening.  I could let her know you’re in town, if you’d like.”

“Thanks.”

We talk a bit longer, and as we do, an idle thought keeps pushing at me.  There had been a tiny bit of hesitation in Anne’s answer, as if she knew a bit more than she was saying.  If she has been talking to Luna, she probably did it here in this room.  Which means I could just look back and see what she said.

It’s something all time mages think about:  the way our magic works makes it really, really easy for us to spy on people.  Any time we want, we can see what someone did and said, last week, last month . . . maybe even last year, if you’re good.  Private conversations, secret habits.  And more intimate stuff.  People love to joke about time mages being voyeurs – you know, the reason you become a time mage is because you’re such a pervert that seeing naked women in the present isn’t enough, you want to see all the ones in the past too.  I’ve never thought it was a very funny joke. 

But joke or not, the temptation’s always there, and as I talk to Anne, I find myself wondering.  I could find out what she’d been saying to Luna.  She’d never know.  All I’d have to do is look. 

But I don’t.

∞

I stay for an hour, then say my goodbyes and gate home.  I’m feeling lazy so I order from my favourite take-away.  Anne’s prediction is right on target, and around seven-thirty my eyes start feeling heavy.  I drop into bed and I’m out as soon as my head hits the pillow. 

∞

My phone’s ringing.  I’m totally exhausted and I try to ignore it.  It rings, stops, rings again.  I’m dragged up out of slumber, resisting the whole way. 

I crack my eyes open;  it’s dawn.  My phone’s going off over and over again, dingetty-ding-ding, the ringtone making me want to smash it.  My head hurts and I open one eye to squint at the screen.  6:07. 

Why couldn’t it have waited a couple more hours?

I fumble my phone off the desk and hit the green button.  “Who is it?”

“Sonder?”  It’s Caldera’s voice.  “Get your arse over here.”

I’m still groggy and I’ve got no idea what she’s talking about.  “Where’s here?”

“West Drayton.”

“I don’t want to go to West Drayton.”  All I want is to go back to sleep.  “Nobody wants to go to West Drayton.”

“Yeah, well, a bunch of us in West Drayton want to see you.”

There’s something grim in Caldera’s tone, and all of a sudden I’m awake.  “For what?”

“Remember our suspect from yesterday, David Freeman?  We found him.”

∞

The West Drayton Novotel is a big tacky-looking building with blue decorations, close enough to the M4 that there’s a constant roar of traffic.  It calls itself the ‘Heathrow Novotel’, probably in a failed attempt to sound more glamorous.  Caldera gates me to a spot behind the outbuildings and I shiver in the cold air as we hurry inside. 

The corridor on the floor is marked off with blue-and-white police tape.  A couple of PCs give us a glance as we duck under the tape but they don’t say anything;  the liaison must have cleared us already.  More police are waiting in the corridor, along with a photographer, but they’ve left the room clear. 

I flinch as I walk in.  David Freeman is there, or what’s left of him.  He’s thin and bony, dressed in cheap-looking clothes, and he’s lying face-down in the hotel room’s small hallway, quite close to the door.  The only scents in the room are disinfectant and hotel carpet, but I still feel as though I can smell the body. 

“Housekeeping found him when they came in this morning,” Caldera says.  “Room was booked under a false name for one night only.  Reception staff confirm that David Freeman checked in yesterday at 2:30 P.M.  He stayed there for the rest of the evening except for one short outing between 8:00 and 9:00.  Last time he was seen alive was when he returned.”

“Alone?” I ask.

“Staff say yes, and CCTV confirms it.  Camera in the corridor has him entering the room at 8:49 P.M.  No-one else used that door until the maid came in this morning.”

Caldera’s stepped around the body and she’s waiting for me in the main room.  Reluctantly, I follow her in, giving the corpse as wide a berth as I can.  It’s not the first time I’ve done murder cases, but I hate being around dead bodies.  If I’m going to use my timesight for this sort of thing, I’d much rather do it from a distance. 

The hotel room’s got that bland, empty look that they all do.  A polystyrene takeaway box with a smear of ketchup and a few leftover chips is lying on the bedside table.  The creepy thought occurs to me that David Freeman was probably eating his dinner last night at the same time I was.  “No sign of a fight?” I ask. 

“No.”  Caldera is looking at me with a what-are-you-waiting-for? expression. 

I don’t really like the idea of seeing a murder this close, but there’s nothing for it.  I close my eyes and open my timesight, looking back.  The lines of the past are static, the dead body lying still, hour after hour.  I scan backwards.  Four AM, two AM, midnight . . .

. . . And I’m blocked. 

Oh.  So that’s how it is.  I keep scanning for another ten minutes, then open my eyes. 

Caldera’s moved up against the wall, but other than that, she’s stayed dead still.  She’s annoying, but at least she knows to stay quiet while I’m working.  “He came in at 8:49 and ate his dinner,” I say, pointing to the bed.  “Then he lay down on the bed and was on his phone.  At least until 9:25.”

“What happened at 9:25?”

“A shroud happened.”  I nod towards the door.  “It’s covering everything in this room, maybe leaking out a little bit into the corridor, but the source was right here.  It lasts from 9:25 to 9:45.  Starts to clear at 9:45, and once it does, he’s lying there.  Nothing else for the rest of the night.”

“Same shroud as yesterday?” Caldera asks. 

I shake my head.  “Signature is totally different.”

“Can you see through it?”

I hesitate, wondering if I should ask for more time.  There’s always a chance that there might be a way through, but . . . no.  Part of being an expert is knowing your limits.  “No.”

“No?”

“No, I can’t.”

“You saw through yesterday’s.”

“Yeah, because that was yesterday’s,” I say.  “That one was standard Council issue.  This one’s a hell of a lot stronger.  Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s variable-strength.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means it’s designed so the mage using it can put more or less power into the focus.  So for everyday business, you just channel the minimum amount, give yourself decent privacy for not much effort.  But if you’re doing something sensitive and you want to be really secure, you can pour energy into it, make that region of space-time completely impenetrable to scrying and timesight.”  I look at Caldera.  “It’s pretty high-end.”

I see Caldera’s face change, and I know she’s figured out what I’m telling her.  There are only two reasons a mage would go to this much trouble with a shroud.  Either they’re really, really paranoid . . . or they know a time mage is going to be spying on them.

“There’s something else,” I say.  “There was gate magic used here.  Both ends of the shrouded period.  One gate towards the beginning, one towards the end.  I can’t get a close look, but you can see the signature from out in the corridor.”

Caldera nods as if she’s not surprised.  “So our mystery guest gates into David’s room, offs him, then gives the place a once-over to make sure he’s got what he came for.  Might even have cleaned up afterwards, given how bloody neat it looks.  Then gates out again.  No witnesses, no evidence.”  She thinks for a minute.  “Where’s his phone?”

“Gone,” I say.  “Unless it’s in his pocket . . .”

“It’s not,” Caldera says.  “Killer must have swiped it.  All right.  Search back and forward.  Look for any conversations David might have had.  And trace the trip he took between 8:00 and 9:00.  I’m going to book an autopsy.”

∞

I search David Freeman’s movements during his last evening alive, but I don’t get any lucky breaks this time.  He went to the local kebab shop, spent a lot of time on his phone, and didn’t do much else.  I spend a tedious hour trying to spy on his calls and Internet usage, and all I learn is more information than I’d ever really wanted to know about the guy’s tastes in porn. 

Caldera doesn’t seem to think it’s useless, though, and she questions me closely.  “Why does this matter?” I ask at last.  We’re standing out in the corridor while an evidence team take photographs of the body.  “You think he passed a coded message or something?”

Caldera snorts.  “That’s spy novel shit.  No, what it tells me is he didn’t see this coming.  If he thought someone was about to off him, he wouldn’t be spending his last couple of hours browsing Pornhub.”  She taps a finger on her arm, frowning at the wall.  “They knew who they were looking for.  Question is, did they scry him, or was it an appointment . . . ?”

I’m about to ask Caldera something when her comm focus pings.  She puts a hand to her ear and turns half away.  “Caldera.”  She pauses.  “Well, can’t you find someone else?”  Pause.  “Come on.”  Pause.  “Yes, there’s something.  You can do your bloody job!”

I listen in as the conversation goes on;  Caldera gets more and more annoyed and finally hangs up.  “What’s wrong?” I ask her. 

“No autopsy,” Caldera says. 

“Why—?”

“You know how since last month all coroners have to be CT-qualified?” Caldera says.  “There are only three on the roster right now and they’re busy.”

“Oh, come on,” I say.  This kind of thing always seems to happen with the Council.  The more urgently you need something, the more likely there’ll be some reason you can’t get it.  “We don’t need anything fancy.”

“Yeah, well, the healer corps say no.”  Caldera frowns.  “We could hand him over to the Met, but if it’s a magical C.O.D. they won’t know what to look for . . .”

“If we hand him over any residue’s going to dissipate,” I point out. 

“Yeah,” Caldera says, and shakes her head.  “Going to have to go to Rain.”

“Rain said we were supposed to handle this case quietly, remember?” I say.  “Fast-tracking an autopsy is kind of the opposite of quiet.”

Caldera swears, and I have to bite back a grin.  It’s a nice change to be the one who tells her what she’s doing wrong. 

But then I get an idea.  “Wait.  We just need a life scan, right?”

“Within the next few hours, yeah.”

“I think I know someone.”

∞

“I’d rather not,” Anne says. 

“They’ll pay standard rates,” I say.  I’m out in the Novotel car park, talking to Anne over the phone.  Grey-white clouds sweep by overhead.  “Plus a call-out bonus, plus expenses.  Much better pay than that supermarket you work at, right?”

“It’s not about the money.”

“Come on,” I say persuasively.  “It’s an easy job.  Besides, this kind of thing’s good networking.”

“Sonder . . . I know you think you’re trying to help, but . . . I’ve seen enough dead bodies.”

Damn it.  Okay, fine.  “Look, you know who owns your flat, right?”

Anne doesn’t answer.

“This is how it goes.”  I try to make my voice sound encouraging.  “It’s going to be less than an hour’s work.  Probably not even half an hour.  In and out.”

“. . . All right.”

“Great!  I’ll text you the address.”

∞

I’m waiting out in the car park when Anne arrives.  Despite the cold she’s dressed lightly, wearing a cardigan.  I wave and she changes direction to head towards me. 

Caldera’s standing next to me.  She catches sight of Anne and I see her eyes change as she puts it together.  “Okay, so—” I begin. 

“No,” Caldera says.

“No, what?”

“You know damn well what.  No.  As in N–O.”

Anne stops some distance away, watching Caldera warily.  I give her what I hope is a reassuring smile, then turn to Caldera, lowering my voice so that Anne won’t hear us over the wind.  “It’s just going to be a quick in-and-out.”

“It doesn’t matter how quick it is.”  Caldera’s voice is sharp, and she keeps Anne in her field of vision.  “I don’t want her in my crime scene.”

“I know she’s not cleared—”

“You’re damn right she’s not cleared.”

“—but she’s still a life mage, and that’s all we really need.  It’s not like we’ve got any other evidence to go on, is it?  And Rain did say ‘quickly’.”

Caldera doesn’t answer and I press my advantage.  “She’s helped us out before.  I know she’s not a qualified mage, but she’s always been really co-operative.  And I know she needs the money.”

Caldera thinks for a second, then shakes her head.  “No.”

What does it take to convince this woman?  “Why not?”

“She’s a Dark apprentice who isn’t cleared for any kind of Keeper operations, much less something this sensitive.  Any evidence we got out of her wouldn’t be admissible, even if we trusted her to tell the truth, which we don’t.  Send her home.”

I stare at Caldera.  She’s barely even looking at me, and that’s the point at which my patience finally snaps.  “All right, you know what?  I don’t need your permission.”

Caldera turns to me with a frown.  “Yes, you do.”

“I’m a Keeper auxiliary,” I tell her.  “While I’m on the clock, that means I’ve got the same authority to call in help that you do, if I think it’s necessary.  Well, I am officially saying it’s necessary.”

“This isn’t your case!”

“I’ve got an assignment from Rain that says it is.  So unless you want to go to him and argue seniority . . .”

Caldera stares at me.  The look in her eyes makes me want to back down, but I don’t.  If Caldera does go to Rain, I know he’ll take her side – she’s a Keeper, and I’m not.  But going to your boss for something like this would make her look really bad, especially after what Rain said about ‘quickly and quietly’. 

Caldera’s obviously doing the same calculation, and coming to the same answer.  “Fifteen minutes,” Caldera tells me.  “She doesn’t touch anything except the body.  Got it?”

I bite back a grin.  “Got it.”

∞

After how Anne was acting over the phone, I’m worried she’s going to freak out when she sees the body.  Luckily, she doesn’t – she kneels down right next to it and touches her hand to its shoulder. 

“One penetrating wound through the left torso,” Anne says.  “It went between the fifth and sixth rib and entered the heart through the left ventricle.”  She studies the body, head slightly cocked.  “Very precise.”

“Weapon?” Caldera asks from the opposite side of the room.

Anne rises to her feet, dusting off her hands.  Caldera takes a casual step away.  “Single penetrating implement,” Anne says.  “Shaped like a knife, but it’s not one.”

“Wait,” I say.  “It’s like a knife, but it’s not a knife?”

“The edges are cut as if with a surgical blade, but it wasn’t a blade,” Anne says.  “To cause a wound like that you’d need something more like a spike, if you could find a spike that was sharpened like a scalpel.  Except it’s not a spike either, because of the rib.  The fifth rib was in the way of the strike and the blow went right through it and punched out a little notch from the bone.  The only things that have that kind of power are air blades and force blades.  In this case I’m pretty sure it was force.”

“Why?” I say curiously.  Anne’s acting totally different from yesterday, cool and distant, and now that she’s finished with the body, she’s acting like it’s not even there.  I guess when she was talking about how seeing bodies would upset her she was exaggerating a bit. 

“Air blades tend to be thinner,” Anne says.  “Plus since they’re made from hardened air they always carry a tiny bit of contamination from airborne pollutants.  But there’s no bacteria here that you wouldn’t expect to see anyway.”

“Anything else that could cause that kind of wound?” Caldera says.  She hasn’t taken her eyes off Anne since Anne walked in. 

“No,” Anne says.

Caldera gives her a sceptical look.  “And how do you know so much about air and force blade injuries?”

“I was the one who treated Alex after he got an air blade through his gut in that case of yours last month,” Anne says. 

Caldera stares at Anne, and Anne looks back at her.  All of a sudden there’s a tension in the room.  A photographer starts to come in behind me, sees the two women, and thinks better of it. 

“Um.”  I clear my throat.  “Okay.  Anything else?”

Anne looks away from Caldera, and the tension’s broken.  “No,” she says. 

“Great, great . . .”  I look at Caldera.  She’s staring at Anne like a dog watching a stray cat.  “Could you give us a minute?”

Anne leaves.  Caldera makes a gesture with two fingers and I close the door, leaving me and Caldera alone with the body.

I circle the body and walk over to Caldera.  “So?”

Caldera stares at the door, tapping her fingers against one thick arm.  “It’s something.”

“What do you mean, ‘it’s something’?  We’ve got the killer’s magic type, just like last time.”

“Which we can’t take to a judge because it’s not admissible,” Caldera says.  “And that’s if she was telling the truth.”

I throw up my hands.  “Can’t you just admit I was right for once?”

Caldera looks at me and I flinch, wondering if she’s going to lose her temper, but when she speaks she doesn’t seem angry.  “We have these rules for a reason, Sonder.”

“Fine, so I bent them a tiny bit.  You really think Rain’s going to have a problem with that?”

“It’s not about bending them,” Caldera says.  “It’s who you bent them for.”

“What, Anne?”  I have no idea why Caldera’s making such an issue of this.  “Why?”

Caldera doesn’t answer, and I’m getting annoyed again.  “You didn’t have a problem with helping her last year.”

“You think I only take kidnapping cases for people I like?”

“No . . .” I scratch my head.  “Look, I don’t get it.  I know you don’t like her . . . well, actually, I don’t know why you don’t like her, but—”

Caldera cuts me off.  “You ever think about why you do like her?”

That takes me aback.  “Well . . . I mean, I’ve known her for years.”  I cast about, trying to come up with reasons.  “She stood for Luna’s apprentice ceremony.  And she’s . . . well, she’s really nice.  And she always—”

“You think she’s hot and you want to bone her,” Caldera says. 

“No!”

“You don’t think she’s hot?”

“Well, I didn’t say that, but . . .”

“Then you don’t want to bone her.”

I glare at her.  “Can you stop using ‘bone’ as a verb?”

“You don’t ‘like’ her, Sonder, you’re just thinking with your dick,” Caldera says patiently.  “You figure she’s a nice girl who’s easy to impress and you want to get into her pants.”

“That is completely untrue.”

“Yeah, one part of it.  She’s not a nice girl.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve been on the job my whole life, and if there’s one thing that teaches you, it’s how to spot a liar.”  Caldera looks at me levelly.  “Your girl’s two-faced.  She pretends to be nice and she pretends to be sweet and she acts like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and she’s lying, Sonder, you can take that to the bank.  You get close to her, you’ll regret it.”

I open my mouth, trying to think of something to say, but Caldera’s turning away, raising a finger as her comm goes off again.  “Sec,” she tells me and talks into her comm.  “Caldera, go.”  Pause.  “No, we’re pretty much done.”  Pause.  “What about? . . . Why? . . . All right, give me fifteen minutes.  Caldera out.”  She turns back to me.  “Haken wants to talk.”

“What about?” I say.  I’m still pretty pissed off. 

“Won’t say,” Caldera says with a frown.  “Making a deal, maybe.  But then why would he . . . ?  Well, never mind.  I have to get back to the station.  Send the girl packing and come meet me when you’re done.”

∞

Anne’s quiet as we take the lift down to the ground floor and walk out through the lobby.  I don’t talk either:  what Caldera said is still going round and round in my head.  I ordered a minicab on the way down, and it’s waiting for us in the car park.  We get in and it pulls away, leaving the hotel and the police cars behind us. 

Once we’re on the M4 and heading east, I start to calm down a bit.  I suppose I should have expected something like this.  Caldera’s always come across as the Guardian type, very hard-line about Dark mages.  Now that I think about it, she never trusted Alex much either, or at least she didn’t before.  Though, well, she kind of had a point there.  But Anne’s not Alex. 

I sneak a look at Anne.  We’re both in the back seat and she’s leaning into the corner, staring out the window at the cars and the West London cityscape, her hair hanging down against the glass.  She really is good-looking, and I wonder if that might be part of the reason Caldera doesn’t like her . . .

Then again, it might just be the Light-Dark thing.  It was something I ran into in the States, as well.  I know it’s not something you’re really supposed to talk about, but it’s always seemed to me like Keepers are really prejudiced.  Maybe it’s the whole police mentality.  I’ve never had much to do with the regular police force, but they always seem kind of . . . judgmental, I guess?  They don’t seem to really think, they just assume the worst of everyone and they’re never interested in changing their minds. 

I mean, I suppose I can see the Keeper point of view.  The Council’s a lot better than the alternative, and you have to draw the line somewhere.  And yeah, in an ideal world, you could rely on Council mages and always go through the proper channels.  But after you’ve been around a while you start to notice that the people who make a go of it, the ones who go up through the ranks, they’re not the ones who always follow the rules, they’re the ones who get results.  Caldera’s been a Keeper her whole life and she’s still a journeyman at . . . what, thirty-five, forty?  Doesn’t seem like it’s working out so great for her.

I’m still mulling it over when the cab pulls in outside Anne’s flat in Honor Oak.  “Can you help me put in my claim?” Anne asks as we get out. 

“Yeah, sure.”

Anne lets me into her flat and goes to make tea as I write up the report on my phone.  I’ll have to print it out since the Council still hasn’t gone digital, but . . .

I’m sitting in Anne’s flat, in the same chair as yesterday, when it occurs to me.  She said Luna was coming around yesterday, right?  Which would have been . . . right here.

I think it’s what Caldera said that does it.  She thinks Anne’s a liar – well, I’m pretty sure she’s wrong.  So I’m going to check and prove to myself that I’m right. 

I skim back through the hours, catching flashes of images.  Anne watering her plants this morning.  Anne drawing something in a notebook.  The night, silent and quiet.  Anne moving through the living room, undressing for bed – I resist temptation and skip past that as well. 

And suddenly I’m there.  It’s yesterday evening, and Luna and Anne are alone in the living room. 

Luna looks really good.  She’s wearing a t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, with her hair tied up, and looks like she’s just come from the gym.  She strolls back and forth across the room, bouncing on her toes.  From a quick scan I think they were in and out of this room for a good couple of hours, and I skim, looking for any mentions of my name. 

I find them.

It’s nine o’clock.  The ceiling light illuminates the room;  the window shows only darkness, broken by a few scattered orange pinpoints from the far side of the nature reserve. Empty plates and two sets of cutlery sit on the table.  Anne’s curled up on the sofa, and Luna’s stretched out in the chair with her legs crossed. 

“. . . was here just this afternoon,” Anne’s saying. 

“Oh, he’s back?”

Anne nods.

“Mm.”

Something about that ‘Mm’ makes my heart sink.  It’s not the kind of sound you make if you’re happy or enthusiastic.  All of a sudden I know deep down that whatever I’m about to hear, it’s not going to be anything good, and a part of me wants to cut off my timesight right now, before it’s too late.  Another part of me wants to keep listening, the same masochistic urge that makes you stop and listen whenever you overhear someone saying your name. 

The second part wins.

“Let me guess, he wants to see me?” Luna says.

“You don’t want to?”

“Well . . . not that much, to be honest?” Luna says.  “He’s kind of hard to talk to these days.  All he seems to care about is his career.  That was why we got into that fight, really.  He kept talking about reputation and what people were going to think of me.”

“He probably thinks he’s helping you.”

“Yeah, by telling me what to do.  It’s bad enough when Alex does that, and he’s seven years older than me.  Sonder’s younger than I am.”

Okay, that stings.  Luna’s still an apprentice, and I passed my journeyman tests before she even knew what the Council was.  As far as the Council’s concerned, I’m the adult, not her!

Luna and Anne are still talking, and I rewind to the start of what Luna was saying to catch up.  “He just feels more calculating, you know?” Luna’s saying.  “Like . . . okay, take this flat.  He set it up so that you can live here, right?  But it’s not for free, is it?  When he calls, he expects you to come running.”

I flinch a bit at that.  I look to Anne, hoping that she’ll say that she doesn’t mind, that she’s happy to do it, or . . .

But Anne just makes an equivocal sort of gesture.  “You don’t get something for nothing.”

“Yeah, thanks but no thanks,” Luna says.  “I like my independence too much.  Anyway.  What about that guy who asked you out, the German one?  Did anything happen with him?”

I snap back to the present.  Anne’s just coming into the living room, and I jump to my feet.  Anne looks at me in surprise.  “You’re leaving?”

I avoid meeting her eyes.  “I need to get back to the station.”

I walk out.  I feel Anne’s gaze on me as I go. 

∞

I should be getting back to Keeper HQ, but I’m too worked up to make a gate.  I walk down the hill instead, my thoughts whirling. 

Using my timesight like that was a bad idea.  I knew it was a bad idea and I did it anyway.  A part of me wishes that I’d just left well enough alone. 

But a bigger part’s angry.  I’ve helped those two so many times!  I even saved Luna’s life when I went in to help her in Scotland!  I had so many sleepless nights worrying about that afterwards.  If anyone had figured out that I’d been there, that I’d worked with a Dark mage and helped attack Belthas . . .

It didn’t happen, but I’d kept thinking about it, and the whole experience made me a lot more careful.  Luna never seemed to notice, though.  She just kept breezing through everything without thinking what might happen.  Maybe that works for her, but I don’t have chance magic giving me a charmed life!  I have to actually work if I want to be safe!

And the fact that Anne just sat there and listened makes me angry too.  I thought she was my friend, she could at least have defended me!  Is this how they always talk when I’m not around? 

A tiny, contrary part of me reminds me what Luna said, about expecting Anne to come running.  She didn’t want to do that autopsy today.

I push the thought away.  It’s not like I’m blackmailing her.  She can always say no.

Can she?

Yes.  She can.  Anyway, Anne’s fine with it.  She heals people for free in her spare time.  She likes helping people. 

But the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  I gate back to Keeper HQ. 

∞

Caldera isn’t answering her comm when I arrive.  I try the interview rooms and get told she’s already left.  I go upstairs and check her office;  it’s empty. 

I’m on the way to Rain’s office and I’m just about to walk up to the door when it slams open and Caldera strides out.  She looks like she’s just had a meeting that has left her very pissed off, and she passes me with barely a glance and stomps off down the corridor.  The door’s swinging closed, and looking through it, I see Rain sitting behind his desk.  He gives me a preoccupied nod and turns back to his PC. 

I catch up with Caldera just as she’s banging open the door to her office.  The door makes a cracking noise, as if it’s taken enough damage over the years that the wood’s on the verge of splitting.  “What’s going on?” I ask as I follow her in and close the door. 

Caldera glowers at me and drops into her chair.  It creaks under her weight.  “We’re done.”

“Done?”

“As in, case closed.”

“How?”

“Haken copped to it, that’s how.”

“He confessed?”

“Next thing to it,” Caldera says.  “He’s going to spin us a story about how he was so worried about those documents destabilising the Council that he broke in and stole them.”

“Then . . . what did he do with them?”

“Incinerated them.  Says he’ll show us the ashes, if we want.”

“What’s going to happen to him?”

“Plea bargain,” Caldera says.  “He takes early retirement in exchange for us not pressing charges.  Case gets wrapped up, everyone’s happy.”

I look at Caldera dubiously.  She doesn’t look very happy.  “What about the murder?”

“What about it?”

“Well, Haken . . .”

“Haken has the most cast-iron alibi for that murder that it’s possible to get.  He was literally in our custody during the exact time window in which David Freeman was killed.  He couldn’t have done it, and anyway, as far as Rain’s concerned, it doesn’t matter.  Our assignment was the burglary.  We had two suspects;  one’s confessed, and one’s dead.  Rain wants us to write it up, and once we’re done, that’s it.  And if you want to know why, it’s because of a load of political bullshit I don’t want to talk about.  Rain wants this settled by the end of the day.”

“This is crazy, though,” I say.  “Isn’t the guy who killed David Freeman still running around?”

“Yeah, he is, and you want to go find him, you’re going to have to take it up with Rain,” Caldera says.  “I can already tell you what he’s going to say, but you want to try, be my guest.  Now I’ve got a report to write.”  She leans forward and hits the spacebar on her keyboard with a lot more force than necessary. 

I stare at Caldera as she starts to type, and make a decision.  “Fine,” I tell her.  “I will.”  I turn and leave.

∞

When I get back to Rain’s office I’m told that he’s been called away and they don’t know when he’ll be back.  I ask to wait in his office and they let me. 

As soon as the door closes behind me I use my timesight.  It’s not that I think Caldera was lying, but I get the feeling there was more to that conversation than she was telling me.  And I’m starting to learn it pays to double-check things. 

The wards over Rain’s office are no trouble;  even a novice time mage could see through them for something as recent as this.  I search back fifteen minutes and there’s Rain sitting behind his desk, while Caldera leans forward in her chair, gesturing for emphasis.  The first part of the conversation goes exactly as Caldera said.  Haken, a plea bargain, the documents destroyed.  But then things get interesting.

“I told you from the beginning, Caldera,” Rain says.  “Quick and quiet.  Now finish the job.”

“We’ve only done half the job,” Caldera argues.  “What about the murder?”

“Not directly connected to the break-in.”

“Come on, that’s bullshit.”

“Yeah, it is,” Rain says.  “But that only matters if we can prove it’s bullshit, and we can’t.”

“We’ve got the scan of the body.”

“Done by a Dark apprentice who isn’t cleared for Keeper ops.”

“Someone found and hired Freeman.”

“Haken takes responsibility for that.”

“Why?  How would he even know what was in those papers?  This whole thing stinks!”
Rain sighs and leans back in his chair.  “Look, Caldera.  I’ve already got two messages from the Council asking for a formal status report on this case.  By tomorrow morning, there’ll be more.  If I tell them I’m keeping it open, I am going to need something really solid.  What you’ve got here . . . it’s not enough.  What am I going to do, get an indictment for every force mage in Britain?  I’m getting pressured to close this case, and honestly?  I don’t see a good reason not to.”

“How about a dead body in a hotel room?”

“That case’ll stay open,” Rain says.  “And it’s yours if you want it.  But I’m not going to piss off half the Council without good reason.  What they care about are the White Rose papers, and that’s over.”

Caldera looks at Rain angrily. 

Rain softens his voice.  “Look, you did a good job, all right?  I told you to be quick, and you delivered.  Both offenders and a confession in under forty-eight hours.  And just a feeling, but I don’t think many Council mages are going to be too upset about those documents getting turned to ash.  You and Sonder are getting a commendation for this.”

“Yeah?” Caldera says.  “This feel like a win to you?”

Rain looks at her steadily.  “You take what you can get.”

Caldera gets up and yanks open the door, striding out towards where my past self is waiting.  I let my timesight drop. 

It’s making sense now.  What the Council want more than anything is for this whole mess to just go away, and that’s exactly what Haken’s giving them.  But why would he take the blame?  Even if he gets a good deal, he’s going to have to leave the Keepers.  What could be worth that?

Luna said that all I care about is my career.  It’s not true, but it does matter to me, and if Haken’s been a Keeper this long, it must matter to him as well.  I think about everything that happened over the last two days.  Why would Haken sacrifice himself?

No, like Caldera said, that’s the wrong question.  The right question is:  why would Haken change his story? 

Well, what happened between yesterday afternoon and now?

David Freeman got killed, that’s what happened.  Maybe that’s why Haken changed his story?  Because now there’s no-one left who could tell a different one? 

But that doesn’t explain who’s behind it . . .

Then something occurs to me and I go over my memories, thinking about that anti-timesight block in the hotel.  Could it be the same?  I’m going to have to go back to check, but I’ve got the feeling I already know what I’m going to find.  It fits too neatly. 

That still leaves the question of what I’m going to do about it. 

Rain still hasn’t come back to his office.  I hesitate for a second, then use my timesight again. 

I skim back further this time, searching for mentions of my name, just as I did in Anne’s flat.  And yeah, that didn’t work out so well, but . . . screw it.  If I’m going to be putting my neck on the line, I want to know what they really think of me. 

I find it pretty much exactly where I’m expecting.  It’s yesterday morning, just before I walk into the entrance hall in Keeper HQ.  Rain and Caldera are talking again, this time in the morning sun. 

“. . . you’ll be working with him,” Rain’s saying. 

Caldera doesn’t look happy.  “Can’t we get someone else?”

“No, we can’t,” Rain says bluntly.  “Drift is busy, I can’t pull Abeyance off her case without people asking questions, and you know what the waiting list is like.  You’re bloody lucky you’re getting a timesight specialist at all.”

Caldera is silent.

“Look,” Rain says.  “I haven’t asked what the issue is between you and Sonder.  But if it’s going to have a bearing here, then I think I’d better hear it.”

Caldera shrugs.  “You’re on the job, you want someone who’ll have your back, you know?  Not the kind who’s always the first one out the door.  ”

“So he’s a bit of a weasel.  It’s not like you only work with battle-mages.  What’s the real reason?”

Caldera blows out a breath, looks out the window, then looks straight at Rain.  “I don’t trust him,” she says.  “He’s a silver-spoon type who’s just looking to climb the ladder.  He doesn’t care about the job and he doesn’t care about us.  Push comes to shove, he’ll always look out for number one.”

“You could say the same about most of our time mages,” Rain says.  “Far as they’re concerned, it’s just a paycheque.  They’re not real police.”  The intercom buzzes and Rain listens to it for a second before pressing a button, answering, and looking back at Caldera.  “He’s here.”

Caldera nods and rises. 

“Oh, and Caldera?” Rain says with a slight smile.  “Try and be diplomatic.  No matter what kind of spoon he has in his mouth.”

Caldera snorts and leaves. 

I let the timesight spell fall again, and I’m alone in the office once more.  I stand there for a minute, staring at Rain’s empty chair, then walk out.  When the man outside asks what I wanted to see Rain about, I tell him it can wait. 

∞

The journey back to West Drayton takes a lot longer without anyone to give me a lift.  I’ve got plenty of time to think, and my mind keeps going back to those timesight conversations.  Specifically, the ones with my name in them. 

The more I think about them, the angrier I get.  I worked hard to get where I am now.  Really hard.  In Washington, I was doing full shifts plus overtime five days a week, and sometimes weekends too.  And I’m not just an empty chair – I pretty much solved this case on my own.  I was the one who did the most to find Anne last year.  I’ve even been in a few battles.  There are time mages who’ve been signed on with the Keepers for two, three times as many years as me without ever doing as much as I have.

So why does everyone keep acting as though I don’t matter?

I don’t come up with any kind of answer, and it makes me more and more upset.  Luckily, my timesight works just fine when I’m angry.  I talk my way past the police and take a second, closer look at the murder scene.  The body’s gone, but I’m not here to look at the body;  I want a closer look at that temporal shroud from last night.  I spend a while studying it. 

Yes.  It’s not an exact match.  But if you did overcharge a shroud like that, then that’s exactly how you’d expect it to look. 

I’ve got my answer.

But what am I going to do with it?

∞

I wander down to the Novotel’s lobby and sit on one of the sofas, lost in thought.  The odd guest is still coming in and out – airport hotels are always busy.  None of them give me a second look, and the receptionists ignore me too.  It’s as though I don’t exist. 

I like using my timesight.  What I don’t enjoy is deciding what to do afterwards.  Figuring out exactly which bits of information to share, and who you should share them with, is this really specific skill, and if I’m being honest, I don’t think I’m very good at it.  The past is nice and certain.  Once you start telling it to other people, things can get really complicated really quickly. 

The knowledge I’m carrying around in my head right now feels heavy, like an actual physical weight.  Even thinking about it feels dangerous, as though someone might notice if I do it too long.  There’s a man walking across the lobby floor towards the doors, and I imagine that he’s a Council agent.  It feels more plausible than it ought to.  How would I know? 

The man pushes open the glass doors and disappears into the car park.  I sigh and lean back on the sofa.  I wish I had someone to talk to.  Someone who’s good at this stuff, who knows how the Keepers work but who isn’t with the Council . . .

Well, come to think of it, I suppose I do know someone like that.  Alex. 

But I don’t want to go to Alex.  I would have, once.  When I first met him I thought he was really cool.  He was a universal mage with time-related magic that was mostly only good for information, just like me . . . except he’d somehow figured out how to make other mages actually take him seriously.  And he didn’t look down on me the way most battle-mages did.  I wanted to be like him.

I can’t remember exactly when that started to change, but I think the big turning point was what happened with those adepts.  Alex got badly hurt and would have been killed if Luna hadn’t saved him.  All of a sudden, his way of doing things didn’t seem like such a great idea any more, especially once I heard what he’d done to make those adepts want him dead.  And the way he ended up solving it . . . I’m a bit more used to that kind of thing after the stuff I’ve seen working in Washington, but at the time it was pretty horrifying.

So that made me start to re-evaluate things.  And once I went back and thought about all those adventures I’d been on with Luna and Alex, I couldn’t help but notice that pretty much all of them had involved people getting violently murdered.  I started wondering, if I stayed around Alex, how long it would take before someone showed up trying to murder me. 

And then there was the issue with the Council.  The Council don’t like Dark mages, and Alex used to be a Dark mage – actually, depending on how you look at it, he kind of still is.  If you hang around with people like that, then a lot of Light mages are going to associate you with them.  It might not be fair, but it’s how things work, and if you want to make a career in the Council, then you have to pay attention to this stuff. 

No, I don’t want to go to Alex. 

But that still leaves me with the same question.  What am I going to do?

∞

It’s late afternoon when I get to the War Rooms.  There’s a slow but steady stream of people leaving the complex, walking away from the legislative and administrative wings towards the surface exits and the gate rooms.  I head up the tunnels and across the Belfry, casual chatter drifting on the climate-controlled air. 

Barrayar is waiting for me in the conservatory.  Like last time, he’s alone.  “Mage Sonder,” he says.  “I hope this is important.”

“I’d say it is.”

Barrayar nods.  “I have a meeting with Councillor Sal Sarque in twenty minutes.  I can give you until then.”

“That’s okay, this shouldn’t take long,” I say.  “Caldera and I solved the break-in.  The culprits were Keeper Haken and an adept called David Freeman.”

“I see.”

“We found David Freeman dead this morning,” I say.  “He was killed last night.  By a force blade.”  I look at Barrayar.  “Isn’t that your magic type?”

I rehearsed this conversation half a dozen times on the way here.  Most of those times, this was the point at which I imagined Barrayar getting nasty.  I’m expecting him to glare, to ask what I’m implying, to threaten me . . .

But for all the reaction Barrayar shows, I could be reading him the weather report.  “Did you discover anything else?”

Okay, maybe I need to keep pushing.  “As a matter of fact, I did,” I tell him.  “The murder was shrouded.  A really powerful shroud.  Now, I’ve been thinking about that, and there’s something I keep wondering.  Why would you go to the effort of sending out a mage with a custom shroud if you’d already used a regular one for the break-in?  A Council shroud was good enough for the first crime, so why not the second?”  I pause, then answer my own question.  “Well, one really good reason would be if you’d just learned that the time mage Rain had put on the case could see through standard Council shrouds.  Funny coincidence that that happened right after our conversation yesterday, isn’t it?”

“That’s certainly one way to look at it.”

Barrayar’s expression is blank, and I feel a stab of uncertainty.  I’d been so sure I was right, but looking at him, my arguments suddenly feel weak and unconvincing.  What if I got this wrong?  I could still back down.  Say I made a mistake and—

No.  I shake off the doubts.  I know I didn’t make a mistake.  “You know what’s not a coincidence?” I say, putting an edge into my voice.  “What’s really interesting?  The signature of the shroud from the murder scene matches the one you’re wearing right now.”

Barrayar’s expression doesn’t change, but somehow, the temperature in the conservatory seems to drop.  Just for a moment, I feel the hairs on my neck rise. 

Then Barrayar turns away and begins walking down the path, his pace slow and casual.  I stare after him, then when he doesn’t turn around, I follow. 

“Identification of a shroud from its temporal signature is notoriously unreliable,” Barrayar says conversationally.  He still doesn’t sound angry.

“I’m good at what I do.”

“So I see.  However, there are other time mages – older, more experienced mages – who will testify that in their considered and professional opinion, the two signatures are not provably similar.”

“They are the same.”

“I see,” Barrayar says with a nod.  We round a planter;  the entrances and exits to the conservatory are out of sight.  “Have you told anyone else?”

“No, I—”

I stop dead.  Barrayar turns to face me. 

A chill goes down my spine as I suddenly realise that the two of us are completely alone.  There was a security man at the entrance, but . . . no, he was there on Barrayar’s orders, wasn’t he?  He’ll be working for Levistus.  My thoughts feel slow and sluggish and all of a sudden I’ve got the sick feeling in my stomach that you get when you realise that you’ve made a really terrible mistake.  Barrayar’s very close.  If he goes for me the only thing I’ve got that might stop him quickly enough is a slowing field, but if I fumble the spell even a little bit—

And then Barrayar smiles slightly and the moment’s gone.  He turns and begins examining one of the rhododendrons.  “You’re not in danger, Sonder,” he says without looking at me. 

I’m not so sure about that.  Barrayar starts walking again and this time when I follow, it’s at a more wary distance.  I’m keeping that slowing field ready for if he makes any sudden movements.

“I should probably tell you that I’ve left a message—” I begin. 

“To be opened in the event of your death or disappearance?” Barrayar says.  He almost sounds amused.  “No, you haven’t.”

How does he know?

“I told you, you’re not in danger,” Barrayar says over his shoulder.  “You’re a Light mage, and an extremely talented one.  An asset to the Council, in fact.  No-one has any desire to see you harmed.  Though I’d suggest you be more careful with your accusations if you want things to stay that way.”

“Okay,” I say.  I’m having trouble processing his words;  my brain’s still catching up from making the jump from ‘safe’ to ‘oh god I’m going to die’ and back to ‘safe’ again. 

“Now,” Barrayar says.  “If you were planning on an indictment, you’d have already gone to Rain.  You haven’t, and that means you have something else in mind.  Let’s hear it.”

I open my mouth and hesitate.  I’ve rehearsed this answer too, but this isn’t going the way I planned and I change tack.  “What’s going to happen to Haken?”

I half expect Barrayar to say that it’s none of my business, but again he surprises me. “Keeper Haken is taking early retirement from the Order of the Star,” Barrayar says.  “After some personal leave, he’ll be going back the way you came, taking up a position in Washington.  Councillor Levistus has need of someone to represent his personal interests in dealing with the Light Council of America.  The benefits are quite generous.  In a few years, when things have quieted down, he’ll be free to return to London.”

I give Barrayar a sceptical look. 

“What did you think we were going to do, drop him in a pool of piranha fish?” Barrayar asks.  “We’re not Dark mages.  We offer retirement plans.”

“That adept didn’t get much of a retirement plan.”

Barrayar speaks calmly and clearly.  “You signed David Freeman’s death warrant when you identified him to Keeper Caldera yesterday.”

That makes me jerk.  “I didn’t—”

“What did you think the consequences were going to be, Sonder?” Barrayar asks.  “A slap on the wrist?  A fine?  It is an extremely bad idea to become a liability in this line of work.”

I feel a chill.  Barrayar doesn’t turn towards me, but once again I’m very conscious of the distance between us. 

“But I don’t think you came here because of Keeper Haken,” Barrayar says.  “What do you want?”

I’m torn.  Looking at Barrayar, hearing his quiet, deadly confidence, the speech I’d rehearsed sounds very feeble.  I think of the body in that hotel room and feel a wave of revulsion.  Something tells me to just walk away. 

But walk away to who?

“I’m not planning to tell Rain and Caldera,” I say.  It’s an effort to say it.  “Like you said.  These things are unreliable.”  Which is true, as far as it goes . . . shroud identifications are unreliable, or at least people think they are, which works out to pretty much the same thing.  If it came down to it, I don’t know if I could actually convince a judge. 

It’s still a lie.

Barrayar is watching, as if waiting to see if I’m going ask for something.  “I’m not looking for some sort of bribe,” I say sharply.

“Then why?”

“Because I actually agree with what you said,” I tell him.  “The Council does need to be strong right now, and the last thing we need is another messy political crisis.  It’d drag on for months, and the whole time Morden would be worming his way in.”  I try to look at Barrayar, but can’t quite make myself meet his eyes.  “The best thing is for this to get settled quickly and quietly.  Even if it does mean . . . overlooking some things.”

“I see.”

“Just don’t get the wrong idea,” I tell him.  I’m not sure what I mean by that, but he doesn’t ask. 

We’ve finished a circuit of the conservatory and Barrayar halts by the door.  “Well,” Barrayar says.  “I do need to get to my meeting.  Should I expect anything further from you on this matter?”
I think about reminding him that the murder investigation is still open, but I know it’s pointless.  Levistus will see to it that it gets buried.  “No,” I say.

“Goodbye, then.”

I start to leave. 

“Oh, Sonder?”

I look back.

“If you’d walked in here today and tried blackmail, it would have gone badly for you,” Barrayar says.  “As it is . . . you can consider yourself owed a favour.”

“I’m not doing this for a favour.”

“Nevertheless, the favour is there,” Barrayar says.  “If you ever need a helping hand.”  He nods.  “Until next time.”

Barrayar walks away, and I stare after him until he disappears.  From behind me, I hear a rustle of movement as the security man follows after him. 

∞

The sun’s setting when I leave the War Rooms.  I wander down the streets of Westminster, listening to the sounds of the coming evening.  Now that it’s all over, I’m having second thoughts.  Did I do the right thing? 

The official rules, the ones that are written down in the books, say no.  I should have gone to Rain and told him everything, laid it all out on the table.  A part of me still wants to.  In a way, it’d be a relief.  Make it all someone else’s problem.

But the bigger and more important rules, the ones I’ve learned from years and years of watching Light mages, say yes.  An accusation like this, timed just as Levistus is about to be raised to the Senior Council, would be a bombshell.  Everyone would get involved.

It would be one thing if it was an open-and-shut case, but it wouldn’t be.  To prove that Barrayar was guilty, I’d have to testify that the shroud signatures were the same.  Barrayar and Levistus would bring in other time mages who’d testify that they were different.  I’d say one thing, they’d say another, and no-one else would have any way to know who was right.  That’s the problem with timesight;  no-one else can see it.  It all comes down to your word against theirs. 

When it’s one person’s word against another’s, people believe whoever’s on their side.  Levistus’s supporters will say that Barrayar’s innocent, and that I’ve made it all up to sabotage Levistus’s Council bid.  They’ll look into my background, use whatever they find to undermine my credibility, and they’ll pressure me to withdraw.  If I don’t, they’ll try to ruin my career.  They’ll probably manage it, too.  No-one will believe that I was just doing my job.

And while all that’s going on, all of the Council mages who haven’t taken a side, the ones who don’t care one way or another, they’re going to look at me and they’re all going to be thinking exactly the same thing.  ‘Why didn’t that bloody fool just keep his mouth shut?’

Because it isn’t just about following the law.  That’s what Caldera doesn’t understand.  You have to think about what’s going to happen when you follow the law.  I’ve heard the rumours – a lot of Light mages are looking at Morden, and saying we’re heading for another war.  The last thing the Council needs right now is to be divided. 

And there isn’t any very obvious reason that it should be divided.  The only part of the case that hasn’t been solved is David Freeman’s murder, and from what I saw of his record, no-one’s going to miss him very much.  He was just another petty criminal, the kind everyone expects to come to a bad end sooner or later.  Is it really worth making a big deal over him? 

I know that most Light mages will say ‘no’.  Which means that if I want to stay part of the Council, that’s what I should be saying, too.

But do I believe it?

I’m not sure.

I sigh.  Everything was so much simpler when I was a new journeyman.  I’d do research in the archives, stay up late drinking with my friends, meet up with Luna and Anne to play board games in Alex’s flat.  It was only a couple of years ago, but it feels like more.  When did things get so complicated?

I could still go to Rain and tell him the whole story. 

But I know I’m not going to.  For one thing, I don’t think Rain really wants to hear the whole story.  One of the things I’ve learned over the past couple of years is that when your boss sends you out to solve a problem, the last thing he wants is for you to bring home a bigger one. 

And then there’s the other reason, the one I don’t say out loud but which lately I’ve been thinking about more and more.  The only time anyone ever actually seems to want me around these days is when they want something.  Whether it’s Rain, or Caldera, or anyone else, they’re very quick to call me in when they need my timesight.  But once that’s done, it’s like they don’t even remember I exist.  Luna didn’t even notice I was back.

I’m sick of putting my neck on the line for people who don’t seem to care about me.  At least Barrayar offered to do something in return. 

The wind’s cold.  A gust makes me shiver, and I look around for a quiet spot where I can gate home to my flat.  As I turn off down the street, somewhere at the back of my mind, a bit of me starts wondering what sort of favours you can ask from someone on the Senior Council.

END