‘Harper Fenn,’ says the guard. He stops at the third door and obediently unlocks it. But even before the door has swung fully open, we both see that it’s empty.
‘Where is she?’ I demand. ‘Is she being questioned elsewhere?’
No wonder he was resistant to Sarah’s magical suggestion. We told him something he knew was a lie, then made him to do a thing he understood was impossible.
‘Transferred,’ he says. ‘But you said you …’ Again, I see struggle behind his eyes between his knowledge and the magic’s pressure.
Sarah’s on her knees by the thin plastic mattress on the built-in cot. As she runs her hands over it, I can see indentations where a body recently sat. The outline suggests female, and not heavily built. It must have been Harper. But …
‘I’m not getting anything,’ Sarah says, frantic. ‘No trace of her.’
‘Our order must have been in error,’ I tell the guard, hoping to ease the conflicted signals in his magic-addled brain. Wrest our narrative back into something plausible. ‘She’s already been removed?’
‘Yes.’
‘When? Show me the log.’
An old-fashioned logbook is kept on wings like this, as backup for all the electronics that could go wrong. But when the guard flips it open, there’s no record of Harper ever coming onto the corridor.
‘Unrecorded,’ I say. ‘Did someone make you leave her off the records?’
‘Paid,’ he says, in a strangled voice. ‘She’s not under arrest. They just needed somewhere secure for her to rest while theyprocessed the other one. The bail-runner. Then they took her.’
‘They?’ Sarah says, and I know she’ll melt this man’s mind with magic to get the information we need.
‘Two men, some professor type and a guy who looked like his security.’
‘Whitman,’ I say to Sarah. ‘Any ideas about the other guy?’
The witch shakes her head.
‘When was this?’ she demands, the fingers of both hands unconsciously curled like a throttling in need of a victim.
‘Little while back. Not quite an hour?’
Harper and Luka could still be here. Or they could be long gone.
38
HARPER
Whitman and some sharply dressed thug wrestle me down the corridor. I yell the minute they get their hands on me, only to find my voice all stopped-up in my throat a moment later.
‘You’re a handy guy to have around, Barr,’ Whitman chuckles. ‘You should consider quitting the Moot and joining us on a more formal basis.’
So the thug is fucking magical and he works forthe Moot? What is this traitorous bullshit? The Moot, that never helped Mom when I was accused. Which fills my father with fury at its spinelessness. I can’t wait to tell him it’s even worse than that – the Moot is actively collaborating with persecutors like Whitman.
I’m wrangled into a plain room with a window set into the door. The momentary hope that gives me swiftly evaporates when I see the people inside. Sandra Ortiz and someone I recognise as the Moot President, seated at a table. Between them is Luka Ortiz looking absolutely broken. What the hell happened to him in here?
Ice-cold apprehension sluices suddenly through me as I realise exactly what, and I start twisting again in the grip of the man named Barr, as Whitman closes the door.
A toss of curls against a shadowed wall. Bea?
They’re going to take my magic.
No. Anything but that. If they so much astry, I’ll make it gush out of me like magma, incinerating everyone in this room before it cools and dies.I’drather be dead than without magic, because I know what that feels like now, after hours locked inside these handcuffs that stifle and suppress it. It feels like walking around with all your insides scooped out. A person-shaped skin filled with sawdust. An emptiness that is also a heaviness. No wonder mundanes envy us and fear us. We’re so much more than they can ever be.
‘Not her! Please not her, too! She’s special. Youcan’t!’
