The Illusionists Read online

  He managed a wheezy laugh. ‘I like being angry,’ he said.

  ‘Because you think it gives you power. And I’m sorry about that. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘I don’t need your pity.’

  She said nothing.

  He pulled himself upwards grimly, building himself back into a whole piece until he could stand again.

  ‘You’re unhappy,’ she said, her voice soft.

  He scoffed. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re unhappy,’ she said again. ‘I thought going to World would make you happy.’

  ‘It does. I just love my life here. It’s perfect. I love being tested and prodded and poked and made to feel like an incomprehensible little pet. I love being told what to do all the time, where to go, who to see and not. I’m like a rat that knows it’s in a cage.’

  She watched him. ‘I didn’t make you go.’

  ‘You were the one who told me to go!’ he shouted. ‘You were the one who said World was so special! It’s the place for me, you said!’

  She fluttered. Her whole body was willowing, shifting before his eyes. Her hair grew sleek and long, her limp little dress turned into a winter cloak, trimmed with black rabbit fur around the hood and those little emerald-coloured buttons – the fashion before he’d left. Her face filled in, took on edges, cheekbones high and proud, eyes dark and secretive. It happened over seconds, until it was no longer the Ghost Girl standing before him but an extremely convincing replica of White.

  Wren turned his head away, feeling sick and empty, his heart pumping erratically as if it would break.

  ‘I only told you that near the end, when you were unhappy,’ said the Ghost Girl, in White’s voice. ‘You had already wanted to go to World for years, Wren, and you know it. It’s been your dearest, most secret wish since you were a child and you watched those foreign ships come in behind the dock fences.’

  She paused.

  ‘You said you couldn’t stay in Angle Tar around White. That you’d kill him if you stayed. And World is the most logical place for you. I told them to take care of you, yes. I arranged it. And if they’re treating you badly then I’m sorry. But you have to fit in somewhere, Wren, don’t you see? You have to bend a little or you’ll never be happy.’

  ‘The only place I fit into is here.’

  That seemed to shock her into silence.

  Eventually, White’s voice came again. ‘No one belongs here.’

  ‘You belong here.’

  ‘I don’t have a choice.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She was silent. She never got angry about his questions, or told him to shut up, or ever did anything other than be silent. It was like trying to talk round a chest of drawers. She simply shut down.

  He could understand that. You were supposed to guard your secrets. The game was trying to break down those walls so that you could get at the secrets, spill them out into the open, collect them as weapons, stored away for future battles. Everyone had a crack in their walls, eventually.

  But what could you do with silence? Her strange scribble eyes gave nothing away, and her ghost frame was too odd to read, almost like she was deliberately designed to be completely unfamiliar. Even when she took on another form, as she had done in the past once or twice, it was the same. White stood before him, but it was an approximation of him, like seeing him created through another’s eyes. It was his voice, but it was her words and manner of speech. It wasn’t White.

  ‘What about the girl they’ve given you?’

  He looked up. ‘Rue?’ he said, coldly. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Is she useful?’

  ‘Hardly. She can’t even Jump yet. Why do you want to know about her?’

  The White approximation watched him. ‘I’m interested in all Talented.’

  Of course she was. But she seemed more interested in some than others. He didn’t know whom else she compelled to visit her here at night, but it seemed obvious that it was the more gifted ones that held her special regard. Why else would she know how to look like White?

  ‘She’s naïve, and irritating,’ he said.

  ‘Have you noticed anything special about her?’

  ‘No.’ He rubbed his arms. You never got used to the cold, here. The Ghost Girl had said that some parts of the Castle were warm, even hot, but she’d never taken him there. He’d find those places on his own.

  Somehow, somehow, he’d find a way to come here without her.

  ‘I’ve been told that she and White were involved.’

  Wren snorted. ‘That’s old news.’

  ‘Is that why you picked her, Wren?’

  He stared hard at the wall.

  ‘Is it because you miss him?’ she said.

  ‘It’s because he needed to be taught a lesson.’

  ‘What lesson is that?’

  ‘That you can’t just treat people like toys you grow out of.’

  ‘I see,’ came her voice, and it was her voice this time. When he looked back at her, she was herself again.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ he said. ‘You see nothing, holed up in here. You have no idea what it’s like to wake up every day in the real, with the weight of all the crap of your life pulling you down. You float around the Castle, judging all of us. Holding this place back from us. Taunting us with it. “Don’t open the Castle. Don’t talk to them. Don’t do anything. Just come here when I want you to, so I can stand there and tell you everything that’s wrong with your life.”’

  He actually saw her flinch.

  ‘You pull me here whenever you feel like it. It’s been months since the last time I came here. What, did you just forget about me? Don’t you care?’

  ‘I do. You’re something to me, Wren.’

  ‘Well, you’, he said, ‘are nothing to me.’ He spread his arms. ‘I don’t care what you want from me any more. I don’t care about your secret little agenda. Are you hearing me? Just leave me alone. Stop pulling me here. Don’t talk to me. Find someone else to play with. Just let me go.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Let me go.’

  Still she stood, watching him silently.

  ‘You LET ME GO. NOW.’

  He took a step towards her, with no thought in his head of what he would do.

  She took a step back, mirroring him.

  ‘You can leave, if you want,’ she said. ‘I’m not stopping you.’

  But she sounded strangled and sad.

  He couldn’t look at her any more, or stand to hear that tone in her voice. So he pushed, and she was telling the truth – for once, there was nothing stopping him from leaving. She wasn’t controlling him. He was free.

  He almost fell into awake, dropping with a slam back into his body, his mind buzzing from the shock of it.

  His room was dim. He jacked in to check the time – 3:34 a.m. No more sleep tonight. He never could relax after a Castle dream.

  Wren’s mind turned back to the Ghost Girl.

  He had never been able to fathom what her agenda was. Most of the time, all she’d seemed to want to do was talk. Talk talk talk, when his whole being itched to explore. But she wouldn’t let him. Why pull him to the Castle, then, if he wasn’t even allowed to see everything it held?

  She was probably lonely. No one to talk to there except for monsters. Well, how tragic for her. Everyone was lonely; it was the state of the damn world. Stupid, condescending prig of a girl. Whoever she was, whatever she was, she could go hang.

  Then there was Rue. Wren often stared at her when her attention was elsewhere, trying to divine from her face and her body what it was about her that had so captured White. Trying to see her secrets.

  But he couldn’t. She was just this country girl, soft and guileless. There was nothing extraordinary about her at all. He hated her, suddenly. She’d caught White in a way that Wren could never compete with. It was monstrously unfair. It made him feel on the outside again, looking in, that same gnawing belly isolation he’d had his entire life.

&nbs
p; Well, maybe he’d visit Sabine again tonight, and see if he couldn’t chase some of that away.

  CHAPTER 5

  WORLD

  RUE

  Rue’s first World party was in full swing.

  It was at a house much like Wren’s, but at the end of a half-hour walk. Wren had complained the entire way of how far they had to go, and how unfair it was that they had been forced to attend a so-called local party that wasn’t even local. Rue had found this both amusing and stupid. But then, World had almost no way to travel around except your own feet, and Worlders never needed to consciously stay healthy; their doctors did that for them. Life gave them everything else. It was surprising, perhaps even alarming, how acclimatised Wren seemed to have become to World.

  Rue looked around the room. The Worlders surrounding them, that cocktail of strange hair and clothes shapes she was slowly getting used to, were laughing and kissing and waving their hands in the air. There were a number of different drugs on offer, spread across the table in the middle of the room like a child’s banquet, in the form of tiny cakes, sweets and pastries. A list of holographic instructions shimmered at one end of the table, listing what could be mixed with what and what should be kept separate if you wanted to make sure all your fluids remained inside your body for the duration.

  So people here liked to sit in a house together, carefully unscrewing their awareness with various different methods and seeing what happened. She knew quite a lot about plant drugs and their effects from her witching lessons with Fernie, way back when. At first the thought of it was much like sitting around and taking medicine when you weren’t ill. She had been drunk before; but drinking was for celebrating. Wren told her that drug parties celebrated being alive. It was a pretty thing to say, and she couldn’t really argue with it. She wanted to be one of these wild Worlders, and learn their love of losing control, didn’t she?

  She leaned against a wall with Wren. ‘What do you have?’ she said, looking at the little cream puff he held in his hand.

  ‘It’s an old favourite,’ he said airily. ‘It’s a higher-than-sky. It makes you feel like you’re flying, like everybody is flying. It’s pretty good. You should try it.’

  ‘One thing at a time, jack,’ she said, and Wren laughed. She liked to make him laugh; he thought her attempts at slang hilarious.

  ‘You’re getting used to the language fast,’ he said, through a mouthful of cake.

  ‘I still sound like I’m stumbling about,’ Rue said, swirling the drink Wren had procured for her.

  ‘Not at all. Sabine said only yesterday how much better your conversation had become. She said you’re starting to lose your accent, now.’

  ‘Good.’

  They were interrupted by a statuesque girl with short white hair and neon green paint around her eyes. ‘WREN!’ she bellowed, taking his arm. ‘Where have you BEEN?’

  Rue watched as he was pulled away into a small crowd. No one took any notice of her. She clutched her drink, feeling suddenly exposed, and looked out across the room, her eyes skidding along the backs and faces of the party goers. Such exotic faces, so many colours. It was almost too much, especially when set against the bland background of the room.

  One girl in particular caught her eye. Her skin was a lovely lily-white colour, which reminded Rue inevitably of White, and brought a sharp pain to her stomach. But thankfully there the comparisons ended. The girl was round of face with large, soft lips, and had a small number of silver dapples painted on her cheeks. Her eyes were a sharp, startling shade of purple and her ears were encased in silver-coloured cuffs.

  Her gaze shifted, catching Rue’s, who looked away.

  But not before Rue’s heart had started to thrum. Realisation ran cold, prickling fingers over her.

  I’ve seen her before.

  Stone walls. Humming dread. Things that ate.

  The girl who had come into the room with the hole in the floor.

  No.

  There was no possible way she’d dreamed a girl first, and then seen her in real life. She’d made it up somehow. Remembered it wrong. That had to be it.

  Because the alternative was just too much, even for a Talented.

  The girl was stood at the far end of the room, talking to a man wearing trousers so brightly, cheerily orange it looked like his legs were on fire. The girl was playing with her hair as she chatted. She was sweet and delicate looking.

  ‘Hi,’ said someone close to Rue’s ear.

  A man had appeared, leaning against the wall. He had reptilian eyes, and was bulky and wide in the fashion that some people seemed to like to augment, projecting an imposing, almost ugly kind of air, rather than a beautiful one.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘That’s odd. I can’t access your name.’

  Wren had warned her about this. Worlders would automatically try to sync with her Life account to look up her name and details. It was their way of greeting.

  ‘I don’t have an implant,’ Rue said.

  ‘Oh, really? How extraordinary.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘No augmentation. No implant. Bit of an accent,’ mused the man. ‘You must be from Angle Tar.’

  Rue looked at him. ‘How did you know that?’

  He laughed. ‘Well, it must happen all the time, Angle Tarain coming here seeking citizenship. I mean, it’s hardly surprising, given the conditions you have to live in over in that tiny place.’

  Rue bristled at this.

  ‘It works the other way, too,’ she said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Worlders come to Angle Tar.’

  The man laughed again – the kind of laugh that seemed specifically designed to irritate.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, with an indulgent smile. ‘Why on earth would they, for a start. Secondly … in all practical terms, they wouldn’t be able to live unconnected from Life. The idea is … horrible, and just ridiculous. Who would voluntarily want that kind of existence?’

  ‘I knew someone from World,’ said Rue. ‘Quite well, actually. He seemed to manage it just fine.’

  ‘He was obviously deranged,’ said the main airily. ‘Worlders don’t go to Angle Tar. But Angle Tarain apparently come here in droves, you know. I think World is a little too generous, sometimes. It’s a wonder we haven’t accepted half the population of Angle Tar into World – I’m sure they’ve tried.’

  ‘What a big bag of jack,’ said a voice behind Rue.

  She turned. The girl that had caught Rue’s eye stood next to them both, her face full of scorn.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said. ‘As usual. A Worlder giving opinions that aren’t even their own, just something they’ve found in the news feeds. You don’t even know if what they tell you is true, and you just accept it. Typical.’ She said a word then, something that the World language data stick obviously hadn’t included, because Rue didn’t understand it at all. It sounded like mudak.

  ‘You’re quite aggressive … ’ the man paused, ‘ … Cho, aren’t you? But I suppose I should expect nothing less from someone with your interests.’

  ‘Whatever that means,’ said the girl called Cho, ‘coming from a man who likes to spend his time at the animal pits.’

  The man snorted and walked off.

  ‘The animal pits?’ said Rue, fascinated with everything that had just been said, and picking that one subject randomly.

  ‘Making artificial animals fight each other for entertainment. It’s stupid, and so of course everyone loves it.’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s on his personal profile, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh. What was that word you said to him at the end?’

  ‘It was just a word in another language.’

  ‘What language?’

  ‘Ehkitay. It was the language of URCI, back when we were independent. It’s sort of this insane mix of two old languages, Russian and Chinese.’

  ‘Aren’
t you from World?’

  Cho shrugged. ‘Sure. But we were all separate countries before World happened. URCI was one of the last to join World, only a few decades ago. That’s why a lot of us can still speak our original language.’ She leaned back against the wall, her eyes darting over the crowd. ‘What’s your name, then, implantless girl?’

  ‘Rue.’

  ‘Short and sweet, like mine.’ Cho paused. ‘What? You’re staring.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s nothing. Um. Have you met as many Angle Tarain as he seems to think he has?’

  ‘Tuh. It’s all jack, like I said. These pitying images of poor Angle Tarain flocking to World like refugees. You could give a perspective. Does that seem true?’

  ‘In honesty,’ said Rue, ‘I was taught that there was nothing much outside of Angle Tar except backward countries and wastelands. And unless things have changed much in the time I’ve been gone, I expect most of the population is still under that impression.’

  Cho smiled properly – a wry smile, but one nonetheless – and it transformed her face. ‘That’s what I keep saying, but no one believes it. No one ever wants to know stuff unless it suits what they already think.’

  Rue felt Cho had got it somewhat backwards, but kept silent.

  ‘I heard you say you knew a Worlder in Angle Tar.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rue, hoping her face hadn’t betrayed the sudden spike in her heartbeat.

  ‘What was this Worlder like? Had they come to escape?’

  ‘I believe so,’ said Rue, thinking of the old news feeds she’d found on White.

  ‘That’s usually the case,’ Cho replied. Her voice was both bitter and smug. ‘I had a brother, you see. He left because of what World is, and went to Angle Tar. He couldn’t stand it here any more. But I decided to stay and work from the inside. That’s braver than just leaving.’

  ‘What do you mean, work from the inside?’

  ‘I’m a hacker.’

  ‘What’s a hacker?’

  Cho raised a brow. ‘Seriously? Sorry, I forgot where you’re from for a moment there. It’s just another word for a coder. If you can change anything in Life, you can code, and if you can code, you can hack. It’s really not hard. And it’s just stupid stuff, you know – breaking into someone’s Life account and changing their avatar to a pig’s head, or something. There are hacking championships, for jack’s sake. It’s practically a sport. And all the most famous artists are hackers. It’s just that hacking can sometimes lead to, you know … more nefarious activities.’ A tiny smile hovered on her lips. ‘Like being able to access information the government doesn’t want you to see.’