“Hey!” Lucella called after him. “What about Tyr?”

  “I’m sure you can handle it,” Byron said with an airy wave. He disappeared up the ramp in the same direction as Tobias.

  Lucella stared after Byron. “I don’t serve anyone,” she said to herself, so softly that I wasn’t completely sure if I’d heard. “And definitely not you.”

  “Uh,” Diesel said. He and Scar had stayed very quiet through the conversation, looking as though they’d been trying hard to avoid drawing attention. “Boss?”

  Lucella kept staring for a moment longer, then shook her head. “All right,” she said, sounding as though she was talking to herself. “All right. Screw them both.” She turned to Scar and Diesel. “Get over here, and once Tyr arrive, stand behind me. Let’s at least pretend like you’ve got a fucking clue.”

  Scar and Diesel moved to obey. Diesel was still limping.

  Lucella watched them in disgust. “Jesus,” she said. “Okay, stand there. Back. Further back, you’re supposed to be bodyguarding me, not trying to look down my dress. Okay, you know what, forget it. Just stand still, keep your mouths shut, and if we’re lucky maybe they won’t figure out how frigging useless you are.”

  “What’s going on?” Colin whispered.

  “Shh.”

  “I still can’t—” Colin began, then fell silent as we both heard the growl of an engine. It grew louder and louder, until with a scrape of tyres something huge and heavy came bumping down the ramp and turned into the garage.

  CHAPTER 20

  The vehicle driving into the garage was a van, big and blocky and painted in dark colours. It looked like a heavier version of one of those paddy wagons the police use for football matches. Lucella, Scar, and Diesel stood watching as the van pulled into one of the parking spaces. The growl of the engine died, then the doors at the back swung open and someone stepped out.

  It was a man . . . probably. He wore a rounded helmet with thick shoulder and chest plates, and as I looked down I saw that his armour just kept on going, similar pieces protecting his arms, midsection, and upper and lower legs, covering his entire body from head to toe. It looked too big and heavy to be real, far thicker and bulkier than the body armour you see soldiers wearing on the news. He was holding a gun, but the armour was so oversized that it made the weapon look like a toy.

  A second man wearing similar armour emerged behind the first, followed by three more. The van creaked as they got out, though their footsteps on the concrete were surprisingly quiet. Looking at the armoured men, I felt a chill. They looked like they should be lumbering and slow, but instead their movements were smooth, almost graceful. The man at the front marched forward, coming to a stop in front of Lucella and staring down. The garage lights reflected off the black lenses covering his eyes.

  “You our contact?” the armoured man said. His voice echoed through the helmet.

  “No, I’m here for the scenery,” Lucella told him.

  The armoured man paused for a second as if listening for something, then glanced back and gave a signal. Two of the armoured men began walking towards the door at the end of the garage. “Codes,” the man at the front ordered, turning back to Lucella and holding out one gauntleted hand.

  “Money first,” Lucella said.

  “You’ll get paid once we’re done.”

  “Yeah, screw that,” Lucella told him. “Money.” She snapped her fingers. “Chop-chop.”

  Much as I hated Lucella, I had to admit that she had guts. Those armoured soldiers looked intimidating as hell: both Scar and Diesel looked as if they wanted to turn and run, and if I’d been in their place, I’d have been thinking the same thing. But Lucella was treating the one in front of her like a waiter who was giving her poor service. I didn’t know whether it was bravery or sheer obliviousness, but it was kind of impressive either way.

  The man stared down at Lucella for a long moment, then he turned back and called something over his shoulder. He paused for ten seconds, then turned back to Lucella. “Transfer’s done. Now. Codes.”

  “Wait,” Lucella said, then pulled out her phone and started scrolling.

  There was a pause.

  “So?” the armoured man said.

  “I’m logging in,” Lucella told him.

  Another pause. Scar and Diesel shifted their feet. The other soldiers looked around.

  “Can we hurry this up?” the one who seemed to be the leader said.

  “Give me a minute.”

  The leader looked down at Lucella’s phone and pointed. “The square with the fire hydrant is that one.”

  Lucella gave him an annoyed glance, tapped the phone, scrolled for a second, then nodded. “Okay, got it. Code for the alarms is six-seven-eight-four-three-two, everything else is switched off. Have fun.”

  The garage broke into motion. The leader walked back to the other soldiers and spoke with them briefly, then another man came out of the van, this one unarmoured but carrying what looked like a toolbox. The van doors slammed shut; one of the soldiers knocked on the driver’s side, and the van started up again, wheeling around in a circle and driving off up the ramp and out of sight. The squad of soldiers and the unarmoured man began marching towards the door.

  In the meantime, Lucella had been whispering quietly to Diesel and Scar. As I watched, all three of them pulled on black masks and then followed the soldiers at a distance. The soldiers filed through the door at the end of the garage, passing under the “EXIT” sign one by one. Lucella, Diesel, and Scar followed. The door shut behind them and the garage was still.

  I stayed hidden, watching and waiting for thirty seconds before letting my diffraction field drop. Colour flooded back into the world, reds and yellows joining the blues. I stood up, stretching the stiffness out of my legs.

  Colin scrambled to his feet, looking from side to side. “Okay,” he asked me, his voice low. “What the hell is going on here? How did you turn all those lights off? Why didn’t any of those other guys seem to care? And what were they even doing here?”

  “First, I didn’t turn the lights off. I put up an invisibility field. You couldn’t see because I was bending light around us.”

  “Just tell me the truth!”

  “Second,” I said, ignoring him, “those guys are from a drucraft corporation and they’re here to steal the essentia from the Well in the building above this garage. The reason Lucella got those two guys to bring me here is so that she can blame the whole thing on me. I only figured it out ten minutes ago.”

  “Jesus.” Colin raked a hand through his hair, looking away. “I did not sign up for this. I thought this was just some rich girl with a grudge, not this corporate espionage shit!”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Colin looked away, then back at me. He looked rattled. “What are these guys going to do if we get in their way?”

  “Well, they were carrying guns,” I said. “So maybe let’s not find out?”

  Colin stared.

  Hobbes was still crouched at my feet; he was looking around warily but didn’t seem inclined to run away anymore. I scooped him up and walked quickly over to the ramp, beckoning Colin to follow. Once I was there, I peered cautiously up towards the exit. The path out to the street looked clear.

  “All right,” I said, turning back to Colin. “Get back to the car and get ready to leave. I might be joining you really soon, and if I do, we’ll want to get out of here fast.” I pushed Hobbes into his unresisting arms. “And try not to lose my cat this time.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m going after Lucella.”

  “What are you going to do if you find her?”

  “Turn invisible, for a start. Don’t worry, I’m not planning on getting caught.”

  “Look,” Colin began. “Can you just talk straight to me and—”

  I took a step back and activated my diffraction and vision sigls.

  The world returned to its familiar shade of blue. Colin stopped dead, staring. From his perspective, I’d have seemed to vanish into thin air.

  “What are you staring at?” I asked, and Colin jumped. “Go. Now!”

  Colin hesitated, then turned and jogged up the ramp. Hobbes twisted around in his grip to look back at me with interest, but didn’t object. I watched them go, then once they were safely out of sight, took a deep breath and headed after Lucella.

  * * *

  —

  The door at the end of the garage led into a basement with a lift and a set of stairs. I headed up.

  Although I’d put on a brave face for Colin’s sake, I didn’t like my situation one bit. Now that the soldiers from Tyr had arrived, Lucella was going to let them drain the Well, then pin it on me. I’d get blamed for the raid, and Calhoun would get blamed for letting it happen. Meanwhile, Lucella not only got to hurt two of her rivals at the same time, she was getting paid for the privilege.

  The question was whether I could do anything to stop it. I could walk out of here right now, but Lucella could just accuse me anyway, at which point it’d be her word against mine. Given that Charles Ashford already didn’t like me, I didn’t like my odds of proving my innocence. What I needed was evidence, something that I could point at to prove that this whole thing was Lucella’s fault. But how?

  I left the stairs on the ground floor to come out into an office building. It was dark and quiet, the only sound the distant rush of the Holborn traffic. I could feel the essentia in the Well, enormously strong and very close. I headed towards it.

  I ran into one of those armoured soldiers almost immediately. The corridor ended in a set of glass-fronted doors that opened up into some sort of courtyard; people were moving inside, but the soldier was standing right in front of the doors and I didn’t dare get too close. Instead I paused and studied the soldier, focusing on my essentia sight.

  The red-brown glow of Matter essentia sprang out at me. It was flowing through the armour, coming from . . . oh, that was interesting. The man was wearing a pair of sigls, not one, set into his armour on either side of his chest. The essentia from the left sigl flowed down into the armour’s left half, and vice versa for the right. A lightening effect, one that reduced an object’s effective mass. So you could make a suit of armour out of solid metal, thick enough to stop a bullet, and still have it be light enough to move in. Using two sigls instead of one spread the load and probably allowed them to use lower-ranked sigls to keep costs down. Pretty neat.

  I shook my head; this wasn’t the time for research. The Well was in that courtyard, but getting closer would mean walking past that soldier, and I wasn’t willing to bet my life on him not noticing my diffraction field. I withdrew to the stairs and went up one floor before coming out into the first-floor corridor.

  That was better. There were windows looking down into the courtyard, but no soldier on guard. I walked forward and peered down through the glass.

  The courtyard at the centre of the building was square. Potted bushes, paving stones, and concentric rings of grass made up a small, carefully tended garden, with a tree standing at the centre, rising up into the sky, its branches overhanging the four sides of the building around it. The Well was right there, at the base of the tree, overflowing with Light essentia, a hundred times the strength of the one on my street.

  Although it didn’t look as if it’d be overflowing for much longer. The Tyr soldiers were scattered around the courtyard, but the unarmoured guy had set up shop at the foot of the tree, his toolbox open and the glint of equipment coming from inside. It was hard to see through the glass; looking around, I spotted a pair of balconies looking down onto the courtyard, one to the north, one to the south. I circled around, keeping back from the windows, and slipped out through the doors onto the south balcony, coming out into the London air and the distant rush of traffic from over the rooftops.

  The unarmoured man seemed to be taking a reading from some sort of device, pausing occasionally to type on a tablet. I thought I could pick up a flicker of essentia from the thing in his hand, but the Well’s aura made it hard to tell. I’d never had the chance to watch someone draining a Well before, and part of me wanted to see how they’d do it—would they make a sigl right here?—but I knew this wasn’t the time. I was the one who was going to take the rap for this, and I still had no idea what the hell to do about it.

  My eyes flicked around the courtyard. It was maybe sixty feet square, darkened windows looking down from all four sides, dimly lit from the orange glow reflecting off the clouds. I couldn’t see where Lucella had gone. Maybe I could disable her, then wait for the police to show up? No, those soldiers would murder me.

  As I looked around the courtyard, though, I frowned. This close, the Light Well was dazzling; it was like standing next to a bonfire, the aura so strong that it was hard to make out anything else. But the more time I spent around these Wells, the more I was finding that I could adjust. The Well’s aura was powerful, but it wasn’t really any different from my own Well, just stronger.

  And right now, I was noticing that not all the Light essentia in the courtyard was concentrated in that Well. There was a second, much smaller concentration coming from the balcony on the far side of the courtyard. It was only a tiny amount, a cupful of water set against a lake, but the more I quieted my thoughts, the more I emptied my mind and focused, the more I became sure that it was coming from there, that point at the centre of the balcony, exactly opposite me.

  I was still staring at that spot when the air there shimmered and changed colour, revealing a young man with white hair and black clothes. His pale face stood out in the shadows. To my eyes, essentia glowed from sigls on his hands and chest, shrouding him in an aura of power.

  “You are not who I expected,” Calhoun Ashford told the men beneath him.

  All around the courtyard, helmets twisted around, guns tilting upwards. The technician stopped what he was doing.

  “Identify yourself,” the Tyr leader called.

  Calhoun stood on the balcony, looking down with one black-gloved hand resting on the railing. “When I discovered that the security rota had been altered, I assumed it must have been someone from my own family,” Calhoun said. He seemed very calm for someone with so many guns pointed at him. “I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that they’d bring in help.”

  I saw the technician look up at the Tyr leader, as if for orders. The leader made a “stay” gesture.

  “I want the name of your contact within House Ashford who arranged for our House security to be sent elsewhere and who deactivated the cameras and alarms,” Calhoun said. “Tell me now, and I will allow you and your men to safely withdraw.”

  The soldiers stared up at Calhoun. The courtyard was very quiet.

  “Get the fuck out of here before we shoot you,” the Tyr leader said.

  Calhoun looked back at the leader. I held my breath.

  “As you wish,” Calhoun said. He turned and walked away.

  The leader called out something to his men, but I was still watching Calhoun. As soon as the edge of the balcony hid him from the soldiers, Light essentia pulsed, and Calhoun’s shape blurred and vanished. Then from where he had been, a man-sized source of essentia, moving very fast, came flying back out onto the balcony. It left a faint shimmer in the air as it vaulted the rail to come down next to one of the soldiers with a thump.

  The soldier spun. He wasn’t fast enough.

  Motion essentia flashed and the soldier flew thirty feet to crash into the wall. The leader shouted an order, and the courtyard erupted in a roar of stuttering gunfire; Calhoun shimmered back into view, his left hand raised, a sigl set into his glove glowing yellow. Tiny flashes sparked in midair as bullets collided with an invisible barrier, pattering to the paving stones at his feet. Calhoun backed away behind his shield, eyes narrowed in concentration, until a pillar came between him and the soldiers; in the instant that he was cut off from view I felt a flash of essentia, and he was invisible again.

  Shouts and gunshots filled the courtyard, a chaos of noise and movement. There was too much going on for me to take it all in; I heard the whine of a bullet, followed by the sound of shattering glass, and I ducked behind the balcony’s brick walls. Calhoun shimmered into view at the opposite side of the courtyard and struck again, this time with some sort of ranged attack that pulsed outward from his hand. Plants froze, leaves and blades of grass frosting over, and one of the soldiers staggered and fell. Again the remaining soldiers sent a barrage of gunfire at Calhoun, and again he deployed that Motion shield, backing away into the shadows.

  The battle was frightening to watch. I was sure that if I’d been down there, I’d have been hit and bleeding by now, just from the sheer volume of fire; the unarmoured technician had fled at the first shots, his tools abandoned at the foot of the tree. Calhoun hadn’t even been scratched. That shield of his seemed able to shrug off any amount of gunfire, and he was fast, his reactions quicker than should have been possible. Despite the odds, he actually seemed to be winning, though the soldier he’d flung across the courtyard had got to his feet and the one he’d frozen was dragging himself towards his teammates.

  But then movement above caught my eye.

  It was Lucella. She and another man were on the same level as me, on the opposite side of the building. I could just make them out through the windows; the man was masked, but I had the feeling it was Scar. Lucella’s face was twisted in anger as she gave Scar some order; he shook his head, then jerked, flinching back as—

  A bullet slammed into the balcony. My concentration slipped and I dropped to the floor, hearing the shouts and gunfire from below. Only once I’d regained my focus did I poke my head cautiously above the railing.