Deadly Magic Read online

  ‘It was three days ago. I was at HQ in Auckland when I heard the news. The official report said it was an accident. Supposedly he tried to use a compression circuit – to ease the swelling in his arthritis – but he accidentally cast a dissection circuit instead. He lived alone, and there was no evidence of an intruder, but …’

  Nephrite’s voice hitched. ‘I didn’t believe it. Ever since I was a kid, my grandfather refused to use medical magic on himself. Said it was too risky, and you’d be a fool to try without a doctor’s supervision. But, my bosses respected the official report, and they wouldn’t let me investigate.

  ‘So I disobeyed their orders. I breached protocol. I had to investigate, to find out who killed him, so I headed south to his cottage. As soon as I arrived in the area, I was attacked by a trio of Inductors. I managed to escape, but …’

  Nephrite shook her head. ‘Someone in the New Zealand HELIX branch must have sold my grandfather’s location to the Inductors. Someone with enough influence to tamper with his death report. I’ve been on the run, living in disguise. I don’t know who to trust. I can’t go back to Auckland HQ after disobeying orders. They’d never believe me. Not unless I told them the truth about …’

  She trailed off, as if the end of the sentence had congealed behind her teeth.

  ‘So you came here?’ Dragon prompted.

  Nephrite nodded, although the gesture was useless over the phone. ‘I arrived at Melbourne HQ this afternoon, but your ID system didn’t recognise my quintessence. Someone must have wiped me from the HELIX database. When an agent came outside, I begged him to let me in, but he refused. Said he wouldn’t breach security protocol, and I’d have to ask my bosses in Auckland to reinstate my clearance.’

  Nephrite clenched her fists. ‘I had to get your attention. I had to get you to listen. My grandfather always used to talk about his old comrade Dragon, and how if anything ever happened to him, I should go to you. He said … he said you knew about his secret, and you would know what was at stake. I could tell the truth to you … and only to you.’

  ‘The vials?’ Dragon whispered.

  The acidity in her tone had melted, supplanted by a chilling twang of fear. I glanced at my friends, confused, but they just shook their heads. Clearly, they had no idea what ‘the vials’ might mean either.

  ‘They got the Sunset Vial,’ Nephrite said. ‘Took it from the safe in Grandpa’s cottage; I think that’s why they killed him. I didn’t have a chance to search for more clues, since the Inductors attacked me. No idea if they’ve found the others yet. But if the Inductors get their hands on all three of them …’

  A note of foreboding hung in the air.

  ‘Right,’ Dragon said. ‘My office, twenty minutes. Cadets, let her in.’

  She hung up.

  I gaped at the others, but no one spoke. I think we were all too stunned to respond. Dragon wasn’t the type to easily change her mind, or to kowtow to threats. She was a strong leader. A decisive leader. She knew the importance of this annual meeting, and she wouldn’t interrupt it in anything less than the direst of circumstances.

  Anything short of a global apocalypse …

  HQ sat on a generic street, in the guise of a generic skyscraper. From the outside, it was a lifeless concrete monolith, as dull as any other structure in this cluster of office blocks.

  On the inside, it was another matter.

  Riff pressed his hand to the front door, allowing us to pass the quintessic ID system. We stepped into a dark passage, which forked into two spiralling corridors. These were technically called the helical stairways, but everyone nicknamed them the ‘corkscrews’. One ran upwards, and the other ran downwards, with a series of tiny LED arrows to indicate which way we should climb.

  The corkscrews were designed to train us, honing our fitness and teaching us to navigate in low-light conditions. Their darkness also helped to protect the privacy of under-cover agents who used the stairs – and to confuse any Inductors who might somehow sneak into the HQ building.

  Normally, cadets were only allowed up to Level Sixteen, since the higher floors were dedicated to sensitive spy work and agent preparation. However, Dragon’s office was at the top of the skyscraper, so we continued upwards with Nephrite in tow.

  The Australian leader of HELIX inhabited a glamorous penthouse apartment, bedecked in gleaming marble tiles and stark white furniture. At least, it had been a glamorous penthouse apartment when our previous boss had inhabited it. With Dragon in charge, it looked more like a police library had hooked up with a newspaper archive and birthed the shambolic offspring of a filing cabinet.

  The walls were no longer stark and minimalist; instead, they were covered with pins and paper, maps and newspaper articles. Photos of Inductors stared at us as we entered, some with bright red crosses through their faces. Tendrils of coloured wool ran between pins on the walls, connecting images with maps and articles. The centrepiece was the only known photo of Teranis himself: a hazy shadow caught on CCTV.

  ‘Right,’ Dragon snapped, by way of greeting. ‘This had better be good.’

  Dragon was well into her seventies: a scowling tangle of wrinkles and sinew. She had been raised in Lancashire, and still spoke with the twang of Northern England – although a lifetime of travel had muddled her accent a bit. She had a prosthetic hand, thinning white hair, and a record to rival any HELIX agent in the world. Over the decades, she had headed agencies on multiple continents, rescued prisoners, saved civilians and battled Inductors.

  And right now, as she glowered across the room, I was very glad not to be standing in Nephrite’s shoes.

  ‘Oh. I …’ Nephrite drew a short breath. ‘Well, it’s an honour to meet you. I mean, I’ve heard so much about you. My grandpa used to talk about you all the time, and it’s just …’

  Dragon rolled her eyes. ‘Quit your lickspittling,’ she said. ‘I ain’t got time for that sort of nonsense, and it’s embarrassing for the both of us.’

  ‘Oh,’ Nephrite said. ‘Well, it’s just …’

  ‘I dunno if you’ve noticed this,’ Dragon added, ‘but I ain’t getting any younger. So how about you get to the point?’

  ‘Someone killed my grandfather, three days ago. He was living alone in his cottage near Otorohanga. HELIX sent a forensic pathologist to investigate, and to collect the body, but his report recorded the death as an accident. I knew it wasn’t true – he never risked using medical magic on himself. I went to find out what really happened, and to fetch the Sunset Vial from his safe … but it was gone.’

  ‘And the other two vials?’

  Nephrite shook her head. ‘I don’t know. My grandfather didn’t keep them all in the same place. Whoever killed him might not know where the others are hidden; they could be anywhere in New Zealand.’

  Dragon considered this. Outwardly, her expression was calm – but by now, I knew her well enough to detect the simmering undercurrent of stress. This news had rattled her, and she did not rattle easily.

  ‘These vials,’ Orbit said, a little too eagerly. ‘What are they? Perhaps we could be of assistance in locating them …’

  Dragon cut him off before he could finish. ‘Forget it, kid. This is beyond your pay grade. Come to think of it, you lot should get back down to the cadet lounge – this has got nothing to do with you.’

  ‘But can’t we help?’ I said.

  Truth be told, I was burning with curiosity. My imagination was firing, alive with conjured images of glass vials, filled with strange coloured potions or toxic fumes, or liquid magic …

  ‘Forget it,’ Dragon repeated. ‘Too dangerous. Centurion might’ve been willing to plonk a bunch of kids into danger, but I ain’t Centurion. If you were ten years older, maybe I’d consider it.’

  ‘But we helped out in London, didn’t we?’ Riff said.

  ‘Aye, true enough,’ Dragon said. ‘And you almost got yourselves killed doing it.’ She pointed a bony finger at me. ‘As I recall, you ended up trapped inside a quintessic shiel
d with a bomb in your hands. At your age, you should be focusing on your studies, not secret missions.’

  ‘But –’ Riff began.

  Dragon held up a hand for silence. ‘If you don’t leave right now, kid, you’ll be grounded for a month. And you can forget about the camp, while you’re at it.’

  ‘You’d make us miss camp?’ Riff said, outraged.

  ‘Aye,’ Dragon said. ‘I would.’

  Once a year, HELIX cadets had a chance to visit an outdoor camp to learn survival and wilderness skills. This year’s camp was less than a fortnight away, and our classmates had been buzzing about it for weeks. The location was always a surprise, and no one could guess where Dragon would send us this year. Some predicted we would visit the rainforest, while others argued in favour of the outback, or even a tropical island resort.

  ‘Now get a wriggle on,’ Dragon said, ‘and get out of my hair. I need to talk to Nephrite here, and you’re wasting our time.’

  ‘But –’ Riff started.

  ‘If you say “but” one more time, kid,’ Dragon growled, ‘I’ll defenestrate the lot of you.’

  As one, we scurried back from her apartment into the downwards corkscrew. I wasn’t quite sure what ‘defenestrate’ meant, but judging from the look on Dragon’s face, this wasn’t the best time to find out.

  ‘Well,’ Riff said gloomily, as we traipsed into the cadet lounge, ‘I guess that’s that. We’d better start cramming for that stupid Disguises exam.’

  None of us were in the mood for memorising theory, but we didn’t have much choice. Written exams were rare at HQ, and could determine whether we passed the entire subject.

  As a gadgeteer cadet, Orbit didn’t study fieldwork subjects like Disguises, so we roped him in to test the rest of us. He made a valiant attempt to drill us on the ‘Seven Principles of Concealment’ – but within five minutes, our conversation had devolved into a whispered discussion of Nephrite’s news.

  ‘What do you reckon these “vial” things are, then?’ Riff said, after glancing around for eavesdroppers. The lounge was largely deserted, since most cadets had turned in for an early night before exam day.

  The lounge was a jumble of colours and styles, decorated by countless cadets over the years. Strands of tinsel lined the skirting boards, retro movie posters coated the walls and origami birds dangled from the ceiling. The centrepiece was Archibald, a life-size plastic skeleton that Riff had rescued from a dumpster. It wore a tacky tourist scarf and a top hat, and grinned at us mawkishly with its plastic jaw.

  This was, more than anything, a room of memories. Almost every decoration was a symbol of a past adventure – from the Union Jack bunting that marked our mission in London, to the half-deflated foil balloon from Sapphire’s recent birthday party. Above all else, the cadet lounge was our home.

  I shook my head, uncertain. ‘Must be serious, if Dragon called off her meeting to deal with it.’

  ‘Well, her work in New Zealand made her famous, didn’t it?’ Phoenix put in. ‘I mean, when you think of legendary HELIX missions, the first thing you think of is the Auckland job.’

  ‘But that was yonks ago!’ Riff said. ‘Gotta be thirty years ago at least, I reckon.’

  ‘It was in July, 1984,’ Orbit said.

  We all stared at him.

  ‘How on earth did you know that?’ I asked. I was used to Orbit’s expertise with machinery, but I’d never realised he was a history buff.

  ‘Oh, that’s an easy one!’ Orbit said, far too enthusiastically. ‘Every gadgeteer knows about the Auckland job; it was the test run for an entirely re-imagined Chameleon jet. There were a few mishaps, of course, although personally I suspect a slight adjustment to the sixth internal calibrator would have fixed the problem …’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Phoenix said dryly. ‘Sounds riveting.’

  ‘No, the problem was the calibrator, not the rivets …’ Orbit faltered. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Never mind.’

  ‘Anyway, it was an important mission,’ Phoenix said. ‘Most of the details are still hush hush, but everyone knows the basic story. There was a gang of Inductors in Auckland, and they built a weapon that could have wiped out any HELIX team they were up against.’

  ‘Weapon?’ I asked.

  I knew vaguely that Dragon had become famous during ‘the Auckland job’, but I’d never heard the full story.

  ‘No one knows the details,’ Riff said, waving a hand. ‘But there was this deadly weapon, right? The Inductors were building it in a secret research facility. Dragon discovered them, destroyed the weapon and saved the future of HELIX. I mean, I guess Dragon must know more details, and that bloke she was working with …’

  ‘Mariner,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, him,’ Riff said. ‘But if he’s gone and got himself knocked off, and the bad guys nicked something dangerous from his cottage …’

  ‘You don’t think these “vials” could be the weapon, do you?’ Phoenix asked, uneasy. ‘I mean, there’s always been rumours that the weapon wasn’t completely destroyed – that it’s still out there, hidden in a secret lab or something.’

  ‘Yeah, but no one really believes it,’ Riff said. ‘It’s just a story agents tell to their kids to scare ’em into behaving.’

  ‘I know,’ Phoenix said. ‘But what if it’s not? What if it’s really …’

  She trailed off.

  It was a chilling question, and its unspoken ending sent a twitch down the back of my spine. What if the weapon still existed? If the vials were part of this mysterious ‘weapon’, and now the Inductors had stolen one of them …

  Riff let out a low whistle. ‘No wonder Dragon cancelled her meeting. If the vials are really that dangerous, HELIX could be in serious trouble.’

  ‘Can’t be that bad, can it?’ Phoenix spoke in a deliberately reasonable tone now, as if she were trying to convince herself. ‘I mean, Dragon didn’t look too scared.’

  ‘Yeah, but Dragon never looks scared,’ Riff pointed out. ‘I mean, for her to look worried at all probably means we’re facing an imminent planetary meltdown or something.’

  A long pause.

  ‘Come on,’ Phoenix said, without much enthusiasm, and picked up her revision notes. ‘We can’t do anything about it now. Dragon’s kicked us off the case, remember? Better get back to this stuff, I suppose.’

  Riff nodded. ‘God, I’m knackered. Hope this exam isn’t too hard, or I reckon we’ll all be resitting it next semester.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I muttered. ‘Assuming the world hasn’t ended by then.’

  In the morning, the sky was grey. I’d barely slept, my throat was dry, and my eyeballs squelched like blobs of gelatine. I downed a mug of black coffee, and then another, and finished up with a slab of vegemite toast.

  A few of the older cadets nodded ‘hello’ as they passed our breakfast table, and I awkwardly returned their greetings. Until the London job, I had been invisible here: just a rookie, with no training and no experience. But rumours about our mission had been swirling around HQ for weeks – and somehow, the news had leaked that I was a Witness.

  Now the other cadets whispered behind my back, and many made a point of chatting to me in the corridors. I didn’t enjoy it. It felt as though the bar had somehow been raised – as if I was now expected to perform on a higher level, or outshine my peers in our Sorcery briefings. I wasn’t just ‘the rookie’ anymore. I was Nomad: the mysterious Witness cadet, with a dangerous mission under my belt and a rare ability up my sleeve.

  I had to prove my worth.

  Yet the prospect of failing my Disguises exam floated before me, as distasteful as the lump of soggy toast I’d just dropped into my coffee mug.

  Riff gambolled across to join our breakfast table, dressed in a Rolling Stones t-shirt and baggy jeans. As he caught a whiff of my coffee, he scrunched up his nose. ‘God, Nomad, you’ve gotta break that addiction. Some of us’ve got functioning nostrils, you know.’

  I raised my mug and adopted my best lovey-dovey voice. ‘A
h, caffeine, the love of my life! Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more –’

  ‘It’s a cup of bean poop!’ Riff said.

  I countered his scowl with a grin. Before I could retort, however, Phoenix cut me off with a snort. ‘Nice teeth, Nomad.’

  Checking my reflection on Riff’s cordial glass, I saw that my front teeth were smeared brown with vegemite. ‘It’s a disguise,’ I said. ‘Just getting in some extra practice before the exam.’

  ‘Impressive,’ Phoenix said, nodding. ‘I’d never guess it was you. If you score anything less than an A+ for that effort, we’ll really know the world’s coming to an end.’

  As always, our morning was devoted to academic classes: Maths and English, Science and Geography. Most of us were too fidgety to concentrate, and our tutors sensed our minds were elsewhere.

  Most afternoons, we attended a specialist spy briefing at 1 pm. Each day, our briefing focused on a different subject – Disguises, Enemy Tactics, Sorcery, Combat and Weaponry or Cryptography – and afterwards, we would complete a ‘mini mission’ to practise our new skills.

  Today was different. It was Tuesday, which normally meant an Enemy Tactics briefing, but instead we were to sit our Disguises exam. We shuffled nervously into the room, sat at our desks, and waited for permission to start writing.

  As it turned out, the exam was mostly a multiple-choice quiz, with a few short answer questions at the back. I was fairly sure I’d flubbed my list of the Seven Principles of Concealment, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to care.

  My stomach felt queasy and I was starting to regret my second mug of coffee. The combination of my headache and nervous energy kept my fingers twitching on my pen. With ten seconds to go, I picked a bunch of multiple-choice answers at random, hoping at least a few of them would be right.

  ‘So, how’d you go?’ Riff bounced on his heels as we finally exited the exam room. His fingers twiddled, already weaving a fresh levitation circuit. ‘Reckon I did pretty well, considering.’

  ‘Depends,’ I said. ‘Was there a practical component hidden in there? Because I’m pretty sure I successfully disguised myself as an idiot.’