Stealing Phoenix by Joss Stirling
‘I’m hurt.’
He gave a nervous glance over his shoulder. ‘But you’re still walking, Phee—you know the rules.’
Having had enough of struggling along, my eyes filled with tears that I could not afford to shed. ‘I know the effing rules, Tony. My bag went up in smoke, OK? And I got burned.’ I held up my blistered palm. For once, I wanted some sympathy, not to be told my duty. ‘It really hurts.’
‘Oh, dashur, that looks ugly.’ His shoulders curved in defeat for a second as he contemplated the consequences, then he stood up straight. ‘I shouldn’t let you back in but so what? Come with me and I’ll sort you out.’
‘Thanks, Tony. You’re a star.’ His kindness helped more than he knew.
Closing the door, he waved off my appreciation. ‘You and I both know this won’t be the end of the matter, not when our kommandant gets to hear of it.’ He gave a hopeless shrug. ‘But for the moment let’s deal with your injury. I expect we’ll both regret it.’
I mopped my tears with the back of my hand. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, yes.’ With his back to me, he made a dismissive gesture with his fingers, a flick of defiance at the onset of trouble. ‘We’re all sorry—sorry all the time.’ He shuffled on ahead down the ill-smelling corridor, part basement, part service tunnel. The Community was squatting on an empty council estate slated for demolition. I think the Local Authority had had dreams that the Olympic development would swallow up this ugly bit of their housing stock but the recession had cut those dreams off at the knees. They’d emptied the low-rise blocks, thinking that the benefit-claiming inhabitants would be replaced by tax-paying city workers, but no one had moved in with bulldozers to build the fancy apartments they had speculated would replace the concrete boxes. Instead, six months ago, we had crept in and established our own little colony. It wasn’t as bad as some of the places we’d been in as it still had water, even if the electricity had been cut off. The police had been persuaded with a well-placed bribe or two to look the other way as we broke in to the boarded-up fl ats. The area tough guys who would’ve used it for dealing had soon been scared off by our guards. If there was any bad stuff going down in this place, our leader wanted to make sure he was the one benefiting. So we were left to ourselves, a group of about sixty Savants and one dominant Seer, him being our equivalent of a queen bee and us the workers.
‘In you go.’ Tony ushered me into the little cupboard of a room he had been allocated. Forced by his injuries off active duty, he was only allowed to stay through the ‘goodness’ of our leader’s heart. That goodness only stretched to this hole. I, by contrast, had been granted a proper bedroom on the top floor—the equivalent of a commendation. And, being the best at my craft, I’d never failed the Seer, until today that was.
‘How bad?’ I asked cautiously as I held out my arm to the grimy window. I could see a white blister forming in the centre of my palm and angry red skin all over my arm up to the elbow.
Tony sucked in a breath. ‘Perhaps you should’ve gone to Casualty, Phee.’
‘You know I can’t.’
He got a tube of salve out of his holdall, which lay on the mattress. None of us ever unpacked as we always had to be ready to move at a moment’s notice. He squeezed a little on to my skin then looked at me through his lashes. ‘Not unless you weren’t planning to come back.’
‘I … I have nowhere else to go, you know that.’ Was he testing me? The Seer often checked our loyalty by putting us up against each other and we all realized there were spies in our midst.
‘Really? A young girl like you should be able to find a better life than this.’ He rummaged through his pack and came up with a roll of cling film, our answer to a surgical dressing. We lived like soldiers in enemy territory, self-sufficient, our own first aiders. ‘This should keep it clean.’
I bit my lip against the pain as he wound the film around the affected hand and arm, watching the salve squash between burn and covering. ‘Is there anything else, Tony? I’ve never been outside the Community. The Seer says people like us aren’t welcome.’
Tony snorted. ‘Yes, and he knows everything.’
He had always seemed to as far back as I could remember. ‘So why do you stay?’ If I was being tested, I could at least return the favour.
‘I really do have nowhere else to go and no money. I’m not here legally, dashur. If they ship me back home, I’d end up in Albania a washed-up ex-car-jacker with no means of sup-port. And I didn’t leave my family in the best of circumstances; they’d probably shoot me on sight.’
Most of us in the Community were like Tony, stateless drifters. It was just one layer in the trap in which we found ourselves snared. ‘I’m not legal either. I’ve no birth certificate, nothing. I’m not even sure where I was born.’
‘I was there.’ He snapped off the last length of film. ‘I think we were in Newcastle.’
‘We were? So far north?’ I hadn’t realized Tony had been with us that long so was absurdly pleased to have a little of the blank filled in. ‘Do you remember my mother?’
Tony shrugged. ‘Yes, she was one of the Seer’s companions at the time. Pretty thing, bit like you to look at. Don’t you have any memories of her?’
I nodded. ‘Not from then—from later, when she wasn’t in good shape.’ She’d died of cancer when I was eight after a year battling the disease and all I could recall clearly was a painfully thin woman with a fierce hug. Fortunately I’d been old enough to take over her gathering duties so we’d kept a roof over our heads for the last days of her illness. Even facing a death sentence, she couldn’t go to hospital—the Seer hadn’t allowed it. He’d told me that doctors weren’t able to help when his own healing powers had not managed to kill off the tumour. I’d believed him then, but nine years later and a lot wiser to his ways, I wondered. His healing powers had never seemed to me much more than mind over matter. My mum proved that you can’t believe yourself better and ignore the pain, as he told us to do, when your body gave out.
‘That should do the trick.’ Tony dropped the medical supplies back into his bag. ‘Are you going to tell me how you got that?’
I swallowed and then nodded. I’d have to tell the Seer later so I might as well see how the story struck a friend. ‘I was on the site as I was ordered last night.’
Tony sat down on his mattress. He knew that part already, having been at the meeting where our duties had been divided up as usual. Our colony was living off an area of east London that took in the financial riches of the City and the new Olympic developments on the Lee Valley, sucking up the wealth like a parasite on a healthy animal.
‘It was going fine—I lifted an iPhone and an iPad from this student’s backpack—a sweet, clean steal.’
Tony whistled in appreciation.
‘I’d nearly got away when they … um … well, they exploded.’
Tony shook his head. ‘Phee, those things don’t just blow up.’
I held out my hand as evidence. ‘They do now. It was like the guy had put fireworks inside them or something. I guess he’d rigged them.’ A thought struck me. ‘Jeez, you don’t think he was a terrorist planning a hit, do you?’
‘If only your fingers got burned, then no. Sounds more like an electrical fire than a bomb.’ Tony frowned.
My expression mirrored his. ‘I did read something about laptops going up in flames a few years back—something wrong with the batteries.’
‘Yes, but to do so when you had just stolen them—that can’t be coincidence.’
I’d concluded as much myself.
Tony scratched his chin, patches of bristle in the wrinkles making a rasping noise against the rough skin of his palm. ‘But he shouldn’t have even known you’d taken them, not if you were still on the site.’ Tony was shrewd; he knew how my gift worked and had spotted the oddest thing in my story.
I curled up on the foot of the bed, weary to the bone. ‘I know. That part really freaked me out. He was aware of me—I swear it. I could
‘Phee!’ Tony struggled up to his feet, finally as shaken as I was by the whole sequence of events. ‘You can’t tell the Seer that! He’ll kill you if he thinks someone knows who you are.’
My throat went dry. ‘He … he wouldn’t, would he?’
Tony gave a strangled laugh. ‘Where do you think Mitch went last year after he got arrested and released on bail?’
I didn’t want to hear this—I really didn’t. ‘He went to Spain, didn’t he? On a job for the Seer.’
‘Spain? That’s one word for it. He went into a shallow grave in Epping Forest, dashur. The Seer got very, very angry with him.’
I wrapped my good arm around my waist and leaned back against the wall. It felt cold and slimy to my bare shoulders. Part of me had sensed the horror that existed just below the surface of life with the Seer, but I wished I could pretend ignorance a bit longer. I was afraid that fear would rob me of what little independence and pride I managed to maintain in the Community.
Tony sighed when he saw my expression. ‘Phee, you can only get out of the Community in two ways—you die or disappear.’
‘I thought we could leave if we found our soulfinder—our other half,’ I said in a quiet voice.
Tony grimaced. ‘Who’s been feeding you those fairytales?’
My mother, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. She had kept on hoping that she would be saved from this living hell by stumbling across her perfect match in one of the cities we’d passed through. According to her, every one of us with a gift had a counterpart, conceived at the same time as us somewhere in the world. Born within a few days or weeks of each other, our lives were a search to find the Savant who could complete us. The hope of meeting my soulfinder had been the story that had warmed my childhood, my mother whispering that I had my own personal Prince Charming waiting somewhere for me. And if my mother had found hers first, then we would have left the Community and I would’ve had a father, someone to cherish me as a daughter. Of these two stories of hers, I wasn’t sure which I’d wished for most. But then my mother had died. Slowly the dream of a soulfinder—a special person to care for and love me, a relationship more intense than any normal love affair—had died with her. In fact, now I thought about it, it had always been too good to be true.
‘I no longer believe such a thing exists.’ Echoing my thoughts, Tony squeezed his working hand into a fist. ‘It’s too cruel to carry on hoping. And even if you did find yours, the Seer would never let you go.’
I closed my eyes briefly, indulging for the last time in the sweet dream that I had a lifeline outside the Community, someone I could stay with for ever. Savants without their soul-finders never commit to another—they can’t; they shift from one partner to the next as my mother had. I had never wanted that kind of existence but that was the one I was going to have to live. It was a child’s wish to believe someone was waiting to save me. I had to let it go.
‘So you have two choices, Phee: death or disappearance,’ Tony continued. ‘Please, please think about the second; I don’t want to be there if the Seer chooses the first for you.’ Tony closed the distance between us and placed his mangled hand on my cheek, fingers curled against his palm. ‘You deserve better than this. And don’t tell him what you told me.’
‘He’ll know. He always knows.’ That was the reason he ruled us: the Seer could smell a lie at a hundred paces. His gifts were strong. He could switch machinery on and off with his brain, manipulate electricity and enter the mind, flipping your private switches to make you do what he wanted, even to the point of killing yourself if that was his wish. Mitch had probably dug his own grave and then thrown himself in on the Seer’s orders. Our leader was also a shrewd reader of character, knowing a disloyal thought even before you had a chance to act on it. We had reason for our willingness to serve him.
Tony dropped his hand. ‘He’ll only bother to check if he doesn’t believe you, so make your story convincing. Practise your shields.’
‘I’ve never been able to hold one up against him.’ I’d always been too scared to try anything so defiant.
‘The Seer likes you; he won’t look for flaws if you don’t show him any. You need another story.’ Tony rubbed his forehead. ‘I know, why not say the tour party was a no-show? If you hide your burn, you could claim that there was a change in plan. I’ll have a word with Sean—he was on site today but he won’t say anything if you make up the loss tomorrow.’ Sean was our man on the inside, working security at the Olympic stadium.
‘So what was I doing all day?’
Tony paced the small space of his room. ‘You … you went in search of your targets when they didn’t come—it was some conference, right, at Queen Mary College?’
I nodded.
‘And you figured out when to hit them tomorrow to get a haul worth at least two days’ work—make the Seer drool for all those laptops, foreign currency and phones. He’ll give you a day to prove yourself to him.’
I brushed my upper arm above the burn. My skin had goosebumps. ‘But he wanted me to hit a particular target and that guy saw me. It’s asking for trouble to go after the same person twice.’
‘Yeah well, you’ll have to do something about that too.’ Tony was no longer looking at me, but at the cracked plasterwork above my head.
‘What do you mean, “do something”?’
‘I guess I mean you need to make sure your iPad boy isn’t thinking about someone stealing from him by giving him something bigger to worry about.’
‘Like what?’
‘For seer’s sake, Phee, use your imagination. Freeze him and throw him down a flight of stairs; give him concussion; bash his hand with a hammer—you can come up with something. So far you’ve only used your gift to steal, but surely you’re not too dumb to realize it gives you a chance to do a lot more than that!’
‘But he’d get hurt!’
‘Go to the top of the class.’ Tony turned away, disgusted with me. ‘I’m not telling you to kill him—just give him something to occupy him. If he’s busy dealing with doctors, he won’t be worrying about the case of the exploding iPad, will he? Make him go home.’
‘I … I can’t.’
Tony flung the door open, his patience worn out. ‘You forget, Phee, you dragged me into this when I let you in without any haul for the Seer. You need to make sure this ends well and that we are back to normal tomorrow—either that or you make yourself disappear so it doesn’t come back on me that way.’ He practically threw me out, getting spooked by how many rules we had just broken together. ‘Go hide and get your story sorted for your report. I can’t help you make those decisions—it’s on you.’
I had just run into one of those barriers in the way of real friendship that are part of life in the Community. I took my leave with a brief word of thanks. All of us were trying to survive and a sense of loyalty to another only went so far. Praying for better luck than normal, hoping not to meet anyone, I took the stairs up to my flat as quickly as I could. The light and smell got better the higher up you were. I had one small room on the fifth floor; the rest of this level was occupied by the Seer and his small band of bodyguards and favourites. They would be the only other people at home at this time but I had to trust that they were occupied with their own business and not patrolling the stairwells. The Seer had made his own lodgings fairly luxurious, complete with private generator that was parked outside my door so that all my evenings were spent to the accompaniment of the engine drone and diesel fumes. I didn’t mind because it drowned out the noise of his parties. Bad things happened at those and so far I had managed to keep out of them. I wondered for how much longer: I had noticed recently that the Seer had begun looking at me oddly. Having been one of the few children raised in the Community, I’d been protected by the long shadow of childhood; now I was seventeen that had begun to fade. I did not want to be dragged into the light for the S
Like my mother.
I made it back to my flat without being spotted. Once inside, I put the flimsy chain across, not because it would stop anyone, but because it made me feel better. The art of living in the Community was to make the most of the small concessions the Seer gave us—privacy one of the most prized. The flat was used as storage for Community goods: stolen electronics, cases of wine, packing cases of leather jackets. It smelt like a department store, not a home. I’d been allowed a bedroom and even a bedstead, a definite mark of favour when most slept on mattresses on the floor. The only others given this privilege were the bodyguards and two other younger members of the Community, both boys, Unicorn and Dragon. Weird names, but then I was called Phoenix so who was I to talk? They were close to the Seer so their special treatment made sense; my privileges were less easy to explain, though I suppose our leader found my gift useful and unique.
That was if it still worked. The Seer would not like to know that there was an exception to my influence. Before the steal, I’d been mentally crowing about being a gold medallist, now I felt like a runner coming in a disgraceful last place. Whatever else I did to the boy, I had to make sure no one else learned that he had been able to resist me.
Nine o’clock at night: my least favourite time of day. Come rain or shine, the Community gathered in the vandalized playground in the centre of the housing complex to report to the Seer. Like the Pope on Easter Sunday, he would emerge on to the balcony above us, watching while his men fetched the haul from each worker. The next day’s schedule was then announced, and then, if all was well, we would split up, either back to our rooms or off on another job.
If all was well.
If not, then the offender would be taken up to the Seer’s room to speak to the man himself. I knew that was what I was likely facing: no goods to hand over definitely required his personal attention.
I prepared for the meeting by putting a long-sleeved top over my burn and tying a bandage round my palm so it would appear that I’d just cut myself—a frequent hazard of breaking and entering so unlikely to raise any eyebrows. I checked my appearance in the shard of mirror still hanging over the sink in my bathroom. My tan made my dark blue eyes look lighter than normal; my shoulder length hair had been rough cut by me a week ago and now fell in unequal wisps about my face, flipping up at the ends. It looked better than it should do after the hatchet job I’d performed on it with nail scissors. With no make-up and a row of modest studs in my ears, I looked younger than seventeen—which I hoped would count in my favour.