Fury

mystery telephone wizards. Throw everything you’ve got at them.’

‘But I look like a terrorist,’ Ryan says, appalled, running a grazed and trembling hand through his dusty buzz cut. ‘Those police on the ground — that’s what they thought we were. And where am I to say we’re going in such a hurry?’

‘Tokyo,’ I reply. ‘By way of the Izu Islands. Specifically, the jet has to make one pass over the uninhabited crag known as Lot’s Wife — the SMfu-iwa.’

Ryan mouths the unfamiliar words, imprinting them on his memory.

‘I’ll explain more when we get on board,’ I add. ‘Minimum crew, you know the drill.’

My outline is already beginning to shred at the edges as Ryan squares his shoulders and stumbles around the front of the building.

When the plane reaches cruising altitude — after passing through a belt of heavy rain that gave us a rocky time — Ryan unbuckles his seatbelt and heads for the couch at the back of the plane. ‘Scooch over,’ he mock- complains when he finds me already there, with a couple of fat pillows under my head and two more set out for him beside me.

There’s a pretty, softly spoken crew member at the front of the plane near the cockpit, her hands clenched unhappily in her lap. Apart from welcoming Ryan on board, she’s tried to avoid him at all costs. I can feel her towering tension from where I am, and it’s rising in me, too. I’ve had time to think, which is always a dangerous thing.

Ryan’s clearly made the most of the passenger lounge inside the hangar during the fifty-seven minutes it took to scramble together a crew and a flight out of Le Bourget: somehow he’s managed to shower and get the worst of the dust off his tee-shirt. He smells like soap and the supermarket-brand deodorant Tommy put inside our backpack. He eases himself down beside me, his mobile phone in his hand, and his eyes seem very tired.

‘What’s at SMfu-iwa?’ he yawns, angling in to face me.

I reach up to trace his freshly shaven jaw, the bruised-looking skin beneath his eyes. He closes them briefly, before placing his hand on mine and pulling our entwined fingers down to rest between us on the couch.

‘More like who,’ I whisper. ‘The Eight were supposed to regroup there after Milan. It could be some of Them, or no one. I just need to tell them Jegudiel and Selaphiel are alive; and then maybe that’s my cue to stop messing you around and get the hell out of your life. For good.’

Ryan draws breath sharply. ‘You’re joking, right?’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ I say, frowning at the broad wall of his chest, unable to meet his eyes, astonished at my cowardice. ‘Every moment I’m here is another chance for Luc to get to me and trigger the kind of “end time” he’s been craving since he fell. They all knew me, Ryan, those demons that I … killed. We had … history. We used to be on the same side. Only at the time I hadn’t realised sides were forming.’ I raise my eyes to his face. ‘They all knew my name. They would have used it, too.’

‘So what?’ he says sharply. ‘So what if they knew your name?’

‘I don’t just suffer from an inconvenient kind of amnesia,’ I say softly. ‘Raphael did something to me — he hid my name so deep inside me that I can’t bear to hear it without going haywire. Any one of the original hundred that fell with Luc could just speak my name and I’d be his again; it would be that simple. Luc would break free of this realm, the holy war would begin, and the universe would become the kind of contested territory this earth has been, for thousands of years. If I stay, everything gets placed in the balance.’

‘I make the mistake of leaving you alone just to take a stupid shower and you come up with all this?’ Ryan says angrily. ‘Haven’t you sacrificed enough? Can’t the Eight take over for you now? Whatever happened to you and me losing ourselves in the world? When do you get to do what you want for a change? Or me?’ I hear his bitterness. ‘Or maybe you’re trying to let me down gently, and I’m not hearing you. All the signals you’ve been giving out — have I misread those, too?’

‘I owe Them my life, Ryan,’ I say pleadingly. ‘And if I’m not around, the Eight will be able to contain Luc the way he’s always been contained — until now. When he didn’t know where I was, he was … constrained. He’ll be constrained again, thwarted again, if I’m not here to fuel his ambitions. In the end, I can’t take you with me,’ I add with a catch in my voice. ‘And I can’t stay. I can’t see any way around it.’

Ryan’s eyes are so dark with pain they’re almost black.

‘But I told my family about you,’ he says, pushing a button at the base of his phone so the screen flares into life. I see a cascade of small electronic squares in bright colours with cartoon logos.

‘I finally did it. They asked when I was coming home, and I said I couldn’t be sure, that it would depend on what you were doing, because I was with you. They wanted to know how “some girl” could be so important that I’d fly all the way to Australia, then turn around and fly to Milan and Paris and Tokyo, then God knows where else, wasting all this time and effort and money when I should be focusing on college. So I had to tell them why. Why you’re so important to me that I’d drop everything again in a second just to be with you; how we all owe you a debt we’ll never be able to repay. At first, they didn’t believe me — they said I’d been brainwashed, kidnapped by some dangerous cult — until Lauren explained.

‘She’s never told them about any of it, you see. She could never bring herself to talk to them in any detail about what happened; not the real way it played out. But she suddenly opened up, and all she wanted to talk about was you. And now they want to speak to you. They want to thank you themselves. And I was dumb enough to think it might finally be okay to share your existence with the people I love most in the world.’

He braces himself on one elbow and moves his finger across the screen’s smooth surface as if he’s painting. Then I see a word appear there: Lauren. Hear a dial tone. My eyes widen as Lauren’s face is suddenly there. I get a flash of perfect white teeth as she smiles, and I’m astonished at the change in her, how the surface cracks have been so readily papered over. She’s still gaunt, still ragged at the edges, but, like me, she’s a carefully curated collection of props, put together to make her seem like an ordinary girl again. Under the veneer, though, there’s something else entirely.

‘Is she there?’ she asks Ryan eagerly. ‘Can I go get them?’ I get a view of the room Lauren’s in. It’s morning, I can tell by the background light. And I know that room: it’s her bedroom; I recognise the dresser. But it’s changed almost out of sight since I stayed in it when I was Carmen. It’s not a girly room any more. The stretch of wall I can see has been painted a vibrant purple and doesn’t have a single poster on it; and all the photographs and knick-knacks that were on the dresser are gone. It’s as bare as the wall.

I look at Ryan, shake my head quickly, mouth: No. No. Wait.

But Ryan just shoves the phone into my hand, a dangerous expression on his face.

For a second Lauren just stares at me, puzzled. ‘Mercy? Is that you?’

I try to hand the phone back to Ryan and all she gets is a muddled view of the Gulfstream’s softly lit interior.

‘Ryan?’ she says. ‘Are you there? What’s going on?’

‘Tell her,’ Ryan says fiercely, refusing to take the phone I’m holding out to him. We wrestle with it for a moment. ‘Don’t make me look like a crazy on top of everything else. Tell her. No, show her.’ He shoves the screen back in front of my face. ‘Show her,’ he commands.

Lauren and I stare at each other in silence.

‘Ryan, can you hear me?’ Lauren says finally.

‘Yes,’ Ryan snaps. ‘I can hear you. She’s doing this on purpose, Lauren, making me look like a liar. Just unbend, damn you. Just do this for me.’

Lauren studies my electronically mediated features for a long time before her frown evens out. ‘Mercy?’ she says tentatively. ‘It is you, isn’t it? You have Carmen’s hair. It was so wild. It’s exactly the same. It’s even the same length. I remember looking at you, uh, Carmen in the hospital and wishing I had hair like that. You always want what you haven’t got, right?’

She falters to a stop, appalled by her own words.

‘You look well,’ I say quietly with my stranger’s mouth, neither confirming nor denying. ‘I’m glad.’

‘Thank you,’ she whispers. ‘This is one of my, um, better days. You just … left, and I had no one to talk to about any of it after Jennifer went home. No one could possibly understand, you see, if they weren’t there …’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t get there sooner,’ I say.

‘At least you got there.’ She looks down momentarily, her voice almost inaudible. ‘I was ready to die.’