The Unknown Spy (27 page)

“What’s he looking for?” Danny whispered to Dixie. “Surely the Seraphim can’t be here already?”

“I hope not,” Dixie whispered back. They had reached some trees and fields where the houses petered out. Without a word Nala drew them into the shelter of the trees.

“I never asked you,” Danny said, forcing himself to address Dixie. “What was it like … I mean with the dead?”

Dixie shivered. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. There was an uncomfortable silence. Nala had moved a little distance off and was watching the sky.

“I need to explain,” Danny said. He told her about Lily and how she had pretended to be his sister, how he had found out the truth and then watched her being swept away by the snow. Dixie listened in silence.

“So,” Danny said at the end, “I know I betrayed you, Dixie, and I know what that means. I just wanted to explain why.” There was a long silence. When Dixie broke it there was no trace of the quirky and mercurial girl Danny was used to.

“There’s a big struggle going on inside you, Danny. We all know the part of you that would betray us. But there’s the other part of you, the one we like, and the one we want to win out in the end. When bad things happen—like me going to … going to the dead—I know it’s because you’re not the same as the rest of us. We’ve just got ordinary good and bad going on inside us. You’ve got bigger stuff.”

She squeezed his hand, and they sat in the growing darkness under the trees until they heard the sound of a car approaching.

The car pulled over and stopped. They waited until Stone got out before they emerged from the trees. Agent Stone’s face was tired and strained, but he managed a grim smile, then a look of surprise when he saw Nala.

“Who’s this?” His expression changed when he moved closer and saw Nala’s eyes.

“Surely he’s a …”

“A Cherb,” Danny said shortly. “It’s a long story.”

“We don’t have time for long stories if the treaty has gone,” Stone said. “You can tell me later. Get into the car.”

Dixie got in. Danny opened the car door and waited for Nala, but the Cherb didn’t move.

“Jump in,” Danny said, but Nala shook his head.

“Your world. My world. Maybe again.” Something that might have been described as a smile crossed his strange face. He glanced upward. “Watch out for Seraphim!” he said, then turned and, without a backward glance, bounded off into the woods.

“That’s the end of him, then,” Dixie said.

“I don’t know,” Danny said. “I’ve got a feeling we haven’t seen the last of Nala.”

Stone turned the car around and started to drive back toward Danny’s house.

“What was that about Seraphim?” Dixie asked. “They can’t have moved that quickly after the Stone was broken.”

“Think again.” Stone pushed a laptop toward Danny. “Search for ‘Angel Sighting.’ ”

Danny took the laptop. Dixie gazed in fascination as he opened it and waited for it to boot up.

“Television?” she said in delight.

“No,” Danny said, “it’s a computer.” Dixie gazed at it in rapt attention as it flickered to life. Danny’s search turned up several newspaper articles in which people described seeing four or five large winged figures in the air. Air traffic controllers said that unexplained objects on their screens could have been birds, but a policeman was reported to be undergoing psychiatric examination after claiming to have seen a “sinister winged figure” standing outside the prime minister’s country residence.

“Seraphim!” Danny said.

“I’m afraid so,” Stone said. “Checking things out, letting the few people who are aware of their existence know that the barrier between this world and the next has been breached. I have always suspected that the Ring has spies in the Upper World. I expect those networks will be strengthened now. We will have to fight them. It will be a secret war, a war of spies—to begin with, at any rate.”

He turned to Danny.

“They will want their greatest asset at their side. Be careful, Danny.”

Danny was barely listening. He stared with unseeing eyes at the winter fields. He could still see Lily’s face as she was buried by the wall of snow. Bitterness welled up in him. First Stone and Pearl had masqueraded as his parents; then Lily had pretended to be his sister. His friends at Wilsons were good, it was true, but he yearned for some deeper connection—if not with a family, then maybe with the Ring. He had not forgotten the way his mind had joined with theirs.

They fell silent as they drove through the countryside. Dixie went to sleep on Danny’s shoulder, and Stone appeared to be lost in his own thoughts. Danny’s mind would not let him rest. What if the Ring did conquer all? Would he not be better off as part of it? At least he would be able to protect his friends, and perhaps put a stop to the worse excesses of the Ring. Apart from anything else, he would be able to use all the power of the Ring to find out who he was.

Before he knew it, they were pulling up to the old house, which had been left scarred and shattered from the Seraphim attack. Dixie woke up and shivered.

“Will Fairman come for us, do you think?”

Danny realized that she was far from home in a foreign world, full of strange things such as cell phones and computers. She was homesick for Wilsons.

“I think so,” Danny said, “although he’s not the only person allowed to cross the border anymore.”

They parked the car around the back and went in. Stone and Pearl had worked hard while Danny had been away. The house was fortified with sandbags in the windows and the doors.

“I’ve got heat and movement detectors rigged outside,” Stone said. “We won’t get caught by surprise again.”

Inside there was a cheerful fire burning and a smell of baking pie. Pearl came to the kitchen door wearing an apron, flour on her hands. Her face lit up when she saw Danny, and she looked like a picture of a mother from an old book. When Danny turned away, he could feel her hurt.

The pie was put out on the table and they ate hungrily. Danny was exhausted, but Stone said that he needed to talk to him. Pearl took Dixie off, clucking over her tangled hair and dirty face. Stone led Danny into the library. They sat down in front of the fire.

“I’ve been researching your background for years, Danny, going through old records and libraries, trying to find out who you are. No one paid any attention before, but I accessed a copy of an old manuscript online, and someone was keeping an eye on it. Opening that document brought the pursuit where I got wounded, and probably brought the Seraphim.”

“What was in the manuscript?”

“It’s to do with being the Fifth, Danny. I don’t know how you came to be here in the Upper World, but I think I know why. The Fifth has access to a terrible power. I believe special powers are not unusual in the Lower World?
It comes from the very core of the Fifth’s being and lies dormant until powerful emotion causes it to be unleashed, for good or evil—but mostly for evil.

“Certain influential government agencies learned of this and thought they could harness the power of the Fifth to develop a new generation of terrible weapons. That was why you were given into our care, so we could keep you safe until you were old enough to be exploited.

“Of course, we never knew of this terrible plan. We’re not sure what happened. It may be that someone is protecting your identity.”

“What are you trying to say?” Danny asked.

“I’m saying you can’t stay in this world. You are being hunted at this very moment.”

“I’m being hunted in the other world as well,” Danny said despairingly.

“Yes, but there they will not conduct experiments on you to find out if you have a power and how it works. And there you have many friends. Here you only have two, me and Agent Pearl. I know you’re angry that we pretended to be your parents, a charade for which I can only say I am sorry. We thought we were acting for your good.”

Danny looked at him and for a moment longed to call this man Father, and to tell him about Lily. But the moment passed.

“Fairman will come for you and Dixie in the morning. I have had no luck in finding out who your parents are. That is another mystery, and it strikes me that both worlds have an interest in suppressing the answer.”

They went back into the living room. Dixie had showered
and was dressed in a Chinese dressing gown. Pearl was brushing her hair.

Dixie sighed. “I hope everyone at Wilsons is okay.”

“We’re going back in the morning,” Danny said. Dixie clapped her hands.

“Brilliant,” she said. “I wish I knew what’s happening there.”

“The Radio of Last Resort!” Danny said. It was still in his bedroom. He ran upstairs and carried it down to the living room. He switched it on, and they all sat in frozen silence when they heard the message that came through the speaker. Brunholm’s voice was being played on a loop, and there was a note of triumph in it that turned the blood cold.

“Attention. Attention. This is Marcus Brunholm. Mr. Devoy has been suspended from his post as master of Wilsons and is now in custody. I, Marcus Brunholm, with the assistance of Rufus Ness, head Cherb, am now in charge of all affairs at Wilsons Academy, pending a full agreement with the Ring of Five in relation to their participation in the running of this institution.”

Danny and Dixie looked at each other, stunned. Devoy was in prison. Brunholm, in cahoots with Rufus Ness, had taken over. They were going to hand the school over to the Ring!

A PLACE OF TORTURE

A
fter rescuing Blackpitt, Les, Vandra and Toxique were pleased with their day’s work but haunted by the sight of Devoy attending to the torture chamber. They had not thought him capable of contemplating such cruelty.

“But who do we tell?” Les said.

“It’s obvious,” Toxique said. “McGuinness. He’s honest. He’ll help us.”

“Good idea,” Vandra said. “In the meantime, I’m exhausted and it’s the middle of the night.”

They decided they would meet in the morning after class and seek out the detective. A simple decision, they thought as they went gratefully to bed, but they would have been less comfortable if they had sensed the pair of red-rimmed eyes that watched the Roosts from the rooftops. Ness’s bloody shoulder had a rough bandage on
it, but otherwise he was unharmed. He had not finished with Wilsons—not by a long shot—and events were about to play into his hands.

T
he next morning the three cadets woke late and almost missed breakfast. They yawned their way through Spitfire’s class—Les earned three strikes with the eraser—and through a double period of maths with Exshaw, which Les thought would earn them at least a Third Regulation offense. But Exshaw merely smirked at them, saying that “punishment, like revenge, is a dish best served cold.”

McGuinness could be elusive, but they found him with ease, sitting on one of the summer seats in the garden as if he had been waiting for them. His face darkened as they told him about Devoy and the torture instruments, and he shook his head in disbelief.

“We’ll have to go upstairs with this,” he said.

“Upstairs?” Vandra said.

“Well, we can’t go to Devoy, so we’ll have to go to Brunholm.”

“We can’t go to Brunholm!” Les was appalled.

“Torture is a treasonable offense in Wilsons,” McGuinness said sternly. “We have no choice.”

E
vents moved with lightning speed after that.

“I knew he would slip up somewhere along the line,” Brunholm had cried and had immediately summoned the other teachers. Some of them, such as Spitfire, refused to
accept Brunholm’s word, and Les was called in front of them to relate what he had seen, which he did, barely able to look Spitfire in the eye.

“It seems that what you are saying is true, Marcus,” Duddy said, “and the news could not come at a worse time. Is the Treaty Stone broken, as we have heard?”

“It must be true,” Valant broke in. “The ravens are in an awful state, wheeling around in the sky all day. And they attacked one of the Messengers when they saw him on the roof.”

“Devoy must be arrested at once,” Brunholm said. “Who will come with me?”

The only person to step forward straightaway was Exshaw. It appeared that he was already heavily armed in preparation. He had tear gas canisters and an expandable baseball bat, as well as a collection of brass knuckles.

“You won’t be needing any of that,” Valant said gruffly as he stepped forward. “I’ll come along to make sure nobody gets hurt.”

“And since it’s a criminal matter, I’ll come along as well,” McGuinness said.

D
evoy had not accepted the charges against him lightly and had barricaded himself into the library of the third landing. He had asked for a copy of the Wilsons book of rules, and when McGuinness went to fetch it, Exshaw and Brunholm had mounted a sustained assault, despite Valant’s protestations. When Devoy refused to come out, Exshaw smashed in a panel on the door and lobbed two
tear gas canisters into the room. Devoy opened the door, coughing and with tears streaming down his face; Exshaw had gone for him with the collapsible baseball bat, dealing Devoy two good blows before a scowling Valant wrestled it from him.

The pupils were having tea in Ravensdale, the place a cauldron of gossip with cadets taking sides. Les had almost gotten into a fistfight with Smyck over his role in the Devoy affair, when the lights went up on the platform from which teachers addressed the school. There was a gasp as the pupils saw the bleeding and handcuffed Devoy, his eyes still streaming from the tear gas. Brunholm and Exshaw accompanied him, and Brunholm read out a long list of charges, alleging that Devoy “did knowingly and feloniously create a place of torture in breach of Article Six of the penal code.”