An Instruction in Shadow

It was wet, it was cold, and I was worried.

Misty rain was falling, too heavy for drizzle and too light to be a downpour. Where the yellow-white lights of the Olympic Park shone, you could see the raindrops slanting down against the darkness of the overcast sky. I was sheltering under a tree, and the wind was blowing gusts of rain in under the branches, sending cold droplets flying into my face.

It was a Saturday night in East London, and I was in Stratford, on a grassy bank above a road called Marshgate Lane. A small grove of trees grew next to a chain-link fence, and had there been any passersby, they might have wondered what was so special about this particular grove that I was choosing to spend my Saturday night here in the cold and rain. The answer was simple: beneath one of these trees was a Well.

Wells are gathering points for essentia, the raw energy used in drucraft. I'd become pretty good at judging their strength over the past six months, and I estimated this one as on the low end of D+. Which meant that Linford's, the corporation I worked for, would pay me £700 for it. But they'd only pay me that £700 if it was still there, and when I found this Well there'd been someone loitering, a boy in a thick hooded anorak. He'd retreated at my approach, but he'd lingered just a little too long afterwards before disappearing. Which was why I was out here, getting rained on, making sure that when the corp extraction team arrived, there'd be a Well here to get paid for.

The wind shifted, sending another gust of rain into my eyes. I shivered and edged around the tree, though there wasn't much point-my fleece and trousers were thoroughly damp by now. I checked the time to see that it was seventy minutes since I'd made the call. There's no telling how long it'll take a drucraft corp to respond to a Well alert; it can take hours, or days, and they won't tell you which.

I wished I could just go home. That's what I normally do when I call in a Well; corps don't pay you to stick around; they pay you to send them the coordinates and then get lost. But something about that boy had set off alarm bells. In theory, once you've claimed a Well and logged the data with the Registry, it's the property of whichever House or corporation you work for. But a certain significant fraction of Well hunters don't care about the Registry, or other people's property rights in general, and that was the reason I was lingering out here in the cold rain.

Still, it had been more than an hour, so maybe I was worrying over nothing. The Well was only a D+ . . . hardly enough to get a raider gang excited, especially not in this kind of horrible weather. None of the Ashfords would even get out of bed for something like this.

Thinking about the Ashfords was a mistake. It sent my thoughts back to what had happened this afternoon.


Five hours earlier.

I spotted her as soon as she came into view. She was wearing a dark purple blazer over a slim dress and was towing a small suitcase, the heels of her shoes clicking on the polished floor. There was a huge billboard behind her, and for a moment, as she walked by, her shape was silhouetted against the stylised dragon on the ad, purple against gold.

I followed her past the end of the railing. She turned towards the terminal exit, still towing her carry-on, and caught a glimpse of me out of the corner of her eye. She turned with a slight frown.

"Hi, Mum," I said.

My mother opened her mouth, still frowning, then recognition flashed in her eyes. She froze.

We stood there on the terminal concourse. People milled around us, greeting and embracing and chattering, then, once the talking was done, joining together in groups to flow out of the airport and go home. Only the two of us were still.

"What are you doing here?" my mother said at last. She looked shocked.

"I was waiting for you."

My mother looked around. Somewhat confused, I did the same; the terminal floor was crowded, but no one was paying us any attention. "You can't do this," my mother said. "You can't be here. If my father finds out-"

"He only told me to stay away from the house and not to try and murder Calhoun," I said. "He didn't say anything about seeing you."

". . . What?"

"He called me in for a talk after the raid," I explained.

My mother stared.

I'd never seen my mother in person, at least not that I could remember. All I'd had to go on for finding her had been some old pictures, and when I'd first seen her walking down the Arrivals corridor, I'd felt no flash of recognition; she'd just looked like a pretty forty-year-old woman in a skirt suit. The longer I talked to her, though, the more something started to stir. The small movements she made, the way she turned her head . . . there was a strange echo there, of the glimpses I'd catch of myself in a mirror out of the corner of my eye.

"I could tell you what happened," I offered when she still didn't speak.

"Not here," my mother said, seeming to come to a decision. She pulled out a card from an inside pocket, then hesitated, shook her head, took out a pen, and scribbled on the card. "Don't talk to anyone else until we've met. Okay?"

". . . Okay."

"I have to go," my mother said. Without waiting for an answer, she grabbed the handle of her suitcase and strode away, heels clicking. After fifty feet or so she looked back. I waved; she gazed at me for a second, then disappeared into the crowd.

The wind shifted, sending another gust of cold rain into my face and pulling me back to the present. I shook myself awake, huddling back under the tree and taking another glance around. The Olympic Park was just as empty as before.

Maybe it wasn't just the Well I was worried about. I'd walked out of Heathrow this afternoon feeling-well, not happy, but as though I'd accomplished something. And when I'd decided to spend the evening hunting for Wells, I'd thought of it as a victory lap.

But as the rush had faded, and the hours had passed by, I'd started to feel . . . what? Bothered? Uneasy?

Dissatisfied. It had left me dissatisfied.

When you spend a really long time looking forward to meeting someone, you build it up. You rehearse it in your mind, spin out fantasies of how it's going to play out. But when it actually happens, it never seems to go the way you've planned. Because of course, you've thought of all the things you're going to say, but not the things that the other person's going to say. And so it always goes in some direction you didn't expect.

I hadn't expected my mother to run at me and give me a hug. Still, I'd been hoping for something . . . well, more. I'd been replaying the conversation in my head, and the more I did, the more I couldn't help noticing that there hadn't really been any point at which my mother had seemed especially happy to see me. Or be around me at all.

The fact that she hadn't remembered that it was my birthday hadn't helped.

The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. You'd have thought the weather would have been a distraction-waiting around in freezing rain might be a crappy way to spend an evening, but if there's one good thing you can say about it, it at least keeps you focused on the present-but it wasn't doing as much as I'd hoped. I was starting to get the vague, unsettling feeling that by meeting my mother I'd disturbed something that might have been better left alone.

I shook my head and tried to push the whole thing out of my mind. One hour and twenty minutes since I'd registered the Well. Maybe I should just go home. It wasn't as though there was any trace of . . .

. . . wait.

Between me and the stadium was a car park. Yellow-white lights reflected off the wet tarmac, and in their glow I could make out shadowy figures heading my way.

Instantly I was on full alert. I flexed my fingers, checking my sigl rings and reminding myself what was on each finger. Slam and light sigls on my left hand, flash and haywire on my right. My strength sigl was tucked away under my T-shirt, hanging from a cord around my neck, and I sent a flow of essentia into it. Energy came flooding out, pouring into my chest and spreading through my muscles. Now that I'd channelled through it, it would keep drawing essentia without further concentration.

I took another look at the approaching figures.

There were four of them, all wearing hoodies. I couldn't make out their faces, but from the combination of speed and swagger, I pegged them as late teens or early twenties, like me. Given that the only other things in this stretch of the Olympic Park were a construction site and a running track, I could think of exactly one reason why these four would be converging on this spot.

I focused on the four shapes ahead of me, opening my senses.

Ever since this April, I'd been able to see essentia. All drucrafters can sense it, but I can see it, currents and eddies appearing in my vision as swirls of colour. The reddish brown glow of the Well behind dominated my vision, spilling out past my feet and down the hill. Even a weak Well like this had vastly more essentia than any human or sigl, but I was still able to look through it, focus on the shapes of the four boys and see . . . nothing. No active sigls of any kind.

Which was both good and bad. Good, because it meant these guys were probably small-time. Bad, because it meant my haywire sigl was useless. I'd designed it to sabotage enemy strength sigls, and in the battles last week it had been my trump card. But it did nothing against an enemy with no sigls of their own . . . and my ability to see essentia wasn't going to do me much good, either.

The four boys crossed the road and came to a stop at the bottom of the grassy bank, not quite close enough to be threatening. They stared up at me. I stared back at them.

"Howzigoan?" one of the boys called out.

"Aright," I said guardedly.

"Yawrigh?"

I made a noncommittal sort of noise.

There was a pause. Rain sheeted down.

"Gotturligh?" the boy asked.

"What?" I said. Living around my part of London, you get pretty used to weird pronunciation, but this guy had such a thick MLE accent that even I couldn't make it out.

"Gotta light?"

I shook my head. The boy made a disappointed sound.

None of the other three had moved. Their whole manner was weirdly friendly. They weren't acting as though they were here to-

Wait. Suspicion flashed through me. Why were they acting friendly?

I glanced over my shoulder.

The guy behind me had already started his rush and I jumped aside just in time. His outstretched arms clutched at my fleece, tugging me off balance before his momentum sent him sprawling down the slope. I whirled back to see that the guy who'd been keeping me talking had closed the distance; I extended my left arm and sent essentia leaping down through my muscles and into the sigl on my forefinger. The sigl erupted in a cone of brilliant blue-white light, and for a fraction of a second night became day. The boy and the one next to him yelled, clutching at their eyes. I triggered my slam sigl and sent two concussive blasts of air at his head; blinded and off balance, he went head over heels.

I felt a flare of satisfaction as I saw him go rolling down the bank, but as I looked around it faded quickly. There were more of these guys than I'd realised. Five, six-

Shadows closed in. I made a quick rush and hit one with my slam sigl; he staggered away, shielding his head, but before I could press my advantage I had to whirl to face a guy who'd been coming up behind me. He backpedalled but now I was surrounded. I backed up to the tree, trying to make it a little harder for them to get behind me. The circle had closed; blinking my eyes against the rain, I finally managed to get a count on them. Seven.

I stood with my back against the tree, rain still misting down. The guys surrounding me crowded in, confident enough to take the fight, wary enough to not want to be the first one in. A gust of cold wind cut through my clothes. Fear and adrenaline pumped through me, heightening my senses. Things had gone bad and they had the potential to get much, much worse. Deep down, a disbelieving part of me was thinking: all this for £700?

One of the boys called out to me, followed by another. I blocked out their words, not wanting to let them see how scared I was. Instead I narrowed my focus, not letting myself think about anything except the next few seconds. All my attention was on the question of who would move first. Would they come from the left or from the right?

The one on the left shouted an insult. I turned slightly towards him but kept an eye on the second guy to my right. There's always one in a gang who's a little meaner and more aggressive than the rest, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye, pretending I couldn't see-

He rushed me.

I triggered my flash sigl. Blinding light caught him and two more, sending them stumbling back. A guy came in from the other side; I put a slam into his face and knocked him to the wet grass. Looking around, I felt a spark of hope-all were backing away. Wait, I could only see six; hadn't there been-?

Arms grabbed me from behind.

I struggled frantically, but the boy behind was bigger than me and he heaved me off the ground, leaving my legs flailing in the air. The others rushed in; I kicked out and hit one, then they were on me. Fists slammed into my shoulders, my chest, my sides; one glanced off my head, sending a jolt of pain through my neck.