Ewan’s phone powered up, and he started to dial.
‘What about Iain?’ Grant’s voice asked through the radio.
He asked about the computer before he asked abou t Marshall. How revealing.
‘His body’s in here next to the desk. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s him.’
‘And McCormick?’
‘…Nowhere to be seen.’
‘Wait wait wait,’ said Alex. ‘Why did he ask about McCormick? Why on Earth would he be in Marshall’s office?’
Ewan’s brain had never been particularly fast when it came to academic subjects, but his strategic instincts operated like lightning. If McCormick had entered Marshall’s office – for the first time in his life – and the computer had suddenly been destroyed, there was only one logical explanation. The bomb had been with him all along.
And if McCormick could no longer be found, despite being guarded well enough to have no chance of escape, there was only one logical explanation for that too.
Lorraine answered the phone.
‘Did she push the button?’ came her tight, choking voice. One sentence alone was enough to reveal her level of distress.
‘Yeah,’ Ewan answered. ‘We all did.’
A yell, strong enough to rattle Ewan’s eardrum, sounded in his earpiece. It was loud enough to catch the attention of Alex and Kate.
‘Lorraine?’ Ewan asked. ‘…What just happened?’
*
Shannon had tuned herself out of the conversation. Listening to Lorraine’s explanation had been traumatic enough the first time, and she already knew what had happened. Marshall was dead, his office and computer destroyed, and the AME project had been utterly annihilated just hours before it would have rendered her father invincible.
And all it had cost them was the life of Joseph McCormick.
Shannon hadn’t had much longer to deal with the news than the strike team. Lorraine had finished her explanation about a minute before half past, which left Shannon mourning McCormick while he was still alive.
‘Just come home,’ Lorraine finished. ‘The mission’s over, and McCormick can’t come with you. Get out while everyone’s still distracted.’
Shannon could hear Ewan’s voice shouting in the background, but Lorraine hung up without letting him finish. She turned to Shannon with a look in her face that was nothing short of harrowing.
‘The whole world’s uglier now,’ Lorraine groaned.
‘My father lost his shield,’ Shannon replied. ‘He won’t be invincible after all. It could have been uglier, I guess.’
But not much uglier.
I t’ll be even tougher for Lorraine once she gets home , and tells the others what she did.
‘I couldn’t stop Joey Shetland from killing himself,’ she wailed. ‘I couldn’t save Callum Turner when his insulin ran out. I couldn’t cure Roy Wolff’s stomach cancer. And now I helped McCormick engineer his own death. What kind of nurse…’
‘You can’t save everyone, Lorraine.’
It was the only sentence that came to Shannon’s mind, and she knew it wouldn’t help. Lorraine rested her weary head in one hand, and stared deep into Shannon’s eyes.
‘Tell me you can forgive me for what I did.’
Shannon raised her eyebrows in surprise. She knew that Lorraine wanted comfort, and that comfort from anyone would do. But forgiveness was a big word to use so soon.
‘I can understand why you did it,’ she answered.
‘But tell me you can forgive me…’
Shannon’s mind wandered to the McCormick she had known and loved, who had taken her in and accepted her despite her background, and done more for her in three weeks than he ever could have known. She remembered his gentle humour, and his quiet but unrelenting love. Her thoughts rested on the first night she had met him, when he had stood over her in the clinic with his unforgettable warm smile.
A smile that would never return to Spitfire’s Rise.
‘Shannon?’
‘I can understand why you did it,’ she repeated.
*
When Oliver Roth had learned that his enemies had escaped, his main reaction was relief.
The destruction of Marshall’s office had wiped out any chance of organising Floor Z. The soldiers scouring for fictional explosives had not been told their orders had expired. The surviving insurgents were able to vanish without a trace, victorious but without their leader.
Roth was just grateful to return to his room for the night. He staggered along his Floor A corridor, the last of his energy faded after an evening that had involved a fight in a burning Experiment Chamber, a rampage through the HPFC, escorting a high-profile prisoner through the darkness, and the violent death of Iain Marshall. And Roth knew that if it weren’t for his boss’ orders to hunt the other rebels, he could have died in the blast too.
He walked into his messy bedroom, dropped his helmet onto the floor, sauntered to his bedside and collapsed onto his covers with an ear against his pillow, half-focusing his eyes towards his personal armoury. Even in his own sanctuary, he was surrounded by instruments of death.
When Oliver Roth looked back on his short life, he didn’t see much that mattered. There were a couple of old schoolmates he had liked, but he had focused more on his bullying victims. There had been vague hobbies, but his biggest efforts went on his social media presence. There had been plenty of decent teachers, none of whom he had respected. Now every one of them – from the pleasant but useless to the unbothered and ineffective – had all ended up inside their nearest Citadel. Some may have been dead.
Meanwhile, McCormick had achieved more than that whole bunch in the five minutes they had spent alone. And somehow, McCormick’s departure from Earth didn’t feel like an extra Underdog scalp. It felt like the world had lost a part of itself. The only man ever to have seen Oliver Roth’s vulnerable side was dead, which was both a distress and a comfort.
Without moving himself from his bed, he kicked off his boots as angrily as he could. It had been more than a year since he last went to bed before midnight, but he just wanted his brain to shut off for the night. The anger infesting his thoughts was unbearable, and it came from a perfect storm of three different sources.
First, the fact that McCormick had seen through him. Roth never had placed his trust in another person. He had plenty of mates at school, but no real friends. And certainly no girlfriend who would expect him to open up. He was neither abused nor loved, and his apathy towards the human race was probably the biggest reason he’d been able to slip so easily into his job.
The second reason for his anger was the obvious one: he had failed the night in every conceivable way. He had let Ewan out of the Experiment Chamber instead of letting him burn. He had been moments too late to stop McCormick from revealing the code to Kate. But his biggest mistake had come from a rare moment of compassion, when he had offered McCormick his shirt back. It had covered up the scar which, in hindsight, must have been where someone had inserted the bomb. Without that shirt, Iain Marshall would have been smart enough to realise what was going on.
Finally, and worst of all, he knew it was too late to change anything about himself. McCormick had tried in vain to bring him away from darkness, but he must have known that Oliver Roth could not be turned. His allies would kill him the moment he became ineffective. Maybe five years earlier, a man like McCormick could have changed him. But even at the young age of fourteen, Roth had already made the decisions that would define the rest of his life. McCormick may have talked about lives being falsely predestined, but Oliver Gabriel Roth would have to remain the murderous assassin forever.