Page 57 of Sullied Saints

And so, through the waiting, tense city, we drive. On one corner, we see the first of them.

A group of men, twenty strong, are clustered around half a dozen cars. Baseball bats dangle from their fingertips as easily as clubs and planks of wood do. They watch our car pass by, wary, not knowing whether we’re with them or against them. Best they don’t know.

“They’re ready,” I say. Ready to be wherever they need to be to take matters into their own hands.

“Tregam doesn’t take well to being held hostage,” Needler quips, to the appreciation of no one. The aim tonight is to avoid violence, to be in and out before any kind of vigilante parade can join in. If we can, we’ll use Tristan to arrest Cassandra. If we can’t… I try not to think about that. About sacrificing Tristan by leaving him with her. Needing to live with the hope that he can control her to some extent. If she doesn’t kill him.

No. It won’t come to that. We arrest her or nothing.

When we reach Crennick, we keep going. All the way to the border of the abandoned zone, to the parts that were dilapidated even before the disaster. We pass slums, crumbling and sunken where the ground has given way to instability. Smoke rises from a few, most likely squatters with cooking fires inside.

"Turn right," Needler instructs. “Stop up here, where that streetlight is.”

The purpose of the building I pull up outside, a hulking dark expanse behind a wire fence that looks newer than the rest of it, has been lost to weather and time.

"What was this place?"

Tristan sits forward, looking out the window, face unreadable inside the shadow of his hood. "A school. Before it was abandoned. It was too close to the bad side," he adds by way of explanation.

"A school you both went to?" Dean asks.

The corner of his mouth twitches, but there's no humour there. "No, we didn't go to school. Slipped through the cracks… but we'd come, listen. Pretend."

That’s… just very sad.

“Why would she be here now?” I ask.

Tristan stares out the window, gaze blank. He might not answer. He doesn’t have to. Turning his head, he meets my eye. “It was the happiest we ever were. Hiding under the classroom windows.” Looking back out the window, he muses, “Imagining a different life.” He pauses. “She used to come back here even when we were taken to another home. It’s where I always found her, even when we were moved far away. That imaginary life was always better than what we went onto.”

His words close into a heavy silence within the car. That’s what we’re dealing with. The same upbringing that made him, made Cocooner.

We all step out of the car onto a wide and empty street, the white lines of the road long since faded. The cracked expanse of tarmac is broken up only by wet-looking piles of rubbish. Any snow that’s tried to dust the curbs or the sunken roofs has given up and turned to sludgy brown water instead. The place is eerily, suspiciously still.

As Dirk pulls him out of the car, Tristan nods towards the stone arch that probably used to be a grand entrance leading into the school grounds. There’s a slight hill angling down behind the high red brick wall, masking the buildings in long shadows from the setting sun. “They’re here, watching.”

“I can’t see anything,” Dean comments, coming up alongside him.

“No, that’s the point. They know you’re coming.”

We had figured that much. Howie is still in the passenger seat, murmuring into the radio. There are about twenty cop cars ready to swarm the place on our signal. He’s telling them our location, for them to be near and out of sight, and to wait. I lean in, eyeing the empty street, suspecting it might not stay that way for long. “How far back are they staying?”

“Scattered, between two and ten blocks,” Howie tells me, gazing at the buildings facing the school. “There’s going to be eyes about, though. We won’t fool the vigilantes for long.”

My jaw tightens. Having come face-to-face with angry protestors once, I’m not dying to do it again. Almost as much as I’m not dying to look into the crazy eyes of Cassandra again.

We need to know where in this place she is, how to get her out with the least loss of life, and to scoop up enough of her followers in the process that they’re not going to take up her mantel in any real way.

Sure, we could call down helicopters, riot squads, all of it. But in the end, if she runs, has some kind of escape plan, she’ll be lost again. And she won’t give us a second chance.

She’s feeling invulnerable behind her army right now. We need to keep letting her think that. Until we can act.

“Okay. Let’s go,” I make myself say. The five of us move towards that wide stone arch.

Passing through it, I feel a heavy unease settle on my back, cold and feverish.

Tristan bumps into me, brushing my side, his attention too fixed up on the dark internals of the building beyond the wall. Maybe seeing, maybe remembering. Howie tugs him back into step.

Cassandra’s followers indeed knew we were coming.

---