Will Hill - The Rising

Tears welled in the corners of Kate’s eyes as she thought about her father, her brilliant, loyal dad, who must be going through hell with his daughter missing and his home recovering from a massacre.

“I should be clear,” continued Major Gonzalez. “This is an offer that is made extremely rarely. Under normal circumstances, once a civilian is exposed to the existence of the supernatural, as you were last night, continuing a normal life ceases to be an option. There are obvious risks in allowing that information to be taken out into the world, and those risks are normally considered sufficient to see the civilian in question placed in classified custody. I’m not trying to scare you, or threaten you, I promise. I’m merely letting you know how this usually works.”

Kate felt both scared and threatened, but she tried not to let it show.

“What’s the second option?” she asked, her voice packed with as much bravery as she could muster.

The smile returned to Christian Gonzalez’s face.

“The other option is that you stay here and help us save the world,” he said. “You become an Operator in this organisation, and you help us stop what happened to Lindisfarne from happening anywhere else.”

“What’s the catch?”

“The catch is that the life you led until yesterday will be over. You will never be able to tell anyone who you are, who you work for, or what you do, and you will never be able to contact anyone from your former life. Including your father.”

Kate felt faint.

The idea that she would never see her dad again was so abhorrent to her that she thought she was going to throw up at the mere thought of it. But what the handsome Major was offering her was a way out of the life that had been stretching inevitably out before her on Lindisfarne: she would inherit her father’s boat, carry on fishing the same small stretch of water for the next forty years, maybe find a local boy to marry, have a kid or two, and live and die on the island where she had been born.

Kate knew she could never have left her father alone, could never have moved to the mainland and abandoned him to an empty house full of the memories of his family. She had come to terms with her lot a long time ago, but now this man was offering her a way to change it all, to do something that mattered, something that would be exciting, and dangerous, where there were no limits to the places she might go and the people and monsters she might meet. But even for all that, there was a price that would be too high for her to pay.

“What will you tell my dad?” she asked, carefully. “I can’t let him think anything happened to me. I need him to know I’m OK.”

“He’ll be told that you are the primary material witness to a major terrorist incident, and that you are being voluntarily detained for questioning. In a few months’ time, when all this has died down, he’ll be asked to sign the Official Secrets Act and told that you have been recruited into the Security Services. He’ll be extremely proud of you, I promise.” This time Major Gonzalez grinned, and Kate blushed, despite herself.

“How long do I have to make the decision?” she asked.

“About an hour,” replied the Major. She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off. “I’m sorry, I know this must seem very unfair. But I’m afraid there are time factors at work here that controlling the public story depends on. If you decide to go, we need to get you home while there is still confusion on Lindisfarne.”

“And if I decide to stay?”

“Then we need to get started,” he said.

In the end, she had only made Major Gonzalez wait for ten minutes before she told him she would take the second option. He congratulated her, before escorting her along a curving grey corridor to one of the Briefing Rooms where she was reacquainted with Jamie Carpenter and the vampire girl, Larissa Kinley. And even then, as she looked back on the most important day of her life, she had noticed the small glances and half-smiles that passed between the two of them.

Tomorrow, she thought again. I’ll tell them tomorrow.

There was a knock on the door of her quarters, and she padded softly across the cold floor to answer it, smiling as she did so, knowing there was only one person who would be visiting her at this hour. Shaun Turner was standing in the corridor outside, his face breaking into a smile as she opened the door to him. Then he was pushing her backwards, his hands on her waist, his lips on hers, and a thought flashed through her head as they sank on to her narrow bunk.

At least I’m actually good at keeping secrets. Well, from one of them, at least.

Jamie stood outside the door to Admiral Henry Seward’s quarters on Level A, pushing his hair back from his forehead and tucking his T-shirt into his combat trousers. When he was as presentable as he was likely to get, he knocked on the door.

“Come,” called a muffled voice. Jamie pushed open the heavy door and stepped inside.

The Director of Department 19 was sitting behind his desk. Admiral Seward put the papers he had been working on atop the towering pile of his inbox, and regarded Jamie with a warm smile which the teenager returned.

They had become close in recent months, these two men; united in grief by the loss of Frankenstein, whom Seward missed almost as much as Jamie, and drawn together by the Director’s terrible sense of guilt over the death of Julian Carpenter. Jamie had never blamed Henry Seward for the loss of his father; for that, there was a jet black corner in the darkest, angriest depths of his soul set aside especially for the traitor Thomas Morris, who had died before Jamie got the chance to make him pay for what he had done. But the Admiral’s guilt was real, even if it was misplaced, and it had allowed Jamie the chance to get to know the man his father had really been.

They had spent many evenings in this room, the Director telling tales of Julian Carpenter, Jamie drinking them in hungrily, then passing them on to his mother, often after heavy editing for violence. It had made the Carpenters feel like a family again, had rebuilt the bonds between that had been eroded in the years after Julian had died, when neither mother nor son had known how to fill the void that had been left in the middle of their lives.

Now look at us, thought Jamie, and stifled a grin. I hunt and destroy vampires for a living, she IS a vampire and lives in a cell hundreds of metres below the earth, yet we’ve never got on better.

“Something funny, Jamie?” asked Seward.

He had clearly not stifled the grin as well as he thought, and drew himself up to attention.

“No, sir,” he replied.

Seward smiled at him.

“At ease,” he said. Jamie relaxed into an easy stance, his hands loosely together behind his back. “Give me your report.”

“Nothing notable, sir. Father and daughter vamps robbing a blood bank.”

“Were you able to capture them?”

“Yes, sir. I handed them over to Dr Yen, sir.”

The Director nodded. “Well done. Lazarus needs all the warm vamps it can get its hands on.”

“So I hear, sir.”

“Any signs?”

“Yes, sir. On the wall outside the hospital. The same two words.”

Admiral Seward swore, scribbling a quick note on a piece of paper.

“Sir,” Jamie continued. “Why does the Lazarus Project need so many captive vamps? What are they doing down there?”

The Director put down the pen he had been writing his note with, and looked at the young Operator. “The Lazarus Project is classified, Jamie,” he replied. “You understand what classified means, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let me remind you, just in case you’ve forgotten. It means that everyone who needs to know what the Lazarus Project is doing already knows what the Lazarus Project is doing. Is that clear, Operator?”