Will Hill - The Rising

“It is, sir.”

“Good. There’s a Zero Hour Task Force briefing scheduled for 1100 tomorrow. Mandatory attendance.”

“New information, sir?” asked Jamie, hopefully.

Admiral Seward shook his head. “Just routine, Jamie. Dismissed.”

Jamie nodded, and left the Director’s study. As he walked towards the lift that would finally, mercifully, deliver him to his bed, his mind drifted back to the speech Admiral Seward had given a month earlier, that had brought to light the existence of the Lazarus Project, that had birthed the Zero Hour Task Force, that had altered how every Operator in the Department went about their job.

The speech that had changed everything.

TWENTY-NINE DAYS EARLIER

“Do you know what this is about?” asked Larissa.

She and Jamie were walking along the main Level B corridor towards one of the lifts standing near its centre. Larissa had a towel slung round her shoulders, and was dressed in a dark green vest and a pair of shorts. Jamie guessed she had been with Terry in the Playground, the wide, sweat-soaked space in the bowels of the Loop where the veteran Blacklight instructor ruled with an iron fist, and she looked deeply unimpressed about being interrupted.

“I’ve no idea,” replied Jamie, glancing over at her. “I got the same message as you.” He had been asleep when his console had blared into life, and was almost as grumpy as Larissa.

“All right,” she said. “Don’t bite my head off.”

“Sorry,” he replied, casting her a weary smile which she returned.

The two teenagers were tired, more tired than they could ever remember having been in their lives before Department 19. You never really got used to it, not completely, although they had both become skilled at not letting it interfere with either their performance as Operators, or the tiny sliver of each day that could charitably be called their social lives. But there was something looming on the horizon that was fuelling their bad moods, something that all the T-Bones and ultraviolet light in the world couldn’t stop.

In five days’ time, it would be Christmas.

Even inside the Loop, surrounded by men and women utterly committed to the secret mission they had undertaken, it was impossible to avoid the festive season. The Operators who had families, who lived off-base as Jamie’s father had once done, filled the officers’ mess with tales of trees and decorations, of presents that had been bought or still needed buying, while the younger men and women who lived in quarters at the Loop juggled days off and swapped shifts in the hope of seeing their loved ones at some point over the holiday. For Jamie and Larissa, it was nothing more than a continual reminder of the differences between them and everyone else, even Kate.

The two teenagers were unique, in that Blacklight’s Intelligence Division had taken them off the grid; they no longer existed in the outside world, on paper or in the eyes of the law. Although she didn’t know it, had Larissa’s mother walked into any governmental office and attempted to prove that she had ever had a daughter, it would have been impossible for her to do so; there were no longer any official records of her child having been born, or having lived, and her copy of Larissa’s birth certificate would have been dismissed as a forgery.

It was the same situation for Jamie; in his case because he was now the son of a creature that did not officially exist, in Larissa’s because she was a creature that did not officially exist. Kate still had a presence in the world; she was officially listed as missing after the Lindisfarne attack, and her father knew that she was still alive, even though he was sworn to secrecy on the subject.

Jamie and Larissa were voluntary prisoners inside Department 19, unable to live anywhere else, because they did not exist anywhere else. Jamie had asked Admiral Seward about it once, asked him what would happen if the time came that he wanted to get married and have a family, have some semblance of a normal life. Seward had told him that it might, might, be possible to reintroduce him into the world under an assumed identity. As far as Jamie was concerned, he had not sounded very confident about it.

Jamie would readily concede, however, that it was far harder for Larissa than for him. All that remained of his family lived in a cell in the base of the Loop, and there had been a small Christmas tree standing in Marie Carpenter’s cell for over a week. Larissa’s family, and in particular her little brother, were still out there, living their lives without her, making preparations for what had always been her favourite time of the year. They had talked about it several times, both of them trying hard not to make the other feel worse, but it had been clear to them both that they were united in a single wish: for Christmas to be over as soon as possible, so their lives could get back to what they had come to consider normal.

They reached the lift and pressed the button marked 0. The message that had appeared on their consoles had been sent to every single Operator, both the active and inactive lists, summoning them all to a briefing in the Ops Room. Admiral Seward had debriefed Jamie less than three hours earlier, after Squad G-17 had returned from a routine call on a housing estate south of Birmingham, and the Director had not mentioned anything about an imminent meeting. Seward had been so phenomenally busy in the weeks since Lindisfarne that Jamie was not surprised, although he was, privately, slightly hurt; he liked to believe that he had the Director’s ear in a way that the vast majority of rookie Operators did not.

Jamie and Larissa emerged on to Level 0 and made their way to the Ops Room. The wide, oval room was already almost full, and they found standing room against the curved wall at the back of the sea of black-clad figures. Jamie caught Kate’s eye as they made their way through the throng, and he nodded at her. She smiled back at them from her seat near the far wall, before returning her attention to the platform at the front of the room, beneath the giant wall screen that was currently lying dormant.

Admiral Seward was standing on the platform, talking in a low voice to Cal Holmwood, the Deputy Director. The expressions on the two men’s faces were sombre, and Jamie felt a pang of nervousness rise into his chest. Everything had been so chaotic since Lindisfarne, as the Department attempted to adjust to the revelations that had been uncovered by the successful rescue of Jamie’s mother: the unmasking of Thomas Morris as the traitor to the Department, the destruction of Alexandru Rusmanov and the tragic loss of Colonel Frankenstein, which Jamie could still barely bring himself to think about.

“Seward looks serious,” said Larissa, as though she could read Jamie’s mind. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” replied Jamie, softly, as Cal Holmwood stepped down from the platform and took a seat in the front row. “Looks like we’re about to find out.”

Admiral Seward stepped up to the lectern that stood in the middle of the platform, and gripped its edges with his hands. He looked out over the massed ranks of Operators, his expression unreadable. Then he cleared his throat, and began to speak.

“Operators of Department 19,” he began. “The time has come to put our cards on the table. Some of what I’m about to say is going to be hard for you to hear, but I believe it’s necessary that you hear it. I know many of you have had questions regarding the events of October 26th, questions that many of you have brought to me in person. I’m sorry that until now I have been unable to provide you with answers. There have been investigations and inquiries under way, and the full picture has only become clear extremely recently. That picture is what I’m here to describe to you today.”