Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

Stephen was trying to keep himself together, but he had to sit down on the steps. Callum too was struggling, but the things Newman was saying . . . I knew they resonated with him.

“Then one day a man came up to me in the street and asked me if I’d like to put my abilities to good use. I still don’t know who he was—someone quite high up in the Met or in MI5, I suppose. It turns out they had started reviewing files at psychiatric institutions to see if anyone was reporting a very specific set of delusions—reporting that they could see ghosts after a near-death experience. A brilliant way of recruiting, really.

“I was taken to Whitehall, to a small office, and the Shades were explained to me. They knew what I was. They liked that I had worked in the prison system. They liked everything about me. They gave me the one thing I had wanted since my accident—a weapon. Something to protect me against these things I was seeing. They gave me some control over my life. The day I became a Shade, I was truly happy for the first time since I was seventeen. I’ll bet it was the same for you.

“I knew we were doing the jobs of bin men, cleaning ghosts off Tube platforms and out of old houses, but I didn’t care. For the first time in my life, I was happy. But I couldn’t help my nature. The others—they were drawn from ordinary police stock. I was an academic. I was a doctor. A scientist.

“There used to be a form of treatment for schizophrenics called insulin shock therapy. The patients would be brought in over the course of several weeks and regularly put into insulin shock, going deeper and deeper each time. Eventually, they’d be put into daily comas and brought out again after an hour or so. Not a very pleasant process, and the results were debatable. But I saw another use for the procedure. I devised a series of experiments to test different areas of the brain, to try to determine which one caused people to develop the sight. But to do this, I needed to re-create the conditions under which the sight develops. Namely, I had to bring the body into a state that mimicked the onset of death. Insulin shock therapy did just that. Paranormal neuropsychiatry, and I was the only person in the world qualified to practice it.

“My status as a Shade gave me unrestricted access, and they already knew me as a doctor. So I went back to the places I had worked before. My idea was simple. I would take the young people I’d met who had the sight, and I would say I was giving them experimental therapy. Getting insulin isn’t difficult, nor is the process of putting someone into a diabetic coma. It’s a bit of a risky procedure, but done carefully it causes no lasting harm. And I would be working on youths in the prison system, people already considered irredeemable. I performed my work for two years, taking the same subjects down about a dozen times each. I also conducted physical and psychological examinations.

“No one knew about this research of mine,” he continued. “I had planned on revealing it only when I had a clear result, at which point I would certainly have been given a proper lab and resources to continue. Finding out what controls the ability to see the dead? That’s a valuable asset. So I still did all of my normal duties—removing ghosts from buildings, getting trains working, all the mundane things they had us do. In my spare time, I did my real work. I had just located a fifth subject, a young girl. I began the process with her. To this day, I’m not sure what went wrong. I took her down—and she didn’t come back up. That’s when the powers that be discovered the work I’d been doing. They should have thanked me, despite the mistake. They didn’t.”

I was convinced now that Newman was telling us the truth. He may have been a murderer, and evil, but he was also honest. At least he was right now.

“The trouble with joining a secret government agency is that they can’t really fire you. And they couldn’t exactly put me on trial either. No . . . the whole thing had to be very quiet. I was removed from this station, my powers stripped, and my terminus was taken away. I came down here that day to talk to my fellow Shades, and to take a terminus. I needed it. I couldn’t go back to the way it was before, having nothing to protect me. I brought the gun because . . . I had to get them to see sense, to give me one. But they wouldn’t. They just wouldn’t cooperate. I suppose they didn’t think I’d shoot . . .”

“Callum!” Stephen said weakly.

“You can let him die,” Newman said, “or you can save him, right now.”

“Let me see it,” Callum said. “Let me see the syringe.”

“I can’t do that,” Newman said. “Not until you each set your terminus down and kick it over to me.”

“You could be lying.”

“But you know my history now. You know why I killed. You know what I want. I want you to save him. I want to protect those with the sight. I just also want to protect myself. There is absolutely no reason we can’t all walk away from this.”

Then he looked right at me.

“Aurora,” he said. “You’ve been exceptionally brave, and you’re not even on the squad. You’ve risked your life to save others. I swear to you—if you set that down and kick it to me, I will be as good as my word. Give it to me.”

Stephen put his head down. I think he knew what I was about to do and he couldn’t watch. I couldn’t watch him die. I slowly put the terminus on the filthy floor and gave it a kick. It landed more or less by Newman.

Now that I’d surrendered, the entire burden was on Callum. He looked as sick as Stephen. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, as if preparing to make a dash. His body was ready, but his mind was not.

“Now you, son,” Newman said.

“Don’t call me son ! Don’t you speak to me.”

Newman closed his mouth and raised his arms to the side, making himself a wide and open target.

“You decide,” he said. “I accept my fate. If you can live with the death of your friend, I can accept my end here. It’s been a noble fight for all concerned.”

Stephen could no longer plead. He had slumped against the wall and his eyes were half closed. Callum raised himself up on the balls of his feet, knees flexed. He was going to do it. I was sure of it.

And then he just opened his hands and let the terminus go.

“Kick it here,” Newman said quietly.

Callum delivered a perfect side-of-the-foot kick, sending it right to Newman. I’d never seen anyone that agonized. He rubbed his hands over his face and held them there in a prayer formation.

“Give us the medicine,” he said.

“When I get the third one,” Newman said.

His demeanor had changed also. His eyes had widened and there was an energy about him—he looked alive.

“The third one isn’t here,” Callum replied.

“Liar!”

It was a piercing yell, with an echo.

“It’s not here,” Callum said again, pulling his hands away from his face and sighing. “But if you save him, I’ll take you to it.”

“Oh no,” Newman said. He began to pace. “He will die, do you understand? And it will be your fault. Do you hear me? Your fault! ”

Newman was yelling to the third person he still believed was crouching in the darkness—maybe in the stairs, maybe in the tunnels. He snatched up the two termini at his feet and began to pace, looking through the archways, looking up the steps, searching for the last Shade. Stephen was going to die for nothing unless . . .

Unless someone could talk Newman down, someone he could believe. Someone who held no threat. Someone he’d talked to before. Someone like me.

“I’ll take you,” I said.

35

THERE WAS A SOUND FROM THE STEPS, ONE SMALL groan from Stephen as he heard me say these words. Newman stopped pacing and stared at me, a wild look in his eye. He went back to the ticket counter and smacked both of the termini down, hard, then cracked open their cheap casing like two plastic Easter eggs. He ripped out the wiry innards, plucking the diamonds from each one, and pushed the empty, broken phones to the floor. Once this was done, he retrieved his knife, which was sitting there on the counter. He crossed the room in a few long strides and came right up to my face.