Something powerful is drawing Ward back to Devil's Island. Something he thought he had forgotten. He must evade vicious lighthouse keeper George Jaggles in order to rescue it, but Jaggles will soon be the least of his worries. Because an assassin is...
After his escape he moved back in with the Carmichaels. The State had not yet become so powerful that it could raid the house of a prominent barrister without a warrant. Nick wasn't so confident. Anna's new bodyguard, as skilled as he was, was no Randall. As for Randall himself, he seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. Nick never heard a whisper of him again.
He kept the dice in his desk drawer, and showed them to nobody – not even Joe.
Then the dreams had started. They were strange dreams that he barely remembered upon waking. One morning he had woken with a desire to smash the dice with a hammer, but although he could raise the hammer over the dice, he couldn't bring it down on them, and he had locked the dice away again, and soon forgot about them.
Joe's oldest sister Janice had from a young age been enamoured with authority, and was consequently a great tattle-tale. Her school report cards were glowing. As is often the way with the credentialed, she was personally affronted by those who were not. She had set herself up as a small inquisitorial force within her family and among her diminishing circle of friends, for it seemed important to her that everyone she knew aspired to the same standards she did. This made her singularly insufferable, and the butt of many jokes.
Janice didn't approve of the friendship between Joe and Nick. Nick's parents had been accused of plotting against the State, after all. It wouldn't do for her family to be associated with such disreputable people – even dead ones. As for her own mere's notoriety as a defender of such people in the justice system, she had to satisfy herself with whispering her disgust to anyone who would listen. Janice wasn't stupid: nobody won an argument against Anna Carmichael.
Nick's trajectory had shot off in a whole new direction after his parents' death, and the two boys had already begun to grow apart. Joe was safe and secure with his family; Nick was a wanted criminal who could be arrested at any moment. Nick couldn't help being jealous of the relative ease of Joe's life. Joe went to school and made new friends his age, Nick could not. When he had taken up with Randall's gang Nick had sworn an oath of silence, which he continued to honour after Randall's disappearance. Joe was generally understanding and accepting of Nick's need for secrecy, but when one friend is not forthcoming the other will tend to retreat into secrecy too, and this is what Joe did.
If Nick was jealous of his friend about anything, it was the relationship Joe had with his fel Kefira. Joe was a Dolittler and Kefira his familiar. He shared a deeper connection with her than any he could have had with Nick. And as Nick and Joe confided less and less in each other, Joe began to confide more and more in Kefira.
Janice had a keen nose for discord. She perceived what was going on, presiding gleefully over the breakdown of the boys' friendship and watching for an opprtunity to sever it for good.
If Nick had been in a more rational state of mind he might have seen right through Janice's sly suggestion that Joe had been using Kefira to spy on Nick's parents. She had only mentioned it in passing, in the heat of an argument about something else, letting it slip in a cunningly offhand way. He should have known Janice said nothing unintentionally. In retrospect it was an absurd theory. Why would Joe spy on his parents? What did he have to gain? Nick's parents had been nobodies. Besides, they had always been kind to Joe, and Joe had liked them.
Before his parents' death he would have given no credence to anything Janice said. At most he would have asked Joe about it, and his friend's denial would have been enough to set his mind at ease. But Nick had changed. His grief and rage, a year later, still burned hot. The problem was, he could blame no one person for his parents' death. The amorphous entities of the State and Brotherhood were unsatisfactory scapegoats. He could have turned on Anna, who had failed to secure his parents' freedom in court, but he knew in his heart that she had done everything she could for them and was blameless. At least she had been at the execution. Joe had not.
It would be years before Nick would come to reassess what had happened and realise that he had acted on little more than Janice's testimony and an unfortunate coincidence. But by then it was too late to make amends. Instead, he had hardened his heart against Joe even further, as if by doing so it might justify what he had done.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
