Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(14)
It was ridiculous.
‘Try not to be too interested?’ she said, a touch sharply. ‘Isn’t your family motto “Sapere aude”, “Dare to know”?’
‘Trust me,’ Jenner said, those brown eyes on hers. ‘There are some things it’s better not to know.’
He turned away, and they all walked on in silence. It was around a quarter of an hour later – Abi could see from Daisy’s face that she was about to do the ‘Are we there yet?’ thing – when the ground sloped upwards to a small rise. And as they crested the top, what she saw stole her breath.
Kyneston.
She’d seen pictures of it, of course: in books, on the TV and online. Seat of the Founding Family. Once the home of Cadmus Parva-Jardine, Cadmus the Pure-in-Heart, peacemaker and chief architect of the Slavedays Compact.
The pre-Revolutionary part of Kyneston was built of pale, honeyed stone. Three storeys high with soaring windows, it was topped with a small dome and edged with a parapet crowded with statuary.
But the rest of it shone almost too brightly to bear. From the main body of the house, two great glass wings stretched out, each as wide again as the original frontage. These had been Skill-forged by Cadmus, just as he had raised the House of Light, seat of the Equals’ parliament. In the low afternoon sunshine, the two wings were like greenhouses filled with exotic blooms of fire and light. Abi first shaded her eyes then had to look away entirely.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Daisy. ‘And very shiny. Do you live there?’
‘Yes,’ said Jenner Jardine. ‘It is, and I do.’
He was smiling, genuinely pleased at Daisy’s pleasure. He loves this place, Abi realized. Although if what he had said about the gate and his lack of Skill was true, he was as much a prisoner here as they were.
‘Look,’ said the young Equal, directing Daisy’s gaze to a petite female figure appearing from behind a topiary hedge. ‘There’s my mother, Lady Thalia. She and I look after the house and grounds. She does everything Skillful, and I take care of the rest.’
‘And who’s that?’ asked Daisy, as a second person appeared.
Then she gasped, a hurt, shocked little sound that made Abi fleetingly wonder if Jenner had pinched her.
Abi glanced at where Daisy was looking, at the second figure now emerging from the hedge-line. It was another woman, her hair a steely coif, her shoulders mantled in what looked like dozens of fox furs. A leash was wrapped around one gloved hand.
And at the end of that leash, crouched on all fours and naked, was a man.
4
Luke
Through the scratched and grimy van window, Luke saw Millmoor squatting under a cloud of its own making. He slid back the tiny pane for a better look, but it didn’t make much difference. The muck wasn’t on the glass. It was in the air itself. The light was pallid and unclean.
They were a twenty-minute drive from home, but even back in Manchester you could taste Millmoor when the wind blew in the wrong direction. Sometimes it was an acrid chemical stink from the industrial zone. Other days, the whiff was foul and rotting, from the meat processing plant. If you were really unlucky and the breeze was strong, it was a gut-churning cocktail of both. On those days, Mum would keep all the windows shut.
There’d be no shutting out Millmoor now. The road dipped and rose, and there was the slavetown again, twice as large, filling the horizon. Chimneys lanced the sky, poking cruelly at a sagging belly of smog. A distant flare stack haemorrhaged flame.
The van was waved through an outer sentry ring then stopped at a second checkpoint, where they all got out. A blank-eyed young soldier with a gun strapped conspicuously across his chest asked Luke his name.
‘Luke Hadley,’ he replied, but the final syllable came out as a gasp as Kessler’s baton drove into his midriff.
‘You are Hadley E-1031,’ the man barked. ‘Now tell him your name.’
‘Hadley E-1031,’ Luke repeated, stunned by more than just the pain of the blow.
From the checkpoint they filed across the car park of a vehicle depot. On the other side was a low, wide building faced with grubby white plastic – a medical centre.
‘I’m really not looking forward to this,’ said one of the blokes who’d arrived with Luke, an overweight guy, pale and stubbly. ‘It’s gotta be the worst thing.’
‘What is it?’ Luke asked.
‘Didn’t you read the booklet?’ the man said. ‘Blimey, don’t you know nothing about this place, kiddo?’
‘I’m not supposed to be here,’ Luke muttered, realizing not quite in time that this wasn’t the best thing to say.
‘That’s right,’ said Kessler, who was there again, his baton prodding Luke forward. ‘Hadley E-1031 here thinks he’s too good for the likes of you. He thinks he should be down south, mixing with his Equals. He thinks there’s been a mistake.’
He mimicked Luke’s words, making them sound prissy and girlish, and the pasty guy laughed, all sympathy gone.
The ‘worst thing’ was pretty sick-making, but Luke already had a hunch that Millmoor would throw a few things his way to rival it. A nurse rolled up his sleeve, prodded the skin of his forearm, then picked up what looked like a staple gun. Except it didn’t shoot out just one needle, but stabbed a dozen of them deep into Luke’s flesh. When the device lifted away, there was a neat matrix of welling blood. Kessler wasn’t around, so Luke risked a question.