"Ah, well. Glad we could entertain you." My sarcasm was ignored.
"It brings back memories," she said.
"Of what?" I asked.
"My daughter."
I was momentarily taken aback. Amber had never mentioned a daughter. As far as I could tell, none of the Warders had children. I had assumed it was part of the job description and yet another reason I wasn't very good at it.
"No one said you had a daughter," I said.
"I don't talk about it. It was a long time ago."
"Where is she now?" I asked.
"She died."
Now I felt really bad. "Amber, I'm so sorry. Here I am, being so insensitive. I'm really… I don't know what to say."
"It's OK. She was old. She had a good life."
"Old?" The question was out before I realised what I'd said.
"She was human, like her father. Completely and utterly as human as could be. She lived into her eighties — not a bad age. At the end… I'd like to think she knew me, but it was hard to tell. The drugs they gave her in the hospital made her memory bad." She thought for a moment. "I think she knew me."
"But you must have been… you didn't age."
"I know. It's strange. She started out as my daughter, and by the end I had to play her granddaughter — too young even to be her daughter then. She would touch my face and tell me I had such good skin."
"Didn't she tell anyone? I mean, it must have been strange. Did she know you were her mother?"
"Yes. It was our secret. She used to laugh at how I never aged a day while she grew older every year — until it wasn't funny any more."
She paused, thoughtful for a while.
"We tried," she laughed, but there wasn't much humour in it. "We tried to bring it out, to activate the magic within her. It didn't work. Nothing did. In the end it just hurt her."
"That's… terrible."
"Is it? Yes, I think it might be. You're either fey, or you're not. You don't get to choose."
"Amber, I'm so sorry. You must miss her very much."
"I wouldn't change it. If I could swap a year of my life for a year of hers, it would be different, but that's not the way it works. Instead you are given the years that are yours. Her years were wonderful. She was a beautiful girl."
"I don't know what to say."
"As I say, it was a long time ago."
"It's strange, Amber. You've never mentioned her before. I never even knew you had a daughter. Why are you telling me this now?"
"It brings back memories — mostly good ones." I caught a glimpse of her sad smile in the half-light. "You're very lucky."
I looked down at the child in my arms. "I like to think so."
"You already have one child who's come into her power. She will outlive you, perhaps, but you won't see her age and die."
"I hadn't thought of it like that."
"Your son — well you won't know until it happens. With fey power on both sides, he stands a better chance, but there are no guarantees."
I looked down at him. He'd stopped drinking, his eyes were closed and his limbs had gone floppy. I withdrew the teat and he made a half-hearted attempt to get it back, but quickly turned his head into my chest and went back to sleep.
"At one time," I told her, "all I wanted for my daughter was that she would grow up as a normal girl with a normal life."
"Be careful what you wish for," said Amber. "It's not easy watching your children die, even if they have a good life. It's not something you ever get over."
"No. I don't suppose it is," I agreed.
"Treasure every moment, Dogstar. You have no way of telling how long you have." She stood, sliding across the room with lithe grace. "Good night, sleep well."
She vanished into the dark and I sat quietly with a lightly snoring baby for some time before I made my way back upstairs. Settling him back into his cot, I wondered what would become of him. I went back to bed, listening to Blackbird breathe in the dark, and by the time I went back to sleep, the first signs of dawn were showing behind the curtains.
The next morning I woke up late and was immediately summoned to see Garvin.
"I have a list of items for you. I hope you know what you're looking for."
He placed a folder in front of me. I opened it to reveal several sheets of paper with typed lists of items on them. "What's all this?"
"It's what you asked for, a list of all the unusual items stolen since the release of the prisoners from Porton Down."
"Can't they narrow it down a bit?" I turned over the first sheet to find the list continued on the next, and the next.
"They could if they knew what they were looking for."
"A seventeenth century chalice stolen from a church near Toxteth, ceremonial robes from another church near Barnstable, a replica sword stolen from a museum in Burgess Hill. How are we supposed to narrow it down."
"That," said Garvin, "is your problem. You have the list. Now you need to tell me what they're doing with it all."
"But these weren't necessarily stolen by any of the escapees. They could have been nicked by anyone."
"Then you need to identify which of it is important, don't you?"
I went down the list. "Well, I guess we can eliminate anything that's a replica, can't we?"
"I don't know," said Garvin, "can we?"
I slid the papers back into the folder. "Let me work on it, see what I can figure out. There must be a pattern to this somewhere."
"Fine," said Garvin, "but in the meantime these people are still running around loose. I want them caught and dealt with, and whatever it is they doing stopped. If you find them, you can ask them what all this is for yourself, can't you?"
"If we find them," I pointed out.
"You're not going to find them in there," said Garvin, nodding towards the folder.
"Perhaps," I said, "but we're not having much success finding them anywhere else, are we?"
"We'll see," said Garvin.
"When are we going to do something?" Alex was pacing up and down the office floor between the empty desks. "We never do anything."
"We are doing something," said Eve. "I'm reading, or I was until you interrupted me. Chipper is doing whatever Chipper does when he's plugged into that machine, and Sparky is… What are you doing, Sparky?"
Sparky looked over the monitor across the cluster of desks. "The internet is still working — I'm downloading movies. There's this Chinese site — you can get anything on here."
"Anything good?" asked Alex.
"I've got Evil Undead 3 if you want to watch?"
Alex sighed. "Don't you ever watch anything but zombie flicks?"
"I watched that thing the other night with the bald guy in it. That didn't have zombies."
"No. It had aliens instead. Why can't we watch something that doesn't involve the human race being wiped out."
"What could be wrong with that?" asked Eve.
She said it jokingly, but Alex caught something in her tone that didn't follow the joke. Alex watched her, but Eve just shook her head and returned to reading.
Sparky went back to browsing files for download. Alex walked up and down the office again. It was an odd place. Eve said the company that owned it had gone bust, so they'd sounded the fire alarms and marched everyone who worked there outside and locked the doors. The desks and chairs were just as they'd left them, newspapers open, coffee mugs half-full of cold coffee with lines around it where the water had evaporated. It was spooky, as the people had been disintegrated leaving everything else in its place. There was even an empty pair of shoes under one of the desks as if the person wearing them had simply vanished.
"Why don't you read a book?" said Eve.
"What? One of your weird-arse mystical relics, or that one about the universe being two-dimensional?"
"Flatland," said Eve. "It's a very thought-provoking book."
"It is not good. It is boring. B-O-R-R-I-N-G, spelled D-U-L–L."