Diema was silent. With all their eyes on her, she shrugged again. This time the gesture seemed to say she’d made her case and they could take it or leave it. ‘It’s true that we want Ber Lusim’s network closed down,’ she said. ‘His beliefs are heresy — abomination. And besides, what he’s doing puts us at risk. It’s too visible. It makes people ask questions and look for patterns. So that’s why I was sent. That’s why I’m here, now, talking to you.
‘But I’d say the stakes are higher for you than for us. Lots of people have already died. But if Ber Lusim gets to the last prophecy, many, many more people will die.’ Diema’s gaze met Kennedy’s. ‘You read the book. Toller talks about the thousand thousand who are going to be sacrificed. A million people. I can’t believe you want that to happen.’
‘But that’s not why you came to us,’ said Kennedy. ‘You don’t give a damn how many people die, so long as it’s our kind and not yours. We’re no better than cattle to you. And the stakes? How could the stakes be higher, exactly? Secrecy is an iron law to you people. Anything that threatens the big secret, you rip it right out of the world. And you want us to believe that this — these maniacs running around loose, making all this noise — is no big deal for you?’
Diema pursed her lips, her eyes narrowing a little. ‘I expressed myself badly,’ she said, with stolid patience. ‘Of course this concerns us. But there’s a parable — about a traveller who is set on by robbers as he sits by his campfire at night. He takes a stick out of the fire to fend them off. Then, when his enemies are beaten, he throws the brand back into the flames and lets it be consumed.’
‘And we’re the stick?’ Kennedy said. ‘That’s sweet. And it’s a lot closer to the truth. But you gave yourself away, girl — when you were talking about the death of the woman and her children, and all of a sudden you had to go to the window and breathe some sweet, fresh air. So why is it so hard for you to say?’
‘To say what?’ Tillman asked. ‘What am I missing?’
Diema glanced at him for a moment, then lowered her gaze to the ground.
‘You’ve seen how they fight, Leo,’ Kennedy said, her voice sounding harsh and hateful in her own ears: because she really did hate this. The big unspoken lie, the sin of omission. She hated everything that was behind it. ‘You’ve seen how casually they kill.’
‘Seen it right up close,’ Tillman agreed. ‘Like you.’
‘But when Diema here dismantled the two Messengers who were about to torture me, she left them both alive. Concussed, bleeding, beaten to a pulp, but alive. And you said at the warehouse …’ She let the sentence tail off.
‘Same thing,’ Tillman confirmed.
Kennedy leaned forward, her face right up close to Diema’s. Like a scolded schoolgirl, Diema kept her head bowed and her eyes down. ‘You can’t kill your own, can you?’ Kennedy said. ‘You put us through all this because you can’t do it yourself. There’s one commandment you can’t break. You’re not allowed to shed the blood of the blessed.’
They held the tableau for a few seconds longer.
‘Answer me!’ Kennedy yelled.
Diema looked up at last. ‘You’re right,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘There are two commandments that can’t be broken — for which the punishment is exile, for ever. And one of them is … what you said. We can’t do this without you. We can find Ber Lusim and we can help you to stop him, but …’
The silence lengthened.
‘But you need us to pull the trigger on him,’ Tillman said.
Diema drew herself up to her full height, which was a head shorter than his. She stared up at him, her arms at her sides, as unbending as the upright of a cross. ‘It should come naturally to you,’ she said. ‘You talk about how easily we kill. But we kill for survival. You’ve killed for much less important things, like money, for example.’
Tillman seemed taken aback by the barely contained fury in her tone. He opened his mouth to answer, but Diema hadn’t finished. ‘The only question,’ she snarled, ‘is whether you want to work with me and use what I know or cut me loose and go your own way. Either way, I’ve said what I came here to say. And even though you’re my enemies, I never treated you as enemies. I gave you more respect than you gave me.’
A single red tear ran down the girl’s cheek. She didn’t move to wipe it away.
‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘That’s not the only question. Before I decide whether I can work with you — whether I can even bear to be in the same room with you — I want an answer on something else.’
The girl looked at her in stolid silence.
‘What’s eating you, Heather?’ Tillman asked. Clearly, he could see from her face that it was something big.
‘We thought there were only two kinds of emissary,’ Kennedy said. ‘The soldiers and the mothers. But suppose there was a third kind? Not fighters, exactly, but fixers. People who make things happen. People with connections and resources, who plant themselves in the Adamite world and do with money what the Elohim do with knives. Protect the Judas People and serve their interests.’
‘Why,’ Diema asked quietly, ‘would you suppose that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. How about because the Validus Trust put Emil Gassan in place to deal with the theft of Toller’s book from Ryegate House. Then Gassan brought me in and I met you, and I went to Leo. None of that was chance, and none of it was destiny. It was planned. You just said as much, right now. Someone set us up like dominoes. Anticipated our every move and the money of the Validus Trust was the first domino. Everything else flowed from that.’
Diema didn’t confirm or deny the hypothesis, and nobody else spoke. They were all staring at the girl.
‘Tell me that didn’t happen, Diema,’ Kennedy said. ‘Tell me we weren’t recruited.’
‘They’re called Nagodim,’ Diema said at last. ‘And they work in exactly the way you just described.’
Kennedy shook her head slowly. The certain knowledge that she’d been manipulated filled her with mixed emotions of outrage and relief. Outrage, because she was being moved around like a playing piece in a complicated game. Relief, because she was being moved around by some ordinary man or woman, not by Nemesis or Fate or God.
All the same, two men had died because of these manipulations. Jesus, they’d probably been behind the fortuitous stroke that had taken out Emil Gassan’s predecessor. Sooner or later, there had to be a reckoning. Kennedy said that to the girl with her eyes.
Aloud, breaking the heavy silence, she said, ‘You haven’t earned my trust. Nothing like. I still think your people are a kind of creeping poison, but this has to be stopped. So I say we work together.’
‘I agree,’ Tillman said. ‘With the same reservations. We pool our resources until we’ve done what we’ve got to do. Beyond that, we don’t make any promises or any assumptions.’
‘Do I get a vote?’ Rush asked.
Kennedy searched the boy’s face for a long second. She could guess at some of what he was feeling: it had to overlap at least a little with what she’d felt when she was helpless in the hands of Samal and Abydos. The difference was that nobody had suggested she should kiss and make up with Samal and Abydos. If there wasn’t so very much at stake, she’d be prepared to give the boy the right of veto here. As it was …
‘I vote yes,’ he said, before she could answer. ‘I’m good with it. In case anyone was wondering.’
He poured himself a glass of the water, which nobody had touched, and drank it down.