“No family you could go to?” Caldera asked.
Leo shook his head.
“You were at Pudding Mill Lane station two nights ago, weren’t you?” Caldera asked.
Leo hesitated, then nodded.
“Did you go there alone?”
Another nod.
“What happened when you got there?”
Leo’s eyes flickered from me to Caldera. He hunched his shoulders. He’s scared, I thought. Scared of what?
“It’s all right,” Caldera said, and her voice was reassuring. “I’m not going to get angry.”
Leo didn’t answer. Caldera kept trying to talk to him, and I searched through the futures, trying different lines of questioning. Most petered out in silence, others led to nothing. One approach caught my attention. “Leo?” I said. “Where did you stay before?”
Caldera shot me a warning look. “At Phil’s,” Leo said.
“But that was connected to a group, wasn’t it?” I said. “An organisation. What’s their name?”
Leo was silent. “It’s okay,” Caldera said. “You can tell him.”
Leo looked down at the floor. “White Rose.”
I felt Caldera go still. Leo didn’t meet our eyes. “You mean the ones here in London?” Caldera asked. “Around Leicester Square?”
Leo nodded.
Caldera got to her feet. “I’ll be back in a second, okay?”
“How did—?” I started to ask Leo.
Caldera walked past me, grabbed my arm, and towed me out the door. “Come with me a sec.”
Once we were out in the hall, Caldera let go. “You could have asked,” I said. She hadn’t been trying to crush me, but my arm still hurt. Earth and force mages tend to forget their own strength.
“We might be in over our head,” Caldera said quietly.
I blinked at that. “Wait. Who are these White Rose people?”
“Independent group based out of London,” Caldera said. “Did you check this place out?”
“I think it’s a safe house. Supplies, gate wards, shroud wards. No one lives here.”
Caldera frowned. “That woman, the one you said divined this address. She tell anyone else?”
“She didn’t divine it—” I saw Caldera’s expression and decided this wasn’t the time to get into technicalities. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Caldera shook her head. “I’m calling for backup.”
“Wait.” I caught Caldera’s shoulder as she started to move past. “Why? Who are these guys?”
“They’re a brothel.”
“You’re scared of a brothel?”
“I’m not scared of them, and if you knew more you wouldn’t be arguing. These people are bad news.”
I looked towards the room where we’d left Leo. He hadn’t moved. “So he’s . . .”
“The kid’s a sex slave.”
I stared at Caldera. “How did—?”
“If he’s with White Rose, that’s what they use him for,” Caldera said. “Look at the way he sits and the way he answers. He’s used to adults telling him to do a lot worse than that.”
I looked towards the room again. Now that Caldera had said it, it fit in an unpleasant way. “I didn’t spot that,” I admitted.
“You run a shop,” Caldera said. “If you were an expert on sexually abused ten-year-olds I’d be a bit worried.” She shook her head. “But I’m not an expert either. I’ll try and get someone from the psych unit.”
“I don’t like this.”
“You’re not supposed to.”
“Not just that.” I gestured around to the house. “This. The kid’s been here for two days. Okay, what you said, if he’s a slave . . . why hasn’t someone from White Rose come to get their property back?”
“It’s warded. They can’t find him.”
I was silent. “What’s getting to you?” Caldera said.
“Something about this feels wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
“I don’t know. Just . . . out of place. Do you ever get the feeling you’re being set up?”
“You looked for danger?”
“As far as I could. Nothing I could see.”
Caldera didn’t answer. “You think I’m being paranoid?” I asked.
“No, I was getting the same feeling.”
I looked at her in surprise. “If you got this address, other people might have got it, too,” Caldera said. “Besides . . . it’s White Rose. There is a lot of shit going on with that group. I’ll feel a lot better when we have some support.”
I nodded. “I’ll watch him. You make the call.”
Caldera disappeared downstairs and I heard her start talking into her communicator. I hesitated, glancing through the futures again, but with Caldera talking they were too unpredictable to search far ahead. That’s the problem with divination—it doesn’t handle free will well. If I’m on my own somewhere deserted, I can look ahead hours, maybe even a day or more. But when you have people talking to each other, making decisions, then the futures keep changing and fuzzing, like clouds in a strong wind. You can see the shape, but they change so quickly.
I went back into the bedroom. Leo was still sitting there, tense. He hadn’t relaxed, and now that I knew what to look for, I could see the signs. His expression was blank, but his eyes didn’t move away from me, always watching. He was looking for any signs of a change in my mood. I wanted him to trust me, but I knew that would be almost impossible. The best I could hope would be that he would answer my questions.
“You remember two nights ago?” I said, sitting down. “When you went to the station at Pudding Mill Lane?”
Nod.
“You had something with you, didn’t you?” I said. I was careful to make my voice normal, unthreatening. “A little green marble.”
Leo hesitated, but I already knew the answer was yes. It’s one of the tricks of divination: by looking ahead to catch glimpses of replies, you can see all the possible answers that someone might give. Very revealing when someone’s deciding whether to lie. More experienced mages know to guard their reactions, making it harder, but Leo was too young. “Yeah.”
I looked to see what would be the best path to take. I wanted to find out who’d given him the focus, but that line of questioning would make him freeze up. I’d have to go the other way. “Were you supposed to take it to someone? Give it to someone?”
Another nod.
“Who were you supposed to give it to?”
“Dunno.”
“But you know what he looks like,” I said. I was trying to sound reassuring, though I wasn’t sure how good a job I was doing at it. I wished Anne were here—she’s good with kids. “Don’t you?”
Another nod, this one reluctant.
“Could you describe him to me?”
“I dunno.”
Footsteps sounded on the stairs and Caldera walked back in. “They’re on their way,” she said. “Should only be a few minutes.”
I nodded and turned back to Leo. “But it was a man?”
Leo nodded.
“Tall? Short?”
I kept asking, drawing information out piece by piece. Leo answered reluctantly, but he still answered—he was probably afraid of what we’d do if he said no. I didn’t much like that, but it didn’t seem the time to push it. The person Leo had met at Pudding Mill Lane had been a mage. Male, brown hair, tallish but not too tall, suit, light skin . . . “How old was he?” I asked.
“Old.”
“Forty? Fifty?”
“Twenty-five or something.”
Caldera didn’t smile. She pulled out her phone, tapped at the screen, then held it out to him. “Was this the guy?”
I looked at Caldera curiously. There was an edge to her voice that hadn’t been there before, and Leo seemed to sense it. He shrank back. “I dunno.”
“Leo,” Caldera said. “I need you to look at this picture. Was this the man you saw on Thursday night?”
Unwillingly, Leo looked at the phone, stared at it for a few seconds, then nodded.
Caldera didn’t take her eyes off Leo. “Are you sure?”