Taken

“That’s ridiculous. Anne’s one of the ones helping me. What information?”

“There was a tip-off from an apprentice—”

“Natasha. Jesus.” I covered my eyes. “She doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about. They’re arresting her over apprentice gossip!”

“That wasn’t all. How much do you know about this girl?”

“Why does it matter?” I took a glance down an empty corridor, searching through the immediate futures of opening the doors. Nothing was there and I kept going, navigating by the distant murmur of sound from the duelling hall.

“After they received the tip-off they did some investigation. And they found that Anne Walker knew or was in contact with all four missing apprentices.”

“Every apprentice knows every other apprentice. It’s not that big a community.”

“There’s more.” Talisid didn’t sound happy. “They found that in each case Anne had been in a position to learn where that apprentice would be just a day or two before their disappearance. And with the first victim, Caroline Montroyd, Anne seems to have been the only one who was told.”

I stopped. “How?”

“We always knew there was someone feeding information from the inside. We may have found that someone.”

I started walking again and quickened my pace. “It’s circumstantial.”

“Maybe it is. But I’m looking over the report right now and I assure you it’s very suspicious. Especially concerning a subject who was a Dark apprentice.”

“She wasn’t a Dark apprentice,” I said in frustration. “Her or Variam. They got kidnapped into it.”

“How do you know?” Talisid asked.

“They told me.”

“Has anyone else confirmed that story?”

“No . . .”

“I see.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Someone’s been trying to kill Anne. She’s the target.”

“Didn’t you say you thought there were two groups doing this?” Talisid said. I started to answer but he carried on, cutting me off. “Look, it’s not yet established that she’s a willing accomplice. She could be being used as an information source without her knowledge.”

I thought of how Anne always seemed to know what was going on amongst the apprentices. Luna’s words: The younger apprentices really like Anne. They tell her everything. Something uneasy twisted inside me.

I heard the sound of raised voices ahead. One of the voices was Variam’s, and as I heard it something fell into place. “I’ve found them,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

Talisid sighed. “Please try not to do anything stupid.”

“When have I ever done that?”

“I’ll let you fill in the response to that yourself,” Talisid said. “Good luck.”

I switched off the phone and looked down the corridor. A mage was standing in front of a closed door, arms folded, and Variam was shouting at him. One or two heads were peeking out of doors to see what the noise was about, but the tournament was still running and most of the mansion’s population was in the duelling hall.

I walked out around the corner. “You can’t do this!” Variam was shouting. “You have to—”

“Variam,” I said. “We need to talk.”

Variam and the mage both turned to me. The mage was lean and tough-looking, his eyes impassive. “This one yours?” he asked me.

“Variam,” I said again.

Variam shot the mage a glare, then stalked down the corridor towards me. “They’ve got Anne in that room,” he said as we turned the corner. “They won’t let me in—”

I opened a door to the left. It led into a small boxroom. Variam walked in and I closed the door behind us as Variam kept talking. “Look, you’ve got to do something. They think she—”

“Shut up,” I said.

Variam stopped, turning to stare in surprise.

“I just got off the phone with Talisid,” I said. “Remember Talisid? The guy who got me to investigate these disappearances?”

“Yeah.” Variam still looked taken aback. “So wh—”

“How did you know that?”

“What?”

“How did you know I was working for Talisid?”

“Uh—you were talking about it, last—”

“Last night in the woods, yeah. But you knew before. You told me at the motorway services while Anne was having that chat with Hobson.”

Variam hesitated. “You must have—”

“After I got home from that duelling class four days ago I got a message pointing me towards Fountain Reach,” I said. “You know what really bothered me about that message? How fast it was. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I started to think that the one who’d sent it must have been at the duelling class too. But even then there was a problem. Talisid hadn’t shown himself to you or Lyle or Charles or Natasha or anyone else. All you guys saw was me and Luna leaving the room and then coming back. But that doesn’t matter to Anne, does it? She can pick out a living person through a wall with no trouble at all. She would have known we were talking to Talisid. And she trusts you. She would have told you.”