Gregory Grey and the Fugitive in Helika

CHAPTER 13.6

  Lesley's Diary - Design - August 10, 1909

  A hundred and one executions.

  That’s how long it took for someone to figure out how Helika was going about determining the guilty. That someone wasn’t me, and it really should have been.

  I helped them choose after all.

  I thought I knew what anger felt like before, but I had been clueless. I’m almost scared of my own brain right now. It feels hot, so hot that everything else is whited out, reduced to noise.

  I’m angrier because we figured it out too late… for as soon as we realised their plot, they stopped calling people out for treason and executing them. Did they know we had figured it out, or did something else make them stop?

  For more than a day, the others and I watched as the condemned were called out. They rose, men, and women and even some children… and when we protested, when we swore we’d never give them up, they told us to stand down, and they went with the Spooks.

  They looked at peace. You shouldn’t bloody be at peace when you’re off to die. You should scream, and fight, and cry, and rage. Death has no dignity, whatever your reasons for choosing to die. Death has no dignity.

  I don’t know her name, but she was a small woman with bulging, worried-looking eyes and untidy, curly hair. She handled the Incoming at the South East Gate, and she had realised who the Spooks were taking and executing:

  The wealthiest of the Reflectives, that’s who.

  I was there when she realised it, almost breaking down in a complete fit when she realised her own complicity, and mine.

  How did the Spooks know who the wealthiest were? Because I, and the other gate staff, had helped the Incoming list their lands and titles when they arrived that the camp… it was the first thing we did.

  And if you’re executed for treason, as these men were, then the Empire is entitled to seize your properties.

  And they used me to select their targets.

  They’re going to regret that.

  Why couldn’t I have thought to rescue them before? Why? I don’t understand… how hard is it just to think something in time? I’m invisible, and can wield magic. It’s all I should need to rescue them… and I was too stupid to think of their rescue.

  A hundred people died today, because I was stupid.

  I must be a horrible person, because that honestly makes me feel worse than when I thought that five million had died because I was unworthy and unprepared. I feel sick, like I’ve never felt sick before.

  The executions are over for today. They executed a hundred and one of us.

  There are going to be no more executions tomorrow.

  I won’t let there be any.

  I can’t let there be any.