Gregory Grey and the Fugitive in Helika

CHAPTER 18.1

  Lesley's Diary - Culling - August 18, 1909

  Stories make spy work seem exciting.

  It’s really, really not.

  In stories, the protagonist just seems to happen upon the right time and the right place, just as critical information is being disseminated/ left out in the open/ discussed.

  Again, a protagonist’s primary superpower is the author’s plotting convenience.

  In real life, you have to turn invisible, sneak into the criminal Headquarters, stick around in a busy looking corridor, until you see an important looking official go through, and then you follow them to their meetings.

  Sometimes, because you don’t know the language or dialect, the meeting is pointless; you’ll wish you hadn’t, but you’re stuck inside a stuffy and smelly room until someone opens the door.

  And then back you go into that busy looking corridor, wondering how many really important meetings you may have missed while you were stuck inside. And the whole thing starts anew.

  One day. It takes exactly one day for you to get skull-gougingly bored.

  That’s when you realise you’re going to have to do it again tomorrow, and you almost cry.

  But you go.

  And on the third day of dreaming up way to creatively murder people for their insane, mundane and inane conversations, you hit pay-dirt, and it’s all worth it.

  I hit the mother of all conspiracies.

  Earlier this afternoon, I came out of my umpteenth useless meeting, and saw Cassius come into the Camp offices. He had company: a man, his face Obscured; his uniform, Imperial. I don’t know who he was, but he was important – a Big Spook.

  I followed them into an office – and inside were Linus and Bouche. They weren’t looking too happy. They and Cassius looked downright sick, and it wasn’t from whatever had got the rest of the camp. They looked haunted.

  He performed some sort of detection spell… but he couldn’t detect me. Yet another perk of being Demon Queen, I suppose.

  I had the pieces of this little conspiracy, and all I really needed now was a story. Today, I heard that story.

  Cassius and the other called the Big Spook the Teacher.

  The Teacher had recruited Cassius, Linus and Bouche sometime before the Camp was set up. Somehow he convinced them that he hated what Helika was doing to the Reflectives. Somehow he convinced them that he was in touch with the Domremin Throne, and in the employ of the Domremin King. He convinced them that there was a plan… a grand plan, to get the Empire to permanently accede the Falstead region to the Reflectives.

  Cassius, Linus and Bouche had lapped it up.

  To do this, the Empire would need to be put under international pressure. To generate that international pressure, the abuse of Reflectives must be made public. To make the abuse of Reflectives public, the Teacher, with Domremin backing, would establish the Blood Census. And to make that abuse prominent, the Reflectives must be seen to suffer badly.

  People needed to fall sick. For that you needed a disease… or more accurately, a poison that manifests as a disease. Enter the White Death. But the poison needed to be administered. Here, the Teacher tells them that they were going to become agents of the Domremin Throne.

  I’ve heard fairy-tales that sounded more real.

  With that blessing, Cassius and the others took to poisoning the camp food and supplies. And sure enough, we fell sick.

  Only, the riot was not part of their plan.

  Today, the Teacher was here to help them mitigate the disaster of the riot… or so they thought. What the poor sods found out instead was that the riot, or something similar, had been the plan all along.

  The Teacher doesn’t want Reflective rights. The Teacher doesn’t care about Reflectives one way or another. What he does care about, is war.

  He told them that the riot could not have gone off better, and that their service to him had been invaluable. It was hard, even knowing what they’d done, to see them crumble. They argued, they negotiated, they begged and they even tried to attack… and at the end, they cried.

  They were crying when he told them that next week, when the antidote ran out, there would be a fresh stockpile of it brought in. But not enough. And the poor refugees would riot again, this time amongst each other, and Domremy would have no choice but to declare war on Helika for its ill treatment of Reflectives.

  He said he was telling them this because they were owed the truth… the truth of the role they played in his vision.

  And then I watched him kill them. I couldn’t have saved them if I’d wanted to… I am not all powerful… and I didn’t want to.

  This will be my last diary entry for a while. I don’t how, but I’m going to get us out of here.

  Really, there’s nothing else I can do.