Chapter 4
Chapter Four
It takes forty-five minutes to reach the airfield. I clutch the steering wheel the entire way and watch for police, half expecting to be stopped and searched again, but I arrive without incident.
The stress of this job is what will kill me in the end.
The airfield is small, used chiefly by business travellers and the flying school, with the occasional government flight. There is no commercial traffic and no crowd, but security is tighter than it appears. Government wards cover the perimeter, embedded in the fencing, road and gatehouse.
My standing delivery pass—keyed to both the car and my bounty-hunter licence—is fixed inside the windscreen.
As I approach the barrier, pale-violet script sweeps over the bonnet.
The pass warms against the glass, the reader flashes green, and the gate rises.
The guard checks his screen, glances at my number plate and waves me through.
He does not care who I am or what I am delivering.
The pass matches the vehicle, and that is enough.
I follow the perimeter road towards the hangar; the track never crosses the runway itself.
The sharp, chemical smell of aviation fuel and de-icer catches in the back of my throat before Mina and I leave the car.
Old snow lies in wind-scoured ridges along the edge of the tarmac, frozen hard enough to crunch beneath my boots.
Overhead, a light aircraft drones through its circuit while the wind cuts across the open ground far harder than it does the city streets.
The hangar door is rolled partway open, and a rectangle of orange light spills across the tarmac. A sleek white private jet sits beneath the strip lights.
I greet the pilot and his crew.
Impassive, the pilot waits while I unzip the body bag. Bruce’s cheeks are still pink. His breathing remains slow and steady beneath the oxygen mask.
The pilot helps me transfer him to a gurney and strip away the monitoring equipment.
He is their responsibility now.
He will be safe.
“Here you are, love.” Lee, one of the ground crew, drags a second bag towards me, his shoulders straining beneath his jacket.
I do not open it. I have been told the contents belong to someone unclaimed, someone whose family could not afford a burial, and I choose to believe that. Any careful observer would see it is not a twelve-year-old boy; the proportions are wrong.
But it is a body, and a body is all my cover requires.
We load the substitute into the hover rig.
“Been frozen a while,” Lee says. He raps his knuckles against it; the sound is hollow and metallic. “Shouldn’t smell. Oh, and your dog food’s by the hangar door.”
“Thank you.” I acknowledge him with a lift of my chin.
Mina is already there, her nose pressed to the box. It arrives frozen, rock-solid, and in this weather nothing will thaw before we get home.
Back at the car, I stow the body bag and the dog food, then check my kit. The oxygen mask needs a thorough wash before it touches another child, and I have cleaning solution at home. I would replace the mask, but funds are low. The oxygen bottle is almost spent too, but it should last one more job.
One more child.
Everything secured, I drive through the gate, pull onto the verge and cut the engine. I unclip my belt, open the door and inhale.
The wind has strengthened. It races across the empty field, carrying the clean, metallic scent of imminent snow. A vast, low white sky presses down on the runway, and the landing lights have come on early.
With my hands buried in my coat pockets, I watch the jet taxi. Its engines climb to a roar that vibrates through my boots until the wheels lift and the aircraft rises into the colourless sky.
Cloud swallows it.
Only then do I release the breath trapped in my chest.
I close the door, restart the engine and drive.
Mina whines, licks her lips and eyes the box wedged into the passenger footwell.
“No. You’ve already had sausages. You can wait.”
Her guarding instincts around food are strong, and I respect them. She eats in peace and, in return, never growls or snaps at my hand. I am not undoing months of training to let her crunch a bone on the passenger seat, even if the upholstery has seen better days.
“Hush,” I tell her. “Besides, everything is still frozen. You could crack a tooth.”
Her expression remains deeply unconvinced.
She will need a proper walk when we get home, an hour at least, and the thought of it makes me long for bed and oblivion. I will walk her anyway. She did not choose this life any more than I did.
Some days, I think that without her and the children I help, I might not be here at all.
My hands tighten on the wheel. My gaze drops to my wrists.
Two marks where there should be hundreds of sigils. A sleep mark and a truth mark. Permission to hunt for the very people who hollowed me out.
When I failed the Games, they severed me from my magic and burned away every sigil I had, leaving only these two because my blood can still anchor and power them. One more leash disguised as a licence. Useful enough for the work, and a reminder of everything I can never have again.
Had I never felt the surge of it, the loss might hurt less. What you do not know cannot wound you. But I had it. Knew it. Loved it. I was told I was ‘special’.
‘Immortal’ is a rich person’s word. I should know; I grew up answering to it.
An ambition polished into a title over centuries until everyone forgot it had begun as a sales pitch.
The powerful families still die—feuds, backlash, accidents, politics—and down here, past childhood, we age as slowly as they do.
The years were never the difference. Magic heals them and it does not heal us, and nothing they have found yet stops the Fade.
I am drifting towards it, year by year, like everyone else.
I turn towards the bounty-hunter crematorium, known, without imagination, as the Body Farm. Bounty hunters are grim people. Grim people choose grim names.
I dislike leaving Mina in the car with food on board—she punishes me by chewing something essential—so we both climb out.
The body bag floats beside me while I scan my identification at the security panel.
Inside, the building is a cold, grey box. No windows, tolerable ventilation and no heat. The air smells faintly of metal, chemicals and old dust. Mina’s claws click across the concrete floor.
I would like to claim the place is dignified, with metal fridges, spotless corridors and something clinical or even funeral-solemn about it. It is not. Nothing here is built to be looked at.
Because of the Fade, people fear the dead.
The disease takes the hair and the teeth first, then shrinks its victims by degrees and lets them die slowly, without dignity.
The pattern appears random. One person stays healthy for two centuries; another begins fading before fifty.
The government calls it a virus, insists that banning magic in the Districts has contained it, and has been saying so since before I was born.
My contacts beyond Elyrion insist our people do not die this way anywhere else.
What the ban has certainly contained is curiosity. Bodies stay sealed from collection to destruction. Nobody inspects them, touches them or wants to breathe the same air, and rapid disposal costs less than identification.
Which is how I can walk a stranger through that door and leave with a boy’s name on an urn.
The clerk behind the desk huddles in a coat as thick as a sleeping bag, with a woollen hat pulled low and gloves covering her hands. Her breath mists in the chill.
I used to greet her with “Good morning” or “Good afternoon”. I stopped long ago.
Her blue eyes narrow as I approach. I focus on her red-tipped nose rather than her expression.
“Bounty hunter seven-six-five-three-seven-five,” I say.
“Right. Paperwork and evidence?”
I set the evidence bag, camera and chit on the counter. She ignores them at first and makes me wait. Then she changes her gloves and wrinkles her nose as she lifts the camera between two fingers.
“Little boy this time. Bruce Boneweather. Poor kid.” She drops the evidence bag into a box, then taps the control panel beside her with one gloved finger. “Crematorium Three. Your pass will work.”
I nod. She mutters something unkind as I leave.
I do not turn back.
Two steps along the corridor, I realise Mina has stopped. She stands rigid, staring at the clerk. No growl. Just that steady, disconcerting gaze of hers.
I tap my thigh. Her ears flick, and she follows.
We have argued about her presence often enough that the clerk has finally surrendered. It has not made her gracious.
Three doors along: Crematorium Three.
I press my pass to the reader.
It flashes red.
I wait, refusing to return to the desk. I scan it again.
Red.
Again.
Red.
On the fourth attempt, the light turns green.
Of course.
A petty punishment for bringing Mina inside, for existing, or both.
I hold the door while the body bag glides through.
The frigid air seeps beneath my coat. There is no furnace here, and no flame.
At the press of a button, the body bag detaches from the hovering rig and slides into the chamber. The empty cradle glides backwards to wait beside the door. I will return it to the car and fit a fresh bag before the next job.
I enter the sequence.
Inside the machine, vials mix and react, glass chiming faintly as liquids hiss through narrow tubes. Alchemy I have never grasped. Then comes a brief, brilliant flash of vaporising magic, bright enough to burn through my closed eyelids.
Silence follows.
The chamber rolls out an urn inscribed in careful lettering: brUCE BONEWEATHER.
My stomach tightens.
I seal the lid and cradle it for a moment, the metal cold against my gloves. Then I set the urn on the collection shelf and exhale. Somewhere across the city, two people are waiting for news they will never survive unchanged. They will grieve over ash that is not their son.
Their boy is alive.
I hold on to that as Mina and I leave.