Chapter 248 The Stranger Who Discovered The Corpse
POV: Nadia | Rookeries border streets, Southwark
I have been marked since I was fourteen, which is the age I was when the fae gate in the Peckham market opened for approximately four seconds during what was officially described as a gas main issue and what was actually the specific kind of boundary thinning that happens when fae activity is concentrated in an area and the boundary between their world and this one becomes temporarily insufficient, and in those four seconds I saw through it and what I saw through it changed the specific quality of my perception permanently, and the changed perception has been producing the specific quality of my life ever since, which is the life of someone who can see the world that exists alongside the ordinary one and who has not found a way to stop seeing it.
I am twenty-eight now and I am a community support worker in Southwark and I spend my days doing the work that marked humans do in the supernatural community's margins, which is providing services to people who exist in the spaces between the supernatural world and the human one, and I have been doing this work for six years and I have developed the specific professional equanimity that the work requires, which is the ability to see things clearly without being destroyed by the seeing.
Tonight the seeing is harder than usual.
The battle started at dawn and it has been moving through the streets since then in the specific way that urban battles move, which is not like a field battle with clear lines and positions but like a spreading event, multiple engagements at multiple points with corridors and intersections and building facades defining the shape of each one and with the Veil working at varying effectiveness across the different areas depending on how many supernatural combatants are in a given space and how much their activity is overwhelming the barrier's capacity.
I am in the Rookeries border area on the south side, which is the area where the Covenant's eastern approach is meeting the coalition's southern defensive line, and I am here because I was called here at five this morning by the Rookeries network that I have been part of for two years, to help with the civilian evacuation of the streets that are going to be in the battle's path, and the evacuation is mostly done and I am working the last corridor when I find the body.
He is seventeen, which I assess from his face, and he is wearing the specific gear of Callum Brennan's younger pack members, the Rookeries insignia on the jacket that I have seen on a dozen different people over the two years I have been connected to this community, and he is dead against the wall of a building on the corner of a street that is not a main street and which is the kind of street that a young fighter ends up in when they have been separated from their unit and when the separation has produced a situation they were not equipped to handle alone.
The wound is significant and it is recent and he died probably in the past thirty minutes, which means he was alive when I was two streets over doing the last corridor check, which is not information that helps anything but which my mind is producing anyway in the specific way that minds produce unhelpful information in the aftermath of things.
I have my phone out before I have decided to call, which is the automatic response, and I am connected to emergency services at the same time that I understand I am connected to emergency services, and I describe the location and the body and the wound and I give the address twice because I know from experience that addresses given once do not always land correctly when the person giving them is managing something while giving them.
The operator is calm and professional and she takes the information and she tells me a unit will respond.
The unit arrives in nine minutes, which is fast, and the two officers who come around the corner have the specific quality of London police officers who have been doing this long enough that they have the professional equanimity of people who have seen difficult things, and they look at the corner where I am standing and they look at the wall and they look at each other and then they look at me with the expression of people who are trying to understand why I am standing in an empty street gesturing at a wall.
They cannot see him. The Veil is working on them completely, the body invisible to anyone who cannot see through it, the wall exactly a wall, the corner exactly empty, and I am standing in it pointing at something that they cannot see and which they are therefore looking at as the absence of something rather than the presence of it.
"He's there," I say. "Against the wall. A young man. He's dead. He has a Rookeries jacket on."
The officers look at the wall. They look at each other.
"Can you describe what you see, ma'am?" one of them says, with the careful professional quality of someone managing a situation they have been trained to manage, which is a member of the public behaving unusually at a scene with no visible incident.
"I can see the truth," I say, and I say it with the specific frustration of someone who has had this conversation in various forms for fourteen years. "Nobody else can."
Behind me, further down the street, I hear the specific sounds of the battle moving closer, the engagement that has been two streets over coming toward this street, and I understand what it means for the corridor I just cleared and for the two officers who cannot see what is happening and for the body against the wall and for me, which is that I need to move.
More bodies are appearing. I can see them from the corner, two more at the far end of the street, the battle spreading through this section in the specific way it spreads through urban areas, filling the spaces between the main lines.
The officers are still at the wall, still looking at the space where the body is.
I run.
"The city's destroying itself," I say to the street, to the running, to the fourteen years of seeing what nobody else can see and which tonight is everywhere and in everything and which I cannot stop seeing.