Born of Metal: Rings of the Inconquo Page 9

  I stared up at him in stony silence, jealous of his height advantage, but I was determined to not let him sense any intimidation. He could smell fear, like bees and dogs.

  His eyes narrowed hatefully, his lip curling into a snarl. “Do you think you are so special, so gifted that the rules do not apply to you?”

  Stung, I shook my head, holding his gaze.

  “No? Then perhaps you think your age or inexperience should excuse you from the common decency of showing up for work on time?”

  Again, I shook my head without letting my stare waver. I seemed to have lost my voice.

  “Really,” he said softly, cocking his head, snakelike. “Then what makes Ibukun Bashir so free, so untouchable? Your looks, your test scores, your gender, the colour of your skin?” He raised his voice. “Tell me, Ms Bashir. Explain it to us!”

  He gestured to the crowd of staff frozen in place. My cheeks burned with embarrassment. Determined not to cry and just as determined to stand up for myself, I opened my mouth.

  But Meredith stepped out from the crowd, one palm out. “All right. This is a conversation to be had behind closed doors.”

  Shelton bristled and turned cold eyes on Meredith. “I will handle this without any assistance from you, Ms Janssen.”

  Shelton turned his gaze and his whole body squarely to face me. Behind him, Meredith gave a little shiver of anger. With a slow exhale, she leaned forwards, her voice quiet. “Adrian, please, this does not look good.”

  Dr Shelton ignored her.

  “Ms Bashir, you’ve yet to answer my question.” Dr Shelton sniffed. “Please explain to all present why you feel free to insult both this institution and the many people who work here with your perpetual laziness and deceit.”

  The heat growing in my belly finally sprang to my tongue. “Lazy and deceitful?” I cried, outraged. “You pile meaningless work on me out of petty spite. Do you, Doctor Shelton, have nothing better to do with your time than henpeck, belittle and tyrannise interns?”

  I was trembling and out of breath, but also exhilarated. Shelton stood rigid, his face reddening and eyes widening. He seemed unable to speak and that emboldened me.

  “Clearly not,” I went on, taking a step towards him, bringing us nearly nose to nose, “because that is all you seem to do. That is when you aren’t lurking around corners like a miserly spectre, waiting to nag, jeer and bitch! You are nothing but a small-minded, ignorant brute! A pretender and a persecutor. But, I forgot,” I sneered with dramatic irony, “that’s your field of study. Isn't it? Excuse me, oh, great professor of vindictive bullying!”

  Shelton rocked back on his heels, expression growing thunderous.

  “That’s enough,” Meredith’s voice pitched sharply at me this time, but it was barely audible as my heart hammered in my ears. “You had your say, so let’s —”

  “You, sir,” I said, hissing the words, ignoring her and narrowing my eyes at Shelton. “You are everything which is provincial, rigid and backwards in this building, this country and this world. You are just the nearest of a long line of strutting and sneering tyrants in tiny sandcastles. If you weren’t such a nuisance, you’d be laughable! A bloody joke. That’s what you are.”

  Adrian Shelton’s face was nearly purple with fury. I wondered if it was possible for a person to explode. I was nearly to the point of laughing at his trembling, swollen face, when a change came over him that made my blood run cold.

  The furious pallor slid away, his eyes became glittering slits. A thoroughly wicked smile spread across his face. A viper’s fanged grin would have been less venomous.

  The rush of victory drained out of me as I realised what a mistake I’d made. With a sinking sensation, I followed his stare to my hand.

  The rings glittered on my fingers.

  In my rush to get to work this morning, I hadn’t stowed them in my bag. My stomach clenched hard enough to make my legs quiver.

  “Not even your bulldog, Schottelkirk, can save you this time,” he said softly. “Falsifying a discovery is an act of criminal proportions.”

  I tried to recover that defiant fire, but it had guttered out completely, leaving me hollow except for an impending sense of dread. I covered the rings with my other hand.

  Behind Shelton, I noticed Meredith’s expression harden. She had seen the rings.

  The little crowd of staff watched dumbly, knowing that something had changed in the scene they were witnessing. Everyone looked at me with a mixture of shock and perhaps fear. I was not one of them, not anymore. Shelton’s public accusation had changed everything even if it wasn’t true. I had somehow, irrevocably, become Other.

  “I … It’s …” The words squeezed out of my tightening throat as my vision began to blur. I looked at Meredith, a woman I respected and who’d always had a smile for me. I saw the face of a stranger. The hard lines of her expression seemed set at every angle against me.

  “Meredith, please,” I managed, “it’s not true.”

  But she shook her head. “Ibby,” Meredith said, her voice flat and cold. “You should leave.”

  “But … I …”

  “Now.”

  It was all I could do to leave the museum without running and bursting into tears.

  Chapter Ten

  I walked the street, aimless and bereft.

  How could I have forgotten about the rings? How could I have been so stupid?

  I felt their weight on my fingers. I wanted to yank them off and hurl them away. I could have hurled them into the street to be smashed by a bus or chucked them down an open grate, condemned to the subterranean dark. I convinced myself I could do it if I really wanted. I could exercise a hollow but no less satisfying justice on the item that had brought such chaos, fear and pain to my life.

  I could have, but something deep inside told me not to.

  As I wandered down streets that were becoming more and more unfamiliar, I rationalised. Turning down an alley that smelled strongly of curry and wet sneakers, I began to enumerate the reasons aloud to the rings.

  “Schottelkirk is connected. Just because a bridge is burned doesn’t mean we can’t get you out to the public. Even if my name can’t be on the project at first, they won’t be able to deny what the tests show. Once they realise … everyone will know Shelton accused me falsely.”

  On the street adjoining the alley, a metro police car shot by, sirens blaring. I jumped, wondering if Shelton had contacted the police. As the sirens faded into the general clamour of London, I shook my head at my own foolishness. The museum knew where I lived, where I went to school; if they wanted me arrested, they would send officers there.

  My heart took its time returning to its normal rhythm. It was a few minutes and a turn down another alley before I resumed talking with the artefacts on my fingers.

  “Besides, I’m an archaeologist, Shelton and Meredith be damned. I’m not going to throw an ancient treasure away just because I’m having a bad day.”

  Up ahead, where the alley opened onto the street, a few people stood sharing a smoke. They were speaking too low to understand, but their voices susurrated between the brick walls of the alley into a kind of hissing murmur. Half-consciously, I tightened my grip on my bag.

  “Also, I’m going to need you to keep me sane. I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life without metal, so you’re my long-term sleep aid at the very least.”

  Approaching the alley mouth, the smokers were so engrossed with their conversation, they didn’t make room for me to pass. I quickened my pace, intending to slip around them without having to walk between the streams of tobacco fog.

  “Excuse me,” I said to alert one that I was moving between him and the wall.

  Both smokers — thickly built men in coveralls and dark windbreakers — turned towards me, effectively blocking off the alley with their bulk.

  “Sorry,” one said with a slight shrug of his meaty shoulders.

  “I just need to get by you, gents,” I answered, assuming he hadn’t
heard me.

  “No, he means, sorry about this,” the other explained as he dropped and stamped out his cigarette.

  “What?” I turned to face him.

  A hand gripped the back of my neck.

  “This,” hissed the voice behind me as the alley wall rushed towards my face. I managed to get my arms up in time to keep from smashing into the brick, but I still struck the wall hard enough to fill my eyes with stars and my head with cotton.

  Someone stripped the bag from my shoulder and threw me to the ground, something my addled brain and unsteady legs were more than happy to comply with. Time took on a strange, syrupy consistency as I lay on the damp concrete, trying to makes sense of the dingy bits of rubbish in front of my vacant eyes.

  A call from further up the alley, “Hey, you find it?”

  The thick voice above me snarled a curse in frustration. “If I did, you think I’d still be shovin’ my nose in ‘er bag?”

  Snorting chuckles came from two of them standing at the alley mouth.

  “Stop sniffin’ around fer panties, yeh perv. Get to the shiny bits,” one chided, setting his partner to braying. “You can get your fill o’ that later.”

  I heard the contents of my bag being dumped to the alley floor, the thunk of books, clatter of pens and the brittle clank of my laptop. The latter sound woke me from my stupor. With a throbbing pain in my arms and one shoulder, I dragged myself into a sitting position. I stared at the heap of my things, dazed.

  “What are you doing?” My cheeks felt stuffed with cotton.

  A tall man with a bull neck and chin like an anvil was squatting over my stuff, hastily shaking whatever he held before roughly tossing it aside. “Nothin’,” he growled, but it was to his partners, not an answer to my question.

  One hooked his chin towards me, while the other fished out a fresh fag and hung it from his lips. “Check her.”

  My mind still hazy, I had just enough time to shift my gaze to the big mugger before he hauled me to my feet with one shovel-wide mitt.

  “Up you go,” he rumbled, one hand wrapped in the lapels of my jacket, while the other flicked out a switchblade that looked almost dainty in his thick paw. He waved the blade in front of my eyes, letting me see the razor edge.

  “You open that pretty mouth to scream, and I’ll cut you a fresh windpipe, understand?”

  Addled as I was, the most terrifying thing was not the threat itself, but the calm, almost workaday way he said it. He might have been talking about the weather or the latest football scores. Somehow, this cut through the rest of the fog, and the knife snapped into focus.

  “You get it.” He nodded from the other side of the switchblade. “Good girl, now let me see your hands.”

  Fear automated my responses. I straightened my arms, fingers extended. He took the hand that bore the rings, crooking the arm with the knife around it so he pinched my wrist inside his armpit. The blade still hung just in front of my face, as he grasped the rings, intent on removing them from my hand.

  That same deep feeling, rooted in my very soul, quickened, and I began to struggle.

  “No! Stop!” I screamed. The point of the knife came less than an inch from my eye.

  “What did I say, lass?” His voice was as hard and pitiless as the razor-sharp steel.

  Steel. A hard, vibrating song. A metal whose chord I’d threaded before.

  The big man was talking again in that same deadpan tone that had chilled me to awareness. “Be smart, and no more of that …”

  He didn’t finish his sentence. His eyes were drawn to the sinuous movements of his knife’s blade. It stretched and curled like a shiny, probing invertebrate, its sharp head searching for a soft home.

  “What the —” and then he screamed as a home was found, deep in his meaty hand.

  He released me as my mind let go of the blade. The metal sprang back into its rigid, straight shape, and he gave another hiss of pain. He released my arm and lurched a step away from me, looking at the blade without its handle, now jutting from his hand.

  I stood there gobsmacked by what I’d just done. Then the other two lunged towards me as their partner pitched against the wall, cradling his hand.

  Spotting the switchblade handle on the alley floor, I mentally grabbed the pewter pins holding the wooden grip together and shoved, hard.

  The handle rocketed forwards, and though I’d been aiming for the closest man’s stomach, the handle struck him squarely in the groin. He gave a windy squawk and fell to his knees, clutching himself feebly.

  The other man barrelled past, knocking his partner to one side as he reached out with both hands. His fingers brushed my sleeve as I threw my mind against the zipper of his slicker. There was a sudden hot, zipping sound as I yanked it upwards, and he gave a wet, strangled cry. He staggered backwards, pawing at his throat.

  I looked at the three hulking men crumpled before me, and I felt something heady and surreal. These men, these brutes, now humbled, had been brought low by my will alone. The sensation, the realisation of it was immediate and powerful. It was like vindication, a kind of manifested conviction. It felt good, but more than good, it felt … right. I looked down at the rings and thought it seemed as if they were saying, finally, she’s figured it out.

  There was a snarled curse, and I turned in time to see the big, thick-voiced man yank the blade from his hand. With blood dripping, he spun and hurled the red length of steel. I sent it flying sideways with one flick of my hand. It buried itself in the alley wall.

  He wasn’t so easily dissuaded. Snarling another curse, he charged, one hand raised to smash me flat. He wasn’t wearing a windbreaker, but the buttons of his open jacket provided excellent leverage to tug him off balance. His swing went so wide he stumbled past me and then, with a little more help from his buttons, smashed face first into the side of the building. He hit hard enough to make me wince. When he slid to the ground, I wasn’t surprised he made no motion to get up.

  I turned towards the other two, expecting to have to defend myself immediately, but they just stood there staring. The one nursing his groin looked from the handle in front of him to me and back again. The other, his zipper now limp with my attention elsewhere, rubbed at the purpling welts around his throat. Both stared at me in open terror.

  Reaching out with my new sense, I laid hold of half a dozen pieces of metal detritus in the alleyway and willed them to rise up. They climbed into the air, hovering between me and what was left of my attackers, a brutal promise made without words.

  “You boys should start running.” A smile I couldn’t help tugged at the corners of my mouth.

  A second more of consideration, and both men bolted from the alley without looking back.

  I let the hovering garbage hang for another moment before I relaxed, and the items pattered to the ground. A tremor travelled up my legs, then it wracked my whole body.

  Shock. I must be in shock.

  I was standing in a dirty alley with my bag emptied at my feet and an unconscious mugger behind me. If anyone happened by, I would have a hell of a time explaining myself.

  Stooping on unsteady legs, I shoved my books and laptop into my bag without stopping to inspect them for damage. My whole body still quivering, I left the alley, doing my best to walk without falling.

  I played the scene over and over in my mind as I walked the open thoroughfares.

  What had I done?

  With a power I barely understood, I’d disarmed and beaten three men. They weren’t like the scrappy ruffians from the other night. All three, judging by their weathered features were in their thirties, if not older. The way they’d trapped me meant they were experienced, had foresight. The thought of veteran criminals executing violent and coordinated robberies was enough to make me feel ill, powers or not.

  If they were random muggers, they wouldn’t have passed up my laptop. Or my textbooks, which could be sold on-line for nearly a hundred quid apiece.

  When the big one had declared “Nothin�
�” over my emptied bag, I’d thought he meant nothing worth taking. But when he was told to check me …

  “Let me see your hands.”

  A chill lifted the hair on the back of my neck. They’d been looking for the rings.

  That was it. And if it weren’t for the powers I’d inherited, they would have the rings right now. And what would have happened to me after they’d taken them?

  The thought hammered me, and I staggered unsteadily to a conveniently placed lamppost.

  People walked past, cars zoomed by, everyone going about their business. I clung to the post, the steel offering its comforting strength from beneath a thin layer of paint. My chest tightened. It was crippling to think that criminals — people I’d never met before, who didn’t know me besides my name or what I looked like — were coming to take something from me, and they didn’t care if I was hurt or even killed in the process.

  I’d always known there were bad people, even evil ones. They needed to be avoided, like traffic or a crack in the pavement. They were there, and they could ruin your day or even be dangerous, but they’d never been looking for me.

  Things had changed.

  Someone had come for the rings.

  But who? And how could they know I had them? Who might have told them?

  The list was small: Shelton, Schottelkirk and Meredith.

  It seemed impossibly out of character for the latter two to be involved in sending professional thugs after me, and Shelton as much as he was cruel and wicked, was really only a grandstanding bureaucrat. He wanted people to kowtow to his position, and he loved to lord his authority over his inferiors. I didn’t believe he had the spine for something like this. Plus, he thought the rings were fake.

  So why was this happening?

  I straightened, one hand still on the streetlamp. The back of my neck prickled with a sense of vulnerability. I had to keep moving. I wasn’t sure where I was going at first, but as I followed my feet, I realised I was headed to the university. I wasn’t ready to descend into the tubes, the open sunshine feeling safer than the enclosed underground. Muscle memory to the rescue.