Chapter Twenty-two: The Voice Revealed

It took four hours for her to get free of the police, eyebrow-man, and a really annoyed verger who didn’t appreciate people pounding on his door in the middle of the night. By the time she reached the crypt, she was exhausted, practically swaying on her feet.

Maria ran to her immediately.

“Did you wait up for me?” Stella asked, then remembered Maria couldn’t speak English. She repeated the question in Spanish.

Maria stuck out her bottom lip at the question, then pointed at the floor. “Sit. Now,” she said.

More than a hundred of the teenagers they had rescued were already on their way to the compound. The fifty or so that remained would follow soon. They’d taken most of the supplies they needed with them, but there were still a few sets of unused bedding lying around. Stella flopped down on top of one of those sets. Looking it over, she was on two woollen blankets and a thin pillow.

She was tired enough that it was all she would need.

“You’re about to fracturarte the hip,” Maria said, touching Stella’s leg and shoulder, and using some Spanish Stella didn’t know. It sounded like fracture, so that might be what she meant. When her fingers brushed against skin, they felt icy cold. “I can feel how close to being completamente deshecho my sanación is, and it’s already almost gone. Your shoulder is fine.”

Completamente deshecho and sanación she didn’t know, but her shoulder was fine and her hip not fracturarted or whatever, so it was all good. “I blame the bobbies,” Stella joked in English, then yawned. She blinked her eyes, straining to hold them open.

“This is serious,” Maria replied. She hadn’t understood the words, but she knew the joking tone. “If I sanar a lesión once, it’s as if it was never herida. If I sanar the same lesión a second time, it is never as good. You might end up with a permanent limp, or worse.”

That sounded really bad, actually. She didn’t want a permanent limp when a prefect hip was on offer.

“I’m keeping you here, on the floor resting, until the twenty-four hours is up. You have eight hours left; you may as well try to sleep some of it.”

It was six in the morning. Stella could make it to two in the afternoon.

When she woke, Maria was sitting beside her, drinking a cup of tea, and skimming through this morning’s London Eye. Since she only spoke Spanish, Stella imagined she was looking at the pictures. Wordlessly, Maria handed her a cup of water and didn’t speak until after Stella had drunk it all. “Three hours. Do not move.” She passed Stella the newspaper and wandered off.

The front page of the Eye was dominated by the bombing. City rocked by explosions. There was a picture of men brushing up glass in the street. Suffragettes were suspected, a source in the police had said. She-demons, the man last night had called them. Suffragettes on the front page two days in a row; that was unusual. She would have lost her paper prediction game if she’d remembered to play it yesterday.

She’d asked her bibi-daj about the suffragette’s once. The Romani woman had smiled fondly and told Stella that the voiceless would always find a way to make themselves heard. Stella had even considered joining them, adding her voice to theirs, her power to help achieve their goals, but before she had worked out a way to help, the bombings had started.

Twenty-four bombings since March. Post boxes. Businesses. Political offices. A particularly tasteless fountain in the front garden of a particularly odious Earl’s mansion. She knew the Earl of Bath only by reputation, which was to say, she knew enough to never want to meet the foul man.

She’d considered stopping the suffragettes, or at least the one group that was responsible for the bombings. They called themselves the Blood-stained Petals, and they had a crude mission statement, if such it could be called: burning love. They would find a man worse than all other men and burn whatever he loved.

They had avoided hurting people, which seemed to have been rather easy. The type of men they hunted never loved people. So long as they restricted themselves to property damage and hurt no one, Stella saw no reason to intervene.

There was another front page article, this one about the Birmingham Boys rioting in Aldgate High Street. Thirteen of them had been arrested. The article didn’t mention Elephant Boys, so it was likely Wag had escaped. It pointed out that no one knew why the Birmingham Boys had come to the city, but there were rumours of secret meetings. Stella considered that, looking around the crypt. The Sabinis had been working in smuggling, an area they usually left to the Hoxton gang, or someone had employed them to help with smuggling. Either way, they had been smuggling youths with incredible abilities out of Europe, into Britain. It probably hadn’t been that hard, with all the Spanish refugees flooding into the country.

The headlines at the end of May hadn’t seemed relevant to Stella at the time, but might be interesting to reread now. There had been one about Spanish refugees avoiding France. At the time, it had seemed reasonable. Spanish forces had held France for years before the French kicked them out at the end of the war. There was a reason the French teenagers she’d rescued spoke Spanish as a first language, and it wasn’t a nice reason.

The Sabinis moving into smuggling. The Elephant Boys escorting the Birmingham Boys to secret meetings. Gangs involved in kidnapping teenagers with abilities and bringing them to London. She didn’t see how the prosthetic limbs could be involved, unless it was owned by whatever nob had hired the Sabinis as muscle, but a high-class brothel was exactly the kind of operation Darby Sabini would run. His illegal activities always seemed to entice the top layer of society. He targeted aristocratic ne’er-do-wells with his fancy brothels, racecourse gambling, and ring fights.

If the brothel was Sabini’s, then Ronnie Staunton was Sabini’s, which fit with his interaction with DI Donald. If the warehouse had been Sabini’s, then all these teenagers had been… recruits? Targets? Weapons? What would he have done with almost one hundred and seventy teenagers with powers? How many did he already have?

If teenagers with powers was the reason a leader of the Elephant Boys met the Birmingham Boys at King’s Cross and was escorting them through neutral territories to a secret meeting, then it meant that at least one of the Birmingham Boys spoke with their leader’s voice. They were important.

She’d crippled the Birmingham Boys, set the Elephant Boys and the Sabini gang against each other, and dragged the Forty Elephants into the mess. She’d deprived Sabini of one hundred and sixty-nine potential weapons. There would be an uptick in gang-on-gang violence for a time, but ordinary people would benefit.

Smiling to herself, Stella read the rest of the front page.

There was a little piece advertising day three of the warlords of the wastes. Today it was about the deserters from the Russian and Japanese armies who were forming towns in the no man’s land between their former nations.

Norway had increased customs inspections. The Dutch were striking over wages. Albania had requested British mediation in their conflict with the Republic of Mirdita. There was a lot going on in the world. It was a busy Thursday.

She was doing the crossword puzzle, which the London Eye claimed the Prince of Wales loved, when her mother approached. Stella set the newspaper aside as her mother sat down beside her.

“Report,” her mother said, lightly. She’d want to know how Stella had been arrested. She would already know that it had happened, because eyebrow-man would have told her instantly. But he hadn’t asked Stella why. He hadn’t even wondered if she was innocent.

“Mama, I can’t leave today,” she said, instead.

“Stella, you’ll be able to move in two hours. Toma isn’t even back yet. There is no reason we cannot leave today or tomorrow, at the latest.”

“There is one reason, mama. I don’t think God wants me to.”

Her mother simply stared at her. No reaction, no blink, no emotion. That was good, full control of her expressions meant she was listening. “I asked for a report, Stella.”

“Mama, I am giving you one. God has Chosen me…” that was the wrong thing to say… “to save prostitutes…” no, what was wrong with her mouth? “He speaks to me in my dreams.” She was going to be tied to her mother’s belt for certain. “Like Joan of Arc.”

Her mother frowned, but before she could speak there was a gasp from the side. Stella turned to see Isabel Cortés sitting a few feet away, staring at her. “You hear it, too?” the spokeswoman for the Spanish teenagers asked.

Stella looked at her and nodded. “I hear God in my dreams. He whispers the names of my Abilities in a voice as loud as the sky and as vast as the sun.”

“Do others hear it?” her mother asked Isabel.

Isabel nodded. She turned and waved to some of the others. Five of them came over, but Maria and Diego were the only ones Stella recognised. “They are asking about the Voice,” Isabel said, switching to Spanish so the others could understand. “Stella says it is God.”

“It is not God,” Maria replied. “God would not turn my brother into a tree.”

Her mother was staring at Maria now. “You hear this voice too?”

“Yes, sometimes. It comes to me when I get stronger, and one other time.”

“Five times it has spoken to me,” Diego said.

“You’re level five?” Stella asked.

“Level?” her mother queried.

“I am fire,” Diego replied.

“Enough!” Her mother’s voice cracked out like a whip. “One at a time. There is a voice. Tell me about this voice. When did you first hear it? What did it say to you?”

“It was the night of my birthday, and it said I was level one, and told me my Abilities. Just names, I had to work out what they did on my own. Then again, after I saved DI Donald, and after the warehouse fire.” Stella carefully didn’t name her Abilities. There were too many ears. “Each time I have received a level after my birthday, it has been when I met someone else who had Abilities.”

The others quickly agreed with her, it came on their birthdays when they turned sixteen, it came when they levelled up. No one had agreed on the last point she made, most of them had thought they were alone until they were gathered together.

“And one other time,” Maria said. “When my little brother died. I kept using my power on him, over and over. It told me to stop; I can’t heal the dead.”

Isabel slipped her arm around Maria’s shoulder, holding her as the healer softly sobbed.

“It tells you a level and gives you an Ability?”

“Two Abilities per level,” Isabel said.

Her mother considered it for a moment, then nodded decisively as a plan solidified in her mind. This was the part Stella had most dreaded; her mother had an idea of what to do next. Stella had hoped to have thoroughly convinced her before this occurred. “Thank you, all of you,” her mother said. “This is something we must discuss in depth at a later point, and we will. In the meantime, I need to have a talk with my daughter. If you will please excuse us.”

The teenagers moved back to give them space, as Stella still wasn’t allowed to move. Her mother sat down beside her head. “Stella, tell me everything.”

Stella tried, but there was a lot. Still, she sat there for two hours, going over everything that had happened: the parts her mother already knew; the parts she didn’t. The Voice. The names of her Abilities. Her struggle with destiny. The gang war she’d began.

“Oh, my little varra,” her mum said softly. “A gang war doesn’t stay between the gangs. The violence will spill over into the pubs and markets. Shops will have their windows smashed, stalls will burn, innocents bleed. It will be a cycle of reprisal and counter-reprisal, of ambushes and street beatings, with the police cracking down on everyone. Not all of their arrests will be just, and sometimes the coppers are as bad as the gangs. There could be mass arrests, curfews, streets sweeps, harassment.”

Stella glanced at the wall, then at her mum, then to the roof of the crypt. “I know,” she said, her voice breaking on the words.

“The Forty Elephants are organised, disciplined, and brilliant. Charles Sabini is politically connected, financially powerful, and ruthless. The Elephant Boys are largely uneducated louts, but they are strong and there is a lot of them.”

Stella raised her chin and met her mother’s eyes fearlessly. “Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content, but a kingdom once destroyed cannot be restored.”

“You are committed, then?”

“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

“Stop quoting Sun Tzu at me and answer my question, you insufferable wretch,” her mother said, but she was smiling.

Stella grinned back. “It is better to be the hammer than the anvil. He who hesitates is lost. Fortune favours the bold.”

“I read all these books to you,” her mum reminded her.

“He who learns but does not think is lost; he who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.”

“You’ll be in great danger,” her mum replied with a small, fond smile, “if you don’t stop quoting ancient generals.”

Previous Chapter: Chapter Twenty-one

Next Chapter: Chapter Twenty-three

Author’s Note

Hi. I hope you’re enjoying the story. Leave a comment if you are. Today’s queerguide has a context post on feminism. It’s not required reading, it’s an optional extra bit of fun.