The Visitor--Kill or Cure--A Tor.com Original Read online

  But in the end it was Ruby Johnson who saved her. The bacteria crowding Angela’s lungs were resistant to six forms of antibiotics. They had certainly found the measure of Angela’s immune system and overwhelmed it. But when Ruby Johnson moved in, it quickly transpired that the bacteria were not immune to the fire that filled Angela’s lungs.

  Angela is as well as she is ever going to get. Her carers come and take her back to the residential home.

  * * *

  A week later a man waits at a desk. He’s in a secure basement three levels below a ten story office block in Paris’s 12th arrondissement. A dozen heavily armed mercenaries guard the access points. He controls a powerful organisation and is in turn controlled by it. If you were to shoot him he would be replaced. He is a cell in the body of a beast whose blood is money. And the beast wants Miles Harman dead. It wants his drug discredited. It wants its interests protected.

  This is the beast that so scared Ruby. It can’t be fought. It’s a hydra with a hundred heads. It is a multitude, immune to governments and their agents, immune to aces and their powers.

  Even the Witch who steps from the elevator cannot challenge the organisation. The man before her, yes she could make a ruin of him, but he is an interchangeable piece of the machine.

  ‘Are we covered?’ the man asks her.

  ‘We are. All agents withdrawn or terminated. Our footprint has been erased. There’s nothing that can be traced back to us.’ The Witch is a disconcerting silhouette. She speaks without emotion. As if she were hardly there at all.

  ‘And the ace?’

  ‘Angela Carter, lives at Carstons Residential home. We’re developing a plan to isolate her and then drown her. She needs to breathe. It’s the easiest of her vulnerabilities to exploit. Though a prolonged fire or powerful explosion would also work.’

  ‘Drowning,’ says the man. ‘Nothing flamboyant.’ He hesitates. ‘And we’re safe from her here?’

  The Witch inclines her head. ‘She doesn’t know where we are. She can’t move. And she needs to touch someone before she can possess them.’

  The man nods. ‘Give it a week or two then make an end of her.’

  The Witch makes no reply. She makes no move to leave. She’s silent and very still. Then at last she speaks. ‘I’ve come to visit.’

  When she lifts her head there is something changed about her. How he knows this the man can’t say. She is, after all, an inscrutable hole cut into the brightly lit space before him.

  ‘You’re a very bad man,’ the Witch says. From anyone else it might be funny but nothing from the void they call the Witch sounds funny.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She didn’t go to the hospital,’ says the Witch, ‘but she did touch me. A piece of her touched me.’

  The man stands rapidly and backs away. ‘I don’t–’

  ‘My friend Ruby says this will take a while,’ says the Witch. She stands and the temperature falls. The lights flicker and dim, the computer banks shudder, uneasy in their metal skins. ‘But that’s ok. I have lots of time now. And she says she’s going to help me.’

  ‘Shoot her!’

  Bullets whine through the air as the Witch advances. Where the bullets that hit her go is unclear, none emerge from the other side or bounce off, but what is clear is that they are no inconvenience to her. Cameras watch her progress. All those who might replace this man are seeing his fate.

  ‘Ruby says there are too many of you and that we’ll never be safe.’ The Witch looks at the cameras, finding each with unerring accuracy. ‘But I told her that nobody is ever safe. And that although you lot might be many … I’m more.’

  About the Author

  MARK LAWRENCE was born in Champagne-Urbanan, Illinois, to British parents but moved to the UK at the age of one. He went back to the US after taking a PhD in mathematics at Imperial College to work on a variety of research projects including the ‘Star Wars’ missile defence programme. Returning to the UK, he has worked mainly on image processing and decision/reasoning theory. He says he never had any ambition to be a writer so was very surprised when a half-hearted attempt to find an agent turned into a global publishing deal overnight. His first trilogy, THE BROKEN EMPIRE, has been universally acclaimed as a ground-breaking work of fantasy. Following The Broken Empire comes the bestselling RED QUEEN’S WAR trilogy. The BOOK OF THE ANCESTOR trilogy, in an entirely new setting, commences with RED SISTER in 2017. Mark is married, with four children, and lives in Bristol. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 by Mark Lawrence

  Art copyright © 2020 by John Picacio