The Raven Conspiracy

Chapter 18 - A Grim Discovery

Just a short A/N: Due to plot changes, the next few chapters *might* look entirely different when I rewrite and edit. Enjoy them anyway :D

Chapter 18 – A Grim Discovery

“How bad is this development?” I asked Jen, buckling my seatbelt. Kairo was taking his motorbike, but I was getting a lift from Jen. The car she drove was a gift from this mysterious Parliament.

“It’s extremely bad. I can’t say much at the moment, since I need to see it for myself...”

She gripped the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles turned white. She drove a little too fast for my comfort, and I clutched the strap of the seatbelt out of nervousness. The radio – tuned to a music station – was promptly turned off and we drove in silence.

Her phone rang again – one of the generic tones – as she drove.

“Will you get that for me, please,” she asked. “It’s in my handbag.”

It was odd rummaging through a complete stranger’s handbag – that I almost dropped when I found a pistol in – but I retrieved the buzzing cellphone and handed it to her. I noticed the designer label on the bag with raised eyebrows.

“Hey. Yes, I heard. I’m on my way there now. I’ve got Kai with me. Uh-huh. I’ll see you in a few.”

“And?”

“A colleague. He has the same information that I do.”

“And this information is?”

“I can’t discuss it.”

“Okay...”

Fortunately, the drive was not long. We drove to the city centre, where she parked in the basement of an unremarkable office building.

“This is Parliament,” she said. “Watch your words. If you have questions, save them for later, okay? Things will be tense and they won’t take kindly to strangers.”

Her words were a sharp reminder of just how new I was to this world. I knew so little.

“My lips are sealed.”

Kairo strode up to us.

“Where to, Jen?”

“The vault. Still have your ID?”

“Yeah...I got a call from Jared. He wants to know what’s happening. Can I sell?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe. It depends if they even let you in to the vault. You know how they can be about security when something small happens, and this is huge.”

I filed that away for further thought. Perhaps I could beat Kairo to selling the information to Jared. There was a chance it would be valuable enough to buy what he knew about the jewellery that kept going missing.

“They won’t turn me down.”

“It’s not just you I’m worried about. Come on, let’s see what actually happened.”

A pair of elevator doors seemed to be the only exit to the parking lot. Jen fished a card out of her handbag and slotted it into a reader. It beeped and the doors hummed as they opened. I squinted as my eyes adjusted to the brightly-lit elevator compared to the dim garage. Kairo and Jen exchanged worried glances. Even though I didn’t know what happened, I picked up on the atmosphere and found my mood turning to nervous anticipation. My stomach lurched as the lift travelled not up – as I expected – but down. I hoped that we weren’t travelling too far down. The thought of being trapped underneath the busy city was not a pleasant one.

The doors opened into a tiled corridor, with a pair of double-doors at the end and a door on either side of the hall. Next to each of the side doors was a bench.

“I have to change,” said Jen. “It won’t take long.”

She slipped through the door on the right. I followed Kairo’s lead and sat on the bench.

“What’s she changing into? A fairy or something?”

“Members of Parliament show their rank by the colours they wear. Jen’s an acolyte, so she’s got blue as her colour.”

A minute later, she returned wearing a royal blue military jacket with gold buttons over her black pants and cream shirt. A gold pin shaped like a rose was pinned to her lapel.

“Let’s go,” she said, fiddling with the pin out of uneasy.

We strode through the double-doors into a massive atrium. White marble tiles stretched out into the distance, trampled by dozens of people. Most wore jackets like Jen’s, but in different colours. With so many people, I expected it to be busy with the sounds of people at work, but there was a hush that blunted the edge of the noise.

Without stopping, we strode past the large counters that lined the walls. Doors stood in rows behind the counters. People wove in and out of them. The atrium opened up into a soaring space with a vaulted, glass ceiling that let in the crystal-clear sunlight. A staircase plunged into the ground. Standing at the edge of it was dizzying.

“We’ve got to go down to the Vault,” said Jen.

She hurried down the stairs, not waiting for me and Kairo.

“Do you know what happened?” I whispered to him.

“I’m as lost as you are, but I have some suspicions.”

The stairs continued so far down that soon, all that was left of the bright light was dim shadows. The amount of people lessened the deeper down we went, until we only saw the occasional black or dark-grey jacket.

“The black is the highest rank,” Kairo explained in a whisper.

Finally, the staircase evened out into a chamber lit by harsh fluorescents. A sickly smell filled the air. Dark shapes were bundled on the floor.  I felt something slippery underfoot and looked down. It was a pool of liquid so red that it could only be one thing – blood.

“Holy f- “ Kairo swore.

I now understood why Jen was so uneasy. The bundles were corpses.