Free Written in the Blood by Stephen Lloyd Jones Page A

One moment his features communicated warmth, and the next they seemed as grave-cold and passionless as those of a corpse.
    She became aware of her chest rising and falling, and was certain he noticed it too: noticed, also, the flush rising on her cheeks.
    He was testing her; playing some kind of game.
    Her skin shivered.
    Sultés removed a small plastic remote from his pocket. He pressed a button and the floor beneath her feet switched from polished black to blazing white.
    It took her a moment to work out what had happened. Then, stomach abseiling away from her, lungs trapping a scream in her throat, Leah realised that the white light came not from the floor but beyond it, and that she stood on a glass divide suspended above hundreds of feet of empty space. A descending series of powerful spotlights shone up at her, set into the mountainside’s vertical face all the way down to the distant rocks below.
    The fainting chamber.
    She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.
    All her life she’d been terrified of heights. Hers was not the usual, healthy fear present in most people; she had an almost fanatical aversion.
    The anchored safety of the living room waited only a few yards behind her, but it might as well have been located on a different continent. Her muscles had frozen. She felt a bead of sweat roll down the inside of her dress. ‘Please,’ she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut. ‘Turn it off. Get me out.’
    ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘Most people, when they see this for the first time, are a little shaken. But there’s a small minority who have a much stronger reaction. Strange, but I can always tell in advance how someone will react.’
    An inch of glass beneath her feet, and then . . . nothing . Leah heard Sultés’s heels click against the floor as he moved to her side. She cringed, wondering how much pressure it would take for the glass to crack, and for how long they would plummet if it shattered.
    ‘Are you insane,’ he asked, ‘to walk in here, into this last refuge of hosszú élet innocents, and ask for our help to repopulate the very society that spurned us, then tried to slaughter us?’
    She clenched her teeth, insisted to herself that she stood on a floor of granite, thousands of reassuring tonnes of it. ‘I don’t wish to be disrespectful,’ she hissed, ‘but you can hardly describe your father’s followers as innocents and expect much credibility.’
    ‘So you think the tanács— ’
    Her eyelids were squeezed so tight she thought her eyeballs might burst. ‘I’m not here to make moral judgements on sentences passed down by the council. I’m not one of you, remember? Not one of them. Not one of anything, really.’
    ‘So why do you care?’
    ‘Please. Turn off the—’
    ‘Answer me. Why would you put yourself in danger like this? You’ve just admitted you’re not one of them. Not in their eyes, at least. You lost half your family to a hosszú élet madman. So why? Why do you care?’
    Leah ran her tongue around a mouth as dry as the pages of old books. ‘How could I not care?’ she whispered. ‘How could I stand aside – how could anyone stand aside – and watch an entire people disappear into oblivion? Balázs Jakab was a monster, but he never defined the hosszú életek race. I’ve heard the stories about your father. I’m sure half of them are falsehoods, and maybe you both have good reason to hate the people who cast you out. But when I was nine years old and I lost my father, and nearly my mother, some of those very people you despise took me in and looked after me, and they’re good people. Wonderful people.
    ‘As I grew older I learned about our history, of the contributions the hosszú életek have made. I can’t turn my back on that. No one with any shred of conscience could.’
    She stopped. Silence followed her words.
    Then: ‘Open your eyes.’
    ‘I can’t.’
    ‘Open them.’
    Shaking with dread, but knowing that if she failed, now, to do as he