The Phoenix. Тилли Бэгшоу

looked at the man. ‘You used the past tense. They “were” legendary.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘So … my parents are dead?’

      ‘Yes.’

      There was no soft-soaping. No ‘I’m so sorry’ or ‘I thought you knew’. He answered her as bluntly as if she’d asked him the time, or some trivia question. Tactless. Like me, Ella thought again. Not that their similarities eased the blow.

      Leaning back against the wall, she fought to steady her breathing. All her life, up until ten days ago, she’d believed her parents were dead, killed in a car crash when she was very young. But since finding the stack of letters hidden in Mimi’s ceiling, she’d been living on hope. Angry hope. Confused hope. But hope nonetheless. That perhaps, miraculously, it wasn’t too late. That one day she would see her mother and father again and they would explain everything. Make everything all right.

      But now, with a single word, this stranger, this bizarre, arrogant, handsome man had extinguished that hope, like a priest at the end of Mass, casually snuffing out a candle.

      ‘Are you sure they’re dead?’ Ella whispered.

      ‘Quite sure,’ said the man. ‘They died on a mission for us in 2001.’

      Two thousand and one. That was the year the letters had stopped.

      ‘I believe you were eight years old at the time,’ the man said.

      ‘What sort of “mission”?’ asked Ella. It didn’t occur to her to wonder how he knew her age, or indeed anything about her. ‘Are you trying to tell me that my parents were spies?’

      He shrugged. ‘We prefer the term “agents”.’

      ‘How did they die?’ demanded Ella, who didn’t give a damn what terms the man preferred.

      He hesitated for the briefest of moments, then said, ‘They were murdered.’

      Ella swallowed hard.

       Murdered.

      For a few seconds she was left mute. ‘How?’

      The man held up a hand. ‘I can’t say any more, I’m afraid. Not yet. But you should know that your parents were both tremendously brave people, Ella. They did their best to protect you, to allow you to enjoy a safe and happy childhood.’

      Safe and happy? thought Ella, bitterly. Those were hardly the words she would have chosen to describe life up at the cabin with Mimi.

      ‘I want to know how they were killed, and why.’

      ‘And you will,’ said the man. ‘When you’re ready. It was always your parents’ wish that one day you would join us. Carry on their legacy.’

      The man continued talking, about ‘The Group’ and ‘missions’ and ‘training’, but Ella had tuned out. She didn’t care about whatever cult it was that he was trying to persuade her to join. All she cared about was that this man knew things about her mother and father. Real things. Specific things. For the first time in Ella’s life, someone was offering her answers – actual, factual answers, not the stream of lies and half-truths and platitudes she’d been fed by her grandmother, well intentioned or not.

      ‘What else do you know about my parents?’ she interrupted him, reclaiming her place opposite him at the table. ‘You said you never met them.’

      ‘No.’

      ‘But other people in your group did?’

      ‘There are people still in The Group who would have known them, yes,’ the man answered cautiously.

      ‘Who? Can I talk to them?’

      ‘I can’t give you names at this stage, I’m afraid.’

      ‘What do you mean “at this stage”?’ said Ella, growing more strident. ‘And why can’t you? They were my parents. I have a right to know.’

      ‘As I explained, once you start training for your first mission, you’ll be briefed more fully,’ the man said calmly.

      Ella rubbed her temples. This entire conversation had been surreal from the beginning, but all this talk of ‘training’ and ‘missions’ was going too far. She wasn’t about to join this weirdo’s cult, still less volunteer for any sort of ‘special ops’. Whatever number these people had pulled on her parents’ back in the day wasn’t going to work on her. She wasn’t Lara Croft. She was an unemployed statistician with questionable social skills and some sort of undiagnosed mental disorder that made her feel as if hundreds of little men with pickaxes were permanently mining the inside of her cranium, day in, day out. Most of the time it was a ‘mission’ for Ella just to get through the day.

      Wearily, she pressed her splayed fingers to the side of her skull.

      ‘Your training will help you with the headaches you’ve been experiencing,’ the man said nonchalantly. ‘As well as with the other side effects of your … gifts.’ He chose the word carefully, turning it over in his mind, like a squirrel trying to select a particular nut. ‘The nausea, hearing voices, all of that.’

      Ella’s stomach lurched. How on earth did this complete stranger know about the voices in her head? She’d never told anyone about them, not even her useless doctors.

      ‘What do you mean my “gifts”?’ Her voice came out scratchy and strained. ‘How do you know these things about me?’

      ‘Here.’ The man reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a silver USB memory stick that looked like an old-fashioned cigarette lighter. ‘Look at this after I’ve gone. It will give you more clarity on the details. You’re unique. But the important thing to understand is that there’s nothing wrong with you, Ella. Your brain was simply designed differently to other people’s.’

      ‘Brains aren’t “designed”,’ murmured Ella, gazing at the stick in her palm and talking as much to herself as to him.

      ‘Yours was,’ said the man. ‘In vitro. Your parents were pioneers in gene editing. As individual scientists they were each brilliant, but as a team they pushed boundaries that none of their contemporaries dared even approach.’

      ‘Wait.’ Ella held up a hand. ‘My parents were both doctors. Medical doctors.’

      ‘That is not accurate,’ said the man.

      ‘Yes it is accurate,’ insisted Ella, angrily. ‘My grandmother told me—’

      ‘Is this the same grandmother who told you that they’d died in a car crash?’ The man gave her a pitying look. ‘Surely you’ve realized by now, Ella, that your grandmother lied to you. Repeatedly. About many things.’

      Ella bit her lip. She wanted him to be wrong, wanted to be able to leap to Mimi’s defense. But she couldn’t.

      ‘What I’m telling you now is the truth,’ said the man. ‘Whether you choose to believe it or not. Your parents were not doctors, they were research scientists. Your mother was a neurologist and your father a geneticist, and they were two of the most brilliant minds of their generation. You were their greatest achievement.’

      Ella waited for him to go on.

      ‘The voices and messages you’ve been hearing aren’t auditory hallucinations. They’re all real,’ he explained. ‘They’re electronic signals – emails, texts, data and voice transmissions. You were genetically modified before birth to be able to receive and, theoretically at least, to unscramble them. We believe you have visual capabilities too, but we won’t know the full extent of your gifts until we get you into the lab. It’s really quite exciting,’ he added cheerfully.

      Exciting? To be told that your own parents had conceived you as some sort of experiment? The words ‘genetically modified’ made Ella think of those perfectly