The first few days Rose had been very angry. She had punched the two guards who had tried to get her to sign a confession saying that she had had a concussion and had fallen down the stairs and couldn't remember anything.
They tried again the next few days. They tried to get her to agree that her mother had died when a terrorist organisation had attacked them. They tried to get her to agree that she had never even left the UK, but she refused every time.
At the last attempt, she just screamed at them: “Why do you even care? You're going to kill me anyway. Why do you care? Just kill me and be done with it. Why are you playing these games with me?”
Finally, one day, early in the morning (4 am by her estimate), they had come into her cell, dragged her by the hair and forced her to change her clothes. She was sure they were going to kill her but instead they had just left her in the middle of the London. “We're going to contact you again in a few days, bitch.”
She had checked her pocket and had a brand new phone, but it wasn't hers. There was also a few hundred pounds in cash as well. She had taken a train back to Oxford, but when she reached her flat, she found someone else living there. It seemed that the landlord had evicted her for not paying her rent and all her clothes and personal effects had been left in the main waiting area.
She had taken the two suitcases and checked into a hotel using the cash to pay for two nights in advance. When she had opened the suitcases, she had found all of Evelynn's clothes and none of hers.
Eve liked to dress very glamorously, like she was a supermodel. That was another thing that had separated the sisters. Rose preferred to wear sporty track suits with running shoes while Eve shopped at the most expensive places. The sisters teased each other about this.
Rose accused Eve of being this wannabe supermodel, while Eve teased her back saying she looked like the Russians were going to attack anyway any day and she needed to be prepared to fight back.
She couldn't believe that had been just a few weeks ago. It felt like more than ten years had passed.
Rose had tried to contact her friends, but none of them would answer her calls. She found that her college had never heard of her, and all records of her had been erased. It was like she had never existed.
One day, as she was trying to call one of her relatives, the connection froze and a strange voice started speaking: “Come on now, Evelynn, you know there is no Rose. It's all imaginary. It's all in your head. Just sign the damn Official Secrets Act. We don't want to make this difficult, but we will. If you push this any further, we'll wipe all records of Eve having ever existed and then you'll become homeless.”
She often got calls from unknown numbers, but those numbers never remained in the phone history. They would vanish a few seconds after the call, as if she had never received a call.
Once she had a 10-minute call, more of a screaming match with one of the Unit 7 agents. But when she had checked her phone, the call wasn't in the history. She was starting to think she had imagined the whole thing.
She was starting to doubt her sanity. Was she going crazy?
Whoever this Unit 7 was, they were very powerful. Not just her friends, but her relatives refused to see her as well. But Rose was still willing to fight. They wouldn't bully her so easily.
At first, she had thought she would go straight to different journalists; but it soon became clear to her: With what?
She had no proof of any of this. Even her own father wouldn't back her so why would some random journalist believe her? She needed proof. She needed to show that her mother and the two sisters had been in Iraq and they had been murdered.
In desperation, she'd gone to see her father one more time. But her father's housekeeper had refused to let her in. She had heard a voice from the upstairs study: “Tell her to get lost, tell her I never want to see her again. Why is she even here?”
That was what had broken her heart.
The little cash she had had run out, and she had been reduced to eating just one meal of canned beans a day just to survive. No one would talk to her, and she was starting to think that she actually was crazy. She didn't want to believe it, but Unit 7 had broken her.
So the next time she received a call from an unknown number, she had immediately answered. “Yeah, I'll sign your damn official secrets act. Just help me get my life back.”
They didn't give her life back; they gave her Evelynn's life.
Including Evelynn's degree, which she had miraculously managed to complete even though she had been in Iraq for the last few months.
In addition to that, Rose was surprised to learn that her mother had belonged to some royal family and that some property dispute had been cleared. She was given ￡10 million in cash and bonds. Not only that, her stepbrother, whom she had never met and didn’t’ even know existed, was a hedge fund manager and he agreed to pay her a salary of 100 grand a year. The only condition she never talked about her mother or what happened down in that cave.
“I will expose you.” She had threatened the Unit 7 agent who had come to get her to sign the final deal. “I will not rest.”
“Please do as you feel. Feel free to write blog posts or talk to the journalists or talk to your father's contact in the media. Yes, yes, yes, we know all about your father's friends. Feel free to contact them, tell them about the secret government agency that kidnapped you. How we killed zombie and stuff. No one will believe you. We didn't even have to pay you off, but our new boss thinks that you are more likely to stay quiet if you have a big bank balance. You should be thankful to us.”
“Gee thanks,” she has said as sarcastically as possible. “What nice people you are.”
“You may not believe it, but we are trying to change. Just a year ago, there's no way we would've let you live. But we have a new boss, a woman of all things, and she’s all like: Let’s be nice and friendly, not kill too many people. Gives us bad publicity.”
“She did have my mother killed, though.”
For once, the agent's mocking facade had vanished, and he looked genuinely sad and worried.
“Listen, I knew your mother, and I'm very sorry about her. But she knew what she was getting into; she knew the risks. In spite of all our efforts, she did open a portal to hell that let hundreds of the undead through. Those zombies could have killed millions of people if they had reached Baghdad or one of the other big cities. I'm sorry, but there's no way we could let her live after a mistake like that.
It might shock you, but we’re not all psychos. But I took an oath to protect this country from any danger and I take that oath very seriously. Your mother's actions put this country at risk, so she had to die. I wish it could have been another way. I'm sorry.”
And with that, he had let.
***
2 years ago
Rose spent the next year moving from place to place. She didn't even need to touch the ￡10 million in her account. The salary she got from her stepbrother, whom she realised actually was a real person, was more than enough to give her a good lifestyle.
Plus, her father also paid her a ￡50,000 per year salary on top of that, with the condition that she never contact him or his new family again.
That hurt. Rose wanted to throw the money back in his face, but she had no way of contacting him. His lawyers had got a restraining order and warned her that she would be going to prison if she even looked his way.
So she moved from city to city, from county to county, never staying at one place for more than a month. She chose hotels, rented out small cottages, stayed at camper vans - any place she could. But she could never escape the nightmares: her mother being shot, her sister vanishing, and the terror in her stomach that kept her awake each night.
Could she have saved her sister?
Was she a coward who had gotten her sister killed to save her own life?
There were too many questions but no answers. At least, none she liked.
She finally went for therapy. It was hard, but she found an old therapist who had worked for the different three-letter agencies and knew about state secrets. He had agreed to keep her life a secret.
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Slowly, he had coaxed out all the memories from her, and it was thanks to him that she remembered the most important piece of information that had slipped her mind. When she did, she had smacked her head. A whole year she had wasted moving from here to there, when she could have gone to see the one man who might believe her.
It was the memory with that strange woman who had saved her life in Iraq. She had said something like, “Tell Henderson we are equal now.”
At that time, she hadn't thought much about it, seeing how terrified she was for her own life. But now that she was calm and collected, she realised who Henderson was.
He was an old uncle, at least they called him uncle although he was related to her grandfather on her mother's side. Old man Henderson was the family joke, the crazy relative people pretended didn’t exist.
He wasn't invited to parties and Rose had only seen him a few times when her mother was with her. People said nasty things about him: That he was a drug addict, that he was a racist who had once beaten a black man to death, that he had been in prison for raping young schoolgirls. Her mother had told us all those things were lies. Spread by a malicious government organisation trying to discredit him, and that he was actually the most honest and sweetest man she had ever known.
Now, with her own experience with Unit 7, she knew her mother had been telling the truth.
Henderson. He was the key.
She had to meet Henderson, but she had no idea where he was. Her relatives wouldn't talk to her. And she officially didn't exist. There was no person such as Rose in the official voting or tax records.
So she did what she had to do. She took on the identity of her sister, Eve. She started wearing Eve's glamorous clothes. The first few times she did so, she broke out into tears. It wasn't just her dead sister's clothes, she felt she was carrying her dead sister's body as well.
She started walking like her sister, like a glamorous and sexy supermodel, and not like that tomboy she had always been. She threw away all her tracksuits and her baggy jeans. When she went shopping, she always thought, “What would Eve buy?”
While Rose didn't officially exist, Eve did. Eve had friends. Eve had contacts. Pretending to be her sister, she had called her sister's friends at university, asking how they could find a crazy old relative who had vanished. Most had expressed confusion. They had no idea how Eve could find her own relative.
Finally somebody had recommended private detectives. Eve had visited every private detective in town and though quite a few had taken her money, none could find this Henderson. One private detective had searched through every government record for the last 60 years and couldn't find a single person called Henderson who would match her description.
Rose was starting to lose hope. The private detectives were a slimy sort. They were more interested in looking up her skirt and down her blouse than helping her. Disgusted, she had gone online and posted in every conspiracy channel she could.
She didn't remember much, but she did remember he was a conspiracy nut.
She found every single conspiracy forum she could and joined it.
She just posted a single message:
Henderson, it’s your grandniece looking for you. It’s urgent, I have information. Mother is dead, murdered I believe.
She was sure the admins would delete her message. But it seemed, in a sea full of conspiracies and idiotic messages, no one cared for hers. Within minutes her message had been lost in the multitude of messages. She felt hopeless and lost, but she didn't know what to do.
Weeks and months passed, and the optimism she had once felt was starting to fade. It seemed this Henderson didn't exist. She had been living in Dundee, Scotland, for the time, in an empty holiday home that a friend of Eve owned.
She returned from a walk one evening to find her door open. That was strange, she was sure she had locked it. As she entered, she found a note attached to the mirror in her bathroom.
You have been drawing too much attention to yourself, dear niece. You are lucky that Unit 7 don't see you as a threat anymore and are barely monitoring your chats, but I would still be careful. You'll find me here. Burn this note and if you are followed I will vanish and you will never see me again.
Below that were some geographical coordinates. She had put them in a map and realised they were in Peak District, which was more than 200 miles away in England. Burning her note, she had gotten into a rented car and drove non-stop through the night until she got to the coordinates.
It was a small holiday cottage of the sort tourists rented in the summer. Since the summer holidays were officially over, the whole place was deserted. Her heart pounding sharp in her chest, she had opened the door to the cottage and walked in.
She found him exactly as he had looked more than ten years ago when she had last seen him. Old Man Henderson, it seemed, was even wearing the same clothes. Baggy Army Combat trousers. A T-shirt that said “Aliens are real and they are here to probe you”. And a messy grey beard and hair.
“My favourite grand-niece, my only grand-niece.”
He had given her the biggest hug, and she had started crying. She wanted to tell him everything, but he had shushed her. “You look really tired. You could've taken your time. I'm here for another week.”
“I had to see you, Uncle Henderson. No one believes me. They killed Mother, and they killed Evelynn.”
“Shhh. We will talk, but let's have something to eat first. I only have frozen pizza, but while that's baking, let's have some tea.”
She looked around the room and was surprised to see books on advanced physics and psychology. On the wall, she saw three different degrees: One in quantum mechanics, one in black hole physics and one on ancient culture and religions.
“Are these degrees yours?” she had asked her uncle.
“Yes,” he had shouted back from the kitchen. “They were long time ago, but I needed to learn advanced physics and ancient religions from my job. So I decided to get a degree in them. The professor was sure I should get a PhD seeing as how I knew more than him, but I found the fact of sitting in a lab for five years really boring, so I quit halfway.”
He came back with two cups of tea and a packet of strawberry biscuits. “Tell me everything now - what happened in Iraq and why are you on the Unit 7 shit list?”
She must have looked surprised, so he added, “Yes, I know everything about Unit 7. I am on their list too. Although in my case, they just want me dead. The fact they let you go means they don't see you as a threat anymore. But enough of that; tell me everything, don't miss a thing.”
It took her two hours to tell her all the details, but she did. Henderson didn't interrupt her once and listened calmly.
At the end, he only asked her one question. “You said you came here ten years ago and met me. What do you remember?”
“What, don't you remember me, uncle?”
From his expression, it seems he didn't. It looked like he had no idea of their meeting.
He gave a noncommittal Umm-hmm. “Just describe to be what you remember.”
Eve tried her best to remember how she had seen him 10 years ago.
He didn’t give any indication that he remembered.
He just nodded, “Okay, I see. And you say your mother is dead?”
“Not just dead, murdered by Unit 7. But why did she call them in the first place? I thought she was just an archaeologist.”
Henderson stared out of the window for a few seconds. Rose looked out but saw nothing except the grass blowing in the gentle rain.
“I warned your mother about this. Not to work for Unit 7. But she said she needed the money and Unit 7 weren't asking too much of her. They had suspicions about this underground city that just turned up one day and had asked your mother to keep an eye out for supernatural things. But like I told her, you cannot trust Unit 7 no matter how much money they throw at you.”
Rose felt a bit guilty; she knew why her mother needed the money. It was to pay for her and Eve's university fees. Her own salary wasn't enough to pay for two spoiled daughters who wanted the best of everything and were used to a lifestyle that didn't match their financial situation.
“I think she needed the money for us,” she said. “We pushed her.”
“Don't do that,” said Henderson. “Don't blame yourself. The only people responsible for your mother's death are from Unit 7. From what you said, the digging team released some sort of demonic force in there. Maybe even opened a tiny portal to another dimension.”
He sat back and crossed his legs. “It cannot have been your mother. She had worked for the Unit 7 before. And she knew the signs of the supernatural and how to avoid them. I trust my niece. No way would she be stupid enough to make a mistake like that.”
Rose was bewildered. How the hell did her boring mother know about the supernatural world? This didn't make sense.
“Are you sure you're talking about my mother? Because she was as scientific as they came. She didn't believe in astrology or tarot cards or energy healing. She used to laugh at such silly ideas.”
“And that was a second problem with your mother. She only had a partial faith in the invisible world. If you dabble with the unknown, you better be willing to go all in or stay out of it completely. The worst people, the people who die, are the ones who cannot make up their minds about what is real or what isn't. You are either full in or full out, I am afraid.
That said, like I said, your mother knew enough not to trigger any supernatural defences the city might have had. It must have been some clumsy worker they hired or someone trying to directly sabotage your mother's effort. Some people weren't too happy to know this city was discovered.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because there is power hidden in places like these, and some people want that power for themselves and they don't like to share. That's only a guess; it might easily have been some clumsy fool who kicked the wrong stone or tripped on the wrong tripwire. We'll never know. I'm sure if Unit 7 would have wiped all traces of what happened, and even if they didn't, it would be suicide to try to go down there to investigate. No, we have to think of the future, and that's where we come to you. So dear niece, what do you want to do now?”
“What do I want to do now?” she asked, a bit confused about what he meant.
“Yes,” said Henderson, “this is your Matrix moment. Take the red pill, or the blue pill. If you take the blue pill, I’ll help you settle in, get you a proper job and you'll forget any of this happened. And when I say forget, I mean 100%. You never Google it, you never search for it on your phone, you never chat about it. If you read or see a newspaper clipping about something supernatural, immediately close it and go away. You can never again, and I mean never, even try to get involved with anything supernatural because if you do, Unit 7 will find out and they will hit you hard, very hard.”
“Right, sure. And what's the red pill?”
“You go even more deeper. Not like your mother, dabbling in here and then for a bit of cash from Unit 7. No, you go all in this rabbit hole. I can hide you for some time, but eventually you'll draw the attention of Unit 7 and every demon worshipper or cultist will come after you. Of course, by that time, I'll make sure you're strong enough to take on anyone, even those pigs at my old unit.”
Eve had been about to chew into a slightly stale French fry, but she dropped it in surprise. “Your old unit?” she asked. “You worked for them?”
“It's worse than that; I didn't just work for them. But I'll explain those details later. It's time to make your decision. All in or all out? Red pill or blue pill?”
“That's quite simple. I want to find out what happened to my sister, and I want revenge for my mother. So it's as many red pills as you can give me.”
Henderson burst out laughing. “All right, let's do it your way then. But first, you must pass a test.”
“What sort of a test?” she asked.
“Simple. I will open your eyes to the supernatural. But you must follow my instructions to the letter. If you deviate even slightly, you will die. This isn't one of those school tests you can take again and again. This is a one-time test. You fail, you die. I cannot work with someone who won't follow my instructions. I'll give you a few days to think about it. Come back to me when you're ready to die.”
Eve stood up and put her hand on her hips and stared down at him. “I am ready now!”
