Girl Who Fell 1: Behind Blue Eyes. Offbeat Brit spy series-cum-lesbian love triangle. Killing Eve meets female James Bond meets Helen of Troy returns (HAIL THE QUEEN series)

by Raechel Sands

  ‘ Hagl. The rune Hail,’ she said. ‘Why’s this come now?’

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  She studied the rune in the palm of her hand.

  Hail? she thought. Is it just hail and snow? No. It is great forces of elemental destruction,’ she told Hebe. Reversals, radical discontinuity.

  That does not sound good, her AI replied.

  It is known as the great awakener. I think I could do with some awakening, Blanka laughed.

  Her eyes turned to the Moon calendar Nearby had given her at Christmas. March: Pisces the fish. In the square for Saturday she had written, Emma & Olga are 3! But today was circled in purple. It said, Dialysis.

  Purple for blood—my blood, Blanka mused. I never used to dream, just saw angels when I slept, it always seemed that way.

  The calendar read: Moon in Sagittarius conjunct Saturn.

  Guilt about the past needs to be overcome. Chal enging issues or memories relating to distant family.

  The Who's Love, Reign o’er Me came to the lines: Only love can bring the rain

  That falls like tears from on high.

  Tears welled in Blanka’s eyes again. She shook her head, she didn’t want to cry, so she pressed the stop button. Her kitchen grew quiet.

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  When the kettle whistled, she lifted it with her dog-shaped oven mitten, and poured the water into her China pot. As she stirred the tea, the leaves filled the liquid, turning it brownish-red.

  The color of dried blood.

  She struggled to recall something she’d promised her mother—it was to do with the date of the Live Aid concerts, July 13th…

  Ooh, on that date in 1917, she remembered. The Fatima Secret was given to the shepherd children. It was in Kitty’s papers… what needed to be done with her Fatima files.

  She went to her parlour, and rummaged through the under-the-stairs cupboard. She found other stuff of her mother’s but not her Fatima box.

  ‘Now, where has it got to?’ she said.

  Her eyes settled on a Christmas decorations box. She opened it, and lifted out an antique set of Christmas angel chimes from the yel owed tissue paper.

  She turned the bronze angels over in her fingers. She’d had them 15 years. They’d come from Auschwitz.

  How does something so beautiful come from such awful horror?

  ‘They belonged to the German Cardinal who befriended your mother,’ her stepfather had told her. ‘She wanted you to have them.’

  Felicity off the hook.

  While the tea steeped, Blanka arranged the chimes on their delicate mounts and spun them. She stared into the mirror, and became entranced, as the five angels whirled. Singing ever-so-softly as their wings struck the chimes, they carried her drifting back to the Christmas just a few months before.

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  When she became commander, Blanka started the tradition of the OhZone AIs meeting on Christmas Eve for their own celebration.

  That afternoon the other agents in service—Sokol, Crusoe Robinson, and Hong Kong-born CIA OhZone David Mu —had arrived for drinks.

  She’d played them a new song from her disco set:

  Monster Mash by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performed live on the British 60s Monty Python precursor Do Not Adjust Your Set.

  Quite unknown to their inventors, the four OhZones privately cal ed each other ‘monster’ in jest.

  Then Blanka had brought out the chimes.

  ‘See how delicately they whirl,’ she said. ‘We’re angels. That’s how we should dance.’

  The others laughed, used to Blanka saying weird things.

  They’d chinked glasses and danced around the Christmas tree; Blanka with Crusoe, Sokol with Mu; Mu with Aussie Crusoe, twirling him around, and Blanka with Sokol.

  How they’d laughed.

  When the men left, the women were still dancing and laughing.

  Then, Sokol suddenly grew sombre, faced Blanka under the tree, and dared to mention the elephant in the room: Felicity.

  Like most raw MI6 recruits Felicity had started in the mailroom. She had a way of delivering mail that suggested other abilities and a wil ingness to use them, and she soon attracted the attention of C. When he promoted her to Grade 2, then Grade 3, then field agent, it was general y assumed he had more uses for her than just sex.

  Then came the shock of her engagement to Jude, Crusoe’s younger brother, and someone everyone in MI6 had romantical y linked with Sokol.

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  Two red candles coaxed the angels to spin serenely, their trumpets making the sweetest sounds. The log fire blazed in the hearth; Luna, just three months old, watched from the sofa as Sokol stood with her wire fox terrier, Puppy.

  People regarded Blanka as an oracle, a Solomon-like woman whose judgements were infal ible, and Sokol shared these views.

  Until that Christmas; until the marriage of Felicity to Jude.

  ‘It’s not real y about Jude,’ Sokol explained to anyone who would listen. ‘Felicity’s evil. Not even a noble evil. It’s a petty, spiteful evil.’

  She told Blanka she would wait until Felicity was drunk on her hen night on December 27th, then throw her to her death from her hotel balcony.

  Blanka fought with the memories.

  ‘Don’t make me go through it again,’ she whispered. But despite herself, she could see Sokol in her mind’s eye, kneeling before her, in the glow of the angel chimes and the small pale lights of the Christmas tree.

  Puppy licked Sokol’s face, as she laboured to explain.

  ‘There is no God, and I no longer have a country, or a church. You are my country and my church. I need your approval.’

  Blanka had never seen tears in Sokol’s eyes before.

  ‘Get up, get up,’ Blanka said, pul ing Sokol to her feet, and setting Puppy barking. ‘We’re friends, equals. ’

  ‘Friends, yes,’ said Sokol. ‘But we’re not equals. You’re good.

  There’s nothing in your heart but goodness. But I must act before Felicity kil s again.’

  ‘Felicity kil s for us,’ Blanka had insisted. ‘Just like you kill for us.’ ‘You know that’s not the only killing she has done,’ Sokol shouted, gripping Blanka’s shoulders. ‘She’s a CU-8 psychopath,

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  with a trail of dead bodies behind her.’

  ‘We don’t have proof!’ Blanka snapped, and then immediately regretted it.

  Stung by the rebuke, Sokol became intent on the spinning angels.

  ‘They make such a beautiful sound,’ she said, in her softest voice. Then she reached out and stopped them.

  ‘How can you believe there’s good in everyone, Nancy Drew?

  Just look at us. Think about what we do.’

  Blanka blinked hard.

  ‘I think about it every day. When I take my contacts out in the mirror. When I see the anguish on my priest’s face. When a body’s found in the woods with no DNA on it…’

  ‘Why are we arguing?’ Sokol final y said, ‘We are—what do Americans say? We’re B.F.F.s.’ Then she laughed. ‘Why are you even still in this business? You prefer animals to people. Christ knows you don’t need the money! … Why don’t you just help your animals? Your simple, uncomplicated animals?’

  Then Sokol said the words Blanka would never forget:

  ‘Don’t you see? It has to be done. I must kil Felicity—before she kil s Jude.’

  Blanka returned to the kitchen, and set the angel chimes down.

  She fitted the tea strainer on her dolphins cup and saucer, lifted the teapot and poured the tea through it. She very deliberately took a matching milk jug from her pantry, and was about to pour in the milk when Hebe stopped her.

  Milk in green tea? the AI said.

  Blanka set the jug down, and sipped the tea. She swil ed it around, but what her mind’s eye saw in the cup was her purple blood, and she
thought of her dialysis again.

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  Have 20 years of fear and doubt shrivel ed up my kidneys?

  I’m sorry, insufficient data to answer that, Hebe replied.

  Blanka pulled a packet of McVities Rich Tea cookies from the cupboard, and dunked one into the tea. It still made her think of dialysis, so she closed her eyes, but ate the cookie all the same.

  What she saw again was that awful night with Sokol.

  Before she left, Sokol warned Blanka that if Felicity lived, married, and then went on into OhZone, The Machine in Paris, The Machine that saw all, would prove her right.

  Blanka feared and hated the OhZone Machine, and her resolve had hardened.

  ‘I can’t give you my approval,’ she said.

  My cousin Valentina.

  To escape the memories, Blanka took a guitar from under the table and strummed another E minor song her band performed: Al Stewart’s Roads To Moscow. She sang a couple of lines.

  Two broken Tigers on fire in the night flicker their souls to the wind.

  Deciding to postpone the dialysis more, and seeking happier memories of her and Sokol, she cued a YouTube video of them singing the song back in the day. The 10-year-old recording showed them sailing on a Thames river barge looking up at Tower Bridge. Blanka watched herself thunder out the haunting bass tab, as Sokol sang the words: The eyes of the city are opening now it’s the end of the dream.

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  At that moment, the cat flap flew open and Luna bounced in, fol owed by wisps of fog. She jumped as the flap clacked shut, meowed at Blanka, and ran upstairs. Blanka set down her guitar, grabbed the other biscuits and followed her, inching closer to the dialysis equipment.

  As she walked into her bedroom, the kitten jumped on to the bed, and meowed at a figure beside the wardrobe.

  The figure was a life size manikin of her namesake, and hero.

  A woman pilot, like Blanka.

  But no ordinary woman pilot; this was the very first woman to go into space.

  Her name was Valentina Starikova, and she was present at Blanka’s birth, in 1978, alongside Blanka’s grandmother, Jane.

  Jane and Valentina were first cousins.

  The manikin wore Valentina’s real space clothes; and sewn on the breast of its spacesuit was the first ever space mission patch made by the human race.

  HISTORY PATCH #1: 1963 A.D.

  Valentina went where no man had gone before

  No astronaut wore a Mission

  Patch until Valentina.

  She designed and handmade

  the first, orbited the planet

  Earth 48 times (bearing the

  olive branch of peace), and

  stayed in space longer than the

  total of all previous (male)

  U.S. astronauts added together.

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  Blanka munched another cookie; she could still hear the music coming from the video downstairs:

  The flames of the Tigers are lighting the road to Berlin.

  I wonder if Valentina knows about the vaccine? she thought.

  She couldn’t very wel ask her. She was now the General in charge of the Moscow Oblask KGB.

  Blanka bit her lip. Of course they know about it. The only question is, what wil Valentina do about Grinin?

  Blanka crept past her study, still putting off her dialysis, and went back downstairs.

  She looked out the window into her yard: if anything, the fog was getting thicker. Feeling the need for chocolate, she took a packet of Lindors from the table drawer, unwrapped a handful, and plopped several into her mouth. At that moment her landline rang.

  It was a ‘90s turquoise princess phone. Blanka preferred landlines since she discovered running an iPhone used more energy than running a freezer. Ironical y, they were also less easy to bug than mobiles. She answered it.

  ‘Herro,’ she chomped.

  ‘Herro Monster. Chocolate?’ the voice at the other end said.

  It was Sokol.

  Blanka gulped down the chocolate. ‘No, just having a cuppa.’

  ‘I heard chewing,’ said Sokol. ‘I can taste the Lindors.’

  ‘ Cookies, ’ said Blanka.

  ‘Did you get the link I sent you? The Arabian Sand Cat?’

  ‘Thanks, it’s gorgeous.’ Then Blanka spoke the code words,

  ‘ Love the postcard, bye for now,’ and hung up the phone.

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  Internal y, she turned on her in-board Scanner and her eyes briefly glowed silver.

  Inside her mind, holograms showed the status of the Op (Operation Russian Caravan, after Grinin’s favourite tea), as wel as the camera view from Sokol’s Scanner, the peaceful looking Victoria Embankment, and the surveil ance cameras’

  views of Grinin’s penthouse.

  Sokol tilted her Scanner up eight floors to Grinin’s penthouse then she swung it around to show her, and Puppy, in a car with a British Asian agent, cal ed Krishna. They waved cheerily.

  Blanka moved the Lindor chocolates out of sight, turned her old Scanner’s camera on, and waved back.

  Crusoe’s Australian voice chipped in.

  ‘G’day from the roof, Guv’nor. Enjoying the lovely London air. Al clear, apart from the nitrogen dioxide. No bird drop* wil get in this way. I could do with relieving at some point: would be nice to take a shower, remind myself what my house looks like.’ [* helicopter drop]

  Krishna nodded to Sokol, opened the car door and climbed out.‘I know we’re short staffed,’ replied Blanka. ‘Hans is off to Paris in a week. For now, let’s concentrate on moving Grinin.’

  ‘Krishna’s on his way to relieve you,’ said Sokol.

  ‘Roger that, I’m out,’ Crusoe replied.

  ‘How are you?’ It was Sokol again.

  ‘Fine,’ replied Blanka.

  ‘You don’t sound it.’

  Blanka could hear the concern in Sokol’s voice and the sound of her taking a deep breath.

  ‘I’m worried about the Op. We could be underestimating C.’

  Sokol paused. ‘ And Felicity.’

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  Blanka said nothing.

  Sokol broke the silence.

  ‘And there’s something else. I don’t want to argue with you, but Grinin keeps disabling the bugs. We need someone in his penthouse around the clock. Maybe a chef? We know he loves fine dining.’

  Blanka chuckled. So Sokol was running the Op now? But it was a good idea.

  ‘Make it so,’ Blanka said.

  Then the silence, ful of things unsaid, returned.

  ‘Take care with your dialysis,’ Sokol whispered.

  Blanka’s dialysis.

  The heating was up high in Casa Blanka as she stripped to her intimate apparel. Blue. She chose it to make her feel good. But Blanka wasn’t feeling good.

  Her head was slumped on her shoulder, eyes closed. She had been going to confession and mass irregularly, but now three times a week she knelt in her study for her own private act of worship: a communion of blood given and blood received. A merging with the divine, a sharing of Christ’s blood; the machine took away her old blood, high in urea levels and poisoning her (like her sins, she believed), and gave her absolution, resurrection, new life.

  But there was a price to pay—the dream that was a relentless by-product of her exchange with the dialysis machine.

  Her body plugged in, her unwilling spirit returned to the dream, the nightmare, of the Second World War.

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  The recurring nightmare.

  It began with a rose, of five white petals, resembling the Rose alba of the house of York, which grew over the front door of her house. There was the friendly smell of conifers and mountains. Somewhere a harmonica played.

  Al too soon the harp’s melody was replaced by the sound of scraping. Scraping
and screeching, the sound of metal screaming. Swords and long knives being sharpened.

  Then Blanka would see the steel swords pushing wheels—

  steel against steel—spinning in endless circles. Spinning swords became train wheels, the sound the unmistakable screeching of train wheels on rails.

  She found herself galloping through fog, on Caesar, next to an old-fashioned steam train rushing through a forest, pulling cattle trucks.

  There was humming, then folk guitar. Scattered among the pine trees were goats!

  From the first car Blanka heard the sweet, clear voice of a girl. The girl was singing a Simon and Garfunkel song Blanka

  knew: America, about another young woman (called Kitty or Katya?) on a bus, looking for America. The lyrics echoed between the mountains, and made Blanka smile: the moon rising over lovers, fortunes and emptiness, cigarettes and pies, New Jersey and spies…

  Then came the sickly smel . Blanka wanted to escape from it, but she couldn’t. The trees changed, now a birch forest, and

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  it was snowing. Barking dogs made of wire, living steel, were shepherding the train into the railroad sidings to rest (but was it to rest?) The snow was thick on the ground as Caesar galloped closer.

  Suddenly, Blanka saw her mother. Pursued by German Shepherd dogs, Kitty was running alongside the train, trying to open the door of the second boxcar. As she struggled with the lever, the dogs caught her and pul ed her down into the snow.

  Blood from her mother’s open mouth spattered the snow crimson in the shape of a heart. Somewhere a bel tol ed.

  The girl had stopped singing. Her song replaced by the music

  of Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei, rising, soaring.

  In the last car, the one her mother was trying to open, Blanka saw two nine-year- old girls, twins, sitting amid the straw on the floor. The huge wooden boxcar was empty except for them.

  Their pretty blonde hair was cropped. They wore the clothes that were the stuff of nightmares:

  those smocks, those pyjamas.

  Blanka recognized her twin cousins from

  Starikova family photos. They were

  Valentina’s older sisters, Katya and Elsa, butchered at Auschwitz in 1944.

  (For a moment Blanka got out of the dream. Luna was meowing, and chasing a ball of wool around the floor of her study.)