‘You’re seeing him through my eyes,’ Hunter says. ‘They’re open, but I’ve done things to my head.’
‘He doesn’t look like that,’ Neith says. ‘That’s not a real face. You’re dreaming.’
‘I am dreaming, yes, to some extent. My mind is broken. The division between me and my stories has broken down a little. But this is his true face, Mielikki. This is what he looks like to me now, and really I am the only person in the world who is in a position to know him. He is a monster and a god and he holds my life and the world, and I cannot fight him without you.’
Flambeau, the symbol of the Fire Judges, of Zagreus. Of the jinn called Firespine. Smith. Megalos. Bekele’s surgeon-jailer. There have been no names for villains in any of this, she realises: Smith is commonplace. Megalos merely means ‘great’. No names, just the things themselves.
‘He doesn’t have a name for me anymore,’ Hunter says, as if overhearing. ‘Just this. This is the meaning of it all. That he can do this to me, and it can disappear, and if that can happen, then the world is broken.’
The burning man leans close to adjust something around her head, and Neith feels the agony and the urge to flee. She hears the words in her head, feels them in her mouth. A puzzle, like everything else. A partial homonym.
A flambeau.
A torch.
A torturer.
Who belongs in some measure to her. He is on her side, and for that she must accept a measure of culpability.
‘Diana Hunter,’ Neith says, as if trying out the words. Her right hand lifts towards the other woman as if she’s going to point at her, the action to match the name.
Hunter accepts her hand. It is only when their palms touch, soft, dry Hunter and cool Mielikki Neith, that the Inspector understands how important the contact was. This woman is real, and they are in some measure the same.
‘If this is your interrogation, am I like them?’
Hunter’s face is endless.
‘Is there an answer to that question which would change what you’re going to do?’
No, she considers. There is not.
Of course not. The right thing.
*
The burning man leans closer. ‘Oh ho!’ he says.
Oh ho!
‘Inspector, we are out of time.’ A smile flickers on Hunter’s face, and on the ravaged face of the body in the chair, defying a stroke-born paralysis of one side. ‘Out of time. Dive. Dive. Dive.’
Oh ho!
Darkness falls, and when it does Neith can see in the sky the thing she least wanted to see: a vast, finned shadow lined against a darker background, slow and terrifying.
Not the shark.
Rebus.
And up above, the churning propeller noise of destroyers. She sees white plumes blossoming around the black hull, hears metal screaming: depth charges. Rebus is plummeting towards them, streams of oil and wreckage trailing behind. She does not know if it is a crash dive or just a crash. In the threshing sound of the pursuing ships and the swirling waters, she hears Smith’s voice say: ‘Got you!’
In the perfect clarity of the falling submarine, Mielikki Neith watches an old woman walk into a local office of the Witness and turn herself in. She has a proud face with puckish lines, and a good singing voice.
Now, just a few days later, she has neither. Now she is a victim in a chair, because she would not give powerful people a thing they should not have, and her vanishing is absolute, under a System that should prevent it entirely.
This woman knew what would come, and she chose it anyway. Smith tore her apart, and in his haste and hubris, he opened the door to her victory.
That happened, she reminds herself. It is happening now. That woman was Hunter, and by whatever other name that man was Smith. He took her voice to torment her. He makes meaningless the promises of the thing in which she placed her trust. He will continue to do so, unless prevented.
He tried to make me the instrument of his torture.
He wanted me to be the hook by which he would pull her brain out through her nose.
The outer world is not Neith’s System. She has never been there. But it is the System according to Oliver Smith: a perfect mechanism of control, masquerading as freedom and convenience; a slow downward spiral from aspirational democracy to battery farm state. The opposite of everything she believes in, wearing its gouged-off face as a mask.
She remembers how much she wanted to be the best Inspector the System had ever had, and how much she believed. She remembers all the people she has helped by being there, by being what the System told her she should, and how that right action has made her complicit in the ugliest of deceptions. She was a front. She thought she was a copper: she was public relations.
Who is the woman, out there, who occupies the space held in here by Mielikki Neith? What do they owe each other, on that account?
She considers everything she has ever cared about, every memory she has, and knows that of all of them, only the last few days belong to her: flight, betrayal, and this.
‘Got you!’
The perfect bray of triumph; the perfect expression of the man who will own the System, who will draw lines in the air.
This is the universe Zagreus made.
And with that comes the only possible response.
Fuck it. Just fuck it.
She doesn’t like it, and she’s going to kill it.
Before the submarine reaches the sea floor, Mielikki Neith closes her eyes and realises she knows exactly what to do.
She lets her mouth open in a hunter’s smile and says:
Activation.
*
I can see my mind on the screen. She looks really, really annoyed.
Good girl. I knew you’d come right.
Very well: you wanted to know what sort of escapologist I am.
Watch me now. I may need to call on you later, as a witness.
Just … watch.
*
This universe is a cancer. It’s an unforgivable bloody blot, configured to rob us of our most precious things. Choice is what we are, what we have. Our mistakes must be our own, or how can we hope to become more than we are?
I say ‘we’, because I do feel a measure of kinship with you all, but of course I possess a clarity that you don’t.
I am Gnomon, sometimes called the Desperation Protocol. I possess the Chamber of Isis: the door in the world that is created by the conjunction of the cardinals. The gates of Firespine are unlocked, and the door is hanging open.
All very picturesque, although honestly I never had much use for symbols. A thing is what it is – in which connection, an open door is an open door.
I’m going to tear this universe apart and rewrite it the way I want it to be.
*
In the interview room, the subject opens her eyes. The Director says: ‘Fuck!’
The old woman smiles up at him.
‘I said I was going to kick your balls up into your armpits.
He sighs. ‘Yes, you did.’
‘You nearly killed me,’ she says.
‘I did kill you. And I kept you alive. You knew I would and you won.’
‘Of course I won.’
‘Don’t try to get up.’
‘Don’t give me orders, you stupid old man. God! You, of anyone, to be giving orders after all this!’
‘I couldn’t let you unmake everything. What we made: Annie, it saves people. It makes the world better.’
‘No. It doesn’t. And anyway, you couldn’t stop me.’ But she does not try to get up. Perhaps she can’t.
‘No,’ Colson agrees. ‘I couldn’t.’
‘Well, that’s settled, then.’
On the screens, every detail of her life, every aspect of their shared and secret history, is blazing like a torch – but no one notices, because by that time all the other screens are blank.
The revolution is not televised anywhere except here.
They have not forgiven one another, the
se two, and nor will they ever. But that, after such lives as they have lived together, and after so long travelling the same deep road, is in some measure beside the point. So they sit and watch in silence, holding hands.
In the deep rooms and the high towers, magnetic needles whisper. The Desperation Protocol is working. It is hard to change the substrate. There are many layers and backups, but the change catches each and every one. By the end of the hour, there is no trace of Firespine anywhere.
The Desperation Protocol is working.
Then, in good order, the machine halts.
System: shutdown.
*
Allan Shand, bookseller, watches the System fall from his upstairs room. The bookshop is closed, but he goes down to the back office, puts on the kettle and opens the door. People will be very alarmed, and in his experience they always feel better knowing there’s a bookshop open.
For a while, no one comes in, but an hour later he has a dozen citizens sitting on chairs between ancient history and fiction, and a make-shift nurse’s station just outside. It warms him to know that this sort of thing can happen without the use of an electric telephone.
A little while later, a delivery arrives quite unexpectedly, new editions of books he had always imagined did not actually exist.
*
Inspector Devana Bendis of the Witness receives a large file as the network shuts down, and indeed her own connection to the System remains mysteriously active for the duration of what is otherwise a total blackout. The file contains several documents, including data sets at odds with the official ones but which her connection confirms as valid, regarding extensive and persistent voter fraud within the System. There are several statements to camera, and a taped confession. The bulk of the file is the record of the longest and strangest interrogation she has ever encountered. She is particularly startled to find her own name cropping up in a variety of forms, in circumstances she can only consider quite bizarre.
Sceptical of this forced identification, she carefully considers the record and the implication of its inclusion, then sits and touches the terminals to her skin. As always as she lifts the second one to her head – she thinks of Humphrey Bogart.
The record is remarkable for its intensity, and she decides, despite the nausea this causes her, to view it laid over her external reality so as to remain outside the illusion.
She is perplexed to find that she is entering the story near the end.
Kyriakos
BRIGHT LIGHT, AND someone shooting into the water with a rocket launcher: that’s how I announce my return to the world. That, and lots of very expensive helicopters.
A woman is doing something in my mouth with a tongue depressor, and I cough. ‘Clear,’ she says. There are spots in my eyes, and a pen torch in her other hand. She has already checked my pupil dilation. What else? Oh, yes. A quick chat with my cyborg sex chip via the bespoke application on her iPhone to make sure my body is not flooding with inappropriate chemical enhancements, and then a remarkably large needle goes into one of my buttocks: antibiotics and a mild sedative, whatever other potions she deems necessary. An etched metal badge on her chest identifies her as Dr Shenandoah.
‘Thanks, Doctor,’ Abelard says. Abelard is paramilitary or just straight-out military, clipped and efficient. Behind him is his boss, Giskard, who is almost totally silent. His people do their jobs. I’m fairly sure he considers actual speech during an operation to be evidence of poor planning.
A few feet away, the vast body of a shark, belly up and gaping where they have cut into it with what appears to be a pair of giant secateurs. My shark. She doesn’t look special now, beyond being immense. No sign of the Chamber of Isis, of the others who were in there. Of course.
She’s a record-breaker, evidently, and one of Giskard’s men is writing that up just in case I should wish to claim the kill.
*
This is me, an hour ago in Stella’s house, using her computer to make a phone call. It is answered midway into the first ring.
‘Security.’ A woman, accent indecipherable.
‘I was given this number to use if I needed help.’
The woman says: ‘Funds?’
‘Fifteen Hundred.’ Not as in that’s how much. As in, that’s who I am. A merchant king.
Anyone can call, the interesting fella explained on the tarmac. Anyone can go through all this. They save you. They take payment. No one has ever lied to them about being able to pay. (No one that anyone has ever heard of, or at least, ever heard of again.) I have invoked their top grade, and laid claim to being in the big leagues. The woman on the phone almost sounds impressed.
‘Position?’ She means, on the list.
‘Upwards of twenty-five.’
‘For confirmation: three things that are important to you. You may be elliptical.’
‘Star. Feynman. Jaws.’
‘You were given a phrase to remember.’
Was I? Yes. Yes.
‘You may travel to the ends of the earth, but I shall hold you always in my palm.’
‘Thank you.’ Keystrokes. They must have some powerful algo. But of course they do. They are the Google of close protection. ‘You are confirmed. You will be partially covered in twenty-four minutes. From half an hour you may assume full protection. Do you require extraction?’
‘For me and one other person. A woman.’
‘The inhabitant of this residence.’
‘Yes.’
‘We can extract you at speed. It will not be discreet. We can also arrange a more subtle—’
‘I don’t need subtle.’
Footsteps outside: the sound of Megalos, his walk, his tones of command. Crap. ‘I am about to be interrupted.’
‘Twenty-two minutes to partial cover. Are you in immediate danger?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Very well, I will expedite. Do you have any preference regarding the disposition of your captors?’
She means do I particularly want them alive or dead.
‘No.’
‘Well,’ she says, with some approval, ‘that makes it all a little simpler. You have engaged Security.’
We stayed alive for nineteen minutes, and that was all it took.
*
I gave Stella half of everything. I don’t care what her name was or who she is now. Someone owes her something and I’m delivering. And part of me loves part of her, so there’s that.
Life is not guaranteed to be comprehensible, only comprehensive.
Megalos is on trial for kidnapping and just about everything else. I’m told he’ll get about fifty to sixty.
Thousand.
Years.
I’ve got a place on the coast. It’s not grand, but it’s very nice. I’m taking some time. I can wear a watch again, though mostly I don’t. There’s nowhere I urgently need to be. I let the sun tell me when to wake and when to go to bed. There’s good white wine in the fridge. Ben Teasdale manages my money for me. He says he’s doing good with it, so far as that’s possible with money.
I do some mathematics, complex stuff. I’m very good at it. I’m working on a paper, anonymously. It’s about time.
I can look at the stock report. The numbers don’t talk to me any more.
I miss Stella, the original and the new one. She writes occasionally. One day, perhaps she’ll visit.
I don’t miss my shark.
I think …
I think this is a beginning.
Athenais
BLOODY DAMN BLOODY ghosts and spirits, bloody gods and monsters and bishops and arseholes! Bastards, every one of them, every man of them. Bastards!
I opened the casket and waked the sleeper and of course it was the wrong one, some random bloody interloping cow on some mission of divine importance, raiding the Pentemychos or some such codswallop. Give me a net mender any day: he knows a job of work. Give me a bloody farmhand or a milkmaid over all the jennaye and all the priests and demons in between the oceans.
&
nbsp; I turned and found myself in Scipio’s house, really there this time, and I cursed and screamed and nothing came of it at all.
Gnaeus came of it, I suppose. On the third day he brought me bread, and I didn’t throw it at him.
I tried to tell everyone about the Scroll of the Chamber, but it seems some lies are simply too big to be undone. I went back to my house and stayed there while Augustine came and went and pronounced the Chamber a fake. He took it into custody all the same, and no doubt even now some holy accountant is prising the stones from the wood and assaying the gold. The Church is nothing if not adaptable.
Mind you, I don’t fancy the Western Empire much.
I didn’t try to talk to him. I honestly don’t think I care any more.
Ten weeks later, I cut myself on a piece of sharp wood, and the blood ran silver for a few seconds before the wound closed.
So now I realise: the choice is before me. I can reach out and call Adeodatus back. There is no rite to it, no solemn invocation. No sacrifice. All those are paid and done. If I call him, he will come. I can put him back in the world, and the world will make room. After that, perhaps, there is an old man I might make young again. Just for my own satisfaction.
You’re wondering whether I’m going to, or whether I will observe the solemn balance of the universe.
You’re an idiot.
Bekele
THEY’RE CALLING IT a miracle, but they don’t mean that literally. I, on the other hand, have twice walked through walls and seen the inside of a magical room that exists outside time. I am rather less didactic about the limitations of the real.
Michael doesn’t believe me, of course: he’s calling it a stress-induced hallucination, and is irritated that I have folded it into my old established refusal to explain the means of my escape from Alem Bekagn, which he has always assumed evidences a deep political connection or personal favour whose history must be worth the telling. But his irritation is ameliorated by the salient facts of the case, and by Annie’s most emphatic demand that he play nicely with his mad old dad.
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