by Zena Shapter
Before they reach the door, however, there’s a high-pitched hum and a snap. A flame of electricity zaps towards the glass window. Ari jumps as it makes contact with the glass. As the electricity recoils, his expression changes into one of inspiration. He aims at the window, pulls the trigger.
Nothing happens. The glass is bulletproof.
He pushes Ólaf at the door as the electric hum of the machine builds again. Ólaf bends to slide his keycard through the door pad, but when Ari steps towards the glass to get a better view of us, Ólaf kicks the gun from Ari’s hand and throws himself on top him. Ari buckles under the surprise of Ólaf’s charge.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Anna screams, watching them grapple on the ground.
More and more zaps punch out from the machine. Burnt wood and scorched paint smoulder like wounds around the room. I can’t see a way out.
“He mustn’t get away!” Anna screeches, looking around. She spots something on the wall. “Can you reach that socket?” She points at where the Sannlitró-Völva’s extension cord is plugged in. The socket is on the other side of the machine and, with wild zips of electricity now flashing steadily around the room, it’s impossible to reach.
I shake my head. “I’m sorry!” I yell over the throb of energy. I wish I could, but I can’t. I’ve failed her.
Anna’s eyes dart around the room, searching for alternatives.
Outside, Ólaf scrambles to his feet and kicks Ari in the face. Ari’s head hits the floor with a whack, dazing him. There’s nothing I can do for him either. Ólaf leans against the glass window, prepares to stamp a foot in Ari’s throat. Ari manages to grab Ólaf’s shoe as it slams down, slowing its crushing force. Still, Ólaf’s clearly winning.
“No, no, no.” Anna’s voice trembles with desperation as Ari paws at Ólaf’s leg. “He mustn’t get away!” Her eyes fill with a wildness that settles on the Sannlitró-Völva. “Stay here,” she commands, flying towards the machine with complete disregard for the two thousand volt impulses thrashing around the room.
I grab at her clothing but she’s too quick, she’s already flinging herself towards the machine’s extension cord. She snatches it up and is about to yank it from the wall when a jagged ray of golden electricity twists after her like a lightning fork in slow motion.
The hissing viper thrusts its spindly finger of destruction into her for what seems an eternity.
When it recoils, Anna falls limp, the cord in her electrified grasp. It’s enough. The weight of her body yanks the cord from the wall and fells the zapping octopus to a deadly hum.
Chapter 29
The stink of scorched skin poisons the air. A soft hum smoulders in my ears. The visual scar of a tentacled monster flames yellow-white radiance across my eyes. But outside the Dómstóll, Ari is still struggling to breathe under the crushing weight of Ólaf’s shoe. I leap over bodies, furniture, wires, anything in my path until I’m tugging at the door. It’s still locked.
“Ari!” I scream.
Ólaf glances up. Our eyes meet. Ari uses the distraction to twist his body and pull Ólaf’s leg with him, sending him crashing to the floor.
Seconds later Ari is standing, panting and coughing. He stabilises himself and waits for Ólaf to rise. As soon as he does, Ari crowns his left cheekbone with a jab from the right, lifts his chin with a left fist.
Ólaf stumbles, eyes glazed, his bulbous cheeks red and sore. Ari doesn’t wait for him to recover. He thrusts an elbow under Ólaf’s ribs and, as Ólaf gasps for breath, Ari drives a punch through his nose. He finishes by swinging his fist down onto Ólaf’s jaw, splitting open his bottom lip.
“Ari!” I rattle the door.
He finds Ólaf’s keycard on the floor and unlocks the door. Behind him I see Ólaf. Dazed and bleeding but still alert, he’s crawling towards the gun.
“Behind you!” I yell, pointing.
Ari hears my muffled warning but the door gives way before he understands what I’m saying. By then I’m already throwing myself into the corridor, spiralling towards the gun. I crash onto my side, shriek in agony as my ribs bear the brunt of my fall.
But in my hand is Jón’s gun and Ólaf is too late. “Stop!” I tell him, my heart thumping. “Stay right there.”
“Why? You won’t kill me.” Ólaf sits up, cradling the nape of his neck. “I did you a favour. I shot the man who killed your brother.”
“Jón would never have touched my brother without your telling him to.”
Ólaf cocks his head. “You want to know what happened? You want to know what your brother said to Jón when we accused him of stealing Sannlitró-Völva technology? We thought he’d be intimidated, pack up and leave.” He snorts at the memory, hauls himself to his feet. “Nei. Your brother told Jón he was a Neanderthal!”
My jaw clenches. I don’t want to hear these details, not from Ólaf. At the same time, I’m mesmerised. It’s why I’m here.
“Now,” Ólaf continues, sensing my interest, “Jón prides himself on controlling his temper. He knows power is nothing unless it can be harnessed. But this, from someone like Mark. It was too much. So he hit your brother, who fell, hit the desk, didn’t wake up. Game over.” He steps towards me.
“Stay there!” I yell.
“It was very inconvenient,” he continues. “I had to disengage the emergency exit alarms,” he moves closer again, “squeeze him into Jón’s car. Ari hadn’t sorted out the security guards yet, otherwise it would have been a lot harder, I suppose.” He takes another step.
I back away, tightening my grip on Jón’s gun. Words like “inconvenient”, “squeeze” and “game” repeat in my mind, making me want to pull the trigger. Alone the words mean nothing. Together they are everything. They treated Mark like an object, disposed of him like rubbish.
I play with the trigger.
Becky! a voice yells in my head, swishing around my skull in the loudest gush of water I’ve heard. My head feels like it’s on fire. I try to shake away the sound. It only yells louder. Watch—him—die!
I close my eyes. I promised myself to value life, to never again treat it with disrespect. Not mine, not anyone’s, no matter what. I can’t kill Ólaf. I can’t kill anyone. Yet…these are unusual circumstances.
“Becky,” I jump as Ari puts his hand around the gun, “I’ll watch him. See how badly Anna and Jón are hurt.”
I grip the gun tighter, then realise how much my hand is trembling. I release the gun and, for a moment, forget what I’m supposed to be doing. Ari has taken the gun; he’s taken away my temptation. Would I have killed Ólaf? Maybe. I don’t know.
It’s only when Director Úlfar slams through the Dómstóll’s top entrance that I jump out of my trance.
“Go check on Anna,” Ari reminds me.
“Anna,” I mumble, throwing myself back into the Dómstóll. I fall at the head of my friend. She’s cold and unmoving. One hand rests on her abdomen. The dress encasing her is crisp, burnt onto her fried black skin. “Anna?” I roll her into the recovery position. I don’t know what else to do.
Someone fumbles with the generator’s cover.
Two men arrive and check on Jón. One of them identifies Jón, the other says he can still feel a pulse. I must have dropped Anna’s phone somewhere nearby as I can clearly understand their Icelandic. I just can’t grasp the implications of what they’re saying: Ólaf and Jón are both alive, whereas Anna…
I place two fingers on her neck, check her pulse by pressing to feel her jugular. The movement must trigger something in her because, as my fingers push against her skin, her eyes shoot open, making me reel back with fright. “Anna!” I gasp.
A silent petrified expression calls out from her eyes as she speaks three terrifying words to me. They sound as though they’re cutting her lungs with a knife. “Watch me die.” Her word mirrors those I heard in the corridor.
She turns her gaze to the ceiling and closes her eyes. A smile almost makes it to her lips before trembling away and, as the tension in her neck muscles weaken, her expression relaxes into a limpness that can only mean one thing.
“Anna. Oh, Anna.” My eyes settle on a single curl of her bouncy white hair, until an unexpected hand on my shoulder makes me jump.
Ari hovers over us, blood dripping from a cut on his bruised cheek. “An ambulance is coming,” he says, “Jón bleeds a lot but he will be okay. The Sannlitró-Völva did not get him.”
I nod, thinking about Anna’s words.
Watch—me—die.
Behind us, someone slots the Sannlitró-Völva’s glass case back into place with a rattle. It sounds like ice clattering over pebbles in some dark lonely river. It makes me wonder. Did the voice in the corridor say to watch ‘him’ die or ‘her’ die? Mark said his message weren’t getting through to me right. Did he mean to refer to Anna? Rehearing the voice in my head, my eyes go to the machine. “Ari, do you know how to work the Sannlitró-Völva?”
“A little, why?”
“Turn it on.”
“I don’t think…”
“Quick!” I throw myself sideways and reach for the machine’s plug. “We need to be quick.” There’s no time to explain. I can’t even explain it to myself. “Trust me.”
Ari stands, unmoving, until I drag Anna’s body closer to the examination chair. Then he seems to understand and goes to the machine’s controls. As the generator charges, he mumbles something about being sorry for not reading my notes earlier, that he should have known Ólaf was the only one with the expertise, the opportunity, the determination…
Overhearing him, Director Úlfar apologies for leaving. “When I heard Ólaf’s name, I recognised it,” he explains. “Haraldur had a list of administrators involved in not-guilty examinations—I went to check if Ólaf Stefánson was on it. He was of course. I thought he was.”
I don’t hear the beginning of Ari’s reply, only the end when he promises to track down the money, the innocent offenders, rectify everything—starting with Sigmar Thorsteinson.
Someone thanks him, and that’s when I look at the two men with Jón. One of them is the boy with shaggy hair from outside the Dómstóll yesterday: Sigmar.
“The machine’s ready,” Ari says eventually.
I heave Anna into the chair.
“Fljótt, Becky!” Ari shouts at me before I can finish. “Quick, look, look!”
My legs feel like dried cement but I stagger over to the machine’s screen.
A pulsating glow is hovering around Anna’s rapidly cooling body.
“It has deep brown, yellow and gold,” Ari says. “All positive.”
I gaze at Anna, the screen, then Anna again.
Director Úlfar joins us, sidling as close to Ari as he can. “What is it?”
To the naked eye there’s nothing around Anna. Through the Sannlitró-Völva, however, there’s a golden-brown glow—a glow that intensifies…and moves.
Slowly, it travels along the contours of Anna’s body, brightening as it gathers around her shoulders and head. Reaching upwards, it twinkles and curls into an oval pinnacle above her temples. It pauses, then swells into a circular ball of light. There’s no sound but, an instant later, it implodes into a brilliant white light that drifts up towards the ceiling. There it floats, waiting.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
Ari shrugs.
Director Úlfar shakes his head, unknowing. “Are you recording, Ari?”
“Já,” he mumbles.
Sensing something, I look for the two other men and Ólaf. They’ve already gone.
Director Úlfar whispers an explanation. “Jón’s bleeding is stable, so they took Ólaf to the cells.”
Still the white ball of light floats and waits.
“What’s that?” Ari points to the left hand side of the Sannlitró-Völva’s screen.
A separate ball of white light appears from nowhere and glides across the screen, speeding up the closer it gets to Anna’s light ball. For a split second, it looks like the two are going to collide. Instead the lights spin around each other, so fast that, in their downward spirals, it’s impossible to distinguish between them.
By the time their spiralling slows, the two balls have fused into one, throbbing brighter together.
“You were right, Anna,” I murmur to myself. “The light in Ísland can play tricks.”
The light throbs twice more before sparkling into nothing.
I watch the screen for a few moments, not sure what I’ve just seen. A part of me waits for clarification, but none comes. Eventually I realise only my gut will offer an explanation.
“What was that?” Ari asks.
“Pàll.” I murmur. “Together until the end.” I inhale deeply, thinking about Pàll and Anna, but the air is so flavoured with singed flesh I stop mid-breath. “They’re gone.” I say after a while.
Director Úlfar doesn’t comment on my use of the plural. “Or we can no longer see her through the Sannlitró-Völva. Það er long leið frá ísland til himnaríkis: it is a long road from Ísland to heaven.”
We pause in thought until footsteps pound outside the Dómstóll, hammering towards us like storming soldiers. We turn towards the noise and wait for the doors to be thrust open. Two paramedics rush in with a stretcher and medical case. They start towards Anna, but Ari redirects them to Jón. As the medics busy themselves reigniting Jón’s fading pulse, Director Úlfar removes his jacket and creeps respectfully towards Anna. I don’t know why, but there’s something about the way he looks in my direction that bothers me.
Chapter 30
It’s close to midnight when Ari drops me off at The Himinn. I want him to stay but he needs to get back to the Litrúm-Hús. He has to secure arrangements for Ólaf and Jón, and he wants me to sleep. It’s easier said than done with a body as broken as mine, as pumped full of adrenalin, with thoughts layering upon thoughts.
I lie in bed and try to switch off, but each time I close my eyes I see Anna’s light on the Sannlitró-Völva. It was so white it reminded me of the nothing I once saw on the ceiling of that ambulance, the vacant void I saw for three minutes. It looked like a white slate of nothing. Perhaps it wasn’t nothing? Have Mark and Anna been right all along?
I roll over to get comfortable. I could wonder and suppose to my heart’s content but there’ll be no knowing tonight. So I fight against my thoughts until they drift into fictions that assure me I’m dreaming, that I’m finally asleep.
When I wake it’s to the distant sniping of a lawnmower and the clanging of metal tools on a driveway. The sounds plant in me a seed of hope that I might be waking to an ordinary day, to a life the same as it always was. Then memories return and I know I’m in a new reality now—a reality where people really can die this frequently in a matter of days.
Unable to put it off any longer, I call my parents from the bed. They can tell from my mumbled greeting I have bad news for them. I don’t know how to explain, so try telling them that Mark was a hero, that he died trying to save innocent people. After all, it’s true.
Still, I hate that someone laid their scabby hands on my brother, my brother, and ended his beautiful life. The injustice of it is so hard to bear I again wish I’d evened out the score last night: put Ólaf out of his misery, then marched straight back into the Dómstóll and put Jón out of his.
But Ari stopped me, and now Mark’s murderers live.
As Mum and Dad cry and whimper on the phone, they only strengthen my regret.
For a while, we simply share our devastation. The words don’t sound real, so we state and restate them in different ways until abstract concepts suc
h as death and murder develop form and become solid enough to one day, maybe, absorb. For me the conversation passes in a blur, dreamlike until practicalities like repatriation and coffins force me to pay attention. They ask about my returning to Sydney. They want me home. Dad says there’s a Jet Cruiser from Reykjavík to Sydney every night via London, and he wants me on the first one.
“What about Anna?” I say. I want to go to her funeral. Ideally, I’d like to stay until Ólaf and Jón’s trial.
Mum’s cries reignite and Dad reminds me that I haven’t been home since I left for London. I have to think about them too.
So in the pause that follows I imagine the hugs they’ll give me when I see them again and my throat tightens. “How about I promise to do my best? I’ll send you a text later with my arrival time. I love you,” I tell them.
“We love you too,” they say, “come home.”
After we say goodbye, I sit in bed for a while. My stomach doesn’t claw at me this morning, probably thanks to yesterday’s baguette, and my wooziness is minimal. Still, I feel sick, trying to process everything that’s happened. Is this all there is to Mark and Iceland? Have I crossed everything off my list, connected everything I need to connect before going home?
My eyes settle on a section of carpet and I study the shadowy furrows in its lush cream pile while I wait for the nausea to pass. In the corner of my eye I see pink, but can’t bear to look at the leather armchairs. In fact, I need to get out of here.
I drag myself into the ensuite and try to clear my mind with a shower.
Once I’ve finished, a notification on my phone tells me Ari has called. I phone him still wrapped in my towel. “When are you coming?” I ask.