by Al Robertson
‘What? But that would be impossible to fake…’
‘Not fake at all. This is the good news. There are two of you.’
‘Oh shit. Lei.’
The Counsellor laughed. ‘I have to admit, Dit has been very effective. He’s letting her run at pretty high capacity. She convinced the Rose.’
Leila imagined another self out there, usurping her life. ‘I can’t believe he’s done that. Gods!’
The Counsellor put a hand on Leila’s arm. ‘Don’t shout. Not here.’
Leila ran a hand through her hair. ‘I’m sorry – but this is crazy.’
‘The gods think that Lei is you. So, you’re safe. For the moment, that is. There is a problem, though. If she just sits at home doing nothing – it won’t take long for them to realise they’ve been duped.’
‘What?’
‘Lei’s a young, single woman. She’s just become incredibly rich. The last thing she’d do is spend all day indoors, catching up on the soaps. She’s got to be out and about, living her life.’
‘Living my life.’
‘It’s the only way to keep the Rose off your back. The rest of them, too, if they start digging around.’
‘No. That’s too much.’
‘She’s been your shield once, and she did a great job. Let her keep doing that for you.’
Leila sighed. ‘I hate the thought of it.’
‘I’m sure you’ll make the right decision. And I’ll watch the Rose and the rest of them. See if anyone else has fallen. When we know exactly what’s going on and who can help us – we’ll act. And right now, Ambrose will help us find out who Deodatus are targeting next.’
‘Is that all we can ask him about?’
‘The way this works, long conversations are impossible. You just get fragments.’
‘Well, fingers crossed. And there’s nobody else who can help us. Hardly anyone even knows about this stuff.’ Dieter used to rant about how apathetic most Station citizens were, how short-sighted they were not to be more curious about their own history. She was beginning to feel quite a lot of sympathy for him. ‘The only other person I can think of is Cormac Redonda. And he’s ghosted himself out.’
‘I’ve already tried him.’ The Counsellor sighed. ‘Didn’t go very well.’
‘You know where he is?’
‘I know where every fetch is, Leila. He locked himself away in an old Flurrytown restaurant on Virgil Street. His little boy had a birthday party there, just before the end. I went and pulled him out of his fugue. But he’s a broken man. He can’t face reality. He refused to help us.’
‘Shit.’
‘But hopefully Ambrose will be more helpful. Let’s go and find him.’
The Counsellor pushed open a little garden gate and led the way up a narrow gravel path past a neatly trimmed little lawn and flowerbed. Leila followed her, feeling a little suffocated both by the neighbourhood and the thought of another self living her life for her. The Counsellor gave the front door a sharp knock.
A short, stout woman in late middle age opened it.
‘Ah, Miss Lympstone,’ said the Counsellor. ‘It’s good to see you.’
Miss Lympstone beamed out a welcome, floating them through the hallway and into the front room on a gushed wave of sentences. ‘Oh, hello! Do come in, please, do come in, may I take your coat? Mr Meeker will be home soon, I’m terribly sorry, he’s been held up at the bowls club, please – come through here, do please sit down.’ The room was empty but for a mahogany dining table with four matching chairs and a small cupboard topped by a little gramophone. Miss Lympstone only slowed when another woman appeared in the door. ‘Ah! And here’s Mrs Meeker to welcome you. I’ll make the tea!’ She bustled out of the room.
Mrs Meeker was a slender woman, about the same age as Miss Lympstone, with a tight little face and hair pulled sharply back into a bun. She stared disapprovingly at the two guests.
‘He shouldn’t be going out there again,’ she said. ‘Not at the moment.’
‘Mrs Meeker,’ replied the Counsellor. ‘I’m so sorry. But we’ve been through this. It’s for the good of us all.’
‘I only care about my husband. He’s got too good a heart. He should have said no to you.’
‘I’m very grateful,’ added Leila. ‘He’s going to be a great help.’
‘There are bad things out there.’
The front door opened, then closed. A second later, a squat little man bustled into the room. Curly hair framed a happy face. Mr Meeker too was in late middle age. Leila wondered if it was possible to live in this channel and be anything else. She decided not to look in any mirrors, fearing that she’d see an older, more placid version of herself peering back at her.
‘Friends! Friends!’ he said, hurrying over to them, somehow managing to simultaneously shrug his coat off and take their hands in his. He was trying to be welcoming, but there was fear in his voice. ‘Welcome! Counsellor, it’s a privilege to see you again. And you are Miss Fenech? I do hope the tides are kind and we can help you.’ He took his coat in his arms and scurried back out again. Mrs Meeker followed him.
‘Tides?’ asked Leila. ‘What does he mean?’
‘Mr Meeker calls himself a fisherman,’ replied the Counsellor. ‘He lets his consciousness fall into the memory seas, and calls out to individual weaveselves drifting there. So they can use him as a temporary platform to cohere around. And then they can speak to us.’
‘Won’t that harm them?’
‘Mr Meeker couldn’t harm anyone!’ sang out Miss Lympstone as she bustled back into the room, a tray laden with tea cups and a tea pot rattling in her hands. ‘A little coherence, a few minutes’ conversation, no damage at all. He’s a rare talent! So kind.’ She poured tea as she talked. ‘We’ve helped people whose loved ones have only just crossed over speak to them. And then those who choose not to become fetches – we can bring them back for a moment, too. It’s such a relief for the ones they’ve left behind.’ Leila found herself holding a steaming cup of tea. ‘The truly dead are often so happy in their choice. And there are those who don’t want to leave the sea, who just drift in all that data. Our guides. They’re some of our closest friends – aren’t they, Mr Meeker?’
Mr and Mrs Meeker came into the room together. ‘As we agreed, dear,’ he told her nervously. She pursed her lips. ‘I’ve made my mind up. The Fetch Counsellor needs our help. We must give it.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine, Eunice,’ said Miss Lympstone cheerfully, taking her place at the table. She reached out and took Leila’s hand. ‘You too,’ she told the Counsellor. Mr Meeker sat down and took the Counsellor’s other hand. Mrs Meeker sighed heavily. She went over to a side table and wound up the gramophone. The black disc on it started to revolve. She moved an arm with a little needle over it and dropped it. Piano notes tinkled out. Leila thought of sunlight sparkling on gentle waves.
‘Mr Meeker loves music,’ enthused Miss Lympstone. ‘It helps him focus.’
Strings kicked in, scratched across with static. A rich, deep voice sang about the sea. Miss Lympstone joined in, her voice reedy and thin, not always getting the lyrics right. Mrs Meeker sat down and took Mr Meeker’s and Leyla’s hands, completing the circle. Then she too started singing. For a minute or so, Mr Meeker stared ahead, his face slack. Then he shuddered.
‘Ah! Here comes our first visitor,’ exclaimed Miss Lympstone.
The gramophone music ground to a halt, the singer’s voice elongating to bass depths then fading out entirely. Mr Meeker’s face leapt into life, but it seemed that it was no longer his. Leila could make out another’s behind it. It was like looking at a doubly exposed photograph. She thought of Dieter. Mr Meeker seemed much more in control. He opened his mouth and began to speak. The words that came were slightly out of sync with the movement of his lips.
‘Hello!’ said a deep voice,
thick with a heavy out-system accent. The head – no longer entirely Mr Meeker’s – nodded to left and right. ‘Good friends.’ It turned towards Leila and the Counsellor. ‘And to you newcomers.’
‘We’re looking for—’ started Leila, but Miss Lympstone shushed her.
‘Don’t break his concentration,’ she whispered.
This new version of Mr Meeker chattered away, complaining about the weather. ‘There’s a storm coming. I can feel it.’ Then his head fell forwards and his shoulders slumped, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Another voice took him – this one a child’s – then a woman’s. They rattled out mundanities. But there was tension, too, a subtle sense of upset. The child mentioned an imaginary friend. ‘She won’t play with me anymore. She’s hiding.’ The woman talked about nightmares. ‘When I ran,’ she said, ‘it couldn’t see me. But when I stayed still it found me.’
‘Is he looking for Ambrose?’ asked Leila.
‘He’s moving through the dead. Trying to track him down,’ replied Miss Lympstone.
Voice after voice shook through the medium, each a new personality, each sharing deeper, darker worries. Mr Meeker was less and less himself, his face and body almost completely disappearing into each new identity. Mrs Meeker held his hand tightly, gazing into his face. Leila imagined her as some kind of anchor, holding on to his root identity as so many others flew through him. The voices became a babble, running too quickly to make any individual words out. Leila was reminded of the Blood and Flesh plague, of the way she’d felt her own self dissolve. She felt fear grow in her.
Then, suddenly, Mr Meeker howled ‘No!’ His face became entirely other. Ambrose stared out at her. ‘Leila, no!’
‘Oh, he’s found your friend,’ chirped Miss Lympstone.
Chapter 20
Mrs Meeker pulled Mr Meeker’s hand to her chest. She looked terrified.
‘No!’ Ambrose shouted again. ‘Leave me alone!’ Sweat beaded his face. There was a rip in his neck where he’d cut it open. The smile dropped from Miss Lympstone’s face.
Shock had silenced Leila. The Counsellor nudged her. ‘Ask him,’ she hissed.
Leila nerved herself. ‘Ambrose,’ she stuttered. ‘Do you remember the Shining City?’
‘Go away!’
‘It’s very important.’
‘I can’t help you. I can’t help anyone. Let me go! I have to keep moving!’
‘The next two Deodatus victims,’ she made herself say. ‘The people you saw on Dieter’s wall. Who are they?’
Blood oozed from Ambrose’s neck. Leila felt like she was forcing answers from a torture victim.
‘You don’t understand,’ wailed Ambrose. ‘They want to see if anyone comes to talk with me.’
‘Tell me, Ambrose. What are the names you saw on the wall?’
‘Oh no,’ whispered Ambrose. ‘You made me stay still for too long.’
The world changed. The little front room vanished. They were still in their chairs, still sat at the table, but now they were hanging in the deep sea. Light shafted down from above and lost itself in the endless dark beneath them.
Ambrose’s voice was full of terror. ‘Now they’ve found me.’
Miss Lympstone gasped. She squeezed Leila’s hand hard. ‘Gods,’ she breathed, looking towards Mrs Meeker.
‘I told you so,’ Mrs Meeker spat at the Counsellor. ‘We’ve been pulled into the depths.’
‘Ambrose,’ shouted Leila. ‘Tell me the names! I have to know.’
‘They’ll be here,’ moaned Ambrose. ‘Any moment now, they’ll be here.’
There was a sense of something vast moving, a little way away – a sharp silhouette, knifing through the depths, circling them.
‘I’m holding it off,’ hissed the Counsellor. ‘It’s already locked on to Ambrose, but I’m hiding us. Can’t keep it up for long.’
‘I’m going to crash us out,’ said Mrs Meeker, pulling her husband’s hand to her forehead. ‘Gods know what this will do to him.’
‘No,’ Leila said, then desperately, to Ambrose, ‘Tell me. The names!’ Blood poured from his neck, fanning out around him in a red mist. She could barely see his face. ‘Ambrose, please!’ she begged. ‘Remember Dieter. It’s all for him.’
‘I can see it,’ wailed Ambrose, looking past her. ‘It’s found me.’
‘Tell me the names!’
‘Can’t hold it back,’ grunted the Counsellor.
A slim grey shape hurtled towards them out of the gloom. Leila had a sense of it rushing towards Ambrose. She glimpsed sharp fins, a compound eye, a gaping mouth that was a nightmare of teeth, then Miss Lympstone screamed again.
‘Gods help us,’ howled Mrs Meeker.
The sea flashed into nothing. There was a moment of absolute void and then they were back in the small front room, the circle broken, Miss Lympstone in tears, the Fetch Counsellor repeating ‘Fuck,’ again and again, and Mrs Meeker hunched over her husband, who was slumped face forward on the table.
‘The names,’ asked Leila desperately. ‘Did he get the names?’
‘Ambrose might have dropped them into Mr Meeker’s memory,’ said the Counsellor. ‘But we need to get them quickly. Before he forgets.’
‘Get out!’ Mrs Meeker told her. ‘You could have sent him to his true death. Out!’
‘But the names…’
‘Fuck your names,’ said Mrs Meeker, then: ‘Miss Lympstone. Recover yourself.’
The Counsellor touched Leila’s arm. ‘I think we’d better let it be,’ she said.
Miss Lympstone led them both into the hall. ‘Really!’ she said. ‘Normally our guests are so well behaved. Poor Mr Meeker.’
‘Can you go back and see if he can remembers the names?’ asked Leila. ‘It’s the only way I have of finding my brother.’
‘I’m afraid that that’s up to Mrs Meeker,’ sniffed Miss Lympstone. ‘And you’ve brought trouble to her door.’
‘Please,’ said Leila simply.
‘It’s for the Fetch Communion too,’ added the Counsellor. ‘Her brother did a lot of work to protect us all. We still need him.’
‘Well. Since it’s you asking…’ She opened the door and disappeared back into the front room. Leila caught a glimpse of Mr Meeker, his chin pressed into his chest, his eyes tight shut, rocking backwards and forwards as Mrs Meeker leant over him. Then Miss Lympstone shut the door with a very emphatic firmness.
‘That was really Ambrose, wasn’t it?’ asked Leila.
‘It was the closest we’ll get before his rebirth.’
‘And that shark – it was one of Ambrose’s search engines. He told the pressure men about the backdoor. They must have gone in through it.’
‘I stopped it from seeing who Ambrose was talking to.’ The Counsellor looked worried. ‘You need to be very careful. You can’t let it spot you. Any of you.’
‘The safe house is insulated from the weave. And if we keep moving when we’re out and about, we’ll be safe. The sharks can only find you when you stop.’
The door opened again and Miss Lympstone emerged, holding a scribbled-on sheet of paper. ‘Mr Meeker’s a little better. We hope he’ll be fine.’ She gave Leila a pointed look. ‘No thanks to you, of course.’
‘I can help heal him,’ the Fetch Counsellor told her.
She held out the paper to Leila. ‘I’m not sure I should even give you this. But then it would all have been for nothing.’ Leila took it from her. ‘Mrs Meeker wrote the two names down for you. And now you’ve got them, I hope we never see you again.’
Chapter 21
When Leila jumped from the Coffin Drives back to the safe house, Cassiel and the Caretaker were both asleep. She slept too, her systems integrating startling new memories with older, more mundane ones. When she woke the next morning, that process keeping her out for longer than usual, she
found Cassiel and the Caretaker sat at the table in the front room. Cassiel’s arms lay on either side of the box. Her hands had grown into a round, translucent dome, covering it. Thin needles of nanogel reached down, moving inside it with careful precision.
The Caretaker looked up. ‘We’ve got the top off,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Cassiel’s having a look round inside. We wanted to wait for you, but we weren’t sure when you were going to wake up again.’
‘Gods!’ gasped Leila. ‘Be careful! Remember what happened to Dieter!’
‘We’re safe,’ Cassiel reassured her, speaking slowly and deliberately. She was concentrating hard. ‘Learning from his mistakes. The dome insulates the box.’
‘He had his defences up too,’ Leila told her.
‘But his guard was down. He thought someone he trusted had already checked it out. I know it’s lethal.’ Her needles twitched inside it. ‘I’ve taken every precaution. There’s nothing to worry about.’
Leila joined them at the table and peered nervously down into the box. The dome obscured her view of fine detail, but she could see that the box was hollow, with a smaller cube inside it, almost filling its interior. Cassiel’s needles explored the space between its walls and the cube. One of the box’s external faces had been cut open. Red gel and wires oozed out.
‘Found anything interesting?’
‘The red gel contains nano-machines. They spin the wires out into a human victim’s body, hardwiring them to the box. They can also consume some or all of their host.’
Leila remembered the fallen minds that had attacked Cassiel. ‘What about you guys?’
‘The wires don’t deploy. Our own nanogel resists them. I assume the embedded flies perform an equivalent function, allowing a full takeover of the infested body.’ The needles lifted up and out of the box. ‘The cube is hollow. I can detect movement within it. Flies, perhaps. But I can find no way of opening it.’ One of the needles became a sharp blade. ‘I’m going to cut into it.’
‘Are you sure that’s wise?’