we have neither the time nor the resources to send any more tourists up to see
it.”
Lee took off his jacket and draped it over his bag.
“We’re not tourists,” he said. “We’re crew.”
“But, sir-”
“No.” He held up a hand to silence her protests. “The Gyre has room for
a hundred thousand sleepers. So far, we’ve filled less than fifteen percent of the
available pods. You’ll find some way to fit us in.”
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, an ancient twin-propeller cargo plane brought Kerri
to Hammaguir. Sprung from the camp, she had been smuggled out via Dublin
and Morocco. Now, she remained on the plane until it had been towed into the
privacy of an empty corrugated iron hangar, and the flight crew had been
dismissed.
The prefabricated hangar doubled as a motor pool, and housed a couple
of jeeps, a motorbike, a workbench covered in tools, and half a dozen jerry cans
of unleaded petrol. Lee closed the doors and climbed the stairs into the plane.
He hadn’t shaved and had discarded his business suit for a black polo shirt and
a pair of Bermuda shorts. The shirt had a mission badge embroidered on the
left breast: a lumpy black potato ringed by two dazzling white moons. Thus
attired, he could blend in among the other astronaut hopefuls kicking their
heels at the base, waiting for their chance to ride into orbit on a pillar of fire.
As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the Widening Gyre was an
orbital refuge for plant seeds and samples of animal DNA; a vault protecting
them from any calamities that might befall the Earth; a cosmic back-up for the
biosphere. Only a select few knew its true purpose and origin: that a Reef had
created the huge ship in order to ferry humans to another star.
Equipped with its own onboard artificial intelligence, the ship set its
own agenda. It would depart at a certain date, whether the humans were ready
or not. So far, just over thirteen and a half thousand people had been shipped
42
up to join the seeds and animal samples in suspended animation in its holds.
By the time the world found out its true purpose—as it broke orbit and
powered away from the Earth—it would be too late to stop the behemoth. If
things had been different, the Americans could have theoretically intercepted
the ship by repurposing one of their Martian shuttles, but Mars currently lay
on the other side of the sun, some three hundred and forty-five million miles
in the wrong direction. And besides, what could they do to stop it. It was
simply too large and too powerful to be stopped by anything short of collision
with a planet or large asteroid.
He found Kerri slumped in a wheelchair at the front of the cabin. Elastic
straps held the chair in place, and her wrists had been handcuffed to its
armrests. Her hair hung across her face in knotted ropes. She wore a filthy
hospital gown with a number stencilled on the front. The same number had
been crudely engraved into the skin of her left forearm.
“Kerri?”
She didn’t look up.
“Kerri, it’s me. It’s Lee.”
Still she gave no answer. Her fingernails were ragged and torn, and a
strange fungus-like growth disfigured the ankle and shin of her right leg.
“Kerri?” He leaned down. “Can you hear me?”
“Bastard.”
“What?”
She shook her wrists against their cuffs.
“Bastard.”
Lee straightened up.
“Kerri-”
Finally, she looked at him, eyes bright and hard above taut, hungry
cheekbones.
“Murdering fucking bastard.”
A Welsh quarry in summer. A teenage boy lay on his back, his forehead caved
like the top of a boiled egg. His blood – impossibly bright, impossibly red – seeped down
his temples, into his ears and hair. His feet, still encased in unlaced, dusty trainers,
twitched.
“I didn’t mean to.” Lee’s fists went to his chest. He felt sick. “I wanted
to scare him. He was trying to take you away. I had to stop him.”
Kerri scowled.
“I’m talking about the camps.” She took a ragged breath. “The lines of
people filing into the swimming pools, day after day. And nobody coming back
out.”
“Kerri, I didn’t know.”
“You signed the orders.”
“I thought we were doing the right thing.” He ran a hand back through
his hair.
“You signed the orders.”
“I know, but-”
“You signed the fucking orders, Lee. It’s all down to you. All of it.”
43
Lee’s fingers curled into his palms. He took a deep, pained breath.
“What do you want me to say?”
Kerri’s lip curled. “I don’t think there’s anything you can say.”
Her shoulders relaxed and she seemed to sag in on herself.
“But I got you out.”
“No.” Her eyes were focused on something else; some internal horror
he couldn’t see. “No, not really.”
“Yes.” He tried to force positivity into his voice. “Yes, look where we
are. I’ve got you and Lewis, and I’m getting us all out of here for good.”
Kerri’s head twitched at the sound of her son’s name.
“Lewis is here?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want him to see me like this.”
“We’ll get you cleaned up.”
“No.” She tugged at the cuffs manacling her to the chair. “No, it’s too
late for that. Keep him away. Keep them all away.”
“Kerri, I’m trying to save you.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Her breath rasped between her teeth. Her lips curled
in a sneer. “Nothing you do will ever matter, because you signed those orders
with that stupid gold pen of yours. You sent those people, those children, to
their deaths. And you did it for money.”
Her heels stamped against the chair’s plastic footrest. The growth on her
shin twitched. To Lee’s horror and revulsion, it blossomed. He could see
tendrils moving under the skin of her arms and neck and face. Blue-black
buboes erupted at her knees and elbows. Charcoal froth bubbled from her dry
lips.
For a second, their eyes met. He saw her fear. Then Kerri tipped her head
back and gave a long, raw howl; the ragged scream of a dying animal.
The blackness burst from her ears and eyes. It split her skull and
consumed her skin. Lee wanted to turn and run but his legs refused to move.
He couldn’t turn away. Within seconds, Kerri had been consumed, burned
away by the Reef within, leaving only a vaguely human-shaped tower of smart
matter, its roots extending down through the fabric of the wheelchair and into
the metal deck of the plane.
Feeling unsteady, Lee forced himself to take a step back. As he did so, a
thin string-like tentacle whipped from the base of the Reef and wrapped itself
around his ankle. He yelled and tried to pull away but couldn’t disentangle
himself. He reached down to dislodge it, but a second tentacle flicked out to
snare his wrist. Pain stabbed his temples and he cried out. He screwed his eyes
against the agony…
AND THEN HE was elsewhe
re.
The wind brought the scent of warm grass; the bleat of sheep; and the
sound of cars down on the main road. Slowly, he straightened up and cracked
his eyes against the sun’s white glare.
“No.”
44
Not here. How could he possibly be here?
He looked up at the moss-mottled grey flank of the round ruined tower,
stark against the bracken-coated hills and blue skies of youth; the rectangular
fir plantations with their razor-straight edges; the unruly, jigsaw fields. Near
the top of the structure, a solitary arched window stood dark and empty like a
ravaged eye socket.
Like the hollow left in the chest of a boy with no heart.
Kerri was sitting in the dust, her back to the warmth of the stones, her
bare feet scuffing amongst the dried grass stalks and fallen stones.
She was fourteen again.
Gone were the rags and grime of the prison camp, the lines and cares of
maturity. In their place, the girl she’d been all those years ago, before that
afternoon in the quarry, in the days when they had both been at their happiest
and life had seemed no more than an endless August drowse.
Lee wanted to burst into tears, to prostrate himself on the baked ground
at her toes and beg her forgiveness—not just for what he’d done and what he’d
become, but also for the missed opportunities, the words left unspoken and
paths left untaken. They’d had such teenage dreams. The world had been a
bright canvas, stretching out in all directions. They would go anywhere and do
everything. But, after the quarry, all that had changed. The cyst of their
happiness ruptured. The wave function of endless possibility collapsed,
leaving them stranded, guilty and alone, on the shores of an inhospitable
puberty.
For long moments, he stood and watched her curl a finger in her stringy
hair. She didn’t seem to have noticed him.
Was he here at all? He felt insubstantial, ready to blow away with the
thistledown.
Nervously, he coughed.
Kerri looked up with eyes that weren’t the eyes of a fourteen-year-old.
They were black and textured. The fabric of the Reef pushed out through her
sockets, stretching the glistening film of each eye into an obscene, cancerous
blister.
And yet, he knew she could see him.
He could feel her gaze and it made him feel raw and naked, exposed like
a laboratory specimen pinned to a bench beneath a hot, bright light.
Blue sparks danced where her irises had once been.
“Lee.”
He swallowed and bunched his fists.
“No,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“Jason, then?”
“Yes.”
Kerri’s dead eyes surveyed the castle grounds.
“Do you like it?”
“You know… You know what this place means.”
“Of course. Why do you think I brought you here?” She stood and
brushed pale dust from her denim shorts. “It’s all about memories, Lee.” She
45
tapped her temple with a bitten fingernail. “You can change your name, but
you can’t run from what’s up here.”
Lee’s heart thumped at the back of his throat.
“Who are you?”
The teenager smiled.
“I’m Kerri.”
“No, you’re not.”
The girl shrugged.
“Well, I’m also the Reef, of course. I’m both. To be honest, it’s sort of
hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.”
Lee cocked his head at the grass and sheep.
“And this place?”
The smile grew wider.
“Think of it as your own personal road to Damascus.”
AN ETERNITY LATER, Lee staggered from the plane, eyes watering and mind
sodden with images of the camps—of the frightened men, women and children
jammed like sheep into lightless shipping containers; of the dormitories that
were little more than concrete huts with straw on the floor; of the flies that
crawled over everything and everyone; and the constant, all-permeating smell
of the bleach.
Silent and trembling, he walked down the steps from the plane. He
picked up a jerry can of petrol and returned to the cabin, where the Reef stood
swaying in a nonexistent breeze, its tendrils investigating the surrounding
seats and overhead air vents. Moving without hurry, he unscrewed the cap and
emptied the fuel over the writhing black mass and the remains of the
wheelchair. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out the complimentary
matchbook from his private plane.
STANDING OUTSIDE, IN the full glare of the setting sun, Lee watched the hangar
burn. Even from a hundred paces away, he could feel the heat of the flames on
his face and hands. By the time the fire crew arrived, howling across from the
far side of the airfield, the jet fuel had caught and reduced the prefabricated
structure to a flaking metal furnace.
Thick, greasy smoke roiled into the azure desert sky. It stung the
monster’s eyes. He took a pair of mirrored aviator shades from his pocket and
slid them onto his face. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.
The roof of the building crashed inward in a shower of ash and sparks,
but he did not look back.
The monster just kept walking across the lone and level sand.
Ahead, a white rocket glistened on its pad, vapour steaming from its
cryogenic tanks.
Earth was over.
46
8.
LEE’S FIRST SIGHTING of the Widening Gyre came as the crew module lined up for
its final approach. He was strapped into a couch with his head craned against
the glass of a porthole. The big ship’s bulk obscured the stars like the very hand
of God reaching out from the darkness. Bathed in the glow of the Earth, the
Gyre’s skin looked a dark navy blue. The paler spots of impact craters, which
gave its bow the appearance of a barnacle-encrusted whale’s snout, had
mottled it. The two pale moons, Odyssey and Iliad, revolved around the ship’s
waist like attendant ghosts, their function unknown and un-guessable. All
attempts by the human crew to penetrate them had been frustrated, and the
Reefs had finally asked the humans to leave the two misshapen eggs alone and
concentrate instead on the business of filling the main ship’s hold with as many
frozen sleepers as possible.
The module carrying Lee and his son also carried another forty
candidates, all volunteers. After docking, they were divided into three batches
and shown to the changing rooms by a red-suited orderly with a handheld
palmtop. Lee and Lewis were put into separate groups and led to different
rooms. “Find your locker,” the orderly said, “and disrobe. When you’re ready,
go through that door and find your designated berth.”
“JASON PEMBROKE.”
However many times he said it, it still felt strange. As far as history
would be concerned, Lee Doyle had died almost a week ago, after jumping
from the Severn Bridge, and his body had been lost to the Bristol Channel tide.
Only Pembroke remained—a man who, although less sure of himself,
resembled in the right light an unshaven, red-eyed and
hollow-cheeked
facsimile of the disgraced CEO.
Standing in front of his locker, in the tiled changing rooms, Lee
unzipped his flight suit and bundled it into the waiting plastic bag. He slipped
off his shoes and, after a quick look around to make sure everyone else was
doing likewise, stripped off his socks and underwear and bundled them all into
the locker.
The air on his skin felt cool and strangely invasive. He had hadn’t been
naked in public since… He scratched his head. Had he ever been naked in
public? There had been that time at University, during the Hay Literary
Festival, when he’d gone skinny-dipping with two friends in the River Wye,
but he wasn’t sure if that counted as being ‘in public’, as the only witnesses had
been half-a-dozen bemused cows.
Some of the other members of the group were talking, exchanging
nervous jokes and laughing at their own self-consciousness. Arms and legs
prickling with gooseflesh, Lee pretended to rearrange the contents of his locker.
He wanted to let them go first. Even at this late stage, he was worried he might
47
be recognised and returned to Earth. A lot of these people had been Lone Tower
employees, and many were fleeing the company’s slow implosion following
the revelation of the existence of the camps. He could trust some of them, but
not all, and he didn’t know how they’d react to finding him suddenly—
Gareth L Powell Page 7