Touch

by Claire North

And as the second demon had pulled his eyes from his face, he’d laughed, a child-like laughter, and whispered:

  “Do you like what you see?”

  Chapter 55

  There’s always something to break.

  First I broke a thick branch from a low spiny tree sprouting from a concrete wall.

  With my branch I broke the window of the white van parked around the corner, and as its siren wailed, I reached down and unlocked the door from the inside. Then I broke a seat while crawling into the back, where I broke into the van’s emergency kit and stole a tyre iron, flashlight and waterproof cagoule.

  Then I broke the side panel of the steering column and stole the van.

  My intention was not to go far.

  Even if Aquarius couldn’t follow a shrieking van with a broken window, the police might rouse themselves enough to ask a few questions.

  I drove until I was beyond the search radius of a running man, then ditched the van and went, tyre iron under one arm, cagoule pulled over my vest, in search of something better.

  I was in a district of Berlin where one-storey industrial blocks squatted amid a grid of streets, overshadowed by glowering tower blocks and great advertising boards declaring the wonders of cheap petrol, good vacuum cleaners and locally traded plumbing parts. The buses were few and far between, and I hadn’t a cent to pay for a ride. I wandered down the middle of an empty shopping street which provided the area’s worldly goods: cheap laundry, fresh tomatoes and cans of fruit.

  The laundrette was the place to begin.

  I smashed at the padlock on the shutter until it gave, then smashed at the glass behind the shutter until I had carved myself an access route. An alarm began to wail, but at this hour locals would be slow to stir, and the police slower yet to answer, and even if anyone did, arrest was the very least of my problems.

  I smashed open the till and was rewarded with not a cent for my troubles. In the back I rifled through plastic-sheathed clothes hanging on a rail, forgetting for a moment that I was smaller, more neatly built than Nathan Coyle, and that a cocktail dress was more my style than a tuxedo. A small red box on the highest corner of a shelf caught my eye; smashed open, it revealed thirty euros in one-euro coins and twenty-cent pieces, an emergency supply gratefully received.

  I thought I heard a siren in the distance so made a quick exit, shattered glass crunching beneath my feet, Alice’s fingerprints all over the crime scene, for what little that might matter in the long run.

  A cold night to be lost in a strange city.

  I wanted to sleep, and so did my body.

  My mouth tasted of bile, arm throbbed, ribs ached. At some point I must have hit me harder than I realised.

  I turned my face towards what I guessed to be the centre of the city, navigating by the towers, and began the long walk towards morning.

  Chapter 56

  The coming of dawn did not so much lighten the sky as shift it from blue to grey, scored by the hissing of falling rain.

  I wanted out of this skin.

  Another day, another internet café.

  I love the internet.

  Online banking! Facebook!

  I struggle now to recall my existence before these two miracles of technology, to remember precisely how – dear God but I shudder to think of it – how hard I had to labour to gather information on my body’s friends, acquaintances, past and wealth. The weeks spent shadowing a target, the long nights cataloguing people met, stories told, the eavesdropping and the subterfuges I had to engage in to crack the secrets of my skins – yet now, oh most precious now, most wonderful of wonders, Facebook! The entire life, the personality, every friend and family member catalogued and listed in perfect traceable glory, just one password away, assuming the skin even bothers to log out. Facebook! How did I ever live a life of reckless possession without you?

  And glory above glories, online banking.

  Miraculous, wonderful, a delight, for all I need to do is remember a name, a password, a code, and in any body, in any skin, I can sit down in front of a computer and move monies around from one place to another, send myself credit here or there without ever having to wear the same skin twice. Gone are the days when I would bury a rich man’s money beneath a secluded tree, to return to it in a poor man’s body when time came to move on; now the tree is the world, and the earth is automated.

  Technology, I thank you.

  The city woke, and I longed to sleep.

  Beneath my stolen clothes my skin throbbed from a dozen untreated slices. I wanted to scratch, but when my fingers brushed beneath my arm I felt the lumpen protrusions of embedded glass and flinched away, repulsed by my own flesh.

  I bought an hour on a computer in an all-night internet café, among the international callers trying to catch their mothers in Taiwan, the insomniac shoppers and the quiet downloaders of internet porn.

  An hour on a computer netted me three hundred euros transferred to the nearest ATM.

  Another euro bought a hot dog from a man with a steaming cart who gave me extra onion with a cry of, “You’re up early, ma’am. Rough night?”

  “Good God,” I replied. “Is it morning?”

  Two hundred and fifty euros netted me a small laptop to call my own.

  I sat in the dullest corner of the darkest café I could find, fighting the urge, the need to jump bodies, forcing myself to stay still and in discomfort, and slipped in the only object that had made a switch unviable – my little stomach-stained USB stick.

  What may be said of the organisation that dubs itself Aquarius?

  If it was half as good at protecting its data as it was its people, I don’t think I’d stand a chance.

  Emails, folders, pictures, accounts, personnel files – more documents than the eye could read in a day, in a week, ransacked by Spunkmaster13’s malicious toy.

  Most of it banal.

  Even secret bunkers of murderous men need to order toilet paper in bulk. Even murderers run out of rubber bands.

  I tried searching for Nathan Coyle and located an email with a little red flag by it.

  The message said: Compromised.

  That was all.

  I searched for Kepler.

  It was the same file that Coyle had taken with him to Istanbul, with only one addendum. Now the first image in the document was not Josephine, but Coyle.

  I tried other names.

  Hecuba.

  Nearly thirty pictures and names, stretching back over four and a half years. They ended in one last face, a woman in a headscarf, head turned to one side, a bullet hole in her skull and another in her throat, lying where she’d fallen on the steps of Senefelderplatz. Hecuba had jumped into her while running, and worn the body eleven seconds before the pursuit team took her down.

  More names, more faces.

  Kuanyin, who died wearing the body of a man who’d sacrificed his life so that the beaten rag of Eugene’s ravaged flesh might endure a little longer.

  Names led to more names: code names I didn’t recognise, some I did. Marionette, poisoned in St Petersburg. Huang Li, shot in Tokyo. Charlemagne, who, realising he was pursued, fled into the body of a seven-year-old boy, proclaiming, you’ll never do it. You’ll never kill me, not a child. In a way he was right, for Aquarius took the child and strapped him down, experimented for weeks on their living subject, cutting out pieces of brain one cluster at a time in search of some miracle mechanism that might yet save the body from the ghost. He was already comatose when his heart stopped, but which mind slumbered, Aquarius did not know, and an unknown boy was buried in a field outside Seville.

  Aquarius were not afraid of experimenting on ghosts.

  Or their hosts.

  Perhaps Hecuba had been right when he refused my macaroons all those years ago.

  Janus.

  The file was thick but patchy. It began in 1993, speculating on Janus’ prior activities, largely incorrectly. It missed 2001–4 but caught up again with Janus as she moved into a long-term body
in Barcelona. The skin had terminal lymphoma, and I was surprised at how long Janus stuck around in the dying flesh.

  The newest picture showed a middle-aged Japanese woman in a Parisian café, her hat pulled low, her scarf high against the wind. The newspaper on the table before her was three weeks ago.

  Galileo.

  Fascination overwhelmed caution; I opened the file.

  Pictures, snippets.

  A face from 2002, another from 1984. A note suggesting Galileo boarded such a plane at such a time, but switched to another passenger during the flight. A face half-turned towards the photographer, a shadow on a window, a receipt from a meal, a copy of a bank statement as the account was drained. Edinburgh, 1983. Someone had tipped off the men who would become Aquarius and they’d nearly got him. Nearly was not good enough.

  A picture of Coyle in hospital, tubes and bandages. Corpses laid on the dockside, at their back, the stern of a ship, Santa Rosa in black and a policeman trying hard not to vomit.

  These were the fragments, the rare glimpses of Galileo’s life that had been compiled, and as I flicked through them with increasing astonishment, the certainty grew upon me that almost every single piece of it, barring a few noble exceptions, was wrong.

  Only one more task remained.

  I searched for Josephine Cebula.

  Chapter 57

  Three euros bought me a ride to Zehlendorf.

  School children slushed through the growing rain, kicking dark water in growing puddles. Pedestrians ran for cover as vans swished by, ducking the spray.

  Back to a quiet house in a quiet street where no harm could possibly befall any man.

  Back to Coyle.

  The house was silent as I let myself in, lights off, rooms empty.

  Nathan Coyle lay where I’d left him, handcuffed to a stone-cold radiator, his head on one side, asleep.

  I walked towards him slowly, tiny laptop tucked under one arm. The floor creaked beneath my feet, and his body jerked, eyes flying open, hand tugging against the handcuff. The gag was still – miraculously – in place, and as he blinked himself to full awareness, his eyes fell on me and widened first in surprise then rage.

  I, Alice Mair, partner of the man who called himself Nathan Coyle – folded myself on to the floor just out of the reach of his legs and opened the laptop.

  He made a strangled sound against his gag; heels pounded on the floor.

  I said, “There’s something I want to show you.”

  Another noise, rage popping against his eyelids, skin flushing red as he tried to throw himself at me through sheer force of will.

  I pushed the USB stick into the machine, let the files unfold.

  “I stole these,” I said, “from Aquarius. At a brief glance, it’s clear that I’ve got account information, personnel information, emails, correspondence, documentation. Enough to destroy Aquarius by remote control, wearing bank managers and clerks, nothing more.”

  He tore again at the cuffs, a throat-deep animal snarl tangling mutely on the gag.

  “However,” I went on, “what I want to show to you is this.”

  I turned the laptop screen so he could see the images as I opened them. “This is the file of the entity you call Galileo. It’s patchy – remarkably more so than any other file, including my own. Here we see, for example, a shot of a man in 1957 who may or may not have been Galileo. Here, the corpses of the Milli Vra, a ferry whose passengers went mad and killed each other one by one on a midnight voyage. Here’s a photo –” I pushed the screen a little closer “– of an individual reported to be Galileo, taken in 2006. A New York gentleman. Observe the dapper dress, the smart black shoes, the professionally manicured nails. I can see why someone might want to be this man – he doubtless has dinner parties and attends all the best shows. But look a little closer –” my finger tapped the screen “– and observe where his neck meets his collar. Do you see?”

  For a moment curiosity overwhelmed Coyle’s pride, and there was a flicker in his eye as he saw the infiltration of broken capillaries and torn-up veins running through the surface of the stranger’s skin in a reddish burst, just above the collar.

  I ploughed on. “Most people are hypersensitive about their skin – it’s what strangers see, what they judge – and any anomaly, anything which may not conform to the image they wish to project of social perfection, they disguise. No such effort is being made here. What may we conclude? Either that this gentleman doesn’t care for appearances, which seems unlikely considering the neatness of his apparel, or that lesions are a common feature of his flesh and he no longer regards their appearance as anomalous. What do you think?”

  Coyle, behind his gag and chains, thought nothing. His struggles had slowed. Now he lay still, staring at the photo which he must have stared at a hundred times before, of a man alleged to be Galileo.

  I let him stare, then flicked over to the next. “How about this? Female, early twenties, stunning, absolutely. I would, wouldn’t you? For a day in that skin, for an hour of that pride. But then look – really look. Observe her shoes where they meet the ankle. Observe the plasters. Blisters and blood – the price of being desirable, you might say, but I say no. There are few irritations as inescapable as badly fitting shoes. And your file says that this woman was Galileo for three months?” I flicked through more pictures, fast now, shaking my head. “Blisters, more blisters! And this!” Another photo, another face. “Do you really think he was Galileo?” I demanded, holding up the laptop incredulously for Coyle’s inspection. “Gold watch, silk shirt, all very appealing. But look, I mean look at his face! The man has a glass eye.”

  Coyle was frozen, shoulders slumped, legs straight. Quieter, I flicked through more photos, shaking my head, a tut, a sigh. “These are not Galileo. Three months with blisters, two with lesions on the skin? Look at her – she’s old. Her face has been maintained with creams, but her fingers are withered, they show her age because so many people in tending their faces forget their hands. No ghost would wear her for more than a few minutes. Back problems, arthritis – any estate agent worth their skin could tell you no. Not for any ghost. Galileo wants to be loved. He wants to look in the mirror and love his face, and see his face loving him back. He wants to kiss his reflection, feel a shudder of delight when his hands touch his skin. He wants strangers to fall into his arms because he’s beautiful, so beautiful, and when he fucks them he wants to flick, one to the other and back again, a breath, a second. He wants to love everyone and everything all at once, as long as everyone and everything loves him. And when he kills, it’s because he looks in the mirror and sees only contempt staring back, and he needs to destroy that face, so he cuts it off, and then looks again and still can’t find any beauty in it, so kills again, and again, and… Well. I won’t go on. You know this story better than most. You should also know, therefore, that these people are not Galileo. Even if they were… Here…”

  I turned to the final photograph, dated 2001, of a woman lounging across a leather sofa, a cocktail in her hand. “November 2001 to January 2002. I grant you there are no physical deformities in this individual, nothing obvious disbarring her from being a suitable habitation, but I know where Galileo was in November 2001. I know who he was. And he was not her.”

  So saying, I closed my laptop.

  Coyle was motionless.

  My eyes felt sticky inside, full of weight.

  “Aquarius experiments on ghosts.” The words fell from my tongue. “The torture isn’t about cooperation. It’s limit testing. They want to know how we work. Look at Galileo’s file. Look at Josephine’s – at her real file, not the tissue of lies they gave you to read. Look again at Frankfurt, ask yourself if this was a vaccination programme or something else entirely. Consider the data they gathered, observe the direction of their enquiries, the resources available. Ask yourself why the researchers died, and why in so much pain. Look at my file, look at dates, times, places, see if I was in Frankfurt when they were killed. Look at Josephine’s
face in the CCTV camera and ask who is looking back at you. Understand that as I have a history with Galileo, so it has a history with me, and this is not the first time we have danced around each other in the course of our lives. Ask yourself: who in Aquarius has been losing time. But don’t tell. Whatever happens, do not tell them what you find. You’re compromised now.”

  I stood up.

  “I’m going,” I said, barely bothering to glance at him as I spoke. “I’ll send someone to pick you up. You can keep the laptop, the money. I can’t take it with me. But this –” my fist tightened around Schwarb’s USB stick “– is mine. Tell your bosses that. And ask them why, of all the ghosts they’ve broken and all the skins they’ve killed, they lied about Galileo.”

  I nudged the laptop closer to him with the end of my foot so that it was just within his reach.

  Walked away.

  Chapter 58

  You must travel light when you wear another’s skin.

  Everything you own belongs to someone else.

  Everything you value you must leave behind.

  It is not I who made a family.

  It is not I who have a home.

  It is someone else, whose face I borrowed for a little while, whose life I lived and who now may live the life I lived as I move on.

  Time to go.

  I went to the post office and sent my USB stick first class to a PO box in Edinburgh, where some time I had worn a skin whose name was

  something-son

  and had opened an account and been careful never to close it. Because even a ghost needs something to call their own.

  I headed to the airport.

  This is how I run.

  I am Alice.

  I stand in the departures lounge of Brandenburg airport, and as the crowds bustle around me on their way to the luggage check-in, I spread my fingers wide and brush

  a child holding her mother’s hand who walks towards the check-in desk for flights to Athens, and as I look up into my mother’s face I decide that actually this body is a little too young and a little too puffy-eyed from an early-morning start, so I switch into