Julia might’ve been carved from stone, staring at Eleanor with fascinated revulsion, unable to look away.
‘Right now there are two people lying dead in your grounds,’ Eleanor went on. ‘The only reason they came to Wilholm was to help Greg. I’m going to wake up screaming every night for the rest of my life remembering that trip. But I’m glad I will, because I thought coming here meant there would be a chance of getting Greg back. All of us, Miss Evans, we all believe in Greg. Even you did once, I think. He’s just an ordinary man, nothing special in the way of the world. But I’d be very grateful if you could do what you can to bring him back to me. Thank you.’
The speech exhausted the last of her strength, she withered back in the chair, spent. Someone gripped her freezing hand in a vice-like hold, which verged on the painful. She knew it must be Teddy.
Julia turned to Ryder. ‘Plug it in.’
41
‘What are you doing?’ Gabriel asked tersely.
Greg had crouched down, squashing his face against the cold banister, trying to bend a wrist double to reach his dinner jacket’s breast pocket. ‘What I should’ve done hours ago. Getting us out of here.’
‘How?’ she squeaked.
‘Tell you, it’s not going to be easy, all right? At the moment, we’re already dead, so a bit of damage now isn’t going to make a whole load of difference. Handcuffs are a bureaucrat’s fallacy to the condemned. Especially the condemned fitted with cortical nodes.’
‘Oh.’ Gabriel’s eyes widened in comprehension.
‘Yeah,’ he said, suddenly disquieted. ‘Besides, you should’ve thought of this too; you went to the same tactics courses as me.’
‘Tactics courses! Christ, Greg, I was a flaming nurse before Mindstar dragooned me.’
Greg’s scrabbling fingertips found the top of the handkerchief sticking out of his breast pocket, and he tugged the square of white silk out into the air. It wasn’t as big as he’d have liked, but it would have to do. ‘Listen, this is going to look bad, OK? But self-mutilation is a damn sight better than dying. If you’ve got a different solution, now’s the time.’
She shook her head silently. Very pale now.
Greg outlined what he wanted her to do and stretched out to give her the handkerchief. Her hands were shaking when she took it.
She leant forwards to press her face into a gap between the stair rails and bit into the handkerchief, chewing it into her mouth. Her cheeks bulged out.
‘Bite hard,’ he instructed.
She ducked her head in acknowledgement.
‘OK. Now let’s get into position.’
They faced the tower’s curving wall, as though they were praying at an altar, Greg thought. He held Gabriel’s eyes as she knelt on the floorboards, willing her on. She pulled the cuffs right up to the railing and rested her hands on the ten-centimetre lip of solid oak planking. Her fingers stuck out over the edge, but her knuckles remained on the wood.
Greg went the other way, sliding his arms right up to the banister and standing on his left foot. He pushed his right leg through the gap in the railings above Gabriel’s left hand.
‘Fist your right hand,’ he told her, ‘Then disengage all the nerves below the left elbow.’
She looked up at him, her shoulders quivering, dry weeping. The sight nearly broke his determination.
Slowly her right hand clenched into a fist, leaving the left open.
‘Can you feel your left hand?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘Are you sure?’ He was worried about the stunshot charge they’d both been hit with; if there was any damage to the cortical node there’d be no chance of pulling this off.
She glared at him.
‘Look away,’ Greg said.
Her head turned.
‘Right away,’ he said, deliberately harsh. He couldn’t risk her flinching.
She jerked her head forcibly aside.
He concentrated on the leg he’d stuck through the railings. He had to get it perfect first time. If he didn’t, he doubted she would ever allow him a second go.
He was wearing sturdy leather shoes. Grubby and scuffed now, but with a hard, flat sole.
Lining the heel up in the funereal glimmer of light.
Greg pushed up with his hands, as though he was trying to lift the banister off the top of the railings. Bunched muscles tightened the jacket fabric across his shoulders. His left foot was pressed hard on to the floor. He could even hear a feeble groan from the oak as it adjusted to the new stress pattern. Praying the strength he’d built filling up the chalet’s water tank would be sufficient.
Ready.
He stamped down.
The heel smashed down on to the top of Gabriel’s knuckles, giving. Bone snapped, a liquid-dulled crack.
She convulsed, slumping forward into the railings, her puling muted by the ball of silk.
Greg tugged his leg back out of the railings, and hooked the back of his calf inside Gabriel’s left elbow. Her head twisted round, there was a small tail of cloth sticking out of her mouth. Shock-wide eyes screamed up at him in pure terror. He jerked his leg back savagely.
Her arm moved with sickening slowness. Then suddenly there was no more resistance, and Greg was swinging wildly, left foot slipping, backside coming down fast. The cuffs made an excruciatingly loud racket scraping down the railing. He sat heavily, his coccyx trying to punch its way up into his throat.
But Gabriel was free. She lay face down on the floor, right hand still through the railing, left arm curled limply at her side, its pulped hand brushing her hair. Her whole body was quaking softly. The handkerchief had begun to emerge out of her mouth like some vile glistening imago escaping from its chrysalis.
She rolled over, gulping, a half-choke. A trail of thin vomit ran down her chin. She wore the expression of the torturer’s victim, an utter incomprehension of how one person could do this to another. Frightened eyes found her left hand. She drew it up to her face, mesmerized, and began to cry.
‘Gabriel?’
She was curling up into a foetal ball, sucking down air in shallow gulps.
‘Gabriel, did the cortical node work?’
‘Yes.’
‘Gabriel, you have to get up.’
A shiver ran down her spine. ‘I want to go home,’ she whispered through clenched teeth.
‘We are going home. Now get up.’
Gabriel rocked back on to her knees, cradling her left hand. Tears streaked her cheeks. ‘Oh, Christ, Greg.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Now look round and find something you can use as a club.’
‘No. No, I can’t do that. Don’t make me do that. Please, Greg. Please.’
‘You can’t leave me here.’ Greg deliberately let a note of desperation filter into his voice. Bullying her with guilt. There’s only about thirty minutes left before the tower blows.’
She clambered to her feet in slow-motion stages, never allowing her arm to leave her side. He could see the film of sweat on her forehead, and felt clammy apprehension rise. The grisly snap of cracking bone seemed to be echoing around the room.
She tottered off behind him, rummaging through the stacks of food crates. He didn’t look, keeping still, eyes on the ancient worn brickwork on the other side of the stairs.
‘Will this do?’ she asked. She couldn’t think for herself. Shock numbness had set in.
The length of wood she’d found was a metre long, four or five centimetres wide. Three rusty screws jutted out of the middle. It ought to be heavy enough, he thought.
‘It’ll do.’ With grim horror he realized that after she’d smashed his hand, he’d have to yank it free through the handcuff himself. She could never manage that.
‘Gabriel, you must be hard. Swing the club real hard, no messing. Imagine it’s Armstrong’s hand, or something. Don’t do it to me twice. Promise?’
‘Right.’
He put his left hand on the ledge of wood, then instructed his cortical
node to disengage the nerves of his left arm. From the elbow down he could feel nothing, not even the dead meat coldness of anaesthetic, the buoyant release of morphine. His forearm and hand had ceased to exist.
‘OK,’ he said, finding out just how much it’d cost Gabriel to say that.
Gabriel pushed the handkerchief into his mouth. It was disgusting. Soggy, tasting of sour acidic stomach juices. Good. Focus on the revulsion. Shutting out the sight of Gabriel steadying herself on the second step. Knuckles whitening as she clenched the makeshift club. Her face mimicking the intense concentration he’d once seen on a golf pro’s face as he lined up his putter for an albatross.
Greg heard the swish of air.
Shock was worse than pain in its own way. His brain seemed to expand time, letting him see the full horror of his flesh being triturated, every detail slamming into his mind. The sight flushing away the intention to pull with all his strength. It took the animal fear of impending death to twist his mind back, overriding reluctance. Greg pulled.
He felt the scream rising inside him as he watched his ruined hand squeezing through a metal circle that was two centimetres too small. It was obscenely malleable, damp cracking sounds marking its progress.
His hand came free, and a lungful of air blasted the handkerchief from his mouth. There was nothing to stop the scream that would vent some of his anguish. He hovered on the brink for one eternal second. Closed his gaping mouth, contracting the throat muscles that would’ve formed the blissful release of sound.
Gabriel: laughing, crying, whimpering. ‘We’ve done it.’ Wiping tears from her face. ‘We’ve fucking done it.’
Greg drank down litres of fresh clean air. His right hand was still on the other side of the railing. He turned it slowly and brought it and the cuff through the gap. His left hand was something from a butcher’s stall, crushed, swelling with blood, pussy fluid leaking from the graze where the club had struck.
Greg shared a long glance with Gabriel, a love that wasn’t physical, didn’t need to be. They were blood siblings, a far stronger bond. ‘Time to go,’ he said. It broke the spell.
She went to work on the store room’s central biolum panel, easing it away from its clips. He started on the Harrods hampers and found a case of three-star brandy.
He clamped the first bottle between his knees, and unscrewed the cap with his right hand. The aroma set up a satanic craving in his maltreated stomach.
After opening five bottles, Greg tiptoed around the room, soaking the kelpboard cases with the liquor. Taking care not to spill any on the floor with its wide cracks.
‘The window’s behind this lot,’ Gabriel whispered, poking a tall stack of cases. ‘It’ll take an age to shift them.’
‘Forget shifting them. Our exit isn’t going to be stealthy. You got the biolum?’
‘Yeah.’ She’d cracked the back open, exposing the activation trigger. A finger-sized pewter cylinder with enough charge to activate the motes’ bias. There was also enough charge to spark – two, maybe three times if their luck was in.
He impaled a wad of paper on the screws of Gabriel’s club, sloshing brandy over it. She put it on the desk, eagerness animating her features, dulling the pain.
He put his shoulders to the stack of crates, tensing. Nodded.
Two idiot smiles.
A minute blue spark sizzled between the cylinder electrodes and one of the screws. The paper caught at once, a bright yellow tongue of flame that left sharp purple after-images on his retinas.
Gabriel picked up her torch and thrust it against some of the cases he’d doused. Flames bloomed wherever it touched. She carried it round in a triumphal circuit.
The room was becoming dazzlingly bright to Greg’s gloaming-acclimatized eyes; but he waited until the fire began to crackle noisily before heaving at the cases. The stack toppled with a crash which seemed deafeningly loud in the small room. Cases burst open, scattering tins of meat with Brazilian labels across the oak floorboards.
Greg jumped on to the two remaining cases below the window, kicking out the glass. It shattered into wicked ice daggers, scything off into the galactic-deep night outside.
‘Out,’ he yelled, and used his good hand to haul Gabriel up on to the cases. She balanced on the narrow dirt-ingrained windowledge, crouching down for the jump. There were shouts coming from the basement. The fire had really taken hold now. Greg could feel its heat on his face and his right hand.
Gabriel had already gone. And someone was pounding up the stairs. Greg flexed his knees and leapt into the cool damp air.
42
Processor Node One Status: Loading Basic Management Program.
Julia’s head jerked up. She hadn’t actually been sleeping, just allowing her rattled, abused thoughts some peace.
Processor Node Two Status: Loading Basic Management Program.
‘What?’ asked Walshaw.
Memory Node One: File Codes Loaded.
The huge black man, Teddy, was giving her that eagle-eyed stare again, as if he was examining her soul. Finding it flawed.
Memory Node Two: File Codes Loaded.
‘Lord Jesus.’ She clapped her hands in excited delight. ‘He’s done it. Royan. He’s in the ’ware.’
Memory Node Three: File Codes Loaded.
The fabric of the nodes’ artificial mentality rose out of nowhere to fortify and enrich her own thoughts. Dictionaries, language and technical lexicons, encyclopedias, logic matrices, all returned to their warm familiar places.
Neural Augmentation On Line.
Walshaw was leaning over his terminal, hands reaching for the keyboard. The cubes were full of crazed graphics, slowly returning to equilibrium.
Hello, Juliet.
‘Grandpa!’
Her view of the study was suddenly riddled with cracks, it fragmented and whirled away. She was looking down on Earth from a great height. But the picture was wrong, there were no half-shades, the colours were all primary; an amorphous jigsaw of emerald, crimson, turquoise, and rose-gold oil patterns. It was overlaid by regular grid lines. False-Colour Thematic Image, supplied the nodes. There was a town at the centre of the image, one which was curiously blurred around its outskirts.
Wisbech, Julia said, intuitively. There was no sound to hear, no tactile sensation present in this flat universe which had captured her, only the image itself. She could sense her grandfather’s presence by her side. They weren’t alone.
Juliet, I’d like you to meet a very smart young lad. Goes by the name of Royan.
Pleased to meet you, Miss Juliet. I’ve never met an heiress before.
Thank you for unlocking my grandpa, Royan.
It was a breeze; whoever wrote the virus was dumb.
It didn’t seem that way when I was on the receiving end.
I’m not surprised. You know, you ought to load some proper protection into your nodes. They’re terrific pieces of gear, wish I had some. But the guardian bytes you’re using leave them wide open.
I used to think I had proper protection.
I could write you some. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you, you’re a friend of Greg’s. And the PSP hates you. That makes you an A-one person in my book.
I’d take him up on that, Juliet, if I were you. Royan and I have been having a long chat. Boy knows what he’s talking about.
Long? she asked.
You’re operating in ’ware time now, Miss Juliet. Fast fast fast.
Oh. Thanks for the offer, Royan. But I think we’d better do what we can for Greg first.
Yeah, said Philip. Misjudged him in a big way. Jumping the gun. Never would’ve done that in the flesh. Reality shouldn’t have done it now. But we can make amends soon enough.
Julia concentrated on the thematic image. Her grandfather was squirting a solid stream of binary pulses up to a company Earth Resources platform through Wilholm’s one remaining uplink, a hum in the background of her consciousness.
Greg’s moving, look, he said.
A diamond star had appeared on the thematic image. The magnification leapt up. Wisbech’s outskirts disappeared. The town was slashed in two by a broad meandering band of deep turquoise. Like a rain-swollen river, Julia thought, even though she knew the whole place was mudlocked. Her grandfather jumped the magnification again. Then again. The star was gleaming a few hundred metres east of the turquoise band. A small dot of crimson on the edge of the turquoise band was turning a brighter scarlet.
Something is warming up down there, Philip said.
I think I can help, said Royan.
A crude transparent map was superimposed on the thematic image.
Ordnance Survey, Royan explained. The last one before the PSP came to power. Nothing much changed between then and the start of the Warming.
The map rotated slowly clockwise until the two sets of grid lines meshed, then it swam in and out of focus, matching up the street patterns.
Close as we’ll get.
Disused mill, Julia read. The dot had become a fluorescent ruby.
Thermal emission rising sharply, said Philip. It’s on fire. And Greg’s moving away, dead slow. Means the boy’s on foot, swimming rather, in that gunk.
Escaping, said Royan.
Could well be. I wonder if Gabriel is with him.
If she’s alive, she’ll be with him, Royan censured.
Julia sensed the adoration verging on love that Royan had somehow managed to convey into their inanimate medium. His belief was unshakeable. And she knew he was right, Greg didn’t desert people to save his own skin.