She moved.
Drop your weight. Never mind that it constricts your breathing. You can’t breathe anyway. Find your base, your connection to the ground. Yes, there. Now: snuggle closer to your attacker. Lock his arm where it is. Grab him by the elbow and bicep and twist your whole body, pivot on your feet. Ninety degrees, more, away from that bicep. Project your hands forward, as if you were pushing a grand piano with the heels of your hands.
Tai Otoshi.
It was like Yama Arashi, but for stranglers.
A man flew over her hip into the desk. He reared up, bloody-faced. There is no compromise in this fight. No pain, no retreat. Edie twisted with his movement and out of the line of his attack, then scooped his neck in a fluid circle and dropped him on his back across the sharp edge of the mahogany veneer. She hoped it would paralyse him for a few seconds, but he was heavier than she had realised and she heard a sharp snap. Iriminage, but she hadn’t meant to kill him. She peered down at the slack face, and recognised it.
Denis. Frankie’s assistant in Addeh Sikkim. Big, friendly, patient Denis.
After a moment, Edie said “Shit.” It came out croaky and loud. And then hated herself. And then hated herself more, because, as she started to say there was no other way, she realised that there was, had always been.
I knew the trick to this one when I was a wee slip of a girl.
She checked on Sholt and found he was conscious, but his collarbone was broken on the left side. She moved him gently back into the previous carriage and told him to stay put, then levered herself up and out, through the skylight, and onto the roof of the train.
It was warm up on the roof, and pleasantly calm. Abruptly, she didn’t want to go back inside. Actually, she wanted desperately not to go back inside. But down at the rear of the train she could see her soldiers. Songbird looked up, hope in his face. Edie sighed.
Yes, of course. He—and the others—needed her to fix all this. Not to be afraid or confused or alarmed. The Bloody Countess never wavers, ey.
She moved forward, and lowered herself through the ventilation panel into the laboratory carriage, holding her breath and praying.
Frankie’s laboratory was empty. In the middle of the room there was a plinth, and on it was a gutted shell of Frankie’s strange making, a Ruskinite casing for a Hakote device. There was nothing inside. Coils of cable hung from the ceiling to the plinth, messy and typically Frankie. The room was calm, and clean.
Edie searched methodically, and tried not to rush. She looked under tables and in cupboards, opening each one with a horrid anticipation of finding Frankie standing inside. A stack of pencils fell on her and she screamed sharply, then threw them with considerable force across the room, her fear changing its face: what if Frankie was not here? If she was not in the lab, then where? Gone, wandering, mindless in the night? Eating the dead outside? Or taken? Was this a kidnapping, rather than an accident? Edie knew of someone who would consider a thousand murdered a good diversion.
She turned, and found her answer: a single word written in chalk on the blackboard: Edie! And underneath, a note, folded neatly. The handwriting was Frankie’s.
Edie grabbed the note and ripped it open.
Edie. I know they will send you. I know that you will come and see what is here and I am sorry. No one should see this.
You will need to know that I have done this. It is not a trick or a trap. It is not Shem Shem Tsien or the Russians or anyone else. It is just me, and I am a prideful idiot. I am alive. In the heart of the storm, there was a safe place, where the field was not projected so strongly. I saw what was happening and I knew, my Hakote eyes could see, and I stood there to preserve myself. I tried to keep Denis with me, but the penumbra took him. I think he was angry with me.
It began with truth, which was splendid. It was a gentle thing. We asked one another questions and congratulated each other on the rightness of the answers. We played with lies, telling outrageous ones and then subtler ones and taking joy in seeing—though it was not actually like sight, more like touch—that those lies were not in accordance with the objective universe.
Sometimes it was sobering, inside one’s head. I understand that I have treated you poorly. I know exactly how poorly. We cried, all of us, for a while, and then we confessed our sins. They were not so many, nor so exciting. We shared forgiveness, and knew that was real, too. I thought I had achieved everything I had set out to do.
And in the moment of thinking it, I knew that I was wrong. So wrong. The machine was too powerful. We had only to look at one another to see not only truths but outcomes of our future interactions. We had only to consider something in the wider world to know about it. Most of them, Edie, they lacked the background to understand, but I saw the mathematics rolling out in front of me and I knew, immediately, what was coming—my knowing and what was gifted to me by the machine ran together, each trying to outpace the other. I cried out, told them all to leave, but they were raptured by the Engine. The second stage, Edie. Knowledge.
I grabbed Denis and I ran for the place in front of the machine which was clear of its function, but he shrugged me off. He shouted that I was a fool, that I had killed them all, and when he said it there was one of those awful silences and they all heard and knew, knew it was true. In that moment, each and every one of them knew that death was inevitable. And worse, Edie. They knew what death was. I have never heard such screams. I did not see death, Edie. I was in the eye of the storm. I went to switch off the machine, but it was too late.
Too late. The third stage began. They began to know everything. The air was thick. Everything seemed to become solid around me, safe in my little cocoon of life. I watched the world around me become sterile. Devoid of life. And yet they did not fall. Their bodies continued.
Denis was right, Edie. I was careless. I must spread the load—but that is enough. I will not tell my secrets now. The government will want this, as a weapon, and they cannot have it. It is so much more awful than it seems.
Have my people taken care of, please. They deserve that much. They have died for their country, or their God. But do not misunderstand: they will not recover. I have killed them.
I have taken the heart of the machine. I will carry on my work one way and another. And Edie, there is one other thing also which I realise now, as I picture you standing, reading this, shaking your head at my foolishness and still so glad that I am safe, even in the face of this horror that I have made. I have taken the heart of the machine, but I have left my own behind.
You are my heart, Edie. Always, you.
Edie stood in Frankie’s lab for ten minutes and stared at the empty plinth. She looked up, and realised that Frankie must have gone out the same way she came in. How many hours? Ten? Twelve? Frankie was doing a flat drop. She would take what she had and run. She might have a bag somewhere, or she might not, but she was gone as best she knew how.
Edie gathered the papers, the victims, and hid them away. She hid the Lovelace. She mothballed her only real home. Because it was her job. Because she believed more than ever that the world didn’t need Frankie’s machine or Frankie’s desperate conviction or anything of Frankie except her silence. Build a better mousetrap. Fix the mill wheel before it breaks. Leave the bloody secrets of the universe alone.
“Bring her home, Edie,” Abel Jasmine said in Whitehall. “If someone else gets hold of her, they might force her to… well. Bring her home.”