The wings surrounded him and there was a kiss. A new music at once exploded from and reasserted every memory he had. With a shock that stole the last of his energy he became himself again.
‘It was Kingdom,’ he said.
‘I know.’
And then there was nothing at all.
Chapter 46
When Jack awoke, he was surprised and not a little relieved to find that he remembered who he was. He was lying on the cold earth, and there was a weight on his chest. He opened his eyes and saw Fist sitting on him. The puppet had his head in his hands and was shaking. The undamaged rucksack was strapped safely to his back. They were on the edge of the city of the dead.
In the air above them hung a snowflake.
Jack sat up, cradling Fist as he did so. The puppet let himself be held, falling limply against his chest.
The snowflake was floating directly over the centre of the city of the dead. Its lowest point brushed the top of the dark pile at the heart of the lake, which was substantially smaller than it had been. Jack saw shades swimming through memories to reach it. Others were clambering up the pile or clinging to the pure white of the snowflake, climbing slowly towards the sky. The snowflake’s peak broke through the clouds and into the weave. The dead were pulling themselves back into life.
Jack was awed at the sight. He wondered how the living would receive both the unadulterated dead and the fact of such direct Totality interference in Station matters. It was, he supposed, an act of war.
Fist kicked feebly against him, reminding him of more immediate issues.
‘Are you OK?’ Jack asked him.
‘Go away!’ Fist’s voice was at once aggressive and broken. Looking round, Jack saw why. The wind played at dying fragments of code, the lines that had defined the embryos. ‘They’re all dead,’ spat Fist. He’d stopped leaking memories. Jack assumed that Andrea had stabilised him too. He wondered where she was, if they’d now actually won. It was clear that Fist didn’t perceive the battle’s climax as a triumph. ‘They hadn’t even been born,’ he said hopelessly.
Jack held him close. ‘We didn’t have any choice,’ he reassured him.
‘So much waste.’ Fist was silent for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was low and quiet and hard with fury. ‘I’m going to kill Kingdom. I’ve got everything I need to break him and I fucking will. If I have to die I’ll fucking do it.’
Dormant machinery sighed and creaked in the depths of Jack’s mind. He was very glad that, for the moment, Kingdom was out of their reach. He tried to soothe Fist, but the puppet wouldn’t let himself be consoled. Jack gave up and asked about Andrea and Penderville. Fist said nothing, consumed by his own thoughts. For a moment, Jack wondered if Penderville too was climbing up the snowflake, if Andrea had used her wings to rise up and find him. But Fist had said that the search programme would bring Penderville directly to him. The thought that he might have melted into the memory lake hit Jack like a punch.
And then a fetch shimmered into being. It was barely coherent, lying like a man-shaped mist on the grey ground.
‘Look, Fist. It must be Penderville.’
Fist turned his back. ‘Fuck off.’
Jack left him to his pain and walked over to Penderville. The fetch was shuddering silently through multiple versions of itself. Child, teenage, adult selves sketched themselves across the opaque materials that life had left behind, emerging for a moment into clarity and then vanishing. Jack even recognised the vacuum-frozen corpse face he’d seen out in Sandal’s docks. Everything flowed in constant gouts of change, except for the mouth. It was always a gaping O, howling pain and loss. After Penderville’s death, his existence had become a perpetual scream.
Jack sank to his knees by the fetch, wondering whether it could ever have anything coherent to say. Andrea could help, but he didn’t know how to reach her. He stretched out to touch a shape that might have been a shoulder. There was nothing but pity in him. The silent scream continued as his hand sank into Penderville’s body. Cold bit into Jack, and then depression enclosed him. He’d never imagined that such density of guilt could be possible. He snatched his hand away, and immediately the pain was gone.
‘Needs stabilising,’ said Grey in a calm voice. Jack turned. Grey’s presence was shock enough. He was even more surprised to see his patron arm in arm with East.
‘What the hell are you two doing here?’
‘Not quite hell,’ replied Grey breezily. ‘Just the Coffin Drives. And we’re here because of the Totality, just like Andrea. They opened a path down here. We all followed them in.’
‘You weren’t just looking to avenge Corazon’s death,’ said Jack to East. ‘This goes far deeper than that. You’re in partnership with Grey.’
‘Why do you think I looked after little apostate you?’ purred East. ‘You were working for my lover, setting him free.’
‘I’ve been working on my own. For my own purposes,’ declared Jack, with as much conviction as he could muster.
East’s laughter rang out in the dead air. ‘Of course you have.’
‘Don’t tease the poor man,’ Grey told her. ‘He’s been through enough.’
‘Not as much as Penderville,’ replied Jack. He turned back to the broken ghost beside him. It screamed on. ‘We need to help him.’
‘Fascinating,’ said East, peering down at the fetch. ‘He’s all crisis. I wish my news producers were this focused.’
Jack turned to East. ‘You disgust me,’ he spat.
‘If you were onweave you’d be watching me, along with all the rest of them. Now,’ she said, turning to Grey, ‘where’s Andrea?’
Jack wished that he had a way of, for a moment, forcing them both out of existence. Their presence had polluted his determination to help Penderville, reminding him that it was driven by specific motive rather than pure altruism.
‘Andrea’s with the Totality,’ Grey replied. ‘Helping stabilise all those fetches before they reenter the weave.’ He turned to Jack. ‘That feather’s a pretty powerful tool,’ he commented. ‘She’s giving each of them an individually customised copy of it.’
‘Ask them if they can spare her,’ East told him.
Grey closed his eyes, then opened them again. ‘They say yes,’ he said.
When Andrea appeared it was without any fuss. One moment she wasn’t there, the next she was walking towards Jack. The air around her vibrated with the faintest suggestion of wings, folding themselves away. Her appearance had none of the dancing imprecision that Jack associated with fetches manifesting in the Coffin Drives.
‘We need you to stabilise Penderville,’ East said.
Andrea ignored her. ‘Hello Jack. It seems I’ve made a bit of a splash.’
‘What happened?’ asked Jack, reaching instinctively for her hand. Andrea took it. At last the matter of their bodies was identical. They could touch as equals. The gods were suddenly so unimportant.
‘Harry came to me, furious. He told me everything. He thought he was taunting me, that he’d be able to roll me back and I’d forget it all. I told him to fuck off, and then I came to find you. He couldn’t do anything to stop me.’
Jack smiled with relief. ‘The feather worked,’ he said.
‘It was a wonderful starting point.’ She drew in close and kissed him. For a moment, they lost themselves in each other. Then she pulled back and asked: ‘Where’s Fist?’
‘Over there.’
He was gaping at her. [God, Jack, if you could see her as I do.] All the rage had gone from his voice.
[ What do you mean?]
[Such coherence. Far more than I gave her.]
‘Your understanding of fetch data structures is remarkable,’ said Andrea, giving him a broad smile. ‘But you hardly know me at all. I had to restructure the feather to fit myself.’ Her wings pulsed in and out of existence. ‘And then I found I needed more than one.’