‘Saskia,’ he said, entering. He noted the chair, the bread on the table, and the stove. He enjoyed its flames with the intensity of an aesthete. Its light dimmed as he stepped closer. The reservoirs of power inside him—stings drawn out by the cold—recovered their extents. The room cooled and Cory healed a little.
He licked his dry lips and stopped at the mirror.
By his own clock, the man who looked back was two years from his ninth decade. This man pitied the youth who had told the Provisional Army recruitment sergeant back in Atlanta that he wanted to enlist to honour his state. In truth, Cory’s reasons were threefold: breakfast, lunch, and supper. Make that fourfold: to put many miles between him and the choleric water that killed four of his six brothers, between him and the Transitional Authority camps, between him and his blind father.
Even now he remembered how gently his mother had read the newspapers aloud to that man, sometimes closing her eyes in sympathy, the better to propagandise hope.
Cory had decades-brewed hate—for himself, his father, this face in the mirror—and he lashed out. The heel of the gun made a star. By his second strike, fractures radiated to the frame and black-backed pieces fell upon the floor.
Where the shards used to be, Cory’s ichor overlaid the heat signatures of two people: one crouched, one lying. He paused: the desperate boy who had signed up for the army was still part of him, was a component that could be resolved with the correct function.
Walk away, soldier. Your superiors aren’t here. You can’t kill Jem now any easier than you could kill her at the safe house. Admit it. She’s too much like…
Cory dug his fingernails into the crack of the false door and tore it off. He was not prepared for the absolute dark inside. A ghost erupted.
Catherine?
The blade stopped before it touched his neck. He had caught her wrist. He paused. He let the moment pay out.
‘Jem.’
‘Get fucked.’
The muscles in his jaw bulged. He felt her wrist bones shift. Grimacing, Jem supported the wrist with her left hand, but his strength was beyond her. She screamed through locked teeth. Cory shook her and the knife fell. He kicked it towards the stove and looked back at her. With one strike, she was unconscious, dropping. He caught her awkwardly and laid her down. He put his gun over her forehead. This woman had hindered him from the start. He noted the syrupy blood that bubbled from her nostrils. He huffed and lowered the gun. Later, he thought. Her immediate death would only distract him. His attention moved to the body in the dark anteroom.
It took only a moment to see that Saskia was dead. Not, perhaps, beyond resuscitation, but her breathing had ceased and her lips and earlobes were darkening to the cyanotic shade that he had seen countless times. Saskia was drifting away from him. He could feel the distance increase with each second, and his anger grew in equal measure. It was not conceivable to come so far and risk so much for the information she surely held about the Cullinan Zero. But, despite her death, there was time. He had to be quick.
‘I’m impressed, Saskia,’ Cory said. And he was.
He closed his eyes and strained to feel the smallest hint of a…
Yes, it was there. The device in her head—a crude prototype of his ichor—was functioning enough to permit narrowband communication. The device would not last much longer, however. Cory felt it was too closely bound to the flesh; the cyanotic, failing flesh.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Cory prepared himself to interface with the device. It would not be easy. Such an antique would need careful handling—the personal touch. He would insert his very personality. First, he slowed his breathing and lifted his face. In this darkened hut on this freezing night, he had a test of his ability to transmit himself. Cory said, ‘I see a fine mesh.’ He imagined taking a single step down a curving, shadowy staircase and felt a growing detachment. It was working. Sergeant Blake would have been proud. ‘I see knots and whorls in the wood.’ Another step into the gloom. ‘I see a window, also covered by the mesh.’ A third step. And, speaking again, ‘I see a bandage,’ he took a fourth. The hypnotic induction continued with four things he could hear—Jem’s breathing, the flexing wood beneath his feet, his pulse in his ears, the hiss of air in the chimney—and four things he could feel. With each verbalised sensation, his mind went deeper down the imaginary staircase. He spoke in groups of four sensations, then three, then two, then one. His eyes closed on the hut and (now) the ichor in his blood began to march. The machines wove his mind thread by thread into the program running on that vital, elusive device at the back of Saskia’s brain. Where was she? How deep had she gone?
He opened his eyes on a vast firmament, infinite in all directions, whose colourless fractals reminded him of feathers, shells and galaxies. Worlds within worlds, he thought. The illusion did not quite surmount the evidence of his bodily senses, which insisted that he still stood in the hut on the mountain, but laid itself like scales across his vision. As he looked deeper into the fractals, his body grew less substantial. The firmament might have been a photonegative starscape. Close by—yet thousands, perhaps millions of miles distant—were darker, larger orbs at the heart of the fractals.
Cory could not move. He might have been an astronaut in free-fall. His breathing became irregular.
I’m still in the hut, he thought. Easy. There is a whole mountain beneath me.
From behind him, he heard the wing-claps of an approaching bird. There was no time for fear. Only a tension before the impact of its talons, which fastened on his shoulders. The bird thrashed on, dragging him through the air towards the closest of the dark orbs. Cory looked up to see a black breast and a scythe-shaped beak larger than his head. He shied from the thumping wind and looked down.
My feet. I must have feet. Why don’t I see them?
Easy.
The hut, the mountain, and Saskia—all were gone.
‘What are you?’ he shouted.
‘Ee-caw! Ee-caw!’
Ichor, he thought. Ichor.
He awoke on a forest path looking at the fractal sky. How much time had passed? His head hurt. When he tried to move, plates of armour shifted about his shoulders. He stood slowly and looked at his hands. He was wearing leather gloves with a metal carapace that shifted as he turned his hands and rippled his fingers. His head was covered with a faceless helmet. Cory suppressed his unease.
So I play the knight.
He was standing in a petrified forest. Behind him and ahead, a mist obscured the beginning and the end of the path. Cory felt certain that each direction stretched to infinity. If this were a planet, the path was an equator. Next to the path, a horse ripped at the short grass. It wore a metal faceplate. The saddle was loaded with bedding, a broadsword… and the bird.
It was perched on the haft of the saddle, watching him. Cory’s instinct was to step back. Its crest was reddish brown and the breast black with blue streaks. The raptor-like eyes were trained on Cory, who put his hands akimbo and said, ‘So what now?’
The bird—if it was a bird—leaned forward and opened its mouth, black tongue pointing as though to vomit.