Cory stepped towards the mirror. Once it was open, and the seal of Saskia’s Faraday cage broken, he would scrape her wetware device of information once and for all, and be gone.
But he hesitated as his reflection swished left and the secret door opened. Saskia stepped into the room. She wore jeans and cowgirl boots. Her shirt had been buttoned. Three teeth remained in her grin.
‘Tell me what I want to know,’ Cory said, ‘or I’ll rip it out. The thornwood can’t hide it.’
She shook her head. ‘I have… set traps.’ She swallowed. ‘Device will destruct. If cracked.’
‘I didn’t know that suicide was one of your talents.’
‘Do, now.’
‘What’s your plan, Saskia? We all want to know. Don’t we, Jem? Gentlemen?’
The table scraped as Danny used it to stand. He helped the inspector into the nearby chair and crossed to Hrafn, who hissed as Danny checked his wound. Jem backed into the curtain that covered the outer doorway.
‘Running away again, Jem?’
He smiled—aware of the blood on his teeth, empowered by it—and set the benefit of killing all the people in this room against the cost of a manhunt and the threat to his anonymity. When he turned back to Saskia, she held the inspector’s gun in her hand.
‘Ah, Saskia. Not one of your better ideas.’
‘Shoot. Me. And I shoot. You.’
‘How did you rig up that EMP weapon? Did the woodsman help?’
‘It’s. Secret.’
Cory looked from the gun to her shaded, broken face. ‘Come back with me. In the present, there’s work to be done.’
‘Present?’
‘This is the past. It’s finished. Can’t you feel it? They are flies in amber, all of them, and they don’t know it.’
‘You. Idiot.’
Cory sighed. Saskia had joined the cult of the walking dead. He was genuinely sorrowful. She had deep courage. She would have made a singular friend. He tossed his gun to his left hand and put the barrel to Jem’s nose. Around the room, heartbeats raised, pressures ramped, muscle gorged and flickers of charge spent themselves across sweaty skin. Except Saskia: she was cold.
‘Wait,’ she said.
‘Tell me what happened on that flight,’ said Cory. ‘Before and after. All of it. I know Harkes passed something to you.’
Saskia swallowed again. She removed her forearm from her back pocket, looked at the ghost of her hand, and began to speak.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Berlin, before the crash
Saskia Brandt, who was certain of most things, could be certain of the exact moment she realised that the tall gentleman walking away from her on Bismarck Strasse was an anachronism. There was nothing unusual about his appearance. He was elderly, slim, and walked with a cane. He was one man among the hundreds taken in her glance.
An instant before, she had experienced an utter violation. It had not been maleficent. More a neutral excavation of her mind by a force that overpowered her. Thoughts had been inventoried: the position of her body mid stride, the rubbing sensation of her canvas bag’s shoulder strap, her satisfaction in picturing, at will, Jem’s blue hair; the loss of her loneliness, hair strands falling across her left eye; hunger. Everything in her awareness, and perhaps the unconscious layers below that, had been breached by some form of electronic, viral attack. Fortunately, before this information could be transmitted back to the originator of the virus, safeguards in her wetware device had been tripped. The virus was contained and killed.
Saskia had stumbled in the street and looked for the source of the assault. It could only be a time traveller. The encryption on her device was unbreakable by contemporary technology.
There he was.
The elderly gentleman paused on the corner of the block, tipping his head to one side as though he had half-heard his name. He looked in her direction and she turned away. She turned back when he continued walking with his easy, imperious gait.
Saskia matched his pace. It was ten minutes later that she sensed a GSM transmission from the man. Saskia felt the information as though it were a gossamer strand trailing from his gentlemanly hat, sunlight glissando on its lone string. The transmission contained TCP/IP packets—easily decrypted—destined for an online travel agency. He had just booked a flight to Milan.
Why Milan? And was he aware of Saskia? Did he know Jennifer Proctor and her father, David? Saskia worried at these questions for every step of the return journey to her apartment. Part of her curiosity was a need to know what had happened to her friends. Had Jennifer become the Einstein of the twenty-first century, a media eminence? And what of David? Had he been fully reconciled with his daughter? It was carrying these thoughts, along with breakfast from the local shop, that she re-entered her apartment one full hour earlier than she had told Jem with a plan to follow her time traveller to Milan. She found the woman in the secure room, where Saskia kept her more personal souvenirs, her financial paperwork, and her weaponry.
‘What the fuck are you doing, Jem?’
Who was
‘I bought us Battenberg cake… and proper English teabags. I was going to invite you on a trip.’
the time traveller? Where was
‘Where?’
he going?
‘Milan.’
Milan?
‘Milan.’
Echoes of her former life.
Sounds dying but not dead.
Saskia boiled with the implications of her discovery—a time traveller, like her—for the short hours of the day with Jem, the barren night, and the morning.
Saskia had taken her usual seat in the rearmost row of the aircraft. Here she could see without being seen. A girl of twelve or so, travelling alone and clearly nervous, looked at her across the aisle. Saskia took her hand briefly. Then the jet engines tuned up and up and the rough take-off pushed her into a doze, eyes dry even beneath their lids, her shoulders cramped and tense, forgetting the girl but remembering the time traveller. Where was he? She had not seen him come aboard. The engine noise played on all the intensity of her anxiety, which itself was buoyed by the absence of Jem. Saskia was conscious that her outfit—a disguise, in part—had been chosen by the woman: the Loblan cowgirl boots that made her feet ache; a fancy knapsack that could carry nothing more than her mobile phone, her wallet, a tampon or two; a tight, designer shirt; a necklace that bounced on her exposed sternum. Each discomfort made her think of Jem. For a time, she had been everything. Everything. Jem with the blue hair, draped over a sofa in the changing room, yawning thoughtfully at Saskia’s new groove and calling it good with a mimed pistol shot.
Peow.
Airborne.
Saskia cuffed away the cold tracks of her tears as a steward passed her, heading towards the rear galley. She watched him return with a rattling cart. As he pushed this along the aisle, she heard a door open behind her. She frowned. It was impossible that someone could be back there. Nobody but the steward had passed her since she sat down, and he would not have allowed the plane to take off with the bathroom occupied.
Saskia turned fully.
The woman who emerged from the dark, L-shaped corridor, and who was now looking nervously down the cabin, was Jennifer Proctor.
Saskia’s memories of 2023 had been dulled by the stresses of 2003, in which she was a fugitive. But she had not forgotten Jennifer Proctor (hair held by chopsticks, arrogant but principled), the woman who had created a time machine and helped Saskia return to 2003. The version of Jennifer who stepped back into Saskia’s life was older. Her hair was cropped and oiled. Her black T-shirt was tight and her stomach was flat. She wore dark gloves and, on her right wrist, a bracelet. Even in the gloom, her eyes were azure. They moved around the aircraft with unconcealed interest.