He joins Evie on the other. They haven’t spoken properly since their failed intimacy in the hotel and his proximity, with no other distractions, makes her nervous. They sit a yard apart, looking away from each other.
‘I’m sorry,’ he eventually says. ‘Yesterday I made you feel bad when… You were trying to be nice.’
‘No, it was my fault,’ she replies, blushing, wishing they weren’t having this conversation. ‘I had no idea, about any of the things you’ve…’
The pressure of the last twenty-four hours has taken its toll on them both. But now they are here in a safe place and as the tension slips away, her tears well up. She closes her eyes to hold them in but they bulge under her lids.
The sofa shifts as he slides along the cushions. Uninvited, he places his arm around her and draws her against him and there is nothing that she can do but let him hold her and let the tears flow.
‘Don’t cry,’ he says. ‘I don’t like to see you cry.’ His simple way of expressing himself, which had at first seemed childish, now seems refreshingly honest.
‘It is better to be able to,’ she says. ‘To let out what you feel.’
‘I want you to be happy.’
‘I think I am,’ she says.
When her swollen vision clears, Evie points at the wall. ‘Look.’ The scene in the woods around where Sola sleeps has changed. A cottage has appeared among the trees and a group of bearded dwarves are emerging from it to stand around in a circle gazing down at her.
Evie lays her head on David’s chest. ‘You know, with the three of us here, I feel properly safe for the first time since we set out. It’s a bit like re-finding paradise. Being allowed back in. Is that possible?’
‘When you’ve done the right thing,’ he replies, ‘I think it should be. You saved me and you saved the little girl.’
Evie nods, blinking, memories – real memories, not ones she was given but ones created by her – flooding her. ‘When I lived in London, we had a garden surrounded by a wall. I wish you could have seen it. It was a beautiful place, something in it for each season – apple blossom for spring, camellias in bloom in June, leaves on the paths crackling underfoot in autumn and as the year ended, icicles on the branches that twinkled in the sun. I was content there. No, more than content – happy. It was tended by my friend. He did all the work but he’d tease me anyway by calling it “The Garden of Evie”.’
‘Your friend sounds like a nice man,’ David says, his mouth so close that his breath ruffles her hair, setting off a tingle in her lobe.
‘He was,’ she says and her eyes fill again.
As she speaks, the surrounding woods retreat, and in their place bright green lawns roll themselves out, cut through by little paths, overhung by trees weighted with blossom, all of it sheltered by rose-covered brickwork basking in the noon sun. It is not her garden, how could it be? But it is enough to transport her back. And she lifts her cheek from his neck, now wet with her tears, and gazes around.
Bam… Bam… Bam… Bam…
The transition is as sudden as that. One moment she is asleep and the next shouting and flashing lights fill the air.
David is being wrenched to his feet.
Rolling off the sofa, Evie lands on the floor on her hands and knees, and slips sideways beneath it.
Torchlight criss-crosses the room, intersecting the green beams of energy rifles.
A half-dozen black-jacketed figures circle the rug. They’ve identified David as their main threat, maybe their primary goal, and are doing their best to restrain him. For now, she and Sola are overlooked.
The video walls are going berserk. The garden scene, which during the hours of darkness had been steadily embellishing itself with a sundial, a gazebo, a greenhouse, a pond and even something that resembles her swing, flickers and flashes as it struggles to adapt to what has become a war zone. It starts to sleet soot and snow.
Sola is sitting upright, staring about her, her eyes large with terror.
Evie, risking leaving her hiding place, crawls across the rug, and, without being seen, takes the child and pulls her down with her, so that they are hidden from view behind the other sofa.
The attackers struggle to subdue David. A couple of them lie on the floor, with smashed skulls. But they are tasering him now, the little blue filaments tangling around his arms, constraining him in a web. He tries to free himself, ripping at the skein of humming wire, stumbling backwards, his face in agony.
He glances in her direction and, despite the pain, mouths to her to go.
The video projection returns to the image of a forest at night. Rain beats down and the branches of the trees bend and scrape with a nightmarish zeal. The dwarves’ cottage has returned too. The door to it is open and a yellow light shines from within.
Sola frees herself from Evie’s grasp and, followed by the dog, creeps the few yards to the wall where the projection of the little door glows invitingly. Evie watches helplessly as her head and shoulders disappear.
Before a second later re-emerging. She glances behind her and Evie follows her over.
They find themselves at the top of a narrow staircase.
The door swings closed behind. The projection of the dwarves’ door corresponded to an actual hidden door – the room has showed them the way to get out. She can only think that Boris had anticipated the merit of an escape hatch.
They hurry down the stairs, not looking behind them, and at the bottom, with minimal pressure, the heavy external door swings outward.
They emerge onto a steel walkway built above the bloated river. Their attention is drawn to the building behind as one of the circular windows forty feet above explodes, scattering glass, David’s body smashing through, tangled with wire weaving false wings between his arms and shoulders. He briefly flies, propelled through the winter air by the power of his death-leap, before plummeting Icarus-like, striking the hard, grey, swollen, icy surface of the river at full pelt.
PART 5
The Actuality
32
Evie gazes across the lake. Spring is in the air here already, despite it being only January. The snow has retreated into the highest valleys and the white peaks reflect in the surface, disturbed only by ripples. It is as if they left winter behind in Paris. A sailboat swings around in a tight semicircle, and then, shedding the wind, comes to an abrupt halt, causing a kerfuffle on deck as the sail flaps and folds back on itself. It reminds her of her own memory of sailing: one moment in full flow with a mother holding her close and then the next… cut off.
The house is across the water. His house. Her ‘father’s’ house. The house of Maier. Although to call it a house fails to do it justice: it is half medieval fantasy and half a collection of glass rectangles. Futuristic and old-fashioned at the same time, not unlike herself.
Evie looks down at the little girl kneeling in the grass, building a wigwam from sticks, the light in her hair, the tip of her nose prodding the air, her pink lips parted in concentration.
The escape from Paris was as fraught as anything she’s been through. After eluding their would-be captors, they’d tramped beside the river, arriving an hour later at Gare de Lyon, and from there’d taken the night-train south. It was almost too much to believe that they’d got away, albeit an escape clouded by David’s horrible end. An event she is struggling hard not to think about. And what of Yuliya’s shocking readiness to betray her own kind – that it was her, Evie can have no doubt – using her own self to bait the trap, for what?
It could only have been for the bounty money. Wealth that would allow her to continue to exist in lonely isolation for a few years longer. There was nothing to distinguish her behaviour from the lowest of what humans do to one another. Such ugliness masked by such beauty could compete with the very worst the animal kingdom could put up. Evie had just not seen it coming; Yuliya had seemed more pampered pet than ruthless survivor.