Rush forced himself into motion. He turned his back on Ber Lusim, while his hindbrain screamed at him to duck and cower and fall into a foetal huddle, and jumped down into the pit.
This time he didn’t manage to keep his footing. He went over on his back in the rancid oil and floundered grotesquely for a second or two before he could roll over and right himself. He crawled across to Tillman, pawed at him with hands now thick with grease and finally managed to turn him onto his back. The big man was profoundly unconscious, but he was breathing.
Rush got his hands under Tillman’s armpits and hauled on him. Tillman was a dead weight, but Rush managed to move him an inch at a time over to the wall of the pit. He propped Tillman up there, wedged into the corner, so that he couldn’t easily slip down again.
Rush was conscious of Ber Lusim’s presence above and behind him — the Messenger’s utter silence probably, but not necessarily, meaning that he wasn’t moving.
‘Have you come a long way?’ Ber Lusim asked.
Small talk, from the saint of killers.
‘London,’ Rush said. ‘Budapest. New York. I’m sure you can fill in the dots.’ He was going for bravado, but his voice — in his own ears, at least — sounded high and weak.
Ber Lusim laughed, as though Rush had said something funny, and jumped down beside him — then walked on, past him, towards the open door.
‘We expect to walk a straight line,’ he said, looking back at Rush over his shoulder. ‘I’m not sure where that hope comes from. Experience should teach us that there are no straight lines in nature. God doesn’t draw with a ruler. What’s your name, boy?’
And Rush took the insult on the chin this time, because what else had he just been, while the men fought it out?
‘Ben,’ he said.
‘That’s half a name. It means son of. Where is the rest?’
‘Rush. Ben Rush.’
Ber Lusim looked momentarily startled. ‘Ben Rush,’ he repeated.
‘Yeah.’ Rush swallowed hard and looked down at Tillman. ‘Look, he’s in a bad way. Will you let me go, so I can get some help for him?’
‘Of course not,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘What help could there be, in any case? In twenty minutes’ time, this building will be a crater. And after that, all reckoning of time will stop. Leave him. I want to show you something.’
He indicated the doorway.
‘What?’ Rush said.
‘Go inside,’ Ber Lusim ordered him.
‘I … what’s inside? Why would I go in there?’ Rush hadn’t been afraid of the dark since he was seven years old, but right then that square opening seemed to be full of inimical promise.
‘You came a long way to find me,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘And you succeeded, where everyone else failed. That was a striking and exceptional thing — and obviously it was meant, as all things are meant. The prophet taught me that, when I had forgotten it, or learned to act as if it weren’t true. I’m going back inside, Ben Rush. I can’t leave you behind me, on your feet and free to leave. If you insist on staying here, I’ll respect that. But—’ he raised his hand and the knife stropped the air as he flicked it back and forth with terrifying dexterity ‘—I’ll have to make sure you’re unable to move. The quickest and easiest way to do that would be to sever your spinal column and the nerve stem that runs through it. The decision is yours. I’ll give you a few moments to consider it.’
‘No, I … I’m good. I mean, I’ll go inside. I pick that one.’
Ber Lusim nodded and indicated with a sweep of the hand that Rush should go first.
Choking on fear and humiliation, Rush stepped into the dark.
To get to the factory’s front gate meant driving around three of the four walls of the compound, but Kennedy just dropped the truck down a gear and took it straight through the fence. A length of the wire-mesh weave remained wrapped around the windshield, and one of the cement posts was ripped out of the ground and went bounding along the ground behind them like a dog.
Diema had used the time while they drove to call Kuutma, but she was answered with the brutal bathos of a voicemail message. She told him in a few terse sentences what Kennedy had guessed, and put the phone down just as Kennedy took the fence.
The rhaka slewed the truck around, raising a tidal wave of gravel, and was already jumping down out of the driver’s side before the heavy vehicle had stopped rocking on its axis. She sprinted ahead of Diema into the building, but slowed once inside to get her bearings.
‘There!’ Diema said, pointing. It wasn’t hard to see where they needed to go: the X that marked the spot was Nahir’s crumpled body, sprawled just inside the doorway that connected the main factory floor to the smaller room beyond.
Diema drew both a gun and a sica, and approached Nahir cautiously. Nothing moved on the other side of the doors. There was no clue as to what had struck him, and no sign of the two Adamites.
She let Kennedy examine Nahir, standing guard over them both while she did so. To her surprise, it was apparent as soon as Kennedy turned the man over onto his back that he was alive. He’d fought and lost, and in that process taken a horrific beating. Blood saturated both of his arms and was still pumping weakly from his gashed wrists. He’d taken an injury to the head, too — an attack that had destroyed the orbit of his right eye. Kennedy flinched from the sight of that wound. Diema didn’t. A buried part of her reflected on how the matter of the eye itself had become tears, spilling down Nahir’s cheek, and how that effect might be rendered in oil pastels. Another part, shocked and protesting, reminded her that she had lain with this man. And a third part, that embraced both of the others and then subsumed them, noted that Nahir’s condition proved the validity of Kennedy’s guesswork. Ber Lusim was here. Now.
Nahir was trying to speak.
Diema knelt beside him. ‘Nahir,’ she said. His lips worked, but the sounds that came from them were formless and atomised.
‘Ber Lusim,’ Diema prompted. ‘Where is he? Where is he now?’
Nahir’s good eye flicked to the grease pit and his finger jerked twice — down.
Diema gathered herself and was about to stand. But Nahir’s forearm bumped against hers. He was trying to grip her arm, but the fingers of his hand were incapable of responding to his brain’s commands. All they could do was twitch in tiny, random saccades.
‘Too … quick…’ Nahir whispered. ‘Too … too … quick … to …’ He took a deep, shuddering breath and tried again. ‘Don’t … fight. Too …’
‘We’ll be back soon,’ Diema said. She was still staring into that one good eye. It pleaded silently, wide with unaccustomed shock and fear. She slipped off her leather jacket, folded it over on itself and slipped it under Nahir’s head. Kennedy went to the edge of the grease pit, drew a deep, startled breath and clambered down into it, out of Diema’s line of sight.
‘We’ll be back soon,’ Diema said to Nahir. ‘We’ll get help for you.’ Or else, she thought, this whole place will be ripped into loose molecules by a ten-kiloton cubane explosion. Either way, Nahir wouldn’t have to suffer long.
She crossed to the pit and surveyed its interior before climbing carefully and quietly down to join Kennedy. Kennedy had found Tillman, propped up in one corner of the pit, and was checking on his condition. His face was masked with blood and he was profoundly unconscious, but his injuries looked to be less severe than Nahir’s. Weakened as he was, he would have presented far less of a threat.
Kennedy opened her mouth to speak, but Diema hushed her with a raised hand and pointed towards the open door. Kennedy nodded. She touched Tillman’s cheek with the fingers of one hand, kissed the top of his head. Then she stood.