Yet the place hummed with a sense of barely managed power; a constant subliminal rumble which transmitted itself into the bones. The balcony we stood on was sheeted over with airtight glass, but even so I had the feeling that I was standing in the corner of a vast, shadowy turbine room in which every generator was spinning at full tilt.
Reivich had given the authorisation for Refuge security to let me in, provided my party were escorted to him. I had misgivings about this — it was too much out of my control — but we had absolutely no choice but to comply with Reivich’s wishes. This was where the chase ended — on his territory. And by sleight of hand, it was no longer Reivich who was being chased.
It might have been Tanner.
Maybe it was me.
Refuge was sufficiently small that there was no real drawback in walking from point to point within its interior; a fact aided by the relatively weak artificial gravity which the habitat’s lazy spin imparted. We were led into one of the connecting tunnels: a three-metre-wide tube fashioned from thick smoky glass, with intermittent glass irises spaced along its length, dilating open and shut to allow us passage and to make abundantly clear the fact that we were being shepherded, like food passing along the gullet. The walk took us further along the main axis of the spindle, gravity rising as we descended from the endcap, but never reaching anything like one gee. The unlit structures of Refuge towered over us like canyon walls at night, and there was no sense whatsoever that anyone else inhabited the place. The truth was that the kind of clientèle which Refuge serviced were the kind of people who demanded absolute discretion, even from others like themselves.
‘Has Reivich been mapped yet?’ I asked, realising that it was an obvious question which so far hadn’t occurred to me. ‘After all, that’s why he’s here.’
‘Not yet,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘There are all sorts of physiological tests which need to be made first, to ensure that the mapping is optimised — cell membrane chemistry, neurotransmitter properties, glial cell structure, blood-brain volume, that kind of thing. You only get one shot at it, you see.’
‘Reivich’s going for the full destructive scan?’
‘Something very close to it. It’s still the way to get the best resolution, they say.’
‘Once he’s scanned, he won’t have to worry about an irritation like Tanner.’
‘Not unless Tanner follows him.’
I laughed — before I realised that Quirrenbach wasn’t making a joke.
‘Where do you think Tanner’s now?’ Zebra said, walking to my left, her heels clicking on the floor, her elongated reflection like dancing scissors in the wall’s reflection.
‘Somewhere Reivich has his eye on him,’ I said. ‘Along with Amelia, I hope.’
‘Is she really to be trusted?’
‘She might be the only person who hasn’t betrayed one of us,’ I said. ‘At least not intentionally. But I’m sure of one thing. Tanner’s stringing her along only until she ceases to be of use to him. Once that moment comes — and it might be soon — she’ll be in very great danger.’
Chanterelle said, ‘You came here to save her?’
For a moment I wanted to answer in the affirmative; to dredge up some tiny crumb of self-respect and pretend that I was a human being capable of something other than wickedness. And maybe it wouldn’t have been entirely untrue — maybe Amelia was a large part of the reason I’d come here, knowing it was everything that Tanner wanted. But she wasn’t the largest part, and the last thing I felt like doing was lying any more, least of all to myself.
‘I came here to end what Cahuella started,’ I said. ‘It’s as simple as that.’
The smoked-glass tunnel wound its way up again, towards the far endcap of Refuge, and then punched its way into the lightless side of one of the looming airtight structures. At the end of this particular stretch of tunnel was another iris, currently sealed. But this one was gloss-black, and it was impossible to see what lay beyond it.
I walked up to it and pressed my cheek against the unyielding metal, straining to hear something.
‘Reivich?’ I called. ‘We’re here! Open up!’
The door irised open, more ponderously than those we’d passed through earlier on.
Cool green light streamed through the opening arcs, bathing us in its insipidity. Suddenly the fact that I didn’t have a weapon — that none of us were armed — hit home. I might die in a second, I thought — and probably not even know it when it happened. I had allowed myself to be admitted into the lair of a man who had everything to fear from me, and no reason in the universe to trust me. Did that make Reivich or myself the bigger fool? I couldn’t begin to guess. All I knew was that I wanted to get out of Refuge as quickly as possible.
The door opened fully, revealing a bronze-walled antechamber, with vivid green lamps hanging from the ceiling. Bas-relief gold symbols scurried around the walls, iterating similar mathematical statements to those I had seen when I’d spoken to Reivich; the incantations which could shatter a mind into ones and zeros; pure number.
There was no doubt that he was here.
The door closed behind us and another irised ahead, revealing a much larger space, like the inside of a cathedral. The room was bathed in golden light, yet its extremities were so far away that they were lost in shadow. I could see the slight curvature of Refuge’s floor, an effect accentuated by the interlocking bronze and silver chevrons which patterned the floor.
The air smelled of incense.
A man sat in the distance, in the middle of a pool of brighter light shafting from a stained-glass window far above. He sat facing away from us, in a high-backed chair of ornate construction, wreathed in gold. A trio of slender bipedal servitors stood a few metres from the chair, presumably awaiting instructions. I studied the shape of his head, almost lost in shadow itself, and knew that I was standing behind Reivich.
I remembered when I thought I had seen him, near the immortal fish in Chasm City. How quickly I had reacted, slipping out my gun and chasing around the fish tank to confront and kill him. I was sure that I would have done so if Voronoff had not been a second faster than I.
Now I didn’t feel any pressing need to kill him.
A voice, like sandpaper rasping against sandpaper, said, ‘Turn me around so that I may face my guests, please.’ The statement itself was a laboured thing, punctuated by wheezes and words less spoken than whispered.
One of the servitors stepped forward, treading with the inhuman silence of their kind, and swivelled Reivich around.
What faced us was not what I was expecting.
It was not possible…
Reivich looked like a corpse: a cadaver briefly animated by the application of electrical puppetry. He did not look like anything living. He did not look like anything which had a right to speak, or to be able to curve his mouth in the semblance of a smile.
He reminded me of a less healthy version of Marco Ferris. We could see only his head and the tips of his fingers. The rest of him was lost beneath a thick quilted blanket, from which trailed medical feedlines, curving around into a compact life-support module clamped to one arm of the chair, a smaller version of the cuirass which I had used to keep Gitta ‘alive’ while I returned her body to the Reptile House. His head was little more than a skull around which skin had been draped; skin which was mottled black where it wasn’t already a shade of bruised purple. His eyesockets had been enucleated; fine cables trailed from the darkness between his lids, running into the same life-support module. There were only a few wisps of hair left on his crown, like the few trees which will always remain standing directly under an airblast. His jaw hung slackly open, his tongue a black slug filling his mouth.