Janus was Michael Peter Morgan for thirty years.
He married.
Had children.
Lived well and, from what I can tell, never once jumped away. Such a life is a luxury that only an estate agent can provide. It is the luxury of wooing a wife over many a rocky year, the empowerment of worrying about a mortgage, the privilege of going to the doctor for an ingrown toenail. It is the joy of friends who love you for the words you speak and the thoughts you think, the honour of being honoured for the deeds you yourself have achieved. It is a name, an identity, which becomes through years of labour entirely yours. A thing that is almost real.
I do not know what the original Morgan would have done with his life, had he lived it.
Questions of “what if ” are not an estate agent’s occupation.
Do you like what you see?
Chapter 51
I don’t know how long it took them to get to Rathaus Steglitz.
To find that Nathan Coyle was not, in fact, there.
Eugene, restored to full hazmat glory, entered the room, then the room within the room, my transparent cage, without a word. He marched forward, drew his right hand up to his left shoulder, and on the backstroke hit me as hard as he could across the face.
It was a slap more than a punch, but the shock of it reverberated down to my very toes.
“Where’s Nathan?” he said.
I shook my head.
He hit me again.
“Where’s Nathan?”
And again.
“Where’s Nathan?”
On the fourth stroke his hand became a fist, and his fist sent my chair over sideways, and my head bounced against the floor, and a tooth rattled in my mouth, and I thought, that’ll cost someone some day, losing a tooth like that, and the chair that I was secured to creaked under the strain.
Bored with hitting me, he tried kicking, and the third time he kicked my kidneys, something inside went pop. A feeling like a blister bursting, the warm glow of fluids seeping into places within my body where such fluids should not seep.
Had he stopped hitting me, I could probably have found some reason to answer his question. As it was, he didn’t, so I couldn’t, and when he stamped down on my little finger hard enough to crack it, it occurred to me that Eugene’s personal problems were getting in the way of his professional integrity. Then he stamped again, and I largely stopped thinking.
“Where’s Nathan?”
I gasped, “Steglitz. He’s in Steglitz.”
Eugene kicked again.
“Steglitz!”
He grabbed a fistful of hair, his gloved hand digging into my scalp, pulled my face close. “You’re going to die in this place, Kepler.”
Ghosts have one defensive move.
We move.
A tale was told of one of my kin who, pursued for her life, hid in the body of a mother. She was eight months pregnant, and as the captain of the killers demanded her name–which the ghost did not know–she hid in the only place left to hide, in the body of the near-born child within its mother’s womb.
Of the consequences of this–life, death–the story is more vague, but the lesson survives: when cornered, a ghost will always run rather than fight.
Now seemed as good a time as any to buck the trend.
I slammed my head, as hard as I could, into Eugene’s visor. Hair tore from my scalp, Eugene staggered back, a thin plastic crack in the sheet across his face. I rolled on to my knees, then dropped back as hard as I could on to the chair.
Plastic snapped beneath me. I tried to move my hands and found that one was free, the leg that had held it broken wood. My other hand was still cuffed to the seat of the chair, which was either a terrible dragging weight or a weapon. I looked up into Eugene’s startled features and swung the chair into his face. The crack spread through his visor like a spider’s web, and he fell to the side as the weight of my makeshift club slammed into the side of his head. Others were moving, one reaching for a Taser, Alice for a gun. I tried to charge them, but my feet were still cuffed and I fell forward. I saw the man with the Taser bring it up to fire, and raised the chair in front of me. The electrodes hissed and spat as they struck, a buzz through my palms and the pop-pop of the gun. An arm went around my neck from behind, squeezing tight enough to send a pulse of blood through my ears, fog across my eyes, and as Eugene stuck his knee into my back and his fist into my jugular vein, I twisted round, tangling my chained feet against his knees, drew my head back and, biting down a hysterical laugh, slammed my forehead into the crack in his visor as hard as I could.
Plastic shattered, biting into my face, my skin, my eyes; a shriek came out of someone’s lungs–mine?–and as a gun fired and a bullet shattered my shoulder blade in a primrose roar, my forehead brushed Eugene’s cheek and
another gunshot. The body beneath me jerked, cried out in pain, and I held on, sweat running down my back, panting for breath, but I held on, my arm across the throat of the security guard beneath me, blood running down his back from where the bullet had broken his shoulder, popped one of his lungs like a can of Coke. He stared up at me, confused, trying to breathe and finding his lung expanding with blood not air.
A dead man in my arms.
His tongue flopped in his bloody mouth, his eyes bulged, and he didn’t understand, and he died.
I scrambled back, bits of broken visor slipping down the inside of my suit.
Looked up.
Alice was staring at me. She held a gun with both hands, and it was pointed at me.
“Leontes!” she barked, and I stared back, empty-eyed, empty-brained. “Leontes! Your suit is breached, Leontes!”
I remembered that my feet were not chained, tried to get up, felt scar tissue tight across every muscle. Constriction in my chest, aching in my ribs, tasted blood on my mouth, heard a whining in my right ear and wondered if Eugene could remember a time when he had felt human, before this constancy of physical distress became all that he knew.
“Leontes! Sir!” Alice’s voice was shaking, but the gun was not.
A picture of Coyle’s phone–Aeolus, Circe.
Call and response.
Alice called Leontes, and Eugene responded…
… God knew what.
I took a step towards her, and as her finger pulled back the safety to fire, I stumbled, fell, landing breathless on my hands and knees, my palm slipping in the growing pool of blood spreading out from…
… whoever he’d been.
Whatever man it was who’d died, eyes cold at my side.
I looked up and met Alice’s eye, and she knew I was not Eugene, and would not permit herself to believe it. I made no sound but launched myself from the floor towards her face, hands outstretched to tear at the mask that covered her head. I heard the gunshot, felt the shock of something below my lungs. She’d aimed low and wide, deliberately, and it wasn’t enough to slow me down as I slammed into her, throwing her back through the open door of the cage and on to the floor beyond. I knelt on her chest, dragging at her suit as the blood ran down my trouser leg and someone jumped on my back and tried to pull me off, and I drove my elbow into their stomach as hard as I could and heard a whomph of air, managed to get my fingers under Alice’s helmet, a bare inch, as she pushed her hands against my neck and chest, trying to drive me away. I could see a corner of her bare skin and, as the man I’d just thrown off tried again, hurling himself on to my back, I bent beneath him and pressed my lips into the side of her neck and jumped.
Alice Mair.
Good to be someone you know.
Above me, Eugene sagged under the weight of the man wrapped across his back. I drew my fist back and drove it as hard as I could into his face, felt his nose snap beneath my fingers. His body went limp. I kicked him off me, and as he rolled, so his attacker rolled with him, still clinging to Eugene with all his might. I pulled my hazmat helmet back down over my suit, and as the final man in the room untangled himself from Eugene, I crawled to my feet and gasped, “Help him! For God’s sake help him!”