For a moment I miss the familiar weight of Nathan Coyle or the runner’s confidence of Alice Mair.
We eat, Janus and I, in a small restaurant opposite a remnant of medieval wall. She orders cheese and wine and duck in simmering purple sauce. The owner/waiter/matron of the place asks me if I will be paying for my mother’s meal. Janus forgets who she is and for a moment is indignant at the idea.
Conversation is hollow.
Do you know the city?
A little.
When were you last here?
A long time ago.
And who were you then?
I forget. But I wore yellow as I walked by the sea, and ate oysters from a nickel bucket. And you?
I was someone extraordinary.
I am always someone extraordinary, you see.
And then Janus said, “Why did you save me?” The question was so against the tenor of our conversation I was taken by surprise. “Our relationship has been… temperamental, shall we say. You need help–you could have gone elsewhere.”
“Galileo. You’re the only one I know–besides myself and one other–who’s met him.”
“And Miami?” she murmured, prodding a piece of drooping vegetable with her fork. “What of that?”
I laid my cutlery down, folded my hands together beneath my chin. It feels like a gesture Sebastian Puis would not make, but then for this brief encounter, for this rare moment between old acquaintances, I am not he, but…
… someone else.
“We… understand flesh,” I said at last. “We are connoisseurs of eyes and lips, hair and skin. The emotions which would otherwise drive the flesh, the… complexity that arises from a life long lived, we perhaps lack. Like children, we flee from pain and deny our own responsibilities. This is the simple truth of our existence. Yet we have still lived as human. We still dread to die and feel all the things humans feel not merely as a chemical response, but as… the only language we have left with which to speak. Had it been me who switched into a body without injury that night in Miami, I cannot guarantee that I would not have fled. I do not say this–” I added as she opened her mouth to speak “–to forgive you. You left me to die; that was the decision you made. As I understand fear and dread, and panic and pain, I also comprehend resentment, anger and betrayal. You saved your skin and left me to die in mine, and though I can comprehend the action I cannot forgive it.”
“And if I repented?” she murmured. “If I… apologised?”
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine how that might sound.”
The end of a fingertip played with the hollow of her spoon. A moment came, a moment went, and that was all that there was to it. Our plates were removed, coffee presented, for you cannot have dinner and not have coffee, Monsieur, it simply is not a concept we are prepared to comprehend. And as she crumbled in a cube of brown sugar Janus said simply, “You were meant to have killed him.”
“Who? I am caretaker to a whole cemetery of responsibilities.”
“Galileo.”
“I did kill him,” I retorted, sharper than I’d meant. “I shot him, and when the police came I knelt over his body and there wasn’t a pulse.”
“And yet the rumours persist. Milli Vra, Santa Rosa…”
“I didn’t know you paid attention.”
“I read newspapers. I’m particularly fond of the celebrity tattlers, but even the tabloid press will give a few inches to a ship found drifting in the dark, blood on the floor, survivors weeping in a barricaded room. And as we have discussed before, it is easy–so very easy–for one of our nature to make a decision regarding the lives of others. You’ve tasted it. You know how it feels. Hecuba was inclined the same way. Families would slaughter each other, from the chambermaid to the master; only Hecuba killed those who threatened him, and you kill those who threaten the things you love, and you love everyone, don’t you, Kepler?”
My teeth ground at the name, fingers rippled along the edge of the table.
“He wore… a host,” I replied as Janus lifted her tiny coffee cup, little finger sticking out like an antenna. “His name was Will. He was my gofer, in the old days. Last time we met, we argued. He had this thing with his left leg, a muscle that cramped when twisted the wrong way. I don’t know the cause, wasn’t around long enough to get it checked out, but when it happened you could feel the tendons stand out beneath the bridge of your foot like they were going to pop right out from the skin. But he was a clean willing host in a city that wanted neither of us. He kept his nails trim and always carried mouthwash in a little bottle. He didn’t ask questions. He was… good company. Not very often you can say that. Then he was Galileo. And he had to die, so I killed him, three shots to the chest. It would be safer to put a bullet in his brain, but I had this picture in my head, of Will’s face, smashed up. Of his nose just exploding, of seeing his skull, of my–his–eyes staring, hanging out, and I should have put the bullets in his brain, but I didn’t.
“Then I was the policeman and I took his pulse, and he didn’t have one and I thought that’s it, but the medics came and they started resuscitation and they failed. Of course they failed, but I imagine there must have been a moment. Perhaps a moment on the ambulance floor when a medic pushed down on his chest and what little blood there was left went through his arm and his skin touched the medic’s skin and… and I don’t know, because I wasn’t there–I was… someone else by then–but I can almost guarantee you that the medic who called time of death on my Will, if questioned today, would have absolutely no memory of it. None at all.”
“And so Galileo lives.”
“It would appear to be so.”
“Just because he is of us,” she added sharply, “doesn’t make him our responsibility.” Even as she spoke the words, her shoulders uncurled, fingers relaxed over the end of her spoon. “Though he seems to have made us his.”
“It’s not just Galileo.”
She waited.
“In Frankfurt Aquarius ran a medical trial. They were attempting to create a vaccine, to immunise people against us.”
“Can that work?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. As it was, they didn’t get very far. Four of their researchers were murdered. A woman called Josephine Cebula did it. She was worn. Aquarius blamed me.”
“Why you?”
“I thought about that. Perhaps because I was convenient, because I showed up. But then I also thought about why they assumed that Josephine was somehow complicit in the act, instead of an unwilling host. I saw CCTV footage of her covered in blood, and to me it seemed obvious–blatant–that she was Galileo. That Galileo did the killing. But Aquarius blamed me, blamed her, and ordered us both killed. Host and ghost. That’s not how these things usually work.”
“How did they die?”
“Who?”
“The people your skin… that Galileo… killed.”
“Badly. Drowned. Stabbed. Mutilated; it varied.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps because they were developing a vaccine; perhaps that was a threat. But also…” I hesitated, drew in breath. Janus waited, a fork between two fingers, playing with it like a ball of string, watching. I ran my finger around the rim of my coffee cup, found I couldn’t meet Janus’ eye. “How did you become a ghost?”
“Badly,” she replied.
“Violently? When I… died–I think it’s fair to say that was the mechanism in my case–when I died, I held the ankle of the man who’d killed me. That was my first jump. I watched myself bleed to death and shook my frozen corpse, trying to get back in, but of course the flesh was dead and I lived, and the watchmen arrested me for my murder, which seemed, in a way, fair. It was, as you say, a bad beginning. I take it your origins were no less glamorous?”
“Stabbed. In the stomach. Bled out. Jumped into the nurse who was trying to push my guts back in.”