Equations of Life

17

Sister Madeleine took him in. She guided him around the plastic buckets dotted along the length of the nave that attempted to catch the copious drips from the roof, stopped to genuflect to the altar, then steered him into the vestry.

Father John wasn’t there.

“Meeting with the bishop,” she said. She took his blanket away, and then wondered what to do with the sodden lump. She threw it out into the church.

“Doesn’t that mean you should be with him?”

“There’ll be more Joans there than priests. He’ll be perfectly safe.” She stared at Petrovitch. “You realize that sanctuary was abolished in the seventeenth century.”

He shivered uncontrollably under her gaze and wrapped his arms around himself. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I thought you had a plan for everything,” she said, then added quietly: “You also said I’d never see you again.”

She took a step forward, and for the briefest of moments he thought she was going to enfold him in her own robes. The look of utter panic on both their faces forced them apart.

She whirled around on the pretense of searching for something. “Doesn’t take a genius to pack a raincoat.”

“I had planned to be at the airport. Then something happened, and I found I needed to hang around after all.”

She found an old two-bar electric fire and dragged it to the center of the room, frayed flex trailing behind it. “Needed to, or wanted to?” She crouched low down by the skirting board and forced the yellowed plug into a wall socket. The wires on the fire fizzed sparks and started to glow red.

“I can still go. Walk out, never come back.”

She straightened up, faced him down. “Why don’t you then? Why don’t you just go away and leave me alone?”

“Because I made a promise I have to keep. I made a vow: you know what that’s like, don’t you? A vow so terrible, so final, that it turns you from a human being into an expendable weapon. I’ve burned my bridges, cast my dice, crossed the Rubicon. Whatever metaphor you choose, that’s it.”

She took several deep breaths. “So what is it that you’re going to do? Die of pneumonia at someone?”

“Yeah. Thanks for that. It’d be nice if somebody took me seriously some time soon.” He peeled off his jacket and dumped it on the threadbare carpet, then tried to bend down to unlace his boots. His canvas trousers had become so stiff, and his fingers so weak, that he couldn’t make any impact on the rain-shrunk knots.

Sister Madeleine got to her knees and bent low, worrying at the laces until she’d loosened first one, then the other. She looked up, face framed by her veil. “Can you manage now?”

“I’ll cope.”

“There are some choir robes in that cupboard. Put on as many as you want. It’s not like we have a choir to offend.” She pointed, then strode to the vestry door. “Look, Petrovitch…”

“Sam. It’s Sam.”

She leaned her head against the door frame. “We can be grown-ups about this, right?”

“Yes,” he said, less convincingly than he’d hoped.

“Give me a shout when you’re ready and I’ll make some coffee.”

“We can’t make a start on the communion wine, then?”

She frowned at him. He shrugged damply back.

“It’s in the safe,” she said. “I don’t have the keys.”

“Coffee will be fine,” said Petrovitch, laying his glasses on the desk and grasping the bottom of the death metal T-shirt.

Sister Madeleine saw the logo and the name, closed her eyes and shook her head. “All this in the house of God,” she muttered as she left. She made sure she closed the door behind her.

Petrovitch struggled out of the rest of his clothes, pausing only to examine the scars on his chest. One was long and curving, livid against his shock-white skin, and the others short, raised lines like knife wounds, which is what they were: the work of a single cut of the scalpel. The latest of these bristled with black thread.

Everything he wore had wicked in twice its weight in water. Where he’d dropped his jacket, the red carpet had turned dark. Not good. But there was another door at the rear of the room, and judging from the draft swirling in, it led outside. He bundled up his laundry and threw it there instead.

In one of the heavy cupboards that smelled of incense and age, he found a rail of vestments. The black ones were the priest’s; the gold ones he assumed were for special occasions. Then there were the bewildering array of white garments, some short, some long, some plain, some edged with lace. He had no idea what he was supposed to use.

In the end, he gave up, and took two of the shorter white robes and toweled himself off with them, then chose one of the longer ones to wear. When he finished fighting his way to the neck end, he found he looked like a marquee.

He managed to turn it to his advantage, though, by holding the hem of the robe over the fire and concentrating the meager output of warm, ozone-tainted air inside.

“I’m sort of ready,” he called.

She came back in, stooping through the doorway. When she saw him, she laughed.

“Yeah. Go on. Something to tell all your nun friends back at the convent.”

“Trust me, there’s not much humor in this vocation. Lots of funerals, if you like that sort of thing.” She cleared a space for the kettle and unplugged the fire.

“Hey!”

“If I put both on at the same time, the fuses will blow.”

“I can wire it so they don’t.”

“And will the church burn down afterward?”

“Not in this weather. Maybe later.”

“We’ll do it my way,” she said firmly. She turned the kettle on, and retrieved two mugs from the desk drawer.

Petrovitch realized he was still holding the hem of his robe out. He let it go.

She sat down in the chair and hunched forward, fingers together; almost at prayer. “Where were you going to go?”

Petrovitch took a while to answer. “Far away. Where no one had ever heard of me, seen me. Somewhere I could start again. Make a better job of it than I did this time around.”

“That your gun?” The sister looked over to where it sat on the desk, moistening the cover of the book beneath it.

“Yeah.”

“Loaded?”

“Not much point in having one that isn’t.” Petrovitch went to pick it up, and she laid her hand across it.

“I should have checked you for weapons. Now I’m going to have to confess that before next mass.” She glanced up. “And accept a penance. You’re nothing but trouble.”

The kettle boiled, and she dutifully made instant coffee spooned from a battered tin.

“What about you?” asked Petrovitch. “You don’t seem, I don’t know, very holy.”

She plugged the fire back in. “Holiness is a work in progress. In the meantime, I can kick your bony ass through a wall, I can group twelve shots at fifty meters and I can take a bullet meant for my priest. The job description didn’t mention sainthood.”

“So what did it say?”

Her fingers tightened around her mug, and she blew steam on her face. “I was fifteen and I was going to end up killing someone. I was full of rage and hate, and I couldn’t control it. Someone offered me a chance; a chance to change what I was going to become. A new start, just like you.”

“Yeah. Not quite like me.”

The lights went out.

In the dying glow of the fire, Petrovitch snatched up his gun and pulled the slide. It was dark, a closed room without windows. He could hear the sister’s clothing rustle softly, then the solid mechanical sound of her own, considerably larger gun being cocked.

He listened intently. There was the rain, the creaking of timbers, the splash of water in over-full containers. There was traffic noise and the clatter of domestic alarms. He could see where the back door was by the slit of light under it. He took two slow steps and stood beside it, back to the wall, ready.

The only movement in the room was now hers. The chair relaxed with a sigh as she rose from it. The air stirred as she walked. She made no sound herself. Even her breathing was below a whisper.

She stopped, and everything was still.

The vestry door gave a very slight shudder, just enough for whoever it was to tell it wasn’t locked. Petrovitch crouched down and reached out with his free hand for his jacket. He found it, and pulled it slowly toward him. He felt in his pocket for his key-fob torch, which he gripped between his lips: his teeth rested against the on switch. He kept hold of the jacket.

The door opened a fraction. Something bounced on the carpet, once, twice, and landed close to his feet. He bit down on the torch and spun his jacket over the thick black disc.

A circle of actinic light flashed out from around the edges of the jacket, together with an almighty clap of thunder. Flames jetted up. He was deaf, but he could still see. He spat the torch out across the room, and suddenly someone was shooting at the tiny point of light as it sailed through the air.

Petrovitch dived the other way, brought his gun up and held his breath. His white robe reflected every last glimmer of light, but the man shrouded head to foot in black wasn’t looking his way.

He shot him twice in the back, and the figure jerked each time. Petrovitch watched the man start to turn, then slip heavily to one knee. The strange green-glowing eye of night vision rested on him.

Their guns came around, and Petrovitch fired first, straight into his face.

Out of bullets. But there was a mostly full pistol in a dead man’s grip right in front of him. He reached for it, and found himself in the crosshairs of another man in black. He looked up and saw a hint of green-cast skin.

“Pizdets.” There was no way he was going to get hold of that gun, let alone use it.

Then the man was enfolded in a shadow that lifted him off his feet and slammed him sideways. Bright flashes of gunfire moved in an arc, away from where Petrovitch lay.

He took the brief window of opportunity to pry the gun away from its entangling fingers, then immediately jammed the long barrel in the ear of the man who had come up behind the sister.

“Otsosi, potom prosi,” he hissed, and pressed harder. “Sister?”

She moved, and the body of the second gunman slid awkwardly to the floor. Petrovitch’s jacket was still on fire. She stamped it out and picked up his torch, shining it right in the remaining man’s night-vision goggles.

“Get his gun,” she said, with such authority that Petrovitch felt his own nerve falter. “And get that thing off his face.”

With the man disarmed, Petrovitch felt confident enough to wrench the goggles away. He wasn’t Japanese.

“Chyort! I was so sure they were from Hijo.”

The point of light moved from one hand to the other, and she took the man down with a punch to the stomach that made him double over before collapsing. She was on him, even while he was retching and gagging, dragging him up again by the neck and holding him against the wall. “I know who these bastards are. Paradise militia.”

The man, the feared killer, resolved into just another street kid; a foot soldier for a gang who, like all the others, thought they could control part of the Metrozone. He clawed at Sister Madeleine’s hand with his scabbed fingers and slowly turned blue.

“You’re strangling him,” noted Petrovitch.

“No. I’m suffocating him,” she said.

“He can’t tell you anything if he’s dead too.”

“I don’t need him to tell me anything.”

“Fair enough.” Petrovitch closed the vestry door, and felt to see if there were bolts he could use. “Don’t you lose your nunhood or something if you kill a man in cold blood, cursed to wander the earth forever?”

She let go.

“Also, don’t you think we should be getting the huy out of here?” He stumbled across the body on the floor and put his hand down in a pool of dark, sticky liquid.

She stood there, staring at the weak, mewling form at her feet.

“We could still die here.” Petrovitch wiped the gore off on his gown and crawled over to his boots. “We could still die and I’m wearing a yobanaya dress.”

She moved, holding the torch high, and strode to the wardrobe full of vestments. “Put this on, and this cape.” She threw them, complete with plastic hangers, at Petrovitch.

“Where’s your gun?” It was hard to put his wet boots on. He jammed his foot down and tore some skin off.

“I dropped it.” She was in the desk drawers, rattling their contents around.

“Not smart.”

“Listen to me,” she roared. “What do you know about fighting? What do you know about close-quarter combat? What do you know about knowing you’re going to be lucky to see the other side of twenty?”

“You just summed up my life, Sister. Now stop screwing around and get your gun. You’re going to need it.”

“I don’t need a gun to shut you up.”

“Yeah?” Petrovitch grunted with the effort of getting the other boot on.

“I could just break your stringy neck with my bare hands, like that guy in the corner.” She rattled an iron hoop loaded with keys. “Get that back door open.”

“I’m busy here.”

“I’m trying to save you. Get a move on!” The keys landed beside him.

“And a moment ago you were contemplating your navel. For some stupid reason it’s me saving you.” He pulled on the black cassock, arms up, and shrugged it down.

“I don’t need saving.”

“Yeah. Martyr yourself on someone else’s time.”

There should have been five guns in the room. Petrovitch could account for three of them, and a set of night-vision goggles proved too tempting not to take.

“What are you doing?” The desk fell over, making him jump.

“Scavenging. What are you doing?”

“Looking for my gun.”

“You mean it doesn’t come when you whistle?”

She heaved another piece of furniture aside. “Got it.”

Petrovitch piled the guns and the goggles on the cape, then scraped his wet clothes on top, even his ruined jacket. He picked up the keys. “Any idea which one?”

“Oh, give them here. You are impossible.”

He gathered the corners of the cape and tied them to form a bundle. “You don’t get out much, do you?”

The lock turned on the third try. “Ready?” she asked.

“Yeah. I still look like a kon’v pal’to, though.”

“You’re fussing about my gun: where’s yours?”

“I’ll be running. You’re the one who can shoot straight.”

She turned the torch off and gripped the latch.

“I know this is probably not the time to ask,” he said, “but how old are you?”

“Nineteen,” she said. She twisted her wrist and the sickly daylight flooded in.