Equations of Life

2

He was disgorged at Leicester Square, where he spent a minute hauling air that was neither clean nor cold into his lungs. It tasted of electricity and sweat: its saving grace was that it was abundant.

He had to walk now, through the city streets, moving in time with the lights and the crowds, stealing the occasional glance up at the spires and slabs of mutely reflective glass that rose above and blotted out the sky, a sky that was itself crowded with private helicopters flitting from rooftop to rooftop without ever touching the ground.

He knew the route well, no need for HatNav or gawking like a tourist at the holographic signposts. The route that still—and he marveled at the inefficiency of it—still followed the medieval roads and possessed names that no longer had any meaning save to denote an address.

So Leicester Square was square, but there was no Leicester: Shakespeare brooded on his grimy plinth, and the trees were all dead. Coventry Street remembered a city destroyed and rebuilt, then abandoned. Then through Piccadilly, with its love-lorn statue sealed in a dust-spattered plexiglas dome.

Onward. Thousands of people, all of them having to be somewhere, moving in dense streams, sometimes spilling out onto the roads and into the gutters. Couriers running and gliding down the lines that separated the traffic, millimeters from disaster.

Green Park. No longer green, no longer a park, the domik sprawl thrown up on it in the first spasm of Armageddon long gone. Towers grew there now, brilliant high buildings that reflected the gray sky all the way to their zeniths. At their feet, marble and granite blocks wet with fountains. Workers filing in to the lobbies, suited, smart, plugged in to the day’s to-do list and already voicing memos, compiling reports, buying, selling.

A woman was coming the other way, out of one of the towers and against the flow of bodies. Her boldness caught his eye. She crossed the plaza, repelling people with an invisible field composed of fear and deference. In the time it took Petrovitch to shuffle another twenty meters, she’d strode fifty, her silks and perfume trailing in her wake.

He thought that, surely, there had to be someone with her. From the backward stares of those she passed, he wasn’t alone in that thought. The woman—the girl—no, he couldn’t decide which—should have had a retinue with her, glasses, earpieces, bulges under their jackets, the works. There was no one like her, but there was no one with her.

They were on a collision course. She was walking like she meant it, expecting a path to open up before her, until they were no more than a meter apart. She looked up from under her asymmetric black fringe, and saw the seething mass of humanity passing before her.

She hesitated, breaking step, as if she’d never seen such a sight before. Petrovitch tried to slow down, found that it wasn’t possible. He was carried on, and she looked through him as he passed in front of her. He had the memory of her slanting eyes glazed with indecision.

Then, abruptly, stupidly, he was moving backward. For a moment, he couldn’t understand why, because crowds like the one he was in had their own momentum: they went, and you went with them.

A slab of chest pushed him aside as if he were no more than a swinging door. An arm reached out, and a hand tightened around the woman’s shoulder, engulfing it in thick, pink fingers.

The man who owned the chest and the hand lifted her off her feet and started for the curb, wading through the crowd like it was thigh-deep water. And somehow, Petrovitch was caught up in the bow wave. He struggled this way and that and always found himself inexorably propelled toward a waiting car, its rear door open and its interior dark.

He knew what this was. He knew intimately. He knew because he’d seen this from the other side.

She was being kidnapped. She wore the mask of mute incomprehension, the one that would transform into blind rage at any moment.

He waited, and waited, and her reaction still didn’t come.

They were at the car, and there were figures inside: two in the front, another in the rear, and they were staring at him, wondering who the hell this kid was, either too inept or too stupid to get out of the way.

The steroid-pumped man wanted him gone: Petrovitch was blocking his path. He raised his free hand to swat at him, a blow that would send him flying and leave him insensible and bleeding.

Petrovitch ducked instinctively, and the hand brushed the top of his head. As he looked up, he caught sight of the one vulnerable point amidst all the muscle. Still, he should have run, stepped back, crouched down. It wasn’t his fight.

But he couldn’t help but ball a fist, point a knuckle, and drive it as hard as he could at the man’s exposed Adam’s apple.

The woman landed next to him, her hands steadying herself against the filth-covered pavement.

He had one more chance. He could turn his back, make good his escape, disappear into the crowd. She could work her own salvation out from here.

Petrovitch reached out a hand, and hers slapped into it, palm against gritty palm.

They were off, not back toward the glittering towers of Green Park. That way was blocked by too many people and the rising man gagging and clutching at his throat. He dragged her out into the road, round the back of the car, back down the street against the flow of traffic—because that car would never be able to turn around. He pulled her behind him like a streamer, his own legs skipping like hers to turn their bodies sideways to avoid the wing-mirrors that rushed at their midriffs. Horns blared, collision warnings squealed, drivers beat on their windows and mouthed obscenities.

Behind them, the lights changed. The traffic stiffened to a halt, and Petrovitch vaulted over a bonnet to the faded white lines that marked the center of the road. The vehicles coming the other way were like a wall of glass, reflecting their fear off every smooth surface.

He stopped for the first time since… since he’d gotten involved in someone else’s madness, and wondered what the chyort he thought he was doing. He looked down his arm at the woman still attached to the other end, trying—like he was—to make herself as thin as possible.

Two men from the car were moving purposefully down the line of stopped traffic. Not running, but striding in that way that meant nothing but trouble. The lights changed and the one lane that was still free to proceed jerked into life. The men in dark suits stumbled and shouted, and Petrovitch saw his chance: the cars in front were slowing. He ran to match their speed, then weaved between bumpers until he made the other pavement.

She was still there. She wasn’t going to let go.

Neither were the men. One, fed up with barking his shins and negotiating his vast muscles through the narrowest of gaps, pulled a flat-black automatic out and sighted down his arm. A red dot flickered across Petrovitch’s chest like a fly trying to land, and a shot banged out, amplified by the facades of the buildings.

A man, a black man with a phone clipped to his ear and in the middle of a conversation, spun violently round and vanished backward into the crowd.

Petrovitch blinked once, tightened his grip and fled. He was aware of the sounds around him: there were shouts, cries, and screams, varying in pitch and intensity, and there was the methodical crack of a pistol. Every time he heard it, he expected to feel bright pain, and every time it was someone close by who spasmed and sank to the ground. Not him, not yet.

It was impossible to judge how far ahead he was. The closeness of the structures, the intensity of the crowded pavement, the noise that was washing back and forth: all he knew was that he was ahead, a meter or ten or fifty, enough that whoever was trying to kill him couldn’t target him long enough to make sure.

And he was sure they were trying to kill him. They wouldn’t risk this, risk everything, shooting random strangers in a central Metrozone street, if whoever’s hand he held wasn’t worth keeping alive. They could have killed her half a dozen times on the way from the Green Park building to the curb. They hadn’t, and yet they kept on firing in an attempt to make him let go.

He was tempted. Even as he saw a side-street, less dense with traffic, actual visible corroded tarmac on the road, he thought about jinking left, loosening his grip, vanishing into the nearest alley and lying low until it was all over.

They’d grab her around the waist, lift her up to deny her the ground, maybe inject something through her pale-cast skin to knock the fight or flight from her, bundle her away, and it wouldn’t be his problem anymore.

He turned left anyway, aiming for the center markings on the road, but he kept hold of her. He didn’t leave her behind.

Now there was space for them to run freely, side by side. He had the chance to steal a glance at her, to check that she hadn’t been hurt by a stray bullet, and he caught her doing the same for him. Neither of them had a hole torn in their clothing, nor a spreading dark stain.

Petrovitch flashed her a grin of pure nervous energy. She looked at him as if he was mad.

There hadn’t been the sound of a gunshot for ten whole seconds. Two in quick succession shattered a windscreen and burned past his ear so close he could feel its passage. They were still coming. Obviously. Crowd density was dropping fast—the word of an incident was out, and those plugged into news feeds and navigation ’ware were steering a course around them. Good in that Petrovitch could run. Bad in that he couldn’t hide.

Still no police. Not even the wail of a siren. Then again, Petrovitch had grown up on the lawless prospects of St. Petersburg. He knew to rely only on himself.

A right turn this time, and then another left. A wider street, busier, or should have been: automatic steel shutters were beginning to close over always-open foyers, and even the nose-to-tail of the rush hour was down to three sets of tail-lights scurrying for cover.

They were becoming exposed, isolated. People were pressed in doorways, cowering, covering their heads, or peering over the rims of basement wells. There were faces at windows and toughened glass portals, safe and watching the spectacle of two young idiots try and outrun a couple of pumped-up killers who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Petrovitch looked up. Regent Street was ahead, the lines of cars stalled, unable, like him, to escape. He didn’t even break step. Over the bonnet of one, the roof of another, one, two, three, and jump down on the other side. A single shot crazed a first-floor pane of smoked glass. Then left again, up the road toward the covered arcade of Oxford Street.

The mall barriers were closing. Paycops in fluorescent vests were willing them to close faster, and Oxford Circus tube was being denied them in the same way: thick metal armor rolling down over the entrances to the underground.

He had to swerve left again, turning parallel to the main street, use the back roads to get to the far end. As he got to the corner, he looked down the empty pavement. He glimpsed the two men—the same two men who had started the chase—running purposefully. They moved like athletes, for all their size. They looked like they could keep going all day.

From the first twinges in his chest and flickering darkness behind his eyes, Petrovitch knew that he couldn’t. The woman didn’t seem to be in much better shape: mouth-breathing, sweat-drenched, letting out little grunts of pain at each footfall. This was going to finish badly even if it didn’t finish earlier.

He put his head down and kept on going because he had to. She was going to be the death of him, and he didn’t even know her name. An empty space opened up in front of them: Hyde Park, all mute shadows and shades of gray. The stink rose from the site like a solid wall. A shrouded Marble Arch, always being cleaned but never quite finished, lay hidden behind wind-torn sheets of polythene and a skeleton of scaffolding. The traffic on all the roads was gridlock-solid, with barely room to squeeze between. The tube was sealed.

His vision started to grow jagged and discordant. It wasn’t the stinging perspiration that was trickling down his forehead and into his eyes; it was his eyes; the first signs of a faint. He was running out of time. He could hear a klaxon blare over the sound of his heartbeat in his ears, but couldn’t decipher what it meant.

He was going down, and his pace faltered.

She took over. She was surprisingly strong. She looked small and light and weak, but Petrovitch felt the tendons in his arm stretch as she pulled him along. Their positions reversed, he trailed uselessly, almost blind.

He could tell enough to know that they were going the wrong way. They should have headed into the park, lost themselves in the labyrinthine shanties, and perhaps even the gunmen would have balked at going in after them: crossing Hyde Park was something that no one chose to do of their own free will.

Instead, they ran through lane after lane of stalled, cringing cars and down a broad, deserted pavement.

And the two men still pursued them. They were gaining on them, arms pumping, knees lifting and slamming down like pistons, driving them closer. Petrovitch was past caring. Any second now.

When it didn’t happen, when the pain grew so intense that his whole being felt touched by fire, that was the moment he stumbled and fell, sprawling half in the gutter. She stopped, and started to drag him by his shoulders.

Then there was someone else who scooped him up like a bundle of damp washing and carried him to a place that was cool and high.

The device in his chest finally, finally decided it was going to work. He jerked like a fish, shuddered and twitched. Once wasn’t enough, not this time. It tripped again, sending enough current down implanted wires to shock his heart into remembering how to pump blood properly.

He gasped, and blinked his eyes to clear them of splinters of light.

Two men, two women, and him lying on bare wooden boards in between. Two guns on one side, one on the other, no clear idea of what was going on or where he was. He could see stone pillars, broken colored light, dark-stained wood. He could smell polish and prayers.

A church, then; he was in a church.

He tried to sit up, feeling every flicker of pain from his ribcage as a white-hot flame. He made it to his elbows before the effort grew too great. The only comfort he had was that the would-be kidnappers were aiming their Glocks at someone else for a change.

He flopped his head over to see who they were trying to threaten now.

She was a nun, fully robed, white veil framing her broad, serious face. A silver crucifix dangled around her neck, and a rosary and a holster hung at her waist. She had the biggest automatic pistol Petrovitch had ever seen clasped in her righteous right hand.