Flashback

Chapter Twenty-Three

Each of his bodily senses returned with petitions for attention. He staggered back against the chipboard partition. Touch competed with sight. In the instant before they synchronised, Cory imagined he was aboard a rolling ship as it crested a swell. He ignored the oncoming nausea and waited for the inconsistencies to cohere. One, two… yes, the hut. The mountain. He was standing over the body of Saskia Brandt in a hut, on a mountain, in Germany, in the year 2003, and he was eighty-eight damn years old and not finished.

The castle and the battlements, and the thornwood and its sun, were as gone as melted snows. Dead, like everything on this planet. Walking archaeology that refused to get with the programme, to lie in its grave and cool. He booted the cot and it knocked against the fine mesh that covered the wall. He did not touch the body. Saskia was dead. It was pointless; it would diminish him still further in his own eyes to attack her now.

Through a rent in Saskia’s shirt, Cory saw part of her breast. Without the steady expansion and contraction of the cavity beneath it, the curve was subtracted of its power. A statue could be beautiful, but not a corpse.

How much do I need you, Saskia?

He decided.

‘You’d better be worth this.’

There would not be enough ichor in his spit to do the job, so he had the factor form a lancet while he shrugged off one arm of his jacket and exposed his radial artery. His incision released a gout of blood. He directed this towards the tracheotomy hole and allowed some to splash over it.

The blood was golden with nanoparticles. He commanded them to enter an emergency reverse-entropy mode that would draw upon all energy in the vicinity to effect repair—except that within Cory’s body. Immediately, the liquid fizzed. The oil lamps guttered and the stove light weakened. Pinpricks appeared on the face of the corpse: intrasomatic tubules that pulled the oxygen from the air. Cory became dizzy and half-dreamed the buzz of piston-driven propellers, smelled leather and sheepskin, and felt the very boards beneath his heels rock as though the hut had swung in a steep bank.

Through this disorientation, he saw the swollen mass of Saskia’s forehead detumify with a hiss.

He remembered a mountaintop.

Tupungato.

A place to observe the stars.

Saskia convulsed once, and old blood, crisp as rose petals, burst from her mouth. A gasp followed, then an exhalation. In the dust, bright blood mixed with the old.

As once it did, thought Cory, in the city of Our Lady, Saint Mary of the fair winds.

Saskia’s arm slipped from the cot, almost tipping a nearby vase. Cory stared at its three flowers and pictured flowers on a grave. Flowers for…

Movement behind him: a flutter of cloth.

Cory did not turn. He said, ‘I see you, Jem.’

The cloth rippled once more.

As Cory turned, he wore the expression of a thoughtful man forced to pinch the life from a bug. The expression changed to fury. Jem was gone. He had not been thinking clearly. He glanced back at Saskia and decided that the ichor needed several minutes longer to heal her to the point where a verbal interrogation was possible. In the meantime, she was going nowhere.

Move it, Georgia.

Cory hurried to the veranda, where he searched the night. Then he jogged upriver. His cheeks were ruddy with embarrassment. When the divots became lost in bushes, Cory stopped. He brooded on the forest. Its wood had closed about him. His visual modifications counted six glimmers of heat through the trees, and any one of them could have been Jem.

He looked at the sky, selected the crest of a sturdy fir, and discharged his gun. A bone-coloured grapnel plumed upward. Behind it trailed a hawser. Cory felt the weapon lighten as the grapnel reached the treetop and bit the trunk with the hunger of a sprung trap. He turned and wrapped the hawser about his chest. The material fanned to a sling beneath his shoulder blades. He detached the gun—now skeletal—and placed it in his outside pocket. He zipped it shut.

He thought of Sergeant Blake from Base Albany. There, climbing had been the easiest of his tradecrafts.

I said, ‘Move it.’

He locked his knees and walked the trunk.

A starfield of snow fell by. When he was five yards from the top, he settled his boots and let the line pull him vertical. Then he hooked an arm around the tree. The sling was tight around his back, and his old lungs worked hard.

The soundless vista stilled him. Its passing, baggy clouds recalled the moon phases on the pocket watch given to him by Catherine’s father on that afternoon, a humid Tuesday, when Cory had sought permission to marry his daughter. How the collar of his new shirt had scratched. Catherine had worked the knot of the tie while they looked in the mirror. She had given him luck with a kiss and whispered that her father was a pussycat really.

Cory forced his gaze into the dark cavities of snow. A sense that the wood guarded Jem infused his perception and, with it, came the bitterness of foreboding. But he smiled when an electromagnetic burst flared in the middle distance. Jem’s phone.

Cory zoomed in. There: Her heat made an intermittent blip as she ran between the trees.

Gotcha.

He unzipped his pocket, pulled out the gun, and let it acquire lock.

Head shot, he thought. End it.

The weapon bucked. The tiny sound reminded him of a kiss. Catherine’s kiss in the mirror.

Damn it.

Trajectory change. Take out the phone.

He sensed the projectile swerve and pass through the plastic case. Beats of his tired heart later, the projectile returned to the gun with a gentle kick.

Cory made a funnel with his hands.

‘There’s nowhere you can run!’

Catherine—no, Jem—had tripped and fallen. Her heat stain was a distant star. She writhed. ‘Fuck you!’ came a moment later.

Cory smiled. Then dread smothered his amusement once more. Her sprawl recalled the dead woodsman, who had dropped inches from the hut, his fingers mixed with the tarpaulin. Sure, Cory thought, uneasy. The man wanted cover. But, more than this, Jem’s shape brought to mind Saskia as her dead hand slipped towards the vase next to her cot.

There was a metal mesh on the ceiling of the antechamber. And its walls.

‘I see a fine mesh.’

‘I see knots and whorls in the wood.’

‘I see a window, also covered by mesh.’

Cory watched the dissolving tusks of his breath.

He had made a tremendous mistake. The woodsman had not been reaching for cover. He had wanted the home-brewed battery.

‘Also covered by mesh.’

Cory swerved in his crow’s nest. Information streams jammed at his centre: the angle of the gun, Saskia’s likely position within the hut, wind speed, and the gloom that he had been outdone by a woman in a coma.

Saskia. Head shot.