Flashback

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Ute Scheslinger, last conscious many months before, awoke on the flight deck of an aeroplane. She was gripping her right hand; blood was bubbling from a cut on its index finger. Her eyes left the wound and widened on this sudden, bright cockpit. The fittings shook and the alarms sang. She was being pushed into the bulkhead by the force of acceleration. She looked at the blood running into horizontal lines across the pilots’ necks, dripping towards her. Disconnected memories returned: a girl without a passport, a cat called Ego, a new apartment in Berlin, pink sheets that foretold the future, and a rendezvous in a darkened church. She had no narrative that gave meaning to Saskia Brandt, a mind once burned onto the device that pierced the back of Ute’s brain.

Ute had woken to her death. She struggled to stand, flung back the door to the flight deck, and entered the cabin. As she moved between the seats, the passengers beseeched her with masked faces. No. Nothing I can do. Ute climbed the ramp-like deck. The narrative of Saskia’s last hours took shape in her mind. Ute remembered feeling excitement at the prospect of a journey to Milan with

a new lover

and irritation at a desertion, then a hurt that struck deep.

The overhead lockers had sprung their loads. Bags and clothes blocked the aisle. Extraordinarily, one man, who wore a bow tie, was reading a newspaper. He lifted it to follow a moving track of the sunlight. Another man was dead. His skull had ruptured. Jammed between his thighs was a bloody laptop computer. His neighbour stroked his hair. Others held hands. Some embraced. Puke. Plastic cups, rolling.

She trampled copies of Die Welt, The Times, Corriere della Sera, and found the summit of the aircraft: its tail, a dark space that struck her as fundamental, but as what and for whom, Ute could not say.

There was a girl alone in the row. No-one had attached her mask. Ute sat next to her.

‘Komm,’ she said, ‘gib mir deine Hand.’

The cabin lights stuttered; gave up. Spokes of sunlight slit the compartment and Ute felt a sense of déjà vu. The G-force pulled a starfield of tears upwards. Oxygen tubes swayed. She heard the faint whoop-whoop of a cockpit alarm, unanswered.

She squeezed the girl’s cold hand. Her last thought was triggered by a jade band around her bleeding finger, flashing in unexpected sunlight.

Jem. Her name was Jem.

Everything stopped.

For lifetimes, she was wind across an empty steppe. Then, one day, she settled as dew on the grasses and coalesced to a watery archipelago. She disappeared, trickle-clean, into the roots of trees whose branches were bald and crooked. She grew glassy and cold.

Solid.

Wake me.

Baba Yaga: the witch who moved through eastern minds. Baga Yaga: the witch who travelled in a mortar with a pestle rudder that scored the forest floor. A silver birch to sweep her track, to erase all but a sense that something had been and gone. Saskia looked at her translucent finger. Blood dripped from the tip.

Wake me.

A forest grew and night fell upon it, moonless and still. Saskia felt her body sublimate. With this, she understood that the forest was a fiction. It had been cut from her memories like a string of dancing silhouettes. Now it folded and halved, folded and halved again, folded and vanished.

This way.

Wake me.

This way comes.

‘Something wicked,’ she said at last.

‘Don’t try to talk. I put a tube in your throat. In the army, I was a medic.’

‘Who are you?’ she asked the darkness.

On the wall.

‘You fell from the sky. I wrote down what the mirror said.’

‘What did the mirror say?’

Mirror. Mirror.

‘I wrote down what the mirror said.’

‘There was a girl next to me.’

‘Don’t try to talk. There is a tube in your throat and I had to pin your tongue to your cheek.’

‘Help the girl. There may be time.’

‘I have what the mirror asked me to buy.’

‘What did it ask you to buy?’

Stars moved in the darkness. Her constellations. The shadow. The heroine. The villain. Beer bottles and ball bearings. She remembered a child’s game that used a tray and a cloth.

‘Memory,’ she said.

On the wall.

‘Really, don’t try to talk. The mirror told me about the Ghost. I won’t ever let him find you. Don’t be scared. My name is Tolsdorf.’

‘Where am I? I don’t understand.’

‘Sssh,’ he said. ‘Sssssh.’

Over time, Saskia came to know that she lay on a cot, the type with a sprung mesh. Her wetware chip had rebooted since Cory’s attack and she felt whole. The chip blocked her pain and conducted unspoken information as certainties: she was smashed; she should not move—soon her tissues would swell. She had to let Tolsdorf take care of her. On and on the fiction wove. The husk on the device—the afterglow of her mind’s heat—had drawn upon the paranoia of this man, probed his needs and promised to fill them, and in return the man had taken Saskia to this anteroom in this hut and assembled the pieces of a desperate defence against someone called… what… yes, Cory, who was chasing something not easily destroyed.

An idea.

Jennifer’s Huckleberry.