Flashback

Chapter Thirty

To Jem, Cory seemed older. His eyes were shadowed and bloodshot. His breath twirled white. ‘You were waiting for me.’

‘We were waiting for you,’ said Saskia. ‘Tolsdorf and I.’

The woman stood braced, as though leaning into a wind. The truncated wrist was behind her. She was covered by the jacket that Danny had slipped across her shoulders halfway through the story. Danny, like all of them, was in thrall to Saskia. He leaned against the table with his arms folded. Hrafn stood next to him. His bony face was thin and bloodless. He had jammed the gauze between his neck and his shoulder, and Jem might have mistaken him for a man on the phone. The inspector, for his part, sat at the table with his hands pressed between his knees. His mouth was open.

‘Well, Cory?’ asked Saskia, her love.

He watched snow crystals stir in the draught beneath the door. Questions burned. Was this fiction? If so, was it designed to misdirect him? Why would Saskia want him to give up the idea of the diamond? He considered the advantage this might lend her. If she was also in pursuit of it, then the advantage was considerable. It would leave her free to obtain it. But Cory did not view Saskia as a competitor. She was a bystander, or a player late to the game. And she was from the past. She had travelled in time fifty years before him. Had she lost her will too? Like Jackson?

Think, Georgia. Is she telling the truth?

Cory shifted his grip on the gun. If she is telling the truth… He would not permit that thought to complete. Its implication might undo him.

‘What now?’ asked Danny.

‘You know what,’ said Saskia.

‘He’s going to kill us?’

‘According to him, we’re already dead.’

Cory smiled. ‘You’re getting with the programme, finally.’

‘The paradox,’ said Saskia, straightening her back. ‘Test it.’

Cory drank the data from her body. She was serious. He switched his gun from Jem to Saskia. The answer to his unspoken question—can Saskia be killed?—came in the utter calm of her expression and the absence of any physiological changes that should have accompanied the threat of the gun. Yet he paused. If he killed Saskia with a bullet to the head, would the ichor he had donated be sufficient to rebuild her? He didn’t think so. He pointed at her head. And if this did not kill her, what then? Did that mean her entire story was correct? Was Cory a patsy? The impact of the truth of her words was too much.

He cut off his thoughts by squeezing the trigger.

The weapon did not discharge. Instead, it flexed like a muscle and jumped from his hand. Cory felt the psychic frisson of the smart matter’s software as it crashed. The mishandled kinetic energy split the device in two and its spinning halves clattered to the floor.

So she is connected to Jennifer. So she really is the second time traveller. What would she care about the Cullinan Zero?

Saskia grinned. Her remaining teeth were cracked, bloody.

‘Well, what now?’ she asked.

The wooden floor amplified her footsteps—heel-toe, heel-toe—until Saskia stood within the reach of his fist. The uncertainty churned within him. But he did not strike. Saskia raised her gun. Still he did nothing.

‘I can shoot most of what matters out of your skull,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’ll be rebuilt by your nanomachines, but it won’t be you.’

‘I’ll know your intention before you do. You aren’t fast enough.’

‘Begin at the beginning. Think. Jennifer sent you back to recapture an item, but the item was not her prize. She wanted Harkes. She wanted revenge. Think back, whoever you are.’

He looked at the men and considered their murders once more. Then he looked at the broken factor.

‘When I was young,’ he began, ‘my father called me ‘the Ghost’. He was blind, and I crept around the house because I was scared of him. Kind of funny, because I became a spook. My father was right. I spent my life elsewhere. My physical body is here, at the turn of the century, but my soul could not cross the bridge.’