The Amber Rooms

Chapter Twenty-Two

The band flashed brighter than the magnesium preparation that had illuminated Kamo and Saskia; brighter than the fireworks opening above the square. Saskia covered her eyes with her forearm. She heard grunts from Soso and Kamo. The gun discharged and its bullet roared harmlessly past her neck. She felt the nerves tingle.

In her blindness, she scudded across to Pasha, blinked at the thundercloud of an afterimage on her vision, and hauled him around the base of the model until they were sheltered from the view of the revolutionaries.

She slapped his face.

‘Pavel Eduardovitch Nakhimov.’

Another bullet struck the wall.

She braced her knee against his chest and ripped open his doublet. It was already sticky with blood. She blinked again, desperate to see, and tried to examine his wound with her peripheral vision. She could not.

Saskia closed her eyes. She understood that the blindness was a temporary saturation of the light-sensitive cells on her retina. Other structures, planted by the i-Core, had grown there. These structures supplemented her vision at wavelengths above and below the human band.

Help me, she thought. Let me see.

She opened her eyes on a curiously monochrome world. The vasculature beneath her hand was visible: glassy, slimy, quick with blood after blood. She looked at Pasha’s waistcoat and saw that his pocket watch was twisted open. She smiled with the hope that the watch had saved his life. But the smile failed; the watch had disintegrated. Parts had travelled, with the bullet, into his abdomen. She tore open his shirt. The wound was hard to identify in the welling blood. She pressed upon it.

Pasha coughed. His breath steamed. He was bleeding from his inferior vena cava, which would cause his death long before the septicaemia.

Why was it was so cold?

Saskia leaned around the base of the model. Soso had not moved. He was holding the gun at his hip, like a gunslinger. Kamo gripped his shoulder. It was clear from their hard blinks that both were still blind. Perhaps the blindness was permanent. Who knew what energies were radiating from the band? Perhaps none of them would see naturally again.

The band spun on.

Saskia slowed her vision to look at it, but the rotation was too fast. It had dimmed to a glow. She told herself that the rotation was part of its normal operation, but this was not consistent with its behaviour on board flight DFU323. Jennifer had used it to escape from the fuselage of that falling aircraft. The band had not lowered its temperature then. Neither had it rotated so furiously. Yes, Saskia thought: there was anger in its spin. Was it alive in some sense, like her former companion, Ego? Did it realise that Saskia was not Jennifer? Did it view her as a thief?

A corona of white grew on the floor around the band. The dark and light woods of the floor began to buckle. Saskia felt a sharp pain in her ear. She swallowed and the pain cleared, but a stealing dizziness weakened her muscles. Her hand slipped from Pasha’s belly wound. Frowning, she put it back. The emptiness of the air reminded her of that pilotless aeroplane.

A note was gaining volume. It had an unsettling quality, like a wet finger on a crystal rim.

She took a breath and held it, trying to force the oxygen into her blood. Her heart was loud. Her breaths reminded her of drumming fingers. Impatience.

The circle of ice expanded until it passed beneath her and Pasha. The cold reached her knees. She tried to jump into a crouch. She lost her footing on her underskirt and fell across the floor.

Another shot was fired.

She pushed herself upright and looked around the base of the statue. Outside, a group of fireworks exploded in an irregular series. Their light caught the huddled shapes across the room.

No, she thought. That is Soso. And Kamo. They have collapsed.

The ice wave reached the edge of the room, where the chairs, tables and cabinets had been placed. She heard their woods crack. The ice seemed to grow up the walls. It rose to the mirror pilasters. The glass shattered, falling like sand to the floor, leaving rectangles of dull wood. The amber panels creaked but held.

The note of the band increased in pitch and volume.

Saskia realised that she was panting. The periphery of her vision darkened. She looked once more at the spinning band and smiled. Its fury had defeated her. Her last sensation before falling unconscious across Pasha was not the note of the band, or the distant glow of the fireworks, but the crackle of her saliva as it boiled on her tongue.

In the dream world, Saskia walked along the shore. Where the edge of the water withdrew, the wet sand bubbled. These reminded her of something that touched the edge of her memory. This dreamed world could be her death; the last reality conjured by a dying brain.

A distant comma of sparrows turned to an exclamation point in the sky and Saskia said, ‘Ute?’

‘Don’t shout,’ said Ute. ‘I’ve been here all the time. Couldn’t you see me?’

‘I don’t remember what happened,’ said Saskia. It disconcerted her to see Ute walking at her shoulder. The woman wore jeans, white t-shirt, and a black leather jacket: the simple outfit Saskia had worn so much at the beginning of the twenty-first century that it had begun to seem like a uniform.

‘I remember pieces,’ said Ute. ‘Something happened in the Amber Room.’

‘Yes—I couldn’t breathe.’ Saskia stopped. She let a wave wash over her feet. It felt neither cold nor wet. ‘Did something happen to Pasha?’

Ute put her hands on her hips. Her face was firm, but motherly.

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘The birds need you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Let them talk to you,’ Ute said, gripping Saskia’s shoulder. ‘Or we’ll never go home.’

Saskia remembered nothing about birds. She remembered suffering from an illness, long ago, in whose fever her words were not her own.

‘Birds?’

‘The sparrows.’

Keeping Saskia’s gaze, Ute pointed at the sky. Saskia looked up. In the sunless blue, the flock whirled in a question mark.

‘Let them talk to you,’ Ute said. ‘Through you.’

Saskia closed her eyes. She listened for the sound of bird call through the surf. There was nothing. But she did feel an urge to speak; the words were not her own.

‘“Tyrants,”’ she said, feeling her mouth move automatically, ‘“conduct monologues above a million solitudes”.’

As Saskia blinked, her lashes fluttered against Pasha’s waistcoat. She sat up. Within a moment, even as the dream of the beach faded, she understood that something was wrong with the Amber Room. She turned to the tall doors that opened onto the square. Through one pane, she saw a masked gentleman looking inside. He had begun to turn the door handle. Neither the hand nor the gentleman were moving. Saskia might have interpreted this as hesitation. But the red fireworks in the sky over his shoulder were motionless as bloodstains on a dark wall.

By their light, with her unaided vision, Saskia saw that Pasha’s chest was still. She touched his cheek with her fingertip. It was cold and hard.

Saskia stood. She felt dizzy and her joints hurt. Her saliva had frozen in her mouth. She could hear nothing but the blood in her ears, the movement of her clothes, and the tiny sounds that betrayed her musculature and joints.

She walked around the model of Frederick the Great and saw her once-friends, Soso and Kamo. They had stopped in a dramatic posture. Kamo, faithful as a dog, was holding Soso by the shoulders, giving him strength. Soso had narrowed eyes and an expression of disgust at Saskia’s betrayal. Not anger. Even in the red dimness, she could see that Soso considered her dead already. A wound to stitch, and then move on. His right arm emphasised this: he was pointing the gun. The sharp lines of his tendons suggested that the gun was about to fire.

Saskia stepped aside.

She looked down at the band. It was dark. It had stopped turning. It lay in a bed of wood shaved from the floor.

She tried to say, ‘I don’t understand,’ and when she could not speak the words, she understood that she was not breathing.

An answer to her unspoken question appeared in the form of a memory that felt like a moment she had experienced only seconds before. But this was impossible for two reasons. First, the memory was her fall through the sky above Siberia. Second, an element had been added: dozens of tiny birds had clawed at the buzzing edges of her clothes and slowed her descent.

Saskia understood. The i-Core was helping her. This was not a memory; it was a metaphor constructed from her memory.

Then she saw a laboratory bench with a beaker of water on top. Two electrodes had been lowered into the water. Around the first gathered bubbles of oxygen; around the second, hydrogen. Just so. The i-Core had found a way to give her sufficient oxygen for consciousness.

Why haven’t I returned to the future? What happened to the band? Is it malfunctioning?

Another image brightened in her mind: an old sycamore that had been split halfway down its trunk during a forgotten lightning storm. Then: a trampled pocket watch on a St Petersburg street.

OK, it’s malfunctioning. What do I do now?

The answer to this question was a memory that might have been true: kicking towards the faraway surface of Lake Baikal, digging upwards at the water as through scrambling from a grave, and achieving the surface, pulling down a great breath.

I don’t understand.

Saskia stumbled against the model. The pain in her knees was sharp. It hurt to blink, and when she looked at her hand in the firework light, she saw the mottled pattern of bruising.

Again, the i-Core presented her with that memory of the trampled pocket watch, which was followed by the penetration of her head through the surface of Baikal.

Not helpful, she thought, leaning more heavily on her arm. She felt sleepy. Dead already. She wished to die next to Pasha, so she moved towards him. His eyes were half open and amber light reflected there. Saskia frowned. She turned in the direction of the main staircase. In the mirrors either side, and in the pressed gold and in the amber, she saw what could only be the blue-grey light of day. Was this another metaphor? Her failing mind struggled to understand what the reflection meant. She fought to concentrate, and with a childlike flash of achievement, understood that the light was coming from behind her.

She shuffled around. Her muscles quivered and burned with pain.

The door to the enfilade was open. Through it, where the next room in the suite should have been, was a second Amber Room. Snow was falling.