Flashback sb-2

by Ian Hocking

  Gently, Jem reached for the safety pin that had fastened her tongue to her cheek. She released it. Her fear and revulsion were distant places now.

  ‘Talk to me, sweetheart.’

  ‘Take,’ Saskia whispered, ‘my hand.’

  ‘Of course I will. There. Now let’s get out of here.’

  The face warped. ‘Take my hand. Take my hand.’

  Saskia snorted in frustration and looked down. She began to dig at the snow with her stump. Jem hesitated. She was uncertain whether Saskia wished her to help. When Saskia had cleared six inches, she rocked back, gasping, and looked at Jem as though for the first time.

  ‘You want me to dig?’ Jem asked.

  In reply, Saskia blinked.

  Jem set about scooping away the snow. The surface was brittle and wet but the deeper snow was packed hard. She dug until her fingers caught a metal edge. It was a small fuel container, perhaps bearing a gallon, and too heavy to move.

  ‘Take my hand.’

  ‘You want me to open it?’

  Saskia blinked again.

  Jem considered the container. It was lying on its side. ‘But the fuel will pour out.’

  Saskia looked at the body of the woodsman and said no more. Jem sighed, covered her nose, and unscrewed the cap. Fuel poured out and dissolved a cavity in the snow.

  ‘What now, Saskia?’

  Saskia pushed at the container. It was almost empty, but something metal knocked against its interior. Jem turned it upside down. She shone her phone on the object that fell out.

  Saskia took the gun and struggled to her feet.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Saskia took uncertain steps through the snow. She passed the woodpile, raised her head to get her bearings, and walked around the side of the hut. Jem followed her; her desire to stop Saskia checked by the presence of the gun and the knowledge that this… this thing was not quite Saskia.

  They crossed the emptiness of the dooryard with Jem lingering two paces behind. Every few metres, Saskia stopped, as though listening. Jem wondered at the technology in her head. Not just the device itself, but how it communicated with the brain. How did it move her legs and arms? Was the process something Frankensteinian, like frog’s legs twitching on a dinner plate? Was the device a puppeteer?

  No, thought Jem. I shouldn’t call it ‘the device’.

  Saskia stopped briefly once more.

  I should call it Saskia.

  They found Cory on his back with fallen branches around and across him. His fluorescent jacket had ripped open at the chest but there was no sign of serious injury. Only his lower leg seemed broken. It was bent at an impossible angle and his foot was turned inward. His eyes were closed.

  Jem had time to notice a small, white cube nearby—was it the thing that sometimes took the form of a cane?—when Saskia raised her gun. She pointed it at Cory’s head. The sight of it focused Jem on the implications of killing him.

  ‘Wait, Saskia. What if he hasn’t finished fixing you? Maybe what’s happening inside you needs him to be alive.’

  ‘Take my hand.’

  A paroxysm overcame Saskia. She doubled at the waist, screaming silently at her bloody feet. Jem moved alongside her. When she straightened, Jem took her in her arms. The gun remained pointed at Cory. Jem touched Saskia’s cheek with hers and closed her eyes. She remembered a morning two weeks ago when Saskia’s breath smelled faintly of the night, and Jem thought, An imperfection at last. She had faced her across the pillow in the white sunshine and kissed the tip of her nose.

  The gloved hand of a stranger—leather, the colour of midnight arrest—closed around the barrel and twisted. Jem gaped at Inspector Duczyński, of all people, who put the weapon inside his jacket. Solemnly, Duczyński turned to a taller, older man wearing a fluorescent jacket and a yellow cap. Snow had gathered on its brim.

  ‘We found her,’ said the taller man. He was speaking into a mobile phone. ‘Hello? Mr Self?’

  When Danny stepped from behind him, Jem felt her strength diminish. Saskia slipped through her hug and Danny caught them both, and the three sank, Saskia sighing as he looked from one to the other. Air blew through the black colonnades of the forest, bringing sparks of snow.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Cory woke from a dream of the crowded recruitment office at Peachtree Creek; of the coughing men in the queue; of the laconic sheriff taking temperatures with an ear thermometer. As it faded, he found himself in the woodsman’s hut. He kept his eyes closed and assembled the footfalls, scrapes of furniture, swallows: one woman, three men. His senses had been reduced to his God-given five but that was fine. More serious was the absence of his factor. Not once in six decades had Cory lost its heartbeat. When he felt ready, he opened his eyes on a tall man wearing a yellow cap. Next to him was the Berlin police officer Cory had shot at the Fernsehturm. He wore a sling beneath his coat. Danny Shaw, nearby, was biting a nail. Jem stood at his shoulder. Her nose was red and swollen.

  A thick collar ringed Cory’s neck. It was leather and smelled of dog. Its chain had been fed around the stove.

  His broken shin began to fill with a familiar heat that meant assisted repair was underway. So the ichor had not been totally disabled. That made sense, because the improvised capacitor under the tarpaulin could not have generated a pulse greater than a gigawatt. His ichor would return to full strength within half an hour; faster even, if he could talk them into returning the smart matter. He rose to his elbows. The inspector, sitting at the table, noticed the movement and leaned forward. At the opening of his arm sling was a gun.

  What manufacturer? How many shots?

  But his ichor was silent.

  ‘I am Inspector Karel Duczyński,’ said the man. The remaining captors straightened their backs and Cory, smiling, knew that this interrogation would pale against Hole Eight, a pit in a field in Base Albany—not yet dug—where the young Cory had learned to build a wall, brick by brick, between him and his pain.

  ‘Who are your friends?’

  ‘Dr Hrafn Óskarson,’ said the tall man. ‘I’m in charge of the investigation into flight DFU323 and I’m tired because I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, so let me make this simple. Behind this hut is a corpse. A few kilometres to the south-west is the grave of one hundred more.’

  ‘Don’t forget Miss Brandt,’ said Cory.

  ‘Brandt?’

  ‘Alias Dorfer, Dr Óskarson. Where is she?’

  The Icelander shifted the bill of his cap. ‘I want you to tell me the complete story of your involvement.’

  ‘Shouldn’t this be conducted in a police station, Inspector Duczyński, with due process?’

  ‘Fuck due process,’ said Jem. Her voice wavered. ‘What did you do to Saskia? She was dead.’

  Cory grinned. ‘Inspector. Doctor. You see the ridiculousness of this conversation? Miss Shaw seems to think that I can raise the dead. Perhaps you should talk to her first. After all, she decided not to board a flight that crashed.’ He blinked slowly at Jem. ‘Did you feel a twitching in your pussy?’

  Danny stepped forward and balled Cory’s jacket in his fists. His cool broken, Cory met the man’s hate with his own, which ran in his veins aplenty, whether the ichor slept or not.

  ‘Karel,’ said Danny, ‘tell Hrafn where you shot Cory.’

  ‘I saw it go through the neck. It should have been fatal.’

  Danny pulled the collar aside.

  ‘The wound has healed,’ he said. ‘There’s a red mark, nothing more.’

  ‘Saskia died,’ said Jem. ‘She stopped breathing. But now she’s awake. Cory can administer some kind of treatment—to himself or others.’

  The inspector moved alongside Danny to examine Cory’s neck. ‘It certainly would appear…’

  Cory drew a sweet breath as the ichor stirred in his blood. A small piece of smart matter had entered his proprioceptive sphere. Energy clicked between the ichor and the smart matter. The trickle was enough to reset the essential gimbals of
the nanomachines coasting in his blood.

  Online.

  Cory instructed his ichor to ramp the release of catecholamide neurotransmitters and he braced for the whetting of his mind. It came. He looked sidelong at the thumb-sized bump in the lapel pocket of Inspector Duczyński’s coat. It felt like a thing long lost: the ghost of a heartbeat. The fabric of the coat distended and, with a tear, the pellet burst out of its pillbox. Impossibly slow, it drifted towards Cory and stopped before his eye. Gasps from his captors. He studied the bead of smart matter. There was a word whose meaning set his murders as stars in a shrine not yet built.

  Camelot.

  He imagined a billion infantry heels coming to attention.

  The mote zinged away and punched a hole through the plank above the stove. Soon it was ten metres out, twenty, then thirty. When it had collected enough distance, he called it

  come

  back

  faster

  to the hut.

  The stove pipe exploded. Cory clenched his eyes and turned as timber shards dashed his shoulders and a dusty tide washed over the floor. Shouts across the aftermath. Knocked by the mote, the inspector’s gun cartwheeled into the swinging meats and camouflaged clothing. Cory had to smile. Jacked on his chemicals, he was fast as a nightmare and his enemies impotently slow. Into the dust he stepped, between the stove and the wall, and, wedged, straightened his long legs. The stove pitched, teetered, then boomed onto the floor. Its porthole erupted charcoal and brick-red wood, which flared alight. The chain was freed.

  Before Cory could consider how to break the links around his wrists, Danny rammed him against the wall. Cory made fists to protect his fingers, but they crunched on the boarding. He shouted, then brought his knee into Danny’s chin. It was a lucky blow. The man slid to the floor. Behind him, Cory saw Hrafn and the inspector emerge from the smoke.

  To me, he commanded. And sharpen.

  Jem screamed, ‘Look out!’

  The inspector, who was shorter than Hrafn, flinched clear of the coin-sized fragment of smart matter, but Hrafn was caught across the neck. He barked and slapped a hand to the wound. Cory felt the spinning mote jam in the boards above the door. The inspector came on and Cory read his scalp for the voltage spike of intention. Cory let his answer draw upon the power of his hips and legs. He headbutted the inspector on the sternum. Duczyński clattered against the table and fell across Danny.

  Gasping, Cory looked at his work. Danny and the inspector were down. Hrafn sat against the table; his hand was a bloody glove and his head rocked with sleep. A rosary of blood, thought Cory, like the night Lisandro was killed.

  Jem spread her arms protectively across the broken mirror. In it, Cory saw pieces of an old man glowing with fury. Jem might have been a mother stretched across her pram. Cory licked his lips and turned to the mote. It detached from the woodwork and dropped into the chain between his wrists. It became a pin, then a wedge, and the chain split.

  He impelled the mote to fly from the hut into the night once more, conducting its impressions of passing fronds, the creak of wooded hillsides, and

  there

  the factor’s signal

  dit-dit-dah

  from the base of a tree, where it had been buried so hastily.

  To me.

  In two breaths, he opened his palm and the factor burst through the wall and slid home; wet with snow; deliciously cold. It quickened to a gun and Cory paired its snout with his sight line as he scanned the room. Hrafn, dying against the wall; Danny and the inspector dazed. Jem had retreated to the outer doorway. Her eyes were downcast.

  Cory stepped towards the mirror. Once it was open, and the seal of Saskia’s Faraday cage broken, he would scrape her wetware device of information once and for all, and be gone.

  But he hesitated as his reflection swished left and the secret door opened. Saskia stepped into the room. She wore jeans and cowgirl boots. Her shirt had been buttoned. Three teeth remained in her grin.

  ‘Tell me what I want to know,’ Cory said, ‘or I’ll rip it out. The thornwood can’t hide it.’

  She shook her head. ‘I have… set traps.’ She swallowed. ‘Device will destruct. If cracked.’

  ‘I didn’t know that suicide was one of your talents.’

  ‘Do, now.’

  ‘What’s your plan, Saskia? We all want to know. Don’t we, Jem? Gentlemen?’

  The table scraped as Danny used it to stand. He helped the inspector into the nearby chair and crossed to Hrafn, who hissed as Danny checked his wound. Jem backed into the curtain that covered the outer doorway.

  ‘Running away again, Jem?’

  He smiled—aware of the blood on his teeth, empowered by it—and set the benefit of killing all the people in this room against the cost of a manhunt and the threat to his anonymity. When he turned back to Saskia, she held the inspector’s gun in her hand.

  ‘Ah, Saskia. Not one of your better ideas.’

  ‘Shoot. Me. And I shoot. You.’

  ‘How did you rig up that EMP weapon? Did the woodsman help?’

  ‘It’s. Secret.’

  Cory looked from the gun to her shaded, broken face. ‘Come back with me. In the present, there’s work to be done.’

  ‘Present?’

  ‘This is the past. It’s finished. Can’t you feel it? They are flies in amber, all of them, and they don’t know it.’

  ‘You. Idiot.’

  Cory sighed. Saskia had joined the cult of the walking dead. He was genuinely sorrowful. She had deep courage. She would have made a singular friend. He tossed his gun to his left hand and put the barrel to Jem’s nose. Around the room, heartbeats raised, pressures ramped, muscle gorged and flickers of charge spent themselves across sweaty skin. Except Saskia: she was cold.

  ‘Wait,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me what happened on that flight,’ said Cory. ‘Before and after. All of it. I know Harkes passed something to you.’

  Saskia swallowed again. She removed her forearm from her back pocket, looked at the ghost of her hand, and began to speak.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Berlin, before the crash

  Saskia Brandt, who was certain of most things, could be certain of the exact moment she realised that the tall gentleman walking away from her on Bismarck Strasse was an anachronism. There was nothing unusual about his appearance. He was elderly, slim, and walked with a cane. He was one man among the hundreds taken in her glance.

  An instant before, she had experienced an utter violation. It had not been maleficent. More a neutral excavation of her mind by a force that overpowered her. Thoughts had been inventoried: the position of her body mid stride, the rubbing sensation of her canvas bag’s shoulder strap, her satisfaction in picturing, at will, Jem’s blue hair; the loss of her loneliness, hair strands falling across her left eye; hunger. Everything in her awareness, and perhaps the unconscious layers below that, had been breached by some form of electronic, viral attack. Fortunately, before this information could be transmitted back to the originator of the virus, safeguards in her wetware device had been tripped. The virus was contained and killed.

  Saskia had stumbled in the street and looked for the source of the assault. It could only be a time traveller. The encryption on her device was unbreakable by contemporary technology.

  There he was.

  The elderly gentleman paused on the corner of the block, tipping his head to one side as though he had half-heard his name. He looked in her direction and she turned away. She turned back when he continued walking with his easy, imperious gait.

  Saskia matched his pace. It was ten minutes later that she sensed a GSM transmission from the man. Saskia felt the information as though it were a gossamer strand trailing from his gentlemanly hat, sunlight glissando on its lone string. The transmission contained TCP/IP packets—easily decrypted—destined for an online travel agency. He had just booked a flight to Milan.

  ~

  Why Milan? And was he aware of Saskia? Did he know J
ennifer Proctor and her father, David? Saskia worried at these questions for every step of the return journey to her apartment. Part of her curiosity was a need to know what had happened to her friends. Had Jennifer become the Einstein of the twenty-first century, a media eminence? And what of David? Had he been fully reconciled with his daughter? It was carrying these thoughts, along with breakfast from the local shop, that she re-entered her apartment one full hour earlier than she had told Jem with a plan to follow her time traveller to Milan. She found the woman in the secure room, where Saskia kept her more personal souvenirs, her financial paperwork, and her weaponry.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing, Jem?’

  ~

  Who was

  ‘I bought us Battenberg cake… and proper English teabags. I was going to invite you on a trip.’

  the time traveller? Where was

  ‘Where?’

  he going?

  ‘Milan.’

  Milan?

  ‘Milan.’

  Echoes of her former life.

  Sounds dying but not dead.

  Saskia boiled with the implications of her discovery—a time traveller, like her—for the short hours of the day with Jem, the barren night, and the morning.

  ~

  Saskia had taken her usual seat in the rearmost row of the aircraft. Here she could see without being seen. A girl of twelve or so, travelling alone and clearly nervous, looked at her across the aisle. Saskia took her hand briefly. Then the jet engines tuned up and up and the rough take-off pushed her into a doze, eyes dry even beneath their lids, her shoulders cramped and tense, forgetting the girl but remembering the time traveller. Where was he? She had not seen him come aboard. The engine noise played on all the intensity of her anxiety, which itself was buoyed by the absence of Jem. Saskia was conscious that her outfit—a disguise, in part—had been chosen by the woman: the Loblan cowgirl boots that made her feet ache; a fancy knapsack that could carry nothing more than her mobile phone, her wallet, a tampon or two; a tight, designer shirt; a necklace that bounced on her exposed sternum. Each discomfort made her think of Jem. For a time, she had been everything. Everything. Jem with the blue hair, draped over a sofa in the changing room, yawning thoughtfully at Saskia’s new groove and calling it good with a mimed pistol shot.