The Albino's Dancer

by Dale Smith

  ‘It’s empty,’ Blandish said apologetically, tearing Catherine’s eyes from Leiter for just a moment. She looked so innocent. ‘Not that it matters: we’re not going to shoot our way out of here. Are we?’

  ‘What are you still doing here?’ Catherine asked.

  Something flicked across Blandish’s face at that.

  ‘Our belt got broken,’ she said simply. ‘We need to work together if we’re going to get out of here alive.’

  The Albino shook his head, but Blandish wasn’t looking in his direction.

  ‘My belt is working fine,’ Catherine almost spat. ‘I don’t need your help to...’

  Lechasseur. She might have a belt, but did she have Lechasseur?

  Catherine knelt back by Leiter’s body, but this time she wasn’t paying her respects – she pulled his jacket open, tore at his clothing, but to no avail. They weren’t there: the belts he should have been wearing were gone. Catherine realised just who had taken them: it was Lechasseur. He’d come here, found the body and taken the travel belt – to replace the one that Catherine had taken from him, because she’d wanted to change history.

  She looked up: Blandish was looking down at her.

  ‘Where’s Lechasseur?’ Catherine growled.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Blandish answered.

  Behind her, the Albino started shaking. It took Catherine a few moments to realise he was laughing, silently. Because he knew where Lechasseur was, as well as she did: they’d escaped the bunker together with him, after all. Lechasseur was gone, and Blandish’s belt was destroyed.

  They were trapped, all of them.

  Leiter was dead, finally.

  Chapter Eight

  8A. 23 February 1951, 03:25

  Honoré felt his heart try to pound itself out of his chest: he was being pushed through time with such violent force that he couldn’t stop even as he arrived. He flew across the dark chamber, and slammed backwards into a wall in a storm of concrete dust. His head ached with such ferocity, it took him a few moments to realise that Kate and Burgess had thudded into the wall beside him.

  Little Emily had turned on him.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ Kate wheezed from the floor.

  Honoré didn’t answer, his concentration on the belt: if the impact with the wall had damaged any of the delicate valves... They all seemed to be intact – his back had taken the brunt of the impact, and was aching nicely just to prove it – but several of them were flashing an alarming red. Red was bad; even Honoré’s limited grasp of temporal mechanics could handle that.

  Burgess coughed consumptively.

  None of the buttons on the belt seemed to be working.

  ‘You know how this works?’ Honoré growled down at the pale body at his feet. Burgess merely treated him to a pink-eyed glare. ‘Don’t you?’

  Still no response. Honoré didn’t have time for this – Emily didn’t have time: he could see her in his vision, trapped and waiting for the end. They’d watched her body being dragged from this bunker, Catherine had said. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

  Honoré lifted Burgess up the wall by his neck.

  ‘It needs resetting,’ Burgess choked. ‘You’ve been bounced.’

  Honoré pulled the control unit from the belt, and thrust it into Burgess’s face.

  ‘Reset how?’ he said.

  Burgess looked to the controls, and Honoré couldn’t help but follow suit. It was a mistake: Burgess’s dangling legs suddenly drove up like a piston, connecting squarely with Honoré’s midriff. All the air was forced out of his lungs, and he felt a blackness creep in at the edge of his vision. Burgess followed up quickly, a simple jab to Honoré’s Adam’s Apple neatly choking him.

  Burgess pushed Honoré away, and thrust a finger into his face.

  ‘Don’t ever touch me again!’ he yelled, out of breath.

  Honoré took a step back and drew himself up to his full height.

  ‘My friend is back there,’ he growled softly. Even Burgess took a step back. ‘If I don’t get her out, she’s going to die. You’re going to reset this belt, and I’m going to go back and stop that. You understand?.’

  Burgess sneered, but some of his swagger had deserted him.

  ‘You can’t get back,’ he sounded pathetic. ‘You’ve been bounced: there’s another belt active back there.’

  Honoré remembered Catherine’s words on the subject. Remembered her taking the belt that they’d used to go, but didn’t remember her turning it off as they’d arrived. Perhaps she’d realised her mistake, and that was why they’d arrived now, but that wasn’t going to help him find Emily in the next...

  Oh God, Emily.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ Kate said again from the floor. There was an edge of panic in her voice. ‘What is it?’

  Honoré looked down at her. He couldn’t hear anything, but ever since Belgium, his hearing hadn’t been as good as it might be: getting caught in an explosion could do that to you, and after he’d bucked expectation by walking again, it seemed a little churlish to complain about the loss of the extremes of frequency. But he could still see: dust was still shaking itself out of the concrete’s joints, long after it should’ve settled back down again. If it had been just their crashing arrival that had caused it.

  Honoré handed her the belt controls.

  ‘Do you know how to reset this?’

  Kate took the controls, nodded solemnly.

  He hoped she did: Little Emily was the only way out of here he could think of, if something bad was going down. And in Honoré’s experience, something bad was always going down.

  He wondered briefly where the real Emily was. If she knew he’d failed her. No – there was still a way to get to her, to save her. He couldn’t see it yet, but there had to be. There would be.

  ‘She’s right,’ Burgess said, heading for a dark doorway hidden in one corner of the room. Something started to flicker there. ‘There’s something out here.’

  Honoré thought of a bomb in a piano in Belgium.

  ‘Get away from there!’ Honoré yelled, throwing himself across the room. ‘Now!’

  Burgess didn’t even turn.

  ‘Don’t tell –’ he started.

  And then everything was fire.

  It raced into the concrete chamber, channelled there as it ate the stale bunker air ravenously. Honoré felt the heat sear the hair from his face before the light blinded him, but he was still diving headlong into it, his arms outstretched; he couldn’t stop himself, even as his higher brain shut down and a more primal pyrophobia took control. He knew only one thing was saving him from being roasted alive, and that was Burgess: as Honoré’s body pushed towards his, Burgess bore the brunt of the flame. Honoré couldn’t tell whether he was screaming, or whether the fire had already stolen his voice.

  The Albino was being born.

  Honoré’s fingers were blistering even as they caught the Albino, the mere contact like grasping at ice cold shards of glass. Suddenly they were on the floor, and Honoré couldn’t tell who was smothering who. They rolled, but who rolled who was lost in smoke and ash and fire. Above them, the bunker’s ceiling made ominous noises as the fire leeched at the already weak and feeble structure. Honoré’s only thought was that he had to escape, had to get away, had to get back.

  And then they were falling, the fire suddenly cold.

  It was only then that he realised that Kate was holding on to him.

  Together, the three of them fell.

  8B. 23 February 1951, 03:22

  ‘Where’s Lechasseur?’ Catherine hissed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Emily answered.

  She wished that she did: in the midst of all of this, there would be a great deal of comfort to be had from having Honoré with her. Telling her that anything could be fixed, with the right contacts, the right amount of
money to pass hands. How much would it cost to get us all out of here?, she’d ask him. How much to make sure that nobody has to die?

  Instead, all she had was the Albino, and he was little comfort. He hovered beside her like a ghost, saying nothing. Obviously. His eyes never left Catherine, his expression unreadable.

  He didn’t even react as Catherine started to laugh.

  Emily wasn’t sure what to do either.

  ‘I thought it was you,’ Catherine cackled, pointing a slender finger at the Albino. ‘Can you believe that? All this time. How stupid.’

  If they were going to get out of here, then somebody had to take charge. Somebody had to try to keep this in hand.

  Emily stepped forward.

  ‘We can still get out of here,’ she said, quiet but firm. ‘If you listen to me, and do what I say.’

  ‘No,’ Catherine said, calmly.

  Emily didn’t answer. It took a few seconds for her to convince herself that she’d heard what she thought she had. Emily looked to the Albino, but he was no help. He just stood, staring at Catherine’s belt – a Little Emily, she assumed, to go with the life-sized Honoré that Catherine had misplaced. Why wasn’t he here? Why did Emily have to be the one to do this?

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Emily said, finally.

  It seemed a little weak, even to her. But there it was, hanging in the air between them.

  Catherine shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘But –’

  Catherine held up a hand.

  ‘Whatever it is, however simple it sounds, I can’t,’ she interrupted, softly. There was something in her voice that Emily couldn’t quite place. ‘I couldn’t save him. I tried my hardest, and I still couldn’t. Do you understand? I wanted to save him, but I can’t.’

  Emily recognised the tone then: she would’ve picked it up earlier, only she was too close to it. It was her voice, when they’d found her wandering around Shoreditch in her pyjamas. An amnesiac, alive but hollow: everything that she might have been was gone, and all that was left was the empty shell of her. That had been before Honoré, and she’d done her best to forget about it since then, but here it was, right in front of her: the sound of someone with nothing left to live for.

  Beside her, the Albino turned on his heels and started to run.

  Emily didn’t watch him go.

  ‘He was my everything, and now... Now all there is for him is the Albino’s sick experiments and no rest, ever. I can’t let that happen to him. Do you understand? I won’t let them have him. Do you know what it’s like to have someone so important you’d do anything to save them?’ Catherine asked, sinking to the floor next to her lover. ‘To have that, but fail?’

  She thought of Honoré, somewhere out there, fighting to save her.

  ‘Yes,’ Emily said. She fixed Catherine with a stare ‘I have you.’

  Catherine looked at her for a moment.

  ‘You’re as important as he was,’ Emily held out a hand. ‘You deserve to live too.’

  Catherine looked away.

  ‘Even though he won’t? Though they’ll take his body, his perfect body, and turn him into a computer?’ she asked coldly. Catherine shook her head, almost sadly. ‘I was only ever what he made me. And he made me vengeful. I’m sorry.’

  Catherine’s hand went to her belt.

  ‘You should run – you won’t make it, but at least you’ll know you tried. It’s easier to die, knowing that.’

  Emily looked at the belt: red lights were flashing on it, building in intensity. She didn’t have to know any of the belt’s workings to know that it wasn’t a good sign.

  ‘I thought it was him,’ Catherine was saying. Emily wondered if she could fight her to the ground and deactivate the belt. Somehow, it didn’t seem likely: where would she start? ‘I thought it was the only way he could kill Leiter. My giant. How could I know he was so fragile? No, he didn’t do it.’

  Emily thought of the explosion that was coming. The blast that would take her life. Was there anything left she could do?

  ‘I did it,’ Catherine said softly. ‘I’m doing it now. You should never have taken him from me. I know you didn’t mean to do it, but you did.’

  ‘I just watched him sell you.’

  Catherine looked away sadly.

  ‘You don’t stop loving someone,’ she said apologetically, ‘just because they make a mistake. And he loved me. If I’d saved him, he would’ve remembered.’

  There was no answer to that – or at least none that Emily thought would have any effect. Even if she reached out to Catherine and told her the perfect way, she didn’t think she’d listen. It had gone beyond that now, beyond saving Leiter and escaping the Albino together. Perhaps she even knew that going back to Leiter would be only another type of slavery. Perhaps this had never been about saving the giant, only ever about bringing it to an end.

  ‘You should run,’ Catherine said softly. ‘You’ll feel better for it.’

  Emily decided it might be best to take her advice.

  8C. 23 February 1951, 03:24

  ‘You should run,’ Catherine said softly. ‘You’ll feel better for it.’

  She could feel the heat of the belt starting to sear her belly through her clothes, as its heart struggled to contain the conflicting forces within it. She felt a little sympathy for it.

  Blandish looked at her one last time. Catherine felt the urge to apologise to her, to reach out to her as a kindred spirit. She hadn’t masterminded this, but she was ultimately responsible for Leiter’s death, for his continuing death. But as the heat from the belt grew, it seemed less important, less urgent. Now she had taken the decision to avenge him, her own fire had died. Perhaps she was dead already.

  Blandish turned and ran, looking back almost apologetically.

  Catherine closed her eyes, briefly.

  Crouching down, she rested a hand on Leiter’s chest. It remained resolutely still, as it never had under her touch before. His face held some of the dignity it had in life, but there was something else there too: a hint of... fear? No, not Leiter. Annoyance: death had appeared before him, pointing to the final sands as they fell through the hourglass... and Leiter had scowled and complained at how inconvenient it all was. Yes, that was him.

  She bent down and kissed his cheek.

  ‘Sleep tight, my love,’ she breathed.

  It might have been different when they had first started travelling together. It was hard to say: the contrast was too great for her to be able to make the image out clearly. He had taken her from nothing, from no future, save the same daily grind until her family took their claws from her flesh, to suddenly being there out in space, touching it and making it bend to her presence.

  ‘Come with me,’ he’d implored, ’I’ll make you scream.’

  It hadn’t been a lie.

  But then things had changed. As he’d promised they never would. He had heard the rumours about the cult who had perfected time travel, and he had to investigate it. It had sounded too good to be true, and so – of course – it had been: the time travel had been no lie, but they hadn’t been about to let him have it without him being under their total control. They had taken his flesh, changed it, abused it: Catherine had only just managed to get him away before they turned their attention to his mind.

  After that, he’d had his time travel, but it had never been the same between them. He had seemed colder, more distant. He had told her about his deal with the Albino, but not what he was selling. But it wasn’t him: her Leiter would never even have considered that. It was something cold and metal that they had put into him.

  Catherine winced as the belt’s heat kicked up a notch. It couldn’t be long now: the core was unstable at the best of times, but this belt had already lived through one explosion. It occurred to her that the explosion that
had damaged the belt in the first place was the explosion she was about to cause. The belt would overload, because it had been damaged in the explosion caused by the belt overloading. There was a symmetry to it that appealed.

  She had thought that she was making a difference, that the change would come. Stealing the valve, keeping the belt, even coming back in the first place: each had seemed like the right step, that she was changing the universe with every move. But instead, she had been blindly following her ordained path. Looking back now, all she could see was the single road, leading inevitably to this. If she had known, she could have really made a difference. But instead, she had rushed blindly in.

  It didn’t seem important now.

  The belt started to give off a high pitched whine. It irritated her ears for a few moments, but quickly moved out of the range of her hearing. All it left in its wake was a slight headache, and a feeling that things would soon be over. Blandish and the Albino would still be running, for all the good it would do them: Leiter had told her of the bunker’s defences, and she knew that not even the Albino himself could escape in the time left to him. How long had it been? Not more than a minute since he had started to run: it took longer than that for the antiquated computers to match his retina print to their records, even in the unlikely event he had made it as far as the door.

  In the time left to him.

  She supposed there wasn’t much time left for her. The belt glowed like a star against her waist. Actually glowed: in a few moments, it would be too bright for her to look at without squinting.

  The thought struck her: if this was Leiter’s dying wish, what would hers be?

  Catherine cleared her throat, awkwardly.

  ‘My Goddess,’ she said, before her voice cracked. She coughed again. ‘My Goddess, deep within, far without. I... Please look kindly on my father. If he’s still alive. And on my sisters. And...’