by Gary Gibson
So he reached out, touched the flickering residual life within Mia, already deep into the terrible abyss it sought and craved. In his mind’s eye he pictured his hand probing to grasp that last tumbling fragment of Mia’s life-force, feeling it writhe, holding it back.
Mia’s eyes twitched rapidly, then widened. Someone nearby gave out a low moan of horror, but Elias didn’t look up to see if it had come from Mik or Josh. A keening sound, almost like whistling, now came from Mia’s throat. Elias didn’t want to know what it felt like to be trapped again, no matter for how short a time, in that shattered body.
‘Tell me who did this, Mia. Tell me, and you can go.’ He glanced up, saw Josh standing right above them, clenching and unclenching his fists. Elias ignored him, looking back at Mia’s face. Muscles writhed like snakes under her cheeks. He wondered if she could feel anything.
‘Let me go,’ Mia whispered weakly, partly in Elias’s mind, partly out loud; it sounded as if she were gagging on the words.
‘Tell me first,’ said Elias. ‘Tell me who did this to you, Mia. Tell me now or I won’t let you go, do you understand?’
‘Macey,’ she said, her voice so small and frail Elias could barely hear it. The flickering life within her seemed to grow a little weaker. Elias tweaked here and there, and Mia’s back arched, a high keening sound escaping her lips. ‘Oh fuck,’ she whispered, entirely in the real now. ‘I can’t, I can’t—’
Her back arched again, and blood sprayed out of her open mouth.
‘Stop it,’ said Josh. ‘Stop it now. You’re hurting her.’
‘I can’t help that, Josh. She says Macey did it. What else do you need to know?’
‘I – nothing. Tell her I love her, Murray. Just tell her I love her.’
Elias stared at him for a moment, unable to imagine Josh capable of ever expressing any emotion remotely like love. But maybe he was wrong. Maybe people really were that unpredictable. He turned back to Mia, grateful now to let the life within her slip away, her body slumping down as that brief spark of light left her eyes for the last time.
‘Did you tell her?’ asked Josh, his mouth twisted in distaste.
‘Sure, Josh, I told her. I can’t guarantee she heard me, though.’
‘You tell me how to do that,’ spoke Mik from the corner in a low, awed whisper, ‘I make you a fucking king.’ Elias ignored him, kept his attention focused on Josh. ‘Macey? The name means something to you?’
‘Does, yeah,’ said Josh. ‘You done good, Elias. You deserve reward. Mik, take him next door. Make sure he gets his reward. Okay?’
‘Sure,’ said Mik with a wide smile like a shark’s. Mik beckoned to Elias, heading back through the door they’d come through, and back into the large room where the two men had been bagging drugs on a long table. Elias stood studying Josh’s features for a few moments, before turning and walking slowly after Mik. Something felt badly, badly wrong here. It wasn’t so much what Josh had said . . . it was the way he had said it.
Back in the larger room, the two men were still there. Elias cleared his throat, and watched as Mik walked over to the table and picked up a tiny diskette. He swaggered back over to Elias, a wide grin on his face.
‘Here,’ said Mik. ‘That what you wanted?’
Elias took the diskette, and looked down at it cradled in the palm of his hand. So tiny, but it held the secret to a man’s life.
Elias nodded, and pocketed it.
The attaché case Hollis had told him to watch out for still sat unattended to one side of the table. Like it signified nothing, nothing at all. It seemed strange they would leave it just sitting in open view like that—
Unless they knew?
Elias looked casually towards Mik, but the kid, damn him, just grinned like he was playing some game. Then Mik walked over, picked up the case, and hugged it to his chest.
He stood in front of Elias. ‘So. You lookin’ for this, maybe, Elias?’
Elias heard the gentlest movement behind him, then the unmistakable chill of a steel gun barrel being laid against the nape of his neck.
‘Elias,’ – he didn’t need to turn around to know it was Josh speaking, Josh holding the gun to the back of his head – ‘you did me a great service tonight, a very great service. Macey will not live out the night. His death will be protracted, painful. Thank you.’
Elias cleared his throat, preparing to speak. Then he stopped in his tracks, the boy Mik still standing in front of him, grinning and clasping the attaché case to his chest. Elias didn’t turn, didn’t want to stare straight into the barrel of a gun. ‘You’re welcome. But you’ve – got an odd way of thanking me, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘You been lyin’ to Mala, Murray, set us up good. That bad. Mala good to its people, but very bad, though, when you fuck ’em. Don’t want fuck with Mala, no,’ said Josh, and it seemed to Elias that the other man’s voice was filled with genuine sorrow. Like the pity a man might feel for some injured animal found by the roadside, right before he breaks its neck.
‘I haven’t been lying to you, Josh. I’m your friend. The Mala Pata have been very good to me.’
The blow came suddenly, unexpectedly. Elias found himself slumping to the ground, lying directly between Mik and Josh. Pain filled his head, and at first he thought Josh might have shot him. Then he realized Josh had merely slammed him across the back of the head, presumably with the gun butt.
He was distantly aware of the two other men, still measuring a crate of powder into those little bags. One of them glanced briefly in Elias’s direction with an expression of amused contempt.
‘Heard everything, Murray: you meetin’ with police, passin’ information. So bad, bad. You tell police, London, everything want know about Mala Pata, about Arcologies. What you get for that, Murray? What price they give you, even when you know anyone fucks with Mala Pata, always end up dead? So don’t lie to me, Murray. I know everything.’
His head still throbbed, but at least he could think again. He rolled slightly over to one side, trying to keep alert. He could see the case still clasped in Mik’s small sweaty hands; enough Blight contained in it to waste half of Europe.
‘When did the Mala Pata start dealing in biological warfare, Josh?’ Elias asked from where he lay. ‘You must know what’s in that case. They call it the Blight.’
‘And it better in your hands?’ Josh scoffed. ‘I told you I’d give you the information you wanted. And you got it, though it’s not much use to you now. You think stuff in that case be better in hands of London Authority? Or in hands of people it came from? You think they make any better use, huh? Least if we all gonna die, Mala Pata get a little reward on way. This your reward, Elias. You told me who kill Mia, and I grateful, really.’ The gun had been hanging by Josh’s side, but now he levelled it at Elias’s head.
‘Killing me is no way to thank me,’ Elias protested. ‘Killing me isn’t going to fix anything.’
‘Other part of reward is, Murray, you die quick, not long and drawn out like you would do otherwise. Gettin’ tired talkin’. What say we finish this?’
And then, it came to Elias. If he only had the strength . . .
‘Mia,’ Elias said, and Josh frowned.
‘What you say?’ said Josh, staring angrily at him. ‘You want die slow?’
‘It’s Mia,’ Elias said, most of his attention seemingly focused elsewhere. He didn’t know if he could do it, didn’t know if he had the power. Always, before, he’d touched them, like Trencher had done, laying the hands on and feeling the light spill out. But Mia was in another room, and that made things very different. But having a gun pointed at your head, he was finding, tended to encourage remarkable levels of motivation.
Something shifted and banged in the room they had left only seconds before, and everyone around Elias froze on hearing it. The only thing in the room the noise had come from was Mia – and Mia was very, very dead.
What was it like, reaching in again, into that terrible place for a secon
d time, finding the thin, delicate cord that led from this world into the abyss beyond life, somehow still connecting Mia’s spirit to her body? Like burying your face in wet, greasy compost and breathing in, he thought. It was the taste and the scent of death, the sensation of a dead soul being pulled back from the brink one more time, back into the light.
It’s lucky I don’t believe in God, thought Elias, or I’d burn in hell for this.
Mik and Josh now had their attention firmly fixed on the room with Mia’s corpse in it. The two men at the table had also moved towards the room door, picking up the two rifles that lay on the table. Nobody, for a few seconds at least, was now paying any attention to Elias. Mik was still standing transfixed directly in front of him, only a few feet away. Elias propelled himself forward, finding it easy to push the kid over onto his back, pinning him down with his knees pressing the metal case into Mik’s chest. Mik’s eyes grew wide with surprise and fright, and could not even look behind him and see what Josh and the other two men were up to.
What happened next lasted only seconds. In his struggle to escape, Mik let go of the case. Elias snatched it up and flung it, hard. Words started to form on Josh’s lips just as the case slammed off his forehead. Meanwhile, the two nameless men with the rifles swung around and raised their weapons, aiming them straight at Elias’s head.
Then they noticed the case, which had burst open across the floor, a fine dust settling amongst shards of broken glass. For the briefest moment, it was as if the whole world had come to a halt.
Elias, still half-kneeling on the floor, realized it could only be the Blight he saw swirling through the air: that same gene-altered alien phage that had already devastated so much of Asia. He turned to see Mik come at him, snarling.
Elias caught Mik’s leg with one hand as the boy kicked out at him, reaching up with his other hand to grasp the handle of the sonic slammer where it was strapped against Mik’s chest. Finding the trigger, he pulled it.
The boy disintegrated. Or rather, the portion of his torso between his upper shoulders and his hips seemed to turn into a fine red mist that expanded rapidly outwards to fill one half of the room, mixing together with the fine, deadly powder of the Blight.
Elias only realized he himself had been shot at when he felt the bullet rip through the side of his arm. The sonic slammer had deafened him, the world around him reduced to death and silence. He groped for his small flechette gun and turned, firing rapidly behind him, while half-scuttling, half-crawling towards the shelter of the long table. He’d been lucky, the bullet hadn’t hit his gun arm, but it turned out that it wasn’t necessary.
Josh stood still in the centre of his room, one hand stroking almost absent-mindedly at the base of his throat. The tiny flechettes had found their targets all over his shoulders and chest, but it was soon clear they weren’t all that was killing him. Elias could feel the Blight working on himself too, as the gun slipped from Josh’s hand, his mouth working silently, his eyes becoming unfocused.
Behind Josh, the two other armed men were sagging to the floor, the rifles slipping from their hands. It had all been so quick, surely no more than a few seconds. Yet Elias was still alive. For the moment. Josh staggered forward, a thin line of drool slipping from his mouth, through air still filled with a mist of blood and Blight. Elias coughed, and coughed again, feeling the strength sapping from his own bones.
He forced himself to crawl towards the door that led back outside, all too aware that he would find more of the Mala Pata beyond it. He reached inside himself once again, trying to summon both the strength to reach the door and the healing light inside him, coaxing it out, willing it to propel his muscles towards the door – and any chance of safety, however slim.
The door opened, and a heavily tattooed face appeared, staring over Elias’s head to take in the attaché case, Josh still standing empty-eyed in the centre of the room, the shattered fragments of Mik’s body . . . everything.
‘Jesus fuck,’ the newcomer gasped, and ran off again.
Elias kept crawling – reaching the door, passing through the door. His hearing was coming back gradually. He could hear people screaming, could understand why. The Blight was still working at him, tearing at his nervous system, and all the time he willed the inner light – the healing light that flowed from his fingers, the same light that had brought Mia back – to resist, to get him out of there, out of the Arcology, away from the Mala Pata.
After a while, the ghost came to him again.
He had silvery grey hair, and walked slowly along beside Elias as he crawled through the now deserted Mala Pata safe house. Not even the Mala Pata, it seemed, were brave enough to stick around for the Blight.
‘Fuck off,’ Elias gasped, once he realized the ghost was there.
‘Now, now, Elias.’ The ghost had lines on his face, but distinguished lines, like an elder statesman or a movie star who’s put his best work behind him. His eyes even seemed to twinkle. ‘No need to be rude. What you did back there wasn’t very nice, was it?’ The words were spoken with the hint of a smile, as if only mock-stern.
‘They were going to kill me,’ Elias gasped. He was getting near to the wide atrium, the great open space filling the centre of the Arcology.
‘I meant Mia, who was once your friend. Bringing her back like that, not once but twice. I imagine her pain must have been beyond words.’ Elias knew it wasn’t really a ghost, that its name was Vaughn. But it was hard to think of this wraithlike thing that appeared and disappeared as anything remotely human, regardless of what Trencher had taught him. Vaughn stepped up to the railing, inspecting what he saw below like the king of some abandoned castle surveying his erstwhile domain.
Elias said nothing to that, because the ghost – Vaughn, whatever – was probably right. So he changed the subject.
‘Why don’t you leave me alone,’ he wheezed, pulling himself towards the railing and hauling himself up into a roughly sitting position. ‘I didn’t ask for you – but you keep on coming.’
‘That Blight powder must have been extraordinarily concentrated to do what it did to those men,’ the ghost said, as if ignoring him. ‘Usually it takes days, or at least hours, to strike people down. But look at you: still alive, still moving. Truly, Elias, you are remarkable.’ He said this without the least hint of irony. The City Authorities would be here soon, Elias thought, and he didn’t want to be here when they arrived. His bones seemed to be on fire, the Blight was spreading through his system, but despite his resentment he knew the ghost was right: he was still alive, still moving. He pushed himself from his sitting position and somehow, miraculously, pulled himself upright, holding on to the railing. The world swayed around him, and for a moment he looked down into dizzying depths, the roof of the Arcology only a few metres above his head. He retched, coughed, started to walk. There were shouts in the distance, and he saw people moving, all moving downwards, away from the Mala Pata safe house.
He decided this seemed a good idea, and found his way to one of the bridges, hauled himself across it.
He didn’t look back to see if the ghost was still there, but it was following silently. Voices echoed from far below, too distant to be made out. ‘They’re going to hurt you for this, you know,’ Vaughn said. ‘You let the Blight escape. Imagine the fuss that’s going to cause.’
‘I don’t need your fucking comments,’ Elias croaked, making himself turn around at last. But the ghost – Vaughn – was gone, vanished. As always.
Two
Ursu
It was on the fifth day of the Ceremony of Commencement that Shecumpeh ‘called’ to Ursu, and he found himself awoken in the depths of the night by Master Uftheyan. He had been dreaming of the orchards beyond the mountains, although he had never seen them. But his mother had, before he was even born, and he wondered how he came to dream of something he knew well he had never seen. He wondered what those orchards really looked like.
Not that he was ever likely to find out, the way things had been goi
ng recently.
Master Uftheyan was bent with age, his brow grey and mottled, but his eyes remained bright and piercing. When he shoved Ursu awake, he woke to see the old priest’s eyes gazing down at him. The old one was hard enough to read at the best of times but, for once, as Ursu sat up on his rough stone pallet, it seemed to him there was some hint of emotion in Uftheyan’s eyes which he could not readily identify.
The cell had a single window, covered over with wooden shutters inscribed and embellished with the teachings of the Speakers. From what dim light filtered through from the sky beyond, Ursu could tell that it was just after dawn.
His first reaction, on being woken at such a strange hour, was fear – fear that the invaders had launched their final attack, and were now scaling the walls of the city. But as he listened hard, his short, triangular ears twitching at either side of his elongated skull, he could make out hardly a sound. So perhaps it was something else.
‘Get up, Ursu. We all heard it,’ Uftheyan urged with a trace of excitement. Normally the old priest was careful to reveal no hint of emotion. He had been a soldier in his youth, apparently, but never spoke of his military life. There were rumours that he had grown tired of the killing, so had become a Master to remove himself as far from his previous lifestyle as possible.
‘Heard what?’ Ursu asked sleepily.
Uftheyan glared at him, revealing a mouth full of long, sharp teeth. ‘The voice of Shecumpeh,’ he said, in a tone of barely restrained anger. The name he uttered was a compound of words from the old language – the one spoken by the first race of city-builders, before they died amid snow and darkness. It translated, more or less, as the-one-who-speaks. Ursu stared stupidly at the old priest, not sure what he was saying.
