“Okay,” the yacht said, “entrance/exit to open. When I say ‘get out’ then g—”
Tris yanked.
And in the silence which followed she realized her heart had stopped. All Tris could feel was a band of ice beneath her breasts that threatened to prevent her from ever being able to breathe again. A power surge shocking her limbs into absurdly rigid positions, which was probably just as well, otherwise she’d have been dancing puppet-like with panic.
Freeing one arm, Tris hit herself hard in the chest and felt her heart start again. Removing the yacht’s memory had been a good idea, getting herself electrocuted in the process…
“Shit,” said Tris. She waited for the yacht to say something in return and then realized how absurd that was, given that she gripped its consciousness in her fingers like her life depended on it.
“Okay,” said Tris. “So you’re on your own. You should be used to it.”
Shattering the fish tank by blasting off one corner using Doc Joyce’s handgun, Tris watched as one after another of the catfish flooded out of the glass wall and into the water now lapping around her knees. And one after another the catfish stopped swimming, became rigid, convulsed and died.
She’d got it wrong again. She should have tried a side wall first. Something stocked with smaller fish. Frantically Tris tried to scoop up the last of the big beasts but there was nowhere to put it and the fish slipped out of her hands before she had time to work out what to do next, going rigid even as she was reaching for it.
Salt water had mixed with the fresh and cold with the warm. There were no catfish left to help. So when Tris realized that the exit had jammed less than halfway open and the gap was too narrow to let her fight through the incoming water, she almost didn’t bother to save herself.
All the same, bulkhead lights still shone with an amber glow that endless members of a Chinese crew had once come to associate with being ripped open and left to drift towards the tectonic plates of a distant darkness. And that glow also meant the yacht’s emergency systems might still be operable.
Rejecting the idea of trying to squeeze through anyway, Tris did something far more sensible; she jammed the blue marble back into position inside the table, flinching in anticipation of an electric shock that didn’t happen.
“…‘get out’,” finished the yacht, then it swore. “No,” it said, “forget it. We can deal with you being an idiot later.” The sliding door, which had begun to open, hesitated and then hissed back on itself, locking tight. Lights came up and the table Tris had left open ran a series of rapid lights, ending in the squawk of a klaxon that shut off as soon as it began.
“Okay,” said the yacht. “This is the way it’s going to work. I’m going to open that entrance/exit completely this time. And you’re going to do nothing until I tell you. What are we going to do?”
Beyond the hull a rock ground itself along the side of the yacht and as the cabin lurched water slopped across the floor in a low wave.
“You’re going to open the door,” Tris said through gritted teeth, “and I’m going to do nothing.”
“Good,” said the yacht. “Now once the door is open, you reach inside the table and take the memory. Only this time I’ll shut down first. Understand? You don’t touch anything until the pretty lights disappear. Otherwise you’ll get hurt.”
“I’m not a child,” said Tris crossly.
The yacht considered this for all of half a second. “Yes, you are.” Its voice was matter-of-fact. “At least, you are according to any definition I’ve got on file. Now you wait,” it stressed, “until the entrance/exit is completely open, then you get out fast and let yourself drift downriver, don’t try to swim for the bank.”
“Why not?” Tris asked, but the door was opening and the lights had dimmed. An inrush of water was her only answer. Grabbing the memory, Tris began wading towards the door only to discover that every forward step she took swept her three steps back again. “Think,” she told herself.
Tristesse al-Heliconid was in her mid to late teens, small for her age and less grown-up than she imagined. She wore her hair cropped short and her breasts small, her hips were naturally narrow. On some worlds girls of her age already had children and on others they’d barely begun their education.
She was unmarried and no one, absolutely no one, had ever tried to make her learn anything; but she had a brain, guts, synthetic sinews and her own reason for being there.
In the end, Tris decided her only hope was to wait until the river stopped rushing in and the water level inside and outside equalized, so that was what she did. And maybe she should have used those long seconds to look for useful tools or find a dagger, but something else had occurred to her.
Digging around inside the table, Tris identified where the marble had been and felt with her fingers, shrinking back when something wet and bristling brushed against her skin.
“Oh, fuck it.” Grabbing the marble from her pocket, Tris gave the thing to the tendrils, feeling them suck the marble from her grip. The AI wasn’t nearly as non-bio as it claimed.
“Well, am I glad to be—” Whatever All Tomorrow’s Parties had been about to say stuttered to a halt. Lights came on all across the cabin and half of them promptly blew, mostly the half which happened to be underwater.
“Good,” Tris said, “you’re—”
“Fucked,” said the yacht. “Unless you unplug me now.”
“I need you to work.” Tris tried to sound commanding, only her voice came out small and rather uncertain. “I can’t do this on my own.”
“You should have thought about that,” said the yacht, “before you stole me.”
“But once I stole you,” Tris said, “I wasn’t on my own, was I? Because then I was with you.” She thought about it. “Anyway,” she said, “don’t semiAIs have rules about having to protect the sentient?”
“That’s household appliances,” said the yacht, “and it’s ‘not harm’ rather than protect. There’s a difference.”
The water was up to Tris’s hips now, pulling at the bottom of her stolen leather jacket. She could feel the cold eating at her legs and dissolving all feeling below her waist. And the yacht was beginning to lean. Last time Tris had checked the cabin was level, ripped by currents and still filling with water but definitely level.
Now it slanted, with one side wall almost underwater and the other, the one with the door, almost clear. Only waves kept spilling in over the sill as the yacht began to settle.
“I’m going to die,” said Tris. Mostly she was trying the idea for size, wondering if it was one she could accept.
“So?” said the yacht. “You should have played it differently. Besides, I’m the one who’s really going to die. You’re just going to revert to a previous back-up. What will you have lost, twenty-four hours? Forty-eight, if you’re really careless.”
“You don’t get it,” said Tris. “I don’t have back-up.” She thought it through, facing the conclusion. “When I die,” she said, “I die.”
She could almost hear the yacht’s surprise. Well, the surprise of its AI, which was actually a blue marble matched to an axion-rich anemone. It wasn’t quite sound and it wasn’t really silence, more like a stumble in her head.
“You die if you get wet?” she asked the marble.
Her question amused it and the answer was no. It died if it got left behind, removed from a source of power and never found again. “Worry about yourself,” suggested the yacht. “Why did you wake me?”
“I wanted to know where I am,” she said.
“Where you wanted to be,” the yacht said. “You’re on Rapture.”
“I know that,” said Tris. “Where on Rapture?”
“In a river.”
Tris sighed. “I’m going to take you out again,” she said, “so you probably need to turn off the rainbow.”
“Rainbow?”
“Those colours,” said Tris. “The ones wrapped around you.”
“You can see the
m?”
“Of course I can,” Tris said. “If I couldn’t see them I couldn’t tell you they were there, could I?”
“Such a child,” said the AI. “So empirical.”
“Whatever. You want to tell me which river?”
“This one,” said the yacht, and before Tris could kick the table, a ghost landscape hung in the air before her. It was topologically accurate, impressive and detailed in the extreme but it was skew to the lapping water and not at all what Tris wanted.
“Just tell me.”
“Here,” said the AI. “You’re here.” A tiny blue thread on the face of the ghost world lit red. At the same time, the world tilted slightly until it was out of true with the wall of the cabin but level over the water.
“And the Forbidden City?”
A different sector lit gold, and even without knowing the scale Tris could see that they were a long way apart.
“I’m taking you out now,” said Tris, reaching for the memory. “And I’ll carry you with me.”
The AI was about to say something but Tris yanked first and the rainbow shut down, tendrils brushing her fingers as they released the marble. All Tris felt was the briefest jolt of electricity and then she was alone again.
CHAPTER 35
Marrakech, Summer 1977
“Come here.”
Moz almost asked, Why? But acting the fool around Major Abbas was not clever so instead he smiled, nodded to Hassan and sauntered towards the grande taxi that had drawn up on the other side of the railings.
A rolling, I’m-not-worried kind of walk.
It fooled neither of them.
“Excellency?”
The police officer didn’t return his smile and when Moz saw the Frenchman in the back of the taxi he understood why.
“I need some information,” said Major Abbas.
Moz nodded. “As Your Excellency wishes.”
“Don’t question him here,” said the Frenchman. “Get him inside.” Claude de Greuze’s voice was brusque, slightly impatient until he glanced at Moz and then it went hard and cold. “Tell him to take a good look,” he told the Major, indicating La Koutoubia and the overgrown gardens where Hassan and Moz had agreed to meet. “This is probably the last he’ll see of it or his friends.”
Without meaning to, Moz glanced across to where Hassan and Idries leant against a concrete bench in the shade of a palm, one broken frond hanging limp and pale like a lock of badly bleached hair. At their back were the ragged remains of an earlier mosque, which had been destroyed when an imam discovered the prayer hall was not truly aligned with Mecca.
Or so Moz had always believed. Only Celia’s Michelin Guide to Morocco told a different story. It said the original mosque had been built by one ruling family and its replacement by another. The imam had merely said what expediency required.
“Is he listening?”
The answer was obvious.
Pushing open the passenger door, Major Abbas patted the seat beside him. “Get in,” he said. The Major wore a cheap suit with the cap of a taxi driver and looked more uncomfortable in this than Moz had ever seen him look in full uniform.
Moz did what he was told.
They drove in silence, turning north onto Mohammed V. And though the sun hammered down onto the taxi’s blue roof, Major Abbas kept the windows stubbornly shut, as if ignoring the rank corruption coming from the old man’s body counted as some kind of courage.
“Where are we going?”
Moz meant his question for the Major but it was Claude de Greuze who answered and his answer was that the little Arab shit should shut the fuck up because he was in more trouble than anyone could imagine. Something Moz had begun to work out for himself.
“Turn here,” demanded Claude de Greuze and Major Abbas glanced with surprise at the driver’s mirror.
“Where did you think we were taking him?”
Their destination was a large if nondescript colonial villa on the corner of Rue Bernard and Avenue Foche. Stucco crumbled from underlying red brick and one of the pantiles lay broken between dead roses on a flowerbed that had dried to the consistency of rock. A peeling board read ECOLE PRIVÉE.
The only new thing about the old school was a rusting steel door that looked out of place between fat white pillars. If Moz hadn’t known better he’d have said the place was deserted.
“Tell him to get out,” said Claude de Greuze.
“Do what he says,” Major Abbas ordered, leaning over Moz to push open the side door. “Don’t keep the man waiting.”
There were a dozen things about that moment which Moz was to remember in the months and years to come. And though sometimes he managed to forget the school altogether, he would never again hear gears grinding at an intersection without his footsteps faltering and his soul shrivelling a little inside.
Roses would bring him out in tears. The sound of any small child being dragged along the pavement by a scolding adult knotted his stomach until it hurt. Sun on his shoulders and the raw tang of fresh dog shit, the afternoon cry of the muezzin, all worked their way inside his memory like splinters of glass. But what Moz really remembered was warm piss running down his leg when he was hit.
The covering of his face with his hands was entirely instinctive, as was curling into a tight ball, and it probably helped that he’d been facing away when the old Frenchman slammed a cosh into his skull.
“Pick him up,” said Claude de Greuze and Major Abbas lifted Moz from behind.
“Now turn him round.” The spring-loaded cosh slapped between the boy’s legs, hard and fast. “Come on.” The Frenchman’s voice was impatient. “Get him up again.”
“Stand,” said the Major, sounding almost sad.
Moz tried. He really did.
Glitter off gravel, so many lights that Moz forgot what he was meant to be doing. A foot caught him between his buttocks and its owner started demanding answers about Malika, only it was hard to hear what the Frenchman was saying over the sound of Moz’s own gasping and the numbing waves of darkness.
“We should get him inside.”
“Why?”
“Because,” said the Major, “someone might see.”
Claude de Greuze nodded scornfully at the colonial villas on either side. One had either been turned into flats or was divided between generations of the same family, sheets drying from wires strung across three huge balconies. The other had boarded-up windows and looked abandoned.
“What are they going to do?” demanded de Greuze. “Call the police?”
“All the same,” Major Abbas said. “There’s no point creating trouble.” Wiping blood from Moz’s jaw, he lifted the boy from where he lay curled on the gravel and carried him up three steps and in through the metal door.
It was dark inside the school, with shuttered windows. A single unlit bulb hung from a small ceiling rose in the middle of the hall and the floor was covered with dark linoleum. There were five doors and all were closed.
“Okay,” said Major Abbas. “Now you must stand.” He tipped Moz onto his feet and steadied his shoulders for a few seconds. When he let go the boy swayed but remained upright, staring mutely around him.
Sounds came from behind most doors.
“Take him to three.”
“No.” Major Abbas shook his head. “Not yet. It’s not necessary.”
Claude de Greuze just looked at him.
“It…is…not…necessary,” the Major said, stressing every syllable. For the first time, Moz heard quiet anger in his voice.
“Do you want to tell me why? Or should I call the General?”
Moz had no idea who the General might be but that didn’t matter. There was always a general or a pasha, someone who made decisions.
“Call him,” said Major Abbas. “Tell him you want to question one of my best informers. Someone I’ve spent five years developing.” There was heavy emphasis on the word “question” and the Major’s voice sounded more furious than ever.
“Is that true?
” It was the first time the one-time advisor to the Pasha had spoken directly to the boy. “Well?”
Moz shrugged.
He’d told Major Abbas some stuff, repeated a few rumours and occasionally followed some foreigner to see where he went. That was it really, not what Moz thought of as being an informer. Informers were sinister figures. Shadows of the men Malika talked about, the Pasha’s eyes and ears back in the days when Thami el Glaoui ruled the Red City.
“You don’t know?” The Frenchman sounded incredulous.
“He knows nothing,” said Major Abbas. “I’ve told you that already. Are you going to make that call or not?”
Moz was surprised that the Major kept pushing de Greuze but something had changed between the two men, and it wasn’t that Major Abbas felt more at home in this strange place because he looked almost as uncomfortable as Moz felt.
It was something else. A challenge of some sort.
The two men stared at each other, both ignoring the boy who stood sticky with blood that showed only as glossy camouflage against the red lettering and black cotton background of his Ramones T-shirt.
“Okay,” de Greuze said finally. “We’ll do it your way.”
“Yeah,” said Major Abbas. “We will. Give me an hour.”
CHAPTER 36
Lampedusa, Saturday 7 July
The file Petra Mayer put down in front of Katie Petrov was tattered along the edges and had a coffee stain prominently over one corner, but what Katie really noticed was the slew of Arabic running right to left across the top and the French translation underneath.
“You need to see this.”
In case Katie couldn’t read the French someone had thoughtfully provided a translation and paper-clipped it to the top of the file.
MARRAKECH POLICE—HOMICIDE DIVISION.
They’d also provided a translation for every one of the pages inside, although Katie Petrov didn’t need a translation to recognize most of the names. Marzaq al-Turq, Jake Razor, Malika bint Kasim…
The shot of Jake showed a man in his early twenties snarling at the photographer. Something about its studied defiance suggested the three-by-four originated with his record company. Moz’s shot was very different, a diminished imitation that had the boy staring into the lens of a police camera, one of his lips badly swollen and a long gash taped shut in his hairline.
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