Meliha couldn’t make out the words, but she knew they would be communicating in English. They always spoke English. Her heart pounded. Of course they didn’t need to speak any louder. They would be enhanced: able to communicate at a distance, to see in the dark, to locate the slightest sound.
They would be working their way through the floor below. Systematically, methodically. The way they did everything. A single consciousness. A groupmind. An egregore.
Taking her torch, Meliha shone it into the darkness to search her surroundings for concealment or escape. The LED light was dim, but she dared not wind up the torch again in case they heard the sound.
There was a storage cupboard further behind her, right at the back of the alcove, barely visible behind a stack of carpets, some lying loose on the floor next to it. If she could get in there, perhaps ease a carpet roll across in front of it, maybe then they wouldn’t see her.
She slipped off the shoes from her aching feet and eased herself off the stack of rugs. She crossed the rough wooden floor to the storage cupboard. It was much bigger than she had thought and empty except for a stack of sample books in one corner and, leaning against the wall, a metre-and-a-half-long roll of a textile that was too lightweight for carpeting but too heavy for curtains. Easing herself in behind the sample books, Meliha rearranged them to offer meagre concealment. She started to move the textile roll over for additional cover, but it was heavier than she expected and started to slip from her grasp. She made a desperate grab for it and only just stopped it from crashing into the wooden side of the cupboard and alerting her pursuers to her hiding place. Muscle-achingly slowly, she eased the textile roll diagonally across in front of her, like the bar of a gate.
Shrinking back as far as she could in the store cupboard, Meliha switched off her torch and was immediately plunged into dark. As her eyes became accustomed to this new depth of darkness, she peered through between the top of the sample books and the angle of the leaning textile roll. She could see only a narrow section of alcove and nothing of the main area of the carpet warehouse.
And she could hear nothing. No movement. No voices.
It was like a shadow passing.
Right in front of her. Someone or something passed swiftly and silently across her narrow view of the alcove. Right to left. A dark flutter you could not identify as a person. She gave a start but instantly contained it, not moving, not breathing. They were there. On her floor. Now she could hear faint sounds of movement. Something spoken quietly in English.
The shadow crossed again, this time left to right. Closer.
Meliha didn’t move. She still held her breath, afraid they would hear even that. A tear welled up and ran down her cheek, the agony of waiting for the moment when they would tear away her makeshift camouflage becoming unbearable. More sounds. Then silence. Minutes passed, still nothing. Meliha concentrated so hard on the silence that she gave a small start when it was broken. But this time the sounds were even more muted. And above her. The next floor up.
She let go her breath, slowly, quietly. They were definitely above her now. They were not as good as they thought. They still had very human fallibilities.
It was difficult for her to tell how long had passed: her fear stretching every second immeasurably. But Meliha guessed it had been at least an hour since they had finished checking the floor above. No sounds of searching, no quiet, calm, measured voices in English. She peered into the gloom. Nothing. Carefully, slowly, making sure not to touch anything, she turned her wrist but, as it lacked a luminous dial, she still could not see the time on her watch. Her legs began to cramp but she didn’t move them. The pain grew and grew, the fibres of her muscles knotting in spasm. But she ignored it. She concentrated once more on driving out her fear.
‘ Benim kucuk cesur kaplanim.’ She focused on remembering her father’s voice as he had said it. The gentle tone; the pride. ‘ Benim kucuk cesur kaplanim.’
She waited for another hour. Meliha perceived a faint brightening of the light out in the warehouse. A hint of morning. She had not heard anything more.
They had failed. Or perhaps they had not known but merely suspected that she had been in the building. There were other places they perhaps knew about and were searching there. She decided that, from now on, she must not go anywhere she had been before. But she had to keep moving. Their failure had presented an opportunity for her to open up the distance between her and them. She could get out of the city, out of the country. If she acted now.
Meliha eased the textile roll back as gently as she could, making no sound. Edging herself out from behind the sample books, she paused and searched all she could see of the storeroom before taking tentative steps out of the alcove.
There were four of them waiting for her. They were standing, motionless, in the centre of the main floor of the warehouse. Four dark shapes, shadows. Genderless, ageless. They were silhouetted against the vague milky bloom of the large warehouse window. Two of them had something bulky around their eyes. Night-vision goggles. None made a move as Meliha appeared; no hint of reaction. They had been standing there for two hours, waiting for her to come out of her hiding place. It was more efficient, quieter that way.
They were what Meliha knew had been pursuing her. They were what she feared most.
Consolidators.
The Consolidator closest to Meliha slowly raised its dark arm as if pointing at her. There was a popping sound and she felt a sharp pain in her chest.
As she fell backwards onto the same stack of carpets on which she had slept, she thought she heard her father’s voice call to her.
‘ Benim kucuk cesur kaplanim.’
Chapter Three
The Night of the Storm
There was no storm.
All there was, was a vast expanse of open, dark sea. No land, no ships; no one there to witness the storm’s night-time birth. But there was syzygy: the perfect alignment of sun, moon and Earth, with the moon at its closest to the Earth, and the yearning sea heaved and arched its back under the moon’s compelling pull.
Above the sea the air was cool. Dry. And higher above it was a colossal mass of even colder air that had been born somewhere in the north and far to the east, and had drifted south-west, over the Baltic Shield. And as it had done so, it had climbed higher into the troposphere. Its Siberian chill had become even colder with altitude. And now, superchilled and super-elevated, it slid silently and disdainfully over the Atlantic.
But it would not be allowed to pass.
Something moved low across the arching back of the sea; something equally as colossal as the cold above it. This mass of air had been born in the tropics and carried warmth and moisture with it. And just as her counterpart above was colder than normal, she was three full degrees warmer than the usual drift.
Warm air rises, cold air sinks: a simple fact of physics, of meteorology.
The storm was born. It sucked the warm, moist air upward in a violent convective mesocyclonic vortex, the torn air reaching speeds of 180 kilometres an hour. A waterspout formed, joining sea to sky. Condensing water vapour from the warm air fizzed and crackled with electricity and clouds bulked and boiled and fumed. A vast supercell stormcloud, like a titanic anvil, formed above the Atlantic, turning the night darker.
Filled with millions of tonnes of water, it rotated slowly, malevolently, and began to shoulder its way towards the land.
Chapter Four
Kreysig recognised the fluttering in his chest as a rush of adrenalin and felt guilty about it. This was a catastrophe: buildings had been damaged, people had been injured, perhaps some had even lost their lives. Kreysig’s home city had been assaulted; violently, relentlessly, without mercy.