That was it: the transmission was over.
“Mr. Pink?” Vasko said. “Who’s Mr. Pink?”
“We go back a way,” Scorpio said.
“He didn’t say anything about himself,” Khouri said. “Nothing about what he’s going to do.”
“I don’t think he considered it relevant,” Scorpio said. “There’s nothing we can do to help them, after all. They’ve done what they could for us.”
“But it wasn’t good enough,” Malinin said.
“Maybe it wasn’t,” Scorpio said, “but it was still a lot better than nothing, you ask me.”
“The conversation he mentioned,” Khouri said. “What was that about?”
“That was between me and Mr. Clock,” Scorpio replied.
After the surgeon-general had taken her blood, he showed her to her quarters. It was a small room about a third of the way up the Clocktower. It had one stained-glass window, a small, austere-looking bed and a bedside table. There was an annexe containing a washbasin and a toilet. There was some Quaicheist literature on the bedside table.
“I hope you weren’t expecting the height of luxury,” Grelier said.
“I wasn’t expecting anything,” she said. “Until a few hours ago I expected to be working in a clearance gang for the Catherine of Iron.”
“Then you can’t complain, can you?”
“I wasn’t intending to.”
“Play your cards right and we’ll sort out something a little larger,” he said.
“This is all I need,” Rashmika said.
Grelier smiled and left her alone. She said nothing as he left. She had not liked him taking her blood, but had felt powerless to resist. It was not simply the fact that the whole business of the churches and blood made her feel queasy—she knew too much about the indoctrinal viruses that were part and parcel of the Adventist faith—but something else, something that related to her own blood and the fact that she felt violated when he sampled it. The syringe had been empty before he drew the sample, which meant—assuming that the needle was sterile—that he had not tried to put the indoctrinal virus into her. That would have been a violation of a different order, but not necessarily worse. The thought that he had taken her blood was equally distressing.
But why, she wondered, did it bother her so much? It was a reasonable thing to do, at least within the confines of the Lady Morwenna. Everything here ran on blood, so it was hardly objectionable that she had been made to supply a sample. By rights, she should have been grateful that it had stopped there.
But she was not grateful. She was frightened, and she did not exactly know why.
She sat by herself. In the quiet of the room, bathed in the sepulchral light from the stained-glass window, she felt desperately alone. Had all this been a mistake? she wondered. Now that she had reached its roaring heart, the church did not seem like such a distant, abstract entity. It felt more like a machine, something capable of inflicting harm on those who strayed too close to its moving parts. Though she had never specifically set out to see Quaiche, it had seemed evident to her that only someone very high up in the Adventist hierarchy would be able to reveal the truth about Harbin. But she had also envisaged that the path there would be treacherous and time-consuming. She had been resigned to a long, slow, will-sapping investigation, a slow progress through layers of administration. She would have begun in a clearance gang, about as low as it was possible to get.
Instead, here she was: in Quaiche’s direct service. She should have felt elated at her good fortune. Instead she felt unwittingly manipulated, as if she had set out to play a game fairly and someone had turned a blind eye, letting her win by fiat. On one level she wanted to blame Grelier, but she knew that the surgeon-general was not the whole story. There was something else, too. Had she come all this way to find Harbin, or to meet Quaiche?
For the first time, she was not completely certain.
She began to flick through the Quaicheist literature, looking for some clue that would unlock the mystery. But the literature was the usual rubbish she had disdained since the moment she could read: the Haldora vanishings as a message from God, a countdown to some vaguely defined event, the nature of which depended on the function of the text in which it was mentioned.
Her hand hesitated on the cover of one of the brochures. Here was the Adventist symboclass="underline" the strange spacesuit radiating light as if seen in silhouette against a sunrise, with the rays of light ramming through openings in the fabric of the suit itself. The suit had a curious welded-together look, lacking any visible joints or seams. There was no doubt in her mind now that it was the same suit that she had seen in the dean’s garret.
Then she thought about the name of the cathedraclass="underline" the Lady Morwenna.
Of course. It all snapped into her head with blinding clarity. Morwenna had been Quaiche’s lover, before he came to Hela. Everyone who read their scripture knew that. Everyone also knew that something awful had happened to her, and that she had been imprisoned inside a strange welded-up suit when it happened. A suit that was itself a kind of punishment device, fashioned by the Ultras Quaiche and Morwenna had worked for.
The same suit she had seen in the garret; the same one that had made her feel so ill at ease.
She had rationalised away that fear at the time, but now, sitting all alone, the mere thought of being in the same building as the suit frightened her. She wanted to be as far away from it as possible.
There’s something in it, she thought. Something more than just a mechanism to put the jitters on rival negotiators.
A voice said, [Yes. Yes, Rashmika. We are inside the suit.]
She dropped the booklet, letting out a small gasp of horror. She had not imagined that voice. It had been faint, but very clear, very precise. And its lack of resonance told her that it had sounded inside her head, not in the room itself.
“I don’t need this,” she said. She spoke aloud, hoping to break the spell. “Grelier, you bastard, there was something on that needle, wasn’t there?”
[There was nothing on the needle. We are not a hallucination. We have nothing to do with Quaiche or his scripture.]
“Then who the hell are you?” she said.
[Who are we? You know who we are, Rashmika. We are the ones you came all this way to find. We are the shadows. You came to negotiate with us. Don’t you remember?]
She swore, then pummelled her head against the pillow at the end of the bed.
[That won’t do any good. Please stop, before you hurt yourself]
She snarled, smashing her fists against the sides of her skull.
[That won’t help either. Really, Rashmika, don’t you see it yet? You aren’t going mad. We’ve just found a way into your head. We speak to Quaiche as well, but he doesn’t have the benefit of all that machinery in his head. We have to be discreet, whispering aloud to him when he’s alone. But you’re different.]