The clouds began to disperse. The downpour abated and blue sky began to push through again. The rain gradually slowed to a trickle and then stopped. The mirrored pavements began to dry as the sun crept out again. Cautiously, the fallen people picked themselves up. Even the horse somehow regained its footing.
“It’s over,” she heard people say, relieved, all around her, as they resumed their progress along the avenue. No one seemed concerned that they had lost their belongings, only that the Silver Rain had ended. The street bloomed with colours once again.
“It’s not over!” Auger shouted, the only person standing still as the pedestrians surged around her. “It’s not over!”
But no one paid her any attention, even when she cupped her hands and cried out even louder, “It isn’t over! This is only the beginning!”
The people walked past her, oblivious. She reached out and grabbed a young couple, but they wrestled free of her, laughing in her face. With a dreadful sense of inevitability, she watched them continue their progress towards the Arc de Triomphe. After a dozen steps, they faltered and stopped in mid-stride. At exactly the same instant, so did everyone else on the street.
For a moment, the Champs-Elysées was perfectly still, thousands of people suddenly completely motionless, some in the most ludicrous of postures. Then, very slowly, as one they lost their balance and toppled to the ground. Their perfectly immobile bodies littered the sides of the avenue as far as the eye could see. Even beyond the Champs-Elysées, a palpable stillness had descended over the entire city. Nothing moved, nothing breathed. The bodies had become silvery-grey, drained of colour.
All was quiet. It was, in a way, quite beautifuclass="underline" a city finally freed of its human burden.
Then a breeze picked up, blowing along the length of the avenue. Where it touched the bodies, it lifted coils of shining dust from them, twining them through the air like long glittering scarves. As the dust peeled away from the bodies, it removed first their clothes and then their flesh, revealing chrome bones and steel-grey armatures of nerve and sinew. The breeze strengthened, abrading even the bones, smoothing the bodies into odd, abstract curves, like a landscape of intertwined sand dunes. Coils of dust snaked between Auger’s lips, peppery and metallic.
She was screaming now, but it was pointless: the Silver Rain had come and no one had heeded her warnings. If only they had listened… but what good, she wondered, would it have done them anyway?
She heard, distantly, a rhythmic sound. Far off in the sea of blurred skeletal remains, a single figure remained standing. The little drummer boy was still drumming, still walking very slowly towards her, picking his way between the bones.
“Verity,” Floyd said softly. “Wake up. You’re having a nightmare.”
It took her several seconds to surface through the dream, even with Floyd shaking her gently. He stood next to her bunk, his head level with hers as she opened her eyes to the dimly lit railway cabin.
“I thought I was back in Paris,” she said. “I thought the rain had begun.”
“You were screaming your head off.”
“They wouldn’t listen to me. They thought it was over… they thought they were safe.” She was cold, drenched with her own sweat.
“It’s all right now,” he said. “You’re safe. It was just a nightmare… just a bad dream.”
Through the gap in the curtain she could see the moonlit landscape slipping by outside. They were still on their way to Berlin, still on their way to that icebound, machine-stalked city, as dangerous in its way as the excavated bowl of Paris. For a moment she panicked, wanting to tell Floyd that they had to turn around, that this was a futile journey. But gradually her thoughts rearranged themselves as the dream began to fade a little. They were headed to a different Berlin, one that had never known a Nanocaust or any of the other horrors of the Void Century. That brightly lit, rain-soaked Paris had been a dream.
“They wouldn’t listen,” she said softly.
“It was just a nightmare,” Floyd repeated. “You’re safe now.”
“No,” she said, still feeling as if the dream might reclaim her at any moment, still seeing the drummer boy stepping towards her through the maze of bones, as if that part of the dream was still playing somewhere in her skull, moving with clockwork deliberation towards an inevitable conclusion.
“You’re safe.”
“I’m not,” she said. “Nor are you. Nor is anyone. We have to stop it from happening, Wendell. We have to stop the rain.”
His hand closed around hers. Gradually she stopped shaking and lay there numbly, and for a little while she let him hold her hand, until she fell back into an uneasy sleep, drifting bodiless through the dust-strewn streets of an empty city, like the last ghost in town.
They arrived in Berlin by mid-morning on Sunday. All around the city, party banners and flags were on display again. Now that Rommel and von Stauffenberg were both safely in the ground, the bright young things had decided that it was time to give National Socialism another crack of the whip. The advertising men had come up with some careful changes: the old hard-edged swastika was gone, replaced by a rounded, softer successor. The party big shots still gave rallies in the Zeppelin Field, but they saved their best performances for the tiny, flickering window of television. Now there was a little slice of Nuremberg in every well-appointed living room, every beer hall and railway-station cafeteria. There was talk of parole for the big fish languishing in the Gare d’Orsay; perhaps even some kind of triumphant return to the Reichstag in the evening of his chemically sustained days.
“It shouldn’t be like this,” Auger said quietly.
“Amen to that,” Floyd replied under his breath.
It was a short taxi ride to the Hotel Am Zoo, a good place at the fashionable end of the Kurfurstendamm decked out with high-class marble and chrome so clean and polished that you could eat your dinner off it. At least the hotel hadn’t changed much. Floyd knew it well enough, since he and Greta had stayed there on two or three occasions in the early fifties. Given that familiarity, it had seemed like the obvious place to head for. But once Floyd had checked in and carried their very few belongings up to the single room they’d just paid for, he began to feel the onset of an annoying but familiar sense of guilt. It was as if he was consciously cheating on Greta, visiting this old romantic haunt of theirs with another woman. But that was absurd on two counts, he told himself. Greta and he were no longer an item—even if the door to them being an item again in the future hadn’t been completely closed. And Auger and him—well, that was just ridiculous. Why had the thought even entered his mind? They were here to work on an investigative matter. Strictly business.
So what if he liked her? She was nice looking and clever and quick-witted and interesting (how could a lady spy be anything but interesting? he thought) but any other man would have said the same thing. Liking her did not take great strength of character. You didn’t have to see past superficial flaws: there weren’t any—except maybe the way she kept treating him like somebody who not only didn’t need to hear the truth, but who couldn’t handle the truth. That part he didn’t like. But it only made her more fascinating to him: a puzzle that had to be unravelled. Or unwrapped, perhaps, depending on the circumstances. When she had finally fallen back to sleep after her nightmare, Floyd had lain awake on the lower bunk, listening to her breathing, thinking of her under the sheets and wondering what she was dreaming about now. He wasn’t crazy about her. But she was the kind of girl he could very easily allow himself to become crazy about, if he wanted to.