‘I’ll do that in person.’ Jack ran his hand over the rough, cold stone. The scrape of it was so convincing. He remembered being a child, rubbing small hands over his father’s stubble, fascinated by the way it prickled at his skin. He sighed.
‘Let’s find Andrea.’
‘She’s locked you out too, Jack.’
‘She hasn’t. She’s the only one.’
‘She might as well have done.’
Her avatar was a few minutes’ walk away, at the end of a pathway lined with more boulders. They had once been elegantly correct representations of Jack’s many friends. Distance made regular contact with the few who’d stayed in touch after he left Station almost impossible. They had in any case without exception blocked him when he surrendered to the Totality. For a moment, Jack wished that the past could be remade. But only today and tomorrow could ever change. He moved on towards Andrea’s avatar. When he found it, he spent a while just gazing. It was a perfect image of her living self. He thought of the last time he’d seen her, singing in a nightclub off Kanji Square. He remembered her final touch. She’d wiped a tear away from his face.
Hurt had carved age into her face, etching light new lines across it. Her relationship with Harry Devlin had not always been easy, but she’d loved him enough to turn back to him when the rogue mind’s rock hit the moon. Security had suddenly seemed so very important. She’d told Jack that she was going to make a fresh start with her husband a week or so before he left Station for the Soft War. It had been such a sudden, final end to their affair. Jack wondered how Harry’s death had hit her. She’d never responded in depth to Jack’s questions about her loss. He’d assumed that, even four or five years later, the hurt went too deep.
She’d at least given him the basic facts. Harry had been shot in a Kanji backstreet. He’d always relied on an extensive network of informants. It was assumed that one of them had been turned and killed him. The assassin was never caught. Jack remembered Pierre Akhmatov and his nightclub, the Panther Czar. He wondered what other stones Harry might have turned over, what dangerous knowledge could been waiting beneath them. He’d always seemed unkillable – so vital, so alive, so rooted in the world around him. It was difficult to think of him as a fetch, sketched into being from the whispering traces that his life had burnt into the weave. It was impossible to imagine its presence offering Andrea any sort of consolation.
The eyes of her avatar were closed. Without thinking, Jack took her hand and initiated a call request. He imagined her seeing his image flash up, wondering whether to talk to him. For a moment he let himself feel hope.
‘Honestly Jack, I don’t know why you people put yourselves through all this.’
There was nothing. Andrea’s hand remained cold and dead. Jack squeezed it again, then let it go. It fell back to hang beside her hip. Her face was in shadow. He kissed the tip of a finger and touched it to her cheek. A chill shook him. Perhaps she was with another lover. But they talked about everything. She would have mentioned that. He imagined her thinking of his return home – one more man who would love her, then die. Perhaps that was why she’d cut him off so suddenly and totally. But she’d always been so ready to face the fact of his death. He forced both thoughts from his mind. Something was wrong. He needed to find her. ‘We’ll see InSec tomorrow, then we’ll start looking,’ he told Fist.
‘I’m bored,’ grumbled Fist. ‘What about the temple? There’s someone up there who’d just love to see you. We can tell him how impressed we were with his little followers.’
‘No, we’re not going to see Grey.’ Jack was surprised by his own anger. ‘Not now. Not ever.’
‘You’re the boss.’
‘Let’s just go back to the hotel.’
The puppet slapped his hard little hands together. The garden slipped away, and Jack was left once again standing in a squalid little hotel room, consumed by lonely hunger, with the heavens hanging lost beneath him.
Chapter 4
Jack stood on the roof of Customs House, looking towards the great circular cliff of the Wart. The whole clutter of Docklands’ habitable space arched up and away to his left and right, then came together again far above him on the other side of the Spine. Many of the buildings were either half-completed or half-ruined. There were a dozen or so burned-out patches, some taking up little more than a few square metres, others extending for a street or more.
Jack looked straight up, trying to see past the spinelights, but they dazzled him and he winced away. He imagined Andrea, out there somewhere, and remembered her talking about Kingdom. ‘He built Station,’ she’d once said. ‘I hate to admit it, but that’s pretty bloody impressive.’ Standing within it now though, Jack still felt trapped. Fist jerked him out of his reverie.
[ Remembering the gods, Jack? I’d love to have a crack at them.]
[ For once, I wouldn’t stop you.]
[ That does make a change.]
A black InSec flyer whined carefully down on to a landing pad, crouching back into mass as its engines died. There was movement within then a door opened.
‘I’m Lieutenant Corazon,’ said its pilot, climbing out. ‘Assistant Commissioner Lestak’s assistant.’
She was a little shorter than Jack. She wore a dark, anonymous uniform. Her scalp was neatly shaven and dotted with tightly tattooed weave sigils. East’s silver logo flared out on the crown of her head. ‘I have to handcuff you. I’m sorry, it’s regulation.’ She helped Jack into the flyer and leant over him to snap in his seatbelt. There was an awkward silence as she fumbled with straps.
‘Docklands is in bad shape,’ said Jack. ‘Surprised nobody’s rebuilt after those fires.’
‘Those are void sites. Where terrorist bombs went off. The gods left them like that to remind us why we were fighting.’
She took the pilot’s seat.
‘Did they catch any of the bombers?’ asked Jack.
‘When Grey fell. Very naïve of him to think they were peace protesters.’ She completed the flyer’s start-up checks. ‘Ready to go. No distraction from that creature of yours while I’m flying, please.’
[So very firm,] whispered Fist. [ I’m rather enjoying being bossed around by her.]
The flyer lifted straight up. As it levelled off just below the Spine, Corazon closed her eyes for a moment and reached up to touch her East logo.
[ What’s that all about?] said Fist.
[ We’re alongside the Pantheon icons. She’s acknowledging her patron.]
[ Tell me you didn’t kiss their arses like that.]
Corazon finished her brief observance and set the flyer moving forward. She was a deft, efficient pilot.
‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes or so.’
‘No doubt.’
‘You’ve been away for a long time. A shame to return like this.’
‘I can live with it.’
They passed through a space designated for container storage. Several hundred hung in canyon walls around them. Other flyers sped along above and below them, pilots and passengers visible in each. Without overlay, they all occupied indistinguishably battered machines, faded carbon-fibre frames showing like lightly tinted bones through body shells that were palimpsests of replaced and resprayed panels.
‘You’re in the care of East?’ Jack said.
‘Through my father, yes.’
[ Here’s someone who didn’t let their parents down, Jack!] cackled Fist.
Jack winced.
‘Are the handcuffs too tight?’ asked Corazon.
‘They’re fine.’ Jack shifted in his seat. ‘Unusual to find one of hers working in InSec.’
‘East called me to it. I followed.’
‘What did you think you were going to be?’
‘A journalist.’
Jack let the silence run on.