“There’s a stall.” Hani looked round, as if about to impart a heavy secret. “At the top of Boulevard Zaghloul. It’s much better than the coffee here. When there is coffee here,” she added to clarify the matter.
“And His Excellency allows you to cross the road by yourself?” The librarian glanced over the edge of the balcony to the avenue below and suddenly realized just how stupid a question that was. Apart from an elderly man in a souf sitting on a bench, the road outside was completely empty of traffic. Though a makeshift donkey cart sporting wheels borrowed from a motorbike was approaching from one direction, followed by a horse-drawn calèche, its leather roof raised against the possibility of rain.
She thought it was further proof of the child’s good manners that Hani didn’t point out that traffic problems were unlikely. Instead, the girl just nodded.
“Oh yes,” said Hani, “I’m allowed to cross roads. In fact the bey allows me to do what I like.”
Madame Syria smiled and decided to go with the bey’s niece to buy coffee. It was true that she really needed to use the child’s machine but that could wait until Lady Hani finished her story.
CHAPTER 53
28th October
The glass girl was up ahead. Avatar saw her backlit through a halo of smoke that was his own cold breath. Her blue eyes watched him stagger up out of the gloom and, as he stumbled, she tossed her head, so that long blonde strands of her hair flicked through the air.
Avatar nodded his reply, the hard band of pain across his forehead tightening its grip, still held in place by invisible screws. His fingers were so numb he couldn’t tell where the dead man’s rifle began and his own flesh ended. Both of his weapons seemed a part of him, or he them; it didn’t matter which way round, the result was the same.
He left the girl without saying good-bye, turning his back on the stained-glass memorial to a future not on offer to those like him, whatever his half sister thought. In the Delta and along the river, the felaheen still used hoes rather than tractors. The only blonde girls he’d seen were rich tourists, out of their skulls on clubnite and still stuck at home in everything but actual place.
Avatar shot the next soldier without even noticing he’d seen the man. A single bullet shredding a larynx in a reflex action that saw Avatar’s arm extended and the trigger pulled before Avatar’s guts had time to knot with fear at what he was about to do; take his total up to four.
Another two soldiers swam into vision, radiating anxiety. They stood in the aquarium dark, arms stiff and bodies tensed. Wired into a command network as they all undoubtedly were, they’d have heard the others die.
Try mixing that . . . Avatar didn’t doubt that he would, should he ever get back to his decks alive.
Stepping out from behind a pillar, Avatar raised his rifle and aimed at the nearest man. All the soldier had to rely on was equipment. Avatar had emptiness.
He pulled the trigger and felt his rifle buck. A second blip and the man behind tried to step forward on a shattered knee, only to stumble, pitching sideways as the remaining leg slid out from under him.
No prisoners.
Avatar walked forward and sighted along the barrel of his Taurus. The fallen figure shrinking into the deck, shoulders hunching as instinct kicked in and the man’s body curled up to protect its vital organs from attack. Instinct based on millennia of experience. Instinct that hadn’t yet adapted to guns.
Revolver in hand, Avatar crouched down and saw the figure flinch. The buckle at the side of the man’s mask was a simple ceramic affair, tinted black as not to catch the light, the helmet’s strap a fat strip of neoprene stitched to the lining. There were electrodes attached directly to the scalp of the person wearing the mask, though their purpose was uncertain.
Not that Avatar gave them much thought. He was much too busy staring into the pale blue eyes of a girl little older than he. Her broad face was set into something Avatar recognized instantly as acceptance. She still thought he meant to kill her.
As if he’d first bother to remove her mask. Except Avatar wasn’t sure why he’d done that; unless, because it was the kind of thing Raf might have done? Certainly not because Avatar expected to find some blonde Soviet corn-daughter hidden underneath.
And she was Soviet. No other Army in Europe used women in frontline combat. A Soviet Spetsnaz ranger on an ex-Soviet liner come face-to-face with some Delta street bastard.
“Not even full Delta,” muttered Avatar to himself. Maybe half-Abyssinian or Danakil. It was hard to know. If a mug shot did exist of his mother, it was probably in the files of the UN or the Red Cross, along with blood type and a tissue sample.
“What a fucking mess.”
Some flicker of recognition in the blue eyes watching him told Avatar that the wounded girl had logged the meaning, half-recognizing his tone in what passed for consciousness amid all that endocrine stink of hope and fear.
And all the while, unanswered questions, mute but frantic, hissed from within the empty mask Avatar now held in his hand. They spilled out in a language he didn’t understand, from a world he understood even less.
“Give me your rifle . . .” Avatar kept his own words simple. And though she didn’t understand them, she followed his gaze until she saw what he saw and knew what he meant. But her hands remained white at the knuckle where they held her weapon tight to her body, one finger curled around the trigger and less than a shudder away from smashing her other knee, because that’s where the muzzle pointed.
“Come on.”
A bullet to her head would have been Colonel Abad’s solution, Avatar realized that, as he waited impatiently for the girl to process his demand and reach her decision. And in combat terms the Colonel was probably right. Of course, if she did something stupid, then that would be Avatar’s solution too . . . But all the girl did was uncurl slightly and push her gun away from her, leaving it to Avatar to kick the rifle away across the metal floor. Then he smiled apologetically and stamped on her good ankle, to cripple her other leg as well.
Once, just once, Avatar thought he might have seen his mother. Standing at the gates of St. Luke’s and staring intently through the ancient wrought-iron bars at neatly uniformed children who kicked a plastic football across melting tarmac or tried to dunk basketballs through a single hoop screwed to a classroom wall.
She looked old to him, but was probably not. A thin face peering from the folds of her heavy hijab. Her eyes had scanned the playground’s movement, seeking a point of silence. And the gaze she met was his. He was the one she watched, with a hunger so open it sent one of the sisters across the playground to find out who she was and what she wanted . . .
Avatar put a bullet through the head of a soldier standing guard outside the old bank vault. A single shot fired through the slightly open door. The Spetsnaz should have relocked the safe after sending the others through. Except she couldn’t, obviously enough, not with all the ship’s systems down.
In reply, Avatar took a slug through his left arm that ripped up muscle and exited at the back. Only Avatar was so cold he hardly felt the blow and was too busy killing the first guard’s partner to notice the blood that stained the canvas of his makeshift jacket.
Two left, maybe one. Up on deck, where Avatar needed to be.
His mother was gone by the time Avatar brought his thoughts back to the long-forgotten and dusty playground. Gone from his memory and from the tall gates before Sister Carlotta even made it across the sticky tarmac.
Up ahead were more stairs and sunlight.