“No,” said Lady Neku, shaking her head. She’d have shaken it whatever the answer, but for once the truth was on her side. The pods were strictly one use only and that was down.
“Oh fuck…” Luc’s voice was small.
Come on, Lady Neku wanted to say. How can you miss it? Surely Luc had spotted Schloss Omga by now. It was that enormous castle crawling up the side of a mountain.
“Luc,” she said, and when Luc stayed silent Lady Neku leaned over to touch his shoulder. It was rigid.
“Leave me alone.”
“Come on,” said Lady Neku. “You can tell me what’s really wrong.”
Faded blue eyes turned towards her. A sky magnified by sadness and something else, something darker. “I’m afraid.”
“Why?” asked Lady Neku, meaning, Why now, why here… God, she knew what she meant.
“Because I was born afraid,” said Luc. “And I didn’t think it would happen like this.”
“What?”
“Death.” Luc shrugged. “She told me you’d try to kill me.” For someone talking about his own fate the boy seemed almost resigned. Afraid, but resigned, there was probably a term for it.
“Who did?” Lady Neku demanded.
“My mother, that’s why she refused to come. She doesn’t trust your family.” Luc shrugged again. “She told my father it was all a trick.” His broken smile was heartbreaking, and the really weird thing was that Luc obviously had no idea how heartbreaking. Nico would have been milking it his entire life.
“We’re not going to die,” said Lady Neku. “And I’m certainly not here to kill you.”
“But we’re out of control.” He gestured at the altimeter’s spinning needles. “You said it yourself, we’ve got no power unit.”
“Luc!”
He wasn’t listening.
“It must be odd,” he said, a moment later. “You know, being able to back up and be more than one person. I find it tough enough just being myself.”
“I’m just me.”
“Yes,” said Luc. “But there’s another you back at High Strange. How did you agree which one should die?”
“We’re not going to die!” shouted Lady Neku.
“Of course we are. You can’t just fall out of the sky. Someone lied to you,” he said. “About not crashing.”
“Luc,” said Lady Neku, grabbing the boy’s hand. “There’s only one of me and we’re not going to crash.” When Luc stayed silent, she gripped his fingers so hard he tried to pull them away. “I’ve made this drop ten times,” she said fiercely. “It’s going to be fine. The castle will catch us.”
“What castle?”
“That one,” she said, pointing down.
It took seventeen minutes to fall from High Strange to earth. The pods had enough strength to survive the howling winds that turned Katchatka Segment’s lower atmosphere into a danger zone, after that it was simply a matter of sitting out the fall.
Each of the families had owned a land base and an overworld back in the early days. These talked to each other, even when the families themselves refused to communicate. Lady Neku had been so surprised by this that she made Schloss Omga provide proof. A history lesson followed. The land bases talked to each other and to individual nodes on the filter, which was what Schloss Omga called the overworld mesh of Nawa-no-ukiyo.
The glitch was not that the bases and nodes could talk to each other, it was that Lady Neku could talk directly to them, without needing to go through a major domo interface.
“Neku…”
“What?” she said, dragging her thoughts back to the pod.
“We’re slowing.”
“Of course we are.” Tapping the window Lady Neku woke it up again. “Look,” she said. “We’ve arrived.”
Spread out below was a massive spiral that twisted to a blunt point, while a leathery fringe around its base locked the castle to rock. A thousand people had lived in its upper levels. Eight members of the Katchatka family, a hundred military modifies, and eight hundred and ninety-two fugees who provided service in return for shelter.
“Wait,” Lady Neku instructed. “And watch.”
So Luc stared intently at the shell below him. “That’s a Viviparus malleatus,” he said finally.
“A what?”
“A trapdoor snail. We’ve got them in our koi pond.” He glanced from Schloss Omga to the mountains on both sides and then at the altimeter dials in front of him, which had slowed to a lazy twirl. “It’s vast.”
Lady Neku smiled. “Yes,” she said. “It is.” Looking across at Luc, she wondered if the boy realised she was still holding his hand.
CHAPTER 46 — Saturday, 30 June
Kit counted off the time by the bells from St. Dominic’s, a new church on the corner of Conde Street, in what had once been a carpet warehouse. After a single peal for quarter past two and a slightly longer peal for half past, the landlord of the Queen’s Head finally arrived to see what the stranger was doing at the back of his pub.
Since the after-lunch staff had been stepping out for cigarette breaks on a regular basis and most had scowled at the sight of a stranger this was not unexpected.
“Police business,” said Kit, barely bothering to take his eyes from a narrow passage back to the road. He must have sounded convincing because the landlord turned back, and whatever was said when he got inside, that was the end of the cigarette breaks.
Motorbikes, rickshaws, taxis, and more white vans than Kit could count rolled down the road. The third time he saw the same shiny black Volvo, Kit left his hiding place and waited for its return at a pavement table on Conde Street.
“Where have you been?”
“Watching,” said Kit, although what he really wanted to say was, Just who the fuck is this?
“Afternoon.” Flipping up her arm, an old woman angled it backwards to shake, while simultaneously pulling away from the curb.
Amy shut her eyes.
The driver’s grip was strong, though liver spots splattered her wrist like dung. Greying hair had been cut tight to her neck, and she wore heavy dark glasses to shade her eyes. “Brigadier Miles,” said the woman, introducing herself. “I gather someone thinks you’re Ben Flyte?”
Kit nodded, catching her gaze in the rearview mirror.
“You’re certain about that?”
“Yes,” said Kit, “I’m certain.”
“Interesting,” said the Brigadier, turning her attention back to the road. Hanging a quick left, the woman filtered right at the lights and checked her mirror; whatever she saw satisfied her.
“Got a lighter?” she asked Kit.
He shook his head.
“Use this one,” she said, passing him something cheap and disposable, then followed it with a packet of Lucky Strikes. “I need a cigarette,” she added, when he just looked at her.
By the time the Volvo had put Piccadilly behind them and the city’s open spaces had switched from Green Park on the left to Hyde Park on the right, the car was filled with smoke and Kit had worked out that the Suzuki up ahead and the Merc two vehicles behind were part of an escort.
As the Suzuki peeled off, to be replaced almost instantly by a different bike, and the Merc fell back a place to allow another car in, before peeling off itself, he realised that at least four vehicles were shadowing this one and that a traffic helicopter overhead seemed to be paying close attention to their route.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To have a quiet talk,” said Brigadier Miles, and left Kit wondering why Amy refused to meet his eye.