She returned to her compartment. No late-boarding passengers had joined her. This part of the couchette was empty, though she could hear a group of Dutch students at the far end playing a drinking game. She twisted the door lock and pressed the switch that toggled between the ceiling light and the lights in each berth. She fell across her mattress and climbed, fully clothed apart from her skirt, beneath the thin sheet. It was stitched along one side to make a bag. She lay there, thinking. Raindrops made slick diagonals on the window. There was a cord to pull the curtains but she wanted to keep the night close. Outskirts of Berlin. Factories. Endless flatness. Did Regensburg mean ‘city of rain’? She had no-one to ask. She tugged the string and the curtains shut.
She dreamed of a castle whose walls moved at night. Saskia was there. She knew its secret passages. Her eyes were swollen and her hair long—the hair of the dead grew—and her lips were like meat on a barbecue, part-cooked and split.
When she awoke, it was still night, but the train had stopped. She plumped her sweaty pillow and waited for the beat of the wheels to resume. After some minutes, they did, and she let the movement wash her to the edge of sleep. But she had a headache where the plates of her skull met, at her crown, and the pain in her abdomen refused to let her move from doziness to true sleep. Her eyes wandered over the sooty shapes in her room and she named them, in order, as the overhead luggage basket, the laminated fire safety poster, and the door. A glimmer winked from the lock. The other beds, the bottle of water, the ladder. Her eyes returned to that glimmering lock. Something was wrong.
Like the sudden falling away of the sea before a tsunami.
Like everything was about to go wrong.
The tab was vertical. Unlocked.
She heard a sound from her nightstand. In the pile of coins she had scooped from the pocket of her duffle coat and placed there, an unnoticed bead the size of a breath freshener rolled—impossibly—over the raised edge and bounced twice on the carriage floor. She heard it cross to the door.
Blood hissed in her ears. Her muscles reeled tight. She could not move anything but her eyes. She found a shape in the darkness. Incidental light shifted in the tell-tale pattern of another person, reaching down to pick up the white bead.
Her struggle resolved to a thought. It condensed on her lips.
‘Cory?’
Suddenly, the cabin was filled with light.
Cory was wearing a black overcoat. There was a dash of white at his neck. She stared at it, conscious of the absurdity but not sure why, until she released that he was disguised as a priest. His hair was wet and his eyes had lost the depth of their blue. White stubble dusted his cheeks. He looked like a man in the last days of an illness. His finger remained on the light switch. As she looked from his hand to his face, Cory nodded slowly. It was the nod of a boxer before a round.
Jem recoiled from this propriety. She repeated the line she had rehearsed with Ego.
‘I thought you were dead.’
Cory moved forward. Jem recalled the moment she had first seen her brother at the TV tower. He had seemed to swoop upon her, like a bird of prey to her arm. Cory’s eyes, this close, were bloodshot. He gripped her head by the ears. This was at odds with the elegance of the man in Saskia’s apartment. She gasped and put her hands over his.
‘Jem, do you understand the danger you’re in?’
He won’t kill me, she thought. Ego had been certain. She had information. She might be able to cooperate. But there was a blankness in his eyes that suggested the professionalism of an executioner.
‘How did you find me?’
Cory blinked. Wrong answer, the movement said. He lifted her head and dashed it against the metal rim of the window. Jem heard the sound as though it came from outside the train. She almost laughed. Cory had wanted to hurt her, but she was fine. He had underestimated the toughness of her nut.
‘I know exactly how much energy your head can take before the skin splits, or the bone cracks, or your brain is damaged. Do you understand?’
‘Yes–’ A sudden dizziness made her head feel hollow. There was a little blood in her eye. ‘Yes, you cunt.’
‘Where is the Ego unit?’
‘Where do you think? I posted it to my Aunt Mavis in Scunthorpe.’
Jem thought once more of the debonair spook who had told her the story of the Star Dust in Saskia’s apartment. She tried to count the distance between that image and the man before her, as one might count the seconds between lightning and thunder.
‘I’m going to ask you a question. Think carefully before you answer. Now, where is the Cullinan Zero?’
‘Wait. I…’
‘What?’
‘Saskia survived the crash. She knows, doesn’t she? About…’ She struggled to remember the word Cory had used. ‘The Coolinan?’
All movement ceased in Cory’s expression. He leaned forward, as if he was going to bite.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’
He put his lips on hers. Jem frowned but did not recoil. Well, she thought, if that will… and her consciousness flatlined like a leaf pressed beneath the iron wheels of the train.
August, 1947, Buenos Aires
It was the evening after Cory had met Jennifer. Cory and Lisandro were alone in an alley alongside the restaurant where, not minutes ago, he had treated the boy to a farewell treat of ice-cream. Now he had Lisandro in his arms, crushed too tightly to draw breath—a snake’s trick—and the white knife pierced the boy’s chest.
He remembered Jennifer’s advice. ‘Cory, the boy has always been dead. He was dead before he was born and he was dead after he died. His life is just a blip on a line: a two-dimensional irregularity on the forever one-dimensional. Here’s the secret: That blip gets smaller when you zoom out.’ The last two words looped in Cory’s mind. Zoom out. Zoom out. Now he spoke them aloud.
‘Zoom out. Zoom out.’
‘Ah,’ said Lisandro. He might have been grasping a mathematical principle at last.
Zoom out.
Cory would never be the same. He knew this.
He watched blood well over his shaking knuckles as the factor probed the heart through those ribs, those little fishbone ribs dressed in cast-off clothes. The boy’s heart valves were fluttering. Cory could feel them. He levered the blade again. A tremor shook Cory’s neck and he felt tears run from each eye. Entrada. Lisandro: held too hard to shout. Abrazo. Ice-cream bubbling on his lips. Cory crouched and let the dead Lisandro come to rest in the puddles and feathers of the alley. Volcada. The boy had passed into the forever one-dimensional.
‘You shouldn’t have followed me,’ Cory whispered. He coughed to recover his voice. ‘But you were already dead. I could have read that newspaper at any time. It was archived long before I was your age. You were always dead.’
Cory checked the alleyway. With his augmentations, the rats were clear shapes among the rubbish. He saw no people. There was a blue pinstripe suit in his gunny sack, and he changed into it.
‘Forgive me, Lisandro. Le llegó la hora.’
He squatted and took the one-hundred peso note from the boy’s bloodied trouser band.
Where the alley opened onto the street, he paused. Martín, the overweight owner of the restaurant next door, was standing on its porch. He described a shape with his cigar to a group of men who were dressed for an expensive dinner, which ruled them out as customers of Martín. Cory turned and put footsteps between him and Martín and Lisandro. His suit’s blue pinstripes complemented the rich colours of this night, though his shoes were bone-white beacons.