Turning, he watched Star Dust pass into the grey shelf that formed the south-eastern face of the mountain. Cory thought the explosion beautiful. It might have been a glimpse through the mountain of the setting sun. Then the grotesque: he saw the snow below the explosion pucker with debris. First wings, then seats, oxygen cylinders, Penguin paperbacks, a torn canvas sack that bore the arms of an English king, the boot of an airman, a human head. Cory lost his desire to look. The phantom sound of propellers lingered. But a thunderclap punctuated the sound, bringing silence.
These poor people.
No, not people. Zombies. Things with no mind.
The air was huge and everywhere. To prove he could, he shouted, ‘Lisandro!’
Lisandro was already dead and he knew it.
His feet struck a promontory and he screamed as both Achilles tendons snapped. He tumbled, cocooned in the strings of his parachute, down a cleft little wider than his shoulders. Pain-inhibiting mechanisms were tripped before his ribs broke, each snap like a pencil in a child’s hand. There was a pit of snow at the base of the cleft. His head pierced hard, packed snow.
Silence.
Upside-down and broken, Cory heard the tick of blood in his ears. Across his vision slipped bar-charts and line graphs describing the negative trends of his life: blood oxygen saturation falling; blood acidity rising; a lung punctured; ribs sprung; a collar bone detached. The automata wished to squeeze water from his tissues, conjure oxygen, and augment his respiration. Did he object?
Do I look like I give a fuck?
He imagined the parachute folding on the soles of his shoes. A silk bag. A cocoon.
In the still moments of his long life to come, Cory would remember that night and its silence. The dark was blindness until his vision slid into higher frequencies. Then the mountain reappeared as great and indifferent as it had seemed on the flight deck of the Lancastrian. A star-filled sky. Away, in the miles covered by his gaze, he could see no pockets of heat: no settlement, shed, or lone shepherd. His lungs burned in the deoxygenated air. Anaerobic respiration stung his muscles. He clawed from rock to rock. Sometimes he fell. Sometimes he slid. The rugged zip on his Irvin held, but the trousers of his tropical suit tore, and his knees bled sluggishly and gathered grit.
After dawn, he found a half-buried object. It was blackened and smelled of carbon and aeroplane fuel. He read the words ‘olls—Royce’ on its side. When Cory grinned, his lips tore, but the blood did not leak. He touched the engine. It cooled as Cory warmed. His automata, revitalised, set about their repair work. Ice-split cells were thawed and reconstructed. His Achilles tendons were reattached. New sinews wove. Metabolic by-products were quarantined, passed into the blood, and set free by his lungs. A circle of snow melted around him. He felt the water impregnate his tissues, load them, buoy his life. He reached again and drew a finger along the flank of the engine. Cory stroked a line of soot beneath each eye and felt the distant pulse of the smart matter. Four hundred metres away, perhaps five hundred. He held out his hand and the cane—clean, perfect, undamaged—flew into his grip. He walked west.
By the fourth day, he had exhausted the energy inducted from the engine. He came to a valley crowded with ice columns. He passed among the frozen army without a sound. He slept at the base of one and expected to die.
On the fifth, he collapsed against a rust-red boulder on the bank of a great, milky river. He awoke when a day moon was visible in the sky. An arriero, a muleteer, was leaning forward with a canteen. He put it to Cory’s lips. Cory knew to take a sip, no more.
‘Bueno,’ said the man. ‘Mi nombre es Evaristo, el mismo nombre que la ciudad.’
The translation came as Cory watched the white-and-brown hills. He turned back to Evaristo, opened his left hand and, with a frostbitten finger, brushed the leather of the palm.
‘Tómelo,’ said Evaristo. He gave Cory a shaving of paper and a pencil with a knife-hewn nib.
In Spanish, Cory wrote, My plane crashed high on the mountain. Where am I?
‘La Vega de los Flojos.’
The meadow of the lazy? Cory smiled.
He wrote, Which country?
‘Chile, Chile.’
Cory vomited the water onto the slush. Icons slid into his vision, flashing, urgent with alerts; his body had exhausted its fuels. The automata petitioned him to kick-start repairs using the life energy of the arriero, but Cory fired back a veto.
His right hand gripped his belt. Five days before, in the lounge where he had waited with the other passengers to board Star Dust, it had been flush with his abdomen. Now it was loose. He twisted the belt to expose inset gold sovereigns. The arriero looked from the gold to Cory. His rough-skinned hand pushed away Cory’s and reset the belt. He shook his head. A stream of Spanish left his mouth.
The translation came seconds later, as though the sound had travelled miles.
‘I do not think you will live, my friend. If you die, I promise to bury you with your gold. But I am a poor man. Perhaps you will offer it a second time, when you are well.’
Cory wrote, Thank you.
The arriero nodded. He turned his head and made a puh-puh sound.
A horse took lazy steps towards them through the scree.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Regensburg
His last word, scree, left a hole in the air, a dead zone. Jem sat with her arms on her knees. She was exhausted. Saskia’s features were shadowed, and as she moved, a new light struck her eyes emerald. Wearily, Jem followed the shaft to a brightening window: dawn.
‘You should not have travelled in time,’ said Saskia. ‘You were not strong enough.’
Jem looked at her. Saskia had been dead and broken on the cot. Now she scanned the room with command in her eyes. This, Jem decided, was once more the unstoppable woman she had encountered in Berlin. She remembered the smile as they waited for the rendezvous with Wolfgang: that businesslike tug of her gloves.
Cory glanced at his broken gun. ‘It took strength to come down that mountain.’
‘You gave up to the mountain.’
‘I did not.’ His voice had a petulant edge. ‘I survived it.’
‘The mountain was not Tupungato. The mountain was Jennifer’s newspaper.’
His eyelids fluttered. ‘Look, if you–’
His words trailed off as Saskia reversed her gun and placed it on the table. At this, the inspector raised his eyebrows and looked at Jem. Hrafn and Danny exchanged a similar look of alarm. Jem reached for the weapon but stopped, unsure of Saskia’s plan.
‘Take the gun, Jem,’ said Hrafn. ‘Quickly.’
‘There is no point,’ said Saskia flatly. ‘No-one in this room is fast enough.’
‘Fuck,’ said Danny.
‘He can kill us all,’ said Saskia. ‘Though he will not.’
Danny looked at her. ‘Pleased to hear it. Why not, Cory?’
‘Honestly? I can’t think of a reason.’
‘Fuck.’
Saskia stepped towards Cory. Her eyes dared his. ‘You know that the Cullinan Zero is fiction. You feel it. And you feel my certainty.’