A column of fire surrounded the leaning skeleton of the Gaukh Engine, heat and smoke pouring with the hurtling updraft through the broken dome and into the outside air.
In the basement mortuary the restless corpses thrashed and subsided. Fire tongues licked the cell-floor bloodstains clean.
Rats and bats and cats and mice and birds escaped or died. Shelves of forgotten files burned unread. Fire touched the hem of the vyrdalak sisters’ beautiful galleried nest and it exploded. Libraries within libraries, their long careful centuries’ archives and collections, the last secret memories of absence and what did not happen, burned.
Moth and her sisters took Lom and Elena across rooftop gangways and down through the most central heart-stone stairwells and unopened passageways of the Lodka where the fire had not yet reached.
The burning was a distant roar, a smell of searing, heat on the face and the thickening of smoke clogging the chest. The vyrdalaks skittered and jumped and flew short distances on vestigial fabric wings. At lift shafts they carried them down: Moth scooping up Lom in her weightless bone-strong arms, one of her siblings with Elena. They jumped into space and leaped from stanchion to bolt, barely touching, barely slowing their plunge. Dull orange glowed far below and a cushion of heat rose from it.
Somebody screamed. Lom wondered if it might have been him, but he doubted it. He kept the lavender folder grasped tight to his chest: the truth he saved from the burning building.
Down and down they went into the closing heat, racing against it.
The outer walls of the Lodka were a crumbling sooty crust enclosing cubic miles of roaring roasting heat. Quiet crowds gathered at the cordon to watch the ancient building burn.
The Lodka’s thousand exterior windows glowed baleful red. Panes burst and shattered and rained glass on the margin of Victory Square. Fragments splashed into the River Mir. Smoke cliffs, orange-bellied and flecked with whirling spark constellations, billowed above the collapsing roofscape and darkened the eggshell sky. Smuts and ash scraps drifted and fell far across Mirgorod. The whole city smelled of burning.
The Lodka–for four hundred years the dark cruel heart and flagship memory ark of the Vlast, the crouching, looming survivor of bombs and siege–the Lodka was ceasing to be, and that was a good thing happening.
Part III
Chapter Seven
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman… Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonised, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.
There is no substance which cannot take the form of a living being, and the simplest being of all is the single atom. Thus the whole universe is alive and there is nothing in it but radiant life.
1
Engineer-Technician 2nd Class Mikkala Avril receives the letter that will change her life. It is waiting for her in the morning. Breakfast at the Kurchatovgrad Barracks.
Today is her twenty-fourth birthday, but she isn’t counting years; what matters is the accumulation of knowledge, the contribution she can make, not the piling-up of finished days you don’t get back again. Only achievement is notable. Next week she takes examinations that will lead to her promotion, and she has a report to finish: her paper on the dynamics of volatile angel plasma under intense shearing pressures. There are efficiencies to be gained by scoring microscopic fresnel grooves in the face of the pusher plate. So she believes. The equations are beautifuclass="underline" they click into place inevitably, like good engineering.
Mikkala Avril dreams of making universal vessels that are less crude and primitive and brutal. More evolved. She has had her hair cut short to save time in the mornings.
Citizen women! Race ahead of the lumbering carthorse years! Consecrate yourselves to speed!
Every day she devotes forty-five minutes to the gymnasium. A good worker is healthy and strong.
The envelope waiting for Mikkala Avril on the morning of her twenty-fourth birthday is flimsy and brown and bears no official crest. A crinkly cellophane window shows the typed address within. She has smoothed it and read the address three times. It is for her. On the gummed back flap there is a purple ink-stamp, slightly off centre–PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL–and a manuscript addendum neatly capitalised: RECIPIENT ONLY. POST ROOM DO NOT OPEN. She notices that the flap has not been slit. The envelope is unopened, its peremptory instruction to the surveillance office (remarkably) obeyed. They must have known where it was from. But who communicates confidentially with an engineer-technician 2nd class at the Kurchatovgrad Barracks and has the weight to give the censors pause?
Mikkala’s heart runs faster: wild momentary anxieties show themselves, and crazy hopes she didn’t know she had. It’s probably nothing. Some error over her pay. A rebuke for some omission in the weekly returns. She leaves the envelope unopened on the tray and finishes her coffee.
Mikkala Avril is eking out the last empty moments of her old life. She is hesitating. She is wasting time. The letter stares back at her from the brink.
She rips it open and hooks out the single sheet.
Technician Avril!
Please be informed, you have been selected for participation in Project PERPETUAL SUNRISE. You are to present yourself for duty at the Yarkoye Nebo Number 3 Institute immediately on receipt of this communication. Personal effects are not required and none should be brought. All necessary items will be provided. Onward travel will be arranged.
This is a secret appointment which you should discuss with no one. Conversation with your current colleagues and officers must be avoided. You are now under my command, and all other instructions are herewith superseded and void. The nature of your new duties will be explained to you at the institute.
I congratulate you, Technician Avril. You will be contributing to special and challenging tasks of tremendous significance for the future of the New Vlast.
You should know that your name was brought to my attention as a candidate for this task by President-Commander Rizhin himself, acting personally. Your courageous determination and clarity of thought at the launch of Proof of Concept has been recognised by the award of Hero of the New Vlast. This is of necessity a secret decoration, of course. No medal can be given. Your promotion is confirmed without examination. I look forward to knowing you better.
2
Lom sat at the desk in the guardhouse at the entrance to the drive that led to Lukasz Kistler’s house. The guard was slumped in the corner, unconscious. He’d have a headache but he would recover: nothing a few days’ rest wouldn’t put right. Lom was wearing the guard’s cap. The interior light was dim: his profile would pass muster. Casual inspection from a distance, anyway. There was always risk.