Mikkala Avril’s screens come back up with ten seconds to go. Everything is fine: readouts dead on the line. She is so relieved she wants to cry, but she does not allow herself; she is stronger than that and holds it in. She is the heart of the youth of the New Vlast and she is good at her job and she will not fail.
Two seconds to go, she remembers to put her dark glasses on. She turns up the brightness on her screen, closes her eyes, presses a black cloth against her face and begins her own interior count. For the first ten bombs it will be too bright to see, and Proof of Concept will be on her own: then Mikkala must open her eyes and be not too dazzled to work.
Before the chief engineer discovered the properties of angel flesh propellant, what Mikkala was about to do would have been impossible: the bombs’ electromagnetic pulses would have broken all contact between ship and ground. But now the ship’s instruments will sing and chatter as she rises, and be heard.
The cosmonauts’ cabin shivers with the clang of the first apricot locking into the expulsion chute.
Launch control is whited out in a flash of illumination that erases the sun.
Bomp–bomp–bomp. Bigger explosions each time. Brilliant blinding flashes. Slowly at first then faster and faster Proof of Concept rises, riding a crumb trail of detonations, climbing a tower of mushroom clouds.
The cosmonauts groan as each detonation slams their backs with a brute fist of acceleration. The whole ship judders and creaks and moans like a bathyscaphe under many thousand atmospheres of pressure.
For the observers in the launch control blockhouse at Chaiganur Test Site 61, the ship itself is lost, the explosion trail hard to watch. The repeated retinal burn forms blue-purple-green jumbling images. Brilliant drifting spectral bruises in the eye. President-Commander Rizhin stands at the window, the hot glare pulsing on his face, an atomic heartbeat.
I am the fist of history. I am the mile-high man.
A long time after the light the sound waves come.
Chapter Two
1
In Papa Rizhin’s world the clocks race forward to the pounding iron-foundry beat, the brakes are off and the New Vlast tears into the wind, riding the rolling wave of continental cataclysm-shock, flung into the future on the impulse-rip of centrifugal snap, taking a piston-blur express ride–six years now and counting and there’s no slowing it yet. But pieces break off and get left behind. Because the past is sticky. Adhesive. Reluctant to let go. The continent is littered with broken shards. Arrested fragments of slower time. Unhealed unforgotten memories and the dead who do not die.
A house and a village and a lake.
On a day in the eleventh year of her dislocated life Yeva Cornelius comes gently awake in the first grey light of morning. There is some time yet to go before the rising of the cooler, circumspect, conciliatory sun. Yeva stays quite still on the couch, breathing slowly, watching the curtain stir. Lilac and vines crowd against the house. The room is leaf-scented, leaf-shaded, cool.
Her hair has been braided again in the night with loving gentleness: she feels the tightness of the intricate knotted plaits against her skull and smells the clean sweet fragrance the domovoi anoints her with while she sleeps. The prickle of tiny decorative twigs. Trinkets of seed and bird shell.
Take the domovoi’s attention as a mark of favour, Eligiya Kamilova had said. It’s glad there are people again in the house. Leave a little salt and bread by the stove and it won’t trouble us.
The domovoi laid trails of crumbling earth across the floorboards, long sweeps and spirals along corridors from room to room. Eligiya Kamilova was right: it didn’t want to hurt, not like those in the rye and oat fields–they were bad. Watchful and furtive, they came at you out of the white of noon and raised welts and sore rashes on your skin. Sly thorn scratches that stung and drew beads of blood. But the ones to be really afraid of were the ones that moved around outside in the night. Darkness magnifies. Darkness changes everything.
Daylight gathers and hardens in the room. Moment by moment the curtain is more visible, rising and collapsing. It’s as if Yeva is moving it with her breath. Experimentally, she holds back the air in her lungs and eyes the curtain to see if it pauses too. Half-convinces herself that it does.
The atmosphere of a complicated dream is ebbing slowly away. Her mother was in the dream. Her mother was looking for her.
Her mother looks for her always, every day. She will have come back to the apartment and found it not there because of the bomb. But somebody will have told her the soldiers took them away, her and her sister, and put them on the train, and she will look for them. Only she won’t know that Eligiya Kamilova took them off the train again, that Eligiya did something with her hands and broke the door of the train and took them into the night and the snow, and they ran away. Her mother won’t know that.
Everywhere they go, Eligiya Kamilova leaves behind messages and notes so her mother can know they have been there and where they are going next. But her mother might not get the messages. She might not know who to ask. Eligiya posted letters to their old address but her mother can’t go back to that house, not ever, because the soldiers sent everyone away. Some stranger will have read those letters. Or they’ll be in a pile in a big post office room in Mirgorod. Or burned.
They walked south through the winter, Yeva and her sister Galina and Eligiya Kamilova, keeping off the roads and out of the villages, staying in the trees and the snow. The cold was like a dark glittering blade, but Eligiya was a hunter in the woods: she didn’t talk much but she knew how to trap, how to make a warm place, how to build a fire in the night that didn’t show light and a barricade of thorns against the wolves. Sometimes she slipped away to a village and came back with something they needed. Sometimes she found a hut or a farm where the people would let them sleep, maybe in a barn.
Yeva remembered every night. Every single night.
Her sister Galina was sick for a long time but she didn’t die, and in the first days of spring the three of them came out of the trees, following a black stream flecked with brown foam, and found the house in the middle of a wide field of waist-high grass: a big square house of yellow weatherboards under a low grey roof, the glass in the many windows mostly broken. They waded over to it, leaving a trodden wake in the grass that buzzed and clattered with insects. Eligiya Kamilova went up under the porch and broke open the door, just like she had opened the door of the train. A wide staircase climbed up into shadow, and on the bare boards of the entrance hall was a pile of leaves and moss. Twigs laid out around it in patterns like the letters of a strange alphabet. Eligiya stepped round it carefully.
‘Don’t disturb it,’ she said. ‘Be careful not to touch that at all.’
There were pieces of furniture in some of the rooms. Mostly they’d had their upholstery ripped open, the stuffing pulled out and carried off for nests. There were chalky splashes of bird mess in the corners and streaks of it down the curtains. In the kitchen there were lamps, and oilcloth spread on the table.