The room gushed with burning tungsten. Saskia glanced at the window shutters, decided they would serve for blackout, and climbed onto the nearest of the two examination tables.
She stood on tiptoe and raised her hand to the hot filament. The light reddened through her flesh. Retinal-embedded augmentations isolated the Meta carrier wave, a trilling note of information in the electrical cacophony comprising luminance changes too fast for the technology of 1908 to detect. Saskia waited until a sample with sufficient fidelity had been obtained. Then she dropped from the table and turned off the light. She took the lancet from her mouth and retreated into the cavity beneath the long workbench, mind crowded with afterimages and the knowledge she had obtained from the carrier wave.
Saskia could not query the carrier wave any more than a sailor could query the constellations. The wave contained only points of reference. First, she was no longer in St Petersburg. This mortuary was in Geneva. Somehow, she had left Russia. Had she been drugged or coerced? Or had she travelled willingly, only to suffer a lacunar amnesia of the past few days? The local time was just after sunset on the evening of 11th June, 1908. Her last remembered moment–the attack in the Amber Room–was the 23rd May, by the Julian calendar. Six days. To reach Geneva so quickly, she must have boarded–or been put upon–a train the morning after that attack.
For now, Saskia settled on the explanation that she had regained consciousness in the Amber Room and pursued the Bolsheviks to Geneva. At some point thereafter, she had been involved in a fatal confrontation that had also interfered with the recent memories on her chip.
The final secret of the Meta carrier wave had the greatest practical importance. Her organisation kept single-blind agents throughout the world on generous retainers. These agents were locals, or ‘intemporals’. Often, these were young men with a gambling or drug problem that could be leveraged. Some were unknowingly modified for strength, speed or intelligence. Many believed that they worked for a foreign state or a clandestine branch of their own government. Saskia had been given instructions to use Agents Intemporal in extraordinary circumstances only. Standard procedure was to engage their services once and pay them off with valuables from the nearest Meta cache.
Saskia now knew the identity of her local Agent Intemporal.
She left her hiding space and walked to the double doors. She put her ear against one. Hearing nothing, she ramped up the sensitivity of her vision, opened it and passed into an anteroom gloomy with sinks. Doors led in all directions. The sign above one said ‘Cloakroom’. Saskia pushed through and found a bank of lockers. They were shut and secure. There was a rack of lab coats on the opposite wall.
As she donned one of the coats and inverted the collar, she thought about the physical tendrils that had been extended into her retinas. She had seen the eyes of uncollected corpses in the gutters of Tiflis, the Georgian capital, when running with Soso’s gang. Dead eyes were the same; but they were not the same. They were the clock unwound and the waveless shore.
When a person looks at my eyes, she thought, they will see how dead I am.
She felt a thickness in her throat, but no tears came. Perhaps that part of her biology had not survived her death.
When she had joined Meta, she had lost her biographical memory and taken the name Saskia Brandt. There was a rumour that all the Singular Agents had been criminals before their recruitment. That was why they were Singular.
Particular. Special.
One-shot.
Concentrate, she thought. Lead your fear.
She entered a through-office. The wall behind the desk held pigeon holes. Saskia searched through them and saw all manner of paperwork, but no death certificates. She was about to break into the desk drawers when she was touched by a sensation whose analogue was dizziness, but whose origin had to be the chip, not her body. She understood that an important routine in her artificial mind was about to fail.
Slow as a snake around a mouse, involuntary as a yawn, her mouth enunciated a word.
‘Fffff… ooooh… ddddddd-uh.’
Food. Saskia nodded. Message received.
With that, she returned to full awareness. She abandoned her search for paperwork and passed through the office, finding herself in a reception room.
An elegant but impractical desk occupied the centre of the room. Pastoral paintings had been hung on the walls. The room was deliberately perfumed and somewhat in disguise. It was the made-up face of the mortuary.
Saskia lifted the speaker of the candlestick telephone and waited for the operator. As she did, she looked at her fingertips. They were ashy with cyanosis. Again, she wondered how her eyes would make her look. Unseeing, like the blind? Inhuman, like a shark?
‘Hello, this is your operator,’ said a French-speaking woman. There was a note of surprise in her voice. Saskia wondered why this might be.
‘Hello, this is Ms Maxine Friedrich,’ replied Saskia. She affected the bad French of a young woman accustomed to speaking Swiss German. ‘Working late on my first day, as you can see.’
After a pause, the operator laughed. ‘You are a brave girl. I couldn’t bear it, I’m sure.’ Saskia relaxed. That explained the operator’s initial surprise. Saskia’s location must have been visible on the switchboard. The operator continued, ‘Your party, please?’
Saskia gave the number for the Agent Intemporal.
‘Putting you through now.’
‘Thank you, and good evening.’
‘Good evening.’
In the silence that followed, Saskia’s gaze idled over the desk drawers. Some of them were open.
A young man said, ‘Hello, Mr Gausewitz speaking.’
‘This is your particular friend,’ said Saskia. ‘Do you remember me?’
‘How could I forget?’ replied the man. His voice was too casual, and Saskia worried that he might overplay his part. However, the question was the correct response to hers.
‘Would you collect me, please? I’m at–’
Saskia stopped. She was staring at a broken vase on the floor. She had not noticed it before now. The red chrysanthemums it had once held were surrounded by shards of glass.
She seemed to step back from herself.
‘Hello?’
Saskia tried to reconcile the chrysanthemums on the floor with the vision that had accompanied her resurrection. She understood that the sound of the vase shattering against the floor had awoken her. But she did not understand how she could have pictured these same red flowers without seeing them first. Local time followed physical law, even for the extemporal Agents Singular. Her training had never covered such a timeslip.
Less haste, she thought. The scenario was not practised, but the lessons of other scenarios might still apply.
‘Chambésy,’ she said. The words came with the ease of over-learned patterns: ‘Oh, and let me show you the outfit I saw.’ That told Gausewitz she needed clothes. ‘You remember the restaurant on Alfred-Vincent? I bought it from a shop near there.’ That told him to bring food.
‘I remember. What about Bernhardt?’
He was asking if he needed to bring a gun.
‘He always complicates things.’
‘Very good. I will see you directly.’
The operator said, ‘Ms Friedrich, your caller has rung off.’
‘Thank you. And goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
Saskia replaced the receiver. Alone, part of the black, she waited as clocks clicked away the quarter hour. Silence grew like a frost. Saskia remained inert. Her eyes closed. She was meditating on the noises beyond: passing carriages; the footsteps in puddles; the cry of a baby. She hoped that the answer to the riddle of the chrysanthemums would come to her. It did not.