‘But is it ever going to work with him? You know we are the same. We understand how the world works. We can be equals.’
For a moment, she allowed herself to think about leaving Joe. In spite of all their problems, it still felt like a fracture in her being, not unlike the old idea of death.
The speaker popped and the car grew cold.
‘He is transferring documents to aether,’ Max said. ‘I did not dare get too close. Should we go in and catch our errant bird now, Mrs White?’
Rachel frowned. Being caught red-handed photographing official documents would lead to serious charges—but they did not know the nature of the documents Bloom had obtained from Downing Street. For all she knew, they could be family photographs. Still, maybe it was worth the risk.
‘I promised Symonds the handlers, too,’ Roger said. ‘I say we wait.’
‘It looks like he is going to be a while,’ Max said.
‘Fine,’ Rachel said. ‘Everyone is to hold position until he is finished.’
‘God, I need a cigarette.’ Roger got out of the car and stretched. Then he looked at Rachel, mouthed the words Think about it, and closed the door behind him.
‘Ah, young love,’ Max said. ‘Your Mr Hollis appears to be rather agitated.’
Rachel said nothing.
‘I see.’
‘Spare me your judgment,’ Rachel said.
‘Oh, I never judge. I merely observe.’
‘And what have you observed?’
‘That one difference between animals and humans is that humans rarely admit to themselves what it is they really want.’
* * *
Peter still had a few pages and plates to go when the phone rang. It was the regular handset used by the living, sitting on a low table in a corner. He stared at it for a moment and then gingerly picked the earpiece up.
‘Polka dot,’ a female voice said. It could have been Nora, but he was not sure. ‘Orange and midnight.’ Then the caller hung up.
The words were George’s codes for You’re under observation, spirit and living.
Peter peeked out through the main window but could not see anything. Then he spotted an old woman sitting on a bench in the small park close to the house. He had to get out, and rapid thought-travel to the Hinton address he had been given was his best chance of escape.
He fumbled with the spirit crown’s off-switch. Its constant headache-inducing hum and ticking died. His vision wavered between the living world and the Other Side. His legs felt like jelly. He struggled to free himself from the cage of the skull, to escape what now felt like a flesh-puppet without strings. But the medium’s soul was holding on to him tight, like some sort of tentacled sea creature. He should not have used Pendlebury so many times: the medium’s soul was so familiar with his now that it was reluctant to let him go.
His hands started shaking. A gut-punch of nausea left him on his knees. He coughed out acidic fluids that stained the sheet covering the floor with brown and red. Aetheric sparks flashed in his eyes. He strained against the medium’s will and felt the foreign soul-tendrils cutting into his mind.
A car door slammed outside.
* * *
‘The phone in the house just rang,’ Max said.
‘To hell with it,’ Rachel said. ‘We are taking him now.’
She turned to Roger. ‘Give me your weapon.’
‘Should we not wait to—’
‘Now, Roger!’ She shot him a furious look. ‘I want to be the one who brings him in. I deserve it.’
Wordlessly, he passed her his sapgun.
‘Take Joan and secure the rear entrance. I am going in.’
Rachel got out of the car and started running towards the house, gun held low.
* * *
Peter was on all fours. The photographic plates lay scattered on the floor.
He gave up the struggle against the medium for a moment and his thoughts cleared. He might be able to free himself, but not in time. They would use a non-lethal weapon, he knew: that would lock him in the medium’s body long enough for another spirit crown to be installed. He only had moments.
But there was still a way out.
He started crawling towards the cupboard where George had kept the camera.
* * *
Rachel was at the door. She had not fired a weapon in years and fumbled with the safety for a moment.
She took a step back, aimed at the lock and fired.
* * *
There was a small revolver in one of the cupboard’s drawers. Peter’s legs were numb, but his arms had enough strength left to yank it open. The entire drawer and its contents clattered to the floor. His hands felt like oversized mittens and firecrackers kept going off in his eyes.
He found something small and heavy and cold. A curved spiky piece of metal had to be the gun’s hammer. He rolled over and pushed the barrel into his mouth.
He had never killed anyone before and tried to think an apology at Pendlebury. Another soul added to the legions that had to be saved from the Cullers.
There was a distant boom. Had he pulled the trigger? No, the pain had not stopped.
Moving the thin sliver of metal was like lifting a mountain. Then there was a flash of light.
He would have smiled, but he no longer had a mouth.
* * *
Rachel heard the gunshot and knew she was already too late.
* * *
The force of the medium’s death threw them both into the Second Aether, tangled souls finally unravelling. Peter struggled away from Pendlebury’s newborn spirit—lost in the initial aetheric confusion—and pushed himself down in the kata direction.
The heart of London was a giant map drawn with blazing electricity. Thought-forms hovered where his body had fallen. One of them looked like Rachel White, but Peter ignored her.
He gathered the aetheric patterns from the Zöllner camera plates like so many fallen leaves on which the codebook numbers and letters shone, painted with light. He seized them with imaginary fingers and bound them to his own luz, in a memory palace of numbers and letters. Then he visualised the Hinton address for the extraction and hurled himself at it through the aether.
The lights of the living world blurred into a shimmering tunnel. Immediately, Peter knew that several other spirits were following in his wake, locked on to his luz, pulling themselves towards him as he thought-travelled. It was like swimming against a current with someone else holding on to him.
He dived into kata, down into Summerland where his hypersight was unobstructed. The penumbra of the living world was a cloudlike layer full of fragmented thought-forms, glowing cones and triangles and spheres that swirled around like confetti. This was thought-refuse: errant ideas that had taken flight from minds touched by inspiration and forgotten. Unweighted by souls, they floated close to the living.
Hiding amongst the lost thoughts, Peter saw three spirits dive right at him, lean and streamlined souls. Two of them were Summer Court Watchers, he was suddenly sure.
Peter pushed deeper into kata, beyond the Summer City, falling like a comet towards the edges of the abyss and the luz mines. Old soul-stones were everywhere here, dead stars with the faintest green glimmer of vim still clinging to them, algae of the kata depths. Aetherbeasts swarmed, spiky, angular presences armoured with ossified thoughts, their soul-hooked tendrils dangling. Peter rode in their wake as they pushed their way through the luz cloud, hoping to lose himself in it, but still the Watchers followed.
The images of the Cullers in the CAMLANN file flashed in his mind and momentarily hurled him even further into kata. A terrible all-consuming chill gripped Peter and he banished the vision from his mind, turning back towards the twilight of the Unseen in ana. His vim was running low. Tiny memories and thought-fragments trailed behind and faded; the smell of pencils at school, his first kiss.