She hung up on him. The circuit anchoring Peter to the phone disappeared and he was ejected back into the cold grey mist.
He spun, disorientated. Inez’s beacon receded into the distance. For a ghost, movement and thought were the same thing. Peter concentrated on the shape of the beacon and dashed after it in effortless, bodiless flight.
He could return to the Summer Court and blame the whole thing on BRIAR. It was tempting, if not for the fact that the Iberian Section, which Peter headed, could not afford to make yet another blunder without attracting scrutiny from C, the SIS chief.
Especially when Peter himself was the ultimate cause of their blunders. They were comrades, even if his job was to persuade her to betray the cause they both served.
He had to get something report-worthy out of her, but how?
The beacon was lost in the labyrinth of wires and soul-sparks. To get a better view, Peter descended in the kata direction—the fourth dimension where only the dead could move.
Madrid expanded into a tracery of light and flame above him, and he felt like a bird flying beneath a strange, inverted firmament. Radio waves pulsed from the Telefónica. The front was close, and he glimpsed a death—the red flash of a soul-spark leaving its body, like a rocket fired into the sky.
Then he saw the ectotank.
* * *
It looked innocent enough at first, a slowly growing white vortex in the gloom, like milk poured into tea. Closer, he saw the white was not white, but made up of countless shimmering colours. Peter felt a sudden compulsion to dive right into it, even though he knew it meant certain doom.
The ectotank ploughed through a cluster of little human lights that had to be a Republic barricade. Crimson firecrackers of dead souls bloomed in its wake, then looped back around and dived into the white whirlpool, unable to resist its allure. As the souls disappeared into the white, the ectotank vortex grew and advanced down the street like a hungry amoeba.
Inez’s beacon was headed straight towards it.
Peter launched himself at the ectophone. He gripped the phone’s bell circuit with aethereal fingers and shook it frantically. Nothing. The milky whirlwind of the ectotank loomed to the right. Clearly, Inez could not see it—a building invisible to Peter blocked her view.
Then he glimpsed the ectotank’s eye, a tiny round window in the midst of the whiteness. Within, he saw flames and street lights and broken buildings in full vivid colour, as if he had living eyes again. He was overwhelmed by an irrational need to dive through the eye. Surely he would be alive again on the other side?
Far away, some distant part of him kept clawing at the circuit, three long rings, three short, three long.
‘I am trying to drive, Comrade Ghost,’ Inez said. ‘Why don’t you—’
Her voice broke the spell. ‘Turn around!’ Peter cried. ‘There is an ectotank ahead!’
‘Jesú,’ Inez whispered. Then she let out a wordless scream.
There was static on the phone, and then the sound of screeching brakes.
The truck swerved right just as the ectotank rolled along Gran Vía like an avalanche. Inez raced down a side street like a madwoman, and even at the speed of thought, Peter had trouble keeping up. A Republic battery in the Telefónica opened fire at the ectotank with Soviet-made aetherguns. It let out a high-pitched keening that sounded like a thousand children screaming.
Finally, the truck came to a halt. Peter waited for a moment and rang again. Inez picked up, but said nothing. Her breathing was laboured and quick.
‘Are you hurt?’ Peter asked.
‘No.’
‘Why did you stop?’
‘There is a hole in the road ahead. A crater where the Metro used to be, black like a gate to Hell. Maybe it is where that thing crawled out from. Madre de Dios, it was the size of a house, like a … a—’ Her voice broke. For a moment, Peter thought she had hung up again, and sighed with relief when she continued. ‘I have never seen anything like it. How can Pope Teilhard bless the Fascists when they send devils to attack us?’
‘That was no devil. There was a human being inside, a medium. What you saw was ectoplasm, spirit essence stolen from the dead, shaped by his thoughts.’
‘Then his thoughts are full of devils.’
A perversion of Lodge’s and Marconi’s original inventions, the ectotanks were created to break the deadlock of the trenches in the Great War: weapons that grew more powerful the more they killed. He had not realised the tanks Britain had supplied Franco with were already being deployed. That would make the Soviets respond in kind, escalating the conflict. It made his mission all the more urgent.
‘War brings out the devils inside us,’ Peter said.
Inez exhaled, a long sigh that turned into a sob.
‘What is it?’
‘There are devils inside me, too, Comrade Ghost. If I was truly brave, like you say, I would put my rifle in my mouth and fire, and let God judge them.’
‘And go to the Republic’s Heaven?’
She laughed mirthlessly. ‘Everyone knows it is not ready. Those who die are lost and Fade, unless they use the Fascists’ Tickets. No, it is like Father Miaja from my village said. Confession and prayer are the only ways to Heaven. When I was a child, I imagined it. A white place, with trees of candyfloss. But it is not for me, not anymore.’
How had he missed it? There was a knot in Inez’s soul-spark. Her thoughts kept winding around it, over and over. That was why she had agreed to speak to a disembodied voice on the phone. It had nothing to do with betraying the Republic.
She simply needed a confessor.
‘Why is that?’ Peter asked gently.
‘Because I was in Getafe to execute the statue of Christ.’
Far away, the screams of the ectotank faded.
‘Mateo gathered a squad that day,’ Inez said. ‘He said they were going to execute a Fascist prisoner. I wanted revenge for what they did to my mother and brother in Guernica, so I took my rifle and went along.
‘We drove to Getafe in a truck. The men laughed and boasted all the way. We climbed the hill, Cerro de los Ángeles. It was hot and dry beneath the carrascos pines. The air was clear and we could see Madrid in the distance. Only when Mateo took out a scrap of cloth and blindfolded the great statue standing there did I understand.
‘I took aim with the others. I could not fire, but I did not stop them. I watched the bullets shatter His face, and wept.’
Inez started the truck.
‘I have said enough now. The comrades at the front need my bullets and shells. Thank you for warning me about the devil machine. Perhaps we will speak again.’
At last, Peter recognised the knotted emotion in her soul. It was paradox. She was trying to believe in a contradiction.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Inez, I don’t think God is done with you yet.’
Inez paused. Anger flickered in her soul-spark.
‘And what do you know of God, Comrade Ghost?’
‘I know what it’s like to be tested. I saw a burning city, too, when I was a child.’
Inez said nothing, but her soul-spark softened, with hues of purple and green. Peter continued.
‘During the Great War, there were German air raids in London. I was five. The sirens scared me, and I would hide in the basement even after a raid was over.
‘One time, when they started, my father picked me up and took me to the window in his study. I struggled, started crying, but he held me tight. My mother begged him to come to the shelter. He would not hear of it and made me look. There was a silver cigar in the sky. Spotlight beams danced around it. Flames bloomed beneath it, bright as the sun. The windows rattled from distant booms.
‘I nearly wet myself. I wanted to hide in my mother’s lap. But my father told me to be brave.
‘The ectoflyers came. Each man had wings like a moth, white and shimmering. They brought the airship down. They swarmed around it and fired at it and cut its belly open. Burning gas spilled out. It was the most exhilarating thing I had ever seen.