‘Anything. My soul.’ He paused. ‘Even to your husband.’
‘You had us worried there for a moment, Mrs White,’ Nora shouted. ‘But I am glad we can resolve this without violence—’
‘Goodbye, Peter. And thank you,’ Rachel said.
Then she shot Peter Bloom in the head.
* * *
For the second time in as many days, Peter Bloom tore through the disintegrating electric net of a brain, ejected into the Second Aether’s chill. This time, he struck something solid: the wall of the ward’s Faraday cage. He fluttered around madly in the enclosed hypercube until the momentum of his death died away and his hypersight started working again.
He saw the spiky thought-forms of Otto and Nora’s men, full of fear and rage. His deceitful Stalinist handlers, Otto cold and calculating, Nora a flower of malicious joy.
A swirling vortex where Captain White stood, pulling Peter in. An ectotank was an anti-medium, not a soul to be fought and subdued but a hole in the aether that was impossible to resist.
And then there was Rachel. As always, her soul was the most difficult to read. He thought he could see forgiveness in its angled, jewel-like petals, but he could not be sure.
Close enough, he thought, and threw himself into the mouth of the raging storm that was Captain Joe White.
* * *
Rachel dived to the floor as the Stalinists opened fire. The volley of shots boomed through the ward, stray bullets hitting unconscious bodies with meaty thunks. Feathers erupted from pierced pillows. She rolled under the metal-framed bed. It shook and rang in the rain of lead.
Rachel kept rolling and emerged on the other side. A silhouette to her right, two beds away, took cover behind a shelf. She fired from a sitting position. The man slumped to the ground, clutching his throat.
More shots. She moved into a crouch and dared a glance at Joe. He stood still, eyes closed. A bullet hole bloomed in his arm. Rachel screamed wordlessly.
It didn’t work, she thought. He is too weak. Two gunmen loomed low behind the cover of beds while another two advanced with shotguns.
Rachel braced her pistol on the bed frame and fired furiously at the oncoming men. The recoil tore at her wrists and lifted the muzzle. She took out a ceiling light in a shower of sparks.
Shotgun thunder. The bed next to Joe exploded in a fountain of crimson and torn sheets. An IV bag turned into rain.
Rachel struggled to bring her weapon to bear. The revolvers were taking aim. The next volley would go right through her.
‘Fockin’ cunts!’ Joan screamed, leaping forward. Something flashed in her hand, a knife. She sank it into one felt-capped man’s neck. Rachel fired at the other, missed. The sheets smoked from the muzzle flash.
Nora shot her zapper’s spikes at Joan. The Scotswoman went down, twitching.
The men with shotguns reloaded their weapons in unison. Spent shells clattered to the floor.
Then Joe changed.
Ectoplasmic whiteness erupted from his eyes and mouth, almost invisible in the harsh glare at first. It flowed over his skin in a thin film like milk, turned him into an eyeless, faceless marble statue.
The Stalinists fired. Rachel screamed. The buckshot stuck to the white membrane covering Joe’s face like metallic acne. He did not fall.
Instead, he rose.
Thick, fuzzy tendrils poured out of him like threads of candyfloss pulled from a child’s stick at a country fair. His body a white cocoon, he stood up on three spindly legs, a giant ungainly insect, brushing the ceiling.
For the first time, Rachel realised the ectoplasm was not white, but interwoven threads of all colours, the rainbow and hues she could not name.
The Stalinists stared up at Joe. For a moment, the guns were silent and the ward was deathly still. Then a bundle of hair-thin tentacles whipped forward from Joe’s central mass. Rachel looked away. Wet noises followed, the sound of falling meat, and one scream. Breathing hard, she crawled forward. The ectoplasm shell made a high-pitched, keening sound.
Nora looked up at Joe’s new form with an expression of utter wonder, like a little girl seeing a butterfly for the first time, and shoved Otto forward, hard. Then she turned and ran.
Otto stumbled and fell. He let out a cry of anger and fumbled for his pistol. Joe descended upon him like a stinging spider.
Rachel wrenched herself up and ran after Nora. The floor was slick and something warm fell on her face, like hot rain. The Dutchwoman was about to slam the door shut behind her. Rachel fired one wild shot in her direction. It glanced off the metal door and Nora fled.
Rachel followed the clatter of her progress up the stairs. She wondered if her gun was empty, and if Nora was armed.
Behind her, the scream of the ectotank creature continued.
Rachel stopped. Nora’s footsteps receded into the distance. She lowered her weapon and then let it fall to the ground. I am not going to let a Soviet spy get between me and my husband a second time, she thought.
She turned around and returned to the ward.
The ward resembled an abattoir. The white ectoplasm thing hunched in the middle, stained pink, a swollen mosquito, its legs folded in sharp angles.
Rachel covered her nose and mouth and walked towards it. The terror would return to her in dreams, later, but for now she closed it out. The creature twitched and keened.
‘I can see you, Joe,’ she said. ‘I know who you are. I am not afraid.’
A tentacle lashed towards her. She closed her eyes. It skimmed her face: it felt like a rough paintbrush. She kept walking. More tentacles came, wound gently around her body. She spread her arms and allowed the thing to embrace her.
As she walked, the tentacles started melting away like candyfloss in rain, and by the time she reached the centre of the ward, only Joe sat there, on the floor, hugging his knees. He cried soundlessly, shaking all over.
Rachel sat down next to him and gathered him into her arms. He pressed his face against her shoulder as she caressed his back.
‘Ssh,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all over now. It’s all over. It’s gone. It’s just the two of us.’
She rocked him gently in the remains of the crime hospital, amongst the dead and the dying and the spirits, until Special Branch finally came.
* * *
So this is what Fading is like, Peter thought.
He was falling, falling faster than he had imagined possible. He had pushed all his vim through Joe White until there was nothing left. The living world receded away from him, all the soul-sparks a starry sky above.
He felt cold. Suddenly, it was difficult to remember what had happened just moments before. Rachel. Nora. The firefight.
He smiled as he fell, and forgot why he was smiling.
He fell through all the layers of the Summer City, lacking the strength to stop his descent, leaving parts of his self behind on the way.
Then all was dark and quiet. He liked it. It was easier to concentrate and think. He was still moving, still falling, faster and faster. Movement equalled thought, he remembered. In Summerland, you could think yourself anywhere. He had read that in a book, but did not remember its title.
If you strip away everything that is not needed, he thought, there will be some axioms left. Some axioms that you cannot prove. And statements like the Liar’s Paradox that can never be true or false. He held it in his mind, from a lecture he had attended, a liar saying they are lying, remembered the infinity of mathematics hiding within, a snake eating its own tail.
The point of consciousness that had been Peter Bloom kept falling towards infinity. After an eternity, he saw an ocean below him, an ocean of light, and on the other side, a starry sky—