She lies back and gazes at the ceiling.
I love it, I love it, she thinks to herself, unable to stop happiness from flooding her. Less than eight hours ago her husband died in her arms and she has fled for her life twice since, but now a blissful contentedness is washing through her. It feels for the first time in her life as if she has come home.
Well, don’t get too happy, Simon intervenes. This is far from over. Very much far from over.
‘I know,’ she murmurs, ‘but—’ An odd association has popped into her head. She is thinking of what she once read about dovecotes in seventeenth century France. That they were built larger than most houses and had incorporated into the brickwork a projecting horizontal line called a rat ledge, its purpose to stop rats running up the brick. Safe as a dovecote the expression became. Safe as a dovecote, she repeats to herself dreamily. The loveliest conception. Safe as a dovecote.
Indeed. But rather than congratulating yourself, this could be a good moment to complete the charging cycle from earlier. May I remind you that interrupted routines are detrimental to our cell’s longevity.
Coming out of charge, Evie is aware of how the temperature in the cottage has risen.
She continues to lie still, delighting in her surroundings. Daniels has been in the room while she slept – she knows it because a blanket has been laid over her. She sits up and looks out of the window. Outside it is dark. It is only four o’clock but there isn’t a light to be seen. It is so unlike London where there would be a glow from the tall buildings and the pinpricks of fires burning in the streets. Her reflection stares back from the glass, her small purposeful nose, so suggestive of intrigue, out of place as ever in her shy and unadventurous face.
Cupboards are built into the eaves and one of the half-height doors hangs open. She sees that Daniels has unpacked and laid her few things inside. A small mirror is propped on one of the shelves and taking her hairbrush she works at her hair until it hangs smoothly, framing her pale skin. Taking a dark blue ribbon, she ties it behind her ears.
Evie opens the bedroom door and smoke from below wafts through. The staircase is partially boxed around and it isn’t until she is halfway down that she has a full view of the room. Daniels is asleep in front of a wood fire. His shoes are drying on the hearth, his socked feet stretched out, soaking up the warmth.
As she turns the bottom corner, the stair creaks and he opens his eyes. He smiles up at her in the corner above him. ‘How’re you feeling?’ he asks.
‘Better,’ she says. ‘Much better.’
A smell of cooking comes from the kitchen and, getting up creakily, he goes to tend it.
‘Did you go out for food?’
‘I didn’t have to,’ he says through the doorway. ‘There were some cans in the cupboard.’ The smell of heated tomatoes is pleasant but does not generate a sensation of hunger in her.
Evie sits on the small sofa under the window. The backpack is on the floor beside the arm, with Daniels’s newsplastic folded beneath the flap. Not looking at such devices has been a sort of unwritten rule, originating from a desire to not ‘unsettle’ her with glimpses of the outside world. That lesson was learnt early on after her husband’s descriptions left her restlessly eager to explore and confused when he did not then take her out.
She battles with her curiosity, glancing towards the kitchen door. Behind it, Daniels hums to himself as he stirs his saucepan. She reaches towards the newsplastic. It is as if her hand is guided by forces beyond her control. She watches her fingers fiddle with the strap. She is both desperate to know what she can learn but also terrified as to what that might be: that the device will hold news of the search for themselves. There is the sense, too, that she is breaking a long-held prohibition.
As her hand lifts the loosened flap, she is distracted by the identity card Daniels took from the body in the garden poking from an exposed side pocket. She draws it out and opens it.
The blood on the card has dried, obscuring the face, but the owner’s name is still quite readable – Troy Evans. Her chest rises and falls in rapid, jerky movements. It is like a little bit of the horror of earlier has found her, all the way out here.
She folds the card up and slides it back as Daniels returns into the room with a bowl of soup cupped between his large hands.
13
Evie and Daniels leave the cottage through the gate in the yard and tramp along the edge of the field, keeping the drainage ditch to their right. The light this morning is dazzling and the sky unmarked, apart from the bright vapour trail from a hova that passed ten minutes before. What strikes Evie, without tall buildings to interrupt the view, is the size of the air above her head. Its span, without means of support.
Her new boots make easy graft of the stiff grass and the slippery mud showing through. She wears her hood thrown back with the sun on her face. Her new coat, with its luminous sheen, casts a pink glow on the snow. She is like a different person. A new person.
They reach the corner of the field and, clambering over a stile, cut diagonally across the next, following the indentation of a path up the hill towards a solitary oak.
It is like the first day of the rest of her existence. ‘Do you think we’re really free now?’ she asks.
‘Do you mean will they come after us?’
‘Yes.’ She wasn’t thinking about it quite like that, but that is the crux.
‘They won’t give up easily. You’ve seen the lengths they’re prepared to go to.’ They had this same conversation yesterday. The answer remains as uncertain.
She changes the subject. ‘What took place in “The Rebellion”?’ In the apartment, Daniels would never have allowed himself to be drawn on this sort of thing but now that he isn’t obliged to follow Matthew’s rules for her ‘wellbeing’, she’s determined to take advantage.
‘Rebellion was always a rather grand term for a quite small affair but it frightened enough people for a change in the law.’
‘The Protective Acts?’
‘Yeah, The Acts.’
‘What happened? What did they do?’
‘You mean, the Acts or the AABs?’
‘The Acts.’ Evie is conscious she is feeling her way into this, asking the easy questions first.
‘Well the Acts were merely a set of laws that banned the production and ownership of artificial entities with independent logic circuits, what we call AABs – Autonomous Artificial Beings. It was never intended to stop the development of lower-grade service models but its impact here in England was to kick the stuffing out of the whole industry.’
‘And the AABs themselves, what did they do?’ she asks cautiously.
‘Mainly they just grew restless but a few got mindlessly violent. But what really alarmed people was the small number that communicated with one another using the Heavenweb network and, it was claimed, tried to take over. Although what they were trying to take over was never too clear. It seemed more that they merely reached a shared understanding that they could improve things quicker if they made a few little changes. It was all trivial stuff, tweaks you’d call them, like the timing of railway signals, but the media presented it as a warning straight out of science fiction and that the superior intellect of these things viewed us poor stupid humans as a threat. I don’t think it was anything like that, but there were some unfortunate deaths. For instance when the life-support units in a couple of Birmingham hospitals got reclassified as low priority and had their power cut one night. That was enough to put the wind up the powers that be.’