‘Let’s just keep all this between the two of us for now.’ She paused, looking thoughtful. ‘What happened next?’
Luc remembered terrible pain. ‘As soon as he was done, Antonov put me back under. The next time I came to, he was dead. I did what I had to do in order to get out of the complex and save my own life.’
‘And then they brought you to Temur, where they found no trace of your instantiation lattice?’
Luc nodded.
Zelia regarded him speculatively, then made a gesture. In response, the floating images around them blurred and shifted, and were replaced by new ones, this time of Luc’s body in the hospital’s regeneration tank shortly after his return from Aeschere. He winced at the sight of his seared and ruined flesh.
She glanced back to him with an expression that almost bordered on sympathy. ‘They had to do a lot of work on you, didn’t they?’
‘When I had that first seizure, they ran scans on me to see if there were any abnormalities in my skull. But they found nothing. The medicians told me everything looked like it should.’
‘I’d agree with you that the worm-like mechant you described must be the means by which Antonov got the lattice inside your head. But if that’s the case, it doesn’t answer the question of why it showed up on my machines, but not those at the hospital . . .’
Her voice trailed off, and she leaned back against a table, drumming her fingers against its edge. ‘Instantiation lattices are just about the single most advanced form of technology in the whole of the Tian Di, apart from the transfer gates. Theoretically, a sophisticated enough lattice could fool certain analytical devices into thinking it wasn’t there. I can’t think of anything else that could possibly make sense. But it also begs the question – why would Antonov want to place such a sophisticated piece of technology inside your head?’
She looked at him as if he might be able to give her an answer.
‘If I could tell you the reason,’ he said, ‘I would.’
She nodded to the images floating around them. ‘Whatever Antonov had in mind for you, it wasn’t for your benefit. You’ve already had two serious seizures in a row, and I’d be an idiot not to think that lattice of yours is the reason why. Is there anything else you should be telling me?’
Luc told her about his strange dream-encounter with Antonov.
‘But you’re saying it wasn’t a dream?’ asked Zelia, once he’d finished.
‘I don’t know what it was, but he told me that if I survived, I had to open a specific record in Archives and make a small alteration to it.’
De Almeida nodded, her face neutral. ‘Go on.’
Luc shrugged. ‘He told me I had to add in a line about calling in a favour, then save and close the file.’
‘And did you?’
Luc nodded. ‘I wanted to see if it was real. If it didn’t exist, then that would have proved the whole damn thing really was just some terrible nightmare.’
‘What was the file’s reference?’
‘Thorne, 51 Alpha, Code Yellow.’
She breathed out through her nose, her mouth making a chewing motion. ‘Tell me what you found in the file.’
‘It described an incident on Thorne more than a century ago – some kind of illegal biotech research that brought about a number of deaths.’ He glanced at her. ‘You were the Director in charge of Thorne at the time.’
‘You’ve been looking into me?’
‘Not as such, but your name was attached to the file.’
‘I remember that investigation all too well,’ she said. ‘Tell me, Mr Gabion, have you discussed the details of this file or how you altered it with anyone else?’
‘Hell, no.’ He laughed nervously, wondering if she had any idea how terrified he really was. Almost certainly, he decided. His palms were clammy with sweat, his heart thudding in his chest. ‘If I’d told anyone what I just told you, they’d have locked me up and thrown away the key.’
Zelia nodded and stepped around to the other side of the slab, looking thoughtful. She reached up to brush a strand of hair back from her face. As she did so, Luc noticed her hand was shaking very slightly.
He glanced towards the sunlit door, beyond which lay the greenhouse. ‘If the others found out what I’ve just told you,’ he asked her, ‘what would happen to me?’
‘To you? To be brutally frank, Mr Gabion, dissection would be the first obvious step. Molecular tools would be used to tease your lattice apart, atom by atom, and highly invasive scanning routines would be used to try and decrypt whatever data or auto-suggestive routines Antonov might have implanted inside you. Assuming, that is, he hadn’t also booby-trapped the lattice to kill you the instant anyone tried to fool with it in any significant way.’ She shrugged. ‘To put it even more bluntly, Mr Gabion, I would not expect you to live for very long.’
Luc got halfway to the greenhouse entrance, his shoes slapping loudly against the tiles underfoot.
Something flashed past him in a blur, and the next thing he knew he was looking up at the outline of a mechant, hovering directly between him and the painted ceiling.
Zelia stepped over, gazing down at him with an expression of contempt.
‘Promise me,’ she said, ‘that you won’t waste any more of my time with stupid stunts like that.’
‘You just told me I’m going to have my brain picked apart,’ Luc groaned. ‘What the fuck would you do?’
‘I already told you nothing would happen to you so long as nobody else found out you were in possession of a lattice.’ She gestured towards the mechant, and it drifted back out of the way. ‘I keep my word, Mr Gabion.’
‘You’re serious?’ He pushed himself up into a sitting position on unsteady hands, staring up at her with desperate hope. ‘You’re not going to hand me over to them?’
‘I want to know just what Antonov was up to when he gave you that lattice. If I shared what you’ve told me with Father Cheng or anyone else in the Council, the first thing they would do is take the matter out of my hands. However, I have very good reasons for not wanting that to happen.’
He decided not to ask her what those reasons might be. There was something unsettling about her eyes, about her whole demeanour, the way she carried herself as much as the way she looked at him, as if he were an object rather than a human being.
‘So what happens now?’ he asked.
‘Nothing for the moment, Mr Gabion,’ she said, her eyes bright, ‘except that you’ll finish the job I brought you to Vanaheim to carry out. And if you ever – ever – think of telling anyone about our conversation here, believe me when I say there would be consequences.’
‘You’re not exactly giving me much choice.’
‘No, I’m not.’ She reached out a hand and he took it, standing up. Her grip was surprisingly strong.
‘Now that we’re clear on our relationship,’ she said, ‘I want to know if there’s anything else you want to tell me. Any other apparent hallucinations or memories you think might be pertinent.’
‘Nothing that really made any sense to me,’ he admitted.
The mechant drifted closer to him, instruments unfolding from its belly.
‘Tell me anyway,’ said Zelia, her eyes slitted like a hungry cat.
Luc stared at the mechant and licked his lips. ‘Okay. I had this dream a couple of times where I found myself looking into a mirror – or what I thought was a mirror, at first, but turned out to be a mask someone wore over their face. Except instead of seeing my own reflection in the mirror, I saw Antonov’s.’
De Almeida stared at him intently. ‘You’re certain of this?’
Luc shook his head helplessly. ‘How can I be certain about anything? It was just some crazy nightmare. But it felt . . .’
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘Real. It felt real.’