‘Anything else?’ he asked.
Her shoulders rose and fell. ‘There are rumours about Father Cheng that have everyone worried.’
‘What about him?’
‘That he might be stepping down as Chairman.’
Luc dropped back into his seat and stared at her in shock. ‘What? Where did you hear this?’
She let out a small, bitter laugh. ‘With the way you’ve been running around between here and Vanaheim or wherever the hell they’ve been sending you, I thought you’d be the one to know something about it.’
‘I had no idea. This isn’t official?’
‘No, it’s not official. But the way I hear it, there’s a faction in the Council demanding Cheng stand down and let someone else become Chairman.’
‘What faction?’
‘Luc, if anyone’s likely to know about something like that, it’s you.’
‘This is the first I’ve heard of any of this, El. Any idea why they’re calling for Cheng to stand down?’
‘Apparently some members of the Council think he’s out of touch with Reunification. That things have to change, and that if he can’t adapt to the new circumstances then he should go.’
‘That sounds like some Black Lotus propaganda I’ve heard.’
‘Well, it’s more than that, from what I’m hearing,’ she told him, suddenly looking as tired as he felt. ‘I’ve been at SecInt all night – I’m still here, as a matter of fact. They have almost everyone on full general alert, but nobody’s explaining why.’
‘And you think it must have something to do with Cheng? El, I swear I had no idea.’
‘They’ve got Offenbach running trend analyses to see the possible outcomes of a shift in power.’
‘Did you hear all this from Lethe?’
‘No, I heard it from another source.’ Her eyes darted away from his. ‘But when I asked Director Lethe, he admitted he’d already heard something along the same lines. And with everything that’s been going on . . . when you wouldn’t reply to any of my messages, I started getting seriously worried about what might have happened to you.’
Luc looked at her – straight dark hair falling to her shoulders, face downcast – and wanted desperately to hold her. ‘Then come and see me here as soon as you can.’
He winced as a deep throbbing began to spread outwards from the centre of his skull. Icy despair took hold of him: it had to be the lattice, growing once more despite de Almeida’s interventions.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, looking alarmed.
‘Nothing,’ he replied thickly, then winced a second time. It was rapidly getting worse.
‘Bullshit, it’s nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m coming over now.’
She arrived just forty minutes later. By then Luc had dragged himself into bed and lay in the dark, grunting as wave after wave of pain swamped his thoughts. Fragmented images he could hardly make sense of flitted through his mind’s eye. He barely noticed when Eleanor entered his apartment.
He opened his eyes to see her drop her SecInt jacket on the floor before pulling her shirt up over her head, her body silhouetted in the light filtering through the window. She leaned over him, taking his head in her hands. Something about her touch made the pain lessen, become more distant.
He instinctively reached up to touch her breasts as her mouth pressed against his. Within moments she was straddling him, gripping his chest hairs and leaning down to kiss him again.
Somehow, despite the pain, he felt himself become erect, and let her manoeuvre him inside her. By the time he came a few minutes later, hands gripping her thighs, the pain had washed away, like a morning tide receding from a shore.
He told her everything – about Aeschere, the implant, Zelia de Almeida and his encounter with Ambassador Sachs. It was all too much for him to hold in any more. She stroked one hand over his stubbled scalp and listened in silence, her expression far away as he spoke.
For the first time in a long while, as they lay there together in the enclosed darkness of his bedroom, Luc felt content.
‘We could go to Director Lethe,’ she whispered to him, ‘tell him everything you just told me. Things might not be as bad as you think, if we can get you the right kind of help . . .’
‘De Almeida wasn’t lying to me,’ he whispered back. ‘Everything she said was true. If anyone else found out about my lattice, I’d be as good as dead, and not even Lethe would be able to help me.’
‘How sure are you that this woman can fix you?’
‘I’m not at all sure,’ he admitted. ‘But some chance is better than none. She didn’t promise she could do it, only that she could try.’
‘But only so long as you do what she wants,’ she said, reaching out to touch his forehead. ‘You really think it’s possible? That there’s a part of . . . of Antonov, somewhere inside you?’
‘All I know,’ he said, gazing at her with pain-filled eyes, ‘is that I’m afraid of what I might see every time I go to sleep.’
He woke at dawn, alerted by Vanaheim’s security networks that Ambassador Sachs had suddenly dropped out of view. He notified de Almeida as he slid quietly out of bed.
Eleanor sat up and looked at him. ‘Do I even need to ask where you’re going?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m wanted.’
‘For God’s sake, Luc! You need to talk to Lethe. You can’t take this level of risk on your own. You need backup.’
‘We’ve already been over this,’ he said irritably.
She shivered. ‘There’s no reason to think you can trust de Almeida any more than the rest of them.’
He laughed. ‘You think I do? She’s crazy – as a matter of fact, I think they’re all crazy. Now tell me seriously, what you think you can do to help me that won’t just get me killed instead? Because I’m open to any ideas.’
‘I swear to God,’ she said, ‘if that bitch doesn’t figure out some way to save your life, I’ll hunt her down and put a bullet between her fucking eyes. You can tell her that from me.’
He leaned down and kissed her on the lips. ‘Now that’s more like the Eleanor I know,’ he said, and finished getting dressed.
Luc found himself back outside de Almeida’s residence a few hours later, his head heavy with the dull ache of fatigue. He took a moment to work up the courage to walk back inside, afraid as he was of seeing any of her grotesques staring back at him with needle-tipped eyes.
He found her inside, entirely alone, and chewing on a thumbnail as she studied several projections arranged around her in the air.
‘Councillor,’ he said, stepping towards her.
‘Sachs is still out of sight,’ she said, without taking her eyes from the displays. ‘I don’t know how he’s done it. He was on his way back from meeting with Meinhard Carter, and his flier just . . . vanished.’
‘You mean it crashed?’ asked Luc. ‘Are we talking about sabotage of some kind?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she muttered. ‘If he’d got into any kind of trouble, his flier should have sent out a distress signal. No, it’s more like he’s become invisible.’
So what’s really got you worried is that someone else can pull off the same tricks as you. Luc stepped up beside her and saw the projections depicted a variety of locations all across Vanaheim.
‘So where exactly was the Ambassador before he disappeared?’
She let out a sigh. ‘That’s a harder question to answer than it should be.’
De Almeida whispered something under her breath, and the projections merged into a single representation of Vanaheim as a spinning globe, more than a metre across. Brightly glowing hoops of navigational data materialized around the globe’s circumference.