‘It’s in there somewhere,’ he said, pointing.
Something struck the cobblestones immediately before them and rolled closer.
It felt as if a giant hand had reached down, picking Luc up and throwing him several feet into the air. He landed hard next to the entrance to an alleyway, his entire body wracked with pain. For a few moments, the world was suffused with an eerie silence. Something in his shoulder and arm didn’t feel quite right.
His hearing came back only slowly, but all he could hear at first was his own ragged breathing. He saw Zelia struggling to push herself upright against a nearby wall, one of her legs twisted at an odd angle. She had her hand to her chest, the fingers stained red.
A shadow passed overhead. Luc looked up to see another Sandoz heavy-lifter dropping to a landing a few streets away. As it descended, a shape swooped down from the heavy-lifter – a mechant, making straight for him.
‘Stop,’ he muttered.
Drifting suddenly to one side, the mechant crashed into a tiled roof, finally tumbling to the cobbles below like an oversized discarded toy.
More mechants appeared overhead. He sent them all scattering across the sky like storm-tossed leaves, but already he felt tired, enormously so, and struggled to stay awake.
Luc looked back over at Zelia, who stared back at him with a blank expression. The red stain on her chest had grown larger. He managed to crawl over to her, despite one of his arms being useless.
‘Zelia,’ he said, collapsing against the wall beside her. ‘How bad?’
Her face was paler than he’d ever seen it, lips thin and translucent.
‘It’s not deep, I don’t think,’ she said. ‘But I’m losing too much blood.’
‘Can you get up?’
‘No, Luc. Leave me be.’
‘If you stay here, you’ll die!’
She laughed weakly. ‘I can’t die, you fucking idiot. I have backups, remember?’
‘Cheng would never let you come back.’
She stared at him with loathing. ‘Fuck you,’ she said. ‘You think I don’t know that?’
Nevertheless, she managed to struggle back onto her feet, and he draped his good arm around her, grabbing under one shoulder, holding her upright.
‘We’re nearly there,’ he said, glancing up and seeing more mechants descending towards them. The taste of gritty ash was on his tongue, carried on the wind.
With a burst of effort, he dragged her towards the doorway. The artefact was just on the other side.
Voices, calling from somewhere nearby. He glanced to one side, but couldn’t see where they were coming from.
The ground again came rushing towards him, hard enough this time to break several of his teeth. He could feel their ragged edges with the tip of his tongue. Another grenade, he guessed.
Rolling over, he saw Zelia lying motionless nearby, and that the door had opened from the inside, a darkened vestibule lying beyond.
The voices he’d heard came closer. A shadow fell across his face; a mechant, hovering less than a metre above him.
More shadows gathered around him, some people-shaped. Hands reached down and took a grip on him, lifting him up with the minimum of care.
But it wasn’t over. Not yet.
TWENTY-THREE
‘Is he awake?’
‘One moment, Father Cheng,’ said a voice in reply.
Light dazzled Luc’s eyes. He tried to squeeze his eyelids shut, but found he couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried. His eyeballs itched and burned furiously.
There was a faint hiss from close by his face, and cool vapour dampened his skin, dripping down his cheeks like tears. The itching and burning faded a little.
He twisted away from a beam of light bright enough that it felt like it could burn its way through the back of his head. Barely visible in the light were the silhouettes of figures standing around him in an otherwise darkened room. When he tried to move, he discovered his wrists had been secured to the arms of a high-backed chair with heavy straps. Other straps secured his feet to the chair’s legs.
Leaning forward, he could see that he had been stripped naked. He swallowed, pain pulsing around his broken teeth. His mouth was still full of the taste of his own blood.
For some reason, he could neither blink nor close his eyes. The urge to block out the light was maddening, but there was nothing whatsoever he could do to avoid it.
‘Yes, he does appear to be conscious,’ said the second voice.
Luc twisted his head from side to side to try and see who had just spoken.
‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ asked the voice of a third man, ‘is what you’ve done to him entirely necessary?’
‘I would say it was absolutely necessary, my dear Meinhard,’ Cheng replied. ‘Didn’t you see what this creature and his accomplice did to poor Bailey? Or are you really suggesting someone guilty of such a crime deserves better?’
Meinhard Carter, Luc realized with a shock: the man Cheng had put in charge of the Tian Di’s deep-space exploration. And the same man with whom Ambassador Sachs had attempted last-minute negotiations over the Founder Network.
‘Of course not, Father Cheng,’ Carter replied with nervous haste.
The pain in Luc’s eyes was becoming extraordinary, maddening. An instant later he felt another burst of cool moisture on his face, reducing the pain and discomfort – but no more than marginally.
‘Reduce that light,’ said Cheng. ‘I want our guest to be able to see himself quite clearly.’
The light dimmed a little, and someone sprayed more moisture into Luc’s eyes. It tasted cool and damp and fresh on his tongue. He swallowed a few drops, filled with a sudden, raging thirst.
‘I think he’s thirsty,’ said another, unidentifiable voice.
‘Maybe we should give him something to drink,’ chuckled yet another. ‘Maybe I should . . . ?’
Luc heard a faint rustle, followed by a stifled giggle.
‘Very droll,’ he heard Cheng reply, with what sounded like faint humour. ‘As you please – but not, I beg you, in his eyes. I don’t want him to end up in so much pain that he can’t talk.’
Something warm and sticky splashed onto Luc’s torso and ran down between his thighs. One of the shadowy figures, he realized, was pissing on him.
He jerked at his restraints and tried to scream, but all that came out of his throat was a hoarse rattle.
‘Enough of this,’ Cheng snapped irritably, and the stream of urine ceased. ‘Let him see.’
Someone turned the spotlight away from Luc’s face, instead focusing it on the ceiling so that he could see his surroundings more clearly.
The room in which they had him was long and low and entirely bare of decoration. The floor had a drain at its centre, while large and unpleasantly sharp-looking hooks hung from the ceiling. A heavily muscled Sandoz warrior stood to one side of Luc, while Cheng, Carter and four others he did not recognize stood facing him. He guessed they were members of the Eighty-Five.
Glancing to his other side, he saw another, unfamiliar man standing immediately next to him. This man’s apparent physical age was much younger, and he wore a plain black tunic, fluted at the waist, that reached very nearly to the ground. His face was gaunt, and devoid of emotion. Lifting a small bulb to Luc’s face, the man quickly squirted moisture into his eyes, one after the other, before stepping back once more.
‘Turn him so he can see her,’ Cheng commanded.
The Sandoz warrior stepped around behind Luc’s chair and, with a grunt, turned it through ninety degrees, the metal legs scraping noisily against the bare concrete floor. Luc found himself facing an identical steel chair, the body of a naked woman secured to it at the wrists and ankles.