‘OK,’ said Lom. ‘If that’s how you want it.’
He leaned back and stretched his legs in front of him. Closed his eyes and let his mind open, focusing on nothing.
Listen. Feel. Breathe. There is plenty of time.
He felt the faint, steady pulsing in the skin-covered gap in his skull. Focused all his attention on it.
Lom used to imagine his unconscious mind as a dark, irrational place, an airless primeval cave where monsters moved. But the opposite was true. The unconscious mind was immense. Bright, airy, perfumed, luminous, borderless, beautiful. The outside world poured into it constantly, without ever filling it up. Everything was felt, everything was noticed.
And all you had to do was pay attention.
Now, at this very moment, there was the street noise outside, the faint calling of seagulls, the rumble of the truck’s wheels on the road, the working of the engine, the whisper of cloth against cloth, four people breathing. The smell of leather and sweat, hot steel and engine oil. The lieutenant’s shaving soap. Maroussia’s hair. Her skin. And there was the rub of his cuff against his own wrist, the sock rucked under his foot, the pressure of the hard bench seat against his back and thighs. In the subliminal mind’s timeless empire nothing was diminished. Nothing wore thin by tedium and habit. Nothing was ignored, nothing judged trivial. Nothing was forgotten. The luminous inner world contained everything he was and everything undiscovered that he might still become. His forest birthright. His strength and his power.
Lom opened his eyes and looked across at Maroussia. She was still sitting straight-backed and staring ahead. How long did they have? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? Then they would reach the Lodka, or the Armoury, or wherever they were going. Then all chance would be gone.
Listen. Feel. Breathe. There is plenty of time.
The GPV came to a halt. An intersection, or a traffic hold-up. Lom reached out into the air around him. Carefully he began to assemble it, to gather it together. He’d never tried to work with such precision before. Always, previously, he’d done what he’d learned to do in haste. In desperation. Recklessly. This time the task needed subtlety: blow out the back of the truck, take down the SV men. But not hurt Maroussia. And try not to draw the attention of everyone in the street. He wasn’t sure if he could do it but it was time to try. He was as ready as he would ever be.
But Lom never made the move. Something else happened. The sudden crash of breaking glass from the cab of the truck. A shout. A scream.
Open to the world as he was, Lom felt the driver die.
23
Lavrentina Chazia had another place in the Lodka, a place few knew of, deeper than the deepest of the interrogation cells, reached by steep iron stairs and locked corridors to which she had the only key. It was not a room but a high, narrow tunnel, running under the immense building and out beyond it. Sometimes, when she was working alone, Chazia heard faint sounds and echoes from the dark tunnel mouths. The skitter of footfalls. Mutterings and distant shrieks. Heavy objects being dragged across stone and mud. She took no notice. Mice and rats in the city’s loft.
The section of tunnel where she worked was filled with cool grey morning light, spilling downwards from smeared light wells in the roof. Parallel steel rails set into the flagstone floor disappeared in both directions into shadow. The air smelled of damp stone and river water and machine oil and the faint iron-and-ozone scent of angel flesh. The tunnel hummed and prickled with the muted almost-life of the angel stuff. It was a low vibration at the threshold of perception. Chazia had collected blocks of it, in slabs and rolls and drums: offcuts from the Armoury workshops where they maintained the mudjhiks. For years she had been working here, at her bench, at night, under the bleak illumination of fluorescent tubing. She worked with lathes and belt saws and finer, subtler tools. It had taken her years to acquire the skills and equipment. Years of trial and error. Years of developing techniques. Years moving towards ever greater power.
The substance dug from the bodies of the immense dead angels varied in consistency. Some of it was as dense as lead and as hard as rock, but it could be soft and fibrous, like meat, or a viscous semi-liquid, or a fine and weightless lustrous diaphane. It ranged in colour from heavy blood-purples, almost blacks, through reds to alabaster orange-pinks. The theoreticians of the Vlast had no idea how the angels’ living bodies might have functioned: there were no apparent internal organs, and no two carcases had the same shape or inner structure.
Unlike the Armoury engineers, Chazia didn’t wear protective clothing. She didn’t work from behind thick glass, her hands in clumsy rubber mittens. She didn’t mask her face with gauze. Unafraid, she immersed herself in angel stuff and breathed its dust. She tasted it. She let it stain and merge with her flesh. Absorbing and being absorbed. It was strength, it was vigour, it was a heady prospect of joy. There had been failures, of course, false starts and disappointments and near-disasters. No one had ever attempted anything so ambitious as this work of hers. No one had dared imagine it or face the risks. But she had driven herself onward relentlessly. And in the end she had succeeded.
She had made herself a suit of angel flesh to wear.
And now, in the grey subaqueous wash of light, she pulled the oilcloth shroud from it.
The thing she had made looked like a mudjhik, but smaller and slighter. A matte reddish-purple carapace of interlocking pieces. And a mudjhik would have had the brain and spinal cord of an animal embedded in it, to give it cerebration, whereas this had none: it required none. She had made an angel headpiece to encase her own head, and angel gauntlets for her hands.
She stared at it, trembling with excitement. Its crude face stared into hers. The sense of power and life in it prickled across her skin, raising the hairs on the back of her neck. She felt the tightening in her throat. The stirring in her belly and between her legs. For weeks she had come down here daily to look at it. To be with it. To stand before it. She had not yet dared to put it on. Fear, or the delicious prolongation of desire, had held her at the brink. The tipping point.
She knew the risks. The science of angel flesh was a thin crust of bluster over vertiginous ignorance. Many had ruined their minds and died. She was not reckless. She would proceed cautiously and step by step. But she had already delayed too long.
No more delay. She must begin.
24
In the first second and a half of the attack on the truck the SV men reacted slowly. They needed time to readjust. Lom was faster. He slid forward on the bench and kicked at the lieutenant’s right hand. The Blok 15 went spinning from his grip and clattered to the floor. Lom punched him in the face. Hard. He went down.
The captain hesitated, caught between the unknown threat outside and what was happening inside the truck. Then he was swinging his gun towards Lom, and Lom was scrabbling towards him, knowing he had no time, knowing he had failed and it was over, when Maroussia grabbed the captain’s wrist and forced it down. The revolver went off, firing into the floor of the truck. The shot was deafening in the enclosed space. The smell of burned powder. Lom clubbed the captain with his fist in the side of the head and he fell sideways.
The tailgate crashed open. A face looked in. A long, oval, serious face under an astrakhan hat. Round wire-rimmed glasses. A doctor’s face. A poet’s.
‘You!’ said Lom.
‘Come with me, please,’ said Antoninu Florian. ‘There is little time to lose. A gunshot will attract attention.’