Edge (2 page)

    "Radial artery, motherfucker." This was the Timetable of Death which Josh could recite in his sleep (and had, according to Maria). "Penetration to onequarter inch, unconscious after thirty seconds. Dead in two minutes."

    He slid the blade to the inside of the man's biceps.

    "Brachial artery. Half inch penetration, fourteen seconds then unconscious, ninety seconds to death." Then the side of the neck, pricking the point against the skin. "Carotid, one and a half inches. Five seconds and unconscious, twelve seconds dead."

    "Please…"

    "Josh, I'm calling the police."

    Carefully, he placed the tau-bar's point against the man's shirt, feeling for ribs beneath the fat. Here you needed to position carefully before you rammed the point in.

    "Heart. Three and a half inches." Josh moved the point, and the man squealed. "Loss of consciousness: instantaneous. Time to death: three seconds."

    There were other arteries, other places to cut and to stab, each with their own triplet of figures – penetration depth, time to unconsciousness, time to death – and Josh could enumerate them all.
For King and country.
He looked at the man's sweat-covered face – the wide eyes, the gasping, drooling mouth – and inhaled the urine scent of fear. Then something changed, for as he pushed the breath out, he also pushed back the rage, and took a retreating step from the violence that so wanted to blossom forth, to manifest itself in surging aggression, filling the moment and drowning the memories of Sophie, but not for long.

    "Sometimes you get to live."

    Josh twisted away, and hurled the man's knife into the darkness, over a high hedge and into darkness. Field and woodland lay beyond. Then he reached into the Audi, grabbed hold of the key – shouldn't do this – and yanked it out – better than killing the bastard – and held it in front of Moron Features' face as the engine shuddering to stillness, quiet now. Josh waited for the moron to speak; but he was too afraid or had learned his lesson, or both. His eyes were very wide.

    "Wise man."

    Josh snarled as he threw the key into the night, following the knife. There was a glint, and then it was gone; then a faint, grass-softened thud. Gone forever, and he so wanted to hew the bastard's head from his shoulders, rip that aloft – see the lolling tongue and shocked, dead eyes – and throw it likewise into the wilderness; and that was when he wondered, whimsical yet serious, at the primal origins of basketball – and suddenly he barked a laugh, then stopped.

    
Won't bring Sophie back.

    Nothing would, that was the point.

    
Sophie, Sophie, Sophie.

    He climbed back inside his car and pulled the door shut. Maria's expression was clamped down, silent, her eyes filled with fear and anger and something more, a mixture he could not decompose or analyse. But he had his own concerns, because Sophie was gone, in every way that mattered.

    
Oh, my beautiful girl.

    The car started forward, and he accelerated gently, keeping control, his attention on the road ahead, refusing to look back at the devastated man and his useless car.

One hour later, in the hotel reception area – all silvery fluorescent lights and stained carpet squares – Josh put down their bags and stood next to Maria before the desk. The young receptionist looked up. Josh wanted to smash that soft face, but the feeling was irrational and the night had been wild enough already, so he forced the feeling down and made his voice soften.

    "Cumberland. We've got a reservation."

    "Uh, sure, Mr Cumberland. Would you care to–?"

    "And a separate room for me," said Maria.

    The receptionist blinked and stared at her.

    "Not necessary," Josh found himself saying. "I'm not hanging around."

    He picked up his black gym bag, leaving her case where it was. Then he stopped, giving her time to speak, to change her mind if she was going to, to fix everything, if only she could.

    Nothing.

    He went back out to the car, tossed the gym bag onto the passenger seat, climbed in and shut the door. There was a moment – he closed his eyes – of total lucidity, a deep knowledge of just how stupid and painful everything was, including his own actions. Then he pressed in the key and pushed the gear lever, and rolled the car forward on crunching gravel, out onto the nightshrouded road, a T-junction ahead. There, he turned right for no good reason, not bothering to read the signs, because everything was cloaked beneath darkness and all roads led to the same location: exactly nowhere.

    He drove on at steady speed.

 

The carriage was warm, the air-con half working, as it rattled along the Circle and District line. Suzanne, from her seat, watched the other passengers reading the news or watching movies on their phones, or bobbing their heads in time to music in their earbeads. Some of the businessmen and women wore the new lightweight suits with trousers ending mid-calf. Her own outfit was dark grey with a silvery sheen, a long-sleeved top and longish skirt; professional, expensive, looking good against her chocolatté-coloured skin.

    The man on her left was reading the news on his phone. Hers was switched off – not realising you could go offline was a modern malaise, had been for decades – but she couldn't help reading the headline: ITALY RIOTS AGAIN, 200 DEAD. How else to start the day than by dwelling on the worst that had happened? The rioters would be African camp-dwellers, some with skins as light as hers, railing at the country that had taken them in before failing to deliver the water-rich paradise they had imagined. In her mind she wrote another headline. BILLIONS TRAVEL TO WORK OK, HAVE ORDINARY DAY. Because geopolitical trends might be bad, but the truth was that half the world prospered, while the majority survived through every day.

    As the train pulled in to Embankment she sighed, thumbed on her phone, and put it to her ear.
"Four mes
sages waiting, one urgent. Listen to urgent message first?"
She tapped an acknowledgment.
"From Peter Hall."
It was a synthetic voice, reading out stored text.
"Sorry, Dr Duch
esne, but I've got a problem at work, and I can't make our
appointment. I'm doing really well. Sorry."

    Shit. She'd have to invoice him anyway because she'd booked the room in Elliptical House for the session. Billing a client for a no-show was necessary but might create a setback. Damn it. The voicemail gave few clues to Hall's mood. She listened to her other messages, all trivial, then put her phone away as the train slid into Westminster. She followed the other passengers off, filing past the kevlar-armoured guards, onto the escalator.

    Out on the Embankment proper she watched the stately vanes of wind-turbines. Sailing boats moved along the steel-coloured Thames, the Houses of Parliament glittered in the hot sun, while somewhere a vendor was selling roast nuts and cicadas – she caught the smell, and then it was gone.

    "Peter Hall," she told her phone. "Ring him."

    She waited.

    
"Unavailable. Would you like to leave a message?"

    Whether he was offline to her specifically or to the world, there was no way to tell. She formed a gesture with her fingers, a simple neurophysiological trigger to create a resourceful mood. Then she held up her phone, smiling at the beady lens.

    "Hello, Peter. How much better are you doing? I feel confident that now you'll make the changes you want to make, and it doesn't matter whether you ring me this morning or tonight, because you'll feel better when we talk. Go well, Peter."

    Good enough. Through careful tonality, some of her words were covert hypnotic suggestions, combining with the results of the previous sessions to give him a confidence boost as soon as he watched her message, or so she hoped. It was funny because, as a little girl, she had dreamed of being an actress, except when she imagined herself as a scientist or doctor; and now she got to be all three. At least that was the way she saw her life now, so much better – I'm lucky, really lucky – than the old days. As she walked, her fingers touched the inside of her opposite sleeve: always long sleeves, not just for her clients' sake. But it was mostly fine, not a case of "Physician, heal thyself," for in many respects she'd done just that.

    Keeping the phone on, she set off parallel to the stone balustrade. The glass barrier beyond was translucent turquoise, the finest of Dutch engineering to keep the capital dry, to ensure that everyone was safe.

    So enjoy the day, right?

    She made herself smile as she walked.

Stag Place was a plaza in Victoria, its shape irregular, surrounded by sweeping glass buildings. The wind tugged at Suzanne as she stopped near a tall steel sculpture, a shining tree whose leaves were big, bright plastic panels: tomato red, egg-yolk yellow, apple green. Elliptical House was another five minutes away, but there were coffee shops inside the mall, and where better to relax and prepare her–

    A ripping sound preceded a woman's scream and the shocking twang of steel cable parting; then came momentary silence, as if something had sucked away the air. And then a maelstrom of dust and flying shards – red, yellow, green, all with edges like knives – filled the world, became the world, while all around were people were throwing themselves down, trying to escape, some plucked upward by the air, levitating for a second, then flung aside like old socks.

    Vortex.

    This was a snap whirlwind, and dangerous. Suzanne dropped to the pavement, holding her head in her hands, imagining all that glass in flying pieces, sharp and deadly, and even as she had the thought, windows shattered overhead. Then percussive wind was beating on her, slamming her down –
no, please no
– and was gone.

    Just gone.

    She was on elbows and knees, head hanging, gasping. Was this the centre, the stillness at the whirlwind's heart, or had the whole thing passed? She dared to look up, then squeezed her eyes shut at the awfulness – no, deal with it – and forced them open. One person was a butchered mess: man or woman, she could not tell, only that the carcass was ripped open and all was soft and slick and glistening, bathed in redness, and none of this was helping. Act professional. As Suzanne hauled herself up, she focused on the ones who needed help: here a blood-soaked face, there a white-haired man, supine and groaning, his arm twisted beneath him. Off to one side, a woman whimpered, trembling, in the throes of seizure. Someone, calm-voiced, spoke into his phone, calling for medics. Others got into motion, crossing to the fallen. One man gave orders: "I'm a nurse. You, press here on his shoulder – yes, there, you've got it, keep pressing – while I help this person over here." All around, like snow in the aftermath of blizzard, shards of glass reflected sunlight, almost pretty if you had not seen the blood. They crunched beneath Suzanne's shoes as she made her way to the shaking woman.

    "Look at me."

    But the woman's attention remained locked on the bloody mess that had been a person just a few breaths earlier, a living person thinking about the day ahead, a thousand small concerns and perhaps the meaningful events of life, images of lovers, children, parents, all of it shut down in an instant. Suzanne stepped between her and the corpse, blocking the view.

    "Are you hurt?"

    The woman couldn't speak, but she was flapping her hands, staring through Suzanne as if the body were still in focus; and in a very real way it was, but Suzanne dared not deal with that until she was sure the woman was not bleeding. She ran her fingertips down the fragile neck, the narrow torso, while checking by sight. Physically, everything seemed intact.

    "Let me help," said a man's voice.

    "We need to get her inside." Suzanne reached under the woman's armpit. "Come on."

    With the man's help – she had a glimpse of blonde hair, a suit: a thin, thirtyish man – she got the woman moving slowly towards the mall. The entrance was mostly undamaged.
All I wanted was a coffee.
They led the woman into Seattle's Finest, then Suzanne sat her down while the man fetched bottled water.

    "I'm Adam," he said.

    The woman did not respond.

    "And I'm Suzanne." To the woman: "What's your name?"

    "You saw him?"

    Her eyes focused on a point in space, seeing the same thing in her mind, over and over. From the pupil dilation and involuntary twitch, she was recreating the mental picture in vivid, moving colours. It was a textbook precursor to post-traumatic stress, but this wasn't a case study – it was a suffering person, in need of help.
So help her.
Usually Suzanne met clients long after the traumatic event when the memories had been laid down – and replayed over and over before finally seeking help. This should be even easier to deal with, except that she herself was shaking in reaction. Or perhaps she could help herself and the woman at the same time: the point wasn't to kill the flooding emotions, just dampen them enough to prevent future nightmares.

    "Just breathe," she said. "Concentrate on blowing the breath out."

    The man, Adam, looked at her, then slowly put down the unwanted water. He gave a nod, seeming to recognise that Suzanne knew what she was doing. At least I'm supposed to know.

    Synchronising her breathing with the woman's, Suzanne began to alter her mental state. In a coffee shop at normal times, you would see friends chatting, their gestures tending to phase-lock, performing a subliminal dance, its intricacy obvious only to trained watchers. Now, Suzanne was using the process deliberately, entering physiological rapport, before leading the way to a different neurological state. She raised her hand before the woman's eyes.