Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) (20 page)

‘Karel,’ said Danny, ‘tell Hrafn where you shot Cory.’

‘I saw it go through the neck. It should have been fatal.’

Danny pulled the collar aside.

‘The wound has healed,’ he said. ‘There’s a red mark, nothing more.’

‘Saskia died,’ said Jem. ‘She stopped breathing. But now she’s awake. Cory can administer some kind of treatment – to himself or others.’

The inspector moved alongside Danny to examine Cory’s neck. ‘It certainly would appear...’

Cory drew a sweet breath as the ichor stirred in his blood. A small piece of smart matter had entered his proprioceptive sphere. Energy clicked between the ichor and the smart matter. The trickle was enough to reset the essential gimbals of the nanomachines coasting in his blood.

Online
.

Cory instructed his ichor to ramp the release of catecholamide neurotransmitters and he braced for the whetting of his mind. It came. He looked sidelong at the thumb-sized bump in the lapel pocket of Inspector Duczyński’s coat. It felt like a thing long lost: the ghost of a heartbeat. The fabric of the coat distended and, with a tear, the pellet burst out of its pillbox. Impossibly slow, it drifted towards Cory and stopped before his eye. Gasps from his captors. He studied the bead of smart matter. There was a word whose meaning set his murders as stars in a shrine not yet built.

Camelot
.

He imagined a billion infantry heels coming to attention.

The mote zinged away and punched a hole through the plank above the stove. Soon it was ten metres out, twenty, then thirty. When it had collected enough distance, he called it

come

back

faster

to the hut.

The stove pipe exploded. Cory clenched his eyes and turned as timber shards dashed his shoulders and a dusty tide washed over the floor. Shouts across the aftermath. Knocked by the mote, the inspector’s gun cartwheeled into the swinging meats and camouflaged clothing. Cory had to smile. Jacked on his chemicals, he was fast as a nightmare and his enemies impotently slow. Into the dust he stepped, between the stove and the wall, and, wedged, straightened his long legs. The stove pitched, teetered, then boomed onto the floor. Its porthole erupted charcoal and brick-red wood, which flared alight. The chain was freed.

Before Cory could consider how to break the links around his wrists, Danny rammed him against the wall. Cory made fists to protect his fingers, but they crunched on the boarding. He shouted, then brought his knee into Danny’s chin. It was a lucky blow. The man slid to the floor. Behind him, Cory saw Hrafn and the inspector emerge from the smoke.

To me
, he commanded.
And sharpen
.

Jem screamed, ‘Look out!’

The inspector, who was shorter than Hrafn, flinched clear of the coin-sized fragment of smart matter, but Hrafn was caught across the neck. He barked and slapped a hand to the wound. Cory felt the spinning mote jam in the boards above the door. The inspector came on and Cory read his scalp for the voltage spike of intention. Cory let his answer draw upon the power of his hips and legs. He headbutted the inspector on the sternum. Duczyński clattered against the table and fell across Danny.

Gasping, Cory looked at his work. Danny and the inspector were down. Hrafn sat against the table; his hand was a bloody glove and his head rocked with sleep.
A rosary of blood
, thought Cory,
like the night Lisandro was killed
.

Jem spread her arms protectively across the broken mirror. In it, Cory saw pieces of an old man glowing with fury. Jem might have been a mother stretched across her pram. Cory licked his lips and turned to the mote. It detached from the woodwork and dropped into the chain between his wrists. It became a pin, then a wedge, and the chain split.

He impelled the mote to fly from the hut into the night once more, conducting its impressions of passing fronds, the creak of wooded hillsides, and

there

the factor’s signal

dit-dit-dah

from the base of a tree, where it had been buried so hastily.

To me.

In two breaths, he opened his palm and the factor burst through the wall and slid home; wet with snow; deliciously cold. It quickened to a gun and Cory paired its snout with his sight line as he scanned the room. Hrafn, dying against the wall; Danny and the inspector dazed. Jem had retreated to the outer doorway. Her eyes were downcast.

Cory stepped towards the mirror. Once it was open, and the seal of Saskia’s Faraday cage broken, he would scrape her wetware device of information once and for all, and be gone.

But he hesitated as his reflection swished left and the secret door opened. Saskia stepped into the room. She wore jeans and cowgirl boots. Her shirt had been buttoned. Three teeth remained in her grin.

‘Tell me what I want to know,’ Cory said, ‘or I’ll rip it out. The thornwood can’t hide it.’

She shook her head. ‘I have... set traps.’ She swallowed. ‘Device will destruct. If cracked.’

‘I didn’t know that suicide was one of your talents.’

‘Do, now.’

‘What’s your plan, Saskia? We all want to know. Don’t we, Jem? Gentlemen?’

The table scraped as Danny used it to stand. He helped the inspector into the nearby chair and crossed to Hrafn, who hissed as Danny checked his wound. Jem backed into the curtain that covered the outer doorway.

‘Running away again, Jem?’

He smiled – aware of the blood on his teeth, empowered by it – and set the benefit of killing all the people in this room against the cost of a manhunt and the threat to his anonymity. When he turned back to Saskia, she held the inspector’s gun in her hand.

‘Ah, Saskia. Not one of your better ideas.’

‘Shoot. Me. And I shoot. You.’

‘How did you rig up that EMP weapon? Did the woodsman help?’

‘It’s. Secret.’

Cory looked from the gun to her shaded, broken face. ‘Come back with me. In the present, there’s work to be done.’

‘Present?’

‘This is the past. It’s finished. Can’t you feel it? They are flies in amber, all of them, and they don’t know it.’

‘You. Idiot.’

Cory sighed. Saskia had joined the cult of the walking dead. He was genuinely sorrowful. She had deep courage. She would have made a singular friend. He tossed his gun to his left hand and put the barrel to Jem’s nose. Around the room, heartbeats raised, pressures ramped, muscle gorged and flickers of charge spent themselves across sweaty skin. Except Saskia: she was cold.

‘Wait,’ she said.

‘Tell me what happened on that flight,’ said Cory. ‘Before and after. All of it. I know Harkes passed something to you.’

Saskia swallowed again. She removed her forearm from her back pocket, looked at the ghost of her hand, and began to speak.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Berlin, before the crash

Saskia Brandt, who was certain of most things, could be certain of the exact moment she realised that the tall gentleman walking away from her on Bismarck Strasse was an anachronism. There was nothing unusual about his appearance. He was elderly, slim, and walked with a cane. He was one man among the hundreds taken in her glance.

An instant before, she had experienced an utter violation. It had not been maleficent. More a neutral excavation of her mind by a force that overpowered her. Thoughts had been inventoried: the position of her body mid stride, the rubbing sensation of her canvas bag’s shoulder strap, her satisfaction in picturing, at will, Jem’s blue hair; the loss of her loneliness, hair strands falling across her left eye; hunger. Everything in her awareness, and perhaps the unconscious layers below that, had been breached by some form of electronic, viral attack. Fortunately, before this information could be transmitted back to the originator of the virus, safeguards in her wetware device had been tripped. The virus was contained and killed.

Saskia had stumbled in the street and looked for the source of the assault. It could only be a time traveller. The encryption on her device was unbreakable by contemporary technology.

There he was.

The elderly gentleman paused on the corner of the block, tipping his head to one side as though he had half-heard his name. He looked in her direction and she turned away. She turned back when he continued walking with his easy, imperious gait.

Saskia matched his pace. It was ten minutes later that she sensed a GSM transmission from the man. Saskia felt the information as though it were a gossamer strand trailing from his gentlemanly hat, sunlight glissando on its lone string. The transmission contained TCP/IP packets – easily decrypted – destined for an online travel agency. He had just booked a flight to Milan.

~

Why Milan? And was he aware of Saskia? Did he know Jennifer Proctor and her father, David? Saskia worried at these questions for every step of the return journey to her apartment. Part of her curiosity was a need to know what had happened to her friends. Had Jennifer become the Einstein of the twenty-first century, a media eminence? And what of David? Had he been fully reconciled with his daughter? It was carrying these thoughts, along with breakfast from the local shop, that she re-entered her apartment one full hour earlier than she had told Jem with a plan to follow her time traveller to Milan. She found the woman in the secure room, where Saskia kept her more personal souvenirs, her financial paperwork, and her weaponry.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Jem?’

~

Who was

‘I bought us Battenberg cake... and proper English teabags. I was going to invite you on a trip.’

the time traveller? Where was

‘Where?’

he going?

‘Milan.’

Milan?

‘Milan.’

Echoes of her former life.

Sounds dying but not dead.

Saskia boiled with the implications of her discovery – a time traveller, like her – for the short hours of the day with Jem, the barren night, and the morning.

~

Saskia had taken her usual seat in the rearmost row of the aircraft. Here she could see without being seen. A girl of twelve or so, travelling alone and clearly nervous, looked at her across the aisle. Saskia took her hand briefly. Then the jet engines tuned up and up and the rough take-off pushed her into a doze, eyes dry even beneath their lids, her shoulders cramped and tense, forgetting the girl but remembering the time traveller. Where was he? She had not seen him come aboard. The engine noise played on all the intensity of her anxiety, which itself was buoyed by the absence of Jem. Saskia was conscious that her outfit - a disguise, in part - had been chosen by the woman: the Loblan cowgirl boots that made her feet ache; a fancy knapsack that could carry nothing more than her mobile phone, her wallet, a tampon or two; a tight, designer shirt; a necklace that bounced on her exposed sternum. Each discomfort made her think of Jem. For a time, she had been everything. Everything. Jem with the blue hair, draped over a sofa in the changing room, yawning thoughtfully at Saskia’s new groove and calling it good with a mimed pistol shot.

Peow.

Airborne.

Saskia cuffed away the cold tracks of her tears as a steward passed her, heading towards the rear galley. She watched him return with a rattling cart. As he pushed this along the aisle, she heard a door open behind her. She frowned. It was impossible that someone could be back there. Nobody but the steward had passed her since she sat down, and he would not have allowed the plane to take off with the bathroom occupied.

Saskia turned fully.

The woman who emerged from the dark, L-shaped corridor, and who was now looking nervously down the cabin, was Jennifer Proctor.

Saskia’s memories of 2023 had been dulled by the stresses of 2003, in which she was a fugitive. But she had not forgotten Jennifer Proctor (hair held by chopsticks, arrogant but principled), the woman who had created a time machine and helped Saskia return to 2003. The version of Jennifer who stepped back into Saskia’s life was older. Her hair was cropped and oiled. Her black T-shirt was tight and her stomach was flat. She wore dark gloves and, on her right wrist, a bracelet. Even in the gloom, her eyes were azure. They moved around the aircraft with unconcealed interest.

Saskia watched her. Since appearing in the air above Scotland, Saskia had been too busy with the reconstruction of her life to consider in detail what her escape would mean for Jennifer. There was a thread of worry in Saskia’s thoughts. Had Jennifer been reprimanded? Or had she risen with the star of her invention?

‘Sweetheart,’ she whispered, reaching out. ‘It’s me, Saskia.’

Jennifer was startled by the motion. She hesitated. Time traveller looked at time traveller and Saskia’s guarded expression changed to one of delight. She had disconnected herself from her home and her time more fully than any human before. Only now, sharing a look of relief and growing good humour with Jennifer, did she understand the cost of that amputation.

She released her seatbelt and stood. She had wanted to embrace Jennifer, but something in the woman’s eyes – shame? secrecy? – checked her. Jennifer, slightly shorter, looked up at Saskia and smiled. They might have been sisters contemplating the fruition of a prank. Then Jennifer took Saskia in a fierce hug. Saskia closed her eyes and pressed Jennifer’s forehead into the hollow beneath her chin. When Jennifer stepped back, she took Saskia’s hands.

‘You’re exactly how I remember,’ Jennifer said. In her smile, Saskia noticed surgically-straightened teeth. Yes, Jennifer had changed. Once their relationship had been that of an older Saskia to a younger Jennifer. Now their roles were reversed. The teeth made Saskia wonder about further advances in cosmetic treatment. Was it even possible, for instance, to tell how old Jennifer was?

‘When are you from?’ Saskia asked.

Jennifer paused. She was reluctant to answer. Why?

‘Decades have passed,’ she said. The words were delivered with the fondness of a person recalling childhood. ‘Did you receive the Ego unit we sent you?’