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‘Soot,’ he said.

‘Do you smell that?’ Ögi was snuffling all around, his moustache twitching. ‘Like something’s burnt.’

Horror crept over him. If the bulkheads were closed, then that could only mean it was
still
burning! Filled with dread, they rode down and could already hear Funaki’s urgent calls by the time they reached the lobby. Lynn shuffled over to the controls, activated the speech function, waved her brother over wearily and sank down into one of the rolling chairs.

‘Michio!’ called Tim breathlessly. ‘Michio, can you hear me? Tim here! Tim Orley!’

‘Mr Orley!’ Funaki’s relief was palpable. ‘We thought no one would ever answer. I’ve been trying to reach someone for half an hour.’

‘I’m sorry, we had to – we had a few problems to solve.’

‘Where’s Miss Dana?’

‘Not here.’

‘Sophie?’

‘She’s not here either, none of the staff are. Just the Ögis, my sister and I.’

Funaki fell silent for a moment. ‘Then I fear you’ll have even more problems to solve, Tim. We’re stuck up here.’

‘What happened—’

‘Control centre!’ Dana’s voice. ‘Please respond.’

‘Excuse me a moment, Michio.’ Wrinkling his brow, he tried to orientate between
the two flashing indicators. ‘I’ll be back in just a moment – I have Dana Lawrence – just a moment, for God’s sake, how do I switch over?’

His sister heaved herself up from the chair with a blank expression, pushed him aside and tapped a flashing section of the controls.

‘Dana? It’s Lynn here.’

‘Lynn! Finally. I’ve been trying for half an hour—’

‘You can save the speech, Funaki already did it. Where are you?’

‘Locked in. In the right shoulder.’

‘Fine, we’ll be in touch. Stand by.’

‘But I have to—’

‘Shut your mouth, Dana. Just wait until someone’s ready to play with you.’

‘What did you say?’ Dana exploded.

‘Oh yes, and you’re fired. Michio?’ Lynn put the enraged hotel director on hold. ‘This is Lynn Orley. Can you tell me your location?’

‘Okay, yes. The Mama Quilla Club, the Luna Bar and the Selene are accessible, but the Chang’e is sealed off. According to the computer the conditions beneath are life-threatening. A fire in the neck of the automatic system must have caused the area to be sealed off. Miss Miranda saw a jet of flame—’

‘
Saw
one?’ They heard Miranda’s penetrating voice in the background. ‘I was practically barbecued by it.’

‘—and only just managed to get away.’

Lynn leaned heavily against the control console. To Tim, she looked like a zombie trying to do something its body was no longer capable of.

‘Who was in the neck when the fire broke out?’ she asked, her voice flat.

‘We’re not entirely sure. It seems like there was an argument there. The Donoghues left the bar to find out, and we heard Miss Dana’s voice, and—’ He hesitated. ‘And yours, Miss Orley.
Sumimasen
, but you probably know better yourself who was there.’

Lynn fell silent for a few seconds.

‘Yes, I know,’ she said softly. ‘At least for the time before I – left. Your observations are correct. Just after Tim and I left, it must have—’ She cleared her throat. ‘Who’s with you right now?’

Funaki said nine names and assured her that, apart from Miranda’s minor burns, they were all uninjured. Tim shuddered at the thought of the neck, now completely sealed off. He didn’t dare imagine what fate had befallen Chuck, Aileen and the chef.

‘Thanks, Michio.’ Lynn’s fingers wandered over the touchscreen, altering controls, changing parameters.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Tim.

‘I’m stopping the convection in the elevator section and in the ventilation shafts.’

‘Convection?’ echoed Ögi.

‘The air circulation. There could be massive amounts of smoke forming up there. We have to stop the ventilators from distributing it and encouraging the fire to spread. Dana?’

‘Lynn, damn it! You can’t do this to me, I—’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘I – listen, I’m sorry if I accused you of being in the wrong, but
everything
indicated that
you
were the one we were looking for. I’m responsible for the safety of the hotel, so that’s why—’

‘You
were
.’

‘I had no other choice. And you have to admit that your recent behaviour hasn’t exactly been normal.’ Dana hesitated. As she continued, her voice suddenly sounded sympathetic, as if there should be a leather psychologist’s chair and a diploma on the wall. ‘No one is angry with you. Anyone can stumble now and then, but maybe you’re ill, Lynn. Maybe you need help. Are you sure you still have things under control? Would
you
have trusted you?’

For a moment, the incapacitating tone seemed to be taking effect. Lynn sank her head and breathed deeply. Then she stiffened and jutted her chin out.

‘The only thing I need to know is that I have you under control, you scheming little bitch.’

‘No, Lynn, you don’t understand, I—’

‘You won’t do this to me twice, do you hear?’

‘I just want to—’

‘Shut it. What happened in the neck?’

‘But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you the whole time.’

‘What then?’

‘Kokoschka. He betrayed you! It was him.’

‘Ko-Kokoschka?’

‘Yes! He was Hanna’s accomplice.’

‘Dana!’ Tim walked over. ‘It’s me. Are you sure about that? I think he wanted to give me something.’

‘No idea what, but that’s right, yes. He got really angry when you didn’t pay attention to him, it seemed things didn’t go as he had imagined. Then – right after you and Lyn left the neck, Anand appeared. I don’t know exactly what she had found out and how, but she said straight to Kokoschka’s face that he was the agent, and Kokoschka,
my God … he just snapped. He pulled out a gun and shot her, then Chuck and Aileen too, everything happened so horribly quickly. I tried to knock the gun out of his hand, and it went off, then one of the oxygen tanks suddenly started spitting out fire and – I just ran, just got out, before the bulkheads closed. He came after me, but he didn’t make it. He burned. The gallery burned, everything. I—’ Dana’s voice ebbed away. As she continued, her attempt to control her emotions was audible. ‘I managed to get him out and close the bulkhead, to extinguish the flames, but—’

‘What is it? Are
you
okay?’

‘Yes, thank you, Tim.’ There was a muffled cough. ‘I’ve probably inhaled a little too much CO
₂
into my lungs, but I’m okay. I’ll keep myself going with oxygen masks until the pressure comes back and the bulkheads open.’

‘And – Kokoschka?’

‘Dead. I couldn’t get anything else out of him. Unfortunately.’

Silent horror and complete incomprehension descended over Heidrun and Walo’s faces. Lynn stepped away from the console, swayed a little, staggered and then crashed down into the chair.

‘It’s my fault,’ she whispered. ‘All of this is my fault.’

* * *

Nina Hedegaard had long suspected that Julian might be a reincarnation of the Comte de Saint-Germain: the alchemist and adventurer regarded as ‘immortal and all-knowing’, as Voltaire once wrote to Frederick the Great, and whose mysterious elixirs and essences he had wanted to use in order to unleash the lasting strength and stamina of a thirty-year-old. During her two semesters of studying history – which she passed inadvertently due to the blossoming of a brief liaison with a historian – the mysterious count had been Nina’s favourite figure. An ingenious gambler, companion to Casanova and teacher to Cagliostro, even the pompadours hung on his every word, because he claimed to be in possession of an
acqua benedetta
, a potion which stopped the ageing process. Born sometime in the early eighteenth century, official date of death 1784; biographers swore blind that they still found traces of him in the nineteenth century. Rich, eloquent, charming and – behind the façade of wanting to make the world a better place – thoroughly unscrupulous, it could only be Julian! The twenty-first-century Comte de Saint-Germain had created a space station and hotel on the Moon, making gold out of earth just as he had since time began, this time by transforming his alchemical genius helium-3 into energy, creating carbon tubes instead of diamonds, making a fool of the world and breaking the heart of a petite Danish pilot.

Exhausted from self-pity and six consecutive nights of sex, unproductive conversations about a future together, more sex, brooding wakefulness and a mere three
hours of sleep, she felt so close to fainting that she had finally been tempted away from the pool and into the chill-out room. She didn’t feel the slightest desire to have another opulent dinner in Selene, play-acting the sweet travel guide. She’d had enough. Either Julian went public about their relationship while they were still on the Moon, or he could rot alone on the Aristarchus Plateau. Her bad mood swelled into a reservoir of rage. So they couldn’t make contact? There was no response from Ganymede? The last sighting of the count was in 2025? Well, so what! It wasn’t her responsibility to keep checking up and searching. She was completely worn out, and now she didn’t even want Julian to find her – if he ever turned up again. In reality, she wanted nothing more than for him to find her, but just not right now. She wanted him to go out of his mind with worry first. To beat his fists into the empty pillow beside him. Miss her. Simmer in his guilt. Yes, that’s what he should do!

Similar to the design of the pool, the chill-out area was modelled on the surface of the Moon, full of little craters and secluded corners. Her bathrobe slung around her, she selected a discreetly located lounger, perfectly suited to not being found, stretched out on it and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep in just a matter of minutes. Breathing evenly, away from the gaze of possible search parties, she rested at the very base of all consciousness. Removed from time and reality, lured into the waiting room of death, she snored softly and felt nothing but heavenly peace, and then not even that.

* * *

Four storeys above her, hell was bubbling away.

Even though Gaia in its intact state resembled a youthful, perfectly functioning organism, whose life-support systems predestined it for heroic acts, gold medals and immortality, a few stray projectiles from a handgun had been enough to turn all the advantages of its systems and sub-systems against it in the blink of an eye. The hidden tanks, designed to offset shortages in the bio-regenerative circulation by pumping the most accurately gauged quantities of oxygen into the atmosphere, had revealed themselves to be a fatal weakness. Twenty minutes after the catastrophe had struck, the affected tank was already burnt out, while other systems, originally intended to be life-saving, gave the hellfire new nourishment. By this point, the sealed-off area had temperatures of over 1000 degrees Celsius. The casing on the oxygen candles had melted and liberated their contents, burning coolants had caused the pipelines to explode, and supposedly non-flammable wall casings were flowing down like glowing slurry. Unlike in the Earth’s gravitational pull, the blaze didn’t flare up high, but instead drifted curiously around, creeping into every corner, including the cabin of E2, the guest elevator, the doors of which hadn’t managed to shut in time because Anand’s collapsed body was blocking them. Only tarry clumps
and bones remained of the three corpses; everything else had been swallowed up by the flame monster. Human tissue, synthetic materials, plants, and still its hunger was far from sated. While the prisoners in the Mama Quilla Club were planning their escape with Lynn and Tim, while Dana Lawrence was foaming with rage, hammering against the closed bulkhead, and while Nina Hedegaard was sleeping through the destruction, the flames raged against a second tank, until eventually its sealing couldn’t hold out any more and a further twenty litres of compressed oxygen unleashed the next phase of the inferno. In the absence of other materials, the monster began to gnaw at the security glass of the window and at the steel brace which held Gaia’s neck upright, weakening its structural solidarity.

At a quarter past nine, the first load-bearing constructions slowly began to give way.

* * *

‘No, it was absolutely right not to use the elevator,’ they heard Lynn say through the intercom system. She sounded tired and drained, robbed of all her strength. ‘The problem is that we can only make assumptions from down here. The sensors in the neck have failed; it’s possible that it’s still burning down there. The fire-extinguishing system was clearly able to make some progress in Chang’e, but there’s still contamination and considerable vacuum pressure. Almost all the oxygen has gone to blazes. I imagine the ventilators will balance that out in the course of the next two hours, just like in the shoulder area.’

‘But we can’t wait two hours,’ said Funaki, with a sideways glance at Rebecca Hsu. ‘And it’s getting hotter in here too.’

‘Okay, then—’

‘What about the ventilator shafts? We could climb down over the staircase.’

‘The data for that is contradictory. There seems to have been a slight loss of pressure in the eastern shaft, but that might just be because a little bit of smoke forced its way in. The western shaft looks okay. As far as the guest elevators are concerned, E2 has broken down, its cabin is stuck in the neck, and the staff elevator is in the cellar. E1 is in the lobby, near us. We’ve used it several times without any problems.’

‘E1 won’t be of much help to us,’ said Funaki. ‘It stops in the neck. If we’re going to use anything it can only be the staff elevator – that’s the only one that goes through to Selene.’

‘Just a moment.’

Muffled voices could be heard in the control centre. First Tim’s, then Walo Ögi’s.

‘I’d like to remind you that E1 and E2 are a good distance apart,’ Funaki added. ‘If E2 has been compromised, that doesn’t affect E1. The staff elevator, on the other hand, travels between the two, and would get very close to E2.’

‘Lynn?’ O’Keefe leaned over the intercom. ‘Could the fire spread to the other elevator shafts?’