The farmhouse belonged to Julie’s uncle, but he was away, and not expected back until the day after next.
The printed documents in the manila folder were the ones Julie had printed from the Céleste servers. Merovech hadn’t read them yet. He’d been awake for close to twenty-four hours, and now he had a headache, and all he wanted was to rest. He leaned his head back against the whitewashed plaster wall and closed his eyes. Through the closed door, he could hear Julie and Frank arguing in the kitchen. They were both speaking English, which he suspected was for his benefit. They wanted to be overheard.
Frank said, “This is stupid. It’s just an animal. It needs a vet.”
Julie spluttered indignantly.
“So, now I am stupid, am I?”
“Well, if you are so clever, can you tell me what the hell we are going to do with it? We do not even know what it eats. Or if it is dangerous.”
“The poor thing has been drugged. It needs our help.”
“Bullshit. This isn’t about the monkey. I know you, Julie. This is all about you getting cosy with
le petit prince anglais
.”
Merovech heard wooden chair legs scrape on flagstones kitchen floor.
“You leave him out of it.”
Frank laughed. “You’re the one who invited him.”
Julie’s hand slapped the tabletop.
“We would never have got in and out of that place without him.”
Frank laughed. “Yeah, and a fat lot of good it has done us. Look around you. We’re fugitives.
Des fugitifs avec ce crétin de singe.”
“You are so full of shit, Frank. All that
merde
you’ve been feeding me.”
“I meant what I said.”
“No, you did not! It was all talk. We finally find an artificial intelligence, and you want nothing to do with it.”
“That thing is not an AI.”
“Of course it is. Just because it is not built of chips and wire, that does not mean—”
“
Je m’en fous.
”
“Frank!”
“Fuck off.”
A glass smashed.
“
Fif!
”
“
Salope!
”
Frank stormed out. Merovech heard the front door slam behind him.
When I get out of here
, he thought,
I’m going to have him thrown into jail.
The thought brought the barest flicker of a smile. He took a deep breath in through his nose and exhaled slowly, trying to relax. He needed to sleep. He knew his security people would be going berserk but, right now, he was too tired to care. He lay down on the hard floor and pulled the hoodie up to cover his head. He would have a nap, then decide what to do about Julie and the monkey.
He had just closed his eyes when he heard Julie’s footsteps clumping in his direction, and the back room door swung open on irritable hinges.
“How’s our patient?”
Merovech sighed. He looked up at her, then across at the monkey.
“He’s resting.”
“You heard the argument?”
“I couldn’t really miss it.”
Julie fiddled with the door handle. “I am sorry. Frank can be a little highly-strung.”
“Frank’s a pillock.”
She smiled.
“Would you like some coffee?”
Merovech hauled himself stiffly to his feet, resigning himself to wakefulness.
“Yes, please. That would be nice.”
As he moved toward the door, Julie bent and retrieved the manila folder he’d left on the floor.
“Have you read this yet?”
“No.”
She frowned, and pushed it into his hands.
“Then I really think you should.”
She dragged him into the kitchen and made him sit him at the table. Heat came from logs crackling in the fireplace. Utensils hung from nails in the blackened wooden mantel. Julie busied herself filling a pan with water while he slid the A4 sheets of paper from the folder.
“What’s this all about?”
She hooked the pan over the fire, and spooned instant coffee granules into a tin mug. The spoon clanked on the rim.
“Just read it.”
Merovech scanned the dense blocks of text. The air had the sweet, sticky tang of burning pine. His eyes watered with exhaustion.
“Have you read it?”
Sap popped in the fire. Julie laid the spoon on the counter. She leaned on her elbows, as if for support. Even rumpled and tired, she looked beautiful.
“
Oui.
”
“Then why don’t you give me the gist?”
She picked at the corner of a fingernail. Beyond the half-open shutters of the window, a wet dawn had begun to break.
“I cannot, I am sorry.” Her eyes glittered.
Concerned, Merovech leaned forward.
“What’s the matter? What is it?” He reached for her hand, but she stepped back.
“This will not be easy to hear,” she said. “And I should not be the one to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“About your mother.”
“My mother?” Merovech pushed himself up, out of the chair. Water bubbled in the pan over the fireplace. “
What
about my mother?”
Julie swallowed, looking petrified.
“I did a search on the Céleste severs. I was looking for information on their AI projects. And I found you.”
“Me?”
She looked at the floor.
“The files were encrypted, but easy to access from within the system.”
“And what did they say?”
She sniffed.
“You are not what you think you are, Merovech. You are not even—” She turned away.
“Not even what?”
She stifled a sob.
“I am sorry, I cannot do this.” She ran to the wall and flung aside a curtain, revealing a sagging wooden staircase. Merovech listened to her footsteps thump up it and onto the first floor landing. He heard a door slam.
Alone, he looked around. Steam rose from the boiling pan of water. Rain spots dappled the window. He still held the papers in his hand. He dropped them onto the table as if they might bite him, and rubbed his forehead with thumb and index finger.
He’d been in and out of the Céleste facility for years. Of course they had a file on him; that was no surprise. But why had it upset Julie so badly? For a moment, he entertained the idea of a fatal disease. Could his last batch of tests have turned up a tumour, or other anomaly, which the doctors had somehow neglected to mention?
His eyes fell on the tin mug into which Julie had spooned the coffee granules. Longing for a drink, he crossed to the fireplace and tried to lift the pan of boiling water.
“Ow! Damn!”
The pan hit the floor with a metallic crash. Water burst over the flagstones. Merovech sucked his fingers and cursed his stupidity. Wrapped up in thought, it hadn’t occurred to him to use the cloth that hung beside the grate.
After a moment, he pulled his fingers from his lips and blew on them. They were red and stinging, but not seriously hurt. Ruefully, he reached for the cloth. The pan had landed on its side, and a little water remained: perhaps enough for half a cup. He picked it up and poured it into the mug of granules that Julie had left. The fridge was empty of cream, so he gave the coffee a perfunctory stir, rattling the spoon against the mug’s tin sides, and was about to lift it to his lips when he became aware of another presence in the room. He turned his head to the back room door and stiffened.
“Who are you?” Ack-Ack Macaque stood in the doorway, scratching his balls. His solitary eye looked yellow and bloodshot, and his fur had bald patches where the electrodes had been removed. He smacked his lips together and sniffed the air. “Is that coffee?”
Merovech looked down at the half-empty mug in his hand.
“Um, yes.”
He hadn’t expected the monkey to speak. But of course it could. He’d heard it talking in the clip of the game he’d been shown in the café.
The animal shuffled over and snaked the cup from him. He huffed the steam into his cavernous nostrils, and sighed; then tipped the rim to his lips with a noisy slurp.
“Ah, that’s the stuff.” He drew the back of his hand across his mouth and ran a pink, human-looking tongue over his pointed white incisors. Then he fixed Merovech with his one good eye.
“Now,” he said gruffly, “who the hell are you, where the fuck are we, and how did I get here?”
CHAPTER NINE
IMAGINARY FLOOR
F
ROM THE WINDOW
of her cabin on the
Tereshkova
, seven hundred feet above the rain-drenched asphalt of Heathrow’s main cargo terminal, Victoria Valois watched a sullen dawn break over West London. She had wrapped herself in her thick army surplus coat, and pushed her feet into her sturdiest pair of boots. She wore a turtle neck sweater to hide the tight, elasticised collar the ship’s surgeon had given her to support and protect the damaged muscles in the back of her neck; and a black, Russian style hat to hide her shorn and stapled scalp.
“I want it back,” she said.
Behind her, the Commodore cleared his throat.
“I still do not think this course of action is wise.”
“Fuck wise,” she snapped. “You’ve seen the news reports the same as I have. Three more killings in the last two days. All with knives, and all targeting the victim’s brain and soul-catcher. And I’ve got the inside scoop. I know what the killer looks like.”
“But the police—”
Victoria turned to face him. The cabin felt crowded with the two of them in it. It was an economical space, with bunks built into the wall, a small metal sink and a fold-down writing table. Victoria slept on the upper bunk and used the lower one for storage.
“Whoever that
bâtard
is, he’s got my soul. Paul’s too. Lord knows what he’s doing with them.” As a journalist, she’d heard rumours of secret military interrogation programs for the souls of captured soldiers; she’d spoken to gang members who dealt in illegally obtained back-ups, selling them on abroad as virtual slaves, put to work in electronic brothels or gold farms, or made to fight in gladiatorial arenas.
The Commodore raised his palm.
“Yes. I know.” A shadow crossed his face. “Believe me, I know. All I’m saying is that I do not think it safe for you to attend the funeral. Whoever this killer is, he will be annoyed you survived, and he will not want you to identify him.”
Victoria gave her head a small shake, and winced and the pain.
“It’s Paul’s funeral,” she said. “I’m not going to miss it for anything.”
In the corner of her eye, Paul’s image waved a virtual hand.
“What do you want?”
He put his hands together, fingertips touching his bristly chin.
“First of all, thanks. For saying you’ll go the funeral. I mean, I’ve got no one else. Literally. So, I appreciate it.” He shuffled his baseball boots on an imaginary floor. “But secondly, I agree with the Commodore. You can’t go, it’s way too dangerous.”
Victoria’s arms were across her chest.
“It’s not your decision.”
“But it is my funeral.”
“So?”
He cast around, avoiding her gaze. “So, I can un-invite you if I want to.”
Victoria laughed despite herself.
“Shut up,” she said, as kindly as she could.
The Commodore’s bushy white brows frowned at her.
“To whom exactly are you talking?”
“No-one.” With a mental command, she silenced Paul and pushed his image to the far edge of her visual field.
“I’m going to the funeral,” she said as firmly as she could, addressing both the old man and the digital ghost, “and that’s all there is to it.”
She saw Paul throw his hands up in disgust. In the real world, the Commodore wrapped his gnarled fingers around the pommel of the cutlass at his waist.
“Well, at least take one of my stewards. You need an armed bodyguard.”
“No. Thank you, but no. I appreciate the offer, but I don’t want to scare him off. I want to draw him out.”
She reached down and pulled an old Tupperware sandwich box from the bags and suitcases piled on the lower bunk. Inside, wrapped in an oily hand towel, lay a replacement for the retractable carbon fibre quarterstaff she’d lost at Paul’s apartment. She took it out and held it before him, weighing it in the palm of her hand.
“Besides, I’ll have this.”
The Commodore huffed.
“You are in no condition to fight, young lady. And besides, you had one of those before, and it didn’t do you much good.”
Victoria felt her cheeks redden. Her fingers tightened around the metal shaft.
“Next time will be different.”
A
N HOUR LATER,
despite the protestations of both the Commodore and the
Tereshkova’
s chief surgeon, Victoria took a helicopter from the pad atop the skyliner’s central hull. The helicopter’s pilot wore mirrored aviator shades and chewed gum. He took her to Battersea Park, bringing the chopper down to kiss the grass for only as long as it took her to clamber down from the cockpit. Then, as soon as she was clear, he was off again and up, peeling away across the Thames.
Victoria smoothed down the rumples in her coat. Warm sun touched her face. The air on her skin felt just crisp enough to be refreshing, and so clear it seemed to chime like a bell. Quite a contrast from the rain she remembered from her last visit. Her breath came in little drifts of vapour. She walked towards the edge of the park, hands in pockets. Despite her bravado, her neck hurt a lot more than she had been prepared to admit. The stitches were tight and sore, and the staples hurt like needles driven into her flesh.
It’s my choice, she thought. Two serious head wounds in two years. I can feel like a victim, or I can feel like a survivor. It’s up to me.
She took a taxi across Battersea Bridge into Chelsea, and west along the river, past the rows of houseboats moored beneath the embankment wall. Holding her head as still as possible, she watched as they drove through the brown brick terraces of Chelsea, with their black iron railings and plastic For Sale signs, to the Exhibition Centre at Earl’s Court, where the driver turned right and pulled over at the kerb. The ride had only taken a few minutes. Victoria paid and climbed stiffly out, onto the pavement in front of the gates of Brompton Cemetery.
As she entered the graveyard, an Airbus whined overhead on its way to Heathrow. The trees were black and bare. She walked along the central driveway. Beneath her coat, the retracted quarterstaff swung against her thigh. The graves, their stones the colour of weathered bone, ranged from simple, overgrown headstones to sprawling mausoleums, their inscriptions too smudged by lichen and neglect for her text-recognition software to decode.