‘Ana,’ Cole said, approaching from across the room. ‘Let’s go outside.’ She followed him, passing Lila who looked at them curiously. They walked silently for a minute, stopping at the edge of the marsh.
‘I’m not sure about this,’ he said, rubbing a hand over the back of his head. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘But you’ve done it,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘This whole angel thing’s gone far enough.’
‘You think Clemence told Tengeri that I was the angel and that’s why he wants to speak to me?’
‘You’re not the angel, Ana.’
‘
I
know that,’ she said. ‘But you’re scared because you think I might be.’
Cole winced, then glanced over his shoulder at the tower. Clemence stood in the doorway, her face too far away to read.
‘So what happens in the Writings?’ Ana asked.
‘It’s cryptic,’ Cole said, starting to pace back and forth. ‘I . . . Most of the interpretations say the angel dies while causing the Fall.’
Inwardly, Ana felt her body still. So that was why he didn’t want her to do it. He thought the shaman could show her something that would influence her way of thinking and steer her down a path of no return. But was it better to live in ignorance than risk knowledge? He couldn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to.
‘Cole,’ she said, reaching for his arm, stopping his pacing. ‘If you were given the choice now to go back eight years and refuse the shaman’s Glimpse, would you?’
He lowered his head. ‘No,’ he said, finally.
She took his hand and curled it between her own. ‘I’m not going to run away from the things that scare me, anymore. It’s what I did before and life just disappears around you.’ It shrinks away, she thought, until you become something small crouched in a dark room, hoping no one will turn on the lights.
‘I don’t know, Ana. You’ve got to understand that Tengeri has a plan. If he shows you something, it’ll be because he wants to influence your decisions.’
‘But they’re my decisions to make. You said it yourself Cole. The future isn’t written. It isn’t written in our genes and it isn’t written in the stars. It’s up to us.’
They stood for a minute watching ducks flap about on the deeper waters of the marshland. In the distance, Lila pushed past Clemence out of the bird-watch tower and started jogging in their direction.
‘It’s your dad,’ she panted as she reached them. ‘He’s OK, but there’s been some weird car accident. He’s in hospital. It was on the news.’
*
Later, as Ana lay beside Cole inside the single sleeping bag, her thoughts flitted from her conversation with her father that afternoon, to him lying in hospital somewhere with a broken leg. The news reports claimed there’d been some sort of brake failure that had sent his car careering off the road but Ana suspected her father and Dombrant had tried to escape the Board’s Special Ops. What she couldn’t understand, was why? She wouldn’t have thought the Chairman would be able to arrest the eminent Dr Barber, or indefinitely hold him somewhere under lock and key. But her father couldn’t have been so confident.
Ever since that morning, a feeling had been building inside her. It had begun when she’d seen Helen and Tamsin, and become deeply rooted when she’d discovered the Chairman was present the morning her mother died and had been toying with Ana ever since. She wanted justice. She wanted to expose Evelyn for the monster she was.
‘Nervous?’ Cole whispered, not asleep either. She was nervous, but impatient too. If the shaman was truly able to visit Ana in her dreams, what did he want her to see?
*
She stood beside a warm stove in the centre of a tent feeling disorientated. She couldn’t remember how she’d got there. The tent was cone-shaped, held together by large wooden sticks that linked up high at the centre and spread out to fixings in the ground. The walls were made of a light coloured canvas. Pots dangled from a metal chain strung between the tent poles. In one corner there was a sprawl of bedding, animal furs and pillows. On the other side a battered table, a wooden chair, glass cups, bowls, stacked boxes.
She frowned. She had the sense that she should know what she was doing here, that it was on the tip of her tongue, the edge of her field of view. But when she tried to focus, she realised she didn’t know anything concrete – not where she was from, her name, her age. Were these things important? She wasn’t sure.
The tent was dark. Only the light shining in from high at the centre illuminated the simple furnishings. She crept across the wobbly floor of unfixed wooden planking, looking for a door. As she moved away from the stove, the draft hit her. Opposite the sleeping area, on the other side of the tent, the canvas wall hung in loose folds between the poles. She reached into the fabric and felt a gap between the layers. Slipping through, one layer fell over the entrance behind her. She pulled aside a second fold of material and ducked out into a landscape as cold as it was breathtaking.
She was in an enormous valley surrounded by snow-tipped mountains. A thick wood of pine trees lay on the other side of a distant river. Up ahead flames from a bonfire licked the air. A husky dog stood before the tent watching her expectantly.
‘Hello,’ she said. The dog turned and began padding across the bright grass towards the fire. After a few steps it stopped, waiting for her to follow.
She was led to an elderly man, with dark cinnamon skin, long hair and high cheekbones. He stood near the fire shaking an object like a dried gourd filled with seeds. His tatty coat flapped in the wind.
The first husky dog joined a second and together they sniffed around in the grass.
‘I’m dreaming,’ Ana said.
‘Then perhaps you could warm the sky,’ the man answered. ‘It is cold here. It is summer and yet it is still cold.’
‘Are you asleep too?’
‘Am I asleep?’ He stopped shaking his rattle and considered her. He was younger than she’d first thought. His hair was dark, not grey. His nose was long, with a flat bridge and wide ending. The wrinkles around his eyes seemed to ripple, as though they came and went like waves on the sea. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘I am no longer sure.’
‘Is there anyone else here? I think someone’s supposed to be waiting for me.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said.
She cast around. Hazy sunlight lazed on the mountains, rambling through the pine trees, bathing on the river. No other tents or signs of human life lay within their great folds.
‘Do you like music?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Every soul is like music. It is made of the same basic notes and yet vibrates in its own unique way.’ He peered closer at her. She flinched when she realised his eyes were clouded over. He was blind. ‘I don’t see as well as I used to,’ he said. ‘The connection has been damaged by many things. But the damage is everywhere now. Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Yes, you have seen it too. Now I see who you are.’
His words reverberated, making the atoms in the air visibly shift. Smoke from the fire billowed up. White cloud covered Ana’s eyes and when the haze began to fade and the world took form again, she was in a suburban street of shabby brownstone and whitewashed houses. The street was empty: no pedestrians, no cyclists and no parked cars. There was litter everywhere.
She didn’t want to be here. This place felt heavy, like gravity had grown in importance and power. She wanted to return to the man, the beauty of the mountains, the searingly crisp air and pungent smell of bonfire. She was walking, but abruptly stopped. From a high window, a distant drumbeat broke the silence. She looked up. A man stood in the first-floor window, wreathed in shadow.
Ana was inside herself, but she wasn’t making the decisions. She was a visitor, a witness, experiencing something that had already happened. This is the past, she thought. This was the day I ran from Cole at the courthouse and wound up being surrounded by the Arashan people who moved like
they
were the ones in a strange dream.
A feeling gripped her and became unshakable. Go back. She was arguing with herself – because back meant towards Cole. But soon she was turning, slipping and staggering. Her foot twisted on a glass bottle. Pain shot through her ankle.
She glanced over her shoulder at the house where she’d seen the man in the window. Someone exited the front door. Adrenalin buzzed down her arms making the tips of her fingers ache. This is not really happening, she thought. I’m dreaming. But the panic felt real. It was in her body, making her run.
A second figure appeared at another door. Closer this time. Behind her, people poured out of every door up and down the street, like creatures from a disturbed nest. Their dark eyes watched her as they ventured off porches and down paths on to the pavements.
Just as they began to draw close, it all disappeared.
She was standing in the doorway of a ten-foot-square bedroom lit by candles. Anger shimmered on the air. Cole was kneeling over a camping stove stirring something in a pan. Lila sat on a single bed, arms folded, annoyed.
Guilt wormed through Ana. It’s the past again. The atmosphere was full of tension and she was the cause of it.
‘Yesterday, after the hearing—’ Her mouth moved, words coming out that she couldn’t change. ‘When you picked me up on your bike, who were those people?’
Cole shook his head, evidently not in the mood to talk.
‘What people?’ Lila asked.
She struggled to alter her body, her voice. It was like being trapped inside a wooden puppet. ‘When I discovered Cole had been following me the night Jasper was abducted,’ she said, ‘it scared me. So I ran away and wound up in this street where all these zombie people were coming out of the houses.’
‘Arashans?!’ Lila gasped. Her head whipped across to Cole, then back. ‘You walked into a street of Arashans and managed to leave?’
She fought to move her eyes. She was speaking to Lila but she wanted to drink in Cole’s face; the way it was before the gels. Why was Tengeri showing her this?
‘What are Arashans?’ she asked.
‘They’re an army experiment,’ Lila said.
‘Nobody knows exactly.’ Cole’s blue eyes darted up to her, and both of her selves sparked on contact.
‘There’s something transmitted in the air where they live,’ Lila continued, ‘that immobilises thought and movement. After living with it for a while, the person can act and think again, but they’re disconnected, slow, dreamy. The experiments are being run by a special Psych Watch unit.’
‘Nobody knows exactly,’ Cole repeated.
She felt an inner tug. Her vision blurred. She was leaving, moving through time again. Now back at the bonfire in the valley. The man was old once more, his hair grey, the skin across his brow wrinkled, his eyes milky with age rather than blindness.
‘Your people have found something,’ he said, ‘a vibration they are sending out which is slowly severing the worlds.’ He threw something into the fire. Tiny explosions of colour shot up into the dark funnel of smoke above them. They fizzled brightly, dazzling in their unique, rainbow colour formations before fluttering back down as grey ash. ‘When the disconnection is continued for too long, we will all become a floating island in the dark heart of the universe.’
‘The people I saw with the strange eyes . . . ? The Arashans?’
‘Yes. They are the start of the change. You cannot destroy one, without destroying a tiny piece of all.’
Suddenly she was spun about. Not the slow weighty pressure of the past. But rapid images, pulling her through them as though she was light bouncing through water. Oblong shapes of colour lay one over the next, rippling reds, blues, greens, purples folding around and in and out of each other. White-washed corridors. Marble floors. A woman in a grey suit looking at something Ana carried in her arms. The Warden Dombrant stepping up behind the woman, holding a Stinger. A young girl appearing from a wall. An operating table. Doctors. A two-year-old boy. Huge black eyes. A green map on his shaved head. An incision. Blood. Gasping. Gasping.
The boy. Save the boy!
Jasper knew. He knew where he’d spent those seventeen days and nights when he was missing; where Ashby had taken him to keep him ‘safe’; and the reason why his memories were so messed up.
Yesterday, he’d been surfing on his interface when news of BBC Live being hijacked trended all over the net. Hundreds of thousands of people had been astounded, mesmerised and thrilled by images of someone filming inside the patient compound of a mental rehab home. Huge black dormitories. Mattresses scattered across floors. Patients lying in the dark. Shoeless teenage girls and boys in scant blue robes loitering in an empty courtyard. No supervision. No nurses. Only more patients wheeled in by orderlies and dumped out like dead bodies.
And that’s when it all came crashing back. He had been a Three Mills mental patient.
It was Wednesday morning. He loitered on the threshold of his parent’s bedroom. His mother, snuggled under the duvet in the four-poster bed, drank tea and flipped through a magazine. His father stood in front of the large gilded mirror, knotting his tie. David was fit for someone pushing on fifty-five. He wore thick-framed rectangular glasses from the moment he woke up to the moment he went to bed. His brown hair was peppered grey and he had a plain, unremarkable face which Jasper’s sister had inherited, while Jasper and Tom had taken after their mother.
‘Ah, Jasper,’ his father said. ‘Good to see you’re up. Your mother and I were just discussing that it’s about time you went back to Oxford.’
Jasper’s gaze inched over to his mother. She smiled, but he suspected she’d had no say in this.