Ian Hocking - Flashback

Then—and had any time passed?—he saw the door to the attic. He laughed with relief and burst through. The attic was empty but for a simple bed, whose blanket he pulled away. His grin froze.

The cot was empty.

He did not flail at the sheet with his sword, though he wanted to. He moved to the open window and checked the sky. The dome of the thornwood was falling as dark rain, lightening the battlement with sunlight. Deep growls of collapse echoed about like cannon shot. He hurried down the staircase and ran onto the flagstones. The door of the middle tower, marked ‘Ag’, had split under the weight of moving stones, but the tower had not yet collapsed. Cory kicked in the door and climbed the identical stairs to the attic room.

Saskia Brandt lay on the cot beneath the small window. She was dressed in her shirt, jeans and cowgirl boots. Every item was intact and clean. Her hands were clasped below her breasts. There was nothing remarkable about her appearance apart from the length of her hair: in this world, it was shoulder-length.

Cory frowned in the doorway. His breath came in gasps and he wanted to cough. He let his sword fall against the floor. The sound was muffled, as though the air was losing its capacity to conduct sound. Saskia slept on. Cory approached the cot, took a handful of her hair and prepared to shake her.

Saskia awoke.

She had no eyes. The sockets were red and dry and infinite as the paths and stairwells of this world.

Bricks fell from the roof as Cory stared at her. He wanted to break her neck but he knew the gesture would be pointless. More bricks fell. They split in chalky puffs against the floor. Abruptly, the tower shifted. Cory braced himself against the wall and looked through the window.

The bird was coming.

‘To me!’ he shouted. ‘Quickly!’

This reality was folding away. With that, the information he needed would be lost. He heard the steady flap of bird wings. The idea of the bird no longer horrified him. Here. Carry me home to

(Camelot)

the mountain.

Then the sun extinguished and not even an afterimage remained in his eye. Reality stopped. The tower was gone, the castle with it, and Cory could not be sure who he was. There was nothing but the bird holding his shoulders and the rushes of air as it flew across emptiness.

Each of his bodily senses returned with petitions for attention. He staggered back against the chipboard partition. Touch competed with sight. In the instant before they synchronised, Cory imagined he was aboard a rolling ship as it crested a swell. He ignored the oncoming nausea and waited for the inconsistencies to cohere. One, two… yes, the hut. The mountain. He was standing over the body of Saskia Brandt in a hut, on a mountain, in Germany, in the year 2003, and he was eighty-eight damn years old and not finished.

The castle and the battlements, and the thornwood and its sun, were as gone as melted snows. Dead, like everything on this planet. Walking archaeology that refused to get with the programme, to lie in its grave and cool. He booted the cot and it knocked against the fine mesh that covered the wall. He did not touch the body. Saskia was dead. It was pointless; it would diminish him still further in his own eyes to attack her now.

Through a rent in Saskia’s shirt, Cory saw part of her breast. Without the steady expansion and contraction of the cavity beneath it, the curve was subtracted of its power. A statue could be beautiful, but not a corpse.

How much do I need you, Saskia?

He decided.

‘You’d better be worth this.’

There would not be enough ichor in his spit to do the job, so he had the factor form a lancet while he shrugged off one arm of his jacket and exposed his radial artery. His incision released a gout of blood. He directed this towards the tracheotomy hole and allowed some to splash over it.

The blood was golden with nanoparticles. He commanded them to enter an emergency reverse-entropy mode that would draw upon all energy in the vicinity to effect repair—except that within Cory’s body. Immediately, the liquid fizzed. The oil lamps guttered and the stove light weakened. Pinpricks appeared on the face of the corpse: intrasomatic tubules that pulled the oxygen from the air. Cory became dizzy and half-dreamed the buzz of piston-driven propellers, smelled leather and sheepskin, and felt the very boards beneath his heels rock as though the hut had swung in a steep bank.

Through this disorientation, he saw the swollen mass of Saskia’s forehead detumify with a hiss.

He remembered a mountaintop.

Tupungato.

A place to observe the stars .

Saskia convulsed once, and old blood, crisp as rose petals, burst from her mouth. A gasp followed, then an exhalation. In the dust, bright blood mixed with the old.

As once it did , thought Cory, in the city of Our Lady, Saint Mary of the fair winds.

Saskia’s arm slipped from the cot, almost tipping a nearby vase. Cory stared at its three flowers and pictured flowers on a grave. Flowers for…

Movement behind him: a flutter of cloth.

Cory did not turn. He said, ‘I see you, Jem.’

The cloth rippled once more.

As Cory turned, he wore the expression of a thoughtful man forced to pinch the life from a bug. The expression changed to fury. Jem was gone. He had not been thinking clearly. He glanced back at Saskia and decided that the ichor needed several minutes longer to heal her to the point where a verbal interrogation was possible. In the meantime, she was going nowhere.

Move it, Georgia.

Cory hurried to the veranda, where he searched the night. Then he jogged upriver. His cheeks were ruddy with embarrassment. When the divots became lost in bushes, Cory stopped. He brooded on the forest. Its wood had closed about him. His visual modifications counted six glimmers of heat through the trees, and any one of them could have been Jem.

He looked at the sky, selected the crest of a sturdy fir, and discharged his gun. A bone-coloured grapnel plumed upward. Behind it trailed a hawser. Cory felt the weapon lighten as the grapnel reached the treetop and bit the trunk with the hunger of a sprung trap. He turned and wrapped the hawser about his chest. The material fanned to a sling beneath his shoulder blades. He detached the gun—now skeletal—and placed it in his outside pocket. He zipped it shut.

He thought of Sergeant Blake from Base Albany. There, climbing had been the easiest of his tradecrafts.

I said, ‘Move it .’

He locked his knees and walked the trunk.

A starfield of snow fell by. When he was five yards from the top, he settled his boots and let the line pull him vertical. Then he hooked an arm around the tree. The sling was tight around his back, and his old lungs worked hard.

The soundless vista stilled him. Its passing, baggy clouds recalled the moon phases on the pocket watch given to him by Catherine’s father on that afternoon, a humid Tuesday, when Cory had sought permission to marry his daughter. How the collar of his new shirt had scratched. Catherine had worked the knot of the tie while they looked in the mirror. She had given him luck with a kiss and whispered that her father was a pussycat really.

Cory forced his gaze into the dark cavities of snow. A sense that the wood guarded Jem infused his perception and, with it, came the bitterness of foreboding. But he smiled when an electromagnetic burst flared in the middle distance. Jem’s phone.

Cory zoomed in. There: Her heat made an intermittent blip as she ran between the trees.

Gotcha .

He unzipped his pocket, pulled out the gun, and let it acquire lock.

Head shot , he thought. End it .