Ian Hocking - Flashback

Saskia took the gun and struggled to her feet.

‘What are you doing?’

Saskia took uncertain steps through the snow. She passed the woodpile, raised her head to get her bearings, and walked around the side of the hut. Jem followed her; her desire to stop Saskia checked by the presence of the gun and the knowledge that this… this thing was not quite Saskia.

They crossed the emptiness of the dooryard with Jem lingering two paces behind. Every few metres, Saskia stopped, as though listening. Jem wondered at the technology in her head. Not just the device itself, but how it communicated with the brain. How did it move her legs and arms? Was the process something Frankensteinian, like frog’s legs twitching on a dinner plate? Was the device a puppeteer?

No , thought Jem. I shouldn’t call it ‘the device’.

Saskia stopped briefly once more.

I should call it Saskia .

They found Cory on his back with fallen branches around and across him. His fluorescent jacket had ripped open at the chest but there was no sign of serious injury. Only his lower leg seemed broken. It was bent at an impossible angle and his foot was turned inward. His eyes were closed.

Jem had time to notice a small, white cube nearby—was it the thing that sometimes took the form of a cane?—when Saskia raised her gun. She pointed it at Cory’s head. The sight of it focused Jem on the implications of killing him.

‘Wait, Saskia. What if he hasn’t finished fixing you? Maybe what’s happening inside you needs him to be alive.’

‘Take my hand.’

A paroxysm overcame Saskia. She doubled at the waist, screaming silently at her bloody feet. Jem moved alongside her. When she straightened, Jem took her in her arms. The gun remained pointed at Cory. Jem touched Saskia’s cheek with hers and closed her eyes. She remembered a morning two weeks ago when Saskia’s breath smelled faintly of the night, and Jem thought, An imperfection at last . She had faced her across the pillow in the white sunshine and kissed the tip of her nose.

The gloved hand of a stranger—leather, the colour of midnight arrest—closed around the barrel and twisted. Jem gaped at Inspector Duczyński, of all people, who put the weapon inside his jacket. Solemnly, Duczyński turned to a taller, older man wearing a fluorescent jacket and a yellow cap. Snow had gathered on its brim.

‘We found her,’ said the taller man. He was speaking into a mobile phone. ‘Hello? Mr Self?’

When Danny stepped from behind him, Jem felt her strength diminish. Saskia slipped through her hug and Danny caught them both, and the three sank, Saskia sighing as he looked from one to the other. Air blew through the black colonnades of the forest, bringing sparks of snow.

Cory woke from a dream of the crowded recruitment office at Peachtree Creek; of the coughing men in the queue; of the laconic sheriff taking temperatures with an ear thermometer. As it faded, he found himself in the woodsman’s hut. He kept his eyes closed and assembled the footfalls, scrapes of furniture, swallows: one woman, three men. His senses had been reduced to his God-given five but that was fine. More serious was the absence of his factor. Not once in six decades had Cory lost its heartbeat. When he felt ready, he opened his eyes on a tall man wearing a yellow cap. Next to him was the Berlin police officer Cory had shot at the Fernsehturm . He wore a sling beneath his coat. Danny Shaw, nearby, was biting a nail. Jem stood at his shoulder. Her nose was red and swollen.

A thick collar ringed Cory’s neck. It was leather and smelled of dog. Its chain had been fed around the stove.

His broken shin began to fill with a familiar heat that meant assisted repair was underway. So the ichor had not been totally disabled. That made sense, because the improvised capacitor under the tarpaulin could not have generated a pulse greater than a gigawatt. His ichor would return to full strength within half an hour; faster even, if he could talk them into returning the smart matter. He rose to his elbows. The inspector, sitting at the table, noticed the movement and leaned forward. At the opening of his arm sling was a gun.

What manufacturer? How many shots?

But his ichor was silent.

‘I am Inspector Karel Duczyński,’ said the man. The remaining captors straightened their backs and Cory, smiling, knew that this interrogation would pale against Hole Eight, a pit in a field in Base Albany—not yet dug—where the young Cory had learned to build a wall, brick by brick, between him and his pain.

‘Who are your friends?’

‘Dr Hrafn Óskarson,’ said the tall man. ‘I’m in charge of the investigation into flight DFU323 and I’m tired because I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, so let me make this simple. Behind this hut is a corpse. A few kilometres to the south-west is the grave of one hundred more.’

‘Don’t forget Miss Brandt,’ said Cory.

‘Brandt?’

‘Alias Dorfer, Dr Óskarson. Where is she?’

The Icelander shifted the bill of his cap. ‘I want you to tell me the complete story of your involvement.’

‘Shouldn’t this be conducted in a police station, Inspector Duczyński, with due process?’

‘Fuck due process,’ said Jem. Her voice wavered. ‘What did you do to Saskia? She was dead.’

Cory grinned. ‘Inspector. Doctor. You see the ridiculousness of this conversation? Miss Shaw seems to think that I can raise the dead. Perhaps you should talk to her first. After all, she decided not to board a flight that crashed.’ He blinked slowly at Jem. ‘Did you feel a twitching in your pussy?’

Danny stepped forward and balled Cory’s jacket in his fists. His cool broken, Cory met the man’s hate with his own, which ran in his veins aplenty, whether the ichor slept or not.

‘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.