Will Adams - The Lost Labyrinth

Bulbous lamps glowed like multiple moons in the high, wide corridors. Hard heels clacked like dominoes on the meander-patterned tiles. Monitors, gurneys, laundry baskets and other hospital paraphernalia were stacked against walls painted pastel yellows and blues, a worthy attempt at cheerfulness that had long-since faded into drabness. A wail pierced the hush: someone struggling with fear or grief. Knox flinched at a decade-old memory, walking to another ICU unit in a different Greek hospital, saying goodbye to his sister Bee on the day he'd been told she was going to die. The muffled, oppressive echoes of these places, the brutal whiteness of the equipment, that numb, dreamlike sense of wafting rather than walking, of being unable to protect the ones you love.

A policeman was sitting on a hard chair outside the ICU's double doors, reading a magazine. 'Damn,' muttered Knox. He'd hoped the police had merely issued edicts against visitors, not actually put someone on watch. A heart-monitor was on a trolley against the wall. 'Distract him,' he told Gaille, as he grabbed it.

She nodded and went to ask a question. The policeman shook his head. She asked him something else, smiled and touched his arm. She had the most disarming smile, Gaille. It could melt glaciers. The policeman rose to his feet and walked a little way with her, then pointed her up the corridor, laughing and waving his hands, barely glancing at Knox as he ducked his head and pushed the monitor through the ICU department's double doors. He left it against the wall, washed his hands with gel at a basin, dried himself off, opened the door to the ward itself. Two nurses behind the reception desk were squabbling in hushed low voices; he caught something about missing supplies. Claire was in the far corner, sitting on the far side of one of the four beds. Even though Knox had braced himself, it was still a shock to see Augustin, the tubes and monitors of life-support, the cage over his chest to keep the bedclothes off his upper body, the white bandaging around his skull, the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, his cheekbone swollen and tinted lurid inhuman colours.

Claire must have sensed his arrival, for she looked up, haggard, grey and harrowed, no remnant of her earlier joy. She frowned and blinked to see him standing there, as though struggling to place him. Then she touched a finger to her lips, got to her feet and came to join him outside.

'How is he?' he asked.

'How does he look?'

Knox didn't know what to say, what Claire needed from him. Situations like these rendered normal language and the conventions of human behaviour inadequate. He put his arms around her, held her against him, stroked her hair. It took a moment for the sobs to arrive, but once they'd started she couldn't stop, her shoulders shaking with grief, anxiety and fear-and not just on Augustin's account, he imagined. It was one of the crueller aspects of tragedies like this, that they made good people like Claire worry about their own futures, so that they'd later lacerate themselves for their selfish thoughts while their loved ones lay dying. He put his mouth close to her ear and murmured: 'It's going to be all right. I promise.'

She stiffened at once, so that he knew it had been a mistake. She broke away, took a step or two back, wiped her eyes. 'All right?' she asked. 'Are you an expert on traumatic brain injury, or something?'

'I didn't mean-'

'Augustin's skull has almost certainly been fractured, and his parietal and frontal lobes violently traumatised. His blood-brain barrier will have broken down. Cerebral oedemas are going to form. Do you know what they are?'

'No.'

'They occur when blood and other fluids are pumped into the brain faster than they can be removed. The whole head swells up, like a sink filling when the plughole is blocked. First it will affect his white matter, then his grey matter. It's one of the most common causes of irreversible brain damage, and it's happening to Augustin right now, and there's nothing I can do about it, except hold his hand and pray. And you're telling me it's going to be all right.'

'I'm so sorry, Claire.'

She nodded twice, wiped her eye again with the heel of her hand. 'I've worked in a hospice,' she told him. 'I've seen car-crash victims and gunshot victims and people with brain tumours. You think I haven't gone through this before? The doctors are putting Augustin into an induced coma: who knows if and when he'll come out of it? And then what? Traumatic brain injuries don't kill at once. Did you know that? They take their own sweet fucking time about it, while the body just falls apart piece-by-piece around them. And even if he should pull through, he'll be at increased risk for the rest of his life from tumours, depression, impotence, epilepsy, Alzheimer's, headaches, you name it. So please explain to me just how it's going to be all right.'

'I'm so sorry,' repeated Knox helplessly.

'What good is that? What good is being sorry? What are you going to do about it?'

'Everything I can.'

She nodded briskly, as though this was what she'd been working for. 'One of the nurses overheard the police earlier. They want to move Augustin out of here. They want to take him into custody. He'll die in custody. That's what they want, of course. They want him to die, because they think this whole incident will go away with him. So if you really want to help, do something about that. Stop them from moving him.'

'I'll do my best. I promise.'

'Your best? Like when that fucking monster was beating Augustin half to death?'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean you could have at least tried to stop him. You could at least have tried. He would have done, if it had been you. He'd have done anything for you. But you just stood there.'

Silence fell. Knox looked helplessly at her, feeling sick. 'I'm sorry,' he said again.

But she turned her back on him and didn't look round until after he'd left the ICU.

The log fire threw flickering light around the castle's great hall, tinting the stone walls orange-grey. It burned so strongly that Sandro Nergadze could feel its warmth on his back through his shirt and jacket. Yet he felt a distinct chill all the same. 'Would you care to repeat that,' he said tightly.

'You've got to understand something,' said General Iosep Khundadze. 'What you're talking about is a situation where the normal army command will break down.' He nodded at the two media magnates seated further along the oak table, who'd just outlined their plans. 'Even if these two can make their vote-rigging charges stick-'

'We can make them stick,' said the newspaper tycoon named Merab. 'If we get the exit-poll data we've been promised, at least.'

'What are you suggesting?' demanded Levan Kitesovi, head of Georgia's largest independent polling agency, angrily. 'Isn't my word good enough now?'

'Gentlemen, gentlemen,' said Sandro. 'We have to trust each other. That's why we're all here.' Everyone was a little on edge. Rumours were swirling of a new intelligence department set up specifically to investigate the Nergadze campaign. Their security arrangements had been duly tightened, because it could be awkward for their guests to explain what they were doing here this weekend. They'd swept all the rooms for bugs, had taken additional precautions against aerial surveillance, had hired more guards. But such security measures were a double-edged sword: they always made people feel more nervous.

He turned back to the general. 'Can we please assume that the first part of our plan has worked. Otherwise, there's really no point us discussing it. It's election day. The media use the exit polls to announce a come-from-behind Ilya Nergadze victory. But then the government declares victory. We flood the radios with stories of government lackeys carting off ballot boxes in mysterious vans. Our sources inside the ministries leak corroboration. Our friends across the world denounce the president as corrupt. The Supreme Court, Church and police…' he leaned forward to acknowledge their representatives '…will speak out on our behalf, or at least remain deadlocked. And so everyone will look to the ultimate arbiters of power in such situations: the army. Last month you assured us that you could bring your colleagues with you; enough of them to make the difference, at least. What's happened to change your mind?'