Greg Chivers - The Crying Machine

Harper Voyager

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Copyright © Greg Chivers 2019

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

Cover layout design by Ellie Game © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019

Greg Chivers asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008308773

Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008308797

Version: 2019-02-14

For Bea, Lucas and Charlotte

Nothing like this instrument is preserved elsewhere. Nothing comparable to it is known from any ancient scientific text or literary allusion. On the contrary, from all that we know of science and technology in the Hellenistic Age we should have felt that such a device could not exist.

Derek de Solla Price, ‘Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1. Clementine

Chapter 2. Silas

Chapter 3. Levi

Chapter 4. Clementine

Chapter 5. Levi

Chapter 6. Silas

Chapter 7. Clementine

Chapter 8. Silas

Chapter 9. Clementine

Chapter 10. Silas

Chapter 11. Clementine

Chapter 12. Levi

Chapter 13. Clementine

Chapter 14. Silas

Chapter 15. Levi

Chapter 16. Silas

Chapter 17. Clementine

Chapter 18. Levi

Chapter 19. Silas

Chapter 20. Clementine

Chapter 21. Silas

Chapter 22. Clementine

Chapter 23. Levi

Chapter 24. Silas

Chapter 25. Levi

Chapter 26. Clementine

Chapter 27. Levi

Chapter 28. Clementine

Chapter 29. Silas

Chapter 30. Clementine

Chapter 31. Silas

Chapter 32. Clementine

Chapter 33. Silas

Chapter 34. Clementine

Chapter 35. Levi

Chapter 36. Clementine

Chapter 37. Silas

Chapter 38. Clementine

Chapter 39. Silas

Chapter 40. Clementine

Chapter 41. Levi

Chapter 42. Clementine

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Men stare from shadowed doorways. She is too obviously alien here, even with the paleness of her skin concealed behind high collars and a tinted visor. The women are invisible in this part of the city. Two sparsely bearded teenagers in baggy sherwal and thawb unashamedly follow her. It does not occur to them she might feel threatened, that they should exercise any kind of restraint. A trapped bird of fear flutters in her chest. All the tacit understandings of gender from home, with all the protections they give, are absent here, replaced by a new labyrinth of unwritten rules she flouts with every step. She is the transgressor in this place.

The address she was given by the trafficker in Marseille should be somewhere close, but the streets are unmarked, the buildings unnumbered save for intermittent brass plaques which seem to follow no recognizable order. She shoves the paper under the nose of a fat man selling leafed oranges from crates. His eyes narrow as he takes in the curling lines of script, then his face relaxes and he stares into the middle distance, pretending not to see her. All the eyes here play the same game, following the pornography of her movement intently, becoming blind the moment she approaches.

A corner leads her into an alley that ends suddenly in a wall topped with curves of broken glass. The two stubbled faces lurch into view when she turns around. They’re close enough to smell – turmeric and teenage boy beneath the faint tang of Jerusalem’s dust. It’s hard to tell the ages; the Arab boys grow hair younger. Their short, compact bodies warn of muscle beneath the loose fabric of their clothes. One looks away instantly in flawless imitation of his elders, but the other smiles nervously before dropping his gaze. Perhaps he has sisters.

The shorter one touches her. His hand on her cheek is damp with sweat. Her stillness should be a warning, but he is too enraptured with the discovery of blond hairs to notice. Without meeting her eyes, he fingers the stray strands behind her neck where they’ve come loose. Her teeth clench as she suppresses the urge to bite or kick. Violence brings attention.

‘Leave me alone.’ She hears her own voice struggling around the Arabic sounds, too high, too frightened. A mistake here could ruin the city for her. There are only so many places left to run.

The boy’s eyes show he understands the words, but a hiss of excited breath is the only response as his eyes travel down her body. As he moves around her, something metal glints behind his ear, a flat circle barely bigger than an earring. A tiny filigree of dark lines betrays the presence of circuitry within. She raises a hand with fingers curled to touch him. He pulls back, wary, but stays still just long enough for her to brush against the thing. The burst of code that passes through her fingertip is benign, a harmless interrogative. It identifies the ear stud as a simple communication device, capable only of voice or lo-fi sub-vocalizations. It requires user authorization to accept incoming signals, but the firewall is laughably primitive.

A moment later he screams. His hand comes to his ear, fingers clawing uselessly at the lobe and cartilage. The pain comes from inside; a continuous pulse of ultra-high frequency bursts at the edge of human hearing, but still capable of stimulating the aural nerves. It will stop soon. The damage will heal quickly and leave no lasting mark that could betray her presence here.

The other one stares in confusion as his friend falls to his knees. She tries to mirror the surprise on his face, a second too late to be convincing, but he isn’t looking at her, eyes fixed on the twitching figure on the floor. She presses the paper with the address into his hand.

‘Where is this? Can you show me?’

A trembling hand points back down the street towards a doorway behind the orange-seller.

The fat man ignores her as she walks past. She resists the urge to brush past him or topple his crates, forcing an acknowledgement of her existence. She feels the presence of others in the room before her eyes adjust to the gloom. Faintly apple-scented shisha smoke glows in slatted light where the sun penetrates wooden shutters warped with age. Four male faces examine her, but the inspection is more human than the ruthless dissections she endured outside. Her transgression is muted within the confines of these walls. Three leather-skinned old men pass the hookah pipe between them without taking their gaze off her. The bald-headed man behind the bar is younger, on the cusp of middle age with a heavy, muscular frame only slightly turned to fat. He acknowledges her with a raise of the chin.