Nick Harkaway - Tigerman

But she ignored him, flat on her tummy and staring down at the wooden boards. They must be painfully hot, and the steam coming up through the cracks must be scorching, but she was resting on some sort of tray or panel. Her expression was intent. What was she doing?

A tendril of flame leaped up a few inches from her face, and she smiled in delight.

He realised she was lying on a full-length mirror on the floor of her burning house, watching the fire. A moment later another jet was erupting between the cracks and then another and he knew the house was giving up, that the time was now. She clapped.

He offered her his hand but she did not acknowledge him, so he scooped her up by the hips and lifted her, his legs and lower back protesting, until she was a wriggling, objecting burden in his arms and he was lunging for the window, feeling the boards sag under him as he went and expecting at any moment to fall into the inferno below, a thing he might just about survive but which would see her roast in his arms in an instant, and that would make an end of Lester Ferris, he was fairly sure, in any form he recognised now.

He lowered his head and hunched as he dived out of the window, felt the catch give way rather than the wood and glass, so no shower of razors, thank God, followed them down onto the next roof. He landed too hard and felt something crack, then realised with relief when no pain followed that it had not been his ankle. He had just enough time to wonder what that meant, and then they crashed through to the ground floor. He picked himself up, ready to fight, but the room was quiet and when he turned on a torch he saw it had until recently been some sort of vegetable stall. A mongrel pup had been sleeping in the corner, and the woman immediately shied a cobble at it, glowering. The mongrel yipped and scuttled out, and she mellowed again immediately, as if that was all it took to restore order to the world.

Sandrine — he had no doubt that it was she, he knew the lines of her face by proxy, and there was a weird disfocus to her expression which spoke of a damaged or remade intelligence — peered at him. Her hand reached out hesitantly to touch the mask, then sank to poke experimentally at the proboscis.

‘I’ve come to take you somewhere,’ he said, then cursed himself as the reassuring words came out metallic and wild.

But she smiled in approval and poked the mask again as if he had done something clever and interesting. She dived forward and began to investigate him, pat him down and follow the contours of his body in frank appraisal. It was not a sexual curiosity, but something else. She had never seen a man in a mask like this. He was a new thing. New things pleased her, so she wanted to know as much as possible about him. When she had roved, rapidly, all over him, and established that he felt essentially the same as other men, she frowned in disappointment and stepped away.

‘It’s not safe.’ He tried again. ‘You have to come with me.’ He made a beckoning gesture. Did she understand language, even though she could not speak? Did waving your hands count as language? Or was she so completely alien now that it didn’t matter, that anything he might attempt to tell her would just be sound and light? Operationally speaking, he realised, he should probably have asked more questions at the beginning.

‘There is a boy.’ He was pantomiming a small, slim person, her son, knowing that she would make nothing of it. ‘Your son, the one you don’t remember. He still loves you and I love him,’ and that was his first time saying that aloud. ‘I came to rescue you. To bring you to him.’ He thought he saw a glimmer of understanding in her face, of happiness or assent, but then she shrugged and wandered away to look at the damage they had done.

He could not leave her here. She was vulnerable to the burning town and to the mob. She was an infant. He realised, in passing, that he had been wrong about something fundamental: no one looked after the boy. When he went away, it was not to be cared for but to care. His mother was his unwitting ward. All seeming evidence to the contrary was proof rather of his self-sufficiency. The comic books he provided for himself; the laptop, the phone, the food — for both of them, no doubt. He was in many ways already grown, waiting only for his body to catch up with his life.

The Sergeant felt a twinge of fellow feeling, unexpected. He had up to a point taken care of his father, when Arthur Ferris had withdrawn to his television set and his late-onset diabetes and smoked himself fiercely towards the plot beside his wife. Young Lester had forged school notes and worked odd jobs and thought he was looking out for number one, but somehow he had put food on the table for his dad as well, and seen him through the few remaining years. His sister, too, of course, but she had been older and already on her way. She had never entirely understood how much their father had ground to a halt, because he freshened up for her, at his son’s insistence, and they were complicit, if in no other way, in concealing the decay. But it had been nothing like this, not really. Or, only somewhat.

His vision flashed white and he was lifted from his feet, a solid impact taking him in the right kidney and hurling him forward. A knife blade, he realised, deflected by the links of chain woven into the vest, the power of it still passed to his body, if spread wide enough to avoid penetration. I’ll piss pink all week, he thought sourly, and rolled as fast as he could to avoid a stamping boot. If I get the chance.

He kept rolling and surged to his feet, bounced off a wall and swirled the torch around the room. There were two of them, ordinary thugs with ugly expressions. Their attention was on him but their goal was Sandrine. He looked for hunger and rape and, curiously, couldn’t see it. Just intent. The nearer one was flourishing the knife at him, the other had a short billy club. Take the blade, but don’t imagine the billy’s not a problem.

The Sergeant slowed, feigning disorientation, lashed out wildly when the man feinted, and invited a circular stab low at his left side, blocked it early and clipped the elbow with the torch to bend it, driving the weapon hand up along his enemy’s spine until the shoulder dislocated, then putting his knee upwards through the man’s face. Shadows danced and he kept moving, trusting in motion to keep him safe. The billy man rushed in belatedly — they weren’t used to working as a team, probably wouldn’t do it again — and the Sergeant threw his first target into the line of attack to ward him off. The knife skittered away and its owner collapsed, moaning.

The other man came on. The Sergeant remembered the taser but had no time to reach it as the man attacked, leading with his weak hand, the billy held in reserve for a quick finish. The Sergeant thrust the torch forward instead, directing the blinding light into the billy man’s face. The man scuttled back and reset his feet.

Sandrine drove the discarded knife in a straight line from the shoulder, hips twisting, power coming out of the legs and the strength of her entire body. The blade went through the back of the billy man’s skull and continued until the point made a soft sound against his forehead. She continued the spiral to bring the arm back, heel of the hand leading and the blade outward, then dropped the knife. He thought it was completely mysterious to her how she had come to be holding it in the first place. The corpse fell at the same time, like a sack.

She looked at the Sergeant, then dropped to her knees and drew the tiger from the stele on his chest, perfectly, in blood on the floor. She looked at him again as if to say that finished the matter, and walked out of the door. He was fairly sure she had no understanding of what had passed, that she had killed a man, and a worm of suspicion was gnawing in him that this was because she only barely grasped what it meant that he had ever been alive. The world — the island — was one piece to her. Some of it moved, and some of it did not, and that was all.