After that I lost track of time for a while. Someone’s flat. I was looking at a strange box of bone parts, all hoaxed up with operation wire—an october switch, it was called. I had one of those, it was an activan machine. A what? My head frazzled through a series of pulls, releases and dissolves. The body is King on Earth, I remembered, a vital lie.
A lightbulb was swinging like a hanged ghost as I drew a thin blade through the smudged centre of the entry stamp on my wrist. The wound pulled open, stretching gluey blood. It looked like a mainline station in there, parallel tracks converging and splitting in a soak of red light. Who was I?
The elemental flutter of etheric draw flickered in the soda blackness to my right, barely visible through brain spuff. Outside influence, drawing like silver stage ropes.
I was in such a bad way. Deep cover—I’d lost myself in it again. I was Alix the ultravivid hero or something like it. I stood up, pushing through thick space, and pull patterns shrivelled like cobwebs around me. The girl was a loft baby, rigged up in a back room, the leather cocoon of her flightbag the centre of a massive kirlian web. Transformation adjustments mashed in the dark, heroine wear backing up, discovered and obliged to die. I had to do a techie before the end. Etheric strands were still trailing into me—all the better.
I used the blade to split the suspension bag—lengths of gelatinous activan stretched from her pale face, she didn’t stir. Laying on hands.
An armchair was already dwindling into the corner as electrovistas opened up in front, the stream of cells blowing past. Bloodshot intervals of subterranean transport and the racket of magic.
Her head was a lovely little number. Creation-fresh, her spirit entering a litter of fallen winter, momentary people reproached her angrily for delicious visions and she died a notch or two. Together the years conspired, denying eachother. Fame admiration trapped the family, their lives in dry dock. Children were plucked like pillows and shoved into formation. Surgeons hand over a mistake, culture paints leaves green which were green, complete and repeated, sickening, and mother birds drop coins into the waiting mouths of chicks. She learnt to keep her eyes closed when crying, tears flowing under the skin and over the skull. Early dreams collapsed like empires. At least there was little chance of her rage dying among the lies. Truthful and ousted, she saw structures in events, sat in crowds watching the armatures of human need and fantasy angle-poising between the people, linking them in a jagged scaffold, and later learnt that others couldn’t see this. Bloodshot canyons of wounds, ward screeches, remote money, a cell padded with snow, a white girl curled round a white soul.
And the Prevail picked her out of the chorus. New fathers taught her to use a sigil gun and walk with street-sensitive claws. Something of herself was left, a miniscule mischief which rifled a secret and took it away. Sacred telemetry. And this rushed into me the instant before her head jumped apart like a balloon filled with water.
The left side of my body was on fire and I was shaking with sobs, several layers of skin gone. She’d been achingly, corrosively beautiful under the make-up. People who’ve had a lot of good luck deny that luck exists—those who’ve had a lot of bad know it does.
2 THE SWEET HALFWAY
Inconsistencies are shown to be limbs on the same creature
The Internecine pulled me in immediately, my headshout summoning a unit before the Prevail swung by in response to the girl’s phonecall. I was ghostburnt, in mourning and voiding lumps of the cover personality.
After a few days in my cell at the Keep, I went to see Lockhart in his study, a room tumoured with statuary and patched with a lot of detail. Chairs of red leather polished like cherry skin, floors of heart pine, fruit hugged in a bowl and a fire the colour of drugs. Here we sat and talked in the utter sadness and treasuring of golden mischief which came of knowing it was all for nothing. The Keepworks cloaking system rendered everything ironic instantly; and all the while we meant it.
‘You know this bit of barefaced enlightenment could have smashed the neighbourhood?’ Lockhart said, his face full of the vitality of old wisdom. Misery glows better with fibres of experience.
‘I got sloppy, then lucked out—that’s all.’ I was healthier. Matter felt right. ‘Where’s Melody?’
‘Paris, sidebanding the Prevail motherhouse. She sends her congratulations. She was interested to hear the Prevail have located the heart of god and this assassin girl of theirs happened to know about it. So you’re to do the job.’
‘Looks that way, doesn’t it? Slingshot into the monster’s eye. Why shouldn’t it be me. A crack in the furnace may be fiercer than the mouth.’
‘Quite. But I’ve been wondering, if the Prevail have the location, why haven’t they carried out the hit?’
‘They’re limousine rebels. Riddles retreat, if they’re weak. This one keeps staring until they look away.’
‘We don’t. You don’t. You’re getting faster. If anything you’re overconfident. We bleed outside the history books, Alix. However tempting to scorn through victory and leave it wrapped in whispers. Don’t become so attached to your rep that you delay the final act forever. Allow for etheric wind-sheer—and that of cowardice.’
‘What the hell does that mean.’
Lockhart’s face congested with concern. ‘People, unlike our target, can give way to pity. I believe the Prevail feel something like that. Individual versus society, or versus god. Either way it’s the resistance to absorption. Independence of spirit. Pause any country and you’ll spot subliminal torture in the frame. The sky of culture looks downward, obstructive and unambitious. The edgemen are a circus of parallel citizenry. So we sometimes forget the pain that drove us here in the first place.’
‘God, camouflaged by sheer familiarity, different to nothing, essence of agony.’ This was re-examined rote, out of an old but good edgemen book called The Ultimate Midnight.
‘The debate is: Destroy the universe entire? Or cut god out like a cancer? We in the Internecine believe that in destroying god, we’ll bring everything to an end—that it runs through all matter. Because the Prevail believe the universe will continue after god’s destruction, their considerations are entirely different from ours. When men assume they’ll continue, responsibility is postponed.’
‘Listen, what if it made no difference, neither ended it all nor made it better—why do the hit?’
‘At the simplest level? Revenge, and honour satisfied.’
‘Then death wouldn’t be punishment enough, would it?’
Lockhart twitched a small smile. ‘You and old Quinas have a lot to talk about.’
I didn’t like the sound of this—Quinas was a charred moon dropped from the sky, yesterday’s hero gone to margin remnants and remains. ‘I’ve met shamanic burnouts. Some shivering leftover with weird eyes? I haven’t got the patience to hear about some gold-rimmed yesterday.’
‘He’s rather younger than I am,’ Lockhart muttered tersely, and I felt like the idiot I was. I loved this kindly gentleman who had been born in the days before our enemy’s existence had even been verified. ‘In any case it’s important you meet him before the big push. And be surprised by nothing you see or hear. He’s ... on the night side of right.’
I decided I needed a little more recovery time. I’d stripped my gears being something deliberately counterclockwise to my idea of myself—someone out of control. Hip discord wasted my time. But I was the great age for edgework—faced with truth, the young