Chapters (56)
- PROLOGUE
- PART 1
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- PART 2
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- PART 3
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- PART 4
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- PART 5
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- EPILOGUE
—And Murakami’s arm, raised, hand filled with the Kalashnikov as he clears it from his belt—
—My own yell, stretching out and blending with his as I throw myself forward to block him, hands still bound, hopelessly slow—
And then the clouds ripped open in the east, and vomited angelfire.
And the dock lit up with light and fury.
And the sky fell in.
FORTY-NINE
Afterwards, it took me a while to realise I wasn’t dreaming again. There was the same hallucinatory, abandoned quality to the scene around me as the childhood nightmare I’d relived after the stunblast, the same lack of coherent sense. I was lying on the dock at Segesvar’s farm again, but it was deserted and my hands were suddenly unbound. A faint mist lay over everything, and the colours seemed bleached out of the surroundings.
The grav sled stood patiently floating where it had been, but with twisted dream-logic, it was Virginia Vidaura who now lay on it, face pallid on either side of the massive bruise across her features. A few metres out into the Expanse, patches of water were inexplicably burning with pale flames.
Sylvie Oshima sat watching them, hunched forward on one of the mooring posts like a ripwing and frozen in place. She must have heard me stumbling as I got up, but she didn’t move or look round.
It had stopped raining, finally. The air smelt scorched.
I walked unsteadily to the water’s edge and stood beside her.
“Grigori fucking Ishii,” she said, still without looking at me.
“Sylvie?”
Then she turned, and I saw the confirmation. The deCom command head was back. The detail of how she held herself, the look in her eyes, the voice had all shifted back. She smiled wanly.
“This is all your fault, Micky. You gave me Ishii to think about. I couldn’t leave it alone. Then I remembered who he was, and I had to go back down there and look for him. And dig through the paths he came in on, the paths she came in on too once I started looking.” She shrugged, but it wasn’t an easy gesture. “I opened the way.”
“You’re losing me. Who is Grigori Ishii?”
“You really don’t remember? Kid’s history class, year three? The Alabardos Crater?”
“My head hurts, Sylvie, and I cut a lot of school. Get to the point.”
“Grigori Ishii was a Quellist jetcopter pilot with the fall-back detachment at Alabardos. The one who tried to fly Quell out. He died with her when the angelfire cut loose.”
“Then…”
“Yeah.” She laughed, barely, a single small sound. “She is who she says she is.”
“Did?” I stopped and looked around me, trying to encompass the enormity of it. “Did she do this?”
“No, I did.” A shrugged correction. “They did, I asked them to.”
“You called down the angelfire? You hotwired an orbital?”