Laura laid both torch and mobile on the counter, then removed Max's old water pistol from her pocket. Made of lightweight plastic, it was a fairish replica though unlikely to fool anyone for long, even in the dark. Still, imitation firearms were banned from all public venues for a reason. She was also carrying a keyring pepper spray, which she'd armed herself with after the police attack on Zach-not much use against more than one person, but she'd seen what Zach could accomplish given the opportunity. One man down was one man less to deal with. If it came to it.
For all Zach's tribal loyalty, simus could be just as unpredictable as the rabble.
She listened attentively but there were no voices and no sounds she could detect, aside from the wind wrestling to invade this once majestic palace-this theatre as absurd as any in which her grandfather preached (and he'd preached in some impressive ones). Resting her forearms on the rickety countertop, she closed her eyes and repeated her message to Max, struggling to intersperse it with an image of that smiling, blue-eyed, crystal-toting figure. Her memory was sketchy at best, for she'd only seen him in brief flashes, but even a well-known face wouldn't have made it any easier. Odd how a person like Zach could be so vivid, so present, so utterly the breath and cell and pulse of you, yet impossible to project onto the screen of your mind.
I don't have a single photo of him, she suddenly thought. And then for one canted moment saw him as she'd first seen him-late for class, leaning into the wind, indifferent to the sheeting rain as if it were no more than planes of grainy light, unsmiling. He lifted his head and his eyes passed over her. 'Look at that,' Olivia breathed, clutching Laura's arm. He stopped-she now realised that he must have been able to hear-and regarded them. Olivia preened at the library window, too self-absorbed to catch the sudden lash of sleet in his eyes before the shutter closed.
In the long weeks and weeks to come it would have devastated Laura to see their colour darken almost to crow-black, clouded by pain.
'Still playing with toys?'
Laura cried out and snatched for the water pistol, but only succeeded in knocking her entire arsenal to the floor. As she backed up against the counter, her heartbeat louder than the final clatters, Fabio bent to pick up the scattered objects. He replaced the torch and mobile, weighed Max's toy in the palm of his hand. 'Not even any water,' he intoned mournfully.
'You're supposed to be dead!'
'Is that so?'
Halfway to the pepper spray, she jammed to a halt. Afterwards, she promised herself, once he explains; by then her hands would have stopped shaking. Fabio, however, studied his wrister, made an adjustment, and with predictable insouciance merely smiled, handed her the water pistol, and walked off, apparently expecting her to follow. She stared at his retreating back for a second or two before hissing, 'You're insufferable.' At his low laugh she switched on the torch and waited to see if he'd demur, then stuffed her mobile into a pocket when he continued crossing the lobby without a backward glance, though beckoning over his shoulder.
'Fabio! Where's Max? I'm not moving a step till I know he's OK.'
He took no notice, and with that the last of her fear burst into rage. 'How dare you! How dare you, after losing a brother yourself! Or was that another of your lies, your little games?'
Fabio stopped and slowly turned round. There was no smile on his face now, and the protean silence carried the voice of Mateus, and the ashen voices of Nicola and Eliot, and voices lost, and voices stolen, and above all the one voice which would call to her, and always call, as if nothing ever changed or died, and forever called.
'I think you'd better tell me what's going on,' she said.
Still he gazed at her.
'Are you a simu?'
'No.'
'Then who-or what?'
'It's your Ophelia who says it best: we know what we are, but know not what we may be.'
'And I must be madder than Ophelia to expect a reasonable answer from you!'
He stared at her a moment longer, the ghost of a smile beginning to lighten his face.
'It's not funny,' she said severely.
'No . . . no, I suppose you'll need a few more years to see the black humour in death. The young are so very earnest. It's one of the first similarities I observed amongst the sentient races.'
Gooseflesh threatening, Laura cracked the lid on first one, then another scenario, not keen to examine any of them closely. She resorted to a familiar stratagem. 'You're a very bizarre sort of ghost. Don't they let jesters and stand-up comedians into the afterworld?'
Fabio laughed softly again, then came back to stand in front of her. 'Shall I kiss you to prove I'm real? I'll be happy to oblige once you've given me the formula.'
The pepper spray was burning a hole in Laura's pocket. 'I take it you know Zach is with me,' she said. 'Haven't you spoken to him?'
'He's busy chasing phantoms.'
'What?'
'There's no one here.'
'Max-?'
'Your brother's fine, don't worry.'
'But that video . . . the simus . . .'
'Simus can act as well as sapiens. Even young ones like Max.'
A short silence.
'You know about Max?'
'It's my job to know. Just as it's my job to protect them.' He waved a hand towards the auditorium. 'So let's save Zach further anxiety. The formula, please.'
'Given this little charade, how am I supposed to trust you? You wear fancy togs, you sport fancy gadgets, you drive a fancy car, and from what I've heard, you've got a very fancy shot at the top of the corporate food chain.'
For the first time she saw a flash of real anger cross Fabio's face. 'Don't equate me with Fulgur!'
She crossed her arms in a stance which would have reminded herself of her mum, had she been looking. Big Mamas come in all shapes and sizes, and whatever else he was, Fabio was Human Resources, someone who saw himself as both connoisseur and mercurial seer, fundi of high-potential startups. Those green eyes of his began to gleam.
'Where I come from, we don't hurt children,' he said. 'You can trust me because Zach does. Because the point of this exercise is to free the simus from Fulgur's tyranny, eventually to find a workaround for the genetic defect. Because our interests, yours and mine, coincide.'
'Maybe.'
'Laura, it's a rare and wonderful privilege to witness a major paradigm shift. Believe me, right now I wouldn't be anywhere else in the scheme of things.' There was no mistaking the fervour in his voice. 'I would never-never-do anything to endanger a single simu.' The almost manic passion of the man. 'You're very young to be a leading actor, and younger still to be an agent of transformation-a fundamental transformation of human life. But it's what Zach wants.'
She nodded, discomfited by the tightness in her throat, the proximity of tears.
'Perhaps I'd best show you.' He indicated his wrister. 'Be prepared for a shock.'
'More shocking than resurrection from the dead?'
She met and held his gaze. 'You've changed,' he said almost grudgingly.
Annoyed at herself for wanting his approval, she became testy. 'Zach isn't the only person chasing phantoms.' Let him beg a little for it. 'You, dear Fabio, need to reprogram your Ouija board.'
'My what?'
'Wow. You mean there's actually something I know that you don't.'
'Plenty, I daresay.'
Damn those eyes! 'Then plug this into your motherboard: there's no serum.'
'Quite a wicked roll you're on. Under the circumstances.'
'I'm not joking.'
He heard out her explanation, then muttered what could only be a colourful phrase in Portuguese. 'The wily bastard,' he added.
'Who?'
'Your dad. Jesus, it's always the quiet ones.'
Without further preamble he played his fingers over his wrister, which by now was making her insanely curious. In an instant, however, the present was forgotten, jolted into a sort of retrograde amnesia by the panorama which unfolded before her, a panorama at once utterly alien and achingly familiar, though glimpsed only for a split second at the smouldering ruins. It was as if she were gazing upon a vision of all the selves she was and could have been, laid out in light. Shock didn't begin to cover it. Nor could she know that this was a baptism very like the immersion Lev would give Zach from a tent in the midst of a blizzard, his however a living singularity in sound.
Later she wouldn't be able to guess how long she stood there, the narrated self of before and during and after compressed to infinite disorder. Gradually she became aware of Fabio's voice, at first distant and watery, then growing stronger as she began to surface.
'Consciousness is fundamental to the cosmos, and indistinguishable from it. It's always a matter of concern when a sentient race seems bent on self-destruction, as localised as the event may be initially. Your physicists are just beginning to understand the concept of entanglement.'
'Who are you?' Laura repeated in a whisper, still awed by a cognitive overload approaching the seizure threshold.
'In all essentials I'm as human as you. Beyond that there's no answer I can give you which would make sense, not in your language, not without the mathematics. Sometimes, of course, there have been references to angels and the like.'
'Please, whatever you do, don't tell me that my grandfather's right after all!'
His sultry laugh. 'Religion is the infancy of self-awareness. What an impatient lot you homo sapiens are.'
'You mean-'
'I mean that Zach, and the simus generally, must be protected, and nurtured, or humans will find themselves in an evolutionary deadend. Not for the first time, need I add, on your world.'
Laura's disorientation was ebbing. 'Yeah, we learned about the Neanderthals in school. Some people think they were smarter than us.'
'Have you seen pictures of those metal branks once used to bridle slaves and heretics and scolds?'
'A kind of iron mask?' Laura asked, puzzled by the apparent irrelevance of Fabio's question.
'Intelligence takes many forms. Sometimes it can be a cage-a stifling, torturous, inescapable mind cage-just like such primitive devices. Believe me, smart, even brilliant as you sapiens can be, you need the simus. They're your future.'
'Then what about Mateus? Was he really your brother?'
There was no answer.
'Fabio?'
'Fabio?'
Where had he gone? Her sight now close to normal, Laura caught a glimpse of shadows at the periphery of her vision, caught shadows and whispers, then felt certain she was being watched, but when she shone the torch into every corner and alcove of the lobby, aim wobbling, pulse jumping, the only oddity she found was a vintage zoetrope, still intact, affixed in a niche not far from the staircase. But no Fabio.
If no one was here, she could call out for Zach.
She didn't call out for Zach.
She did, however, refresh her memory, and for one canted moment saw him as she'd first seen him-late for class, leaning into the wind, indifferent to the sheeting rain as if it were no more than planes of grainy light, unsmiling. He lifted his head and his eyes passed over her. 'Look at that,' Olivia breathed, clutching Laura's arm. He stopped-she now realised that he must have been able to hear-and regarded them. Olivia preened at the library window, too self-absorbed to catch the sudden lash of sleet in his eyes before the shutter closed.
In the long Arctic to come it would have devastated Laura to see their colour darken almost to crow-black, clouded by pain.
As she made her way towards the theatre doors, steeling herself for the unlikely, the improbable, surely the impossible, she heard, or thought she'd heard, keep telling him-words now so intimate that the threshold between hearing and remembering and confabulating, between herself and the other, seemed as elastic as nilas, that thin, transparent crust of sea ice which bends rather than fractures under pressure. If she repeated the words fast enough, they flowed into one another like frames of a film. Or she could drawl them to a near standstill, so that each sound loosed itself from its auditory moorings. Upon immersion in freezing water a mammal undergoes a powerful autonomic reflex, the diving response. Vital signs-breathing, heartbeat, peripheral blood circulation-diminish to a near-death state.
Keep. Telling. Him.
Her dad had been the one to test the ice on the pond before they were allowed to skate. 'I've seen totally unnecessary fatalities during my stint in A&E,' he'd explained. His ardour for exactitude impelled him to add, 'Sometimes, though, we'd get lucky. If you're young and fit, and especially if you keep your head above water, you can survive hypothermia for up to an hour. Once, a boy's arms froze to the ice, and we managed to resuscitate him. But don't count on it. Usually, you die.'
Zach, do you hear me? I'm not going to let the ice have you. No matter what it takes.
* * *
Laura couldn't put it off any longer. Her stomach cramping, and her mouth beginning to fill with spit, she placed her ear against the narrow, almost non-existent gap between the double doors. There was nothing she could make out, certainly no murmur of voices. Her own breathing seemed exceptionally loud. With her free hand she patted the bulge in her pocket like a talisman. She'd decided not to go in brandishing a pistol. Keep something back for the last length, Janey always insisted.
Laura swallowed, tightened her sticky grip on the torch, cautiously pushed the right-hand door open no more than a finger's breadth, and listened again. Still only silence. In just such a silence she'd found two rows of corpses lined up like inflatable dolls. In just such a silence the screen had burst forth with an impossible silent movie. In just such a silence a dead Fabio had appeared behind her in the lobby. She would torch this place herself once she and Zach (and Max?) were away.
