Evensong

“What do you think Chulo felt when Levin was breaking him piece by piece? Not fear, the training would cover that. Pain? The training should cover that too, but none of us has taken damage like that before. I expected pain, but I willed it to go away and I willed the broken parts to go on working.But only part of that was the training. Maybe it was because I had someone to fight for.”

“So did Chulo. His family.”

“His family weren’t there and they weren’t being directly threatened, and he knew their feelings for him. She was present and she was directly threatened, but her feelings, I don’t know. So I thought I had an answer to your question but I don’t. I don’t know where it came from.”

She didn’t reply. She usually knew when to say nothing.

“I’ve been doing sums, Arden. Addition and subtraction. Nineteen of us originally, then we started to say, ‘Eighteen, or is it Seventeen?’ Then gradually we started saying Seventeen. It wasn’t then, when we started saying it, but it is now.

“Before I came here I’d only killed one person, and that was accidentally. I’ve now killed four. One accidentally, two indirectly through botching up their questioning, and one directly and deliberately. I’ve never entered any combat before where I was wishing and intending to kill an opponent. I’ve never had to.”

She still didn’t reply.

“Go back to Fallingwater, Arden. I have unfinished business here.”

“Unfinished business?”

“We found your Detail, and it’s dealt with. For now. You still have to find how they got to Levin and how they remade him, but that’s for you.

“Now I need to find her Detail. I almost saw it for a moment, right after Levin died, but it’s gone. Would you believe that? For once, I can’t remember something!”

“You will.”

“I’ll see you back at Fallingwater. Please have one of those VSTOLs at the airfield, ready. I’ll drive out there in a day or two.”

The VSTOL that brought her, and took the doctors away, had returned and was already waiting for her on the Pier’s landing pad; hovering politely, as always, an inch or two above the surface. Arden Bierce left.

He lay there, doing nothing. He thought, she was here all night. Why? Because she hadn’t expected either of them would survive, and now they had, and she wanted to be sure he hadn’t seen The Detail? Or maybe just because she wanted to help him recover. Sometimes pick the simpler explanation.

He slipped into another unexpectedly dreamless and relaxing sleep. When he woke it was the evening of October 21.

He knew he was getting better because he started taking stock of his hospital room. Spotless, white and silver, like everywhere except her bedroom. The window looked out to sea, not back towards the Brighton foreshore or over the spires and domes of the Pier’s Cathedral complex. The sea was featureless, dark grey.

The hospital was located in part of a Pavilion-style building on the edge of the Pier and near its end, so emergency planes could land nearby. He saw gulls from his window. Their sheer numbers, and their messy opportunistic feeding, made them almost vermin. But they were beautiful when they flew, graceful and most un-verminlike as they slid down the air or soared on it. Their slender white shapes would have graced any New Anglican interior. Sometimes, maybe the surface and not the inside was what counted.

Gaetano visited. Anwar felt the same kind of relativity he’d felt in the Signing Room. They spoke to each other out of different frames of reference. They communicated only obliquely, across different universes. Remarks that were mundane or conventional or well-meant in Gaetano’s universe were charged with menace and double-meaning when they travelled across the room to Anwar’s.

“If anyone threatens her...Can never repay...Most important person in the world to me...She’ll always owe...”

And vice-versa, from Anwar’s universe to Gaetano’s.

“Not over yet...I owe her too...Still some details...Unfinished business.”

And, as the door closed behind Gaetano, Anwar kept thinking, You went back. You shot him in the head, to make sure he was dead.

On the night of October 21, the first dream came. He was alone in the room. Olivia, who seemed to have evolved a shift pattern, left a gap in her shift, and the dream slid in softly, visiting him when she wasn’t.

Maybe it was the accumulated trauma, hitting him at last. What should have been the final part of the dream, the part where he learned The Detail, came first and most easily. The Detail walked up to him, showed itself to him...and swirled coquettishly away.