Evensong

Later they stood at the window looking out at the lights of Brighton’s shoreline and seafront. They were naked. They hadn’t been naked while on the table. Fully clothed, like the first time, she’d said. It’s better when you act like it’s spontaneous.

Normally Anwar preferred the feel of a woman’s naked body against his. But he was getting to like it her way. Disarranging her clothes was like unwrapping a gift. Seeing what was inside. And, if he still had to satisfy his obsession not to make tidy things untidy, he found he could disarrange her clothes carefully and slowly. She didn’t seem to mind.

She’d taken him into herself even more greedily than last time. I’m almost wiping her kidneys, he thought incredulously, amid the swelter. They went again and again. Her greed, for food and for sex. It’s unbelievable. Where does she put all that food? And all that sperm?

They kept stealing looks at each other. Naked, she was exactly as he’d imagined when he’d seen her for the first time: lithe, slender, and toned. He wasn’t quite as she’d imagined. His musculature was impressive and defined, but somehow not entirely right. On Brighton beach, a few people might have looked twice at him.

It was modelled on the musculature of big cats. All cats had a higher ratio of muscle to body-weight than other mammals, and so did Anwar. He wasn’t a cyborg or robot, but a living thing, with enhancements replicating other living things, in specific areas where they were better than human.

She didn’t know that, but she knew the Dead were somehow made. His muscles didn’t bulge unnaturally like those of a bodybuilder, but they rippled. Everywhere. She’d felt them moving, under his skin and under the touch of her greedy grabbing hands. They were living tissue. Not mechanical or metallic or electronic.

But still not entirely right. As if he’d been taken apart and somehow put back together according to slightly different principles. Which was, she realised, probably the case: millions must have been put into him. Tens of millions. She thought, Can he protect me from what they’ll send?

As in the Boardroom, there was an easy silence between them: fitting for the simple slaking of simple lust. Literally in and out, he thought, with no baggage. Tidy and self- contained. Even better than the best prostitutes. And he could afford the best.

They looked out at the i-360 Tower on the seafront two miles away, at the bright lights of its main structure and the illuminated observation pod, a large ring-doughnut going up and down the Tower’s shaft.

“I know an architect,” said Anwar, “a good friend of mine, who would have seriously considered redesigning that doughnut as a hand.”

She looked at him in puzzlement for a moment, then burst out laughing. But by the time he’d decided to join her (he normally preferred to smile quietly rather than laugh out loud) she’d already stopped and was thinking about something else. 

FIVE: SEPTEMBER 2060

1

The following day, promptly a t9:00a.m., Anwar started work. It was an easy commute. Gaetano’s apartment and offices were on the same floor as Olivia’s. She had left three hours earlier on Church business.

Gaetano’s office, like every interior he had seen—though he hadn’t seen hers, yet—was nacreous white and silver. It was tidy and sparse, as Anwar had expected.

“You’re early,” Gaetano said.

“No. It’s exactly nine, as we arranged.”

“I meant for your stay here. September isn’t over yet and the summit isn’t for two weeks. A young woman named Arden Bierce called us last week and said you wanted to come here early. A very nice young woman.”

“Yes, people like Arden. She has a way about her.”

“Well, it made her suspicious.”

“The Archbishop? Why?”

“It was different from what she got Rafiq to agree...She really does feel threatened. You may not think she acts or sounds like it, but she does.”

“Last night she was supposed to give me a briefing about who’s threatening her, but she changed her mind halfway through. Apparently I’m now getting it from you.”

“She was in a strange mood last night...What did she tell you?”

“Only that the people threatening her are the people who really run the Church’s original founders: the ones who aren’t named, even in conspiracy theories, and they don’t like her having moved the Church beyond their control. Is there any truth in that? Do you believe it?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then why didn’t she say more? If she wants me to protect her, why didn’t she say exactly who she wants protection from? Do you know who they are? Where they are? Why they’re threatening her?”