Omega

The complex was well equipped, with a swimming pool, fitness suites and viewing theatres showing the latest Cinema Vérité releases. Owain retraced his path to the chapel room, and found it filled with a small but raucous audience who were watching jerky video footage on the screen that had been set up at its front. It showed a portly middle-aged man, who was obviously known to them, frantically mounting a much younger woman in a pink ballerina’s tutu who had draped herself across a gymnasium vaulting horse. She was looking knowingly at what might have been a hidden camera with a crafted expression in which outrage and amusement were intermixed. There were bursts of hilarity and encouragement from the watchers.

Owain descended the stairs and went outside. He walked down through formal gardens of pruned rose bushes and stunted shrubs, past ranks of greenhouses, workshops, stables. Migrant workers were using besoms to brush the snow off the fairways and greens of a golf course. A quartet of senior officers was already teeing up at the first hole.

It was a surprisingly bright morning, the clouds like mother-of-pearl. He found himself in woodland, next to a glittering stream. He’d come out without an overcoat but the freezing air was invigorating. He followed the stream through the woodland until eventually the trees thinned and he came out on heath land where a tall triple-layered fence marked the edge of the estate.

There were distant bursts of gunfire. Surmounting the hill, he saw beyond the fence a small group of riders pursuing a darting creature over the white landscape: feline, with mottled grey flanks, like an arctic leopard. It was a werecat, a breed originally engineered as a potential plague carrier but released into the wild for sport. The riders, all women, sat in pairs on the broad backs of their horses, the pillions brandishing automatic rifles. They swiftly vanished between the folds of the hill.

The fence was electrified, enclosing a tank trap and, according to the signs, landmines. The ground dropped away sharply, was almost a cradown which he might easily plunge. He looked skywards, searching for the bright smear of the sun. Suddenly he felt adrift again, almost disembodied. If he let himself fall, who would ever find him?

“So?” Tanya said. “What did you think?”

We were coming out of a cinema in Leicester Square. Already it was getting dark.

I looked blankly at her. I couldn’t remember a single thing about the movie. Not one thing.

She gave a short laugh.

“What?” I said.

“You were sitting so still I had to keep nudging you to check you were awake.”

She tucked her arm through mine and led me off. Inwardly I was still reeling. What would happen to me if Owain died? Would my connection with his world be severed? Or would I be extinguished too? It was a very real possibility, given my increasingly visceral identification with him. I was also unnerved by the revelation about his sexuality and its murky undercurrents. The more I found out about him, the more he alarmed me.

We wandered across the square. It was filled with neon and bustle, people hurrying in all directions, wolfing burgers, talking on mobiles. It was the first time I’d been in central London since the explosion. Regent Street wasn’t too far away, a few minutes walk at most. Fortunately we were going in the opposite direction.

“Are you hungry?” Tanya asked. “We ought to eat. There probably won’t be much this evening apart from vol-au-vents and carrot sticks.”

She yanked me through a forecourt of empty tables. “By the way, who’s Marisa?”

I jolted. “What?”

“You said her name at one point. While you were dozing.”

A trilling noise. Tanya unzipped her shoulder bag and rummaged inside. It would probably be Geoff calling. I felt as if I had been rescued.

Something squawked. It startled him. A second or two passed before he realised it was the radio in his pocket.

Owain pulled it free. He was walking along a two-lane road, keeping up a brisk pace to banish the chill of the day. He’d followed the line of the perimeter fence and must have almost completed a circuit of the estate. He couldn’t imagine where all the time had gone. Now, with night rapidly falling, he had no idea where he was.

A crackle. “Owain?” Giselle’s voice.

“Yes?”

“Where are you?”

“Out walking.”

“We need you here. A.s.a.p., please.”

He could hear an uncharacteristic anxiety in her voice.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“The field marshal. He’s collapsed. Just get yourself back here, OK?”

He asked what had happened, but she’d already cut the connection. Owain thrust the radio into his pocket and broke into a jog, heading towards where he thought the nearest road would be.

Soon afterwards he heard an engine sound. A squat Centaur ATV appeared from behind rusty mounds of rhododendron.

Owain stood in the middle of the road, waving his arms. The Centaur pulled up. It had army markings, a young khaki-bereted head poking out of its top. A corporal.

“I need a lift back to the house,” Owain called.