Vicious Circle

It still wasn’t a pleasant prospect, but I didn’t have any better ideas. Lowering my weight onto a beam that led directly across to the door, I tentatively let go of the sill with my hands and found my balance. This expedition was turning into a laugh riot.

The room wasn’t big: three steps would bring me to the open doorway and the deeper darkness beyond. I took the first one okay, and the second. The third became problematic because the beam gave an audible crack under me and shifted slightly. I abandoned plan A and dived for the door, catching it in a tight embrace just as the beam sagged and parted, sending a clattering storm of sooty fragments into the void beneath.

There were no floorboards on the other side of the doorway either, so I was hugging a fat beam, charred in the middle but seemingly sound, while my legs dangled into emptiness.

“You can let go,” said a gruff voice from down there. “There’s a cement floor about eight feet underneath you. So long as you land on your feet, you should do okay. Throw your weight wrong and you’ll bust a leg at best, but I guess that’s the price you pay for breaking and entering.”

“Think—you could manage—a stirrup?” I panted, slightly winded.

The voice gave a sound between a snort of laughter and a throat-clearing hack. “I think you better do as you’re told,” it said. “If you just dangle there like a Chinese lantern, I’m going to put some holes in you so the light shows through better.”

“What light?” I ground out, still holding on tight.

The voice sighed, long and deep and slightly ragged. Then a second voice that raised the hairs on the back of my neck said, “Give him some light, Dad.” It was a little girl’s voice, distant and faint but perfectly clear. Abbie’s voice. I craned my head sideways to see over my hunched shoulder, but it was still too dark to make out anything in the room below.

Something scratched against something else, and a neon line wrote itself across the dark, blossoming abruptly into the flare of a match. The light dipped, guttered, twinned itself momentarily into two yellow-white eyes. Then, as the candle caught and spread a meager glow across the scene, Peace flicked the match away. It died as it fell.

He was lying on the ground a few feet to my left, a blanket spread over him. And he was pointing that fucking handgun straight at me. Maybe the candle illuminated one or two other details of the room below me, but for some reason the gun was the thing that drew my attention.

“Drop,” Peace suggested again. “I’m running out of patience here.”

I dropped, more or less straight, and managed to keep my balance when I hit the ground. The gun stayed with me all the way: at least, I assume it did. Either way it was pointing directly at my chest when I straightened up and turned to look at Peace again.

He looked as though he’d fared badly since we met on board the Collective. There was a ragged wound across his face, from his left temple down across the bridge of his nose to his right cheek: a heraldic bend sinister drawn in red so deep that in this light it might as well be black. The rest of his face around that dark line was as white as milk. The hand that held the gun seemed to tremble slightly, as if it was hard work for him to keep it aimed straight.

Abbie stood behind him, almost lost in the shadows. She was little more than a shadow herself, the candlelight shining through her to highlight the rough texture of the brick wall in grainy lines of white and soot black. She stared at me with curiosity—but calmly, without any trace of fear. Given how she’d died, that was impressive: a lot of ghosts never tear themselves free from the emotions they were feeling when they crossed over. The moment of their death becomes their destiny and their eternal rest. Or lack of it.

Because I was looking for it, I saw the glint of gold on Peace’s wrist. I couldn’t make out the shape with any clarity, but I knew what it was: he was wearing Abbie’s gold locket as a bracelet on his right arm, just as he had been before. He wasn’t taking any chances of being separated from her.

The room was a gutted shell, the walls and floor blackened. It was empty apart from the rough bivouac that Peace had set up there: a Calor gas stove, a suitcase, a bucket for a latrine. There was a sour smell in the air, redolent of old sweat and recent pain. Riding over it without hiding it at all was the sweeter scent of sandalwood incense.

I put my hands in the air, fingers spread to show that they were empty.

“You know who hired me?” I said.

“Probably better than you do,” Peace answered, his voice hard. He had me on that one.

“I’m not working for them anymore.”