CORDELIA PA
I opened my eyes and flinched against the bright sunlight streaming in through the diaphanous white gauze curtains. I was sitting on the edge of a bed in a hotel room by the coast. I wore a pressure suit, but the helmet had been removed and lay on the carpet beside my booted feet like an upturned goldfish bowl. Beyond the window, a rich azure sea sweltered beneath a hot white sun, and I had to put up a hand to shade my eyes.
Across the room, my father lounged in a chair. His right ankle rested on his left knee and a champagne glass dangled from his fingers. He looked younger than he had the last time I’d seen him, on the frozen plateau. The grey flecks that had speckled his hair were gone and the wrinkles around his eyes seemed to have been smoothed away, as if by the patient thumbs of a long-suffering sculptor. He wore a loose cotton shirt and a pair of blue denim jeans, and his eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.
“Hello, Cordelia.”
I gaped at him. “Dad?”
He shook his head, and I could see miniature reflections of my face in his lenses.
“Call me Nick.”
“Nick?”
“It’s my name.” He gave a self-conscious smile. “One of them, anyway.”
“I don’t understand.” I couldn’t remember how I’d come to be there. One moment I’d been on the Aunt, trying to figure a way off the Plate, the next… “What’s happening? Where are we?”
“We’re inside the Intrusion.”
“Inside…”
Nick tapped his temple with the middle finger of his right hand. “Aftershock.” He looked apologetic. I frowned dubiously at the room’s white walls and nondescript furniture.
“You’re not dead?”
Nick uncrossed his legs. He bent forward and placed the empty champagne glass on the carpet. “So I’m told.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Here we both are.”
I felt a sudden shiver of panic. “I’m trapped too?”
“No, child. I told you, we’re both inside the Intrusion. This is…” He reached out and rapped his knuckles against the wall. “Just an illusion, like a simulation.”
My gloved hands were resting on the coverlet. I squeezed two fistfuls of material. It felt real enough through the gloves.
“Why are we here?”
“Because the Intrusion wants me to talk to you.”
“The Intrusion? About what?”
“About your talent for manipulating Plate technology.” He took off his glasses, folded them, and slipped them into the chest pocket of his shirt. Now I could see his eyes, he had that middle-distance stare some of the older scavengers wore back on City Plate Two. It was the disengaged, inward look of a man with too much past and too little future; a man who had seen and done terrible, unconscionable things in the name of survival; a man who had borne witness to atrocities, who had gone toe-to-toe with death and thereby suffered an epiphany he would never be able to satisfactorily articulate, even to himself.
“The Intrusion’s sentient,” he said. “Its builders made it that way, to cover their retreat.”
“The Hearthers?” To a child growing up on City Plate Two, the Hearthers had been figures of folklore, fading deities who had fashioned the twenty miniature worlds of the Plate system and then abandoned them to the ravages of time. I had lived and grown amongst the debris of their vanished civilisation, scraping a living scavenging trinkets from their empty buildings. If I had any interest in them as living beings it went only as far as trying to guess where they may have hidden their valuables or fixed their booby-traps. I got up and walked across to the window. The suit weighed on me like a guilty conscience. My boots left ridged treads in the carpet.
“We need you to be vigilant,” Nick said behind me. “The Hearthers’ ships turned on them, and drove them to create the Intrusion as a means of escape.”
I pressed my face to the window. The pane chilled my nose and forehead. The hotel had been built on the edge of a promontory overlooking a rocky shoreline. Through the fog of my own breath, I could see a narrow strip of tough-looking grass, and the waves rising and falling against the rough barnacled teeth at the foot of the cliff.
“You’re telling me this as if I can do something to stop the ships.”
“Perhaps you can.” He came and stood next to me, watching the gulls riding the updrafts above the lip of the cliff. “You need to find your brother.”
“Mikey?”
Nick shook his head. “Mikey will be there when you need him. I’ve paid a scavenger named Doberman to deliver him to the place you’ll need him most. He’ll be there with you at the end. But right now, I’m talking about your other brother. His name is Lewis.”
“I have another brother?” I felt my mind race with questions. Before I could ask, Nick held up a hand to shush me.
“Lewis lives on Cold Chapel,” he said, “and has in his possession an artefact I gave him four years ago. You need to get it from him and take it back to the city.”
“City Plate Two?”
“There’s a room, set in a tower. You need to retrieve the artefact from Lewis and take it to that room.”
“And then what?”
“Then I will have fulfilled my purpose. Can you do this, Cordelia? Can you do it for me?”
I bit my lip. The suit felt cumbersome and hot. “I wouldn’t know how to start.”
“We’ve sent somebody to help you.”
“Who?”
“The woman you found.” Nick smiled with one side of his face. “Also, I’m going to give you a present. This is a simulation. As long as we’re in here, we’re just software. So, I’m pasting all my flight experience, all my knowledge of captaining the Gigolo Aunt, into your memory.”
“Wait, I’m not sure I want—”
He held up a hand. “It’s my gift to you, and it’ll be there when you wake.”
“But, Dad…”
He took the elbow of my suit. “Call me Nick.” He stepped up close and kissed my forehead. His lips felt as cold as the window.
“How much of your life have you already forgotten?” he asked. “Trust me, even if you’re blessed with a reasonably functional memory, by the time you reach thirty there will be whole days, weeks and months of which you retain no conscious recollection. All those boring Sunday afternoons; all that stuff you learned at school; all those nights you lay awake thinking; all those books you read; all those people you used to know… They say we’re the sum of our memories, Cordelia. But what happens when we forget?” He looked into my eyes. “When our memories are lost or taken from us, what remains? When we lose the things that make us who we are, who do we then become?”
“Nick, I—”
A woman entered the room. Like Nick, she wore blue jeans and a white shirt, but had covered them with an old tweed jacket, and had pinned up her long hair. She looked like a younger version of the woman we had recovered from the observatory.
“It’s time,” she said. Her eyes were full of stars.
Nick glanced at his wrist. “Already?”
“I’m afraid so.”
The woman took me by the hands. Her fingers were as smooth and cool as marble. “I’m sorry to hurry you away,” she said, “but it’s time for you to go back.”
“Who are you?”
The woman narrowed her eyes, as if trying to decide how much to disclose. “When I had a name,” she said at last, “it was Sofia.”
“When you had a name?”
“I no longer need one.” Her lips were the colour of night; her skin the sallow hue of old wax. She led me over to the bed and bade me sit. “But now the time for questions is past; now all that matters are deeds. In a moment you will fall asleep. When you wake, you will go to Cold Chapel. You will retrieve the key.”
“What key?”
Sofia’s eyes were a warm summer’s night. The wind moved and the curtains stirred in time to the rise and fall of her chest. She was the focus of the world. The room, the sky and the sea were hers to control.
“Are you part of the Intrusion?” I blurted. Sofia looked down fondly and put a hand to my hair.
“Child, I am the Intrusion.”