BERD SNATCHED A kiss from Charles’s lips and before he could respond, flew out to the elevator.
“Berd!” he called. Though he had begged her to leave, anguish aged his face. She prayed he did not guess what she was about to undertake.
“Go!” she demanded as she inhaled the tantalising taste of ginger. From now on, she would always associate ginger with grief. “Go! Don’t wait for me.”
Charles clenched the steering wheel, nodded. His eyes were bright with unshed tears, his face pale and distant as the moon as he prepared to dance with Death once more.
She had never loved him more.
She pressed the ‘G’ button. When she looked back the door had already shut. Gone. This time she was leaving him. The ride was swift and when the door opened, she stumbled out. The hum was louder here on ground level. Noisier than before. She shivered. The dizzying fresh smell of pine made her blink rapidly, but to her surprise she was dry-eyed and excited.
Clear of the stack, she turned around and waved. The top of the stack was a speck. She couldn’t see Charles but assumed he had seen her for in less than a minute the stack had rumbled back into motion and was lurching away to meet the other book stacks.
The attacking army of book stacks.
Hundreds of monstrous shadow crabs were scuttling forward on that ghoulish landscape. Pincerless. Amber sparks trailed the ground, the reek of copper and scorching melded with the smell of burnt pine.
She turned away, not wishing to see the battle. She was also running out of time. If Charles failed, there would be no need to reprogram Gine. Charles had mentioned that he had instructed Gine to do whatever it had to do to save Charles’s life.
She had to find where Charles had placed that instruction.
If he had told her, she could not recall. The way she understood it, each computer engine basically performed one program. To change programs generally required modifying each engine itself or else inserting fresh cards via the punch reader until Charles came along with his novel ideas of storing past programs in secondary storage. Great innovation only it complicated matters, because it meant that the line of code to save his life could be anywhere.
She doubted Charles would have been stupid enough to place it in a stack. It would mean uploading the program each time to run it. The instruction was too important. Charles would have to have placed it in the Mill. She did not think she needed to find the original instruction. Surely all she needed was to insert a new instruction: Save hers AND Charles’s lives.
Then add one more: get them out.
But if it was really that simple Charles would have done so a long time ago. What must have happened was that once Charles had started to execute the program, he was unable to halt its execution. Programs generally executed until the engine ran out of energy or the program finished or there was an error, but this Engine running out of energy meant the end of Charles. And the program never finished because Gine was constantly learning. Correcting any errors.
Engines never allowed the addition of new instructions or the modification of current instructions until the program finished executing. Yet Charles had been able to add that extra instruction. She chewed her lip as she pondered how he had done so. Charles’s intelligence was making life complicated. The only conclusion she could come to was that after he added that command something must have happened to stop him modifying the program.
Berd stepped onto moist ground that glowed seaweed green. She had almost reached the waterfall. Ahead the thick ribbon of fluorescent blue burned in the darkness like Jacob’s ladder. The waterfall’s sapphire light lit up the sides of the cliff face: a taper shining before a masque on a black-and-windless night. Not so long ago she had imagined angels dancing in the air, now silvered outlines of dead men floated in their place, the cold spray of the waterfall their salivary kisses pressed upon her brow. If the water had laughed before, now it wept.
Then the ground leapt like a blanket, shaken as if spread out. She tumbled forward a couple of times before she rolled to a stop.
Giant drops of boiling water seared the ground. Steam jetted into the air where they landed. A book stack must have collapsed!
Berd screamed as one of the monster drops landed on her arm and scorching pain wracked her body. Clenching her teeth, she fought for control as bits of broken metal thudded, smashing the ground around her. She curled her body, cowered, and when the deluge lessened, pushed to her feet, relieved to hear the battle still raged behind her – Charles was alive.
She scrambled forward, hugging her injured arm to her side, refusing to look behind. Smooth as a pane of glass, the waterfall was a window to another world: a vista that burned and boiled with a slow azure fire. Silver shimmered up from its depths, rising as the throbbing veins of insect wings carried the metamorphosing dead to new life.
Berd’s wound, swollen from shoulder to elbow, chafed with every movement. Excruciating pain, made her eye the energy with hope, for she knew that energy would not just ease the pain but eradicate it, completely.
As if the waterfall knew, the air before Berd thinned, quickening her progress while currents pushed, eddying at her from behind.
Forward. Forward. Hurry. Hurry. Voices in her head called.
She had to look behind the pane. She had to find out. She had to. Any indecision dissolved into clouds, dissipating like cirrus on a stiff breeze. No conflict. No pain. No Charles. Not even Gine. Only beauty and love and peace. She was about to step behind the veil when a hand rested upon hers, frail as a baby’s breath. She looked up into familiar eyes: James.
Berd’s scream broke the trance.
“James!”
No, not him! Not her brother!
Her mind had been so much on Charles, that when she neared the Engine she had not thought through the consequences of her disappearance. What tortured her most was that Gine had not turned James into some tangible life-form, like he had done her and Charles.
James was still dressed in his dove-coloured morning suit. He lifted a finger to his lips. His eyes were hollow, yet she could see the self-same determination in them when he jumped on Charles. The door of the Faraday car opened as he led her towards it. She urged him in, but he shook his head. Charles had mentioned that Gine could not enter. But for some reason, neither could James.
She sat and the door shut. Bending forward, she covered her face in her hands. In the silence of the Faraday car, the ghost memories of the two men she loved most in the world hovered around her.
I was a fool to think I could win Charles and defeat Gine.
She had murdered her brother and caused her love to close with death. If only she had retired to that cottage in Wales, for then she would have hurt no one.
The first time she had ridden in this car she had been in love with Charles. Only she had fought it, sacrificing everything to escape the Engine even to the point of sacrificing him. Now she was sacrificing everything for that love.
Gine was dangerous. He had shown that time and time again. This time he had almost succeeded in getting her into the energy, and if it were not for James...
She pressed her fingertips to her temples. She had to defeat Gine, or she had damned them all.
Around her the velvet silence fell like a heavy curtain. She had no idea if the car was going and presumed it was, not that she had any way to stop or to start it, if it failed. Or open it. Charles’s plan was for her to remain inside while he fought off the other book stacks. He had reasoned that inside the car, she would be out of Gine’s reach. Yet if she was out of reach, Gine would not be able to transport her out of the Engine.
In a way, it was the perfect trap.
She shook her head. Charles rarely made mistakes. It was simply further evidence that he was worried and exhausted. It didn’t matter anyway; she was not planning on remaining in the Faraday car. She was going to the Mill. If she failed because Gine culled her, at the very least, she had bought Charles time.
Her right arm throbbed. A sticky substance oozed down the length of her arm as her blister ruptured, plastering her silk sleeve to her pelisse. She wiped her forehead with her good hand then pushed the pain out of her mind.
Countless times, she had focussed on a problem and the hours had flown by. Countless times, she had gone into the stables at breakfast only to come out at supper time. She would open the stable door, and stagger out to find her dinner on a tray by the door, stone cold. Or half-eaten by the neighbour’s calico cats. Countless times…
She had been hungry then. Not for food. Only for a solution. So many times she had gone to bed, angry with herself because she had not found an answer, only to find that as soon as she had placed her head on her pillow, the solution had arrived. She had gotten dressed and gone back down again in the freezing cold.
Numerous were the episodes when she had forgotten everything else except for the joy of what she was doing. This frame of mind was what she had to achieve. Be so single-minded and focused in order to reprogram Gine.
The door opened.
Outside the trees gleamed with an eerie slickness as blue light nestled like beetles in their cracks, crawling out when she neared. She stumbled on, the glare of the Mill calling her, trying desperately to ignore the pain from her right arm.
Light and the hum grew as she travelled forward.
The landscape changed, becoming a paper cut-out of black and white. Heat from the Mill beat like a furnace, and she smelled charring metal as her cheeks grew uncomfortably hot.
What worried her most was the intense light. Brilliant beams, as if the sun was low on the horizon, sliced into her eyes, obliterating her vision. She moved forward only with great difficulty, shielding her eyes with her fingers, constantly walking into metal trees. Her pelisse and hands were scored and cut.
She had thought the Mill a single tower rising from amongst the trees, but it had grown into towers of cast iron and glass, ten times the height of the Crystal Palace in Penge. Gold and black imprints of its image rose on the back of her lids when she closed them, showing her a dazzling structure more in keeping with the Hagia Sophia of long ago Constantinople.
Holy wisdom.
Silver balls of lightning burst from within, tailing off in dazzling streams that veined tantalisingly across the surface of the glass walls. But closeness caused the pain in her right arm to flare even more.
Finally, her heart pounding savagely, Berd stood before the glass walls of the Mill, squinting behind the shield of her clasped fingers, tasting browning metal in her lungs. She had just reached out one hand to touch the surface, when she heard her name called.
“Berd!” A familiar voice shouted.
She whipped in the direction of the caller, some distance away to the right, at first eager and then confused. The voice had sounded like Charles. Her heart skipped a beat. No, it was more likely Gine pretending to be Charles in order to stop her from entering. Charles may have improved his driving greatly, but there had been hundreds of book stacks.
Frantic, she turned, intending to search for a door when a shadow lunged at her.
She screamed and jumped back. For one split second, the intense white light of the Mill was cut off by the figure’s body, before it slammed against the inner walls of the Mill. She stared, unable to look away, as the figure was wracked with electricity, mouth open, head tilted back.
But only as it sprawled to the ground did she realise that the figure was inside. Inside the Mill!
How did it get within so swiftly?
She would have sworn the earlier voice had been some distance away. And it had called from the right. But something had lunged for her from the left…
She had heard neither its horrific screams nor smelt the burning of its charred limbs because it was within the glass confines. Had it not been, it would have grabbed her. Yet she had heard it earlier. The only conclusion she could come to, was that it was not the same figure who had cried out.
Common sense deemed the figure inside to be Gine, but if it was Gine then it made no sense for him to leap at her if contact with the Mill’s glass walls caused such a heinous incident. Gine would know not to touch the walls. But then so would Charles. The difference would be that Charles would leap at the walls if it would save her life.
The figure behind the glass walls… the figure with the sky-blue eyes. For one incredible second, she had thought she was staring into the face of Charles. But she had left him back in the stack… unless Gine had trapped Charles, placing him inside the Mill. Anything was possible with Gine.
All thought of escape or even of reprogramming vanished. Immediately, it was far more important to find out who the figure inside the Mill was because then she would know the identity of the figure on the right. And know whom she kissed in the book stack; whom she had pledged her love to...
Lightning scored the skies overhead and the trees around her seemed to jump up. Thunder cracked a second later.
The Engine was under attack.
“Berd!” The figure to her right reached her.
Berd swung around a tree, keeping it between her and the figure as she tried to determine if the figure was Charles or Gine. She tried to stare into his eyes, but like her, he was squinting through the fingers of one hand as he shielded himself from the heinous glare of the Mill. She could not tell.
“Come! Hurry.” He reached forward to grasp her arm only she ducked out of the way.
“What the hell!” he sputtered. “The Engine is being attacked. We need to get out!”
She felt stupid as she shouted, “Who are you?” The truth was that she had no way of determining if he was telling a lie.
The figure cursed loudly and vehemently. “Don’t be daft, princess. We don’t have time for games. We need to leave before the Engine blows up. Come on!” Again he reached to grasp her arm.
Instead, she kept up a two-step round the metal trees, constantly out of reach but where she could see the figure on the right, which certainly looked like Charles.
But then both figures did.
As she agonised over the identity of the two figures, the left figure, the one behind the glass walls, crashed against the glass again. It was thrown backwards in an explosion of white hot sparks.
“Who is that?” She pointed one shaking finger at it.
The right figure stiffened. “Can you not even tell us apart now?” The edge of his voice trembled with disbelief.
If the right figure really was Charles then she was insulting him by confusing him with Gine. She was risking their lives because she hesitated. But she had to be sure.
Again Gine had tricked her. He had made her focus on something else other than her objective: reprogramming.
And time was running out.
Gine was good. No, Gine was brilliant. A pity he was not on her side.
“I need to know. I need to know who you are. If you are truly Charles then I apologise. But I need to know,” she insisted. “That figure has been throwing itself at the glass walls, almost electrocuting itself in the process. Why is it doing that?” Unless it was Charles trying to protect her from Gine.
Lightning flashed across the sky.
The figure on the right spoke through gritted teeth. “It is hard to destroy stacks without destroying some of the Engine’s memory. It probably can’t remember how to get out.”
“Charles has never lied to me.”
Thunder boomed overhead. The leaves of the metal trees shook as if in a strong wind and she winced as some fluttered perilously close to her. The tang of motor oil glistened on the air.
He sighed heavily. “I am Charles, and I’m not lying. Now please, please, please come, before that thing breaks through.”
She was almost convinced. “But how did you get up so fast?”
He tilted his head to the heaven, rolling his eyes, such a Charles-like expression that she longed to believe. “I parked the stack near the top of the plateau.”
“But how did you know I was here? You’re Gine.”
“I’m Charles—”
The glass walls of the Mill cracked. The figure on the left was almost through.
The figure on the right grabbed her round the waist. She whimpered when he brushed against her right arm but turned and ran with him.
“Can it… can it break through?”
“Yes, now run! Run for your life because he will be fast.”
“But who is it?” cried Berd as she picked up the hem of her skirts and ran.
“It is all that remains of Charles. But I wouldn’t stop to speak to him. His sole objective is to cull you.”
The glass wall crumbled just as something inside her disintegrated.
A bone-chilling roar filled the air and Berd knew the creature had fixed its gaze on her: the figure on the left. The creature who had once been Charles. Her love. Which could only mean she was holding Gine’s hand. Her enemy.
As if he sensed her repugnance, Gine whipped his hand out of hers. Then he shoved her hard between the shoulder blades.
“What are you doing?”
“Run! Run! Run! I’ll hold him off as long as I can!”
All Berd could do was to run and keep running, or it could catch her.
She longed to know how Charles could have changed so much. Or how could Gine call himself Charles. But the selfish question that burned in her mind was if she would reach the Faraday car in time.