No Life But This (16 page)

I folded her into
my arms. ‘Oh, Rose,’ I breathed.

‘It’s okay. I came here for you, not for me.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ she said, her voice stern. ‘I made the decision.’ She looked me over. ‘You okay?’

‘Head hurts,’
I signed. ‘
A little.’

She gave me a very sad smile. ‘Well. I have some pills for that, if you want.’

I chuckled, and she went and got a bottle from her bag. I didn’t argue over it, I just took
it. Rose lay me down on her couch and rubbed my shoulders. I barely noticed the headache with her hands on me.

We couldn’t have been there more than twenty minutes. The pain had barely had time to dissipate before my rest was cut short by a terrible pop, followed by a rush of what sounded like wind. ‘What was that?’ Rose asked.

I shook my head, but a loud klaxon suddenly sounded outside the
window. I went to look, but the window was ice beyond the insulated layer. It let the light in, but it was next to impossible to see out of. A moment later Rose’s door banged open, startling us both.

Xavier stood there panting, his face grey with fright. He must have been running. It was hard to imagine the old man running, but he was only old – he wasn’t dead. When he saw Rose there was a visible
sagging of relief. His hands, always battling a slight tremor, were shaking badly. ‘You’re here,’ he breathed. He glanced at me. ‘Both here,’ he added, but I knew he didn’t give a squitch about me. ‘We need to find Ted and the twins,’ he said to Rose. ‘I want you to stay with me.’

‘Can’t you cell them?’

‘Try,’ Xavier said.

Rose pulled her cell up from around her neck and clicked it. She clicked
it again. ‘There’s no signal.’ That was impossible. There was always a signal. ‘There’s nothing.’

‘Stay with me,’ Xavier said again to Rose. ‘I don’t want you out of my sight!’ He took Rose’s hand in his and strode out the door. I got the feeling I could have stayed stock still and Xavier would never have noticed, but Rose looked over her shoulder as he dragged her, and I knew she expected me
to stay with her, too. I followed at her heels.

It was pandemonium outside the chalet. People were running and shouts echoed from the dome. That klaxon still sounded loud enough to wake the dead. The cold air was strange, misty, and a glaring orange light was coming from the centre of the village. ‘Ted!’ Xavier shouted. ‘Ted!’

‘It’s hopeless,’ Rose said. ‘No one can hear anything in this.’

‘The twins were heading to the skating rink,’ Xavier said. ‘We must find them.’

We darted and wove through the chaos. Xavier kept a firm grip on Rose the entire time. ‘But I don’t understand. What’s happening?’ Rose panted.

Xavier’s voice was grim. ‘What do you think is happening?’ he asked. ‘There’s been a bomb.’

‘A bomb?’

‘Terrorists,’ Xavier said. ‘They get a lot of them up here, but the villages are usually safer than this. They usually restrict themselves to the city ships. Easier to hide in a throng of millions.’

‘Then that … that light …’ Rose’s breath was coming in gasps. I wondered if Xavier had forgotten that Rose was still physically fragile, or if he just couldn’t be chivalrous
in a crisis.

‘Firebomb,’ Xavier said. ‘Probably a hydrogen IED. They get a lot of those too. Waste gases from drawing oxygen from the water.’ He pushed someone aside. ‘Move! Moriko! Kenji!’ he called.

We were nearly at the skating rink now. We were also near the site of the attack. I could see the impact of the firebomb on the village. One of the gorgeous ice buildings was on fire, or whatever
synthetic material inside it was. The ice was half melted, leaving a skeleton of a burning building, crackling with smoke. The heat had carved a crater in the ice ceiling above us, and water was steaming around the floor of the building, so we couldn’t tell if the fog in the air was mist or smoke. ‘God damn it!’ Xavier muttered.

‘What?’

‘They took out the cell tower. That’s why there’s no signal.’

‘What?’

Xavier turned to her. ‘No satellites can penetrate the ice shield. No radio waves, no cell feeds, nothing. That’s why it’s safe down here – the ice shield protects the colony from the radiation. Every connection from outside Europa comes down through the elevators, and is distributed through that tower. Every connection from the city ships is caught at the docks, and distributed
through
that tower
. The cell tower allows our cells to link and our screens to connect. That tower,’ he pointed to the simmering building, ‘was what enabled us to communicate. The whole village is cut off.’ He stood back up to his full height. ‘Moriko!’

A terrible thought struck me. I grabbed Rose away from him. ‘
What about Quin?’
He’d gone out – I didn’t know where. He could have gotten caught in this
… thing.

Rose was a blank. This was not a crisis she felt prepared to handle. ‘We’ll find him,’ she said. ‘We’ll find all of them.’ She turned back to Xavier. ‘Moriko! Kenji!’ she cried out, her shrill, clear voice very small in the hubbub.

Xavier’s wasn’t much louder, aged and wavery as it was. And I couldn’t shout for Quin. I didn’t know what to do.

‘The clinic,’ Xavier said suddenly. ‘If
they’re hurt, they’ll have been brought there.’ He took hold of Rose again and dragged her through the throng. I followed at her heels. We were getting farther from the site of the attack, and now there were signs beyond smoke and melting ice. Victims of the fire were being carried away, their bodies burned, their hair singed off. The moaning was terrible. I found myself in a bit of an odd position
as eyes started staring at me and whispers carried up and down the rows. I’d been recognized, that was clear enough. ‘Oh my god, it’s 86!’ a young female voice squealed, and was immediately hushed by her companions. The entire village was in chaos, and all she could think about was a passing celebrity? I tried to ignore it.

‘Granddad!’ The sudden cry was a relief from all the desperate shouting.
Moriko and Kenji were sitting by the side of the clinic. The tiny crystal clinic wasn’t large enough to accommodate all the victims, and several people were being treated on the ice outside, wrapped in warming blankets. Kenji and Moriko were well enough that they weren’t on the stretchers. Moriko looked all right, but she wouldn’t leave Kenji, whose leg was thrust out in front of him wrapped in
a bandage. She waited for us to come to her before she grabbed Xavier in a huge hug.

Xavier knelt down beside them and touched Kenji’s leg. ‘What happened? Were you caught in the attack?’

‘Not really,’ Moriko said. And quite suddenly, and without any warning, she collapsed into tears.

Xavier let Rose go and wrapped Moriko in his arms. ‘Shh, shh,’ he whispered. ‘It’s all right, you’re with us
now. Tell me what happened.’

Moriko was past answering, but Kenji looked up from his seat on the ground. ‘The explosion started a panic,’ he said. ‘Mori and I were on the rink, and people started running over the ice to get away from the fire. I got caught in the rush, and someone else’s skate blade caught my leg. It’s a really big gash.’ He seemed almost proud of it. ‘Down to the bone on my
shin. Mori almost carried me here, and she answered all the questions while they numbed my leg and bandaged it.’ He looked proudly up at his sister, then he scowled. ‘She was great until a second ago.’

‘I’m here now, she’s allowed to break down,’ Xavier said gently. He put Moriko gently aside and took both the twins’ hands. ‘Do you know where your father is?’

The twins shook their heads. Xavier
frowned, and then glanced up at Rose.

Rose was almost as blue as I was, and shivering visibly. He only now realized that he had brought her out into winter temperatures without a coat. ‘Stay here,’ he said, and disappeared into the crowd of wounded. A moment later he returned with a single shiny warming blanket which he activated and then wrapped around Rose’s thin frame. ‘Hey,
I’m
cold!’ Kenji
said. ‘They said they didn’t have enough to go round.’

I had never wanted to say shut up so badly as I wanted to say it then. I glared at him, and he made a visible flinch away from me.

‘I asked after Quin,’ Xavier told me. ‘He’s not among the wounded here. Otto, could you see if anyone’s still running that store?’ he asked, pointing to the kind of tourist souvenir shop that dotted the whole
village. ‘They’ll probably have coats or a sweatshirt or something.’

The store was empty, but there was a rack of coats with a ‘RayonEuropa!’ sign above them. I looked around for a self-serve credit point, and found one, but when I tried to run my cell over it to read my credit tick, all I got was the same ‘no signal’ indicator Rose had gotten earlier. The attack really had effectively frozen
the entire village. I shrugged. I’d tried, and this was an emergency. Maybe we’d go back and pay later. I grabbed a woman’s coat and two men’s coats and carried them back out. Xavier wrapped Rose up first. I’d chosen a long white coat for her with a deep hood. It looked warm. Xavier’s and mine were both blue, and he shrugged his on without a second glance. I didn’t realize how cold I’d been until
I zipped the coat up. I pulled up the hood, both to get warmer faster and to conceal my face.

‘Come on. We have to get you back to the chalet,’ Xavier said. ‘Hopefully, Ted will find us there.’ He handed the warming blanket to a passing man in uniform. ‘Could you take that back to the clinic, please?’ he said, and then turned away without waiting for a confirmation.

‘Mr Zellwegger?’

Xavier
turned back, looking annoyed. ‘Yes?’

The uniformed man handed Xavier a small canister. ‘This is for you,’ he said, and turned away quickly.

Xavier frowned at the canister a moment before his eyes opened wide. ‘Get back!’ he shouted as he pulled back his arm to throw it far down the trail. He didn’t have time. With a pop so sudden it rattled my bones the canister just disappeared. A brief flare
of white flame engulfed Xavier’s hand, and shrapnel flew too fast for us to see. One second Xavier was holding a cylindrical canister, and the next he wasn’t; his hand was on fire and blood trickled down his face.

The force of it dropped him backwards, and a sudden spray of blood arched into the air, splashing across the ice, and across Rose’s new white coat, shining luridly on her pale face. ‘
Xavier!’
She fell to her knees, trying to paw at the wound on his neck, which was where the spray of blood had come from, though there were injuries on his face and his hand was badly burned.

‘Rose …’ Xavier flailed, and I could see that Rose was shaking too much to hold pressure on the wound. Moriko and Kenji were helpless, and everyone else was too busy running from the fresh explosion. Nothing
for it, then.

I pushed Rose aside and pressed my hand to the slice. I tried to use my coat instead of direct skin-to-skin contact, but the blood seeped through so quickly that it was a fruitless defence. Xavier’s pain seeped through with the blood, and his mind was a screeching storm, a blizzard in the Himalayas, frozen and painful, with ice cutting at my psyche.

A thought came through the maelstrom.
Save Rose.

‘Rose is fine!’
I told him angrily.
‘And she’ll hate me if I let you die in front of me.
’

‘She’ll hate me anyway,’
he thought, but the thought scattered as the blood loss fazed him. He was losing consciousness. At his age …

‘No you don’t!’
I told him.
‘She can’t lose both of us, and I can’t be sure I’ll survive. Xavier? Xavier, you GET BACK HERE!’

I think it was that which pulled
it forward. Maybe it was the fact that I was drawing him, forcing him to come to me. Maybe it was because I called him Xavier, a name he didn’t use anymore. Or maybe it was something more basic than that. Maybe he’d been looking for an escape all along. Maybe it was because half my mind was already primed by what Rose and I had done in the stass chamber. But in any case, he came back. He came back
with a vengeance. But it wasn’t Mr Zellwegger that fled screaming into my mind, father, grandfather, executive. It was Xavier.

Xavier, no more than nineteen, angry and frightened and lonely and hurting so deeply that I froze as he hurtled himself against my psyche and ripped holes in my sanity.

He was hate and loss and anguish. He was a twisted knot of blame and self-loathing that fed upon itself,
feeling guilty for feeling guilty, which only made him angry, which made him guilty, again and again, twisting into a burning coil of torment. A soundless scream ran through my mind as the emotional personification of a young self-tormented Xavier, Rose’s soul mate, railed at the old man who had failed to find Rose and had dared to keep going and live the WRONG LIFE!

I wanted to pull away, but
this black knot of tortured anguish was worse than any of Rose’s briars, and it held me. I hadn’t realized how softened her pain was by her circumstances. The stasis itself had softened it. She did not blame herself anymore. But Xavier’s pain grabbed me, squeezed me, twisted me in a maelstrom of blackness that wanted to drag down everything – himself, both young and old, Rose, then and now, her
parents, the entire corporation of UniCorp, his family, everything. Xavier as a young man had been resurrected when Rose was, and he was deep inside this old executive, screaming and screaming and screaming.

The old man’s natural balance was the only thing that had saved him. His very rigidity allowed him to ignore that knot of pain, lock it off behind daily needs, a schooled philosophy, the
very knowledge that his life was nearing its end, and the emotional pain couldn’t torture him for more than a few more decades. The monster of his younger self had been jailed behind walls of neutrality even more carefully constructed than his grandson Bren’s. I realized that this man had probably been rather like Bren in his youth – clear of mind and determined of purpose. And his purpose had been
to love Rose.

I don’t know how long I crouched there, holding firm pressure on a potentially arterial wound, but we were close enough to the clinic that it couldn’t have been more than a few moments. People were shouting all around me; some of them were probably shouting at me, but I couldn’t really hear them. I was too overwhelmed by Xavier’s personality. Finally, someone physically moved me,
taking over the first aid, applying a wound paste bandage and checking his vitals. Rose knelt trembling beside him, her hand gripping his as if someone was trying to pull him away from her.

So I was freed to lean against a building and go quietly insane.

The echo of Xavier’s beast roared at me. So much hatred, pointed mostly at himself, but twisted into everything. So much anguish. So much love,
and sixty years of longing for a dead girl who wasn’t dead. He’d lost Rose about the same time that the world had crumbled under the weight of the Dark Times, and his grief for her was all tangled into the chaos of the New World Order. He’d had to become a different man, and the young man he had been had simply – stopped. Xavier had become Ron Zellwegger, and ‘Xavier’ as Rose had known him may
as well have died. When Rose came miraculously back to life, Xavier had been resurrected too. But Xavier was only a memory; he wasn’t real, and that meant that the world was backwards, and he was trapped in the mind and behind the body of Ron, an old man, who wouldn’t, couldn’t, let him out.

I know now it wasn’t actually Xavier that was inside me. I know it was only the strength of his troubles
which had affected my mind. I wasn’t possessed by any real spirit, there was no transfer of a soul. The trapped Xavier beast was no more real inside me than 42. But he was there as surely as she was, and I was oppressed by him. More so than I’d ever been by 42. 42 had been a companion beside me. This beast was hungrier than that. He didn’t want to just talk to me. He wanted freedom.

I sank my
head down onto my knees and gave myself over to someone else’s tears.

I’d never cried like this. It wasn’t in my nature. When 42 died I went still and tragic, and when I cried the tears were few, and they came silently, privately, usually late at night. These weren’t tears of only grief, though they were that. They were tears of rage and powerlessness, of helpless guilt, of bitter longing. I
hugged myself, moaning, half screaming in my awkward, childlike non-voice, and I couldn’t care that someone might hear me. But there was too much chaos out there in the street for anyone to care what was happening to me.

When I think back on it, I know things would have happened differently if I’d been on Earth. I’d have gone to see Dr Bija immediately, and her trained psychology would have brought
me back out of it. She would have pointed out my vulnerable mental state: half drugged, half weightless, tens of thousands of kilometres from home, having suffered weeks of pain and exhaustion, paralyzing fear, the threat of death, the distance from my sisters, not to mention the shock of having made any headway with Rose, and the personal compromise I had made to get it. My psyche might as
well have been cut open and laid bare. And because of that, I allowed myself to succumb to a form of psychic madness.