World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine (34 page)

In the kitchen, Rosa stopped preparing food. She had heard Mason’s voice, but over the years, had trained herself to tune out the actual words. It was better for her mental health, and better for her daughter and grandchild, that she wasn’t aware of Mason’s plans. But the sound that stopped her in her tracks now was new. She had never heard it before. It was the sound of Mason in pain. She hesitated for a moment, then went to the doorway.
 

The sight before her was so shocking at first that her brain didn’t process it properly. She closed her eyes and took a couple of breaths before opening them again. The scene remained the same. She steadied herself with one hand on the doorframe and accepted what was in front of her, knowing that everything was—finally—about to change.

Mason’s eyes had rolled into the back of his head and his breathing was shallow and intermittent. He was dying. A few yards in front of him stood a man with no head. As she watched, a mass of tiny writhing tentacles, many thousands of them, drove upward out of the man’s neck. They moved with astonishing speed and, as they did, a shape began to form. It was very much like watching someone drawing a 3D picture, but drawing it at a pace that was inhumanly fast. The only color in use at first was a deep red, the lines—both thin and thick—quickly revealing something familiar. Rosa realized she was looking at something she had seen on a medical program once. It was a diagram of the arteries supplying blood to the neck and head. As she continued watching, dark liquid began pulsing through the network of tubes.

The brain grew first, fed by blood from the new arteries. It seemed to float in mid-air for a few seconds, then it became harder to see. It was as if Rosa was looking at it through mist, or a thin piece of white muslin. Her view was progressively obscured over the next few seconds, then, with an involuntary gasp, she realized solid bone was forming in front of her. As the brain disappeared behind the bones of the skull, a jawbone grew below. Musculature and ligaments followed, glistening with the blood flowing into them. Teeth were next, and before the fast-appearing skin obscured them completely, Rosa had time to count three fillings, which—she noted in an oddly calm fashion—was surely a pretty strange occurrence in a freshly grown mouth. Although she was at the wrong angle to know if she was correct, Rosa guessed the faint plopping sounds she heard next signaled the arrival of a pair of fresh eyeballs.

By the time it was finished, there was a healthy young man standing in the middle of the room. Most women would have described him as handsome, but it wasn’t the first word that leapt into Rosa’s mind having just seen him grow his own face back. She looked at Mason. His head had lolled back on his neck. His skin was gray. He was completely still.

The man turned and looked at her.

“Are you ok?” he said. She nodded, mutely. She couldn’t look away from the slumped figure in the wheelchair. Eventually, she managed to turn her head and look at the stranger. She was shaking. She had lived in fear for too long to dare to think that it might be over. She felt her knees buckle. Before she could hit the floor, Seb Walked and caught her, picking her up and laying her on the nearest couch.

When Rosa opened her eyes, she was being offered a glass of water. She took a few sips. He supported her trembling hands, steadying them with his own. For a few seconds, she wasn’t quite sure what was happening, then she remembered and began to shake, her body going into mild shock.
 

The man smiled gently.

“My name is Seb,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Ro- Rosa,” she said, trying—and failing—not to picture the young man’s head growing out of his neck minutes earlier.

“Rosa, who else lives here? Is it just you?”

She shook her head. “My daughter.” She sat up fully. Her eyes flicked over to the shape in the wheelchair. “Is he—?”

“Dead? Yes, he is. It’s all over.”

“Oh my god, my god.” She sobbed for a few minutes, then stood up. “I must tell my daughter. We can leave, we can finally leave.”

Seb followed Rosa to a small bedroom. A pregnant woman was asleep on top of the covers. Rosa gently shut the door.
 

“She needs her sleep,” she said. “I’ll tell her when she wakes. Oh, what a day, what a day.”

Seb listened while Rosa told him about her brother Jesse, her father Isaac, her daughter Ruth, and the next generation of the family Mason used as his servants.
 

When she had finished telling her story, Rosa checked on Ruth again and found her awake. Seb made a call while the two women wept and hugged each other. When they emerged, dry-eyed, but holding onto each other as if they were afraid they would fall, he told them a taxi was waiting to take them to a suite in a hotel on the other side of the city.
 

“The suite is available for as long as you need it,” he said. “Please leave me your bank details. Mason had quite a fortune. I think it’s only right that you decide how best to dispose of it from this point forward.”

Rosa still couldn’t bring herself to get much closer to Seb, who seemed to draw on the same power Mason had used to enslave, hurt and murder for over thirty years. Ruth, who hadn’t witnessed the battle, hugged Seb long and hard, kissed his face and thanked him. She held a silver-framed photograph of an old man.

“My grandfather Isaac,” she said. “It’s the only possession I ever want to keep. The rest can be burnt.”

After the two women had gone, Seb walked back into the main room, and picking up a chair, placed it opposite of the slumped body in the wheelchair. Sitting down, he leaned forward and looked at his defeated enemy. There was still a pulse fluttering in Mason’s neck. His chest was moving so slowly it was almost indiscernible. All of his Manna had gone, but the tumor was still there.

“He’s paralyzed,” said Seb2. “And he’s lapsing into a coma. If the tumor isn’t removed, he might last a week with immediate medical attention.”

“And without medical attention?”

“A day or two. He won’t regain consciousness fully, he’s too weak.”

“Will he suffer?” thought Seb.

“Probably,” said Seb2.

“Good,” said Seb, and Walked.

Chapter 40

International Space Station

Massimo Paolini looked back at the International Space Station from his precarious viewpoint, tethered to the far edge of one of the solar arrays. He couldn’t see Columbus laboratory from his vantage point, which cheered him up considerably. He’d been sharing the tiny lab on the ISS with Petr, a humorless Czech engineer. Five long weeks had passed without the man even smiling. And Massimo liked a good joke. He could be the life and soul of the party. He had dedicated a great deal of time to trying to break through to his grim-featured colleague. Every kind of joke had been used in the attempt. Even physics jokes, which were universally acknowledged as poor, but often made physicists laugh in an attempt to appear normal. Nothing had worked. The gregarious Italian had finally given up, and consequently, was delighted to take his turn on a little light maintenance outside of the station.
 

Naturally, Massimo wasn’t alone out there, but Vlad, his space-walk buddy, was currently out of sight on the opposite array. Protocol demanded they stick together, but Massimo had found in Vlad a kindred spirit, in his flexible and pragmatic approach to rules.

“I have to smell everybody’s balls for half a year in this floating toilet,” the Russian had commented drily. “The least we can do is have a little private time while we look at our planet, da?”
 

Massimo had agreed wholeheartedly. He turned and looked at the planet now. Earth. Beneath him, well, not
beneath
him, there being no up or down in space, but he had to think in words that made some kind of sense, so
beneath
would just have to do, the planet rolled. A gigantic blue ball. Massimo was no poet, but his soul leaped within him every time he got outside the ISS and saw the vast blueness of his home unfolding in front of him. It was
so
blue. Nothing could prepare you for that. Clouds danced across the scene, their shadows trailing across oceans and land masses.

“Big blue ball of hugeness,” thought Massimo. “No. Enormous slow-mo football made of blue stuff. No. Spinny big thing. Shit.”
 

Kramer—the American—had told him the English language was best for true poetry, but Massimo was starting to wonder if Kramer had only said that because she couldn’t speak any other languages herself. If Kramer hadn’t been female, blonde and kind of cute, he might have argued in favor of the beauty of the Italian language, but since he was hoping for a celebratory dinner with Kramer once they were home, he’d conceded the point. A celebratory dinner followed by some traditional Italian disrobing ceremonies, he hoped. So, English it was.

Azure
was another word for blue, right?

“Azure,
as you’re
turning beneath me—”. Now, that was clever. A play on words. In a second language. Massimo felt a flush of pride. He might try that one on Kramer later. He knew there was no chance of serious flirting while they were onboard, but he could do some preliminary work and—

“Che cazzo?!” he said, crossing himself involuntarily. Which wasn’t an easy thing to do in a spacesuit.

The area of space alongside the ISS was no longer unoccupied. It was filled by a massive object which Massimo, under less stressful conditions, would undoubtedly have described as “a bloody massive spaceship”. Considering he was currently at the end of a solar array, tethered by a single strap, floating far above anywhere that might remotely be considered ‘safe ground’, he actually described it in a far more colorful way. He did this in Italian. It was an unbroken string of swearing that only dried up when he finally drew breath. Under other circumstances, it might have qualified him for some sort of award. As it was, no one heard it, and he had time to take a good look at the spaceship and consider his next actions carefully, before he opened a channel to Kramer in the control room. He wondered for a second what her first name was, and why she had never revealed it to anyone. Then he marveled at the human brain’s ability to think such a useless thought on an occasion such as humankind’s first contact with aliens.

“Massimo to Kramer.”

“This is Kramer. How’s it looking out there this afternoon, Massi?”

Only Kramer and Massimo’s mother were permitted to call him Massi.

He looked at the sleek gray surface which partly blocked his view of Earth. It was cigar shaped, but as Massimo watched, it transformed itself, both ends moving inward as the middle expanded, ending up looking like a miniature moon.
 

He opened his mouth to report, then closed it again. Why had no alarms gone off? Why hadn’t Houston alerted them? He thought hard for a few seconds. The spaceship hadn’t been there before. Now it was. It had appeared
—
some might say—magically. Magical appearances were frowned upon by those with a scientific mindset. He thought back to the rehydrated macaroni and cheese he had eaten about an hour ago. As well as being an insult to Italian cooking, the cheese had tasted particularly strange. He stared hard at the spaceship, blinked and looked again. It was still there.

“Um. All looks, er, very nice here,” he said. “Big planet, stars and whatnot. How are things with you?”

“Everything’s fine. Massi, did you just say, ‘whatnot’?”

“So, er, nothing to report on the proximity detectors? The cameras? Radar?”

“No, all normal. You seeing something out there?”

Massimo took another very long look at the spaceship. He thought about the cheese.

“No, nothing. I’m feeling a little unwell. I think I’ll come back in early if that’s ok.”

“Can you stay another thirty minutes? Just to make sure that panel will stay in place?”
 

“Well, I think it might be better if I—”

“For me, Massi?” Kramer was doing that husky voice thing. It was very unfair.

“Thirty minutes more,” he said, looking at the spaceship, which now seemed to have thousands of tiny lights racing across its surface in every direction. He knew that American cheese was poorer than the glory that was Italian cheese, but he was shocked at the powerful side-effects. He only hoped his stomach would hold up for another half hour. Toilet accidents in the sealed environment of a space suit were no fun at all.

Chapter 41

The 747-400 nosed its way through the clouds above Heathrow, bumping slightly as it banked slowly through one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, ending up facing almost due west. The flight to JFK was close to reaching its cruising altitude of 35,000ft, about twenty-seven minutes after takeoff, when a tall man appeared in First Class.
 

Chief Steward David Burn saw it happen. He was mixing a vodka martini for a guy in 1A (
extremely
dry, chilled glass, with a twist, and could he make sure the accompanying nuts were
heated
) when the man materialized, standing by the empty 4B. Onboard manifests were correct, every passenger was accounted for. David’s first reaction at a passenger appearing
in mid-flight wasn’t one of bewilderment or shock, but a mild annoyance at the administrative headache it would cause when they reached JFK. He had seen an awful lot of bad behavior in First Class over the fourteen years he’d been working for the airline. Tantrums, fights, projectile vomiting, thefts, every kind of sexual misdemeanor and once—memorably—an impromptu game of rugby. He wondered which section of the flight report covered magical materializations. He shuddered at the prospect of explaining it to his supervisor.

He pulled the corners of his vest down and smoothed his hair before walking toward the stranger.
 

“Good morning, sir,” he said. “Can I offer you a drink?”

The man smiled at him. David flushed slightly. He supposed unauthorized magical appearances on his flights wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if they were all this cute.

“No, thanks, I’m good,” the man said. He winked. “Just passing through.”

With that, he stepped sideways and vanished.