Flashback

Chapter Nineteen

Jem did not pass another car on her journey into the mountains. After half an hour, there were neither city lights to be seen nor moon. She phoned Ego and spoke about the special regard Germans had for their forests. Then she asked it who Saskia really was, expecting it to be reticent. The candour surprised her.

‘Saskia’s identity is a computerised representation stored on a high-density, solid-state device of uncertain origin. It has been surgically inserted at the back of her brain. Everything about her can be attributed to this device. That is, everything you would consider the product of her mind. When you asked Saskia a question, it was the device that replied. When you reached out for her, it was the device that took your hand. The device felt your touch.’

‘That’s weird.’

‘Think of it as a homunculus, or little person, truly controlling Saskia’s body.’

There was a logic within the idea. It explained Saskia’s perfect recall, her oddness, her virtuoso performance of violence. And yet: Whose eyes had Jem stared into? If Saskia’s conscious mind was contained within the device, what was contained within her flesh-and-blood brain? Was there another woman trapped inside that body, screaming unheard?

‘So the device sent you a mayday.’

‘It did once, and that confirmed its approximate location. It has not signalled since. I can’t be sure if it has survived the crash intact. Saskia may not be recoverable.’

‘God,’ said Jem. ‘It’s like she’s… a black box.’

‘We’re here.’

Jem steered the car into a small lay-by. She extinguished the headlights. The silence and the darkness, though expected, became a space for her loneliness to fill. She closed her eyes for five breaths. They opened with clearer night vision on snow-bright ground and glistening tree-trunks. She remembered the leather spine of the Grimm’s fairy tales that had unlocked the curtained door in Saskia’s apartment. And she recalled a music box that had played something by Bach. She opened the car door. She imagined new sounds in the silence: the patter of a wolf on patrol, its mouth shut and low, the flutter of a witch abroad.

Ssssssssssssss.

‘It’s cold out there,’ said Ego. ‘If your phone’s power fails, warm the battery. We may be separated. Don’t lose heart.’

‘OK.’

‘Do you see the dusky colour reflected by the clouds? That’s Regensburg. Keep it behind you and try to stay walking uphill.’

She locked the car with the radio fob. The indicators splashed orange. Then she took the torch—a metal, heavy comfort—and cut a piece of light from the darkness. She moved through the powdery mires, alert for other footsteps in the hush. The trees were black bars. She drew the cold air through her nose. At first, she could not separate the odours. Then she identified something like incinerator smoke and remembered the putrid rat Danny had discovered that wet August in Poole when they were eight or nine. And the tang of polystyrene melting on the woodland fire that had warmed Jem and her mates when, years after the rat, they downed Diamond White by the bottle, and spun the empties to mark the unlucky victim of an interrogation, sexual and hilarious.

‘One is never too old to play with matches.’

‘KGB or CIA, what’s the difference?’

‘Never follow me. Understand?’

‘I understand.’

She stepped on something that deformed like an oil can, and when she raised her foot, it barked across the forest and she understood that a great space had opened before her. In the failing light she saw scabs of ash and the grave of a whole aeroplane, wings and engines and all. A yellow cordon stretched away to her left and to her right.

Holy fuck.

Then.

Clock hands meeting at midnight. The night, under whose auspices Saskia had blossomed like a moonflower. Perfume drifting: conservative and sensible, mixed for her in the south of France. Her hair was long and never stronger was Jem’s urge to nose its waves. Later: a policeman, unconscious alongside his car, and Saskia reaching back for a fallen Jem.

The cavalier smile.

‘Take my hand.’

Reaching back.

The hopelessness was devastating. On what, truthfully, had she based her hope that Saskia was alive? A feeling? How could her intuition compare to the forces that could undo the fabric of a building’s worth of metal and plastic, swimming pools of fuel, this tonnage of raw meat? Saskia was hopelessly gone. Perhaps her superimposed spirit watched, alongside fellow passengers and crew as Jem lifted her phone and sobbed, ‘Ego, what now?’

But the phone had died. She pressed the power switch. Nothing happened. Was the battery too cold? She slipped the phone into her waistband and stepped back from the debris, fleeing, heading towards the blackness. The powder reached her knees as she strode. She pressed the car key. Nowhere did indicator lights blip.

She had been cut off from Ego and the heavy torch was no longer a comfort. It was painting her like a target. She turned it off.

Unseen, a branch broke.

‘Sss-sss-sss,’ she stammered, looking for the branch. ‘Sassssssssssskia?’

Calm. Only the weight of snow had broken it.

She backed against a trunk and slid down. Clods of snow struck her shoulders. She felt as though she could stay here. She put her nose to her knees and pulled a full, chill breath.

Her neck straightened.

Perfume.

‘It was made for me in the south of France.’

Her muscles, tired to the point of collapse, quivered as she stood.

‘Sssssss,’ she whispered. ‘Sss-sss…’

Her sudden, downhill strides slit the dunes. She fell from one tree to another. Fronds scratched her scalp. The powder grew wet underfoot and the dampness reached her ankles. The perfume was a will-o’-the-wisp; present and absent by turns. When, seconds later, she reached the trough of the valley, her exhaustion could no longer be outrun. She let her forehead rest against bark.

Snow quietness descended.

Yet the air was not empty. There was an element of static, of ssssssssssss.

Running water.

Jem crawled on, though her palms flamed with cold. Her breath shrank to snorts. A stone struck her shin and she was felled. She tumbled down a stony bank and stopped, sitting upright, with her boots on a hard surface. She had lost the torch but she could see a frozen stream sparkling beneath a sickle moon. There was a hut on the opposite bank. The wide, low roof was decked with firs. Behind it, trees rose. The forest and the hut had combined like the hands of father and son. Only a halo of red suggested the doorway.

Jem walked upstream and crossed the water on three concrete stepping stones. She placed each foot heel-to-toe until she reached the door. It did not squeak as she pushed it open. Warmth and smoke and a meaty smell puffed from the interior: a room lit by oil lamps and the flickering roundel of a pot-bellied stove. She looked about in wonder. A chandelier of powdered sausages and game birds hung from the low ceiling. A Dutch drier rocked over the stove. It held camouflaged trousers, long underwear, socks, and a dripping newspaper.

‘Hello?’

Jem closed the door and pulled across its blackout curtain. There was a cloth-covered table beyond the hanging sausages. She remembered her mobile phone and placed it near the stove to warm. On the table were empty beer bottles and a stack of newspapers. Next to them was a half-bitten piece of bread. An opened plastic container held some sliced meat and a paring knife.