Newton’s Fire

III

They said your life would flash before your eyes at the moment of maximum danger. But as Rachel looked up at Luke, straining with everything he had to hold on to her as she flailed above the cathedral floor, all she experienced was a terror so complete that it left no room for anything else. All she experienced was the certainty of her own imminent death and the knowledge that she was powerless to prevent it.

Then the alarm stopped and she heard shouting and she looked down to see Jay and the police arriving like a miracle on the cathedral floor beneath her; and their presence gave Blackbeard no choice but to reach down between the stanchions, take her free hand, and help Luke hoist her back up and over the balcony rail to safety.

She fell onto her knees on the cold stone, arms across her stomach, retching and retching as her gut tried to expel its surfeit of chemical fear; but nothing came out. Luke knelt beside her, hugged her tight against him. ‘It’ll be okay,’ he kept saying. ‘I promise.’ But his words did little to reassure her. Her father, after all, had said something similar when he’d first broken the terrible news of his diagnosis, and that hadn’t turned out okay. His slide had been astonishing in its speed and remorselessness. And then, in the weeks after his death, her mother had simply fallen apart from grief and loss and fear and guilt at having spent the family’s small wealth on futile quack remedies. And so, two months to the day after her husband’s funeral, she’d parked her battered old Renault by a level crossing, fortified herself with a bottle of gin, then had walked out onto the tracks. And, just seven months after that, Bren’s body had been shredded by an IED.

Never show weakness; never show vulnerability. An irony of human nature, that the more you needed help the harder it was to ask for. In the wreckage of her family, Rachel had built a shell around herself in which she’d learned to rely on nobody but herself. But that shell had been shattered into a million tiny pieces as she’d hung there looking up at Luke, utterly dependent upon him, the strain of holding her written so clearly in his grimace and the blood rushing to his face and the tendons like stretched steel in his shoulders and throat. And now all the unexpressed grief and loneliness and despair of recent years sobbed itself out onto his shirt, while he held her tight and whispered words of comfort.

Blackbeard proved to be neither a sentimental nor sympathetic man, however. He took her wrist and twisted it fiercely enough to tear her away from Luke. ‘This way,’ he said. He dragged her along the Triforium corridor into the room with the model cathedral and handcuffed her to a cast-iron radiator beneath a window. His companions frogmarched Luke in a moment later, cuffed him to the next radiator along. Their captors then went out again and there was shouting, though too muffled by doors and distance to make sense of.

She became, suddenly, exquisitely aware of Luke; of being alone with him, of the weakness she’d just shown. She glanced his way. He was looking at her with a pained and empathetic expression on his face, as though worried by the scars the experience was sure to leave. ‘I thought I was gone,’ she said. ‘If you hadn’t held me …’

‘Nothing to do with me,’ he told her. ‘Your watch strap just caught on mine, that’s all.’

Under the circumstances, Rachel’s laughter wasn’t far short of a miracle. ‘Thank you,’ she said.