Sanctus

Chapter 104

For the second time that day Liv finished relating the strange circumstances of her birth and waited for the reaction. She examined the three faces opposite her staring at the cruciform scar on her side.

‘The cross will rise,’ Oscar whispered, ‘to unlock the Sacrament.’ His eyes flicked up and met hers. There was something close to wonder in them. ‘It’s you,’ he said.

Liv pulled her shirt back down, feeling suddenly exposed and shy. ‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘Only, I have no idea what the Sacrament is so I’m not sure how I’m supposed to “unlock” it.’

She sat down and turned to the page in her notebook where she’d copied the letters and re-read the message she’d found in them. When she’d written it down she thought she was on to something. But it had proved to be just another dead end. The Mala had no more idea what the Sacrament was than she did. She suddenly felt unbearably tired, like someone had opened a sluice gate and flooded her with weariness.

‘Were the letters scratched on to leather, like the phone number?’ Gabriel asked.

‘No,’ she said, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘They were scratched on seeds.’ She stopped rubbing and looked up to discover everyone staring straight at her.

‘Seeds?’ Oscar repeated.

She nodded. The old man’s body seemed to contract in a moment of deep concentration, then he breathed out and reached across the desk to pull the computer keyboard towards him. ‘During my time in the Citadel,’ he said, opening a browser window, ‘I did learn some of their secrets.’ He typed something into the search box and hit return. An image started downloading on the screen. It was a patchwork of greens, greys and large areas of blue. As it sharpened it manifested itself as a satellite photo of Eastern Europe. Oscar clicked on an area of the picture. The image zoomed into a section of southern Turkey until the screen showed a dense network of streets radiating out from something large and dark at its centre.

‘This is a satellite image of Ruin,’ Oscar explained, ‘taken in the 1980s. Before then all aircraft were forbidden from flying over the city.’ The image continued to sharpen. Liv leaned in closer to the screen as the picture stopped downloading. The Citadel sat at the centre. It was oval in shape and completely black except for a large area of dark green close to the centre. ‘After NASA published this photograph they lifted the ban,’ Oscar explained. ‘Even the Citadel’s jurisdiction does not yet extend into space.’

Liv focused on the patch of green.

‘What is it,’ she asked. ‘A lake?’

‘No,’ Oscar replied, zooming the image as close as it would go.

‘It’s a garden.’