The Key

69

The modified McDonnell Douglas DC-9 lifted off from Newark International Airport and began its rapid climb into the early-afternoon sky.

On the outside it appeared to be a regular charter flight, the only distinguishing markings being a light blue logo with a white dove on the tail that looked like a scrap of a better day, sliding across the flat, grey sky. Inside, it hardly resembled a plane at all. The seating section had been ripped out and replaced with a double layer of steel cot beds running almost the entire length of the plane. At the back a separate section was kitted out as a fully functioning operating room.

The DC-9 belonged to the White Dove Organization, a global, Church-run charity that flew extreme trauma victims and other civilian cases out of war-torn countries to be treated in state-of-the-art Western facilities. The plane averaged three round-trip flights a week with almost all the patient traffic being inbound. For the outgoing journeys it served as a transport plane, so for this flight all the bunks had been stripped of their mattresses and turned into large shelving racks that were stacked solid with boxes of medical supplies and other equipment.

The solitary patient was at one end, strapped to a lower bunk. Three seatbelts stretched across the knees, waist and chest, and thin arms stretched out either side of the body, mummified in bandages that also crept around the neck and wrapped the head. A gel mask covered the face, indicating that the patient had suffered some kind of severe facial trauma as well as extensive damage to the arms and torso.

The medical carnet detailing the patient’s history was in a zip-lock bag tied to the side of the bed along with a passport that identified her as Annie Lieberman, a missionary from Ohio, who had been brutally raped and mutilated then set on fire and left for dead by rebel soldiers in Guinea, West Africa. The immigration officer who had come on board prior to their departure had checked the documents but hadn’t bothered to unwrap the bandages or lift the mask. Burn victims never looked like their photographs anyway, so there was little point. Her notes said she had been receiving treatment at the Burn Center at Saint Barnabas in New Jersey and was now on her way to undergo genital- and breast-reconstruction surgery in a specialized clinic in Bangkok. He had blanched when he read the details and quickly signed the necessary paperwork to send them on their way.

The plane banked now as it broke through clouds, flooding the interior with slowly moving shafts of light as it levelled off and headed east. Part of the plane’s modifications had been to add extra fuel tanks, giving it a much longer range than the standard factory model, but at seven and a half thousand nautical miles, the flight to Bangkok was still too far in a single hop. Consequently their flight plan included one re-fuelling stop at Gaziantep International Airport in Southern Turkey.

Liv lay in the cot bed, awake but not awake. She was aware of the hum and vibration of the engines. She could feel the pressure of the bindings holding her in place and there was also something on her face, pressing down on her skin. She tried to move her arm to feel what it was, but nothing happened. She tried to open her eyes, but they too remained shut. It was as if the communicating lines between her brain and her body had been severed, robbing her of all movement but leaving her mind alert. A sensory memory surfaced and she started to hyperventilate. She’d known these things before. Claustrophobia. Confinement. Pain. They were things so raw and familiar they felt like part of her. Yet even as she remembered them she knew they were not her memories. They belonged to the thing she now carried inside her, like a dark child she must deliver safely before time ran out for both of them. She remembered the dream of the dragon, and felt its presence nearby, waiting to consume the child, just as the passage in the Book of Revelation had predicted. Then something was lifted from her face and a voice whispered in her ear.

‘Don’t try to talk,’ it said, ‘and don’t try to move: you won’t be able to and it will only cause you distress. You’ve been paralysed by a drug called Suc-cinyl-cho-line. But don’t worry, it will start to wear off pretty soon.’

She felt pressure on her eyelids as he placed his thumb and forefinger on them and gently prised them open. Bright light seared into her head and she found herself looking up not at some biblical beast but at the massive silhouette of a man. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Soon have you home again, back where you belong.’

His words sank in and the panic returned. He continued to talk but Liv was no longer listening. All she could hear was the whispering noise rushing through her, drowning everything out like a scream, bringing images of the spike-lined Tau in the chapel of the Sacrament. Her skin prickled painfully at the memory of it and fear burned through her. She remembered the translation of the monk’s note: So they kept her weak. The light of God, sealed up in darkness, For they dared not release her, for fear of what might follow, Nor could they kill her, for they knew not how.

They had kept Eve prisoner since the beginning of time and Liv had set her free, but not for long.

Soon have you home again, the man had said. They were both being taken to the Citadel to be sealed back up in darkness.