The Demon Code (45 page)

By this time, Diema had extorted further concessions from Nahir’s people. Kennedy had been moved to a cell with a bed in it, and Tillman to a thoroughly disinfected room in which a full trauma suite had been painstakingly assembled.

Diema demanded a report and the doctors obediently provided one. The Adamite, they told her, had lost more than two litres of blood – close to the maximum that a human body can shed without shutting down for good. The anti-toxin that Diema had had Kennedy give him had probably prevented, by a hair’s breadth or so, his slipping into clinical shock, and allowed him to survive long enough to be given a transfusion, but his wounds were terrible. The damage to his right arm, particularly, was likely to be irreversible, and they wouldn’t be able to tell whether there’d been any brain damage until he recovered consciousness – for which the doctors could offer no realistic estimate.

She went to see him. A doctor was examining Tillman’s pupillary responses, but he stepped back from the bed when Diema entered the room and waited with his arms at his sides.

‘Go outside,’ Diema told him. ‘Stay there until I call you.’

The doctor inclined his head and retreated.

She went to the bed and looked down at Tillman. He looked old and weak, and more than a little ugly, his skin mottled red and white with broken blood vessels, his cheeks sunken. Tubes for fluid and wiring for diagnostics decorated his flesh or tunnelled into it. A faint smell of sweat and disinfectant rose from him: the smell of bad news delivered in well-lit rooms.

Diema wrestled with the riddle, but she couldn’t solve it without a clue of some kind, and everybody who could have given her the clue was dead. Her mother, Rebecca, who had taken her own life. Kuutma-that-was, who in the end died because he grieved for Rebecca too much. And her father – the father she remembered, lifting her and carrying her away (as she cried and kicked) from her half-finished drawing. The father who lived mostly in the scorched earth between the thickets of her memory, and who had torched most of that ground himself.

Are you him?

The red-and-white thing on the bed, trailing strings and wires like a marionette, couldn’t tell her. She thought of Punchinello. No matter what the question might be, Punchinello’s only answer was to grab his stick, which he cradled like a child in his two folded arms, and commit another murder. And she thought of Wile E. Coyote, whose implacable enmity for the Roadrunner was the core of his being.

She had wanted Tillman to be like that: a cartoon creation, simple and predictable and easy to hate. That was how she had always seen him, even before she knew what cartoons were. She could still see him that way, with only a little effort.

But here was someone else, who had come to her when she needed him instead of trying to save the
rhaka
who was his friend and ally, who had faced down Hifela, the Face of the Skull, with his arm all but useless, and let his chest be sliced like pork rind while he did what he could to give her a clear shot.

Hifela’s words echoed in her head.
Y’tuh gemae le. Net ya neiu.

One of the People had tried to kill her. And the father of her flesh had saved her. She had to acknowledge that paradox, and deal with it.

Or become a cartoon character herself.

It was time to stop putting off the inevitable. She went to see Kennedy – who went off like a bomb as soon as the door was opened.

‘Where’s Leo? What have you done to him?’ The woman took a step towards Diema, not in the least deterred by the two
Elohim
who stood, stoical and watchful, to either side of her. ‘If he’s dead—’

‘He’s alive,’ Diema said. ‘But only just. Sit down, Heather. Please.’

Kennedy obeyed – perhaps because hearing about Tillman’s condition had taken some of the strength from her, or perhaps because she’d registered that Diema had just used her Christian name and knew from this that something significant had changed.

Diema sent the Messengers away with a curt gesture and closed the door behind them.

‘Tell me,’ Kennedy said, her voice tight. ‘Tell me how he is.’

Diema recapped the blood loss, the chest and shoulder wounds, the continuing coma. It was a concise, full and factual summary. Her teachers would have been proud of her.

‘But he’ll recover,’ Kennedy said, not quite asking, still less pleading. ‘This is Leo. He’s going to get back up again.’

‘They think so,’ Diema said. ‘Everything except the shoulder. They say the damage to the muscle was very severe. They did what they could to knit it back together again, but they can’t promise.’

‘And who are
they
, Diema?’ Kennedy demanded savagely. ‘The doctors you trusted his life to? This place isn’t a hospital. It’s a prison. So where in God’s name do you source your doctors from?’

‘It’s not a prison,’ Diema said. ‘It’s just a safe house. The doctors are on staff here, but they’re in touch with other doctors in Ginat’Dania. They’ve spoken to the most skilful of our healers, taken advice. And those other doctors are on their way here, now. I asked for them to be sent and they’re coming.’ This wasn’t a boast: it was just a statement of fact. Kuutma had promised her all the support she needed, without question. She had told him she needed this.

‘I want to see him,’ Kennedy said.

‘He’s unconscious. He won’t know you’re there.’

‘I want to see him.’

Diema nodded. ‘All right.’

‘And Rush. What happened to Rush? I want to see both of them.’

‘Yes,’ Diema said. ‘I promise. But I’ve got something else to ask you first. The mission has reached—’

‘Oh my god,’ Kennedy raged. ‘Don’t. Don’t even talk about that. We did what we could. We did everything we possibly could, but we were outclassed. We should have known that before we went in. It was
not
our fault that the mission was a fiasco!’

‘No.’

‘If it had been anyone but Leo, I would have
known
it was madness.’ Kennedy was speaking to herself now, rather than to Diema. She shook her head in dismayed wonder. ‘I thought he was some kind of bloody Superman. I thought he couldn’t fail. And so I let him go up against those … those monsters, and I went up against them myself. As if we had a chance. But we didn’t. We failed because we had to fail, Diema.’

‘We didn’t fail.’

‘Because nobody could take on a whole—’

‘Heather, we didn’t fail.’

Finally, Kennedy wound down, assimilating what she was being told. ‘What?’ she muttered, confused. ‘What are you saying? They all died. Or else escaped. We got nothing.’

‘We got everything we needed. I know where Ber Lusim is. And we’re going in. We’re just waiting for the equipment. That’s why I came here. To ask you if you want to come. I think you’ve earned that right. And I think …’ She hesitated. It was hard to frame the words, around the bulky, ugly concepts that they covered. ‘I think you’ll be safer if you stick with me than if I leave you here.’

Kennedy’s unwavering stare was full of surprise and mistrust. Perhaps there was an accusation there, too.

‘I’m not asking you to kill anyone,’ Diema said. ‘You already told me that wasn’t something you felt you could do.’ She’d seen the police reports from the Gellert Hotel by this time and knew what Kennedy had done with a sica to a trained assassin, but she felt that might be a conversation best left for another time. ‘For your insights. I need you as a detective.’

Kennedy was implacable – and bitter. ‘To detect what? Something you say you’ve already found? Do you think I just fell out of a tree, girl? Do you think I don’t know how you spoon-fed us all the way down the line? You let Leo get a fix on your bike so he’d follow you to that factory. You let us find Toller’s book for ourselves and then went ahead and told us what was in it. You only needed Leo to cut throats – and you only needed me to bring in Leo. Which, God forgive me, I did. But I’m all done, now. You go on and play your games.’

‘But it was you that brought us here,’ Diema said. ‘You and the boy. You put together all the things you knew and made sense out of them. Gave me a direction. I want you to be with me when I go into Ber Lusim’s house, in case that’s needed again. Whatever’s in there, whatever he’s still got planned, it might help me if I can see it through your eyes.’

‘That’s a pity. They’re staying right here, along with the rest of me. Along with Leo.’

Diema’s impatience made her reckless. She slapped Kennedy hard across the face.

Kennedy’s response, before she’d even registered the pain of the blow, was to slam her fist into Diema’s jaw. Diema took the blow without a sound, without even wincing.

‘Your pain,’ Diema said, feeling the thin trickle of blood running down from the corner of her mouth, ‘and my pain. Are they the same?’

Kennedy had stepped back, arms raised, readying herself for a fight. It didn’t seem to bother her that it was likely to be a very short fight. But the question troubled her. She dropped her hands again, nonplussed. Then after a moment she shrugged it off, making a gesture of disgust and dismissal.

‘Please get out of here,’ she told Diema. ‘Let me see Leo, or get out. I’ve got nothing for you.’

‘Answer the question. Your pain—’

‘How do I know if they’re the same?’ Kennedy yelled. ‘I’m not inside your mind, am I? I don’t know what you feel. Or
if
you feel. I don’t know anything about you except your name, and even that’s kind of a grey area.’

‘But we’re all the same,’ Diema said. ‘Under the skin. That’s what you believe, isn’t it?’

Kennedy stared at her, angry and incredulous. ‘Never mind what I believe. It’s not what you believe. You believe in a separate creation – your people and the rest of the world. The chosen ones and the dregs at the bottom of the barrel.’

‘So which of us should care the most about a million dead?’ Diema asked.

She didn’t expect an answer, but she was pleased when the woman reacted – a succession of emotions appearing briefly in her face, like a slide show. At home in Ginat’Dania, Diema was used to saying what she thought, and even more used to refusing to do so. But in the Adamite world, talking was like fighting. You said what would give you advantage.

‘You don’t need me,’ Kennedy said. ‘You’ve got everything you need.’ But there was no conviction in her voice, and a moment later she spoke again. ‘Did you manage to take one of Ber Lusim’s people alive, after all? Have you been interrogating him all this time?’

Diema was certain that she’d won, but she didn’t let that awareness show in her face or her tone.

‘There’ll be a meeting,’ she told Kennedy, ‘in half an hour’s time. By then, the equipment I’ve asked for will have arrived and we’ll be ready to go in. I’d like you to be there. You can make a final decision when you’ve heard me out.’

She left, nodding to the
Elohim
to lock the door behind her. There was no need to talk any more.

Except to Nahir, who was still uncertain about what she was asking him to do and would need to be argued with. And to the boy, who would just have to do as he was told.

The boy.

Ronald Stephen Pinkus, risen from the grave yet again to haunt and torment her.

‘We set up an ambush, but it didn’t work. In fact, we got ambushed ourselves.’

Diema’s voice rang out, almost too loud in the small, crowded room. Along with Nahir, there were more than forty Messengers, many of whom were recently arrived. They sat in silence on folding chairs, flimsy things of stainless steel and black plastic, dressed in the hand-woven linen of their home. They were vectors of terrible violence, eerily suspended. Birds of prey, somehow brought to earth and persuaded to pose for a group photograph.

In their midst sat Kennedy and Rush, ringed by empty seats. Nobody wanted to sit next to the
rhaka
, the wolf-woman, and take the taint of her proximity.

Diema stopped, alarmed, and cleared her throat. There had been a shrill, rising note to her voice. She sounded like an idiot. Worse, she sounded like a child. The palms of her hands were hot and moist.

For all the things that she had done, and had had done to her, over the last three years, she had never been called on to speak in public. She feared now that it might lie outside her skill set.

She tried again. ‘The idea was to lure one of Ber Lusim’s Messengers into trying to capture Heather Kennedy – as they’d already tried to do in England – by making it appear that we might know where their base was.’ She looked from one grave face to another. ‘That part worked. Except they didn’t just come for Heather Kennedy, they came for all of us. And they didn’t send one Messenger. They sent many.’

‘They only sent one after me,’ Rush said. ‘Turned out to be a mistake.’ Given the state of his face, and the fact that his muffled, distorted voice was coming out of one side of a hideously swollen jaw, it could only have been intended as a joke. Forty
Elohim
, with no sense of humour when it came to their holy calling, stared at him in grim silence.

‘There were more than a dozen in all,’ Diema said, hastily pulling their attention back to her. ‘We can’t say for sure how many, because they waited until we were separated and attacked us in smaller groups. The last to fall was Hifela, who all of you know, or at least have heard of.’

The room was suddenly sibilant with a dozen whispered conversations. Diema waited them out. She’d used that phrasing deliberately and she wanted her countrymen to reflect for a moment on what it meant – that twelve
Elohim
had been sent against three Adamites, two of whom were sitting in front of them, still breathing.

‘We fought Hifela, on the slope of Gellert Hill,’ she said. ‘By we, I mean myself and … and Leo Tillman, known to the People because he was once …’ Her throat was dry and she had to clear it again. ‘Known to the People in other times, and other contexts. Hifela fought hard and might have won. Some of you have seen his body, so you know. It took a dozen bullets to kill him.

‘And as he lay on the ground, beside us, he spoke these words. “
Bilo b’eyet ha yehuani. Siruta muot dil kasyeh shoh
.”’