‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘Don’t fight this, Del. I’m stripping out the neurovirus.’
‘What?’ He was sobbing now, the pain was so intense, burning along every nerve to punish his quaking brain.
‘I love you, Del, you know that. Nothing can take that out of you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then say it!’ she demanded.
‘I love you.’
Her hands ripped apart the last of the huntsphere shell to reveal his Olyix quint body.
‘I can’t be that,’ he wailed.
‘I love you, Del. Forever. No matter where that takes us.’
‘Help me,’ he pleaded.
The end of the universe was curving around them, its final fragments forming a fetid vortex that was pulling them down into the death of eternity and the golden god at its side – the one waiting for them. Yirella’s hands sliced into the quint flesh.
Dellian felt fingers closing around his arm. She pulled. Quint flesh stretched like slippery rubber, clinging to him, merging to give him strength. Now he was struggling against it, the foreign thoughts of devotion to the God at the End of Time tearing free in agonizing ruptures.
‘Yirella! Don’t let go.’
The universe rushed to extinction, the vortex walls spinning past in a lethal whirl of nightmares and demons.
‘Please,’ he begged.
Yirella tugged hard, crying out wordlessly at the terrible exertion. Slowly, with stringy alien goop clutching at every centimetre of his skin, she pulled him out of the quint body. He came free with an excruciating tear. The extinct universe vanished.
Dellian juddered wildly. Bright light flared around him. Everything hurt – but nothing like as bad as it had mere instants before. He was waving his limbs around – proper human limbs – though they were wrapped in wires and fibres as if someone had scooped him up in a net. His short hair was on fire as something pulled every last follicle out of his scalp.
His flailing stopped as he ran out of strength, and he flopped down onto the bed. There was no air in his lungs, and his chest heaved desperately, trying to get a breath down his throat. The surroundings swam dizzyingly in and out of view. People in medical robes clustered around, worried faces peering down, talking incoherently fast. There was a curving glass wall three metres away, with the whole squad pressed up against it – mouths open to shout, eyes wet with tears. Janc was pounding on the glass; Uret had sunk to his knees. Tilliana was weeping.
‘What the fuck?’ The words were a rasp. He turned his head.
Yirella was on the couch next to his, propped up on her shoulders, her scalp invisible beneath a fur of silky white strands finer than any hair. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she stared at him.
‘Del?’
‘I love you,’ he said. Then the memories crashed back with the power of a tsunami, knocking him back down onto the mattress. ‘The Saints are dead,’ he told everyone and burst into tears.
London
8th December 2206
The time icon flashed up in Ollie’s tarsus lens: the image of an old Seiko wristwatch with hands that clicked around in combination with Tye, his altme, supplying a tiny tick of clockwork in his audio peripheral. Ancient watches were popular these days – not that anyone went short of power for an altme processor peripheral; they all worked off body heat. But still, it was an understandable fad given London’s chronic shortage of electricity and how quirky solnet was nowadays. Trouble was, Ollie had spent his first twenty-four years immersed in purely digital displays, so analogue messed him up. It took him a second to work out that the way the hands were pointing meant it was six o’clock. Which was actually eighteen hundred hours, so it was officially evening. In the time before what every Londoner now called Blitz2, people would have known it was evening – the biggest clue being that the sun used to set every night. But now that clue was no more.
Presumably it still did set – not that Ollie trusted the government to tell anyone if the Olyix had stopped that from happening as well. When he glanced up at the London shield, all he saw was the devil-sky, same as it had been for the last two years: an eerie violet glare seething kilometres overhead. Sometimes, if he squinted against the intensity, he thought he could make out patterns writhing against the thick barrier of artificially solidified air protecting the city – milk-clouds in coffee, but sped up to hypersonic velocity.
The atmosphere outside was completely ruined now, decimated by the grotesque amount of energy the Olyix Deliverance ships were firing at thousands of city shields across the globe. They’d heated up the air to a point where ocean evaporation had reached a previously unknown peak. Climatologists on the remnant of solnet were talking about a ‘Venus tipping-point’, but all Ollie knew was that the air outside had degraded to a constant blast of hot fog. Plants simply couldn’t survive the hostile temperatures and humidity. As for animals, they were dying in a catastrophe that surpassed the Pacific Rim firestorms back in 2056.
A few months ago, he and Lolo had travelled to the edge of the shield out at Epsom, just to see if it really was as bad as everyone said. There in the deserted suburbs, the overhead violet glare condensed into slender ribbons of lightning that crackled around the rim, allowing the foolhardy to glimpse what lay outside. They’d seen the Surrey hills through the short breaks in the turbulent mantle of smog. Lying beyond the vast dead marsh that now throttled London, silhouettes of the ragged slopes rose to a bleak hellscape of steaming ground matted with the slushy remnants of vegetation. Any evidence of human habitation – the ancient towns and elegant villages dating back to the time of mythical kings, the new carbon-sink forests triumphantly planted throughout the twenty-second century – had all been vanquished in the backlash of the invaders’ assault.
What they’d witnessed left him depressed, yes, but it was the guilt that had inflamed his anger and determination. The Olyix have killed Earth, and I helped them. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know. But that made no difference to the shame.
He gave the devil-sky a last hateful glance and went back into the small industrial building that was now home – a fancy description for a brick-wall shed with a carbon-panel roof. They’d found it just off Bellenden Road, squeezed in between the nice houses of Holly Grove and the old railway line. He’d been reluctant to use it at first; the railway arches were too similar to the ones that his old gang, the Southwark Legion, had used. So not only were there painful memory triggers facing him every time he walked outside, there was also the danger of pattern recognition. He was still on Special Branch’s most-wanted list, so their G8Turings would have profiled him. What if they’d decided he was emotionally weak, needing to cling to familiarity? They would have him reading those shabby, ivy-smothered brick arches as a psychological crutch.
Or . . . ‘You’re so paranoid about the police,’ as Lolo told him every time he mentioned the possibility.
Ollie’s rational brain knew sie was right. From what he could gain from his cautious and intermittent access to the remnants of solnet, he was still high up on the authorities’ list of wanted suspects; they were never going to forgive and forget the Legion’s involvement in the Croydon raid, nor the disaster that was Lichfield Road. Not that the Specials would mount surveillance along every stretch of London’s disused railway arches just in case he was so pathetic he needed a familiar landscape for reassurance. Besides, even two years into Blitz2, the government was providing the city’s residents with minimal support. Their whole effort was devoted to maintaining the shield and keeping the population fed. Everything else was secondary – or so they said. But Ollie wasn’t so sure. The authorities had been very keen to find him.