CHAPTER THREE | NEO BRITANNIA

  41 hours until Contact, 27 days until Convergence

  ‘If they were wise, they would understand; they would comprehend their fate.’

  – Deuteronomy 32:29, as cited in ‘Prisca Theologia’ by Dr Mujahid Shah

  Sophie didn’t cry—didn’t allow herself to cry—for Laurits was dead, and that was impossible.

  ‘Time’s up, Sutton.’

  Mother Campion palmed at the plexiglass. ‘Just a little longer, for pity’s sake!’

  ‘Why? That million ain’t payin’ for itself.’

  Sophie didn’t remember the guard dropping her off into one of the lines shuffling towards Administration, rows upon rows of insolvents filing through various assignment booths tasked with designating every inmate with a temporary work transfer. ‘Sutton, Sophia,’ the automated chatbot announced as she passed through the scanner, its rigid cadence overlapping with other synthesised voices projecting into the room. ‘Agriculture—proceed to Shuttle Five.’

  ‘Ag-Sec again?’ a neighbouring insolvent leered, watching covetously as the pixels within Sophie’s cuffs morphed into a familiar shade of green. ‘Those farm boys down at Kew must really enjoy your company.’

  ‘It’s those “green fingers” of hers,’ another inmate taunted. ‘They’re... skilled, I hear.’

  It would’ve been easy to undercut them; judging by the leaden colour of their cuffs, the pair had been yoked to Sanitation. But when another guard nudged her toward the line leading to Departures, Sophie wondered what would’ve been the point.

  What was the point of anything... anymore?

  ‘They said it was some kind of... “psychoactive”,’ Mother Campion had explained, ‘that it was quick. Peaceful.’

  Self-termination was not uncommon among the religious who called themselves “Neo-Gnostic”, so determined to be reunited with the “Oneness”, the “Unknowable Absolute” pervading the universe. But not Laurits. Never Laurits. His faith had sat at different feet.

  ‘“What happens, happens. Who am I to change what has or what will be? I am just the figment of a dreamer, a thread within the weave, the thought inside an intellect far richer—far greater—than me”.’

  Sophie remembered looking down at him—the man she had once considered a most beloved father—so frail, so cankered in his bed. ‘So that’s it then? You’re just going to roll over because that’s what the universe wants you to do? What about free will? What about choice?’

  ‘Hah...’ Laurits sighed, his withered fingers tracing the snake circling his amulet. ‘“Choice”. A question of the ages, little one.’

  ‘You sayin’ we don’t?’

  ‘Maybe once. But not anymore.’

  Sophie glanced at the platter of figs positioned nearby, her favourite, a class-A source of prebiotics and dietary fibre, a heady luxury this far out in the Fringe. ‘You’re talkin’ about “sin”, aren’t you? “You may eat from any tree except the one I’ve left within reach, totally not on purpose”.’

  Laurits chuckled. ‘I fear your rendition suffers a severe lack of context.’

  ‘I’ve read enough of Donati’s “manifestos”: the God of Abraham bein’ a lesser divinity, the serpent havin’ been sent to free us from ignorance, etcetera, etcetera...’

  ‘I prefer to think it a little more... nuanced than that.’

  ‘Why else would you have a snake as your sigil?’

  Laurits paused upon his amulet. ‘This is not just a snake, little one. It is an ouroboros, the “self-consuming dragon”. It is unity and harmony, the infinite and the self, transcendence and immanence, the bounded yet the free.’

  Sophie stumbled, thunder routing her flesh, flash-freezing her bones. And from within the swooning black—that wrenching, prising, circling dark—she saw a hand reaching out... pleading...

  No... Please... Not without you...

  ‘Watch it, Sutton.’

  Sophie rejoined the shuffle, straining to fix her stride. Ahead, the corridor leading from Administration opened out into a small sub-surface station, restored to working order by the transportation needs of the Insolvency Bureau.

  Before Koenig’s wall, much of the city’s underground network had been lost to rising sea levels. These days, the waters of the Thames were no longer an issue; the brutish winters following the Collapse having relocked water into glacier and cap. But despite this, there had been little movement by the city’s transport sector to reclaim the pre-Wall infrastructure, save for the tunnels the Bureau had requested for their own use; Koenig Corp—in its near-omniscient wisdom—had already provided the people with far preferable modes of transit.

  Rubbing her eyes, Sophie resisted the tug of images incomprehensible and headed for the shuttle bound for Ag-Sec. Little more than a pre-Wall multiple-unit, the vehicle was a far cry from the lev trains and aerodynes of Neo Britannia’s upper levels, but—for the Bureau—the outdated technology was more than enough; the city’s indentured didn’t need to travel in luxury.

  After claiming a seat, Sophie paused to pull down a respirator, fixing it over her mouth and nose. Unlike the vacuum-sealed facilities of the Bureau or the air-scrubbed echelons of the Interior, the tunnels leading from Departures were riddled with pollution, some of it toxic enough to suffocate in seconds. So, when a guard came to magnetise her cuffs, Sophie watched as other Ag-Sec assignees yanked down their respirators.

  The younger generations behaved as she did, treating the routine as just another nuisance of the present day. Older cohorts were more sombre, the regret plain in their eyes.

  ‘You’d be the same,’ Lavigne would sneer, ‘if you knew what we’ve lost.’

  Sophie could not deny it. The thought of a planet where humans could roam freely was an entirely alien concept. All her knowledge of the pre-Wall world had come second-hand, gained after spending a childhood watching Edju-Tech streams or listening to those old enough to have lived it. According to them, even the green magnificence of Ag-Sec only contained a fraction of what had been. To fill the gaps, Sophie often resorted to her imagination, retreating to a forest with no end, where giant trunks and verdant treetops stretched into a blue and untarnished sky. She had heard of such marvels from Javier’s stories, her favourite involving a land called “California” and a species of giant tree named “sequoia”.

  ‘There was one that I saw once,’ he had explained. ‘Its name was General Sherman. Before the wildfires destroyed it, it stood over eighty metres tall.’

  ‘That’s almost as tall as the Wall,’ Sophie remembered murmuring back, a wide-eyed sixteen-year-old snuck out to rub shoulders with racers of the city’s lev tracks.

  ‘It wasn’t even the tallest in the world at the time,’ Javier had continued. ‘That title belonged to Hyperion.’

  Wonder bristled. ‘Did you get to see that one too?’

  ‘Nada.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The pilot’s seriousness had broken then; unlike the others, he seemed to find her youthful persistence somewhat endearing. ‘Its deets were kept shush.’

  ‘Shush? Why?’

  ‘Jesús, ni?a. Because back then, there was nothin’ we liked to do more than shit on everythin’ the mighty Jefe had given us. Take the tree folks called “Prometheus”. Grew in a state called Nevada. At the time, it was ‘sidered the oldest tree in the world. By about five thousand years.’

  ‘Woah. How did they figure it was the oldest?’

  ‘They cut the bastardo down and counted its rings.’

  Cynicism and contempt were not uncommon in Neo Britannia, especially since many of humanity’s troubles had been wholly self-inflicted. And though Laurits’s band of Neo-Gnostics had always attempted to raise her with hope, Sophie struggled with the concept of an intelligent universe. If divinity through logic was truly the underlying force of Creation, why had it allowed itself to go so terribly wrong?

  ‘It’s not like it didn’t try to steer us in the right direction,’ a fellow orphan had argued during one of Sophie’s many theology classes. ‘There was that business with Noah and the Ark, after all.’

  Sophie recalled Laurits’s reaction, being one of the three priests tasked to manage the Sutton Institute for Foundling Children. ‘So, you think we are irredeemable?’ he asked. ‘Doomed to fail?’

  The foundling took time with his answer. ‘I mean... look at what we’ve done to the planet. Perhaps we were a mistake. Perhaps we never should’ve existed.’

  ‘Or perhaps,’ Laurits countered gently, his smile contradictory yet serene, ‘we are the strength by which Earth will heal itself.’

  According to all accounts, it was Laurits to whom Sophie owed her life, being the one to find her all those years ago, a tiny whelp of a thing, alone and helpless in the western regions of the Fringe. Knowing she had been abandoned by her parents—regardless of their reasons—was often a hollowing reality, but Laurits had always encouraged gratitude instead. Orphaned children were commonplace in Neo Britannia; most were either snatched up as peddlers for the drug cartels or sold into contracted servitude by the trafficking gangs. But for Sophie, at least, luck had been on her side. It had led to a childhood spent with fusty monastics, but she could not deny that it had likely saved her from a short and miserable existence somewhere else.

  An alarm heralded the closing of Shuttle Five’s doors. Safely magnetised around a supporting handrail, Sophie slumped, hoping to catch sleep.

  Laurits had been there when the Insolvency Bureau had come to claim her. In all the chaos and confusion, she had half expected the priest to take Javier down in anger. Then again, red-blooded physicality had never quite been his style. ‘Why, little one?’ was all he had kept asking, his once round face harrowed and thin. ‘Why did you do it?’

  Her reasoning had seemed evident at the time. Thanks to Koenig Corp technology, many of mankind’s terminal diseases were no longer the death sentences they had been in the pre-Wall days. Unfortunately, access to these treatments often came with a hefty price tag, leaving most Fringe-born residents to prefer death over indenturing themselves or their families to the Bureau. When Laurits’s diagnosis arrived, Sophie was already full-grown, pursuing her dream to race hover-rigs upon the lev tracks of the Fringe. In her eyes, the solution was simple; if the Institute could not afford to give Laurits the money he needed, she would win it for him instead.

  ‘You’re takin’ on the Palace?’ Javier had pressed. ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘Hiroto thinks I’m ready.’

  ‘You’re racin’ for Hiroto? Me cago en Dios!’

  ‘You said yourself I’m the best pilot—’

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  ‘The Palace ain’t no fuckin’ spin track, amiga. Cancel the deal.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. I’ve practised all the ‘figs in all the—’

  ‘Me chupa un huevo! If it’s the Palace you want, I’ll get you there within the year, but—’

  ‘Laurits doesn’t have a year.’

  Shuttle Five jolted into motion, metal wheels screeching upon rusted tracks as it hastened through the murk. Four weeks ago, the voices that had goaded such an audacious risk had spoken far louder than those urging caution. Laurits was one of the universe’s best. Surely, fate would steer fortune in her favour.

  Sitting inside the shattered wreck of Hiroto’s rig was a gut-wrenching way to be re-educated.

  ‘Why, little one? Why did you do it?’

  ‘I did it to save you!’

  ‘To save me? But why? I am simply returning to that which birthed me: a subroutine reverting to standby—having fulfilled its task.’

  What Sophie said next... she would always regret.

  ‘Fine! Go ahead and die if that’s what you want! I don’t care!’

  He’s gone, Sophie... I’m sorry...

  Sophie pressed her head against the handrail, twisted toes within Bureau-issue plimsolls.

  But he can’t be. She hadn’t had a chance to fix things yet.

  ‘Look, little one. They’re growing.’

  She was eight years old, tottering into the Institute’s “grow house” that supplemented their food supply. ‘Are there figs?’ she asked, hurrying to look upon the tray of soil they had prepared a week earlier, disappointed to see only the tiny germinations of green-pale leaves.

  ‘Not yet,’ Laurits soothed. ‘But give them time; “patience brings near that which is far”.’

  The memory shifted back to an afternoon she had spent flipping through giant encyclopaedias on the floor of Laurits’s study. Most children preferred interacting with the Edju-Tech streams—holographic and brightly shining—but for Sophie, nothing quite compared to rifling through the pages of a dusty pre-Wall tome.

  ‘“Ficus religiosa. The Tree of Awakening”.’

  Sitting at his desk, Laurits looked up from his work. Unlike Brother Donati and Sister Campion, the priest never seemed to mind the regular invasion of his privacy. Perhaps he knew she was lonely, held back by an anger—a terror—she could never quite place. ‘Ah... the Sacred Fig. The Buddha was said to have attained enlightenment after meditating beneath said species.’

  ‘The Buddha?’

  ‘He was a spiritual teacher.’

  ‘Like Jesus?’

  Laurits nodded as he noted something on the interface set within his desk.

  ‘Weird,’ Sophie said. ‘Donati’s never mentioned him.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Laurits smirked. ‘For a Neo-Gnostic, Brother Donati has a somewhat... narrow view on theology.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I guess he fears what he may be forced to confront.’

  ‘Why? This... “Buddha” guy... were his teachings... bad?’

  ‘On the contrary. There are those who believe that Gnosticism—and later Christianity—was somewhat influenced by them. Take the Sacred Fig, a tree that imbued Buddha with spiritual knowledge. In the Bible, there is a similar symbology: that of the tree that gifted Adam and Eve with the knowledge of good and evil.’

  ‘Pretty sure that was an apple tree, not a fig tree,’ Sophie said. ‘And they weren’t “gifted” with the knowledge. They stole it against God’s wishes.’

  ‘Stole?’ Laurits repeated.

  ‘Yeah. Donati said.’

  ‘I see. And because Donati said, so it must be, eh?’

  Sophie hesitated, fingers hovering over the pages of the encyclopaedia. ‘So... the Tree of Knowledge was a... fig tree then?’

  ‘How should I know?’ Laurits shrugged.

  ‘Stupid! Why correct Donati when you don’t even know yourself?’

  ‘No one can know everything. Anyone who claims to think otherwise is a fool.’

  Sophie grinned. ‘You callin’ Donati a fool?’

  ‘How dare you,’ Laurits said with a wink.

  The rasp of shrieking metal cleaved Sophie from the past. Like a cattle prod against the skin, it was a noise that—over the weeks—had become painfully familiar, informing her that Shuttle Five had arrived at Ag-Sec.

  Not yet willing to face the encroaching day, Sophie closed her eyes and allowed herself to be rocked by the diminishing momentum of the train. Soon, she was back in Laurits’s study, scrabbling for the glow of simpler times.

  ‘Laurits?’

  ‘Yes, little one?’

  ‘What do figs... taste like?’

  * * *

  Surrounded by holo-cladded megastructures, the neoclassical architecture of the British Museum looked distinctly out of place in a city of neon-laced concrete and monochrome steel. Defiant, the building remained much like its pre-Wall original, its perceived cultural importance protecting it from the vertical growth that had plagued much of everywhere else.

  Stepping out of an autonomous taxi, Laithan paused to appreciate the forecourt’s spaciousness, admiring the forty-four Ionic columns lining the building’s southern fa?ade. Leaning back, he studied the sculptures decorating the pediment crowning the museum’s central portico, heavily eroded from years of exposure to the sulphuric compounds congesting the Earth’s atmosphere. Designed by a British sculptor in the mid-nineteenth century, they told the story of Man’s progress through the ages, guided from savagery to enlightenment by several Muse-like figures, Astronomy standing at the centre of them all.

  ‘She represents one of humanity’s oldest disciplines,’ Laithan’s father explained. ‘For as long as mankind has been able to perceive the stars, we have questioned our place among them.’

  Memory steered Laithan’s eyes toward the depiction of Primitive Man, straining to free himself from a rock squeezed within the tapered corner of the pediment. Nearby, an angel was encouraging his endeavours, Man’s first step toward humanity illuminated by the light of their divine lamp.

  ‘Look closely,’ his father continued. ‘“Humanity is redeemed by religion”.’

  Laithan hunkered down and crossed the forecourt of tight-grained paving stones.

  Redeemed? Or imprisoned?

  He passed through the museum’s entrance hall. ‘“Vergina Suns”,’ his father said, pointing to the room’s coffered ceiling and the rayed depictions of stars at the centre of each recessed panel. ‘Sixteen light rays around a rodakas. To the Greeks, they symbolised totality. Twelve Olympian gods. Four elements. One Earth.’

  Inside the museum’s Great Court, a crowd of staff members were already milling around the police cordon closing off the western galleries, drawn in from their morning routines by the morbid gossip of a freshly dead body. Above them, the tessellated glass roof covering the museum’s central quad did little to brighten the enclosure’s vacuous gloom. Thirty years ago, the six thousand square metres of gridshell and glazing had been a sight to behold, an undulating work of pre-Wall engineering to frame a vast and open sky. These days, it appeared much like the atmosphere above it, yellowed and dull, befouled with pollution; there was little point in keeping it clean when everyone would rather keep their eyes down.

  ‘Shah? What are you doing up? Happy Hour isn’t for another eight hours yet!’

  Laithan forced a smile as he neared the officer guarding the cordon. ‘The powers that be thought you could use a hand.’

  ‘Really?’ The officer sleeved out his access cuff, hurriedly scrolling through a cloud of materialising ‘grams. ‘Viotto never mentioned you had been... Ah, nope. There you are.’

  Laithan queased at the mention of her name. ‘Where’s the body?’

  ‘Room Six,’ the officer said, gesturing south as he permitted him entrance into a gallery lined with Egyptian sculptures.

  ‘Room Six?’

  The officer moved to usher away a civilian who had wandered a little too close for his liking. ‘You deaf or somethin’? Yeah, “Room Six”. Viotto will give you the rundown.’

  ‘Stone... Spire... Spire... Stone...’

  Laithan did his best to ignore the whispers—the shadows glitch-knotting the walls—as he weaved through the gallery, vacant, dead-eyed stares of antiquated effigies surveying his passage. Eventually, Egypt morphed into Ancient Assyria, his route into Room Six overlooked by a pair of twinned, sphinx-like statues. From somewhere, Laithan’s father was continuing with his tour, commenting on their historical purpose, that such colossal sculptures were often placed at gateways as a defence against demonic forces. But Laithan was no longer listening, his eyes locked upon a far more gruesome display.

  ‘His eyes...? Where the fuck are his eyes?’

  ‘He clawed them out,’ a voice answered as Laithan continued to study the body lying on the marble-wrinkled floor, floodlit beneath portable investigation lamps, its head encircled by a broad pooling of blood. ‘Whatever he took, it gave him one hell of a trip.’

  Laithan turned to face the woman who had approached him. ‘Uainin...’

  Senior crime scene investigator Uainin Viotto narrowed a pair of mahoganied eyes. Short and top-heavy, she was not beautiful in the conventional sense, but when he had once spent a night between her thighs—her stare umbered and blazing above their mingling breaths—he had thought her beautiful, nonetheless. ‘What are you doing here, Laithan?’

  Laithan crouched to survey the body. Rigid and in the peak of rigor mortis, he guessed that the victim had died about eight hours earlier, his internal fluids having long pooled in the lower-lying regions, the gored, red-empty eye sockets made all the more horrifying by contrast. ‘I was assigned.’

  ‘No shit. Who?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Laithan said. ‘Called himself Bodes.’ He shifted back to his feet. ‘You really thinkin’ suicide?’

  Uainin cocked an eyebrow. Taupe brown eyes set over a prominently bridged nose, she had thought the detective handsome once. But the past few months had seemingly taken their toll, clouding the virtues nature had given him beneath the tongue-souring odour of alcohol. ‘You here to tell me different?’

  Laithan avoided her stare as he slipped the access slate—an early holographic offshoot from the touchscreen era—from her fingers. ‘What d’ya already know?’

  Uainin sighed. ‘Father Tiidrik Laurits. Neo-Gnostic. Stage four pancreatic cancer. Textbook self-induced euthanasia.’

  ‘He couldn’t pay for an immunocouch?’

  ‘Neo-Gnostic,’ Uainin repeated. ‘Any assets he owned were tied up in devotional strings.’

  Laithan flicked through the chaos of multiple open tabs, the air between them scintillating with the glow of holographic green. ‘What’d he take?’

  ‘Something new. A Frankenstein’s Monster of a salvia variant. Some synthetic hallucinogens were seen piggybacking the natural compounds, but Pharmacology hasn’t been able to identify them yet.’

  Laithan glanced toward the cannulated syringe still attached to the victim’s forearm. ‘You tellin’ me this guy could nay afford a couch but had enough free-floatin’ cash for a thirty-mil douche of unclassifiable? Belly prices for basic smack can cost up to three-hunnie for a gram.’

  ‘He was stage four, Laithan. You know treatment would’ve needed multiple bakes. If you ask me, he took the preferable way out. Question is, why here?’

  It was a cruel jab, and Uainin knew it. Hands itching for his medicine jar—his hip flask—Laithan fought to settle himself with nothing more than sheer force of will. ‘Spire...’ voices whispered, scratching at his back, teasing him from the artefact lurking in a nearby alcove. ‘Stone... Stone... Spire...’

  ‘Fine. You got any witnesses to corroborate this bullshit?’

  Uainin followed the glance he’d tried so hard to suppress—to the exhibit niched behind them, a gypsum bas-relief of two Assyrian deities: the warrior-god Ninurta, and the demon-monster Anzu. Their legend, she remembered, had been a particular favourite of Laithan’s father. ‘The night guard,’ she said. ‘Why?’

  Laithan handed back the access slate. ‘Because you missed somethin’, slick.’

  He had duplicated an image, an annotated edit, irreversibly attached to the case file. Uainin scrambled to study it. Voids upon a nondescript edge of the victim’s blood pool. Subtle. Tiny. Something that had stood on three legs—a tripod—swiped just haphazardly enough to leave a three-pronged trail.

  Uainin looked up as Laithan sauntered away.

  Motherfucker.

  * * *

  The return to the physical plane wasn’t as smooth as it should have been. Helena looked round at the splintered furniture and bullet-ridden walls. Scrambling in panic-stricken gulps, she could not recount the events that had led her here. The smell of blood was potent; its traces splattered across the carnage. Unable to hold back her feeling of nausea, Helena tipped herself forward.

  ‘Easy. I’ve got you.’

  The voice came with a hand to her shoulder, supporting her weight as she vomited onto the carpet below. Shivering, she soon felt another hand move to gather up the loose strands of her hair, pulling them back—gentle yet precise—before they could trail into her own ejecting slick. ‘Where am I?’ she whimpered mid-retch, reaching out to the figure crouched before her.

  ‘The Royal Albert Hall,’ the voice replied. ‘You... You don’t remember?’

  It was a man’s voice, perfectly baritone and warm. Helena allowed her fingers to wander the muscles of his arms, fingertips trailing across a suit tailored to accommodate the gun holster strapped to his shoulder.

  The man seemed to interpret her bold exploration as a need for further reassurance. ‘It’s all right, miss. I’ve got you.’

  It was the second time he had spoken those words. Helena couldn’t help but tremble as they stirred up a different kind of chaos. The sensation made her curious; taking a few steadying breaths, she settled her hands upon the muscles at the base of his neck and lifted her head to look at him. Grey-eyed, clean-shaven and pleasingly angular, the face that stared back did not disappoint.

  ‘Barnes?’

  Olek Barnes gave a half-look of relief. ‘Are you all right, miss?’

  Whatever had been hampering her return to functional clarity, that question alone seemed to give her subconscious the kick it needed. In the clearing fog, she became acutely aware of his proximity—

  And the putrid puddle lying between them.

  ‘Steady,’ Olek said when she quickly jerked away, cheeks burning as she hurried to wipe the lingering dregs from her chin. ‘You were... gone for a while.’

  ‘How... How long?’

  ‘Two hours, at least.’

  Helena rubbed her forehead. No wonder she felt so disconnected. Her faculties were returning steadily, slotting into place like the missing pieces of a puzzle. But fragments of her still felt uncomfortably adrift; her forays into the Deep never usually lasted this long.

  ‘Boss. We should shimmy.’

  It took Helena another moment to bring the second man into focus, studying her with the same attentive skittishness—though... for wholly different reasons—as Olek. The latest of her father’s “charity cases”, his pair of rimless, smoke-coloured glasses did little to mask the biomechanical retinas shamelessly phosphorating through every colour of the visible spectrum.

  ‘Bixby,’ Olek growled.

  ‘Her vitals are goin’ haywire,’ Nicks justified.

  Concern fissured Olek’s face.

  ‘My father,’ Helena murmured. ‘Just... get me to my father.’

  Olek chin-signalled Nicks to prepare the aerodyne. ‘Can you walk?’ He slipped his arms around her. ‘It’s not far.’

  Helena wasn’t sure where to place her hands as she was aided out of the Royal Box, their passage towards the exiting staircase stalked by a scattering of loitering theatre attendants. ‘Here,’ Olek said, having clicked at one for water.

  ‘Thanks,’ Helena replied, grateful to finally wash the bitterness from her mouth.

  ‘I’ve got you. Remember?’

  Her heart raced when she stopped to look up at him, her emotions still reeling from the moment of brazenness she had never thought herself capable. Like a gentleman, he hadn’t taken anything more that night than the kiss she had offered him, but as she watched his eyes shift from storm grey to silver, she prayed that next time—if she were lucky enough for a next time—he’d be weak enough to devour her instead.

  ‘Barnes—’

  ‘Olek.’

  ‘Olek. I... I think I’m good to walk now.’

  Nicks was smirking when the pair joined him at the dyne, waiting until Helena was safely stowed within the “hackney-styled” passenger cabin before firing up the rotors, the pedestrians milling the Kensington Gore thoroughfare cued to scarper as he tilted the craft’s fan-like nacelles into a rapid—yet cautious—ascent. ‘Eyes on the sky,’ Olek reminded, settling into the co-pilot seat as he did his best to resist the draw of the rear-view mirror, the forbidden fruit reflected within it, the taste of it—that mouth-watering, subjugating lapse of self-control—days old, but still sweetly intoxicating upon his lips.

  ‘Damn, boss,' Nicks cracked, his words mercifully muffled by the thrum of aerodyne rotors. 'She's got her claws in you good.'

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