The Thousand Emperors

‘Hell, no.’ He laughed nervously, wondering if she had any idea how terrified he really was. Almost certainly, he decided. His palms were clammy with sweat, his heart thudding in his chest. ‘If I’d told anyone what I just told you, they’d have locked me up and thrown away the key.’

Zelia nodded and stepped around to the other side of the slab, looking thoughtful. She reached up to brush a strand of hair back from her face. As she did so, Luc noticed her hand was shaking very slightly.

He glanced towards the sunlit door, beyond which lay the greenhouse. ‘If the others found out what I’ve just told you,’ he asked her, ‘what would happen to me?’

‘To you? To be brutally frank, Mr Gabion, dissection would be the first obvious step. Molecular tools would be used to tease your lattice apart, atom by atom, and highly invasive scanning routines would be used to try and decrypt whatever data or auto-suggestive routines Antonov might have implanted inside you. Assuming, that is, he hadn’t also booby-trapped the lattice to kill you the instant anyone tried to fool with it in any significant way.’ She shrugged. ‘To put it even more bluntly, Mr Gabion, I would not expect you to live for very long.’

Luc got halfway to the greenhouse entrance, his shoes slapping loudly against the tiles underfoot.

Something flashed past him in a blur, and the next thing he knew he was looking up at the outline of a mechant, hovering directly between him and the painted ceiling.

Zelia stepped over, gazing down at him with an expression of contempt.

‘Promise me,’ she said, ‘that you won’t waste any more of my time with stupid stunts like that.’

‘You just told me I’m going to have my brain picked apart,’ Luc groaned. ‘What the fuck would you do?’

‘I already told you nothing would happen to you so long as nobody else found out you were in possession of a lattice.’ She gestured towards the mechant, and it drifted back out of the way. ‘I keep my word, Mr Gabion.’

‘You’re serious?’ He pushed himself up into a sitting position on unsteady hands, staring up at her with desperate hope. ‘You’re not going to hand me over to them?’

‘I want to know just what Antonov was up to when he gave you that lattice. If I shared what you’ve told me with Father Cheng or anyone else in the Council, the first thing they would do is take the matter out of my hands. However, I have very good reasons for not wanting that to happen.’

He decided not to ask her what those reasons might be. There was something unsettling about her eyes, about her whole demeanour, the way she carried herself as much as the way she looked at him, as if he were an object rather than a human being.

‘So what happens now?’ he asked.

‘Nothing for the moment, Mr Gabion,’ she said, her eyes bright, ‘except that you’ll finish the job I brought you to Vanaheim to carry out. And if you ever – ever – think of telling anyone about our conversation here, believe me when I say there would be consequences.’

‘You’re not exactly giving me much choice.’

‘No, I’m not.’ She reached out a hand and he took it, standing up. Her grip was surprisingly strong.

‘Now that we’re clear on our relationship,’ she said, ‘I want to know if there’s anything else you want to tell me. Any other apparent hallucinations or memories you think might be pertinent.’

‘Nothing that really made any sense to me,’ he admitted.

The mechant drifted closer to him, instruments unfolding from its belly.

‘Tell me anyway,’ said Zelia, her eyes slitted like a hungry cat.

Luc stared at the mechant and licked his lips. ‘Okay. I had this dream a couple of times where I found myself looking into a mirror – or what I thought was a mirror, at first, but turned out to be a mask someone wore over their face. Except instead of seeing my own reflection in the mirror, I saw Antonov’s.’

De Almeida stared at him intently. ‘You’re certain of this?’

Luc shook his head helplessly. ‘How can I be certain about anything? It was just some crazy nightmare. But it felt . . .’

‘What?’ she demanded.

‘Real. It felt real.’

‘I think Antonov planted some of his own memories in your head,’ she told him. ‘I’m going to be honest with you. Once a lattice is in, it’s in for good, and the means by which Antonov placed it inside you strike me as extremely crude compared to how it’s usually carried out. The whole process has to be carefully monitored under laboratory conditions from beginning to end, and it can take weeks, even months, for a lattice to properly meld with the surrounding tissues. But what he did to you will almost certainly kill you, probably within weeks, sooner if left unattended.’

Luc nodded dumbly. ‘Isn’t there some way to, I don’t know, reverse the process? And if I’ve got an instantiation lattice in my head, doesn’t that mean you’d be able to create a backup of my mind?’

‘A backup couldn’t be made at this early a stage of your lattice’s growth, no. It simply wouldn’t work. And a mature lattice is precisely what will kill you. But in return for your aid in finding Sevgeny’s killer, I’ll do my best to reverse any damage brought about by your lattice until I can figure out some other, more long-term solution. The