The rings under her eyes appeared painted on. Her black hair, deep as night, hung against her pale skin.
‘Yes, I have,’ she said. ‘I thought you were going to die last night.’
Tamas laughed. The movement hurt his ribcage, but he couldn’t help himself. Blake’s bluntness was reliably amusing. His voice never cracked with her, his cheeks didn’t bloom red.
‘I thought I might too, for a little while. But,’ he gestured towards himself, ‘I survived.’
She didn’t reply, just stared at him, her amber eyes never leaving his. He recognised the distant look she wore because she wore it so often. Even more so over the past few weeks. Tamas waited, staring back at her. There was a cluster of veins at her right temple he didn’t remember seeing before. Blake’s cheekbones were too defined. She forgot to eat far too often. Tamas made a mental note to speak with Rossiter and have him monitor her consumption.
The goddess, apparently not fond of silence, roared into his mind with a force that staggered him.
‘Are you sick?’ Blake’s nose lifted, ever so slightly.
‘Blake, can you take me to him?’ He touched a finger to his temple. ‘I didn’t quite make it till the end of proceedings, as you know, and the goddess isn’t too happy.’
Blake’s distant expression snapped away, replaced with the guarded mask she always wore when the gods were mentioned. ‘I won’t be withdrawing the inhibitors till the captain is done with service. The proper protocols need to be in place. Does your boss understand?’
The goddess’s reply roared like a brain freeze through Tamas’s skull. He held his breath, determined not to let the discomfort show. Ereshkigal was not pleased. Mostly at Blake’s impressively stubborn refusal to believe the goddess existed at all.
‘That’s fine.’
‘We should keep this brief,’ Blake said. ‘You need to rest.’
It was kind of impressive, the degree of scepticism Blake still maintained. She never called Ereshkigal by name, never mentioned gods and goddesses. To Blake the gods were some other alien species, ultimately knowable and understandable.
Tamas walked behind her, eyes down to avoid unnecessary eye contact with the smattering of personnel at work in the chamber. He kept his gaze on Blake’s purple steel-toed boots, a present from Kira a few Christmas’s ago. Blake had barely gone a day without wearing them since. After watching the sisters’ complicated relationship for so long, he was kind of grateful he had no siblings. Tamas lifted his head as they reached the steps to Tech Room One. The brighter light inside the room wasn’t kind against his raw senses. He squinted, focusing on what lay at the room’s centre. The buck of recognition coming from the deity inside his head caused him to sway. Tamas steadied himself against the door.
A man lay prone on a white porcelain examination table. He was surrounded by monitoring equipment, which hummed and beeped with electronic declarations. Here lay the result of the First Meld. The first of five gallu to be sent by the goddess from Kur. This creature was only a guinea pig; he would not be a hunter as the other Four would. He would not be a part of the search for Dumuzi, the demigod long buried inside the living, breathing flesh suit of a human. This gallu was to test the carapaces and enable the Syranians to train for what was to come.
‘The design is holding?’ he said, not taking his eyes from the slow rise and fall of the man’s chest. There was no real intake of oxygen involved. The movement was all for show.
‘Yes, it is.’ Blake stood alongside him, close enough that the fabric of their sleeves touched. There’d been a time when they had been even closer. A one-off that neither wished to repeat. Discovering that what they really desired were the long comfortable silences and the acceptance of the fact that they were willing slaves to their work. Blake didn’t give a toss if he stuttered; she barely listened to him at all. ‘What do you think? Is this what they wanted?’
‘I believe so.’
The Technician’s work was flawless. Tamas had watched Blake build every part of the shell that lay before them now. From the very first sketches of the metallic skeleton, to the development of the tools needed to work with the Syranian metal Telteriun, to the development of the faux skin that bound it all together. This human carapace was a constructed masterpiece, but for all intents and purposes, a cage. The gallu had to be restrained in order to be controlled. And control would be needed when they would be used like hunting dogs to find Dumuzi.
The artificial man looked to be in his late twenties. His upper body was bare, his lower body clad in green linen pants that didn’t quite cover the sharp V-shaped muscles running from his hips towards his pelvis. His skin was a deep olive, much darker than Tamas’s own, with a square defined jaw and chin; dark, heavy brow and strong flared nose. The man was average height – the Syranians would tower over him – but his body was taut, with a hint of muscular tone that suggested greater underlying strength. Blake had literally taken him from the cover of a magazine, several magazines, creating a mash-up of two Iraqi models she’d discovered online. Her creation was a living Photoshop image. Impossible perfection. A reflection of that brief moment at the beginning of all this when Blake had been dazzled by the divinity around her.
But Tamas had seen the other carapaces. Her beguilement had long since passed.
‘You’re not saying anything,’ Blake said, adjusting the circlet around the man’s head which fed back vital-sign data. ‘What does she think of Azrael?’
‘Azrael?’ Tamas stood slightly back from the table. He’d thought the Syranian metal would contain the gallu’s energy entirely, but the punch to his senses told him otherwise. Between that and the wild, darting sensations the goddess sent through him, Tamas’s skin felt
