Before he could move, he felt a piercing sting in his neck. ‘Fuck!’ Confusion coalesced with a drug-induced dizziness as he lost motor control. He shuffled around, his fingers probing the site of the sting. Pulling the barb from his neck, he swayed as he turned to locate its source. His vision faltered and faded. Fumbling at the fastening of his jacket, he went for his gun.
‘Ethan. Where are…’
Gravity won. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.
9
The hazy gauze of consciousness found Helix in complete darkness. Were his eyes open or closed? The effortless switching of the functions provided by his ocular prothesis was gone. No night vision. No thermal imaging. No rangefinder. No weapons systems. His body was absent. ‘Hello.’ The word registered in his head but failed to materialise as sound. His mind was telling his muscles to flex, to probe his environment. Where was the adrenalin-powered rush to action? There were no smells, nothing to taste, nothing to touch and nothing to hear. If your consciousness had been decanted, were you even alive? He searched the darkness for what he could recall. Ormandy. An explosion. Ethan. The rain. The sting. The figure stepping from the shadows.
He had to move. Had to find his brother. The imperatives were clear, but the paralysis complete. Was Ethan dead? He could deal with that if he had to. Injured? He’d been there before, they’d been there before. Anger rose like magma with no outlet, filling his head with a scream that was as silent as it was futile.
He instructed his body to take a few deep breaths, tried to create a space in which he could think. Thought was all he had.
A pin prick of light penetrated the darkness. Helix focussed on it, willing it manifest into something tangible, something with which he could orientate himself in his sensory deprived existence. It was like looking down the barrel of gun, a narrow lens of focus, foggy objects forming. The field of vision expanded, the round edges flattened. Was he going towards it, or was it coming to him? Was this the white light they talked about when experiencing near death? If he could have used his eyes he would have squinted in the burgeoning light, containing the hazy haloed image of a person as if they were standing in front of the sun.
‘Gabrielle?’
The gentle face and features of Gabrielle Stepper swam into focus. She smiled. Many were the nights he’d seen that face in his dreams. Happiness was peppered with regret at his inaction, his failure to express his feelings when he’d had the chance. Guilt knotted somewhere in his conscience. At least she was safe. Where was the image coming from? Regardless of the crumb of comfort it provided, he wanted to set it aside and work out how to get to Ethan.
‘Dear Helix,’ she said, pausing to moisten her lips. ‘Where to begin? This must be the fifth or sixth version of this that I’ve tried to write.’
Helix recognised the words. The letter she’d left for him. The one he carried in his jacket pocket. His brain told him to move his lips in time with hers, reciting every memorised word, down to her confession about killing Valerian Lytkin and her regret at not telling him what had happened before she disappeared. ‘Leaving London will be easy,’ she’d concluded by saying, ‘Tearing myself away from you won’t be.’ With that, she looked up, blew him a kiss and dissolved into a blinding light.
Wherever Helix had been he was now aware that he was lying in a pool of warm water. Panic rose. His childhood aquaphobia threatened to overwhelm him as his bodily senses exploded back into reality. Dizziness filled his head as he was thrust upwards. The shell of the pod he’d been trapped inside split and fell to the sides. The water drained away. His body spasmed against the restraints holding him down as he was spun around. The bed folded beneath him, leaving him in a reclined seated position facing the bearded giant he saw in the last few moments of consciousness in that rain-swept street.
Helix blinked under the white lights, at the white ceiling, white walls, white floor. No windows. No doors. Virtual or actual reality? The bearded giant was playing his part, with a white coat and trousers contrasting against his weathered skin, heavy black beard and matching eyebrows. Helix tilted his head at the array of threatening instruments hanging dormant on their jointed mechanical arms at either side of his head and upper body, like a demented dentist’s surgery. A hundred questions rattled through his mind. He selected one to test his voice.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ he croaked.
His jailer stiffened his shoulders, expanded his barrel chest and flexed his neck to the sound of cracking vertebrae. Helix pressed against the restraints. His right arm and leg were heavier than usual. He blinked his left eye closed. Darkness. The reason for his encumbrance – the Prosthetic Command Module giving control to his enhanced prosthetics – lay on a polished metal tray alongside the folded pages of Gabrielle’s letter. His jacket, shirt and trousers lay in a heap on another table with his shoulder holsters and P226s.
‘What have you got to do to get a drink in this place?’ Helix said.
A metallic rattle echoed around the room as Beardy dropped whatever it was he was doing. He stepped away from the severed heads of a Doberman and a golden retriever. The dogs’ dead eyes stared back at Helix, their lolling tongues hanging from the sides of their mouths. A polished ivory-white skull – presumably belonging to the second of Blackburn’s Dobermans – sat beside them.
Helix pushed against the head restraint as his jailer put the end of a drinking straw between his lips. He fixed his eyes on him as he drank. Rolling the water around his mouth,
