temple.
'Here's the deal.' Now he could make out Helen's face. 'If you need to take a leak or a shit, the time is now. Then you're back in the car.'
As Kendrick nodded, she tucked the gun into her jeans and yanked his trousers down around his thighs. He felt a hot flush of humiliation.
'Don't make the mistake of thinking I'm enjoying this,' Helen muttered, 'but there is absolutely no fucking way I'm going to untie you.'
She dragged him to the side of the road where the tarmac merged with rough desert grasses, then kicked him over onto his side.
'Right, take a leak if you need it. Don't take for ever.'
Kendrick tipped himself a little further over onto his side, and urinated onto the desert soil, only partially managing to avoid wetting himself in the process. He gritted his teeth and twisted away from the puddle of urine.
'D'you need to shit?' Helen asked him.
Kendrick twisted his head from side to side in the negative, staring into the middle distance while she yanked his trousers back up around his hips.
'Well, thank Christ for that,' she muttered. A few minutes later she lifted him up and rolled him back into the boot of the car. Kendrick watched the daylight disappear again as the boot-lid came down with a solid thunk, leaving him with only his own thoughts and the petroleum stink of a pile of greasy rags – which was the nearest thing he had to a pillow.
Summer 2088 (exact date unknown) The Maze
Kendrick shivered, wrapping his arms around his ribs. His thin paper uniform provided absolutely no defence against the freezing cold of the darkened corridors. He'd given up trying to count the hours and days since their abandonment.
Someone had died recently just a few metres from where he now crouched. The death had occurred in a sudden outburst of violence that'd had nothing to do with Sieracki's instructions. It might already have been a few hours ago, but time was getting harder to judge.
The man's dying screams had gone on for far, far too long. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, or who was responsible for the killing. Kendrick had been the first to stumble across the body, while it was still cooling. The weapon used to slay him – a piece of metal twisted from one of the trolley frames – still lay nearby in a pool of gore.
And that's how it happens, Kendrick thought, alone now in the darkness. Fear and desperation were driving them all apart.
He'd known from the start that he would answer Sieracki's call when the time came.
Sieracki's voice had boomed out again, some indeterminate number of hours before. Three names had been called; nobody Kendrick knew, but all of them men. A crowd had followed them to one of the great shield doors beyond which lay the lowest levels, but Kendrick hadn't had the stomach to witness it.
As always when the names were called, the door lay open.
The first time this had happened, several men and women had rushed eagerly towards the suddenly open shield door, not seeing what the rest had noticed – automated gun turrets positioned just beyond. Those who ran forward were cut down instantly; as the rest fell back, the turrets powered down with a whine like a jet plane approaching a runway. Kendrick witnessed it all.
When those first two names were called out again, a woman had stepped hesitantly forward from the crowd, her expression unreadable. Kendrick realized with horror that she could see nothing in the darkness; she made her way hesitantly, by touch.
She was joined by another, a man this time, and it was clear from his movements that he could see better than the woman. He had glanced at her uncertainly as, her face pale and drawn, she had found her way to the edge of the shield door, guiding herself past the gun turret by sliding her hands along the corridor wall.
Kendrick remembered how someone had reached out to try to stop her, only to be slapped away. There were shouts and heated debate, a cacophony of voices.
He remembered the woman screaming, then running forward, stumbling blindly away from the corpses of the recently fallen. Her selected combatant had stared after her for at least a minute, before himself stepping forward with the stiff gait of someone deliberately walking over a cliff edge.
Kendrick could still smell the blood and scorched flesh of the bodies that had been torn apart by the guns earlier, and he despised himself when that memory made his mouth water. Wherever the innards of the dead were exposed he could see fine filaments, like silvery wires, threading through their flesh.
He kept telling himself that when his own time came he could refuse. Others had done so, and lay slowly dying of thirst and hunger in the corridors and the echoing spaces all around.
Kendrick knew that he could refuse, but deep inside he already knew he wouldn't.
24 October 2096 En route to Texas
Kendrick could hear the sound of jet planes outside. He was lost in oil-scented darkness, the air so thick and stifling that it was almost like drowning. His lungs heaved and his skin felt on fire. Even if it wasn't Helen's actual intention to kill him he was pretty sure that he'd suffocate if he remained trapped in the tiny space for much longer.
He kicked out with his feet, trying to make some noise, draw attention. He felt relief blossom in his chest as someone finally unlocked the car boot.
His reward was a chink of light, a tiny, star-like point, and he felt a rush of ecstatic relief that they were going to let him out. He wasn't going to die there in the airless dark after all.
The chink of light expanded, rushing towards him. Not sunlight, however – something else altogether.
Kendrick found that he was no longer bound. Instead he was falling, as in a dream, through an ocean of warm air. Finally he came to a soft landing on a very familiar grass plain. Once more he could see insects buzzing through the tall grass while, further away, the land curved upwards, rising to meet itself.
Kendrick looked around him, his aches and bruises suddenly a memory. He stooped down to pluck a blade of grass, twirling it between forefinger and thumb. It felt very slightly damp, the texture of its surface somehow vivid under his fingertips. If this was some kind of augment-generated hallucination, it was entirely indistinguishable from reality.
But really he was trapped, tied up in a car boot somewhere in America, not here. Logic demanded that. Yet it was hard to deny the apparent reality of what he was now experiencing.
Perhaps this is death, he mused. Or maybe the sneak preview? Either way, he felt curiously unconcerned, for the Archimedes provided a curious substitute for Heaven – or for Hell.
A darkness swept across the green, the shadow of something vast. Kendrick looked up.
Far above his head, floating in the centre of the vast cylinder that was the Archimedes, he saw a twisting, amorphous shape that he didn't recall from his previous visions. At first he thought it was merely a cloud. But this was more like a great ocean of silver droplets that had been suspended in the artificial sky above him, the grasslands around him and his own upturned face captured and reflected in its shifting peaks and troughs.
Watching the cloud become more agitated, Kendrick felt himself gripped by a sudden fear, as if something malevolent lurked unseen just behind his shoulder.
He looked around. The great shell of the Archimedes stretched into the distance on either side of him, capped at each end by striated layers of steel. He knew that the station was divided into two huge caverns. Nearer one of these layers could be seen great scaffold-like structures surrounding transfer facilities that were used for bringing materials into and out of the station.
