Above him the mercury-like cloud appeared to be dispersing. Spinning fragments, resembling drops of molten metal, boiled away from it like a swarm of silver locusts.
They began to rush down towards him and Kendrick didn't wait to see what happened next. He bolted across the grasslands, feeling the tug of his own muscles, the air streaming past him as he moved.
Even so, he could see the shadow of the pursuing cloud-fragments overtaking him, darkening the grass around him in every direction. Light poured down upon him from long, narrow windows extending the length of the chamber, the light itself diffused by complex mirror arrays.
He stopped, dream muscles aching, and stared up again. The individual cloud-fragments were now more discernible, moving with clear intelligence and purpose. Like swarms of tiny fish darting through ocean depths, their movements appeared almost telepathically coordinated.
Kendrick stopped again, wondering what it was that felt so wrong about all this. It was like the time when his heart had ceased beating, the feeling that part of him had vanished so suddenly that he could not at first work out what was missing.
And then he knew.
He was no longer breathing.
In this dream-place, his lungs, like his heart, were still. He deliberately drew breath then, so that air filled his chest. He actually felt the air flooding into him.
At first, panic surged within him and he felt himself begin to hyperventilate – suffering the delusion that something was blocking his nose and throat. It took a serious effort of will to maintain self-control, to remind himself that none of this was real. His lungs still moved inside the flesh-and-bone cage of his real body regardless of where his mind currently resided.
Kendrick heard the singing long before it properly impinged on his conscious mind. It brought a kind of peace that he had never believed might be possible, as if he had woken up into an angel's dream. Hardenbrooke's medication was finally wearing off: there was now little to stand between Kendrick and the message that Buddy and the rest of the Ward Seventeen Labrats had already received.
But there was still that sense of malevolence he'd felt. Where did it come from? He remembered what McCowan's ghost had told him about Robert.
The insect-like motes were close enough now to take on discernible shapes. They rushed around each other as they approached Kendrick, faster and faster until they flowed together again, taking on an outline, vaguely humanoid, fleshing out as the motes blended together into a seamless whole. It took on the size and shape of a man: a flesh-and-blood human being.
At first the shape had the face of Robert Vincenzo, but its expression constantly flowed like liquid, becoming somehow simultaneously imbecilic and dangerously intelligent.
The singing faded and Kendrick struggled to hear it still, wanting to follow that sound for all eternity, to rest in its gentle cadence until the end of time.
For the first time, Kendrick understood what Buddy had been trying to tell him, understood the peace and the safety that Buddy and the others believed they would gain from boarding the Archimedes. Everything Erik had told him, on that chilly shore so far away, suddenly made sense.
The face of Robert Vincenzo stared back at him from the dream-landscape of the Archimedes. Its mouth twisted silently, forming words that Kendrick could hear in his head, as if they were his own thoughts.
Not you.
Kendrick started to speak and felt his lungs spasm violently as they kicked back into action a second time, sucking in the air necessary to project the words that he was trying to voice.
'I didn't mean to kill you,' Kendrick stammered. 'But you made me do it, damn you.'
The face twisted into the parody of a smile.
Without warning, the ground split apart under Kendrick's feet and he fell, tumbling into a bottomless well of night filled with stars.
Kendrick lurched up from the motel bed, the sudden motion spinning him off it and sending him sprawling onto a hard wooden floor.
In an instant he was back in the real, in the here and now. He found himself in the narrow space between the side of the bed and the nearby wall, staring up at the underside of a cheap bedside table. A Gridcom box sat on it, its tacky styling designed to resemble an old-fashioned telephone.
From somewhere outside, he could hear the rush and roar of aircraft landing and taking off, just as when he'd been imprisoned in the car boot. He was still tightly bound at his hands and ankles. He struggled and twisted on filthy green linoleum, kicking and pushing until he worked his way round to the wider space between the bed and the room door.
He heard more aeroplane noise from outside. Then the sound of animated voices. The motel-room door crashed open and soldiers entered, wearing camouflage gear overlaid with dark grey armour.
With a sinking feeling, Kendrick realized that they were Los Muertos. Every one of them had a crude crucifix stitched onto the shoulder of their camouflage gear. One also wore a wide and varied collection of religious paraphernalia attached by strings and chains draped around his neck. Among these were pieces of circuit board, strung together.
And something else: something dull and silvery that Kendrick realized must have come from near the Maze. It was the same nano-stuff he had seen infesting the flesh of a dying Los Muertos warrior.
One of the soldiers grinned at the sight of Kendrick lying prostrate and helpless on the floor, and chuckled as he helped his colleagues hoist him off the floor like a sack of potatoes. Kendrick's gag had worked loose and he tried to speak, but even thinking about it left him feeling listless and drained of energy so he decided to save his strength.
As they carried him outside, Kendrick could see the rest of the motel, which mainly comprised run-down breeze-block huts with dried-out gardens delineated by narrow margins of whitewashed pebbles. Several of the huts lacked glass in their windows, and beyond these buildings and a small park filled with abandoned-looking trailers he could see a vast fenced-off area with the all too familiar features of a military base. Administrative buildings and prefabs stood next to a long runway and a complex of hangars, all dusty and broken-looking, as if it had all been abandoned a long time ago.
The soldiers dumped Kendrick unceremoniously into the back seat of an ancient manual-drive jeep that now looked as if it was composed primarily of rust. He felt his teeth clack together as his head bounced off the side door. One soldier got in the front, another sat next to Kendrick in the back, and they took off in a cloud of dust. After only a few minutes' journey they arrived at a security gate and were waved straight through.
In the distance Kendrick could see a series of vast hulking shapes at the far end of the base, looking for all the world like sleeping giants hidden under enormous camouflage shrouds. He could not even begin to guess what they might be.
Several minutes later they came to a halt outside a low, whitewashed building that turned out to be a jail. Limbs still bound, Kendrick was locked into a cell.
From the floor of the cell, he could see that there was one tiny barred window, which looked too small for him to even squeeze his head through, set high in what was presumably an exterior wall. Some soldiers were talking, out of sight, further along the corridor, and two appeared a moment later. Like all the rest, they wore crucifix- adorned uniforms.
While one kept his rifle trained on Kendrick's skull the other jailer pointed a wandlike device through the bars of the cell and Kendrick's bonds suddenly fell loose. In a matter of seconds he could pull free his aching wrists and feet.
The soldiers left him then and he groaned with relief as blood rushed back into his fingers. He crouched on the tiled floor, seeming to feel every one of the thousand bruises and aches that now patterned his body. Free at last, he thought sourly.
