Against Gravity

"I'll speak to you soon," he said to Whitsett, the words sounding more abrupt than he intended. "Goodbye."

Whitsett nodded. "I'll be in touch."

Kendrick walked rapidly away, not wanting to turn back and see there was nobody there.

Going back to his own place wasn't an option – at least, not for tonight. If Malky and Todd failed to wipe him from the Saint's visual records, if somebody knew who he was and wanted to kill him for some obscure reason, then simply heading home really wasn't going to be a good idea. Kendrick slowed, realizing he had nowhere else to go.

After a moment, some instinct made him head for Caroline's place. She might not be happy to see him, but where else was there? Besides, he now wanted someone familiar, someone who'd been through the same experiences that he had.

After only half a block, he turned around and saw that Whitsett was gone. He studied the spot where they'd last spoken together, his fingers flexing unconsciously. He's real, he decided. He's real.

It took Kendrick thirty-five minutes to make his way by foot through the city centre, heading for Stockbridge. The brisk pace and the cold air helped to sharpen senses that until now had been dulled by barely faded nausea. He palmed his wand and stepped up to the entrance of a refurbished tenement building in which Caroline Vincenzo owned a flat, on the top floor. The entrance stairwell visible beyond the reinforced glass was brightly lit. He carefully, steadfastly ignored the voices in his mind, yelling out all the reasons why he shouldn't be here.

He could use Caroline's cryptkey – still stored, even after so long, in his wand's memory – to gain access, but he didn't think she'd react well to that. Instead he touched the wand to his ear and waited for her to answer.

Pain flickered brightly in the back of Kendrick's skull, sending him reeling and collapsing against the vestibule side-wall.

Not again, he thought. Not twice in one night.

He started to hyperventilate, on the verge of panic, letting himself slide down until his back pressed against the door. Bright flashes now strobed and flickered at the edge of his vision as he settled his buttocks onto cold concrete. Bile forcing its way to the back of his throat, he gagged.

Kendrick looked down at the wand nestling in the palm of his hand as it pinged faintly. Come on, he thought. Perhaps she simply wasn't at home. Perhaps-

A tsunami of agony bore down on him and he yielded to it as the street around him disappeared from sight. Then the strangest thing happened… the pain was gone, in an instant.

He was somewhere else, a soft, warm wind buffeting his head. The air around him was as thick and sweet as honey. It was the same as before: a figure, born of some i

Its wings sprouted impossibly from the shoulders of a tiny homunculus figure, perhaps a hand-span in height. The wings were wide, shimmering things whose surfaces seemed to drift and flow as if caught in some invisible current. Its blank face – so disturbingly human – gazed back at him with an expression of amused contempt.

Kendrick felt as if he had been reduced to a point of simple awareness, somehow suspended in the air as though his thoughts were trapped in some dense, liquid amber. The boy with the gossamer wings suddenly appeared to grow bored – then darted away from him with shocking speed. Kendrick's non-existent eyes stared after the tiny figure as it flew across a landscape born of dreams.

He was now in some kind of garden that surrounded a group of low, office-like buildings whose pale walls glowed as if they radiated some i

He had been here before, always in the throes of a violent seizure that tore at his body and his nerves, always leaving him feeling ruined, sick and distraught. He had seen the same gossamer-winged boy before… and this strange garden, and the building it surrounded.

Kendrick could see the boy-creature, wings flapping lazily to carry it above the long untended grass.

He looked up, studying the walls encompassing his world, wondering why he would dream of this place of all places…

And then he was back in Edinburgh, the breath ragged in his throat, staring up into Caroline's face, realizing in an instant that she must have dragged him inside from the vestibule to where he now lay at the bottom of the stairs. Worry and anger warred with each other across her face as he closed his eyes, waiting for the pain to go away.

13 October 2096 Caroline Vincenzo's flat, Edinburgh

Kendrick pulled the T-shirt over his head and studied his bare chest in Caroline's bathroom mirror, noting the lines that traversed his hips, curving across his ribcage, continuing under his left arm and around his back, and culminating near the base of his skull before burrowing even deeper into his flesh. They had been there since his days in the Maze but, now that his augments had turned against him, there would soon be more – it was only a matter of time. The lines felt hard under his fingertips, as if steel cables criss-crossed beneath his skin.

Next he touched two fingers to his wrist and found a pulse but, instead of the familiar rhythm he had known all his life, there was a steady throb more like that of a machine.

He leant closer to the mirror, studying the fine flush of red in his cheeks – he could see with far greater detail than any unaugmented human. Something was keeping his body going, keeping the blood pumping through his arteries. But it wasn't his heart. Not any more.

"Kendrick?" Caroline's voice from outside the bathroom door. "Are you okay in there?"

"I'm fine."

He pulled his T-shirt back on and walked into her living room. Not so long ago, it had been their living room, but that had all ended several months before. He watched as she rolled a cigarette, an act of folly since her augs would sweep the active agent from her bloodstream before it got anywhere near her cortex. But for Caroline it was a carefully crafted eccentricity. She told people she liked the taste.

Thick dark hair spilled in heavy curls down the back of her shirt. Kendrick noticed that she was still wearing a suit, and the eepsheets and papers scattered around the floor in wild abandon suggested that she'd only just returned from meeting clients, and had been busy in locating suddenly necessary notes and reference materials.

"Thanks for letting me in," he said.

Caroline shrugged lightly, an expression of cool distance on her face. She reached out with one foot that was still clad in an expensive low-heeled shoe, and hooked an ashtray lying near her on the floor. Then she tapped ash into it. The cigarette was still her shield, its smoke a mask over her thoughts.

"I could have left you there, Kendrick, but you know how my neighbours are." She sighed heavily. "What happened to you tonight?"

"I had another seizure."

She shook her head. "So you came to me? What am I supposed to do?"

"It's not that." He then told her about the earlier events in the Armoured Saint.

"Christ," Caroline muttered once he'd finished. "Did you have to speak to the police?"

"I left before they arrived."

Kendrick sat down across from her and smiled halfheartedly. "The seizure only hit once I actually got here. It was the second one today, and the first hit a couple of hours ago."