2
Tommy had spoken to Jayne as Sean had dragged her through the breach, reminding her of the years they had been together, good times and bad. She’d laughed and cried with him, raged at him and made love with him, and most of those memories had not involved her churu. Coming through at last, she had been sad to leave Tommy behind, but in a way she never would. He had saved her life and whatever she did from now on was testimony to that.
‘Want me to carry you?’ Sean asked.
‘Want me to carry you, old man?’
‘I’m fifty-two!’
‘Yeah? And?’
‘I’m not old.’
‘Look old to me. Bit of a beer gut there. Greying hair, thinning on top.’
‘I am not!’
‘Quiet!’ Moira was a few steps ahead, and she’d turned to scold them. They’d all been warned to walk in silence, and the children seemed to be doing it better than those adults who’d come through. Perhaps it was a game to the kids, but Jayne wasn’t sure. Maybe for those so young, survival and adaptability to change were instinctive.
They walked slowly, mostly as a concession to Jayne. The people from Gaia looked at her with a combination of awe and fear, and she wasn’t certain she’d ever get used to that. Sean had already stopped trying to persuade her to take Drake’s cure. When Marc is done, she’d said. He’s the main man now. They both knew to expect hard times.
As they topped the first rise and she could see further, a wave of pain washed over her. She gasped, and Sean held her arm.
‘Will you look at that,’ he said softly.
Jayne sighed away her pain, and saw another world that she might call home.
3
The lines snaked through the Basilica ahead of him and Jonah had finally seen the truth. The Inquisitors and their masters feigned ceremony, ascribing great weight to their pronouncements and speaking with deep solemnity. But this was little more than a processing plant.
As they entered the building, naked people were taken in front of the Holy Fathers and given their blessings. Past them in the darker corners of the building were the operating tables. Cries of pain echoed from the high stone ceilings, and the stench of blood filled the air. Between cries, accompaning the shuffling of feet, Jonah was sure he could hear the liquid gurgle of blood running through drains and into gutters.
Beyond the operating tables a ramp sloped up towards the exits at the rear. Here stumbled the new, naked, blood-streaked Inquisitors he had seen leaving the building perhaps an hour before.
He would never reach the operating tables. He would die unchanged.
Shuffling forward with the others, Jonah prepared himself for what was to come. He was old and had done so much, and yet there would be that instant when he had to bite. The moment between life and death.
It’s for everyone, he thought. Everything I know, and the infinities I don’t. He was witness to genocide on a universal scale, and he carried the means to end it. Perhaps. It made him sad that he would never know whether or not it had worked.