“It is a sign,” he said, eyes bright. “I am in your blood, Cadet Savano. I am in your soul. Would you be one who murders her savior? Would you be Judas?”
No, Lord, said the voice in Chevie’s head. Her own voice.
“Fire your weapon, Cadet!” thundered Box.
“I will not be that cadet ever again!” Chevie shouted and pulled the trigger for the third time, the bullet fizzing harmlessly into the water around her thighs.
“Three times you have denied me,” said Box advancing through the torrent. “But you can deny me no more. I am Clayton Box. Your lord and savior. The savior of the world.”
Chevie backed away, hefting the gun in two hands, but still it seemed so heavy.
“Your body betrays you, Cadet. It will not allow you to shoot me. You cannot harm me, because I am your life and the light of the world. No one gets to heaven but through me. On your knees and beg forgiveness.”
Chevie felt water lap at the small of her back.
“I will never kneel. Never.”
But Old Chevie dragged at her heart. Kneel. Oh, please kneel. Remember DeeDee.
DeeDee. Executed.
“Damn you!” screamed Chevie in a last burst of resistance, and pulled the trigger. The shot was a mile wide, shattering the glass on a framed world map.
I can’t shoot the Blessed Colonel, Chevie realized. Savior of the world. It is not in me.
In me.
In which me?
Who am I now?
I am fighting myself, Chevie realized. And one of me is losing. It’s the Traitor.
“On your knees, sinner!” shouted Box. He could have taken the gun easily, but he did not even try. “On your knees. My will be done.”
Chevie felt her eyes blur. It is the Blessed Colonel. I am in His presence. I have sinned.
Box was mere steps from her, and he seemed to radiate light. His tall frame filled Chevie’s mind and vision.
I have defied the colonel. God forgive me.
Chevie felt her knees bend and tears of frustration and sorrow flowed down her cheeks.
Do not kneel. Do. Not. Kneel.
Shoot. Kill him.
But she was sinking down, and the water swirled around her waist, then her chest, hugging her like a mother. As she dropped, her gun hand came up in a last-gasp defiance of Cadet Savano, who was in control now.
“At last she has seen the light,” said Box, raising his eyes to heaven. “The vessel of the Lord shall not be martyred this day.”
He pressed his chest against the gun barrel. “For the faithful are forever bound to me in this life or any other life and they shall not harm me.”
“My Lord,” mumbled Chevie. “My Lord Colonel.”
Box met her eyes. “There is no tomorrow but the one I bring forth unto the world. And those who would conspire against me must give up their secrets before giving up their lives.”
My dad, realized Chevie. He is talking about my dad.
But still she could not pull the trigger, and it was almost a relief when Box took the pistol from her trembling fingers.
It’s out of my hands now, she thought. I’ll just stay here on my knees, and very soon the waters will close over me.
“Praise God. There is rejoicing in heaven when the prodigal son returns to the fold.”
I bet there is no rejoicing on earth, said Traitor Chevie, who was on the way back to her cage.
“Sadly, here on earth,” confirmed Box, as though he had heard the thought, “in this valley of tears, the prodigal son or daughter must be severely chastised as an example to others.”
Yep, said Traitor Chevie. Severely chastised. That’s what you get for showing mercy.
Box took hold of Chevie’s collar and stalked across the chamber, dragging her facedown through the rising waters. She did not struggle or thrash and would probably have allowed herself to drown had not the colonel dumped her on his own desk, which had been floating until her weight pinned it down. Chevie lay on her back, feet dangling in the water, coughing rancid water from her lungs, salt tears on her cheeks.
Box dangled the gun by its trigger guard and held it out to his side.
“You. Dispatch this sinner to her just reward. I must gather my mother.”
He was talking to Vallicose, who was half-conscious now, recovering from her shocking, and had picked herself up from the pile of columns.
“Yes, Lord. Of course, Lord.”
Vallicose took the gun, but not with the enthusiasm she generally exhibited when handling weapons.
“I am sorry, Lord.”
“Sorry for allowing yourself to be incapacitated, I imagine, for putting my life in danger.”
“Yes,” said Vallicose. “But mostly for…”
Box scooped handfuls of ash into the urn’s broken base. “Mostly for what, soldier?”
“For losing faith, Lord. I was beginning to doubt.”
“Doubt? You doubted me?”
“Yes, Lord. Nothing is as we were told. Even this room is so vulgar. I had never even seen you pray, so I doubted you until right now, when I saw the divine spirit through you. It was blinding. I beg forgiveness.”
Box wiped the last specks of ash from his fingers. He had been saving his moment of anger for Savano, but he found himself suddenly furious with this insufferable idiot Vallicose. He had thought it mildly amusing that she consistently credited God with stratagems that he himself had planned out over months and sometimes years.
“Divinity is a tool,” he snapped, cradling the ashes in his arms. “Religion is a tonic for the troops.”
Vallicose was confused. “No, Lord. You are God, surely.”
Box turned on his disciple. “Clayton Box is nobody’s god. I am the prime instrument. All the great dictators, with few exceptions, have armed themselves with religion. It is convenient to do so. I have never spoken with the voice of God. I simply came from the future, like you. Are you so zealous that you cannot see the evidence? No God, just science.”
“So you don’t believe in yourself?”
Box angled his large head. “Do you really think, Vallicose, that, if there is a God, He wishes my master plan to succeed? God wishes us to obliterate an entire class of people? God approves of our intention to wipe out whole cities?”
“But those are foreigners. They are heathens.”
“Jesus would be a foreigner here, Vallicose. And Moses. Even Saint Paul. All foreigners. People will always follow a leader with God on his side, and so I decided to have God on my side. And from what you tell me, I decided to be God. Are you so dense that you cannot understand that?”
Vallicose was crumbling from the inside out. Her surroundings were completely forgotten.
“I followed you all my life. The things I have done in your name…”
“Exactly my point,” said Box. “Sheep will run straight over a cliff if they believe.”
Vallicose’s legs could barely hold her up. “I was blind.”
Box nodded pointedly at the gun. “But now you can see, soldier. You can see to shoot.”
Vallicose looked at the gun in her hand as though she did not know what it was. In fact, she didn’t seem certain what her hand was.
“Shoot?”
“Yes. Shoot the child.”
“But God…”
The walls shook as successive surges battered them and several sections tumbled inward, allowing the floodwater to gush through the hole. Rat heads bobbed past the busted masonry as the rodents swam for dry land.
Box realized that time was dangerously short.
“But God? But God?” he said, wading toward the door. “Forget God, soldier. God is just the next rank up from general.” He took one hand from the vase remnant and jerked a thumb at Chevie. “Now, shoot the girl. Your new god commands it. Fall back to the air
ship hangar in the docklands and bring my trunk.”
Two words smacked Vallicose in the face like physical blows. And they were not airship hangar, as might have been expected in the 1890s, when such things were rare.
Forget God?
“Forget God?” she said, raising the gun. “Blasphemy.”
“Blasphemy is a tool,” said Box, not turning back. “Just like God is a tool.”
“God is a tool?” Vallicose said, reduced to repeating what she heard. It seemed as though her limbs belonged to somebody else and her skull was too small for her brain. She felt somehow numb and hypersensitive at the same time.
Everything I have ever believed is a lie. Everything I built my life around.
Wait. Not everything.
Not God. I may have been tricked, but not by God—by a man. Perhaps that is why I have been sent here.
Box realized that he had not heard a shot, and he turned back to Vallicose. There was no anger on his almost simian features, just mild disappointment.
“Don’t be a child, soldier. You have been to war. Religion is just a weapon in our arsenal. A very big stick.”
Vallicose shot him in the heart, and the colonel died so quickly that he never even got to change his expression. All his body did was jettison the tension it had been carrying around for decades and topple slowly forward into the rushing waters, which bore him into Vallicose’s waiting arms.
She wept tears of shock and confusion as she gathered him close. “Colonel, O Lord Colonel. God told me to do it. God is not a tool. We are the tools.”
Box didn’t hear. He was beyond listening. Clayton Box was simply beyond, and his great projected empire would never materialize.
Vallicose wept, her entire body shaking, and her mind snapped under the weight of what she had done. She pulled the colonel tight to her chest, shooting warning looks at the rats who rode the flotsam.
“You shall not have Him,” she called, using the last of her bullets on the rodents. “He is mine.” She wiped streaks of Box’s hair from his brow. “Don’t worry, Lord. I am here to protect you. Nothing will happen.”
She searched for an island in the chamber and her eyes settled on the desk, which was slowly spinning, half afloat, semi-anchored by Savano’s weight.
This is all her fault, Vallicose thought unreasonably, and she reached out with one arm, pushing Chevie into the floodwater. The current welcomed her into its load of detritus and she was borne swiftly to the door, where her head knocked against the last remaining panel.
Vallicose climbed onto the desktop, dragging Box’s body with her, and their combined weight anchoring the table for an extra moment. She settled him across her knees and waited underneath the newly installed painting of Michelangelo’s Pietà for God’s cleansing flood to wash over them both, eager for the Lord to assure her that she had acted according to His will.
Chevie heard the gunshots boom against the curved ceiling, but she was beyond any act of self-preservation. Her mind was packed tight with the struggle between two warring personalities.
Who was she now?
Cadet Chevron, or Special Agent Chevron? Just when it seemed quite possible that she would never emerge from the cocoon of this struggle, she was unceremoniously dumped into the water, and the shock took her a fraction closer to consciousness. But it wasn’t quite sufficient and she was a second away from inhaling a pint of cloudy water, which would have been the end, when her forehead crashed into an obstacle and the sharp pain brought an automatic reflex action from the FBI consultant in her.
Chevie floundered for a moment and then jerked herself upright, a hair’s breadth from panic, and took a huge gasp of air. The water tugged at her like a fat eel wrapped around her torso, flipping her over and dragging her legs and torso underneath the door’s busted central section. Only a ridge of her skull jammed against the top panel kept her in the chamber.
The last thing Chevie saw in Box’s apartment was the dead colonel cradled in Vallicose’s arms in an eerie echo of the Pietà copy hanging behind them. Then the door crumbled entirely and Chevron Savano was pulled along the corridor.
He is dead, she thought. I am free.
And she felt the grip of Cadet Savano lift from her mind. She still had the memories, but they were less potent.
Anyway, time to consider all of that later, when she wasn’t drowning in a catacomb and so forth.
There were just inches of air at the curve of the ceiling, and Chevie rode the space, tiptoes and fingers skidding along the brickwork, breathing as much as possible, enlarging her lungs for the final breath, which had to come soon and last until she cleared the catacombs entirely. He legs were buffeted by underwater missiles borne along by the sewer flush. Hundreds of rats swam past frantically, a few taking refuge on her head until she swiped them off.
But no bodies, Chevie thought. I haven’t seen any bodies.
Which was a comfort, because in spite of what these men had intended to do with their fantastic weapons, Chevie had no wish to see them murdered. The flush should have given them time to swim out.
Most of them, at any rate.
Her job now was to escape this claustrophobic place, find the rest of her team, and make sure they got away safely.
The corridor split in two, and Chevie took the left branch—or rather, was taken down the left branch—she didn’t have any choice in the matter and it was a pity she didn’t, because it was the wrong branch to take. The right-hand tunnel led into the underground dock and from there, underneath Camden Bridge and dry land. The left-hand branch led into the smelting room, which had a lower ceiling and was already full.
Imagine the horror, the sheer terror, of being suddenly completely underwater with the only sensory inputs being the frantic scrabble of rats and water pressure. Chevie slid into the foundry and the current changed from linear to swirling, and things began to bump against her.
Bodies, she realized, one twitch away from screaming underwater just for a quick death, but then she opened her eyes and saw a tunnel of light.
A tunnel of light?
But no, it wasn’t the afterlife. Some distance away, a pale cylinder of light cut six feet down into the water before raggedly fading into the gloom.
That must be a chimney! thought Chevie, and she pulled out of the current she was in, striking hard for the twenty-foot shaft that allowed machine smoke out of the catacombs.
She willed herself not to panic, even though the odds were stacked sky-high against her actually surviving this ordeal.
And even if I do survive, what then?
Amazingly, this was the first time Chevie’s own future had occurred to her beyond dealing with Clayton Box.
This is not the right moment to make a life-changing decision, she thought as she squinted through the murk, fixing on the blades of light cutting through the water.
Actually, it was the perfect time to think about something for half a minute, to distract herself from her situation and keep panic locked up in her mind.
The first fact to accept was that she could never go back to the twenty-first century. She could feel the Timekey lying on her breastbone, but the landing pad had been dismantled and destroyed, so now the pendant was nothing more than a complex ornament.
Chevie was surprised to find that she didn’t really care about the future. All she wanted to do was lie down somewhere dry and go to sleep for a long while.
And a medal from Queen Victoria would be nice. And a decent cup of coffee.
Dryness and sleep, she decided, were the priorities. Queen Vic would have to wait a few days.
She reached the chimney, thrust herself inside, and was mightily relieved to find a tube of air leading twenty feet up to the surface. The shaft was soot-blackened and rose steeply, but not vertically, so she had a fighting chance.
Chevie shared the chimney with hundreds of
rats, who trotted easily along the shaft. At another time she would have been disgusted and repulsed by their spiky wet fur and pink tails, but on this day she was almost relieved that the rats were taking the same route.
These guys know what they’re doing.
All the same, Chevie had no desire to get nipped and pick up a dose of some Victorian plague, so she placed her hands carefully and tried not to flinch when the rats clambered over her forearms, careless in their desperation.
On a good day, with sunshine and breezes, a twenty-foot climb with plenty of toeholds would not have inconvenienced Chevie much—in fact, her pulse probably would not have risen much above sixty—but now, with her uniform sopping wet and death all around, it seemed to Chevie that this sloping shaft could be the straw that not only broke the camel’s back, but its will to survive, too.
The chimney’s surface was treacherous for a climber. The bricks were coated with soot and oil, which had been slickened by the rats’ claws as they hurried to the surface. Chevie dug her fingers into the spaces between bricks and pulled herself upward inch by painful inch. She could see her hands now and was not surprised to find her knuckles bloodied from the climb. She lifted her face toward the sky and thought that the pale disk of evening light was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
I will survive this, she thought. I will swim in the ocean again. In clean, sparkling water.
Which was a lofty ambition indeed, given her current surroundings.
She was halfway there now, and the world had reduced itself to this struggle. What came before and after the climb did not matter. It was very simple: go on, or die. So she dug in her fingers and toes, dragging herself along, watching her blood seep out from cracks in her skin’s sooty coating.
There were too many rats now—a bubbling carpet of claws and teeth—and so Chevie began sweeping them off with her forearms, clearing a path for herself. The chimney narrowed as it rose, and Chevie fought back panic when it occurred to her that she might not be able to squeeze through the opening.
I will fit, she resolved. Cadet Chevie may not have had the resolve for this fight, but she is gone now. Forever.
But her mind was all Special Agent now. The cadet had been losing coherence from the moment she saw Box’s body. The Boxite Empire would never come to pass.