The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(77)

“Who am I?”

“You’ll find out.”

“I’m scared!”

“I know,” I murmured. “That’s how you know it worked.”

I put her back to sleep before she could ask anything more. As a child, born again, she might perhaps remember this encounter, and consider it a dream, but there was no need to give her anything more material than was absolutely necessary. When the nurses came in the next morning to change Akinleye’s sheets, she was dead and I was gone.





Chapter 58


A hospital bed.

Awakening.

A figure by my side.

Vincent, folded up beneath the curves of his arm, sleeping, his head resting against the mattress where I lay.

I woke from my own Forgetting, from my own encounter with mental death, and I was…

… still myself.

Still me.

Still Harry August and I remembered…

… everything.

I lay still a while, not daring to move in case I woke Vincent with my stirring, and my mind raced. I was still a prisoner in Pietrok-112. I was still a threat to Vincent. I was still dying, my body consumed by the poison I had ingested, but my mind–my mind was my own. Like I had with Akinleye, Vincent would want to test this hypothesis when I woke, would look for any sign that there was still a Harry left in my mind. I would not give it.

Some part of me must have twitched because Vincent jerked awake at my side. Seeing my eyes open, at once he leaned forward and examined me, as a doctor might examine a patient, looking for responses behind my eyes. I considered speaking, considered reverting back to my native tongue, to my native voice, as Akinleye had, but it seemed an over-complication. Instead I opened my mouth and made an empty baying animal sound of distress, which hardly took any mimickry to achieve, so ravaged was my body by poison and pain.

“Harry?” Vincent was holding my hand, as I had held Akinleye’s, and his face was a picture of concern. “Harry, can you hear me?” He spoke Russian, and I just wailed the louder. Seeing this, he switched to English. “Are you all right? Are you OK?”

He was playing the concerned friend. The cheek of it almost roused me to reply, but there was so little time left, so little life, best not to squander it now. Besides, in the time I had been unconscious more tissue had died inside my body, and now all I could do was lean over the side of the bed and heave up a stomach full of acid and blood. I like to think some of it got on Vincent’s shoes before he managed to jump back. My head was pounding, and someone had lined the inside of my eyes with Velcro, which crackled around the inside of my skull whenever I tried to look. My left eye kept going off in its own direction, creating a bewildering picture of a room with a gap down the middle as my brain tried and failed to join up the confusing sense data coming into its core. Poor old Vincent–the timing couldn’t have been worse for him–not enough time to see if I was faking before I would inevitably die. He chose a bolder test. Leaping back from my bed he waved at two guards, barking in Russian, “Take him!”

They took me, one arm each, and dragged me out of my bed. They hauled me down the corridor–I was in no fit state to be anything other than hauled–and dropped me on my knees in a shower room where a lifetime ago I’d had an encounter with a very friendly lab assistant called Anna. Vincent stood in the door and barked in English, “Kill him!”

What was I meant to do? There was a risk that, by demonstrating comprehension of the order, I would show that my grasp of language had survived intact. Then again, if I took my own impending death too calmly, that might suggest that I had a residual awareness, an understanding that death was a relief in this scenario. Thankfully, the wretched state of my own body did most of the work for me as, finding itself dragged down a hall and deposited so unceremoniously, it duly went into convulsions which, I suspected, were the penultimate step in departure anyway, and I didn’t even notice when the bullet went into my brain.





Chapter 59


My thirteenth life began…

… exactly as it always had.

Berwick-upon-Tweed, the ladies’ washroom. After all the drama I’d been half wondering if I’d wake up the son of a king. If there was any form of divine justice in this universe, it was clearly taking its time in getting round to the affairs of the kalachakra.

The usual process. Passed over to Patrick and Harriet, raised as their own. I began to reclaim memory by the age of three and was, I am informed, a remarkably quiet child of very little note. Aged four I was on the verge of full faculties, and by my sixth birthday I was ready to go out into the world and declare to all members of the Cronus Club the simple truth of Vincent’s plans and the things he would do to achieve them.

I wrote to London, to Charity Hazelmere and the Cronus Club, telling them everything. Vincent Rankis, the quantum mirror, Russia–everything. I felt that there was no time to bother with the whole rigmarole of removing me kindly from my family, so informed Charity that I would be stealing the necessary money and writing myself a suitably adult-sounding letter, and making my own way to Newcastle to explain everything to her in person. All she needed to do was wait for my telegram and meet me at the station. This haste and urgency, I later realised, probably saved my life.

I received no reply, nor expected one. Charity was always reliable in matters of infant kalachakra. I stole some shillings from Rory Hulne’s desk, wrote myself a very fluent and eloquent letter informing any readers that the bearer of this note was heading to school in London and should be assisted by any willing adults in his path, and, armed with my best–and indeed, only–pair of boots and a sack of stolen fruit, I set off for Newcastle. Getting transport from the local village was impossible–far too easy to confirm with my parents whether they had given me permission for my adventure–but by walking through the night I reached, of all places, Hoxley, where once I had fled from Franklin Phearson and his interest in the future, hundreds of years ago. By presenting my letter and earnestly informing the postmistress that I was an orphan bound for London, I was given not only a ride on the back of her rattling truck, along with two yews and a lazy Labrador, but also some hot bread and lard to see me through.