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  A klaxon started to whoop. Hazard panels flashed battenburg patterns. The awful, juddering vibration suddenly became something a whole lot worse: a feral, pummelling fury.

  They were descending rapidly, planing down in an easterly direction. Once again, Falk wasn't sure if this was something that Masry intended, or a result of the boomer's increasing inability to avoid the ground. The cold highlands loomed ahead of them, grey and wet, scribbled on with chalk-mark clouds. They were crossing the line of the highway, leaving Eyeburn Junction and the depot behind over their right shoulder. The landscape below was unworked, wild. Scree slopes, grass meadows, thickets of gorse, thorn and salt bramble, pale and rusty like a stain of lichen on a boulder. Beyond that, stands of trees, then beards of denser forest, tangletree and snowgum and the fat, starchy genus that looked like rubberwood. The forest coated the escarpments of the rising hills, and lined the dark clefts and glens, the steep slices in the rock where mist hung like net curtaining, veiling private darknesses and secret streams. It felt as though they had some destination, as though the wounded Boreal was pressing on, down towards one of the forested gaps, drawn by an instinct or a navigation program.

  Despite the icy, wet wind blasting in through the open slider doors, they could all smell burning, an overhot stink of frying plastic that was welling out of the drive compartment behind the cabin space. Debris from the exploding engine had punched into the main fuselage and done untold harm, splintering and tumbling and spreading like hollowpoint rounds inside a target body. What systems had been destroyed? What was burning? Hydraulics? Fuel lines? Electrics? Fucking fire suppression?

  "Can you land this?"

  Falk looked up. Preben was braced beside him, holding on to the overheads, shouting forwards at Masry in the nose.

  "Masry? Can you land this?" he called.

  Masry said something.

  "I can't hear you, Masry," Preben yelled. "What did you say? Can you land this or not?"

  Something. Something like a yes, maybe?

  Preben flicked his eyes at Falk for a second, saw he was watching. Falk wiped blood off his mouth.

  "Masry?" Falk shouted. "Masry, where are you going to set down?"

  "Masry, answer Bloom's question," Preben called. "Where are you going to set down? Masry?"

  Nothing. Preben looked at Falk.

  "I should just fucking shoot him," he declared. "We wouldn't be in any worse shit."

  "Masry!" Falk shouted.

  The engine note changed suddenly. Briefly, Falk thought everything had cut out, but then he realised that the ground was beginning to rise quite significantly beneath them. It was rushing closer. The tree cover was soaking up the reflected roar and clatter of their engines, suddenly giving little of it back. The roar became a buzzing and whirring. The airframe kept jolting and rattling.

  "Oh fuck, man," Falk heard Valdes moan.

  "Masry!" Falk yelled. "Steer towards the flat ground! The open ground, Masry! Over that way! Don't take us down into the fucking trees! Masry!"

  It wasn't going to happen. There was an ocean of tree tops skimming under them, a grey treescape. Falk willed them to stay above it. It was just leaves. Just leaves and twigs. It should be soft, it ought to give. They could almost bounce right off it, like a coin springing off a corner-tucked sheet, like a stone skipping across a lake.

  Turned out it was like hitting a wall.

  There was an impact, like striking rock. Noise again, roaring, clattering, engines shrieking. Klaxons. The whole machine shaking and rattling with homicidal rage. Squeaking, scraping, ripping, cracking, scratching sounds as they tore through the tree cover, broken branch ends knifing the hull, leaf debris in the air around them, driven in through the side doors.

  Then something bigger, heavier, more ungiving, smacked into them and turned them hard, like a right hook breaking a jaw, turning a skull aside. Then another, a blow to the ribs that almost rolled them to the left. Headlong still, demolishing canopy and splintering solid boles. Needles of wood and chips of bark in a blizzard, motion too blurry to control.

  The final sledgehammer hit. Falk was thrown forward, bouncing off the back of the cab seats and the cabin divider.

  The shaking wouldn't stop. There were sounds all around him. The hull yelped like a whipped dog as it buckled and cracked, laminates crumpling like foil, metal screeching and shredding, dermetic alloys protesting. Falling metal versus trees and ground.

  Then nothing.

Falk wasn't sure which way up he was. He wasn't sure if any parts of him were missing, if any parts of him had been torn off. He was reasonably certain he was alive, which was, in itself, a major miracle. It wasn't clear how survival had been at all possible.

  Denying all of the pain that would inevitably follow, he allowed himself a tiny moment of triumph, of joy at the randomness of fortune.

  Then the snake struck, and the cramp hit him, and he was gone anyway.

TWENTY-FIVE

"Falk."

  His name was unfamiliar. He hadn't heard it spoken in a while. Backmasked voices and upside-down sounds hummed inside his head, coming in and out, first soft, then louder, then soft again.

  His name emerged from the sounds, briefly, like some small, deep-sea creature coming up for air and breaking the surface. It was the right way around, his name appearing intact out of the reversed nonsense of the voices.

  "Falk."

  There was no pain. This was either merciful good news, or an early indication of fundamental spinal calamity.

  "Falk."

  He opened his eyes. Bloom's eyes. Above him, a canopy of leaves and branches, a dark grey, cavernous space under the spread of the forest, where the light was soft and slatecoloured, like snow light, like the hue of the sky before a blizzard came in.

  He was on his back, looking up at a roof of gum branches, tangletrees, leaves the colour of ash and chalk, bark like untanned skin. Succulents wrapped every limb and trunk like external circulation. The looping ropes, which reminded him uncomfortably of snakes, were weighted with white berries like milky pearls, and little dot flowers of yellow. Some of the vines had intertwined so enthusiastically, they resembled sheafs of electrical trunking or cable-tied wires.

  Daylight, tiny triangles of daylight, peeked through the gently moving roof.

  Faces loomed. People were bending over him, looking down at him, into his face. Expressions of concern. Rash, Preben, then Valdes. They were all grubby, their faces smeared with dirt and sweat, and speckled with blood and oil.

  "Falk?" said Rash. "Can you hear me? If you're alive, make some kind of sign."

  "Falk," said Preben. "You're hurt. We have a serious problem. Unforeseen. We're trying to solve it. Falk? We're going to help you, okay?"

  He wondered how they'd found out his name. How had they done that?

  "Falk," said Valdes, eyes wide as he peered down. "Please. We've been trying to reach you for hours. Please respond to me."

  They all had the same voice, he realised. All three of them had the same voice, and it was a woman's voice.

  "Please, Falk, please respond," said Rash. No, he wasn't saying that. He wasn't saying anything like that. His lips didn't match the words. He was saying something else, saying something to Preben. The voice Falk could hear was merely speaking at the same time. Overlap. It was like bad dubbing on a movie.

  Falk closed his eyes so he could hear the voice better. It was coming and going out of the backmasked track, but many of the words were now the right way around.

  "Falk?"

  "Cleesh?"

  A pause.

  "Falk? Oh my God! Oh freek
^®
me! I've got him! I've got him! Falk, can you hear me?"

  "Yes, Cleesh. It's nice to hear your voice."

  "Oh, Jesus, Falk! You freek
^®
! We really thought we'd lost you! I have been going crazy here!"

  "Can you calm down a little, Cleesh? Can you? It's a bit weird here. I need you to talk slowly and more calmly, so I can understand you."

  Her voice receded into the blackness for a moment then came back.

  "…I can, sure. No problem. It's just good to hear you, that's all. Listen, listen to me, Falk, we're trying to dig you out of there. We're trying to disengage you from the soldier."

  "His name's Bloom."

  "Bloom. Right, okay. I knew that. Look, it's complicated. Ayoob says it's complicated. Things have happened that they weren't expecting."

  "Like what?"

  "Just things they couldn't predict, things they couldn't prepare for. We're working on it right now. They're–"

  "Like what?"

  A pause. It gave him a moment to get used to the blackness around him. With his eyes closed, it was almost as if he was floating in a lightless tank full of warm water and not lying on a forest floor at all.

  "I've been talking to you all the time, since you went under, Falk," Cleesh said. "Have you been able to hear me? I've been with you all the way, like I promised I would."

  "Thanks."

  "I said I would. Like old times."

  "I know."

  "Okay."

  "Cleesh, can you tell me what the problem is? Why am I still in the tank? Why haven't you pulled me out?"

  "Bari says–"

  "Bari can go fuck himself. Sorry, but I want you to explain it, Cleesh. I want you to explain it without any fucking around."

  He waited. He could hear the warm water gently rocking in the darkness.

  "Turns out," said Cleesh. "Turns out you weren't properly fit. Underwood was right. We should have done a lot more tests. A lot more. We rushed into it. I told you it would be okay. I'm sorry, Falk. I shouldn't have done that."

  "It's okay. What's the problem?"

  "You had underlying medical problems, which mean you're weaker, your immune system. Uhm, there was way too much alcohol and stuff in your bloodstream too. That's freeked
^®
things up a bit. The biggest problem is your hip."

  "My hip?"

  "Yeah. The bone density. Too much time on drivers. Underwood said the bone density was a systemic problem, but your hip is the worst place. The bone strength there is so weak, you've actually broken it."

  "I've broken my hip?"

  "It's a hairline fracture, but yeah, basically. You had so much alcohol in you it was masking the pain, but the fracture, it's new. Looks like you might even have broken it as recently as the night we put you in. Falk?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Why did you laugh?"

  "The chances are I broke my hip engaging in vigorous and empty sex that I was too old for anyway."

  "You dog," she said. "That'll teach you."

  "It will. So I've got a fucked hip. How does that alter anything?"

  "It's infected. Remember what I said about your immune system? You're sick. Fighting it, running a temp. Underwood's trying to treat it with broad spectrum, that kind of stuff, but you're sick and it's affecting the interface. We're trying to disengage you, except Ayoob's worried that pulling you out might freek
^®
your system up."

  Warm black water slapped in a lightless womb.

  "And when you say that you mean 'kill me'," he said.

  "There's a range of stuff that Ayoob's concerned about," Cleesh said. Some of her words, if not actually backwards, sounded side-on. "Paralysis, brain damage, organ failure… Basically a whole bunch of things, none of which you want."

  "You know me so well."

  "So we're working on it. Just being able to get through to you is a huge step forward and a really good sign."

  "There's the other problem as well, isn't there?" he asked.

  Water, rolling in darkness. Backwards whispers.

  "Yes."

  "Bloom's dead, isn't he?"

  "Yes, functionally."

  "Tell me what you know."

  "Underwood's monitoring his vitals," said Cleesh, "but the data is patchy. We haven't got the whole picture. What we've seen so far is the effect of the headshot. All higher function's gone. If he was on his own, he'd be dead."

  "There's actually a surprising amount of him still about in here," said Falk. "Emotions. Memories. Under stress, his muscle memory takes over. It's done that a couple of times."

  "Interesting. I'll talk to Ayoob."

  "I keep getting bouts of pain, Cleesh. Crippling pain. Cramp in my belly and head. It comes on, no warning, and

I'm helpless, then it fades."

  She said something. The words were backwards, whispers.

  "Cleesh?"

  She'd drifted out, her speech just backmasked loops.

  "Cleesh?"

  "I said, that's us, Falk," she said, suddenly loud and the right way around again. "The pain is us. Our fault. I'm sorry. It's the attempts we're making to physically remove you from the Jung tank and disconnect. Each time we've tried, the trauma you've suffered has been so great, we've been forced to abort."

  "What about Bloom?"

  "What about him?" she asked. Unseen water lapped.

  "What happens to him if you get me out?"

  "We don't know. If there was decent medical support for him…"

  "Cleesh?"

  Quiet.

  "Underwood thinks you're keeping him alive. Your mind is keeping the autonomic functions of his body running. You're kind of like his life support. You're what's keeping him going."

  "So if you pull me out, he's definitely dead?"

  "We think so."

  "Okay. Okay. You know what's going on here?"

  "We've got a partial picture. We've been listening via you. And we've been watching developments here. Apfel is going through channels via GEO's links to the SO, but there is no official line. SOMD issued a statement that an operation is underway, no other details. That whole zone is still communication-dark. Via you, we can see the problem on the ground. Have you got confirmed Bloc forces?"