Free Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds Page A

Propped up in the seat, a hole blown through his chest, there was no way he could be mistaken for anything other than a corpse. But at least he wasn’t lying in the corridor any more.
    ‘Still another ten minutes from the stop,’ Meroka said, checking her watches. ‘Better find us an empty compartment somewhere else.’
    ‘Do you think there’s another angel on the train?’
    ‘If that thing was an angel, it wasn’t like any I’ve ever seen. Fucker didn’t even have wings. You sure you know who’s really after you?’
    As they walked towards the rear of the train, Quillon said, ‘It was an angel, just not like the ones we see flying overhead. The angels have been trying to find a way to survive beyond the Celestial Levels for years. That thing - the ghoul - was one of their deep-penetration agents, surgically and genetically adapted to function down here.’
    ‘Looked half-past dead to me.’
    ‘He was dying from the moment he crossed into our zone. But just being able to operate down here at all is a significant step forwards for them.’
    ‘You know a lot about angels.’
    ‘When they’re trying to kill you, you make a point of studying your enemy.’ He paused as they passed a washroom. ‘I need to get this mess off my face, Meroka. Do you mind?’
    ‘Don’t take all week.’
    He went inside and locked the door. The light came on automatically, bathing everything in a liverish yellow. He took off his hat and glasses and looked at himself in the mirror, trying to match his face against the ghoul’s, trying to convince himself that there was a world of difference. He’d been able to pass as human in daylight, when he had first come to Neon Heights. But forced into exile, cut off from home, he was reverting to type. He had shaved his head when the hair started falling out. He had taken to wearing spectacles when the blue tint of his eyes began to deepen unnaturally. As he dabbed away at the spatter and gore with soap, water and a handful of scratchy paper towels, his skin seemed little more than a translucent membrane stretched perilously tight over alien bone-structure. He had been amongst humans long enough to know how weird he was starting to look.
    Half-past dead.
    He reached behind his back and felt through the fabric of his coat and clothes for what should have been the hard ridge of his shoulder blade. It wasn’t there. Instead he felt a soft, cancerous bud. There was one on the other side as well, precisely symmetrical.
    For years he had practised a kind of chemotherapy on himself, dosing himself with a cocktail of drugs, holding the process of reversion at bay. When that began to fail, he had gone back to Fray. Black-market surgery, performed in a squalid annexe of the Pink Peacock, kept the wing-buds from growing back. Every twelve months, the buds had been meticulously cut away, the wounds stitched and bandaged. Then every six, as the growth rate began to accelerate. Then every three.
    And now he was overdue.
     
    By the time Meroka and Quillon had disembarked, a snorting black dragon of a steam engine was already being backed into place where the internal-combustion locomotive had been, ready to take the train on the next leg of its journey. Everything happened with stopwatch precision, fixed to a routine that hadn’t changed in centuries.
    ‘Maybe we should have stayed on it,’ he said, as they followed the handful of other disembarking passengers away from the platform to the station hall.
    ‘Either way it’s a risk,’ Meroka said. ‘Least now we aren’t stuck on that thing with nowhere else to go.’
    From somewhere behind them came a scream, followed by shouting and a growing commotion.
    ‘Sounds as if they just found the body,’ Quillon said, making a conscious effort not to alter his stride.
    ‘You can look back,’ Meroka said in a low voice. ‘Everyone else is.’ He risked a wary glance over his shoulder. Passengers and station staff were gathering around the coach where