Terminal World Read Online Free PDF Page B

waiting. You’ll take the train. Now - you going to show me what the angel gave you?’
    ‘Is it safe here?’
    ‘Provided you don’t think it’ll blow up on us.’
    Quillon lifted the medical bag onto the table and sprung open the gold clasp. ‘I suppose if the angel meant to hurt me, he had ample opportunity in the morgue. But that’s only my theory.’
    ‘We’ll roll with it for now.’
    The bag yawned open. Quillon reached into it and dug to the bottom. He pulled out a heavy bandaged object, like a severed hand wrapped in linen. Quillon let the linen unroll across the table, revealing that it contained eight smaller packages, each individually wrapped. ‘This is how it came out of him, in pieces.’
    ‘What do you mean, “out of him”?’
    ‘The pieces were surgically implanted. I noticed bruising and swelling as soon as I saw him on the table. That was the only way to do it. If the angel had come down bearing some obvious item of advanced technology, it would have been separated by the clean-up crew and sent up to the Bureau boys before I ever got a look at it.’
    ‘Proves they were serious about getting it to you, at least. It wasn’t just an afterthought.’
    ‘No, I don’t think so.’
    ‘There’s a problem, though. Why send down something that isn’t going to work? Nothing from the Celestial Levels functions down here. You know that as well as anyone.’
    ‘I don’t think the angels would have gone to so much trouble if they knew it would be a futile gesture.’
    Quillon unwrapped the pieces one by one, placing them on the bare table with the wrapping beneath them. The linen had been white before, but now it was soaked through with pink and yellow discoloration. None of the components was any larger than the palm of Quillon’s hand, and each was still covered in a thin slime of blood and tissue.
    Fray tapped a finger in the air, pointing at the objects and mouthing silently. ‘Sure you didn’t miss anything?’
    ‘He told me precisely where to cut and how many parts I’d find. This is all we have.’
    Fray took one of the larger parts, smeared off most of the residue onto the edge of the linen and held it up to his eyes with a trembling hand. Like the other pieces, it was made of a hard, matte-silver metal.
    ‘Expecting it to be heavier.’
    ‘Everything they make is light,’ Quillon said. ‘They’re light. They’ve got very good at it.’
    ‘How long did it take before you stopped saying “we”, Cutter?’
    ‘Protective camouflage. It doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten who or what I am.’
    Quillon retrieved a fresh sheet of linen from the medical bag and set about cleaning up the other seven parts. Fray watched with an expression of quiet fascination, as if he was studying the opening moves of a high-stakes card game. One by one, Quillon put the cleaned parts back down on the table.
    ‘Anything leaping out at you?’ Fray asked.
    ‘I don’t know where to start.’ Quillon sifted through the parts, fingering each in turn. The angel hadn’t given him any detailed instructions on what to do with the pieces. It wasn’t even clear that the angel had known the exact nature of the weapon it had been carrying. Eight pieces, which will fit together. That was all he had been told.
    Fray jabbed a finger. ‘That piece looks like it might go with that one.’
    Quillon picked up a kind of elongated pipe, ribbed with lateral flanges, and decided - provisionally - that it might be a barrel or focusing device. There was another piece, a thicker cylinder with an open end, which appeared to slot into place on one end of the barrel. He slid the pieces together and felt a tiny, microscopic click - too precise to be accidental.
    ‘Good call.’
    ‘Anything started ticking yet?’ Fray asked.
    Quillon said nothing. He tried pulling the pieces back apart, but they were fixed solidly together. He couldn’t even see a visible join where one piece fitted over the other. It was as if the parts had