Lazarus Rising

1.14 Lazarus Rises

Just like the oceans under the moon, our belief in our gods rise and swoon. The refrain seemed stuck in her head like a long forgotten poem suddenly remembered. Cheyenne opened her eyes. It was Christmas day. Christmas, the commemoration of the godless. Christmas, the discarded day of reflection, now barely celebrated. Rejected as no longer relevant by the melancholy Litost it had long since joined the ranks of the other, unfashionable pagan festivals.

Today was also the day Lannius Lazarus would be reborn.

The realisation of both made her rise quickly from her bed. Pushing back the falling hair from her face she wrapped a robe loosely around herself and ducked into the sparely furnished galley kitchen. Kneeling down she pulled up a hidden hatch in the floor, extracted a rusted metal box and rummaged through its contents until she found what she was looking for. Carefully she lifted out a wire animal and a delicately winged figurine, dropped the box back into the hole and covered it up with the flooring.

She bent the soft wire frame into shape and put the reindeer on the window ledge. Next to it she stood the paper angel and straightened its wings until it stopped toppling over backward. She'd made both when she was small, with her Aunt. One Christmas, long ago when the snow outside was white. Or so she imagined, it was always pure white in her memories of childhood. Today, outside it was wet and grey. The snow had turned to rivers of freezing slush, marking the ebb of the night-walking Litost and the early morning flow of the Risers down to the ever burning furnaces.

Moments later, her aero hummed across a fire flecked dawn. Etched in charcoal thin cracks of wavering smoke trails, the sky appeared so fragile that at any moment it might shatter into a thousand pools of molten glass. In the distance she could see a pall of silver grey smoke hanging over Grafton Lake. Above the shattered ice of the lake crowded a small host of airborne vehicles lifting up pieces of burnt wreckage and lugging them to the shore, where they sat in long lines of twisted chunks of blackened metal.

There would be no survivors, she knew that. A shot of guilt run through her. Was it her fault the investigation had stumbled to a halt? She had failed to make progress. But then so had Rovin even with all the resources that he had at his disposal.

And what of Haydens insistence that the deceased Lazarus be bought back. A man long dead, out of touch with the present world. Did that really make any sense? Lazarus knew about Risers for sure but the Riser connection was perhaps diminished with the other deaths. There were many paths to follow in the investigation now. Too many perhaps and Lazarus could end up being a distraction. She didn't doubt Hayden's sure touch. For, despite his removal from reality, he did seem to move through a plane that connected to the events around him and the things he foresaw had an uncanny art of coming into being. She'd always trusted his foresight and always would.

She landed her aero next to the towering monolith she'd met Ventner in and walked across to the research building, a long low squat building whose mirrored surface reflected the blood splattered sky. The sharp winter air burned her cheeks and the depths of her stomach filled with a sense of nervous foreboding. Who was Lazarus really and why did Haydens have so much faith in his ability to make a difference. An intangible feeling of Deja-vu descended over her. For a split second, she felt like she was following a predetermined plan. It was as if she was an actor in a play where everyone else had seen the script but her. She had an uncanny sense that she was stumbling forward searching for the answers that all the others already knew.

Inside the complex she was guided through a long maze of identical looking, clinical white corridors by a single female medical orderly. Cheyenne wished she'd not worn the heavy boots that echoed through the corridors ahead of them making her feel out of place against the soft shoed assistant. They walked in the uncomfortable silence that as an Investigator from the Sanatorium she had long become used to. Avoiding her eye the girl ushered her into a starkly lit room with slick, cold walls and slipped away hoping not to be remembered.