Ring. Sister. Piano (Book 4 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Fifty Four: The Red Room

A long room, cold and vaguely bluish. Clouds of breath hanging in the air. Pale faces floating in the blue like jellyfish. 

They were not crowd faces. Some of them he knew very well, and some were sketchy. But they all had a chilly significance that the faces back in the stadium had lacked. They all had something in common.

Jack opened the door again, and then closed it again. Some kind of sound must have escaped his lips, because he heard Sita, from very far away, asking what was wrong. And then she was pinching at his clothes again, struggling to hold him as he sank down with his back against the closed door.

A long room, filled with the dead. Everyone he'd ever killed. Every life he'd ever ended. They had parted to make a kind of corridor for him to walk down. He had no reason to suppose they would attack him, or Sita. But they would stare.

Their arrangement interested him. One of the closest faces had been that of Violet Pike. And, opposite her, the too-tanned old man who'd commanded the gargoyles. He was not – as in some stupid ghost story – holding his severed head under his arm, but there was an immaculate line of bruise-purple stretched across his throat, as though the wound had fused together in water.

After that had been soldiers – barely glimpsed and yet somehow sharply detailed. He could see the overlapping scales of their armour, the chin-straps on their helmets.

Their arrangement, though. Their arrangement was chronological. Well, reverse chronological. Was there a word for that? Retrological? Which meant that, at the end, in the blue distance, would be the first person he'd ever killed – the one he'd begun his life by killing.

It was a long time before Sita's words got through to him. He knew, because she had stopped tugging at his clothes and started pounding on his chest. Even so, she was still muted – screechy and far-away, as though he had water in his ears.

"–t is it? –ot is it? Tell me!"

"It's everyone I've ever killed," he said – or tried to say. Sita quietened down, so he supposed he must have said something. 

She sat beside him with her back to the door and rested her chin on her knees. "There are lots of them?"

"Oh yes."

"But you're a soldier," she said doubtfully. "Probably any soldier would see lots-"

"There are women too," said Jack.

"And children?"

"Only one child."

At this, he felt a lurch of nausea that made him curl up around his stomach. What would he see? Just Baby Jane? Would she be cradling her unborn child in her arms? Would it look like a child?

And, all at once, he hit a brick wall of certainty. He couldn't go in there. He knew what he could do – it had always been one of his greatest strengths. It had never worked the other way before, but now he knew – as surely as he'd known that he could liberate the colonies or get Ellini into bed with enough cheerful persistence – that he couldn't go in there.

He told Sita this. He hoped he phrased it differently, but again, he had no idea. His awareness kept cutting out, as though he was falling into lots of little pot-holes and hauling himself up again.

She was still and silent beside him. He got the feeling she was pursing her lips. "There's no-one else," she said at last. "If you don't help me, I'll be here forever."

This made the barest impression on him. It would have stung, ten minutes ago, but now he was underwater. "When I don't come back, Elsie will send someone el-"