“What problem? He kidnapped Kate O’Mally’s granddaughter.”

Jimmy Giangos actually gulped.

“Robbie didn’t tell you that?”

“No,” said Jimmy the Greek. “He forgot to mention that bit. We knew nothing about…”

“Mrs. O’Mally understands that,” Kit said. “She sends her regards.” Shutting off the phone, Kit looked up to see Kate staring at him.

“Look,” said Kit, “I had to say something.”

“So that’s why Pat came back,” said Kate, barely listening. Pushing away her chair, she walked to the window and stared out into the darkness, only coming back to her desk to rummage for another cigar. “He must have worked it out for himself,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me in Tokyo?”

“Tell you what?”

“The truth.” Kate O’Mally shook her head crossly. “Everything finally makes sense. Mary’s postcards to you. Her leaving you the flat and her gallery. The reason she’d never talk about being pregnant and what happened while she was away.”

Any objections Kit might make vanished as Kate’s phone began to buzz. Having listened, the woman nodded a couple of times and broke the connection without saying a single word. “The police,” said Kate. “It’s time we got you out of here. Come on.”

But Kit was remembering what she’d said about Mary writing to him. He wondered whether to tell Kate that he knew where Mary was, assuming she was anywhere. I always thought this is where we’d both end up.

It was the both that gave her away. Vita Brevis—bass/vocals/lyrics. Not one to waste words, ever…

CHAPTER 54 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

Her cloak stank of smoke and her knives were gone. High Strange was cold and empty and not at all as it should have been.

“Door,” said Lady Neku.

The door, however, said nothing. It just stood there, black lacquered and shining, in the middle of the wall, with great brass hinges and a handle cut from a single block of obsidian.

KATCHATKA STATION read a metal plate on the lintel. BUILT BY KITAGAWA INCORPORATED, SHINJUKU, IN ASSOCIATION WITH PEARL ISLAND ENTERPRISES.

Neku shook her head. That description was wrong. It wasn’t the wall that had brass hinges. Well, yes, but not in the way her words sounded. And anyway, the door might be black but it wasn’t urushi lacquer, being made from a single block of obsidian, which meant the handle had to be something else.

Details were hard to remember. Continuity glitches was the technical term and her life had been full of them. Crossing out three lines of hiragana script, Neku rewrote the door as obsidian and its handle as marble, changing this to diamond as being more likely. She made the hinges steel for the sake of it and because brass felt too predictable.

Sixty-four pages it said on the back of her notebook, which was also the front, depending on which script she used. So far Neku had written alternate pages, from front and back, using a mixture of kanji, romanji, katakana, and hiragana, being Han script, Roman script, man’s script, and woman’s hand. She regarded it as her duty not to make the truth too accessible, also safer…

“Come on,” said Lady Neku, giving the door a kick. “All you have to do is open.”

“You know,” said the door, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“Because,” said the door. “Once opened, I’m open. Returning to a time when I was locked becomes impossible.”

“I can re-lock you myself.”

“That’s not the same,” said the door. “And you know it.”

“I’m going to hate what’s inside,” Lady Neku said. “That’s what you’re saying, right?”

The door stayed silent.

Every other door in High Strange had opened as Lady Neku approached. Only the council chamber stayed locked. Six sided, to reflect the high stations, the chamber had six doors, one for each family; every segment had a council chamber and the layout was identical for each.

The door should have recognised Lady Neku instantly and opened itself. It was the grandest of the doors, because this was High Strange and that was how things worked. In the d’Alambert Sector, Luc’s family would have the grandest door, such things stood to reason.

“You know who I am?”

“Of course.”

“So why won’t you open?” Lady Neku demanded, resisting the urge to kick the door again.

“Because,” said the door. “You’re dead.” There were so many things wrong with that statement that Lady Neku barely knew where to begin, so she began with the most obvious.

“If I were dead,” she said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

The door considered that.

“Also,” said Lady Neku, “I can see my reflection.”

“Do you look like you?”

“Yes,” said Lady Neku, rather too fast. “At least, I look like the me I remember.” She stared hard at her reflection in the door’s black surface. Her face was coarser, her hips slightly thicker than she’d like and her hair had been dyed silver, but she still looked like her, despite the tattered lace of her cos-play dress. Lady Neku could definitely see herself in the other girl’s eyes.

“I am Neku Katchatka,” she said. “You will open.” So the door did and it was right, she didn’t like what was inside one little bit.

A spread of shingle was washed by waves. The water so cold that she could feel nothing, although that might have been memories draining from her head. A boy was on the beach behind her, half kneeling, he seemed to be looking for someone and Neku was afraid it might be her. He never saw the man who put a gun to the back of his head and…

“Wrong,” said Lady Neku, covering her ears. “All wrong.”

The audience chamber was colder than she expected and icy underfoot, but for all its frosty chill the air was tainted with corruption. None of the lights lit on command, and the windows remained shuttered against the sky beyond. Flakes of ice had drifted into patterns on the floor. Lady Neku could only see these because light from the corridor flooded a strip of tiles in front of her. The rest of the chamber was in darkness.

Lady Neku knew what answer there would be to her request for the shutters to open and the lights come on but she asked anyway, refusing to be shocked, surprised, or even disappointed when they stayed closed and the lights failed to work.

Instead she stopped at the nearest window, trying and failing to force its covering before moving to the next. High and lonely and arched into darkness above her, each shutter rejected her attempts. Their touch burned Lady Neku’s fingers and glued cold metal to her skin.

“Fuck,” said Lady Neku, ripping herself free.

Each window took her deeper into darkness, until the door by which she’d entered became a tiny smudge of light that vanished as she reached half way around the chamber and some object finally obscured the smudge from sight.

She kept up her litany of swearing until she approached a window. Only to begin again when each shutter refused to budge. After a while, the words lost their meaning and Lady Neku’s voice lost its fury and the hot sweat beneath frozen arms, and the pain in her fingers, told her to stop doing and begin planning instead.

Everything was linked…As surely as the solar system completed its orbit of the galaxy every 250 million years and fugees needed the floating rope world to protect them from being poisoned. Everything was linked. She could get somewhere with that thought, Lady Neku just knew she could.

Forcing torn fingers into the web of a fresh shutter, Lady Neku heard a click, echoed from eleven other windows. As she watched, each began to iris, preparing to reveal light through a wall of metal flowers. And though every single one glitched before it was even a quarter open, this was enough.

The obsidian door had been right; what was seen could not be unseen and doors could be re-shut but not unopened.