US jeeps locked off the coast road at both ends. Half a dozen marines stood next to each vehicle, the marines flanked by a dozen unhappy-looking carabinieri. Their commander, a colonel on loan from Rome, had tried to claim control of the operation. He'd lost.

"You see that flash?"

A flare of sunlight reflected from a headland to one side of them.

"Telescopic sights," said Prisoner Zero, sipping his coffee. He'd seen the snipers with their long rifles on his way to the café. A couple of them had stood by a hastily thrown up roadblock, waiting for orders.

Their job was to stop anyone shooting at Prisoner Zero, that was what Colonel Borgenicht had told Petra Mayer. Maybe the marines didn't do irony. The Colonel certainly seemed to find nothing odd in throwing up a cordon to protect the life of someone his men were scheduled to kill in seventy-five and a half hours.

Four thousand, five hundred and thirty minutes.

Two hundred and seventy-one thousand, eight hundred... The prisoner tried to blink away the darkness and got freefall, except he was roped to a cliff and it was this safety line which brought him up short, spilling numbers from his mouth.

"Shit," said Petra Mayer, looking at the pile of vomit. "That's all we need."

Very carefully, the owner put a glass of water on the table in front of the prisoner and retreated to the safety of inside. Maybe he just wanted to be out of the afternoon sun.

"Sip it slowly," Professor Mayer instructed. "But wash your mouth out first."

Spitting water into the dust, Prisoner Zero swilled out his mouth and spat again. He drank half of what remained in a single gulp, overflow escaping from the sides of his mouth to roll down his chin and splash onto his combats.

"Slowly," said Petra Mayer.

Colonel Borgenicht had him dressed in desert casuals and canvas combat boots. So many subtexts were backed up behind this decision that Prisoner Zero hadn't even tried to shuffle his way through them. He was leaving that to Petra Mayer.

She'd been the one doing all the talking since she had Prisoner Zero dug out of his cell, dressed at gunpoint and loaded into a jeep. Only then did she mention that they were going for a picnic. Mostly she'd been talking about the guilt Prisoner Zero must feel for Malika's death. Quite how the woman had the gall to imagine she knew, Prisoner Zero was uncertain. Only the more he listened, the more certain he was that she did.

It was a weird feeling.

"Those flashes," Petra Mayer said, watching another spark from a peak of the headland. "They're camera lenses."

The prisoner thought about this and decided it made as much sense as anything else. "There must be a lot."

"Six," said Petra Mayer. And Prisoner Zero remembered how keen she was that he took the other chair.

"How do you know?" Prisoner Zero demanded.

When Professor Mayer smiled her face crumpled into a map. "Because that's how many I told the Italian police to let in."

"They didn't mind you--?"

Petra Mayer's laugh was not entirely kind. "I gave them names."

She might pretend to dislike the marines, but in the end the Professor, Dr. Petrov and the marines were all on the same side. It was, Prisoner Zero reminded himself, as well to remember this.

"What do you want?"

"No," said Petra Mayer, "that's not the question." Picking up a paper napkin, she tore off the strip that read "Café Lampedusa" and twisted it into a tiny rope which she placed neatly beside her saucer. "Displacement," she added, when she saw Prisoner Zero watching. "Something you seem to have turned into a life's work."

He was meant to ask, All right then, what is the question? Prisoner Zero understood that but he just couldn't be bothered. And anyway, she was going to tell him, it was obvious from her face.

"Do you regret trying to shoot the President?"

"I'm not sure," Prisoner Zero said with a shrug. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Petra Mayer sighed. "The correct answer is ‘Yes, deeply’... We have a problem. And the problem is that the world doesn't want you dead."

Prisoner Zero looked at the small woman who sat opposite, chain-smoking her way through a packet of Italian cigarettes.

She appeared to be entirely serious.

"Don't you get it?" said Professor Mayer. "It would be like shooting Einstein. World opinion won't let Gene do it, that's his first problem. The second is, he can't afford simply to pardon you."

Prisoner Zero smiled.

"What's funny?" There was irritation in Petra Mayer's voice. And a low-level fear that she might have missed something important.

"Who said I wanted pardoning?" asked Prisoner Zero. "You know what I see when I look at you?"

"Malika?"

"I see cliffs. Impossibly tall cliffs. And you know where they are?"

The Professor didn't.

"Etched onto the inside of my eyes. Make sense of that if you can." Reaching out, Prisoner Zero drained the last of his glass of water. "You know what I see if I keep my eyes shut?"

There was no way she could know, but Prisoner Zero asked anyway because he was talking to himself; which was all anyone ever did, it seemed to him, talk to themselves while half meanings and misunderstandings fed into the minds of those who thought they were listening.

"I see ice and darkness," said Prisoner Zero.

Professor Mayer lit the last of her cigarettes. "Really," she said. "So what does the darkness see?"

CHAPTER 52

Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]

Many things had changed next morning. The wind, which usually swung Tris and Luca's sleeping bag through the patterns inherent in the bag using only one retaining rope but containing two people, both fastened by tethers of their own... This wind was gone.

Better still, the heavy cloud that had clung like guilt to the lip of the cliff was also gone and had taken the snowfall with it. Clean skies spread above Tris and hawks ran thermals in the clear air below.

It was said that in the old stories skies had been blue rather than pale silver. This idea was odd enough to have caught Tris's imagination as a child. And she'd spent much of one week trying to come up with reasons why. In the end she'd given up, not because she couldn't find reasons but because she had better things to do.

Like find her way from one level to another.

And now Tris could see from where she hung on the cliff right to the valley floor, and it was very long way. So far indeed that Tris wasn't sure if what she saw below her was a village, a town or the Forbidden City itself. All she could see was a square smudge of green.

"What do you reckon?"

A faint echo was her only answer.

That was the other change and Tris wasn't too sure how she felt about this one. In fact, if she hadn't been so annoyed with Luca she'd probably be crying again. But there was a limit to how much and how often one person could cry and Tris felt she was beyond it.

All the same...

She woke cold but not frozen and found herself curled up like a child in the bottom of their makeshift sleeping bag. Curled up and alone. Waking slowly through the dreams of a man who stared out over a huge expanse of beaten metal below the blue of a childish sky.

Still tired and unquestionably cross, Tris had kicked out one leg, claiming stiffness in her knees but really hoping to hit Luca. Instead of the Baron her bare foot caught the edge of the sleeping bag and she felt it then, the change. A part of her wanted to describe it as a wrongness, but Tris wasn't sure this was the right word.

Luca was missing.

Struggling to her knees inside the bag, Tris reached out and made sure of what she already knew. Luca had gone and she was alone. More than this, he'd left his knife, the marble, his satchel, what remained of the food and their two unused climbing spikes.