Then Newcomen came out of the fog at him, sprinting like he was trying to make a touchdown.

Petrovitch slammed the axe blade into the ice, and gave the mightiest pull on the haft that he could. He was sliding, sliding over the white ice and towards the hole he’d made, that cut through almost a metre of frozen sea to the cold, dark water below.

“Too yebani slow, Farm Boy.”

They hadn’t given Newcomen a gun. If they had, Petrovitch would never have made it. The American dived for his ankles, even as Petrovitch got his fingers into a crack at the edge of the abyss.

He pulled himself forward. The block of ice he was on bobbed, and started to tilt.

“Petrovitch! Don’t you dare take the coward’s way out.” Newcomen lay sprawled on his belly, his hand ineffectually snapping at anything of Petrovitch that might still be in reach. “You’ve done the wrong thing. Exactly the wrong thing.”

The sky above them was brightening, almost blinding, and Newcomen hadn’t noticed.

“You have to bring Lucy back.”

“She is back,” said Petrovitch, and the tablet of ice he was clinging to turned over.

The water closed over his head, as thick as oil and cold as death.

He sank down, and watched the circle of light above him flash momentarily blue. His feet slowly struck the gritty sediment of the seabed, and his legs buckled beneath him. The water clouded with both clay and blood, though only a little of both. He found he was barely underwater at all, this close to the shore. He could reach up and touch the underside of the smooth, sculpted ice, if he wanted to.

He let his heart race. Near-frozen blood coursed through his constricting veins, from his skin to his core. Still conscious, still thinking, even though everything else was shutting down.

[Sasha.]

“My turn for the long sleep now.”

[One moment. Help is coming.]

“If they get me out now, I’ll die for sure. This way…”

[Sasha.]

He disabled the security locks on his heart, and readied himself. The pressure on his lungs was growing, and he bled the air out in a thin stream of bubbles that danced like quicksilver on their way up.

He was empty. He knew he had to breathe in, to make it right. He would, just not yet. He deliberately slowed his heart right down, to almost a stop. He was blacking out, embalmed by the Arctic water, lit by the unnatural sky.

[Sasha?]

39

He was patient, and he waited. He was aware of the waiting, and at the same time unaware of just how long that waiting was. One moment it was interminable, an eternity. The next, a blink, the moment between breaths. Both were the same.

He was nowhere, either. Or somewhere. It was dark – no, not dark, just not there. Then it was light, and he was in a white landscape with no features, no beginning, no end. Again, it was both.

There was nothing to do but wait. He’d chosen this path. He’d choose it again. No point in feeling anything like anger, denial, despair. He’d been right to do what he’d done. Time ran on like a shinkansen or crawled like a slug.

He couldn’t feel or see or smell or hear. He thought to himself that it was very odd: when Michael had slept, he’d dreamed of a whole universe. Empires that spanned entire galaxies had been born within his imagination. Those same empires had withered and died there, too. Yet Petrovitch seemed to be stuck in this trance, where all moments met and collapsed into timelessness.

But now he could remember that thought. That put it in the past. Unless it had always been in the past, and he had only just remembered it now. Or he had forgotten it a million times, and was surprising himself anew with the memory.

Metaphysics had never been his strong point. If he had had a throat, and lungs, he would have growled.

A tear, a rip, a sharp dragging sensation that felt like half his head coming away. It faded, and it left a row of numbers behind. They clicked over in a steady progression. One was followed by two.

A chequered pattern appeared. Lines. Circles. Colours.

A reboot. That was what was happening. He was rebooting. That information was coming from his eyes.

He’d annoyed himself alive.

Everything was happening in a rush: he was being lifted, thrown up in the air, then falling and landing with such a crack that the abruptness shocked him.

He was in a room. A ward. In a hospital. There were other beds, other patients. There was a ceiling, and ceiling lights, and another really bright burning light that was being shone directly into his right eye.

He tried to jerk his head away. Not only could he not, the light travelled the short distance across his face to burn out some of the receptors in his left eye as well.

He wanted to tell the light to go away. He couldn’t talk either. There was a snake in his mouth.

That would be stupid. Snakes didn’t do that. It had to be a tube. A tube attached to a ventilator that was hissing away on a trolley next to him. He could just make out the shape of it, but as he couldn’t move his eyes, he wasn’t sure.

The light receded. It belong to a man in blue scrubs who put it away in his top pocket. He shook his head, walked out of view, and away.

Another figure appeared. As he bent down and peered at Petrovitch, his mop of black hair fell forward over his face.

[It worked, then.]

The voice echoed in his head. He answered the same way. “I don’t know yet. Why can’t I move? Or feel anything?”

Michael stood in the middle of the bed, his waist projecting above the sheets. He raised a speculative eyebrow. [Considering you have been dead for thirty-three hours, a lengthy recovery is to be expected.]

“Thirty-three? Okay. Best comeback since Lazarus.”

Michael’s avatar walked through the rest of the bed and affected to look at the equipment surrounding him. The heart monitor registered zero beats, as it ought, and no blood pressure, which it ought not. [Did you dream?] he asked.

“No. I thought I would. I just… was.”

[Should I tell the others you are awake?]

“Give me a minute first.” He tried to blink. It wasn’t happening. The heart thing worried him, though. “Is that machine connected? Hang on. I think I need to spin up.”

[Your core temperature is still below normal. In fully human patients, therapeutic hypothermia protocols suggest restarting the heart only when thawing is complete. Please go slowly: I am standing by to record the results of this experiment for posterity.]

“So I’m still clinically dead?”

[I believe the diagnosis is mostly dead. Which was the effect you were trying to achieve, after all.]

“I’ll take it to a quarter-revolutions, then.”

Michael peered down at Petrovitch again. [Welcome back.]

“Yeah. I haven’t been dead for years. Can’t say I miss it.” He willed his heart controls into virtual being, and examined the interface carefully. “Here goes.”

He slowly nudged the controls forward, and everything started tingling. All sorts of electronic alarms sounded around him, and he was suddenly surrounded by a flurry of medical personnel shouting obscure cant at each other.

On Petrovitch’s part, he ignored them because it felt like he was being eaten alive by ants. Pain from one or other part of his body he could deal with. The whole of him? It was tempting just to slow his heart down again, but he wasn’t quite done with the meat. Not yet. Not today.

He was cold, unspeakably, indescribably cold. He hadn’t realised just how cool they’d kept him, how carefully they were defrosting him. But Michael hadn’t gainsaid his course of action, and he trusted his friend wouldn’t let him do something that might actually kill him, properly this time.