The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [283]
“I know a lot more than that. My name is Aornis Hades. You killed my brother.”
I tried not to let my surprise show.
“Self-defense, Miss Hades. If I could have taken him alive, I would have.”
“No member of the Hades family has been taken alive for over eighty-three generations.”
I thought about the twin puncture, the Skyrail ticket, all the chance happenings to get me on the platform.
“Are you manipulating coincidences, Hades?”
“Of course!” she replied as the shuttle hissed into the station. “You’re going to get on that shuttle and be shot accidentally by an SO-14 marksman. An ironic end, don’t you think? Shot by one of your own?”
“What if I don’t get on the Skyrail? What if I take you in right here and now?”
Aornis sniggered at my naïveté.
“Dear Acheron was a fine and worthy Hades despite the fact he killed his brother—something Mother was very cut up about—but he was never truly au fait with some of the family’s more diabolical attributes. You’ll get on that train, Thursday— because you won’t remember anything about this conversation!”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” I laughed, but Aornis returned to her powder compact and I had got on the train.
“What is it?” asked Wilbur, who had been staring at me as the memories of Aornis came flooding back.
“Recovered memories,” I replied grimly as the lights flickered. The first backup generator had failed. I checked my watch. There were six minutes to go.
“Thursday?” murmured Wilbur, lower lip trembling. “I’m frightened.”
“Me too, Will. Quiet a sec.”
And I thought back to my next meeting with Aornis. At Uffington, when she posed as Violet De’ath. On this occasion we had been in company, so she hadn’t said anything, but the next time, when I was in Osaka, she had sat next to me on the bench, just after the fortune-teller was struck by lightning.
“Clever trick,” she said, arranging her shopping bags so they wouldn’t fall over, “using the coincidence in that way. Next time you won’t be so lucky—and while we’re on the subject, how did you get out of the jam on the Skyrail?”
I really didn’t want to answer her questions.
“What are you doing to me?” I demanded instead. “What are you doing to my head?”
“A simple recollection erasure, Thursday. I’m a mnemenomorph. My particular edge is that I am instantly forgettable— you will never capture me because you will forget that we ever met. I can erase your memory of me so instantaneously I am rendered invisible. I can walk where I please, steal what I wish—I can even murder in broad daylight.”
“Very clever, Hades.”
“Please, call me Aornis—I’d like us to be pals.”
She pushed her hair behind her ear and looked at her nails for a moment before asking: “I saw a beautiful cashmere sweater just now; it’s available in turquoise or emerald. Which do you think would suit me better?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’ll get them both,” she replied after a moment of reflection. “It’s on a stolen credit card, after all.”
“Enjoy your game, Aornis, it won’t be forever. I defeated your brother—I’ll do the same to you.”
“And how do you propose to do that?” she sneered. “When you can’t recollect anything about our meetings at all? My dear, you won’t even remember this one—until I want you to!”
And she gathered up her bags and walked off.
The lights in the nanotechnology lab flickered again. Wilbur and I looked at one another as the second backup generator failed. He tried the phones again in desperation, but everything was still dead. Death by coincidence. What a way to go. But it was now, with only two minutes to go, that Aornis lifted the last barrier and I clearly remembered the last occasion she and I had faced each other. It had occurred not twenty minutes before at the ConStuff reception. It hadn’t been empty at all; Aornis had been there, waiting for me—ready to deliver the coup de grâce.
“Well!” she exclaimed as I walked in. “Figured this one out, did you?”
“Damn you, Hades!” I retorted, reaching for my pistol. She caught my wrist and pulled me into a painful half nelson with surprising speed.
“Listen to me,” she whispered