Whenever it happened, the ascent was too swift to hang on to your haul. Jewels, stacks of bills, bags of precious stones—the pressure inevitably tore them from your grip. Your clothes split at the seams, you felt in every abused joint like you’d been torn apart by wild horses. And then there was the friction of water on your body: a pleasant silken caress that grew ever more painful as the speed increased. When you woke up, your skin was red as if it’d been sandpapered, with open wounds where the friction had been greatest.
David forced himself to breathe slowly. Clutching the bags of diamonds to his chest, he groped his way toward another consistency pill. He slipped it from the tube onto his tongue, swallowing to force out saliva and dissolve it. Three pills: he’d reached the maximum dosage. Any more and he was in danger of what diverscalled
the bell
: an extreme inertia that slowed your every move and forced you to make countless calculations before lifting so much as a finger. In his early days, David had made that mistake once or twice; he’d found himself literally paralyzed by a maniacal obsession with measurements. While sitting in an armchair, he’d suddenly been plagued by an insane need to determine at once the exact resistance the seat offered the weight of his body; then to derive the equation governing the translocatory motion that would take him from the armchair to the door. After that, he’d furiously calculated the pressure his fingers exerted on every square inch of the porcelain knob. He’d wound up abysmally lost in estimating the perimeter and volume of the room, trying to determine the specific resistances of the materials that composed it. He woke just as he was beginning a new series of computations to ascertain with the greatest possible precision the number of years—centuries?—it would take rain to erode the walls and reduce them to the thickness of rolling papers. The bell was a holy terror. A kind of mental vertigo that hurled you down a well of mathematical formulae and equations. Three pills was really the max, if you didn’t want your brain to turn into a crazed calculator.
His heart was beating almost normally now. The punctured safe was no longer singing. Only the severed hand kept twitching on the blotter. Suddenly it threw itself at David, trying to claw his face, put out an eye. He flung it aside with the back of his hand and hurried from the room. He was almost to the airlock when he remembered he needed the body parts to get through it again. He eyed the metal plate that concealed the two scanners. If he wanted to get out of the boutique, he’d have to go through the exact samesteps he’d used to get in. He needed what Nadia had removed from the anesthetized jeweler. The image came back to him: the man reclining in a barber’s chair, all leather and upholstery tacks (a rich man’s fancy), with his oddly truncated arm wrapped in a towel, and a gauze plug stuffed in his empty eye socket like an out-of-place cork. “He didn’t feel a thing,” Nadia had said. “I left him instructions for when he wakes up, and a little something for the pain.” But where was the hand now? And the eye?
David retraced his steps. The severed hand was scratching at the blotter like a mad beast, raising a cloud of pink dust. The eye was floating high above between the pendants of the chandelier. “C’mere!” David ordered stupidly, taking a step forward. The hand sprang from the desk at once and scuttled under a chest of drawers. David got up on a chair to try to grab the eye, but it hugged the ceiling, remaining out of reach. He took another swipe, but the legs of the chair went rubbery and the seat tore under his weight, throwing him to the ground. The back of his neck struck the corner of the desk, but it was painless; even the desk was now soft as marshmallow. The deterioration was getting worse. He checked his watch. The glowing face read
1,650 feet
. He had to get out of the