The drone of the plane's engines was the only constant, passing through the window and becoming a numbing vibration in my blood. Below, the snowcapped Alps gleamed cold and hard in the dawn, like the exposed, jagged spine of some enormous beast. Vienna, the city of music and coffee, was nothing more to me now than an unfolded map marked with unknown dangers.
The Cemetery of the Nameless. Countermeasures against contract objects.
Those two phrases circled in my mind, the only faint points of light in the darkness-or perhaps ghostly flames luring me deeper.
The notebook lay unusually quiet in my backpack, its evolving pulse steady and deep, like a predator dozing in the sun after a full meal. But I knew the undercurrents beneath that calm. The conflict in Istanbul, the conceptual attacks it had demonstrated, and its powerful will of its own had utterly changed our relationship. I was no longer merely its user. I was more like a keeper bargaining with a tiger, constantly afraid it would turn on me.
Assimilation. The word that woman had left behind lodged like a shard of ice in the deepest recesses of my consciousness. My right hand occasionally trembled beyond my control, my fingertips still retaining that alien sensation from when they had been forced to write. This was no illusion. The notebook's power was eroding my nerves and my will in some incomprehensible way.
I had to find a way to suppress it, quickly. Before it digested me completely.
The plane landed, and the heavy impact dragged me out of my thoughts. I followed the crowd down the boarding stairs and into the bright, spacious terminal of Vienna International Airport. Warm air, bustling travelers-everything seemed normal and peaceful, worlds apart from Greenland's deathly silence and Istanbul's chaos.
Yet that