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1a. Milan
Drifting aimlessly through the Pinacoteca di Brera, Alice briefly contemplates a heist, eyeing up a pasty Bellini Madonna. It wouldn't be worth the hassle, she decides in the end; she pushes her sunglasses back up her nose, smiles a razor-thin smile at a gallery attendant, and moves on.
In the evening she takes a man to the opera. It is Lucia di Lammermoor, and the soprano's coloratura almost makes her forgive the inane dinner conversation. But the crescendo of the evening is later: when he tries to put his hands on her she is glad the dress she wore is black because blood does stain anything else awfully.
1b. Moscow
It's cold. She gets an ushanka and wears it constantly, putting on her best caricature of a tourist. Laughing at her puts the Mafia men she is dealing with off their guard enough that she leaves at the end of the week considerably wealthier - and with a few bodies in her wake, but what are a few more motes of dust to a black hole?
1c. Marrakesh
Alice likes this city. She likes the geometrical exactitude of the architecture, and the idea that her hair blends with the red stone of which the ancient city is built. She has been immortalised, and nobody knows it but her.
In the souk beside the Koutoubia Mosque she buys a postcard for John, and she strolls back into the garden to write it just as the muezzin's call to prayer begins to gust above the treetops. It puts her in mind of frosty light filling the windows of a London church. Smiling a secret smile, she writes There is still love in the world.
2. London
Looking out across the city, Alice breathes in the lighted windows and the surging sounds of traffic, quieter now night has come.
She has seen the world, or the parts of it which begin with M, and it comes down to this: London is her city. She is not sentimental but she is jealous, and London is her city. She has been a wife and a widow, but she has never been in love. She is jealous, however, of the things which are hers. John Luther is hers, as surely as London is; neither of them have realised it yet.
She is not gentle with the things which are hers. John Luther has broken edges, and part of her wants to be abrasive, to smooth them out, while part of her wants to be pliant simply to see if he will cut her. London she has wrecked many times over, and will wreck many times more before she is done with it.
From a London rooftop, it is almost impossible to see the sky. Galaxies are forming, somewhere; stars are dying, somewhere.The orange veil across the sky is another step in the great human struggle to forget infinity, but infinity is still there, however hidden. She wonders how many people have forgotten her.
Tomorrow, she decides, she will find John.
3. what now?
She runs away with him. Or perhaps he runs away with her. They run away together. The law, which has been a sword in their metaphorical bed for so long, pursues them ineffectually.
She becomes his weapon, which she finds she minds less than she thought she would; in return, she lets him think that he is her moral compass. She has none, of course; she needs none. But it is useful that he shines so bright he can obscure her darkness.
He still believes in evil, but she thinks she is beginning to believe in good. When she finally, finally kisses him, he holds her like he is falling and kisses her like he is starving; his agony is sweet on her tongue, something pure. She thinks she could get used to the way he worships her.
Once she asks him, "Are you afraid of death, John?"
"You mean death? Or dying?"
She leans into his side; they are aboard an aeroplane somewhere above the Pacific, which is enough to make anyone contemplate mortality. "Dying, of course."
"Dying." He looks down at his hands and she can feel him considering. "No. I haven't been," he says slowly, "for a long time. I came to terms with it a bit too soon, you could say."
"I suppose so."
"Are you? God knows you see enough death - " kill enough is what he is really saying - "to have to think about it."
"Only of dying quietly." She laughs a dry breath. "I fully intend to be remembered, and I am afraid of losing the chance to go out with a bang." The last word is slightly too loud; people in neighbouring seats jump and glance around. Alice smirks.
"I don't think you need to worry about that," John says, and to her the words are sweeter than I love you because it means he believes in her.
*
While it's true she'd always wanted to be a widow - the word almost as round and satisfying as orphan, though not as deliciously rhotic and sibilant as murderess - what she had decided long ago she really wanted was to be a god. A god, after all, could be capricious and whimsical, magnanimous or cruel. What she wanted was to be powerful.
She had been both dreaded and revered. A city had been hers, and the world, and a man. She had held the power of life and death in her hand.
Given the choice, she generally chose death. If nothing else qualified her for deification, surely that did.
*
In her defense, she is a genius. Nothing interests her for long, because once she has solved a problem, why would she keep at it? The human mind is something she solved long ago, since she discovered that most people are facile, pliable, and afraid of her. John is not afraid of her, and that is as fascinating as dark matter. It is no mere urge to self-destruction, either. It is not the attraction of a star to a black hole, because the black hole does not incline towards a star which enters its gravity.
She is making a study of love, and finding it much the same as dark matter: it is invisible, intangible, only discernible through its effects on the things around it. Without it, the infinite spaces of the universe would be unbearably empty.