A week. Thirty hours, even.
He sighs. ‘Yes. The one that got away, as it were.’
‘At whose request did the intervention take place?’
‘Well, everyone. Even her. It was a mental health crisis. She had a very subtle layer of delusion, as I understand it, with savage spikes. Must have been awful to live with. Imagine suddenly turning around and believing everyone is your enemy. Even the people you work with, and trust. The whole world against you.’ He coughs. ‘I’ve rather come to a new appreciation of that idea in this last little while.’ In this position, the swellings stand out on his neck. She experiences a brief consilience of vision and implication: the black pox become the same ones she saw outside the embassy, the many eyes of the Witness. She looks away.
‘Do you remember who in particular? Names?’
‘It’ll be in the file.’
It won’t.
She doesn’t answer, just waits politely. He coughs hard, then sucks on the aqualung. ‘There was a man, Smith. One of those terrible bastards who stop ageing at a sort of diffuse forty-something. They don’t get fat, and their wrinkles just make them look hardy.’
She nods. ‘I know about him.’
Emmett blinks. ‘Do you, now? In an investigative sense?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Oh. I probably oughtn’t to be pleased.’
‘He was in charge?’
‘No, that was the woman.’
‘What woman?’
‘Never got her name. Didn’t work to her directly, just to him. She was a specialist, though, presided over the whole thing. Arrived gloved-up, paper mask, left when it was done. Cold as a stone. Ironic, really.’
‘How so, ironic?’
‘They called themselves the Fire Judges. I asked if they did parties. Not much of a laugh.’
And there it is, in so many words. Hunter was a Fire Judge herself. A rogue judge, then? Or a true one, and the others false?
‘What about the Turnpike Trust?’
‘Rings a bell. Government work, you don’t need to read all the fine print. It’s authorised, it’s consented, it’s for the good of all. So off we went to the races.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. There wasn’t nearly enough of her in there that we could reach to keep her personality intact. Erasure by therapy – but she didn’t die, and it was better than the other thing. End of story, good night. That’s how you survive being a doctor. You don’t keep score against God because he cheats.’
‘Until the Hunter interview.’
Emmett looks up sharply. ‘Yes.’
‘Hunter died.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Smith was there again.’
‘I don’t think he meant her to die, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘What did he mean?’
‘He wanted something. Wanted it badly. Couldn’t get it.’
‘Did he mention Firespine?’
Emmett hesitates. ‘He might have. There was a moment when he whispered to her and I only half heard. He might have said “Firespine”.’ A shrug. ‘Or almost anything else, I suppose.’ Emmett coughs again, and she sees blood on his handkerchief. ‘Revolting,’ he says. ‘I know. But it’s getting better. Slowly but surely, they tell me.’
‘I’m glad,’ Neith replies. Then: ‘You have organochloride poisoning. Not sarcoidosis or syphilis.’
He nods. ‘Yes. I know. I’m a doctor.’
‘You have to tell someone.’
‘Don’t need to. You’re already here.’
‘I mean you need medical attention.’
He waves the aqualung with a ghastly pink smile. ‘But I’m getting it, Inspector. It says so on my file. And – what if my condition were contagious, after all? I wouldn’t want my wife to catch it. Which I feel is rather implicit in the situation, don’t you?’ He chuckles, pink-lipped.
Neither of them says anything for a while. The Inspector listens to the sound of Emmett’s breathing, to him sucking air from the aqualung. Then she gets up and he shows her out.
‘Go get ’em, tiger,’ he says.
*
From the top deck of the tram she looks for the winter sun, low and white.
– You will be reassured to know that Dr Emmett is recovering well.
‘Oh, I am.’
– After your expression of concern, his file was passed to a senior diagnostician for review. The symptoms and clinical response path are confirmed. He will be better soon.
The Inspector nods. ‘Of course.’
Her tram stops a little way from her front door. A couple of Brazilian tourists sitting on the single limestone step look up at her as if caught in transgression and scuttle away to find another roost.
Almost, she goes straight inside. There is a bed somewhere up there that belongs to her. It is comfortable and familiar. The notion of lying down in it has desperate appeal. When she goes up the stairs and the door opens, she will finally relax, if only for a little while.
Instead of going in, she sits down on the front step, in the same space occupied by the young woman a moment before, and begins to cry.
At first she takes this sudden and uncharacteristic display of emotion for fatigue and possibly even post-traumatic stress. She has, after all, been asked to accept numerous bad things over the last few days. It would not be entirely out of place for her to suffer some kind of adverse emotional reaction. Or perhaps this is just fury: she lost her suspect and one of her key informants, and that does not often happen to her. Lönnrot is playing with her, leading her about by the nose, and she has so much information and nowhere to put it, and Lönnrot is not even the problem, or not only and entirely. She feels hollowed out, as if she’s acting herself rather than actually being there.
It’s the case. She knows so much, so why does she feel she still doesn’t understand?
Well, maybe that’s why she’s crying now, at last: sheer professional affront, and not rage or shame or bafflement. This was not what her life was supposed to be. This is not who she is. She’s not a lone wolf, however much she likes to play at it. She is a loyal servant. Only now it transpires that her master is disloyal and she has nowhere to go but home.
A friendly drunkard, most likely looking for somewhere to pee, ambles by and wishes her the top of the morning. She supposes it is morning, technically. She doesn’t bother to query the Witness and find out who he is.
She gets to her feet and turns to the door, and knows abruptly that she cannot go in. That is why she was weeping on her own stoop, it would seem: not trauma or wounded pride at all, but simple despair. She can’t go in. She can’t go in, because her home belongs to the enemy. The feeling of safety it provides is an illusion. What might a storyteller do with her assassination, right now, tonight? A piquant twist, surely, removing a thorn and preparing the way for a revenge drama starring a hand-picked officer.
She cannot go inside.
With a heaviness that seems to begin in the small of her back and thread its way down into her feet and up into her fingers, she removes her terminal and weighs it in her hand, then opens the Squid. The interface displays a waiting prompt. After a moment staring at it, she types a general instruction rather than a query. She’s almost begging.
GET ME OUT OF HERE.
Somewhere, stolen processing cycles parse this request, and the Squid responds.
INSUFFICIENT RESOURCES.
Well, of course. She could hardly expect so much. A child’s hope. She will have to do the best she can with what she has. Perhaps she should go upstairs after all, and accept what comes. She stares at the blank screen for a moment, and just before she looks away, a query box opens, almost shyly:
ENGAGE KRAKEN?
Tubman told her not to, made it clear that in the extreme case she should. Is this extreme? God yes. She can think of very little that would make it worse.
ENGAGE KRAKEN?
She sees Smith’s corpse again: wet floor, flesh and hanks
of hair. A man torn apart by a shark. By Athenais. By Gnomon. By an angry mob, or by a god. How do you fight a god?
ENGAGE KRAKEN?
And then she must have said yes, because the box goes away and something begins to happen: the cheeky image of a cephalopod in the corner of the screen takes off his glasses. His chest bulges and his arms wave, and he rips open his shirt to reveal a huge ‘K’ stencilled on his skin. Kraken, she reminds herself, not Kyriakos.
YOU MAY TRAVEL TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, reads the text underneath, BUT I SHALL HOLD YOU ALWAYS IN MY PALM.
She hears a hissing sound like a deep-fat fryer waiting its time, and Piccadilly is full of rickshaws.
*
The rickshaws are identical, a whole digitally controlled fleet emerging from some backstreet storage bay. She wonders if this is theft or taking without consent, or whether the relevant law is old and agricultural, some suborning of the affections of cows. The laws of this nation are still occasionally very ancient, pressed into new service just as the Worshipful Company of Fan Makers moved to admit the makers of aeroplane engines. It feels as if she is absconding with a pod of domesticated dolphins, or being carried off by them. Each rickshaw is a single electrical cycle at the front joined to a severely romantic black passenger compartment large enough for two people to snuggle at the back. The folding rain cover reminds her, as always, of a Victorian perambulator or a businessman’s umbrella gone rogue: when you close the thing entirely, the rickshaw swallows you. It’s a modern innovation, to keep your lover’s expensive designer shoes dry in the rain.
The rickshaws whisper as Kraken herds them along the road, and settle at her door, then wait. She can almost imagine that the nearest is tapping its front wheels – Come on, lady. Rescue in progress! We haven’t got all day.
Following the screen prompt, she removes the terminal, touches it to the entry panel and – when the door opens – tosses it into the lift beyond. Then she steps into the rickshaw – it jostles irritably when one of the others tries to muscle in – and presses back into the dark velvet seat. The whole rickshaw pod moves away as a single unit, blocking traffic and startling pedestrians, then weaves and wobbles so that her particular vehicle shifts position as it slips between food trucks. She hears a chime of reinitialisation and sees the transponder number flicker. The pod breaks in two parts, then four, then recombines. On the digital screen of a passing bus, she can see news reports, thousands of false alarms all over London: fires, riots and terrorist attacks, showers of fish, the theft of the Crown jewels. Automated street cleaners have gone berserk in three boroughs, power is out in two more. The drains are blocked between Tower Bridge and Westminster, with the consequence that traffic has slowed to a crawl in three of the commuter tunnels as grey water collects at the lowest point. Traffic lights have been randomised.
Around her the city has fallen into All Fool’s Day – the first one now will later be last, and all that. The rickshaws team and dart in a shell game with Neith as the pea, separating and plaiting themselves until abruptly the pod bursts, dandelion-style, and hers is just one of fifty or sixty rickshaws headed in all directions through the chaos. Under the seat is a biodegradable rain cape, courtesy of the London tourist board, and a pair of overshoes. She feels a heavy lump in the pocket, and reaches in to find a chunky pay-as-you-go tourist terminal with a broken screen, wrapped in a map of the West End. Kraken’s animated face winks up at her. Yes: this rickshaw, not any of the others, because only this one had this lost terminal sitting here for her. By tomorrow it would have run out of charge. By the day after that, the network provider would have come and collected it – but of course, by then there’d be another and another, because tourists leave these things everywhere and others pick them up. It’s part of the business model.
The boxy thing doesn’t fit in her pocket, so she just holds it. There’s tape over the voice and video input. That, too, is a common precaution among tourists in the System. She puts on the cape, then tears a piece of the map and folds it up, jamming it into the heel of one of the overshoes before slipping them on. The cadence of her walk will be fractionally altered. Marilyn Monroe, history records, put a sliver of cork in one shoe to give her hips a sassy twitch. The Inspector will get only a minor redistribution of weight to the other heel, a consequent shift in sacral alignment. The clumsy overshoes will force her to take smaller steps, and will encourage her to a flat-footed shuffle. With the hood up and starting from a random location, the System won’t immediately recognise her. She guesses that she will have at best twenty-four hours from the moment anyone starts seriously looking.
The explosion doesn’t come until she has nearly reached Fortnum & Mason for the third time in the rickshaw’s vagrant departure. She wonders with glassy calm if Kraken held the lift so that it would not arrive until after its blitz on the resources of the Witness had materialised, or whether it’s just coincidence. How good is its penetration of the network? How long can it hold against the System’s self-repair? The sound of her would-be assassination is familiarly embracing: a thing of the body rather than the ears. The rickshaw shudders, but does not slow, as the windows of the hallowed department store crack along their widest axis and the awning scythes away over her head. She feels the detonation somewhere in her chest, and waits for the inevitable blizzard of dying fish to wash up from under the seat. To her disappointment they never arrive, and the orchestra seems to have taken the day off as well, leaving only the dull, ordinary noises of destruction and the distant sound of ambulances and fear.
Reflected in the modernised exterior of the Ritz bar, she can see the hole in the world where her flat used to be: the gaping doorway into darkness framed by the broken fragments of the Real Life sign.
At Green Park the rickshaw halts by the entrance to the station. An Austrian tour group is discussing opera, having just seen a production in the open air. They seemingly have no idea of the mayhem all around, or perhaps just assume that wild, bohemian London is always beset by vast bangs and sirens. Taking the hint, and a page from Lönnrot’s book, she goes down into the underground and merges with the crowd.
I can walk through walls.
She wonders if Bekele died, or if he, too, remembered how.
*
The flow of people through the station isn’t at its most absurd, but it’s not negligible either, and once she gets down on to the platform she knows the System will lose track of her at least intermittently, if it’s even looking. Kraken must have hacked the local infrastructure – a temporary brute-force attack, profoundly illegal, and useless in most cases because in a minute at most the System will overwrite a fresh install of itself in the local net – and given the impression that she went inside her building. Do they think she’s dead? No. They will not assume. They, or Lönnrot? But Lönnrot has had opportunities and has not taken them, indeed has been quite clear about wanting to help her. Lönnrot, going by the narrative in Hunter’s head, is a futuristic monster turned … what? Assassin? Saviour? A creature who is also looking for Hunter, and whose murder of Smith Hunter either predicted or proposed.
Be careful, the Inspector tells herself. The story does not say that I met Gnomon when I met Lönnrot. It appears to refer to our meeting, but that is not the same thing. That is Athenais, weaving the Scroll into the past by implication. It is what these people do. They leave spaces in the truth for you to fall into, or they take advantage.
‘Hunter.’ Even Lönnrot calls her Hunter. Even in her fictions, she never gave any hint of another name. Smith thought he was playing with her, but she was playing with him, surely, leading him along to her own destruction – and through it, to his. To achieve what? This mess? All that preparation, for this random squall? All this noise and meaningless destruction?
No. Hunter was not taking aim at her former colleagues, except tangentially. Catabasis. Apocatastasis. This was an undertaking and it is not finished. She was taking aim at the System, Neith is increasingly sure. She was taking aim at a sickness in the
world.
The universe has cancer.
Although as the Fire Judges surely realise by now, that something is tangential to this case is no guarantee that it is not also central.
Place and time in the world.
Did Smith realise? Did he understand that Hunter compromised his counter-narrative even as it went in? No. He had no idea. She must have been working on him for months, pushing him in that precise direction. A random discussion over lunch about the future, about worlds and time.
Something. She would find something. Gnomon was Smith’s creature, but Hunter was waiting with open arms.
She changes trains, wondering where she should go, not knowing where to go, and in consequence able to think of only one place. Pulling up the hood of her rain cape, she returns to the surface, and boards a tram. She wonders briefly whether Kraken is simply a ruse, a false-flag operation of the Witness, and there is simply nowhere to run. She changes seats in the tram, left and then right and front and back, the absurd twitching of a mouse already caught or already escaped from the cat, until at last she washes up in a place she has never been before, her face against the cool door. Kraken brushes the keypad lock with an almost apologetic kiss, and she slips inside.
*
She stands in the hallway, conscious of intrusion and on the other hand of the mitigation of need, and beneath that regretting another transgression she suspects does not have a name, but which consists in bringing too much weight to be loaded upon a strong but unready foundation.
She breathes the air and reaches out to touch the wall, the floor. She has dreamed of sex on this carpet – or rather, she has imagined this carpet with moderate accuracy, a striped hall runner cut so that the old boards are visible underneath, and imagined herself having sex upon it. This was where she held his shoulders. This was where she lay down. She has not, of course, viewed images of his home, or plans of the building at last sale. It would have been out of bounds, beyond the limits of their agreed encroachments. No. She simply knew that his place was one of these, and considered how a person like him – like her – would arrange it. The encounter which hangs in her eyes now is fantasy laid (ho ho) over supposition.