seemed more real each time, as though it were merging with reality, and reality was slipping further towards the illogical blur of dreamscape. The figures he had seen on the lobby stairs kept coming back to him. Had they really been there? How could that be possible?
They had worn suits, had carried working smartphones—the Old World relics that stood proud in Alexander’s office, beneath in New Canterbury’s vaults, and peppered the ruins of almost all the Old World. There had been live electricity in those things, and he swore he had heard tiny scratching voices emerging from them, voices from across the sea.
What’s happening to me?
He checked his watch, saw that the council was due to convene any moment, and any thought of his dream vanished from his mind. A few other stragglers trudged around him. As a group they lumbered towards a set of large, wooden doors ahead. A great buzzing wafted from within, thousands of voices. There was no mistaking the excitement and apprehension.
The air was heavy, humid and yet lacking in warmth. It made the already laborious task of breathing almost impossible.
“The cheek of it,” a nearby man muttered to himself, his heavy green overcoat masking his features and contrasting against his twisted white hair. “Holding this meeting now, of all times.”
He spoke to nobody in particular, but seemed to speak for the collective, as several others around him grumbled in unanimous agreement.
“We’re about to be slaughtered, and they want to play politics. How about putting some effort into getting some food? Forget this rabble playing arsonist; we’re all still bloody starvin’.”
More murmuring.
So discontented were they that they failed to notice Norman beside them, for which he was grateful. It had been many hours since he had gone unnoticed. The buzz grew closer, the blending of a thousand different conversations, mixed with the racket of chairs scraping and the clapping of shoes on wooden floorboards.
Norman rubbed his chest absently, and they passed from the hall into an enormous room, the council chambers. During the Early Years, when the empty shell of London had first been surveyed by those looking to rebuild, Canary Wharf had become a meeting place, and the tower had been in service since then as the coalition had formed under Alexander’s hand. This room had seen every major negotiation between every power in the South since the End.
“So few. So few have come,” the farmer said. His gruff grumble had given way to an awed tremble at the back of his throat.
So few are left.
The chambers were housed in a hollow that had formed of its own accord as the tower decayed in the first years; support struts close to the glassy pyramidal structure at the tower’s peak had given way and carved a path of destruction through the spire’s heart, cutting a channel dozens of floors deep before reaching the twentieth floor, where they had come to rest, along with many tonnes of debris. Under its weight, three whole floors had collapsed, leaving a cavern that filled almost the whole width and depth of the tower.
When they had found it, the cavern had been unstable and ready to collapse further, but they had cleared the rubble, strengthened the floors, and converted it into what it was today.
The result was a true wonder. There was no need for artificial light in here. Golden shafts of light lanced down a pyramid of glass hundreds of feet above and pooled before a parabolic bench that housed over two dozen elevated seats. Though these seats were closer in appearance to thrones.
Positioned upon each of the three floors in the chamber were thousands of chairs: designer stools, executive swivel chairs, ergonomic recliners, and unwieldy chic things of leather luxury, all poached from the tower’s many derelict offices. The overall layout was that of an amphitheatre, centred on a large oval of open space, a polished concrete dais upon which the sunbeams glittered.
It was an embodiment of what they truly were: the dregs of the civilised world, fizzing lights in the dark, brought together under one spire for mutual warmth and comfort.
Despite any humble truths, Norman could never get over the fact that Alexander had a penchant for the grandiose. The chambers reminded Norman of Olympus.
There had been a time when the space had been so crammed with bustling bodies that the floor and walls seemed alive with endless beds of insects. Now, the council chambers seemed enormous in comparison to the paltry numbers in attendance, which barely filled