“I don’t know where Dane is,” Wati said immediately. “I keep looking, but we’re going to have to hope Jason has more luck. They’ve got charms up or something.”
Billy said, “I want to tell you something I dreamed.” He spoke as if he were still dreaming. “I could tell it was important. I dreamed about the kraken. It was a robot. It was back, the whole thing in the tank. I was standing next to it. And something said to me, ‘You’re looking in the wrong direction.’”
There were seconds of silence. “Jason’s going in, and while he is I want to find out why that angel’s looking after me,” Billy said. “It might know something about what’s going on. It knew to come find me. And it might have been looking after me, but it let Dane get taken.”
He told Wati what Fitch and Saira had done. He felt no hesitation, though he knew it was a deeply secret secret. He trusted Wati, insofar as he trusted any Londoners now. “Tell them they have to help us,” he said.
Wati went leapfrogging, body to body, but had to return. “I can’t get in there,” he said. “It’s the London Stone. It pushes out. Like swimming up a waterfall. But …”
“Well you better find a way to tell them they have to help me, because otherwise I’m going to walk around the city screaming what they did. Tell them that.”
“I can’t get in, Billy.”
“Screw their secrets.”
“Billy listen. They’ve made contact. I got a message from that woman Saira. She’s smart—she knows I was with you and Dane. She put a message through my office. Didn’t give nothing away, just, ‘We’re trying to get in touch with our mutual friend. Perhaps we can arrange a meeting?’ She’s telling us they want to help. They’re already against the Tattoo. That makes them nearer friends than enemies to us, right? I can’t go in, but I’ll try to send some of my people. Get them to ask Fitch where the Nazis are.”
“Because if it’s in London …” Billy said. “He should know.”
“That’s the idea. That’s the idea.”
“How long?”
“Don’t know.”
“We move,” Billy said. “We’ll get him out. I’m looking in the wrong direction. I have to know who’s fighting me and who’s fighting with me. So Wati, how do I find out about angels?”
IN A CITY LIKE LONDON …
Stop: that was an unhelpful way to think about it, because there was no city like London. That was the point.
London was a graveyard haunted by dead faiths. A city and a landscape. A market laid on feudalisms. Gathering and hunting, little pockets of alterity, too, but most of all in the level Billy had come to live in a tilework of fiefdoms, theocratic duchies, zones and spheres of influences, over each of which some local despot, some criminal pope, sat watch. It was all who-knew-whom, gave access to what, greased which palms on what route to where.
London had its go-betweens, guerrilla shadchans facilitating meetings for a cut. Wati could tell Billy where they were, and which had weak connections with the angels. Wati kept searching, and he had his own war to attend to, too. The moon made horns, the sky was gnarly. The cults were skittish.
So there was Billy, all alone, and he knew that he should have been terrified, but he was not. He was itching. He felt as if clocks hesitated with each of his steps. It was early when he started walking the list Wati gave him.
Billy knew how hunted he was. Now more than ever. He discovered that his legs had learned the step-spells that Dane had stepped for him, that he walked now with self-camouflaging rhythm. That he automatically went for half-shade, that he moved a little like some occult soldier. He held his phaser in his pocket, and he watched his surrounds avidly.
So, alone, Billy knocked on a door at the back of a sandwich shop in Dalston. A church and a carpet showroom in Clapham. A McDonald’s in Kentish Town. “Wati said you could help me,” he said again and again to the suspicious people who answered.
The safest approach was to never speak to anyone about anything. Communication could mean implication in some fight you might not even believe was taking place, taking a side, inadvertently signing on a dotted line. Nonetheless.
Fixers and goers-to had their scenes. Rooms and Internet shacks where men and women employed by their faiths to steal, torture, kill,