would notice. So it was escorted in a circle like an aging king. Its motion hid it, as must the scraps of gris-gris stuff, the offcuts, the accoutrements nailed or placed in the vehicle’s interior.
“Who’s driving?” Billy said. He turned.
Dane was on his knees. He knelt close to the tank. His eyes were closed, his mouth moving. His hands were clasped. He was weeping.
EVEN THE LONDONMANCERS, USED TO STRANGE FERVOURS, STEPPED back. Dane murmured. He prayed half audibly. Billy could not hear what it was he said, but he remembered a snip that he had read in the teuthic canon, a phrase: Kraken, with your reaching, feeling the world to understand it, feel and understand me, your meaningless child, now.
The passion ran as long as it would run, and it was a long time. Dane opened weepy eyes. He touched the glass. “Thank you,” he said, again and again, to the tank. He stood at last.
“Thank you,” he said to the room.
“I can’t fucking believe you,” he screamed suddenly. “Why would you do this, why wouldn’t you tell me?” He slumped, and made a face that Billy realised he must have made when he was being tortured to death. “But you took care of, of, of it,” he said. “Of my god.”
DANE SANK AGAIN. POOR TORTURED MAN. HE PRAYED. BILLY PUT ON the long full-arm rubber gloves, like a vet’s, the Londonmancers provided. They—well, their little inner cabal—watched him.
He did not know exactly what he was looking for. He looked at Dane until Dane saw him do so and did not stop him or say anything, and with that permission Billy took off the lid and reached through the cold broth of dead cells and chemicals. He touched the specimen. It was dense, coldly and deadly dense.
We found you, he thought.
“What’s going on?” said Saira.
Billy clenched, but there was no twitch of time now. He pressed into the flesh to feel what he would feel. He ran his hands along it, parted its parts, gently, pressed his fingertips into the suckers that acned the dead animal’s limbs. It could not vacuum him, but the very shape of those pads stuck them for a moment to him, as if it were gripping, all dead as it was. He heard Fitch make some noise like huh. Then Fitch said, “I need … I need to read …”
“I don’t think you do,” Billy said, without turning. He pressed down. What’s this, then? he thought, but no knowledge crept in through his fingertips, his own inadequate ten tentacles. He shook his head: no haptic gnosis, no insight. There was nothing, no knowledge of what would happen, or why, or what it was of this fucking squid, this squid, why this squid? Why would it usher in the end?
Because it still would.
“I don’t think you need to be a seer to know that,” he said. “Cut open the city you’ll see the same thing.” He turned and held his arms up like a surgeon in a sterile field, as they dripped toxins. “I know we were hoping,” he said. “It would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it?” He nodded at Dane. “He’s come back from the dead for this, you know? That’s got to be written somewhere. Can’t tell me there’s no verses about that somewhere. And then you’ve got me. That’s two of us must be all over some scripture like a bloody rash, so you might think this’d change stuff.” He peeled off a glove. “But come on.” He shrugged. “It’s still the same.”
Maybe it was because it was a misunderstanding. He, Billy, had been chosen by the angel of memory for some stupid error, some misapprehended gag. Specimen magic, not the alien majesty of the benthic tentacular.
“Don’t matter,” Dane said, surprising him, as if he’d spoken aloud. “How’d you think messiahs get chosen?”
Dane was the real deal, had really gone into it and come out again, and his was real faith. One might have hoped that that was the end, the reuniting of faithful and faithee enough to heal the burning. That perhaps the Londonmancers—having failed to banish that finality by offering themselves as rescuers, believing finally that the intent of Billy and Dane was not to burn the thing themselves, handing control of the stranded deep god to its devotee and kind-of-sort-of prophet—might have averted the worst. But.
“Nothing’s changed,” Billy said. You did not, he was sure, need to be, as he was, a mistaken beloved of an angel to feel it. London