“What happened?” Wati would cry, on emerging into a lion face made in mortar, to see a picket bust up, its members scattered or killed, two or three still there trying to fix themselves. They were tiny sexless homunculi made out of animal flesh. Several had been left just bone-flecked smears.
“What happened?” Wati said. “Are you okay?”
Not really. His informant, a man built of bird parts and mud, dragged a leg smudgelike. “Tattoo’s men,” he said. “Help, boss.”
“I ain’t your boss,” Wati said. “Come on now, let’s get you …” Where? He could not take him anywhere, and the animal-man-thing was dying. “What happened?”
“Knuckleheads.”
Wati stayed with him as long as he could bear. The Tattoo had been paid to close the strike down, and efforts were being stepped up. Wati went back to the dolls in Billy’s and Dane’s pockets. In agitation he trembled between the two as he spoke.
“We’re being attacked.” “The Tattoo …” “… and the police …” “… trying to finish it.”
“I thought they already were,” Billy said.
“Not like this.” “Not like this.”
“We made him angry,” Dane said slowly.
“By getting you out,” Billy said.
“He wants me back, and he wants you, and the kraken, and he’s getting at us through Wati. I heard him, while I was there. He’s desperate. He can feel everything speeding up, like we all can.”
“We have one of his knuckleheads, you know,” Wati said with the ghost of humour. “Got political after he joined. Got sacked, no surprise.”
“Wati,” said Billy. He glanced at Dane. “We need to get into the police station.”
“Where even are we?” Wati said. He had followed the aetherial ruts ground out from and back into this figure without even clocking his location. “Not that I can get in—they’ve got a barrier.”
“Near,” Dane said. They were in an alley out back of a café in the dark but for a fringe of streetlight. “It’s round the corner.”
“Jason’s inside,” said Billy.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Wati said.
“Wait,” Billy said. “Hold on. I’m thinking … how I first met Goss and Subby. It was the entrance that they had to get over. Collingswood didn’t make the whole place out of bounds.”
“It’s a lot easier to just guard a perimeter,” Dane said. “I get it.”
“So if we can get you past that …” Billy said.
WATI IN THE FOETAL, MOST INNER OF THE RUSSIAN DOLLS THAT Billy had snagged a long time ago, jogged in the mouth of his mouse escort, a longtime activist of the UMA. She had never spoken in twelve years of membership but was absolutely solid.
She was a big mouse, but the doll was still a big mouthful. The mouse was a speck of dark under headlights, disappearing under gates, up an incline of crumble, below unmoving cars and through cavities. “Alright, this is great,” Wati said. “Thanks. We’ll sort this out, don’t sweat it. We’ll sort this all out.”
Midway through the outer wall Wati felt a limit point, felt space try to keep him out, “Whoa,” he said, “I think there’s a …” But the mouse, little physical thing, felt nothing and ran on through, hauling Wati’s consciousness with her, straight on in, snapping through the block.
“Ow,” Wati said. “Shit, that was weird.”
The distinctive mutter of striplights. Wati was used to dramatic shifts of scale and perspective, to seeing from giant figures then lead miniatures. Right now the corridor was cathedral. He felt the pounding of an incoming human. The mouse waited under a radiator. Legs came past. Several officers. There was some emergency.
“Can you follow that lot?” Wati said in his small voice. “Careful now.” The mouse went after the earthquake footprints, down stairs, onto different carpet, into different lights. “He’ll be in a cell,” Wati whispered. The animal agent stuck to the shadows: crouched under the open door itself, of a cell around which the police were gathered. Near what was definitely blood.
“Oh fuck me sideways,” Wati whispered.
The mouse turned him slowly in its little mouth, so Wati’s eyes tracked up the mountain of dead body that lay on the cell’s bed, the red dead man. There were the FSRC. The other milling police shunned them. Among the bustle of voices two words rose to Wati’s attention. “Goss,” he heard, and “Subby.”
“Oh, no no no,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
The mouse waited while he whispered miserable curses. “Okay. Okay. Let’s concentrate. Let’s find their office,” he said eventually. “See if we can get some information. Goss and Subby are with